Who Speaks to Us? It is YHWH We Encounter in the OT, and not Some Other God

I lived and taught in India for a number of years. On one occasion I was teaching a seminar over a weekend for Christian professionals in Andhra Pradesh, on one of my favorite themes--the ethical teaching of the Old Testament and how it applies to Christian living today.  After the first session a man came to speak to me, his eyes gleaming. ''I'm so glad you are teaching us from the Old Testament," he said, "for I became a Christian through reading the Old Testament." Now you don't often hear that, as an Old Testament teacher, so I asked him to tell me his story.

He was then a lecturer in engineering at the local university. But he had grown up among the despised Dalit (outcaste) community in his vil­lage, and his whole family had suffered greatly at the hands of the high­-caste Hindus in the village—all kinds of harassment, violence and injus­tice. He had a great thirst for revenge, and so he worked very hard at school, to get to university, so that he could get a job with some influence and power, and then turn the tables on his enemies. That, he said, was his deliberate intention.

The day he arrived at the university, he found a Bible on his bed in his room in the student hostel. It was in Telugu (his state language), and it had been left there by some Christian students of the Union of Evangel­ical Students of India. He had never read one before, though he knew that it was the Christians' holy book. He opened it at random and started reading the story of Naboth and Ahab in 1 Kings 21. He was amazed. The story had so many familiar elements. "This was my story," he said. His family had also experienced theft of land, false accusations, murders, the brutality of the powerful against the ordinary people.

But then he read on and was amazed to read about another man called Elijah, who, in the name of some God called Yahweh (or whatever the translation of the personal name of the God of Old Testament Israel is in the Telugu Bible), denounced King Ahab, and said that he would be judged and punished by this God. This was astounding, my friend said. Here was a god who took the side of the suffering ones and condemned the government and the powerful for their wicked deeds. "I never knew such a god existed" were his exact words to me, which I have never forgotten.

My friend had millions of gods within Hinduism to choose from. He knew the names of many gods. But he had never heard of such a god as he was reading about in this Bible. Here was a god quite unlike anything he had met before in his own religion.

So he went back to the beginning of the book and started reading the Bible through from Genesis. He grew even more amazed. "This god thinks of everything!" he said, as he read through the laws of Exodus, Leviticus and Deuteronomy. He was impressed by the character of the God of Israel, with his concern for the poor and needy, his passion for justice, and so on. Exactly the kind of god he was looking for in his own thirst for justice.

When he reached Isaiah and started to read of the love of God (in Is 43, for example), he was not so pleased, he told me, for he wanted a god who would give him vengeance on his oppressors, not love them! How­ever, just about that time, the Christian students visited him, and like Philip in Acts 8, led him from the text of Isaiah to Jesus, and eventually led him to faith and conversion.

What struck me in this man's testimony was this. It was precisely the story of the Old Testament that demonstrated the identity of the God of the Bible. Furthermore, he found great surprise, but also great reassur­ance, in aspects of the identity and character of the Old Testament God that some Christians find disturbing. But essentially he found salvation not because he found "a god" (for he had plenty of gods already), but be­cause he learned the true identity of the true and living God, through his encounter with the text of the Bible.

WHAT KIND OF GOD?

It is not enough to say that one believes in God. What is important finally is the kind of God in whom one believes. Or, to use different language: metaphors matter. The images used to speak of God not only decisively determine the way one thinks about God, they have a powerful impact on the shape of the life of the believer. They may, in fact, tend to shape a life toward unbelief.

In his autobiography, the American journalist and critic Thomas Matthews, a preacher's kid, writes:

Try as I may, I cannot altogether shake off my habitual awe of the church nor completely dissociate it from the far more fearful God to whom the church makes its ritual obeisance. I still think of God—no, not think, but apprehend, as I was trained as a child to envision him—as a watchful, vengeful, enormous, omniscient policeman, instantly aware of the slightest tinge of irreverence in my innermost thought, always ready to pounce if I curse, if I mention him in anger, fun or mere habit (though with ominous patience he might hold [back] his hand [of punishment] for a time) .... But how can that kind of fear of that kind of God be the beginning of wisdom?

