Set Apart for the Sake of Others

“…you will be for me…a holy nation.”

These are the words of Israel’s god Yahweh, spoken to the Israelites after he brought them out of slavery in Egypt. In another place the LORD calls his chosen people to “Be holy as I am holy”. Clearly “holiness” was high on God’s list of priorities for his newly redeemed people, but why?

To be holy means to be set apart. Out of all the nations on the earth, God chose Israel to be his own special, distinctive people. They were to stand out from those around them, not only because of the unique god they worshiped but also because of their moral character (though the two can hardly be separated - we become what we worship, it has been said).

This all sounds a bit…exclusive, right? It sounds like Israel was called to be a nation permanently riding around on a gigantic high horse, scoffing at others who aren’t as “holy” as they are. This seems like holiness for the sake of self-righteousness, or perhaps holiness for the sake of exclusivity and nationalist pride.

David Peterson, in his book Engaging With God, paints an altogether different picture of Israel’s vocation to be holy. He says of the Israelites (quoting W.J. Dumbrell along the way) that,

They were chosen to demonstrate what it meant to live under the direct rule of God, which is actually ‘the biblical aim for the whole world’.

Go back to Israel’s roots, and this reality becomes apparent. YHWH promised that through Abraham’s descendants, all the nations of the world would be blessed. Israel was to be a “light to the nations”, a manifestation of the kingdom of God here on earth. Yes, they were to be set apart from others, but they were to be set apart for the sake of others. It was distinction with a view to inclusion. Transformative holiness, you might call it.

Fast forward a couple of millennia, and we find a Jew, Peter, writing to Jews and Gentiles in Eastern Europe and calling them “a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation”. The church -- consisting of men and women from every tribe, tongue and nation -- is Yahweh’s “called out ones”; she is simultaneously the recipient of the blessing promised to Abraham and the means of passing on that blessing to those in need of it. Like Israel, she is called to be holy, just as the god she worships is holy. But once again, this is not to be an exclusive holiness. The church is called to be set apart from others for the sake of others; a manifestation of the kingdom of God, drawing in those who remain outside of the Messiah Jesus, who did for the world what Israel could not do.

If whatever we call holiness is not something which engages with the needs of those around us, if our holiness doesn’t get our hands dirty (as it certainly did Jesus), then we have missed it. The history of Israel is a history of “missing it”. What will be the history of the church of this generation?

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?

To Borrow a Term

In Him also you were circumcised with a circumcision made without hands, by putting off the body of the flesh, by the circumcision of Christ, having been buried with Him in baptism, in which you were also raised with Him through faith in the powerful working of God, who raised Him from the dead. - Colossians 2:11-12

I've been thinking about the significance of this passage since last Sunday. Not all the time obviously. There is a limit to how much a man can think about circumcision. Anyway, the fairly straightforward indicative remark made by Paul is that when you are joined to Christ by faith (i.e. "in Him"), you are considered circumcised.

Circum-what? As a male "Gentile" this is a slightly odd thing to think about, so I can only imagine how strange it must be for a woman "in Christ" to consider herself circumcised. Truth be told, none of us probably think of it very much. But while we're of course not called to consider (nor indeed undergo) circumcision in the physical way, Paul appears to place a lot of significance on the "circumcision without hands" that has been performed on our hearts on account of our union with Christ.

In fact -- and here is crux of my week-long musings -- this circumcision without hands seems for Paul to have always been the true meaning of circumcision. Forget about having a fraction of Mr Knish snipped. That was never the sign of who truly belonged to God. Paul affirms this loud and clear in Romans 2:

"For circumcision [of the flesh] indeed is of value if you obey the law, but if you break the law, your circumcision becomes uncircumcision. So, if a man who is uncircumcised keeps the precepts of the law, will not his uncircumcision be regarded as circumcision? Then he who is physically uncircumcised but keeps the law will condemn you who have the written code and circumcision but break the law. For no one is a Jew who is merely one outwardly, nor is circumcision outward and physical. But a Jew is one inwardly, and circumcision is a matter of the heart, by the Spirit, not by the letter. His praise is not from man but from God."

No wonder Jews didn't take too kindly to Paul's teaching - "No one is a Jew who is merely one outwardly..." Had Paul asked you to show that you were a Jew, and had you the cajones to show him your circumcision of the flesh, he would have probably said, "So what? That means nothing to me, and more importantly, it means nothing to God. Also, please never do that again. It's just weird". For God, and thus for Paul, circumcision is not nor has it ever been merely outward and physical.

Finally, and this is what I have been pondering: Had Paul asked you to show that you were a Jew, and had you never been circumcised nor gone through any of the other external rigamorole, yet you demonstrated a life lived by the power of the Spirit through faith (which looks like a life in harmony with God's law), then he would have proclaimed you a "Jew". What a role reversal! "Jews" are not actually Jews, whereas Gentiles can be true Jews, who get their praise (where the word "Jew" originates from) from God. Later on in Romans Paul declares that Gentiles have been engrafted to the "olive tree" (11:17ff.) which began with Abraham and the other patriarchs, thus giving extra credence to what he swiftly mentions in chapter 2.

