“Shalom” in Hebrew

Jeremiah 29:11 ranks high on the list of favorite Old Testament scriptures. As much as we love it, do we really understand how much it promises? “For I know the plans I have for you, declares the Lord, plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future.” (NIV)

“Prosper” translates the Hebrew word shalom, a word (a noun, by the way) so rich it has no good English equivalent. It usually appears in English translations as “peace.” In fact, many English translations of Jeremiah 29:11 say, “plans for peace” or something similar.

Shalom

Here, according to the Brown Driver Briggs Hebrew lexicon is the meaning of shalom: 

completeness, soundness, welfare, peace

1. completeness (in number)
2. safety, soundness (in body)
3. welfare, health, prosperity
4. peace, quiet, tranquility, contentment
5. peace, friendship
   1. of human relationships
   2. with God especially in covenant relationship
6. peace (from war)
7. peace (as adjective)

Take some time now to reread Jeremiah 29:11, substituting each English word in the list for “prosper” in the NIV translation.  Since shalom is a noun, it will be an easier substitution if you pretend the NIV said “for prosperity” instead of “to prosper.” That entire list of nouns is what God plans for his people. That is what God plans for you.

Is that what you see in your life? Does that describe your experience? If not, you can either reject the promise as untrue, which means falling into unbelief, or you can use it to stretch your faith and believe God and have a vibrant, living hope that you will experience shalom (peace, prosperity, etc.) in the foreseeable future.

Or, to state the same challenge from another scripture: “I have set before you life and death, blessings and curses. Now choose life” (Deuteronomy 30:19, NIV). In other words, when God speaks, he gives you two choices and even tells you which to choose.

Shalom in context

[Shalom] dawning

¹⁰ This is what the Lord says: “When seventy years are completed for Babylon, I will come to you and fulfill my good promise to bring you back to this place. ¹¹ For I know the plans I have for you,” declares the Lord, “plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future. ¹² Then you will call on me and come and pray to me, and I will listen to you.

Jeremiah spoke to a corrupt people, led by a succession of corrupt kings and priests who had hardened their hearts against the commandments of God. God had promised punishment, and it was Jeremiah’s job to proclaim that punishment.

Take a look at the entire 29th chapter of Jeremiah. http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Jeremiah%2029&version=NIV The punishment had already begun. King Jehoiakim had died, and his son Jehoiachin, his designated successor, had been taken as captive to Babylon. False prophets both in Jerusalem and Babylon told everyone not to worry. God would soon defeat the Babylonians. The king and exiles would return to Jerusalem, and everything would be hunky dory.

That’s not what God had in mind. Here’s how Jeremiah explained how the exiles in Babylon would receive that shalom (peace, prosperity, etc.):

• Settle down in Babylon.
• Raise families there, have lots of babies, and grow in numbers.
• Pray for the shalom  (peace, prosperity, etc.) of Babylon and reap the benefit of Babylon’s shalom as long as you live there.
• Exile will last 70 years.
• In other words, most of the exiles receiving Jeremiah’s letter would not live to see the end of the exile. All of those children he told them to have would return to Jerusalem after the fulfillment of the 70 years.

So who, in verse 12, will call upon God, pray to him, and be assured that he will listen? Only those who believed the word of Jeremiah and prayed for shalom not only for themselves, but also for the people who caused them to live in unwelcome circumstances.

In other words, God promises shalom (peace, prosperity, etc.), but not the immediate restoration of the circumstances in which people would prefer to experience it!

If you do not experience shalom (peace, prosperity, etc.) in all of its varied richness in your current circumstances, then pray for it. Pray not only for yourself and your loved ones, but also those who appear as your adversaries. Do not wait for outward circumstances to suit your preferences before you turn to God for shalom.

God has planned shalom (peace, prosperity, etc.) for your future, but you will benefit from his plans only if you start living out shalom now.

Photo credit:
Shalom in Hebrew. Wikimedia commons.
Shalom dawning. Some rights reserved by JD|Photography

The clemency of Cyrus / Jean Fouquet, ca. 1470-1475.

For the past 150 years or so, some so-called biblical scholars have assumed that everything has a natural explanation, that the supernatural cannot be real, and that therefore the prophets of old could not possibly have predicted the future. In a recent post, Idolatry and redemption today, I mentioned a temporary redemption that came through the Persian emperor Cyrus, as predicted in Isaiah 44.

He reversed the long-standing Assyrian/Babylonian policy of removing conquered peoples from their homeland. He ordered the restoration not only of Jerusalem, but every other identifiable ethnic group in his empire. Today I’m returning to that chapter, verses 26-28, as an example of the fulfillment of predictive prophecy.

Until quite recently it has been almost axiomatic that the ancient prophet Isaiah wrote only the first 39 chapters of the book that bears his name. An anonymous author (or two) some 200 years later, who lived in Babylon wrote the rest of it.

And why couldn’t Isaiah himself have written the whole book? It is considered impossible for someone to predict, by name, the man who would conquer the Babylonian empire two hundred years in the future.

(For a thorough defense of the unity of Isaiah, see Isaiah: an Introduction and Commentary by J. Alec Motyer. Tyndale Old Testament  Commentaries, 1999.)

