God Hates You, Hate Him Back: Making Sense of The Bible (30 page)
Read God Hates You, Hate Him Back: Making Sense of The Bible Online
Authors: CJ Werleman
Ask yourself if the above words are that of a cool, calm and collected overseer or that of a hot-tempered, maniacal lunatic or Tea Party activist?
The Israelites had become so disgruntled with Jeremiah’s forecasts of pending doom that they hatched a plot to murder the young prophet, but God provided him with advance warning and he escaped with his life. Jeremiah thanked the lord saying that he had been unknowingly,
“led like a lamb to slaughter”.
Which is where this phrase originates. In retaliation God promises to slaughter the plotters and also their sons and daughters.
Jeremiah continues his preaching to the Israelites, reminding them to obey all of God’s commandments, because failure to do so would lead to their destruction. If this is sounding repetitive already, then read the Bible itself to see how monotonous this to and fro actually is. On one particular occasion, Jeremiah prophesized the destruction of the city within the presence of the city’s priests and they seized him for blasphemy with many demanding his execution:
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This man should be sentenced to death because he has prophesized against this city. You have heard it with your own ears.” (Jeremiah 26:11 NIV)
Jeremiah defended his actions claiming he only spoke on behalf of God and that if they decided to kill him, then they would have the blood of an innocent man on their hands, and God would act swiftly to punish them. Jeremiah must have laid bare a convincing argument because they decided against any punitive action and, furthermore, they chose to hear what else God had to say through him.
Jeremiah had now earned the respect of the elders and he was asked to send a letter to the Israelite exiles residing in Babylon under captivity, on behalf of Judah. The letter was ordained by God, of course, and reads as instructions for mounting a quiet resistance against their Babylonian captors:
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Marry and have sons and daughters; find wives for your sons and give your daughters in marriage, so that too may have sons and daughters. Increase in number; do not decrease.” (Jeremiah 29:6 NIV)
This operation to breed like bunnies also came with a promise from God. A promise that stated that if the Israelites showed remorse for their wicked ways in serving other gods and returned to obey the laws of the covenant, then their captivity would end after seventy years.
As Jeremiah had promised on numerous occasions, the Babylonians attacked Jerusalem and its people fell into captivity. This attack was, of course, sanctioned by God, as he said to his people in a gleeful tone:
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Do not deceive yourselves, thinking, ‘The Babylonians will surely leave us.’ They will not! Even if you were to defeat the entire Babylonian army that is attacking you and only wounded men were left in their tents, they would come out and burn this city down.” (Jeremiah 37:9-10 NIV)
Jeremiah was thrown in prison, accused of deserting. As the Babylonians began to amass their armies to lay siege on Jerusalem, he remained in custody until the day the city was captured. This took place in the ninth year of Zedikah’s reign over Judah, which is estimated to have been 588 BC.
After eighteen months of siege, King Zedikah and his soldiers fled from the city, as they knew they were no match for the approaching Babylonians. The city fell without much of a fight and the invading army chased Zedikah and his soldiers to the plains of Jericho, where they were captured and brought before Nebuchadnezzar king of Babylon. The victorious king used swift vengeance and had Zedikah’s two sons slaughtered in front of him, their bodies laid at his feet, before he was himself was blinded and carried away in chains to Babylon.
Nebuchadnezzar then called for the destruction of the royal palace in Jerusalem and for all the surviving Israelites within to be taken into exile. Word reached the Babylonian king that the prophet Jeremiah remained in custody within the city gates and thus commanded a small platoon to find him with instructions not to harm him. Within a day of this search and rescue mission, they found the young prophet bound in chains walking amongst his fellow captives. The commanding Babylonian officer read the following order to Jeremiah:
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The Lord your God decreed this disaster for this place. And now the Lord has brought it about; he has done just as he said he would. All this happened because your people sinned against the Lord and did not obey him. But today I am freeing you from the chains on your wrists. Come with me to Babylon, if you like and I will look after you; but if you do not want to, then don’t come. Look, the whole country lies before you; go wherever you please.” (Jeremiah 40:2-4 NIV)
I find this quite bizarre that the king of Babylon would release an Israelite prophet of a god that he, the king, did not believe in or worship. It is bizarre rhetoric that makes absolutely no sense and is quite clearly a strip of adhesive to fill in the gaps of the story. Furthermore, Jeremiah, despite Nebuchadnezzar’s generous offer, continued to cry out against Babylon and prophesized their eventual doom. Whilst not excluding the Egyptians and Assyrians from his lambast.
The Bible does not mention Jeremiah’s death, but scholars believe that he died somewhere in Egypt.
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When I do good, I feel good; when I do bad, I feel bad, and that is my religion”
Abraham Lincoln
The author of this book is widely accepted to be that of Jeremiah, although it does not claim to be so in any of the passages. This book includes five poems pertaining to the period of Israel’s exile to Babylon and Assyria. They are poems of sorrow that articulate Israel’s pain in refusing God, but accepting of his punishment they believe God has better days promised for them.
