Blessings and Curses

So we have the nation of Israel for the first time divided, it seems, into units of less than twelve. There are six tribes on one mountain and six tribes on another, one group responsible for announcing the promised blessings of God and the other responsible for His promised curses.

Although it is weird in terms of Israel's history, as we saw yesterday for a variety of reasons, it's actually pretty common in the contemporary church.

It is the classic tension between grace and truth.

This is the tension we're all feeling right now, no matter which mountain it is that we're standing on. There are Christians out there speaking the blessings of God (grace), shouting from the mountaintops ideas like forgiveness, mercy, love. And they're not wrong. These are all promises of God, given to His covenant people under the New Covenant just as much, if not more, than the old one. Were these things not true, we should have to say that the Lord our God has lied to us.

At the same time, there are Christians out there speaking the curses of God (truth), shouting from the mountaintops ideas like hell, condemnation, and the need for repentance. And they're not wrong. These are all curses of God, pronounced upon His covenant people under the New Covenant just as much, if not more, than the old one. Were these things not true, we should have to say that the Lord our God has lied to us. 

The trouble for the modern church is that we have lost the Deutero-Joshua example of the two mountains. For us, there is only one mountain. Ours.

But see, this is what we're missing. When Israel did this little exercise, even though it seemed that they were divided into two, they were very much aware that they were still one whole. The two halves of the nation had one message, and as they proclaimed God's blessings or curses, they never stopped looking at each other. They were on two mountains, but they were both facing the same valley. They were keeping eye contact with one another. They were responding, in voice, to each other.

We've forgotten how to do this. For most of us, we are standing on our own mountain, wholeheartedly proclaiming either the blessing or the curse as though it is the entirety of God's story, as though it is the only covenant. We are shouting them into the sky, over the whole world, more like Leonardo DiCaprio in Titanic than like Israel on her two mountains. We're not looking at each other any more. We refuse to look one another in the eye. 

Not only that, but we don't even claim any more that we're standing over the same space. We won't even look toward the same valley. Those Christians...those heretical Christians standing on the other mountain...they're wrong. They're ruining everything. We laugh at them for the way they're shouting off their mountain, unaware that we're doing the same off of ours. And at the end of the day, our mountains are where we fall. 

Because unlike Israel, this is where we stay. We have no plans to come back together, no plans to meet again in the valley, no intentions of hugging our brothers and celebrating that only together do we have the heart of God's covenant, only in grace and truth do we proclaim what God has proclaimed. No. Ain't nobody got time for that any more. We'd rather die on our own mountains, shouting into the wind. 

And that's exactly what's happening. 

And that's exactly why this story from Israel's history is so important to us now. We're living it out all over again, but we've forgotten how the story goes. We've forgotten the very key dynamics at play here, specifically that on our mountains, we are only one-half of God's story; that it is incumbent upon us not only to look each other in the eye, but to speak into the same valley, to speak to each other; that at the end of the day, we are not two peoples of God, but one. One holy nation, one royal priesthood, one people of God. And these mountains? These are the mountains from which we speak, not the ones on which we die. 

A Tale of Two Mountains

There is an interesting scene that unfolds when Israel moves into the Promised Land and starts defeating her enemies, a scene that is set up by God's command through Moses in the waning words of Deuteronomy. 

Essentially, here is the plan: when you get to the place where God, your God, is giving you, then divide into two - six tribes and six tribes. Half of Israel is to stand on one mountain, and half of Israel is to stand on another mountain. There, from your places, recite the blessings the curses God made in His covenant promise with you. 

Weird.

It's weird for a couple of reasons. First, it's a stark break in message from the God who seems to be immensely concerned with unity. Most of the time, God is calling His people together. He tells them when they must all assemble for this or that festival. He explains the concept of community accountability, where if one man is found in a certain sin, the entire community must come together to stone him to death. He emphatically explains to the three tribes who took their land on the other side of the Jordan that they still have a responsibility to fight for their brothers in the Promised Land before truly settling down.

Everywhere we see Him, God is always referring to the twelve tribes as one; they do everything together. There are twelve gems in the priestly ephod, but they are placed there together. There are twelve tribes in the camp, but they all have their places around the Tabernacle. There are twelve stones in the altar, but they were all gathered by the leaders of the twelve tribes themselves. This is the only time where we see God break Israel into real units of less than twelve. 

Six. And six. 

