“The Gaze of Abraham into Infinity,” by Alex Levin (2023).

Introduction

Abraham is central to the three major monotheistic faith traditions in the world today. His story is rich and intriguing. References to him occur throughout the Old and New Testaments. In the next few posts, I want to look at his story. I want to consider especially how God is present in these texts. Today, I will begin by looking at this call in Genesis 12.

Introduction of Abram

The LORD first speaks to Abram in Gen 12:1–4:

Leave your land, your family, and your father’s household for the land that I will show you. I will make of you a great nation and will bless you. I will make your name respected, and you will be a blessing. I will bless those who bless you, those who curse you I will curse; all the families of earth will be blessed because of you. (CEB)

Read on its own, this part of the passage might paint the following picture for readers: Abram, minding his own business in his own land, encounters the LORD, who calls him to leave all of that behind to go to the particular land that the LORD has told him to go to.

In other words, Abram was inert at the beginning of this passage but had to decide about whether to respond to the words he heard. Further, God gave him explicit instructions about where he should go.

But both assumptions need corrected. Readers’ first encounter with Abram actually occurs in Gen 11. There, we meet Abram along with his father, Terah, his two brothers, Nahor and Haran, and his nephew, Lot (v. 27). Abram was also the husband of a woman named Sarai, who was unable to have children (vv. 29–30). Those details will all become relevant later.

For now, what is more important is what happens in v. 31: Terah, Abram’s father, took his whole family from Ur of the Chaldeans and began a journey toward the land of Canaan. However, when they arrived in a land called Haran, they stopped and settled.

“The Land I Will Show You”

These verses from Gen 11 provide a different framework for how readers hear Gen 12:1–4. First, the instructions to Abram to leave his land take on nuance. He and his family had already left Ur of the Chaldeans. They’ve now settled in Haran, but they had already started the sojourn. Abram had already taken on the identity of a “resident alien,” as some translations describe him in later parts of the Bible.

And, second, not only had they begun their journey, but they were headed toward Canaan, which is eventually identified as the land of promise given by the LORD. By v. 4, the LORD has not even identified the destination; he merely instructs Abram to go. By v. 7, the LORD will confirm that the land to which Abram has traveled is the land that will be given.

At this point, two details stand out: (a) Abram and family had already planned to go to Canaan, apart from any explicit instruction from the LORD; and (b) the LORD only confirms the destination afterward; he does not provide the destination beforehand. In other words, the “I will show you” of v. 4 does not indicate that the LORD will provide directions. It might imply something more along these lines: “the land that I will reveal to you or confirm for you once you arrive there.”

I find these two details intriguing—in their own right, but also for their implications for how God seems to work. We might have imagined an alternative. For instance, Abram could have either been settled comfortably in Ur of the Chaldeans or he could have been journeying in the opposite direction of Canaan. In either case, we might then imagine the LORD calling him explicitly to go to Canaan. In either of those scenarios, the calling would have challenged what Abram was currently doing with an alternative.

In what actually happens in Genesis, with Abram having already begun the journey toward Canaan, and then only receiving confirmation that he is in the right place once he arrives, the LORD seems to utilize the initial plan that Abram and his family had. He also seems to allow space for Abram to set out in the direction that he deems best. The LORD does not even provide general directions.

The simplicity and openness of God’s guidance echo the simplicity and openness with which the LORD approaches other characters throughout Genesis—Adam and Eve, Jacob, Joseph. Of course, at other points in Scripture God can provide much more specific, concrete instruction—I think of the instructions to Moses about returning to Egypt to face pharaoh. But the pattern in Genesis seems to provide an alternative way in which God interacts with people.

God’s interaction with Abram does not suggest that God engages people as an architect with a clear blueprint, one that must be followed exactly. Rather, here as well as throughout Genesis, God is portrayed as interacting with people in a much more dynamic, interactive way. Perhaps God is presented more as an artist, working to make something beautiful out of what is provided by the human characters.

“I Will Cause You to See”

As the translation I provided above indicated, God said to Abram that he would “show” him a land. The word “show” here comes from the Hebrew word that means “see.” God calls Abram to go to the land that “I will cause you to see.” Without jumping too far ahead, the verb “see” will play a crucial role in the offering of Isaac (Gen 22). There, again, God instructs Abram to go to a land that “I will show you.” And then Abram names the place “the LORD sees,” explaining, “on this mountain the LORD is seen.”

I wonder if the LORD’s point here is less about the land that will be seen than it is about Abram’s ability to see. Stated more clearly: maybe it’s less about the land than it is about Abram’s encounter with the LORD.

Perhaps the real calling is less about geography than it is about formation. The LORD wants Abram to become one who sees. Yes, this will involve confirmation that he has arrived in the land of promise. But Abram’s story in Genesis is more about his journey of knowing and learning to trust—learning to see—the LORD.

Below are the previous posts within this series:

Part 1: Introduction

Part 2: Why Do We Read Scripture in the First Place?

Part 3: Human Authors, Traditions, and the Divine Author

Part 4: The Text of 52:13–53:12 and Its Location within Isaiah

Part 5: The Suffering Servant in the Old Testament and Beyond

Part 6: The Suffering Servant in the New Testament

Part 7: Voices from Christian Tradition

Part 8: Three OT Scholars

Introduction

Wow…it’s been a while! The summer ended up being busier and fuller than I expected (including a basketball-related broken nose and subsequent surgery…). I’m finally back to wrap up this series. I would recommend that you look over the linked posts above to catch up on where we’ve been so far.

In this post, I want to wrap up the series. My goal here isn’t so much to summarize what has been said as it is to try to pull the threads together and ask how they might shape our reading of the Suffering Servant passage.

So…Is Jesus the Suffering Servant of Isaiah?

This question has guided my exploration in this series. I’ve highlighted throughout the challenges associated with exploring this question—challenges that even include establishing the text itself but also our interpretive assumptions and practices. I’ve argued along the way that what we read and why we read already shape and constrain how we read.

With our particular passage, our determinations about what we are reading and why we are reading it already condition the sorts of answers we might offer. For instance, one impulse within the church has pushed interpreters to say that the servant must be Jesus. A similar but exactly opposite impulse has led many professional biblical scholars to conclude that the servant cannot be Jesus.

So…what are we supposed to do?

Jesus Is Not the Suffering Servant

My own admitted bias is that when I find myself in a dilemma such as this, in which two well-intending sides (I’m assuming the best of both) come to such starkly different conclusions, is to presume that both are, in some sense, getting at something that is important and true. This might not always be the case. But I find it a helpful starting point.

Let’s start with professional biblical scholarship. One of the guiding assumptions for many biblical scholars is that the goal of reading the biblical text is to uncover what really happened in history. When they come to an issue like the one before us, this might mean prioritizing what was in the mind of the original author(s).

We might, then, rephrase the question in this way: did the original author(s) intend for the servant to be identified with Jesus?