To tie all of this together, the circumcision discussed in Colossians is not some rite of passage to become part of a new religion which finds its origins in Jesus, or even Paul. Jews (based on Paul's definition of a Jew in Romans 2) didn't have one circumcision while we Christians now have another. To be sure, in Christ we are new creations, and members of a new covenant. However, this covenant isn't new in the sense of separate from the one established with Abraham. It is new in the sense of being the definitive fulfillment of the Abrahamic covenant; we now live in the age of the Climax of the Covenant, to borrow Tom Wright's term. Our "circumcision of Christ" means that we are in fact true sons of Abraham and heirs to all of the blessing that were promised to him. (As an aside, is there any greater motivation to get immersed in the Hebrew Scriptures than this?) We are true Jews, and yet we are not Jews at all. Nor are we Gentiles. For there is neither Jew nor Gentile in the family joined with the Messiah Jesus, but we are all one in Him.

What is the fruit of this sonship, this belonging? What does it look like to be a covenant member? Is the proof in the penis? By no means! It looks like a heart moved by the Spirit of God and enabled to fulfill the law by loving God and loving others; it looks like a life characterised by The Jesus Creed, to borrow Scot McKnight's term (I'm just borrowing terms all over the shop, amn't I?).

We're Missing Something

The story of Christianity in four words:

Creation, Fall, Jesus, Salvation.

Right?

Wrong! At least according to N.T. Wright. He says we're missing something in that industry-standard list that will actually shape how we read the entire Bible, and thus to ignore it is to miss one of the keys to unlocking who Jesus is and therefore who God is. Wright's list looks like this:

Creation, Fall, Israel, Jesus, Salvation.

Scot McKnight's is something very similar (though aided by its alliteration):

Creation, Cracked Eikons, Covenant Community, Christ, Consummation

This is starting to look like a page from one of Rob Bell's books what with all the gaps, but I just thought it was interesting how quick we as Christians are to ignore Israel when it comes to the gospel of God.

Perhaps we need to introduce the song "Father Abraham" into our corporate worship times. I'll let you know how that goes...

Law and Gospel

'The witness of the Law and the Prophets to the righteousness of God is not merely, as Christians have sometimes strangely supposed, a witness concerning a severe retributive justice; it is a witness concerning God's gracious saving power, as Psalm 143 demonstrates.'

As I read Echoes of Scripture in the Letters of Paul by Richard B. Hays I am continually beaten over head with this one truth: I don't have a clue how to read and interpret the Old Testament. Up until recently I wasn't too concerned with this. The Old Testament is, well, old, and large chunks of it don't apply anymore. I don't have to have bulls and goats sacrificed on my behalf, nor am I forbidden from eating my favourite of the meats - pig meat.

And yet as obvious as this sounds, the Old Testament was the only Bible the apostle Paul and all of the other Jewish Christians of his time knew. They had "the Scriptures" (what we call "the Old Testament"), and that was it. The Law, the Prophets and the Writings were Paul's bread and butter. He didn't have the Book of Hebrews to chew on, nor could he open up his Bible and read Romans. I mean he wrote Romans! And what's more, he didn't even write it thinking he was writing Scripture. Paul wasn't looking to render the Scriptures as he knew them obsolete by writing a "New Testament". Paul was writing a letter to the church in Rome in effect saying "This is what the gospel of God as found in the Scriptures is about. This is its fulfilment." That is why he could say in Romans 3:21,

"But now the righteousness of God has been manifested apart from the law, although the Law and the Prophets bear witness to it..."

This sounds rather paradoxical, but what Paul is saying is that the Scriptures are like a signpost. You don't arrive at the signpost and think "I'm here. I've arrived." The signpost and the destination are not one and the same. They are necessarily "apart". However, they are by no means unrelated, and yet as Hays rightly points out, we as Christians draw lines between the signpost (the Law and the Prophets) and the fulfilment/destination (the righteousness of God found in Christ) and force people to pick sides. In our caricature, the Law and the Prophets bear witness to a capricious God who is fond of punishing people who disobey Him, but the New Testament? Well, God had a change of heart, and lets just be thankful for that.

For Paul, such a reading and interpretation of the beloved Scriptures he grew up on would have deeply offended him. His gospel was not plucked out of thin air. It was founded on 2,000 years of salvation history. It reverberated with echoes of the Old Testament, from the story of Abraham, to the prophetic writings of Habbakuk to the lyrics of the Psalms. All of these witnessed to the righteousness of God, which has demonstrated itself in Christ and is credited to us through faith in Christ. This is why Hays can say that Paul's gospel "does not annihilate the Law but establishes it".

There is much more to be said on this, and much much more to be mulled over from Hays' excellent book. To close this particular musing out, here is the Psalm which Hays says is echoed in much of Romans 3:

¹Hear my prayer, O LORD;
give ear to my pleas for mercy!
In your faithfulness answer me, in your righteousness!
² Enter not into judgment with your servant,
for no one living is righteous before you.

³For the enemy has pursued my soul;
he has crushed my life to the ground;
he has made me sit in darkness like those long dead.
⁴Therefore my spirit faints within me;
my heart within me is appalled.

⁵ I remember the days of old;
I meditate on all that you have done;
I ponder the work of your hands.
⁶ I stretch out my hands to you;
my soul thirsts for you like a parched land.
Selah

⁷ Answer me quickly, O LORD!
My spirit fails!
Hide not your face from me,
lest I be like those who go down to the pit.
⁸ Let me hear in the morning of your steadfast love,
for in you I trust.
Make me know the way I should go,
for to you I lift up my soul.

⁹ Deliver me from my enemies, O LORD!
I have fled to you for refuge!
¹⁰ Teach me to do your will,
for you are my God!
Let your good Spirit lead me
on level ground!

¹¹ For your name’s sake, O LORD, preserve my life!
In your righteousness bring my soul out of trouble!
¹²And in your steadfast love you will cut off my enemies,
and you will destroy all the adversaries of my soul,
for I am your servant.