When the Road to Peace is Stained with Blood

 

Wednesday, February 16, 2022

I took my troubles to the Lord; I cried out to him, and he answered my prayer.  Rescue me, O Lord, from liars and from all deceitful people.  O deceptive tongue, what will God do to you?  How will he increase your punishment?  You will be pierced with sharp arrows and burned with glowing coals.  How I suffer in far-off Meshech.  It pains me to live in distant Kedar.  I am tired of living among people who hate peace.  I search for peace; but when I speak of peace, they want war!  Psalm 120:1-7

Peace is forever sought and elusive.  The writer of today’s Psalm of Ascents for those travelling to Jerusalem’s temple, understood the anguish of one living far from home.  And the distance was not in miles or travel days, but attitude.  “Home” (as the poet has it) is where the heart is.  The heart of this writer longed for kindness and strength of trusted relationships.  You can almost feel his bones creaking for the absence of peace.  He brings forth his words from a tired heart that aches for the renewing of truth, an honest moment of unguarded rest.

The sentence that stands alone in this Psalm is I searched for peace, but they wanted war!  As the exhaustive climb to the apex of life’s mountain of experiences comes to a close, this aging prophet looks back at life and the vanity of all else but peace; his stand-out takeaway-line is anger.  He craved a soft, refreshing water of calm truth to restore his dusty soul; what he got was a mirage of an amusement park’s diversion…success offered on the backs of the poor and lonely.  So-called peace was bought with bloodstains on every road.

The Psalm begins with assertion that God heard and answered his cry for rescue from the peace-barren, angry foreign place!  So, how is the prayer of the writer’s troubles answered?  This is a good question, and one which the eons of humanity find sparse answer.  That is – there is sparse answer without the leap of faith. 

There is a tendency toward thinking too much in the here and now, as opposed to the eternal.  Peace (in this life…at the address you call “home”) is measured in fleeting moments of satisfaction with circumstances.  The key word is fleeting.  That word is key, because the heart longs deeply for peace that is eternal.  Considering the track record of humankind, from the moment Eve took the first unsatisfactory bite of the fruit that separated her from God’s loving embrace, to the sharing of it with Adam, and then passing it along to Cain, and the rest of every breathing being, staining with curse every part of our existence right down to this present moment, we can have little hope in the maneuverings of human cleverness to somehow produce anything close to peace.  

Much more likely is the scenario of Russia invading Ukraine, and then America retaliating, followed by some sort of “peace-response” of the United Nations, followed by decades of tension-filled negotiations, incidents, and exposed treachery on all sides.  Man longs for peace, but it’s an illusion, because the blood-stained road of war is more “profitable.”

For You Today

It is a short-leap from the history books to despair.  The one antidote for such misery is embracing it the way God did.  He sent his only begotten, beloved son, Jesus to deal with our problem.  In true fashion, we nailed the Prince of Peace to a tree on the town garbage dump.  And that’s when the olive branch of peace appeared…in the wonder of an empty tomb!

So…go on in…look around that empty tomb; see the folded death shroud…feel the empty space death was supposed to inhabit…and know that peace lives forever in the beating, resurrected life of our Savior.  And he wants you to have it.  You only need drink…deeply!

You chew on that as you hit the Rocky Road; have a blessed day!  

[1] Title and other images:  Pixabay.com    Unless noted, Scripture quoted from The New Living Translation^©    

Jeremiah's Message from the Garbage Dump

 

