At the end of the day, God is God
“I will restore the fortunes of my people Israel, and they shall rebuild the ruined cities and inhabit them; they shall plant vineyards and drink their wine, and they shall make gardens and eat their fruit.” (Amos 9:14)
I suppose some of us might have been getting worried at the end there. Would God really condemn all the Israelites/Judahites to death? Would there be anyone left to carry on the name Hebrews? Would God wash the Divine Hands of this experiment ‘humanity’? Would faith-believing people ever get it right? Verse 14 allays much if not all of these fears. The ‘people Israel’ will continue. God’s wrath will not consume them totally.
There is a scene from “The Fiddler on the Roof” that exemplifies this. The main character, Reb Teyve’s daughter gets married. It is a wonderful comic scene that is filled with joy and celebration. Into the middle of this joy comes the reality of the animosity against the Jewish people in the form of a pogrom. Russian soldiers come in to disrupt the wedding feast and destroy and scatter the wedding gifts and the wedding guests. After the destruction they leave the wedding feast to go on and destroy more elsewhere. Reb Teyve tells his daughter and new son-in-law, and the other wedding guests to pick up and clean up. In other words, go on about the business of living. This is what I think God is telling the Israelites, to pick things up and go on living.
May we as people who hold on to hope against hope learn to pick up the pieces of lives, and help others pick up their lives, in the face of the evil and destruction that is in our world. Shalom.