Exile and the Fear of the Lord

We are walking through Lent together: the 40 days of Jesus in the wilderness pointing to the 40 years of the Israelites wandering in the wilderness after they were released from slavery in Egypt. As Jesus’ link with Israel is strengthened during his temptation in the wilderness in this way, there’s another event in Israel’s history in the times of the kings and the prophets that points back to Israel’s time in the wilderness. We read about it in our Old Testament lesson today, so let’s turn there.

The story of Israel is a story we’re grafted into spiritually. This happened at the death and resurrection of Jesus and at the coming of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost. Being grafted into Israel means that our story needs to be reframed in light of their story. And so the Old Testament takes on new meaning for us and we have new lessons to learn and a new identity to live into. The lessons of ethnic Israel become lessons for us to learn from as well. Israel’s history brings spiritual value and even identity for us, as new children of Abraham, the father of faith.

So this morning, in the season of Lent, we look at a particularly painful event in Israel’s history. We see the people of God being uprooted from the promised land that God gave them. For the first time since the wilderness wanderings with Moses, God’s people were forced to live apart from his promise, from their appointed place. Not for 40 years this time, but 70 years, a number representing an even greater fullness of time. If the people leaving Egypt were kept away from the promised land for a generation, the people led off into exile were kept away for a lifetime.

This moment was not the act of a vindictive God, waiting for the most minor mistake or overstepping of the law to end it and kick Israel out of the promised place. The fullness of Israel’s exile is proportional to the fullness of Israel’s failure as the people of God. The people, the priests, from youngest to oldest, the great American experiment, the city on the hill, only it was Jerusalem, the people of God in the place that he had given them, for all intents and purposes, that experiment was at an end. God’s people were removed from God’s place. And in that moment, it looked as though God’s promise was failing. But the Law of Moses said it would happen, that they’d be removed from the Land if they were unfaithful to the Lord.

Deuteronomy 28:58–63 ESV

58 “If you are not careful to do all the words of this law that are written in this book, that you may fear this glorious and awesome name, the Lord your God, 59 then the Lord will bring on you and your offspring extraordinary afflictions, afflictions severe and lasting, and sicknesses grievous and lasting. 60 And he will bring upon you again all the diseases of Egypt, of which you were afraid, and they shall cling to you. 61 Every sickness also and every affliction that is not recorded in the book of this law, the Lord will bring upon you, until you are destroyed. 62 Whereas you were as numerous as the stars of heaven, you shall be left few in number, because you did not obey the voice of the Lord your God. 63 And as the Lord took delight in doing you good and multiplying you, so the Lord will take delight in bringing ruin upon you and destroying you. And you shall be plucked off the land that you are entering to take possession of it.

Deuteronomy is anything but boring. If you haven’t read it through, you should. What we see here is that after bearing with Israel through time after time of unfaithfulness, he finally came to a point where it was time to keep his promise in the law and remove Israel from the land.

We are given a glimpse even today about how that could look in a modern context. Invaders rolling in to terrorize, kill, and carry away captives. That scene unfolded early in October of last year. And as terrible as that moment was and the retaliation was, in the exile of the Old Testament it happened to the entire nation of Israel.

The land, as the possession of Israel, the gracious gift of God to his chosen people, was being saved from them. The sabbaths that the land was supposed to receive from the people, taking a year off from growing anything on it, just wasn’t happening, and now in the captivity, the land would get its sabbath, its rest.

At the beginning of our passage we see what led there. As interested faithful learners from the story we’ve been grafted into, we ask what did Israel’s violation of the law look like? What led to their exile? Our passage tells us.

2 Chronicles 36:14–16 ESV

14 All the officers of the priests and the people likewise were exceedingly unfaithful, following all the abominations of the nations. And they polluted the house of the Lord that he had made holy in Jerusalem. 15 The Lord, the God of their fathers, sent persistently to them by his messengers, because he had compassion on his people and on his dwelling place. 16 But they kept mocking the messengers of God, despising his words and scoffing at his prophets, until the wrath of the Lord rose against his people, until there was no remedy.

The prophets were a gift from God. They were there to turn Israel to repentance, to change their ways. God’s people were living in the promised land, in the land of milk and honey, in safety, in the presence of the loving God who brought them there. And they lost their way: their kings, the people, the priests and it was to a point where God could have righteously exiled them, when looking at his law. But instead he sent messengers to warn them and they ignored them and mocked them and harmed them.

They had everything they needed to turn around and get right, but they just didn’t. And they ignored the ones that God sent to help them get straightened out. And as you get into the details and the motivations and the actions, the lesson begins to hit our hearts. This true story from Israel’s history is something we can learn from. And in this penitential season of Lent, it’s a good time to ask the questions that the exile lays before us.

For the last few days I’ve taken up the only Baptist lectionary I know of, the book of Proverbs. As you might know, the book of Proverbs has 31 chapters, so you can certainly read one chapter per day. What’s the date? That’s your chapter in Proverbs. Proverbs is a really good place to realign your heart and your life with God. Perhaps the most important lesson that summarizes all of the proverbs is that the fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge; the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom.

Sometimes our knowledge and our wisdom need a new beginning. If we’re not careful, we can start to give ourselves the freedom to make reasonable choices, as they seem best to us in the moment. This is something adults need to do. But if we start to trust in our own ability over time to get it right and forget that actual knowledge, actual insight come not just from the Lord, but from the fear of the Lord, we can lose our way, and wisdom can slowly depart from us. What do we mean by separating wisdom and knowledge as being from the Lord vs from the fear of the Lord? I mean this: wisdom and knowledge are not transactional gifts. God doesn’t put them in boxes and now they just belong to us and we can sell them on ebay if we want. The gifts of wisdom and true knowledge require a continual realignment with God and his ways and his law. If we separate the gift from the Giver as our own possession, we begin to move off the path. There’s grace there. We can realize we’re on the wrong path and cry out for understanding to the Lord, and in seeking him, in that moment, we’ve become wiser and we’ve also started back on the path of true wisdom.

