Faith in a Brutal World

If you’re reading through the Hebrew Scriptures and you get to the book of Kings you’ll get accustomed to the “good kings” and “bad kings”. The descriptions are stark, black and white, good and evil.

2 Kings 16:1–4 (NET)

¹ In the seventeenth year of the reign of Pekah son of Remaliah, Jotham’s son Ahaz became king over Judah. ² Ahaz was twenty years old when he began to reign, and he reigned for sixteen years in Jerusalem. He did not do what pleased the Lord his God, in contrast to his ancestor David.³ He followed in the footsteps of the kings of Israel. He passed his son through the fire, a horrible sin practiced by the nations whom the Lord drove out from before the Israelites. ⁴ He offered sacrifices and burned incense on the high places, on the hills, and under every green tree.

2 Kings 18:1–8 (NET)

¹ In the third year of the reign of Israel’s King Hoshea son of Elah, Ahaz’s son Hezekiah became king over Judah. ² He was twenty-five years old when he began to reign, and he reigned twenty-nine years in Jerusalem. His mother was Abi, the daughter of Zechariah. ³ He did what the Lord approved, just as his ancestor David had done.⁴ He eliminated the high places, smashed the sacred pillars to bits, and cut down the Asherah pole. He also demolished the bronze serpent that Moses had made, for up to that time the Israelites had been offering incense to it; it was called Nehushtan.⁵ He trusted in the Lord God of Israel; in this regard there was none like him among the kings of Judah either before or after.⁶ He was loyal to the Lord and did not abandon him. He obeyed the commandments which the Lord had given to Moses. ⁷ The Lord was with him; he succeeded in all his endeavors. He rebelled against the king of Assyria and refused to submit to him.⁸ He defeated the Philistines as far as Gaza and its territory, from the watchtower to the city fortress.

If you stop reading here you can preserve the stark relief. The story, however, doesn’t end here. It is the way of the text to offer these flat summaries. Ahaz bad, Hezekiah good. If you keep reading, however, you begin to see how painful “good” was, and how wobbly and flawed the “good” were.

Judging Hezekiah

Hezekiah lead a nationalist, reform movement that sought to clean up a lot of what his father had done. Was he moved to do this because he loved Yhwh more than the gods of Assyria? Did he see in the decisions of his father the path to destruction that northern brother-kingdom Israel had descended? Was his mother a Yhwh-fundamentalist? Was he ambitious, seeing and hoping for an opportunity to be released from the yoke of Assyria? We can’t judge him peering through the thin straw of the texts available to us. Isaiah and the authors of Kings and Chronicles sure seemed to like him and they were clearly highly devoted Yhwhists.

Hezekiah had real decisions to make in his life. Would he join a coalition to rebel against Assyria? Would he look to Egypt for aid which in the eyes of Isaiah was swapping one pagan overlord for another rather than trusting in Yhwh alone as the great King of Israel and Jerusalem?

Realpolitik

2 Kings mentions, not Isaiah, the pay-off Hezekiah made to Sennacherib in his first invasion. Lachish was the fortress that defended the path to Jerusalem. When Lachish fell Jerusalem was in peril.

2 Kings 18:13–16 (NET)

¹³ In the fourteenth year of King Hezekiah’s reign, King Sennacherib of Assyria marched up against all the fortified cities of Judah and captured them. ¹⁴ King Hezekiah of Judah sent this message to the king of Assyria, who was at Lachish, “I have violated our treaty. If you leave, I will do whatever you demand.” So the king of Assyria demanded that King Hezekiah of Judah pay three hundred talents of silver and thirty talents of gold. ¹⁵ Hezekiah gave him all the silver in the Lord’s temple and in the treasuries of the royal palace. ¹⁶ At that time King Hezekiah of Judah stripped the metal overlays from the doors of the Lord’s temple and from the posts which he had plated and gave them to the king of Assyria.

Hmm. Sounds like he bowed to realpolitik. John Bright in his History of Israel interprets Isaiah 1:5 as Isaiah’s acquiescing in this instance.

