The Fall and the Fallen

Look, I was wrong. We had an approach to survival that was “stand our ground and pretend that defeat is not going to happen.” We were wrong. Based on the latest intelligence, we believe defeat is going to happen. Destruction is imminent. If we try to escape or defend ourselves, the situation gets worse. We will surrender. Yet, in surrendering, we are entrusting our fate to the God who ultimately promises to deliver us.

As hard as it would have been to give that speech, the lost, tortured, blinded Zedekiah would have given anything to turn back time and obey God. Again, I don’t want to be too hard on Zedekiah. I have not been in that situation. Yet I do wonder, How did he get to that place in which he was so defiant toward God? We knew that the fall was coming, but this did not have to happen this way. God made that clear enough. So why did it? The answer could be called “The Anatomy of a Fall.” Here are a few obvious things.

The king was living in a veritable echo chamber. You’ve heard that term before. The term echo chamber is used to describe a hollow enclosure that, based on the shape of the structure, allows sounds to reverberate. These can be used by scientists to test sound waves or by musicians to produce certain effects. The simple idea is that the sound is not lost. The voice once spoken comes back.

Metaphorically the term has come to describe an individual or a church, business, university, institution, news outlet, or other group that has created its own environment in which all they can hear is the sound of their own voice. The voice of the speaker is so loud that it is the dominant voice, and any other realities are ambient noises and little more than distractions to the main voice. We see this effect throughout the lives of these kings. They surrounded themselves with people who were only willing to tell them what they wanted to hear. There is usually safety in a multitude of counselors, yet the multitude is not effective if they are motivated by anything less than the truth. If they are motivated by a false sense of loyalty, or even a false sense of love, they have not helped when they have not told the truth.

This is why it was a shocking act of grace when God allowed the king to step outside his echo chamber. For some reason the king knew he was not getting the whole truth, so he stepped out to take counsel with Jeremiah (38:14-28). He heard another voice—the voice of truth—but it didn’t matter; he would not respond.

Over and over again in Proverbs, the wisest king Israel ever had gave his son the advice to listen to counsel. Solomon made clear that the success or failure of his son rested on his willingness to receive counsel. Look at the insightful words of Proverbs 1:1-7:

The proverbs of Solomon son of David, king of Israel:

For learning wisdom and discipline;

for understanding insightful sayings;

for receiving prudent instruction

in righteousness, justice, and integrity;

for teaching shrewdness to the inexperienced,

knowledge and discretion to a young man—

let a wise person listen and increase learning,

and let a discerning person obtain guidance—

for understanding a proverb or a parable,

the words of the wise, and their riddles.

The fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge;

fools despise wisdom and discipline.

While we do not know about all of Solomon’s sons, we do know about his successors to the throne. They rejected the voice of God who was graciously trying to protect them. While we are reading this text, sometimes I feel like I am watching an old movie in which I know people are in danger and I can’t help but yell at the screen. This is Zedekiah. Why won’t he just listen to all the obvious lessons? The answer is the root sin of pride.

As Bill Elliff said, “Pride is the mother of all sins” (“The Sin that Prevents Revival”). Pride was driving Zedekiah’s rejection of counsel. Pride produces someone who can hear but not listen. The pride of his heart had a physiological effect: it caused his ears to filter out everything he did not want to hear. The echo chamber was not around him; it was in him. The echo chamber was created by a heart that did not want to respond to God. This is the key issue. We all struggle with pride. Yet when pride is in the heart of a leader, the implications are more profound. The pride of his heart caused him the loss of family, officials, eyesight, and kingdom (39:6-7).

His blindness is a metaphor for what he could not see all along: his pride was killing him. It wasn’t supposed to be this way. He was going to exile, but he could have surrendered. He could have saved his life and the lives of those who were with him. It’s more than ironic that he died blind. He was a great king. All he is now is a metaphor.

This picture of Zedekiah scares me. It scares me in the way a mirror does when you do not know it’s there—you know, when you scare yourself.

A pride monster is inside of me because it is I. We’re attached. Occasionally I take credit for something God has done. It’s food for the monster. At other times I feed the monster from compliments I send down to him and not up to God. Over time he grows so strong that I just imagine he is real. My self-perception is perverted by the organism I keep feeding until, once permeated by the beast, I cannot listen to those who could challenge him. I will only listen to those who want to feed him. He is so demanding.

Christ came to heal us, and we are only whole when the beast is slain. He cannot be kept in the corner and ignored. It doesn’t work like that any more than you would pluck an animal from the wild and let him roam your house.

No, the pet of pride kills and destroys, so the most loving thing you can do for your God and for those you lead is to kill the beast. Kill the beast. Kill the beast.

This is precisely what Zedekiah did not want to do. He did not kill the beast; he coddled the beast. Once fed and cultivated, the beast roared and took everything. The officials, the sons, the eyesight were simply the beast roaring out of control, insatiable, wanting more. He fed the beast that killed him. I understand because I do too.

So, as we saunter through the story of the tragic fall of Jerusalem, as we walk through the rubble and ponder the mysteries of God, we feel sympathy for a blind man who is so much like us.