Chapter 02, God's Interaction With Israel, Time and Space

Time and Space

            What is particularly significant about looking to God’s interaction with Israel is that it roots God’s revelation to humanity within the world of time and space.  The gospel is not a collection of timeless and spaceless truths as if these two considerations did not enter into its content.  It is important to understand that God does not just move, God moves in particular times and in particular places.  There is a sense that the truths of Christianity are independent of time and space because they are rooted in the very being of God, but this must not be turned into an attempt to bypass God’s actual interaction with Israel in favor of reading preconceived notions inherited from various philosophical traditions back into God.

            For example, as will be discussed in later chapters, it is problematic to develop a doctrine of the one God based purely on ideas and independently generated reason rather than on God’s concrete activity.  The question of how we come to know God can only be addressed after it is concluded that we have come to know God.  To begin with questions of possibility or to try and determine our ability to know God independently of our actual knowledge and interaction with God will tend to lead us into arrogance or skepticism.

            Since the history of God interacting with Israel, culminating in God’s final self-revelation in Jesus Christ takes place in the world of space and time, the world that we can see, touch and experience, it overthrows any cosmological dualism, which believes that the visible world and the invisible world are utterly distinct and cannot ever have any real interaction.  Such views were common in Greco-Roman thought and have continually tried to separate God from God’s revelation.

            The main point in this is to realize that, since God has actually communicated God’s self to humanity, ultimately becoming incarnate in our midst, the gospel and all the preparations for it, are intrinsically relevant to humanity.  Revelation is not something “out there” that is utterly mystical and beyond all human comprehension, but is something where God has come to us and condescended to communicate God’s self to us in a real way that impacts the way we live.