Introduction
There is a profound, mostly ignored message in the Bible that has been hiding in plain sight for centuries. It’s not the traditional Christian or Judaic message though it shares elements of each. What it expresses is an understanding of what God, as Creator, desires for and of each of us.
Once we understand that desire, and glimpse the plan that springs from it, our traditional understandings are undone. Some of us react to this realization, predictably, by defending our beliefs to ourselves, and rejecting this message that represents for many a paradigm shift of enormous proportions. No longer can we comfortably sit back expecting the salvation of our future Messiah, comforted by the rhythm of a calendar. No longer can we rest in the assurance of our ticket to heaven despite the testimony of our lives. God, and his plan, after all, isn’t constrained by our long-held beliefs, no matter how sincere.
Our purpose here is to expose what the Bible teaches is God’s desire and intentions of, and for us, and as a result, how the rest of one’s traditional religious beliefs and practices are supplanted. Having understood God’s heart for us, we will see which aspects of the Bible reveal it, and which don’t. Those that don’t, we need to recognize are there for different, and by definition, secondary, reasons.
The Bible’s story of God’s plan and message isn’t “new”. It is simply non-traditional, and so largely ignored.
What We Are
To understand the tension in the Bible, we have to start by forming a clear-eyed assessment of what we are as seen by the Creator.
We don’t have to read very many pages into the Bible before it begins to expose us. Genesis 3 (the “Fall”) kicks things off by showcasing man’s willful self-interest, resulting in his metaphorical separation from God. Immediately thereafter, we have the story of one brother murdering another because of his envy and jealousy. And not long after that, we have the outbreak and spread of general debauchery on a global scale, so much so that God allegorically “decides” to start over by destroying the current population, save for Noah and his family.
That experiment, too, fails almost immediately, sparked by some drunkenness on Noah’s part. This is followed by a relentless decay of a society dedicated to itself and to ignoring the God that created them by doing whatever their egos led them to do.
Eventually, however, we encounter a person who actually believes God and obeys his instructions. For doing so, God blesses him and his progeny, telling him that they (or one of them – the singular Greek σπέρμα of Gal 3:16c, or the Hebrew וּבְזַרְעֶֽךָ׃ of Gen 28:14) will one day be a blessing to all the families and nations of the earth. But even this seemingly “righteous” man (Abram) engages in deceit and a kind of immorality when his own well-being is threatened in Egypt.
From Abram on, we get a mixed bag of stories in which some characters sometimes do laudable things. But these seem to be the exceptions (e.g., Jacob’s reunion with Esau, Joseph’s forgiveness of his brothers). More typically, we see unethical behaviors (e.g., Jacob stealing from Esau, Joseph’s brothers selling him/leaving him for dead) that serve to underscore the Bible’s basic theme of our natural unrighteousness – at least most of the time. At a minimum, humanity is portrayed as disinterested in and disobedient to God’s will for their lives.
So, the Bible insistently exposes this dichotomy of our nature: sometimes moral and ethical, but normally not. It may help us to understand this tension by returning to Genesis 1.
There we see that God created us in his(/their) “image”. The term translated “image” is 6754. צֶלֶם tselem, which is elsewhere translated “idol”. The idea is that this tselem is a representation of something (in the idol case, some imagined god). In the human case, it seems that God’s intention in making us was to create us as his representatives. And, when we live up to that charter, we find ethical, moral behavior briefly shining its beam of light into what is normally the darkness of our natural (nominal) “unrighteousness” [i].
What God Wants…
…Of Us
I think we can all agree that producing a species that is persistently ungodly as its default nature doesn’t sound like a way to produce a family of righteous children. What did God have in mind?
The Bible gives us several clues as well as descriptions of what God sought and seeks. Let’s start with the passage already mentioned in Genesis 1. Ge 1:26
26Then God said, “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness. And let them have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over the livestock and over all the earth and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth.”
God says he made us in his image, as his representatives. And since he is not material but spiritual, we should understand that the way in which we are to represent him has to do with our spiritual nature – having true (i.e., pure) spirits, toward he and others. He goes on to create all the animals and plants for the man to use in sustaining his life. The implied covenant seems to be: “I’ve given you all you need for life. Now live in the way I desire you to live, and I will be your God with you”.
