Closing the wombs

How, exactly, does God bring a curse upon a culture?

Well, listen to God's warning to Israel, way back when she first entered the fertile land of Canaan. Canaan was the proto-garden, the replacement for Eden lost, the first establishment of a new place of God's presence and rule. It was governed by Torah, the law of Moses given to Israel as her means of being salt and light to the surrounding nations. In her time, Torah and Canaan (law and land) were Israel's God-given way of returning home from exile, of figuring the redemption of Adam and of his dominion-bearing mission to the world. The law therefore was wholly of grace, and yet listen to YHWH's warning:

However, if you do not obey the LORD your God and do not carefully follow all his commands and decrees I am giving you today, all these curses will come upon you and overtake you: you will be cursed in the city and cursed in the country. Your basket and your kneading trough will be cursed. The fruit of your womb will be cursed, and the crops of your land, and the calves of your herds and the lambs of your flocks. You will be cursed when you come in and cursed when you go out.

It is interesting, isn't it, how much this curse reflects the original judgment on Adam and Eve, as they proved faithless: a curse on production from both ground and womb. Truly, Israel was Adam and Eve come again.

At this time, when Israel knew herself to be Adam's replacement, as the figure of God's Son, she had this to say, through the royal person of the king:

I will proclaim the decree of the LORD : He said to me, "You are my Son; today I have become your Father. Ask of me, and I will make the nations your inheritance, the ends of the earth your possession. You will rule them with an iron scepter; you will dash them to pieces like pottery." Therefore, you kings, be wise; be warned, you rulers of the earth. Serve the LORD with fear and rejoice with trembling. Kiss the Son, lest he be angry and you be destroyed in your way, for his wrath can flare up in a moment. Blessed are all who take refuge in him.

28 generations later, Jesus' claim that he was the king and true Son, the Son of David in the full sense of inheriting the Davidic throne and kingdom, was breathtaking. He took Israel's identity and claimed for himself the image of God's anointed, the Servant of blessing to the world. And astonishingly, God vindicated that claim by raising Jesus from the dead, bringing Israel's story and mission to an awesome, incredible climax.

Now, while this climax was still at its peak, and the world of Israel was in turmoil at the events, Paul had this to say about the depravity of Israel as she rejected her God:

They exchanged the truth of God for a lie, and worshiped and served created things rather than the Creator--who is forever praised. Amen. Because of this, God gave them over to shameful lusts. Even their women exchanged natural relations for unnatural ones. In the same way the men also abandoned natural relations with women and were inflamed with lust for one another. Men committed indecent acts with other men, and received in themselves the due penalty for their perversion.

So then, here is the curse worked out. Paul sees Israel's abandonment to perversion as itself the penalty due her abandonment of God. The curse is received and expressed in Israel's own bodies.

Israel should have known, as did those who responded to Peter's Pentecost speech, that by the resurrection of the one who claimed to be the Christ, God had made Jesus Lord and King - the definitive replacement for Adam. He was and is the true Israel, the full Son of David. He had fulfilled Torah, and had become for the creation salt and light. The earth he received as his inheritance was and is the reward to a faithful Adam. Far from being cast out for refusing to believe God, he was returned from death for his obedience, and was given it all.

Tragically, however, Israel clung to her hope in the glories of Moses for a place in the restoration from Adam's rebellion. Even worse, she clung to the rituals of Torah while in rebellion against its true cause: being light and salt for the world through obedience. She ignored God's testimony about His Son, and with Moses outmoded, continued to fill YHWH's nostrils with the stench of her empty offerings. She forgot her own words, and failed to kiss the Son. He therefore destroyed her in his wrath.

Christ's rule on behalf of YHWH is fearful, and Christ continues to rule now. Now, two millennia later, we must interpret our own age according to the same story, with a continuation of the same plot-lines and themes. And what do we see?

We see a culture that used to know God losing itself to gay abandon, celebrating and establishing homosexuality as legal privilege, just as it has established the horror of abortion as a liberating right. Of course, the problem is not our sexual behaviour, nor our failure to protect the most vulnerable - thrown away with the same self-indulgence that created them. On the contrary, these things herald a much deeper rottenness, a corruption right at the core, now extending to the very perimeters, there for all to see. According to the pattern of old, then, we must suspect that we are not awaiting a curse to fall; rather, we are already subject to one.

And when we read a piece of cultural self-analysis such as this, our suspicions are surely proved right on target. We are in the midst of a people once again subject to being given over, receiving in our own bodies the due penalty of our error. Once again, God is closing wombs, bringing to nothing a people who will not embrace life. And it is a terribly fearful thing. What is still to come, if we do not repent?