An A-Z of ruin
Every day we're reading or listening to part of the Bible together and sharing thoughts with you. Today it’s Bern Leckie:
What did I like about today’s passage?
Where in the Bible is the story of “the fall”? My first thought is near the beginning of Genesis with Adam and Eve, the original sin and having to leave the Garden of Eden. But while that account was inspired and important, it wasn’t eye witnessed by a nation of God’s people.
However, their defeat and exile to Babylon was a tragic fall they suffered and had to come to terms with in real time. In many ways, it was similar to the original fall, a result of turning from God, making bad choices at every level of society, resulting in an unsustainable situation in God’s promised land. Closeness to God was replaced by distancing, as God had warned.
Hearing what happened to Adam and Eve would have been one thing. Seeing and feeling the results of defeat and exile would have been something else – a deserted city, displaced people, forced labour, looted treasures, suffering, starvation, death. The first poem here makes this feel horribly close, and it’s bound up with reflection – why has this happened?
There is acknowledgement of sin here, but it’s the second poem which really credits God with an active role. What a painful reversal from the victories and joy of entering the land, the glory stories accumulated about God’s work and the movement from slavery to freedom.
These poems feel heavy and comprehensive, and it turns out that they are constructed in a way which makes this even clearer in Hebrew. Each verse starts with a consecutive letter of the alphabet, so each poem is literally an A-Z (more literally an Aleph-Tav) of failure, desolation and suffering.
Is there hope? There has to be hope, right? We’ll have to wait and see…
What did it show me about Father God, Jesus or the Holy Spirit?
God can be seen in several ways here. At first, perhaps he looks like a cruel punisher. It seems that he has not just observed but been active in this process with “fierce anger” and “without pity”, “like an enemy”. The rejection Israel felt would make it feel like that, certainly. But this is a poem. We should expect imagery like a “wound as deep as the sea” to be meaningful, true but not literally so. What else can we see about God?
There is also an element of faithfulness and consistency – “The Lord has done what he planned, he has fulfilled his word,” not with nice results, but he is not random or unpredictable, at least. His work to warn and show the way to walk with him covers centuries.
He is also mourning along with Israel. This is not an account which is independent of God but inspired by his Spirit. The ruin is caused by people’s choices, the pain of the results is shared.
What am I going to do differently as a result?
This was hard to read! I’m going to reflect on how God shares the pain of our bad choices.
Who am I going to share this with?
People I pray with.