Isaiah 36 and 37

Isaiah 36 and 37 duplicate what you can find in 2 Kings without the collapse of Hezekiah to Sennacherib. It’s a story of Hezekiah’s weakness and difficulty. The Assyrian commanders come to taunt Hezekiah and ask him to turn over the city to them. They taunt the people of Jerusalem to overthrow Hezekiah to save themselves.

Assyria had a reputation. Cities and nations would capitulate by the weight of the sheer threat. Rulers of the ancient world were ruthless and efficient when it came to empire building and income generation. Threaten your neighbors and demand incredible tribute that would keep them poor and your army well fed and compensated. In Assyria’s case if they weaker nations didn’t capitulate they would not only plunder their wealth with their wives and children as slaves but also deport the people and cast them throughout their other conquered lands, dispersing them to accomplish cultural genocide.

This choice was simple. You can pay almost everything now, or if you resist you will lose everything later including your life and your national identity into the future. Most nations made the rational choice. Ahaz did. Hezekiah did.

Who was Isaiah to Hezekiah?

Of course when we read the Bible today we see its characters through thousands of years of adoration, embellishment or villany. I doubt Isaiah appeared to Hezekiah like he appears to us. I’m sure Hezekiah had plenty of mixed motives in his own heart and he had to weight Isaiah’s politicking along with all of the other voices in his court.

Isaiah encourages him and tells him to stand, but Hezekiah is king. It is his call, not Isaiah’s.

Hezekiah’s prayer

I love Hezekiah’s prayer.

Isaiah 37:14–20 (NET)

¹⁴ Hezekiah took the letter from the messengers and read it. Then Hezekiah went up to the Lord’s temple and spread it out before the Lord. ¹⁵ Hezekiah prayed before the Lord: ¹⁶ “O Lord who commands armies, O God of Israel, who is enthroned on the cherubim! You alone are God over all the kingdoms of the earth. You made the sky and the earth. ¹⁷ Pay attention, Lord, and hear! Open your eyes, Lord, and observe! Listen to this entire message Sennacherib sent and how he taunts the living God!¹⁸ It is true, Lord, that the kings of Assyria have destroyed all the nations and their lands. ¹⁹ They have burned the gods of the nations, for they are not really gods, but only the product of human hands manufactured from wood and stone. That is why the Assyrians could destroy them.²⁰ Now, O Lord our God, rescue us from his power, so all the kingdoms of the earth may know that you alone are the Lord.”

His prayer stands in the tradition of many such prayers. David, Jonathan, Moses. It is a prayer of faith, a kind of faith that hopes for good outcomes when there is no power to secure them.

Happy Endings

Hezekiah’s story of course has a happy ending for Jerusalem. Jerusalem is spared and Isaiah 37 ends with Sennacherib killed in the temple of his god by the hands of insurgents. He lived by the sword, he died by the sword.

False Religious Triumphalism

Why is it that the person who points out “many who pray such prayers and are slaughtered!” think they are offering some new revelation to the prayerful. Anyone who is both honest and prays knows this both emotionally and intellectually. Most honest praying people know that prayer and doubt from unanswered prayer often come like Drakes Yodels, two to a package.

Maybe because too often the church prioritizes these successful rescue narratives. Narratives of prayers offered for deliverance and deliverance received are in the Bible and can regularly be found in the wild. You can find testimonies to it in prayer notebooks in church and on Facebook. These stories encourage us emotionally to keep praying. I’m glad for them.

There are of course plenty of stories in the Bible and in the wild of unanswered prayers for deliverance.

• I can imagine the Jews at Masada praying for deliverance until they decided to take their own lives.
• There are many stories of children praying for deliverance from abuse and torment that go unanswered.
• As a pastor I know that those who keep their prayer books to record answers to prayer have many pages without happy endings.

The greatest failed prayer for deliverance was of course Jesus’. He walks into the arrest, torture and execution. God doesn’t show. His plight is interpreted as revelation of his falsity.

