Daily Bible Reading: Jeremiah 49-50 and Romans 11

Jeremiah 49 - Oracle on the Ammonites – The lands of Gad, on the east bank of the Jordan, had been taken by Ammonites after the collapse of the northern kingdom. (Amman, Jordan today).  Milcom is the God of the Ammonites.  Jeremiah promises destruction of them as well and eventual restoration too

           

Against Edom – an implacable enemy of Israel, they profited from Judah’s downfall. They were renowned for their wisdom, but it does not save them from destruction: “As when a lion comes up from the thicket of Jordan to the permanent feeding rounds, So I, in an instant, will drive men off; and who I choose I will establish there!  For who is like me? Who can call me to account? What shepherd can stand against me?” (49:19).

           

Against Damascus -“How can the city of glory be forsaken, the town of delight. But now her young men shall fall in her streets, and all her warriors shall be stilled” (49:25).

           

Against Arabia – “Hazor shall become a haunt of jackals, a desert forever, Where no man lives, no human being stays” (49:33).

           

Against Elam – An ancient kingdom east of Babylonia. “I will bring upon Elam the four winds from the four ends of the heavens: I will scatter them to all these winds, till there is no nation to which the outcasts of Elam shall not come” (49:36).

Jeremiah 50 – Against Babylon: Jeremiah foresees their defeat in 538 BC at the hands of the Persians, though he foresees that it will be the Medes who overtake them. At this time the Medes were stronger than the Persians in the northern area. The defeat of Babylon will bring the return of the people of both Israel and Judah to their lands. “My people are like sheep whose shepherds have let them get lost in the mountains. They have wandered like sheep from one mountain to another, and they have forgotten where their home is” (50:6). The Lord’s judgment on the Neo-Babylonians is very harsh – a little inconsistent, I think, with earlier reference to them as being “sent” by God to punish His unfaithful people. It is a little hard to believe that the same hand wrote these words as wrote the words of Jeremiah 6 or 13, when the Lord was threatening His unfaithful people with destruction from the North.

Now it is the Neo-Babylonians who are threatened with punishment for having destroyed the Lord’s Temple and taken His people into exile. And the Israelites and Judeans will be brought back to get a new start. “I will punish the king of Babylon and his land as once I punished the king of Assyria; but I will bring back Israel to her fold, to feed on Carmel and Bashan, and on Mount Ephraim and Gilead, till she has her fill” (50:18-19). “They shall seek Israel’s guilt, but it shall be no more, and Judah’s sins, but these shall no longer be found; for I will forgive the remnant I preserve” (50:20). 

Romans 11 – “I ask, then, has God rejected his people? Of course not! For I too am an Israelite. . .” (11:1). NO! The call of God and the favor of God toward the Jews is ‘irrevocable’ we learn in this passage (29): “For the gifts and the call of God are irrevocable.”

Paul refers to a story from the Hebrew Scriptures about Elijah and the prophets of Baal to justify the approach he (Paul) and ultimately many in the early church will take to the Jewish reluctance to accept Christ - his tendency to reproach them in a prophetic way.  This prophetically critical approach to the community at large familiar to those in the Jewish tradition. It is part of their own sacred writings, so it is not surprising that Christians took this same tack, which modern “liberal” scholars reproach Christians for today.  Paul refers to the Elijah story: Elijah says to God, “I have been most zealous for the Lord, the God of hosts, but the Israelites have forsaken your covenant, torn down your altars, and put your prophets to the sword.  I alone am left, and they seek to take my life” (1Kings 19:10 and 18). Paul compares himself and the Jews (and Gentiles) who do accept Christ to the 7000 faithful Jews of the Elijah story—those whom God set aside to be the saving “remnant.” He says, “So also at the present time there is a remnant, chosen by grace” (11:5).

The good to be found in the unfaithfulness of the Jews is the opportunity it gives to take the message out to the Gentiles. But when all the pagans have been brought in the Jews will also be converted.  God has not forgotten them. 

What I find interesting about this passage is the light it could shed on the unfaithfulness of those gathered into Christ, namely us, the pagans, the second half of God’s harvest in the world.  What does the history of the Jews have to teach us about our own problems.  The problem of unfaithfulness in and amongst God’s people is not something that began with the Jews’ rejection of Christ. It was part of the relationship from the beginning. Elijah himself is quoted by Paul as prophetically addressing it.  But there will always be a remnant that God can build upon.  Christ opened the invitation of God to all the nations; but the ingathering that came of it has been very much like the first ingathering.  It has been marked by both heroic faithfulness and mass back-sliding.  If we only could see in Jewish history the pattern of our own, we would not keep looking back at the Jews and talking about how unfaithful THEY were in not accepting Christ.  It is WE whom we must tend to, our failure to be true to our roots.

