Category Archives: Genesis

The Ultimate Victory of God’s Kingdom (The Kingdom of God, part 6)

Posted on by

This is the sixth (and final) installment of an article on the Kingdom of God.

Part 1 began with Jesus’s proclamation at the start of his ministry about the kingdom of God. Part 2 looked at Jesus’s sermon at Nazareth, in which he explained the nature of the kingdom he was inaugurating.

Part 3 shifted to the biblical backstory of the kingdom, beginning with the royal calling of humanity created to image God, including how we squandered our calling through sin and violence, culminating in the tower of Babel. Part 4 traced the story of Israel from Abraham to the Babylonian exile, with a focus on the theme of “rule” (power and agency).

Part 5 picked up the story with the messianic ministry and mission of Jesus, leading to his confrontation with the powers in Jerusalem at Passover.

The current installment examines the climax of the story of the kingdom of God, as God’s purposes for creation and history come to fruition through the Messiah.

After the Babylonian exile, when Israel had returned to the land, the prophetic expectations of restoration and blessing had not been fulfilled. Israel was still oppressed by various empires (the latest being Rome) and the people were still mired in sin and injustice.

There was a growing sense in the Old Testament, however, that the problem Israel faced was greater than either the external oppression by empires or the internal sinfulness of the people—though both were certainly real.

The Supra-Human Powers of Evil

Various biblical texts make this point by using the metaphor of the chaotic sea or dangerous sea beasts to represent the supra-human power of evil that lies behind human action.

Examples include Ezekiel’s description of the Egyptian Pharaoh as a great water-monster whom God will pull out of the Nile with hooks or haul up with a net (Ezekiel 29:2–7; 32:2–4) and Jeremiah’s picture of the king Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon as a sea serpent swallowing Israel, which will be forced to disgorge its prey (Jeremiah 51:34 and 51:44). It is as if there are destructive powers that lie behind human embodiments of evil.

The book of Daniel portrays a series of four oppressive empires as ravenous, devouring beasts arising from the sea (Dan 7:1–8), noting that they will be judged by God and their power taken away (Daniel 7:9–12).

Granted, neither the sea nor great sea beasts are always used as symbols of chaos or evil in the Bible; they are portrayed positively as aspects of God’s good, though wild, creation in some texts (Genesis 1:21; Psalm 95:5 and 104:26; and Job 41:1–34).

Yet elsewhere God is said to oppose and battle the sea, Leviathan, or some form of sea serpent (Job 26:12–13; Psalm 74:14 and 89:9–10). In Isaiah 27 this symbol is used for God’s final, eschatological judgment on evil: “On that day YHWH will punish with his fierce and great and strong sword Leviathan the fleeing serpent, Leviathan the twisting serpent, and he will slay the dragon that is in the sea” (Isaiah 27:1).

The sense that there were supra-human powers of evil, which had human individuals and even empires in their grip, developed in the period between the Old and New Testaments. This led to the explicit doctrine of personified evil, both in the form of demonic forces (also called unclean spirits or principalities and powers in the New Testament) and the devil or Satan, which the book of Revelation, drawing on Old Testament imagery, calls the “great dragon” and the “ancient serpent” (Revelation 12:9).

Although many of our popular ideas about the devil and the demonic come from post-biblical literature and not the Bible itself, the Bible clearly endorses the idea that there are systemic meta-human powers of evil that constrain human behavior.

Angels (lit. “messengers”) from God often appear in the Old Testament, though there is no systematic explanation of who they are. It is not until the book of Daniel that we find the first explicit reference to angelic opposition to God, in the form of a struggle between “the prince of the kingdom of Persia” and an angel (who seems to be Gabriel), who had to be aided by another angel, Michael, “one of the chief princes” (Daniel 10:13). By the time we get to the New Testament, the idea of supra-human powers that oppress human beings and have them in their grip is standard in Jewish thinking. This underlies the Gospel stories of Jesus’s confrontation with demonic powers throughout his ministry.

Jesus could counsel his followers to love their enemies (Matthew 5:43–44; Luke 6:27–28) because he did not regard even his human opponents (Jewish or Roman) as the ultimate enemy. As Ephesians 6 puts it: “We do not wrestle against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers over this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places” (Ephesians 6:12).