He must be a false prophet because God would not allow a true follower to be abused and exposed like this. The Romans and the Greeks believed this. Why follow a loser god, one that can not deliver. Islam continues to deny the death of Jesus on a cross for the same reason.

This line of reasoning is strangely in keeping with Hezekiah’s. Yhwh will be vindicated if Hezekiah and Jerusalem are spared, which they will be. Will Jesus be exposed as false if he dies? Same line of reasoning.

Voices in the Dark

If Jesus didn’t rise from the dead then I think we need to capitulate to the reasoning of natural religion, that the value and veracity of a faith is measured by its observable outcome. Jesus’ resurrection answers the question of natural religion and calls for faith once more. Jesus is vindicated by God in the resurrection but the coin of validation is not cashed in by his believing followers.

Many hero movies have the hero falling but somehow arising to finally overcome the foe. It is a standard story. Jesus’ resurrection and ascension ask the disciples to kick the can further down the road by 2000 years at least. Paul dies and stays dead. Peter dies and stays dead. Swords and bullets still silence us and leave the violent in charge.

I probably read too many atheist blogs and apostate voices for my own good. People giving up or taking an easy way out.

• If Jesus hasn’t shown for 2000 years only a fool would keep waiting for him
• If your obedience or loyalty doesn’t “work” what good is it. There are predictable ways of “making life work” that promise better outcomes. Do what’s practical.
• There are plenty of crazy fundamentalists of all religious stripes doing horrible and hated things. If you hold onto these things and teach your children to they will either become nuts like your or they will wisen up by rejecting your religion showing you to be a dupe and a fool.
• Your religion can’t agree on its own set of rules or expectations and even when they do they can’t follow them themselves. What a joke.

Sennacherib’s Practicality Didn’t Save Him Either

I get the sometimes crazy foolishness of faith in a God that will not predictably deliver either out of what pinches me or kills me. He didn’t even deliver his son. I get that, unless of course, again, you believe that he not only rose from the dead, but did so in new flesh that would never see decay and sits next to his Father in heaven with this flesh and will return with this flesh to transform all matter into a glorious new creation.

Critics say “that’s awfully far fetched”

Yep. Last week at men’s group after once again laying out what it looked like for people in what is today north Turkey to believe in Jesus as described in 1 Peter George kept saying “I can’t believe anyone there would believe this stuff especially with what it cost them to believe.” Yes they did, and that is a matter of historical record that no one can object to.

So I look at the strangeness of my faith, the failure of many of my prayers to pan out.

I must, however, compare it to what else is being offered.

Sennacherib according to Isaiah bought in the presence of his god. A lot of good that god did him. A lot of good his wealth and power did him which is what I would certainly major in if I gave up on God.

Death in the Natural World

Yesterday I read a fascinating article on extinction. This piece exposes the strange rather religious feelings of even the secular conservation movement. On one hand we want to call humanity simply a trousered ape, yet when we note the destruction we are bringing to the planet we somehow call it “unnatural”. We can only think this way if we set ourselves outside of nature, instinctively above it. Why do we do this?

Strictly speaking, the earth does not itself mind being brought into the Anthropocene. There is nothing about the earth that justifies any talk about the temperature it “ought” to maintain, or the size of the polar ice caps it “should” have. The fact that recent climate change is, beyond any reasonable scientific doubt, anthropogenic in nature makes no difference to the earth.

In all of this, again, nature itself is indifferent. The earth does not resent its humans, nor does it have any interest in preserving its polar bears or its rain forests. In fact, many species would do very well in a significantly hotter environment. … Attempts have been made to account for the current state of the earth as the one that is fitting and “healthy.” But unless one accepts the Gaia hypothesis, there are no plausible grounds for supposing that the earth is an organism, and thus that it might really be healthy or sick, or that it might have a suitable body temperature or ideal set of charismatic megafauna. We talk about “saving the earth,” but what we really want is to save ourselves.

The earth cares not about the death of the gorilla or the thoughts of a man if you are a materialist. It all goes to the same end, mute, unremembered, cold.

