He who thinks of nothing but personal victories is conquered by vice of greed.  Solomon told us.   Early Israel was allowed to loot and pillage the Canaanites to accomplish God’s justice on them. Apparently their time had run out and God was interested in replacing the amorites with Abraham’s descendants, recently released from Egyptian bondage. The next time that Israelites were allowed to plunder their neighbors was in the Babylonian exile when the Persian king, discovering a plot to murder a Jew, allowed the Jewish people to plunder and pillage the Persian people. There is hardly a better icon of triumphalism and treachery than the Jewish pride that accompanied the rebuilding of Jerusalem and the province of Judea under Ezra and Nehemiah. One must conclude that the American criminal enterprise that has taken over the White House and the Republican Party represents a kind of treachery that has no outlet for forgiveness.  The puppets who are imprisoned in the cult of MAGA and the host of Evangelical and Catholic activists will never recognize the uselessness of their senseless prank, holding up Mammon as proof of divine favour.

To this day both the Jewish people and the Persians have not embraced the veracity of God putting the two peoples together with episodes of thrilling transparency and double-edged justice.  Israel, we assume, from the imaginary history invoked by Israelites from time to time, cannot seem capable of saying “the Lord made the Persians our caretakers”.  Out of this colonial relationship came the magnanimous venture of the return from exile.

LET HIM GO UP. 

“Thus says Cyrus king of Persia, ‘The Lord, the God of heaven, has given me all the kingdoms of the earth, and He has appointed me to build Him a house in Jerusalem, which is in Judah. Whoever there is among you of all His people, may the Lord his God be with him, and let him go up!’” (2 Chronicles 36:23)

LET HIM GO UP.  

‘Whoever there is among you of all His people, may his God be with him! Let him go up to Jerusalem which is in Judah and rebuild the house of the Lord, the God of Israel; He is the God who is in Jerusalem. (Ezra 1:3)

Organized and authorized looting in Persia

LETTERS SENT BY COURIERS 

In them the king granted the Jews who were in each and every city the right to assemble and to defend their lives, to destroy, to kill and to annihilate the entire army of any people or province which might attack them, including children and women, and to plunder their spoil, (Esther 8:11)

Time runs out for everyone

Babylon the great had almost 100years.  Persia had 200+ years.  Greece had nearly 509 years.  Why had Rome been the implicit power for 2 millennia?  Because this time when time runs out the cycles of human dominance will end catastrophically.  After Rome lost its grip on the levers of power the world has been subject to something akin to international piracy.  The enterprises of Portugal, Spain, England, Holland, Germany and the United States are all proven failures.  Do you still wonder why they are all reaching for past greatness.  They are all bankrupt of ideas beyond the exploitation of the vulnerable.

Even the Church of Jesus Christ has been infected by this tremble bug, that says people have to crush others to be successful, they have to enslave others to feel empowered.  If God does not relieve you of your discomfort and disease he is still God.    If God does not spur your  business into bigger barns is he still not God?  If we keep facing famine,/hunger, violent discrimination, poverty, distress and persecution we still overwhelmingly conquer.