Rising sun

Jereboam II presided over the good times. Israel wrested free of the thumb of Aram, and expanded its boundaries "from Lebo hamath to the Sea of the Arabah." Not only so, but all this was accomplished "in accordance with the word of the Lord, the God of Israel, spoken through his servant Jonah, son of Amittai, the prophet from Gath Hepher" (2 Kings 14:25).

Is not the Lord blessing this nation? What can be clearer? We have as evidence the conjunction of the prosperity itself and a prophet's pronouncements. What a court favorite Jonah must have been!

As a matter of fact, this was the last hurrah before Doomsday --- the well-oiled machinery of Assyria under Tiglath-Pileser (745-727 B.C.) and then Sennacherib (701B.C.). A complacent nation had wrongly gauged the Lord's pleasure, and their own spiritual okayness, by the weather-vane method. God had to get the attention of a certain hyper-patriotic prophet in the belly of a fish: I'm telling you a second time. Go preach to the Ninevites; they're no more unworthy of mercy than Israel.

It seems silly to us now what Israel responded to Jeremiah's warnings of national spiritual adultery: "We will not listen to you….for then [during the time of our idolatry] we had plenty of food, and prospered, and saw no disaster. But since we left off making offerings to the Queen of Heaven and pouring out drink offerings to her, we have lacked everything and have been consumed by the sword and by famine" (Jeremiah 44:16-18). Huh? Some cause-and-effect-challenged reasoning there.

In 1787 Benjamin Franklin had a view of the half sun on the back of George Washington's large chair. He later remarked, "I have often looked at that picture behind the President without being able to tell whether it was a rising or setting sun…."

The best way to tell is not by Wall Street but by the Word of God.