By the Rivers of an Everlasting Babylon

Dear Ehud,

Before we get to the arguments from Scripture—and they are coming, promise—I wanted to touch on one more subjective element that I suspect you are dealing with. In my previous letter, we looked at the element of struggle—wrestling with both God and man. In this one, I would like to consider the sense of isolation and exclusion.

It is kind of a push-me-pull-you situation because the isolation is chosen by you, and the exclusion is chosen, or so you feel, by the other. You are not a Christian because you have not become one. You have not been baptized. And yet at the same time, you feel rejected by the Christians, as though you were not invited to the party and you should have been.

All of this is rooted in several events of the first century, the principal one being the death and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth. While Christians and Jews share the Old Testament, we come down here to a foundational principle of division. Jesus either rose from the dead or He did not. The Old Testament either prophesied that He would, or it didn’t. If He did not rise, then as the apostle Paul noted, we Christians are the most pitiable creatures ever (1 Cor. 15:19). If He did rise from the dead, then He is the promised Messiah that the entire Old Testament was pointing toward. That would make the Jews the most to be pitied. This would mean that the ingenuity of a thousand rabbis can’t put the Old Testament jig saw puzzle together . . . because someone put the wrong box lid on it. The lid is of a lighthouse, and the puzzle itself is of a sailboat.

And whether Jesus rose from the dead is one of those binary things. He either did or He didn’t. There is no halfway. If He didn’t, then what honest man would want to be one of those deluded Christians? If He did rise, then every sensible person would want everyone else to know and acknowledge it. But the one thing we cannot do with whether He remained in the grave or came out of it is . . . split the difference. Splitting the difference is not a rational option. There is no difference that can be split.

The second great event of the first century I was alluding to was the destruction of Jerusalem in 70 A.D. I will go into this in greater depth in my next letter, but after the judicial murder of Christ, the city of Jerusalem was doomed. Christ saw all of that coming and lamented for Jerusalem for that very reason (Matt. 23:37-38). All the early preaching of the Christians was in the light of that impending destruction, which Jesus had told them would occur within that same generation (Matt. 24:34). The early Christians started selling off their real estate holdings for a reason (Acts 4:34). For them, the sense of foreboding was palpable.

After the destruction of the city at the hand of the Romans was completed, the initial scattering of the Jews began. It began, but there were still enough Jews there half a century later to attempt a second rebellion against Rome under Bar Cochba. After that rebellion was quashed, the Jews were truly exiled . . . in every direction they were exiled. Their earlier time in Babylon had been a pretty straightforward exile and return. But this was exile, followed by more exile, topped off with yet more exile. Hanging your harps by the rivers of Babylon was hard enough when the exile was only 70 years, but this has been 2,000 years now.—by the rivers of an everlasting Babylon. That’ll do something to a people.

But this whole massive exile has also been covered over in literary ironies, century after century. It doesn’t matter how rich, or how powerful, or how influential certain Jews have become—and many of them have done exactly that—they remain fundamentally outsiders. This has happened many times in Christian countries, and from the Jewish perspective the galling thing is that the Christians, the younger brother, persists in acting like the older brother.

After two millennia, many thought that this sense of permanent exile, or permanent homelessness, would be addressed through Zionism, through a return to the ancestral homeland. That seemed more than plausible, but the remarkable history of the rise of modern Israel has to include this melancholy fact. Once Jews were frequently pariahs in every nation, and now, such is the climate of our time, modern Israel has become the pariah nation. Israeli doctors could develop a cure for every kind of cancer, and they could decide to give it away for free, and still get condemned for it in a UN resolution.

Of course, those who give way to irrational Jew-hate are responsible for their own sin because nothing excuses that kind of thing. But at the same time, more than one Jew has looked up to Heaven in order to ask, “Why?” Everyone who knows that there is a God knows that the deeds of evildoers are somehow under His control. There are the people who bring the trial to us, but in the courts of Heaven there had to have been a determination to send that trial, and that is the thing that troubles and rankles. Why are the Jews, such talented insiders, always outside?

I don’t want to get sidetracked into a long discussion about the problem of evil, so I will just say a quick something here as an aside. To react to the horrors of evil by denying the existence of God is actually a suicidal argument. If there is no God, there is no such thing as evil, and so where did the problem go?

I recall reading somewhere that one rabbi said that in all the afflictions that the Jews had suffered down through the years “there was something of the golden calf.” I believe there is a healthy instinct here, but I would want to expand it to include the rejection of the Messiah. That was the culmination of everything that was wrong about human history. And note that I say human history, not Jewish history alone.

As Jesus put it, all the crimes committed against God in the history of the human race—from the blood of Abel on down—were going come crashing down on that particular generation (Matt. 23:36). But please note that this is not any of that “Christ-killer” foolishness—as though Gentiles had no hand in it—because Abel was slain a couple millennia before the first Jew appeared. But it does mean that everyone—Gentile and Jew both—who wants to be right with God has to come to terms with his own complicity in what happened in that first century travesty of justice. For you, as a wandering Jew, that complicity has a unique texture, but it is a complicity shared by every son of Adam.

So then, these are the two aspects of your experience that I believe the gospel will address efficaciously. Your struggles can come to an end, and you can find rest for your soul. And secondly, that sense of permanent alienation, always at your left elbow, can be banished forever as you find your sins forgiven.

I know this is attractive to your soul, but it also needs to be demonstrated to your mind. So what are the arguments?

Until next time . . .

Cordially in Christ,

Douglas Wilson