Israel, The Messiah, & The Progress Of Redemption

We are continuing to look at this matter of the harmony of the Scriptures in terms of the Old and New Covenant. We remind ourselves that as we come to the New Testament we are coming to the final development of the covenant of grace that has been unfolding in the Old Testament administration by administration of the one covenant of Grace.

This continued fulfillment and extension of the Promises that are constitutive of the covenant of grace that we find in the Old Testament is called by theologians “the progress of redemption,” or “salvation history.” This history recorded in Scriptures is real history but it is also a unique history inasmuch as that history is uniquely concerned with what redemption is, looks like, and means.

the Old Covenant is so concerned with Israel and the life of the Nation of Israel because the tribes of Israel is where God gives us this unique salvation history. This is so true that we can say that Israel’s unique experience as God’s chosen people to be the container which God would incrementally and increasingly fill with the meaning of redemption is unmatched by the history of any other people. This unique experience of Israel whereby they receive the law, the covenant(s), and the promise(s) is important to the flowering of redemption that comes in and through Jesus Christ in the New Testament the way that exposition, conflict, and rising action in a story or novel, are important to climax, falling action, and resolution of that novel. This is important to say because so many in the Church in our country today want to believe that they can understand the story of redemption’s climax (New Testament) w/o understanding its exposition, conflict, and rising action in the Old Testament. And as we have said before by peeling off the climax of salvation history from its exposition, conflict, and rising action in the Old Covenant the consequences is that the climax is reinterpreted (usually in a humanistic direction) in order for it to remain consistent with the previous story line that is now retold with a completely different narrative line then Gods. The result is then that we have a different story and so a different salvation history then the story that God tells in Scripture.

All of this explains why we must understand what happens in all of Scripture as being God’s salvation history, thus being one story.

Now, in this story, Israel’s experience is unique as is clearly set before us in the passage read this morning (Deuteronomy 4:32-40). No other people as a people were called and raised up by God to be the players in the progress of redemption. No other people were known by Yahweh and were to know Yahweh the way the people of Israel were known and did know. They are unique. This does not mean that God was absent in the histories of other people but his presence in the histories of other peoples is not a presence that is unfolding His story of salvation. Only in Israel did God work within the terms of the covenant of grace as that was initiated and sustained by His covenantal relationship with them.

The passage in Deuteronomy 4:32f communicates that the history of Israel as being absolutely sui generis in all of space and time.

32 “For ask now concerning the days that are past, which were before you, since the day that God created man on the earth, and ask from one end of heaven to the other, whether any great thing like this has happened, or anything like it has been heard. 33 Did any people ever hear the voice of God speaking out of the midst of the fire, as you have heard, and live? 34 Or did God ever try to go and take for Himself a nation from the midst of another nation, by trials, by signs, by wonders, by war, by a mighty hand and an outstretched arm, and by great terrors, according to all that the LORD your God did for you in Egypt before your eyes? 35 To you it was shown, that you might know that the LORD Himself is God; there is none other besides Him. 36 Out of heaven He let you hear His voice, that He might instruct you; on earth He showed you His great fire, and you heard His words out of the midst of the fire. 37 And because He loved your fathers, therefore He chose their descendants after them; and He brought you out of Egypt with His Presence, with His mighty power, 38 driving out from before you nations greater and mightier than you, to bring you in, to give you their land as an inheritance, as it is this day. 39 Therefore know this day, and consider it in your heart, that the LORD Himself is God in heaven above and on the earth beneath; there is no other. 40 You shall therefore keep His statutes and His commandments which I command you today, that it may go well with you and with your children after you, and that you may prolong your days in the land which the LORD your God is giving you for all time.”

In this passage some of the peculiar elements of God’s relation to Israel that comprise integral parts of Salvation history are heard. Here we find the ideas of election, redemption, covenant, and inheritance to name but a few. We even find in the emboldened passage above that the uniqueness of Israel’s national experience points to the uniqueness of Yahweh Himself as God.

As such it is easy to see why Christians would contend that the revelation of God and His method of redemption are bound up with the history of tiny Israel. God told the history of salvation in the unfolding of the history of Israel. This is something that is not true for any other nation.

