Fast friends

Ah, reconciliation. Isn’t it grand?

There is good evidence that on Nov. 2, in a town called Atareb, west of Aleppo, Syria’s largest city, two hitherto nemeses agreed to bury the hatchet and start working together. According to forces in Syrian rebel groups helped by the United States, ISIS and the Nusra Front, al-Qaeda’s affiliate in Syria, agreed to put aside their bitter rivalry and turn their faces in unison against Kurdish fighters in northern Syria.

This is no marriage made in Jannah, of course. The center will not hold indefinitely, for John’s Revelation foretells what happens to power alliances based on hatred for God’s people:

“And the ten horns that you saw, they and the beast will hate the prostitute. They will make her desolate and naked, and devour her flesh, and burn her up with fire … (Revelation 17:16, ESV).

Whomever you make out to be represented by the “ten horns” and the “beast” and the “prostitute” or great “harlot,” it is clear that these players are initially in league against the people of God, and then at some point there is a turning on each other. For it was never love that bound them but hate.

C.S. Lewis effectively captures the unstable nature of cooperatives of hate in his short work Screwtape Letters. He does so by springing it on us at the end of the book. All indications throughout the correspondences between master demon and demon-in-training were that the enemies of the earthly “patients” were friends (though the discerning reader gleans hints of suppressed animosity throughout the letters). Finally, after reams of missives regularly ending with “Your affectionate uncle, Screwtape,” when the postulant has failed to snag the soul he was assigned to, we find this final revelatory post from the disapproving elder:

“Meanwhile, I have you to settle with. Most truly do I sign myself, Your increasingly and ravenously affectionate, Screwtape.”

In the course of relating the most earthshaking story in the annals of the world, the crucifixion of Jesus for our sins, the evangelist Luke anticlimactically notes the following historical footnote:

“… Herod and Pilate became friends with each other that very day, for before this they had been at enmity with each other” (Luke 23:12, ESV).

It proves to me the existence of glee of a mutual hatred for God, even where there is not necessarily anything to gain strategically, as in the rapprochement of ISIS and al-Qaeda. But it would be folly for us to suppose that the two rulers of the ancient Middle East went on to experience the through-thick-and-thin devotion that we associate with Jonathan and David (1 Samuel 18:1).

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