As we continue to explore the meaning of Pentecost in light of the narrative of Old Testament history, today our journey brings us to Ezekiel 37. In this passage, the prophet Ezekiel is given a vision in which he sees a valley full of dry bones. In verse 11, the interpretation is given by God, saying that “the bones are the whole house of Israel; behold, they say, ‘Our bones are dried up and our hope has perished. We are completely cut off.” Interestingly, God says that these bones are the whole house of Israel, as opposed to were. The bones represent the existent Jewish people. What this means is that we are dealing with a metaphor. Ezekiel was seeing bones that represented the nation of Israel (unless you think that bones are in the habit of speaking).

While being metaphor, the aspects of the vision are still extremely significant. The interpretation God gives has three parallel phrases:

1) Our bones are dried up – in other words, their rotting flesh has completely decomposed and only bones are left – they are completely dead – way beyond the state of for example, the boys who Elijah and Elisha resuscitated (1 Kgs 17; 2 Kgs 4). There is nothing of them left to be raised from the dead.

2) our hope has perished – we’ll come back to this one in a minute.

3) we are completely cut off – the same word is used in Psalm 88 to describe complete and utter desolation, similarly using death as a metaphor: “I am reckoned among those who go down to the pit; I have become like one who has no strength, forsaken among the dead, like the slain who lie in the grave, whom you remember no more, and they are cut off from your hand. You have put me in the depths of the Pit, in the regions dark and deep.

What about that second phrase? What hope has perished? What is all this dreariness about? Again, the vision clues us in. Why might there be a large number of bones gathered in one location? In Jewish tradition, dead persons are to be buried relatively quickly and to leave bones unburied was both ritually and socially unpropitious. Even if someone was left unburied, that would not explain why in this one valley, so many bones were amassed together, unless they all had died in that place. I think the best explanation is that the bones belonged to people who died in a battle, a battle in which Israel was decimated. This would certainly then allude to the invasion and subsequent destruction of Jerusalem by Nebuchadnezzar II in 586 BC. When Israel speaks of their “hope perishing,” by this they mean the exile.

The exile was the period in Israel’s history that began in 586 BC when Nebuchadnezzar II captured Jerusalem and burned it to the ground, including the temple. Of those who survived, many were taken into captivity to Babylon, while many others were left to pick up the pieces. Regardless, Israel as a national, social and political entity was annihilated. As a religious entity, however, they endured, specifically in relation to what they called “our hope.” I think perhaps on one level their “hope perished” in that their normal human desire to live a long and happy life had been abruptly curtailed. However, it is significant that the bones spoke collectively of “our hope” (singular). It is the national hope of Israel, the expectation rooted in their history of living under the promises of God. This goes all the way back to the promises to Abraham, that to him and his seed God would give great blessing and bless all the nations of the earth through them, which in context means being God’s solution to the problem of sin (cf. Gen. 3-11). Yet how would they be God’s agents of blessing if they were constantly being harassed, oppressed and dominated by foreign powers? How could this future be true if all the institutions of Israel’s religious and national identity had been destroyed?

The solution to Israel’s desolate state is the Spirit of God – “And you shall know that I am the Lord, when I open your graves and bring you up from your graves, O my people. I will put my spirit within you, and you shall live, and I will place you on your own soil; then you shall know that I, the Lord, have spoken and will act.” The Spirit of God will be the agent through whom this metaphorical resurrection of the nation of Israel will take place. Israel’s hopes will be restored and fulfilled my means of the Spirit of God “breathing” new life into them and bringing them back to their land.

Fast forward a couple hundred years. Israel had been back in their land, having returned from Babylon, since 536 B.C. Nevertheless, there was still a strong belief that the exile had not yet fully ended. They were back in the land, but were still under the domination of foreign powers (Click here for more on the notion that the exile was believed to have continued past the geographical return from Babylon). Leaving aside the Gospels (which confirm the same general point I am about to make), when the sound of a great and mighty wind enters the house where the disciples were gathered, as recorded in Acts, we are meant to understand this breath of God as (an at least incipient) ending of the exile and the restoration of God’s people. In Greek (and Hebrew) the word for wind and breath (and Spirit for that matter) are the same word. This doesn’t mean that they did not differentiate between those concepts, but the ambiguity enabled authors to add layers of nuance and allusion to their texts. When the wind blew upon the 120 Jewish believers in Jesus, they were experiencing the Ezekiel 37 breath of God which launched the beginning of the restoration of Israel and the ending of exile. All of God’s promises were being answered “yes” in and through the Messiah Jesus. The people of God were being restored. There would be a worldwide family descended from Abraham that would be a blessing to all the people’s of the earth, dealing with the problem of sin and overturning the effects of the fall.