However, this peculiarity of election for Israel that provides the meaning of redemption — and which causes so much resentment among other peoples and gods — was not a peculiarity that was to insular. Their unique calling and function in the world was to facilitate God’s promises to the nations. Israel’s role was to be Priest to the nations — doing what a Priest does by representing the nations before God.

6 And you shall be to Me a kingdom of priests and a holy nation.’ These are the words which you shall speak to the children of Israel.”

Israel was to be the means by which the saving knowledge of God would be brought to the nations. Israel was to be the nation leaven that leavened the whole world. In order to fulfill that assignment Israel’s national life was to be Holy (separated) unto God, exemplified by their taking seriously God’s Law.

For I have known him (Abraham), in order that he may command his children and his household after him, that they keep the way of the LORD, to do righteousness and justice, that the LORD may bring to Abraham what He has spoken to him.”

And because of this reality the Deuteronomy text in vs. 39-40 can give us the moral necessity that is built upon the theological reality that God is God alone.

So in this salvation history Israel’s one of a kind position was one that spoke of missionary duty as much as it spoke of privilege. If Israel failed in its missionary duty and moral high calling then it’s special status became festooned with heavier judgments then the other nations. (To whom much is given, much is required.)

The book of Amos reveals this truism.

Amos recounts the blessings and privileges of Israel as God’s salvation history people but this recounting of blessings and privileges is used by God through Amos to indict them for their societal injustice and cultural corruption. A people who had the privilege that Israel had, by walking crosswise to those privilege would be inflicted w/ even greater penalty (Amos 2:6-16, 3:2).

2 “ You only have I known of all the families of the earth;
Therefore I will punish you for all your iniquities.”

So God calls upon Amos to bring covenant lawsuit against Israel and the verdict is that Israel would be severely chastised and the land left deserted. And in the face of possible protest that God would never do such a thing to His special people God says through Amos,

7 “ Are you not like the people of Ethiopia to Me,
O children of Israel?” says the LORD.

“ Did I not bring up Israel from the land of Egypt,
The Philistines from Caphtor,
And the Syrians from Kir?

Now keep in mind that God is not saying here that Israel’s history is not unique. The point seems more to be that if Israel will violate the covenant then Israel’s uniqueness is forfeited and they become not substantially different then the other nations. The point here is not that the other nations are like Israel in terms of God’s salvation history but that Israel has become like the other nations as seen by their covenantal degradation. The point here is not that God has worked in the other nations redemptively the way He worked w/ Israel but rather that Israel has become altogether corrupt like the other nations.

What Amos says in 3:1-2 reveals the unchanging uniqueness of Israel,

1 Hear this word that the LORD has spoken against you, O children of Israel, against the whole family which I brought up from the land of Egypt, saying:
2 “ You only have I known of all the families of the earth;
Therefore I will punish you for all your iniquities.”

Note here that it is precisely because of God’s unique relationship w/ Israel that they will be punished because of their iniquities.

All this to say that the uniqueness of Israel, as the telling of salvation history is clearly part of the teachings of the OT. God is indeed sovereign over all the nations as Amos clearly teaches but He is intimately sovereign over the affairs of Israel. However, keep in mind that this intimate sovereignty of God over Israel was always w/ the purpose of calling the nations. Israel unique position existed only to be a vessel to accomplish God’s intent to call all the nations to Himself.

Now … in light of all of this when we consider Jesus in the New Testament he is presented to us as the Messiah — Jesus the Christ. And this Messiah was individually what Israel was to have been corporately. As Israel was to be for the calling of the nations, so Jesus, the Messiah is for the gathering of the Nation. Where Israel failed in its calling the Messiah succeeds. The Messiah was the success of all that Israel had been a failure at in God’s setting them apart. The Messiah is God’s self-revelation for the work of the redeeming of the nations. Because Christ is all that God called Israel to be, like Israel Christ is absolutely unique and it is still the case that should the nations desire to come to God they must, like the nations in the OT were to come through Israel to God, come through the one that has been uniquely set apart to be the revelation and redemption of God. This explains why the synoptic Gospels are so given to a kind of recapitualation story of Israel when they tell the story of Jesus Christ.

As God’s true Israel, Christ is the successful High Priest to the nations that Israel never was. This explains the Christian faith’s insistence, to this day, that Jesus is the only way to the Father.

