We all sometime in our lives experience betrayal - children abandon elderly parents, spouses commit adultery, employees betray their employers and vice versa, citizens betray their countries, and vice versa.
Whenever a duty of loyalty is violated, a betrayal occurs. Betrayal is one of the hardest sins to forgive, because of the sometimes intimate trust that is broken by it.
These days, we've heard of America's betrayal of our Kurdish allies in Syria, but this is nothing new. Since the early 1970s, we have repeatedly betrayed the Kurds, urging them to join us to help out in some foreign quagmire, promising to provide them support, and then abandoning them to their fate once we obtain what we want.
Because betrayal is so common to human experience, the Bible is filled with examples of it, and teachings concerning it.
The first betrayal was by man of the God Who created him. In the garden of Eden, Adam and Eve rebelled and betrayed their Creator, Who had done nothing but good to them, and intimately communed with them. Yet they chose to follow God's enemy, the devil, and betray the loyalty due to God.
Then Cain betrayed his own brother Abel, murdering him because God rejected Cain's "good works," and accepted Abel's animal sacrifice. "Am I my brother's keeper," Cain scoffed, thereby articulating the crux of the matter: that Cain did owe his near kinsman a duty of loyalty and protection. Cain's murder of Abel set the pattern of sinful man's hatred of the Lord's people who trust in the sacrifice that God has ordained to save man.
Joseph was sold into slavery by his brothers, and ended up cast into prison in Egypt.
David murdered Uriah, his loyal subject. |
