Discovering the Book of the Law
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I have a confession to make. I like America… but I don’t like most sermons about America. I don’t often see America in the Bible, and when I do, it’s usually a stretch. It often seems like a misuse of the precious time devoted to God’s word to make the sermon about the greatness of America, or elections, or politics in general. BUT, I’m about to give a sermon about America, something I never thought I’d do. Don’t worry, I’m not here to bash America. America has a lot to like about it, to love, even. But I’m not here to give a typical sermon about America either. I’m only bringing it up because the Scriptures compel me to. Again, I’m not very happy about this, for a number of reasons, but here we go. America likes to identify with Israel’s story. From the settlement at Jamestown, onward, many of the first people who came from England and elsewhere to settle in this land, at least a substantial swathe of them, saw a chance to be a recapitulation of Israel. To take up Israel’s story and relive it in a way, to be the people of God in the promised land. It’s been and still is the source of patriotism for many. We’ve moved to this place to have a Christian nation, to be the people of God, to have a physical place, a land of promise to start over and worship God in the way he has ordained us to do. So, at best, those who co-mingle America with Israel see a recapitulation, a reenactment of God’s relationship with Israel. And I think well of those who see America that way. America is perhaps unique in this way of thinking. I don’t think that America is intrinsically unique in being able to make a claim about living out a reenactment of Israel’s past. It is possible for another nation to attempt it. In fact it’s probably the sort of thing that should be encouraged, at more than one level. The New Testament, after all, tells us that being grafted into Israel’s past is part of the humbling privilege of being a Christian. So in many ways, living out Israel’s past, as it should have been, should be a goal for us at least personally, if not corporately, and perhaps nationally as well.
But I don’t think we always take in the whole picture when we see America as recapitulating Israel. As individual Christians, and corporately, God graciously gives us pictures from Israel’s past that show us how to live faithfully with him, that highlight his promises. But we often read those and close the book before we read the stories that aren’t so lovely, that are there to warn us. Some of the terrible things we’ve seen happen in this country map to an improper understanding of Israel’s story. Many missionaries wanted to see the indigenous Native Americans come to find out about the One True God and his Son Jesus Christ. Other citizens of the new America treated them like Canaanites to be destroyed to make room for the true people of God. Others had no theological framework at all and just wanted to destroy them and ended up living out a staggeringly paradoxical part of Israel’s story unknowingly.
There is a sense that the Canaanite conquest is a helpful allegory for the Christian life. But converting the Canaanites or destroying them to eradicate sin in the land of promise is certainly not a model for how we are to treat people in this epoch of salvation history.
However, if it’s depersonalized for our modern context, where we’re not seeing the Braveheart version, but a theological version, seeing the ancient enemies of Israel as embodying the physical presence of sin, and Israel’s mandate to deal with sin one way or another, by conversion or destruction, we see the motivation, a rough outline of some aspect of God’s perspective on the Canaanite conquest. We see God simultaneously giving the land of promise to Israel and doing away with sin, with it’s tendency to spread. To fight sin, especially in our own lives is what we’re called to do.
The fact that it is completely unsatisfactory, even totally egregious to think that the way to eradicate sin is to kill sinful people, makes the connection between the Canaanite conquest and the Christian life difficult to embrace. And it wouldn’t have been easy for the Israelites either. To live a life dealing out death and conquest is not ultimately the way it’s supposed to be for the people of God, and it points to the need for a better way to deal with sin. A way that is found in Jesus. Where Jesus stands in for us who serve as the physical presence of sin and dies as if he’s the only physical presence of sin to be destroyed and takes the punishment of sinners everywhere in order to make a way to truly and finally eradicate sin without the killing we see in the Old Testament. Eradicate the sin, not the sinner. And to live in this new reality we look back at the conquest of Canaan as a lesson. We look to glean something. As seen earlier, one thing we can see is that in the era of Christ and his church, the Canaanite conquest serves as a picture of the need for spiritual conquest. Frightening and violent, this picture of sin and its eradication is traumatic. And the spiritual battle to conquer your own sin is traumatic as well. It’s difficult to work at doing away with sin. You have to die to do it.
