- Had I Known…
Sometimes, potential disasters come with such alluring benefits as blind the common sense of their prospective preys. At such ensnaring times, even the howling voices of loving caution tend to sound in mesmerised ears as the hypocrisy of jealous witches. Usually, only after the terrible monster has claimed its prey does everyone go back to regret the road signs ignored. Only then do they bemoan the hidden costs ignored in the haste for apparent benefits. Nothing is free in life. Somebody has either paid, or will; somehow, someday. I would usually say that Moab never gives free bread. Here’s the story again.
- Seduced by Bread
Once upon a time, a prophetic family endowed with a messianic and royal destiny faced famine in their land. It was an ironic famine. The name of their land meant “the house of bread,” yet the time came when there was no bread to find. On the contrary, in a faraway land with no bread in its name, in a land commonly detested for its ancestral incest, there was bread; plenty of bread for everyone.
There seemed to have been a dilemma: to go or to stay. That was when a strange wind might have whispered in their ears, “Why wait until you die of hunger in a ‘house of bread’ without bread, when Moab offers you such free bread only a distance away? Why be so fatally legalistic about mere bread?” That was ‘common sense,’ it seemed, so the family of four took off at once from Bethlehem-Judah to Moab; to a land with a stigmatized history repudiated by holy Jews, because that race had sprung from a widowed drunk father impregnating his scheming desperate daughter.
- The Baited Bread Party
The family arrived in Moab. They settled among those people of whom God had said that none from their abominable stock would enter His holy house until a tenth generation (Deuteronomy 23:3). They arrived to a lavish reception of breads: Moab sweet bread, Moab coconut bread, whole wheat bread, brown bread, buttered bread, French croissant, round bread, Indian naan bread, the Brazilian pao de queijo, the flat Greek pita bread, Nigeria’s famous Agege bread, and even a homely Jewish challah to remind of God’s holy Sabbaths. Wao! God is good. God must be leading. ‘Holier’ Bethlehem-Judah must have been fooling everyone with a promise and a name it couldn’t fulfil.
- Moab’s Bread Taxes
Moab gave them enough time to settle down to its baited breads, then came calling for the Special Bread Taxes that every stranger paid in non-refundable currencies of the soul. Eaters often paid with the lives of their males – or with their lives if they were males. First stage of the Moab Tax Process (MTP): all the males in that hitherto promising family seemed mysteriously castrated by the powers of the land. The father had no more child as long as he was there. His two hopeful sons married local Moab girls, but try as they did, none of them could father a child – not in Moab. Next stage in the MTP, the land began to claim their souls – beginning from the top of the list; from the oldest to the youngest. The men began to drop dead one after the other, starting with the father – all of them departing childless, in Moab.
Moab gives no free bread, it was beginning to be realized. Besides, it would appear that the prognostic Enemy, spying their Messianic and royal destiny, was determined to eliminate that lineage early. But the merciful God still had His Plan B. That will be a story for another day.
From The Preacher’s diary,
September 12, 2022.