Paul says this too. “For God delivered all to disobedience, that he might have mercy upon all.  Oh, the depth of the riches and wisdom and knowledge of God! How inscrutable are his judgments and how unsearchable his ways! ‘For who has known the mind of the Lord or who has been his counselor?’” (11:32-34)

Daily Bible Reading: Jeremiah 48 and Romans 10

Jeremiah 48 – Oracle against Moab – Bitter enemies of the Israelites (conquered by the Babylonians in 582 BC, two years after Jerusalem. “Because you trusted in your works and your treasures, you also shall be captured” (48:7). The Lord says through Jeremiah, “Moab has always lived secure and has never been taken into exile. Moab is like wine left to settle undisturbed and never poured from jar to jar. . . So now, the time is coming when I will send people to pour Moab out like wine. They will empty its wine jars and break them in pieces. Then the Moabites will be disillusioned with their god Chemosh, just as the Israelites were disillusioned with Bethel, a god in whom they trusted”(48:11-13). Bethel was the site of Jacob’s dream, a sanctuary town and official shrine for the northern kingdom. Still, even if they were bitter enemies, it seems that Jeremiah sees tragedy in Moab’s defeat.  They were a proud and glorious nation from what he writes.  He even says “And so I wail over Moab, over all Moab I cry, over the men of Kir-heres I moan. More than for Jazer I weep over you, vineyard of Sibmah.  Your tendrils trailed down to the sea, as far as Jazer they stretched.  Upon your harvest, upon your vintage, the ravager has fallen” (48:31-32). Great poetry! At the end of the oracle, there is an implied promise of restoration, though, even though these are not officially His people: “But I will change the lot of Moab in the days to come, says the Lord.  Thus far the judgment on Moab” (48:47).

The prophecies of devastation, whether to the Israelites or to other groups known to the prophets and writers of these times are sometimes very hard for some people to read. I know among those who regularly read scripture with my husband and me, some just can’t associate harsh words with the God they know. But I think if one looks at them as the words of men, who were inspired by God to help people SEE the hand of God in all the joys and disappointments of life, there have to be the downs, the defeats, the moments of desolation and despair [amazing how many negative words begin with “d” in English – devil too!]. There is a tremendous amount of hard stuff in life – in our individual lives and in the lives of ALL who have lived in history. What do we do with all that? I think what the God-lovers have done is try to see through it all to the good that lies in it or beyond it.

Romans 10 – Paul does not abandon hope for the Jews, for they “are deeply devoted to God”; but their “devotion is not based on true knowledge” (10:2). I take this to be Paul’s way of talking about the “experiential” or existential level of devotion early Quakers focused on so intently.

“God’s way of putting people right” (10:3) is something deeper than what the Law can achieve. Paul maintains here that “everyone who believes [in Christ] is put right with God” (10:4). “They have not known the way in which God puts people right with himself, and instead, they have tried to set up their own way; and so they did not submit themselves to God’s way of putting people right” (10:3). This translation of “putting people right” is from the Today’s English Version. The Douay-Rheims version talks about “the justice of God” and most other translations us “God’s righteousness” meaning the “way” God saves. It’s tricky.

Like the words Moses said of the law in Deuteronomy 30, the same could be said about Christ: “’Who will go up into heaven?’ (that is to bring Christ down) or ‘Who will go down into the abyss?’ (that is to bring Christ up from the dead)” (10:6-7).  No one needs to do this.  Christ is near us, even in our hearts and in our mouths—“that is the word of faith that we preach” (10:8).

But people can only “call on” Christ if they believe in him, and they can only believe in him if they have heard of him; and they can only hear of him if we preach about him; and we only preach of him if we are sent.  Paul sees in some of Isaiah’s words a prophecy of the turn of events they are seeing unfold: “I was found [by] those who were not seeking me; I revealed myself to those who were not asking for me” [quoting Is. 65:1-2]. The people of Israel, on the other hand, continue to be “a disobedient and contentious people” (10:21).

Much is made of words like these that have been used by so many over the years to inflame “anti-Jewish” sentiment, but to think that Paul really entertained such animosity is ridiculous. He was himself deeply Jewish in genealogy and conviction; but he did believe that the Jews, who were clinging strictly to the Law were being unfaithful to their own identity. They were belaboring their people for not seeing that Christ was a fulfillment of God’s promises to them. Like Jeremiah, Isaiah and the others, they were merely trying to convey what they saw as a prophetic ministry.