All too often the sole focus of the ministry of the church has been on whether one believes in God. Insufficient attention has been given to the kind of God in whom one believes, often with disastrous results. Witness any number of atrocities, from the Inquisition to Jonestown, committed in the name of God by those who believe in God. Moreover, to define God solely or primarily in terms of activity can get one into comparable difficulties. The God of Jonestown was a creator and redeemer God who had a clear plan and purpose, moving the people toward a specific goal. The question of the kind of God in whom one believes is not only important, it is crucial. It is a question of images. Metaphors matter.

The OT tells us that the people of God were often guilty of worshiping idols, of making up their own god, of creating gods, or even Yahweh, in a certain image. We oversimplify this matter if we think of such images solely in terms of wood or stone; the plastic image conveyed a particular way of understanding these gods or Yahweh. And, we have learned over the years that idolatries do not need the plastic form to qualify as such. One can move directly to mental images which construct a false image of God and have the power of wreaking havoc in people's faith and life. Metaphors matter...

While discerning the variety of metaphors in both their specificity and generality is important, not all have the same value. This is true at two related levels. First, we need to recognize what might be called the “varying degrees of correspondence" between the two terms of the metaphor. One might speak of degrees of revelatory capacity. There are those with a low capacity (God as dry rot, Hos. 5:12; God as lion, Hos. 5:14; God as whistler, Isa. 7:18), with a moderate capacity (God as rock, Ps. 31:2-3; God's arm, Isa. 53:1), and with a high capacity (God as parent, Hos. 11:1).

The OT as Christian Scripture

The book of Exodus [as but one example] has participated in this Christian experience. Young Christians have been reared on the stories of Exodus, from the story of baby Moses set adrift on the Nile to Israelites walking through the sea on dry land to the gifts of water and manna in the wilderness. Catechisms that include the ten commandments have been impressed upon their memories and have given shape to their speech and action. Liturgies have had built into their very center the themes of passover and unleavened bread, and Exodus 15 has been appointed as a text for Easter Day, so cosmic is the victory of God seen to be. Theologies of various sorts have drawn on Exodus texts with abandon, from theories of atonement to issues of divine agency to more recent theologies of liberation from contemporary communities that truly know what oppression is all about. Christians know deeply in their own being the meaning of the cry, "Let my people go," and make their confession of faith in terms of the exodus-shaped language of redemption. The exodus is a constitutive [that is, essential and formative] event for Christians; without it they would not be who they are: a redeemed people of the God of Israel.

The understanding of the Christian gospel has been decisively shaped by this salvific [or saving] experience. Jesus, like Israel, is "called out of Egypt" (Matt. 2:15) and tempted in the wilderness (Matt. 4:1-11). He not only celebrates the passover (Mark 14:12-25; Matt. 26:28) but, in a radical theological extension, is himself identified as the "passover lamb" (I Cor. 5:7; 11:25) and the "supernatural Rock" who followed Israel in the wilderness (I Cor. 10:4). He assumes the role of a new Moses—or is it the instructing God of Exodus 20?—as he teaches his disciples from the mountain (Matt. 5-7). And, in the most remarkable move of all, Israel's God "tabernacles" in his very person (John 1:14). Drawing upon virtually every existing interpretive means available to them, the New Testament writers used Exodus texts as a vehicle for interpreting and proclaiming God's act in Jesus. At the same time, Exodus texts are not only applied to Jesus; a continuity is seen between Israel and church as people of God. These texts are "written down" for the "instruction" (I Cor. 10:11) of the Christian community. They can be used as warning (I Cor. 10:6-11), apologia [that is, an explanation or defense to outsiders] (Acts 7:17-44), instruction (I Cor. 9:8-12; II Cor. 8:14-15), specifications of what love requires (Rom. 13:8-10; Matt. 19:16-22), examples of human faithfulness (Heb. 11:23-29), reminders of the missional purpose of the community (I Peter 2:9-10; Rev. 1:5-6; 5:10), or resources for an eschatology [that is, a view of the future when God sets things right] (Rev. 8:6-9:21; 15:1-5; 21:3; 22:4).

