The Ruler Must Obey The Law Of God

Saturday of 17th Week in Course

Men and women without faith in the twenty-first century are a lot like the Israelites who were hearing and yet not listening to Jeremiah five centuries before Jesus. If you have no faith in Christ, in the transcendent reality we call communion with the Trinity, you are stuck trying to find the ultimate meaning in your life in some earthly god. Maybe that false god is being the best at your job, or having the best-looking partner, or accumulating wealth, or just having one meaningless sexual encounter after another. Those who do this are trying the fill the God-sized hole in their humanity with something that couldn’t fill a demitasse. St Augustine said it best: “Thou hast made us for Thyself, O Lord, and our heart is restless until it rests in Thee.”

Jeremiah’s audience in the years close to the destruction of Jerusalem was at best a cynical mob. They probably had been living just like their parents and grandparents. Politically, they had little flexibility, since Judea was positioned right in the middle of the route between a powerful Egypt and another powerful Assyrian or Babylonian kingdom. Their king, Josiah, had stupidly tried to stop one of the countless invasions within the inhabitants’ memory, and had perished in the losing battle. He was the last good king of the tiny Jewish kingdom, and his relatives who succeeded him were faithless, corrupt and weak. But the political weakness wasn’t the worst part. When they made treaties with one or the other foreign kingdom, they were expected to worship the gods of that kingdom. So they did. Jeremiah, Isaiah, and Ezekiel, over a period of a hundred years, railed against that betrayal of the true God, the Lord, but they were not heeded.

Here you see the predictable result of Jeremiah preaching the true word of God against the corrupt leaders of the people. They demanded his death. Why? Precisely because he told the truth—that the abandonment of fidelity to the Lord and justice in their dealings with the poor would lead to the destruction of Jerusalem. What was Jeremiah’s answer? Did he apologize and tell them he would be quiet to save his life? No. He doubled down and told them the truth once more, calling on them to repent and change their habits. For a while, that cowed them to the point that they stopped calling for his execution, but they endeavored to keep him hidden from the people so his words would not sap the morale of the soldiers.

Herod Antipas, grandson of that murderous Herod who was a friend of Caesar Augustus, heard of Jesus, and His preaching and miracles. There was a rumor floating around that Jesus was a reincarnation of John the Baptist. Why? Because Jesus stood up for Truth and Love and Justice just as John had done. Herod, weak-willed and enslaved to his unlawful wife, Herodias, had executed John. Ultimately he would be involved in executing Jesus. If a ruler does not hold God and God’s Law in the highest respect, he will ultimately fail, not only in building a strong society of strong families, but in what should be our highest objective—eternal union with the Trinity in Christ.