Category: Justice

When the Deliverer Comes (1 Samuel 30:1-31)

Cain killed Abel because Abel’s sacrifice was pleasing to God and Cain’s was not.  Esau sought to kill Jacob because Jacob had swindled his birthright and his blessing.  But, as with Cain, we were told at the beginning of the boys’ lives that God had chosen Jacob and had not chosen Esau.  So, Esau’s vengeance was born of envy, as was Cain’s.

Over a millennia later, the story was repeating itself again in the persons of Saul and David.  Saul had forfeited his anointing due to his failure to obey what God had told him to do through the prophet Samuel.  David had been anointed to replace Saul, and, though Samuel never told Saul whom he had anointed to succeed him, Saul realized quickly that David was the most likely candidate.  So, as Cain conspired to kill Abel and Esau conspired to kill Jacob, Saul conspired to kill David who, at that time, was one of the most successful soldiers in his army.

And yet, despite Saul’s repeated attempts to end David’s life, David refused to take any hostile action against Saul, even when given the opportunity.  And, perhaps more surprising still, David also continued to fight the enemies of Israel on Saul’s behalf while Saul was pursuing his life.  But, David could not carry out his campaign while living in Israel due to the threat of Saul.  So, David lived amongst the Philistines and pretended to fight for them, while, in fact, he continued to raid Israel’s hostile neighbors.

While playing this dangerous game, David resided in Ziklag.  And during one of David’s excursions, Ziklag was raided by a band of Amalekite warriors.   The events that follow are preserved for us in 1 Samuel 30:

1Now when David and his men came to Ziklag on the third day, the Amalekites had made a raid on the Negeb and on Ziklag. They had attacked Ziklag, burned it down, 2 and taken captive the women and all who were in it, both small and great; they killed none of them, but carried them off, and went their way. 3 When David and his men came to the city, they found it burned down, and their wives and sons and daughters taken captive. 4 Then David and the people who were with him raised their voices and wept, until they had no more strength to weep. 5 David’s two wives also had been taken captive, Ahinoam of Jezreel, and Abigail the widow of Nabal of Carmel. 6 David was in great danger; for the people spoke of stoning him, because all the people were bitter in spirit for their sons and daughters. But David strengthened himself in the Lord his God.

1 Samuel 30:1-6, NRSV

After inquiring of the Lord and receiving assurance from God of victory, David pursued the Amalekite raiders.  He set out, at first, with six hundred men, but two hundred dropped out before the search was completed.  After having found an informant who revealed the location of the raiders, David and his remaining four hundred men descended upon the Amalekite camp.

16 When he had taken him down, they were spread out all over the ground, eating and drinking and dancing, because of the great amount of spoil they had taken from the land of the Philistines and from the land of Judah. 17 David attacked them from twilight until the evening of the next day. Not one of them escaped, except four hundred young men, who mounted camels and fled. 18 David recovered all that the Amalekites had taken; and David rescued his two wives. 19 Nothing was missing, whether small or great, sons or daughters, spoil or anything that had been taken; David brought back everything. 20 David also captured all the flocks and herds, which were driven ahead of the other cattle; people said, “This is David’s spoil.”

1 Samuel 30:16-20, NRSV

Having recovered what was taken, David also decided to share the bounty with the two hundred men who had neither completed the journey nor fought in the battle.  Needless to say, a number of those who had remained to the end objected to David’s decision, but not only did David share the spoils anyway, but he also sent some of the proceeds to the elders of the tribe of Judah in whose territory the Amalekites had been operating.

When reflecting on a story like this it is tempting read oneself into the story in the role of David.  But, the canon of Christian Scriptures cautions us from reading this story in that way.  Why?  Because David was the anointed king of Israel.  He may not yet have ascended the throne, but God had already anointed him through Samuel.  We cannot anoint ourselves king.  We are not David.  In fact, only one is truly the heir of the promises made to David; only one is the true Messiah who has been anointed by God to rule His Kingdom—Jesus, our Messiah.

When we read the tales of David, it is important to understand that Jesus is the fulfillment of David.  And though it is true that David’s story includes moral and legal failures to which Jesus did not succumb, it is Jesus who fills the role of the true King of Israel in the Christian Scriptures.  Read in that way, this story from 1 Samuel 30 finds fulfillment in the second coming of Jesus.

