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Welcome to VerseNotes Out Loud. I’m Jerry Towler.
For Christmas Day, instead of a new reflection, like we’ve done each day of Advent for Advent of Carols, I want to read you something I wrote ten years ago. It’s a story about waiting—about how long God’s promises can feel, and how thin hope can wear.
Let me tell you a story.
It begins, as all good stories do, long ago, with a great king and a small kingdom. The kingdom had been at war since the king took the crown, and he fought many battles against many enemies. This king knew God, and followed Him throughout the fighting. One by one, his enemies fell before him, and he won a kingdom. Now, this king was also a man, and the man made some mistakes. Trusting in God, and in his prophets, the king repented, and all was well.
The king had a son, who was also a great king. His father’s battles had brought about a time of peace, so the son spent his time making trade deals and building forts and walls and monuments. He took the great, peaceful kingdom, and he made it safe and wealthy. This king knew God, and did all that he did in God’s name. But this king, too, was a man, and the man made some mistakes. More than his father even, but he, too, knew God would protect the kingdom. And so He did.
Now this king also had a son, who was not a great king. Not long after his father’s death, the kingdom began to fray, and finally split into a northern half and a southern half. This king knew of God, but he did not trust and follow Him, and he did not listen to His prophets. And so the kingdom was divided, as were the people.
Within a hundred years, all the power and wealth won by the two great kings was lost, and the kingdoms, which together had stretched from water to water, were shriveled and weak. No more were the kings great kings. The best were mediocre, and the worst were cruel and selfish.
Throughout the years, God kept sending His prophets—some to the north, and some to the south—to tell the people to repent, to have hope, to trust in God. They said, “God is fixing this.” But scarcely a hundred years again, and the northern kingdom was attacked by a great army from the east. To prevent them from ever rising again, the army scattered the people across the land, and to this day, they are called “the lost tribes.”
The southern kingdom was now alone.
A generation went by, and the great army slowly chipped away at the southern kingdom, which had had slightly better kings, and lasted slightly longer. The southern kingdom knew God better, and God’s temple was in its capital. But within another hundred years, a different eastern empire attacked and conquered the kingdom. Panicked, the king went to the south and begged for aid; he sold the kingdom to a great southern empire for protection, and they wer saved, for a while.
Another generation went by, and the eastern empire defeated the southern empire, and the little kingdom changed owners once again. This time, it lasted only four years before the southern empire once more invaded and took our little kingdom back. Four more years, and it happened again. This time, the eastern empire deported ten thousand of the best and brightest citizens of the bedraggled kingdom back to its own capital, so they could no longer resist.
The people despair. Barely three hundred years since the great kings, and they have been divided amongst themselves, rebelled against from within, and conquered six different times by three different enemies. And now, the greatest of those left have been removed. Their God had promised to make of them a great nation, a powerful kingdom, but that dream seems long lost, barely a memory of ages past. They scratch out an existence as vassals on the one hand, and homeless refugees on the other.
Yet God sends prophets still, saying, “Trust God, and have hope, for your salvation is coming.” They say, “God is fixing this.” Hard words to hear, and even harder to believe, when fifteen generations have known only war and brokenness.
But all is not lost: fifty years after the deportation, an even greater empire arises to defeat the oppressors, and it sends some of the refugees back home to their kingdom to try to start again. It’s slow going, but another hundred years later, God sends them a leader—not a king this time—and they rebuild the temple, and they rebuild the walls, and they elect a government. After four hundred and fifty years, for a time, it seems what remains of the kingdom might survive after all.
It does not.
A hundred years go by, and the little kingdom knows relative peace, before the greatest kingdom the world has ever known arises and sweeps across the land. It crushes to dust everything in its path, and that includes the little kingdom. But instead of scattering the people, or exiling them, this new conqueror aims to crush their spirit. Their God is outlawed, their temple desecrated, and they are ruled by foreigners. All hope is finally lost. Their God has turned His back. Even the prophets, those motes of light in darkness, have stopped coming; the last one is dead, and there will be no more. The promised salvation has come and gone, and the kingdom and its people are mere shadows of what they once were.
The kingdom, now a shrunken nation, turns to itself and thinks, “God is not fixing this.” It has been owned before, it has been enslaved before, but this last indignity is too much. Backed into a corner once too often, after yet another hundred and fifty years of subjugation, the people raise an army to fight off their oppressors. They were warriors once, under that great king, and it seems the people remember how to fight. Impossibly, they win back their freedom. They rejoice! Surely their God has given them the victory! They joyfully install the leaders of the rebellion as rulers, never to be slaves again.
And they immediately regret it. For the new rulers are as bad as the old, and worse: they are also traitors, putting down the very people they had promised to save. Surely, now there is truly nothing left. When, a hundred years later, the world’s greatest empire comes through and crushes them once more, they hardly notice. Their temple, the house of God, has been gone for centuries; there have been no more prophets, and there is only darkness upon darkness. More than nine hundred years since the last great king, and half of that without their God or His prophets. They look around, and they think, maybe dare to speak, “God is not fixing this.”
And in those days, a decree went out from Caesar Augustus that a census was to be taken…
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Merry Christmas