While Ezekiel 37 mostly has the national identity of Israel in mind, Acts 2 (together with the rest of the NT) has in view the full extent of the Abrahamic promise to address the woes of sin and death. In Ezekiel 37, the “resurrection” was metaphorical – speaking of the return of Israel from exile. However, beginning with Jesus, this “resurrection” suddenly became literal. When God restores his people, he does more than revive national hopes, but enables the completion of the Abrahamic mission by destroying the power of death itself. All who receive this life-giving Spirit participate in the very power that raised Jesus from the dead (cf. Eph 1.19) and are guarunteed a share in the final resurrection (Rom. 8:11). As God welcomes his people Israel home from exile, he also welcomes all of humanity back from the exile of death they had shared ever since Adam and Eve were “exiled” from the Garden of Eden, immortality escaping their grasp. All are invited home to experience the fullness of life in and through allegiance to Jesus the Messiah and Lord of the world.

At the end of each post in this series, I’ve been commenting briefly on a developing “praxis of Pentecost,” i.e., what kind of practical expressions, lifestyle, etc., flows out of an understanding and experience of the Spirit poured out on Pentecost. The Spirit of God is ever and always the Spirit of the Resurrection, whom the universal Church confesses as the “Lord and Giver of Life.” As long as the Spirit is the Giver of Life, it is the enemy of death and all that causes death. A truly “pentecostal” person will never acquiesce to the “death drives” of our modern culture, whether they be associated with the death of innocent “expendable” lives (abortion, euthanasia), the sickness that robs the life of the body, poverty that denigrates the dignity of life, the narcissism of our image-obsessed culture that effaces the true beauty of life, behaviors that abuse and destroy relationships (unbridled sexuality, violence), diseased philosophies and theologies that kill the meaning of life, reckless political, economic and domestic practices which damage the world God created and loves, or the brutality of war. I am not here making a moral statement related to the whole “just war,” but all Christians must be at least eschatologically opposed to war (Isa 2:4; 46:9; 60; Hos. 2:18; Mic. 4:3-4; Zech. 9:9-10). A “Pentecostal” Christian, alive with the energies of the resurrection flowing through their members, opposes death in all its forms, eagerly acting as an agent of the restoration of true life, in collaborative partnership with the Holy Spirit.

Related posts

• Reading the Bible in the Right Direction (Part 4) – The Overarching Story of Scripture (14)
• We’ve Been Unbabeled – When the Day of Pentecost Had Fully Come (Part 2) (1)
• The Return of the Lost Ark (0)
• Resurrection and New Creation (Part 2) – Whirlwind Tour of the Gospel of John (2)
• Reading the Bible in the Right Direction (Part 2) (13)

Last time, I wrote about the “new exodus,” describing it as a way of speaking of the ending of the Jewish exile while investing it with the epochal significance of replacing the Exodus as the defining event in Israel’s history and their revelation of God. I then described reasons for believing that theologically, the Jewish people did not understand the exile to have ended when the exiles in Babylon physically returned to their homeland in 538 B.C. Understanding this brings a dynamic twist in understanding the NT and the person and message of Jesus. Before we look at how interpreting the New Testament is affected by these realities, it is important to add another dimension.

A significant theme which recurs throughout the later OT writings is the link between the ending of exile and the forgiveness of sins. The classic introduction of this theme is in Isaiah 40 where (if you do something funny to account for the peculiar placement of Isaiah 35) Isaiah’s in-depth exposition of New Exodus kicks off:

Comfort, O comfort my people, says your God.