The Clash of the Kingdoms

The clash between God’s kingdom and the powers of evil is clear from Jesus’s response to the accusation that he was casting out demons by the power of Satan, here called “Beelzebul, the ruler of the demons” (Luke 11:15). He responded that if this were true, it would mean that the kingdom of evil was divided against itself (Luke 11:18). However, “If it is by the finger of God that I cast out demons, then the kingdom of God has come to you” (Luke 11:20).

Jesus then used a vivid metaphor to describe his work of overcoming the dominion of the Evil One: “When a strong man, fully armed, guards his castle, his property is safe. But when one stronger than he attacks him and overpowers him, he takes away his armor in which he trusted and divides his plunder.” (Luke 11:21–22) This metaphor points to Jesus’s mission to liberate Israel and all people—indeed, the entire creation—from bondage to evil. Since Passover was the symbol of the expected liberation, Jesus chose that central Jewish festival as the time of his confrontation with the powers in all their raw opposition.

But how did Jesus overpower the “strong man”? In line with his teaching about an alternative form of rule—different from gentile overlords—Jesus did not come to overcome evil by the violent use of power. Rather, he came “to give himself a ransom for many” (Mark 10:45).

By submitting himself to Roman crucifixion, Jesus disarmed the powers of evil and absorbed into himself all the brokenness and corruption of human life, all the selfishness and the violence that mars this world—to suck it out of creation, to drain the mortal wound of sin, and give us back life and health and peace instead. Although any explanation of the sacrifice of Jesus on behalf of others always falters—it is ultimately a paradox—the New testament affirms that when the Messiah offered himself as the Passover lamb for a new exodus, he effectively “takes away the sin of the world” (John 1:29).

From Inauguration to Consummation—A Comprehensive Kingdom

Through his death on a cross and resurrection victory, Jesus inaugurated God’s kingdom as an alternative to the corrupt empires and dominions of this world. His resurrection is the “first fruits” of those who have died (1 Corinthians 15:20); the harvest of new creation has begun—the promised reversal of sin and death has been inaugurated.

But the reversal doesn’t happen all at once. The Bible is ruthlessly honest about the continuing struggle against evil; the clash of the kingdoms continues in our time. Yet the Scriptures envision a day when the kingdom will be consummated—bodies will be healed and human society will finally reflect God’s purposes for mercy and justice.

Throughout the Gospels, Jesus’s teaching about the kingdom of God anticipates God’s ultimate triumph over the powers of evil. In one of his parables, Jesus compares the kingdom of God to a woman who put some leaven (yeast) into a large amount of dough, in preparation for baking a loaf of bread. The yeast eventually permeated the entire loaf (Matthew 13:33; Luke 13:20–21). It may be a slow process, but the leavening of creation by the kingdom of God will be comprehensive, “far as the curse is found” (to quote the Christmas carol, “Joy to the World”).

The comprehensive nature of the kingdom of God is also portrayed in Daniel’s vision of a huge statue confronted by a small stone. The statue represents all the kingdoms of the world, whereas the stone is “not made by human hands” (representing God’s kingdom). Yet this seemingly insignificant stone strikes the statue and demolishes it; then the stone grows into a mountain that fills the entire earth (Dan 2:31–36, 44–45).

This transformation is envisioned in the book of Revelation when an angel announces, “The kingdom of the world has become the kingdom of our Lord and of his Messiah, and he will reign forever and ever” (Revelation 11:15).

The growth of the messianic kingdom is nothing less than God’s redemptive purposes becoming manifest in history, till the earth is filled with the knowledge of God (or of his glory) as the waters cover the sea (Isaiah 11:9; Habakkuk 2:14). On that day, the prophet Zephaniah proclaims, “YHWH will be king over all the earth” (Zechariah 14:9).

The Human Role in the Coming Kingdom

When God comes to bring justice to the earth, even the non-human created order will respond in praise to its maker (Psalm 96:11–13). Just as earthly life was subjected to corruption by the distortion of human rule, so in the kingdom of God the earth will be restored when redeemed humans take up their rule again—this time in accordance with the principles of God’s peaceable reign.

In the Beatitudes, Jesus affirmed that “the meek [not the powerful oppressors] will inherit the earth” (Matthew 5:5) and the book of Revelation pictures a great number from many nations formed into God’s royal priesthood (God’s redeemed people), who will “reign on the earth” (Revelation 5:10); this is the restoration of the original human calling as the image of God (Genesis 1:26–28). Indeed, the redeemed will “reign forever and ever” (Revelation 22:5).

