Hitchhiker’s Guide to Babylon (5)
“Build houses and live in them; and plant gardens and eat their produce. Take wives and become the fathers of sons and daughters, and take wives for your sons and give your daughters to husbands, that they may bear sons and daughters; and multiply there and do not decrease. Seek the welfare of the city where I have sent you into exile, and pray to the Lord on its behalf; for in its welfare you will have welfare.” Jeremiah 29:5-7 NASB
Multiply/not decrease – If God has already given the command to marry and have children (and grandchildren), why does He also add, “multiply” and “not decrease”? The answer lies in the recalling of Exodus.
When Israel went into Egypt, they were a small family group. When they came out, they were a nation. Now they face captivity again. What will prevent them from simply assimilating, from giving up on any possibility of return, now that it is apparent God intends them to stay for a long, long time? The exodus. Multiply!
The Hebrew verb is raba. One of its derivatives is a description of locusts. It’s generally about becoming many, but there is a little nuance here that would certainly inspire a captive people. rabi is a common suffix in many Babylonian names (e.g. Hammu-rabi). It’s divine irony that God’s captive people are instructed to become a multitude with a word that reminds them of their forced connection to Babylon. But perhaps it’s intentional. Only because of cooperation with Babylon will Israel once again emerge as a nation of its own.
Multiply. OK, we got that. But why add, “and do not decrease”? Isn’t that redundant? Yes, it is, but this is a Hebrew idiom. The full expression, revu-sham ve-al-tim’atu is a way of covering the entire range from becoming great to diminishing into nothing. What is the danger of this captivity? That Israel will disappear like all the other overrun kingdoms. God instructs His people to act in ways that will prevent this. They are to become the fodder from a new exodus, a returning exodus. But in order to do that, they will have to do everything necessary to not only survive but to increase. They will not do anything that will cause them to decrease. They will become great again. They will not fade into the pages of forgotten history.
But here’s the catch. No one hearing these words will ever see that day. Just as the generations that lived out their days as slaves in Egypt, so these people, the first of the exiles, will live out their days before the great return occurs. So they must know what to do despite the fact that they will not return. And what they must do is grow! Grow regardless of not seeing the result. Grow because some day this will matter. Grow because God says so.
Aren’t we exiles just like this? Will we see the return? Probably not. Does that mean we give up and fall in line with the culture? Does that mean we disappear along with the hordes that history no longer remembers? No! What we do now, while we wait, matters. Without it, the return cannot come.
Topical Index: multiply, raba, not decrease, al-tim’atu, exodus, Jeremiah 29:5-7
I always say to myself: I’m in the return path toward learning the whole truth about Yeshua’s teachings, eliminating hundreds of wrong interpretations and doctrines… if I don’t get there, my children will… and their children after them… so let’s keep digging…
I wonder if that call could also include the idea of “unify” – which is more of a compounding, as opposed to simply an adding – idea, and includes, I think, a reference to strength, which likewise compounds with a corresponding pressing together, or unifying with, each other in exclusion to all other. That strength does not exactly correspond to the simple addition of numbers, per se, but more perfectly refers to how well the subject group has been unified with itself. The story of Gideon is the golden example of this idea.
The Children were subject to conquest because they identified with, or “joined themselves to”, or UNIFIED THEMSELVES WITH, false gods, whereupon YHVH honored their choice and proclaimed full captivity as the means to cure them of that unity, or assimilation. Placed under the power of what they were mesmerized by, they learned the Tree way – by experience – what they had been only warned of before. Called to be a distinct people, identified by their insistence that they were YHVH’s people; literally joined to, or unified with, Him, was the end result of learning why they should NOT assimilate with, or be absorbed into, a foreign culture that “knew not YHVH”. They were being driven back to unity by default. This process is highly interesting to me. What is even more interesting is that they did learn exactly that.
Jews down through the ages have shown the world, however imperfectly, what a people committed to YHVH first should look like. As inheritors of that call, we should continue that legacy. Standing shoulder to shoulder with each other is what Paul referred to as perfect unity, which by necessity of definition, means to separate FROM, or fall out of unity with, what is around us. We, like the ancient diaspora, are also having to learn in the same crucible what that entails. May we form perfect ranks with each other, like that famous 300 (of Gideon, not of Greece, LOL), committed to heaven alone, and learn what the Reformers also saw under the iron fist of the Hapsburg Empire, and so stand with them in their cry – the cry that created this mighty country, in fact – “no king but King Jesus”! May we, like those ancient Jews, finally be able to show this world (that we have likewise been melted into) what that truly looks like is my #1 prayer. Amen.
We want comfort, and the illusions of ease,t but it seems trouble is a more effective way to get us back on focus and willing to go the way that is essential for life and fruitfulness- not theory but the walk we are on with Messiah. Funny how it prunes and steadily sets us free from the deceitful encumbrances that so easily stumble us, and brings us closer to those marvelous comrades, the faithful who dwell in His land!