Preparing the Way
Isaiah 40:3-5, 9-11
When God called the Jewish people, he gave them everything necessary to follow Him and for salvation, principally, the Law. When they entered the Holy Land, God warned the Jewish people not to intermarry with the Gentile and to always keep God first. They did for awhile but as the generations passed, the Jews were continually tempted by the Gentiles and their gods around them. Perhaps a key decision indicating the direction of the Jews away frok god was when in the face of the looming threats all around them, they cried out for a king when God was already their king. So God sent judges but judges were not enough. Then God sent the prophets to call people back to Him but their warnings went unheaded. Even when Josiah recalled the people to God and rededicated the nation and people to God, it was shortlived. Finally their rebellion was too much and God realized there had to be another way.
http://paradigm-shift-21st-century.nl/plaatjes/captivity-of-judah-in-babylon.jpg When Nebuchadnezzar defeated Jerusalem in 597 BC, he deported more than 10,000 Jews to the city of Babylon, the capital of the Chaldean Empire in what is now modern day Iraq. They took the most prominent, educated and skilled citizens of Judah. The deported Jews formed their own community in Babylon and retained their religion, and practices. They were allowed to farm and perform other sorts of labor to make a living. They married, built homes, had children and settled in because Jeremiah told them they would be there for 70 years. Despite all of this, exile was difficult as they now found themselves separated from home, Temple, land and God because God was viewed as tied to the Holy Land. The Hebrew faith was built on the promise that God would protect the Hebrews and use them for His purposes in human history. Questions of why and how God could allow this to happen and whether God had abandoned them were prevalent. They were forced to question their understanding of and relationship to God and what it means to be a faithful and obedient Jew. Perhaps the most difficult and painful lesson they learned in exile is that it was their own rebellion which brought the judgment of God upon them, as the prophets had continually warned. As the years rolled by, a spirit of despair and hopelessness fell upon them.
After several decades, a follower of Isaiah rose up to speak a message of hope to the exiles: their punishment is almost done and God is now preparing the way for them to return home. He will go before them, making a straight, smooth and level path home; in other words, a much easier journey home than their journey here. They ended up returning in three waves one under Zerubbabel in 535 B.C., Ezra in 458 B.C., and Nehemiah in 444 B.C. They rebuilt Jerusalem, its Temple, its walls, their homes and their lives. There was a renewed commitment to the faith, the study of the Scriptures and leading holy lives, separated from the influence of the Gentiles. But after a generation or two, they wandered from the path again.
And God saw the need for a new path to guide and redeem His people. But despite all of this, in the four hundred years prior to Jesus’ birth, there was utter silence from God. No books of the Bible were written, no prophets were raised up, Israel continued to be under foreign rule and God didn’t intervene in history. In the Jewish faith, God is what God does and when God is silent and is not acting on behalf of His chosen people, it leads one to ask, “Why?” Times were difficult. Babylonian rule gave way to Persian rule which gave way to Greek rule and finally the worst of all, Roman Rule. It was during this time of occupation that Israel’s hope for a Messiah began to increase. The more difficult life was, the more people yearned, watched and prayed for the Messiah to come. They continued to faithfully wait without answers. The hope for a Messiah was not something new. Isaiah writes in the 8th century BC: “For unto us a child is born, unto us a son is given: and the government shall be upon his shoulder: and his name shall be called Wonderful, Counselor, The mighty God, The everlasting Father, The Prince of Peace. Of the increase of his government and peace there shall be no end, upon the throne of David, and upon his kingdom, to order it, and to establish it with judgment and with justice from henceforth even forever.” And so they waited and prayed and cried out to God. Slowly their hope for a better day today gave way to a better day tomorrow and extended further and further into the future as God was silent. Or was He?
And what we find is that the words of Second Isaiah begin to take on new life as His message speaks to the generations after the exiles. Though none can see it, God is working behind the scenes and through the course of history to prepare the way for the coming of the Messiah, setting the earthly stage for the entry of His only begotten Son into the world. How? First is the Greek language. Alexander the Great rose to power in 336 BC and in just 13 years conquered most of the Middle East and Northern Africa, including Israel. Alexander loved Greek culture and saw it as a key to uniting all of the different peoples and nations now under his rule by having a common culture and language. This allowed Jews and Christians to communicate the Good News to anyone in the Empire. But even more so, Greek was the perfect language to communicate the Good News as it can communicate the conceptual and philosophical ideas of the Gospel. The Hebrew language was no longer suitable to convey God’s new work in Jesus Christ because it was a functional language focusing action and doing and not the philosophical and theological. Through Alexander and the Greek empire, God set in place the language of the Good News and eventually, the language of the New Testament as the OT was translated into Greek by diaspora Jews. When Paul quotes Scripture in his ministry, he's not quoting the Hebrew Bible but the Greek Old Testament.
