Ezekiel 30:1-8, 32:17-18 "Lord of History" Scott Hoezee

Those of you who have read The Inferno by Dante no doubt recall some of Dante's vivid portrayals of hell. Perhaps you recall the dog Cerberus or maybe you remember the gates of hell emblazoned with those chilling words, "Abandon Hope, Forever, You Who Enter Here." Dante was also grimly adept at concocting punishments for specific sins. The bodies of gluttons are themselves forever being eaten away. Hypocrites are clad with beautiful golden coats that look good on the outside but inside are lined with lead, forcing them to carry this heavy burden forever as punishment for a lifetime of concealing their ugliness behind a mask of goodness.

But in addition to such literary inventions something else is going on in The Inferno. Throughout the work Dante takes revenge on his enemies. As the narrator descends through the various levels of hell, he encounters some of Dante's real-life political foes, the philosophers whose work Dante did not like, and here and there a few popes, archbishops, and cardinals of the Catholic Church! It did not pay to be on Dante's bad side.

Most of us would probably agree that getting in your licks by consigning your enemies to hell is definitely a low-blow! However, seen from a cynical vantage point, it could be possible to allege something similar about Ezekiel. The verses we read tonight are just a small sample of a larger unit in this book. Starting in Ezekiel 25 the prophet systematically works his way across the map and declares Yahweh's judgment on every nation he sees. Ammon, Moab, Edom, Philistia, Tyre, Egypt, Lebanon, Libya, and all of Arabia are told that they would some day go down the tubes of history and when they do, it will be proof that Yahweh alone is the sovereign God of the universe.

But you do not need to have a great deal of historical knowledge to recognize that every one of the nations which Ezekiel singles out was one of Israel's enemies. In this way you could view these chapters on a par with Dante. The message seems to be that no matter what a nation may have "gotten away with" in the past, the day will come when the scales of justice will balance. "You'll all get yours in the end," Ezekiel basically declares.

But what are we to make of this string of chapters which pronounces unmitigated doom and gloom, calamity and chaos on all these nations? For that matter, what were the original hearers supposed to make of this? After all, Ezekiel did not preach these words to the nations in question. He spoke all of this from within the confines of his Babylonian exile. The Pharaoh of Egypt and the kings of Arabia did not hear these words, only the Israelite exiles did. So tonight let's wonder first of all what purpose these chapters serve within the context of the Book of Ezekiel proper. But then secondly let's wonder what we might make of these words from our vantage point in the Christian Church.

First of all, then, the meaning of this within Ezekiel itself. Believe it or not, the immediate function of these words was to generate hope! Last week we said that the end of Ezekiel 24 represents a turning point in this book. We said that the last half of Ezekiel contains messages of hope and restoration. So you may now be surprised to discover that as a matter of fact the first eight chapters following Ezekiel 24 contain nothing but tirades of doom against the nations! How do these upsetting oracles tie in with hope?

They do so in two ways. One, they remind Israel that despite all the bad things that have happened to her (and despite the first 24 chapters of this book which are all prophecies against only Israel and not the other nations), God has not forgotten about the ways in which various nations have in the past wounded his chosen people. Yes, as the first half of this book proved, God takes his people's sins with utmost seriousness. But now the people are reminded that the sins of other countries are taken equally seriously by Yahweh. The fact that God was not going to let the evil of the nations slide was a hopeful sign to the Israelite exiles. The world had not been abandoned by God after all.

But a second way by which this might have conveyed some hope to the exiles has to do with the power and sovereignty of Yahweh. In and through these oracles of doom Yahweh is consistently portrayed as being in charge of nature, of historical events, and of the very things which other nations regarded as gods and goddesses. In terms of Egypt, the Nile River is not a god nor is the sun in the sky--Yahweh is shown as being able to control the Nile and the sun the same way he did in the days of Moses in the plagues leading up to the exodus. Yahweh alone is supreme and in charge. There are no other gods.

Starting in Ezekiel 33 Yahweh is going to begin making grand promises of restoration for Israel. Given their pathetic situation in exile, not to mention the destruction of Jerusalem and its Temple, those promises of restoration may have seemed like ridiculous pie-in-the-sky optimism. But by prefacing those promises with these towering images of Yahweh's sovereign power, perhaps the people would have reason to embrace the promises after all.

