Sour Grapes and the Abolition of the Great Pendulum

The great prophet of God, Ezekiel, prophesying to the captives in Babylon, had the following message from God to the people in Ezekiel 18:

²“What do you people mean by quoting this proverb about the land of Israel:

“‘The fathers eat sour grapes,

and the children’s teeth are set on edge’?

³“As surely as I live, declares the Sovereign LORD, you will no longer quote this proverb in Israel. ⁴For every living soul belongs to me, the father as well as the son—both alike belong to me. The soul who sins is the one who will die.

Ezekiel went on to lay out one of the greatest passages on personal responsibility for sin in the whole Bible, calling people to realize in their lives that God will not allow any of us to blame our fathers for the state of our lives: that each of us has a choice to be righteous and we will be taken to task for the choice we make.

But perhaps more interesting is God’s dim view of the proverb that was circulating in Israel that taught the people to think otherwise and so project an ungodly perspective into their lives. “As surely as I live, declares the Sovereign LORD, you will no longer quote this proverb in Israel.”

God looked down and categorically condemned and set forth an outright ban on a phrase that carried no benefit to the people of God, and, in fact, was destructive to their thinking and society.

The great prophet Jeremiah, prophesying about the time when the people of God would be freed from their captivity in Babylon, wrote the following words about the same topic starting in Jeremiah 31:23

This is what the LORD Almighty, the God of Israel, says: “When I bring them back from captivity, the people in the land of Judah and in its towns will once again use these words: ‘The LORD bless you, O righteous dwelling, O sacred mountain.’ ²⁴People will live together in Judah and all its towns—farmers and those who move about with their flocks. ²⁵I will refresh the weary and satisfy the faint.”

²⁶At this I awoke and looked around. My sleep had been pleasant to me.

²⁷“The days are coming,” declares the LORD, “when I will plant the house of Israel and the house of Judah with the offspring of men and of animals. ²⁸Just as I watched over them to uproot and tear down, and to overthrow, destroy and bring disaster, so I will watch over them to build and to plant,” declares the LORD.

“In those days people will no longer say,

‘The fathers have eaten sour grapes,

and the children’s teeth are set on edge.’

³⁰ Instead, everyone will die for his own sin; whoever eats sour grapes—his own teeth will be set on edge.

³¹ “The time is coming,” declares the LORD,

“when I will make a new covenant

with the house of Israel

and with the house of Judah.

³² It will not be like the covenant

I made with their forefathers

when I took them by the hand

to lead them out of Egypt,

because they broke my covenant,

though I was a husband to them,”

declares the LORD.

³³ “This is the covenant I will make with the house of Israel

after that time,” declares the LORD.

“I will put my law in their minds

and write it on their hearts.

I will be their God,

and they will be my people.

³⁴ No longer will a man teach his neighbor,

or a man his brother, saying, ‘Know the LORD,’

because they will all know me,

from the least of them to the greatest,”

declares the LORD.

“For I will forgive their wickedness

and will remember their sins no more.”

Even under the new covenant, the same phrase is detestable before God, but the difference is that people living under the new covenant, would not want to say it because they will know God and the ungodly perspective about sour grapes would disappear.

A few years back, when my children were about that age when sarcasm and clever wit were developing in their young active minds and the world that surrounded them in school was beginning to invade their lives, I was reading this passage and it occurred to me that we have such phrases in our culture also.

It has always been my conviction that I need to take the lead in my house and as I looked around, I isolated several common phrases in the vernacular of our world that had absolutely no place in the disciple’s vocabulary. These were phrases that, try as I might, I could find no context in which they could possibly be encouraging. We had a family talk, and with the help of my friends, Jeremiah and Ezekiel, I banned them from my house.

“DuUUh!” spoken with that inflection that only teenagers can really put onto it, is one of those phrases. We talked together as a family and tried and tried to find a way in which this expression could be used that would build up anyone at any time. We did come up with a couple jokes that might be considered funny that used the phrase, but ultimately, we agreed that the phrase always carried an ungodly edge into our lives. The phrase was banned.

I like the urban myth about the linguistics professor that taught his class that in all his study of the world languages, every language he knew had cases where double negatives conveyed a positive thought, but that he knew of no language where a double positive conveyed a negative thought. As soon as he said it, a bright, cynical student in the back of the class called out, “Yeah, right!” Leave it to the Americans to set a new course in Linguistic history! So we talked about it as a family and agreed; this too, ought not infect our vocabulary.

As the children have grown and matured, they have grown to appreciate and think about their vocabulary so that now, for the most part, they do not want to say things like this, just a the people of God would grow to no longer want this phrase in the Israel of God.

In our fellowship, I have a dear brother whose years in the world have taken a toll that left him convinced that, for the most part, the world was a place of defeat. He would frequently quote Murphy’s Law and all of its many corollaries. It infected his life to the point where he could never rise to claim many of the promises of God because of it. It saddened me greatly as I toiled to try to encourage this discouraged man.

So we had a family talk, and in our household, we took Murphy’s Law to court, declared it unconstitutional (Under God’s constitution) and repealed it, declaring it null and void in the presence of God. Every time this brother quoted it in its multitudinous forms, I would declare that we had repealed it and that it no longer applied, at least to my life and to my household. This may seem trivial, but such thinking pervades our world and invades the church so that we lose sight of the great perspective that God wants us to have.

We have many comments in our societal vernacular about babies and bathwater, carts before horses, and the cutting off of noses to spite the faces from which they were cut and the like, that convey our tendency to react or over-react rather than simply to act. In some ways, when we use them, we acquiesce to the great follies of our world and its inability to find a center that is true and right.

In the foyer or the great Smithsonian Museum of Science and Technology in Washington, D.C, there is a huge Foucault Pendulum, hung from some invisible point in the cavernous ceiling above the rotunda. Once a day it is set in motion, swinging majestically back and forth, isolated, by the way it is suspended, from the world that turns out from under it. Back and forth, forth and back, staying its course as the world moves, systematically knocking over the little quarter-hour pins that move into its way, marking the relentless progression of time, and never yielding: back and forth, forth and back.

Historically, one of the greatest technological developments in the history of our world was when men invented ways to get rid of the pendulum and created clocks that no longer depended on back and forth, forth and back.

I believe that the greatest spiritual advances in God’s kingdom will be made when each of us finds a way to abolish the pendulums of spiritual action and reaction that afflict our world and invade our church. To do this will required much maturity, but most of all, it will require each of us to find a center and settle into it ourselves first. This center is Christ, Jesus the Son of God. Whenever we stray from this center we start swinging back and forth, forth and back; we become like leaves tossed in the wind, foam on the ocean blown by the wind. In our haste to clean up our act, we overturn the bath tubs and lose the baby. In the rush, we leave the horses bewildered by what it means to push a cart and we back bite and devour each other, slicing and dicing until no one is left with a nose that can smell the roses God has for us.

It is time to slow down and find this center. It is time for every disciple to find their God and beg Him to show them where the center is and beg Him to teach them how to live there. It is time to stand up and refuse to participate in the great swings of the world; to abolish the great pendulums, the nose cutting, tub dumping and to stop blaming our fathers for the edginess of our teeth that results in gossip, slander, back biting and devouring of each other.

It is time to take hold of the New Covenant we have with our God; to know Him and not deviate to the left of the right from the path he has laid out for us, to stay the course, to love the brotherhood of believers and abolish any phrase and any concept that would sway us from this path.

Frederick Faller

March 2003