I find myself sitting in my sukkah again this year - grateful that I am still here - grateful that the Lord has been doing so much in my life - fighting the urge to grumble about the heat (weather.com says it’s 88 degrees but it’s going to be 104 today and the sun is high enough that it’s already beating down at 9 in the morning) . . . and I sit here meditating on the age old idea of justice and mercy.
I’ve always heard justice and mercy presented as opposite ideas that those who follow God have to keep in balance - if you show too much justice you are being legalistic and standing in the place of God; if you show too much mercy you are being permissive and allowing too much sin to go on around you. I don’t know if I have ever been fully comfortable with that explanation, but I haven’t really felt the need to spend much time challenging it. So it’s been there - like an undercurrent of thought. In the last month it surfaced like a giant wave that I’ve become increasingly aware of not being quite comfortable with. In praying about what to think about this week for Thoughts from the Sukkah, this conflict keeps coming strongly to my heart so I figure this is what I’ll dive into.
It started with the acknowledgement that when I hear people around me talk about justice it is often for other people’s sins and not their own. In a way that suggests their discomfort with something means God needs to enact some justice. As I’m not immune to such thoughts, it took me a while to connect everything but I don’t think my thoughts are always right and I don’t think this thought is right at all. It keeps making me think of Jonah.
See, most people know the story of Jonah that involves God telling him to take a message from God to Ninevah - the hell on Earth of his day. They know Jonah ran away, got on a ship, God caused a storm, Jonah gets thrown overboard and finds himself crying out to God who saves him from drowning by having a big fish swallow him and three days later, when Jonah agrees to take the message to Ninevah, the fish spits him out on the beach and he goes. And the people repent. And God doesn’t destroy them. Great story. Except that isn’t how it ends.
The story then shows Jonah heading out to a hill that overlooks the city and throwing himself a pouty pity party because, we now learn, the real reason he didn’t want to take that message to Ninevah wasn’t that he was afraid - it was because he KNEW that they were going to repent and God was going to forgive them and, here’s the shocker, Jonah didn’t want them forgiven! Jonah didn’t like the Ninevites - they did all sorts of nasty torturous ungodly things (I know that Veggie Tales is adorable with their fish slapping Ninevites, but when I really did some exploring into what they did I had a hard time blaming Jonah - they were awful! Even by Ancient World standards!). Jonah wasn’t okay with God forgiving such horrible people who were CLEARLY in need of some serious judgment!
Isn’t that just how God works, though?
But God commends his love toward us, in that, while we were yet sinners, Messiah died for us. (Romans 5:8)
Most translations I’ve used for reading will say “God demonstrates his love” instead of “commends” but there is a huge distinction. Demonstrates means “clearly shows” and “reveals” and, yeah, He does that! The Greek word used, however, is about tying or binding two things together to reveal them - to prove them, to establish them, to combine them and hold them together.
What this verse is trying to communicate to us is that God acted in such a way as to bind two disconnected things together. God acted, in and through Messiah’s dying for us, to bind together God (holy, righteous, Creator, Spirit, eternal, perfect in unity, thought and deed) and us (sinners and none of the things He is). He didn’t just “demonstrate” that He loves us by being willing to die for us. He accomplished a binding together of two separate things in a way that reveals something True. His love for us is proven by His willingness to die for us - while we were still sinners who were separated from Him.
God’s love for us didn’t extend to us once we were worthy of it in our own merit. We didn’t have to clean ourselves up and put on a nice spit-shine so that we looked good enough for God to be seen in public with us. We weren’t given conditional love that will stay with us as long as we don’t do anything to embarrass God (and man, do we have some awesome ways of embarrassing God!)
The story of God telling Hosea to go and marry a woman of disrespect who is known for giving it away (or selling it - oh, the things scholars debate about) is amazing because “we” are the woman of disrespect. God is Hosea buying us off the auction block where we sit naked and waiting for the next “man” to see something in us that he wants to take and steal for himself. But God pays more than is being asked for us - clothes us in beauty - elevates us to the status of Bride - and is able to bind together righteous and unrighteous by the fact that, when God moves on our behalf, He removes our unrighteousness and gives us His righteousness in exchange. No doubt the most uneven exchange in history!
And Jonah knew that!
One of the things that you start encountering when you actually read and study the Tanakh (Hebrew Bible/Old Testament) is that every time there was some destruction, or action against one people group over another, there were people who saw what was about to happen, clearly saw the situation for what it was, and wanted to be on the more powerful side of history because, in the perspective of the Ancient World (that was a lot more comfortable with spiritual things than most people today in our Western world) the more powerful God was ultimately going to take down any god who opposed them. See, a god might allow the community that worshiped them to be defeated here and there, they might be punished by losing a battle, or going into captivity for abandoning everything they were told to do, but whoever the god was, he kept his people going as long as he was powerful enough to do so.
In fact, God clearly told Moses and the Hebrew people that HE was going to clear the Land for them - it was going to happen over time and not right away because they weren’t enough people to fill the whole Land He was giving them, but as they grew so would their territory. (See Exodus 33:2 and Joshua 13:6 and note that in Exodus 6:1 this is the way God says that Pharaoh drove Israel out of Egypt.) All they had to do was keep His commands and live righteously in the Land He was giving them and He would defeat the foreign gods and drive them and their people out. “Here is a gift - treat it with respect according to the instruction manual and you will get long life from it; treat it with contempt and it will be removed from you before you destroy it completely.”