Cyrus as a partial fulfillment of prophecy

In fact, throughout the Old Testament, God proclaimed that the fact that his prophets could correctly predict the future and that false prophets were always wrong was what authenticated their prophetic call. Not only is predictive prophecy possible, but necessary for God’s purposes. I want to consider for a while the significance of Cyrus in this context.

Between about chapter 42 and 53, Isaiah writes four so-called Servant Songs. Only Jesus Christ fits the description of the Servant, because the Servant accomplishes supernatural works. And yet it is Cyrus, not the divine Servant who orders the restoration of Jerusalem.

Jesus is our redeemer, but God intended to accomplish this work of restoration through Cyrus and not through the ministry of Jesus. Therefore, the return of the Jews to Jerusalem represents a political, worldly restoration.

By that time, the sin of idolatry was completely purged from their system. But there were plenty of other sins that the Jews could and did commit that caused further judgment to fall on them.

The restoration that Cyrus ordered therefore could not be the glorious future that Isaiah predicted not only in the Servant Songs, but in many other passages. That restoration can only occur when Christ returns in glory.

God told Isaiah that Cyrus would order a restoration. Isaiah had no idea when or how. God also told Isaiah of a restoration to be accomplished by his Servant. Isaiah had no idea when or how.

Jesus as another partial fulfillment and promise of its ultimate completion

We can look back two thousand years and see a partial fulfillment of the Servant Songs in the restoration that Cyrus ordered and in the earthly ministry of Jesus Christ. We can also see that not everything predicted there has yet happened.

We have no more idea than Isaiah did as to when or how God will accomplish the final restoration and redemption. But we know that Cyrus showed up and accomplished what God said he would. We know that Jesus showed up in his incarnation and accomplished what God said he would in that roll.

Once we wrap our minds around those two thoughts, we ought to have a pretty strong faith that God will accomplish everything else he has promised.

Two different psalms proclaim that a fool says in his heart there is no God. Nowadays, plenty of fools say it out loud and write books claiming the superiority of their intellect for saying so.

Anyone who studies the Bible, who is careful to note exactly what it says, and who is careful to compare Scripture with Scripture will find plenty of reason to believe in God, and to keep believing regardless of what bad things happen before he brings about the final restoration.

Photo credit: Public domain, from Wikimedia Commons.

Joshua and the Israelite People / Korolingischer Buchmaler, ca. 840

Jesus said, “Ask and it will be given to you.” He did not say, “Ask and it will be given to you immediately.” He also did not say, “Ask and it will be given you exactly as you envision it.” When we ask and seem not to receive, it’s easy to fall into some kind of crisis of faith.

Ordinarily, Bible teachers deal with the questions of unanswered prayer by looking at the text in detail in order to point out conditions or the various ways we sabotage our own faith. Instead, let’s look at Joshua.

The 11th chapter of Joshua might not make the most fascinating reading, but it does summarize the accomplishments and answered prayers of one of the Old Testament’s most successful leaders. I also want to look at it in the context of two larger stories.

The background to Joshua’s conquests

First, in the Garden of Eden, God promised that he would destroy the devil and his works. In order to fulfill that promise, God needed a people to work through and land to serve as their base of operations.

Moses led God’s chosen people out of Egypt.  They captured the land under Joshua’s leadership.

Ultimately, God kept his promise when Jesus was crucified. Ever since then, the world has been a battle zone in which the devil’s defeated army has been mounting a guerilla war and taking human shields in order to avoid capture. But read Revelation. God wins.

Second, God promised Abraham land for his offspring. He himself never owned any of it. God even told him that his descendants would be in Egypt for 400 years because the sin of the people living in the land was not yet complete.

Moses, the chosen man to lead Israel out of Egypt, managed to make his own time of training longer than it would have been by taking matters into his own hands and committing murder.

Then, just on the verge of entering the Promised Land, the people chickened out and refused to believe that God was strong enough to help them defeat the militarily powerful Canaanites. God swore that not a one of them, except the two faithful spies Joshua and Caleb, would ever live to see it. It took 40 years for all of them to die.

The conquest of Canaan

Joshua 11 summarizes what Joshua had accomplished. He had defeated 31 powerful Canaanite kings, all militarily superior to his rag tag army. He had conquered a significantly large base of operations. Jericho, the first town conquered, is just north of the Dead Sea.

Ai, the second, is west and a little north of Jericho, and about a quarter of the way between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea. Other early battles were in the same general vicinity.

From there Israel defeated first a coalition of kings to the south as far as a line between the southern end of the Dead Sea and the Mediterranean. Then they defeated a northern coalition and gained territory as far as what is today the southern part of Lebanon. The Israelites had already conquered much of what is now modern Jordan under Moses.

They destroyed all of the kings and major cities, but there were still pockets of Canaanites in the land capable of offering resistance. The next generation was expected to continue to drive out Canaanites until the whole of the Promised Land was their undisputed possession. As the book of Judges shows, they didn’t bother—with disastrous consequences.

I hope this hasn’t made the book of Joshua sound like a boring history lesson, just a dreary account of battles. There is no militarily good reason why Israel should have won a single one of them.

The ten spies that Moses sent out and returned with a bad report described what they saw very accurately. The Canaanite people were well organized, well armed, well fortified, and individually taller and stronger than the Israelites.

There was no way in the world for a ragtag, poorly armed and militarily inexperienced people could have defeated them.

And that’s the point. Joshua won not because of his strength or tactical skills, or ingenuity. He won because he waited until he found out what God wanted him to do, and then he did it.

