Our Life in the Lord Part Four: The Long Pursuit
Next, God acts with mercy by binding himself to his people, slowly, over many generations. In all of scripture, God presents his people with a covenant: a relational agreement, not a contract for services. Where a covenant sets life and death before the people, living up to it secures their existence, and failing it brings their death. The words themselves aren’t magic. God keeps the covenant because of who he is, and the people bear the consequence of how they choose to be. Since one of the parties is God, who is Truth itself and cannot deceive, his side of every covenant stands forever. Throughout our salvation history God makes promises and delivers on them, while we make promises and are unable or unwilling to meet them. God keeps his relationship with us unbroken from his side. We can and have frequently broken our side.
One Sentence in Every Covenant
God speaks one sentence in every covenant, in every age and dress, from Sinai to the prophets to the end of the scriptures: I will be their God, and they shall be my people. Everything else, the law and the land and the liturgy, is the working out of that sentence in a particular collection of centuries. It’s more like the declaration of a marriage than that of a treaty. Israel’s whole history, and ours, is the record of what a faithful husband does with an unfaithful spouse he refuses to stop caring for and loving.
God makes his covenants in a sequence, with a direction. God invites, the people abide for a time, then grow forgetful, bored, and prideful, and abandon the path for lesser things, over and over again. Each time, God responds by making the next covenant in some way easier to follow, more inviting, or more apt to the disposition of the people at the time, just as good parents devise new ways to teach when the previous methods have failed. That is, each covenant is a further accommodation, a further condescension (in a positive way), a further shortening of the distance. From far enough back, the whole history looks like a lover stooping lower and lower toward a beloved who keeps turning away, until they hit the floor.
Noah and the Saving Waters
After the flood, God covenants with Noah, and through him with every living creature, hanging his bow in the clouds. In the flood God already shows how he will work from now on: the waters that drowned a corrupt world carried one family to safety, so that God turned the very thing that kills into an instrument of life. The flood is the first draft of the remedy God will fashion out of mortality itself, which is why the Church has always seen in those waters a figure of baptism.
Abraham and the Question of Every Age
God calls one man, Abram, out of a world of competing pantheons, and Abram leaves everything on the strength of a promise: descendants beyond counting, a land, and a purpose that reaches past both, that in him all the families of the earth would find blessing. God elected Abraham for the sake of the nations, so that God’s chosen people, the people of his own possession, would be a blessing to every other people: a beachhead of faith in a world that had forgotten its maker.
That vocation, to be a blessing to the nations, stays the same through everything that follows; only its social form changes. It has been the job of God’s holy people to be a blessing to the nations since Abraham’s time: first as a family, then as tribes, then as a nation, then as exiles scattered among foreign lands, even subdued in their own lands, and at last, in the final age, as missionaries to every corner of the earth. For the Lord of Hosts is God over every land, and not the local god of one territory among the territories of the nations’ gods. He gathered a people from one land and gifted them another because he is Lord of all existence, and a people of his own possession exists for the sake of everyone else.
Abram asks the question of every age: “how will I know that I will possess it?” (Gn 15:8). He is asking whether the sacrifice is worth it, whether any of this is real. God answers with a theophany, and not with a proof. A deep sleep falls on Abram, a dread darkness envelops him, and a smoking fire pot and a flaming torch pass between the halves of the divided animals. Christian readers, reading in the light of what was revealed much later, have seen the whole Trinity in that scene: the Father speaks, the Spirit overshadows, the Son passes through as the torch that ratifies the covenant (roles understood through a later digestion of the text). The observed rite of that age implied something more unusual to any age’s sensibilities: the one who walked between the pieces called down on himself the fate of the animals should the covenant fail. And so, on that reckoning, God swore by himself and took the cost of the failure onto himself, two thousand years before a price was ultimately paid.
The Mountain of Moriah
Years later God tests the promise in the flesh, on a mountain in the land of Moriah. God asks Abraham for Isaac, the son of the promise, and Abraham consents. Isaac is old enough to carry the wood of the sacrifice up the hill on his own back, and he asks his father the critical question: “Here are the fire and the wood, but where is the sheep for the burnt offering?” (Gn 22:7). The tradition has always read a son’s willing consent in that silence. At the last moment God stays the knife and supplies a ram, and Abraham names the place for what he learned there, so that people say to this day, “On the mountain the LORD will provide” (Gn 22:14). Then God’s promise hangs unfulfilled for two thousand years, through everything that follows, until on a hill of that same country God provides the sacrifice from his own First Fruits, his only begotten Son incarnate.
