The Shaping of the Israelite Culture
One of the difficulties that permeates the modern church (though it might also be said for the church throughout the ages) is a tendency to neglect the Old Testament. This is somewhat understandable as Jesus is only explicitly found in the New Testament, the Gospels are entirely narratives which are easier to read than some passages in the Old Testament texts, and the Epistles are full of explicit statements about God’s love and the grace that we are given through Christ and in the Holy Spirit. And yet, to lose the Old Testament is disastrous. Too many people treat Christ as if the historical and cultural context of the Incarnation are unimportant. To separate who Jesus is and what he has done from where and when he did it is to lose the interpretive framework that we need to make sense of it.
The fact of the matter is that if God were to become a human being without a nation of Israel in preparation, he would have been completely incomprehensible. For example, the title of Christ, “The Lamb of God,” does not make sense unless it is interpreted within the Israelite context of sacrifice. In fact, none of the images used in the New Testament receive their meaning from general human experience or an arbitrary interpretation, but are grounded in the Old Testament. Since Jesus is consistently interpreted throughout the New Testament in terms of images and prophecies from the Old Testament, any examination of Christ must take seriously the painful shaping of the Israelite culture over hundreds of years that paved the way for such an interpretation.
If we are to understand the Israelite history, we need to begin with Abraham. God chose Abraham to leave his family, his place of residence, and everything he knew and go out into the wilderness, trusting in nothing but God to take care of him. It must be noted that God chose Abraham and not the other way around. Further, this choice had nothing to do with how good or bad Abraham had been. In one sense, it is an arbitrary choice. God chose Abraham and not someone else, but that does not mean that God could not have chosen anyone else, but simply that God, if he was going to shape a culture to prepare for his entering into the created world, had to start somewhere.
However, though God could have started with someone else, he didn’t. Again, this does not make Abraham any more intrinsically worthy of being chosen by God (in fact, the New Testament hints that, had God chosen someone else, their descendents might not have been so stubborn. Matthew 11:20-24), but we must make sure that we always remember that though God could have chosen anyone, he actually did choose Abraham. This means that we are not free to take an independent way to understanding the Incarnation that sets aside what God has actually done in Israel. We cannot take, for example, the ancient Greek way of thinking or the modern American way of thinking and create the same interpretive framework. There is no way to bypass the hundreds of years of interaction with Israel. If we project a Gentile way of thinking onto Jesus, we will miss key insights for interpreting God’s full self-revelation.
In his interaction with Abraham, God began to move in decisive ways that, as they were assimilated into the collective unconscious of the Israelites, prepared the way for the Incarnation. By accepting him before commanding circumcision, God prioritized faith above the law (Gen 15; Rom 4). With the birth of Isaac, God began to associate the establishment of God’s people with the miracle birth of a promised child. Through the story of Abraham nearly sacrificing Isaac, God set the precedent for understanding sacrifice as a substitute where God provides the lamb where even the best we can offer is replaced by a sacrifice chosen by God (Genesis 22). Throughout his life, Abraham was promised that, because he had been singled out by God, all the world would be blessed. Even in the act of God choosing a particular person and his descendents, God was emphasizing that his intentions were fully universal and this separation of the Israelites from their pagan neighbors should not be construed as God’s rejection of the Gentiles.
If we skip ahead in Israel’s history a few hundreds years, we come to Moses, through whom God established some of the most important images for the understanding of the Messiah. Most significantly for the formation of the Israelite culture and pointing forward to what Jesus would eventually do is the Passover (Exodus 12). Many aspects of this event help us to understand the work of Christ. After Israel was delivered from slavery, they received the law, some of which seems clearly applicable to modern Christians, some of which does not. We will examine the nature of the law below, but for now suffice it to say that, by establishing laws that were considerably unlike those of their neighbors, the Israelites were effectively set apart.
Indeed, this separation is extremely important. It is not important in the sense that it was intended to endure forever or because it gives us particular insights into the person and work of Christ. However, it is important for a very different reason. If the Israelites were not kept very distinct from their pagan neighbors, they would quickly assimilate themselves into their ways of worship. Indeed, the history of Israel is riddled with examples that this would be exactly what happened if God did not send prophet after prophet to set them straight. The continual faithfulness of God in the face of the continual rejection of God by Israel reinforced the fact that the status of Israel as the chosen people of God is not based on works, but on grace. The love of God is shown to be a love that will not let the people go, even when they want it to.
Over the centuries, God worked out key concepts like atonement, sacrifice, substitution, obedience, prophet, priest, and covenant throughout the life of Israel. If we were to attempt to bypass this history, we would inevitably have to interpret the life of Christ in terms of other frameworks; frameworks not shaped by the continuous explicit interaction of God with the people. If we do not allow the Old Testament to shape our concepts at any particular point, we will misunderstand and misinterpret Christ at precisely that point.
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