Speak tenderly to Jerusalem,
and cry to her

that she has served her term,
that her iniquity has been pardoned…

Notice the two couplets that I have marked off by leaving space between them. This is to illustrate the extremely common and primary feature of Hebrew poetry called parallelism. We commonly think of poetry as rhyming the sounds of words. This however, is not at all how Hebrew poetry functions. Instead of rhyming words, they would rhyme thoughts. This came in two primary forms (although technically one could tease out various additional nuances). The first is synonymous parallelism, where the two lines of poetry express synonymous thoughts, i.e. their meaning are essentially the same. Examples of such would include:

O come, let us sing for joy to the LORD,
Let us shout joyfully to the rock of our salvation. (Psalm 95:1)

I will extol You, my God, O King,
And I will bless Your name forever and ever. (Psalm 145:1)

One generation shall praise Your works to another,
And shall declare Your mighty acts. (Psalm 145:4)

The LORD of hosts is with us;
The God of Jacob is our stronghold (Ps. 46:11)

The wilderness and the desert will be glad,
And the Arabah will rejoice and blossom (Isaiah 35:1)

Behold, the Lord GOD will come with might,
With His arm ruling for Him (Isaiah 40:10)

The point in all these and many other verses is not that each line is communicating a new and distinct idea. Rather it is a poetic way of saying the same thing. Where this becomes critical is that seeing parallelism can often indicate to us two concepts that the author is holding closely together in a semi-synonymous (though not necessarily precise – remember this is poetry) relationship.

The other major form of parallelism is antonymous parallelism, in which the two lines of the couplet express the opposite idea. This form of parallelism is much less common than the former.

The LORD keeps all who love Him,
But all the wicked He will destroy. (Psalm 145:20)

For the LORD knows the way of the righteous,
But the way of the wicked will perish. (Psalm 1:6)

They will find gladness and joy,
And sorrow and sighing will flee away. (Is. 35:10) – an interesting case, not precisely synonymous or antonymous parallelism, it is expressing the same idea in opposite ways

The purpose of this digression on Hebrew poetry is to show how meaningful it is when the Isianic text brings into parallel the notion of the ending of exile (she has served her term) and the forgiveness of sin (her iniquity has been pardoned). In other words, the author is bringing into a poetically synonymous relationship, the twin notions of the end of Israel’s exile and the forgiveness of their sins. How can these two seemingly disparate themes be related? One has to do with their historical circumstances, the other with their relationship with God. One concerns “horizontal” relationships, the other “vertical.” The one is temporary, the other eternal. Let me explain how I think this works.

The book of Deuteronomy is essentially the covenant charter of the people of Israel. It explains at length the relationship between God and Israel. In chapter 28, blessings are described, which are for Israel if they keep the covenant, while curses are described for Israel if they do not keep the covenant. Interestingly, these blessings and curses are not for individuals, but are for the nation as a whole with regards to corporate obedience or corporate disobedience (an extremely foreign concept for twenty-first century individualism-assaulted denizens). The result of obedience is that God “will establish you as a holy people” and consequently, they will be blessed and prosper, specifically with regard to the surrounding nations of political adversaries. However, if as a nation they do not follow the covenant, they are told that “the LORD will scatter you among all peoples, from one end of the earth to the other end of the earth” and that “The LORD will bring you back to Egypt in ships.” In other words, God’s deliverance of the people from the Egyptian captivity (the exodus) will be reversed by virtue of their corporate disobedience. Chapter thirty also promises that if while in captivity in foreign nations, if they will return to the Lord, he will bring them out of captivity, restore them to the land and bless them abundantly. In summary the result of corporate disobedience is exile and the result of corporate repentance is return from exile.

What we see from Deuteronomy is that the concept of sin and exile are intricately related. Sin is understood in essentially a causal relationship with going into exile. The reason why the captives addressed in Isaiah 40 are in exile is because of their corporate sin. These sins are delineated in much of the pre-exilic prophetic literature and the historical books.

What is critical to grasp here is that sin and forgiveness are not primarily viewed from an individualistic or existentialist perspective. The concern in Isaiah 40 is not “how one feels” when relating to God (i.e., feeling forgiven or feeling shame). Neither is the concern the accumulation of merits and demerits, nor the eternal fate of individuals (i.e., heaven or hell). Rather, the concern is typically Jewish: it is historical, national, geographical, political and related to the future of life on earth. When these people were awaiting the “forgiveness of sins,” they were not anticipating a spiritual experience whereby their guilt-anxiety complex was assuaged. They were not expecting a declaration from heaven announcing their forgiveness or status of righteousness. They certainly we not even dreaming of being assured of escaping the earth for an eternal heavenly abode. They were looking forward the ending of the exile, freedom from foreign powers, the restoration of the nation and the fulfillment of God’s covenant promises in which the entire earth would be renewed. According to Deuteronomy, they would know they were forgiveness, not by the warm-fuzzies, but because they had been brought back to their land and restored as a people. In this passage the forgiveness of sins is not individualistic, internal or “spiritual.” Rather it is corporate, historical, national, geographical, ecological and political. For the exile to end means that Israel has been forgiven of their sins. If the exile has not ended, the logical interpretation is that they have not yet been forgiven and the “wrath of God” still remains over them.