Melchizedek passes across the same patriarch’s story almost without context: king of Salem, priest of God Most High, offering bread and wine as his gift of oblation. Scripture records neither his birth nor his death. Melchizedek’s offering of bread and wine seems small, but it moves forward as part of Hebrew custom through the Passover and Shabbat in homes until it finds its full purchase with Jesus in the Last Supper.
The School of Sacrifice
Sacrifice itself, through all these ages, was a school. The nations around Israel fed their gods, imagining that worship supplied something the gods needed. God taught Israel the reverse: God needs nothing from man, and the sacrifices exist to order the offerer, to open and align our hearts toward what matters most, which is why God asks for the first fruits and the best of the flock rather than the leftovers. The whole practice carried the logic of substitution: the offerer deserved to die for what he had done, and in the Lord’s mercy the creature died in his place. At every altar in Israel, for centuries, God taught both lessons, so that when the true offering finally came, at least some would recognize what they were seeing.
Every gift costs the giver the time it takes to give it, so time is the one sacrifice every creature can make, and it lies underneath every offering. Time is how creatures experience everything, and time spends in only one direction. God, who creates out of nothing, needs neither the lamb nor the grain nor the time; time given has its effect in the giver. To take time for the Lord, as primary choice and not as leftovers, is to vote with our day what Abel expressed with his firstlings, his first fruits: this relationship outranks whatever else our time could have bought. That is, every sacrifice is a priority made visible and manifest.
Israel rehearsed the true offering most solemnly on one day each year. On the Day of Atonement the high priest passed alone through the veil into the Holy of Holies, the innermost room of the Temple sanctuary, carrying blood that was not his own to sprinkle on the mercy seat of God (the Ark of the Covenant). Outside, the high priest confessed the nation’s sins over the head of a goat (the scapegoat) which was driven into the wilderness bearing on its head the weight of the people’s broken relationship with God. God stored up every component of that day as a lesson for fulfillment in time: the one mediator, the blood, the veil, the confession, the taking away of the burden of sin. Centuries afterward a single person would take up all the separated roles of that day at once, the priest who enters, the altar that bears, and the victim who is offered, and he would pass through the true veil once for all.
Egypt, the Lamb, and the Sea
The family becomes a tribe, the tribe goes down into Egypt, and the descendants of the promise become slaves. God hears them and calls to a shepherd, Moses, out of a bush that burns without being consumed. Moses asks for a name to bring back to the people, and God answers with a form of the verb to be: “I am who I am,” and then, “I AM has sent me to you” (Ex 3:14). The name stands apart from the names of the nations’ gods, for it declares the one who is existence itself and receives existence from no one, beside whom every other claimant is as nothing at all. Armed with that name, Moses goes down to Egypt. What God does in that land of slavery, Israel will retell every year until the end of the world. The Israelites slay a lamb, its blood marks the doorposts, and death passes over the marked houses. God opens the sea before them and closes it over their pursuers, and once again God makes the killing waters into saving waters.
Everything later leans on the details of that night. Each household takes a lamb without blemish, slaughters it at evening, marks the doorposts with its blood, and eats it roasted, consumed to the bone, with unleavened bread and bitter herbs, dressed for travel, staff in hand, in haste. Death passes through Egypt, yet passes over every house under the blood of the lamb. Then the Lord gives the command to turn a singular moment into an institution: for Israel to keep that day as a memorial feast to the Lord, a perpetual institution for all generations (Ex 12:14). Israel keeps that night by re-entering it every year, as though every generation itself came out of Egypt. Israel obeyed, and obeys still. God was laying down the shape of that obedience, a lamb, a meal, blood that saves from slavery and death, a memorial that makes present, for something no one at that first table could have imagined.
The Desert as Classroom
God keeps them forty years in the desert before he brings them into the promised land, because the people needed unmaking and remaking more than they needed the land. Bread-like manna falls daily and spoils if hoarded, so that by the daily bread God teaches a people who wanted security to receive tomorrow from him one day at a time. They grumble the whole way, longing for the fleshpots of Egypt, for slavery with reliable meals. They name a campsite after their own question, the question underneath every later refusal: “Is the LORD in our midst or not?” (Ex 17:7). We might as well call the books of that journey the books of grumbling. God feeds them anyway.
