Thursday, March 28, 2013

Year 3, Day 87: Jeremiah 34

Mercy

You might be wondering how it is that I can title the first section of my writing as mercy when it really describes Zedekiah’s capture, captivity, and death.  Here’s the thing.  Zedekiah was rebelling against God every day that he refused to humble himself to Nebuchadnezzar and accept God’s edict that Nebuchadnezzar was God’s rod of judgment.  Zedekiah was living in utter rebellion.  God could have been justified in having Zedekiah be captured, dragged to Babylon, and executed in Nebuchadnezzar’s presence.  It would have been a fit and just end to his life.

But this is not what God declares.  God says to Zedekiah that he will not die by the sword.  God tells him that he will die in peace.  He will die in such a manner that connects him to the kings that came before him.  God is merciful, even in the midst of God’s wrath and judgment.

Emancipation Proclamation

Then we learn something utterly despicable.  The Hebrew people had made slaves of their own kind.  They had forced one another into subjugation.  I’m left wondering: when your city around you is being encircled, when the food is running out, when the drinking water is tainted, and when life is bleak – what exactly is the purpose of slaves?

We don’t really have the answer here as to why they had slaves in captivity in the first place.  Well, we don’t have the answer other than human beings tend to be cruel to one another.  We tend to always want someone who is below us.  Although I think it is anathema, humanity does attach itself to a saying first composed for Satan in the book Paradise Lost: “Better to reign in Hell than serve in Heaven.”  While I disagree with that saying in its entirety, humanity does live along that line.  We live as though it is always better to reign in a horrible place than serve. 

So why would people in a besieged town have slaves?  They needed to rule someone.  If they ruled someone, then there was always someone worse off than they were.  Fundamentally, that is why I think slavery endured in Jerusalem even into the siege.  I really loathe that dynamic of human culture.

However, in a moment of repentance, the people of Jerusalem are convinced to give up their slaves.  How pleased must God have been that they finally listened!

Revoked

How pleased must God have been until they revoked the emancipation, that is!

You might be wondering what happened here.  Why would the people give up their slaves only to take them back?  The answer is pretty easy historically speaking – but not exactly given to us in scripture.

When the Hebrew people of Jerusalem gave up their slaves, God allowed the army of Babylon to pull away from the city.  In fact, the Pharaoh in Egypt came up to attack the army of Babylon.  So the Babylonians had to abandon their siege for a little while to repel the attack of the Egyptians.  God actually did relent when they listened to His decree about taking their own people as slaves!

However, when the Babylonians pulled away from Jerusalem, a bunch of the Hebrew people started looking at their disassembled town.  They started looking at the siege implements surrounding their city.  There was a lot of work to be done getting the city back to the way it was.  Of course, they decided that the quickest way to get the job done was to take their slaves back and put them to work!

So that is exactly what they did.  When the pressure was off, the repentance was proven unfounded.  The people didn’t care about God when they gave up their slaves; they wanted to save their own neck.  Once their neck was saved, they went back to their old way of living: subjugate others.  It is pretty sad, to be honest.

What we see happening is that once the Hebrew people have demonstrated that their repentance was false, the Babylonians are brought back by God.  They deal with the Egyptian threat from the south and then immediately reinstate their siege warfare against Jerusalem.  The Hebrew people had an opportunity to show true repentance and utterly blew it.

It makes me wonder how many times this is also true about me or my community.  How often do we feign repentance to get what we want or at least take the pressure off?  How often are we convinced our outward behavior can fool a God who can see the inward nature of our heart?


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