Monday, November 06, 2006
Moses' View
I've learned something fundamental recently. Well, perhaps that is not the right word. Yet, an idea has caused a paradigm shift in my understanding of the Pentateuch. It is a way of looking at what Moses wrote that is new for me. For several weeks now, this idea has continued to disturb my thinking, declaring that it will change how I understand a large piece of Scripture and challenging me to take the time to think through its implications.
I don't remember why, but I found myself reading Genesis and pulled out Volume 2 of the Expositor's Bible Commentary (Zondervan). I've really appreciated this series over the years and am glad I took my pastor's advice before coming to Africa and invested in a copy. The section concerning Genesis is by John Salihamer. He was at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School 20 years ago when the book was written. Like all the guys' in this series, he's a serious evangelical scholar.
OK, and so I am the kind of guy who reads commentaries!! I admit it. Well, I don’t read commentaries constantly, and some I find to be just awful, but I do like to understand the background of what I’m reading or studying. And I also appreciate having another perspective on a passage. I don’t claim to be a scholar, though, even if I enjoy theology. In fact, it is one of my regrets that the life God has given me hasn’t yet included the luxury of an extended period of seminary classes or even a degree.
Anyway, Salihamer rocked my world with a thought. It wasn’t a large thought, really. It was a simple perspective on when and why Moses wrote.
Perhaps someone had expressed this thought to me before and I wasn’t yet able to hear it. Ideas are like that, often. You need to have a base of other information and experience to be able to see why a particular idea is so important or profound. After all these years of studying and teaching the great stories of Genesis and Exodus, I do have a good working knowledge of the Pentateuch. After hearing so many sermons and discussing so many theological issues, after receiving so much teaching about the implications of the Old Testament, especially the writings of Moses, on understanding Jesus and the Gospel, this little idea in the right place and in the right time made my jaw drop.
Here it is. Moses didn’t write to record or teach the Law. Moses wrote after the Law had already failed to bring peace with God. His goal was to explain why. His books are the teaching of a prophet, not the records of the court stenographer.
Moses didn’t write those five scrolls on the far shore of the Red Sea in the triumph of escape from Egypt. He didn’t write at Mount Sinai in the glow of God’s glory filling the Tabernacle. He wrote during the 40 years of wandering in the desert, a curse brought on the people for rebellion, for their rejection of God and His covenant. He didn’t write for those who escaped tyranny and suffering. He addressed their children. Moses wrote to explain all that failure and pain and death that we tend to skip over. He needed to interpret the events that had happened, not just record them, so that those who followed could understand what it all meant.
So, Moses addressed a certain generation: the children of the wilderness wanderings. They had questions, certainly. What did it all mean? Who is this God that our parents say brought them out of slavery in Egypt with power and came to dwell with us, but who, in anger, has us in the wilderness now? Why did He bother to save us? Why is He still with us? What is His goal? What can we expect? Can we trust Him? Can we trust ourselves? Won’t we just mess up, too?
Well, I don’t know all the questions they might have asked. What this new thought is challenging me to do is to try to understand which questions Moses did answer and how. I have read Exodus as history and theology. I have not read it as history theologically interpreted for the next generation after Joshua. I haven’t ever thought to put myself in that time frame.
But I’ve begun to. And it is exciting, because Moses foresaw human failure repeating the pattern, but he also promised that God’s faithfulness to His plan would bring a return to the intimacy of Eden. The Gospel will be even clearer, I expect, when I hear Moses more clearly.