The second reason that it's weird is that there doesn't seem to by any rhyme or reason by which the six and the six are chosen. That is, if you read the blessings of the twelve tribes in other places, or if you read the descriptions of them and the way that they are, it's difficult to see how some of these tribes carry the blessings and some of them carry the curse. There are clearly at least a few that we would easily, by our human nature, place on the other mountain. 

That is, if it were up to us, we could tell you which rabblerousers were going to be the ones to curse Israel and which saints would be the ones to save her.

Third, most of us seem to have a real theological problem with the God who curses His people, so it's hard to imagine that His people at any time and place would be so willing to stand in the affirmation of His curses. It's why we preach about Heaven and not about Hell. It's why we talk about grace and not condemnation. It's why we talk about sin only in the nature of redemption. It just seems to us that if God was as loving and everything as He says He is, then all twelve tribes should have been standing on the mountain of blessing. 

Just sayin'. 

Finally, what is most weird about this whole thing is that after each statement of either blessing or curse is recited by the six tribes, all the people were to say (and said), "Amen." 

So there's a lot of crazy stuff going on here, just inside the Promised Land. And there's a lot that we can break down in all of this, which we'll do in the coming days. 

Worship or Rest

We've wound our way back, much like Israel, to the place where we once stood, faced with the question presented by the Exodus and Deuteronomy versions of the Ten Commandments: what, exactly, is the Sabbath? Is it a holy day on which we rest because God created the world in six days and rested on the seventh or is it a sacred day on which we worship because God, our God, delivered us from Egypt?

Yes.

Just as we saw yesterday, the answer is not either/or but both/and. There is absolutely no tension in wholly and fully accepting both presentations as truth and fulfilling them simultaneously; they confirm one another, and they confirm the character of God. 

When we rest because our God is holy, we take a new view of creation. We stand back and see how the world is set in motion and, like our God, we declare that it is good. We have a moment to see ourselves, not in motion, but at rest - in a state of human being, not in human doing - and we can say that it is very good. In holy rest, we see what the world always knew - Creation itself has been given all that it ever needs, for it has been masterfully crafted by a great Artist and endowed with His very presence. On the Sabbath day of rest, we stop trying to improve it and stand back, letting the Artist speak. 

When we worship because God, our God, brought us out of Egypt, we free ourselves from the curse for just a bit. No longer do we have to toil for everything we've got. No longer do we cry out in labor pains; we're not responsible for life. God has given us everything, and He brings life. For the breath of this sacred day, Creation is restored to its intended design - God is our God. We exist in proper, worshipful relationship with Him. It is not that we have forgotten our fallenness; we have simply forsaken it for the better thing. 

And here, we have two truths that become abundantly clear on the Sabbath, and they live in harmony with one another: God is good, and He is for us. And are these not the two most fundamental truths of our entire faith? God is real, and He is here. God is Love, and He loves us. God created everything, but we are His treasure. This is the essence of the faith!

So it is interesting to see how the story of Scripture changes from one place to another, for example, from the outskirts of Egypt to the edge of the Promised Land, and to look at all of the factors that go into something like that and what such a change might mean. But we need not be troubled by what seem to be such dramatic differences in revelation. Quite often, they complement each other rather than being contradictory. We just have to figure out what's going on, why, and what it says about our God, in order that we might find what is both good and beautiful even in the mess. 

After all, isn't that all we're doing anyway? Looking for what's good and beautiful even in this mess....

God Your God

It's easy to see how Israel's story changes from the outskirts of Egypt to the edge of the Promised Land. In those short forty years of wandering, the emphasis has changed from God's incredible, unchangeable nature to His more intimate, personal nature. The Lord has become God, your God.

In the verses that we've been looking at this week, that also means that the Sabbath has changed from a day of holy rest because the Lord is holy and rested on the seventh day to a sacred day of worship because God your God brought you out of Egypt. And this raises kind of the heart of Christian theology to question in a very profound way:

Do we worship God because He is holy or do we worship Him because He is our God?

It's not an easy question to answer, probably because the true answer lies somewhere in the both/and. The Scriptures plainly tell us to be holy because the Lord our God is holy, but most of us spend our whole lives trying to be like Jesus without ever being thankful for Him or in awe of Him or properly in love with Him. We fall in love only with the idea that He reflects in us, our ability to be like God because the Lord our God is holy. 

At the same time, if we focus exclusively on the intimate, personal relationship that we have with our God, we can become so thankful, so in awe, so in love with Him that we neglect to change our own lives or hearts in any meaningful way in order to be more like Him. Here, too, we fall short of what it is that God would have us to do. 

