You just can’t get good help around here.
—Papa
Out of the twisted darkness of Adam’s fall, the Lord, ever the lover of the human race, called a pagan man named Abram. He did not choose Abram because of his religious potential, but because he was as blind and fallen as everyone else on the planet. In Abram and his descendants the Lord establishes real relationship with the fallen children of Adam. But this is not going to be easy.1 Israel, trapped in the delusions of the Adamic mind, is scared to death. The relationship between the Lord and Israel is a relationship of love and grace and promise, but it is also one of anguish.
Think of Peter in the boat with Jesus. Peter had fished all night and caught nothing. Jesus got into his boat to teach the gathering crowds, and after he had finished teaching, he told Peter to push out into the deeper water and let down his nets. Already exhausted, Peter was a little hesitant. I can imagine Peter muttering to himself, “But Jesus, we have fished all night and caught nothing.” He did, however, as Jesus suggested, and they caught so many fish that two boats were filled and began to sink. Peter was surely thrilled at the prospect of having such an excellent fishing guide, but his response was surprising: he was afraid. “Go away from me, Lord, for I am a sinful man, O Lord!”2
At first this seems odd, but Peter’s reaction is a window into Israel’s world. Peter here is a picture of the history of Israel. The covenant between the Lord and Israel means that the Lord himself is in the boat, so to speak, with Israel. This is a relationship of grace, to be sure, but also one of agony and conflict, for the sheer love of the Lord, while certainly comforting and full of hope, nevertheless brings Israel’s sin and brokenness to light.
When my wife, Beth, and I were first married, we got into a debate about the color of the walls in our apartment. I insisted that they were obviously white, while she smiled and said they were “off-white.” To prove my point I grabbed a piece of typing paper and slapped it against the wall, and to my instant horror realized that the walls were clearly off-white. This is what happens in Israel’s history. The Lord’s presence puts the white paper against the wall of Israel’s life, instantly exposing all manner of darkness. His presence with Israel means the presence of life, and this life inevitably reveals that what Israel is living is not life at all but a twisted form of sadness and dying. Israel is caught between the love and grace of the Lord and the divine exposure of its broken and sinful existence. Peter’s cry echoes the agonizing pain of Israel’s nakedness.
The One from whom Adam hid walked into the room of Israel’s conscience and closed and bolted the door. The pain of Adam’s fall had nowhere to hide in Israel, for the presence of the Lord was a terrifying blessing. How could it be otherwise? For neither the Lord nor his exposing love would go away. And things got worse, much worse. For the love of the Lord “not only revealed Israel’s sin but intensified it.”3
This is about relationship, and relationship means knowing and being known. Relationship means that the Lord is not only walking in the garden, but has actually found Israel hiding in the bushes. But Israel is fallen. The “Go Away, Do Not Disturb” sign is blaring, and Israel is not about to allow the light of God’s love to shine into the corridors of its shame and wickedness. So in tender grace and accommodating mercy, the Lord established the sacrificial system for Israel’s sake. But even with rivers of blood from the thousands of sacrifices, the Lord’s presence in Israel was still too much for Israel to endure.
As the Lord walked into the room of Israel’s conscience, his presence jabbed every raw nerve of the fallen mind, from its guilt and homemade religion to its shame and self-justification, from its fear of exposure and self-protective hiding to its pride and self-referential judgment. If relationship meant only the sharing of information, then Israel could transcribe the words, put the clay tablets on the wall, and contemplate things from a safe distance. While the Lord shows great accommodation and tenderness—he takes “baby steps”—relationship nevertheless means that God himself is in the room with fallen Israel, and therefore Israel’s heresy and carnality, its heathenism and alienation, are exposed, stirring up all manner of hostility and animosity toward God. Israel’s recoil, its rebellion against the love of God, was neither approved nor ignored; it was accepted as the way things are with fallen humanity. But even the Lord’s acceptance of Israel’s rebellion means that he is one step closer, pushing Israel’s conflict with him toward fever pitch.4
The Lord walked with Israel and, in the genius of the Spirit, used the responses of Israel his presence provoked (both good and bad) to create a new medium for human understanding.5 Israel’s way of being and thinking were thrown into the fiery furnace of God’s love, and its basic beliefs about God were melted down and remade. In the presence of the Lord, Israel’s entrenched ideas were thrown onto the potter’s wheel, broken down, and refashioned. New ideas, concepts, and categories began to emerge in Adam’s fallen world: the names of God, the Word and Spirit of God, the love of God, covenant, sin, atonement, grace, prophet, priest, king, mercy, and forgiveness.6 In the glorious affliction of real relationship, the love of the Lord began to find its fruit in Israel in a restructuring of Adam’s tragically confused mind, all of which would become “the essential furniture of our knowledge of God.”7
For Israel, to walk with the Lord meant discovering a new world of understanding, and with it great hope. But it also meant feeling the pain of being stripped naked with all of its illusions exposed. Either the Lord was naive, and failed to anticipate that his life, light, and love would rattle the bones of Israel’s very being and intensify Israel’s conflict with him, or, inconceivable as it may sound, the intensification was deliberate, and the deliberate intensification of Israel’s conflict with God was part of his way of establishing real relationship.8 Far from appeasing the wrath of an offended and angry deity, or fulfilling God’s honor code, or pretending there is no problem, relationship is about the triune God deliberately embracing us in the twisted trauma of our fallenness and drawing so near that we feel the hellish anguish of our estrangement and lash out against him. Jabbing every raw nerve of Israel’s fallenness is the point. For real relationship necessitates that the Lord get to the very bottom of the Fall, into the catacombs of our human hostility toward him and his love. All the poison of the Fall has to surface. Anything less leaves us lost in our delusions and the Father unknown.
The one thing that the Lord could count on from his fallen creatures was that we would not be able to cope with his presence and love, and that we would do everything within our power to escape them both, including twisting his Word into religions custom-designed by our fallen minds to keep the Lord at a distance. As the Lord in his great love drew near to Israel, the more intensely Israel wanted to run. It was too much.
The bitter enmity inherent in Israel’s attempt to push the Lord out of the room and close the door is the chilling, terrifying, unnerving, yet very real and personal situation into which the Father’s Son will be born. The intensifying conflict between Israel and the love of God is the womb of real divine-human relationship, the “womb of the Incarnation,” and is destined to reach its boiling point as the Lord, in shocking grace, comes in person to meet Israel at its blind, fallen, and obstinate worst. Fallen humanity and the love of God will square off in the person of Jesus Christ.