Staying At Your Post
There's gallantry here in the prophet's response (2:1), "I will stand at my watch and station myself on the ramparts; I will look to see what he will say to me, and what answer I am to give to this complaint."We're hearing a frightened man talking about staying at his post and we're listening to a compassionate man. He's agitated in his soul over the oppression of the defenceless and now that he hears marauding international gangsters are coming he is even more concerned about his nation and the righteous in it. Local law-benders are bad enough but who will stop these pagan hordes once their destructive work has begun? The whole nation is under threat and so he cries out (1:12), "O Lord, are you not from everlasting? My God, my Holy One, we will not die." This is half hope and half concern. If God has appointed Babylon as the chastising rod so be it, but surely it can't be that the changeless Lord has turned from Israel.
This is a shaken man! A man who peers into the horizon to see the movements of the nations and to dread the coming of the vandal scourge. But he isn't doing it from some hideaway to which he has run for safety while his people go through hell. And while he has already been given the word of God about the nature of the judgement he wants more of God's word. There's no blind sulk here even as there was no cowardly slipping away to safety.
The man who will shortly be given a message about being faithful is showing that he is up for the challenge even though it will turn him to jelly (3:16). In a world of changing fashions, in a world where covenants are so often broken that people sometimes only make them under legal duress, in a world where tastes change and passions evaporate with incredible speed, it's something really fine to be sure of a person. To see about them a blessed predictability. That is one of the wonders of the world.
And do you suppose that that faithfulness would be any less dramatic and powerful if we had seen it in the distressed families that had few to care for them and none at all in high office to listen to their case? There's a mother who wouldn't jettison her children and a wife who wouldn't turn from her husband who was too "weak" to gain enough to provide adequately. There's a father who did however much it took within honour's limits to nurture and protect his family. Are there more striking examples than these of people staying at their posts? All over the world there are people who turn down promotions because the vulnerable would be left without help. There are school teachers and preachers who won't move on to easier positions because they feel a deep and an abiding call to stay in their difficult place of service. All of these recognise the desperate nature of things and they know God is not acting as they often fervently wish he would act; but they stay at their posts.
But it's precisely that kind of gallant faithfulness to God by the oppressed that makes the approach of the predatory armies from the East all the more horrific and confusing. What's to become of the faithful? Why should they be put to grief?
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