Obedience
What is that way? We don’t get a lot of explicit commentary on character traits in the Torah/Pentateuch. We’re told that God treated Abel’s offering favorably, but this story isn’t there to teach ethical behavior – both brothers made offerings to God (despite the fact that there won’t be a “law” requiring them to do so for another 1500 years), and so displayed God’s prized character trait – that of (anticipatory) obedience to his (purported, future) will. Abram demonstrated the other critical character trait, and that is people’s trust in him. We’ll get into the nature of this “trust” presently. But Abram displayed it; acted it out; and left his home at God’s direction for an unknown destination. And, of course, his acts were obedient.
A Word on Trust
Because the terms “trust”, “faith”, and “believe” in our vernacular are so tepid, we have to take a minute to clarify what God wants when we say he wants us to “trust” (or “believe” or “have faith in”) him. The following description is an excerpt from Recovering the Gospel – I:
‘This is where the presentation of the Gospel, in my opinion, has fallen down. The word “believe” in common English usage means “have confidence in the truth of” or “agree with”. It’s an intellectual conclusion. You think something is true, and so you “believe” it.
But this word “pisteuō” is different than that. This word has more of the sense of “rely on” or “entrust”. You don’t just “think” it’s true; you’re relying on the fact that it is true. There’s something at stake for you in the position you take, and so, having agreed with the proposition, you are betting your life on the truth of the proposition. You’re all in, you’re committed to living as if it were true, not as a dispassionate, external observer.
This is what the Bible means when it uses the word “believe”, or its cognate “faith” (4102. πίστις pistis, pis’-tis;) when it is talking about the belief/faith that leads to salvation. So when we read it or preach it, this is what must be communicated.
Matthew Bates has written in Salvation by Allegiance Alone a quite compelling argument for this very same conclusion. In it, he concludes that: “the gospel is purposed toward bringing about the practical obedience characteristic of allegiance to a king—what I have termed enacted allegiance.”’
Love
Joseph’s story presents several traits of the interactions between people that God seeks. Preeminent is Joseph’s demonstrated love for his father and brothers, and his forgiveness of those brothers despite their having abandoned him to die in the wilderness.
So, before we even get out of the Bible’s first book, Genesis, we’ve seen obedience to God, trust in God, and love for one another acted out and treated as prized character traits that God seeks in his people. As it turns out, we could almost stop here and have received a complete picture of what God wanted of us. The one missing trait is love of God, and we don’t read of that until we dive into the Psalms (and, of course, the Shema). There, we find many love poems to God. Nearly everyone, for example, knows the love poem that is Psalm 23.
Click here to see a list of pertinent verses from the Psalms.
Ps 5:11-12
11But let all who take refuge in you rejoice; let them ever sing for joy, and spread your protection over them, that those who love your name may exult in you. 12For you bless the righteous, O LORD; you cover him with favor as with a shield.
Ps 18:1
1I love you, O LORD, my strength.
Ps 31:23
23Love the LORD, all you his saints! The LORD preserves the faithful but abundantly repays the one who acts in pride.
Ps 42:1-2
1 As a deer pants for flowing streams, so pants my soul for you, O God. 2 My soul thirsts for God, for the living God. When shall I come and appear before God?
Ps 63:1
1O God, you are my God; earnestly I seek you; my soul thirsts for you; my flesh faints for you, as in a dry and weary land where there is no water.
Ps 146:6-9
Blessed is he…6 who made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that is in them, who keeps faith forever; 7 who executes justice for the oppressed, who gives food to the hungry. The LORD sets the prisoners free; 8 the LORD opens the eyes of the blind. The LORD lifts up those who are bowed down; the LORD loves the righteous. 9 The LORD watches over the sojourners; he upholds the widow and the fatherless, but the way of the wicked he brings to ruin.
What about when we don’t act in love, or trust, or obedience to him? Well, we still have all of the Prophets and a lot of the Writings to review. And there we find a mixture of his will/expectation of us when we both are, and aren’t, obedient/faithful.
In Is 6:8 we have Isaiah trusting and committing to obediently serve the Lord:
And I heard the voice of the Lord saying, “Whom shall I send, and who will go for us?” Then I said, “Here I am! Send me.”
Malachi tells us how we are to make amends after having been unfaithful, Mal 3:7
7 From the days of your fathers you have turned aside from my statutes and have not kept them. Return to me, and I will return to you, says the LORD of hosts…
by which he means return to trusting and being faithful to him. The very act of turning back to and recommitting to him represents more than just a simple act of will. It is, rather, an implicit act of love of God.
Micah seems to distill the essence of the will of God for us when he says Mi 6:8
8He has told you, O man, what is good; and what does the LORD require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God?
Doing justice and loving kindness seem to be key to what God wills us to do. Doing so makes us obedient/faithful to him. And both of those require a profound humility on our part.
