Today’s Scripture Reading (December 18, 2016): 2 Kings 16
“Let us sacrifice our today so that our children can have a better tomorrow.” The words belong to A. P. J. Abdul Kalam, the eleventh President of India. A follower of Islam, Kalam was the great unifier of India’s diverse cultures. His plea was that his people would learn to live together in peace – and prosperity – bringing a better tomorrow for the future of India. One of the reasons for his policies and personal habits of unification was so that the India of tomorrow would be one from which the children of the nation would benefit. With unification comes strength. The only thing that division ever brings is weakness. It is a lesson that Muhammad taught in the very early days of Islam. But it is also a lesson that his followers have not always appreciated.
The building of a better tomorrow for is not something that I feel my generation has done well with, often because we do not want to sacrifice. We want things easy now. The national debt that the West is handing to our kids is obscene. And the reality is that at some point, the money will have to be repaid. Maybe not in our time, but in the time of our children, or maybe our grandchildren. Kalam’s plea of sacrifice to build a better world for our kids seems to have fallen on deaf ears. That scares me. Instead of sacrificing today so our children can have a better tomorrow, we appear to want to sacrifice tomorrow (and our kids), so that we can have a better today.
Maybe we are a step better than Ahaz, but only a step. The practice that the author of Kings is referring to here is the worship of the god (or maybe better phrased, the demon) Moloch. The worship of Moloch included the building of a large brass idol representation of the god, often seen with the head of a bull. The hands of Moloch were outstretched, and the priests would build a fire at the base of the idol. Of course, a fire at the base of a brass idol means that soon the whole idol would be red hot. When the idol was suitably heated, the father would place his infant son in the outstretched hands of the god. The child would scream as he was slowly burned to death. To hide the screams, the priests would bang loudly on drums so that the father could not hear the cries of his child.
The first-century historian Plutarch wrote that –
... with full knowledge and understanding they themselves offered up their own children, and those who had no children would buy little ones from poor people and cut their throats as if they were so many lambs or young birds; meanwhile the mother stood by without a tear or moan; but should she utter a single moan or let fall a single tear, she had to forfeit the money, and her child was sacrificed nevertheless; and the whole area before the statue was filled with a loud noise of flutes and drums took the cries of wailing should not reach the ears of the people.
The children were sacrificed in a perversion of Kalam’s desire – The children were sacrificed so that the adults could enjoy a better today.
Tomorrow’s Scripture Reading: Isaiah 1
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