DO NOT PRAY FOR THIS PEOPLE

A Mennonite Reflects on God and Country

in an Election Year

Philip E. Friesen

‘Do not pray for this people, do not raise a cry or prayer on their behalf, and do not intercede with me, for I will not hear you.” Jeremiah 7:16

‘Do not pray for this people, do not raise a cry or prayer on their behalf, and do not intercede with me, for I will not hear you.” Jeremiah 7:16

Prayer for the Nation

Should we Americans look to God to protect our country from terrorism? The events of 9/11 brought crowds of people into churches to pray—for the victims, and for protection. Is that what we should be praying for?

Jeremiah and the Temple, A Legacy of Faith

The prophet Jeremiah spoke to Jerusalem in time of war, when people were praying for security:

Jeremiah said, “Do not trust in deceptive words, “This is the temple of the Lord, the temple of the Lord” (Jeremiah 7:4).

The book of Kings tells us that when Solomon dedicated the Temple, God visibly entered the Temple in a cloud to take up residence (1 Kings 8:10-12; 2 Chronicles 7:3). Surely God would never abandon the temple, his earthly palace!

When Solomon’s great-great-grandson King Jehoshaphat faced invasion by a coalition of three neighbors, he led the people to the temple, and, borrowing the very words of Solomon’s prayer, asked God for protection (2 Chronicles 20:9-13 and 1 Kings 8:33-39) . Reassured by a prophetic word, the army went out the next day, led by a choir singing praise. They found that the three armies had fought and destroyed each other. At a later time, King Hezekiah received a threatening letter from the commander of Assyria’s approaching army. Bringing the letter to the temple, he spread it before the Lord. That night, the Assyrian army was decimated by an act of God (2 Kings 19).

In Jeremiah’s time it was Babylon that threatened Jerusalem. Surely God would not abandon the Temple! It was his house, the icon of God among them. For them, faith in the temple was equivalent to faith in God. So long as they maintained the temple ritual, God would help them defeat their enemies.

But God told Jeremiah,

“As for you, do not pray for this people…for I will not hear you….I gave them this command, “Obey my voice, and I will be your God, and you shall be my people; and walk only in the way that I command you, so that it may be well with you. Yet they did not obey or incline their ear (Jeremiah 7:16 and 23-24a).”

America’s Legacy of Faith

Americans also have sacred icons in which they trust. The icon of Israel was an architectural wonder. The American icon is a literary wonder- the constitution, the bill of rights, and the way of life these icons represent. The American icons have an impressive legacy. We might even say that like the temple, they show something of the glory of God, but we must understand as Jeremiah did, that an icon is a temporal thing, and will pass away. We too must not confuse faith in our democratic system with faith in God.

Is Our Faith Warranted?

The people ignored Jeremiah’s warnings, and about ten years later another prophet, Ezekiel, had a vision of the temple (Ezekiel 10-11). In his vision he saw the glory of God rise from the temple and leave the city. Without the presence of God, he knew that destruction was imminent, but his contemporaries were unable to recognize what had happened. Another five years after that, King Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon destroyed both the city and the temple. The people’s misguided faith had let them down. The question we must ask is this, “Will we recognize when the glory has left our institutions?”

Solomon’s Mistake, Pride of Power and Greed for Gain

The man who dedicated the temple, Solomon, planted the seeds of its destruction. When King Solomon married foreign wives for diplomatic purposes, and when he built up his armed forces, importing horses from Egypt, in direct disobedience to Moses’ commands, he planted seeds for the temple’s destruction (See Deuteronomy 17:16 and 1 Kings 10:28). Solomon’s disobedience led to dependence upon wealth and military power, and in they end, they failed. The pride of power and greed for gain led to both injustice and idolatry, which topics occupied the prophets for two full centuries after Solomon.

The Seeds of Destruction

Are there seeds of destruction already embedded in the American social fabric? Can we afford to believe that so long as we observe the ritual of voting and maintain a good defense, that we will be successful? Can the Constitution free us from God’s laws without consequences?

Our enemies say we are obsessed with possessions and pleasure, and guilty of injustice towards them. These are important themes of both the prophets and apostles. We take our excess wealth, spend it on advertising to coax and cajole people who have too much to buy more, and ignore those who have nothing because they can’t compete in our system. Are the enemies right? Conservatives express great concern for the human dignity of the unborn, but what about the dignity of the poor, both at home an abroad? America’s military budget exceeds that of all the rest of the world combined. Scripture repeatedly warns against relying on military power. Some of these warnings were written by the warrior David himself (Psalm 20:7). Have we made the same mistake as Solomon?

During my time in college, my generation repudiated God’s law concerning marriage, making the sexual relationship into mere recreation rather than the act of commitment that it should be, in fact, an act of worship that displays the Unity of the Trinity through the oneness of a gender differentiated humanity. Soon afterwards abortion was given the status of a human right, and the pressure for gay marriage has followed. This is not to say that either of these things should necessarily be forbidden by law, but if one starts with the assumption that a healthy social order depends upon life-long, monogamous marriages of a one man and one woman, then there would seem to be definite sustained movement in a negative direction.

