watchmen, what of the night?

“…The heart of the sons of men is full of evil, and madness is in their heart while they live…” (Ecclesiastes 9.3)
 
Wherewith shall I come before the LORD,
and bow myself before the high God?
He hath shewed thee, O man, what is good;
and what doth the LORD require of thee,
but to do justly, and to love mercy,
and to walk humbly with thy God? (Micah 6.6, 8
​

​america’s mad state of rebellion:
watchman, what of the night?
Thursday, 17 march 2022

​​In the twenty first chapter of his book, Isaiah reports hearing a voice, saying,
 
“Go, set a watchman,
   let him declare what he seeth” (vs. 6).
 
Later in the same chapter, Isaiah hears a voice from afar.
 
“Watchman, what of the night?
   Watchman, what of the night?” (vs. 11)
 
In today’s blog post, I will play the role of a watchman and report a just a few of the many things I have watched and seen from my perch on scripture.
 
I have watched the planet continue to heat dangerously from its inhabitants’ insatiable and rapacious appetite and from the impotent response of leaders caught in the web of lust and covetousness.
 
I have watched American citizens, guided by their own insatiable narcissism and led by inept leaders and a freely elected immoral sociopath, insanely refuse to act rationally and morally in the face of the worst pandemic in a hundred years, thus bringing needless sorrow and death to hundreds of thousands of their neighbors.
 
I have watched fathers, mothers, and children worry about having shelter from nature’s hostile elements—necessary shelter inhumanely thought and spoken of by those in power only in sanitized terms such as “rental property” or “house and home”—while rich vulture (no, that is not a typo) capitalists, with legislators' approval, buy and sell needed shelter to line investors’ pockets with the skin they strip off the bodies of the poor.
 
I have watched American lawmakers place anti-democratic obstacles in voter’s paths to the ballot box. Then, if voters possess the chutzpa and demonstrate the ability to negotiate the damnable obstacle course placed before them, those same unlawful law makers threaten to not count and/or certify those audacious voters’ ballots.
 
I have watched tens of millions of innocent American children live in poverty and go to bed hungry while, even in a pandemic, business tycoons count their growing wealth by the billions and unfeeling businesses rake in their misbegotten profits by preying on the vulnerable and powerless.
 
On this very day, I watch another man work himself to the bone laboring at two jobs so he can keep his life-prolonging medical insurance while he weakens daily as another pound of the twenty pounds of flesh that his cancer has already taken falls from his enfeebled frame.
 
In this very hour, I watch with the rest of a perverted and impotent planet as innocent citizens, non-combatants of Ukraine violently die in burning and crumbling cities barbarically targeted by a nation’s army that accepted a psychopath as national leader.
 
As I watch these and countless other crimes against God, angels, and humanity, I also watch secular and religious leaders’ pathetic and impotent—too often near non-existent—response to them. Watching their callous indifference, I imagine that I see Nero, backlit by towering orange flames, playing his fiddle while Rome burns. Or, like Jeremiah of Old Testament fame, I see watchmen who refuse to fulfill their saving call—likely more concerned with the money they have given to their “exchangers” than with the vulnerable and endangered (See DC 101.49).
 
“Also I set watchmen over you, saying,
   ‘Hearken to the sound of the trumpet.’
      But they said, ‘We will not hearken’” (Jer. 6.17).
 
What else am I to think and feel when I compare the desperate needs evident in such dire times with the woefully inadequate and impotent response of America’s secular and religious leaders to those needs? What am I to think and feel, for example, about legislators who, in the face of such need, are so useless as to waste serious discussion and precious time in a matter as trivial as whether we turn clocks forward or backward twice a year? And what am I to think and feel about these “leaders” when this is the only sort of issue—other than weaponizing the planet—around which they can gather and agree? Am I really supposed to take them seriously as “leaders”? Hardly. They are worthless as leaders.
 
And what am I to make of religious leaders who waste time speculating on things such as the possible existence of divine matriarchs, worrying and lecturing about a possible obsession with them, and then attempting to legislate how one utilizes capital letters when referring to this unknown being? What am I to think when those same leaders in “Zion” so seldomly and timidly address in word or deed the very purposes for which God created Zion in the first place—alleviating the suffering of the poor and replacing their poverty with abundance?
 
“That you might be honored in laying the foundation, and in bearing record of the land upon which the Zion of God shall stand; and also that a feast of fat things might be prepared for the poor; yea, a feast of fat things, of wine on the lees well refined, that the earth may know that the mouths of the prophets shall not fail; yea, a supper of the house of the Lord, well prepared, unto which all nations shall be invited. First, the rich and the learned, the wise and the noble; and after that cometh the day of my power; then shall the poor, the lame, and the blind, and the deaf, come in unto the marriage of the Lamb, and partake of the supper of the Lord, prepared for the great day to come” (DC 58.7-11).
 
Twenty-five hundred years ago, Jeremiah complained of the uselessness of Judah’s secular and religious leaders “from the least of them even unto the greatest of them.” “They,” he charged,
 
“Have healed also the hurt of the daughter of my people slightly,
   saying, ‘Peace, peace;’ when there is no peace.”
 
Jeremiah was amazed so see that “they were not at all ashamed, neither could they blush” at their uselessness (See Jer. 6.13-15). America’s secular and religious leaders, too, find no reason to blush at the obscenity of their leadership. If only they made an even half-hearted attempt to “heal… the hurt,” rather than perpetrate greater suffering and more death upon the very people they were elected and called to serve, heal, and protect.
 
We do not go too far or exaggerate when we conclude that far too many American secular and religious leaders are worthy of the same prophetic condemnation as that spoken by the ancient Jewish prophet, Ezekiel.
 
“Woe be to the shepherds of Israel that do feed themselves! Should not the shepherds feed the flocks? Ye eat the fat, and ye clothe you with the wool, ye kill them that are fed: but ye feed not the flock. The diseased have ye not strengthened, neither have ye healed that which was sick, neither have ye bound up that which was broken, neither have ye brought again that which was driven away, neither have ye sought that which was lost; but with force and with cruelty have ye ruled them. And they were scattered, because there is no shepherd: and they became meat to all the beasts of the field, when they were scattered. My sheep wandered through all the mountains, and upon every high hill: yea, my flock was scattered upon all the face of the earth, and none did search or seek after them” (Ezek. 34.2-6).
 
Nor do we do too far in hoping that God will put an end to this, at best, useless rule, and, at worst, self-servingly deadly rule.
 
“Thus saith the Lord God; Behold, I am against the shepherds; and I will require my flock at their hand, and cause them to cease from feeding the flock; neither shall the shepherds feed themselves any more; for I will deliver my flock from their mouth, that they may not be meat for them… As a shepherd seeketh out his flock in the day that he is among his sheep that are scattered; so will I seek out my sheep, and will deliver them out of all places where they have been scattered in the cloudy and dark day… I will seek that which was lost, and bring again that which was driven away, and will bind up that which was broken, and will strengthen that which was sick: but I will destroy the fat and the strong; I will feed them with judgment” (Ezek. 34.10, 12, 16).
 
Even so, come, Lord Jesus!