As Adam and Eve found themselves alone with the Serpent in Genesis 3 and as the people of Ziklag found themselves alone with the Amalekites in 1 Samuel 30, so, we too, have found ourselves alone with the enemies of God since Jesus ascended into the heavens.  Of course, the Holy Spirit has been poured out on the Church, and God has not left us as orphans in the world.  But, the Kingdom of God is not yet manifest and the King is not yet with us in the flesh.  Our Messiah has not yet returned.

And while Jesus has been seated at the right hand of the Father in the heavens, the book of Revelation tells us that the Serpent has been pursuing the woman who gave Him birth—Israel—and her children—those who have become children of God by faith in Jesus, our Messiah, our King.  We are those in Ziklag, and we have been taken by the enemies of God while our King has been away.

Some of us know we are now living in enemy territory, whereas others have forgotten that we were kidnapped at all.  Some seem convinced that the Amalekites are working for David.  But such convictions are folly.  The children of God have been kidnapped, and the second coming of Jesus, the gathering of the remnant, the awakening of those who are sleeping are ways of saying that just as David led an army to liberate those who had been stolen, so Jesus is coming to deliver His children from their bondage to the enemies of God.

Wherever we live—in whatever nation or tribe or culture—we who follow Jesus must remember that we are exiles in a land not our own.  We are citizens of another Kingdom—a Kingdom not of this world.  And though we are enslaved by the enemies of God in bondage to our captors, both human and spiritual, our King will not leave us in exile.  Our King is coming to deliver His children; our Shepherd is coming to gather His scattered sheep. The enemies of God have prepared themselves for Jesus’ coming, and they will not surrender to Him.  So, as God did battle with the gods of Egypt in the events of Exodus, God must do battle with our captors, as well.

For those who have not followed Jesus and have not given their allegiance, both body and spirit, to Him, the days to come will be terrifying.  But, for those of us who know we are living in slavery to foreign leaders and false gods, we will shine as lights in the darkness, rejoicing in the suffering of those days for the joy set before us will embolden us.  As David rescued the captives of Ziklag, so Jesus is coming to gather His children.  Do not waver in your faith in the days to come, children of God.  However powerful the Amalekites, as God assured David of victory, so the Father has declared victory for the Son. Do not turn back, children of God.  Jesus is coming.

~ J. Thomas Johnson ~

Reflecting on Justice

A few years ago I had the privilege of reading Fleming Rutledge’s The Crucifixion: Understanding the Death of Jesus Christ. To say that the book was challenging is to put the matter mildly. I felt as though I had been wrecked theologically, emotionally, and behaviorally in only the first third of the book.

For the purposes of this blog, I wanted to focus on a section from Chapter 3 of The Crucifixion, “The Question of Justice.”

The reign of Sin and Death over the kosmos is inseparable from the question we are asking in this book: Why did God in three persons agree on such a peculiarly gruesome manner of death for the second person? What does the method itself tell us about the meaning of the death? There is no quick and easy answer to that question. The biblical account offers hints and suggestions rather than worked-out solutions.

Pushing this train of thought to its most radical application, however, we arrive at a point that is all too rarely acknowledged. In the final analysis, the crucifixion of Christ for the sin of the world reveals that it is not only the victims of oppression and injustice who are in need of God’s deliverance, but also the victimizers. Each of us is capable, under certain circumstances, of being a victimizer. Václav Havel, president first of Czechoslovakia and then of the Czech Republic, was imprisoned several times for his dissident activities under the Communist regime, the longest stretch being from 1979 to 1983. He wrote extensively about life in the Stalinist galaxy. Here is one of his reflections: “The line [between good and evil] did not run clearly between ‘them’ and ‘us,’ but through each person. No one was simply a victim; everyone was in some measure co-responsible. . . .Many people were on both sides.”

Fleming Rutledge, The Crucifixion: Understanding the Death of Jesus Christ

This is a challenging passage, and it is situated in a context in which Rutledge is contending for the idea that the cross is about more than forgiveness. For Rutledge the cross is also about justice, and it is a justice for and against all of us.

