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“I can only answer the question, ‘What am I to do?’ if I can answer the prior question, ‘Of what story do I find myself a part?’”
Pressure for harmony among cultures and nations would seem to urge us to regard the Bible as just another volume in the world’s library of interesting stories, of which perhaps none—or all—might be more or less reliable. But to do so would be to treat the Bible as something other than what it claims to be: the one true story of the world.
The Christian churches have comprehensively failed in their one central task—to retell their foundation story in a way that might speak to the times.”
3 The Israelites first come to know God (through Moses) as their Redeemer; only afterward do they learn of his role as the Creator.
The creation stories of Genesis thus are argumentative. They claim to tell the truth about the world, flatly contradicting other such stories commonplace in the ancient world.
God is the divine source of all that is. He stands apart from all other things in the special relationship of Creator to creation.
Creation cannot be even remotely considered an emanation from God.
Instead, it is a product of his personal will.
Genesis 1 looks at humankind in its relationship to the world. In the process the three great places of the world are brought into existence: earth, sky, and sea. Genesis 2 focuses on the man and the woman in their relationships to one another and to God.
We are to rule over the creation so that God’s reputation is enhanced within his cosmic kingdom.
Autonomy means choosing oneself as the source for determining what is right and wrong, rather than relying on God’s word for direction.
the fundamental nature of sin. It is a quest for autonomy,
In the Old Testament, to remove someone’s clothes could signify their disinheritance; God’s provision of clothes for Adam and Eve is a sign to them that he has not given up on his purpose for them. They are still to bear his image in this world. They are still to “inherit the earth.”
Culture is the name we give to organized activities within society,
Covenant, the word that describes the relationship between God and his people, is helpfully defined by O. Palmer Robertson as a “bond in blood sovereignly administered.”
The trophies that the people of Babel attempted to take for themselves—fame, security, and a heritage for the future—are God’s free gift to Abraham.
like the miracles of Elijah and Elisha recorded in the books of Kings, the Exodus plagues show that what the Egyptians think to be true of their gods is actually true only of the Lord God of heaven and earth.
election is not just for privilege: it is for service, for the sake of the nations. If they live under his reign, they will be a “kingdom of priests” and a “holy nation” (v. 6).
God is not calling his people to live in an eccentric, unhistorical fashion: they are to be genuine people of their own historical time and place. And yet God recasts common law to reflect his own character and creational intentions, and so it has some quite distinctive elements.
while some law of that time valued property above people and made the punishment for stealing greater than that for murder, Israel’s law always places the value of people above that of mere property, for only people, of all God’s creations, have been fashioned in his own image.
In the ancient Near East, only the Israelites have no concrete image of their god to bow down to.
Theirs is to be a community in which the divine shalom of peace and harmony characterizes life within the family and among neighbors.
The commandments are thus the keys to living fully human lives; they are certainly not intended as horrible constraints to make life difficult. We must remember that they were given first to the Israelites living in the ancient Near East, and our own interpretation of their meaning should account for this context.
The communion between God and his people that is central to the covenant is wonderfully enacted in Exodus 24:11: the elders see God, and they eat and drink. God has promised a relationship with his people, and here we see that promise well on its way to being fulfilled.
“Thirteen chapters having to do with the tabernacle is a long stretch of non-story that can be wearisome reading.”61 But these exhaustive details make an important point: such a residence cannot be taken lightly.
Once they were forced into building for the Pharaoh in Egypt; now they willingly donate their materials and expertise to build God’s house in their midst.
“The ironic effect [of making the calf] is that the people forfeit the very divine presence they had hoped to bind more closely to themselves.”62
The shining of Moses’ face in the wake of the experience of the divine glory . . . is to become characteristic of Israel as a whole, a radiating out into the larger world of those glorious effects
of God’s dwelling among Israel.
Israel is not free to exploit the land at will. Israel always lives in the land with the Lord, and his laws contain many instructions about how to manage the land properly.
there is a sense in which these books of the Old Testament tell the story of the First Commandment.”
To the Roman, calling yourself king is treason, a challenge to Caesar’s sovereignty; to the Jew,
it is blasphemy;
