169. Lev 26:3-46; Deut 4:44-49, 6:20-25, 28:1-68

IV. A. (continued)

7. The Creation of Wrath (Leviticus 26:3-46 and Deuteronomy 28:1-68)

If the Law failed to establish righteousness in the people of Israel, then what exactly did it accomplish? Does it only manage to give us a sense of failure? What did obedience to the Law do for an Israelite or for the nation? What were the consequences of disobedience to the Law for Israel or for an individual citizen? Only the last question is easy enough to answer. To answer it we turn to Leviticus 26:3-45 and Deuteronomy 28:1-68; these passages are particularly critical for understanding how the Covenant of Holiness is related to grace. The knowledge of holiness is the knowledge of how alien Yahweh is to us; but more devastatingly, it is the knowledge of how alien we are to Him. The dissimilarity between Yahweh and His people is so enormous it is frequently described as a gulf or a chasm between us and Yahweh, and not just for dramatic effect. The enormous disjunction between people and Yahweh, when it is viewed through the lens of the Law, creates two new categories of experience and of thought for Yahweh’s people: wrath and sin. We will consider the first of these now: wrath as a new category of experience, as a new theological category.

“For the Law brings wrath” Paul said in Romans 4:15, and I take him to mean that wrath was not part of the world before the Law. I maintain that the wrath of God was not a category of human experience throughout the book of Genesis, and did not exist as a concept among the Covenant people until Israel arrived at Mt. Sinai. There are three events in the book of Genesis that are commonly taken as the pre-eminent examples of the wrath of God: the Fall, the Flood, and the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah. For my take on those events I must refer you to the book I wrote on Genesis in which I argued that wrath was not part of what happened in any of those events, and you must evaluate my arguments in those places. If I am at all accurate in the way I understood Genesis, then the giving of the Law was also the creation of wrath, just as Paul said.

There were great blessings promised for keeping the Covenant of Holiness: perfect weather, bountiful harvest, peace with their neighbors, and Yahweh’s very presence walking among them. Except for the last, these were all blessings that the patriarchs typically enjoyed without the Covenant of Holiness, and Abraham enjoyed the last of the blessings more completely than anyone besides Moses. Since the blessings added nothing new to the Covenant that had already been in place, the focus of the Law and the Covenant of Holiness was on the curses threatened for disobedience; certainly this is true if we merely count verses: 11 verses of blessings compared to 26 verses for wrath in Leviticus 26; 14 verses of blessings compared to 54 verses for wrath in Deuteronomy 28. The Law brought wrath to their experience and to their theology and that was part of its purpose. In particular, the Law did not bring life, it did not bring grace, and it did not bring Truth.

It is most instructive to look at how He described His threatened response to sin and Leviticus 26 gives us as systematic and graphic a description of what His wrath would look like as can be found. The description in Deuteronomy 28 is more poetic and vivid, but it is not organized in as convenient a form to discuss so I will mainly focus on Leviticus 26. Yahweh’s wrath was to occur in five stages, each stage being a punishment “seven times more severe” than the one before it. Each stage of wrath was intended to bring repentance, to bring them back into obedience to the Covenant and prevent the next stage of wrath from being necessary.

Here is a summary of these stages of wrath. At stage 1 Yahweh would “set His face against them”, the opposite of the Covenant blessing that the light of His countenance would shine upon them; He would send a pestilence to waste away both body and soul; sowing would be futile; enemies would consume the little they produced and rule over them. If that did not bring them to their senses, in stage 2 He would set more than His face against them; He would make the sky like iron and the earth like bronze, hard and unyielding, shutting them out; all of their efforts would be useless and unfruitful. If there was still no repentance, in stage 3 their hardships would increase by seven fold and wild beasts would be sent to consume them. By stage 4 Yahweh would Himself directly act with hostility toward them, as if all that had come before were merely the natural persecution of the world against them: the sword of their enemies would strike them, and real famine would come. Finally at stage 5 Yahweh would act with wrathful hostility, as if His fighting against them in the previous stage had been nothing personal, only an earnest attempt to bring them back but without rancor: now His soul would abhor them; their land would be so desolate that even their enemies would be appalled by it; the famine would reduce them lower than the Molech worshipers who sacrificed their children – they would be driven to eat their children in desperation; and finally, they would be scattered over the earth, lose their land, and be filled with terror continually, even when there was no threat. In summary, Leviticus 26:38 said they would perish.