This perspective helps to makes sense of some other “baffling” passages. I always used to get tripped out over verses like these:

Psalm 103:9 – He will not always accuse, nor will he keep his anger forever.

Psalm 85:4-6 – Restore us again, O God of our salvation, and put away your indignation toward us. Will you be angry with us forever? Will you prolong your anger to all generations? Will you not revive us again, so that your people may rejoice in you?

Psalm 79:5 – How long, O LORD? Will you be angry forever? Will your jealous wrath burn like fire?

Micah 7.18-20 – Who is a God like you, pardoning iniquity and passing over the transgression of the remnant of your possession? He does not retain his anger forever, because he delights in showing clemency. He will again have compassion upon us; he will tread our iniquities under foot. You will cast all our sins into the depths of the sea. You will show faithfulness to Jacob and unswerving loyalty to Abraham, as you have sworn to our ancestors from the days of old.

I would think, “don’t the Israelites understand that we’re saved by faith? All you have to do is ask God to forgive you and he will.” I would change the words of these Psalms around when praying and singing them. Instead of saying “you will not always accuse, nor will you keep your anger forever,” I would say something like “you do not always accuse, you do not stay angry forever.” I didn’t make any sense that one would have to plead with God for him to forgive you. That sounded like Medieval penance theology.

These verses (and MANY others) only doesn’t make sense when a modern notion of “justification by faith” and the radical individualization of sin and forgiveness is applied to these passages (See my posts on “Reading the Bible in the Right Direction” for more on this). There is certainly a personal concept of sin in the Scripture but it is not the only way sin is treated and in many passages it is not primary. The verses given above, however, are patently not about the individual assurance of forgiveness. That was not the primary concern of the Israelites in captivity. We don’t see in the Scripture a spirituality of “well, we’re in captivity and slavery, but at least we have the inner assurance of God’s forgiveness so we are content.” That kind of forgiveness was not on their radar. For them, to be forgiven meant to be restored in the full sense of the word, as we see in Ps. 85:4 (restore us again). This is not an issue of “pre-cross/post-cross” as I’ve sometimes heard it described (as if only after Jesus died on the cross can we be forgiven immediately, before then we had to beg and do penance). The context of these passages make clear to us what they are about without bringing in an artificial theological framework that is foreign to the texts. The context of Psalm 85:4-6 is immediately in relation to the notion of the captivity of Israel in exile. The context of Psalm 103 immediately preceding the quote above is all about Moses and the exodus and a quotation from Moses’ encounter with God on Mt. Sinai. Psalm 79 is about the destruction of Jerusalem and the temple as the Babylonian exile was inaugurated. The passage from Micah seven explicitly correlates forgiveness of sin to faithfulness of the covenant with Abraham (i.e., the land).

As I will develop further in my next post, the notions of the ending of exile and the forgiveness of sins are intricately linked in these and many other passages. Understanding this helps restore a more authentically Jewish (and less of a Medieval European) biblical perspective and sheds (in my opinion), radical new light on the both the OT and the NT, especially the life, message and mission of Jesus and the theology of sin, forgiveness and justification in Paul.

One way it immediately helps us, is it beckons us to break out of the morose and obsessive inwardly-bent introspective posture that we can develop when all we think about is dealing with our personal sin and the corollary confusion that the focal point of Christianity is to aid you in dealing with your guilt-anxiety complex. I hate to break it to you, but there is more to Christianity than you and your personal sin! God has a much more expansive and exciting vision for the world and the future than for you to neurotically manage your besetting sins. Of course, dealing with sin and our own insidious propensity towards hatred and violence is incredibly significant, but it can only be done when we are fully engaged with God’s bigger picture for the human race and the future of life on earth. It will necessitate getting our eyes off of ourselves, perhaps at first for only moments at a time, but more and more we will lift our gaze and begin to see the wide and open space of freedom and life God is inviting us to.

