The Two Compassions
The Two Compassions
As the invasion from Gaza was brewing on October 6th, my schedule of “Bible in a Year” readings arrived at Isaiah 30 and a verse I consider important in my spiritual walk:
Your ears will hear a word behind you, “This is the way, walk in it,” whenever you turn to the right or to the left. Isaiah 30:21
But a foreboding came on me as I read a verse just before it, for the fortieth time, or seemingly the first time…
Therefore this evil will be to you
Like a breach about to fall,
A bulge in a high wall,
Whose collapse comes suddenly in an instant, Isaiah 30:13
Walls, borders, and fences about to collapse. The invasion by Assyrians in Isaiah’s day? Some other dark reference? Suddenly, just a day later, as Hamas invaded from Gaza on October 7th, Isaiah began to read like the newspaper, the chapters that followed suddenly brimming with both tragedy and victory. I learned an important lesson:
Zionism and God’s compassion are the same to God.
Salvation is being saved from tragedy.
There are two types of compassion. One is the human compassion we have for others. We have a need to identify with others. It leads us to form families and communities.
The other is God's compassion for us, which leads us to identify with Him.
One can exist apart from God. The other IS God. It’s been a crushing disappointment to me that identity compassion can be a mutual support of depraved hatred.
Human compassion is good, of course. But its limits are just within arm’s reach. Yes, we can expand the borders of our compassion.
God’s compassion and Zionism are one and the same. God’s compassion comes from God loving Israel eternally.
Deuteronomy 30:3 3 Then the LORD your God will restore you from captivity, and have compassion on you, and will gather you again from all the peoples where the LORD your God has scattered you.
God cares for her. He'd die for her. He poured out His Spirit on her on her festival of ingathering. He regathers her. God regathering Israel = God’s compassion. Rather than answer God’s invitation to be grafted into his plan for the whole world to be blessed, many (Christians) twist the scriptures into some sort of Wheel of Fortune, with lovely verses of encouragement written to them, with no particular context.
Human compassion is tender, but in the end, it’s neither good nor bad, godly or ungodly. It is free to cut itself off from its roots in Zion It is so painful to see the moral and spiritual illiteracy of compassion limited to identity groups, which is devoid of Israel's God. Anti-zionism, because it denies the root of an eternal God’s idea of compassion:
Isaiah 30:18-19
18 The LORD longs to be gracious to you,
And therefore He waits on high to have compassion on you.
For the LORD is a God of justice;
How blessed are all those who long for Him.
19 O people in Zion, inhabitant in Jerusalem, you will weep no longer. He will surely be gracious to you at the sound of your cry; when He hears it, He will answer you.
I have been plunged into the darkness of this massacre, this war. A military war and a war of ideas and deep sadness at how many people embrace that evil in the name of their own “identity”. I devour news in search of hope for peace but there is none. I scour the internet for some idea that the community of faith has not also become morally illiterate and am repulsed at their moral ambivalence. World leaders will not state a clear goal beyond their own re-election.
The book of Isaiah suddenly reads like the news. Rabshakah surrounding Jerusalem with a quarter of a million of the cruelest, tortuous warriors is the backdrop for the “promises” of blessing we blithely “claim”. Salvation means something very different to those facing death.
“Comfort, O comfort My people,” says your God.
“Speak kindly to Jerusalem;
And call out to her, that her warfare has ended, Isaiah 40:1-2
… was not written as a soothing “promise book” entry. It was written during “a day of distress, rebuke and rejection” Isaiah 37:3…as a quarter of a million of the most hardened, rapacious, and bloodthirsty warriors were at the very gates of Jerusalem The terror they brought eclipsed Hamas’s evi as an entire Jewish nation was poised to be plunged into horror of death and terrors.
As I walked my dog, weeping over the revelations of October 7th, I knew Israel would have less than a week of sympathy before false equivalencies, a “cycle of violence” and blood libels set back in. I am faced with my own folly: I hoped for leadership from “leaders” I’ll continue to have compassion for the oppressed. They won’t return the favor.
16 Thus says the LORD,
“Stand by the ways and see and ask for the ancient paths,
Where the good way is, and walk in it;
And you will find rest for your souls.
But they said, ‘We will not walk in it.’
17 “And I set watchmen over you, saying,
‘Listen to the sound of the trumpet!’
But they said, ‘We will not listen.’ Jeremiah 6:16-17
God’s love for Israel is not just a by-product of His offer of love for all mankind. It is rooted and grounded in the Judaism that He created. The “ancient ways” are the path to peace. I hoped for a human solution, human compassion, and human understanding. I am a fool.
A key to all the scriptures I'd been reading, with my heart crushed by the depravity and evil I've heard testimony about, been relayed firsthand evidence by journalists who have seen terrorist's videos of the horros the gleefully perpetrated, maybe I understood for the first time that salvation is being saved from dire oppression. It is not a lifestyle choice. It is not an identity issue.
If I deny God as the source of compassion, how much better am I than an anti-semite? if I deny that Yesua’s identity as a Jew, which He carries with Him into eternity, is not at the core of who He is. He tells us He takes His Jewish Identity into eternity and the only hope to …
“stop this weeping is to behold, the Lion that is from the tribe of Judah, the Root of David. HE AND ONLY HE has overcome so as to open the book and its seven seals.” Revelation 5:5
Comments
Post a Comment