Publicerad: 2014-02-09
Purpose no longer met
Myrklafsaren (“the swamp squelcher”) wrote – “When he goes in and control ... so he erases entire cities, pure acts of terrorism in other words.”
God rules. But the Israelites had the opportunity to ignore the commandments of God, but then they would have failed and died because of the, from a human perspective, overwhelming resistance from their enemies. They could have ignored God's command to pull out of Egypt where they were slaves. But then they would have been destroyed. They were hard-pressed already when they left. Later they had the opportunity to ignore God's commands during the migrations, and so be killed off by the well-equipped surrounding armies.
The fact that the commandments of God proved to be based on asymmetric warfare, a radical and crafty strategy, demonstrates more reasons for obeying God than only "blind" obedience. I have in my examples described why every form of disobedience in fact would have resulted in not doing what was absolutely necessary and the smartest thing to do ever in the given situation, with the life at stake.
It's constantly a matter of life and death. The Israelites' enemies were also humans, that is, God's creations. THAT’s why God warned them for 450 years urging them to stop their abominations. God is the Creator, and he has a plan for His creation. But what these people were doing was something that the creator could not tolerate. And Creators do what they want with their property.
There was a risk that the obscenities like child sacrifice and more would spread to other nations as well, so there was only one choice - quit or be obliterated from the face of the earth.
God gave them 450 years of "grace" while he warned them of the consequences. During the same period Israelis' situation in Egypt declined. God had an eye on several parallel events. In 450 years, however, customs and traditions of a culture become so ingrained that it takes several generations to break it. They were offered many generations of time in which they could have responded to the warnings, but they ignored them.
So God rules, he really does. But both Israel and the corrupt pagan cultures had the opportunity to ignore God's commands if they wished. When the Israelites did not adhere to the commandments, then evil people in an evil world gained power over them, and many people died.
So when people refused to stop the desecration of human life and dignity of their own special way, they had finally forfeited their right to live. They had a choice and they chose wrong. This was bad enough, but actually it wasn’t any better before, as we shall see.
But these incidents accounted only for small trifles compared to what happened a millennium earlier. Before the flood it had gone so far with the people that they prayed that God would depart from them (Job 22:17). But the very purpose for creating man was that man would reflect the nature of God's own heart, i.e. reflect aspects of God’s personality, or, his way of relating to things. Incidentally, this is the exact meaning of the ancient Hebrew idiom "image", and we were created “in his image”.
God's original purpose with his "construction”, man that is, were thus no longer possible to meet with individuals whose nature had become so corrupt and rebellious as it had in the days of Noah. And we are not offered countless opportunities to repent, neither as individuals nor as groups or cultures.
So what does a designer do when his design completely falls short of its purpose? God exterminated all humans and animals from the surface of the Earth's, short of 8 people and a pair of land animals of each created kind. God's plan was to start afresh with Noah and his family.
And it had actually passed a very long time after the Flood when we again read about how corrupt the people had become in their idolatry. And today, more than three thousand years later, the last great rebellion against God is approaching its climax.
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/ / Rolf Lampa
First published at Newtonbloggen, August 17, 2012 at 14:56