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How deserted lies the city, once so full of people! How like a widow is she, who once was great among nations! She who was queen among the provinces has now become a slave. Bitterly she weeps at night, tears upon her cheeks. Among all her lovers there is none to comfort her. All her friends have betrayed her; they have become her enemies.” (Lamentations 1:1-2 NIV)
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Her foes have become her masters; her enemies are at ease. The Lord has brought her grief because of her many sins. Her children have gone into exile, captive before foe.” (Lamentations 1:5 NIV)
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Without pity the Lord has swallowed up all the dwellings of Jacob; in his wrath he has torn down the strongholds of the Daughter of Judah. He has brought her kingdom and its princes down to the ground in dishonor.” (Lamentations 2:2 NIV)
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The Lord is like an enemy he has swallowed up Israel. He has swallowed up all her places and destroyed her strongholds. He has multiplied mourning and lamentation for the Daughter of Judah.” (Lamentations 2:5 NIV)
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The Lord has rejected his altar and abandoned his sanctuary. He has handed over to the enemy the walls of her palaces; they have raised a shout in the house of the Lord as on the day of an appointed feast.” (Lamentations 2:7 NIV)
Highlights the pain of slavery.
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He has made my skin and my flesh grow old and has broken my bones. He has besieged me and surrounded me with bitterness and hardship. He has made me dwell in darkness like those long dead.” (Lamentations 3:4-6 NIV)
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To crush underfoot all prisoners in the land, to deny a man his rights before the Most High, to deprive a man of justice – would not the Lord see such things?” (Lamentations 3:34-36 NIV)
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Men will wrangle for religion; write for it; fight for it; die for it; anything but live for it.”
C.C. Colton
Ezekiel was sent to the Israelites to speak on God’s behalf whilst they lived in captivity. His primary function to remind the Israelites, as they were whipped by their captors day and night, why it was that God had forsaken them, while also reminding them that he still loved them. Hey, who said love was easy, right?
This was truly a tragic period for the Jews, with the fall of the Northern Kingdom of Israel to Assyria in 722 BC and the eventual collapse of the Southern Kingdom Judah to the Babylonians in 587 BC. Heartbreakingly so, for the psyche of the Israelites, Jerusalem had been laid flat and its Temple destroyed completely. The Israelites were now in chains and had returned to an era of slavery just as they had, allegedly, in Egypt. Hence, they needed a prophet and not one to just remind them of their wrong-doings, but one who could offer them hope, hope to survive these troubled times. That hope came in the form of Ezekiel.
An easy way to remember Ezekiel is as the dude that God forced to eat shit sandwiches for 430 consecutive days. This grotesque protest was ordered by God to symbolize the prophesized fall of Jerusalem. How so, you ask? God ordered Ezekiel to build a model of Jerusalem made of clay, then to lay on his side on the street facing towards the model. God says to Ezekiel:
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Lie on your left side and put the sin of the house of Israel upon yourself. You are to bear their sin for the number of days you lie on your side. I have assigned the number of days as the years of their sin. So for 390 days you will bear the sin of the house of Israel.” (Ezekiel 3:20 NIV)
God then tells Ezekiel that he is to turn onto his right side of his whilst lying on the street next to model Jerusalem for a further 40 days, to represent the number of years of Judah’s sin against God.
During this 430 day long street protest, God says to Ezekiel that he must feed himself bread made from lentils, barley and beans. But here comes the kicker:
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Eat the food as you would a barley cake; bake it in the sight of the people, using human excrement for fuel. In this way the people of Israel will eat defiled food among the nations where I drive them said the Lord.” (Ezekiel 4:12-13 NIV)
I bet your Pastor didn’t tell you this story in Church? What kind of megalomaniac would force one of his chosen prophets to do such a ghastly act for 18 consecutive months? Hitler?
For many of us the first time we heard of the book of Ezekiel was mention of it in the movie
Pulp Fiction
where Samuel L. Jackson’s character would recite Ezekiel 25:17 prior to assassinating his victim:
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The path of the righteous man is beset on all sides with the iniquities of the selfish and the tyranny of evil men. Blessed is he who in the name of charity and good will shepherds the weak through the valley of darkness, for he is truly his brother’s keeper and the finder of lost children. And I will strike down upon those with great vengeance and with furious anger those who attempt to poison and destroy my brothers. And you will know that my name is the Lord when I lay my vengeance upon thee.”
As a matter of fact, a good dose of Hollywood fiction was applied to the above script, as the actual passage of Ezekiel 25:17 reads:
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I will carry out vengeance on them and punish them in my wrath. Then they will know that I am the Lord, when I take vengeance on them.”
But credit to Quentin Tarantino for adding his skill of dramatization to what is a somewhat obscure passage in the Bible.
The cheesy adult film scriptwriters in San Fernando Valley would have trouble matching this piece of horny prose:
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There she lusted after her lovers whose genitals were like those of donkeys and whose emission was like that of horses. So you longed for the lewdness of your youth, when in Egypt your bosom was caressed and your young breasts fondled.” (Ezekiel 23:20-21 NIV)
Makes you wonder why Christians have such an aversion to sex, because God’s prophets fricken love the raunchy stuff.
The opening chapter of Ezekiel begins with the prophet experiencing an obvious hallucinogenic vision of God, as he writes:
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The heavens were opened and I saw visions of God… I looked and I saw a windstorm coming out of the north – an immense cloud with flashing lightning and surrounded by brilliant light. The center of the fire looked like glowing metal and in the fire was what looked like four living creatures. In appearance and their form was that of a man, but each of them had four faces and four wings…Their faces look like this: Each of the four had the face of a man and on the right side each had the face of a lion and on the left the face of an ox; each also had the face of an eagle. Such were their faces.” (Ezekiel 1:1-11 NIV)