Thursday, January 21, 2021
This is what the Lord said to me: “Go and buy a clay jar.  Then ask some of the leaders of the people and of the priests to follow you.  Go out through the Gate of Broken Pots to the garbage dump in the valley of Ben-Hinnom, and give them this message.  Say to them, ‘Listen to this message from the Lord, you kings of Judah and citizens of Jerusalem!  This is what the Lord of Heaven’s Armies, the God of Israel, says:  I will bring a terrible disaster on this place, and the ears of those who hear about it will ring!  “‘For Israel has forsaken me and turned this valley into a place of wickedness.  The people burn incense to foreign gods—idols never before acknowledged by this generation, by their ancestors, or by the kings of Judah.  And they have filled this place with the blood of innocent children.  They have built pagan shrines to Baal, and there they burn their sons as sacrifices to Baal.  I have never commanded such a horrible deed; it never even crossed my mind to command such a thing!  So beware, for the time is coming, says the Lord, when this garbage dump will no longer be called Topheth or the valley of Ben-Hinnom, but the Valley of Slaughter.  “‘For I will upset the careful plans of Judah and Jerusalem.  I will allow the people to be slaughtered by invading armies, and I will leave their dead bodies as food for the vultures and wild animals.  I will reduce Jerusalem to ruins, making it a monument to their stupidity.  All who pass by will be astonished and will gasp at the destruction they see there.  I will see to it that your enemies lay siege to the city until all the food is gone.  Then those trapped inside will eat their own sons and daughters and friends.  They will be driven to utter despair.’  “As these men watch you, Jeremiah, smash the jar you brought.  Then say to them, ‘This is what the Lord of Heaven’s Armies says:  As this jar lies shattered, so I will shatter the people of Judah and Jerusalem beyond all hope of repair.  They will bury the bodies here in Topheth, the garbage dump, until there is no more room for them.  This is what I will do to this place and its people, says the Lord.  I will cause this city to become defiled like Topheth.  Yes, all the houses in Jerusalem, including the palace of Judah’s kings, will become like Topheth—all the houses where you burned incense on the rooftops to your star gods, and where liquid offerings were poured out to your idols.’”  Then Jeremiah returned from Topheth, the garbage dump where he had delivered this message, and he stopped in front of the Temple of the Lord.  He said to the people there,  “This is what the Lord of Heaven’s Armies, the God of Israel, says:  ‘I will bring disaster upon this city and its surrounding towns as I promised, because you have stubbornly refused to listen to me.’”  Jeremiah 19:1-15

The state of Judah and Israel, along with its people, smelled like Ben-Hinnom, the garbage dump outside Jerusalem.  Metaphorically, it was like the dumpster behind an abortion clinic…it smelled of death, and nothing living could survive there long.

Jeremiah’s message, something of a children’s sermon object lesson, was unmistakable; the broken pieces of a clay pot belonged on a rubble heap, useless – its purpose forever shattered.  God was telling his people they’d done this to themselves, become a shattered mess of what hopes and dreams they’d sinned-away by worshipping other gods, and even resorting to the unthinkable practice of child-sacrifice.  Disaster was about to be applied to the fragile clay pot of an unsuspecting nation.  A message like this could not have had a pretty reaction.  Indeed, Jeremiah’s future was probably sealed by this sermon.  It would be thirty years later that Jerusalem would fall, but the memory of God’s enemies is long.  The prophet’s message was fulfilled just a few years later as Jerusalem fell in BC 586.

I have long seen this as a shroud of warning to our country, once a beacon of life, now copying the practices of the garbage dump with opulence, hedonism, and children sacrificed to the god of convenience.

Today is the first full day of a new administration in our country.  Some have said that the new president’s most daunting challenge is to unify a divided population.  While that is an expected and somewhat laudable idea, I disagree.  You cannot unify (in any lasting or genuine sense) people who have antithetical values.  For Christians, guided by Holy Scripture, you cannot simply request that they accept darkness as light.  Opposites may attract, but eventually they negate each other.  When cold decides to coexist with hot the result is nauseating lukewarm.  Frankly, shades of gray (produced by the marriage of light and darkness) may do well in a charcoal drawing, but as a life principle, anything short of stepping into the light of God’s will is well-short of the mark.

For You Today

I do not approve of anarchy or the kind of bloody insurrection we have seen of late in Washington.  But neither can I keep from praying to God that we wake up to the smell of the garbage dump of Hinnom and turn away from the culture of death.

You chew on that as you hit the Rocky Road; have a blessed day!

