Israel

For some reason tonight I thought of struggles, and in particular, the idea of wrestling, of coming to grips with something.

"For we do not wrestle against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this age, against spiritual hosts of wickedness in the heavenly places."

So says St Paul in the Epistle to the Ephesians. It is an interesting image, because in some ways, it leads one's eye away from that other great wrestling match of the Bible, the one found in the 32nd chapter of Genesis:

Then Jacob was left alone; and a Man wrestled with him until the breaking of day. Now when He saw that He did not prevail against him, He touched the socket of his hip; and the socket of Jacob’s hip was out of joint as He wrestled with him. And He said, “Let Me go, for the day breaks.”

But Jacob said, “I will not let You go unless You bless me!”

So He said to him, “What is your name?”

He said, “Jacob.”

And the Man said, “Your name shall no longer be called Jacob, but Israel; for you have struggled with God and with men, and have prevailed.”

Then Jacob asked, saying, “Tell me Your name, I pray.”

And He said, “Why is it that you ask about My name?” And He blessed him there. So Jacob called the name of the place Peniel: “For I have seen God face to face, and my life is preserved.”

It is possible to contend with God, it seems. And God seems to welcome it. Why else does He allow men like Abraham and Moses to argue with Him all the time? That makes hash of the Greek philosophical argument known as the Euthyphro dilemma for the simple reason that God is not bound to fit any human idea of good, and yet is good. It lowers the philosophical hazard to believe that, than to believe that there isn't a God at all.

I invite people to wrestle with that issue, if they can bring themselves to it. Perhaps they will end up joining hands (figuratively) with the Good Doctor, Thomas Aquinas. Or maybe the other Good Doctor, Isaac Asimov. Heh.

Shifting Bricks

One of the most peculiar incidents in the Bible occurs in Exodus 5 and 6. In that passage, the Egyptian Pharaoh gets rather irritated at the requests coming from the Israelite side. So he says, "You guys want a break? Lazy, idle, good-for-nothings! Instead, I will give you more work... and make it harder!"

A lot of people question the veracity of the Biblical account of the Israelites in Egypt. They point out that there is no explicit mention of the Israelites in Egyptian records. Well, I think that just as modern Americans don't particularly talk about where in Africa some of them came from, so also the Egyptians didn't particularly care where the slaves came from as long as they did the work.

But what has the ring of truth about it, no matter how displaced in space or time, is the vindictive pressure brought to bear on the Israelites by Pharaoh. He tells them to make as many bricks as they did before, but without the reinforcement of straw. He says that they make noise because they are lazy, and the cure for that is to do more work so that they have no time to make noise. The reasoning is askew, the logic is faulty; these are elements in a grand psychosis.

He is Pharaoh, and he is a God-King. He has no interest in treating them fairly, and takes malicious delight in showing his power over them. It is this very trait, the desire to display power over others, that God uses to set the Israelites free in the end. Pharaoh just cannot let go. Even after he has allowed the Israelites to leave, he will pursue them to the destruction of his own army. And later, he will expunge those records that show his colossal lack of judgement. That is how some people have always done such things.

The Archangel Of The Perverse

I have known for a very long time what the 'imp of the perverse' is. The term crops up in a short story by Edgar Allan Poe, and is a figure of speech that describes a self-destructive impulse in which one does what one should specifically not do.

But just this other day, a wingman raises the term 'The Archangel of the Perverse'. Neither he nor I could imagine whence it came, and so I did some digging. It isn't to be googled (although I imagine it soon will be). But I do find the two words in distant and uneasy relationship in the very short epistle to St Jude (patron saint of lost causes), in the New Testament, and the Old Testament book of Numbers.

In the former book, the canonical Bible's sole archangel, Michael, is inspired to rebuke Satan in a paragraph that seems to imply that there is only one Archangel, and if Satan ever was one, he is one no longer. In the latter book, the Angel of the Lord stops Balaam the false prophet and arraigns him for animal abuse ('Wherefore hast thou smitten thine ass these three times?' says the King James Version), making it clear that whatever Balaam's intended course of action, it is perverse.

It would seem that the commonality between the two passages is one of self-destructive behaviour, in both cases rebuked by the highest of divinely-aligned powers. Michael, the power who is said to oversee Israel's historical course, must surely have his hands full in these dark days.