It’s a Creeping Thing

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Ray and I spent a good part of Saturday pecking away at From Adam to Us. I finished up my writing time in Israel while Alexander the Great’s generals Ptolemy and Seleucus and their descendants were fighting over who would control the Promised Land and while the Jew Judas Maccabeus and his descendants were pushing them out.

I wondered how I would find photographs to illustrate the lesson, which is a biography of Judas Maccabeus. In the end I was able to scrape together eight. Two photos from a city built in Israel in the early 300s BC break my heart. I know that the city broke God’s heart back then.

Alexander the Great and his army spread Greek culture from Greece to Persia as they conquered kingdom after kingdom. When four of his generals, including Ptolemy and Seleucus, divided up his empire after his death, they continued to spread Greek culture. This spread is called Hellenization.

God used one part of Hellenization for good — the spread of the Koine Greek language. When the New Testament was written in Koine Greek, people from many nations could read it. On the other hand, as Greek culture spread, so did pagan Greek religion.

Visitors to Israel today can visit Bet She’an National Park. Bet She’an was a city in Israel during the reigns of King David and King Solomon, but Assyrian forces destroyed it in 731 BC.

In the late 300s, the Greeks built the city back, as a Greek city with colonnaded streets, bathhouses, fountains, theaters, and pagan temples. The photos I chose for the lesson included one that showed colonnades with a countryside scene of Israel in the background and one of a sculpture of a Greek god.

How could Israelite mamas and daddies let this tragedy happen? How could descendants of people who crossed over the Red Sea on dry land, of people who saw the walls of Jericho fall down, and of people who listened as King Solomon prayed to dedicate God’s temple in Jerusalem make choices that eventually allowed pagan temples and idols to exist in the land God had promised to Abraham and his descendants?

Hadn’t God told them what He wanted them to do? Hadn’t He warned them? Hadn’t He commanded them:

You shall teach them to your sons,
talking of them when you sit in your house and
when you walk along the road and 
when you lie down and when you rise up.
Deuteronomy 11:19

I like watching the clematis creep up the trellis in my garden . . .

. . . and the vinca . . .

. . . and the thyme creep onto the garden path.

Sometimes creeping things are good, but when sin creeps slowly in and people get more and more used to it until they don’t even realize that things are changing little by little, that is not good.

The Israelites didn’t go from a triumphal walk across the dry ground of the Jordan River into the Promised Land to having a city with pagan Greek temples overnight. It was a creeping kind of thing — and not one of the good kind.

And do not be conformed to this world,
but be transformed by the renewing of your mind,
so that you may prove what the will of God is,
that which is good and acceptable and perfect.
Romans 12:2

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