The Scarlet Letter
By: Nathaniel Hawthorne Modernised and edited by Jim McGuiggan (2004)
By: Nathaniel Hawthorne Modernised and edited by Jim McGuiggan (2004)
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Samaria went down to the Assyrians in 722/21 and in a series of deportations the northern kingdom that began in Solomonic injustice and heresy ended in corruption, regicide and insolent apostasy that refused to be taught (see 1 Kings 11 & 12 and Isaiah 28:1,7-13). With a smugness that beggars description Judah went on her ugly drunken way, head over heels in treachery against God and abuse of the voiceless and defenceless (see Ezekiel chapter 16). Despite the panic that sometimes swept the kingdom they felt in their bones that they could take care of any circumstance. If they didn’t have the military might they had the shrewdness to make the right alliances, so they thought. Despite the cowardice or despair that sometimes swept the nation they saw themselves as tough enough to endure. That’s it, it was their durable nature, their shrewd wit and capacity for intrigue that kept the kingdom standing when others fell.
Wasn’t it smart to bribe the Assyrians! Hmmm, maybe, but can the Assyrians be trusted to keep their word? Ah, but that’s where the intrigue comes in because Judah had also made a secret alliance with Egypt so it was heads Judah wins and tails she doesn’t lose. This political brilliance is what would keep Jerusalem from falling to any enemy.
Then the word of the Lord came to the shrewd scoffers that ruled Jerusalem (Isaiah 28:14-22). If Jerusalem remains inviolate it won’t be because they have taken refuge in lies and conniving. It’s because God has laid in her for a foundation a stone that has been tested, a foundation stone that is also the cornerstone (28:16). In Isaiah’s day it’s God himself and in later centuries it will still be God who comes to his people in and as Jesus Christ (1 Peter 2:6-7 with Isaiah 8:13-14).
To keep the nation alive they made a "covenant with death" (Isaiah 28:15), that is, with those that had the power to hand out death or deliver from it. But God said such an arrangement couldn’t bring comfort (28:20) and besides, he would annul their covenant with death. He would expose their faithless shrewdness so that what they feared would come on them (28:18-19).
Is this a spiteful God in a fit of jealousy, determined to ease his spleen on a nation that prefers to sideline him? Hardly! This is the God who chose them in Abraham, rescued them from Egypt, brought them through the wilderness, buried nations to give Israel an inheritance and swore eternal loyalty to them. Let those who wish to, see it as callous and spiteful but it was God attacking his own city to put his name there (Isaiah 29:1-4). It was God annulling their covenant with death so that they would know their only hope lay in him (29:5-9). A nation that keeps itself alive by rejecting God is not fit to live! A kingdom that is built on dirt and treachery cannot stand and will not stand. And that’s why God will not allow them to sideline him.
"You say, ‘We want to be like the nations, like the peoples of the world, who serve wood and stone.’ But what you have in mind will never happen. As surely as I live, declares the Sovereign Lord, I will rule over you with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm and with outpoured wrath." Ezekiel 20:32-33.
Such circumstances are not confined to 8th century BC. The kind of people who lived then lived in the days of the Christ and he said (Matthew 15:7-9), "Isaiah was right when he prophesied of you." Only the dates are changed, the world spirit remains the same in every generation, ours included. Isaiah saw the glory of God in the person of Christ (John 12:39-41) and in his own setting he saw God rejected to keep the nation alive. John saw the same thing happening in his own day when Caiaphas said (11:49-53), "You do not realize that it is better for you that one man die for the people than that the whole nation perish...So from that day on they plotted to take his life."
They made an alliance with death (the Romans) to preserve the nation (see Acts 2:23) but God annulled their covenant with death by raising Jesus from the dead (Acts 2:23-24). And in light of their treacherous covenant with death he brought on them the very thing they feared—the killing foreigners (Luke 21:24 and elsewhere). And was it divine spite, was the destruction of Jerusalem in AD 70 nothing but God’s colossal sulk? For those with the ears to hear and eyes to see and heart to believe it was a part in the whole narrative of world redemption.
To see the Sennacherib invasion of 701 BC as fearful and the Vespasian/Titus invasion and sacking of Jerusalem as savage and horrific is correct. But to see all that as nothing but humans against humans is wrong! To see it that way is to see it as less than it truly was. To see God in it, working redemption and exposing the lunacy of self-trust for what it is. These events, horrible as they are, are part of a cosmic narrative of salvation. Who can trust in "the brotherhood of man" in the face of the Gulag, Dachau and the killing fields of Cambodia? And how can we seriously believe in "the brotherhood of man" if we don’t believe in the "Fatherhood of God"?
The prophets call the world to trust in God! They tell us that in the face of our disbelief, when we would jettison God, we should see that God simply refuses to be dumped. They urge us to see that catastrophes like war are a mixture of barbaric cruelty, human greed and fear, hunger for justice, the suffering of the innocent and the chastisement of the wicked. But they urge us to believe that God is in the midst of it all, attacking our blindness and ripping away the props that shore up our idiotic faith in ourselves! They would urge us to believe that God comes after us not to destroy or maim us but to bless but that he’s perfectly willing to put us to grief to bless us along with the whole world. He annuls our "covenants with death."
The prophets would urge us to believe that the wrath of God is only another face of God’s holy love and mercy. We plant a tree of wickedness and nurture it, feeding and cultivating it and we note that it’s bearing evil fruit. Pleased with ourselves, and getting pleasure from the whole venture, how we whine and complain when God comes to uproot our tree. Here he comes, without apology or asking our permission, and rips it up by the roots and we think him vicious and spiteful. He’s nothing of the sort! The reverse is true! Ultimately, it isn’t us he’s mad at—it’s the tree!
Isn’t this all easy speech, dabbling in issues of profound depth and involving countless people who writhe in agony and despair? It isn’t easy speech—it’s prophetic speech and they earned the right to speak! And, yes, it does involve people who have borne and do bear the extremes of suffering. But these are the only people who have a right to hear such speech! They’ve earned the right to hear a prophet say to them that their pain is neither pointless nor trivial!
The idea that God would trouble himself to provide a suitable hairdresser for some slightly unhappy believer is an offence to God and an insult to the masses of the world. Asking God to get me a third job so I could have another TV or DVD player is obscenity! To endlessly complain to God that we’re depressed if the depression on examination turns out to be the result of our self-pampering greed is monstrous. The only time the prophets spoke to that prissy, self-serving and whining spirit was to rebuke it. And when they spoke of loss that went deep or of pain that made people sob or a crisis faced by a nation they did their hearers the honour of taking it seriously. They lifted all that to a cosmic level and said, "Your crisis is worth addressing! Your loss is worth noticing! Your trouble merits discussion." And when they addressed it they said, "This situation is profoundly deeper and wider than you know. Don’t exclude God from it. That only makes less of it. See him in it and know that what you are enduring and bearing has the weight of the cosmos in it. Trust God."
(Taken by permission from my little book THE GOD WHO COMMANDS THE IMPOSSIBLE. If you think you'd like to purchase it, in the USA call 792-6408)
