Moses doubts

Listening to: Bob Dylan: Blonde on Blonde

Moses said to the LORD, “Oh, my Lord, I am not eloquent, either in the past or since you have spoken to your servant, but I am slow of speech and of tongue.”

Then the LORD said to him, “Who has made man's mouth? Who makes him mute, or deaf, or seeing, or blind? Is it not I, the LORD? Now therefore go, and I will be with your mouth and teach you what you shall speak.”

But he said, “Oh, my Lord, please send someone else.”

Then the anger of the Lord was kindled against Moses

(Exodus 4:10-13)

Moses turned to the Lord and said, “O Lord, why have you done evil to this people? Why did you ever send me? For since I came to Pharaoh to speak in your name, he has done evil to this people, and you have not delivered your people at all.”

But the LORD said to Moses, “Now you shall see what I will do to Pharaoh; for with a strong hand he will send them out, and with a strong hand he will drive them out of his land.”

God spoke to Moses and said to him, “I am the LORD. I appeared to Abraham, to Isaac, and to Jacob, as God Almighty [El Shaddai], but by my name the LORD I did not make myself known to them. I also established my covenant with them to give them the land of Canaan, the land in which they lived as sojourners. Moreover, I have heard the groaning of the people of Israel whom the Egyptians hold as slaves, and I have remembered my covenant. Say therefore to the people of Israel, ‘I am the LORD, and I will bring you out from under the burdens of the Egyptians, and I will deliver you from slavery to them, and I will redeem you with an outstretched arm and with great acts of judgment. I will take you to be my people, and I will be your God, and you shall know that I am the LORD your God, who has brought you out from under the burdens of the Egyptians. I will bring you into the land that I swore to give to Abraham, to Isaac, and to Jacob. I will give it to you for a possession. I am the LORD.’”

(Exodus 5:22-6:8)

In the both passages Moses doubts.

In the first passage Moses doubts God's power and God is angry.

In the second passage Moses doubts God's good purposes and God promises he will save and then Moses will stop doubting.

Leithart says of Barth:

What does Barth make of the “Name” theology of the OT? It shows that Israel must know God a “second time,” not only as hidden God but as revealed God. To know the name is to know God as partner in covenant (317-18).

The hidden God is the God of power only. His purposes are uncertain.

The revealed God is the God of both power and good purposes.

With thanks to Jim H

Corollary or contradiction? God's love and anger

Listening to: Radiohead: The Bends

[Rather hasty and unrefined thoughts that I was decided to put down prematurely because of a discussion in comments to a post of Dave Bish]

We can drift into a simplistic dualism when thinking of God's wrath and love. God's anger and God's love can be seen as implacable enemies never to be reconciled, and the cross can be seen as the place where God's love is shown to be stronger. People then seem to drift into either seeing either:

• God the Father as the angry one, and God the Son as the loving one;
• The devil as angry (god?), and God as love; or
• God as schizophrenic.

Against this we can say that God gets angry because he cares, not despite caring. He punishes us to bring us to repentance, as a father disciplines his children. Or, he hates all that is destructive and acts to protect his creation, as an artist won't stand by and see his painting be destroyed.

We remember that God is love from all eternity, but God's anger is a recent response of this love to the invasion of sin. Perhaps we could describe God's anger as an 'aspect' of his love.

But I think that perspective can lead to problems too. Anger and sadness with God's acts of punishment are disallowed, and God's love becomes distasteful.

I think the Bible offers a more complex and paradoxical picture of the relationship between God's anger and love than we often allow. We either subsume anger into love, losing both. Or oppose them so completely that God is robbed of his sovereignty and we are robbed of our hope of final victory. I think this paradoxical picture can be seen when considering three different ways in which God acts in anger at sin:

1. People

• Habakkuk complains to God about the sin of Israel, and cries to God for justice. God responds by explaining that he will use the Chaldeans as a tool to punish the people.
• Understandably this doesn't satisfy Habakkuk, but neither does it satisfy God. He promises to bring the agents of his punishment to an end too.

2. The devil

• The devil is depicted in chapter 1 of Job as if he is a servant of God, even if their relationship does not seem amicable. But the bible is clear that the power of the devil is derived from God. He is called 'Satan' ('the Accuser), because he accuses, appealing to God's justice. As Henri Blocher says "the weapon in the devil's hand is God's own law" (p. 139, cited in PFOT).
• At the same time Christ's victory over the devil is fundamental to the Gospel. From the Genesis 3:15 to Revelation 20 we are promised that he will be crushed, imprisoned, and thrown into the lake of fire.

