The Puzzle of Christianity

And the shuttles cease to fly,

Shall God reveal the pattern

And explain the reason why

The dark threads were as needful

In the weaver’s skilful hand

As the threads of gold and silver

For the pattern which He planned.

History is not a mere series of events; still less is it simply based on decisions made by human beings. For Jews, God’s hand lies behind the whole of human history and it was God who took the fledgling people of Israel into Egypt. Once there, the group of families settled and grew prosperous, only to find with the emergence of a new ruler that they were seen as immigrants and resented. Their numbers increased, but they were made into slaves and their lot was a miserable and unhappy one. Still the Scriptures record God as being with them and that they maintained their faith, hoping against all expectation for deliverance. This eventually comes with the extraordinary story of Moses, a Jew but raised as an Egyptian. God is recorded as taking this outsider and using him as an instrument to lead the people of Israel back to the land promised to their forefather Abraham.

This is another theme constantly recorded in the Hebrew Scriptures – that God does not favour and choose the strong and powerful but often works through those who are seen as weak and who are outsiders to power structures. God does not depend on human strength and ingenuity nor does God value people on the same basis as human beings. Moses was an unlikely outsider and had to stand against the might of the Egyptian ruler, the Pharaoh, but with God on his side was able to free the people of Israel. They fled from oppression in Egypt and, in later times, persecuted Christians remembered God’s hand working to save the people of Israel. Christians were to come to see themselves as ‘the new Israel’ and, therefore, stories of deliverance and salvation in the Hebrew Scriptures became related to Christian concerns.

Figure 2: This painting by Nicolas Poussin, The Adoration of the Golden Calf (1634), is an imaginative re-creation of the god in the image of a golden calf created by the people of Israel when they felt abandoned in the Sinai desert (Exodus 32:1–4).

Although the people of Israel successfully left Egypt, protected by the direct action of God, their lack of faith is not disguised in the Scriptures. They wandered for many years in the harsh environment of the Sinai desert and many felt initially that it would have been better to remain as slaves. God appeared to have become an absent God. Having lived in Egypt, they were used to the Egyptian gods that were visible, so they made an idol – a golden calf. This seemed much more real and immediate than the remote God who appeared to have deserted them and left them to be wandering nomads. In other words, they lost faith; they did not realise that God’s timescale was not theirs. The Hebrew Scriptures are frank in recognising the continuing disobedience of the people of Israel, but always God remains faithful. So it proved in this story, and after many years of hardship and wandering in the desert, as their numbers increased still further, they were eventually led back to the place they considered home, the land they believed to have been promised them by God through God’s promise to Abraham.

It was on the way out of Egypt that God is recorded as giving the people of Israel the Ten Commandments which are the cornerstone of Jewish law, although this law is amplified by many other commands given by God over the centuries. They eventually arrived back in Palestine, only to find it peacefully settled with strong and powerful cities, and their presence was resented and opposed; the locals certainly did not recognise any rights of this strange and alien people. However, the people of Israel had been through great hardship and they maintained their unity, moulding themselves into a formidable fighting force and conquering, in a series of wars, much of the land that was to become Israel.

The new land of Israel was divided between twelve tribes, representing the twelve sons of Jacob. They were surrounded by neighbours who wished to destroy them and the identity of the people of Israel was under constant threat. Only in loyalty to God, they believed, could their identity be safeguarded, and the Hebrew stories contain myriad accounts of men and women and the whole nation being preserved by God in times of crisis when all hope seems to be at an end. Indeed, the preservation of hope and trust when all the evidence runs in the opposite direction is another feature of the Hebrew Scriptures.

There is no single piece of territory that can be described as ancient Israel – the borders were fluid and changed over time. When the people of Israel came out of Egypt they described this as an Exodus and Jews saw themselves as ‘coming home’ to their forefather’s land. During this time they were led by a series of great leaders or Judges (one of them was a woman, Deborah; see Judges 4:4–5:31). The tribes of Israel retained their own identity, living in different areas and, initially, they avoided the cities. Yet the Judges could call them together in time of war to unite against a perceived military threat.

