Context No. 3641 of 4322 · 2 Maccabees

2 Maccabees 6:1-6: in context

1Not long after this, the king sent out an old man of Athens to compel the Jews to depart from the laws of their fathers and not to live by the laws of God, 2and also to pollute the sanctuary in Jerusalem and to call it by the name of Olympian Zeus, and to call the sanctuary in Gerizim by the name of Zeus the Protector of foreigners, even as the people who lived in that place did. 3The visitation of this evil was harsh and utterly grievous. 4For the temple was filled with debauchery and reveling by the heathen, who dallied with prostitutes, and had intercourse with women within the sacred precincts, and moreover brought inside things that were not appropriate. 5The altar was filled with those abominable things which had been prohibited by the laws. 6A man could neither keep the Sabbath, nor observe the feasts of their ancestors, nor so much as confess himself to be a Jew.

This is a dark hour of persecution. Antiochus sends to force the Jews to abandon the laws of their fathers, defiling the temple and rededicating it to a pagan god, filling the holy place with debauchery, forbidding the Sabbath and the feasts, and making it a crime even to confess oneself a Jew.

The sacred things are trampled, and faithfulness itself is criminalized. It is a bleak picture of the pressure to abandon one's faith under threat, when merely to be known as God's is dangerous. Such times have come again and again through history, and the passage soberly names the cost. But the very books of Maccabees exist to tell how the faithful resisted, how some chose death rather than deny their God, and how God ultimately preserved his people through it. Even when it becomes dangerous to confess our faith, God sustains those who hold fast, and the darkness of persecution does not have the final word.

When holding to my faith becomes costly or dangerous, will I hold fast rather than deny God, trusting that he sustains those who remain faithful under pressure?

Sources

2 Maccabees 6:1: "The king sent out an old man... to compel the Jews to depart from the laws of their fathers and not to live by the laws of God."
2 Maccabees 6:6: "A man could neither keep the Sabbath, nor observe the feasts of their ancestors, nor so much as confess himself to be a Jew."
2 Maccabees 6:2: "To pollute the sanctuary in Jerusalem and to call it by the name of Olympian Zeus."