July 29 2017
WHY GOD HAS DISAPPEARED
In THE HIDDEN FACE OF GOD Richard Elliott Friedman, professor of Hebrew and Comparative Literature in California traces God’s physical appearances in the Bible, and also how, on several occasions, God hides his face.
One of the most intriguing statements in the Bible is found in Deuteronomy 31: 17-18; 32: 20. There God for the last time talks to his ‘friend’ Moses, and says, “I shall hide my face from them. I shall see what their end will be.” Dr. Friedman, who knows his Hebrew, writes that the word ‘end’ does not mean their finish, but rather their distant future. I believe we now live in ‘that distant future’.
God hiding his face indicates two things: (1) It gives humanity an opportunity to grow up; (2) it also means his abandonment. Both events are intimately connected with the COVENANT God made with Humanity and CREATION.
God’s gradual disengagement.
God initially was quite involved with humanity, evident in the first Bible chapters where we can easily trace God’s direct concern with the human race. This was quite extensive with Adam and Eve, intimate even. God personally breathes life into the first human being, personally forms the first woman, personally shapes the Garden of Eden and fashions the animals.
Then each day he walks there where the humans hear him. There’s constant contact between God and Adam and Eve. God sees them as children, tells them to multiply, what to eat and what not. In other words, Adam and Eve take little responsibility themselves. When they are embarrassed over their nudity God even makes them their first clothing. All this makes them appear quite immature.
Noah is completely different. While God gives him the broad outlines about the building of the Ark, Noah does all the work: a gigantic task, involving decades of hard labor.
Then there is Abraham. He is told to start a journey without really knowing where he would end up, and when he arrived, he is told to “take your son, your only one, whom you love, Isaac, and offer him”. Imagine being tested that way! The stakes of human responsibility are raised sky high. His implicit trust in the Lord gives him the audacity to argue with God about the fate of Sodom and Gomorrah. Quite a change in attitude!
Then, except for an appearance with Moses on Mount Sinai, God never appears again in person. His voice is heard – Samuel – and his presence felt, but, he’s never seen again.
THE COVENANT WITH CREATION!!
Because Noah believed in God, his family was chosen to make a new start in creation. For that purpose God made a Covenant involving all of creation.
In this Covenant, related in Genesis 9, we read that God repeats six times that this Covenant is with every living creature and with the earth. It sets the tone for the entire Bible. In essence God says here: “People of the earth, I am the Creator. Here I now pledge to form a triad, a Covenant with three parties (1) With the Earth, (2) With you as my image bearers, and (3) With me, as the Head of the Covenant.”
It should be noted that the parties to the covenant are considered to be equals!!
“Remember,” God said, “the line of the Covenant is not vertical: first Me, then you, then the earth, with the earth not really in touch with Me. No, no, the earth, the trees, the rocks, the bees and buffaloes, all are my creatures, the works of my hands. Consider them equal partners and treasure them as you treasure me!”
Picture a triangle: God is on top and the two corners occupy us and the earth, with two lines extending to and from each corner as we all are interdependent, as the Earth gives life to us humans, but also receives input from us. We are dependent on the earth, but must also enhance it. God gives life to us and the earth and both praise God in return: “the hills clap their hands, the mountains leap with joy”, the Psalms say.
In other words, when we look after the earth and after ourselves and our fellow creatures, caring for the crocodiles in the jungle and our cousins next door, then God will look after us. That’s what Genesis 9 says. That’s what a COVENANT is all about: a mutual help society, like a marriage.
This Covenant, said God to Noah, will endure throughout eternity. God, People, the Land are an inseparable Triad. To seal it all, God sent his Son, as the New Head of the New Covenant. Jesus, God’s Son: Jesus, the heart of our religion; the Head of the Covenant.
The signs of the Covenant.
In 1 Samuel 18 we read that David and Jonathan made a covenant. As a sign of the Covenant Jonathan, the crown prince, took off his clothes and gave them to David. He also gave his sword and other weapons. And David did the same.
They completely exchanged their personal belongings, as a sign and symbol that they were one. Imagine!! God did that with us!! He gave all he had, his creation and his Son, and we do the same with God!
David and Jonathan also did something else, not related in the Bible, but part of the general rule of personal Covenant. This ritual required an incision in their wrists. Both parties would then raise their wrists to heaven and let the blood mingle. In the incision they would rub dirt to leave a scar as a permanent sign of their mutual allegiance. They then would sit down, make a list of their possessions, and exchange those lists with the promise that whatever the one part owned would become the rightful property of the other.
In order to seal all this they would walk in the figure of an 8 around two altars as a sign of eternity. Then the two parties to the covenant would eat a special Covenant meal, a lamb and unleavened bread, with each party bringing its own bread and offering it to the other, and the same with wine, pouring the wine of the one into the goblet of the other.