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[1] Title Image: Courtesy of Pixabay.com   Unless noted, Scripture quoted from The New Living Translation^©

For other posts on this topic see Broken Pieces and Shattered Beyond All Hope of Repair      

 

The Cry Heard in Ramah

 

Monday, December 28, 2020

After the wise men were gone, an angel of the Lord appeared to Joseph in a dream.  “Get up!  Flee to Egypt with the child and his mother,” the angel said. “Stay there until I tell you to return, because Herod is going to search for the child to kill him.”  That night Joseph left for Egypt with the child and Mary, his mother, and they stayed there until Herod’s death.  This fulfilled what the Lord had spoken through the prophet:  “I called my Son out of Egypt.”  

Herod was furious when he realized that the wise men had outwitted him.  He sent soldiers to kill all the boys in and around Bethlehem who were two years old and under, based on the wise men’s report of the star’s first appearance.  Herod’s brutal action fulfilled what God had spoken through the prophet Jeremiah:  “A cry was heard in Ramah—weeping and great mourning.  Rachel weeps for her children, refusing to be comforted, for they are dead.”  Matthew 2:13-18

Known as the slaughter of the innocents, Herod’s attempt to stamp out any possibility of claims to his throne is one of the more heinous acts recorded in history.  This blot on humanity is on the par of genocidal despots like Hitler, Stalin, or the Rwandan regime’s purging of the Tutsi’s in the 1990’s.

The estimated number of children ripped from their parents’ arms and annihilated range from less than 10, to as many as 144,000.  Considering the population of the area, the lower number is more likely.  But that does not lessen the murderous impact of evil.  When it comes to holding-on to power, bloodlust is a staple.

In our day it is no different.  We tend to dress up the pig for public scrutiny.  Abortion is called choice, or family planning, but it is what it is…infanticide.  Our maniacal culture has made it legal, convenient, and safe…but only for the adult.

Centuries before Jesus was born, the prophet Jeremiah looked at the destruction of his homeland from a jail cell.  The Babylonian king’s defeat of Jerusalem, and the captivity of its people that followed were a low ebb of God’s people’s history.  There was a cry in Ramah for the defeated ones.  Jeremiah’s prophetic voice rose from his prison pit and spoke a word of hope to the captives. 

But now this is what the Lord says:  “Do not weep any longer, for I will reward you,” says the Lord.  “Your children will come back to you from the distant land of the enemy.  There is hope for your future,” says the Lord.  “Your children will come again to their own land.  Jeremiah 31:16-17

Jeremiah was writing about the devastation of Mt Zion’s city, Jerusalem, and her inhabitants.  We all await the return of prisoners, and those in far away Babylon (Iraq) were the subject of Jeremiah’s prayers.

Fast forward 600 years, and, unbeknownst to Jeremiah, his words are applied to the mothers and fathers of Bethlehem, whose children became the extermination project ordered by King Herod.  But what word could comfort the mother holding the limp body of her little son, put to death by a Roman guard’s sword?  Jeremiah says your children will come again to their own land.

Enter the child whose parents left in the middle of the night, bound for Egypt.  It is 30 years later, and he is back.  And his promise is to proclaim what God will do, release the prisoners, and set the captives free.  Jesus would face the executioner, and the executioner’s consequences, nailed to cross beams on the town garbage dump.  And he would face death’s reality by descending into its very jaws and the gates of hell, and he would lead the captives back to their home.

Even his name, Jesus, means God saves.  It means the cry heard in Ramah will not go unanswered.

For You Today

For those who trust in Jesus, believing in His resurrection power, there is no Rachel syndrome, refusing to be comforted.  These are they about whom another prophet, Isaiah wrote, comfort, comfort my people ^{(Isaiah 40:1).} 

If there is any hurt in your heart that refuses to be comforted, strengthened, healed, and made to walk in the light, remember the cry heard in Ramah became the shouts of joy filling Jerusalem.  This is the way of our God!

You chew on that as you hit the Rocky Road; have a blessed day!

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Title image:  By Domenico Ghirlandaio via Wikimedia Commons   W  Unless noted, Scripture quoted from The New Living Translation^©

For another post on this text see When Life Gets Broken