It’s very easy to become secure when we are surrounded by people who look like us and think like us. It’s even possible to do so by pretending that we think alike. But in such situations, we often create secure worlds that are mostly of our imagination. By clinging to established rules and to accepted stories, we build an illusion of safety.
But history has a way of shattering such illusions.
In the early 6th century BCE, the inhabitants of Judah lived in just such a secure world. Falsely secure. They believed that the physical presence of the Temple in Jerusalem acted as an iron-clad guarantee of their safety, irrespective of any of their actions. After all, wasn’t this the dwelling place of the Most High God? They had promises to their ancestors, David and Solomon and others that their royal house would endure forever.
Then came 586 BCE. The Babylonian armies breached the walls, the city was leveled, and the Temple was burned to the ground.
For the Judeans, this wasn’t just a military defeat; it was a collapse of everything they believed about themselves and their world. Their understanding of God, the land, and identity was shattered. They found themselves marched off to Babylon—a minority in an empire that dominated the middle eastern world.
How do you sing the Lord’s song in a foreign land (Psalm 137)? How do you maintain a faith when all the physical “props” of your religion have been completely destroyed?
A Tale of Three Messengers
When we look back at this historical crisis, we see that God didn’t respond by handing the exiles a neat list of rules. He didn’t provide them with an explanation that would make them feel good. Instead, He sent specific people to match specific groups in their unique situations.
In my book, When People Speak for God, I explored these distinct exilic situations through the lens of three very different messengers:
- Jeremiah: Jeremiah had the agonizing, unpopular task of speaking to those still in Jerusalem who were living in denial. He didn’t just speak the message; he wept it. His life became a symbol of a God who refuses to give up on His people, even when they are marching straight into a disaster of their own making.
- Ezekiel: Ezekiel was himself an exile among the captives by the Chebar canal. He was given a wild, wheels-within-wheels vision of God’s glory departing the Temple and traveling east. The message was revolutionary: Yahweh is not a territorial deity bound to Jerusalem. He is mobile. He can travel into the “unclean” dirt of Babylon to personally be a sanctuary for His people.
- Daniel: Daniel and his friends had to serve inside the very halls of the pagan Babylonian court. They faced the daily temptation to compromise their identity to gain power, status, and comfort. Even further, to simply survive. Yet, through quiet noncompliance, they proved that one can master the learning of the dominant culture without letting the one true God be pushed aside.
- Obadiah: This is the fourth of three! While my book focused on three messengers, a fourth, Obadiah, completes this picture by ministering to the remnants of Judah who were still living in a largely desolate land. I’ll expand on his message below.
Each of these prophets spoke for God in a way that met the people exactly where they were, showing them that exile was not the end of the story—it was a life-size classroom.
This experience preserved the identity of the Jewish people by effectively remaking it, by detaching it from physical Jerusalem. With the temple in ruins, the God of the temple remained God, universal and sovereign. God was not surprised and was certainly not threatened by the powers that overcame the Kingdom of Judah. God was not limited by space.
Obadiah, that fourth prophet, adds a special spice to that message. He most likely ministered in the territory of Judah after the exile. His message is addressed, however, to Edom. What is the purpose of this message, addressed to a foreign people?
To the people who would have initially heard it, the remainder of the Judean population, those the Babylonians didn’t consider important enough even to take into exile, it meant that God was still watching them. (Note that Jeremiah, the weeping prophet, also ministered in Judea, but he was quickly taken to Egypt.) He provides a similar message in Jeremiah 49. God was watching over the population of Judea, and was willing to challenge those who would harm even this lowly remnant of the once proud kingdom.
That message, however, indicates God’s concern for Edom and for other lands. There is no point in words of warning for someone if there is no action possible to turn aside the doom that is proclaimed. Giving a warning is an indication of concern. Compare Obadiah to Jonah. Note that in Obadiah we lack the backstory. We don’t know how directly he might have confronted the Edomites. But what if the Edomites did listen, and stepped back from the brink?
Scrambling Our Modern Labels
Today, we are living in our own season of cultural exile and disorientation. Many Christians feel that they are diminished and less than they used to be. They mourn the passing of a Christian nation, and the presence of people from so many faiths. These things shake our sense of identity.
Sometimes that is the best thing for us.
To be a witness for Jesus in the world as we are called to be we need to have two things, and these things often seem to contradict one another. First, we need an identity. You have nothing to share if you have no identity. But secondly, we need a presence in the world outside our personal, limited visions. A wonderful witness is worthless if nobody encounters it. Your piety is useless if it exists only in the bounds of the church, your home, or people like you.
Israel, and then after the exile of the northern tribes, Judah was called to be a witness. For this, they needed an identity. They built that identity around a city, Jerusalem, and the Temple in it. That identity tended to separate them from the world. There was a need to draw them out of that limited sense of identity to a realization of just how great a mission God was calling them to.
Building that new identity started with the shattering force of the exile. There was no way to have an identity built around a temple that had been destroyed. A territorial identity could not survive with a people scattered from that place.
Through these four prophets, God worked on that new identity, one that made God’s people connect with a broader world and realize that God was not so limited as they had thought. The shatteringly complex vision of Ezekiel 1 tells the prophet something very important: God is here at the River Chebar, just as he would be at the Jordan. Your limited view, Ezekiel, has been shattered. See the vision and learn that your God is greater than you ever imagined.
Limited Vision Limits
When our vision is limited, then our actions will be limited. When the people imagined that God would protect them in Jerusalem because the temple was there, representing God’s presence, that imagination limited their ability to be witnesses to the world beyond.
Ezekiel expanded that vision into Babylon.
Jeremiah taught the people that God was still active in Judah, even when God was simultaneously active in Babylon.
Daniel taught that God was not only active in the camp of the exiles, the people who had thought of themselves as God’s people. God was fully active in the court of the king of Babylon. Not only that, but the King of Babylon was, reluctantly, open to guidance from the God of distant Judea.
Only the concept of God as the God of Israel, or the God of Judah was too limited.
God was the God of Israel. But God was also the God of the entire universe.
Vision needs to be shaped by what is beyond our limited surroundings.
Finding God on the Periphery
If you feel that God’s message is getting lost in the world. If you feel that God is often absent even from the life of your church, you need to find that vision. The vision of the God who sits above those wheels and is served by the flying creatures who are unlimited in their movement.
And in case you think this message was just invented in the early 6th century BCE, the God of the scriptures is, and has always been, the God of the edges. We tend to forget that as we read. For Abraham, more than a millennium earlier, God has a call to something beyond imagination (Genesis 12). Over and over we see biblical characters called to things they didn’t imagine possible.
For Gideon (Judges 6 & 7), some 600 years earlier, God has a call to the edge. When Gideon is called, he is hiding from the enemy in a winepress. There is nothing bold about him. But God changes Gideon’s vision and lets him see what God can do through him, rather than what he can do himself.
God wants to expand our vision. To do that, he has to get us to abandon our own limited vision.
Will it take a disaster to get your eyes off your own limitations?
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