In This Is Love (part 4)

Continuing our qualification of Israel as the explicitly referenced son of God of Scripture, we are also forced to make reference to the son and grandson of Abraham. These two, Isaac and Jacob, are in-line recipients of the Abrahamic covenant and its blessings. Therefore, if at the bottom line, Abraham’s covenant-connected call was to destroy the works of the devil, then so too was that of these two men as well. However, the call to do this destroying of the devil’s works was not nearly as overt as it would be for the descendants of Jacob. Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob’s roles appear to be more oriented towards being a blessing to those that surrounded them, primarily through the amassing of wealth, thus providing them with the ability to function in that role. Not only would this be a matter of being able to meet physical needs, but the great wealth which all three came to possess without having to resort to domination and oppression, would inevitably lead to numerous inquiries, from all manner of men, as to the reason and source of such wealth. These three men, and even their nephews and brothers (Lot, Ishmael, and Esau), who also benefited greatly and were able to amass their own fortunes, would only be able to point to the covenant of the Creator God as the source of blessing. Thus, they would be that blessing, causing men to turn their eyes to that God and away from idols, and in so doing, diminish the power of the work of the devil, which has always been (since Adam) to get men to worship and honor that which is not God.

That said, we are now able to turn our attention specifically to Israel, the son of God, and another revelation of God’s love. Is Israel rightfully considered to be the son of God? Not only did Israel think of themselves in that way, thus undoubtedly causing the author of the Johannine letters to operate within this cultural and mental framework, but the whole of the Bible is infused with the idea of Israel as the son of God. This idea takes shape, unsurprisingly, within the book of Exodus. It does so “unsurprisingly,” because the story of the Egyptian experience and the exodus is the single most defining story of Israel’s history. It is what gave them their identity as a nation, and is that to which they were constantly looking back, with regularity, to understand their various situations and to understand their God and His dealings with them.

In the fourth chapter of Exodus, God personally instructs Moses to go to the Egyptian Pharaoh and tell him, on behalf of God, that “Israel is My son, My firstborn… Let My son go that he may serve Me” (4:22b,23b). Of course, there are numerous other examples littered throughout the divine record, but the example of Exodus will suffice because the portrayal of Israel is suffused with this understanding that is rooted in their experience of exodus no matter where we were to look, be it the Hebrew histories, poets, or prophets. Consequently, this self-understanding bleeds through to the Gospels, into Acts, and into the letters of the New Testament, which means that the whole of the Bible, with all of it written in the wake of Israel’s being chosen out as the covenant people of God, is written within the context of Israel, the covenant people, as the son of God. We cannot fail to understand that the concept of covenant people as God’s children, with that as the basis for mission, is a paradigmatic construct of Scripture.

If all of this is the case (and it clearly is), then Israel has been given the task of destroying the works of the devil. This will be in response to the love and grace that God has shown to them in bringing them into covenant with Him, and will result in showing forth God’s love for the world. Though Israel would be initially charged with taking possession of the land that had been promised to them through Abraham, and to do so through the extermination of the peoples that occupied the land (which they would never accomplish), which was that strikingly overt call to destroy that which represented the works of the devil and which defiled and defaced that land that God had given to His son (as a microcosm of what God intended for the whole of the creation), we are able to cast our gaze elsewhere in order to understand the way in which Israel was truly called to destroy the works of the devil as love’s great work. In doing that, we take into view the covenant markers that were given to Israel at Sinai.

The events of Sinai are intimately connected to the whole of the exodus account that generated the way in which Israel saw itself as God’s son, and therefore the law and its markers that came to them at Sinai were a crucial component of the way that were to be revealed sons of God that serve the purpose of destroying the works of the devil. These covenant markers ultimately point to the same age-old problem that had initially brought corruption and evil into the world, which was the worship of that which was not God. So when we consider that Israel, above all things, was to reverence God’s sanctuary (His tabernacle and His Temple, as well as the created world in which God rested on the seventh day---a temple was commonly understood to be the place where a God would rest), to observe and honor His Sabbaths (the weekly Sabbath, the feasts, the Sabbath of the land, and the year of jubilee) as a reminder of His position as Creator and sovereign over the world and of the human role of divine image-bearer in this world, and to avoid the worship of idols, we see God’s design that would allow them to destroy the works of the devil. This end would not be best served by physically exterminating their enemies in the land, but rather, by adhering to these marks of covenant, like Abraham, to recognize and worship and proclaim their God as the only God, so as to be the exemplification of divine blessing to the world, turning them to Israel’s God, forsaking all others, and thereby destroying the work of the devil. Would this not be a shining manifestation of love?