This prophecy was fulfilled in the return of Israel to the temple and the rebuilding of Jerusalem under Ezra and Nehemiah. They did not have to redeem themselves: they were given the resources of the imperial treasury to rebuild the temple under Cyrus.
[A quick aside. The Jews had a better run under the Persians than the Greeks. The Persians — with the exception of Naaman — allowed them to practice their faith, to prosper, and returned them to Canaan. The Greeks tried to put idols in the temple. The Jews did not rebel against the Persians: they did against the Greeks, setting up the Maccabean republic (ruled by the Sanhedrin) until the Romans garrisoned them, and even then they were allowed to practice their religion until the fall of Jerusalem under Titus. It was not the East — Persia that was iniquitous in Ancient times, it was the West].
My question is how does this apply to us, and to the church. For we have people who would sell us to the political powers as a voting bloc, as a source of goodwill, as an endorsement of their plans, for good or for ill.
For thus says the LORD: “You were sold for nothing, and you shall be redeemed without money.” For thus says the Lord GOD: “My people went down at the first into Egypt to sojourn there, and the Assyrian oppressed them for nothing. Now therefore what have I here,” declares the LORD, “seeing that my people are taken away for nothing? Their rulers wail,” declares the LORD, “and continually all the day my name is despised. Therefore my people shall know my name. Therefore in that day they shall know that it is I who speak; here I am.”
(Isaiah 52:3-6 ESV)
I believe that Christ is the head of the Church, and not us. That when we put ourselves at the head, when we insist that the church becomes part of the therapeutic state, things go horribly wrong. I would also add that this rot affects the leadership of the church, who want to be part of the elite and members of those committees that make political decisions, thinking this is ministry. The believing church will grow.
If they preach the gospel and do good works. However, we are silenced by hate speech laws and banned from good works by the social welfare system.
I have many friends in the UK who classify themselves as evangelical Christians. They almost all embrace moderate to leftist economics, and they complain to me about why the church is in decline, why there is no interest in apologetics, why they can’t find Christian girlfriends, why they can’t get speaking engagements. The answer is, of course, that by majoring only in theology and apologetics, they have crafted the rope that their secular allies in government are using to hang them. Leftism is embraced by European Christians in part because they don’t want to be like those dastardly Americans with their free enterprise system and their rule of law and their private property and their law-abiding gun ownership.It just goes to show you why Christianity suffers when we focus on piety at the expense of practicality. Too much A. W. Tozer, not enough F.A. Hayek. I doubt my well-meaning UK Christian friends – who are so proud of their laughable NHS health care – even know who F.A. Hayek is. To think that Lady Thatcher ones brandished “The Constitution of Liberty” by F.A. Hayek and declared “this is what we believe!”. But ordinary UK Christians do not believe what she believes, and now they must reap what they sowed with their knee-jerk rejection of the free enterprise system. Ignorance of economics killed Christianity in Europe, and pious, risk-averse Christians were willing participants in the murder.
I can see people despairing, because they read the sociology of religion. (Hat tip to Mundabor for that). But I do not.
For the sociologists work from the idea of secularism, and as the current of the times is accurately described as one of total control. But that is slavery: not freedom.
Faith requires a pinch of naivete, the readiness to give up control and open oneself to the Incomprehensible. Groping and hoping. No wonder that many find this increasingly difficult in a world which is set upon industrially reorganizing the last untouched domains of being: sexuality, love, birth, death. Total control, complete autocracy over one’s own life is in trend. A more inhospitable breeding ground for faith is barely conceivable”.
But I believe in the holy Catholic Church and the resurrection of saints.
And I see that Christ will redeem the church. Our experiment in socialist democracy will fail, for we have already run out of other people’s money, and are now writing IOUs to ourselves. And the Church will remain, when our states and nations do not, and the universities of secularism have crumbled into dust.
