Redemption is rooted in the consistent commands requiring absolutely fidelity to the worship of the one true God. By Yahweh’s sovereign act of “re-creating” Israel in leading them out of Egypt and through the Red Sea, God has the right to speak to Israel as the God who is faithful to His Promises. God speaks to Israel at this point by authorizing Moses to speak and act on God’s behalf before Pharoah and before the descendants of Abraham. A challenge to Moses’ leadership is viewed as a challenge to Yahweh’s leadership, so empowered is Moses to speak and act on God’s behalf.

 

When Moses addressed the tribes of Israel at the end of their journey out of Egypt, Moses was speaking and God was speaking and yet there was only one set of words. As the drama unfolded, we learn that Israel would enter into the presence of Yahweh only through the appointed servant Moses. This presence was regulated and Moses was the appointed gate-keeper for that presence. 

 

In the founding constitutional document of Israel’s corporate existence, Israel was reminded that they were to have no other gods before Yahweh. This was not centrally a prohibition against a belief in polytheism though implicitly it might have carried this connotation. Rather, it was first and foremost a diatribe against idolatry. Yahweh was to be Israel’s greatest desire. They were to honor Yahweh above all else. They were not to find their fundamental significance in any creation of their own hands or in any other part of the created order. In short, idols would never satisfy their deepest longings. God alone had hard wired them to find their deepest satisfaction in Him alone. Here was the ground upon which their moral responsibility to each other rested. They were all alike accountable to God above all.

 

Israel was not to have any grave images because God had already established an image of himself, humankind. The attempt to create another image of the divine being would inevitably lead to a lowering of the original image and a loss of the original significance granted to humankind in being image bearers of God. 

 

And so the ten commandments continued. Israel’s relationship with Yahweh was sacrosanct and to be protected at all costs. The pluralist impulse could be interpreted in this context as the attempt by Israel to define their relationship to Yahweh in the categories of the surrounding nations. This was to be resisted, not because there was no “common wisdom” in the nations, but because religious fidelity was the correct analogue to Yahweh’s role as Israel’s sole creator and redeemer – and preserver of human dignity.  

 

There was to be for a time, a cultural unity in Israel to protect this call to religious fidelity to the one and only true God, Yahweh. There was to be a central location for the worship of God, expressing again the prerogative of Yahweh to define worship. So too there was a (initial) prohibition against the creation of a monarchy, rooted in the prohibition against creating a human king to replace the divine kingship. In this and in many other ways, Israel was to be distinctive in its separation and difference from the surrounding cultures.  In part this was a partial recovery of the original experience in Eden but more so, a typological anticipation of the final fulfilled kingdom of God in which culture and worship would be one and in which there would be no discontinuity between the human and the holy. 

 

The divine drama progresses as it anticipates the story of Jesus. The climactic part of the drama was reached in the first advent of Jesus. In an ironic fulfillment of the promise of redemption, the followers of Jesus were no longer to be a sequestered ethnic group. It was no longer in the interests of the spreading of the gospel that cultural parameters defined the spiritual location of God’s reconciling work. The people of God were now to be found in all cultures, eating and drinking, enjoying music and art and making tools with those who did not yet know the gospel. The proclamation of the Christian message was actually to help break down the cultural barriers to the building of a human community reflective of the divine character. The dividing walls were to be broken down by the mercy of the gospel. Now, even the Gentiles and the Samaritans were to be full members, side-by-side with Jews in the redeemed community

 

And this is the analogous situation we find ourselves in today. The drama of divine redemption continues to unfold in the outbreaking of divine mercy across our cultural divides. That drama is centered on the person and work of Christ and this unifying center is the very centrifugal force which pushes the gospel outward, across the length and breadth and width of the globe. The very exclusivity of the gospel in Christ is the foundation of its universal impulse.

 

However the universal impulse cannot finally be reduced to the pluralist impulse. The distinctiveness of the one man Jesus Christ, prohibits the equating of the gospel with many diverse readings of that central truth. Appropriate are culturally diverse forms of obedience to this one gospel, but not culturally diverse renderings of this one gospel. The unique and non-negotiable wisdom of God is understanding that the ‘power of God’ is ‘expressed in the suffering of the cross’. None of us would have “naturally” done it this way if it were up to us. But through the cross we come to realize that dying to ourselves means that we might live for larger purposes – and here is the ground of reconciliation across our deeply rooted conflicts. Simply being tolerant of those conflicts will not finally solve them. It is the concreteness of Christ’s death for us, that pushes this grace into all the world. Therein lies the dialectic between creation and redemption in the divine drama. 

 

The meaning of this story of forgiveness does not lie in the first instance in the changes which it occasions in the life of the reader. The central significance is contained in the actual redemptive acts of God’s mercy themselves. It is likely that diverse parts of the drama will impact diverse readers in diverse manners. And over this diversity of experiences the text cannot exercise control. But neither should we suppose the text was intended to be read in diverse ways by diverse peoples simply because diverse peoples read the text in diverse ways.

 

One final parenthetical note. The danger of conforming the drama of redemption into the parameters of the reader’s own interests is not removed by claiming of the text that it is inerrant. It may well lessen the danger of shaping the text into one’s own image if one also believed that the text was true in all of its details. But the danger still is present. Believing the text is true does not remove the danger of reading into the text things it does not say. The real question is whether the text exercises a “control” over the reader or whether the reader exercises a greater control over the text.  Again we affirm, it is God’s story into which we fit, rather than fitting God into our story.

 

 

 

© 2010 The Center for Gospel Culture