Saturday, January 13, 2018

Faithfulness Far From Home --by Linden Malki

Mesopotamia, the "Land Between the Rivers", was where Abraham's family was living when God called him to move out and promised him a new land to be filled with his descendants.  Close to 1500 years later,  many of those descendants found themselves back, but not of their own choice. This river valley was now the center of one of the great civilizations of the ancient world, known as Babylon.

In those years, Abraham's people had been to Egypt and back, and in a thousand years had built two kingdoms out of twelve tribes, and a city with a Temple to Abraham's God.  The northern tribes rebelled against being ruled from Jerusalem, rebelled against Jerusalem's God, and had been conquered by an empire from the northern part of Mesopotamia, Assyria, and their people scattered among the nations that Assyria ruled. In 625BC, Assyria was conquered by their rivals in the south, and in 604BC the Babylonian king Nebucadnezzar invaded the Kingdom of Judah, captured the king, installed a puppet king and brought the treasures from the Jerusalem Temple and many of the leading citizens of Judah back to Babylon.

One of the young men captured is named Daniel; and this is where his story begins. The first thing we know about Daniel and his three friends is that they are intelligent and capable young men, chosen for the royal civil service. The next thing we know is their dedication to the Torah's dietary  laws they had been raised with, and how they convinced their supervisor into allowing them to eat kosher.  Daniel had a long and successful career with the Babylonians and later the Persians. He was able to work in a strange culture and hold to his commitment to God under tough times. 

One of the things that is interesting in the history of our country, is the number of places in the world that people have come from, and the challenges between faith and culture. I took an opportunity to learn to live with quite a different culture (a Swede marrying into a Lebanese family) but the thing that really made it work is that this family were historic Christians who had become associated with Protestant missionaries. Even though the historical backgrounds were very different, our spiritual backgrounds and values were very similar We discovered that my in-laws knew a Baptist missionary cousin of mine whose mission headquarters was in Beirut. It's important when dealing with cultural differences to be clear about your spiritual values.

No comments:

Post a Comment