As you can imagine, the quick answer to this question could be: of course not. The identity of the original author is highly debated among said biblical authors. But in no interpretive scenario would many biblical scholars allow that whoever wrote this text had a man from the first century of the Common Era in mind when they wrote. Historically, that’s virtually impossible. Jesus would not live until centuries after the time of writing.

This point is hard to argue against.

Some Christians might begin to think, “Well, good riddance to professional biblical scholars! We don’t need them to challenge what we see is obvious!” But before we jettison their work, I keep coming back to the comment I made at the beginning of this section: are they getting at something that is important and true? Can we learn and grow from these conclusions?

Two problems can emerge from too quickly concluding that the author(s) had Jesus explicitly in mind.

First, we might wonder what significance this text would have for the audiences that first heard the words of the book called Isaiah. We do well to remember that the Bible addresses real communities seeking wisdom to live life before God, often in the midst of threats. Isaiah in particular deals with a people facing or already experiencing the trauma of exile. How would a message about a man who wouldn’t live for centuries help them or make sense to them?

Second, we might consider the interpretive implications. If Isaiah explicitly thought of Jesus as he wrote, then we might imagine that he could have communicated this with the expectation that his audience would understand, at least to the extent that was possible. But even by the time of Jesus, the Jewish people did not see Jesus as the obvious person to whom Isaiah pointed.

Let me come at this second issue from another angle. Frequently in the church I’ve witnessed a level of interpretive arrogance: we Christians see how obviously Jesus fulfills the Old Testament; therefore, anyone who doesn’t see what is so obvious is ignorant or, worse, diabolical.

As I’ve alluded to before, in this series and in others, of the many problems that emerge from this sort of anti-Semitic interpretive approach, one is that it fails to consider how Christians only see what is “obvious” because they stand on the other side of having come to believe and trust in Jesus as the one who makes those things obvious to us.

Throughout the Gospels, Jesus’s disciples are just as ignorant as anyone. It’s only after they’ve encountered the resurrected Jesus and come to trust in him that they can then make sense of everything else.

In other words, the train runs in exactly the opposite direction. It is not that Isaiah 53 and the rest of the OT so obviously point to Jesus, and therefore when we see Jesus we understand him. It’s that, having trusted in the resurrected Jesus, we se so obviously how he points back to the OT, and therefore when we see the OT we can understand it.

In an important sense, then, I think that those who argue that Jesus is not the suffering servant can shape our interpretation. Even for those who wish to read Isa 53 from a Christian perspective, these concerns and sensibilities can help us to understand which connections are viable and which are harmful.

Perhaps the original author(s), audiences, etc., did not think of Jesus explicitly when they read this text. Perhaps the text has significance even apart from that conclusion. I mean, to reiterate something I said in an earlier post, even the early Christians, such as Peter, who clearly saw a connection to Jesus, did not see Jesus as fulfilling the passage in the sense that no one else would.

In fact, Peter urges the exact opposite: Jesus was a servant to show us how to be servants. The vocation of the servant is not something that Jesus does instead of us; it’s something that Jesus does for our benefit and for our example.

I think it is helpful, then, to appreciate the conclusion that in some sense, the suffering servant is not Jesus.

Jesus Is the Suffering Servant

What about the other side, those that argue that Jesus is the suffering servant? Are they onto anything?

As a Christian reader of Scripture, I cannot see how anyone could conclude otherwise. At a minimum, a reading that calls itself “Christian” must wrestle with the fact that the New Testament authors as well as prominent voices throughout church history have made this explicit connection.

Admitting up front that the connection depends first on having already trusted in Jesus, it then does provide a helpful framework for making sense of the text itself. It’s not that other interpretive perspectives cannot make sense of the text. But many have argued that Jesus seems uniquely to shine the clearest, brightest light on the text. In other words, the text of Isa 53 just lines up so neatly in many respects with Jesus’s own life. (Of course, it doesn’t line up as perfectly as many have imagined; there are points of tension.)

As many Christian readers have put it when meditating on Isa 53, “How could this not be talking about Jesus?” This is a genuine question I often hear from my students when we look at the issue. And they aren’t trying to be judgmental of those who do not draw the same conclusion. They are merely reflecting on how well they see the narrative of Jesus’s life and mission fitting alongside the passage.

This perspective also challenges one of the major assumptions of the alternative perspective, namely, that the main goal of reading Scripture is to uncover what the original human author could have intended. Invoking the category of “Scripture” to refer to these texts invites us to consider that God is using these texts to speak a living word. God is, in a real sense, the Divine Author of these texts.

We could even go so far as to say that the original human author had no idea that he spoke in some sense in reference to Jesus. That does not preclude that God could speak beyond what the original author had in mind.

If nothing else, Jesus took up fully and conclusively the vocation of servant. In that sense, he is the suffering servant.

I find it essential for a Christian reading of Isa 53, then, to conclude that, in some sense, the suffering servant is Jesus.

Pulling It All Together

So…what do we do with all of that? Here are my own thoughts on how this hangs together.

Several key voices throughout church history have recognized with piercing insight how Jesus’s incarnation, life, death, and resurrection reveal everything about creation. One of the most significant figures is a guy named Maximus the Confessor (you should Google why he was called “Confessor”).

Admittedly, I am no Maximus scholar. Plus, I’m attempting to provide an oversimplified version of his ideas. But one of his main theses is this: Jesus is not only the Savior who comes, historically, after the Fall. Instead, he was the purpose and pattern of creation itself, from before time.

To use one example: historically speaking, Jesus was in the image of Adam since he came after Adam in time. But Adam himself was created according to the pattern and logic and goal of Christ.

Riffing of the logic that Maximus uses, we could say that though, historically, Isaiah the book comes before the person of Jesus, Christ himself was before Isaiah, and he was the logic and purpose toward which Isaiah pointed.

Even if Isaiah had in mind some specific historical person or group of people, the full pattern of the servant was always determined according to the logic of the one who is true Servant of God. Anyone who ever fulfills the vocation of servant begins to follow the pattern that is established by and finds its goal in Christ.

Thinking back to 1 Peter, to which I alluded earlier here as well as in a previous post, we can see this conclusion. If Peter can argue (a) that Jesus fulfilled the vocation of the servant as described in Isa 53 and (b) that therefore Christ’s followers are themselves called to pick up that vocation by emulating Christ, then (c) even before Christ’s historical incarnation, those who pick up the vocation are emulating Christ.

I know that this gets a little wonky, but it holds up logically.

To state it as clearly and bluntly as I can: those who live like the servant—regardless of whether they do so before or after the incarnation—are following a pattern that is set by and fulfilled in Christ.

This sort of interpretation does not mean, though, that a reader must first determine that Christ is the pattern and goal of the servant before understanding and embodying the text. After all, the text itself, as we pointed out in previous posts, is less concerned with who the servant is than what the servant does.

I want to press even further on this point. At the heart of the question of this series, “Is Jesus the Suffering Servant of Isaiah?”, is a potentially bigger problem. This question could be one that is asked from a speculative perspective. Even asking this question has the effect of distancing inquirers from the practical and moving them into the abstract.

Jesus himself seems to push against this way of approaching life. He’s far less concerned with his followers’ understanding everything at a theoretical level than he is at them trusting in God and obeying and being transformed.

The way of Servant Jesus is never merely the way of abstract thinking; it involves those who wish to ask the question.

A statement of pastor and author George MacDonald, in his sermon, “The Truth in Jesus,” comes to mind:

Is Christianity a system of articles of belief, let them be correct as language can give them? Never. So far am I from believing it, that I would rather have a man holding, as numbers of you do, what seem to me the most obnoxious untruths, opinions the most irreverent and gross, if at the same time he lived in the faith of the Son of God, that is, trusted in God as the Son of God trusted in him, than I would have a man with every one of whose formulas of belief I utterly coincided, but who knew nothing of a daily life and walk with God. The one, holding doctrines of devils, is yet a child of God; the other, holding the doctrines of Christ and his Apostles, is of the world, yea, of the devil.

Responding to the hypothetical retort, “How! A man hold the doctrine of devils, and yet be of God”, MacDonald says, “Yes; for to hold a thing with the intellect, is not to believe it. A man’s real belief is that which he lives by; and that which the man I mean lives by, is the love of God, and obedience to his law, so far as he has recognized it.”

Pondering these words, we might say this: unless one is willing to become the servant, to take the vocation of servant upon oneself, then one has not yet believed that Jesus is the servant.

Conclusion

Here, in my last post in this series, I want to reiterate what I have said throughout. The goal of this series has not been to arrive at the correct answer, to solve all of the interpretive issues (for there are legion!). Instead, it has been an attempt to listen humbly to myriad voices that have wrestled with this text throughout the millennia.

In so doing, I wanted to read this text as Scripture—as divine address. And though I remain open to alternative proposals for interpreting the details associated with this text and issue, one thing seems to me to be clear at this point: God calls through this text to God’s people to look to the servant to understand reality. God speaks to us about how we humans are to live our lives before God—a vocation that, yes, Jesus himself embraced and lived out fully, but certainly not only that he removed from his followers.

The more pressing question, at the end of the day, is perhaps not, Is Jesus the Servant of Isaiah?, but rather, Are we who follow Servant Jesus willing to become servants?

Introduction

What does it mean to be saved? If I were to ask Christians living in the United States today, I would probably get a significant number of responses that look something like this: it means going to heaven when you die. If I were to press further—say, to ask that person who is saved and how one is saved, I might get the following: each person is saved once they accept Jesus as their savior.

This picture isn’t quite at home in the Old Testament’s reflection, however.

In this post, I look at one of the primary ways in which the Old Testament speaks of salvation, namely, through the exodus event. I aim to show that the Old Testament offers a rich challenge to an oversimplified way of thinking about salvation.

Getting to Heaven?

Before I look at one prominent example of what is in the OT, I want to call attention to what is not in the OT. Notoriously, the OT does not speak much about anything that might be called an afterlife. There simply is not much material addressing the issue. We might call attention to a couple passages—the dry bones in Ezekiel, the resurrection in Daniel—but those prove the exception, not the rule, and even those are debated among scholars.

Someone might ask here about hell. For the layperson, the OT might seem to talk often about hell. In particular, it mentions a place called Sheol. However, Sheol is not hell. Sheol is itself a more nuanced topic. It is the realm of the dead. It’s where all the dead go. When it is mentioned, it’s not really explained; it’s only evoked. To the point, it doesn’t provide us much by way of understanding what salvation is.

Before I move forward, I want to clear up what I am not saying. I am not saying that the OT cannot be used to reflect on and consider some sort of afterlife. In fact, much of what develops in Jewish and Christian thinking on the resurrection of the dead and some sort of end-time restoration comes precisely by reflecting on the OT and thinking through its logic. But that is different than claiming that the OT talks directly about heaven or the afterlife.

More positively, I would say this: that the OT does not seem to reflect so obviously on heaven should, at least, challenge us to enter in the OT and think with it. How does it think about God’s act of salvation? This is what I want to focus on in this post.

The Exodus as Archetype

Arguably the paragon of salvation in the OT is the exodus event. Not only does the account of the exodus itself play a crucial role in the narrative, but it also shows up throughout the OT. It’s not only conceived of as an act of salvation in the past, but it is regularly seen as the pattern for the way God saves in the present and in the future. In other words, it is seen as the template for salvation, in many ways.

A quick aside, before I start looking at the details itself. One common temptation for us is to come to the text with our agenda, our questions, and then compel the text to address what we want it to address. Yes, the text of Scripture can address the questions we bring to it. But it is also important for us to allow Scripture itself to form us not only by giving us answers to our questions but training us to ask the right questions. I want to look at the exodus event to see what questions it asks, what issues it raises.

Salvation: How? From Whom/What?

In Exod 1, the pharaoh, perceiving the proliferation of the people of Israel as a threat, sets out to oppress them and eliminate their male children. He does so unsuccessfully, due to the working of God through a few key women—the midwives, the family of Moses, and pharaoh’s own daughter. (I’ve written a few different posts on Exodus: see Keeping the Law to Earn God’s Favor?, How Did the King Not Know Joseph?, Moses and God: The Gospel of Matthew and the Book of Exodus, Who Are You?, and Reading Scripture with the Midwives of Exodus 1.)

Once an adult, Moses witnesses an Egyptian killing a Hebrew. He intervenes by killing the Egyptian and burying him in the sand. Once news spreads, he flees. Then the narrative tells readers that God heard the cries of the people (2:23–25). Readers know that this sets in motion God’s great act of deliverance.

Stated more directly: what sets in motion God’s act of salvation is the people crying out and God hearing the cries. On that alone God intends to save them. As readers will see, at times, the people seem to be committed to trusting that God will save them. At other times, though, they question. But God will not waver about the plan to save them, regardless of how they respond at a given moment.

Also important to observe is that salvation is from oppression. It involves a flesh-and-blood oppressor as well as tangible experiences of oppression. It not, as some might be inclined to say in our world, “spiritual” salvation as a realm set apart from physical. Exodus operates with a much more holistic picture. Those two realms are not separated. We might even say that everything is spiritual.

Two questions that are often asked in theological conversations about salvation might now be asked about the way Exodus presents salvation. First, how are people saved? That is, what initiates their experience of salvation? Second, from what/whom are people saved?

Salvation in Exodus begins with God hearing the cries of the people and is then anchored in God’s determination to save. It is not based initially on some robust, perceptive trust by the people. And the salvation God initiates is salvation from oppression, which includes what we might call “spiritual,” but it also includes what we label “physical.”

Salvation: For Whom? When? By What Means?

As the narrative progresses, God invites Moses to participate in this great act of deliverance (Exod 3). Moses plays a crucial role in leading God’s people out of Egypt. Salvation is never something Moses accomplishes alone, but it is certainly not something that God accomplishes without him.

Exodus doesn’t spend time parsing out and classifying which parts of salvation belong to God, which parts belong to Moses. Rather, it presents something much more mysterious, something much more organic, something much more cooperative, in which it is hard to separate divine and human.

Exodus 14 might be identified as the moment of salvation. This is when God delivers the people of Israel through the sea but crushes Egypt in the same sea. I want to talk about two dimensions of this moment.

To begin, it is crucial to notice that deliverance is not something that happens at the level of the individual. Whereas we tend to talk about salvation as something that happens to me or you, individually, the salvation enacted here is communal. God delivers a people.

I suppose we might say that it is up to the individual to determine whether they will share in the communal experience of salvation. We might imagine some Israelite who decides not to talk out onto the dry bed of the sea. But their experience of salvation as an individual comes as they choose to join the communal salvation that God enacts.

Also important to note is that though Exod 14 might mark the key moment of salvation, it is a part of a wider experience that began before that moment and extends beyond it. In previous chapters, God sent Moses to speak before Pharaoh. He brought plagues on Pharaoh and his people. He gave the people of Israel the observance of the Passover. Salvation was begun back in Exod 2; even though it reaches a sort of climax in Exod 14, it is not something that happens in a singular moment.

Likewise, salvation extends beyond the moment at the sea. When God committed to delivering the people from oppression, God committed to delivering them to service to the Lord and to dwelling in the land of promise.

Notoriously, the people will have significant failures at this juncture. But their failure does not change the fact that the salvation that God initiated was not complete. In a very real sense, they had been saved, freed from oppression, but they were not yet living fully as God intended them to live. Salvation might involve key moments, but those moments are part of a broader journey, one that is not yet complete.

We might ask here some more questions from conversations around salvation. First, who is saved? Second, when does salvation occur? Third, whose activity saves: God’s or human’s?

In Exodus, salvation is not primarily an individual experience. God is saving a people. Further, though we might be able to identify key moments along the way, salvation is a journey, a process. In a real sense, we might speak of salvation as past, present, and future: the people were saved, they are being saved, and they will be saved. Finally, Exodus envisions salvation that comes fully from God, yet it involves the full participation of humans. Those realities cannot be clearly separated.

Salvation: By Grace Alone?

Having been rescued, the people of Israel enter into the wilderness experience. The whole experience is cast as testing. Moses, later reflecting back over the forty years in the wilderness, says, “Remember the long road on which the LORD your God led you during these forty years in the desert so he could humble you, testing you to find out what was in your heart: whether you would keep his commandments or not” (Deut 8:2, CEB).

God’s instructions given to Moses for how the people should live before God and with one another are not presented as the optional add-on to the real experience of salvation. They belong to salvation. That is, Exodus presents salvation as involving the key moment of Israel’s deliverance from the forces of Egypt, yes, but including also the formation involved in becoming the sort of people God is calling them to be.

Stated in other words, it would be foreign to Exodus to imagine that salvation refers only to the initial act of deliverance and then may include subsequent reshaping of life. The journey of salvation includes both. Salvation is all-encompassing.

With the children of Israel, their failure to live faithfully as God has called them to live actually prevents them from entering into the land of promise, that place that represents the geographical as well as metaphorical destination of salvation. They do not fully arrive; they die in the wilderness.

Were they saved? Yes, in that they experienced God’s deliverance from oppression. Were they saved? No, in that they did not make it to the land of promise and live faithfully before God. Again, Exodus does not seem to operate with oversimplified dichotomies.

Another question: are “works” or “fruit” necessary for salvation, or is salvation by the grace of God alone?

Exodus clearly roots salvation in the work of God, apart from which the people could not have experienced deliverance. Yet at the same time it sees a necessary role for the people, apart from which they will not experience the fullness of salvation. People must respond to God’s deliverance. An organic rather than a mechanical metaphor is more appropriate: a good tree will produce good fruit.

Conclusion

In this post, I’ve attempted to think with Exodus about salvation rather than come to Exodus and force-fit it into preconceived categories. When we do that, we see that Exodus offers a vision for what it means to think about God’s great deliverance.

But this is not limited to the past; Exodus provides a template for how God delivers into the present and on into the future. The biblical witness is replete with just this sort of thinking. The exodus event looms large in the imaginations of the biblical authors when they think about God’s new acts of deliverance.

The result of this exploration has been a particular portrait of salvation that is both illuminating and challenging. It points to a particular vision of salvation that might not sit easily with all the usual categories and questions we Christians bring to the discussion.

At the same time, I want to say that my approach here has not been to replace one way of thinking about salvation with only one other way of thinking about it. Rather, I’m assuming here that part of what the biblical witness challenges is precisely the idea that there is only one, right way of thinking about a topic such as salvation. The exodus is one, perhaps primary, way to think about salvation, but there are others.

The goal really has been to allow Exodus to have its own voice. Coming humbly and openly before the text involves a willingness to be shaped not only by the answers it provides but by the questions it asks.

Below are the previous posts within this series:

Part 1: Introduction

Part 2: Why Do We Read Scripture in the First Place?

Part 3: Human Authors, Traditions, and the Divine Author

Part 4: The Text of 52:13–53:12 and Its Location within Isaiah

Part 5: The Suffering Servant in the Old Testament and Beyond

Part 6: The Suffering Servant in the New Testament

Part 7: Voices from Christian Tradition

Introduction

We are nearing the end of this series. After this post, there is one more scheduled post, in which I will pull together all that I have been saying so far and offer some concluding thoughts. That might turn into multiple posts, but that is the current plan.

In this post, I want to survey what some modern scholars say about the identity of the servant. I consider three prominent voices who have all, in their own way, engaged the issue from an explicitly Christian perspective.

I want to say ahead of time that this post in particular might feel overwhelming to the non-scholar. I’ve reduced most of the technical jargon, but this one might feel like more work for some of you. I encourage you to do your best to get through it. But try not to get bogged down in the details. Try to keep your eyes on the forest, not the trees.

Starting Assumptions of Modern Biblical Scholarship

Before I get to these scholars, though, I want to make some comments about modern biblical scholarship in general. In the opening posts in this series, I hit on some of these matters. I addressed how our conclusions on the why and the what of Scripture already constrain our interpretations just as they open up newer possibilities for us.

For modern biblical scholarship, being downstream of the Enlightenment has significantly influenced all assumptions about Scripture and its interpretation. In real ways, much of the last few centuries of biblical scholarship has emerged precisely as interpreters in the modern period have critiqued and tried to move beyond earlier interpreters.

For example, in my last post, I referred to Justin Martyr, Irenaeus, and John Wesley. I don’t think it’s much of an overstatement to say that you would rarely find any of these figures mentioned in modern commentaries on Isaiah—at least mentioned positively! Those earlier figures, modern biblical scholars might say, are problematic precisely because of their biases. We must move beyond those biased Christian attempts to read Isaiah.

Instead, the modern biblical scholar feels pressure to participate in the historical–critical paradigm, as we might call it. This paradigm, shaped in and by the modern period, prioritizes approaching the biblical text as a window onto “what really happened” in history. A (sometimes unstated) goal of reading is to determine what really happened and how well the biblical text corresponds with that. Further, interpretation prioritizes the historical moment of production—the original author, the original audience, their original historical context—for interpretation.

I am not insinuating that everything within modern biblical scholarship is wrong or bad or unnecessary. Plus, we cannot go back to a “premodern” time and simply pretend that what we have now learned does not exist. I am saying, though, that this approach is also biased, and no less so than any other approach. It is simply biased in another direction.

All of this is to say: modern interpreters of Isaiah not only feel the pressure to talk about the suffering servant in light of what could have been in the mind of the original author, what could have been heard by the original hearers, and how all of that spoke to the original historical context, but they also feel the pressure not to talk about Jesus in these spaces, or at least to do so often only with fear and trembling.

Several scholars have moved in that direction, though. We will look at three figures.

Three OT Scholars

My focus here will be on voices that explicitly try to bring together the results of the historical–critical paradigm with explicitly Christian convictions as they read the suffering servant passage. In his published dissertation entitled Theological Interpretation and Isaiah 53: A Critical Comparison of Bernhard Duhm, Brevard Childs, and Alec Motyer (2014), Charles E. Shepherd examines and compares these three named preeminent scholars. I use this volume as the basis of my work here.

Bernhard Duhm

The first scholar that Shepherd considers is Bernhard Duhm (1847–1928). Duhm’s approach is very much at home within and extends the trends of scholarship in his day. He concerns himself with the original author and the specific historical circumstances being addressed. He employs the tools of historical criticism to help him ascertain the results.

Yet he considers Christianity the true end point of the Old Testament. Therefore, after having done the work of critical engagement with the text itself, he considers the way in which the text belongs to a longer tradition that extends to and includes Jesus Christ. His concern is primarily historical here: the tradition developed and moved toward Christ. Yet he speaks openly about his approach as being “deeply imbued with theological concerns.”

Coming to Isa 52:13–53:12 itself with all of this in mind, he draws a few conclusions. First, he sees the servant as a real, historical reality from the time of the author. He reads the chapter in terms of themes of debasement and exaltation, which provides access to the poet’s own reflection on his situation and his future hope.

Second, the chapter bears a teleological relationship with the events of Christ—that is, it ultimately points to it and finds its deepest hopes fulfilled in it. Because of that, he does not wish to see Isa 52:13–53:12 as corresponding directly to Christ. He speaks of what is most miraculous in what the original poet conveyed:

That an Old Testament poet sketches a picture, which becomes a reality centuries later, even if in some major respects it falls short of the actual occurrence. This shows the internal relationship of the Old Testament religion with Christianity, as well as its inferiority, because it can think the highest thoughts but cannot make them real. (p. 204, emphasis original)

Thus, whereas readers today might want to assume a direct correspondence between the suffering servant passage and the Christ event—Isaiah said this, Jesus did that—Duhm suggests that the reality is something different. It’s more like this: the original poet expressed the general sketch of a hope, which was embodied in Jesus, even if at points it fell short of what actually happened. The main difference, of course, was the in the original poem the hopes remained hopes, which the poet could not bring about. But with Christ, the hopes are made real.

Brevard Childs

The second scholar Shepherd engages is Brevard Childs (1923–2007). Childs is well-known for the “canonical approach,” which starts with the final form of the text as it has been received. His approach does not dismiss the historical–critical work that had been done before him, work that had suggested, for instance, that the book of Isaiah might have been written by multiple people in different times and places. Rather, he starts with the form that has been transmitted to the people of God as witness to God.

This means that Scripture is not anchored solely to a past that must first be recovered before the text can address its audience. So, for instance, even if scholarly conclusions about the composition of the book of Isaiah are valid (i.e., that it was written by multiple people across centuries facing different circumstances), the book has been put together in its final form and must be considered as such. Interpretation of Isa 52:13–53:12 must consider how this passage has been woven into the textual fabric. This investigation might also extend beyond the book of Isaiah. The book of Isaiah has been placed by the community of God’s people within a collection that includes, say, Jeremiah and Ezekiel.

What is especially important in Childs’s work is that he invokes not only historical categories but also theological. He argued that Scripture must be read as Scripture—a means of encountering God. This is why the text was written and passed on, and this is why it is to be read. The text is not mere artifact; it is living word of God. The Old Testament speaks to and of God directly, with its own voice. But for Christians, the voice of God is the voice of the one we identify as Father, Son, and Spirit.

In practice, this means that Childs engages the text as distinct witness to God, trying to avoid either (a) presuming that the voice of God in the text is always constrained by the original historical circumstances or (b) that it must be overrun with explicitly Christian categories.

In his commentary on Isa 52:13–53:12, he says that the responsibility of a scholar is first to hear “Israel’s own voice in the plain sense of the text.” But once that has been accomplished, he offers theological reflection on the passage within the context of the Christian canon of Scripture.

He indicates that interpretation of the chapter depends on correct assessment of the literary and theological function of the text within its present canonical context, which he specifies as Isa 40–55. He suggests that his hermeneutical decision “separates the ensuing interpretation fundamentally form the radically atomistic interpretation of the heirs of Duhm.”

He sees the initial collective identification of the servant as Israel in 42:1 as transferring to an individual prophetic figure in 49:3. After his engagement with what he calls “Israel’s own voice” in the text, he turns to theological reflection on the passage. Here, he argues that the canonical shape of the book of Isaiah presents a suffering servant figure who, though a real, historical figure, is not simply a figure of the past. Rather, the servant has an ongoing theological role for Israel.

The early church picked this up. But rather than seeing the connection between the suffering servant and Jesus as prophecy and fulfillment, Childs argues that they saw an analogy between the activity of the servant and the passion of Christ. They both attest to the reality of God at work in the life of Israel.

Here is Childs:

In a word, in the suffering and death of the servant of Second Isaiah, the selfsame divine reality of Jesus Christ was made manifest. The meaning of the Old Testament servant was thus understood theologically in terms of the one divine reality disclosed in Jesus Christ. The morphological fit between Isaiah 53 and the passion of Jesus continues to bear testimony to the common subject matter within the one divine economy. (Childs, Isaiah, 423)

He then summarizes, “[T]he servant of Isaiah is linked dogmatically to Jesus Christ primarily in terms of its ontology, that is, its substance, and is not simply a future promise of the Old Testament awaiting its New Testament fulfillment.” For Childs, the servant in Isaiah is not merely a future promise awaiting NT fulfillment. Rather, “The suffering servant retains its theological significance within the Christian canon because it is inextricably linked in substance with the gospel of Jesus Christ, who is and always has been the ground of God’s salvation of Israel and the world.”

Alec Moyter

The final scholar with whom Shepherd interacts is Alec Moyter (1924–2016). Moyter approaches the text without any indebtedness to scholarly conclusions regarding the composition of the book of Isaiah. He takes for granted that the whole book of Isaiah comes from the prophet Isaiah himself, writing in the eighth century B.C.

He begins with an assumption of God’s sovereignty that makes God’s involvement in history accessible. God guides and is involved in history. The proclamation at the center of the Christian faith is that God has intervened in history, as recorded in the OT and the NT. This certainly puts him on a different playing field than, say, Duhm.

For him, then, there is no reading of the suffering servant passage apart from its connection to Jesus. His approach, though, is more nuanced and layered than a simple prophecy-and-fulfillment framework would allow. He also avoids the debates about who the servant was, as a historical person.

In his only comment on Christ in his discussion of Isa 52:13–53:12, he says, “It is impossible not to be reminded of the resurrection, ascension and heavenly exaltedness of the Lord Jesus” (emphasis added). As Shepherd summarizes Moyter, “Isa 53, alongside the Old Testament’s wider ‘messianic hope,’ is ‘realized’ in Christ.” Moyter explains what he intends with “realized”:

[I]t is like a perennial. The first year’s flowering begins to show what is there, but years of maturing bring the flower to perfection far greater than the first year’s almost tentative display. Yet nothing is new; it is what was always there . . . Carpenters might like a different illustration: the surface grain of a fine piece of timber displays its beauty and quality; the end-grain shows the depth and fulness that has always been there. Jesus is the “end-grain” of the prophetic Scriptures. He is what was there and intended from the start. (Shepherd, Theological Interpretation, 213)

In short, Moyter is distinct from Duhm and Childs in collapsing the distance between the suffering servant passage and Christian theological use of it.

Conclusion

In this post, I have attempted to provide brief engagement with three scholars who have interacted with Isa 52:13–53:12 from a Christian perspective. The three represent very different ways of taking the issue up. All three demonstrate the need to consider issues of history and theology in engaging the text, though they do so in quite different ways. Shepherd, the author of the volume used as the basis of this discussion, does not ultimately “pick a side,” but argues that these three scholars demonstrate that theological reading of the OT is complex.

I have done my best to present the work of Shepherd as well as each scholar fairly but in a way that can be accessible to those who might be reading this. The technical discussion might be overwhelming to those of you who are not scholars. In short, the main goal in this post has been to show the ways in which scholars have attempted to engage the text of Isaiah as well as the scholarship around it in light of Christian theological convictions. Each of these scholars, in his own way, tries to hold together advanced scholarship on the OT with their understanding of God in light of Christ.

Now, I start to move toward the finish line.

Below are the previous posts within this series:

Part 1: Introduction

Part 2: Why Do We Read Scripture in the First Place?

Part 3: Human Authors, Traditions, and the Divine Author

Part 4: The Text of 52:13–53:12 and Its Location within Isaiah

Part 5: The Suffering Servant in the Old Testament and Beyond

Part 6: The Suffering Servant in the New Testament

Introduction

In Part 6 of this series, I considered a couple passages in the NT in which the suffering servant passage from Isaiah occurs explicitly—Acts 8 and 1 Peter 2. In both instances, a portion of Isa 52:13–53:12 is quoted directly. Engagement is richer and more nuanced than a simple prophecy-to-fulfillment interpretation. Yes, both read Isa 52:13–53:12 in connection to Jesus. But Acts 8 reads Isa 52:13–53:12 as a part of the wider “good news” that Philip proclaims, and 1 Pet 2 reads it as pattern set by Jesus that all Peter’s audience should follow.

In short: neither reads it simply as, “Isaiah was thinking only of Jesus,” even if he were thinking of Jesus.

In this post, I want to consider a few voices from the church beyond the time of the NT. The suffering servant passage has a long history of engagement in the church. I can only sample a few voices. The intent is to look at how Christians have read this passage as a part of the life of the church.

Justin Martyr

Justin Martyr (c. 100–165 A.D.), in the Dialogue with Trypho, engaged extensively with Isaiah as a part of an apologetic interaction with a Jewish man named Trypho (his identity is debated). Justin clearly demonstrates that he sees his reading of the Scriptures of Israel as standing in the apostolic line that itself goes back to Jesus’s own reading.

In particular, he read Jesus’s life, death, and passion as the fulfillment of what Isaiah foretold. His exposition is the first extensive Christian work to make such explicit connections. Yet this does not amount to simple prooftext. Rather, he reads all of the OT as finding fulfillment in Jesus, so that he can read individual verses as foretelling Jesus, yes, but he can also read large portions of a book like Isaiah as finding fulfillment in him.

However, his reading does not presume that anyone reading Isaiah should have clearly seen the connections he makes. Rather, he presumes that Christ must reveal the meaning of prophecies before they can be understood as such. As Childs puts it in The Struggle to Understand Isaiah as Christian Scripture, “No one can understand the scriptures before Christ reveals the meaning of the prophecies.” One does not start with, say, Isaiah and end up at Jesus; rather, one starts with Jesus and then one can understand Isaiah.

Starting from that hermeneutical assumption, Justin saw Isa 52:13–53:12 as speaking of Jesus’s passion, death, and resurrection. Justin finds in Isaiah grounding for important claims about Jesus: he was the culmination of the promise of salvation to the nations (13.8; cf. Isa 52:10–54:17); his coming was of divine origin (76.3; cf. Isa 53:8); the mystery of his birth had been declared beforehand (43.3; cf. Isa 53:8); his death and burial had been foretold (97.2; cf. Isa 53:9). From Justin’s starting point, Christ’s experience runs so clearly alongside the experience of the servant in Isa 52:13–53:12.

However, much like with 1 Pet 2, Justin’s reading does not presume that Christ fulfills the vocation of the servant in the sense that Christ does something instead of others. Justin’s reading does not compel him to say that Christ is the only servant, even if he is the ultimate servant.

Irenaeus

Irenaeus of Lyons (c. 130–200 A.D.) is known mainly through two of his works, one entitled Against Heresies and the other entitled the Demonstration of the Apostolic Preaching. For purposes generally related to this series, perhaps his biggest contribution is that he developed the most influential interpretive method in the early church.

Most important for this series is that Irenaeus approached all of Christian Scripture, OT and NT, alongside and within what is called the “rule of faith.” The rule of faith is not a specific statement, but it is the general summary of the apostolic faith that the church held. It is not equal to the Bible itself, even though the two overlap. It is often seen to be made concrete in something such as the Apostles’ Creed or the Nicene Creed.

What this means is that, for Irenaeus, a properly Christian reading of any part of Scripture is made with reference to the faith already held. Scripture is not read as the sole foundation of faith. Scripture is already read from faith commitments. But in turn the reading of Scripture shapes and refines faith commitments, which in turn shape and refine the reading of Scripture…and on it goes.

In the Demonstration, he puts on display his hermeneutical approach. He opens the work by referring to and outlining the rule of faith, which includes three articles, one devoted to the Father, one to the Son, and one to the Holy Spirit. This is his starting point before embarking on a journey through the Old Testament to demonstrate how God had been preparing for the salvation that would be brought through Jesus. Irenaeus says at one point that the Spirit of God foretold all these things for our salvation. He organizes his reflection around key statements about Jesus, within which he invokes parts of the OT.

Irenaeus focuses on Isa 52:13–53:12 in discussing Christ’s death and resurrection. He opens a subsection called “The Miracles, Passion and Glorification of Jesus Christ” with a statement important enough that I want to quote it in full:

Of His healings, [Isaiah] says thus, ‘He took our infirmities and bore our diseases,’ that is, ‘He will take,’ and ‘will bear,’ for there are places [where] the Spirit of God, through the prophets, relates things that would come to pass as having happened, for with God [what is] approved and determined to be is counted as already having happened, and the Spirit employs words considering and regarding the time in which the fulfillment of prophecy is accomplished. (Demonstration, 67)

He continues to move through Christ’s passion, making regular reference to the suffering servant passage as well as other passages from prophets such as Jeremiah and Zechariah.

Irenaeus, much like 1 Pet 2 before him, understands the implications of invoking the divine Author in talking about the origin of Scripture. If the Spirit of God brought these texts to us, then the passion of Christ was a known reality to God at the time that Isa 52:13–53:12 was written in the first place.

But with Irenaeus we see even more clearly and explicitly what might be assumed with earlier authors: his claim is not purely chronological or historical. He begins with specific, explicit convictions about the apostolic faith as conveyed in the rule of faith, and from that starting point engages the OT for how it might inform and enlighten what he already holds to be true. He does not read the OT apologetically—that is, he is not reading to convince himself about the life, death, and resurrection of Christ. He’s reading to enrich the beliefs he already holds.

We might infer, then, that in claiming that a passage such as Isa 52:13–53:12 was given by the Spirit beforehand to foretell the salvation that comes through Christ Irenaeus is still not saying that the passage was written by the human author with that knowledge in mind. Since for God things to come are already having happened, God could speak beyond what the original author could have known.

He is also not necessarily saying that Isa 52:13–53:12 can only refer to Christ. He could be saying that it finds ultimate fulfillment in Christ. It’s possible that the original author thought, say, that he was referring to himself, and perhaps he was. But God uses these words to say more.

John Wesley

Finally, as someone who situates theologically in the tradition of John Wesley, I cannot help but consider what he has to say. At various points in his works—his sermons, his notes on the Bible— Isa 52:13–53:12 occupies his thoughts. I will look at some explicit examples.

One occurs in the sermon he preached at the death of George Whitefield. He and Whitefield had very public, very sharp theological disagreements. However, in his sermon, Wesley praises Whitefield and highlights what they have in common, theologically speaking. In the final section of the sermon, he explores the “grand doctrines” to which he held and which Whitefield preached. He exhorts listeners to keep close to these doctrines while determining to “agree to disagree” on other doctrines.

Among them, he indicates that humans “are all helpless, both with regard to the power and to the guilt of sin.” God alone can accomplish salvation and empowerment to live in holiness; humans do not accomplish this for themselves. He then says, while quoting Isa 53:5, “Whatever, therefore, God does, He does it merely for the sake of His well-beloved Son: ‘He was wounded for our transgressions, He was bruised for our iniquities.’”

Along with beginning from the passion of Christ to read Isaiah (as did the others we have considered so far), it is clear that he has also viewed the text through the prism provided by the Protestant Reformation, one that emphasizes the grace demonstrated in and provided through Christ’s passion.

Wesley engages the text in more detail in his Explanatory Notes Upon the Old Testament. He comments on 52:13, “This is the beginning of a new prophecy, which is continued from hence to the end of the next chapter. My servant—That is Christ who is here spoken of, is so evident, that the Chaldee paraphrast, and other ancient, and some later Hebrew doctors, understand it directly of him, and that divers Jews have been convinced and converted to the Christian faith, by the evidence of this prophecy.” Here, Wesley refers to other Jewish interpretations that have likewise seen this text in Isaiah as referring to the messiah. The “Chaldee paraphrast” appears to refer to the Targum to which I referred in Part 5: this Aramaic translation includes the word “messiah” in reference to the servant.

He then works through the text verse-by-verse, reading it from the starting point of the passion of Christ. He sees not only how the passion of Christ fills out what Isaiah said, but also how what Isaiah said prepared (or should have prepared) people to recognize the fulfillment when they saw Christ’s life, death, and resurrection.

In his sermon entitled “The Way to the Kingdom,” he attempts to offer a shorthand of the gospel. He says that in its broadest sense, it is the whole revelation by Jesus Christ. Then he offers a few versions of the substance of the gospel: “The substance of all is, ‘Jesus Christ came into the world to save sinners;’ or, ‘God so loved the world that he gave his only-begotten Son, to the end we might not perish, but have everlasting life;’ or, ‘He was bruised for our transgressions, he was wounded for our iniquities; the chastisement of our peace was upon him; and with his stripes we are healed.’” He follows those statements by saying, ‘Believe this, and the kingdom of God is thine.” He sees Isa 53:5 as the substance of the gospel, alongside the other statements that come explicitly from the NT. He reads the OT as bearing direct witness to the gospel.

Conclusion

I have looked here at three voices from within Christianity that read Isaiah in the light of Christ’s life, death, and resurrection and vice versa. I surely could have included many other voices. These were selected purely for representative purposes.

But having looked at these three figures, we might draw a few conclusions about their reading. All three, with various levels of explicit awareness, are reading unabashedly from a Christian standpoint. They start with convictions about who Christ is before reading. That matters because it suggests that the sort of readings they propose are not neutral readings. Those who have already been convinced that Christ’s life, death, and resurrection reveal God cannot read neutrally. This bias could be negative or positive, depending on how it is employed, but its existence is unavoidable.

Having started from this conviction, they explore how the passion of Christ sheds light on Isaiah and how Isaiah sheds light on the passion of Christ. From that position, readers are hard pressed not to see the overlap. Jesus fully embodies the reality to which Isa 52:13–53:12 bears witness.

However, I do not think that the readings put forth by these three figures require (a) an interpretation that the servant is only Jesus or (b) that the original author knew that he was talking about Jesus. As Irenaeus made explicit, invoking the divine Author opens space for us to consider how the Spirit of God, for whom all of reality is present, speaks through texts written by human authors what goes beyond even their original intent.

Next, I turn to the interpretations put forth by modern scholars.

Below are the previous posts within this series:

Part 1: Introduction

Part 2: Why Do We Read Scripture in the First Place?

Part 3: Human Authors, Traditions, and the Divine Author

Part 4: The Text of Isa 52:13–53:12 and Its Location within Isaiah

Part 5: The Suffering Servant in the Old Testament and Beyond

Introduction

In the previous post in this series, I looked at how Isa 52:13–53:12 was received by other Jewish sources outside the OT leading up to and beyond the time of Jesus. We saw a couple important points of emphasis. First, some of these sources read the suffering servant passage as speaking of an individual person, even as the Messiah, at a later time, acting on behalf of the people.

