BEING HUMAN

#BeingHuman. #BrutalHonesty. Ten contemplations, 15 to 18 August 2025. When Assyria is your enemy, Babylon is not your friend. Will we be Hezekiah’s church?

One. The summit. On 15 August 2025, as the world watched two aging emperors meet in what their handlers called an extraordinary peace summit, I found myself watching the ancient folly of King Hezekiah play out in real time. Trump, the returning king of the American empire, and Putin, the enduring czar of the russian realm, sat displaying their respective treasures, and those treasures were the right of the strong, spheres of influence, and promises of mutual non-interference in each other’s imperial projects.

There will be peace and security in our days, each seemed to whisper to his own audience, even as Ukrainian children go on being killed and injured every day and night through 1,272 days of this unprovoked full-scale war, and even as democratic institutions strain under authoritarian accommodation. The success of that summit was measured by the temporary quieting of tensions that threatened comfortable arrangements of power, rather than by justice for the violated or a just peace for the victims of aggression.

Here was Hezekiah’s choice made visible: secure an immediate peace through compromise with tomorrow’s destroyer, and call it wisdom. Prophetic voices warning of future captivity were dismissed as obstacles to peace, since what mattered was peace in their own days, never mind the inheritance left to the next generation.

Watching this theater of empire, I had to return to a biblical story that speaks with unsettling relevance to our moment and to the institutional global church. What happens when people who claim to follow the Prince of Peace mistake imperial arrangements for the peace of God?

Two. The ancient folly. Jerusalem’s walls still bear scorch marks from Assyrian siege machines, and by God’s intervention the enemy has withdrawn. Hezekiah, recently healed from a deadly illness, receives a diplomatic delegation from distant Babylon. They arrive with gifts and pleasantries, presenting themselves as natural allies against a shared Assyrian threat, and the king, perhaps intoxicated by his recent deliverance and eager to secure new friendships for his own lifetime, opens every door of his palace and his treasury.

What follows is breathtaking naivety. Hezekiah had previously stripped gold and silver from the temple doors to pay tribute to Assyria, much like churches today that have already traded their prophetic voice for political and cultural relevance, wanting to belong to power. Now, with his wealth mysteriously replenished, he parades everything in his storehouses before these foreign dignitaries: silver and gold, precious spices and oils, his entire armory, every treasure in his kingdom, and nothing remains hidden anywhere in his realm. “And Hezekiah was attentive to them, and showed them all the house of his treasures, the silver and gold, the spices and precious ointment, and all his armory, all that was found among his treasures. There was nothing in his house or in all his dominion that Hezekiah did not show them” (2 Kings 20:13, NKJV).

Are we not sometimes equally eager to display our political connections and our cultural influence to any power that promises protection and a share in that same right of the strong, in exchange for unquestioned loyalty?

Then Isaiah arrives with words that cut straight through the king’s diplomatic euphoria: “Behold, the days are coming when all that is in your house, and what your fathers have accumulated until this day, shall be carried to Babylon; nothing shall be left, says the Lord. And they shall take away some of your sons who will descend from you, whom you will beget; and they shall be eunuchs in the palace of the king of Babylon” (2 Kings 20:17–18, NKJV).

And Hezekiah’s reply reveals the whole moral bankruptcy of his political calculus: “The word of the Lord which you have spoken is good!” For he said, “Will there not be peace and truth at least in my days?” (2 Kings 20:19, NKJV).

Three. But what kind of peace? Hezekiah spoke of peace as though it were simply the cessation of external threat, the quieting of siege engines, the withdrawal of foreign armies from his borders. But real peace, shalom, is the presence of God’s justice, the flourishing of the vulnerable, the healing of wounds and the restoration of right relationships between peoples, rather than the mere absence of war.

The peace Hezekiah secured through his Babylonian alliance was the peace of the privileged, purchased by displaying his power and wealth to those who would eventually destroy his people. It was the peace of those who can afford temporary security while ignoring the storm clouds on the horizon, and the peace of a generation willing to mortgage its children’s future for immediate comfort. This is what I mean when I keep repeating: keep your children away from war.

How often do the institutional structures of the global church settle for this same counterfeit? We celebrate victories for religious freedom inside Christian empires while staying silent about the systemic injustice that crushes the poor in Ukraine and in other places, including a Middle East that too many evangelicals now find inconvenient to name. We tout traditional Christian family values while turning away from the family-destroying forces of war, economic inequality and the predatory capitalism of a prosperity gospel we have baptized as blessed by God, whether through a faith office in the White House or a religious public chamber in the Kremlin.

Hezekiah’s peace was fundamentally selfish, since his horizon reached no further than his own lifetime, his own comfort, his own reputation. What he secured was peace for himself and his immediate court rather than peace for his children and for the people of Judah, who would live with the consequences of his shortsighted diplomacy.

Four. But what kind of truth? And what of the truth he claimed to embrace? He called Isaiah’s devastating prophecy good and spoke of truth existing in his own days, but what truth was that? The truth that sets captives free, or the truth that lets captors sleep soundly? What he accepted was partial and comfortable, a truth that confirmed his own temporary peace while ignoring the judgment it pronounced.