When the kingdom of God is fully established in human life, and humans image their Creator by their loving and generous exercise of power, then creation itself, which has been groaning in its bondage to corruption (Romans 8:22), will be liberated from this bondage to share in the glorious freedom of the children of God (Romans 8:19–21).

The entire biblical story from creation to eschaton—from origin to climax—testifies to God’s unshakeable purpose for the flourishing of the world. “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth” (Genesis 1:1); and in the end there will be “a new heavens and a new earth, in which righteousness dwells” (2 Peter 3:13).

That new creation is the fulfillment of the kingdom of God.

The Story of Israel from Abraham to the Exile (The Kingdom of God, part 4)

Posted on by

This is the fourth installment of an article on the Kingdom of God.

Part 1 began with Jesus’s proclamation at the start of his ministry about the kingdom of God. Part 2 looked at Jesus’s sermon at Nazareth, in which he explained the nature of the kingdom he was inaugurating. Part 3 shifted to the biblical backstory of the kingdom, beginning with the royal calling of humanity created to image God, including how we squandered our calling through sin and violence, culminating in the tower of Babel.

The current installment traces the story of Israel from Abraham to the Babylonian exile, with a focus on the theme of “rule” (power and agency). This backstory is essential for understanding the kingdom of God in the New Testament.

The Call of Israel—Election and Covenant

God’s response to this imperial violence was to call one couple, Abraham and Sarah, out of the nations of the world, so that they would become the progenitors of an alternative nation, who would function as a model or microcosm of God’s purposes for humanity on earth. God promises to bless this chosen nation so that they would flourish as a people, with the long-term purpose that through them blessing would come to the other nations of the world (Gen. 12:3; 18:18; 22:18; 26:4; 28:14); this would, in effect, restore the human race to its original purpose of imaging God.

But this long-term blessing is delayed as Abraham’s descendants (named Israel, after one of his grandsons) are enslaved by the Egyptian empire, whose Pharaohs typically styled themselves as the living image (indeed, the incarnation) of the gods on earth, which justified their absolute power. But Israel’s God (the Creator of all peoples) intervened to deliver Abraham’s descendants from Egyptian oppression by the hand of Moses, to whom he revealed his distinctive name, YHWH (Exod 3:14). The name, probably pronounced Yahweh, is typically written without vowels, since in later centuries Jews (including those responsible for the text of the Bible) viewed the divine name as too sacred to be pronounced.

The central event in the Old Testament is the exodus from Egypt, which climaxed at the Red Sea, when the people were pursued by Pharaoh’s army. Initially trapped between Pharaoh’s chariots and the Sea, God made a path through the waters for his people to escape. The final line of the victory song that Moses and the Israelites sang when they escaped the reach of Pharaoh’s power was: “YHWH will reign for ever and ever!” (Exod 15:18). Under their breath they may have whispered, “and not Pharaoh”; they had become part of an alternative kingdom.

After delivering the Israelites from Pharaoh’s army through the Sea, YHWH led them to Mt. Sinai (Exod 14–19), where the Torah (divine instruction, including the Ten Commandments) was given as part of the covenant God made with them (Exod 20–24). At Sinai, God clarified the calling of this newly redeemed people: “Now if you obey me fully and keep my covenant, then out of all nations you will be my treasured possession. Although the whole earth is mine, you will be for me a kingdom of priests and a holy nation.” (Exod 19:5–6a)

God’s elect people, chosen for a royal-priestly role, were intended to carry on the holy task, which had been distorted by human sin, of mediating God’s blessing and presence into the world by how they lived, including how they exercised power in the pursuit of justice. Since the human race was not fulfilling its created purpose, God calls Israel to be imago Dei—to reflect his purposes through their communal life. They are to model the sort of just and righteous life that God intended for all people, by embodying the values of the covenant God made with them at Sinai.

Monarchy and Exile

Although Israel originally came into being as a loose confederacy of twelve tribes, without a unifying monarchy, within a few centuries the people asked for a king so that they could be “like the other nations” (1 Sam 8:5). God graciously granted their request (1 Sam 8:7, 22), while providing normative standards for the king to follow (Deut 17:14–20). Given the typical practice of absolute power by ancient kings, these standards were intended to substantially limit the power of Israel’s rulers.