It was actually the Land that cried out to God - requesting that the Canaanites be removed from it, and ultimately asking how long God was going to let Israel commit those same sins in her. God removed Israel because if she stayed in the Land, it would result in her death as a natural consequence of her choices. God was not willing to let Israel die completely, so Israel was removed from the Land and promised that when she was ready to live there the way she needed to live there she would be restored to the Land. (Read Deuteronomy 29 and 30 with this in mind and see if they open to you in a deeper way.)
The first place they encounter after they actually get into the Land is Jericho - and when the spies go to the bed and breakfast in town for lodging they encounter Rahab who tells them she knows who they are. Everyone is afraid of them, they have heard the stories of how powerful the God of Israel is for 40 years and now that Israel is there, outside their walls, they are sure they will be defeated. Then Rahab announces her intention to be on the winning side of history - to shift allegiance and align herself with the more powerful God as she is sure He will act to save His people. For this she is not just spared, but honored by God! Matthew 1:5 reveals to us “Salmon begot Boaz by Rahab, Boaz begot Obed by Ruth, Obed begot Jesse,” and Jesse’s son was David.
Ruth (who gets her own book!) was also a “convert.” She proclaimed to her mother-in-law Naomi, after Ruth’s husband had died and Naomi tried to send her back to her family, “Your people shall be my people and your God shall be my God.” (Ruth 1:16). I wonder if Boaz was able to see the potential in a union with Ruth because he himself came from the union of Salmon and Rahab. How amazing was the faith of these women that they abandoned the gods of their fathers and clung to the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. They clung so tightly that they were in the direct line of King David! They were grafted in so securely that they were in the line of David’s direct descendant, Yeshua of Nazareth!
Any time God’s people were in an area the people already there had the opportunity to join them. This is why so many Egyptians were spared in the Exodus and traveled with them in the wilderness. This is why there are such clear instructions about how the Israelites were to treat, and welcome in, the outsider. This is why Torah instructions (even Shabbat!) applied to everyone in Israel - the Jew and the Sojourner among them.
Jonah was familiar with this - he knew that anyone who aligned with God became part of His People. God was never against inter-racial marriage. God has always been against Inter-Faith marriages - for the reason that aligning yourself with a person that intimately is aligning yourself with their god. Jonah knew that no matter how wicked the Ninevites were, if they repented and aligned themselves with God, He would forgive them and bless them.
So Jonah sat on the hill, bitter that God was forgiving the Ninevites. And then God did an interesting thing - he caused a plant to grow up and “cover” Jonah and protect him from the heat of the sun. God gave Jonah a little sukkah to sit under. Jonah was grateful for the “sukkah” but when an East wind blew in and the sun scorched the plant and Jonah lost his shade, Jonah was so upset that he declared it would be better to die than to live. Then
God said to Jonah, “Is it right for you to be angry about the plant?” And he said, “It is right for me to be angry, even to death!” But the LORD said, “You have had pity on the plant for which you have not labored, nor made it grow, which came up in a night and perished in a night. And should I not pity Nineveh, that great city, in which are more than one hundred and twenty thousand persons who cannot discern between their right hand and their left—and much livestock?” (Jonah 4:9-11)
In Deuteronomy 31:10-13 we find that after Moses wrote out the Torah and gave it to the elders of Israel he gave them his final instructions:
And Moses commanded them, saying:
“At the end of every seven years, at the appointed time in the year of release, at the Feast of Tabernacles, when all Israel comes to appear before the LORD your God in the place which He chooses, you shall read this law before all Israel in their hearing. Gather the people together, men and women and little ones, and the stranger who is within your gates, that they may hear and that they may learn to fear the LORD your God and carefully observe all the words of this law, and that their children, who have not known it, may hear and learn to fear the LORD your God as long as you live in the land which you cross the Jordan to possess.”
And here I find myself in modern times, in a land so very far from Israel, sitting in a sukkah and meditating on God’s Word - His justice and his mercy. Since a sukkah, and the Feast of Tabernacles, is intended to teach us about what it means to have God dwell with us, I want to be careful about what I learn and want it only to be sound and True!
Like Jonah, I do value my sukkah - my personal relationship with God - so deeply that I would rather die than live without it. Unlike Jonah, I don’t want to sit under my sukkah and have bitterness that God might offer a sukkah to someone I don’t find worthy.
Yeshua tells us, in John 14:2, that in His Father’s house there are many mansions. Since through Yeshua God acted to bind His righteousness to sinners so that by being bound to Him they become righteous, I expect those many mansions to be full of all sorts of people! I’m grateful I will be there - and I want everyone there!
The thought I keep coming back to - and that I will continue exploring this Sukkot - is this: Think about the people you are sure are enemies of God. Think about the people you are sure will not be in eternity with God - and who you are okay with knowing that is their fate because you know God is not okay with what they are doing. Then ask yourself, why are you okay with that?
We’ll talk about that more tomorrow.
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