Judgement on Earth
READ 2Chr.36.15-21
How many times do you give a warning?
- my girls learned quickly that I only give two warnings if they don’t do something
- I've tried to present this as a virtue, as a mark of consistency in parenting
- but actually my patience runs out and boils over after more than two warnings
How many warnings precede a war? Far more, one would like to think
- the UN asked Saddam Hussain to submit to proper weapons inspections
- and their patience did not run out even after 18 years of non-compliance
- unfortunately France said they would never allow the UN to act, so action was left to a small number of countries, resulting in the mess we all know about.
- when Melosovitch was ethnically cleansing muslims out of Serbia, the UN had seemingly endless patience
- and now in Darfur, the UN's patience also seems endless, while people are dying
How long should God remain patient and hold back?
- and what is it that finally provokes God to action? Ethnic cleansing?
- in this passage we find what God is really concerned about
- but at first sight, it appears that God’s viewpoint is very different from ours
- he appears to be angry about rival religions and about bad farming techniques
- that is, he was angry that these last kings encouraged worshipping other gods
- and that they had neglected the Sabbath Year rest for the land every 7 years
This anger makes sense when you know about the religions God was angry about
- the last Kings of Judah and Israel encouraged worship of the old gods of Camaan
- including gods like Molech and other gods introduced by the Philistines
- these were the worst kinds of violent gods who demanded child sacrifice
I will always remember a terrible room in the museum in Sousse in Tunisia
- the museum has many relics from the days of the Philistines who came from there
- their greatest city, the city of Carthage, was nearby and has been excavated
- the museum is quite fascinating – many very old inscriptions and artefacts
- but then I came to the Tophet room – from the shrines of Baal Hammon and Tanit
- this contained many many monuments of child sacrifice, often with pictures
- one picture showed a priest holding a baby on outstretched arms. Terrible
- and each little stone in that room represented a sacrificed baby or toddler
- [see http://lexicorient.com/tunisia/carthage02.htm]
The Philistines were sea-farers who expanded out of North Africa into Palestine
- they brought their terrible religions with them when they settled
- Egyptian records tell us they tried to repel the Philistines from Canaan, but failed
- it appears from the Bible that God sent Israel into the land to clear them out
You have to realise that these religions are not just misguided human ideas
- they were inhuman demands by inhumanly evil spiritual beings
- a friend of mine was carrying out an exorcism (which is still sometimes needed)
- he demanded the spirit's name, which is necessary for getting rid of a demon
- but he got a very strange answer: My name is Dagon
- he recognised it as the name of the old Philistine god, often depicted as half fish
- he guessed that the demon was lying to him for some reason, so he demanded, in the name of Jesus, that the demon tell him his real name
- and then it was straightforward getting rid of it.
- But why had it lied? Why would a demon pretend that it was the god Dagon?
- My guess is that it was trying to frighten him, but he wasn’t frightened because he didn’t really associate this old name with a real spirit of frightening power
- that demon thought he would be frightened by the prospect of coming up against such a powerful spiritual being
- but the demon didn’t realise that, for us, these are just old names with little reality
These old gods were not just other religions. They were powerful evil spirits
- fortunately many of them have been cleared away during the Christian centuries
- don’t compare them with some of the modern western religions which are often merely jumped up philosophies without any spiritual power behind them
- these were nasty old religions which were a worse scourge than a plague
- they were so terrible, it was necessary to wipe them out completely
- the land had been cleared once already, by Israel themselves
- God brought them into the land and gradually they cleared out all these practices
- so it was particularly ironic and unforgivable that Israel re-introduced them
I suppose it is possible that the Jewish rulers regarded these religions as necessary
- they knew that these gods were supposed to ensure fertility in the land
- especially the storm god Baal who brought rain, and the fertility goddes Ashera
- and in time of war, they turned to the god Molech who made terrible demands
- in their own minds, they were acting in the good interests of national wealth
Presumably this was the same reason they stopped following the Sabbath years
- God’s law, given to Moses, said that the land had to lie fallow every 7 years
- just like in old English agriculture we had a fallow year about every three years
- the land was left to rest and whatever grew by itself the poor could eat or graze
- before we had fertilisers this was the only way for the land to renew itself
- when fallow years were neglected by early settlers in the USA, this helped turn fertile land into dust bowls
- the same happened in Siberia and Kurdistan when they ignored summer fallows
- the profit motive has always been very strong, and the idea of land lying fallow, doing nothing except feeding the poor, goes against commercial instincts
In Moses law, the land only had to lie fallow every seven years
- and every seventh seven years (ie every half century) was a Jubilee
- at this time land had to revert to the ownership of the original inheritors
- each family had a plot, and they could sell a leasehold, but not the freehold
- the land always reverted to the family, so everyone had a means of income
- and the society never polarised into the rich landowners and poor peasants
- that was the theory – but the rich had been ignoring this law for a very long time
So what we have here is a situation created by the rich and powerful
- the rich landowners had been gradually buying up small plots of land
- prophets like Amos tell us about unscrupulous rich landowners who bought up family plots of land then didn’t give them back
- the sabbath year never came, and the year of Jubilee never came
- so the rich got richer and the poor got poorer
- and they re-introduced the old gods who promised fertility and power
- they were even willing to sacrifice their children in return for more profit
How long did God let the rulers and rich land owners get away with this?
