How sin empties us out and the choice we face
2 Kings 17:1-23
I have mentioned on this blog C.S. Lewis’ imaginative treatment of heaven and hell in The Great Divorce, as busloads of hell-dwellers get a chance to visit heaven. These people experience heaven as a beautiful but unbearably solid place, where blades of grass are sharp and unbending and droplets of water like stones. Likewise, the people in heaven have the same solid quality. The trouble is, that the visitors are like ghosts, transparent and without substance so that heaven is not attractive but painful to them. What Lewis so creatively portrays is the quality of those who follow the Lord as opposed to those who do not. While he describes a spiritual reality, this hollow quality of life is visible to us even physically in some extreme cases, for instance, in the faces of those who lived a life of dissipation. How does one come to this point, and can the process be reversed?
Israel’s emptiness and its cause
Israel’s story reflects a similar trajectory summed up as ‘they followed emptiness and became empty’ (2 Kings 17:15, NABRE). The Hebrew word hevel (NASB ‘emptiness/empty) means something like vapour, an ephemeral reality without substance, hence translations like ‘useless’, ‘empty’, ‘vain’, ‘worthless’. Used frequently in Ecclesiastes (‘vanity of vanities’, Eccl. 1:2), it describes what is transitory and meaningless. For Israel, their spiritual emptiness will also become a physical reality as they are emptied out all that is meaningful in Assyrian captivity (2 Kings 17:6). The key issue leading to this is not breaking pernickety rules but breaking the relationship with God. The Lord saved His people from Pharaoh and Egypt’s power, but they chose to worship other gods and follow the customs of the very people whom God drove out because of those customs (2 Kings 17:7-8)! It is a brazen attitude that fails to appreciate both God’s power and grace.
The pathology of sin
What follows is a litany of sins from building high places (shrines where God’s worship got mixed up with pagan concerns, 2 Kings 17:9) to the worship of other gods, child sacrifice and forbidden occult practices (2 Kings 17:16-17; Deut 18:10-12). The gods they chose were ones that promised to meet their needs for fertility of land and people (Asherah; 2 Kings 17:10),[1] for rain (the storm god, Baal; 2 Kings 17:16) and for power (the golden calves (v.16). God gave them opportunities to repent through His prophets (2 Kings 17:13) but they refused to listen and rejected God’s ways (2 Kings 17:14-15). The expression that they ‘sold themselves to do evil’ (2 Kings 17:17) suggests that they gave away their lives in exchange for perceived benefits and enslaved themselves in the process. Even in direst need, Israel (and later Judah) could not bring themselves to repent. Consistently choosing sin wrought changes in their perspective and attitude that made repentance too painful to contemplate.
The choice that can reverse the effects of sin
Our passage sheds light on the pathology of sin, how it starts with the severing of the relationship with God when we refuse to acknowledge that He has saved us. We were created for this relationship and when we walk away from it, we will inevitably fill our lives with counterfeit goods that parade as gods but are empty and without substance. Thus, we might look for happiness in status, wealth, health, relationships, a career, experiences, pleasure and so on. Yet in our eagerness for the benefits, we sell ourselves into the power of sin hoping to fill the gap that rejecting God left. Ironically, God saved us to be free from the mastery of sin, but we give ourselves back into its power when we sin. Moreover, we become what we worship (Ps 115:4-8). The more we chase after things that are hollow and will never truly satisfy, the emptier we ourselves become and frequently the less able to hear His call. As so often, Scripture portrays our alternatives through dramatic situations. Nevertheless, we face those same choices in our mundane reality. Every time we choose sin, we are slipping away from God, every time we choose Him, our lives develop substance and fullness, a solid reality that reflects godlike qualities of love and true goodness. May we repent of wrongdoing when we catch ourselves in the act and keep choosing the Lord.
[1] Asherah is the name of the fertility goddess. Asherim is the plural, which is also used for the cultic symbols (usually wooden poles) that represented the deity.
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