Continuation of the chapter 8
The way of the nations
3) Letter from “France to Isaac”
I am happy of being able to address this mail to you, to tell you how much I love you, even if at the time of my youth, I sometimes went to make you the war. I am truly repenting these blunders of my first years that I considered glorious, when, in these times that I still call “crusades”, I went to make you the war, under the fallacious pretext that you had remained out of my blessing. My words are too weak to tell you how much today I feel pitiful to have carried the hand against you in these ancient times, whereas it is of you that I would have to take example sometimes.
I would have doubtless many others repentances to achieve toward you, but because you are to the origin of a people good and generous, I know that you already forgave all the bad testimony that I was for you, son of Abraham, who is also my adoptive father in the faith. As I grew, I understood just like you that our God is a Great God, slow to wrath, who does not want the death of the malicious one, and forgives at the one who is repent. We thus have one and the other understood, like the Lord God says it by the mouth of the Ezekiel prophet to the verses 21 and 22 of chapter 18, But if the evil-doer, turning away from all the sins which he has done, keeps my rules and does what is ordered and right, life will certainly be his; death will not be his fate. Not one of the sins which he has done will be kept in memory against him: in the righteousness which he has done he will have life.//
This God who concluded an alliance with you in Horeb, and who, as he told in the book of Deuteronomy to verse 9 of chapter 7: Be certain, then, that the Lord your God is God; whose faith and mercy are unchanging, who keeps his word through a thousand generations to those who have love for him and keep his laws;//
If you knew how much I am grateful to you today not to have always been a wise and perfect child, who would have left me only the good example, whereas I am sometimes so fickle. The faults that you made and of which often you was repented, however did not prevent me from making sometimes worse than you without I not repenting myself of it.
If I am still sometimes inclined to criticism towards you, it is that a share of myself, did not yet completely carry out how much in Jesus-Christ, there are however advantages to like the one another, beyond our differences. Besides without you reproach of it, I believe to have noticed a little identical phenomenon in you. You saw certainly to achieve large things by the powerful hand of our God, without you agreed always with him. Since the power of Love that I received in Jesus-Christ, did not allow me to do either, better than you, I would be then the last one to reproach it to you.
A long time I warred with you because you did not have received Jesus like son of God, whereas he had said Himself as a prophet, “a prophet is scorned only in his fatherland and his house”. If you had received it, it is that he would not have even been prophet, another comprehension was then done in me: It is not necessarily because of you that the reign of the “Almighty” is delaying, but because of me that He wanted to also adopt.
This is why I do not want any more to fight you, nor to criticize you, but to love you. The power of the Love is also in you, since it is in our God who loves you.
We had been both of them a very bad testimony of the Divine love. Concerning you, you deprived me of the testimony of works of the Lord God of Armies to the head of a nation, while having claimed a king of human nature, just as me, I deprived to you of the testimony of Love of Jesus-Christ His Beloved Son, whom I will have expressed if I had not so often given reason to my unhappy human nature.
Since it arrives a time or nobody any more will teach more anybody, as it is written in this letter from Simon, son of Jonas addressed to you and all your Hebrew brothers and who says to you in chapter 8, verses 8 to 13: For, protesting against them, he says, See, the days are coming when I will make a new agreement with the house of Israel, and with the house of Judah; Not like the agreement which I made with their fathers when I took them by the hand, to be their guide out of the land of Egypt; for they did not keep the agreement with me, and I gave them up, says the Lord.
For this is the agreement which I will make with the people of Israel after those days: I will put my laws into their minds, writing them in their hearts: and I will be their God, and they will be my people: And there will be no need for every man to be teaching his brother, or his neighbor, saying, This is the knowledge of the Lord: for they will all have knowledge of me, great and small. And I will have mercy on their evil-doing, and I will not keep their sins in mind.
When he says, A new agreement, he has made the first agreement old. But anything which is getting old and past use will not be seen much longer.//
This is why today I am delighted to see your children returning from all the places in which they had been dispersed, such of forsaken sons of the Eternal, and you are become again a people. God re-establishes you under the alliance of “the flesh the war”, of which the days become exhausted as it was case at the day of Noah, and by which He showed us our limits and our incapacity to lead us both of them, as He asked it of us.
It was for better doing us to enter under the alliance of the Holy Spirit of God, which we so smell in your country, according to my children who one day went in your beautiful country. The Lord God does not want to keep us away from this alliance of Peace, which He wants to put in your beautiful country of Canaan, you who paid so expensive the tribute of the Glory of God.
I am happy that you keep in a great share of yourself the memory of your first years in the company of your Ishmael brother, and your Abraham father. I often do myself the sad experiment of the recomposed families so difficult to manage, but I know that for a long time our God started to put his laws in your heart. Hand in hand I therefore invite you so that we agree with Him together, so that He preserves us of a simply human peace, whose danger hovers over us all.
Henceforth, just like I made the decision not to criticize my various Christian brothers, even if they are not better than me, and they make yet sometimes many errors by making the war against your uncles and aunts, I will silence any mouth that will protest in judgment against you.
This is why my more cordial prayers go to Jerusalem that I carry in my heart just like you.
Through this slogan that you like so much, I bring to you my goodbye, and propose you to go part of the way together towards the big city, “At the next year in Jerusalem”.
France