Wow. I’m kind of getting excited and am feeling this already-too-long post burgeoning into more than can fit here. More on this to come…

Related posts

• Resurrection and Justification Part 1 (0)
• Prayers for Revival – Hatred of Sin (1)
• Pentecost – The Coming of the Holy Spirit (0)
• New Exodus – Part 3 – The Ending of Exile (5)
• Jesus the Crucified and Resurrected Lord Part 1 (0)

OK – here’s where I say what the New Exodus is: the decisive event that the Jew’s were waiting for that would bring the definitive revelation of the “God who will be” faithful to his covenant promises was the ending of exile. The ending of this exile was often described with exodus-like imagery and language. The “New Exodus” is a way of speaking of the ending of the Jewish exile while investing it with the epochal significance of replacing the Exodus as the defining event in Israel’s history and their revelation of God.

As a quick historical review the “exilic” period of Israel’s history officially began in 586 B.C. when Babylonian armies sacked Jerusalem, destroying the temple and exiling most of the people of Jerusalem (excepting the poorest) to be slaves in Babylon. This period of deportation ended when Cyrus issued the decree for the return of the exiles and the rebuilding of the temple in 538 B.C.

However, while this physical deportation to Babylon ended in 538 B.C., there are many reasons for believing that according to the Jewish people, the exile had not in fact ended. This point is crucial for understanding the message of the Old Testament as a post-exilic canon of literature and for understanding the historical context of the New Testament. There are two distinct interpretations of this phenomenon. The first, of whom the leading exponent is N.T. Wright, is that the Babylonian exile was believed to have not ended. The second interpretation, offered by Brant Pitre, disagrees with Wright in that he believes the exile had not ended because there were in fact two exiles – one in which the ten northern tribes were deported by the Assyrians around 727 B.C., and the second, in which the remaining tribes of Judah and Benjamin were deported by the Babylonians beginning in 597 B.C. and again in 586 B.C. and 581 B.C. Of these two exiles, the Babylonian exile of the southern kingdom had ended, but the Assyrian exile of the northern kingdom had not ended. For this reason, then, according to Pitre, in the days of Jesus it was still believed that the exile had not yet ended.

I believe that Scripture points to the conclusion that both are true: neither the Babylonian nor Assyrian exiles had truly ended.

1) The first reason is the clearest literary example that the Babylonian exile itself was not believed to have ended. This is found in Daniel 9, esp. vv. 24-27. Daniel had been reading the writings of Jeremiah and after concluding that the appointed time had come for the exile to end, began to pray and fast for its fulfillment. While praying, the angel Gabriel appeared to him and in essence explained that the exile was in fact not over, the time of fulfillment had not come, and that instead of their being 70 years of captivity, their would be seventy “sevens” (i.e., 490 years).

2) With regard to the exile of the northern kingdom, there are a number of scriptures, especially in Jeremiah, which speak of both Israel and Judah coming back together. This gathering never happened and yet remained unfulfilled.

Jer. 3.18 – “In those days the house of Judah will walk with the house of Israel, and they will come together from the land of the north to the land that I gave your fathers as an inheritance.

Jer. 30.3 – “For behold, days are coming,’ declares the LORD, ‘when I will restore the fortunes of My people Israel and Judah.’ The LORD says, ‘I will also bring them back to the land that I gave to their forefathers and they shall possess it.’”

Hos. 1.11 – “And the children of Judah and the children of Israel will be gathered together,  And they will appoint for themselves one leader…”

3) Additionally, all the promises given in conjunction with the announcement of the return from exile were not fulfilled. One example will suffice. Isaiah 35 speaks of ecological renewal, bodily restoration, freedom from ungodly beasts, the cessation of suffering and the arrival of everlasting joy simultaneously with the return of the exiles to Jerusalem. This could be demonstrated many times over throughout the prophetic literature. When the exile was to end, it was expected that Israel would be freed from its enemies, the creation would be restored, justice would go to the ends of the earth. At this point, forget the renewal of creation and global justice, after the return from the Babylonian deportation, the Israelites still continued under the domination of foreign powers. Theologically, this meant that the exile had not yet ended.

