The Jerusalem Experiment

“A land flowing with milk and honey…” God’s promise to the people of Israel was not a precursor to the prosperity gospel. Rather, God was relaying his intention to pull His people from the clutches of slavery in Egypt (a land flowing with wheat and water) and bring them back into the patriarchal land where folks like Abraham and Jacob planted tiny vineyards and shepherded massive flocks of sheep and goats. They were sojourners in a strange land of hillside terraces, desert wastelands, and vivid wildflowers. They made covenants with pagan kings out of necessity, searched the heaves from some semblance of the mysterious God who had brought them from the serene rivers of Babylon, and slowly annexed established clans and wilderness wanders in order to become a people.

“A land flowing with milk and honey…” Believe it or not ancient Israelites drank goat’s milk. Apparently my mom fed me the stuff when I was really little, hoping I would turn out more holy. After 430 years in Egypt, the Israelites return home, a land no one who crossed the Jordan had ever seen. The first Israelite settlements were likely scattered tents in backwoods places like Shiloah, Mizpah and Shechem. They searched steep hillsides for sparse patches of grass in order to keep tiny flocks alive during summer months, cut into dusty and rocky soil in hopes of establishing vineyards and keeping ancient olive groves alive. All the while, the Israelites ebbed and flowed in their devotion to the God who promised,

And if you will indeed obey my commandments that I command you today, to love the LORD your God, and to serve him with all your heart and with all your soul, he will give the rain for your land in its season, the early rain and the later rain, that you may gather in your grain and your wine and your oil. And he will give grass in your fields for your livestock, and you shall eat and be full (Deut. 11:13-15).

Terraced farming west of Jerusalem

The Promised Land was never meant to constitute a manifest destiny filled with BMWs, palatial pavilions and aquamarine pools. God was leading His people into a land of…enough. Because prosperity breeds the illusion of autonomy and blindness to the truth that not even a crooked hair atop our heads falls to the floor without God’s concent. The moment we forget that everything we have is a gift, that we are entitled to nothing, is the moment we start setting up idols on hillsides and screaming on mountaintops for our Baals to show up (1 Ki 18). In the opening act of Solomon’s kingdom, the writer of 1 Kings 4:25 speaks of a situation in which Israel had finally entered into the kind of reality the Lord promised when he drew the heart of Moses with the burning bush,

And Judah and Israel lived in safety, from Dan even to Beersheba, every man under his vine and under his fig tree, all the days of Solomon

No mention of riches, no empire building, only a simple devotion to YHWH and his promised provision. More than enough. Shalom.

But our hungry hearts, violently slipping out of contentment, constantly crave things we were never meant to hold. This was Solomon’s condition,

When you come to the land that the LORD your God is giving you, and you possess it and dwell in it and then say, ‘I will set a king over me…Only he must not acquire many horses for himself or cause the people to return to Egypt in order to acquire many horses since the LORD has said to you, ‘You shall never return that way again.’ And he shall not acquire many wives for himself, lest his heart turn away, nor shall he acquire for himself excessive silver and gold (Deut. 17:14, 16-17).

An aim towards needless aquisition is the threshhold to spiritual ruin. Case in point: Solomon

Thus King Solomon excelled all the kings of the earth in riches and in wisdom. And the whole earth sought the presence of Solomon to hear his wisdom, which God had put into his mind. Every one of them brought his present, articles of silver and gold, garments, myrrh, spices, horses, and mules, so much year by year (1 Ki. 10:23-25)

Silver and Gold. Check.

And Solomon gathered together chariots and horsemen. He had 1,400 chariots and 12,000 horsemen…And Solomon’s import of horses was from Egypt and Kue (1 Ki. 10:26, 28).

Horses. Check.

Now King Solomon loved many foreign women, along with the daughter of Pharaoh: Moabite, Ammonite, Edomite…from the nations concerning which the LORD had said to the people of Israel, ‘You shall not enter into marriage with them, neither shall they with you, for surely they will turn away your heart after their gods.’ Solomon clung to those in love (1 Ki. 11:1-2).

Women. Check. Exclamation point.

a fig tree tucked into the hills of Judah

As Solomon accumulates, His heart turns away from the Lord. More than enough is no longer enough for the man who quickly becomes the envy of the Ancient Near Eastern world. Israel was never meant to be an empire, never meant to hoard wealth and point people back towards itself. Israel was supposed to be a brotherhood of priests, a holy nation, a nation devoted to the Lord’s glory being made manifest through the in-breaking of His shalom. A vine and a fig tree…more than enough.

A brutally honest personal inventory may be helpful here.

Do you complain about what you don’t have instead of being grateful for what God has provided? Does gratitude rise like the evening tide in your heart? Does it spill out into acts of love? Does gratitude leave you smiling, giving, embracing and whispering, “God, you’ve given me a simple vine, a modest fig tree, your love and grace and redemption. I have more than enough.