Israel wasn’t totally successful. Their lack of success spread and they took on the sins of the Canaanites instead of conquering them. And the sins of the Canaanites spread among Israel, until the actions of the Canaanites and the actions of Israel were indistinguishable. This maps to our own personal experiences of sin sometimes. It maps to America’s national sins sometimes. Sin spreads and it has to be dealt with, not through killing sinful people, but through doing spiritual battle with our own sin. The sins of the Canaanites had grown like a cancer throughout Israel to the point that people were killing their children in honor of false gods and setting up sex cults under every green tree, with the kings encouraging and commanding it. With all of this as background, we come to our passage in 2 Kings, where a good king, Josiah, finally begins to reign. And he is shown to be good by repairing the temple and turning to the Lord and as they begin to rediscover who they are, they find the book of the Law. And here is a place I’d like to make an explicit connection to our time, to live into our recapitulation as Israel. Israel, the high priest of Israel, has to find the Book of the Law. This means that the Book of the Law was not on everyone’s lips. It had fallen out of memory. And it makes me wonder, are we as individuals, as the church, as a nation doing the same? America and the church in America, corporately and individually, is in danger of largely following this piece of the recapitulation of Israel. We dismiss and play down God and his Word. We invoke it however we want, or not at all. We ignore it completely. Now, have we completely forgotten it exists? Do we find ourselves in the same lowly state that Israel found herself in? Fortunately not yet. And that is why the warning of Israel’s story also can serve as a source of hope. May we pull out of the dive before, generations later, we rediscover a strange book in a church basement somewhere and only then open it up to see what it says. For those of us who haven’t pulled out of the dive, who have indeed set it aside as a piece of sentimental 1950s Americana, Israel’s history shows us a path forward, another recapitulation from Israel’s history. Look at what King Josiah does.
He reads what is actually there. He sees all the ways that Israel is explicitly violating God’s Law and the extent of the punishment that is waiting for those who do what Israel did. And he tears his clothes in mourning and humility, in anxiety and terror. He doesn’t know what to do, so he inquires of the Lord. And while God stays true to his word—the punishment for sin was still going to be meted out on Israel—for Josiah, the one who heard God’s word, who believed, and responded appropriately, he would escape the punishment that was coming for his nation and would live his life faithfully and rest in peace. If we’re going to recapitulate Israel’s story, may we do so as Josiah and not the kings before and after him. But even more, let’s not let things deteriorate to that point in the first place. Let’s not need to rediscover God’s word, not personally, not as a church, even if we may already be there as a nation. But if we have lost it, let’s pick it up. Let’s open it. Let’s read it. Let’s tear our clothes about it if we need to. And as we realize how far we’ve drifted away from the Lord and his word, as we’re standing there with eyes open for the first time in a long time, holding the Bible, not knowing what to do with it, we can do what Josiah did and ask the Lord. What do I do in light of your truth and how far I’ve drifted from it? What can I do? How am I supposed to live? Help me! And we’ll find that when the disaster comes, it doesn’t come upon us, it comes to Jesus, it lands on Jesus. He suffers, not us. He experiences our anguish, we experience his peace. He dies, and we live. He dies for his people, for the whole world, and bears its rightful destruction on the Cross. Because of him, and him alone, we have a chance. As individuals, as the church, and then as a country. In our own lives, being grafted in to Israel, let’s live out the promises of God for his people. Let’s rediscover his word and keep it. After all, we can’t live out promises that we've never heard or read.
It’s from there that we can continue the conquest of sin in our hearts by the power of the Holy Spirit. The conquest isn’t through physical death and destruction any longer, but through Jesus’ death, his new life, and his peace imparted to us. God has provided his new way, his superior way, his perfect, holy way. And it’s fully revealed in his Word. From there he brings his kingdom, a land of promise for the people of God. Let us never forget it.