Answered prayer

Praying Hands / Albrecht Dürer, 1508

That, right there, is the whole secret to answered prayer. Through the Holy Spirit, God can talk to any of us individually, and he does. The entire problem of unanswered prayer results from our problems with staying still long enough to listen, listening long enough to understand what we hear, and then humbly doing that instead of something else that seems to make more sense.

In fact, Joshua suffered from two lapses of prayer. First, he assumed that taking Ai would be easy. After the victory at Jericho, for which he deserved no credit, Joshua rather casually sent a small group of fighters there. If he had prayed first, God would have warned him of Achan’s sin. http://grace.allpurposeguru.com/2011/07/achans-judgment-and-gods-grace/

Second, when a bunch of dusty looking men told Joshua that they had heard about his fame and come from a distant land to make a treaty, he believed them without praying. As it turns out, they were from the nearby town of Gibeon, which he was supposed to have destroyed.

Now it’s important to recognize that answered prayer is not something we earn or deserve by obeying God. God never owes us anything. We all sin, and so the only thing we ever earn is death. Eternal life and any other promise we seek after is possible only because God in his grace has chosen to give us what we don’t deserve.

Car troubles

The attitude, which we all have, that causes divine judgment

Tom, a friend of mine, once told me about the first car he ever owned. To make a long story short, he never thought to change the oil. Of course he never read the owner’s manual. He never even got curious about all the oil change places he drove past.

In other words, whatever oil was in the crankcase when he first bought the car was all it ever got until, eventually, the engine froze up and he couldn’t drive it any more. And he had no idea why.

You’re making a judgment about him, aren’t you? You ‘re thinking about how stupid he was. He wouldn’t argue the point, but let’s use the incident as a metaphor for the way people nowadays think when the subject of God’s judgment comes up.

According to divine law (as represented by the owner’s manual), “Thou shalt change the oil in thy car at regular intervals.” Failure to do so is sin. (Seriously: “sin” comes from a Greek archery term that means to fall short of the target. Tom certainly fell short of the requirements for taking care of his car.)

And so God, looking down from heaven (or, perhaps the Ford Motor Company, looking down from Detroit) became offended. He decreed that Tom, that sinner, must be punished. So he destroyed poor Tom’s car.

Now that’s stupid, too. At least it’s no stupider than the loons that proclaim that, say, a hurricane is God’s judgment on homosexuals or some such. After all, the “punishment” in the car story at least has some clear relationship to the “sin” of not changing the oil.

But neither God nor the manufacturer singles out the cars of negligent owners for destruction as a means of punishment.  The engine broke down as a natural consequence of not putting oil in it. At the same time, your judgment is entirely accurate. Tom was stupid and destroyed his car through his stupidity.

Darrell Scott’s testimony before Congress

Library table at Columbine H.S., adjacent to the killers’ suicides

Darrell Scott, whose daughter Rachel was murdered in the Columbine High School massacre, testified before a subcommittee of the House Judiciary Committee on March 27, 1999. That testimony has been circulating through email ever since. I recently received such an email and wanted to check it out.

Every transcript I have found online is on a site that has an axe to grind. I have no particular interest in what other people make of Mr. Scott’s very brief comment about gun control, the quality of media coverage, or any other strictly political issue. After some hunting I found a government-issued PDF file of his testimony.

Here are a couple of brief excerpts that highlight what he had to say that’s relevant to divine judgment.

What has happened to us as a nation? We have refused to honor God, and in so doing, we open the doors to hatred and violence. . . The real villain lies within our own hearts. . .

We do need a change of heart and a humble acknowledgment that this nation was founded on the principle of simple trust in God!” “As my son Craig lay under that table in the school library and saw his two friends murdered before his very eyes, He did not hesitate to pray in school. I defy any law or politician to deny him that right!

Nowadays, some people have no understanding of the distinction between church and religion. There is no constitutional requirement to separate religion and state.

No one could keep Craig Scott from praying under that library table, but the whole array of godless lobbying groups loudly applauds whenever school children are punished for expressing their faith in book reports or art projects. In their willful contempt of what the constitution actually says, they actively campaign to have all levels of government infringe on the right to speak the name of Jesus in public as something other than a curse word.

As Mr. Scott points out, our educational system, in fact our entire political system, was open to “spiritual influences,” or to be more explicit, Christian influences throughout most of its history.

He rightly points out that expelling Christian influence from society opens us to violence and all manner of evil. Is that because God has become offended and has decided to punish us? Or is it, like Tom’s ruined car, simply a predicable consequence of our society’s poor choices?

King Manasseh of Judah

Child offered to Molech to be burned alive. Manasseh practiced and encouraged it.

2 Kings 21 tells of the 55-year reign of King Manasseh, Judah’s most wicked king. His father Hezekiah was one of the godliest kings. His grandfather Ahaz was perhaps the weakest and most foolish. He inherited an independent kingdom and through cowardice made into a vassal of the Assyrian empire. Every subsequent king struggled to regain independence.

Manasseh and his advisors evidently thought they would be safer if they did nothing to anger the Assyrians. They also evidently thought that Hezekiah’s insistence on worshiping the God of Israel made the country stand out too much from its neighbors.

