Ezra Azra
© Copyright 2024 by Ezra Azra
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Gold Rusts Ezra Azra © Copyright 2024 by Ezra Azra |
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In the Bible narrative, almighty god Jehovah created us. He was so enamored of the idea that He went all out and created us in His very own image:
“And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness.”
Sadly, after a happy time, we failed Him so seriously that He cursed us to a horrible existence, forever after:
‘Unto
Adam God said, cursed is the ground for thy sake. In sorrow shalt
thou eat of it all the days of thy life. Thorns and thistles shall it
bring forth to thee. And the Lord God said unto the woman, I will
greatly multiply thy sorrow.’
In the Bible narrative, we failed Jehovah because of the evil in the serpent which Jehovah had created.
Evil? Where did evil originate? There is no record of evil being among Jehovah’s countless creations in those first six days of creations before He stopped, happily, forever.
Whatever motivated that serpent to start all the failure, it is not named evil in the Bible:
“Now the serpent was more subtil than any beast of the field which the Lord God had made. And he said unto the woman---.”
Most of the books that make up the Bible speak about Jehovah’s desperate attempts to overcome the evil that is in us.
At least four times, evil in humans drove God Jehovah to want to kill all humans:
“And God saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every imagination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually. And it repenteth the Lord that He had made man on the earth, and it grieved him at his heart. And the Lord said, I will destroy man whom I have created, from the face of the earth; both man, and beast, and the creeping thing, and the fowls of the air; for it repenteth me that I have made them.”;
“The Lord said, I have seen this people, and, behold, it is a stiffnecked people. Now, therefore, let me alone, that my wrath may wax hot against them, and that I may consume them.”;
“Behold, I create new heavens and a new earth: and the former shall not be remembered, nor come to mind.”;
“I saw a new heaven and a new earth: for the first heaven and the first earth were passed away.”
Eventually,
sadly, inexplicably, almighty Jehovah gave up trying. He promised to
send a Messiah who would accomplish the task for Him.
Jehovah’s promise was made over three thousand years ago, according to the Bible’s narrative. Jehovah’s promised Messiah has not yet shown up to correct Jehovah’s admitted failure, despite promising us on five different occasions, nineteen hundred years ago: “I will come unto thee quickly.”
While we have been waiting for the Jehovah-promised Messiah, Geoffrey Chaucer was the first to dare to bring up the question of where did evil originate.
Since the answer was bound to include comment on the Bible’s negligence to have answered the question, Chaucer had to be very, very careful. Those were Times when the Christian authorities burned persons at the stake for claiming to know more about the Bible than the Christian authorities.
Thousands and thousands of persons had been already stake-burned to death before Chaucer’s lifetime. The last Christian to be so immolated in Chaucer’s Christian England was William Tyndale, over three hundred years after Chaucer’s peaceful death from natural causes.
William Tyndale was a highly qualified person. He had translated the Bible into English for all people in England! That highest professional and societal status did not protect Tyndale from the stake-burning Church authorities.
Geoffrey Chaucer was a mere secular poet!
Chaucer’s approach was, ingeniously, through his coined poetic proverb: “If gold rust, what shall iron do?”
On the one hand, in the Bible narrative, Jehovah’s spiritual perfection is continually linked directly with gold, at least twenty-two times:
“Thou, O Lord, remainest forever; thy throne from generation to generation, comparable to fine gold.”;
“In the seventh month, in the one and twentieth day of the month, came the word of the Lord by the prophet, saying, I will shake all nations. I will fill this house with glory. All its gold is mine, saith the Lord of hosts.”;
“And it shall come to pass, saith the Lord, I will bring them through the fire, and I will refine them as gold is refined, and I will try them, as gold is tried. They shall call on my name, and I will hear them. I will say, It is my people. And they shall say, The Lord is my God.”
On the other hand, within Christian reference, Chaucer’s associating gold with a possibility of rust was dangerously close to sacrilege, Chaucer’s mere proverbial poetry notwithstanding.
With
the Christian moral stake-burner police of the times, it was a
powerful fact in Chaucer’s favor that the character about whom
he observed “If gold rust---” was a Christian role model.
Chaucer could credibly claim, if officially interrogated by the
Christian authorities stake burners, that his proverbial question was
intended to apply to only his highest holy Christian character:
“A good man was there of religion.
He was a poor parson of a town,
But he was rich in holy thought.
He was also a learned scholar
Who would preach Christ's gospel.
His parish wide; houses far apart.
Going by foot, in his hand a staff,
He gave example to his sheep:
He wrought; afterward he taught
Words out of the gospel.
This metaphor he added also:
If gold rust, what must iron do?
If a priest we trust, be foul,
It’s no wonder a layman go bad.”
Even though Chaucer’s question was, in its context, meant to be merely rhetorical, “If gold rust”, it yet invites an association of base rust with gold’s pristine purity; and so invites an association of evil with Jehovah Himself.
The
image of Himself which Jehovah forged in us, was made of dust(dirt)
mixed with His holy breath:
“The Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul.”
No authority, Christian or other, has explained why almighty God Jehovah stooped to scoop dust(filth) with which to make man, allegedly His highest creation.
That ineradicable dust(filthy dirt) in us adulterates, vitiates, corrupts the breath of God in us into being an ineradicable evil force in us.
And so, because in us dirt and divinity cannot exist in harmony for long, so are we doomed sooner or later, to degenerate into disobedient stiffneckedness towards Jehovah, no matter how good He is to us for awhile; now-and-then; sooner-and-later.
We are so in the image of God, after His likeness, that the evil the dust generates in us is, as well, in the likeness of the evil in Jehovah Himself, at DNA level.
In other words, the outer dust was not the first origin of evil in us; evil’s origin is in Jehovah Himself! In the Bible narrative, it is recorded at least ninety-four times when Jehovah freely chose to be evil!:
“Thus saith the Lord God, Arise thou therefore, and get thee to thine own house. And when thy feet enter into the city, the child shall die.”;
“Then God sent an evil spirit
between Abimelech and the men of Shechem.”;
“The Spirit of the Lord departed from Saul, and an evil spirit from the Lord troubled him.”;
“The Lord had appointed to defeat the good counsel of Ahithophel, to the intent that the Lord might bring evil upon Absalom.”
The really depressing fact is that, in His promised Messiah, Jehovah’s plan of redemption will make deliberately worse His original dust-in-us mistake, by coagulating that dust into a stone:
‘I heard the son of man saying in a great voice as of a trumpet, when I saw Him: I am alpha and omega, the first and the last. To him that overcometh I will give to eat a white stone; and in that stone a new name written, which no man knoweth saving he that receiveth it.’
In other words, our real hope for eternal salvation is not in Jehovah’s promised Messiah, but, somehow, by Geoffrey Chaucer’s subliminal clue, the gold that is Jehovah who can choose to never rust!
Is
Geoffrey Chaucer’s poetic proverbial intimation, ‘Please,
Jehovah, retract your Messiah promise and return to us and take
another shot at doing it yourself?’
Why not? After all, it is recorded in the Bible that almighty God Jehovah ‘repents’ and withdraws decisions of His at least nineteen times!