Most of Israel’s kings, however, ignored these standards and ended up no different from the kings of the other nations. Many tolerated, or even fostered, idolatry (compromising the worship of YHWH with allegiance to other gods) and this idolatry led to injustice, which was the consequence of ignoring the value system embedded in YHWH’s covenant.

Indeed, it was the idolatry of Solomon, Israel’s third king, combined with the oppressive practices of Rehoboam, his son and successor, that led to a split in the nation (1 Kgs 11:20–12:24). The ten northern tribes seceded from the unified kingdom in the tenth century BCE, forming their own nation (the Northern Kingdom of Israel or Ephraim), with Samaria as its capital, leaving the much smaller Southern Kingdom of Judah (the “house” or dynasty of David), with Jerusalem as its capital.

About two hundred years later (722 BCE), the Assyrian empire invaded and conquered the Northern Kingdom and deported much of the population. The inhabitants were resettled in a variety of nations that Assyria had conquered, while the Assyrians settled foreigners from conquered nations in Israel (this is the area that in New Testament times became Samaria and Galilee). Many refugees from the north also fled south and settled in Judah.

A little over a century after the Assyrian conquest of the North, the Babylonian empire (which had in the meantime conquered Assyria) invaded the Southern Kingdom of Judah and deported some of its inhabitants to Babylon (597 BCE); a second invasion followed ten years later (587/6 BCE), when Babylonian forces destroyed much of Jerusalem and demolished its temple, deporting even more inhabitants to Babylon.

At this point the line of Davidic kings (the only Israelite monarchy left) came to an end in massive failure. Although there are complex historical explanations for these imperial conquests of the Northern and Southern Kingdoms and the forcible exile of the people that followed, the Bible’s prophetic literature understands these events ultimately as consequences of the sins of God’s people, their disobedience to the covenant, especially through the leadership of unrighteous kings (2 Chr 36:20–21; with more detail in 2 Kgs 24–25).

Hope for the Future after the Exile

It was precisely in this time of national crisis—which included the ending of the monarchy, the destruction of the temple, and exile from the land—that hope for a new beginning arose, especially in Israel’s prophetic literature. Some of the prophets living on the edge of exile and others from within the exilic period began to articulate a vision of a hopeful future beyond exile.

The starting point of this vision was a return to the land, portrayed in Isaiah 40–55 as a new exodus; just as God liberated Israel from Egyptian bondage in ancient times, so God would release the Jews (the exiled Judeans) from their Babylonian captivity. Whereas at the exodus God’s people passed through the Sea to escape Pharaoh’s army, God was doing a “new thing”; this time the journey would be through the desert or wilderness, as the exiles traveled from Babylon back to their homeland (Isa 43:16–21).

But the return to the land was just the start; the prophets also envisioned the healing of the social order (such that justice and righteousness would prevail between people), the flourishing of the natural world (even the desert would bloom), a peaceful relationship with the nations (in place of war and oppression), the forgiveness of sins and a new heart (enabling obedience to God after a history of rebellion), the restoration of righteous leadership (in contrast to the corrupt kings of the past), and God’s intimate presence among the people in the renewed land.

In part 5 of this series, we will examine the rise of messianic expectation after the Babylonian exile and how this was fulfilled in Jesus’s mission.

Created in God’s Image: The Royal Calling of Humanity (The Kingdom of God, part 3)

Posted on by

This is part 3 of a series of posts on the kingdom of God. Part 1 can be found here. Part 2 can be found here.

The kingdom of God in the teaching of Jesus is a distinctly Jewish idea, rooted in Israel’s Scriptures. To understand the significance of this kingdom we will need to explore some of the biblical backstory—especially the theme of “rule,” a royal metaphor for the exercise of power.

Imago Dei: The Royal Calling of Humanity

The opening chapter of the Bible recounts the creation of humanity (male and female) with the vocation or calling of being God’s “image” on earth (Gen 1:26–28). Genesis 1 here draws on (and interacts with) the royal ideology from the cultures of the ancient Near East (such as Mesopotamia and Egypt), which viewed kings (and sometimes priests) as the “image” of their gods. These human leaders were thought to have a function similar to that of the “image” (or cult statue) of the god, which was located in the temple. Just as the cult statue was thought to mediate the presence and power of the god from heaven to earth, kings (and some priests) claimed to be the gods’ unique earthly delegates, exercising power over the people on the gods’ behalf (a royal function), by which the gods’ presence was made manifest in their society (a priestly function).

