The nature of the divine-human relationship, and our attempts to understand it profoundly shapes who we are and, most importantly, how we love God and our neighbour. The primary factor that stops us from understanding the full nature of this relationship is God’s infiniteness and our finiteness: an interesting combination that leaves humanity with more questions than answers.
Chief among these questions is the peculiar gap between promise and human reality: ours is a God who deals both life and death, who causes the rain to fall on both the wicked and the righteous. What then compels us in the face of disillusionment to maintain that God is worth putting our trust in?
If I were to determine a theme, a recurring idea or lesson which has woven its way through my hours of reading and course instruction this year, it would be this: God is a God of people and God meets people in history.
The combination of RELS 101: “Introduction to Old Testament” and RELS 342: “Psalms and Wisdom Literature” has awakened me to how the Old Testament can help our understanding of the gap between the promises of God and the reality of human experience. That is not to say the Old Testament has provided me with answers to these questions, but within its pages are case study after case study of God encountering humanity. From these encounters come stories of praise and lament, victory and defeat, prosperity and desolation. Yet through it all is God, who, though dealing both life and death, calls his people to ‘choose life’ and trust in Him.
In each encounter of finite man with infinite God, there lies exposed the gap between promise and reality; Adam eats of the fruit and does not die, Abraham dies before seeing a new nation, and so does Moses, before entering the Promised Land. However, rising at what seems the end of promise is always the ubiquitous promise of life; from Adam’s seed a Saviour comes who defeats death, from Abraham’s sons a nation is born, and to Moses’ successor, the Promised Land is delivered. What compelled these people to trust in God? Encounters with Him.
In encountering God, Abraham lived in faith, following God out of the familiar, out of the safe, and out of the comfortable to what ultimately appeared the destruction of God’s promise–the command to sacrifice his own son. This moment in history–-Abraham, knife in hand, ready to slit his son’s throat–epitomizes life in the gap between reality and promise. At this moment Abraham’s faith does not rest in God’s promise but in God himself, and it is then that God provides sufficient sacrifice.
So too, when we live in the gap between promise and reality, God is calling us to encounter and to trust Him. This does not mean a deferential and docile faith, but a bold one that expects, that longs, and that has its hope founded in the revelation of God to us. The worshiper who pleads, “How long will you hide your face from me?” reveals the expectation that God would make himself known to us. And He does. Faith is not engineered, but is the result of encounter with God. God is a God of people.