For whatever reason, Manasseh restored the pagan shrines that Hezekiah had torn down. He even offered one of his own sons to be burned alive at one of them. He met opposition with violence. According to legend, he ordered Isaiah, one of his father’s close advisors, to be stuffed into a hollow log, which he then ordered sawed in half.

God responded with a promise of stern judgment.

Now the Lord spoke through His servants the prophets, saying, “Because Manasseh king of Judah has done these abominations, having done wickedly more than all the Amorites did who were before him, and has also made Judah sin with his idols;  therefore thus says the Lord, the God of Israel, ‘Behold, I am bringing such calamity on Jerusalem and Judah, that whoever hears of it, both his ears will tingle. I will stretch over Jerusalem the line of Samaria and the plummet of the house of Ahab, and I will wipe Jerusalem as one wipes a dish, wiping it and turning it upside down. I will abandon the remnant of My inheritance and deliver them into the hand of their enemies, and they will become as plunder and spoil to all their enemies; because they have done evil in My sight, and have been provoking Me to anger since the day their fathers came from Egypt, even to this day.’”

Moreover, Manasseh shed very much innocent blood until he had filled Jerusalem from one end to another; besides his sin with which he made Judah sin, in doing evil in the sight of the Lord. – 2 Kings 21:10-16

Did Manasseh think that cooperating with and imitating Assyrian religion would keep him safe? He had second thoughts when the Assyrians dragged him to their capital with a hook in his nose!

His name, by the way, means “causing to forget.” After 55 years of violent repression, he caused the nation of Judah to forget God and worship demons instead. Only one later king (Josiah) even tried to restore traditional worship. The following generation apparently blamed him when the international situation went from bad to worse.

The Bible speaks of God acting in anger, but the working out of divine judgment against the Kingdom of Judah happened by completely natural means. It would have been impossible to predict the divine protection Hezekiah experienced. It hardly required a prophet to predict the eventual exile of the entire kingdom under kings indifferent to both God and simple justice, who cared only for saving their own skins.

How it all fits together

Light after darkness

In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth and entrusted care of the earth to human beings. The devil immediately came to take away God’s word and seduced humanity to obey him instead.

By willfully committing high treason against God, the humans cut themselves (and their posterity off from receiving both divine love and divine wisdom. Human stewardship of the earth has not gone well. People do not understand natural processes well enough to work with them instead of against them. People selfishly seek what feels best for themselves and therefore have always been incapable of living in a society based on love.

How can we take care of the planet if we can’t even muster the wisdom to take proper care of the machines we build? Isn’t every industrial accident a consequence of some combination of lack of wisdom and lack of love? And doesn’t everyone but the guilty parties swiftly render that judgment?

Manasseh was not the first ruler to try to evict the living God from government and society. Nor has he been the last. The violence he perpetrated in the process is merely typical. Recent centuries have seen the same pattern repeat in the aftermath of the French Revolution and in the Soviet Union, to mention but two instances.

Of course, it does not require explicitly godless people for a society to turn to evil and violence. Probably anyone who knows or cares about history can find instances where people turned away from God’s influence by violently trying to force others to “honor” God with some prescribed doctrine or ritual instead of some other one.

As Darrell Scott pointed out, the expulsion of Christian values from society results in evil and violence.  The religious wars of the 17th century, when Catholics and Protestants turned their back on love and justice and expelled God’s values in order to kill each other over institutions and labels. That resulted in little-c “christian” violence.

If anti-Christian American groups get their way, it can only result in “progressive” violence, no matter what they  consciously intend before it starts.

Meanwhile, God has already ordained that his program of love and grace will ultimately defeat the devil. God will eventually destroy all sin, including all foolishness and lovelessness. And what more is divine judgment than the working out of that gracious promise?



Photo sources:
It’s all about me. Some rights reserved by Randy Willis.
Columbine library. Dave Cullen
Child sacrifice. Source unknown
Light after darkness. Some rights reserved by JD|Photography

The Resurrection of Christ / Noel Coypel, 1700

Does it seem odd that Paul wrote “Remember Jesus, raised from the dead” (2 Timothy 2:8) to a dedicated minister of the gospel?

Earlier he had testified that no one on his staff was equal to Timothy. Why should a man like that need a reminder? Remember Jesus? Timothy must have spent most of every day either teaching his church about Jesus or sharing Jesus with the unbelievers in his city.

If we step back a little, though, and consider the history of God’s own people, it doesn’t seem so strange.

The long habit of forgetting God

God chose to reveal himself to one family out of all the families on earth. He led them to Egypt, and then he led them out with a mighty display of his power. He led them to a mountain where he spoke to them in an audible voice.

Within a month, they forgot.

God instituted a system of sacrifices and ritual cleansings so that the people could remember. He called one tribe out of that family to officiate at the worship rituals and take care of the sacred objects, and called one family out of that tribe to be priests.

The priests forgot God sooner than anyone else in the entire nation.

The law God gave contained a curse for forgetting God. When the people forgot anyway, they suffered exile, but God in his grace allowed them to return to their homeland. He gave them synagogues where they could hear regular preaching on his word and learn the requirements of the law.

The rabbis became so careful about observing all of the details about keeping the Sabbath, the dietary restrictions, the ceremonial washings, and all the rest that they forgot God and began to despise the people who were less careful

Jesus’ post-resurrection ministry

Finally, God sent his Son, Jesus, into the world. Unlike anyone else God ever sent, Jesus always remembered God.

