This is the second of five sermons in which we are attempting to give an overview of the Bible. That’s quite a task, but we’re going to give it a go! Last Sunday Bruce began an overview of the Old Testament: ‘From Abraham to Joshua’. This week we are looking at the great central part of the Old Testament and the title is ‘From Joshua to the Exile’. So prepare to leap through about 600 years in a few courageous bounds!
I need to begin by saying that the great pivotal point of the Old Testament is the Exodus. God saw an undistinguished slave people in Egypt, and decided to deliver them from slavery and take them through a long journey until they found their homeland. It is so significant for the Jewish people because it defines their existence as a distinctive people; their relationship with God their Deliverer; Moses as the great proto-type of the leader they were always hoping would come again, and that act of rescue is ritually remembered and re-enacted every year in the Passover. It is so significant for the Christian because it is the model from which our own story of salvation takes its origin. We are very ordinary people, in slavery to sin and the powers of evil, and God through Christ comes to our rescue, sets us free, and leads us across our own Red Sea and on our own journey through to the homeland he has promised. That is the Christian’s salvation history writ large for us in a huge visual aid.
But Moses, who has led God’s chosen people across the Red Sea to freedom, and through the arduous years in the wilderness, dies before he can complete the journey. It falls to Joshua to complete the task, and lead the people to occupy the land of Canaan, the land which God had promised.
But this relatively small strip of land to the east of the Mediterranean is prized land because it is highly fertile. It is right in the middle of what historians and archaeologists call the ‘Fertile Crescent’ running in a crescent shape from modern day Iraq, Jordan and Egypt round to modern day Turkey in the north. It includes a great plain which was known as the bread basket of the Middle East. Many believe it was there that ancient people first began to grow crops and settle as an agricultural people rather than hunter-gatherers.
So it was always going to be the object of fierce competition – as indeed it remains today. Nations to the north and west from Syria to Assyria to Babylonia to Greece to Rome all sought to conquer it. And from the south, the great enemy was always Egypt. This promised land was a small country, ‘boxed in’ in the middle of all the great military powers who eyed it greedily from all sides.
The Israelites could never defend it in their own strength. They relied on God’s help, and the great question which was to hang over their nation during all these centuries was whether they could keep their side of the covenant God had made. Could they keep his commandments and rely on his power, rather than their own resources? Or would they rebel against the God who had saved them from slavery and made them free, and pursue their own ends, and find themselves, as a result, inevitably crushed between the great competing world powers? Sometimes they veered one way and sometimes another. Overall the lesson is painfully clear – when they ceased to rely on God, they became over-confident, self-reliant, broke his commandments, and disaster invariably followed.
And I don’t see this, myself, as God’s directly punitive action, let alone revenge. I see it as the inevitable consequence when a person or a nation or a church becomes proud and over-confident, turns away from the living God, and begins to live in its own strength. It is a fact of life. The wages of sin is death – not because God wills people to destruction – but simply because that is the final payout.
To follow the story through this period briefly goes as follows.
The twelve tribes occupied the promised land of Canaan not, initially, as a single nation, but as a loose confederation. This is the picture we see in the Book of Judges. There was nothing resembling a central government or organisation – the tribes largely went their own way. But when there was an outside threat, God raised up a charismatic leader who rallied the tribes (much as a romanticised history of Scotland sees a charismatic leader arise from time to time, and unify the different clans to fight a common cause against the English enemy).
But the surrounding nations were more cohesive, and they had central leaders who were kings. And after some 200 years, there arose a groundswell of opinion that Israel, too, needed to become a nation like those around it, and they wanted and needed a king who would form a central government. The leading prophet Samuel was highly sceptical of this desire, as he foresaw that behind it lay the desire to become like all the other nations, relying on human structures and military might, rather than on the power of God who had brought them to this land. No doubt the memory of that glorious conquest of Canaan under God and Joshua was, by this time, becoming something of a distant memory, and they were already becoming (so to speak) infected by the pagan outlook (not to say pagan rituals) of the native population who still remained in great numbers. What God thought of this desire for a king is neatly summed up in 1 Samuel 8:7 where He says to Samuel “They have rejected me as their king!”
But Samuel was persuaded and (with God’s guidance) Israel acquired its first king – Saul. After a bright start, he became a disaster, and Samuel quietly (and under God’s specific guidance) anointed the young shepherd boy David, to be king in Saul’s place.
We have no time to relate the story, but David became Israel’s greatest king who went down in their history as the model to whom they always looked back (however marred his character). Whenever times were hard for the next thousand years and more, they looked, prayed and hoped longingly for another David. What they imagined, of course, was another such great military leader – what they never dreamt of, was a son of David who looked or acted like his true successor - Jesus.
David was succeeded by his son, the great king Solomon, who built the temple. He was a great king, but in practice he was simply a copy of the great oriental rulers. Magnificent, lordly, worldly, with his army and his horses, and his myriads of concubines and wives. The very model of an magnificent oriental despot. It was the height of Israel’s worldly power and glory, and the brink of the precipice.
History bristles with tales of great rulers who sons cannot match them, having grown up in splendour without responsibility, pride without wisdom, power without experience, and who inevitably lead their people into catastrophe. So it was to be with Solomon’s son Rehoboam.