The details of the stages are academic. It is not helpful to try to sort them out  and make some diagnostic chart to spell out which stage of wrath a people might be in, or what might happen next. The point of the chapter was not a list of specific disasters but a dramatic description of the increase in intensity. The point of the five stages is that things get worse, that they go on getting worse for quite a long period of time, and that at each moment there is the possibility of repentance. It is the last stage and the finality of the word “perish” that we must focus on. Generally to perish is to die, to arrive at a complete and final end, with no hope and no future forever. The Hebrew word does not necessarily carry this finality, however, though our translation makes it sound as though it did; the Hebrew word can mean “to be ruined” or “to be carried away”. It is the eventuality of exile that is being pictured here: that they would perish among the nations, that their national identity, their Covenant identity as the nation of priests to the earth, would disappear.

By the way it continues, Leviticus 26 does not allow us to read “perish” as meaning ultimate, final, permanent. Though they might perish in the land of their enemies, that is not the way the passage ends; 26:44,45 is the actual last word: “Yet in spite of this, when they are in the land of their enemies, I will not reject them, nor will I so abhor them as to destroy them, breaking My covenant with them; for I am the LORD their God. But I will remember for them the covenant with their ancestors, whom I brought out of the land of Egypt in the sight of the nations, that I might be their God. I am the LORD” (emphasis mine). Though they had so far disintegrated that they could not remember the covenant, He would remember it for them. When He established the Covenant of Holiness, He placed all the responsibility for obedience on the people, but He took upon Himself the responsibility to preserve the Covenant in spite of their disobedience, to guarantee that their sins would never go so far as to annul the Covenant.

In this way, His promises were like the promises He made to Noah and to the world in the Covenant of Preservation. Indeed, when Israel did suffer the fullness of these five stages of God’s wrath, it was exactly parallel to the Covenant with Noah, and the prophet Isaiah said so explicitly (Isaiah 54:9,10). He might abhor them, He might behave with wrathful hostility; but nothing, absolutely nothing including His own wrath, could nullify the Covenant He had made with them. They might perish – that is, they might be exiled among the Gentiles and lose their nationhood – they might experience the extremity of His wrath, but they would never cease to be His people, they would never be beyond resurrection. There is no finality in any death that Yahweh cannot redeem it.

Thus we see that even in this most threatening of all passages, Yahweh set a limit on His wrath; He always has and always does. In verse 44 He said that even at the extremity of His wrath He would not reject them, nor abhor them so much as to destroy them. But in verse 42 He made an even better promise, not referring to the Covenant of Holiness which He had just established, but clearly referring to the Covenant of Revelation and Abraham and Isaac and Jacob: at the extreme point of Yahweh’s wrath against His people for violating the Covenant of Holiness He promised to remember His Covenant with Abraham. Ultimately the hope of Yahweh’s people rested, not on Moses and the Law, but on Abraham and the faith of Abraham.

It is easy to miss this important point, so I will repeat it: when the Scripture talks about people “perishing”, the end it has in view is not so complete and final as it sounds in our translation. And when the Scripture talks about people being under the wrath of God it does not mean a permanent eternal condition that is beyond the reach of grace. Hell does not have the same substance, the same durability, as heaven. Just as evil does not have the same kind of existence or power or reality that good does, so hell does not have the same kind of reality or substance or permanence that heaven does. This is because the reality of hell does not rest on God’s character and therefore can not be a permanent category of existence; it is as provisional as the Law.