The Jewish leaders cared more about ritual purity and about the nation’s status as God’s chosen people than they cared about God. They hated Jesus and had him executed.

Jesus rose from the dead, but instead of staying behind to guide his friends and followers, he returned to the Father in heaven and sent the Holy Spirit.

By the power of the Holy Spirit, Jesus established his church and gave it gifts. He gave apostles, prophets, evangelists, pastors, and teachers (Ephesians 4:11).

But just as there had been false priests, false kings, and false prophets for centuries before Jesus came, false prophets and false teachers quickly arose within the church.

When persecution arose, even some of Paul’s closest associates forgot Jesus in order to preserve their own skin.

Breaking an evil pattern

If Timothy needed to be reminded to remember Jesus, then so do we. Only by consciously remembering Jesus can the church ever break the evil, forgetful pattern established by the generation that first heard God’s voice from the mountain.

We have all known good times and bad times. In good times, it is easy to enjoy them, assume they’ll last forever, think we somehow deserve them, and forget Jesus.

In bad times, it is easy to notice that our prayers are not answered the way we want as quickly as we want. Jesus did say that trouble would come.

It is easy to become frustrated and angry and forget Jesus. The Bible has given us stories of the Old Testament Jews falling into idolatry, the New Testament Jews falling into a cold and judgmental legalism, and some of the earliest church leaders falling into failures of their own.

As individuals and as a body, we must break that pattern every day. Otherwise, the church in our time will become as dead as the Jewish priests ever did. There is only one way to succeed where they failed.

Remember Jesus, raised from the dead.

Photo source: Public domain, from Wikimedia

What is Truth? / Nikolai Ge, 1890

Pontius Pilate famously asked, “What is truth” and turned away without waiting for the answer. He had no inkling that Truth stood in front of him. He had no inkling that he was about to condemn Truth to crucifixion.

Fulfillment of Scripture demanded that Jesus be crucified. The ordinary way of executing prisoners under Jewish law was stoning. Only the Roman governor, Pilate, could authorize a crucifixion. He was initially unwilling.

Pilate thought he was in charge of the situation. He was wrong. Jesus was in charge. In the face of many obstacles, he had to insure his own crucifixion. It turned out to be hard work.

So let’s not make Pilate into a mere villain and cluck at him with disapproval. Let’s not dismiss him until we are sure we aren’t like him.

Pilate and the Jews

Jewish leaders had already decided they wanted to have Jesus put to death before they arrested him. They held an illegal night-time trial looking for evidence to justify the verdict they had already reached, and after some difficulty, they found it.

I suppose they could have taken Jesus out and stoned him, like they did Stephen, but they didn’t. Instead, they took him to the Roman governor Pontius Pilate to have him crucified.

So here’s the setting. Pilate’s headquarters were located adjacent to the temple walls. In fact, his walls were taller, which gave him an unimpeded view of the temple court and everything that happened there, including all the sacrifices. The Jewish leaders greatly resented that.

Going up to see Pilate was certainly humiliating. If they actually went inside his compound, they would all be ceremonially unclean. So they woke Pilate up, but refused to go inside.

He had to perform some kind of shuttle diplomacy, because of course all of them wanted to stay ceremonially clean so they could perform their leadership roles and eat the Passover. They stayed outside, while the prisoner, Jesus, was inside, and Pilate went back and forth between them. He couldn’t have been happy about that.

Meanwhile, the Jews declined to tell Pilate just what the charge was. When he asked for the accusation, they said they wouldn’t have bothered him if Jesus weren’t a criminal. Somehow they must have conveyed the charge of sedition, of being a direct danger to Rome by claiming that he was king of the Jews without any authorization from Rome.

The witnesses at Jesus’ trial before the Sannhedrin couldn’t get their story straight. Finally, in effect, the high priest had to get him to testify against himself.  The simple truth of the case before Pilate was that Jesus was no threat to Roman authority.

Roman justice demanded his release. Only God’s judgment against sin demanded his death. With that in mind, let’s look carefully at the conversations between Pilate and Jesus as recorded in John 18:28-38.

Pilate and Jesus

Ecce Homo (Behold! The Man) / Antonio Ciseri, 1871

Why didn’t Pilate take that obvious course and simply dismiss the charges? I suspect he was mad at being disturbed so early in the morning and mad at having to play the fool to preserve the Jews’ ceremonial purity for laws he had no use for.

He regarded the Jewish leadership with great contempt and wanted to humiliate them with his superior authority. They had already prepared for that and out-maneuvered him entirely

Pilate asked Jesus point blank, “Are you the King of the Jews.” That’s a question that seems to invite a one-word answer, yes or no. Instead, Jesus responded with another question: are you asking that question on your own, or did someone else put you up to it?

With that question, Jesus asked Pilate to consider his own authority. Was Pilate running the show, as he imagined, or was the Sannhedrin manipulating him? What an embarrassing question for a prisoner to ask the judge! It’s one that had probably occurred to Pilate himself, and his pride would not let him face it.

Like Jesus, Pilate evaded giving an answer and deflected the question with two more. “I am not a Jew, am I?” and “What have you done?”

Again, Jesus didn’t answer the question. After all, the answer is that he had preached, taught, worked various miracles. He had challenged the moral authority of the leadership of the synagogues and temple, but had made no attempt to remove anyone from office.