Genesis 1 draws on this ancient, highly elitist notion of the “image of God,” but radically democratizes or universalizes it, applying it to all people, male and female (irrespective of their social status). This biblical vision of all people sharing the “royal” status of the “image of God” (imago Dei in Latin), with equal dignity in the sight of the Creator, helps explain a well-recognized historical fact: when the people of Israel came into existence as a nation (after their exodus from Egypt), they existed for centuries without a monarchy—something entirely unique in the ancient Near East. The idea of all humanity created to be God’s image functioned as a radical critique of—and form of resistance to—the royal ideology of the ancient societies among which Israel lived.

In Genesis 1:26–28, the image of God is manifested in the ordinary human exercise of power or agency in earthly life, involving “rule” (or “dominion” in some translations) over the animal kingdom (equivalent to animal husbandry) and “subduing” the earth or land (equivalent to agriculture). In Genesis 2, the human vocation is portrayed (without using the term “image”) as working and protecting a garden of fruit trees that God planted (Gen 2:15). Since God planted the garden, God is portrayed as the first gardener and humans implicitly image God as they continue tending God’s garden. Psalm 8 echoes the theme of animal husbandry from Genesis 1, when it describes humans as created a little less than God (similar to being God’s image in Genesis 1) and granted rule over various forms of animal life—on land, air, and water (Ps 8:5–8).

The image of God (imago Dei) is both a gift (humans are granted the status of being VIPs in God’s world) and a calling or vocation (we are commissioned as God’s ambassadors in the world). Every person is both gifted with royal dignity and also authorized to represent God’s rule in the ordinary practices of earthly life. Whereas Genesis 1 and 2 focus on caring for animals and farming the land, Genesis 4 extends this by mentioning that humans invented and developed cities, nomadic livestock herding, musical instruments, and metal tools (Gen 4:17, 20–21). This suggests that God is imaged by all forms of legitimate cultural innovation, as people develop the potentialities of earthly life.

But Genesis 3 portrays humans rebelling against their Creator (transgressing the limits God instituted) so that the gift of human agency or “rule” becomes distorted and twisted, with corrupting effects on the social order.

Life, Death, and Violence in Human History

In the Garden of Eden narrative, humans are warned that “death” is the consequence of disobedience to God (Gen 2:15–16). This death was not the introduction of mortality, as if humans had previously been immortal and only now would have an ending to their life; the idea of original immortality is an idea imported by later interpreters into the text. Rather, humans are created from “dust” (Gen 2:7), a term used throughout the Bible as a metaphor for mortality (see especially Ps 103:13–14). The “death” warned about in Genesis 2 is best understood as the constriction and diminishing of life, where “life” refers to the fullness of earthly flourishing.

Immediately upon disobedience, the original harmony in the garden begins to be distorted, as the primal couple cower in fear before God and in shame of nakedness before each other (Gen 3:7–8, 10), while ordinary human relationships, like marriage, childbirth, and farming, became disharmonious (Gen 3:16–20). Ultimately, humans are exiled from the garden, losing access to the fullness of life (symbolized by the Tree of Life in the center of the Garden) and the intimate presence of God. These consequences are various ways of describing the “death” that results from sin.

Yet humans retain the dignity of being God’s image and the call to represent God is not rescinded (see Gen 9:6). But violence (the misuse of the power or agency associated with the image of God) is introduced into human history, evident in Cain’s murder of his brother out of jealousy (Gen 4:8) and Lamech’s revenge killing of a young man who injured him, while boasting about it to his two wives (Gen 4:23). Distorted human “rule” then spirals out of control, until violence fills the earth and life becomes corrupted (Gen 6:5, 11–12), which generates the flood to cleanse the earth of this corruption.

But the respite is only temporary and human violence culminates in the story of Babel (the normal Hebrew word for Babylon), an empire that tries to dominate others and impose its will (and even language) on conquered peoples (Gen 11:1–9). The tower of Babel is likely a ziggurat, a series of giant steps for the gods to descend from heaven to their favored city, thus providing religious legitimation for the empire. With the rise of every “Babylon” in history, every imperial legitimation of violence in the name of law and order (including Rome in the time of Jesus), God’s purposes for life and flourishing are impeded. In the “Babel” of Genesis 11, God’s purposes for blessing seem to have come to a dead end.

How will God respond to this imperial violence? That is the topic of part 4 of this series (The Story of Israel from Abraham to the Exile).