So, in this OT history God concentrates the uniqueness of Israel’s salvation history into one man and from this Messiah God opens the way to the universal offer of salvation to the nations. Israel’s salvation history was unique because God has a universal design for them. Jesus embodies the unique salvation history of Israel and achieves God’s universal goal that through His faithful Son all the nations of the earth would be blessed. He is, indeed, the savior of the world.

And so, because we have all this history of redemption and because we find its climax in Christ we command all men everywhere to repent so as to taste and see that the Lord is Good.

Obama Disavows Obvious Truth

While addressing Republicans in Baltimore MD. President Obama said, “I Am Not An Ideologue.”

http://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2010/01/29/obama_to_gop_i_am_not_an_ideologue.html

Shortly afterward, President Obama went on to say to the assembled Republicans that, “I am not a Black man.”

I’m not making this up … well at least not the first part.

But both statements are equally believable and each statement leaves one equally incredulous.

A Tip of the Hat to Political Correctness In The Republican Response to the State of the Union

“A child’s educational opportunity should be determined by her intellect and work ethic, not by her ZIP Code.”

Governor Bob McDonnell
Governor — Virginia

Now people are going to think I’m being picky here and hyper-critical but until the last 10 years or so anybody speaking or writing that above statement would have used the male pronoun “his” where the female pronoun “her” is used. Why the change? The answer is that we have bought into political correctness so that when we right papers or speak in public we think it necessary to occasionally sprinkle our speaking and writing with female pronouns where male pronouns had once been universally used. Up until we were crushed with PC everybody understood that the male generic pronoun was used to be inclusive of all mankind. However, some where along the way someone decided that the use of such pronouns was not sensitive to the female persuasion and as such, in an effort to show sensitivity to someones hyperactive feelings, our culture has gone to deleting the male pronouns in favor of the female pronouns. This happens everywhere from academic papers, to political speeches to bible translations. The habit is ubiquitous and what is a hoot is that the people who do it actually believe that they are revealing themselves to be a sensitive, kinder, more caring people.

Now, at the end of the day the pronoun itself is a very small thing. What is a very big thing though is all the feminism, multiculturalism, and political correctness that lays behind these small pronouns. What is a very big deal is the linguistic Marxism that tells us what speech we can use in order to be considered culturally attuned and what speech we can’t use lest we be considered social troglodytes. If the PC police can have their way with a culture on personal pronouns how much more will they have their way with culture on issues that are genuinely weighty?

Finally, all of this reveals to me again how compromised the Republican party is. If Gov. McDonnell spoke this way unconsciously then it shows he has unknowingly surrendered to some PC assumptions. If Gov. McDonnell spoke this way consciously then it shows he is willing to consciously compromise with the feminist, Marxist (but I repeat myself) zeitgeist.

Most people find it hard to believe how basic these seemingly small matters are to civilization, but it is my conviction that giving into this PC speak is indicative of a underlying bedrock Marxist layering that is operating as the intellectual background out of which a person communicates.

But then most people think I see far more then what is really present. You be the judge.

The Nature Of Social Revolution & The Escondido Hermeneutic

“Like the English Revolution in the seventeenth century, the Papal revolution pretended to be not a revolution but a restoration. Gregory VII, like Cromwell, claimed that he was not innovating, but restoring ancient freedoms that had been abrogated in the immediately preceding centuries. As the English Puritans and their successors found precedents in the common law of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, largely passing over the century or more of Tudor-Stuart absolutism, so the Gregorian reformers found precedents in the patristic writings of the early centuries of the church, largely passing over the Carolingian and post-Carolingian era in the West. The ideological emphasis was on tradition, but the tradition could only be established by suppressing the immediate past and returning to an earlier one. Writings of leading Frankish and German canonists and theologians of the ninth and tenth centuries were simply ignored. In addition, the patristic writings were interpreted to conform to the political program of the political program of the papal party, and when particular patristic texts stood in the way of that program they were rejected. Faced w/ an obnoxious custom, the Gregorian reformers would appeal over it to truth, quoting the aphorism of Tertullian and St. Cyprian, “Christ said ‘I am the truth,’ He did not say ‘I am the custom.'” Gregory VII quoted this against Emperor Henry IV, Beckett quoted it against King Henry II. It had special force at a time when almost all the prevailing law was customary law.

