“Then they said to one another, ‘We are not doing right. This day is a day of good news, and we remain silent’.”
2 Kings 7:9
I have been reading Plato’s Republic this past week and engaged in the philosophical argument between Socrates and his fellows about justice and injustice. Those favoring injustice, cloaked by an appearance of justice, advanced many of the arguments the new “Woke” crowd of today espouses. This position, they said, was more profitable and engendered more happiness than being just. The story I shared a line from today could be used by this crowd as a case in point.
I’m going to set the scene for you. The capital of Israel has been under siege. A cup of dove’s dung was selling for two ounces of silver—if you could find it. Living up against the city walls were four men. Neither side cared about them. They were lepers, cast out from society as unclean, disease-spreading vermin.
The king of Israel blamed the prophet Elisha for the entire situation, and as kings do, hatched a plot to rid the country of the voice of opposition. Meanwhile, the four lepers decided they would rather die by the sword than starvation. They went to surrender to the Syrian army only to find everyone gone. All the tents, animals, and supplies were there but the army was nowhere to be found.
It's true that they ate all they could hold and took some treasure for themselves. But it dawned on them that such action was not right with an entire city starving behind the walls. So, they went and told it. The city was saved, but what of the lepers?
As far as we know, they went right back to living up against the outside of the city wall. They remained lepers. No one thanked them for their bravery or their sense of justice that moved them to share the good news. Their just action availed them nothing and cost them whatever treasure they might yet have carried off.
Do not expect the world to grant you the least kindness or imitate whatever right actions you model. Injustice, wearing the cloak of repairing past wrongs, is the rule of the day. Just action is for fools, clingers to old ways, and those who have passed from usefulness.
Closing churches in the name of the good of all or some misplaced sense of caring for neighbors is to negate the underlying truth that we need loyalty to God and right action more than vaccines and the departing from the divine commandment. Better to be disgusting social lepers than the servant whom the king leans upon.
“Therefore to him who knows to do good and does not do it, to him it is sin.”
If the Church truly believed 2 Chronicles 7:14 was an answer to the country’s ills, it would repent en masse for its shameful actions of the last two years. We need not expect to prosper until we do.
Maranatha
