The
Crisis Continues
Stephen
Terry
Commentary
for the November 14, 2015 Sabbath School Lesson
“You
say, ‘I am rich; I have acquired wealth and do not need a thing.’ But you do not
realize that you are wretched, pitiful, poor, blind and naked.” Revelation
3:17, NIV
As we gear up for an upcoming election year here in the
United States, we find numerous candidates promoting themselves for the office
of President. Some claim to be qualified because of their wealth, others because
of intellect, and still others because of family connections. Perhaps this has
always been the case for leaders from the beginning. No matter what the basis
behind a beginner’s rise to a small increase in power and influence, the
temptation seems to be to accumulate more. Often that increase in power seems
to come at the price of the Christian walk. At first small compromises are made
to be seen as a more reasonable religious person and not some zealot, but as
power increases, the tradeoffs also seem to become more substantial. In the
end, what shreds of our faith we may still possess may not be enough to
differentiate us from those who know nothing of those beliefs.
If the road to power requires us to adjust our diet to
be more “progressive” in what we eat and when, then we make the change to do
so. If abstaining from work on the Sabbath becomes problematic, well, God will
understand if we fudge a bit. If we must have the support of those groups whom
our church would not welcome into membership, we find it OK to reach out to
them anyway, making promises inconsistent with the faith we agreed at one time
to practice. After all, our rise to power and wealth proves that God is blessing
us, doesn’t it? And if He is blessing us, we must be on the right path. We
perhaps forget that God does not bless us because we are right or wrong, but
because He is love. He sends his blessings to all.[i] While prosperity preachers
would have us believe that wealth is somehow an indicator of our being on the
path of righteousness, there have been several individuals in the Bible, like
the prophet Habakkuk, who noticed that God seemed to favor, not the righteous,
but the wicked.[ii]
However, God revealed to Habakkuk, just as He did to Job, that we do not have the
understanding that would allow us to even begin to challenge God over what
takes place upon the Earth. In the end, Habakkuk could only humbly proclaim, “The
Lord is in his holy temple; let all the earth be silent before him.”[iii]
Some may find this inscrutability of God to be a reason
to claim that He endorses wanderings and compromises. A distant God may be more
to the liking of those who like to fudge a little. He doesn’t mess up personal
agendas by interfering. Instead, He becomes like the God in an old anecdote. In
that anecdote, three men were talking about the sacrifices they made for God.
One said that he gave ten percent of everything he earned to God. A second said
that he gave twenty percent. The third said he gave it all to God. The first
two asked him how he managed to pay his bills then. He explained, “It’s like
this. I cash my paycheck and when I arrive home, I throw it all up in the air
and tell God that He can have everything He can grab before it hits the floor.
He graciously leaves me everything.”
All humor aside, the third person illustrates how
convenient a distant God can be. However, relying on God’s apparent
indifference or distance may be a fool’s game. This may be the presumption
behind much of what has taken place for thousands of years. The Bible is filled
with examples to illustrate just that. Those who were locked outside of Noah’s ark, may have scorned the idea that God would ever directly intervene
in opposition to the prevailing mores of the antediluvian Earth. He may have
appeared distant and uninvolved, but when He interjected Himself into what was
going on the presumptions about Him and about morality floated as well as a
stone.
Later the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, and the Exodus
from Egypt were events that demonstrated an involved God. The latter of the two
was a textbook example for those who may have made a case for a God who is
distant and does not care about what takes place on the Earth. After all, when
we consider the length of a human life, four hundred years seems a stretch to
wait for God’s intervention. But even that pales in comparison to the wait for
the advent of the Messiah, who had been promised since Adam and Eve fell into
sin.[iv] Even after Daniel
apparently prophesied when He would arrive, the wait continued for over five
hundred years.[v]
But this was as nothing compared to what we are waiting for now. Angels
promised that Jesus would return to those who were present at the time of His
ascension,[vi] yet here we are,
approximately two thousand years later, still waiting. If people lost faith
after a few hundred years of waiting for divine intervention, how many will
hold on to their faith for thousands of years? Even Jesus considered the
challenge of waiting for all those years and asked whether faith would last
that long.[vii] In spite of this ongoing
test of our patience, God’s only answer seems to be the same as what Habakkuk was
told, “Wait for it.”[viii]
Finding the patience to do so may be the hardest test of
our faith. How long do we normally wait for someone to arrive for a previously
scheduled appointment? Do we wait five minutes, fifteen minutes, half an hour,
or more? Likely, our patience gives out quickly. Not only do we move on to
other things, but perhaps we do so with some grumbling about the unreliability
of the person who stood us up. If we have these feelings toward someone like us
who may have missed an appointment by minutes, how much more are we inclined to
feel unhappy, if not perturbed, by God’s apparent failure to come through for
so long?
Why is all of this important, and what does it have to
do with Jeremiah? Simply this, Jeremiah was dealing with people who no longer
had faith that God was going to come through for them. Instead they had been
developing the habit of making things happen themselves. Since they did not
feel God was near at hand, they began to cast about to the surrounding nations
to see why they were prospering. As a result of doing so, they started to
emulate their behaviors in an attempt to also model their success. This
included bringing back to Jerusalem the religious practices of those nations.[ix] It is almost as though
they were saying that while their wife was away, who could blame them for
visiting their neighbor’s wife? Perhaps this is why the prophets often
addressed it in similar terms, calling it adultery. In the absence of direct,
daily intervention by God, these alternate worship practices became so
widespread that even the precincts of the temple became profaned.[x] All of this took place in
spite of the interventions that were well established cultural memories, the
Exodus from Egypt and its attendant miracles perhaps being the most widely
understood.
Perhaps as often seems to be the case for us today, even
regarding the incarnation, they viewed the Exodus as simply a myth, useful for
teaching children to be good, but of questionable veracity at best. Often it
seems to come down to that. Were the stories really true, or were they simply
elements of myth strung together to dominate an unsophisticated populace? Maybe
we developed our modern skepticism about such things as a modern response to a
medieval church that not only employed these stories to dominate their
parishioners, but even restricted access to the Bible which gave the
authoritative versions of those stories, versions that might challenge what the
church was teaching. Interestingly, we have come another step beyond that.
Where the Bible was eventually used in an authoritative way to challenge those
practices, we now challenge the veracity of that biblical authority as well.
However, this begs the question. In the challenge to biblical authority, doesn’t
such nihilism bring many only to despair? Even self-interest, enlightened or not,
is meaningless if it fails to actualize. In fact, this may be the model we see
in the world around us as some assert their self-interest above that of others,
at times to an absurd degree. For those who do not find their needs met, it may
matter little whether those forces are market driven, or driven by the
indomitable will of some tyrant. In the end they stand with empty hands with
little hope but to cry unto God in much the same way as the Israelites
oppressed in Egypt did for four centuries. Jeremiahs both ancient and modern
say God will answer, and He will intervene. Much of society questions whether
such beliefs are anything but fables, and the oppression continues. In the end,
no matter what opinion we hold on the matter, we can only “wait for it.”
