End of the World as We Know It

Jerusalem finally got sacked by the Babylonians in today's reading.
I think it's worth meditating on just how mind-shattering that event had to have been.
Everything you thought you knew to be true was, in the breach of a wall, rendered totally subject to question. You lost everything in the world that you thought was familiar, and, worse yet, it seemed like the God you believed in wasn't powerful enough to preserve you from some upstart Chaldeans. Maybe that God didn't even exist.
It's only in the macroscopic view of history that you can really know what was going on...that as much as that invasion seemed to attack your entire perception of the universe, in the end, it couldn't change reality.
At times, I think that's even a more important lesson of the Old Testament than trying to read it typologically. Every time a world event seems to erase God from the playing field (be it Egyptian slavery,internal corruption, Babylonian captivity, or a host of other hostile takeovers), God does, in time, step back into the picture.
It's as if the authors of the Old Testament are saying, "We hear you. A lot of the time, it really doesn't look like there is a benevolent God...but just hang in there, and you'll see what we're talking about." To a Christian, the Jewish Bible is essentially reads like one long "I told you so."

We can't know whether we'll get to see what they are talking about in our own lifetimes, but we can bolster our faith by seeing how things played out in the past.

Comments

[Tom Annulis]

Would anyone know where we can purchase this picture to frame (The Ark and the Dove--Arrival at St. Clement's Island). Thank you for your help!!