God gives them water from a rock when Moses strikes it with the same staff that had turned the Nile to blood and parted the sea, so that the instrument of judgment kept becoming the instrument of rescue. A tradition of the rabbis said that the rock followed Israel through the wilderness, and Paul, looking back across the whole distance from the far side of the Resurrection, continues the reference without blinking: they drank “from a spiritual rock that followed them, and the rock was the Christ” (1 Cor 10:4). The desert generation drank from him already, without knowing his name. God’s pursuit of his people was always closer than it looked.
Sinai and the Law as Accompaniment
At Sinai God makes his pursuit a proposal. “Now, if you obey me completely and keep my covenant, you will be my treasured possession among all peoples, though all the earth is mine. You will be to me a kingdom of priests, a holy nation” (Ex 19:5-6). God gave Adam a vocation in the sanctuary of Eden, and here God gives that same vocation to an entire people: priests of the earth, set apart to bring the thanksgiving of the whole world to the world’s maker. God gives the Law with the covenant to a stumbling people, to keep them in a safe neighborhood; the Law is therefore less a cage than an accompaniment, and it carries concessions, like the toleration of divorce, which Moses permitted for the hardness of their hearts. God walks with people from where they are and leads them toward truth: all of salvation history is about this.
A plain human pattern runs underneath the Law’s growth. When a relationship is strong, the two need few procedures, for two who love each other and walk side by side can leave much unsaid. When the relationship weakens, when one party grows bored, distracted, or self-preferring, the procedures multiply, because someone must now spell out what love once supplied. Israel’s history is that pattern at the scale of a people: God offered covenants ever more generously, and God specified instructions ever more exactly, as Israel’s distraction proved chronic, for there was always a shinier god one valley over. The Law’s growth measures the wounds in the relationship, but God’s goal never changed: he wanted a people so practiced in the procedures that he could at last write on their hearts the law of love those procedures protect. Compliance for its own sake was never the point.
The Law is intelligible through and through, because the same Word through whom all things were made speaks it. Its commands have reasons, the reasons can be found, and finding them is part of keeping them well. A people formed on such a Law were learning something about their God that no pagan nation guessed about its gods: that he makes sense, that his world makes sense, and that obedience to him is the homecoming of the mind, and not its crushing.
The Tent, the Temple, and the River
God moves into the camp: Israel pitches a tent at the center of the wandering people, the Ark of the Covenant rests inside it - its cover the “mercy seat” of God. God travels with Israel, cloud by day and fire by night. Solomon builds the Temple in time, pilgrimage and sacrifice gather to one mountain (Zion), and Israel begins to imagine that holiness is a thing hoarded at the center, behind a veil, guarded from the world. God corrects Israel through Ezekiel, who sees water trickling from beneath the temple threshold, deepening as it flows, ankle-deep, then knee-deep, then a river no one could cross, fostering life-giving and healing trees on both banks and freshening even the sea. Holiness was always a wellspring, for God always meant the trickle to become a river running outward to the nations.
The Question of the Good King
Israel asks for a king, so as to be like the other nations, though God had chosen Israel to be a people apart. God warns them what kings take from their people. Even so, God grants the request, for authority itself is his idea and human nature requires it. Every shepherd of the people was to be a servant of the same people (the Law itself had legislated as much). Under most circumstances, it seems good to be the king. One question runs through the whole Old Testament: is the king good? God tries Saul, who fails, and David follows.
David shows what God was looking for in a king, and it was repentance. When the prophet Nathan confronts David with his own adultery and with the murder that covered it, David, who could have silenced the prophet, breaks down instead, owning his sin without excuse. The 51st Psalm, the Church’s own Friday morning cry for mercy, comes from that experience. The king God can work with is the king who kneels (the penitent man who is humble, kneels before God). The Almighty attaches the promise of a throne without end to David’s lineage, not waiting for a perfect spotless one, which teaches its own lesson about what God intended to build on.
The kings after David decline, until the kingdom splits, and rots, and falls.
Prophets Sent and Discarded
God sends the prophets one after another for centuries: to kings, to priests, to the whole people, warning, pleading, promising. The people hear them for a season, then discard them or absorb them into the convenient cultural patterns of the time, and some of the prophets they kill. The pattern is so consistent that the Lord will later fold the whole history into a single parable about tenants who beat the servants and finally kill the son.