One can see that many parts of Exodus, along with much else in the Old Testament, are often (literally) contained within the New Testament; in being so blended into the New, it becomes as new as the New. Together than constitute a new coherent totality, yet without the Old losing its character as word of God—no word of God can lose all value—or the New losing its sense of genuine newness. One could say that the Old Testament constitutes both a pre-Christian word of God and, by virtue of the new totality, a Christian word. The God of the exodus is our God, whose salvific activity we too have experienced. We are one with those Israelites who stood on the far shore of the Red Sea and proclaimed the victory of their God. Their songs have become our songs.

As God Speaks to Us the OT Story Becomes Our Own

But how in our study of Exodus do we do justice to both of these realities: our knowledge of its pre-Christian roots and our experience of hearing it as a genuinely Christian word?

There is no one way in which this must be done, but a two-step approach may not be the best available: first, one is to be historical, descriptive, objective; then, with that material in hand, one moves through the New Testament to a contemporary application. This often belies what actually happens in the course of interpretation, where no specific "application" step is undertaken at all; the text itself applies immediately by virtue of the text being experienced as the word of God. For Christians who hear, say, Psalm 23 or the first commandment, there will be an immediacy of meaning because of the intersection with a certain life experience. Because of the high degree of commonality of experience across the centuries, one does justice to both pre-Christian and Christian dimensions of the text simultaneously.

Other texts are less immediate to contemporary experience for a variety of reasons (e.g., transcultural differences). In such cases, more "explaining" is necessary before the horizons of text and reader meet. This can take many forms, but one way is to talk about the text itself, but in language that both honors the realities of the pre-Christian world (e.g., avoiding obviously anachronistic terminology) and at the same time enables it to ring true to common Christian experience (hence doing justice to both worlds). This is what we will seek to do in this commentary.

There will usually be no specific point of "application," but an attempt will be made to merge into a single story the experience of the people in the text and the contemporary experience of the people of God. A elision [that is, fusion] of worlds may thereby occur.

This approach will be consonant with the testimonial character of the text itself. That is to say, for each successive Israelite generation this material was told and retold, and each retelling often was integrated into the text itself. The text thus consists of a series of retellings all interwoven with one another. This integration is so complete that it is often difficult or impossible to discern where the inherited traditions and the new retellings begin and end. Each successively larger shape of the tradition thus functioned for Israel as an ongoing witness to what God had said and done without a specific move to "application." It was a matter of retelling the story in such a way that the worlds of past generations and ever-contemporary communities of faith merged with one another. This is also a contemporary task.

The OT, as God's Story and Ours, is Relevant

This approach assumes that one does not make the text relevant to today but that the text is relevant and that the task is to enable that relevance to be seen; the task is to facilitate the urgency of the text as it intersects with ever new lives and situations. The reader's perception of what has happened will be different from a two-step approach. The reader will be left, not with an interpretation of the text in some secondary or applied fashion and abstracted from the text, but with the textitself whose meaning has become immediate to the reader’s own life experience. Thus the text is not an object, something that is tinkered with and talked about as something back then, but rather it becomes direct address [of Yhwh himself!] and hence congruent with its original function for the community of faith.

Our task, then, will be to relate to the text as if in a conversation, an asking and a listening that are open to the faith claims of the text, and with contemporary experience in view. And we will seek to do this, not as some capstone to a more objective analysis of the text, but at every step along the way. The hoped ­for result will be that the text, the interpreter, and the latter's situation vis-à-vis the people of God will illumine one another. A dialogue may emerge wherein the text, tradition, criticism, and contemporary experience are constantly intersecting, and out of that mix important insights in the text may become available.

Philip Greenslade, A Passion for God’s Story: Discovering Your Place in God’s Strategic Plan (Cumbria, UK: Paternoster Press, 2002), 216-221.

It is for reasons like this that we might speak of the tactical flexibility of God. ‘God’s strategic plan’ is the sub-title of our journey. The language of ‘strategy’ and ‘tactics’ is interesting. Science, politics, business, and the military all employ ‘strategies’. By definition ‘strategy’ stands for the plans of the powerful imposed from above in an all-embracing way. Once again we are reminded of the post­modern rejection of 'master-stories' for being inherently oppressive.