It is the hallmark of the great revolutions of Western history, starting with the Papal Revolution, that they clothe their vision of the radically new in the garments of a remote past, whether those of ancient legal authorities (as in the case of the Papal revolution), or of an ancient religious text, the Bible, (as in the case of the German Reformation), or of an ancient civilization, Classical Greece (as in the case of the French Revolution), or of a pre-historic classless society (as in the case of the Russian Revolution). In all of these great upheavals the idea of restoration — a return, and in that sense a revolution, to an earlier starting point — was connected w/ a dynamic concept of the future.

It is easy enough to criticize the historiography of the revolutions as politically biased and, indeed purely ideological…. What is significant is that at the most crucial turning points of Western history a projection into the distant past has been needed to match the projection into the distant future. Both the past and the future have been summoned, so to speak, to fight against the evils of the present.”

Harold Berman
Law & Revolution — The Formation of the Western Legal Tradition — pg. 112-113

Now for a couple varied applications,

1.) There is an attempted Revolution going on in the Reformed Church right now and it is being pursued by Westminster Seminary California. The way they are seeking to frame the debate is in keeping with the observations that Berman makes here about all revolutions. Like all Revolutions, WSCal is clothing their vision of the radically new in the garments of a remote past. They are taking an ancient religious authority, the Reformed Confessions and they are interpreting them to conform to the political program of the Escondido / R2K political program of the WSCal party. Like all Revolutions, they are selling this great upheaval as a return to a pristine time and are connecting it to their “dynamic” concept of a yet to be realized future.

The fact that they are interpreting the Confessions to conform to their political program can be seen in the Kerux article observation that while those advocating the Escondido Hermeneutic mouth the words of the confessions, they at the same time are speaking a different language. Kerux states on pg. 70-71,

“Though much of this language (the language of the Escondido Hermeneutic adherents — BLM) is clearly in line with the confessional formulations, it is not entirely clear to us that it accurately reflects its traditional and accepted meaning. There is a marked ambiguity that runs throughout all of these formulations—it is not always entirely clear in what precise sense the Mosaic covenant is to be considered a covenant of grace, or at least ‘part of’ or ‘connected to’ the covenant of grace….

Likewise, although these authors attempt to utilize traditional, orthodox language regarding the Mosaic covenant (“administration of the covenant of grace”), it is not entirely clear the precise sense this language carries in their formulations. Again, there is marked ambiguity, tension, and even self-contradiction in some of their formulations.

When this is combined with Kerux’s earlier observation that their is a desire on the part of some of those in the “Escondido Party” to change the language of the Confessions it it clear what is going on here is a radical revolution of the type that Berman speaks. When the Escondido Hermeneutic speaks on the confessions on the issue of covenant or R2K it is like watching a old Japanese Godzilla movie where you hear people speaking English and yet you know that they are saying something funky by the way their lips don’t quite match their words.

If the boys from Escondido get their way and are able to impose the Escondido Hermeneutic on large portions of the Reformed Church it will be a revolution in the Confessional Reformed Churches in America, which pro-rated for its smaller size, will be every bit as seismic as the Revolutions that Berman cites above.

2.) At the same time there is an attempt in America at large to pull off social revolution in this culture by the elites in both the Republican and Democratic parties. Using Berman’s language we would say that that the Cultural Marxists, as led by B. Hussein Obama, are clothing their vision of the radically new in the garment of the remote past by appealing to the ideal pre-Christian multicultural egalitarian society.

We must keep in mind the words of Obama in his inauguration speech that communicated his intent at Revolution,

“But our time of standing pat, of protecting narrow interests and putting off unpleasant decisions — that time has surely passed. Starting today, we must pick ourselves up, dust ourselves off, and begin again the work of remaking America.

The Cultural Marxists that has been embraced by our elites are on a mission of revolution and they are casting that image in clothing of fairness, and social equity. Because this is true every appeal to the past, or to legal documents (i.e. — Constitution) must be heard through the grid of their attempt to bring cultural Marxist revolution to America. These people will be satisfied with nothing less then social revolution for the simple reason that they are social revolutionaries.

Berman’s quote, especially the emboldened part, is quite handy for the times in which we live for we are surrounded by people who desire to bring in their version of social Revolution.