2 Maccabees 9:5-12. The punishment of Antiochus. Antiochus IV, the king of Syria, which controlled Israel at that time, continued his father's Hellenization of the Syrian empire, including Israel and the Jews. Antiochus III had eased up a bit and allowed the Jews to practice their faith more freely, but his son adopted extreme measures to force the Jews to abandon their one God and adopt the worship of the Greek pantheon. He outlawed the Sabbath and circumcision, and erected an altar to Zeus in the Temple, among other things. Antiochus' extreme measures actually succeeded in uniting the Jews to fight back by starting a revolution. Many of them had, up until that point, been tolerant of the more subtle corruptions of their faith.

In this passage, Antiochus feels the wrath of God and learns that God is God. "The all seeing Lord, the God of Israel, struck him an incurable and unseen blow." First, Antiochus begins to suffer with extreme intestinal issues. As soon as he uttered the words "When I get there I will make Jerusalem a cemetery of Jews" he was "seized with a pain in his bowels... and with sharp intestinal tortures" but he continued on his way to Jerusalem "breathing fire in his rage against the Jews." So then he falls from his chariot and is tortured "in every limb of his body." His living body is filled with worms, and the stench of him is so great that no one can approach him to carry the litter he is laid on. "[B]ecause of his intolerable stench no one was able to carry the man who a little while before had thought that he could touch the stars of heaven." Then, only when he can't even stand the smell of his own body, he finally sees that "It is right to be subject to God, and no mortal should think that he is equal to God."

I have said before that God's lessons, the lessons of the Bible, apply on an individual level, and a group level, and even on a world level. Here we see the application of spiritual physics at both the group level, with the Jews having to experience extreme persecution before they wake up and decide to fight to preserve the truth of their faith; and on the individual level, with Antiochus having to experience extreme pain and degradation before he wakes up and realizes he is subject to God, and not a god himself.

The Jews had not been acting in an evil way, they had just been "going along to get along" for the most part (although I am sure some had been completely "Hellenized" just as some Christians in our modern times have been completely secularized - it is very difficult to fight the spirit of the age!) Things had to reach the point of full-blown persecution under Antiochus before the Jews realized their faith was in jeopardy. So things got gradually worse and worse and they failed to realize it, like a lobster in a pot with the heat gradually increasing. It had to come to almost a full boil before they realized they had to get out of the pot! This involved armed resistance, unfortunately. Perhaps, if they had woken up earlier, they wouldn't have had to fight, but who knows? Actually, God does, and if he let it get to this point, he knew that they wouldn't fight back unless it got this bad.

Antiochus is worse. He was acting evilly, and he thought of himself as being able to control everything (power corrupts!). "He had thought he could command the waves of the sea in his superhuman arrogance." So Antiochus' suffering had to be much worse, on a personal level, than the Jews' persecution, before he woke up personally. But then, the armed resistance that the Jews would now have to fight would result in suffering and death for thousands - so they will suffer, as a group, as much as Antiochus suffered, personally. It is all for the same purpose, though, to bring everyone back to God.

When we turn too far away from him, in either ignorance or arrogance, we suffer. Eventually, hopefully, we wake up and turn back to God. Only then can we start fighting the good fight and getting ourselves and the culture back on the right track.