Recent events in our culture have reminded me again how easy it is to draw our enemies very flatly. As a Christian, I find the convictions of those who believe that one race or another is superior to any other to be a flat out rejection of the Gospel of Jesus. In the context of the Scriptures, the specially chosen people group were the Hebrew descendants of Abraham, and their election, as Romans 9 makes fairly clear, had nothing to do with them and everything to do with God’s purpose in election—that is, the deliverance of all nations of the earth from the tyranny of Sin and Death. For this reason, it is easy for me to paint those who judge others by superficialities like skin color as an uncomplicated and thoroughly corrupted enemy.

However, what Havel has suggested to the world is that at the root of the gravest of deceptions and at the foundation of the worst horrors of humanity’s cultural history is the conviction that some of us are thoroughly on the side of the angels, while others are entirely demonic. This de-humanizing of our adversaries and even our enemies is a useful tool of hate and of war because it paints those with whom we disagree as somehow non-human, as somehow less deserving of basic human considerations.

This very human tendency toward de-humanization was manipulated to devastating effect by the Nazi leadership in World War II Germany. In that context the Jewish people were cast as sub-human demons, devoid of any human complication. And ironically, in many of the responses to the systemic evils within our own culture we are witnessing, even among our own Christian brothers and sisters who rightly recognize the abominableness of the principalities and powers that permeate the world, the rush to flatten, to demonize, and to dehumanize those with whom we disagree seems at times as pernicious as the propagandizing of World War II Germany.

The line [between good and evil] did not run clearly between ‘them’ and ‘us,’ but through each person. No one was simply a victim; everyone was in some measure co-responsible. . . .Many were on both sides.

Václav Havel

Perhaps these sorts of realizations lie at the heart of Jesus’ instructions to “love our enemies and pray for those who persecute us.” Of course we must speak and stand against evil, and our outrage against tyranny and poverty and racial superiority and corruption is godly and Christlike, in my view. But, evil is never as simple as the totality of an individual. Evil is a power in which each of us participates and which runs through the heart of each of us. Our moral outrage can become as much a tool of the tyrannical powers of Sin and Death as our hate and self-centeredness. In fact, there may be no more infectious type of evil than the evil done in the name of justice.

However criminals are prosecuted and unholy philosophies and ideas are countered and adjudicated, we must never lose sight of the fact that the knowledge of good and evil runs through every human heart, and our enemies are never any less human or deserving of human dignity than our friends and loved ones. Perhaps this is the hardest of the teachings of Jesus and His Apostles to accept. It is easier to oppose people than to oppose Sin and Death as powers that run through the middle of all of us. Individual people can be tortured, defamed, humiliated, and killed. But Sin and Death survive every human life, and continue to hold even those who oppose them in sway long after human justice is done.

For Rutledge, and increasingly for me, this is part of why Jesus not only died, but was crucified. In His manner of death He exposes what lies within even the righteous justice of humanity. Jesus was condemned by the religious leaders of His culture for blasphemy, and it was in how we executed this one blasphemer that who we really are has been revealed. Jesus on the cross is an indictment not only of human sin, but of the corrupting influence of justice; of the fear that causes us to torture and dehumanize those deemed too evil to be treated as human, as beings made in the image of God. The best of intentions crucified Jesus, and the deepest of zeal for right and rightness played out on His flesh and Person. Truly the line between good and evil does not run between us and them, but through each of us.

Let the people of God beware.

~ J. Thomas

Reflecting on Genesis 21:8-21

By J. Thomas Johnson

There are times in which contemporary sensibilities and the narratives of Christian Scripture run seamlessly together. Contemporary concerns with respect to environmental stewardship, for instance, and the biblical insistence in Genesis that humanity was created to care for creation are deeply compatible. However, at other times contemporary mores and Biblical narratives seem to diverge fundamentally. I suspect that the narrative we find in Genesis 21:8-21 is as good an example as any of this apparent divergence.

Genesis 15 recounts a covenant that God made with Abraham. At the heart of God’s promise was a miracle. God promised Abraham and his wife, Sarah, that after decades of infertility they would have a son. So, perhaps as a way of helping God along, Sarah suggested that Abraham take her maidservant, Hagar, as a concubine and produce a child through her. Abraham agreed, and the result of their union was Ishmael. And almost immediately conflict between Sarah and Hagar began to develop.

However, God’s promise to Abraham was not fulfilled in Ishmael. God had intended to provide a child to Sarah and Abraham together. So, in time, Sarah did become pregnant, and gave birth to a boy in her old age. They named him Isaac. And the conflict between Hagar and Sarah escalated.

