Hitchhiker’s Guide to Babylon (2)
“Build houses and live in them; and plant gardens and eat their produce. Take wives and become the fathers of sons and daughters, and take wives for your sons and give your daughters to husbands, that they may bear sons and daughters; and multiply there and do not decrease. Seek the welfare of the city where I have sent you into exile, and pray to the Lord on its behalf; for in its welfare you will have welfare.” Jeremiah 29:5-7 NASB
Plant/eat – Back to the Garden, but this time, we have to make it ourselves. Exiled from the Garden God made, we still have the task of bringing Eden to the world. And what better place to start than in a land filled with God’s enemies.
God instructs His people in Babylon, “Plant and eat.” Of course, there’s a long time between planting and eating. Leviticus 19:23 gives the requirement. “When you enter the land and plant all kinds of trees for food, then you shall count their fruit as forbidden. Three years it shall be forbidden to you; it shall not be eaten.” Some fruit like pineapple can be eaten as soon as it ripens, but, from experience, that still takes about a year. How do these slaves survive in the meanwhile? Go on a three-year fast? Hardly! This command is like the one about building. This is not for the short run. You might be able to build a house in less than three years, but if God expects you to plant and eat, then it’s going to be at least a three-year process. Just like the difference between houses and home, orchards are not the objective here. Eating the fruit is the objective, and that means waiting. Once again, God’s specific instructions point toward long-term commitments and community involvement.
Pretend you’re one of the exiled slaves. The first thing you must do is get along with your master. After you’ve shown that you are not a rebel, you might approach him for materials to build a home. You will have to get them on the basis of his best interest since you have no capital for purchasing what you need. Good will is your only currency. And, if you’ve demonstrated the character of your God during this time, he’ll give you what you need because a content slave is a good worker. So you build. You have shelter, but you need to eat. So far you’ve eaten what the master provides—and you’re grateful for it because it kept you alive. But now you need to return to kosher if you can, and fruit is the best way to do that. If you have your own orchard, then you can produce food for yourself that God approves. So you plant.
Ah, but where do you get the seedlings and the land and the fertilizer and the tools? Back to the master. Back to good will, best interest and cooperation. Back to obedience, commitment, integrity and trustworthiness. Back to Joseph. Do you suppose Potiphar would have put Joseph in charge of all that he owned if Joseph were trying to escape, defiant or destructive? Joseph is the biblical model of the man in captivity. And that means Joseph is our model for we are also captives in a world that does not know the God of Israel. Plant and eat, people. Nitu veiklu.
Topical Index: plant, nata, eat, ‘akal, Leviticus 19:23, Jeremiah 29:5-7
What is righteousness? Relationship with all around us. The world benefits best from people who are actively thriving; who are carrying their own weight and are being productive. We relate best when we have taken care of ourselves first. It is hard to share and help and care when you are only on the receiving end of the stick or the soup line. In fact, it is almost impossible, unless you are willing to just die, which would not do heaven or the world much good. If we love (obey) and accept to love of God, we will have the abundance we need to care for ourselves properly and thus be in a position to love everyone and everything else out of that abundance. I did not say “out of that success”. I think there is a difference.
We worship success. I suspect it is in part because we equate it with the blessings bestowed upon those who are correctly relating with all around them. We like to hang out with the winners, hoping that some of that connection will rub off onto us. This is not wrong, per se. There is a lot of homespun wisdom in the simple observation of cause and effect; in observing the consequences of actions (or non-actions). It is not hard to diagnose the problems, either. Everybody, like Leonard Cohen sings, wants the long-stemmed rose and the box of chocolates. BUT, there exists a quantum leap between observing, diagnosing, and actually accomplishing. People can appreciate function, but that does not mean they can accomplish it – on their own, anyway.
I have noticed that the world cheats when it comes to what it terms success. Because there is no other source for genuine love, people of the world tend to invent what Isaiah. 8:12 calls “confederacies”, and we would call contracts. Contracts are not wrong, but they are not a substitute for true function. Associations created by the world mimic the benefits of love; people go to great lengths to copy the actions of love, too, but it all presumes a purpose of self benefit, and all others know that (because that is what they are doing, too).
Further, when success – by worldly terms, anyway – is achieved, I have noticed that people immediately tend to turn around and use that wealth to buy even more substitutes for love; or, function. They obsess about cleanliness and order; they create perfect order around them, too. Everything has to be ‘perfect’ in order to look and feel loved, or, functional. They also go to great lengths to be served. I have noticed the successful (not all of them) tend to surround themselves with legions of others who are all focused on pleasing them – for benefits, too, of course. However, I think this is the closest the world can come to function, and it is all a sham. True function (connection) still eludes them.
We are promised daily bread. Enough for the day However, heaven’s way of living hand to mouth differs from what the world understands, for heaven’s way is to provide the ability for us to share; our hand to the mouth of others. Even if it is the last of the flour in the barrel, those who know where their bread comes from will always be rich enough to share; to give. Conscious living is asking for the resources for not only us, but also for enough to provide for those around us, and investing in shelter and food resources is the action of confidence; the action of faith that we will have the ability to love those around us, too.
I think the true measure of success is not how much you have, but how much you have to give away to those who cannot benefit you back. Our efforts must all be for the purpose of having these riches to share. Not only must we relate to those around us, as Skip says, in order to obtain resources, but we must build, plant and obtain in order to pass on those blessings, too. This is true purpose. May we all be that rich.
Leviticus 19:23 gives the requirement.
I understand your overarching premise, but I don’t think this verse can be used as proof support. Leviticus is talking about when they were going into the Promised Land, not “any” land — and especially it is not referring to a land they were yet to be exiled to. This would be like saying the shmita year (letting the land rest) should be observed outside the land. It can be, but that doesn’t mean that it is required.
I also understand your point, but if God wants His people to represent Him in Babylon, wouldn’t that be grounds enough for following the Torah commandment even if we were not in the Promised Land. After all, the point of Jeremiah’s passage is that they failed to do what God wanted in the Promised Land, so now they must learn to do so in the land of the enemy. Anyway, if you’re correct and the command does not apply outside the Land, then we still have to problem of “plant and eat” which obviously does not happen in one season.
The way I read the text, the original Garden command was to bring the entire planet to order; not stay in the Garden. The Diaspora was a physical ‘nudge’ to do just that, and we are blatantly called to be a light and witness to the world in the NT. The Jews got hung up on exclusivity, but I don’t think they understood that they were designed to be a spiritual, intellectual and biological infection for the world. The Apostles, on the other hand, heard that call loud and clear.. So, I think, should we.