Ironically, much conservationist thinking involves an implicitly mythological conception of species diversity that agrees in its essentials with the creation account offered in Genesis. In the scriptural tradition, God looked upon his work and deemed it good, and what ensued was a stable order of fixed, discrete, and well-bounded kinds, with no relations of descent among them. The best metaphor for conceptualizing biodiversity in this view is Noah’s ark, where each kind can be neatly separated from the others in its own compartment. The conservationist view generally leaves the creator out of the picture, yet the creatures are still deemed good, intrinsically good, and if they do not remain fixed and unchanging, then we may conclude that something is out of order—or “unnatural,” to use Kolbert’s term.

Darwinism, properly understood, is the opposite of this mythological outlook. It tells us that no particular arrangement of biodiversity is good in itself, and that no species has any absolute reason to exist. For a given species to be “better” than another is simply for it to have an adaptation that enhances its likelihood of surviving to reproductive age. Are humans better than fish? It is impossible to answer, without specifying whether the contest is to take place on land or under water. Should there be air-breathing animals at all? That depends on whether the planet has a breathable atmosphere. If not, it would be better to live in the ocean and to breathe through one’s gills. And so on.

The point here is not to relativize the current ecological crisis, or to call for an approach to mass extinction that simply says, que será, será. Rather, it is to suggest that conservationism might do well to acknowledge the endurance and the strength of the mythopoetical conception of nature, the one that sees our fellow creatures not only as more or less well adapted, but also as good, truly good. This would not require any overt theology, as it is already implicit in conservationist thinking, and many if not most conservationists have no patience for cosmological arguments for the existence of God. But it would require an abandonment of our piecemeal wisdom about animals and our relations with them, a wisdom thrown together out of sloppy scientism, utilitarian half-­measures, and basic ontological mistakes.

Did Hezekiah simply pray to change places with Sennacherib? Was there something to this Yhwhist tradition that was worth preserving, superior, deeply precious?

Other Things Isaiah Said

Isaiah also spoke about lions and lambs, swords into plowshares, the earth being filled with the knowledge of the LORD as the waters covered the seas. None of which has come to pass but we keep quoting it, writing some of it on walls even in places that object to the 10 Commandments.

All the clear eyed materialists can really leverage against my faith position is the assertion that I have a duty to truth. I do have a duty to truth but my duty to truth is premised on a coherent world which for me involves an eternal self in relation to my everlasting one who calls me to such a strange, currently perfectly unattainable thing. I have a difficult time in godless world finding my duty to truth much less anything else beyond my own ends of comfort, security and imagination. In a materialist world what is duty beyond an imagination of honor or importance that evaporates with my and other minds to appreciate it, the end of which all materials assert? 

I cannot understand how my duty to truth exists beyond my or another’s capacity to imagine or esteem it. My duty to truth in a materialist world finally isn’t of any greater value than my fondness for good fitting shoes.

The radical freedom which a materialist world may invite but against which is impossible to assail allows me to desire the beautiful, the glorious, the noble, the eternal.

Don Quixote de La Mancha

I’ve been working through Don Quixote for the last few months. I find it feeds me in a world of doubt. I see the foolishness of this mad knight but his madness itself is a mystery. Is he mad? Yes, but he often seems more sane, and more important, more good and more beautiful than what passes for banal sanity around him.

James KA Smith is right. Our hearts desire the kingdom and it is that desire that moves us. Worldview follows.

Praying with Hezekiah

So I find myself in the temple with Hezekiah, spreading before us the threatening letters of the world around me. I spread them before my God and ask him to do what I cannot.

I would rather pray with Hezekiah than die with Sennacherib.

I think the Gospel keeps winning, even as it always seems to lose, because it is beautiful.

Here Ira Glass, an atheist, reflects in his relationship with a couple of Christians and the stories we tell ourselves.

So I pray, I doubt sometimes, I struggle, but each time I “do the math”, the sum is the same. I go back to the temple with my notes and letters, lay them before the LORD, and wait for his response, learning to trust.