Yesterday we explored how Adam and Eve suffered the consequences of their rebellious actions and found themselves cast out of Eden to live a life now marked with suffering, pain, hardship, and alienation. Things don’t get much better as the story progresses either, for in Genesis 3-11 we see humanity spiral dowanwards into all sorts of savagery, brutality, violence, and oppression.
But God never gives up on his dream for creation and for humanity. For running through this tragic narrative is a thread of grace weaving its way through it all until, in Genesis 12, God calls Abraham and his family, Israel, to be the answer to all this brokenness and sin. Where humanity’s choices have led to death and curses God wants to bring about blessing. The promise from God is that if they will be faithful to him and walk in his ways then he will bless them and through them he will bring blessing to every corner of the earth. The people of Israel are, in a sense, a renewed humanity, those who will partner with God again to restore a world which had gone so wrong.
Tikkun Olam – A Jewish phrase which means ‘the repair of the world’!
To help and to guide them in this great calling and responsibility, God gives them his Law to show them the way to life and blessing. This divine instruction showed Israel the difference between was pure and impure, holy and unholy, righteous and unrighteous, and once again the people of God are faced with the choice between obedience and disobedience, blessing and curse, and life and death (See Deuteronomy 28-30). However, as the story of Israel rumbles on they discovering that rather than being the solution to the problem of sin, they too were often part of the problem?
‘Are we part of the cure, or are we part of the disease’?
Coldplay
As part of the problem, Israel repeat this pattern of sin, judgment, and rescue that runs throughout the Old Testament and part of the reason that this was such a problem is that their choices didn’t just damage them, it also, grieved and angered God,a nd blocked the flow of blessing to the nations. Israel too find themselves under judgment, but Kevin Kinghorn draws attention to three really important points about God’s judment on Israel:
- The first is that God’s judgments are always a last resort:
- The second is that the pronunciation of judgment is never the final word.
- The third is that God’s judgments are often transformed through repentance.
This revolving pattern of judgment and salvation led to a hope that one day in the future things would be different, where they would be faithful, recieve God’s blessings, and become a source of blessing to the nations. Much of their hope rested on the coming of the Messiah, the anointed one of God who would bring salvation, and to him we shall turn in tomorrow’s reflection.
Take a moment to watch the video below that covers some of the issues we are discussing here.