The Old Testament and Some Other Stuff

I’ve developed a habit of reading the Bible when I get up in the morning. When I was young and zealous, I would read 3 chapters in the Old Testament, and 2 in the New. That way I would cover the Old Testament in a year, and the New two and a half times a year. Today I pretty much read one chapter in each Testament, and often not even that, because my mind goes up a rabbit trail before I get to the New Testament reading. I’ve fixed that by occasionally starting with the New Testament and wandering off before getting to the Old.

My point, from which I have already wandered, is that the Old Testament habitually frustrates me. That’s because I grew up sitting in a circle with a teacher holding up pictures of the Red Sea parting, or David holding Goliath’s head (the boys loved that, especially because the girls were grossed out). We learned that those Old Testament characters were super heroes who always obeyed God and dwelt in a supernatural realm that we would experience if we obeyed God too.

But my reading of the Old Testament as an adult has violated my expectations. Every page is filled with moral failures, rebellion, and unbelief. Adam falls. Abraham begets Ishmael. Jacob connives. Moses strikes the rock. The people indulge in pagan idolatry even before they get to the promised land. For four hundred years the nation shifts from idolatry to conquest to repentance and back again. Saul completely fails. David is a murderer and an adulterer. Solomon begins well but condones idolatry to keep his harem happy. The northern kingdom goes completely pagan. Its prophets whine and complain. Judah’s religious preferences depend on who’s on the throne at the time. And even after deportation and restoration, Nehemiah has to slap people around because of lapses against the Mosaic law. I’ve come to believe that Old Testament Judaism was definitely ordained by God simply because no one trying to manufacture a religion would portray its adherents in such a negative light. A charlatan would have given us the Sunday School Old Testament.

My frustration with the Old Testament is of course based on faulty expectations from my childhood. Let me suggest some other perceptions that have been a help to me. The first I gleaned from a former pastor who pointed out that the Old Testament (duh) is about God. He is the hero, and the only hero. Against a background of human depravity and failure he keeps showing up with unmerited grace and deliverance, for his own purposes. He pours out this grace on the nation, but also on individuals. Adam is clothed. Abraham receives the promise for his descendants. Jacob is humbled and becomes a prince of God. Moses sees God face to face. Israel enters the land under Joshua. God raises up deliverers in the period of the Judges. David becomes an example of humility and gives us the penitential Psalms. Solomon is given insights that passed to us through the Wisdom Literature. God does miracles in the lives of common people through the prophets of the northern kingdom. God moves a pagan ruler to bring Israel back from captivity and reestablishes his law through Ezra and Nehemiah.

The Old Testament is about extremes: darkness and light, life and death, depravity and mercy, sin and grace. I don’t like it, because I prefer the mediocrity of a sweet and predictable God with easy morals who tolerates about everything and kills giants. I would like to be Daniel without spending time in the lion’s den. The Old Testament tells me that God by definition is God, and he is an extremist. Extreme sin, extreme guilt, extreme failure on the human side; and extreme grace, forgiveness, and acceptance on his side. Without that perception, the Old Testament constantly frustrates my expectations.

Another concept that I bring to my understanding of the Old Testament is that of the Remnant. Paul states in 1 Corinthians 1 and 2 that God makes “foolish the wisdom of the world,” and that God has chosen “what is foolish in the world to shame the wise,” and “what is weak in the world to shame the strong.” God in building his kingdom by-passes what would be my obvious choices and calls out those least likely to be noticed as kingdom material at all. This was a pattern in the Old Testament. Israel is called out of the world. Judah is called out of Israel. David’s line is called out of Judah. At one point the prophet Elijah complained that he was the only faithful follower of God in the northern kingdom. God reminded him that there were still “seven thousand who had not bowed the knee to Baal.” There is no indication that these seven thousand came from a particular class (prophets, priests), but were common folks scattered throughout Israel and known only to God. These unknowns apparently were in existence through Old Testament history, so that when we open the New Testament we find some of their spiritual descendants. After three hundred years of Greek and Roman influence, after all the corruption and intrigues of the Hasmonean period, we find some common folks who would argue with angels, but not for a moment question their existence (see Luke 1 and 2). These were salt of the earth, down to earth, maybe naïve, but stubborn believers in God. They represented the faithful Remnant.