He had never mentioned the Romans at all except in direct response to a question from Jews. On that occasion, he only said that they should give Caesar whatever belonged to him. In other words, Jesus had done nothing whatsoever that could have troubled Pilate.

But remember. Jesus’ object was not to gain the acquittal that he deserved under Roman law. He had come to Jerusalem to be crucified. So when Pilate asked him what he had done, he said nothing at all about what he had done. Instead he went back to the earlier question about being king of the Jews. He brought up his kingdom and said that is it not the kind of kingdom Pilate knew anything about.

Jesus is rightful king of the universe. Satan stole the human race and planet Earth when he persuaded Adam and Eve to rebel against God. Jesus’ kingdom has nothing to do with who sits on some earthly throne. Jesus’ kingdom is neither political nor military.

Satan set up the system by which kings fight and depose each other with military violence. Jesus would depose Satan by becoming a victim of violence. The ways of Satan’s world require accumulation and use of power. Jesus intended to defeat him through weakness, the weakness of dying to pay the price of Adam’s sin.

Or as he said to Pilate, his kingdom is not from this world. It is not from this physical planet. It is not from the system of the world that Satan built. He would not take power by having armies fight on his behalf. He would not take power by committing violence.

That has to have taken Pilate by surprise. He probably never expected this grubby-looking peasant to say anything at all about being a king. He asked, “So you are a king?”

And again Jesus didn’t answer directly. The only possible direct answer would have been, “Yes. I am.” Instead he asserted, “You say that I am a king.” Pilate had used the word, and Jesus wasn’t about to tell him he was wrong.

 Pilate and us

Adam’s skull on Calvary / Fra Angelico, ca. 1435

The kingdom Jesus spoke about, not being of this world, is only for people concerned with ultimate justice, not the imperfect approximation that is the best human judges can find. It operates on a spiritual and moral power, not physical or political power.

Therefore, it is only for people who understand the strength of love and absolute, non-contingent truth. Jesus came into the world in order to testify to a level of truth that no world system can deal with. Individuals who want to know truth on that level will listen to Jesus’ voice.

But will we? Or will we, like Pilate, let ourselves be jerked around by our feelings of pride and fear? PIlate was willing to settle for the world’s standard of truth and justice. It’s hard to testify to the truth of a heavenly king, as much as we might want to, if we insist on thinking and acting according to the ways of this world.

Pilate asked, “what is truth” and walked away.  If we want to belong to the truth, we have to listen to Jesus—especially when he makes us uncomfortable.

Photo credits: Public domain, from Wikimedia Commons

Our idols aren’t quite the same as those of the ancients, but they work the same way. We trust our own resources more than we trust God. Certainly God expects us to use our own resources much of the time, but we must not trust them. We must trust God. Otherwise, whatever we trust instead becomes, functionally, an idol, the god we truly worship.

Once we realize that we as individuals and as a society are only superficially different from the people Isaiah had in mind when he wrote Isaiah 44:14-20, we can look at the promises that follow with real understanding.

Four things to remember

Beginning in verse 21, Isaiah writes not in his own voice, but as the voice and words of God himself. “Remember these things,” says God. What things?

1. His word about idolatry and the foolishness of trusting on manmade things more than God.
2. Our proper relationship to him. He made us so that we would serve him. We are not independent free agents, no matter how many ways society and the devil want us to believe we are.
3. That we have sinned, but also that he has swept away our sins. We cannot do anything about our sins. They cling to us, cripple us, and stain us. To God, however, our sins are as insubstantial as a cloud or a mist. He not only can sweep them away without difficulty, but he already has.
4. That God has redeemed us.

Redeemed. We don’t use that word much any more. If any Israelite ran into such hard times that he had to sell himself into slavery, his relatives had the obligation to redeem him and restore him to freedom. It cost something.

We are slaves to sin. Christ has redeemed us from the curse of the law, and it cost him his earthly life. Isaiah had little idea of what it would cost God to redeem us from that curse and from our slavery to sin, but he boldly proclaimed that God had already accomplished it.

Redemption now, redemption to come

“I have swept away your sins,” says God–and he’s hung up his broom.

Now I want you to notice a point of grammar. God did not speak in future tense. He did not say, “I will sweep away your sins and I will redeem you.” He spoke in perfect tense. “I have swept away your sins and I have redeemed you.” The matter is settled. It is finished.

The people of Judah have not yet finished sinning. The judgment for their sin has not yet fallen. As we will see, the restoration promised in this chapter is not a full spiritual restoration, and so the people will continue in sin one way or another after they return to Jerusalem. But God has already swept all of that sin away, too.

Today we’re still waiting for the final redemption. As many as read Revelation try to puzzle out what it means. Here’s all we really need to understand: God has already swept away our sins and redeemed us. From our perspective, we’re waiting and puzzling. From God’s perspective, it is an accomplished fact.

But wait, there’s more. Isaiah is still writing to people in Jerusalem who have fallen so deeply into idolatry and other gross sins that God has decreed the destruction of Jerusalem and the exile of its people. But remember, he had also created the nation of Israel to serve him and accomplish his purpose for them.

God does not always get his way in details. He did not intend for Adam or anyone else to sin in the first place. But he does always get his way in the grand sweep of the universe. His people will serve him and accomplish his purpose, and that requires their return to Jerusalem.

