What if God knew the nature of humanity and planned for it in God’s redemptive design from the beginning? Assume evil, including the evil of racism, was not a surprise to God or a reality that dictated a series of emergency rescue strategies up to and including the life, death, and resurrection of Christ. If that is accurate, then the coming of Christ was not a radical departure but rather a culminating act by which God seeks to redeem the world. Evils such as racism are clearly actions and conditions that are in rebellion against God and God’s intentions for creation, but they are not outside of the redeeming power of God.
THE BIBLE STORY
In order to explicate this idea, it is necessary to recall the narrative history contained in the Hebrew Scriptures. As the Gospels make clear, what took place in Christ is entirely consistent with what God had already revealed through the Scriptures as to the nature of God’s saving work. “Then, beginning with Moses and all the prophets,
(Jesus) interpreted to them the things about himself in all the scriptures.”
After they sinned, God clothed Adam and Eve as he sent them from the Garden, and God would not make an end to the human project in the flood. God refused to be defeated by evil in the creation. In Genesis 12, the story moves from a story of all of humanity to a more specific story of God with a particular people. However, it is always made clear that the ultimate purpose of God is for the sake of all humanity. It is made clear from the beginning that the fulfillment of the promise in the covenant rests on the faithfulness of God and not on the faithfulness or wisdom of humanity. Yet even the Israelites were haunted with the question of whether they might someday cross some invisible line, and God would give up on them.
GOD AND MOSES
The rather humorous dialogue between God and Moses following the golden calf incident illustrates this fear. God was pictured as so incensed with this act of idolatry that he began to refer to the people not as God’s people but as Moses’ people. He declared that he was going to wipe them off the face of the earth. It was only Moses’ intervention that prevented this judgment from taking place. Another version of this same question was illustrated in God’s rejection of Saul as the chosen one to lead Israel. God’s promise to establish an everlasting covenant with David was an attempt to settle the question of God’s faithfulness despite the sinfulness of humanity, but the question still persisted.
GOD’S JUSTICE AND COMPASSION
While God is a God of justice, as the prophet Hosea described, God’s justice is an agonizing struggle with the compassion of God’s own heart. “How can I give you up, Ephraim? How can I hand you over, O Israel? How can I make you like Ad’mah? How can I treat you like Zeboi’im? My heart recoils within me; my compassion grows warm and tender. I will not execute my fierce anger; I will not again destroy Ephraim; for I am God and no mortal, the Holy One in your midst, and I will not come in wrath.
”This compassionate side of God was particularly evident in the life of Israel’s greatest hero, David. Among many examples, perhaps the clearest was in the events surrounding his adulterous affair with Bathsheba: murder, adultery, coveting, false witness, stealing. David broke most of the commandments and clearly dishonored God in whose name he had been anointed.
How patient can God be with a person or a people who continue to dishonor him and refuse to recognize their grateful dependence on God? Yet God had made a promise to David, “Your house and your kingdom shall be made sure forever before me; your throne shall be established forever.”[xiv] Would God give up on David as God had done with Saul? Will God give up on humanity? If not, how will God’s promises be fulfilled in the face of the persistence of human sin?
HOW DO YOU ANSWER THAT QUESTION?
EXCERPT FROM RACISM AND GOD’S INVITATION
A Messiah?