At Just the Right Time
“At Just the Right Time”
Romans 5:6 (1-11)
With all the confusion and chaos around us, it is tempting to wonder if God is still in control. In a recent Bible study, we read from Zechariah 1:12 these words: “At that time I will search Jerusalem with lamps and punish those who are complacent ...” The Lamsa translation of the Aramaic text reads, “the men who despise their watchmen.” That is, those who ignore the warnings, “... who think, ‘The LORD will do nothing, either good or bad.” The image is of those who are complacently drunk, ignoring the chaos around them, or using drink to deal with the chaos, but don’t believe God is either present, active, or concerned.
That was a common failure of ancient Israel, particularly in time of idolatry. The Northern Kingdom, Israel, was that way when the Assyrian armies threatened, and when the Assyrian general Sennacherib sent threatening messages. “We’re God’s chosen people. God won’t let them harm us.” They felt that God was on their side, no matter what they did. Even in the face of a potential invasion, they did not repent of their sin and their idolatry. Then, when the Assyrians breached the defenses of Samaria and decimated the population, the people wondered why God had abandoned them. “Why us? Aren’t we the chosen people?”
And when Babylon threatened, and when the armies approached and laid siege to Jerusalem. The Southern Kingdom, Judah, like their northern counterparts, were complacent in their “chosen-ness.” God is on our side; what can the Babylonians do to us? Like Alfred Newman of the old Mad Magazine, “What? Me worry?” Then, when the Babylonians breached the walls of Jerusalem, leveled the temple and carried the nation into captivity, they wondered why God had abandoned them. Out of that came Psalm 137, By the rivers of Babylon we sat and wept when we remembered Zion. There on the poplars we hung our harps ... How can we sing the songs of the LORD while in a foreign land? How can we praise God now? Look what has happened to us. God has brought calamity on us. What do we have to praise him for now?
And it is a common theme in our own lives. When things go wrong we wonder what there is to be thankful for. How can we praise God here, in this situation? Why did God not protect us?
The apostle Paul had the audacity to write to the Roman church, and my mom had the audacity to remind me of it – Romans 8:28. Before I read it, let me set the stage a bit. Paul has been writing about the present sufferings; his own imprisonment and sufferings, the creation that is in bondage to decay (8:21) and groaning as in the pains of childbirth (8:22), and when life is so heavy that we don’t even know how or what to pray (8:26). Then he has the audacity, I said, to write this: And we know that in all things God works for the good of those who love him, who have been called according to his purposes. For those God foreknew he also predestined to be conformed to the image of his Son ...
Don’t get sidetracked on the predestination thing just yet. We’ll get there in just a moment. But stop and think about that all things part. God is working in all things for the good, not just of those who love him, but for the good of those he loves. Every good and every bad thing. Every sickness, every trauma, every joy, every sunny day, every rainy day, every strength, every weakness. Every day that goes smoothly, and every day that is filled with chaos. He is working in nations and kingdoms to bring his good will to fruition. And he’s doing it (here’s the predestination part) because he wants and plans that the world will hear and be reconciled to him through Jesus. He knew you and planned for your salvation. Predestination here means God wants it, not that God forces it. His will is clear, but he will not violate your will. But Paul’s point is that God uses every king, every nation, every movement in history to bring about his plan for the salvation of all who believe.
And we begin here.
The northern kingdom, Israel, was conquered in 722 BC when the Assyrian army captured and destroyed the capitol city of Samaria. The people were scattered across the empire, separating not just communities, but families as well. The southern kingdom, Judah, was conquered in 586 BC, when the Babylonian army captured and destroyed Jerusalem and the temple. In a series of three exiles, they took first the best and brightest, including Daniel and his three friends, and then anyone who they could use in any way, leaving behind only the sick and the elderly. With these two events, the Jewish people were scattered across most of the Middle East.
Babylon was defeated when the Medean army dammed up the Euphrates River and marched in under the walls. That empire was supplanted when Cyrus the Great defeated the Medeans, and in 539 BC, Cyrus issued the Edict of Restoration, allowing displaced Jews to return to Israel and rebuild their temple. We have that story in Ezra/Nehemiah. In 334 BC, Alexander the Great of Greece began a ten-year campaign and ultimately defeated the Persians, taking control of the whole of that empire, and invaded India and North Africa, creating the largest empire the world had ever known.
Now, hang with me for just a few moments. Alexander died in 323 BC and the Diadochi, rival generals and friends of Alexander, divided the empire into five parts. The rulers were Epirus, who controlled a small part of Greece; Cassander, who ruled the rest of Greece/Macedonia; Lysimachus, ruling Thrace and western Turkey; Seleucus I Nicator, controlling from eastern Turkey across to India and down into Judea; and Ptolemy 1 Soter, who ruled parts of Judea and North Africa. Only two of those matter to us going forward: Ptolemy (Egypt) and Seleucus (Syria). Those two mini-empires waged war with each other over the strategic sliver of land we know as Israel, and eventually, the Syrians (Seleucids) won. So, now, it is the successors of the Seleucids, or Syrians, that concern us. A lot of this story, believe it or not, is relayed in Daniel 8 and 11.