This is the tension that most of us feel more of the time than we'd like to admit. There are certain things in my life that I'm good at, gifts of God that come naturally to me. There are others that I have to work at and still others that I'm never going to do well. That's just the nature of who I am. On the one hand, my theology of God requires me to continue to diligently work at all of these things, in order to become more like my God. Be holy, for He is holy. 

At the same time, my fallen and humbled human nature fully recognizes that I'm not ever going to get there, and so in this case, my proper response must be one of worship and awe. I praise the things in God that I'm not good at. I love that He is so much better at these things than I am and that it's not all up to me to do these things in the world; He's already doing them. And I praise Him for the grace that He gives that enables me to keep trying. 

Too often, we think it has to be one or the other - that I must either worship God or become more like Him. That He must either be the Lord or God, my God. That I can either stand in awe of Him or stand in the nature of Him, but I cannot do both. The truth is, however, that it must be both. I must worship Him and become more like Him. I must stand in awe of Him and stand in the nature of Him, doing my best to both sing His praise and live His love. He must be Lord and God, my God. 

Indeed, He is the Lord, my God. 

Slaves in Egypt

So by the time Israel reaches the Promised Land, the Sabbath has transformed from a holy day of rest because the Lord your God is holy to a sacred day of worship because the Lord your God brought you out of Egypt. Yesterday, we looked at how a man like Moses could potentially change the message, depending on which heart he was speaking out of.

But can we really blame Moses?

If we watch carefully, the longer Israel is in the wilderness, the more reminders of Egypt become a part of their story. God frequently reminds them of the place where they have been, perhaps because the generation that left Egypt is passing away and their children are coming up to take their place. These children (all of those who were under twenty years of age at the time of Israel's rebellion with the twelve spies) would have only a limited understanding of what was going on in Egypt. 

Like all children, they heard the whispers. They saw their parents' frustration, anger, exhaustion. They knew their fathers came home broken and tired, perhaps even bruised and bleeding. They knew their mothers felt helpless to care for the family. They knew the fervency with which their parents prayed, and then, perhaps, even stopped praying, since things never seemed to get better for them. They may remember the night that they slaughtered the lamb and painted its blood on their doorposts, for the first time ever, eating with their sandals on, bags packed and leaning, waiting, against the door. They would have had faint ideas about all of these things, but they may not have understood them.

They would have known better the difficulty that they faced in the desert. They would have remembered the morning that manna first appeared on the ground, the day that quail started to rain out of the sky. They probably remembered the day that they ran out of new recipes for quail and started to feel what God had predicted - complete disgust at the meat. They would know intimately the grumbling of the community of Israel all along this journey, and maybe here, they, too, would stop praying. Who is this God who brought them to this wilderness to die? What had He ever done for them?

This is why the longer they wander, the more reminders we see of God being the God who brought them out of Egypt. They don't remember, or perhaps they don't even know, what a big deal that was. 

And here's what I really think was happening: the closer Israel got to the Promise Land, to becoming the people of God that He had called them to be (and Moses makes reference to their becoming the people of God in Deuteronomy 27-28-ish), the more God was trying to establish Himself as their God. 

That's what makes Him different from all of the other gods that they were about to encounter.

It's great and all that God created them in the garden of Eden, in the image of Himself He created them. It's great that He put this whole world together and orchestrated everything just the way that He wanted it. It's great that He saw that it was good, then very good, then rested on the seventh day. But none of this essentially sets Him apart from any of the other gods, who also claimed to have created the world. Who also claimed to have a design in mind, great power, and an awesome plan. 

What sets God apart from the other gods is that He alone can claim to be involved in the lives of His people. These other gods? They required worship, but their interaction with the faithful was severely lacking. Their worshipers might say that they provided fertility or increased the crops, but that was only when the worship was just quite right. This is not the testimony of YHWH. His story is quite different.

So as Israel is set to encounter the Baals and Asherahs and Molechs, as they stand on the edge of what other nations claim as sacred space, their story of God transforms into the testimony of Him. No longer is He simply the force, the power, to whom all things must be credited. That's too easy; that can be said of any god. This is the God who brought them out of Egypt. This is the God who intervened for them of His own volition. They didn't ask to be brought into the desert; they didn't pray for the Promised Land. They grumbled about Egypt, and God said, "I got this." So slowly, but surely, as they wound their way through the wilderness, the story of God was quietly becoming the story of their God. 

And by the time they stand on the edge of the Promise, no longer is the Sabbath holy just because the Lord your God is holy; now, it is sacred because the Lord your God is your God.