Stephen
Terry, Director
Playing God
Commentary
for the February 6, 2021 Sabbath School Lesson
"See, the day of the
Lord is coming
a cruel day, with wrath and fierce anger
to make the land
desolate
and destroy the sinners within it.
The stars of heaven
and their constellations
will not show their light.
The rising sun will be
darkened
and the moon will not give its light."
Isaiah 13:9-10, NIV
In Isaiah's day, he
lived in a time of national transition, where his country was being destroyed
from treachery within and military failures without. Isaiah foretold that this
would lead to the destruction of Jerusalem and captivity for its people. He
said that the enemy that brought this about would themselves eventually be
destroyed, but the prophets foretold that they would not see this for at least
70 years.[i] The kings and many of the people
felt that their fate was in their hands to decide and rejected the words of the
prophets, greatly abusing or murdering them for their temerity to oppose the
will of the king and the nobles. Even when they came to a prophet and asked for
the Lord's will in a matter, they refused to obey that will when the prophet
shared it with them if it differed from their own desire. They appeared
possessed of a spirit of rebellion against God that they could not shake. It clouded
the judgment of nobles and priests alike. One would think that those who served
in the temple would be able to clearly recognize the voice of God, but that was
not the case. Instead, they accused God's righteous prophets of conspiring
against the country and demanded their death, hiding the fact that they were following
their own vain imaginations[ii] and were themselves conspiring
for power and gain without regard for the consequences as they brought the
nation to its knees around them. Selfishness and greed were the order of the
day, and that allowed no room for a God who would restrain any of that. Since
his prophets spoke his will in opposition, they had to go, even if it meant making
an example by sawing Isaiah in two to silence him.
We live in a similar time of transition. Scenes that have played out in many countries
before are now playing out in the Untied States. A lust for power and wealth
has continued to enrich those in power to obscene levels and impoverish average
Americans, pushing them to homelessness, food insecurity, and a sense of
helplessness in the face of disease and continually rising costs. Despite those
rising costs, the federal minimum wage has not changed since 2009 and the United
States Senate has refused to provide meaningful relief
for wages or pandemic needs. The wealthy claim that they cannot afford to pay
higher wages to their employees as they have complained ever since the minimum
wage began. They lament that doing so would be the downfall of the economy,
even though that has never been the case at any time when the minimum wage was
raised.
In the past, the social welfare system has been a safety net that families
could turn to, but it has been more than that for society at large. Empty
stomachs and homeless transients are fertile soil for revolution as Marie
Antoinette and her husband Louis, found out. Desperate people only await a
modern Madame de Farge to egg them on. As we have seen there are plenty such
souls in the United States willing to do just that. Manipulating anxious people
with unfounded theories of horrendous conspiracies, they push them on, lighting
them afire with fear that no one will care for them, so they must take matters
into their own hands. People who would otherwise trust in the social safety net
are squeezed between those who would defund that net, and those who brand the
users of that safety net as socialists and communists out to destroy the
country. A moment's careful thought would cause a normal person to ask, "Why
are people urging this? What's in it for them?" But desperation, worsened by a
deadly pandemic sometimes prevents those quiet moments from happening. Instead,
those moments are replaced with conspiracy propaganda constantly being hammered
home by social media and some well-placed individuals capable of building a
following by pandering to fear. Some of these individuals, like the sycophants
of tyrants of the past, are likely hoping to profit from the chaos and rise to
greater power and wealth under those they set upon the throne. But their greed
and selfishness betray them in the end.
Were they to study the lessons of the past, they could predict their own
future. The Roman Republic, a representative form of democracy, survived for
almost five hundred years until Julius Caesar dealt it a mortal wound. He paid for
that wound with his own assassination, and the republic limped on for another seventeen
years before it finally expired with the declaration of Octavian as Emperor.
But as happens so often with dictators, many of the Caesars met a violent end.
We see this same trend in the Bible with the kings of the Northern Kingdom of
Israel as usurpers, one after another, brought down kings and replaced them, often
eliminating not only those they usurped, but their entire families. The weakness
this creates within a nation eventually sets it up for destruction by foreign enemies.
