A History Lesson (2)
and My people who are called by My name humble themselves and pray and seek My face and turn from their wicked ways, then I will hear from heaven, will forgive their sin and will heal their land. 2 Chronicles 7:14 NASB
Turn – A little historical pun. That’s why the choice of shuv in this instance is so fascinating. It isn’t simply that these people whom others recognize as God’s chosen are asked to turn from their past disobedience. It is also that they are returning to the promised land. So their actions are both internal and external. As they physically return, they are asked to spiritually return.
Shuv is also a significant concept in the pre-exilic arena. Jeremiah uses it dozens of times with at least a dozen different nuances. The failure to turn back is the cause of the captivity and now those who are returning need to recognize their ancestors refused to turn around so that they have to make the return. Shuv is woven into the history of Israel in so many ways. Ultimately, it is also our word. In this sense, the entire story of the Bible is the story of recovery, that is, returning to the fatherhood of God.
A few days ago I pointed to Heschel’s comment, ““The problem was not whether to trust God but whether to trust one’s acceptance of God.”[1] I mentioned that I would alter this insight to, “The problem was not whether to trust God but whether to trust one’s acceptance by God.” I think the story of the exile, both before and after the actual captivity in Babylon, is another case of learning what it means to be accepted by God.
Perhaps the most difficult thing for us, those who have grown up in the post Augustine-Luther original sin, federal headship of Adam environment, is to realize that God is our living, loving Father. We have been trained, perhaps subliminally, to believe that God is the moral policeman of creation. That He demands obedience. That He punishes. That He condemns. And that we deserve it. Therefore, we are separated from Him as far as human beings can imagine. But the Bible says otherwise. Of course, it does speak of judgment, but its real message is the recovery of the Father, the necessity of realizing at the deepest possible level that God is our Father who loves us beyond compare. To Him, shuv is a celebration, not a requirement.
History lesson number 2: when the people did not turn, they were sent into captivity so that they might turn and return. This principle applies. It does not mean that our land will be healed. After all, we don’t live in Israel. But it does mean that we also can turn and return to God as Father, and that has incredible social consequences. The promise in this verse might not be a conditional eternal one, but it can certainly point us in the right direction. And that direction is to reverse course and go back to Him.
Topical Index: shuv, turn, return, 2 Chronicles 7:14
[1] Abraham Heschel, A Passion for Truth, p. 94.
I have been trying to grasp the fact that I, right now, am a sum total of all the choices that came before. C.S. Lewis, in his book Mere Christianity makes the observation that God may see us more as one tree, combined with all who are connected with us and who came before us, rather than as separate, concrete isolates of individuals as we have been taught in the West, especially by our emphasis on humanism. This is why the smallest unit He recognizes is the family and He also refers to Israel as one collective.
We are not used to thinking this way, with our modern emphasis on individual salvations by an individual Saviour for individuals who are split in a thousand ways instead of connected.by them, but then, I am beginning to think that, as worshipers of the human as our current god of the land, we build our paradigms from our own perspective out. I also think that we today base our understanding of God from within the understanding of ourselves, or our own paradigms. We can see ourselves as split and disconnected; as INDIVIDUAL FROM, and so we conclude that God, as modernity has rebuilt Him in the image of itself, is the same. But, I digress. I also am suspicious that it may be a good deal more important how God views us anyway, than how we view Him or ourselves.
I may be focused on my own little itty bitty individual sins and problems but He may be seeing both me and them from another perspective entirely. It is for sure that I got as far out of whack as I am by a whole bunch of choices that I did not personally make, and therefore I am going to have to turn and return from a place far more out of line than where just my own choices landed me. When the Children returned from captivity and confessed the sins of their forbears too, they were also returning from the consequences of choices made long before. 70 years in captivity is another couple generations out at least from those who chose themselves into that captivity.
We are captives to propensities and delusions that resulted from the consequences of choices handed to us by those who came before us. If we just go looking in our own tiny lives and individual choices we are never going to be able to figure out why we are so messed up. I need to return from the land that my forbears got hauled off to, too. This is why it is important to recognize that the choices of others affect me, and vice versa. I don’t just return for myself, either; I also return for the sake of all those others who are affected by my choices, including that choice to return to the function that got chosen away so long ago.
I too have been seeing things more in this collective perspective. And it appears that when I return, there is in a very real sense a returning of all those who went before me. I think of Ruth who brought redemption back to the land through her Chesed. When Obed was born, all of Elimelech’s house was brought back to life from the dead.
Many years ago Our Father pointed out to me the scriptures where His people repented of both their sins and the sins of their fathers that had landed them in the situation they found themselves. And so it has been my practice since then to include them in my repentant moments.
It has been just recently however that I realized the powerful change this has made in me personally. In order to ask my God to forgive them in earnest, I must first forgive them for being as humanly weak as I am. The hideousness of my sin begins to flood my soul as I realize that they didn’t do anything to me that I have not done to mine and I’m humbled so that I’m able to truly forgive those who put me where I am. If I do not forgive them, then He does not forgive me. And so I now I’m beginning to understand the cry of my Messiah on the cross,
“Father forgive them for they know not what they do.”