In 141 BC, Judas Maccabee led a revolt and Israel gained its first independence in more than 6 centuries. But in 63 BC, the Roman Empire conquered Israel. This was a dark and oppressive time; Roman occupation was viewed as the equivalent of the kingdom of evil ruling the land. Life was harder and more difficult than it had ever been under Roman rule. James Carol, author of “Constantine’s Sword”, describes the Roman Empire as “The world first totalitarian regime” asserting that the Jews experienced “the most grievous violence against the Jewish people until Hitler’s attempt at a Final Solution.” But despite that, the Roman Empire provided many of the catalysts which would enable the Good News to spread and lead to dramatic growth of the church. The Roman Empire may seem the greatest enemy of early Christianity, and at times a bitter persecutor, yet it was in many ways the grandest preparation and in some ways the best ally of Christianity. It was used by God to prepare the way of the Lord reminding us of Proverbs 16:4 “The Lord has made everything for his own purposes, even the wicked for a day of disaster.” The irony of all this is mind boggling. While the Jewish nation was chafing under Roman rule, with many crying out for the Messiah to come and deliver them, God was at work using the Roman Empire to prepare the earth for the coming of His Son. This led to five contributions of the Roman Empire to the spread of the Gospel.
First was Roman peace. The world had not been at peace since the days of Alexander the Great three centuries earlier. The Roman Empire united Greeks, Romans and Jews all under one government and brought peace where there had been dissension and fighting. Peace allowed the Good News to spread and the church to flourish. Second was diaspora Judaism. The term diaspora means scattering. The exile of Jews to Babylon started this movement of Jews outside of Israel. The diaspora really increased in Roman times. Strabo, a Greek geographer of the late first century, B.C., says that you can't go anywhere in the civilized world without encountering a Jew. By the middle of the first century, there are probably more Jews living outside of Israel, than living in Judah proper, resulting in major Jewish communities in most of the large cities of the Empire. Christianity spread among the Jews because they were the first target in Jerusalem, Judea and the diaspora. The synagogue, the central place of study, worship and community for diaspora Jews was the first place Paul and others started preaching the Good News and not only gave them a home base but a familiar group of people to whom to begin ministry.
Third is the Roman highways. Rome built an extensive system of more than 30,000 miles of roads throughout its Empire to move troops around quickly and to facilitate trade where Rome made much of its money. Roman roads were famed for being straight and well made. Some still exist to this day. The roads knit the Roman Empire together and made it safer to travel as they had soldiers posted every mile. These roads greatly facilitated the spread of the Gospel and the community amongst Christian believers in different towns. They also provided relatively easy access to large numbers of people to which to share the Gospel. Fourth is the Roman postal system. These highways also facilitated quick and reliable communication through the Empire. The emperor Augustus, who reigned from 27 B.C. to A.D. 14, established Rome’s first official postal service to communicate reliably as well as rapidly with the help of his numerous governors and military officials. Thus, when Paul and other Christians needed to communicate or disciple from afar, they could use the postal system and be assured that their letters would arrive.
Sixth is religious freedom. Rome was the first empire to allow the people it conquered to maintain their gods and their religions. Rome was polytheistic and had 3 main Roman gods: Jupiter who watches over the Roman state, Juno who was the god of women and Minerva who was the god of wisdom and sponsor of arts, trade, and strategy. When Rome conquered a people, it would adopt their major gods which grew to a list of 15. This openness to other gods and faiths greatly favored the growth of Christianity and spread of the Gospel. As long as a faith wasn’t a danger to public morality or to the peace of society, they were allowed to spread unchecked under the eyes of the state. This allowed a strange sect which proclaimed a Jew as Messiah who was raised from the dead to spread without fear of reprisal.
Seventh is Caesar Augustus. Augustus had a successful and long reign as Caesar, ending 100 years of civil war and achieving over 40 years of internal peace and prosperity. He expanded the Roman Empire to become far more than a collection of countries. Instead, it became a diverse society and enormous marketplace in which people across Europe, north Africa and the Middle East could trade and travel under Rome’s protection. Now the Greeks believed that gods came down and became a man and intermingled with us, and this belief was adopted Rome as well. When Augustus died in 14 AD, the Senate declared him a god. Doug Greenwold says that this opened the door to the idea of Jesus becoming man, setting the stage for the Roman people to accept the Good News of Jesus Christ readily.
And so in this brief view of history, we see that God has been at work during this 400 years of silence. God used Alexander the Great and even the evil Roman Empire to prepare the way for the coming Messiah, when Israel thought God was silent. When you look at the three centuries of history and what was accomplished through these Empires and how God used them and prepared the way for His Son, we can now more fully understand what Paul meant when he spoke of “the fullness of time ” for everything was now in place for the birth and expansion of the mission of Christ and the Kingdom of God.
There are three questions for us today. First, what or how is God working at a higher level or even behind the scenes to accomplish His will in your life? How has God been preparing the way to do a new, totally unpredicatable and life changing thing? Second, has God been giving you the silent treatment recently? Silence is often God’s prescription for those times when we are having difficulty listening to Him, when we are so preoccupied with our own issues that we don’t hear, or can’t take time to listen to God’s “still small voice.” As painful as it sometimes can be, silence can be a blessing, the significance of which we may not comprehend. Solitude and silence provides opportunity to reflect, to listen, to regain our perspective, and to refocus on who He is, His will and His ways. That is all the more needed in the rush and noise of the Christmas and holiday season. Sometimes God uses enforced periods of silence, both for our benefit and His glory. Often, He does this to get our attention (again). Many times, it’s an opportunity when God can draw us to Himself once again and we to Him, so that we can more clearly hear His voice.
And finally, how are you going to prepare the way for you and others this Advent to receive the Christ child and God’s new work for your life this Advent? Amen and Amen.