Exile as Pedagogy
When the warnings run out, Babylon breaks the nation and carries it off. Exile is pedagogy: a people had exiled themselves interiorly, so God now shows them corporately what exile from God looks like. By the waters of Babylon, having lost the Temple and the land and the throne, they finally grieve for what they had never valued while they held it.
New Hearts Promised
Amidst the ruins of Babylon, Israel writes down much of what was transmitted only in memory: much of its prophecy and about the men who brought it to the nation. There in exile, God gives the greatest of the promises. God’s own breath will re-enflesh dry bones, and the bones will live. A covenant is coming, and God will write it on hearts instead of stone tablets. A servant is coming who will be pierced for our sins, and by his wounds we will be healed. God will pour out his Spirit on all flesh. God himself will come to shepherd his people, since every shepherd he sent them failed.
God planted a seed in one scene among those prophets prior to exile. Elijah flees for his life and prays for death under a broom tree, and an angel wakes him, with a hearth cake baked and water set out, saying, “Get up and eat or the journey will be too much for you!” (1 Kgs 19:7). He eats and drinks twice, and walks forty days on the strength of that food to Horeb, the mountain of God. An angel baked a cake for a journey too long for human strength, which is why the Church has always seen in that cake the Eucharist coming, food for the journey given ahead of time. Even then, these hearth cakes would remind God’s people of manna given during the sojourn in the desert. At the mountain, God teaches Elijah where to listen for him: not in the wind, not in the earthquake, not in the fire, but in a tiny whispering sound that only a quieted man could catch.
The prophets, for all their variety, keep circling the same few truths. God tells Hosea to marry an unfaithful wife and to keep taking her back, so that Hosea’s household acts out the covenant. Amos thunders that festivals and offerings disgust God when men sell the poor for a pair of sandals, for worship without justice is mere noise. Isaiah sings of a vineyard lovingly tended that yielded wild grapes, of a virgin with child, and of a servant who suffers. God sends Jonah, the comedy among the prophecies, to Nineveh, the enemy capital; Jonah runs the other way, a fish returns him (with his life lost and restored for mission), he preaches one reluctant sentence, and he watches the whole brutal city repent in sackcloth down to the livestock, and then he sulks, because he could not bear that God’s mercy should be wider than his own. The book ends with God’s unanswered question about pity, hanging in the air for every reader who has ever resented mercy shown to the “wrong” people.
Jeremiah names what God will do: “I will place my law within them, and write it upon their hearts; I will be their God, and they shall be my people” (Jer 31:33). God promises a changed interior, a heart that wants what God wants. Through Ezekiel God promises the same change more bluntly still: he will take out the heart of stone and put in a heart of flesh. Everything wrong since the garden had been, at the core, a disease of the heart. Here, at the nation’s lowest hour, God promises to treat the disease itself and not the symptoms.
The scribes of the later sacred scriptures speak of God’s wisdom in a way that verges on what was coming. God gave wisdom to Israel as a treasure, and to no other nation. Baruch describes it appearing on earth and walking among the peoples, the whole Law made something like a person, living in the middle of ordinary life. It is poetry, and it is also preparation, for God was teaching his people, centuries ahead of the event, to imagine his wisdom as a presence on a road and not as a scroll in an ark. When the Word finally did become flesh and walk among us, the blueprint for understanding was mature.
Four Hundred Years of Waiting
God’s people could already guess how he would come from how he had always worked. When Gideon mustered thirty-two thousand men against Midian, God pared them down to three hundred, armed them with trumpets, clay jars, and torches, and gave the victory without a sword drawn, so that no one could pretend the strength had been theirs. God demonstrates his saving power through the meek and lowly to humble the strong and haughty. He proves his power through meekness and a view into men’s hearts. A people who had watched their God do this for two thousand years had every reason to expect him in poverty, yet, it would prove to be a hard pill to swallow.
A remnant returns to the promised land, rebuilds, and then, for roughly four hundred years, the voice of prophecy falls silent. Nothing visible happens. But waiting, in the cadence of the Lord, is itself an intentional activity: the Hebrew word conveys longing, lying in wait, being bound together, so that waiting of that kind is all-consuming, the surest preoccupation of a life. A people is waiting, wherewith that’s the particular activity itself. Through all of it, the covenants, the desert, the kings, and the ruin, God had been doing one long work: forming a people capable of recognizing what kind of king God is, so that when he came in poverty, the humble would know him.
Comments