We’ve all had “bad hair days” – and we all know this cliché has nothing do with hair – unless we’re talking about those annoying little contributions deposited by our pet cats throughout the house. You know what a typical bad hair day looks like: the dishwasher flooding all over the kitchen; one of the kids getting sick at school and needing to be picked up; being handed that dreaded pink slip at work.
When it comes to bad hair days, the entire nation of Israel comes to mind; except its bad hair days were bad hair decades and even centuries. It’s fair to say that Israel has experienced a bad hair history. Yes, the Jewish people can look back and remember a handful of stellar episodes in their narrative, like their exodus out of Egypt in the 15th century BC; or their world supremacy under the administration of King Solomon almost five centuries later; and most recently, their reunification as a nation back in May of 1948, after 2,000 years of dispersion and dissolution, something unprecedented in all of history.
However, when these blessed events are viewed against the backdrop of all of Israel’s events, they’re virtually lost in the deluge of cursed events the nation has undergone. A smattering of examples will illustrate: 400 years in Egyptian slavery; two exiles at the hands of the Assyrians and the Babylonians; the near annihilation of the entire race due to Haman the Hangman’s decree in the early 5th century BC; the actual disintegration of the nation as a nation in 70 AD when the Roman Emperor Titus invaded and decimated Israel; and of course, as comparatively recent as the Nazi Holocaust during WWII when 6 million of the then 9.5 million European Jews were exterminated.
So what about Israel today? Why not come out this Sunday to hear the good news for the nation? – and for all who believe in the God of the Bible in a sermon I’ve entitled, “All Bad Hair Days Will Cease.”