…For Us
God wants for us something he hasn’t yet attained to the extent he desires. Early on, the Bible relates that he wanted an idyllic garden for us in which life would be bountiful, healthy, and endless with him. This arrangement would have produced an enormous, adopted human family with whom he could share in eternal communion in his presence.
Well, that didn’t work out. Nevertheless, that’s our purpose. That’s the plan.
Following the initial failure, the narrative relates a couple of repeated tries (re-creations): the flood survived by Noah’s family (also quickly derailed), and later the redemption of a people who reportedly had been enslaved in Egypt.
God frees those people and, unlike in the past, specifies in writing what he expects of them (trust, obedience/faithfulness to his instructions/Torah). In addition, God offers them a land to settle, plant, raise their crops and livestock, and live in in communion with him.
We should note that God sought intimate interaction with the Israelites as he had had with the first humans in the garden. The narrative relates that from their sojourn at Mt. Sinai until Israel actually entered “the land”, God (or at least his “presence”) had remained with them in their midst. Starting with the Garden narrative, we’re to see that God’s relationship and interaction with humanity is paramount to him. This is his heart. Not separation.
He says, “I freed you from slavery, and I’ll give you a land to possess on which to live and grow. All I require in return is for you to live as I will you to live. And look, I’ve even written down the principles of that living for you!” This is the covenant he makes with Israel to which they agree. And if they uphold their end of this bargain, God says they will be to him “a treasured possession among all peoples” and “a kingdom of priests and a holy nation.”
The Israelites were to be God’s priests, spiritual mediators between him and all of the pagans, to represent him and thereby draw even more God-seekers into his human family – those with whom he would spend eternity.
Here, you have to feel the intense tragedy and irony of this narrative so far.
God wants a family to spend eternity with. He provides multiple opportunities for us to take him up on his offer, and we reject (or just simply ignore) each one, choosing instead to serve ourselves. Not only are we not holy (set apart exclusively for God), but we do our best to ignore him. And not only are we not priests to him for others, but we’re so far away from him that we need priests to just tell us what he plainly wants from us.
In fact, our estrangement from him became (and remains) so severe that ultimately, he backs off his “priest” and “holy nation” expectations, and simply has Micah provide his pass/fail guidance Mi 6:8
8He has told you, O man, what is good;
and what does the LORD require of you
but to do justice, and to love kindness,
and to walk humbly with your God?
This represents what God’s expectations for us had become. And for the vast majority of us, even they are beyond reach as a pattern of life.
Other Themes
The Bible is filled with other narratives that relate themes other than God’s will, people’s rejection of it, and his judgment, though this is its principal, meta-narrative.
A whole genre of writings referred to as the “Priestly” material dominates the Pentateuch that nearly exclusively deals with technical minutia and narrative legend that is essentially of interest and value only to ancient priests. This is not to say this material, filling the books of Leviticus and Numbers, and much of Genesis and Exodus, is completely useless. One of its greatest values is, in fact, demonstrating the utter futility of religion and religious practice, as portrayed in the Bible in the Temple Cult, or in modern life as a church “worship” service, to soften and draw people’s hearts toward their God.
If anything, the Priestly material documents a system that separates the people from their God on purpose. This was the whole metaphor of the off-limits, holy Temple that was exactly opposite of God’s expressed desire.
So, whether or not this material has any divine pedigree (which I seriously doubt – see Did God Want a Temple, Sacrifices, or a Monarchy?), it does (and did) absolutely nothing to advance God’s plan for his children (yes, “children” – his adoptees).
There are many, many other subplots interwoven throughout the Tanakh, some fairly obvious, like the severe consequences ultimately for ignoring God, and many quite obscure and encoded narratives, having to do, for example, with Temple or court politics, or foreign oppression and oppressors. And there are some absolutely beautiful portraits of humans rising above their normal existence to express pure love and devotion (as in the book of Ruth), bravery and faith (as in the book of Esther), narrative fantasy (as in the book of Ezekiel), elegant poetry (as in the Song of Solomon and many of the Psalms), and righteous character development (as in the apocryphal book of Tobit). All of it (except the purely priestly material) is worth your time and meditation.
Growing a Righteous Family
God hasn’t changed his plan for humanity. He still wants a righteous (meaning dependent on God’s life) people who can commune with him for eternity. And through them he has said he will be glorified, Isa 43:7
7everyone who is called by my name,
whom I created for my glory,
whom I formed and made.”
So how is he going to achieve this?