And so, through Isaiah, he proclaims some basic facts about himself:

• He made the whole universe with no help or advice from anyone.
• He carries out the words of his servants.
• He makes fools of the false prophets and the wise of this world. Their predictions will not come true.

The Assyrian empire had long had a policy of deporting conquered peoples, and not one had returned to their original home. The Babylonian empire would continue that policy and deport the residents of Jerusalem.

But then, declared God’s servant Isaiah, by the command of someone named Cyrus, the descendants of the deportees would return to Jerusalem and restore it.

Isaiah looked even farther ahead. In four “Servant Songs” he described the ministry of Jesus Christ himself. That Cyrus, not the Servant, accomplished the immediate redemption shows it wasn’t intended to be permanent.

We’re still waiting. We’re still living in a rough neighborhood, assaulted with a bewildering array of problems. Let’s wait in faith and turn away from our idols.

Photo credits:
Wooden idol. Some rights reserved by Criss!
Broom closet. Some rights reserved by wayne’s eye view.

from Charming Bible Stories / Henry Davenport Northrop (Philadelphia, 1893)

Nowadays, multitasking seems to be the rule, not the exception. I have long observed people who claim they can be more efficient by doing several things at once. Usually I observe that they do at least one of the tasks so badly that they have to do it over. I’m not much in favor of multitasking, but sometimes I have no choice.

The wall

After 70 years of captivity in Babylon, the Israelites were allowed to return to their homeland (538 BC). They found it in ruins and, of course, began to rebuild immediately. The people who had ruled the land in the mean time did not want to give up power and appealed to the imperial government to order a halt to the rebuilding effort.

The book of Nehemiah opens in 446 BC, nearly a century after the return from exile. At that time, Nehemiah learned that the walls had been broken down and burned. In other words, the opposition had recently destroyed whatever rebuilding had been accomplished in the meantime.

The news upset Nehemiah very much. An unwalled city was a defenseless city. Nehemiah secured an appointment as governor of the district and set about to make sure that the wall got built. His appointment did not greatly impress Israel’s enemies. They continued to harass and oppose building the wall with all of the tactics they had used for decades.

The threat

Nehemiah rallied his people and assigned various groups to work on specific parts of the wall. The enemies watched in dismay and anger as the people repaired breeches in the wall and built it up to about half its eventual height.

The enemies began a war of words. The Israelites’ morale proved too firm for mere ridicule to undermine. Propaganda about the immensity of the task began to have an effect, though. The people began to doubt whether they were capable of finishing the work. At that point, the enemies began to make threatening noises about an armed attack.

At that point (Nehemiah 4:9), Nehemiah first prayed and then ordered armed guards on day and night watch. The guards turned out not to be enough to allay the people’s fear. That’s when Nehemiah resorted to multitasking.

He took half of the people off building duty and had them stand guard, ready for any attack. The other half of the people worked with “one hand doing the work and the other holding a weapon” (4:17, NASB). It’s hard to imagine anyone literally working that way, but hyperbole is a very respectable literary device. Here are the important outcomes:

• People worked in shifts. At any given time, half of them served as armed guards while the other half worked on the wall.
• The builders and carriers likewise bore arms, ready to stop and fight at a moment’s notice.
• Work continued without interruption until the wall was completed.

The spiritual lesson

In a way I have misrepresented Nehemiah. Although he was a man of action, he was above all a man of prayer. Although he excelled at making plans and adjusting them quickly when necessary, he never expressed faith in his own abilities or any natural advantages.

Even when speaking to enemy leaders, he laid much more stress on his faith in God than his official royal connections and written authorization. And as a result of his prayer life and his openness to God’s leading, his “citizen-soldier” plan presents a powerful picture of how Christians ought to work at whatever task they’re doing.

Nehemiah recognized that he was not simply restoring a wall around a once great city. He was rebuilding a ruined wall around the city that housed the temple of the living God, the city where God himself had chosen to live. At God’s direction, he was doing God’s work, which happened to entail rebuilding a wall.

We, too, have a powerful and implacable enemy. Satan stands opposed to building the kingdom of God and comes against the church with a wide array of weapons. Whatever else we are doing, we are at work building the kingdom of God in wartime conditions.

Like the ancient builders of Jerusalem’s wall, we must work diligently, but also be mindful of the enemy. Whenever Satan attacks, we must be wearing the full armor of God and prepared to use the weapons of our spiritual warfare.

Moses / Michelangelo

My great grandfather

Several years after the death of his first wife, Rev. Benjamin Franklin Morgan remarried. His new wife bore him a daughter, my grandmother, when he was 61. She was 8 when he died, but I remember hearing about a letter home from California, when he described the beef there as having “the taste, color, and tenderness of raw mahogany.”

He must have been a fascinating man. Judging from that one sentence, he had a way with words that has been passed from generation to generation. (One of my nieces, Rev. Morgan’s great-great-granddaughter is an aspiring novelist and playwright.) So when my sister in law, an avid genealogist, transcribed his journals for her Christmas present to me and my sibs, I was really excited. When I read it, it was hard to stay excited.

Here is the longest entry on a page I selected at random:

March 5, 1870. Saturday

The day cloudy and damp. Attended the funeral of Bro. Willson. There was a large congregation & deeply affected. The Supt. of the Street Railroad cars furnished cars for all that wished to accompany the remains to the depot & then the friends took him to Viana on the Jeff Railroad. The official meeting the stewarts reported. There was quite a snowfall during the night.