4) The exiles left Babylonian according to the decree of Cyrus to return and rebuild the temple. Though the prophet Haggai could say that the glory of the latter temple would be greater than the glory of the former (Haggai 2:9), the historical reality is that the second temple was quite lackluster when compared to the former. This is so simply in terms of the quality and comparative magnificence of the building. More importantly, though while with the first temple we have glowing reports of the glory of Yahweh descending and filling the temple (e.g., 2 Chr. 7), there is nothing comparable in the entire period of the second temple. No where is it ever said that Yahweh himself returned to Zion by dwelling in the temple.

5) A further reason is the on-going lament over the fall of Jerusalem and the end of the Davidic Monarchy in 586 B.C. This can be exemplified in the book of Psalms. This collection of songs is evidently a post-exilic redaction as shown by Psalms that celebrate the return from exile, such as Psalms 107, 147 and possibly 66, 96, 98, 132 and others. Nevertheless, laments over the fall of Jerusalem and prayers for the ending of the exile remain in the collection:

Ps. 74:2b-7 – “Remember Mount Zion, where you came to dwell. Direct your steps to the perpetual ruins;   the enemy has destroyed everything in the sanctuary. Your foes have roared within your holy place; they set up their emblems there. At the upper entrance they hacked the wooden trellis with axes. And then, with hatchets and hammers, they smashed all its carved work. They set your sanctuary on fire; they desecrated the dwelling place of your name, bringing it to the ground.”

Ps. 79:1 – “O God, the nations have come into your inheritance;   they have defiled your holy temple;   they have laid Jerusalem in ruins.”

Ps. 89:38-40 – “But now you have spurned and rejected him; you are full of wrath against your anointed.  You have renounced the covenant with your servant;   you have defiled his crown in the dust. You have broken through all his walls;   you have laid his strongholds in ruins.”

Ps. 106:47 – “Save us, O LORD our God, and gather us from among the nations, that we may give thanks to your holy name and glory in your praise.”

Ps. 126:4 -  “Restore our captivity, O LORD,   like the watercourses in the Negev.”

Ps. 137:7 – “Remember, O LORD, against the Edomites   the day of Jerusalem’s fall,  how they said, “Tear it down! Tear it down!  Down to its foundations!”

Other examples could include Pss. 42-43, 68, 80, 85, and 102. What could this phenomenon mean, that after the exile had ended, the prayers and laments of the exilic condition were collected as part of the nation’s continuing liturgical material? What would it mean for the people who had already come out of exile to lament the exile and pray for its ending? It seems that in a significant way (especially considering the poignant and potent language used in some of these Psalms) the Jewish people believed that the great restoration related to the fall of Jerusalem and the exile had not yet in fact happened. It remained in the future and hence the past events should still be lamented and the future events prayed for.

Other reasons could be given, but these five points develop a case that after the Babylonian captives returned to the land, the promised had not been fulfilled and the exile had not yet ended. The faithfulness of Yahweh to his covenant promise to Abraham was still awaited. Hence the ending of exile and the new exodus were future events  anticipated as the definitive revelation of God through his historical intervention on behalf of his people and his creation.

Related posts

• New Exodus – Part 2 – The Historical Revelation of God (1)
• New Exodus – Part 1 – The Divine Name (3)
• Reading the Bible in the Right Direction (Part 4) – The Overarching Story of Scripture (14)
• Reading the Bible in the Right Direction (Part 2) (13)
• Why Greek Matters (Part 7) – The Genesis of Jesus the Messiah (Genealogies Really Matter!) (0)

In a few posts I’ve included prayers for the current season that have been taken from established liturgies. The following is my first hand at writing my own prayers in a liturgical style. It is based on the readings that are in the Revised Common Lectionary (a three year cycle of scheduled readings which is followed by dozens of denominations) for this week (Epiphany 2 year A) including Isaiah 49 and John 1:29-42.

The Lord be with you
(All) and also with you.

Lift up your hearts.
(All) We lift them to the Lord.

Let us give thanks to the Lord our God.
(All) It is right to give thanks and praise.

It is right, and a good and joyful thing,
always and everywhere to give thanks to you,
Father Almighty, Creator of heaven and earth,

For the glory of your Son
Was revealed to us as the Passover lamb
Who takes away the sins of the world,
Ending the exile of fallen humanity.
Even when we turned from you,
Each of us going our own way,
You saw our wanderings.
You took note of our lamentation.
You heard the cry of our groaning world,
beholding our affliction, our toil and our oppression.
Like a mother you could not forget your nursing infant,
or fail to have compassion on the child of your womb.
Brooding over this bent and broken world,
you sent forth your Son as the light to the nations
so your salvation might reach the ends of the earth,
That through his life he might render powerless the power of death
And save us from slavery to the fear of the same,
Leading us out of bondage and everlasting night
Through the waters of baptism and the wilderness of life
To the glorious new creation of all things:
Your new heavens and new earth
Where justice is at home.