This conflict is at the heart of Genesis 21:8-21. As Sarah observed the interaction between Ishmael and her baby, she uttered one of the crasser statements to be found in Genesis: “Cast out this slave woman with her son; for the son of the slave woman shall not inherit along with my son Isaac” (NRSV, Gen. 21:10).

So much is bound up in Sarah’s charge to Abraham. A distinction of classes is, of course, explicit. But buried within these harsh words are pain and regret and envy and, perhaps fundamentally, fear.  These are not surprising qualities to be found in Sarah given the narratives of Genesis which have preceded hers. What is surprising, at least to me, is that God instructed Abraham to follow her counsel. “But God said to Abraham, ‘Do not be distressed because of the boy and because of your slave woman; whatever Sarah says to you, do as she tells you, for it is through Isaac that offspring shall be named for you. As for the son of the slave woman, I will make a nation of him also, because he is your offspring'” (21:12-13).

In the text, we are told that Abraham loved both of his children, and it seems implicit that Abraham could only exile Ishmael and Hagar because of God’s promise to care for them personally. And God was true to His word. Genesis tells us that not only did God send His angel to communicate with Hagar and to rescue them both from thirst, but also, “God was with the boy, and he grew up;…” (21:20).

I’ve often reflected on why it was that God did not require these two rivals, Hagar and Sarah, to find a way forward together, and why it was that Ishmael and Isaac could not have been raised as brothers. And then, again, the risk to both in the culture was certainly great. When Abraham’s grandson, Jacob, married two women and took two additional concubines later in Genesis, the rivalry between the women and the children was painful and, in the case of the children, violent. It resulted in one of the sons being sold into slavery by the others. Was God’s decision to support Sarah’s desires rooted in this sort of cultural complexity?

Even more, when God became flesh in the Person of Jesus several thousand years after these events, Jesus taught us that God’s desire was for His followers to love our enemies and to pray for those who persecute us. He instructed His disciples to accept insults without retaliation and to respond to governmental oppression by going beyond what was being forcibly required. In the teachings of Jesus, certainly Sarah’s concerns would have received a rebuke, wouldn’t they? And yet, at the time, God consented to allow her callousness to persist.

As I reflect on this passage again, I am reminded that God begins with us where we are. The rivalry between heirs was pervasive in the culture of Abraham’s day, and Sarah’s concern for the safety and future of her son was certainly reasonable.  And God, rather than asking Sarah to undergo a miraculous and radical transformation of character and worldview all at once, instead allowed her to remain uncharitable, while He Himself served as a personal example of watchcare and devotion to a child that was born outside of His expressed will. God became Himself the caregiver that Sarah could not find room in her heart to become. And by His example, the descendants of Abraham have learned that those who wish to be like God must follow Him into the wilderness and care for a child born out of an act of faithlessness.

I am convinced that Jesus could instruct His followers to embrace their enemies in part because God Himself had set the example for such practices in instances like that of Hagar and Ishmael’s abandonment. Sarah had never seen or experienced this kind of generosity of spirit, and so, she had no context out of which to obey such a command. It is only after God demonstrated His love to those He had not chosen that He asked humanity to respond in kind. God goes first where He asks humanity to follow, and no example of this reality is more fundamental in the church than that of Jesus journey to the cross.

Much later, the Apostle Paul, in his epistle to the Galatians, would recall this episode in the life of Abraham and Sarah and Hagar and Ishmael, and Paul would suggest that God’s love for Israel herself had more in common with His love for Ishmael than with His devotion to Isaac. The canon of Scripture taken together suggests that we all are children born in a world of rebellion against God’s intentions for humanity. We all have come, in one way or another, into a world that has lost faith in its God, a world that has tried to fulfill God’s intentions by its own wisdom and with its own strength. Each of us has more in common with Ishmael than with Isaac. And yet, God cares for children who would not be had He been trusted, and God has been with us. Perhaps this story, too, is echoed in Paul’s summation of the Gospel of Jesus: “But God proves his love for us in that while we still were sinners Christ died for us” (NRSV, Rom. 5:8). When we are faithless, God is faithful. Ishmael became a great nation. May the Name of the Lord be praised by our willingness to follow in His footsteps.

