TF Torrance quote to follow. Keep in mind the short discussion we
had today regarding whether the real problem we face is sin. Torrance
does a beautiful 180 here and states that through our sin God (Jesus the
Mediator) brings us into reconciliation. This is great stuff.
Makes the heart sing. JBH
“The covenant between God and Israel was not a covenant between God and a
holy people, but precisely the reverse. It was a covenant
established out of pure grace between God and Israel in its sinful,
rebellious and estranged existence. Hence, no matter how rebellious or sinful
Israel was, it could not escape from the covenant love and faithfulness of
God…There were evidently critical moments in Israel’s history when it seemed
ready to do anything to flout the will of God in hope of breaking loose from
the grip of his unswerving love and of escaping from the painful
transformation of its existence that relations with ‘the Holy One of Israel’
involved. No, the covenant was not made with holy people,
nor did its validity depend upon a contractual fulfillment of its conditions
on the part of Israel, for its was a unilateral covenant which depended
for its fulfillment upon the unconditional grace of God and the unrelenting
purpose of reconciliation which he had pledged to work out through Israel for
all peoples. And therefore…it depended upon a vicarious way of response to the
love of God which God himself provided within the covenant—a way of response
which he set out in the liturgy of atoning sacrifice and which he insisted on
translating into the very existence of Israel in its vocation as ‘servant of
the Lord.’
jt: And what about all the people who perished because
they broke the covenant? Let's see, how many were there who perished in
the wilderness? How many died in one day for fornicating with the
Moabite women? The son of the high priest perished for bringing strange
fire before the Lord. The earth opened and swallowed up Korah and his
family for hiding in his tent things that were under the ban. I could go
on and on....
“…the more fully God gave himself to this people, the more he forced it to
be what it actually was, what we all are, in the self-willed isolation of
fallen humanity from God. Thus the movement of God’s reconciling love toward
Israel not only revealed Israel’s sin but intensified it. That
intensification, however, is not to be regarded simply as an accidental result
of the covenant but rather as something which God deliberately took into the
full design of his reconciling activity, for it was the will and the way of
God’s grace to effect reconciliation with man at his very worst, precisely in
his state of rebellion against God. That is to say,
in his marvelous wisdom and love God worked out in Israel a way of
reconciliation which does not depend on the worth of men and women,
but makes their very sin in rebellion against him the means by which he binds
them for ever to himself and through which he reconstitutes their
relations with him in such a way that their true end is fully and perfectly
realized in unsullied communion with himself.
jt: So the fall was a good thing? Are you sure
this guy is not a member of the LDS?
“That is the way in which we are surely to interpret
the Incarnation, in which God has drawn so near to man and drawn man so near
to himself in Jesus that they are perfectly at one. In Jesus the
problematic presence of God to Israel, the distance of his nearness and the
nearness of his distance, which so deeply trouble the soul of the psalmists
and prophets alike, was brought to its resolution” (T.F. Torrance, The
Mediation of Christ, pp. 28-29).
jt: Just wishful thinking.....
