This post is written from my perspective as a Bible-clinger and a perennial student of history.
Failure to recognize or accept the existence of evil in the world does not protect you from it.
Conservatives, people of faith, Tea Party patriots and normal, hard-working Americans have a high degree of difficulty with believing the worst about other people’s intentions.
We have been slow to recognize intentional evil in our midst. There are many reasons why this is so but my purpose is to point out that this level of deliberate evil on the part of a nation’s own citizens, campaigning for her destruction and planning evil against her, is nothing new. Not at all.
And therefore–as we know that--we do not have to feel apologetic or squirrelly or “on the spot” when we conclude that it is indeed appropriate to believe the worst about the intentions of some folks in places of influence and power. It may feel like a very unfamiliar place for us to have to decide to take a stand. It sure has felt odd for me. But we didn’t go looking for this place. It has come to us.
About 600 years before Christ, things were bad in the nation of Judah. Things were real bad. From 587BC through 70 AD when the temple at Jerusalem was destroyed, the Jews experienced serial captivity and bondage under the empires of Assyria, Babylon, Persia, Egypt and, finally, Rome. Quite a fall, wouldn’t you say, from the heyday of “the land flowing with milk and honey” and the days of King Solomon whose riches and wisdom were so amazing that folks traveled from all over the known world just to come and look at what he had accomplished?? Quite a fall.
So right about 600 BC–here’s the deal: Judah was in decline and the nation of Babylon was flying high across the landscape of the known world. Ezekiel was a prophet during the years spanning “before-during-immediately after” Babylon’s conquest of Judah. In 610 BC, Egypt had attacked Judah from the south. In 606 BC, Nebuchadnezzar attacked them, and then again in 597 BC. Then in 587 BC, the final blow came and ended with Jerusalem in flames as a majority of the Israelites were taken into captivity and marched off to Babylon. They walked to their captivity in Babylon–about 500 miles or so. Included in that march of captives was the young man, Daniel. There were also 10,000 of the “chief people” and almost all of the remaining population.
In the midst of turmoil there will always be those who have reasons for denying the truth about how bad things are and who mock those who recognize how bad things are. What I describe in the next couple of paragraphs is something ugly that was happening within Jerusalem just before that final blow.
During the days just before the final collapse of the kingdom of Judah, there were at least twenty-five influential individuals who lived in Jerusalem who specifically wanted the nation and its citizens to just keep on snoozing. They didn’t want truth or light. It was all good as far as they were concerned.. These men were civic leaders who are described as princes or leaders of the people in Ezekiel 11:1. These were Jews in positions of authority who were lying about how bad things were–and they were calling Ezekiel and the other prophets liars for warning of the looming attack of the Babylonians.
They said, “Oh, good grief, no!! Come on, folks! Relax! We’re as safe as the meat in a pot of soup…safe inside the kettle called Jerusalem! Nothing bad is going to happen! The worst has already happened!”
Here is what Ezekiel 11:1-3 says, (NIV)
Then the Spirit lifted me up and brought me to the gate of the house of the Lord that faces east. There at the entrance to the gate were twenty-five men,……the Lord said to me, “Son of man, these are the men who are plotting evil and giving wicked advice to this city. They say, ‘Will it not soon be time to build houses? (IOW–everything’s normal! Construction season is soon here! There’s money to be made.) This city is the cooking pot and we are the meat.’ ” (IOW–here we sit, snug in the kettle called Jerusalem, safe as meat in a strong cooking pot)
The NIVSB note explains the context of their assertion: The residents of Jerusalem who were not exiled in 597 BC felt smugly secure, thinking that nothing worse would befall them. Those left behind behind were boasting that they were the “meat,” the choice portions–the inference being that the exiles already in Babylon were the discarded bones.
They did not want the people of Jerusalem to recognize the danger and realize that the ground was indeed liquefying under their national feet. They wanted the Jews [their constituents, their neighbors, their friends] to remain deceived as to the danger the nation was in.
Then there are those who have a vested interest in things going from worse to worse. Some folks make a very good living implementing intentional evil. The prophet Micah had been on the scene some years earlier than the prophet Ezekiel, but he had been preaching the same warnings to the nation of Judah, and he describes a similar group of people who had a different spin of evil going–when he says, (in Micah 2:1),
“Woe to those who devise iniquity, and work out evil on their beds. At morning light they carry it out, because it is in their power to do it.”
Verse 2 gives more detail on exactly what it is these guys were doing:
They covet fields and seize them, and houses and take them. They defraud a man of his home, a fellowman of his inheritance.
Because the men referenced in verse 1 are in control of the power structures of their society, they have the power to do this. They “devise iniquity and work out evil”….and at daybreak, they implement it. It’s rational and it’s deliberate. Evil which is implemented by men over a period of time is never the result of individuals or groups “stumbling into it.” This kind of evil is planned and it has planners. It has purpose.
These passages describe men who, as their nation was falling apart, abused their positions of power and influence.
When things are going badly for a nation, there will be those within that nation who will find a way to prosper by the nation’s disaster. There will be those who make a career of assisting with the destruction from within. They intentionally plan further bad things; they want to help with the implementing of it. They schedule meetings. They get together and come up with ideas for how to move the national cancer to the next step. They enjoy making bad things happen. They are willing to make it a priority and give it the time required for successful implementation.
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Let us not think that something strange is happening to us when we feel surrounded by palpable, deliberate evil that comes wrapped in institutions we have valued and which we used to trust.
I think one of the reasons some of us feel at a loss for reference points these days is because we have not consciously accepted that evil itself is now a necessarily constant reference point. In our personal experience, we may not have assumed that we really had to “set our personal systems in order” and prepare to fight evil in hand to hand combat. We do.
When we consciously recognize that we are not manipulating historical incarnations of evil and we are not exaggerating the presence of evil today, we will no longer feel like we’re slowly losing our minds.