So the people were supposed to hear hope ringing through all of this. But were they also supposed to take a kind of vengeful glee? As they heard about the upcoming punishments of all these former enemies, were they supposed to pump the air with their fists and say something like, "Yeah! Go get 'em, O Lord! Sock it to 'em for what they did to us way back when!!" In other words, is all of this on a par with the kind of sardonic wit of Dante as he neatly disposed of his opponents by vengefully sticking them into hell?

It's possible that some people had this reaction, but I don't believe it was intended by Ezekiel or God. For one thing the first half of this book was a fierce condemnation of Israel for being guilty of the same sins as the rest of the world. Israel was in no position to gloat. If she felt sorry for herself and was at long last generating some penitence for the past, then a transfer of similar emotions should have been made to the other nations.

A second and related reason not to gloat is the fact that scattered throughout these oracles are words of lament. That's why I read that snippet from chapter 32. What you find here is not just condemnations but also laments, sad songs of divine sorrow and pity that any of this should ever happen on Yahweh's good earth. This is not happy material. It is not intended to be read with raised fists pumping the air but with downcast eyes weeping for the dead. This is not the way it was supposed to be--not for Israel but not for Egypt or anyone else, either. This is a tragedy. History is a tragedy.

But if all of this is difficult to make sense of within the context of Ezekiel, it is vastly more difficult to deal with in our current context within the Church of Jesus Christ. What, if anything, do these chapters tell us about history and God's relationship to it? After all, in one sense the events of history--including any and all events that happened to Egypt in the centuries following Ezekiel's prophecies--are just raw data.

History proper does not carry with it any single set of interpretations. Maybe Egypt did get invaded at some point after Ezekiel's prophecy. But that doesn't mean the Egyptians would have seen this as Yahweh's judgment of them. Also, whatever army invaded Egypt did not see itself as God's instrument in fulfillment of something a man named Ezekiel once said. Of course not! History does not, in and of itself, reveal the hand of God.

Just think of something like World War II. If you wished to do so, you could frame that entire war in Christian terms. Hitler represented evil, a man clearly filled with the devil and so opposed to anything that had to do with God's good designs for the world. In that case, any and all who fought against Hitler could be seen as being on God's side, on the side of righteousness and justice. The downfall of the Third Reich was, therefore, a work of God in which we were privileged to be co-workers with the Almighty. It was all a holy cause.

But you don't have to interpret it that way. An atheist would not do so. It is fully possible to present all the facts of World War II without reference to any personal God or devil. And most history books do exactly that. Things just happen. Bad people come and go, sometimes getting squashed, sometimes not. So it goes.

Some years ago I read a history book about the Middle East which included data on ancient Israel. But this book was not written by a Jew or a Christian and so, not surprisingly, did not attach any particular significance to Israel. Instead the book just academically reported various historical events without reference to Yahweh, the covenant, or anything else theological or religious. In fact, Israel did not receive much attention at all from this historian for the simple reason that compared to Egypt and its pyramids or Babylon and its splendid hanging gardens, Israel was nothing! It was just a puny group of people occupying a parcel of real estate not much bigger than an area the size of western Michigan. And it reminded me that you do not have to read even Israel's history as sacred history. The raw data is like historical silly-putty that can be molded into whatever shape a scholar may wish.

It is only the eyesight of faith that perceives God's hidden hand over and in and under this world and its flow of history. Eventually Ezekiel's prophecies about Israel returning to the promised land came true when King Cyrus of Persia conquered Babylon and then set the Israelite refugees free. And did you know that Cyrus is one of the very few figures in the Bible who is referred to as a "Messiah," a "Christ" of Yahweh? Cyrus is God's anointed one to perform the holy task of setting God's people free from their exile. But Cyrus did not know Yahweh had anointed him! Cyrus was not a worshiper of Israel's God and so far as we know never became a convert to that faith, either!