It is in verse 41 that the phrase “uncircumcised heart” was first used. Circumcision was the sign of the Covenant of Revelation; it was therefore the sign of the faith of Abraham that formed the the foundation around which the Covenant of Revelation was built. When the Law spoke of circumcision, it was speaking of something outside itself, it was speaking of something bigger than itself. To say that a person was uncircumcised in heart was nothing to do with the Law or obedience or sin; it was about trusting Yahweh as Abraham trusted Yahweh. Therefore an uncircumcised heart is about idolatry, in the most basic sense. The ultimate iniquity of Israel would be that they trusted another god than Yahweh. The devotion to another god had not yet been cut from their hearts, their heart was not yet circumcised. And in this extremity of failure, where they had so far rejected Yahweh as to worship another god, Yahweh still had not rejected them. He would remember their marriage to Him for them. In the end, they did not belong to Yahweh because they were faithful to Him; they belonged to Yahweh because He was faithful to them.

Once they were scattered among their enemies and the land was desolate, then finally the land would be able to enjoy its Sabbath rest, the rest it had been denied while they were living on it. I do not think this passage was predicting that they would not observe the Sabbath years, though in fact they seem never to have observed them. I think the picture painted by this passage is deeper: that evil is itself a failure to rest or to give rest. There is no record that Israel ever did observe even a single Sabbatical year, but if they had made the attempt, the breaking of the Covenant – and here the Scripture means emphatically the worship of other gods – inherently disrupts the Sabbath rest of the land. Idolatry enslaves the earth – all the creatures down to the dirt itself – and subjects it all to bitter labor. Idolatry soaks into the soil like toxic waste, like innocent blood after a murder, and the ground becomes cursed anew, like it was after Adam’s sin and after Cain’s sin.

The connection between sin – murder, idolatry – and the cursing of the ground was not just an initial connection from the mythological past. On the contrary, it continues into the present. Whom we worship right now has a real presence in the land itself. The Scripture said that if Israel turned to other gods then the land would “spew them out”, as if the land itself had become nauseated by their behavior and vomited them up. It is a metaphor, but metaphors mean something real. It may sound mystical, it may sound new agey and unscientific, but it is nonetheless the case that Scripture describes a spiritual connection, a cause and effect connection, between our worship of Yahweh and the health of the world. Even now, I think, it is our idolatry that we see at work, tattering the world, wearing it thin like an old shirt, reducing it all to rags.

To conclude the discussion of wrath, we must return to Sinai. There the threat of the wrath of God was embodied before their eyes. This darkness was not something new in God; it was not in God at all. This was the darkness that was in them, that is in us. Only His grace had kept it hidden from view. This was the darkness that the Law was given to reveal. This was the darkness of the knowledge of good and evil. It stood up before them clenching lightning in its fist, the horror of every evil thing hiding in their souls, and showed them plainly what good and evil look like to those who are dead. This was the darkness that had covered their nakedness with the skins of dead animals, that would cover again their nakedness with the blood of the sacrifices of those same dead animals, and then would expose their shame by covering it. The ragged edges of that cloud were the rags of the righteousness woven by the Law, of a righteousness we all had to wear until a better robe could be found. And in the very heart of that darkness, which was our shallow righteousness, was the wrath of Yahweh.

But Sinai was not the mountain Yahweh was leading them to. Sinai was the first stop on a longer journey to another mountain in a Promised Land. As the writer of Hebrews 12 said, our final destination is Mt. Zion, the heavenly Jerusalem. The fire and darkness and gloom, the tempest and that trumpet blast and the Voice – the sacrifices, the rituals, the commandments – in short, all the various facets of Yahweh’s wrath – all these things were the Covenant of Holiness that would never bring them into holiness, that would never bring them into the true Promised Land.

And yet how else could we understand the necessity of the Messiah, how else could we recognize the Messiah’s work, unless we were terrified into honesty by the wrath of God? Thus the harshness of the Law. The truth is that there are some truths we will not face unless we are made to face them. The truth is that when it comes to admitting the crisis we are in, we are proud cowards scrambling for any possible escape. We are so desperate to escape the truth about ourselves that we contrived to stay at Sinai and to assume the pretense that the cloud, once it had vanished from view, was not coming back. Israel, at least, did so. Every prophet that announced the coming of wrath was greeted with incredulity.

