The Most Ironic Event in History

Irony is defined as “a state of affairs or an event that seems deliberately contrary to what one expects and is often amusing as a result.”  It is often used as a literary technique to create interest in a story or situation and provide a dramatic turn of events as an end result. It also happens in real life with an eerie frequency.

In The Wonderful Wizard of Oz Dorothy and her companions search for the wizard to fulfill their heart’s desires. In the end they find that the wizard is a fraud and they never needed him anyway, because they already had what they wanted all along.

The Biblical story in the book of “Esther” of the rivalry between the good man, Mordecai, and the evil Haman is irony at its finest. In brief, Haman is a proud and vengeful Persian official. Mordecai, a Jew of much less stature refuses to bow down to Haman. You’ll find the details in “Esther,” but the first irony is that Haman tells the king how he, Haman, would like to be honored. The king tells Haman to honor Mordecai in that fashion. Secondly, Haman erects a huge scaffold on which he intends to hang Mordecai. In the end, Haman, himself, is hung on that very platform.

Satan actually plays a large part in Biblical irony. When you think of the most evil of all evil, of whom do you think?  When you think of the one most dedicated to destruction of all things good, of whom do you think? Barely has God created the world than we find Satan in the mix trying to ruin what God has created. The Bible refers to him as the deceiver and a tempter.  His name means accuser. In Job, Satan first accuses Job of following God for cynical reasons. Then he sets about to destroy everything good in Job’s life.

Revelation 12:7-9 provides the most direct reference to Satan’s history in the Bible, whom it depicts as a dragon and ancient serpent (Genesis 3, anyone?) It tells of a war in Heaven in which Michael and his angels prevailed in battle with the devil and his angels who were thrown down to earth. There was no place for them in Heaven.

We know that he is a deceiver, an accuser (of righteous people), and a tempter. We know that his every effort is to destroy that which is good, to work against God’s desires. (There are people like this in the world today. They have no true goals for their own lives, but seem to live for the purpose of ruining what others have built. I wonder where they get such ideas?) Satan wallows in the filth of sin.  He exists to promote sin’s destructive power. He works against God and all that God stands for.

God, who is love (1 John 4:8) created mankind as a being upon whom He could bestow His love. This is my belief although I cannot point to a verse that says this in so many words. He created a magnificent universe as a place for man and as a demonstration of His power and might (Psa. 19:1-3) that we might be properly awed by it and Him (Romans 1:18-23.) And He gave us free will so that we could respond to His love with a love of our own for Him, because robots cannot love or choose to serve out of gratitude, AI not withstanding.

He knew that our free will would lead us to make wrong decisions, i.e. to sin. God cannot abide sin and our participation in it would preclude us from His presence (Isaiah 6:1-8, Isaiah 59:1-2.)  Because of this, “before the foundation of the world,” before the creation, He had a plan for the salvation, the redemption from sin, of mankind that involved the shed blood of His dear son. This is love in action (John 3:16-17.)

This plan developed through stages that are clear in the Bible. Ephesians 1:10 refers to this as the “fullness of the times.” More specifically, first there was the Patriarchal Age. This is mostly found in the book of Genesis when God spoke directly to family patriarchs such as Abraham, and informed them of His will. This was followed by the Mosaical age beginning at Mt Sinai where God delivered the Mosaical Law, symbolized, but not totally contained, in the Ten Commandments. The ‘fullness of the times” arrived with the Christian age which was “heralded” by Jesus’ time on this earth, but began in earnest with His death on the cross, and started full force with Peter’s sermon on the Day of Pentecost in Acts 2.

Thus did God provide for the salvation of man’s souls through the church that Jesus built (Matthew 16:18.) We are powerless to do anything about our situation. We are like the man in a movie I saw years ago. His wife was swept away in a torrential river to certain death. He jumped in to save her but was powerless against the current. Once in the current, he couldn’t even save himself, let alone his wife. We are that man, and sin is our current. Jesus alone has power to extricate us from the problem.

To save a person’s soul is to redeem it from the sin to which that person has fallen prey. To redeem is to buy back from whoever might possess that which was rightfully yours.  Jesus paid that price on the cross (Isaiah 53, John 1:29, 2 Cor. 5:18-21.)  Jesus, through His death on the cross paid the debt of sin that we owed and bought us back from the slavery and certain destruction of sin. Jesus, through His death on the cross redeemed man from Satan.

And who is it that seeks to destroy everything that God desires? Who was tempting the chief priests and Pharisees to call for Jesus’ death? Who was leading the rabble before Pilate in the cry, “Crucify Him”? Who was trying to destroy the work of the Son of God whom he had been unable to tempt in the wilderness? Satan, of course. Instead, he implemented the will of God, and provided the means for mankind to escape his clutches -  the greatest irony in the history of the world.

In 1 Kings 22, Micaiah, the prophet of God, told King Ahab of Israel that he would be killed in battle. Thirty-two captains of the enemy had no job but to find and kill Ahab, but they couldn’t find him because he had disguised himself and did not appear as king.  Nevertheless, there was an archer in the enemy ranks who let an arrow fly at random without even aiming. That arrow pierced between the joints of Ahab’s armor and killed him. You can’t thwart God’s plans, even if you’re the devil, himself. You’ll just become an amusing ironical footnote as God’s plan marches on.