A New Covenant
One can’t really read the Bible as an “unfolding” story from God’s point of view. If he is God, he knew how his plan would develop, what its setbacks would be, when they would occur, and what his next step would be.
From early on in the narrative’s chronology, the authors of the Tanakh had been planting the seeds of what to them bordered on an eschatological prophecy, which people have termed the New Covenant (Dt 30:6, Jer 31:31-34, Eze 36:24-28, Eze 37:21-23, Is 11:11-12, Joel 2:28). I’ve written a fair bit on this subject in Interpreting the New Covenant, Unpacking the New Covenant Gospel, Learning the Real Paul (and Unlearning What You’ve Been Taught), Forgiven vs Transformed to Righteousness, and Paul’s Real Gospel, among others. Therefore, I won’t spend much time repeating myself.
In the narrative chronology, we see the New Covenant first appear in Deuteronomy 30:6
6And the LORD your God will circumcise your heart and the heart of your offspring, so that you will love the LORD your God with all your heart and with all your soul, that you may live.
Here God announces (through the character of Moses) that he, himself, is going to transform people in the future so that they love the LORD sincerely. What’s “new” is that this is the first time (in terms of narrative chronology) that we learn that God is going to take the responsibility for transforming people to love him, rather than relying on the people themselves.
This is huge. If the people were naturally (nominally) un- or ill-equipped to diligently love God and their neighbor (as themselves), then God was going to step in and change them so that they could and then would. He was somehow going to enable them to do so. The dark pattern of their behavior that we see throughout Genesis and Exodus would extend on through Judges, much of Samuel and Kings, and certainly the prophets, so that by the turn of the first millennium, it was time for change.
How Do I Get Changed?
The natural question for those seeking eternal life with the perfection of their Creator becomes “how do I get changed?” That’s their natural first question. But it actually should be: “Do I want to be changed/enabled to live the life God wills for me instead of the one I control and naturally live?”
This is not a trivial question. This is a question the answer to which defines one’s entire future life: either in service to God or in service to oneself. Contrary to the modern, western, Christian lifestyle model (and no doubt the more liberal sects of Judaism), this is an all-or-nothing proposition, not an occasional proposition.
So, if one’s considered answer to this question is “Yes, I do want to be changed”, how does that happen?
We find the answer in a few places in the Tanakh (and all over the New Testament), for example, Je 31:31-34
31 “Behold, the days are coming, declares the LORD, when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and the house of Judah, 32not like the covenant that I made with their fathers on the day when I took them by the hand to bring them out of the land of Egypt, my covenant that they broke, though I was their husband, declares the LORD. 33 For this is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel after those days, declares the LORD: I will put my law within them, and I will write it on their hearts. And I will be their God, and they shall be my people. 34And no longer shall each one teach his neighbor and each his brother, saying, ‘Know the LORD,’ for they shall all know me, from the least of them to the greatest, declares the LORD. For I will forgive their iniquity, and I will remember their sin no more.”
Notice he specifies that this new covenant is with “the house of Israel and the house of Judah”. We’ll unpack that presently. And the means by which he will install his law within them we find spelled out in Ezekiel 11:17-20, where the prophet, speaking for YHWH, says:
[17] Therefore say, ‘Thus says the Lord GOD: I will gather you from the peoples and assemble you out of the countries where you have been scattered, and I will give you the land of Israel.’ [18] And when they come there, they will remove from it all its detestable things and all its abominations. [19] And I will give them one heart, and a new spirit I will put within them. I will remove the heart of stone from their flesh and give them a heart of flesh, [20] that they may walk in my statutes and keep my rules and obey them. And they shall be my people, and I will be their God.
That’s how God’s “law” is going to be instilled within them, through the agency of “a new spirit” and a “heart of flesh” rather than stone. This new spirit is God’s spirit. Time and space don’t allow us to completely unpack the effects of this spiritual metamorphosis, but I encourage you, if you have the interest, to review Learning the Real Paul (and Unlearning What You’ve Been Taught), as Paul is by far the most prolific and most knowledgeable author of all things “indwelt Spirit of God” specified in Ezekiel’s prophecy. It helps that Paul planted and lived with churches of people who all had experienced this exact transformation, as he had himself.
