THESE WORDS THE LORD SPOKE through the prophet Ezekiel were fulfilled not once, not twice, but three times: “You have been more unruly than the nations around you and have not followed my decrees or kept my laws. I will make you a ruin and a reproach among the nations around you. You will be a warning and an object of horror to the nations around you when I inflict punishment on you in anger and in wrath and with stinging rebuke. I the Lord have spoken.” (Ezek. 5:7, 14-15) First under Assyria in the 8 th C. B.C.; second under Babylonia in the 6 th C. B.C.; and finally, under Rome, in the 1 st C. A.D. this multifaceted prophecy was carried out. Each time was more severe than the last, with the last diaspora not finding the beginning of the end until A.D. 1948, when the United Nations restored Israel as a nation and began repatriating Jews to their hotly contested homeland.
The object lesson was severe. The privations of diaspora had been a continuous cycle of destruction, the beginning of prosperity, and then destruction again, and again, with one great exclamation point at WWII. At that time, six million Jews were, not killed, not murdered, but, a most loathed of terms of inhumanity, exterminated in a massive genocide—to the feigned horror of the post-war world.
However, the ‘warning to the nations’ was never received in Ezekiel’s time, nor in any other time, and has almost never even been perceived. Today’s true Christ-followers, like those of earlier generations, shake their heads in disbelief at the secular world’s lack of perception, generation after generation. As one philosopher has said, *“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”
There is another apocryphal prophecy, made long ago and as yet unfulfilled, that awaits the rebellious nations. “I will gather all nations and bring them down to the Valley of Jehoshaphat. There I will enter into judgment against them concerning my inheritance, my people Israel, for they scattered my people among the nations and divided up my land.” (Joel 3:2)
The destruction of nations—even the most powerful—always begins from within. One generation rises on the successes brought by the struggles of those who went before, who through both work and warfare built the nation. That prosperity becomes an inheritance to the next, but slowly, generation by generation, grows into a sense of entitlement, and is finally lost due to both lack of work ethic and a dilution and fracturing of core beliefs. Another philosopher said, **“What you have inherited from your fathers, earn over again for yourselves, or it will not be yours.”
In the inevitable decline that follows, angry voices attack each other until any possibility of unity is destroyed. Paul warns, “If you keep on biting and devouring each other, watch out or you will be destroyed by each other.” (Gal. 5:15) At that point all it takes is a nudge from the outside, and the hollow shell of a once-great nation implodes. It is the standard lesson of history, and it is always lost upon the nations of the world. There is both a worldly wisdom and a Godly wisdom that speaks warning to nations. Neither has prevailed. One never will, but the other is inevitable, for it is God’s will.
Today, in once-great nations, we stand at a point in circumstance and time where many have stood before and became a footnote in the history of civilizations. And if world history is an honest teacher, we must acknowledge that we are powerless to change what the future holds. But we are not powerless in our own choices and actions. Our Father speaks of other outcomes, and he speaks them as both promise and possibility to those who can both perceive and receive, and who must then be accountable to act. “If my people, who are called by my name, will humble themselves and pray and seek my face and turn from their wicked ways, then will I hear from heaven and will forgive their sin and will heal their land.” (2 Chron. 7:14)
Whether we act or do not act, there remains ominous and unavoidable prophetic outcomes over which we have no control. Let this, however, be our guide: “For it is time for judgment to begin with the family of God; and if it begins with us, what will the outcome be for those who do not obey the gospel of God?” (1 Pet. 4:17)
Better by far that we act, and act in obedience to the clear voice of our Father. As confusion swirls around us in a decaying culture, scripture nevertheless stridently warns and encourages us about our attitude towards boldly taking godly action. “Do not throw away your confidence; it will be richly rewarded. You need to persevere so that when you have done the will of God, you will receive what he has promised. For, ‘In just a little while, he who is coming will come and will not delay. But my righteous one will live by faith. I take no pleasure in the one who shrinks back.’ But we do not belong to those who shrink back and are destroyed, but to those who have faith and are saved.” (Heb. 10:35-39)
Q. Is life an obstacle or a path?
* George Santayana, The Life of Reason, 1905.
*Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, “Faust.” Act I, scene i, 1808.
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