We have seen this with the Assyrians destroying Samaria, and the Babylonians
destroying Jerusalem, a city split between worshipping the true God or the gods
of other nations. Even the Babylonians fell before the Medes and the Persians
in part because of a conflict between Nabonidus and his son Belshazzar and the
Babylonian priesthood.[iii] The king and his son wanted
to have only one deity. This might not have caused a serious rift except that
they wanted the deity to be Sin, but the Babylonian priests wanted it to be
Marduk. As a result, When Cyrus rode into Babylon, he styled himself champion
of Marduk and won the hearts of the priests and the people. Divisions, especially
those with a religious foundation, can destroy an empire, but they can also destroy
those who rise from the ashes of that destruction.
The flames of that
conflagration licked at the Capitol, sometimes called the People's House, in a,
thus far, vain attempt to overthrow our republic. This conflict, too, was
fanned by the flames of religious fervor over issues like abortion. Some would
rather destroy our almost two-hundred-and fifty-year-old republic over the
issue, replacing it with a religious (read that Christian) dictatorship, the same
kind of religious tyranny that caused many of the first colonists to flee
Europe in the first place. Perhaps they forget that there was a time when, even
with Christian governments in power, a Catholic ruler slaughtered the Protestants
(remember Bloody Mary), and when the Protestants were in charge, they did the
same to the Catholics. Those who are familiar with United States history may
remember the anti-Catholic riots of the early 19th century a time
that gave birth to Millerism and eventually, our own Seventh-day Adventist Church.
It was a time when Catholics were believed to be of the devil and not Christian
at all. Subversion of the government has the potential to bring horrors like that
back again.
The church today, as
in Isaiah's day, appears to have lost its way. Commanded to passively carry the
love of Christ to the world, they instead demand the punishment and even death
of sinners at their hands. Much of that religious zealotry was echoed in the repeated
cries to "Hang Mike Pence!" on January 6. When I asked some Christians how they
could even support such a perversion of their faith, they replied that Pence
was betraying Donald Trump and Trump is against abortion, so Christians must be
on the right side of that single issue. Of course, Mike Pence opposes abortion
also, but that disconnect does not seem to register for some. Religious zealotry
caused the priesthood of Christ's day to be blind to his role as Messiah.
Perhaps we are facing a similar blindness here. Some Christians are seeing the
assault on the Capitol as an apocalyptic or end-time event. Paul wrote prophetically
of that time to the church in Thessalonica when he said "The coming of the
lawless one will be in accordance with how Satan works. He will use all sorts
of displays of power through signs and wonders that serve the lie, and all the
ways that wickedness deceives those who are perishing. They perish because they
refused to love the truth and so be saved. For this reason, God sends them a
powerful delusion so that they will believe the lie" (2 Thessalonians 2:9-11,
NIV)
Could that delusion deceive
even the churches? Jesus said, "For false messiahs and false prophets will
appear and perform great signs and wonders to deceive, if possible, even the
elect." (Matthew 24:24, NIV) If these things will threaten to deceive even the
elect, what will be the case for the nominal Christians? Perhaps we see the results
in the many "prophets" who foretold that Donald Trump would be restored to
office by Congress on January 6 and urged others to storm Washington, D.C. and
make it happen. Some are still calling for the overthrow of the electoral
process in their sermons almost a month later. We might ask how this can be,
and how apparently faithful Christians can be deceived so easily. Perhaps it is
because things are not as they appear to be. Writing to the church in Corinth
when other Christians opposed his ministry, Paul said, "For such people are
false apostles, deceitful workers, masquerading as apostles of Christ. And no
wonder, for Satan himself masquerades as an angel of light. It is not
surprising, then, if his servants also masquerade as servants of righteousness.
Their end will be what their actions deserve." (2 Corinthians 11:13-15, NIV)
Maybe what all of this means is that instead of buying into conspiracies
preached from our pulpits and through online ministries and by rabble rousers,
we should seek instead to find truth through a closer relationship to Christ and
a deep, abiding trust in his ability to deal with the problems of the world. We
are commanded to carry the Gospel everywhere because that will bring about the only
revolutionary change that he exemplified. Once that is universally carried out
the rest could naturally fall into place.
Too many self-styled
influencers want to speak to our fears to manipulate us for their agendas and for
questionable ends. In response to that Isaiah says, "Do not call conspiracy
everything this people calls a conspiracy; do not fear what they fear, and do
not dread it." (Isaiah 8:12, NIV) Maybe it is time we turned to the quiet
message of the Bible instead of the pundits shouting from the rooftops to relieve
our fears.