I hope it is helpful for my reader to apply these presuppositions to his reading of the Old Testament. Now I’m faced with another question: do these presuppositions apply only to the Old Testament? It is common to blame the failures of its characters on incomplete revelation; that is, they behaved badly because they only knew types of shadows that pointed to the fullness that the New Testament revealed. By that argument, those who believed the gospel of Jesus lived instantly on a higher moral ground. I’m not so sure about that. Before the death of its first leaders, the church was dealing with moral depravity, heresy, infighting, struggles for power, legalism, mysticism, Gnosticism, pride of gifting and ministry, and party spirit. This seems a bit familiar.

Church history fairs no better: heresy, divisions, diverse traditions, powerful movements of God that hardened into monuments to the past, inquisitions, auto de fes, the Great Schism, the wars following the Reformation, my own English ancestors who slaughtered each other for forty years in a religious frenzy, and then sat down, had a cup of tea, and decided to all get along. It’s a bit embarrassing. Not to mention the American church, carrying the same divisions, but eschewing slaughter, limits itself to irritating one another on Facebook.

To be fair, there may be a deeper reason for this, perhaps locked in the New Testament itself. The gospel is so counter-intuitive, so alarming, so expansive, that no one human mind can take it all in. Hence, varieties of interpretations arise based on what part of the gospel one is focused upon. I have no idea what has happened to Bruce McLaren and Emergence (I feel no obligation to keep informed), but I do know that his A Generous Orthodoxy had an impact on me. In it he analyzed the strengths of the seven or eight major divisions of Christendom. When I finished, I realized that his outline was based on the whole Christ event—incarnation, life, death, resurrection, ascension, second coming. Each division of the church focused on no more than two of these, but usually just one; the point being that there is a fullness of Christ expressed by the church universal, but compartmentalized.

But it is simply impossible to take all of Christendom into one’s heart and experience. The best we can do is to be faithful in our own tradition, but keep its walls porous. I grew up Presbyterian, and spent thirty years in the charismatic movement. That means that I am most comfortable with an esoteric group of charismatic Calvinists. Yes, they really are out there, under the suspicion of both charismatics and Calvinists: God’s tongue-speaking elect. I’ve tried other avenues, especially Anglicanism, which I dearly love. But I never could get the nuances, the inside humor, or the via media. I was outside looking in, hoping to find CS Lewis. So I’m back to the Puritans, although I will read Athanasius and St. John of the Cross out of reverence for traditions outside my own. (I do draw the line at Word of Faith books. I am not that porous.)

Thank God for blogging, which allows us to say whatever we want without documentation or the rigidity of a formal essay. I say that because I am aware that I am off my initial subject, and will now try to wander back.

Let’s go back to the alarming notion that God is God. History is exactly where he wants it, and it is moving according to his purposes. I am having trouble finding the exact word to describe how I think he works. “Sneaky” is not bad, “stealthy” might be better, but both are a bit pejorative. I prefer something more like “counter-intuitive” even though it is becoming a cliché. God seems to enjoy moving outside our boxes and definitions and structures. For instance, I have read, but not confirmed, that numbers of Moslems in the heart of the Middle East have had direct encounters with Isa through dreams and visions. As jihad expands, something unpredictable is going on at its center. Even if these reports are overstated, they are still a good example of not only God’s sovereignty, but of his sense of humor. As in the Old Testament, there is still in the world this contrast of sin, heresy, depravity, etc., and unmerited grace, mercy, deliverance working in the world, unexpected, unearned, and based solely on God’s desire to show off.

Likewise, the concept of the Remnant is equally valid in the New Testament age. While structures and confessions are absolutely necessary for the purity and continuation of the visible church, there is still a company within it who are united in love to Christ, and who are known only to Christ. They include a babushka before her icon, a nun with her rosary, a Pentecostal gentleman waving his handkerchief in the aisle, a Presbyterian seminary student struggling with Hebrew verbs, and a host more. These love God and leave a residue of love in the lives of others. They form the Kingdom of God. God sees them. They are the church. The external structures they represent, while necessary, are shadows to God. As in the Old Testament, God still has a remnant.

In summary: God is not worried. Everything is OK.