That’s what God did with us!! Made us equals!
Jesus’ blood flowed for us. His wounds are still visible as an eternal sign of the Covenant, an everlasting scar on the God of the Trinity, that whatever is God’s, is also ours.
Yes, the Lord of Creation gave it all to us. He is the God of the Universe. He signed over the ownership of this cosmos to the people of the Covenant, those who confess Jesus to be their Lord.
An amazing treaty!
Yes, God and we have become one in Jesus Christ. Look at the Lord Supper. There Jesus says the familiar words: “This is my body, given for you, and this cup is the New Covenant in my blood poured for you.”
Now not God, but Jesus is the party of the Covenant. God has disappeared from the scene and Jesus is now at the center. Paul tells us to clothe ourselves with the cloak of righteousness, with the Lord Jesus Christ, and so become a new creation, for God has reconciled the cosmos to himself in Christ’s full-bodied Covenant language.
The Covenant idea is woven throughout the entire bible. In essence the Bible is the Covenant story. God made a covenant with us and with all creation. The covenant between God- Jesus- humanity-creation is the intimate foundation, the meaning and purpose of creation.
Creation is the visible basis of the Covenant, its ultimate realization. Creation is there because God in Jesus desires to enter into a Covenant with humanity. We, as human beings, exist because God continuously calls us to the Covenant. God makes us discover our existence more and more as the daily experience of living in the Covenant, in his creation. All this is derived from the loaded expression of “created in God’s image and likeness.”
Our day-to-day life refers to God. Our life resembles God because we, as men and women, as conscious persons, experience our living as participants in the Covenant. We realize the meaning of God’s self-revelation in creation through the Covenant. In the created world, we are the visible representatives of the invisible God. Psalm 82: 6 says, “You are all children of the most High,” so we must not sell ourselves short.
Jesus is the original human pattern, the prototype of all human existence. God, in his plan of salvation, revealed himself fully in Jesus, who represents humanity for us and in this way completed creation and attained the perfect life in God.
We are created after the pattern of Christ. Through the Covenant we experience that likeness to God in a personal response of love. As Children of God, as his heirs, through the Covenant with God we share our humanity with the Son, who is the Lord of all that exists, and through whom the universe was made. The entire creation is there because it is permanently willed in Christ by the Father, because the Father loves it as the Christ.
SO, WHY HAS GOD DISAPPEARED?
Two reasons. (1). God withdrew his presence when we refused to abide by THE COVENANT, the treaty between God, the Earth and Us, when we ventured on our own, and declared God irrelevant.
When one of the parties to the Covenant reneges, that’s it. That is the tragic situation we now experience every day, as is evident from an article in THE NEW YORK MAGAZINE, entitled
THE UNINHABITABLE EARTH,
an essay that has been widely circulated. The article predicts famine, economic collapse, a sun that cooks us: total chaos: soon.
Genesis 15 gives an illustration of what happens when we break the conditions of the Covenant. There it is related how God and Abraham covenanted. Abraham is asked to cut animals in two and both God, in the form of fire, and Abraham in person, pass through these severed animals. The cutting of these beasts illustrates that if the covenant is not kept the bodies of the parties concerned would be cut in half as punishment. But those who abide by its terms will, when Christ returns, share in his glory and complete the work of creation: an eternal assignment, because Creation is Infinite as God is Infinite.
I started this essay by stating that, “One of the most intriguing statements in the Bible is found in Deuteronomy 31: 17-18; 32: 20. There God for the last time talks to his ‘friend’ Moses, and says, “I shall hide my face from them. I shall see what their end will be.”
The warnings are out.
Just as all future forecasts have been far too optimistic, with the NEW YORK MAGAZINE article the most pessimistic so far, it will also turn out to be too optimistic, with far worse to come and far sooner. It paints the world without God.
Hebrew 10 relates what happens when we break THE COVENANT. Verse 31 says, “It is a dreadful thing to fall into the hands of the living God.” God’s revenge is built-in into Creation. By breaking our treaty with God and creation, a Covenant sealed by the blood of Christ, we have heaped on our heads the wrath of God, who so loved the world, the cosmos, that he offered his Son to buy it back from the Satan.
(2). Another reason why God has disappeared is that he wanted us to become what we are: mature enough to stand on our own feet, without God’s help.
God made a virtue out of us breaking the Covenant by giving us the opportunity to live ‘etsi deus non daretur’ to quote Bonhoeffer, ‘to live as if God no longer exists’.
Bonhoeffer calls this our “coming of age.”
God wants us to grow up to be ready to inhabit the New Creation. Adam and Eve needed God’s help. Over the many millennia God has directed us to maturity. Yes, this time we will be and can be on our own.
Thanks be to God.