The prophets have a vital role to play in understanding Jewish history. They were often lonely and isolated figures, harsh and unyielding. However, they continually spoke up in the name of God, standing for justice and goodness in the face of power and corruption. Above all, they stood for the necessity for God to have a central place in the life of the Jewish state and for high moral standards as well as concern for those who were weak and vulnerable. The prophets did not speak on their own authority. The Word of God came to them and they were, effectively, the mouthpieces of God, sometimes speaking with reluctance because they often faced death or persecution from those in power. However, the reality of God’s Word to them was so great that it was almost impossible to resist. The prophets, however, could also be wrong; the story of Jonah is the story of an insular prophet, obsessed with the rightness of the people of Israel and the wrongness of everyone else and convinced that God favoured only Israel. The whole book is a wonderful story to make it very clear that, whilst God is the God of Israel, God is also the God of the whole world and that good and righteous people are to be found beyond Israel’s borders. Jonah is forced to recognise this, for him, uncomfortable truth. Never, except in the early days, did the people of Israel see their God as one amongst a number of local gods. They were convinced that the whole created order depended on God alone and that all other gods were merely human creations with no significance or power at all.

Initially the people of Israel were wanderers. Abraham and his descendants would have been like modern Bedouin and, even when they came with their extended families into Palestine after leaving Egypt, they were essentially a tribal and pastoral people. Settling into cities came later. There was suspicion not only of a king but of any central capital and even of a temple. Their God was an invisible God, the Lord of the whole earth, and no human-made building could contain God. What was more, the Ten Commandments had specifically forbidden any representation to be made of God so no statues or other idols were made. The people of Israel could not even utter the name of God and one of the Ten Commandments specifically condemned taking the name of God in vain. The result was that the nearest thing to a temple was a travelling ‘ark’ or tent which was seen as the symbol of holiness and the dwelling place of God on earth.

In these years it was felt that only God could be the Lord and Master of Israel. Religiously, therefore, the idea of having a king was treated with scepticism. However, political and military expediency made the choosing of a king necessary. Three great kings unified and, in the case of two of them, extended the national borders: first Saul, then David (the greatest king of all, who was also a musician and a poet and who ruled over the kingdom of Israel at the time of its broadest extent) and finally Solomon. It was during David’s reign, many modern biblical scholars argue, that the story of Abraham was written down. The boundaries of David’s kingdom coincide closely with the land promised by God to Abraham, but it was only for a very short period that Israel actually controlled these territories.

David was at one time held to be the author of many of the psalms which have been recited or sung in Christian churches down the centuries. One of the most significant directly attributed to David was Psalm 23:

The LORD is my shepherd, I lack nothing.

He makes me lie down in green pastures,

he leads me beside quiet waters,

he refreshes my soul.

He guides me along the right paths

for his name’s sake.

Even though I walk

through the darkest valley,

I will fear no evil,

for you are with me;

your rod and your staff,

they comfort me.

You prepare a table before me

in the presence of my enemies.

You anoint my head with oil;

my cup overflows.

Surely your goodness and love will follow me

all the days of my life,

and I will dwell in the house of the LORD

for ever.

(Psalm 23:1–6)

This psalm, with its message of trust in God no matter what the outward circumstances might be, represents a wonderful statement about Jewish and Christian faith in the righteousness, power, goodness and mercy of God in spite of all difficulties. However, what God required in return was obedience to God’s laws and, above all, acting justly. The prophet Amos was later to express this well when, speaking on behalf of God, he said:

I hate, I despise your religious festivals;

your assemblies are a stench to me.

Even though you bring me burnt offerings

and grain offerings,

I will not accept them.

Though you bring choice fellowship offerings,

I will have no regard for them.

Away with the noise of your songs!

I will not listen to the music of your harps.

But let justice roll on like a river,