House of Israel and House of Judah
Earlier, we saw that the New Covenant promises were for descendants of the families of Jacob – the House of Israel and House of Judah. It doesn’t say anything about “the nations”, meaning Israel’s pagan neighbors. Here’s where the story is non-intuitive and has only been deciphered fairly recently through the research and scholarship of Dr. Jason Staples and his books, Paul and the Resurrection of Israel: Jews, Former Gentiles and Israelites, and The Idea of Israel in Second Temple Judaism: A New Theory of People, Exile, and Israelite Identity. I have tried to summarize his monumental work in the paper linked in the previous paragraph.
No brief introduction to Staples’ interpretation can do it justice. But you need to at least see its fundamental idea, which is that the dispersed House of Israel, the northern tribes of the previously united nation of Israel, were, as a result of the exile into surrounding nations in 722 BC, assimilated into those non-Israelite (and certainly non-Judaic) nations through intermarriages, cultural imperatives, and the passing of some 800 years. As a result, they gradually become Gentiles – “the nations” — themselves. Therefore, if the New Covenant was to be effective in reaching those now-Gentile distant descendants of the northern tribes, they – the now-God-seeking Gentiles would have to be pursued, along with faithful Judahites. This would act to not only resurrect the then “dead”/”swallowed up” House of Israel, but also fulfill the rejoining of Israel’s two Houses, the resurrected House of Israel and the House of Judah, into the presence of their God, which was his clear objective (Eze 37).
What Do I Do?
We’ve seen the mechanism God employs. But obviously not all former descendants of the House of Israel and the House of Judah (whoever they might be today) are walking around animated by God’s Spirit, perfectly knowing his will for their lives, and through their lives serving as his tselem – representatives – to their other, as-yet-unchanged, neighbors. But where we have seen people changed by God’s Spirit are those committed to following Christ. And, as it turns out, Jesus’s message of the Kingdom of God, the life of complete obedience he lived, and his resurrection had everything to do with inaugurating this new access to God via this New Covenant.
So “What do I Do?” Both the Old and New Testaments present the same message: repent of your life apart from God, and decide you want instead the life he offers – one of diligent fidelity to God and his will out of love for him, and meeting the needs of (i.e., the love of) your neighbor. The “Two Loves” formula.
Earlier, we discussed the gravity of this decision. It is not to be taken lightly. And we tried to make clear the extent and magnitude of the change resulting from ceding the control of your life to God. This change amounts to you humbly foregoing control of your life and handing that control to God so that he can, through his Spirit’s animation of you, love and serve your neighbors. (This is precisely what Micah meant by “walk humbly with your God”.)
But if taken, I, for one, can at least provide my personal assurance that you’ll never look back. The way you think, your interests, and your capacity for and interest in serving others will all be transformed. And, if you want to get a clearer, more personal testimony as to how the change will affect you, find a Christ follower you know (note: these are not your typical church goers) and ask him or her to explain their experience. They’ll be happy to.
If you want to take this step, does it mean that you have to be a distant descendant of one of Israel’s tribes? Not necessarily. The New Covenant promises stated who they were for, but they didn’t say that they were exclusively for Israel and Judah. This is where we need to remember the other unfulfilled promise that God had on the books at the turn of the first millennium, and that was his promise to Abraham that his progeny would be a blessing to all the “families” and “nations” of the earth. That’s everyone. And God’s Spirit is the blessing.
So, this New Covenant turns out to be the way in which God ultimately succeeds in building his righteous family of those who love him and their neighbor, and with whom he will live eternally. In addition, it turns out to be the method whereby God achieves the fulfillment of three separate prophecies – Abraham’s (blessing to nations), Ezekiel’s (rejoining), and Jeremiah’s (new covenant). The really interesting thing about it, once you get past its beauty and elegance, is that it is not an exclusively Jewish idea, nor is it an exclusively Christian idea. But it is a thoroughly biblical idea and reality that integrates elements of both. It is the New Covenant Gospel.
[i] You might be surprised at the virulence by some to this message. It seems that another widely held trait of humans is to judge themselves “good”, or at least “OK” rather than as victimized by an inheritance of self-interest. I say inheritance because it’s really not their personal doing. They didn’t do anything “wrong” except happen to be born into this species, about which the Bible and History are quite clear.
The fact is that no matter their degree of petty offense, be it cheating on taxes, lusting over the car or fishing boat or vacations his neighbor has, or simply acting on the basis that their needs and priorities are more important than their neighbor’s, they will still, perhaps out of self-defense, see themselves as “good”. And nearly everyone subconsciously thinks that way. World history is a testament to people responding to self-interests while seeing themselves as good as they hack through those standing in the way of achieving their goal. It is the best evidence that exists that this analysis of the predominant strain of human nature is historically accurate.The Bible’s Crucial Lesson
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