Psalm 137:1  By the rivers of Babylon we sat and wept when we remembered Zion.

 

Today, God’s Chosen People, his Church, are very much in the same situation as were his Chosen People of old during their 70 year captivity in Babylon.

Those of us who are older can well remember the nominal ‘Christendom’ in which we grew up: assembly prayers and hymns at State-run primary schools; very large attendance of young children at Sunday School; well-attended churches with large, active Youth Groups where we met our future spouses; we find it hard not to get nostalgic when we remember these things, and Psalm 137 gives us permission to do so; but we need to remember that we are no longer there – we are in our new Babylon!

And we also know that the Prophet Jeremiah was given a clear message concerning life in Babylon, a message that applies to us as much as it did to them: “Build houses and settle down; plant gardens and eat what they produce.  Marry and have sons and daughters; find wives for your sons and give your daughters in marriage, so that they too may have sons and daughters.  Increase in number there; do not decrease.  Also, seek the peace and prosperity of the city to which I have carried you into exile.  Pray to the LORD for it, because if it prospers, you too will prosper” (Jeremiah 29:5-7).

They struggled with this, as we struggle with our circumstances.  They were to be citizens of two ‘cities’ – Zion and Babylon – just as our citizenship is in heaven and on earth, and we are to be good citizens of both.  It’s not easy, and our loving, sympathetic God gives us permission to weep when we ‘remember Zion’.  But such emotion should never prevent us from being good citizens in our present culture, doing everything Jeremiah is instructing us to do.

It is also helpful to reflect on all the problems and negative aspects of the ‘Christendom’ we remember.  It also produced widespread nominalism that acted as a powerful inoculant against the gospel!  Remember how hard it was in Christendom to convince people they were sinners who needed a Saviour – just as it was in the ‘Zion’ that Jesus himself entered and in which he was totally rejected?

So let’s ‘bite the bullet’ and be determined to do what Jeremiah commanded whille we are weeping in our ‘nostalgia’.  Daniel and his three friends are there as excellent role models of how to do this well.  As the German poet, Samuel Rodigast says: ’Whate’er my God ordains is right: so shall my stand be taken; though sorrow, need, or death be mine, yet I am not forsaken.  My Father’s care is round me there; he holds me that I shall not fall: and so to him I leave it all.’

So our present culture is part of God’s eternal plan for us in history.  Let us take firm hold of the opportunity to present, and live out, the powerful Gospel of hope. As Stephen McAlpine writes in ‘Futureproof’: “Here’s the encouragement: There’s a King above who still rules and reigns, despite the secular culture’s insistence otherwise.  The culture war is, in the end, a phoney war; the true battle has been fought and won by King Jesus over the powers and principalities.  What we are experiencing are the retreating skirmishes of a vanquished foe – rebellious citizens who have usurped their true King in the vain hope of claiming territory they do not own.  But we have true hope”; and then he quotes Philippians 3:20-21!

– Bruce Christian