Solomon was hardly in his grave before rebellion broke out, and the result was that the kingdom split into two. The ten tribes to the north of Jerusalem declared independence and thereafter are named in the Bible as Israel. The two remaining tribes grouped around Jerusalem – Judah and the tiny tribe of Benjamin - remained under sovereignty from the capital Jerusalem and thereafter they are called in the Bible Judah.
To cut a long story short, the kingdom of Israel to the north comprising those ten tribes were attacked in the 721 BC by Assyria (the great world power of its day), the people taken away into exile and never heard of again. They literally disappeared off the face of the map. By New Testament times, this area of land is known as Samaria. The great Old Testament prophets (such as Amos and Hosea) had declared with great passion that this was bound to happen, because these people had forsaken God and his covenant, indulged in appalling social injustice, and forfeited their right to his protection.
Over the next hundred and fifty years, the southern kingdom of Judah lives on, sometimes rallying its faith and finding in God its great God and Saviour, and sometimes straying far away and finding itself in mortal danger. The crunch came in the year 586 BC when the Babylonians captured Jerusalem and took all the Jewish inhabitants away into captivity in Babylon where they remained for the next 50 years. Eventually they are allowed to return, rebuild Jerusalem and the Temple, and a new era dawns. That’s the cliff-hanger for next week, and the end of today’s history lesson.
But overarching it all, we have two readings today from the New Testament, which are angry commentaries on this long saga of God’s people. They tell us that, throughout this chequered history, God had constantly sent prophets and leaders, who had listened carefully to what God was saying, and told the people in no uncertain terms what they needed to do to repent, turn back to God, worship him in the right spirit, rely on him for salvation rather than their own armies, and avert disaster. On and on God had pleaded with his people. These terrible catastrophes, and all the suffering that went with them, need not have happened if only they had listened.
But sadly these prophets sent from God had consistently been ignored, laughed at, persecuted, imprisoned and often killed. That is the message that overhangs all the historical story I have been telling. And, of course, the message both of Stephen and of Jesus is only too plain. God’s people are repeating the same terrible mistake. God has sent his only Son – the greatest prophet, leader and saviour of all – and, instead of listening and responding, the people had conspired to have him falsely tried, tortured and crucified. And the inevitable result was to follow – within 30 years or so, Jerusalem and its Temple would be destroyed by the Romans, and it would not be long before the Jewish people would be expelled from the land God had given them for the next two thousand years. The lessons of Israel’s long history had not been learned.
The two readings Bruce has chosen for today to sum up this period of Jewish history are angry tirades against the religious leaders, the religious establishment, and all those who kept to the law, but failed to listen to God who was speaking to them through the Holy Spirit. It is summed up by Stephen in one blistering verse – Acts 7: 51: “You are just like your fathers. You always resist the Holy Spirit!”
Now I am very aware that my time is up, but I find it impossible to leave it at that point without asking where we stand today. What is the application of this message? Is it possible that our religious establishment is equally resisting the Holy Spirit and courting disaster?
We look out on a world struggling with great issues of war and peace, great riches and great poverty; a western world becoming ever more secular and an eastern world becoming ever more militant. If ever there was a need to proclaim the Gospel, it is now. People we know everywhere struggle with their finances, with their relationships, with their children, with authority, and overall hangs the fog of confusion and the hope of salvation. The Gospel of Jesus Christ was never so relevant and potentially powerful. The Holy Spirit urges us forward.
And what do our church leaders do? They argue among themselves about whether women may become bishops, when all around us (and indeed in our own congregation) we see women manifestly anointed by the Holy Spirit for ministry within the church of God. Do we follow where the Holy Spirit leads? Or do we insist on sticking by our traditions?
And now comes the Lambeth Conference, where our church leaders will spend their time arguing about homosexuality! It’s difficult to think of a worse or more negative advertisement for the Gospel and the Church.
It’s significant that both issues, at root, are about sex, which seems to obsess the church and become the worst of sins. But doesn’t Jesus always demonstrate his greatest compassion for our outward sinful natures, while reserving his fiercest condemnation for the spiritual and inner sins – pride, hypocrisy, passing judgement on others while failing to deal with the planks in our own eyes, and our own lack of self-discernment, faithfulness and love for God?
If ever there was a failure to read the signs of the times, it is now. If ever there was a failure to listen to the Holy Spirit, surely we see it as our leaders argue among themselves while the world waits for the message of salvation. Surely they should be uniting in sending out a massive message of encouragement to the church to preach the Gospel of Jesus Christ – who, to the best of my knowledge – said nothing about either issue.
I have opened up a huge subject without the time to explore it even superficially, and for that I apologise. But if we are to learn the lessons of the Old Testament, and pay attention to Stephen’s and Jesus’ condemnation “Woe to you, teachers of the law and Pharisees, you hypocrites!” “You always resist the Holy Spirit!” Then it is time to pray earnestly for our church and its leaders. The Old Testament teaches only too clearly the fate of those who maintain their traditions and will not listen to what the Spirit is saying to the churches.
-----------------------------
1. How did you react to the debate in General Synod concerning women bishops, and the surrounding publicity?
2. How can we best pray for the bishops as they attend the Lambeth Conference?
3. How can we best be open to the leading of the Holy Spirit, and avoid the temptation to resist what he is saying?
4. What do you think the Holy Spirit is saying to us at St Michael’s now?
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment