What God seeks, God will find

Exodus 32:7-14

7The Lord said to Moses, “Go down at once! Your people, whom you brought up out of the land of Egypt, have acted perversely; 8they have been quick to turn aside from the way that I commanded them; they have cast for themselves an image of a calf, and have worshiped it and sacrificed to it, and said, ‘These are your gods, O Israel, who brought you up out of the land of Egypt!’ ” 9The Lord said to Moses, “I have seen this people, how stiff-necked they are. 10Now let me alone, so that my wrath may burn hot against them and I may consume them; and of you I will make a great nation.”

11But Moses implored the Lord his God, and said, “O Lord, why does your wrath burn hot against your people, whom you brought out of the land of Egypt with great power and with a mighty hand? 12Why should the Egyptians say, ‘It was with evil intent that he brought them out to kill them in the mountains, and to consume them from the face of the earth’? Turn from your fierce wrath; change your mind and do not bring disaster on your people. 13Remember Abraham, Isaac, and Israel, your servants, how you swore to them by your own self, saying to them, ‘I will multiply your descendants like the stars of heaven, and all this land that I have promised I will give to your descendants, and they shall inherit it forever.’ ” 14And the Lord changed his mind about the disaster that he planned to bring on his people.

1 Timothy 1:12-17

12I am grateful to Christ Jesus our Lord, who has strengthened me, because he judged me faithful and appointed me to his service, 13even though I was formerly a blasphemer, a persecutor, and a man of violence. But I received mercy because I had acted ignorantly in unbelief, 14and the grace of our Lord overflowed for me with the faith and love that are in Christ Jesus. 15The saying is sure and worthy of full acceptance, that Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners—of whom I am the foremost. 16But for that very reason I received mercy, so that in me, as the foremost, Jesus Christ might display the utmost patience, making me an example to those who would come to believe in him for eternal life. 17To the King of the ages, immortal, invisible, the only God, be honor and glory forever and ever. Amen.

Luke 15:1-10

1Now all the tax collectors and sinners were coming near to listen to him. 2And the Pharisees and the scribes were grumbling and saying, “This fellow welcomes sinners and eats with    them.”

     3So he told them this parable: 4“Which one of you, having a hundred sheep and losing one of them, does not leave the ninety-nine in the wilderness and go after the one that is lost until he finds it? 5When he has found it, he lays it on his shoulders and rejoices. 6And when he comes home, he calls together his friends and neighbors, saying to them, ‘Rejoice with me, for I have found my sheep that was lost.’ 7Just so, I tell you, there will be more joy in heaven over one sinner who repents than over ninety-nine righteous persons who need no repentance.

8“Or what woman having ten silver coins, if she loses one of them, does not light a lamp, sweep the house, and search carefully until she finds it? 9When she has found it, she calls together her friends and neighbors, saying, ‘Rejoice with me, for I have found the coin that I had lost.’ 10Just so, I tell you, there is joy in the presence of the angels of God over one sinner who repents.”

The big question we’re always trying to address here is, “Who is God?”, which is the theological way of asking the question that everyone asks, one way or another: “What is the nature of existence?”  - and the closely related: “What does it mean to be human?”.  This is always the fundamental task before us; if we don’t get this right, more or less, then it’s hard to get anything else right.  

Scripture is always the starting point for Christians trying to answer these questions, but the answers are not so straightforward, not least because the the OT and NT seem to have vastly different ways of speaking about God.  From the earliest days there have been those who argued that the two testaments really do portray different versions of God and that the OT should be dispensed in favor of the NT.  And although Christians have officially asserted the indispensable nature of the OT for understanding the NT, the reality is that we only selectively pay attention to it, if at all.  

The passage from Exodus depicts a conversation between God and Moses up on the mountain.  God has delivered the Hebrews from slavery in Egypt, brought them through the Red Sea, and has them on their long journey to the Promised Land.  But here God doesn’t take responsibility for any of this, calling them the people whom Moses brought out of Egypt (which Moses corrects later) because he is angry that they have made a golden calf to worship.  God expresses is intent to destroy them, but Moses intervenes, talking God out of it by appealing to God’s vanity and reminding God of his past promises (you don’t want to be the king of God who breaks promises, do you!?).   Here Moses plays the role of level-headed wiseman to God’s bad-tempered despot, using reason to avert God’s own passion.  You can’t read this without wondering if this is indeed what God is like?  Or you may wonder if you’re obliged to imagine God like this because Scripture compels you to?  Or, if this is how Scripture speaks about God, should Scripture and/or God be set aside?  

It probably won’t come as a surprise to hear that I don’t think this passage should be taken to present a verbatim transcript of an audible conversation between Moses and God.  Rather, I would take it to reflect a people’s understanding of their apparent experience with God, a way of making, an understanding which is necessarily incomplete, at best, which is filtered through their own expectations and limitations.  Even when God is revealed to us, we still have to make sense of that revelation, and we don’t always do that well.  

The Apostle Paul famously experienced a direction revelation of the Lord Jesus on the road to Damascus and received a commission to an entirely new ministry.  Looking back from the other side, having previously been a persecutor of the followers of Jesus but now the foremost evangelist to Christ, he rejoices that God had mercy on him in his ignorance, who saw in him not someone to condemn but to transform, to bring him out of the darkness and into the light.   The Gospel given to Paul to proclaim is the same one he experienced himself, that Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners, of which he was the worst.  That God would be patient with Paul, that even Paul would be an object of God’s mercy, serves as a lesson to all about what kind of God we’re dealign with.  

And Jesus himself told a parable to this effect.  It’s worth noting that Jesus tells this parable in the presence of the scribes and Pharisees who had been grumbling that, “This fellow welcomes sinners and eats with them.”  As I said a few weeks ago and will surely say again, the Pharisees are the living embodiment of a religious impulse that apparently persists in every time and place - including our own.  They make religion about not only their own righteousness but, crucially, their superiority to and their separation from the unrighteous.  They are the ones with whom God is pleased, and they avoid association with those whom God is obviously displeased with.  And the fact that Jesus willingly associates with such “sinners” raises all sorts of problems in their minds.  They have no category for a righteous man who associates with the unrighteous.  After all, God is the sort of character who looks down from the mountain, sees the disobedience and rebellion of the “sinners”, and resolves to destroy them.  God’s mercy, God’s patience, is temporary, an aberration, something God gets talked into contrary to his natural inclination.   

But Jesus paints a very different picture, appealing to their own common sense.  Which one of you, he asks, if you had a hundred sheep but lost one, would not leave the 99 to find the one lost one?  And upon finding it, would you not rejoice?  And likewise, consider a widow, who upon losing one of her precious coins goes to great lengths to find it, and upon finding it not only rejoices but invites her neighbors to rejoice with her, for what was lost has been found.  Again the moral is the same as earlier: if you - imperfect person you are - would seek after what is lost, how much more would God do the same.  And yet we have a strange habit of ascribing to God characteristics that we’d find abhorrent in our neighbors.  

Perhaps this unnecessary to say, but it sure seems to me that there are lot of Christians in the world today who seem to be working with a picture of God much like the one found in Exodus, where a righteous God is itching to destroy the sinners, and with the important corollary that these sinners really deserve what’s coming to them.  And, of course, those working with this picture of God almost invariably understand themselves as the righteous with whom God is pleased, in a high position up on the mountain top looking down at the sinners below.  But rather than being like Moses, persuading God to be be merciful, so many seem to encourage the destruction of the sinners, to see them get what they deserve.  This does’t just give Christianity a bad name, it completely misrepresents God.  

Most of us know that God is more gracious than this, that grace is an essential aspect of the Gospel.  The standard version of this story, especially (but not only) amongst evangelicals, is that God, through Christ, presents to us an offer of salvation, that there is nothing we need to do other than receive the gift that God would give.  The fact that we can do nothing to merit this gift receives much emphasis, and yet its hard not to tell the story in such a way that we do need to do something, however passively - like believe in our hearts - which distinguishes the saved from the unsaved.  God stands ready and willing to embrace us if only we would turn to him.  

But the passage from 1 Timothy and Luke suggest that this is still a fairly impoverished understanding of God’s grace.  Paul’s story is not merely that, though he was a blasphemer and persecutor of Christians, God refrained from striking him down, or even that God made himself available for Paul to eventually find.  Paul’s story is that God, even when Paul wasn’t looking, went out and met Paul and revealed himself to Paul.  Paul did nothing; he doesn’t even respond, for having seen what he’s seen, there are no decisions to make.   

Jesus’ parable suggests that God is not like a shepherd who, having lost a sheep, sits around waiting for the sheep to find its way back, who thinks about how much he loves the sheep but puts the onus on the sheep to return - no, God is like a shepherd who leaves the fold and goes out looking for the sheep to bring it back.  And God is not like a woman who, having discovered a coin has gone missing, just hopes that it turns up, but rather one who searches everywhere to find the coin. “There will be more joy in heaven over one sinner who repents than over ninety-nine righteous persons who need no repentance.”  Repentance - the return to God - is presented as God’s work, not so much something that happens when we come to our senses, when we find our way back, but we God finds us as, indeed, one way or another, God will.