3. Death

• In Genesis it is clear that death is God's active response of punishing human sin. In the NT there is hope that death is essential to our process of being freed from this body of sin, to new life. It is clearly from God, and for believers a 'good' thing.
• But despite all that "the last enemy to be destroyed is death" (1 Cor 15:26).

Asymmetrical paradox

We should notice though that the paradox is not equally weighted. It remains a paradox, but God stands asymetrically behind the two sides. God's anger is always done through tools:

• God uses other people to punish, but when he loves he does himself in sending his only Son.
• God uses Satan as an agent of his wrath, but he restores us himself.
• In God there isn't death, but pulsating life (John 1:4)

Wrestling with God

This is not an impractical thing to wonder about. If we want to escape punishment we have to believe that it is under God's control, but we also have to believe that he has acted, and is acting, to save us from it.

We want to protect every part of the truth that "one appeals to God against God" (p. 213, Bayer, Martin Luther's Theology).

A review of 'Just Love' by Ben Cooper

Just Love: Why God must punish sin (currently half-price at the Good Book Co) is a good little book by Ben Cooper, formally an economics tutor at Oxford and curate of St Helen's Bishopgate, now researching a PhD on the Gospel of Matthew in Sydney.

It's written for the Christian/seeker who is seriously concerned why God must punish evil. Unfortunately I can't think of another book setting out to do the same thing, and yet it is surely one of the most important objections people have to Christianity. Does anyone know of any other books on this? Seriously, I would like suggestions.

The book is pure St Helen's Bishopgate in style and content, so your feelings about the book would probably be easily predicted by your thoughts on that particular flavour of teaching. I quite liked it. It is neither over-emotional, nor unfeeling. It is very clear, although maybe a little demanding for its intended audience. Very faithful to the Bible it was more expository than I expected, and he was always concerned to keep the cross at the centre throughout.

As criticism, I found the overall structure was a little confusing despite regular signposting, and the explanatory diagrams could do with revising as I found them quite hard to grasp. I also thought a bit more discussion on hell, particularly in a way that empathetically addressed the struggles of those who are worried about friends and relatives, would have been helpful.

The GBC should be congratulated on publishing such a helpful resource for the church. I really liked the cover too. Although if they ever reprint they should proof-read it for typos and correct the mis-numbering of the chapters which was particularly embarrassing (I'm sorry, I know that I, of all people, have no right to criticise typos).

After the introductory chapters, the argument of the book could be summarised as:

• Chapter 2: God is Love. "God is love" in the context of 1 John shows that God's love is best understood in God sending his Son to die for us. If we consider how the Bible describes this act of love it is clear that Jesus died to take the punishment for our sin. Not only that it explains that there was no other way for us to be saved. Punishment had to happen.
• Chapter 3: Real Outrage. As CS Lewis identified there is something dehumanising about reducing the purpose of punishment to either rehabilitation or deterrence. Our intuition tell us that certain crimes deserve retributive punishment. Although we may be quicker to cry out for the punishment of others than ourselves.
• Chapter 4: God is Creator. God graciously provided for us in creation. As he is the Creator he has the right to decide what is good and evil. He promised that if we tried to take this role that belonged to him he would punish us. Because sin is refusing to be dependant on him, punishment by being cut off from the presence of God who is the source of life is a fitting response.
• Chapter 5: God is LORD. Sin is unbelief and calling God a liar. As God's name is defamed he has to clear his name and demonstrate that he is God. He has to show that he is just and has authority as he claimed in the warning he gave in Adam and Eve. This means that there has to be death either of us or a substitute.
• Chapter 6: God is Good. The necessary flip-side of loving good is hating evil. God being good means that he is angry at evil, and he is not so inconsistent that he will not act on this anger.
• Chapter 7: Just Love. Jesus provides an escape from God's punishment of sin. He was the one person who didn't deserve death, but by died so that we could live. As the new Adam he reversed the curse of the old Adam for all those that trust in him. The implications of this are that we should (i) put our trust in him, (ii) tell others about the danger they are the rescue, (iii) recognise the seriousness of sin and turn from it, (iv) live a life of love, and (v) rejoice in God's love.