Most days, he just reported the weather, whose house he ate at if invited somewhere, a word about church attendance on Sundays and other mundane details. Here and there, as in the excerpt quoted, his entries show some emotion or glimpses of his personality.

He didn’t exactly keep a diary. It was a simple journal. Extant letters and sermons give a rounder picture of his life and character. That, it would appear, perfectly explains Numbers 33. It is a brief journal presented within a longer and more personal diary that comprises the books of Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy.

Moses

Moses Pleading with Israel, as in Deuteronomy 6:1-15, illustration from a Bible card published 1907 by the Providence Lithograph Company

Numbers 33 may seem to serve no purpose for us, but for the generation of Israelites that left Egypt and their children, who crossed the Jordan to destroy Jericho and conquer the promised land, it was a reminder of how long and difficult their journey had been, and also a that only two individuals in that first generation, not even Moses and Aaron themselves, proved worthy to cross the Jordan.

When we read it, we can see the reference to the camp with no water and recall the absolute rebellion that the faithless first generation mounted in response. We read about the death of Aaron and recall that he was appointed priest on no other basis than grace. After all, he had taken a leading role in an earlier rebellion by making a golden calf and declaring it the god who had led the people out of Egypt.

We read of Moses addressing the people across from Jericho, saying “when you cross the Jordan, not when we cross. Moses himself had impetuously disobeyed God in wrath and thereby stretched God’s patience with him to the breaking point. God finally forbade Moses himself to cross.

We know these details from the larger account, which Moses surely didn’t share with everyone. In those books of scripture, he spares no one, not even himself. He describes both the high points of victory and the low points of rebellion in detail.

You and me

Each of us can easily compile a list of biographical facts. We know our various addresses, the places we have lived, the schools we have attended, the churches we have belonged to, the relationships we have had, many of which are now broken in various ways.

That is our journal, whether we have ever committed it to writing or not. That is the structure of our lives. Our memories of those structural points reveal our spiritual journey. That journey is our diary, whether we have ever committed it to writing or not.

We can be as unsparing as Moses in remembering and describing those who have opposed us or hurt us.

Can we be as unsparing as Moses when we describe our own moral failings? Can we be as accepting as Moses of the just consequences?

And can we continue to serve God as faithfully as Moses did in the face of disappointment? Can we maintain Moses’ same understanding of God’s gracious love and faithfulness to his promises?

Photo credits:
Pictures of Moses are public domain. Source of the diary photo is unknown.

The Forerunners of Christ with Saints and Martyrs / Fra Angelico (about 1423-24)

But notice how Paul describes the church. It is the household of God. I suspect not many people nowadays understand what that means. On the other hand, I suspect any modern Christian would quickly agree that “godliness” makes a good one-word definition of proper conduct. Paul calls the source of godliness a mystery.

The household of God

Today, household usually means the people who live together in a house, usually some kind of family structure. As far as the church is concerned, that definition is very good as far as it goes, but Paul, Timothy, and everyone they ever met lived in an empire.

The emperor had a household with a greatly expanded meaning. That meaning has lasted until the present day, actually. It persists not only in all monarchies, but also in the mansions of the very rich.

The Biltmore Estate, one of North Carolina’s best known tourist destinations, was the family home of George Vanderbilt. His household extended far beyond his family

Christ Enthroned / Bartolomeo Vivarini (1450)

As Christians let’s not forget whom we work for. We are God’s household. Not only we lay Christians, but also the clergy, including all of the bishops or their equivalents in other denominations are God’s household.

From the top leaders to the newest convert, the church exists to serve God. 1Timothy 3:15 actually expresses that truth the other way around. God’s household, his roster of servants, is the church, or assembly, of the living God.

Assembly can mean both the gathering of a congregation and unity of all congregations. These are distinct, but not separate meanings. Paul primarily means the local congregation here, but goes on to call God’s household the pillar and bulwark of the truth.

Any large structure requires more than one pillar, so whatever Paul says about a local congregation requires the understanding that it must take its place within a universal structure to uphold the truth and defend it against attack.

Think of it this way: Some of the royal household in England work at Windsor Castle, others at Buckingham Palace, etc., but they all serve the same queen and have the same basic mission. Rivalry and dissension among various groups of the royal household would be quite unseemly!

The mystery

Paul calls Christianity a mystery. For some reason, we tend to use that word as if it meant some kind of impenetrable puzzle. Fortunately, we still preserve a more profound understanding of the word, at least in literature.

As in any modern mystery novel, that means that something unknown and unknowable in the beginning is revealed in the end.

Much remains unknown to us, but God has already revealed how the story will end. He began that revelation immediately after the fall: he pledged to redeem Adam (his generic name for human) from the bad bargain he had made with Satan.

And through Jesus Christ, God revealed the greatest clue to date about his final intentions, about the grace that leavens his judgment, and how thoroughly Satan has already been defeated.

That thought inspires Paul to write down another hymn of praise that’s truer now than it was when he put it in this epistle:

He appeared in the flesh,

was vindicated by the Spirit,

was seen by angels,

was preached among the nations,

was believed on in the world,

was taken up in glory.

People throughout more of the world than Paul ever imagined believe in Jesus. For all its faults, the church is accomplishing its mission in the world.

Image credits: Public domain