But when the power of the Law ended, the power of wrath was ended as well, and wrath stepped aside for grace. Wrath had done its work and was replaced by a better worker, for grace does the same work as wrath. Grace also stands up to reveal our hearts, not by embodying their darkness but by shining into their darkness. Grace exposes our corruption by enlightening the darkness, not by giving it form. Grace does the same work as wrath and Law only better, covering our nakedness not with the rags of our righteousness but with Yahweh’s own righteousness. The Law turned out to be the emperor’s new clothes; it claimed to cover up our shame but turned out to be revealing in all the wrong places.

8. The Creation of Sin

There is one other dimension to the meaning and purpose of the ethical part of the Law, particularly the Ten Commandments. The Law, the Ten Commandments, created sin. I mean this in the most literal sense. Sin did not exist before Moses went up onto Mt. Sinai and was given the stone tablets and brought them back down. Paul made the same point in Romans, that sin is not counted where there is no Law. In giving the Law, Yahweh created the context in which sin would be counted, the context in which sin would exist. Just as wrath became a new category of our experience and thought, sin became a new category as well.

Now, I do not mean that evil did not exist before the Law. Evil had been in the world since Adam, since the serpent. But sin is not the same thing as evil. This is part of the point Paul made in Romans 5:13,14. Sin was in the world before the Law was given in the sense that all the deeds condemned as sin by the Law were in the world, but they didn’t count as sin. Evil was there in all its depravity and it brought forth death, but before the Law their  “sinning was not like the transgression of Adam”. The transgression of Adam was the breaking of a law, the command not to eat the fruit. After Adam, however, sinning was not that kind of thing at all because there was no law to transgress. Cain was not violating a law when he murdered Abel; he did not sin as his father Adam had sinned; he simply acted out of the evil in his heart. Evil is evil and it produces death whether it is called sin or not, and so death reigned over all things even without the Law. But sin, guilt, the understanding that we have violated the character and standards of God, did not exist until the Law.

At Sinai, sin became a new category of thought, shaping their understanding of everything they did, permeating their lives with the feeling of being unclean. For the first time, they knew what sin was because they saw the judgment it incurred. For the first time, they knew what sin was because they felt the guilt of it. And this kind of sin only existed in Israel. The Law was not given in Babylon, the Law was not given in Egypt. The nations were under the power of evil, but Israel, and only Israel, had to come to grips with the power of sin. I have borrowed in advance from the New Testament a perspective that Israel would not have had. For the people of Israel, the Law was the Law, and they did not consider whether it might have deeper mysteries or purposes. The Law was not given to make people speculate on theological questions. It was given to make them experience evil in a way they had never experienced it: as a force inside them. It was given to make them struggle with it, to feel its power, to learn to be afraid of their own inclinations and desires. Eventually they would think about the theological implications, but the Law was part of a long term process, a piece of the much deeper and grander work of the Spirit.

The arrival of the Law at Mt. Sinai seems to me to very clearly manifest the distinction between evil and sin (and you must judge, of course, if my analysis is correct). The violence and horror of the cloud and the Voice and the trumpet and the lightning did not arise because there was a more profound presence of evil in Israel. On the contrary, it arose to embody before their eyes their sinfulness; it arose to create a new and powerful manifestation of the evil in their hearts, to be out there what already existed in here.

Understanding what happened at Sinai is foundational to how Christians inter-relate with the world. When we preach the gospel to a thoroughly pagan world, we need to understand that they are not in sin. When we talk about sin to pagans, we are talking to people who have no clue what sin is and do not need to know what sin is. When we meet their incomprehension, we wrongly conclude that we must first prove to them that they are sinners by preaching the Law, by making them into sinners. This hides the gospel behind a legal disguise that is both confusing and misleading. Well-intentioned Christians have made this mistake from the beginning. In the first century the circumcision party harassed the emerging Gentile church about obeying the Law, a Law they did not know, and we follow in a modern version of that old error.

