Musings on The Book of Eli

I haven't seen the movie The Book of Eli but I have read the book How the Irish Saved Civilization. Thomas Cahill's work describes how the island people preserved Western civilization from being entirely lost, copying Bibles as fast as their hands could write while barbarians were running around torching the libraries of Europe. I understand that Eli is also about protecting the Bible (though reviews suggest the idea is books in general, which may be so).

All this was marinating in my brain this morning as I happened to read Jeremiah 36 and plunged into a little fantasy of my own.

The seventh century B.C. prophet records a scene that would seem odd transposed in our day. God has commanded Jeremiah to commit to a scroll all the pronouncements of judgment (as well as future restoration) that he has been announcing (with very little to show for it) for decades to the stiff-necked Israelites. Jeremiah has his friend Baruch take dictation. Then he dispatches Baruch to read the scroll aloud in the temple, in a last desperate hope that the people will repent and yet avert God's wrath.

The part that strikes me as delightfully odd is that the princes actually listen. Somebody important at court named Michaiah overhears Baruch's reading, and grabs him and hauls him off to the scribe's chamber in the king's house, where at a hastily assembled clandestine meeting he has him reread all the words he just read to Elishama, and Delaiah, and Elnathan, and Gemariah, etcetera. These hang on every syllable, and the men confer and agree that these words must be brought to the attention of the king himself.

What a refreshing idea---that God's word is not just pretty or poetry or devotional material or a quiet-time ritual or inspiring, but urgent. If we don't get this right, we're dead men!

Since 2010 appears to be the year of the apocalyptic Hollywood film (The Road, 2012, The Book of Eli), I would like to suggest for next month's offering a script based on Jeremiah 36. It has all the elements we need for an end times plot, based as it is on the final days of Judah before its destruction by Nebuchadnezzar. Oh, that our own nation---from the greatest to the least---would tremble at God's every word the way Eli did, and the way the princes of Israel did. Someone get a Bible to Capitol Hill and 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, quick. There may yet be time.

"But this is the one to whom I will look: he who is humble and contrite in spirit and trembles at my word" (Isaiah 66:2).

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