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Faith Under Fire:
Exile. For many throughout history, it represented a fate worse than death. Being forced from your people, family, and land to live as a perpetual outsider. The safety and security they felt at home, now lost living in foreign lands and often hostile powers.
Of course the biblical writers were not strangers to the exilic experience. For many in both the Old and New Testaments, the idea of exile plays a prominent role in their understanding of the world.
At some level, all humanity is meant to feel exiled since being forced from the Garden. We are living east of Eden and (if we haven’t become too jaded yet), we still long for it—a paradise free from injustice and chaos where we might feel truly at home, where the presence of God walks among us. As Tolkien remarked, “Certainly there was an Eden on this very unhappy earth. We all long for it”
Beyond that general sense, God’s people have experienced more literal exiles as well. Due to their sin, God drove His people from the land. The northern Kingdom of Israel was hauled away by the Assyrians in 722 BC followed by the Kingdom of Judah in 586 BC by the Babylonians.
In Babylon, God’s people wrestled with what faithfulness looks like apart from the Promised Land and under the thumb of hostile empires. They wondered about what was to become of God’s promises and their identity as a people. “Should we assimilate? Rebel? Wait it out?”
We’re living in unprecedented times and many of us have seen the culture move from ambivalent to hostile toward the Christian faith rather quickly. Christians no longer feel at home and implicitly (or explicitly) know that holding to Christian ideals can make them persona non grata.
Like those in captivity, we have similar choices between fighting, insulating, assimilating, or rebelling. Beyond these we are tempted by false messiahs promising to deliver us from the uncomfortable or hostile situations if we would just compromise a little.
In all these new situations, we look to the book of Daniel, where we see God’s wisdom to navigate through troubled times and find the God who brings his people home.
Isaiah 51:3
For the LORD comforts Zion;
he comforts all her waste places
and makes her wilderness like Eden,
her desert like the garden of the LORD;
joy and gladness will be found in her,
thanksgiving and the voice of song...
11 And the ransomed of the LORD shall return
and come to Zion with singing;
everlasting joy shall be upon their heads;
they shall obtain gladness and joy,
and sorrow and sighing shall flee away.