This is the truth that lets us nod in agreement with prophetic warnings while living as though those warnings applied to everyone except ourselves. How many church leaders today echo his response? Yes, yes, judgment may come, persecution may increase, the culture may turn against us, but surely not in our days and not on our watch, praise the Lord, and surely we can secure a little more peace for ourselves, a little more cultural influence, a little more political power before the bill comes due.

That is truth divorced from love, prophecy separated from ethics, warning disconnected from repentance, and it is the existential poverty of Christian imperialism, which turns the Gospel from good news for the poor into good news for those who can afford to buy their way out of consequences. It is the hermeneutic of empire: reading Scripture in ways that justify our compromises rather than challenge our complicity, pursuing the peace of Babylon and calling it the peace of Jerusalem.

Five. The prophecy fulfilled. The prophecy proved devastatingly accurate. Hezekiah died around 686 BC, and exactly a hundred years later, in 586 BC, Nebuchadnezzar’s armies laid siege to Jerusalem for eighteen grueling months. The temple burned, the walls crumbled, and tens of thousands began a seventy-year march into Babylonian exile. Babylon also took Syria, Palestine and much of Phoenicia, all the territories neighboring Judah. The enemy of Assyria had become the destroyer of Judah.

Six. Our contemporary Babylonian moment. As I write these reflections after an extraordinary peace summit, Hezekiah’s story serves as a warning. But are we listening? The seductive logic that the enemy of my enemy must be my friend keeps tempting God’s people, and it leads us to baptize political alliances built on the right of the strong with a theological significance they cannot bear.

The mills of God’s history grind slowly and exceedingly fine. Empires rise and fall with the regularity of seasons, and among some prominent evangelical leaders today, and I would rather not name them since you can guess as you read them, I hear the echo of Hezekiah: as long as there is peace and security in our days, what does it matter what comes after?

But what legacy are we building for the generation that has to inherit our compromises? What are we teaching the next generation of theological leaders and missionaries?

Seven. The Church’s true calling. The Church is called to be a prophetic voice to the empire, within the empire and beyond it, bearing witness to a Kingdom that operates by entirely different principles, Gospel and Kingdom values rather than merely traditional and family ones, and not to serve as chaplain to a Christian empire, blessing its wars and sanctifying its power. How often do we find ourselves more fluent in the language of political expediency and both-sidesism than in the grammar of grace and mercy for the vulnerable and the injured?

The cross of the crucified God, and the seven exclamations from it that so many evangelicals find uncomfortable, stands as a permanent question mark over every earthly Christian empire, including those that claim divine guidance and the blessing of a faith office in Washington or a religious chamber in Moscow. Are we prepared for the exile that comes with saying so?

I name these two because both have a direct impact on Ukraine as a country and a people, and on the Church here. And we still remember the difference between a Christian community and the people of God, the Community of Hope in the United States, in Europe, in the Global South. But what does faithfulness to the Kingdom look like when both Assyria and Babylon court our allegiance?

Eight. A global church in crisis over justice and just peace. Much of the global church’s institutional structure is living out Hezekiah’s folly in real time across several theaters at once.

In Ukraine, Christians pray in basements and bomb shelters while some of their fellow brothers and sisters in russia bless the very missiles that target our houses of prayer. Many russian Christians displayed their treasures, meaning political influence, a Russian World theology, traditional values, before a Kremlin that promised to protect those values in exchange for prophetic silence. And now that same protector has become the destroyer, of the Ukrainian people and of the soul of russian Christianity itself. Meanwhile parts of Western evangelicalism trade the same currency, offering their prophetic voice as tribute to political powers that promise short-term victories in culture wars.

Here Hezekiah’s lesson becomes most urgent, since churches showing their golden vessels to a political Babylon may soon discover that their protectors have become their captors, and the traditional values we parade before earthly kingdoms have already become the chains that will lead our children into exile.

Nine. The choice before us. Will we go on displaying our treasures to political powers that promise protection in exchange for silence? Will a comfortable cultural relevance, funded by state subsidies, turn out to be our own form of Babylonian captivity? Will we keep baptizing the empires that court our allegiance, or will we finally embrace the homelessness that comes with following the crucified God, which was the theme of this year’s Summer School of Theology at the Eastern European Institute of Theology?

Will we be Hezekiah’s church, securing peace and security for ourselves while our children inherit a spiritual exile? Or will we be Jeremiah’s church, weeping over our cities and our people while pointing toward a Kingdom not built by human hands, even when that means our own institutional crucifixion alongside the crucified God?

Ten. Hope beyond the summit. The mills of history keep turning, and new Babylons rise to challenge old Assyrias. But the calling of God’s people stays constant: to be light in darkness, a city on a hill, a Community of Hope that demonstrates the possibility of life beyond the endless cycles of domination and revenge and violence.

Hezekiah’s story reminds me that there are no permanent political allies, only temporary arrangements between fallen powers that claim to defend Christianity and so often become the hope of Christians, though only as an obedient political project. Our hope is anchored deeper than the rise and fall of any Christian empire, since at the throne of God in the book of Revelation we see healed nations and tribes and languages, and no empire at all.

Our Babylonian moment is a missional calling to be embraced rather than a crisis of evangelicalism to be managed, and it is an invitation to discover that Christ Himself is the only treasure worth keeping. Will we learn from Hezekiah’s example, or are we destined to repeat it on a global scale?

Taras D., Ukraine
15–18 August 2025