King of the Hill

By: J. Thomas Johnson

Do kids still play king of the hill? Some may remember standing atop a hill while other kids tried to wrestle, toss, or somehow eject you off and claim the throne momentarily. I know my children don’t play it. In fact, I can easily imagine myself stepping in to stop them if they tried.

I’m not sure from whence that instinct has come. When I was a child, my friends and I rarely saw a hill that one of us didn’t try to claim. But, for whatever reason, that game and many others of my childhood are disappearing from the public life of children. Sam Greenspan wrote an article a few months back that listed king of the hill as one of eleven childhood games that are too violent for contemporary American culture. http://11points.com/11-playground-games-played-kid-violent-today/

King of the hill was both a powerful and a terrifying game. While climbing the hill, I would be filled with aggression and violence. The only goal was to topple the king. The only morality was achieving that goal. The thrill of having achieved that goal was intoxicating.

And yet, once atop the hill, with the power of victory came isolation and paranoia. Whereas all of us climbing the hill had been allied in an attempt to depose the king, upon becoming the king, now I was surrounded only by enemies. In many ways for me, it was more fun to topple the king than to be the king. I can remember on many occasions allowing myself to be defeated so as to recapture the simplicity and safety of the attack. It was a game that, if I had been truly observant, had many life lessons wrapped up in it.

It seems to me that in the public life of our culture, the vast majority of people have come to appreciate the safety of standing on the slopes trying to topple the king. Whether we’re talking about celebrities, comedians, politicians, principals, pastors, institutionalized religion, or even God there is safety and comradery in joining the masses attempting to topple those who have the audacity to stand atop the hill. Today it would seem that the moral high ground is on the slopes. From news media to social media to community life, the safest place to stand is on the slopes and the safest stance to take is opposition to whoever or whatever stands upon the summit.

A few years ago several prominent comedians—Jerry Seinfeld and Chris Rock among them—made headlines when they publicly declared that they were done playing college campuses because of the hyper-sensitivity of students to their humor. Here is a link to an Inside Edition story from 2015: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1kVdHr7sR0o.

This is a strange rebirth of king of the hill.  In this version the players cooperate to topple the king, but very few if any wish to assume the summit. And those who do assume the summit spend a lot of time and energy trying to convince the masses that they are, in fact, on the slopes with them, disowning the summit on which they stand and trying to distance themselves from power and associate it with an adversary.

It seems to me that Heath Ledger’s Joker in Christopher Nolan’s Batman trilogy is the prophet of a newly emerging kind of leadership:

Do I really look like a guy with a plan? You know what I am? I’m a dog chasing cars. I wouldn’t know what to do with one if I caught it! You know, I just… do things.

There are some interesting social dynamics tied up in this historically atypical social competition. Edwin Friedman in his book A Failure of Nerve has diagnosed our culture as chronically anxious. There seems to be a growing consensus about this cultural anxiety, but causes and correlations are difficult to discern. Some believe that the rise of social media is to blame or smart phone technology or unprecedented wealth and affluence or the ease of access to mood-altering and pain-reducing pharmaceuticals, while others, like me, suspect it is the loss of faith in God as Creator and Sustainer of life that has allowed these other things to contribute to such systemic anxiety and despair.

Like kids on a playground, outrage may be safe, mocking may be community-affirming, and protesting might be morally soothing. And all these things have their place in an ethical society. But, if these transitional phases become habitations, both personal character and social ethics will eventually be undermined. As the Jewish and Christian Scriptures have long warned us:

1 Blessed is the one who does not walk in step with the wicked or stand in the way that sinners take or sit in the company of mockers, 2 but whose delight is in the law of the Lord, and who meditates on his law day and night.

Psalm 1:1-2, NIV

Being outraged by evil is certainly an ethical stance. The capacity to see the hypocrisy or foolhardiness or grotesqueness of evil is a moral type of discernment. Publicly protesting evil can be a valid form of resisting it. But, for those of us who follow the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob Who became flesh in the Person of Jesus, our personal morality and our cultural ethics are not rooted in our reaction to evil, but in our submission to the teachings God has given to us and our practical embodiment of those teachings in our lives.  There is great peril in allowing the Joker to be our sage.  Jesus’ voice will lead us to the health for which our moral outrage longs:

43 “You have heard that it was said, ‘Love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ 44 But I tell you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, 45 that you may be children of your Father in heaven.

Matthew 5:43-45, NIV