Missio Dei - #10: It's Israel

We've been delving into the nature of biblical authority in the last few posts, discovering along the way that the Bible is our authority for mission not only in the sense that it contains commands along those lines, but because reading it is an encounter with reality - the reality of a personal, purposeful God, and the reality of a story which we are all caught up in, from the least of us to the greatest.

I noted before that there are three specific realities dealt with in Wright's book, with the third of those being:

The Reality of This People

I think this reality is the one we most struggle with. We can accept that the Old Testament is about God, we can accept that there is a grand narrative casting its shadow over the pages, but what we perhaps don't often think of is that it is a collection of texts almost exclusively dealing with a quite specific group of people - Hebrews. We perhaps have a tendency to strip the characters we read about of their national identity, so that Abraham, David, Solomon, Moses, Elijah et al. become generic Bible figures as opposed to historical persons from Israel. And we do this to our detriment.

Wright says that,

Ancient Israel, with their distinctive view of their own election, history and relationship to their God, YHWH, is a historical reality of enormous significance to the history of the rest of humanity.

"Christianity appeals to history; to history it must go" said George Caird, and like it or not, the history of Christianity is wrapped up in ancient Israel and their role in the story. Israelites were a people of the story, careful to remember its past events, and anticipating its future. They were a community of memory and of hope.

Their memory was of YHWH and what He had done for His chosen people. They spoke of His glory and salvation, and remembered His deliverance of them out of Egypt in the yearly Passover celebrations. Well says Wright that YHWH was known through what He had done. Abtract theology and philosophy was not how Israel came to know the one true God. They came to know Him because He reached down into history and secured for them a miraculous salvation, as promised by Moses in one of my favourite Bible verses:

Fear not, stand firm, and see the salvation of the LORD, which he will work for you today. For the Egyptians whom you see today, you shall never see again. The LORD will fight for you, and you have only to be still.

Their hope is something less talked about, but something which rears its head in Israel's origins and explains why God chose them in the first place. YHWH's promise to Abraham was not simply that He would bless the children of Israel, but that through Abraham's seed all the nations of the earth would be blessed. As Wright succinctly puts it, Israel existed for the sake of the nations. And so while they were specially chosen by God and were uniquely privileged in their experience of God's covenantal love, this was not so that they could boast in their favoured status with God to the surrounding countries, but so that they could act as a light to their neighbours and "declare His [YHWH's] glory to the nations". (As in aside, how might this effect the way we read the word "elect" and its cognates in the New Testament? Perhaps with more of a missional thrust?).

Through this people missio Dei was to be accomplished. Abraham's seed would be the one to bring God's blessing to all the nations of the world. The history of Israel as a nation is both a foretaste and a guarantee of the glorious future, and yet this people's story is one of seemingly constant rebellion and covenant breaking. What N.T. Wright calls "God's-single-plan-through-Israel-for-the-world" was seemingly being hampered by a stiff-necked people. What to do?