Did God Will The Scattering Of His People Israel?

Third Sunday Integral 2026

On my voyage through Scripture, which began many decades ago and continues daily, my mental boat sometimes runs aground on a reef of confusion. If that’s never happened to you, then you probably aren’t spending enough time reading the Bible. Get together with a good Internet resource like “the Bible in a year” with Mike Schmitz and Jeff Cavins and just do it. You’ll have no regrets.

Here’s the reef of the week, from Isaiah: “First the Lord degraded the land of Zebulun and the land of Naphtali.” Wait a minute. This isn’t a translation problem. The Hebrew verb qalal translated “degraded” has a multitude of possible meanings, but they are all “downers.” But God is good, and all He creates is good. How do we put that together with what the writer says about Him degrading the land of Israel’s two northernmost tribes?

The controlling reality is that God is good, and He wants only good for us humans created in His image and likeness. But when God created us, He gave us free will along with His commandments that are meant to be like our operating system. That is like His “perfect” will, and it’s only for our good. The word “perfect” means well ordered toward a good end or result.

But when we freely choose to disobey God’s commands, He often allows us to suffer the bad consequences. Allowing us to make hurtful choices is called God’s permissive will. He allows our choices and He allows the result. That does not mean God is deficient in any way. It just recognizes that we are suffering the result of the weakness of man’s original rebellion in the Garden of Eden.

About 733 years before Christ, because the northern tribes of Israel had fallen into idolatry after they rebelled against the divinely-ordained Davidic ruler in Jerusalem, God permitted the kingdom of Assyria to invade and degrade the north. Eventually He allowed the total destruction of northern Israel, and because even the Davidic kingdom fell into systemic sin, God permitted Babylon to destroy Jerusalem and the Temple in 586 BC. God’s perfect will was for Israel to live by the commandments, and with right worship and right behavior to attract all the nations to that worship and right living. But Israel refused, top to bottom. So with God’s permission, foreign invaders scattered them. That’s the story of God’s permissive will. It’s sad because humans refused to follow the good and rebelled against His perfect will.

In the rest of the reading from Isaiah, the Holy Spirit tells us about recovery, about God’s perfect will for Israel and the rest of us as well. Light dispels darkness; the people rejoice. God smashes the rule of foreigners over His people. And looking at the psalm, we see that there would be is a Temple we may contemplate, with the loveliness of the Lord and the bounty of the Lord. We are encouraged to wait for the Lord’s appearance courageously and with stout hearts.

St. Matthew uses and even quotes from Isaiah when he writes about the early ministry of Jesus after the arrest of John the Baptist. Jesus is preaching in Galilee, which is the land that was occupied by the tribes of Zebulun and Naphtali at the time of the original conquest by Joshua. His words seem to be encouraging those dwelling in that northern area to do exactly what their ancestors refused to do when they fell into serious sin. Jesus commands all to repent of sin, because the kingdom of heaven—the kingdom of God—is at hand. We will later learn that Jesus, the descendant of King David, is the true King and Messiah.

Jesus is gathering, beginning with a group of four fishermen. The prophet Jeremiah five centuries earlier had predicted that God would send “for many fishers” to catch both Jews and Gentiles for the restored kingdom. Jesus says to Peter and his brother Andrew, and James and his brother John, “Come after me, and I will make you fishers of men.” Over three years of earthly ministry, Jesus and what will be a band of twelve apostles will be spreading the good news of God’s perfect will. They were catching human beings in a net called a qahal or ekklesia or church, depending on your language. The perfect will of God is that we be gathered together in a community of right worship and right living. This week’s readings speak of that.

That three-year ministry centered on one man who also happened to be the incarnate Lord, Jesus Christ. In the perfect will of God, He is the light of the world, the loveliness of the Lord, the bounty of the Lord and the new Temple. After thousands of years of waiting in gloom and sin, the Lord Himself was ministering to His people.