From the outside looking in, Cyrus' role in all of that is just one little historical quirk among millions and billions of such quirks. It didn't have to happen that way, but that's how it shook out. It's just a neutral fact open to any, or no, interpretation. In some ways all of history could be seen as no more than a series of events which could have been different.

Most of us at one time or another play the historical "What If?" game. What if the South had won the Civil War? What if Hitler had developed the nuclear bomb first? What if Oswald had missed? Years before World War II Sir Winston Churchill visited New York City. Since the traffic in Britain travels on the opposite sides of the road than here, Churchill looked the wrong way when crossing a New York street and got hit by a car. What if he had died right then? Would England have made it through the war?

Most people think that nothing had to happen the way it did. History is just a booming, buzzing confusion in which nothing was inevitable. It's all open-ended and random. Viewed this way the past constitutes a story only in the sense that you can repeat various narratives. History contains all kinds of stories, but the whole thing taken together does not constitute a single story. The world is not going anywhere. There is no script, no purpose, no meaningful beginning to the story, no discernible middle, and no foreseeable end to the tale, either. History is not like a novel with a plot telling a single story but a collection of diverse short stories that just happen to all be in one volume.

Ezekiel 30 is one of many places in the Bible which reminds us that this is not how Christians view history. No, we do not necessarily believe that every single jot and tittle of anyone's life was completely scripted long ago such that, all appearances to the contrary, we are really no more than puppets dancing at the end of God's strings. Believing that God is in control of history does not have to mean that freedom is an illusion or that God himself is responsible for every event that happens, including, therefore, the horrid ones.

But what we do believe is that history matters such that it is never out of control. There are some scholars and cynics who seem to think that the actual history behind our Christian faith doesn't matter a whit, not even to us believers. Some people have written in recent years that if it were proven that no such nation as Israel or no such person as King David ever existed, it wouldn't change a thing for Christians. A few books have even suggested that if tomorrow the verifiable bones of Jesus were uncovered in some ancient tomb in the Middle East, Easter this spring would mean just as much as it ever did.

But they're wrong. We are perilously dependent on our belief that God is the Lord of history and that our faith is founded on real events in time and space. We could not bear with equanimity the historical destruction of what Scripture teaches. And not just for the obvious reason that it would cast the Bible into doubt but for the more subtle reason that it could very well mean that our God is not really the Lord of history after all. Such a thought treads desperately near to nihilism, to those who say that nothing means anything, everything is up for grabs, and so we must all create our own meaning, or not, as best we can.

We Christians must not pretend that we always know exactly what every event in history means. We cannot and should not pretend that seen the right way every past event can be fitted very neatly into God's plan. But what we must not give up is the belief that we, like all people past, present, and future, really are living in the midst of a grand story of creation and redemption--a story whose one constant is the abiding presence of God who somehow really is weaving together a narrative with a beginning, middle, and end.

What's more, we believe that an actual historical event, Jesus' death and resurrection, is the center of that story. That man's life and death and resurrection reach back to the beginning of the cosmos and forward to the end of the cosmos in ways that proffer hope. On that we cannot and must not compromise.

Perhaps all of that seems like a lot to draw out of a Scripture reading such as we had this evening. Yet in a sense if we do not have this larger perspective on God and history then most of the Bible, and certainly Ezekiel's prognostications about the future, is so much wishful thinking which we need not take seriously. But if, as Ezekiel believed, history is brooded over by a God close and loving and holy enough to grieve both the sins of the nations and the consequences of those sins, then perhaps there is hope in the end.

As most of you know, my Princeton seminar is this year considering themes related to science and the future. Science often tells us some grim things as to how and when this planet, if not the entire universe, will end. In one sense we don't like to think about meteors crashing into our planet or nuclear holocausts or the winking out of our sun.

But as one of my colleagues reminded us at our last meeting two weeks ago, the very act of coming to worship is our way of declaring that we do not believe the world will go on forever. We come to worship each week because we know history will end. But even so we come to worship with joy, and not with drawn faces of worry, because we think the world's finite nature is just fine. It's just fine, because it was God himself who created all that is finite. God can never be blind-sided by history. He's got the whole thing in his hands and so in the end, all will be well. That is our hope. That's why we came to worship today. Blessed be the Lord of history, Amen.