The story of America is remarkably like that of Israel as a nation. Taken out of the slavery of Europe, a ragged band of pilgrims crosses the sea and finally arrives on the shore of a new land, a land occupied by tribes of savages. (We romanticize the American Indians as "pure spirits," but I'm not so sure, based on history.) Anyway, the early pilgrims recognized the hand of Divine Providence as they settled and spread throughout the new land. They worshipped God and separated themselves into different colonies based on their freedom to worship as they chose. Even our official founding documents recognize the God Who established the nation.
Eventually, though, our history follows Israel's exactly. In Deuteronomy 32, Moses is about to take his leave of the people he led through the desert, and he recites a hymn of Israel's history:
Is [Yahweh] not your Father, your Creator,
who made you and formed you?....
In a desert land he found [you],
in a barren and howling waste.
He shielded [Israel] and cared for him;
he guarded him as the apple of his eye,
like an eagle that stirs up its nest
and hovers over its youong,
that spreads its wings to catch them
can carries them on its pinions.
[Yahweh] alone led him;
no foreign god was with him....
Jeshurun grew fat and kicked;
filled with food, he became heavy and sleek.
He abandoned the God who made him
and rejected the Rock his Savior....
The Lord [Yahweh] saw this and rejected them
because he was angered by his sons and daughters.
"I will hide my face from them," he said,
"and see what their end will be....
They are a nation without sense,
there is no discernment in them.
If only they were wise and would understand this
and discern what their end will be...."
When Moses finished reciting all these words to all Israel, he said to them, "Take to heart all the words I have solemnly declared to you this day, so that you may command your children to obey carefully all the words of this law. They are not just idle words for you -- they are your life. By them you will live long in the land you are crossing the Jordan to possess (Deut. 32, selections).
Like Israel, we as a nation have grown "fat and sleek" and have forgotten God and rejected our Savior. It is not so much that God is angry enough to punish us, but more that we, like the Prodigal Son, have walked out from under His protective care. We no longer eat the food He provides to us, but rather the husks fed on by the pigs. We languish in a foreign land, without any god at all, while even the servants eat from the table in our Father's house. Like rebellious teens, we think we can get along without our Father, without our God.
Someone once wrote that what we call the "wrath of God" is really the "wrath" of a fallen and chaotic world. As long as we dwell in the house of the Lord, we are protected from that wrath -- the wrath of indifferent nature, the wrath of wildfires, the wrath of torandos and hurricanes and floods; the wrath of drought and of famine. But when we are no longer under the banner of love, we have no defense against any of these things.
I've always loved The Lion King for its depiction of a land under a good and just ruler and for its portrayal of a desolate land under an evil king. That is a very biblical perspective; the blessings of God are linked by word and image throughout the bible with lush greenery, flowing waters, and rich crops. The Hebrew words for "blessing" and for "streams of water" are separated by one vowel: berakhah means "benediction,blessing, prosperity (by implication), and berekhah means reservoir, or pool where camels drink. And the word for "birthright" in Hebrew is bekhorah.
When Jacob steals Esau's bekhorah/ birthright, -- the land he would have inherited from Isaac --, it was no good unless he also somehow could get the berakhah/benediction which would bring the berekhah "streams of water" to enrich the land. In the biblical account, reversal of letters and sounds comes together as Esau cries: Isn't he called ya'qob/ the deceiver?
He has deceived [ya'qebeni] me twice:
My bekhorah / birthright he took away
and now he takes away my berakhah / benediction!
The Bible does not record so much what happened as what happens. I am afraid that by forgetting our birthright as born of God we have also lost our blessing, our 'streams of water' that overflow and nourish the gift of land we have inherited. In Genesis 2, we are told that God had not yet sent rain upon the earth..."but streams came up from the earth and watered the whole surface of the ground."
Throughout the rest of the Old Testament (and the New, if we but read it right), we find the analogy of water and blessing. Jeremiah 17:
Cursed is the one who trusts in man,
who depends on flesh for his strength
and whose heart turns away from the Lord.
He will be like a bush in the wastelands;
he will not see prosperity when it comes.
He will dwell in the parched places of the desert,
in a salt land where no one lives.
But blessed is the man who trusts in the Lord,
whose confidence is in him.
He will be like a tree planted by the water
that sends out its roots by the stream.
It does not fear when heat comes;
its leaves are always green.
It has no worries in a year of drought
and never fails to bear fruit....
Those who turn away from you will be written in the dust
because they have forsaken the Lord,
the spring of living water.
I am so afraid that by going our own way, we as a nation have forsaken the Lord, the Spring of Living Water, and have, as Jeremiah told the Israelites, dug broken cisterns for ourselves that cannot hold water (2:13). What happened to Israel can easily happen to us, but if we turn back to our Source of Life, we, too, like Israel can be restored.
No comments:
Post a Comment