'Tactics', on the other hand, are said to be the' art of the weak'. The powerless are opportunists who seek to find and fill whatever gaps and spaces they can. This distinc­tion is helpful. It serves to remind us that it is God, not the church, who has the strategy. The story we have followed reveals a God who, in his strategic interests, is adept at accommodating himself tactically to the needs and oppor­tunities of the moment. And furthermore, in pursuance of his long-range goal, God continually steps over to the side of the weak. Time and again this God gets emotion­ally involved with the marginalised in the patient long­-term tactical battles that are part of the greater strategic war going on.

This helps to throw an eerie but wonderful light on the God whose story this is. He emerges as a God keen on entering into dialogue rather than authoritarian decree; a God who does not hastily opt for closure but keeps debate alive and his options open. This God appears curiously persuadable. He wants people to share the emotional turmoil of decision-making as if inviting persuasion, prayer and appeal.

With Noah, for example, God shares the terrible secret of his intention to judge and destroy. By singling out Noah as his confidant, God invites Noah into the heart­breaking decisions he has to make. It is almost as if God wants Noah to be the pretext for wresting some good from the situation. God's emotional vulnerability invites us to see into his deepest feelings. It sets up the reader for the amazing disclosure that even after the flood, while the sinful nature of humankind remains unchanged, God resolves to change and 'never again' flood the earth (Gen. 9:15).

God is equally flexible and open to argument with Abraham. He allows Abraham to haggle with him over the fate of those in Sodom and Gomorrah. God proposes to do something to these cities, which he 'can't hide from Abraham' (Gen. 18:17). Why not, unless God is encourag­ing his covenant partner to barter [or better, to collaborate-in-dialogue] with him in some way? Here again we are given an insider's view of God's openness and strange vulnerability to entreaty. Pressing his case with God, Abraham argues, 'Far be it from you! Will not the judge of all the earth do right?' (Gen. 18:25). It may be going toofar to say, as Walter Brueggemann does, that Abraham is being invited to help God decide what kind of God he wants to be in this situation. God is after all never going to be less than the steadfast God of covenant faithfulness. But this dialogue again sharply faces us with just how versatile and vulnerable God is able to be.

Versatile and Vulnerable

The dialogue between God and Moses illustrates both these points after Israel's 'fall' into idolatry with the golden calf (Ex. 32-34). God effectively repudiates his people to Moses: 'Go down, because your people' - note it is no longer my people - 'whom you brought up out of Egypt have become corrupt' (Ex. 32:7). An exasperated God has had enough of his people: 'Now leave me alone so that my anger may burn against them and that I may destroy them. Then I will make you into a great nation!' (Ex. 32:10). God wants to be left alone in his anger, but because Moses will not leave him alone, he pledges again not to leave Israel alone! With the words 'then I will make of you a great nation' God makes the same promise to Moses that he had made to Abraham as if he is offering to start all over again with him! To his credit Moses refuses. Audaciously he banks everything on God being gracious:

'Moses sought the favour of the LORD his God' (Ex. 32:11). He boldly appeals to God's self-interest: having expended so much divine energy on Israel's behalf in the past, why give up now? (Ex. 32:11). He pleads God's reputation as if to ask 'what will the neighbours think?' (Ex. 32:12), and recalls God's previous covenantal com­mitments, as if to query whether God has lost the plot (Ex. 32:13).

 

Evidently God's grace can stand the strain of this brash and argumentative praying. So, 'the Lord relented and did not bring on his people the disaster he had threat­ened' (Ex. 32:14). God is vulnerable and versatile, tactical and strategic, flexible and faithful. He opens himself to the intercessory negotiations of Abraham and Moses. By so doing he remains faithful to his covenant promises and long-term plan.

 

Perhaps we can discern three levels of God's will operating here:

 

1.   His over-arching strategic promise-plan of salvation.

2.   His decisive redemptive and covenantal commit­ments, which he pledges never to go back on.

3.   His dynamic responses to circumstances and needs, which display his tactical flexibility and emotional vulnerability.

 

God seems ready to respond to lament and protest, prayer and intercession, interacting with his covenant partners and disclosing more of himself in the process ­and all in the interests of his long-term covenant purpose.

