Whether great or small, all nations should learn humility before the LORD God!
Tonight, our text includes five short oracles against five small nations. The first and the last oracles include promises of salvation. The middle three only focus on judgment.
What is Israel supposed to do with this? And what are we supposed to do?
As Walter Brueggemann puts it, this book “has the powerful capacity to cause us to rediscern our own situation, to experience our situation in quite new ways, and to participate in our own historical situation with new liberty and fresh passion – liberty and passion that arise in and with faithfulness.
“Such a text, when read critically, characteristically assaults every ‘structure of domination’ with its self-serving and misrepresenting propaganda, including our own military, technological, consumer-oriented establishment. Such a text, when read imaginatively, issues a forceful invitation to an alternative community of covenant, including a risky invitation in our own time to practices of justice, risks of compassion, and sufferings for peace.” (18)
To put it simply: the United States of America stands under God’s judgment – and there is nothing that you can do to prevent that!
As we’ll see in most of the oracles tonight, we don’t know when judgment will fall – but it will fall – and there is really no way to predict how soon that will be! It doesn’t matter how good or bad a nation is – no nation is good enough to avoid God’s common wrath. Sure, some are worse than others – but there is no guarantee that the worst will be first!
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