Main news for 14 January 2020

How does God respond to human unfaithfulness? With rebuke? Yes. With punishment? Yes, that too. But not only these. Perhaps His most unexpected and most important response is the call to keep going. Stubborn, “stiff-necked,” unfaithful Israel must nevertheless cross the Jordan and enter the land God promised it. How are we to understand this? Does God really place His trust once more in people who have already deceived Him so many times—and will do so more than once again? Or does He intend to fulfill His design at any cost? In trying to answer these questions, we will draw closer to understanding who He is and how He relates to us.

Characterizing the people of God from the very beginning of their history, the author of the book of Deuteronomy puts very harsh words into Moses' mouth about this people. Of course, while reading them one can recall much: the unbelief in success that the people showed already in Egypt, the story with the golden calf, and the refusal, immediately after the Exodus, to conquer the land promised by God, although that was quite possible.

And also that constant grumbling and dissatisfaction, that constant desire to turn back to Egypt, which accompanied the people throughout their whole journey from Egypt to Transjordan. And later history, the history of life on the land promised by God and conquered by the people with God's help, was by no means rich either in faithfulness to God or in obedience to Him.

In essence, throughout the whole pre-exilic period the faithful among the people of God formed not the majority, but a minority. One has to admit that the whole history of the people really confirms the words of the Torah cited here. But then a natural question arises: why, with all this, does the Jewish people still remain the people of God? And why, if they are the people of God, did their spiritual path turn out to be so winding?

Of course, from the very beginning God wanted to see His people as a community of the faithful. But achieving this proved not easy: a historical remelting in the Babylonian furnace was required in order to reach the goal.

And yet the Jewish people remained the people of God throughout their whole history, because the covenant-union that God made with them remained unbreakable, at least on God's side. And among the people there was always preserved, to use the language of the prophets, a remnant that kept faithfulness to God even when, speaking in human terms, there was no sense in doing so. Acting otherwise was impossible.

Of course, at any moment God could have started everything over. At any moment He could have begun a new history of another union with another people. But there are no guarantees that this other history would have been better than the one we know: this takes place in a fallen world, and there is nothing to be done about that, unless one sets the goal of not saving the world that exists, but creating the world anew. So God can only act as He does act, carrying out His plan with the people who are there. And along the way He prepares His people for the tasks that await them ahead.

Describing the situation, Moses sets the accents with complete clarity: the people receive the land not because of their own righteousness, but because of the wickedness of the peoples who inhabit it at the moment. Here we have the logic of history that stands behind many events, especially conquests, coups, and revolutions. Most often what stands behind all these is not the will of God but, as theologians usually say in such cases, His allowance. In the overwhelming majority of cases God does not take the side of one group against another. He simply steps aside, withdraws, not because He is indifferent to everything, but because, as a rule, He supports neither side. And this is no surprise: in the same overwhelming majority of cases the parties involved in the events have no concern either for God or for His will. God takes no one's side because no one is on His side, and God will not force Himself on those who do not need Him.

With His people, however, the situation is unusual. The people of God are included in history just like all other peoples, and at the same time they are no better, no more righteous, no more spiritual than any other people. But God has a special plan, a special intention concerning His people, and that is what makes His people unusual, distinguishing them from all other peoples of the earth. Of course, the people themselves do not become better merely because God has a particular plan for them, but their path will still differ from the path of any other people on earth. God needs to bring His people to the place where He wants to see them, where He has appointed a meeting with Himself for them.

The path of any other people may be determined by a chain of God's allowances, which for the people themselves will look like accidents and turns of their historical fate, just as happens with a person who, not knowing the way, moves from one accident to another and calls such movement fate. The path of the people of God, however, is in any case determined by God; but it runs among ordinary peoples, such as the peoples who inhabited pre-Israelite Palestine. They were no worse, but also no better, than any other people, and therefore they were subject to the same changes and chances of fallen history as all other peoples. Yet God deprives them of the land not for their special sins, but for the ordinary wickedness characteristic of all fallen peoples. Likewise, He gives His own people the land not for their special righteousness, but because that is His plan. Yet the wickedness of the peoples whom God drives from the land makes such expulsion possible, allowing God to carry out His plan concerning His people.