God has revealed His absolutes (He also reveals His grace)
"We would prefer the bliss of a kingdom without moral absolutes, presided over by a God without wrath and entered through a Christ without the cross. But the price of this would be to discard not just this or that bit of the Bible but the whole God - given book, for in it God has revealed his absolutes and that He is a God of intense, fiery holyness. Jesus died bearig our sins in his body on the cross, for that is what sin merits, and saving us from the wrath to come, for that is where sin leads." (Alec Motyer: 'Exodus' 2005)
Some may read this passage and feel condemned, others will read it and discover God's grace (perhaps for the first time). For me the good news is that we are all in the same boat - that is to say, All have sinned and fallen short of God's glory (Romans 3: 23) we are all in need of a Noah's ark to escape the wrath of God - and that ark has been provided through the blood of Christ.
He himself bore our sins in his body on the tree, so that we might die to sins and live for righteousness, by his wounds you have been healed. 1 Peter 2: 24
Some may read this passage and feel condemned, others will read it and discover God's grace (perhaps for the first time). For me the good news is that we are all in the same boat - that is to say, All have sinned and fallen short of God's glory (Romans 3: 23) we are all in need of a Noah's ark to escape the wrath of God - and that ark has been provided through the blood of Christ.
He himself bore our sins in his body on the tree, so that we might die to sins and live for righteousness, by his wounds you have been healed. 1 Peter 2: 24
Comments
The 1st problem I have is that the notion of the Bible as a complete whole; this is a fairly modern idea – it was 300 years or so after the last bits of the N.T. were written that the canon of the N.T. was agreed; and even today there are major differences between denominations as to what constitutes the ‘whole’ Bible. Not to mention the differences between early manuscripts (there are NO original manuscripts in existence – the earliest surviving manuscripts were written 300 yrs after the N.T. era). A blog that illustrates how arbitrary translation of the Bible can be is http://evangelicaltextualcriticism.blogspot.com/. The Bible itself is contradictory and cannot be seen, in my view, as a consistent whole.
The 2nd is the difficulties between the God and theology of Old Testament and the N.T.. As previously noted in a response to your pornography post – there is an implied (and even explicit) dualism in the N.T. (or many Christian’s understanding of the N.T.) that is absent in the O.T. There is no ‘Devil’ in the O.T. – The Law is given (not the Ten Commandments, as many of our American cousins seem fixated upon, but 613 commandments) and the responsibility for keeping this law does not focus on the individual, but on the nation of Israel. Failure to keep the commandments was not ascribed to ‘temptation’ by an evil spirit, but personal and corporate failing (though God is said to ‘turn their hearts’ – so whose fault is error in such cases? However in the N.T. we have this ‘Devil/Satan’ character thrown in – besides notions of ‘the soul’; resurrection and ‘final’ judgement. These concepts found their way into non-Biblical Judaism and Christianity by the social exchange available via the Greek and Roman Empires. Are we to now believe God slipped these ideas in ‘later on’?
The third is ‘moral absolutes’ – no ‘Christian’ society has moral absolutes – these change over time, depending upon the needs of that society – usury, divorce, the role and status of women, corporal and capital punishment, slavery, the use of wealth, the purpose of charity etc. All these things have changed over time – and will change again. It is part of our existential arrogance to believe the times in which we are living are either ‘The Last Times’ or that our age has a ‘special’ understanding of the Bible.
Taking just these three difficulties, it is hard for some of us to take the ‘Bible’ as a comprehensive and cohesive whole. As I have noted elsewhere – for me there is an explicit conceit, especially within Evangelical Christianity (and, ironically, High Islam): individual salvation, an individual relationship with God through Jesus and personal revelation and immediacy with the ‘Divine’ via Scripture. It all makes for a rather overly inflated view of the self and self importance; it is in short, a recipe for narcissism. ‘I am so sinful...’ ‘Jesus died for me....’ The ‘Self’ is always in the centre of this worldview.
For you, Neil, Motyer’s reading of Exodus is perhaps sufficient, or self-explanatory For me, and many others, this reliance on the appeasement of a vengeful God smacks too much of Augustine, Latin legalism – and a rather over inflated view of our individual importance in the ‘scheme of things’. If we are indeed saved by Grace and the Love of God and can do no ‘good’ act of ourselves, then our focus should be on cultivating a relationship with God and our neighbour, as opposed to the vagaries of moral absolutes – the latter are often an occasion for the weak to use symbolic capital as a means of telling others what to do. Hence are best avoided – we’ve seen what a mess that can make over the centuries and in individual churches.
I hope you had a happy Christmas?!
L.L.