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Magnaminity

 


Ezekiel 25:5
I will make Rabbah a pasture for camels and Ammon a fold for flocks. Then you shall know that I am the Lord.

Thought for the day – What goes around comes around
Have you ever caught yourself smiling at someone else's downfall? Not proud of it. But there it is — that little flicker of satisfaction when the arrogant get humbled, when the bully finally loses.

That's exactly the mood God is confronting here. Ammon had watched Jerusalem burn and the temple fall, and instead of grief, they said "Aha!" They clapped. Judah's tragedy was Ammon's entertainment. So God speaks — not against Judah this time, but against the gloating. Rabbah, Ammon's proud capital, would become nothing more than a camel pasture. The mockers would become the punchline.

I think of Winston Churchill, drafting his maxims for the Second World War. He didn't write "in victory, celebration." He wrote ‘in victory, magnanimity’. He'd watched what triumphalism does — how the humiliation heaped on Germany after the first war planted the seeds of the second. Gloating doesn't just wound the fallen. It grows into something that comes back around.

Ammon forgot that the God who judges Judah is the same God who judges Ammon. There's no grandstand seat outside God's justice. We're all standing in the same courtroom. 

Bur here the thing; God doesn't ask us to pretend we feel nothing when the proud are brought low. He asks us to lay down the "Aha!" — and remember that the ground is level at the foot of the cross. 


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