Therefore we praise you, joining with Angels and Archangels
And with all the company of heaven
Who for ever sing this hymn to proclaim the glory of your Name:

Holy, holy, holy Lord, God of power and might,
Heaven and earth are full of your glory.
Hosanna in the highest.
Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord.
Hosanna in the highest.

Related posts

• Pentecost – The Coming of the Holy Spirit (0)
• Prayers for Revival – The Spirit of Prayer (0)
• Jesus the Crucified and Resurrected Lord Part 1 (0)
• A Prayer for Epiphany (0)
• Will You Forget Me Forever? (1)

This past Sunday was Pentecost, a day on which believers for many, many years have celebrated the coming of the Holy Spirit to dwell with and within the people of God.

Even before it was a celebration of the Spirit coming from heaven, it was commemorated by Jews for the coming of God’s law, “from heaven” at Mount Sinai after they were freed from slavery in Egypt. I don’t know about you, but I personally have a hard time believing that the gift of the Spirit “just happened” to be given to that fledgling Jewish movement around 30 AD, on the same day they were remembering God’s gift of the Law. God could have chosen any day to launch this fearful group of disciples who were hiding in a back room and launch them into public, joyful, powerful mission in the world. Why this day? Was it just a coincidence?

The plot becomes thicker when we remember that the death and resurrection of the Messiah took place in context to the celebration of Passover, the commemoration of Israel’s freedom and deliverance from slavery in Egypt, which we now call the Exodus. The Jewish people were celebrating their deliverance from Egypt as Jesus died on the cross and rose from the dead. The Jewish people were celebrating the giving of the law at Mount Sinai following their deliverance from Egypt, as the Holy Spirit descended, filled and empowered a small Messianic movement who had seen the resurrected Lord with their own eyes.

What can this mean except that what God was doing in and through Jesus the Messiah and the Holy Spirit was not in absolute discontinuity with Israel’s history with God. Rather, it was in dynamic continuity with their historic experience of God’s covenant love and His faithfulness to the promises He had made. In a very real sense, what was happening was a New Exodus. God was being faithful to his covenant people yet again. He was delivering them out of slavery, not simply from slavery to one nation, but from all the powers of darkness and evil. In a marvelous way, this salvation was being offered universally to people of all nations.

In the first Exodus, God gathered Israel to Himself from Egypt. Now, in this New Exodus in the Messiah, people of many nations were being drawn to Him. On the first day the Spirit fell, there were people from all over the then-known world celebrating the Passover. When the Spirit came upon the disciples, they began speaking about the great works of God, that is of the resurrection of Jesus, and each person, regardless of their national origin, heard them speaking in their own language. Could this be a reversal of the Tower of Babel story in Genesis 11? There, all the people spoke one language, but because they planned evil together, God scattered them by giving them all different languages so they could not understand each other. In some way, at Pentecost, God began regathering humanity out of its long exile to which it was sent by the fall of Adam and Eve and the separation of the nations at Babel. Though from diverse nations and cultures, these people were experiencing unity with God and each other through the gift of the Spirit and fateful events from millennia prior were being overturned by the mighty hand of God.

Let’s not allow this season pass us by without celebrating and remembering the great acts of God in the resurrection of the Messiah and the gift of the Spirit. Through them a New Exodus is happening in which all who call on His name will be saved and even the “entire creation will be set free” (Rom. 8.23). Death has been defeated. The Holy Spirit has been sent forth, renewing the face of earth. It is the “unrestricted presence of God in which our life wakes up” and all things are made new (Rev. 21:4). Where relationships were severed, personally, corporately, nationally and culturally; the door has swung open for them to be renewed and restored by the power of the Holy Spirit. “On this day the Lord has acted. Let us rejoice and be glad in Him!” (Ps. 118:24).