 

The language of God 'relenting' or even 'repenting' serves to highlight this paradox. It is precisely in those contexts, such as Jeremiah's vision of the potter and the clay (Jer. 18-19), which most seem to emphasise God's [adaptable] sovereignty, that he is said to be responsive to our repentance and willing to relent (Jer. 18). Where God is said 'not to repent' (e.g. Num. 23:19; 1 Sam. 15:29), it is precisely where the text seeks to guard him against accu­sations of human-like fickleness or instability. As Chris Wright says of Moses' exchange with God, 'The paradox is that in appealing to God to change, he was actually appealing to God to be consistent - which may be a sig­nificant clue to the dynamic of all genuine intercessory prayer'. Wright goes on to suggest that:

 

Moses was not so much arguing against God ... as participat­ing in an argument within God ... Such prayer not only par­ticipates in the pain of God in history but is actually invited to do so for God's sake as well as ours. This is a measure of the infinite value to God of commitment to persons in covenant relationship. God chooses in sovereign freedom to link that divine sovereign freedom to human prayer. Intercessory prayer, then, as a divine-human engagement, is not merely a human duty to be fulfilled as part of the mission of the people of God, but ultimately flows from and into God's own mis­sion in the created world (cf. Rom. 8:18-27).

God's responsive 'repentance' - dare we conclude - is tactical: his non-negotiable unrepentance is strategic. God's profound emotional investment in this story is undeniable. In one of the high points of Old Testament revelation, God says through Hosea, 'How can I give you up, Ephraim? How can I hand you over, Israel? How can I treat you like Admah? How can I make you like Zeboiim?' (Hos. 11:8). The prophet makes us a party to God's own self-questioning and emotional turmoil. God evokes the memory of the cities of the plain destroyed with Sodom and Gomorrah. It is as if God is remember­ing what was done there in face of Abraham's pleading and wonders whether he can go through it again with his own people. 'My heart is changed within me; all my compassion is aroused. I will not carry out my fierce anger nor will I turn and devastate Ephraim' (Hos. 11:9). Evidently God is moved to make a new decision. 'For I am God and not man - the Holy One among you. I will not come in wrath' (Has. 11:9). The pain of Israel is taken into his own heart for since Israel is a nation like no other nation so he will be a God unlike any other god by feeling Israel's pain in this way.

Christopher J. H. Wright, Salvation Belongs to Our God: Celebrating the Bible's Central Story (Downers Grove: IVP Academic, 2007), 13.

It is also very important to emphasize that when the word Israel is used in this book, I am talking about biblical Israel of the Old Testament era, or its theological extension in the New Testament to include all those who through faith in the Messiah Jesus are included in the seed of Abra­ham. It is impossible to gain a fully biblical perspective on salvation without reference to the great story of God's involvement with the people of Israel in biblical times, his promise to Abraham, the exodus, the cov­enant at Sinai, the temple and sacrificial system, and of course the mes­sianic promises that lead us to Jesus. But we shall see that the promise of God to and through biblical Israel was a promise that includes all the na­tions in its scope. Indeed, even in the Old Testament itself, Israel as the name for the covenant people of God becomes extended, in prophetic anticipation, to include other nations.

Most of all, it needs to be stressed very emphatically that although we do need to speak of Israel, if we are to be faithful to the Bible's own story and teaching, there is nowhere in this book where I am referring to the modern Israeli state. That is not part of this discussion at all. In my view great damage is done by those who confuse and conflate the Old Testa­ment Israelites in the canon of the Bible, the contemporary diaspora [geographic  dispersion] of ethnic Jews around the world, Judaism as a religion and the modem po­litical state of Israel--as if they were all the same thing, and can carry the same theological affirmations. I do not believe these four entities can or should be simplistically identified in that way. Especially we need to dis­tinguish what we believe the New Testament says about the Jews as the ethnic descendants of Abraham from the claims and actions of the mod­ern state of Israel, and not assume that the former can be simply applied to the latter. So I ask the reader constantly to remember that Israel in this book refers exclusively to biblical Israel, in the ways that the Bible itself uses the term in both the Old and New Testament (ways which, in my opinion, bear no theological relation to the modem state of that name).