After several generations, Antiochus IV Epiphanes, came to power over the Seleucid Empire. He was prophesied in Daniel 11:36-45. The Syrians had typically respected Jewish culture and protected their institutions, but Antiochus Epiphanes reversed that. He banned circumcision and most Jewish practices. He banned the Hebrew language and insisted that all should speak and write in Greek. He outlawed the rituals and practices of the Jewish religion and replaced it with a syncretistic religion that included the worship of Zeus. After a short-lived revolt by the High Priest Jason, Antiochus replaced him with Menelaus, sacrificed pigs in the outer court of the temple, and sprinkled the blood around the temple grounds. He had a broth made of the pigs’ flesh and sprinkled it across all the holy books, and then set up an altar to Zeus in the temple itself. He extinguished the holy menorah and forced the high priest and other leading Jews to eat the flesh of the swine. The Jews were only able to preserve their scriptures by translating them into Greek, giving us the Septuagint. And the desecration of abomination was complete.
Does it feel as if God is in control? It probably felt as if they had been forgotten by God, that all their prayers were useless. Most of the Jewish people were scattered across the known world, and those who lived in Judea were persecuted and oppressed, their temple desecrated, their faith banned, the culture destroyed. Where is God in all this? Paul had the audacity to suggest that God works all things together for the good of those who love him, but where is God in all this. But I make this one point: the whole world spoke Greek. Greek was the language of education, culture, and religion. Greek was now the common language. Everybody in the known world spoke Greek. But this is not the end.
A revolt began under the leadership of the Maccabees, and in 167 BC they succeeded in wresting control from the Syrians. They cleansed the temple and relit the Great Menorah. The oil they had was enough for only one day, but it burned brightly for eight days, and Jews celebrate Hanukkah to this day with the lighting of the menorah. After a brief period of freedom under what is known as the Hasmonean Dynasty that lasted from 141 to 37 BC. But in 63 BC, the Roman Republic intervened in a Hasmonean civil was, making Judea a client state and signaling the end of that dynasty. The last Hasmonean ruler was displaced by Herod the Great in 37 BC, and the Romans were in full control. But by then, the Roman Republic had become an empire ruled first by Julius Caesar and then by Caesar Augustus, who was emperor when Jesus was born.
We too often read the Christmas story without knowing, or if we know, without thinking that maybe God was moving the events of history to bring us to this moment. Through all the political upheaval of empires rising and falling and what appears to our eyes to be mere chaos, perhaps God was working out a plan that is greater than we will comprehend at the moment. But wait. One thing more, and then we can apply what we have learned.
Some of you already know because I’ve talked about this before: what was the Roman Empire most famous for? Roads. The reason the Roman empire expanded so fast and so far was that they built roads for their armies to travel on. These are marvels of engineering that have lasted for centuries with only wagon ruts to mar them. They were built quickly, but built to endure. And the confirmed network of 186,000 miles, according to archaeologist, may represent only about three percent of the total.1 That means the Roman may have built 6.2 million miles of road in order to move armies and supplies across the empire, that at it’s peak covered 3.1 million square miles.
Some of the major roads: the earliest is the Appian Way, connecting Rome with southeast Italy; the Via Flamina connecting Rome with the Adriatic Sea; and the Via Egnatia, from the Adriatic Sea across the Balkans to today’s Istanbul. This is the road Paul traveled from Philippi to Thessalonika. There was also a network of roads across Turkey from Tarsus to Ephesus. Paul is known to have traveled at least parts of these roads, and these roads connect the seven churches of Revelation.
Three things have happened that may seem unrelated: First, Jews have been scattered across the world, from north Africa to Asia Minor, and as far as Spain. There are Jewish enclaves in virtually every city and town across the known world at the time. Second, the whole world speaks and writes in a common language: Greek. And third, there are roads everywhere across the Roman empire. Travel from one end of the empire to the other is easy – from Carthage in Africa to York in Britain. What that meant is that Paul and the others could go anywhere rapidly and find people who were waiting for the Messiah and preach the gospel in a language everyone could understand. They carried with them the stories of Jesus written in Greek, that everyone could read. They wrote letters that could be shared across the Empire that could be read by Germans, by Britons, by Iberians, by Macedonians, by Arabs, and by Egyptians. And while Latin was the language of the empire, Greek was the language of the people and the language of commerce.
What seemed like chaos and turmoil ... what seemed like the ends of ages and civilizations ... what seemed like destruction ... what seemed at the moment the abandonment of God ... was God working out the events of history to set up the precise conditions for the rapid spread of the gospel. God’s people, Israel, were the seed of the gospel and they needed to be among people who needed to hear the gospel. The exiles were not fruitless. Even in exile, God had a plan. So, wherever the apostles went, like Paul, they could find an inroad for the gospel – to the Jew first, Paul wrote, and then to the Gentile. They didn’t have to spend years in language study, to speak dozens of languages, for, thanks to one evil, egomaniacal emperor, the whole world spoke a common language. And, thanks to the very people who crucified Jesus, the way had been paved for the messengers to travel rapidly across the world.
You see, at just the right time, when we were still powerless, Christ died for the ungodly. And the miracle of Christmas is this: the world was ready. The conditions were exactly right. God had worked all things together for the good of a lost and dying world.
1 https://www.sciencealert.com/massive-new-map-reveals-300000-km-of-ancient-roman-roads