- we find out here, because it says the land would recover all its lost Sabbath rests
- the Exile would last 70 years – one year for each lost Sabbath year
- in other words they had ignored the Sabbath years for 7x70 years – 490 years!
- and that is how long God had been displeased and had been sending warnings.
- that is, from about half way through the reign of Solomon
- when Solomon married wives foreign wives they reintroduced foreign religions
- Solomon also started a culture of the rich, who then just got richer and richer
- the rot set in very early, and then things just got worse and worse
- God warned them and warned them, and they did not listen:
2 Chronicles 36:15 The LORD, the God of their fathers, sent word to them through his messengers again and again, because he had pity on his people and on his dwelling place. 16 But they mocked God's messengers, despised his words and scoffed at his prophets until the wrath of the LORD was aroused against his people and there was no remedy.
When Jesus was asked ‘How often do we forgive’ he said 7x70 times
- that’s the same number of years that God put up with this gradual downfall
- and when he saw that the Jewish leadership was set against him, he told the parable of the tenants of the vineyard
- let’s read it, with the destruction of Jerusalem in mind, and you’ll see more of what Jesus is saying:
READ Matt.21.33-41
We see Jesus making a clear threat to those Jewish leaders who were rejecting him
- they were being like the rich and powerful in the days before the Exile
- they ignored or even killed the prophets, but these leaders were worse
- because these leaders were ignoring the Son, and were planning to kill him
How could they go on and on ignoring the prophets?
- perhaps they thought God wasn’t really in charge and couldn’t carry out the threat
- or perhaps they thought God was too soft and wouldn’t carry it out
- or, most likely, they just thought that God was so attached to them, that he would go on forgiving them forever
- God made a covenant with them at Sinai, ie a contract, like a marriage
- surely God wouldn’t break up something like a marriage. God isn’t like that!
- and the prophets acknowledged that God did indeed regard himself as Israel’s husband
- but this meant that he regarded Israel’s worship of these evil gods as adultery
- time after time the prophets warned Israel and Judah about their spiritual adultery
- and when the end came, the prophets said that God had finally divorced them
- God gave Israel a divorce certificate and threatened Judah with one (Jer.3.8).
God is forgiving, and he gives many second changes, but this is not weakness
- Jesus used this incident to emphasise how many times we should forgive (7x70)
- in other words keep forgiving almost to infinity
- but he also used the incident to emphasise that God will bring judgement
- esp on those leaders who rejected him and turned the nation away from him
And sometimes God acts in very dramatic ways to bring evil to an end
- the cultures where human sacrifice continued are now almost all gone
- Carthage is gone – destroyed and almost wiped off the surface of the ground
- the old religions of Canaan are now completely gone – wiped out
- human sacrifice continued in the new world, in Mayan and Aztec cultures
- they were destroyed so fully that there is even doubt about what they practised
- but some of the pictures of priests extracting hearts from people on altars make it plain enough
- judgement does not come by lightning or earthquakes, but by foreign armies
- Israel and Judah were carried off by the Assyrians and Babylonians
- but the warnings from the prophets make it clear that this was part of God’s plan
- this doesn’t mean that every war is planned by God and every defeat is God’s judgement
- but it does show that God uses armies and wars to carry out his judgement, when necessary
Isn’t this judgement indiscriminate? Don’t the innocent die along with the guilty
- certainly, the use of such blunt instruments does result in indiscriminate suffering
- though I”m not sure we can say that the innocent suffer because, although it sounds like a technicality, no-one is actually innocent in God’s eyes
- all of us who are permitted to live, do so as a result of God’s generosity
But actually, things are often not as unfair as they seem at first
- we see that particularly with the defeat and Exile of Judah, as in this passage
- the Exile actually occurred in three stages
1) a few of the nobility and the sons of the nobility were taken – incl Daniel
2) some of the priests and more nobility were taken – incl. Ezekiel
3) the city was destroyed and then who was taken?
- in 2Chr.36.20 it appears as if everyone who was left alive was taken:
20 He carried into exile to Babylon the remnant, who escaped from the sword, and they became servants to him and his sons
- but Chronicles is written from the point of view of the priest, the important guys
- what it says, in effect, is that ‘everyone who is anyone was taken to Exile”
- but if you read 2 Kings, which has half an eye on the common people, you read:
2 Kings 25:11 Nebuzaradan the commander of the guard carried into exile the people who remained in the city, along with the rest of the populace and those who had gone over to the king of Babylon. 12 But the commander left behind some of the poorest people of the land to work the vineyards and fields.
- the common people, who had been suffering under their leaders, were left behind
- these were the people whose land had not be returned at the year of Jubilee
- and these were the people who should have been able to help themselves to food from the fallow land during Sabbath years.
- now their oppressors were taken away from the land, leaving them free