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A friend recently asked me whether I align myself more with the “theology of the cross” or the “theology of glory.” Not really understanding what he meant by either of those terms, I asked for a clarification. The “theology of the cross,” as he explained it, is an understanding of our life now, primarily understood in terms of dying to the flesh, to sin, etc. Our lives now are primarily cruciform in shape and our main task is to be conformed to the Messiah in the likeness of His death, while being conformed to the likeness of His resurrection awaits us in the age to come. The “theology of glory,” as he explained it, would emphasize the present tense dimensions of the power of the resurrection in which the cross mostly lies behind us as the once-and-for-all payment for and defeat of sin. Our lives now are primarily to live in the victory of the resurrection and move “from glory to glory” (2 Cor. 3:18) and “from strength to strength” (Ps. 84:7).

I seem to think that both approaches have shortcomings which if taken to far could quickly become altogether different from that to which the biblical texts witness. The deficiencies of the “theology of glory” are readily recognized by a postmodern society strongly reacting to centuries of oppression, power games and imperialistic rhetoric, in addition to whenever residue of such is seen surfacing in contemporary society. My fear is that a “theology of glory,” which from my (albeit limited) perspective translates to a “praxis of victory” may leave the weak, broken, suffering and afflicted behind, with a momentary wonder as to why they don’t “get it together,” “move on,” “walk in faith,” “live in victory,” etc. As I’ve run into this approach over the years, there seems to be little understanding of human pain, little expression of compassion, and general confusion as to why their instructions do not “fix” people.

While I believe that such a “theology of glory” could in fact be dangerous to the people of God, I do not believe a thorough-going “theology of the cross” leaves us in a much better place. Where all we do is conform to the Messiah’s death, there seems to be little or no expectation of or room for the startling newness of what Christ has already accomplished. The dramatic thrust of New Testament eschatology, where the future of God’s righteousness and justice rushes forward in the justification of the people of God becomes little more than the “forgiveness of sin” conceived in abstract categories. The justification of life in the Messiah is “not merely a gift that has been made manifest, but means also the power of the Giver which is at work in the life of the believer.” Justification, far from being mere relief to our guilt-anxiety complexes, is the beginning of return from humanity’s long exile of sin and death. In this dynamic work of God, we know can indeed “walk in newness of life” (Rom. 6:5) because “if anyone is the Messiah, the New Creation has come!” (2 Cor. 5:17). The future of God for the world has rushed forward into the present by Jesus the Messiah and is not to be interpreted merely in judicial or moralistic terms.

My fear is that a “theology of the cross” may too readily reconcile with sin, death, suffering and injustice, understanding it to be part of being conformed to the cross, while inadvertently being a shield from the deeper pain of wrestling with the contradictions between what God has promised and present reality as it exists and more difficult still, who God is as He says in His word and who we believe in by faith, and what present reality as it exists shows us God to be like. Far from accepting suffering and death the woman or man “who is justified begins to suffer under the contradiction of this world with which he [sic] has a bodily solidarity, for he must in obedience seek the divine righteousness in his body, on earth and in all creatures” (Jurgen Moltmann, Theology of Hope, p. 206). In light of the cross and the resurrection, our suffering is not an acceptance of all things that are, but a suffering in and against the realities of the fallen world in anticipation of God’s righteousness covering the earth when He comes.

Paul says in Romans 3:21, “But NOW…the righteousness of God has been made manifest,” that is God’s faithfulness to his covenant promises, the righteousness of God that will set all things right in the age to come is made manifest NOW. The “but now” indicates the presence of the future even in the midst what by all other indicators is still “the present evil age” (cf. Gal 1:4). This echoes what he said earlier in the letter to the Romans, that he is not ashamed of the gospel (see earlier entry “the Gospel of God” for clarification as to what I mean by this term) – why? – because it is in itself the power of God that brings salvation. The gospel, the declaration that Jesus is the crucified and resurrected Lord of the world, in itself, is the dynamic power that brings salvation—not security for my soul to float off to heaven when I die—but the restoration of all things, righteousness, peace, joy. life and freedom on the earth in fellowship with God when He comes here to reign forever. The proclamation is the power that brings those realities into the present tense, not in wishful thinking but in the sense that we can truly say “the reign (kingdom) of God is in your midst (Luke 17:21).

What I think may be coming out in what I am saying, is that, in my opinion, the problem with the theology and praxis of “glory” and “the cross” are at heart Christological. How do the crucifixion and resurrection relate, not only in our personal lives, but in the person of Jesus himself? To this question I will proceed in my next entry.

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