“The Slaughter of the Innocents” and God’s Intervention in our History
“The Slaughter of the Innocents” and God’s Intervention in our History
This sad story was the Gospel reading for Sunday’s Eucharistic liturgy:
Matthew 2:7…15 “Then Herod privately summoned the wise men and determined from them when the star had appeared. He sent them to Bethlehem and said, ‘Go and look carefully for the child. When you find him, inform me so that I can go and worship him as well.’ … After being warned in a dream not to return to Herod, they went back by another route to their own country … When Herod saw that he had been tricked by the wise men, he became enraged. He sent men to kill all the children in Bethlehem and throughout the surrounding region from the age of two and under, according to the time he had learned from the wise men. Then what was spoken by Jeremiah the prophet was fulfilled: ‘A voice was heard in Ramah, weeping and loud wailing, Rachel weeping for her children, and she did not want to be comforted, because they were gone’.”
Jeremiah had prophesied about that tragic event (Jeremiah 31:15). For many people, it seems that if a prophecy is being “fulfilled” then it must mean that somehow God caused what is being “fulfilled,” or at least was somehow approving its happening. However, in the Scriptures there are actually two kinds of prophecy:
- Prophecies about deeds that MEN will do; for example:
“Then they will hand you over to be persecuted and will kill you. You will be hated by all the nations because of my name. Then many will be led into sin, and they will betray one another and hate one another. And many false prophets will appear and deceive many, and because lawlessness will increase so much, the love of many will grow cold” (Matthew 24:9-12).Will GOD be causing ‘them’ to hate and kill them? Will HE be causing them to hate one another and preventing them from loving one another? No, in the numerous prophecies like this one, He is merely describing WHAT will be happening among men, not what HE will be causing or approving.
- Prophecies about deeds that GOD will do; for example:
“Then when the Lamb opened the fourth seal, I heard the voice of the fourth living creature saying, ‘Come!’ So I looked and here came a pale green horse! The name of the one who rode it was Death, and Hades followed right behind. They were given authority over a fourth of the earth, to kill its population with the sword, famine, and disease, and by the wild animals of the earth” (Revelation 6:7-8).These devastating judgments clearly ARE caused by God Himself, through His angels!
An individual prophecy can, of course, contain a mixture of both kinds, and we cannot always be certain whether God may have caused some of them. After all, He does sometime actively harden the hearts of His enemies: e.g., Pharaoh (Exodus 4:21); kings (Deuteronomy 2:30; unbelievers (John 12:40, Romans 8:18).
As it ought to be clear, the prophecy of Jeremiah that was fulfilled by the butchering of these little children is a prophecy about deeds that men will do.
God is sometimes judged as heartless for allowing such an action to occur. “Theodicy” is the discipline of examining and justifying why God has done or allowed to happen. And in order to explain why He would permit such an atrocious to occur we have to spend some time examing why He intervenes in some of our history but chooses not to do so at other times.
It is often taught that ALL that happens is the product of at least the INDIRECT will of God, meaning that the God who knows the end from the beginning (Isaiah 46:10) at least ALLOWS all that happens to occur. And because He allows it when He physically COULD have prevented it, then He is ultimately responsible for its happening – a charge often made against God by critical unbelievers. But I believe that what the Scriptures actually demonstrate is somewhat different from that. What I see happening throughout the Bible is that while our Creator has the POWER to intervene in our history whenever He chooses, He only chooses to intervene when He DECIDES that it will accomplish His specific goals for an individual, for a nation, or for His own long-range plans. Otherwise, He just leaves us alone with our Adamic “freedom” – and the reason that He “leaves us alone” is because that is what we descendants of Adam actually want within our corrupted hearts. The human norm is to not WANT to obey what His Son clearly requires of us, as was so clearly spelled out in the Gospels. Most of the time, when our “backs are up against the wall” and we beg for His help, He continues to leave us alone, because – in our hearts – we do not want to have a continual relationship in which we seek to obey His specifically described commands for us on a regular basis. He who knows the heart of man, knows the difference between true submission and momentary panic! When our first parents rejected their relationship with God, we were entered into a sort of “bondage covenant” with Satan, who became the actual “GOD of this world.” We humans basically “Kicked out” God from our affairs and inadvertently give Satan the actual right to work out HIS goals about what He wants to accomplish in human history!
So, getting back to Herod’s murder of all of those children in Bethlehem under the age of two: Because of US, God allows the same evil to occur back then with Herod as He had allowed among the ancient Egyptians, Greeks, Indians, Chinese, Scandinavians, Aztecs, and Apache! The inclusion of that horrible story of Herod’s brutality merely demonstrates the kind of world into which the Son of God chose to be incarnated, the kind of world in which He still chooses to intervene – or NOT to intervene.