My interpretation of the Law and its purpose would suggest some changes in our evangelism. First, we must stop preaching the Law (and wrath and hell) along with the gospel. We preach the Law and wrath and hell because we think people must first be made to feel guilt or fear before salvation can mean anything to them. We bring them bad news first to prepare them for the good news, and so we become the people who are selling guilt. If the first thing the pagan world hears from us is the message of guilt and sin and a long list of prohibitions they must begin to observe, they frequently are unwilling to wait until we get around to grace. In post-Christian America, for example – which is more impervious than most pagan nations – we usually begin by preaching a high standard of sexual behavior, which might have made sense in a world before contraceptives but now only sounds absurd. They see sex as being simply fun with no particularly harmful consequences, and we are the ones spoiling it all, trying to make people feel guilty about what ought to just be fun. We lose our audience before we get to the gospel. Then often, in discouragement over the world’s rejection, we write them off as morally reprobate and denounce them.

This is not the way Paul did it. Paul was vehemently against making the Gentiles first into Jews and then into Christians. He knew that the Messiah had come to deliver His people from sin and wrath and Law. Would it not make his gospel absurd if he first made the Gentiles obey a Law and then preached deliverance from the Law he had just imposed? Does it make any sense to first enslave people so we can then come to their rescue? Instead, Paul went right for redemption and there is plenty to be redeemed from without sin or the Law. He preached deliverance from death and futility and evil; deliverance from sin was a mere side-effect. We do not need to mention the Ten Commandments and sin to preach salvation. There is a universal experience of evil, of suffering, of decay, of death; everyone knows why they need saving. Publicly portray the Messiah as crucified and as risen from the dead, and anyone who has experienced the reality of death will know what you are talking about.

In II Corinthians 3:6 Paul says, “…who has made us competent to be ministers of a new covenant, not of the letter but of the Spirit. For the letter kills, but the Spirit gives life.” To the western mind the Spirit seems all too subjective. We have so little concept of the Spirit that we confuse Him with our feelings. We seem to believe that Christ is the head of the body, but not in any tangible sense. And since He is not present tangibly as the Head, and since we can not imagine the Spirit being tangible, we imagine we have no alternative but to look to the Law to do His work for Him. We count on the Law to tell us right from wrong, because we do not know how to let the Spirit to do it. I must add, at this point, that so-called charismatic Christians, the “Christians of the Spirit”, are as captive to the Law as the rest of the Body, as ignorant of the Spirit as the rest of the Body. They do mistake their experience for the Truth. To be a faithful servant of Christ only happens if He, not the Law, is the Master, the Head, the tangible leader and director promised in the Spirit. To go on as we are, ministering an old covenant of the letter, will compromise our message and our mission; it will surely kill us as we see it is doing.

Sin and evil overlap to a great extent, but they do not coincide. The Law condemned as sins some deeds that were not in themselves strictly evil; and the Law legalized some things that were not in themselves strictly good. As long as we are thinking in terms of sin/righteousness, in terms of what the Law says, we will find ourselves supporting what Yahweh does not ultimately support and opposing what Yahweh does not ultimately oppose. As long as we are thinking in terms of what the Law says, we are focused on the compromise and not on the perfect will of God that we want, in our inner being, to pursue. Rather than analyzing what is or is not sin in legal terms, we should spend our time analyzing what is or is not evil in terms of God’s character. The question before the Church is not whether prostitution or homosexuality or divorce or same-sex marriage or abortion is sin according to the Law, but whether these things are evil according to the goodness and character and love of God. The question before the Church is not how we are to judge sinners but how we are to show grace to people enslaved by evil. It is an entirely different kind of question, but it is the kind of question that draws us in to the heart of grace rather than the heart of wrath, and grace is where the heart of God is to be found.