Forgiveness

It ought to be clear that mankind weaves tangled webs about nearly all issues of life.  To these complexities we add further ones in perceptions and management, and the story of history – sometimes objective, sometimes made up (contrived) and nearly always given a spin that originates in the emotions of persons and groups.  Careful scholars know this is a burden to be borne in the pursuit of truth, reporting, and the contexts for life that may or may not be to social advantage.  To simplify matters God helps us along with various tools to extract ourselves from the intellectual, physical, even spiritual holes we dig for ourselves.  We make various mistakes, choices, even deliberate errors in thought and conduct, perhaps to gain recognition, advance our preferences, gain financial benefit, or try to advance some plot – good or ill. 

The problem becomes so extensive that it hangs on.  It may not be resolved.  The time and resources that it employs might be used for useful means meeting the needs of mankind.  Men like George Washington wanted to create a government that would offer freedom, and be effective in developing a country, but he wondered if it could be done.  Three departments were proposed to check on one another in the belief this would force better government in the name of the electorate.  As this is being written, all three of the departments (courts, congress and presidency) have become so politicized that the nation is threatened again with the shut-down of government because of the inability to get otherwise intelligent (usually) persons to make laws and carry them through for the benefit of the nation.  It was evident with a diluted freedom in the acceptance of slavery counting each slave as a percentage of the privilege of citizenship, but without right to vote. A fierce war four score and seven years later on the noting of the greatest battle of that war, the matter of slavery was on its way to become illegal – and that it did.  That victory did not dissolve the prejudice that even divided the church, resulting in a costly loss of the meaning of Scripture in that each side interpreted the Bible as defending contradictory ideas about race and forced labor.

Slavery is another ancient institution that was not at first tied to race.  Persons of color enslaved persons of color, persons of one civilization enslaved persons of another civilization (note Israel in Egypt), persons defeated in warfare enslaved the defeated enemy (note Israel and Babylon), and the story can be documented further.  One of the arguments of secularists related to biblical history that it was unlikely that a nation of people could be held as slaves in Egypt until Moses led the nation, Israel, out of Egypt to go forward to their ancestral land.  In an unpublished manuscript from William Foxwell Albright, the acknowledged prince of archaeologists, the answer to the doubt about massive slavery reported in Scripture: If the ancestors of Israel spent any length of time as Semites in Egypt, they could only do so as state slaves, since the Egyptians reacted violently against the domination of the prevailingly Semitic Hyksos (Genesis 43:32)  Albright challenged the historians by asserting that the wanderings of the Jews through the centuries and the ultimate statehood under the leadership of Ben Gurion after World War II become hard stories to believe, had mankind not been a part of history that includes the event of Israel’s experience with slavery in the Old Testament era.  Albright implies that there must be something wrong in the reporting themes and events respecting attitudes of reporters thinking currently and on their own, rather than the facts and probabilities that were applicable in all history. (Biblical Archaeological Review, March/April 2015)

This story is replicated in other circumstances along the way as occurred in the enslavement not only of the northern tribes of Israel, but later by the southern.  On occasion even Israel sold their children into hated slavery so to survive personal economic conditions.  None of this, according to Albright, is as astonishing as the preservation of Israel and the establishment of Israel, after many centuries of wanderings and persecution, to become a nation among world nations – perhaps too much for belief two millennia after Christ.  Persons and groups shabbily treated in history will not find a way out of ignominy without learning the secret of genuine forgiveness and effort to cultivate a future of truth/equality in moral civilization.