But if we continue on our own path, with our “own wisdom,” leaning on our own understanding, we’ll find one day that the ground has shifted. And if we keep walking away from the Lord, we’ll find alternate truths, alternative wisdom, and we won’t be able to see our unfaithfulness. And then we’ll begin to offer to God what we think he wants instead of what he’s told us he wants. We’ll ignore others who want to help us turn our lives around and we’ll begin to see true wisdom as foolish, and as the prophets say, we’ll come to the point of calling light darkness and darkness light.

And because of this, I think the word fear is still helpful when we talk about the fear of the Lord as the beginning of wisdom. We tend to downplay the negativity or lack of marketability that comes with that word fear. We don’t want to leave anyone with any bad feelings about God. So we say that the fear of the Lord is a healthy respect. Or some might revise the Bible enough to say that the love of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom. It is wise to love the Lord. The fear of the Lord is not the only wise way to approach him. But it is the beginning, if we’re to be wise. And if we’ve ceased to be wise completely, the fear of the Lord is the way back. If we were to begin to set up statues of Buddha or Vishnu on the altar here, we might be able to convince ourselves that we love the Lord. The love of the Lord isn’t enough to make us wise in that moment. But the fear of the Lord is. The fear of the Lord brings major alignment when we need it. The fear of the Lord brings us into acknowledging our need of him. The fear of the Lord brings us to a love of the Lord that sees him for who he truly is. If you truly love the Lord, the fear of the Lord is a part of the path. Instead, humans tend to fear other things. The loss of possessions or health or family or notoriety in the world. The fear of the Lord helps us to see these things as they really are. They are gifts. They are blessings, rich blessings some of them. But we can’t take these good things and make them the ultimate thing. When we do that we dethrone God in our hearts. The fear of the Lord is the beginning of seeing only God as God. It repairs our vision and lets us see the world as it really is.

And if Israel had feared the Lord, and the prophets sure tried to help them, they would have turned back to the path of right relationship with him. But they refused to fear the Lord. They started offering deformed animals as sacrifices to God, thinking that technically they were still offering sacrifices to God. They placed idols in the Holy of Holies, you know, where the religious stuff goes. They took on Canaanite practices with cult prostitution under every green tree. They took the promised land and made it more vile than it had been before they came. Can you imagine such things happening in Heaven? No. I still can’t get over the grace of God in sending messengers to try and make them see reason rather than just kicking them out of the land earlier. But God is more gracious than I am. Eventually, however, for their own good and for his own honor, Israel was taken away in captivity, away from the promised land, away from the place of his presence to learn. To be broken in order to be rebuilt into the people God wanted them to be.

And as we walk in the wilderness of Lent, in the exile, we set aside this portion of the Christian year to search our own hearts, to search the Scriptures for where we’ve gone astray. Has unfaithfulness to the Lord worked its way into my heart?

As unfaithfulness infected even the temple in Jerusalem, has unfaithfulness worked its way into even the way I approach God. Am I offering to God what he wants to be offered, or have I decided myself what is appropriate to offer the Lord? In Lent, we learn things that we can only learn in the wilderness, in exile.

When it was time for Jesus to pay the temple tax, he told his disciples to go fishing. They caught a fish and in its mouth they found a coin, a denarius. And he told his disciples to take it and render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s and unto God what belongs to God. What belongs to God? Everything! When we offer him only our money or our voices or our making the sign of the cross and leave for ourself our family, our job, our health, our home, our hearts, our very self, are we rendering unto God what is God’s? No. We need to be careful.

How can we continually offer these to God? And when we fail, how can we start again? And if we even find ourselves carried off into exile, whatever that might look like, what can we do? We can start by reflecting, in the fear of the Lord, on the blessings of this life and acknowledging them as the gifts of God to us, not something we’ve earned or something to displace him. Even every breath is a gift, something undeserved that we acknowledge as belonging to God, something he has shared with us. Render unto God what belongs to God. And then when God gives you the ultimate gift, I’m not talking about a house, not a car, not a job, not the land of Israel, but when he offers you the ultimate gift, the life, death, and resurrection of his Son Jesus Christ, don’t miss it for what it is. Don’t mistreat it. Don’t devalue it. Don’t try to turn it into something it’s not. But just like if you were given a magnificent gold watch or a French villa with a garden, examine it with joy. Open it up, read the instructions, polish it, or walk the grounds, find the hidden rooms, paint a picture of the way the light hits the eastern bedroom. Treasure it. When God gives you the gift of his Son, treasure him. Learn from him. Experience him. Even take, and eat. And when you do, you will see that God is using the gift of his Son to preserve and sustain you in the land of exile until you find yourself restored from exile, living in the new Jerusalem, in the place God has prepared for you to live in, never to be removed again.

Israel came back from exile. Exile was a fixed time. God is gracious. Your exile won’t last forever. But while we walk in the exile of this earthly life, or the exile of a wayward soul, don’t waste your exile. This Lent reflect on the faithfulness of God. Reflect on your need of him. Fear the Lord as the beginning of knowledge and wisdom. And turn and look to Jesus who sustains you in your exile and will bring you to live redeemed, restored, and right with him forever.