God’s willingness to intervene is not based upon the principle contained in that famous maxim: “there are no atheists in fox holes!” He is not interested, or willing to accept, “hit and miss” relationships with Him, relationships based upon when WE decide to call upon Him. He is a covenant-based God, who offers only a “package deal” relationship, as spelled out in His two very specific relationships: the one He had offered through Abraham, then Moses; and the one being offered through His Son Jesus to those willing to become what HE defines as a “disciple.” A “disciple” of Jesus is one who has come to a form of surrender to Him that has no conditions or qualifications, such as was required of the Germans and Japanese in the Second World War, except a disciple’s is based upon genuine repentance and trust in Jesus: Neither those war time enemies nor Christ’s disciples are invited to “negotiate” or make any “qualifications” in their Article of Surrender. Yet, unlike the our early brethren and their churches, an informal and implied version of those “modifications” is common within contemporary Christian Churches. In Evangelical versions of Christianity, the non-specific version of “accepting Jesus as Lord and Savior” is FAR too vague and ill-defined to be accepted by Him as the way to enter into His covenant of Salvation. His own repeated warnings about the cost of following Him ought to make that very, VERY clear. And, based upon BIBLICAL definitions and examples, within our Catholic, Orthodox, and Protestant churches many or most of our members are NOT what Jesus and the early apostolically founded churches would have considered to be a “disciple.” And that is the fault of their leaders: I suspect that most regular and serious church members would yield to the influence and teaching of their leaders.
Based upon the clear examples of both the New Testament and of the practices of the original, apostolically founded churches, HIS covenant is not as simple as admitting your sinfulness and accepting His death as the source of your reconciliation with the Holy God. A “disciple” is also openly committed, among many other things, to the way that Jesus and His apostles modeled commands like the following, “do not resist an evil person. But whoever slaps you on your right cheek, turn the other to him also. If anyone wants to sue you and take away your tunic, let him have your cloak also. And whoever compels you to go one mile, go with him two. Give to him who asks you, and from him who wants to borrow from you do not turn away” (Matthew 5:39-42). Remember, that Jesus gave those teachings in the presence of those who were not yet committed to becoming His disciples; so when they DID make that choice they well knew what they were committing themselves to! But our churches have turned those, and numerous other commands – commands very specifically described and exemplified by Jesus – into much vaguer “principles” than the first Christians ever conceived valid! Leaders tend to reduce discipleship to high level principles, such as “love one another” and “do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” Jesus, of course taught those things, but in a context full of other, VERY specific commands that were also full of specific examples. Consequently, His command to “love one another,” when put into the context of those other commands, winds up saying something like, “Love one another in a way that prevents you from engaging in societies call to kill or practice violence upon other human beings,” and, “Love one another in a way that leads you to share your possessions together, ‘that there may be equality’” (as in 2 Corinthians 8:13). Compared to our post-Constantinian evolved forms of Christianity, those ancient Christians chalked up a marvelous “track record” about placing His high level generalities within His context of those very specific commands that He also insisted be obeyed as the condition for escaping the harsh “lordship” of Satan!
If we are not willing to submit to His commands in the way that HE and His apostles described and modelled them, then we are not invited into His covenant promises, pure and simple! Those numerous specific commitments were an essential aspect of “continuing steadfastly in the apostles’ doctrine and fellowship” (Acts 2:42). That is why His “regenerate” people were also called “disciples” (Acts 1:15 … 21:16, 27 times! ).
Despite how profoundly our contemporary versions of becoming a “Christian” may differ from what has been described above about “discipleship,” anyone who studies the Christians of the first three centuries can easily confirm for themselves that this was the clear teaching of all of His “one, holy, catholic, and apostolic” churches, as well as the basis upon which their disciplining was conducted. They were willing to be faithful to Jesus’s call to be a distinct society, called His “Kingdom of God,” that has to remain a society that is separate and in friendly opposition to any secular society in which it finds itself. His SPECIFIC teachings create a way of life, a world view, and an inability to fulfill some “civic duties” that their secular neighbors find important. In our day, we tend to find such distinct separation as “cultic,” when all that it actually describes is the brotherhood that Jesus had created and which functioned so powerfully for centuries.
So, the bottom line is that if we hope for our God to historically intervene without our lives, we had better make sure that we have honestly and passionately embraced all that He and His apostles taught, promised, AND commanded! “Repentance toward God and faith in our Lord Jesus Christ” (Acts 20:21) includes a “faith” in what Christ as done on our behalf, AND a faith that commits to ALL that He commanded, in the WAY He commanded and modeled them, the way that enabled most of the first Christians to take on all of the brutality that the vicious Roman empire could dish out to them but without trying to use violence to “serve God’s righteousness!” Like most of the simple fishermen and carpenter original disciples, they were taught to believe that Jesus and His apostles taught in a way that what you communicate means what it SEEMS to mean: “You have condemned, you have murdered the just; he does not resist you” (James 5:6). OUR forms of secular culture-loving Christianity in America (and elsewhere) have somehow developed pastors and professors who have encouraged their versions of “Christians” to go kill the “godless British” the “godless Germans and Japanese,” the godless “Muslims,” et al – because we have learned to merge with our secular cultures at the cost of adulterating His separated and holy society by making vague what Jesus very specifically and clearly had commanded of us! Creating “nice people” is not the same as creating “holy people”! “Loving one another” in a context in which YOU can create the specific ways to exercise that “love” – ways that do not include the more demanding directions with which Jesus associated them – such “modifications” of the spirit and letter of Jesus’s commands and way of life do not lead to the “discipleship,”to the divine intervention, and to the experiential “righteousness, peace, and joy in the Holy Spirit” that Jesus promised to HIS disciples.
