Too Far Off

The prophets of our day are the scientists. They see the climate changing. They tell of the waters rising. They report the population growth. They tell of the wars over water.  The prophecies of the scientists are given in decades not minutes. They talk of events that will happen in twenty or thirty years.  Their prophecies get very little attention from the people who are now making decisions. The CEO's who are focused on the bottom line today. The politicians who are focused on the next election.  They may hear the prophecies but these prophecies are not as important to them as the decisions of today.

I suspect that the same reaction may have been given to the prophecies of Jeremiah.  Jeremiah has some short term prophecies that are not very pretty.  Jerusalem and the people are going to be sacked by the Babylonians, taken into captivity, the temple is going to be stripped of its treasures and all the "brightest and best" are going to be made slaves of the Babylonians.

Then Jeremiah says, "The Lord proclaimed:  When Babylon's seventy years are up, I will come fulfill my gracious promise to bring you back to this place (Jerusalem)" (Jeremiah 29:10)  Judgment, punishment, pain and sorrow will last seventy years, but don't worry, at the end of seventy years, you will be brought back.

Who would find any comfort in that in our day and age?  At my age the fact that in seventy years things will be better is not a good message for me. I will be dead.  All the people who are taken into captivity now will be dead. That is why Jeremiah tells them they have to have their children marry, have babies, and make a living in Babylon so that there will be people to be brought back.

The people who hear and can accept Jeremiah's good news are people who are more concerned with their corporate identity, the existence of the people of God, the national concept, who care more about the survival of their group than about themselves.  They have a very solid identity as a people. The individual is only a part of the whole.  The way fans look at a college sports program.  It is more about Kentucky basketball than about any individual player.

It seems to me that there is a small sense of corporate identity in our culture.  We may care about our country, but I suspect that if you had told those people in the great depression that in seventy years the stock market would recover they would not have found that much good news. If we were to say that in seventy years we will have found a cure for cancer, I am not sure that that would bring joy to the cancer people now.  I think our society has a lot more focus on the immediacy and the individual satisfaction than we have on our corporate survival and success.   Pie in the sky bye and bye is not a big seller any more and I doubt if pie in the future (three generations) would be a big hit either.