I appreciate your thoughts here. I am reading a book now (more on it later) that confirms how much of our “past,” both ancestral and personal, influences our present ability to be fully alive and how recalling those traumas IN A SAFE WAY returns us to health. I believe that there is a lot more to this, and the biblical text is much more about restoring LIFE to traumatized people than it is about dealing with guilt before God, though obviously, the two are connected. I am planning to write a great deal more about this–and to look at the Bible is a different way as a result of insights into the somatic consequences of disassociation. Perhaps sin is so deadly because it removes us from ourselves, not because it incurs the punishment of YHVH.
Oh, wonderful! Yes! He is not mad at us! He just wants us to show up in our own skin in real time so that He can fellowship with us! Sin keeps us out of our present and what is disassociation? Is it not fracture from our own identity? Sin lies and deceives and forces us to abandon life, which is what our identities ARE. The instruction in the Garden was simple: do not choose the Tree. The instruction post Tree is just as simple: Choose life. The Commandments merely help us identify and remove what is not life so that we can choose it again. We really do need to learn to stop listening to radio Satan!
LET’S NOT CELEBRATE PREMATURELY!
TESHUVAH IS FIRST THE PAINFULNESS OF THE FATHER’S DISCIPLINE, THEN THE JOYFUL CELEBRATION OF THE PEACEFUL FRUIT OF RIGHTEOUSNESS.
THE KINGDOM OF ELOHIM IS FIRST RIGHTEOUSNESS. THEN PEACE. THEN JOY.
BUT LET US NOT BE AFRAID OF HIM. FOR THAT INVOLVES NOT TRUSTING HIM. LET US FEAR HIM!
“In struggling against sin, you have not yet resisted to the point of bloodshed. Have you forgotten the warning addressed to you as sons? ‘My son, do not take lightly the discipline of Adonai or lose heart when you are corrected by Him, because Adonai disciplines the one He loves and punishes every son He accepts.’ It is for discipline that you endure. God is treating you as sons—for what son does a father not discipline? But if you are without discipline—something all have come to share—then you are illegitimate and not sons. Besides, we are used to having human fathers as instructors—and we respected them. Shall we not much more be subject to the Father of spirits and live? Indeed, for a short time they disciplined us as seemed best to them; but He does so for our benefit, so that we may share in His holiness. NOW ALL DISCIPLINE SEEMS PAINFUL AT THE MOMENT – NOT JOYFUL. BUT LATER IT YIELDS THE PEACEFUL FRUIT OF RIGHTEOUSNESS TO THOSE WHO HAVE BEEN TRAINED BY IT.”
“For you have not come to a mountain that can be touched, and to a blazing fire, and to darkness and gloom and storm, and to the blast of a shofar and a voice whose words made those who heard it beg that not another word be spoken to them. For they could not bear what was commanded: ‘If even an animal touches the mountain, it shall be stoned.’ So terrifying was the sight that Moses said, ‘I am quaking with fear’ But you have come to Mount Zion—to the city of the living God, the heavenly Jerusalem, and to myriads of angels, a joyous gathering, and to the assembly of the firstborn who are written in a scroll in heaven, and to God the Judge of all, and to the spirits of the righteous ones made perfect, and to Yeshua, the Mediator of a new covenant, and to the sprinkled blood that speaks of something better than the blood of Abel.”
“See to it that you do not refuse the One who is speaking! For if they did not escape when they refused the One who was warning them on earth, much less will we escape if we reject the One who warns us from heaven. His voice shook the earth then, but now He has promised, saying, ‘Yet once more I will shake not only the earth, but also the heavens.’ Now this phrase, ‘Yet once more,’ shows the removal of those things that are shaken—that is, created things—so that what cannot be shaken may remain. Therefore, since we are receiving a kingdom that cannot be shaken, let us show gratitude—through this we may offer worship in a manner pleasing to God, with reverence and awe. For our God is a consuming fire.” [Heb. 4]
Just out of curiosity would these events be in the same time slot as Jeremiah or Isaiah and the other prophets that started out Gods redemption process? Centuries after David and centuries before Yeshua.
As this was God answering Solomon who according to earlier blogs did very little to change the conditions of the people but rather further his own interests.
AS these records refer to events close on 700 years prior to the restoration procedure commencing… Could these really still be applicable?
May I ask how different is this restoration promise from the one discussed around Jeremiah 29 (Excavation Plans) and the one introduced by Yeshua.
As each one was for a specific era or group of people why would this one be for a general group of people and that now 2700 years later?
Should we not rather read the restoration promise as in Malachi and or Paul’s version to find today’s updated plan from God?
I do not say there is nothing good in the historic events. As we can learn from them to understand our relationship with God, we cannot use them to describe our relationship… We are in a new relationship a different era people.
Skip mentioned Heschel’s comment, ““The problem was not whether to trust God but whether to trust one’s acceptance of God.” May I add how do we accept God’s interaction with us today? is it personal or still from a distance for which then the prophecies and historic records will be very relevant as they define how others were advised to draw closer to God…