Underground Exiles

Leviticus 20.1-5 is the final text I’ll ask you to consider:

“The Lord spoke to Moses, saying, “Say to the people of Israel, ‘Anyone of the people of Israel or of the strangers who sojourn in Israel who give any of his children ot Molech shall surely be put to death.  The people of the land shall stone him with stones.  I myself will set my face against that man and will cut him off from among his people, because he has given one of his children to Molech, to make my sanctuary unclean and to profane my holy name.  And if they people of the land do at all close their eyes to that man when he gives one of his children to Molech, and do not put him to death, then I myself will set my face against that man and against his clan and will cut them off from among their people, him and all who follow him in whoring after Molech.”

Lest there be any confusion, “giving” a child to Molech was not some form of indentured servitude.  Leviticus 18.21 makes it explicitly clear that God is talking about child sacrifice, the heathen ritual of offering live babies as burnt offerings to pagan gods.  After reading this passage does it seem like God has much patience for this barbaric practice?

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So I had another conversation this morning at church before the service started surrounding the question of free will.  There is a dear, dear lady at the Well who walked up before church started and noticed that our pastor had a copy of Erasmus and Luther’s debate on Free Will.  She picked up the book and said she’d never read anything by Erasmus and thought she might be interested in the book.

Seeking to engage the conversation, I mentioned that Pastor Todd had loaned me the book several years ago, and that I thought Luther’s writing in Bondage of the Will was by far the best piece of writing he’d every produced.

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While orphans, widows and abortion-vulnerable children are all “in distress” - and generally unwanted by society at large - the circumstances surrounding their distress are very different.  It is one thing to provide food and shelter for people in need, and another thing entirely to intervene on the behalf of people who are about to be killed.  Perhaps you wonder if the Bible actually mandates our involvement in the more extreme circumstances, whre the price of involvement is much higher, and the level of opposition is more, much more, significant.  Here enteres Proverbs 24.11-12:

Rescue those who are being taken away to death; hold back those who are stumbling to the slaughter.  If you say, “Behold we did not know this,” does not he who weighs the heart perceive it?  Does not he who keeps watch over your soul know it, and will he not repay each man according to his work?”

Like almost all biblical proverbs, the text gives zero indication what kind of specific injustice, if any, the author has in mind.  It serves as a general guidline for what God’s people are called to do in the face of violent injustice.  If innocent human beings are in danger, God-fearing people are to come to their rescue.

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The book of James is a practical book about meeting practical needs.  It even provides a practical definition of true religion, found in James 1.27:

Religion that is pure and undefiled before God, the Father, is this:  to visit orphans and widows in their affliction, and to keep oneself unstained from the world.”

This concise definition makes it clear that helping those in desperate circumstances is a primary component of pure and undefiled religion.  Orphans and widows are the examples given, but it’s pretty unlikely that these are the only two groups he has in mind.  In the very next chapter, he warns against neglecting the poor; so we must surmise, then, that the application of James’ admonition goes beyond just widows and orphans alone.  They are simply representative of those in severe distress.  And lest we wrongly assume that James’ emphasis on practical deeds of love is out of step with the rest of Scripture, consider the prophet Jeremiah’s command in Jeremiah 22.3:

Thus says the LORD: Do justice and righteousness, and deliver from the hand of the oppressor him who has been robbed.  And  do no wrong or violence to the resident alien, the fatherless, and the widow, nor shed innocent blood in this place.”

In the patriarchal society in which James and Jeremiah wrote, where there was no safety net of state-funded social services, the prospects for widows and orphans were bleak in the extreme.  With their natural providers gone, orphans and widows would not likely survive apart from the active intervention of God’s people.   As daunting and desperate as their circumstances were, children facing abortion are even worse off.

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More likely than not, this post is going to get me in trouble with the elders in charge of H20, as well as an ex-girlfriend, and various other groups of people.

I was recently told that if I would just be a little more meek, my sermons would go down easier. A couple of weeks before that, I was given practically the same advice.

I was raised Southern Baptist, with this image of

“gentle Jesus, meek and mild,”

to quote the old hymn by Charles Wesley. Then I grew up and read the New Testament for myself, and it seemed like Jesus really enjoyed screwing with religious people.

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