Thursday, September 14, 2017

Promises, promises

God takes covenant pretty seriously.

Nebuchadnezzar had come and conquered Judah.  He had dragged off the best and the brightest to Babylon as prizes and hostages and as a way of pacifying the land and keeping it subject.  He had allowed the nation of Judah to remain, even allowed a branch of David to remain upon the throne in Zedekiah.  As the conquered, the surrendered, as terms, they would have had to swear fealty to King Nebby.  They entered into covenant with him.  They may have even had a ceremony where some animals were torn in two and Zedekiah, as the vassal king, would have walked between them while swearing his oath to obey and pay tribute to Babylon or be cut to pieces as these creatures have been.  Cutting a covenant it's called.  Very visceral, very visual, very memorable process, i'm thinking.

And here's the thing.  God heard and witnessed it.  Zed may have even invoked Yahweh's name as part of the ritual.  To him it was in vain, for as we see, he neither knows nor fears God but God held him accountable all the same.

God had whistled for Nebby.  He had brought the Assyrians and then the Babylonians in to punish and discipline his people.  God.  Yahweh.  Not some angry god of the old testament who has nothing to do with the hippie god of the new one.  God is consistent, God is one.  Jesus as God would have done this.  He had long warned them he would, beginning with Moses.  The children of God disobeyed and disregarded the covenant of Sinai where God married himself to his people.  And now, because of their disobedience and spiritual adultery, he had forced them into covenant with a pagan king.

And he expected them to honor that covenant.

They don't.  Despite more dire and very specific warnings from Isaiah and Jeremiah and Ezekiel and others, Zed looks for a way out of God's justice, God's holy arrangement designed for their good and humbling.  He looks to Egypt.  He looks to another pagan regional superpower.  He allies himself with one devil over another.

The effects are devastating.  Total annihilation.  The sacking and burning of Jerusalem.  Zed's last sight on earth is of his sons, his seed, murdered before his eyes so he will know his line is cut off from the earth, his wives given to others as slaves.  Then his eyes are torn out.

So don't break your word... to anyone.... ever.

But as good advice as that is, that's not the point of the story really and you don't have the power to do it in yourself.  Which IS the point!  Because the Bible isn't a series of moral lessons to make you your better self now.  It's the story of God pursuing his wayward bride.  Ezekiel 17 which tells this story in parable form, doesn't end with the devastation of our sin upon our own heads, but with God showing how He's going to magnanimously and extravagantly keep His side of the Covenant we broke!

Thanks be to God!

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