The Fading Glory and Its Consequences

There are then, significant reasons to suggest that the glory is fading? The question is frightening. In Romans 1, Paul describes a people whom God had given up. Because they rejected God, they lost their freedom and became enslaved to their sensual appetites. Paul focused his comments specifically on sexual appetites, but we could add chemical and financial appetites to the list, as the New Testament discusses them elsewhere. People controlled by these appetites become victims to every kind of manipulation, and have no freedom at all. The right to choose one’s leaders is valid only for those who are free, and the ritual of voting has no more benefit for those enslaved to the passion for power, possession, and pleasure than did the temple rituals of Jeremiah’s time. Such people have lost their good judgment, and will choose leaders to their own harm. Our enemies’ charge, that we have become obsessed with pleasure and sensuality, is not a frivolous charge.

Democracy does not make us free. It is free people who create free institutions, and free people are needed to maintain them. Today the United States is at war to bring freedom for those have been enslaved to dictatorship. As followers of Jesus, do we really want them to become like us Americans? For millions of people in the Middle East, when they hear Americans talk about freedom, they see it as the right to fornicate, the right to drink alcohol, and the power to control unimaginable, unlimited wealth, the three addictions just mentioned. American armies on their soil will surely recall memories of the Romans, the Crusaders, the French, and the British in history. If this is how we are known, then has not the glory already departed from our institutions? And if the glory has departed, then our efforts at self defense and self promotion will be no more effective than the efforts of Zedekiah’s army to defend Jerusalem in Jeremiah’s time, but the prayer of repentance is still available for those who recognize their inability to help themselves.

The lesson of Israel’s judgment is a warning to us. When Israel was militarily strong, she became corrupt and immoral. After Israel was in captivity in Babylon, she became a light to the nations; so much so that when Paul preached to the Gentiles, the Gentiles came rushing into the kingdom of God. Israel, God’s suffering servant, yes, Israel scattered among the nations, had introduced them to Israel’s God, and Paul’s role was simply to remove the specifically Jewish cultural barriers that kept them from worshiping him. Jesus showed us that strength comes in weakness, and power makes us weak. Paul said, “When I am weak, then I am strong.” (2 Corinthians 12:10) A nation of true faith will take pride in its own defenselessness, because it has a God who gives the peace, the protection, and the provision for life that we all seek. This is what Moses taught, what Israel never learned, and neither have we.

In this situation, how shall we pray? God will answer the prayer of repentance. Both Daniel and Nehemiah proclaimed, “I and my fathers have sinned (Daniel 9:8 Nehemiah 1:6). Jesus taught us this prayer in the story of the two worshipers who came to pray, one a crook, and the other a religious philosopher. The prayer God accepted was this, “God be merciful to us poor sinners.”

The Real Threat to National Security

I have described how Solomon himself, the builder of the temple, sowed the spiritual seeds of its destruction by pursuing material gain and relying on military power. Unfortunately we have been guilty of the same sins. The ethnic cleansing of the native Americans was fueled by greed for gain, not to mention African slavery. All of us have inherited these moral debts, which in God’s economy, will have to be paid. Repentance is both a personal and a national necessity. We should say that unconfessed sin is the greatest national security threat over the long term.

For Jeremiah and Ezekiel, repentance meant surrender to Babylon. It is time we surrender our demand to be #1. Jesus said whoever wants to be #1 should become the lowest slave. He warned us against accumulated earthly treasure (Matthew 6:19-20), and he refused all military means for achieving justice. These teachings seem to go against common sense, but the Bible is not a book of common sense, it is a book of faith. Instead of focusing on the rights and possessions we fear losing, we need to live pure and holy lives, avoiding all sexual immorality and greed, downsize our holdings and share what we have while it is still ours to share.

God’s Gift of Liberty

Israel’s liberty was a gift from God. If we preach that our liberty is also a gift from God, and not something we achieved ourselves through some natural superiority of our own, then our situation is analogous to that of Israel, and we face similar judgment. If the blessing is from God, then the disasters are from God too, including the disaster of 9-11.

If America does have a heritage of faith, built upon Biblical principles, then she will be judged by those principles.

The Basis of Hope

Years ago, doing research in missiological anthropology, I studied the gods of many primitive cultures. While learning how the gospel has triumphed over the various nature gods, I was continually forced to ask myself, what are the gods of the Americans that we need to confront with the gospel? In light of what we have observed, it seems that the god of America is ourself, our pride, our possessions, and the voting booth is our temple. This voting booth is the chief icon of our national faith in self and the democracy we have created. Our god’s chief ritual is the election and the debates that surround it, while the wars we fight for the spread of democracy should be described as nothing other than human sacrifice. This god will fail us.

Still I see a great hope. It lies with the stranger and the poor. There are millions of immigrants in this country who have not participated in America’s sins. They bring their own sins, but that’s a different matter. . God would have spared Sodom had there been ten innocent people in that city (Genesis 18-19), and he may spare us because these immigrants are here. Moses commanded the Hebrews to welcome the stranger and care for the poor. If we repent and turn our attention to doing right for our neighbors rather than feed our sensuality while defending our rights and privileges, God may still hear our prayers, because his mercy endures forever, as Jeremiah said (Lamentations 3:22).