Second, though, this focus on an individual was complemented by sources that saw the suffering servant passage as having obvious communal implications. That is, these texts, even when identifying a particular figure as the focus of the suffering servant passage itself, did not see the work of the individual as something he or she performed instead of the community. Even if an individual taught the way of the servant, it was so that others might learn it and follow it.

In this post, we look at some voices from the NT. Here, I want to explore how the experience of Jesus enlightened how they read the suffering servant passage. I will look at two explicit uses of Isa 52:13–53:12 in the NT.

The Suffering Servant in Acts 8

One of the explicit uses of the suffering servant passage comes in Acts 8. In Acts 26–40, an angel from the Lord instructs Philip, one who had recently been chosen to serve the tables of Gentile widows (6:5) but who was currently performing fantastic signs, to take the road from Jerusalem to Gaza. An Ethiopian official, who had been in Jerusalem to worship, happened to be traveling back home toward Ethiopia by the same road. While traveling, he also happened to be reading the prophet Isaiah from his carriage.

The Spirit told Philip to approach the carriage. As Philip ran toward it, he heard the man reading Isaiah. Philip asked, “Do you really understand what you’re reading?” The man replied, “Without someone to guide me, how could I?” Then he invited Philip in.

The passage he was reading was the suffering servant passage. After having read the verses about the servant being led to the slaughter like a sheep and having his life taken away, he asked Philip, “Tell me, about whom does the prophet say this? Is he talking about himself or someone else?” His comment shows that he apparently presumes that the servant is an individual. His question is which individual. He offers one of the common interpretations even among modern interpreters: that the servant is the prophet himself.

I want to focus on Philip’s response. Acts 8:35 says, “Starting with that passage, Philip proclaimed the good news about Jesus to him.”

This reply is rich with interpretive implications. But first, let’s observe what Philip does not say. In response to, Who is he talking about?, Philip does not say, “He’s talking about Jesus.” At the risk of filling the space between the lines too full, I think that the distinction could be important. (And I’m not the first to point this out; cf. Goldingay’s commentary on Isaiah at this point.) The text says instead, “Starting with that passage, Philip proclaimed the good news about Jesus to him.”

Elsewhere in Acts (e.g., Peter in Acts 2; Stephen in Acts 7), proclaiming the good news involves retelling, re-narrating, the story of God from the OT to Jesus. When the OT is cited, it’s not in a simple formula such as, “The OT says X; Jesus is X.” Instead, it centers on how God has been at work among the people of Israel, but how Israel has often opposed and rejected the work of God. It sets the stage for the religious leaders’ opposition to the work of God in Jesus. It writes them into that ongoing story.

With that in mind, we might consider that the statement about Philip starting with the suffering servant passage and then proclaiming the good news about Jesus functions as shorthand for a similar approach. The main point is that Philip seems unlikely to be working with a simple “prophecy–fulfillment” schema, in which some OT passage awaited its fulfillment in Jesus. It seems unlikely that Philip says, “The servant was described in these ways; Jesus is that servant.”

At the same time, he does make a connection. In light of what we have seen from other sources outside the NT, we might imagine something more subtle: Jesus could be, for Philip, the template of the servant, but that would never exclude others (the prophet himself, other individuals, the whole community) from being called to fulfill that vocation as well.

After a brief and limited engagement with Acts 8, I want to offer some initial comments about how the suffering servant passage seems to be functioning there. First, even though the Ethiopian official does press on the issue of the identity of the servant, Philip’s response actually diverts in interest. He is interested in presenting the “good news,” which, elsewhere in Acts, involves the message that Jesus Christ is Lord of all, that his kingdom of peace has come, and that this was what God had promised the ancestors. He replies to the official by folding the suffering servant passage into a retelling of the story to demonstrate these points.

Second, based on interpretive trends we have seen in other sources, it would not be uncommon for Philip to see the suffering servant finding embodiment in Jesus. Philip could consider how the text from Isaiah shines light on the good news that has come to fruition in Jesus, and he could also consider how the experience of Jesus casts its light on the suffering servant passage. He wouldn’t be limited by chronology in his reflection—that is, simply because Jesus came “after” the suffering servant wouldn’t mean that Jesus’s own life, death, and resurrection cannot affect how his followers read the passage from Isaiah.

The Suffering Servant in 1 Peter 2

Another explicit reference to the suffering servant passage comes in 1 Pet 2. The relevant verses come within a larger section of the letter in which Peter encourages his persecuted audience to submit to every human institution for the sake of the Lord (v. 13). What Peter is doing would require a much more extended discussion. For now, 2:15 provides insight: “Submit to them because it’s God’s will that by doing good you will silence the ignorant talk of foolish people.”

The more immediate portion of the letter to which the relevant verses belong deals with one manifestation of this submission: slaves submitting to masters (v. 18). Peter encourages the audience to endure patiently, knowing that they serve the one who is truly Lord and who will ultimately justify them.

To bolster his encouragement of endurance, Peter refers to the suffering servant passage. He says, “You were called to this kind of endurance, because Christ suffered on your behalf. He left you an example so that you might follow in his footsteps” (v. 21). He then quotes the portion of the suffering servant passage that describes the servant as entrusting himself to God even while others unjustly taunt and accuse him (vv. 22–23).

Peter also references the servant carrying the sins of the people, but he has extended it to speak of Jesus carrying “in his own body on the cross the sins we committed” (v. 24). Jesus’s act made Peter’s audience righteous. Continuing to quote Isa 52:13–53:12, Peter says explicitly, “By his [presumably Jesus’s] wounds you were healed.” He has understood the actions of Jesus as explicit fulfillment of the servant from Isa 52:13–53:12.

But before we run off and say, “See! Peter clearly understood Jesus as the fulfillment of the suffering servant, so the servant has always been Jesus, and it’s always been about what he did for us so that we do not have to do it,” we should slow down and examine what Peter is, and is not, doing.

First, we must note that he opens his engagement with Isa 52:13–53:12 by talking not of the uniqueness of the work of Jesus but of the example he provided for others to follow. As Joel B. Green notes in his commentary, the word “example” or “pattern” here, only occurring at this place in the NT, was used outside the NT of lines on a page to assist children in learning to write or for letters set out for children to copy. Think of those pages we might’ve used in elementary: The capital letter A is written in dashes, and the children are to draw over them so as to practice writing.

The main point is that for Peter, Jesus “fulfilling” the vocation of the servant certainly does not mean that he did something so that others don’t have to. He fulfilled it in the sense that he filled it out to its fullest. He did something so that others could follow his pattern.

Second, Peter does not begin with the content and order of Isa 52:13–53:12 and then move to Jesus, in some sort of prophecy-to-fulfillment move. Rather, he begins with the passion of Christ, in content and order, and then moves to Isa 52:13–53:12 to find commentary on Jesus’s passion. That is, he starts with the reality and experience of the passion of Christ as the prism through which the suffering servant passage can be understood.

This gets to some comments I made earlier in the series. When we presume that chronology has priority, we cannot help but conclude that Jesus’s death comes after the account of the servant in Isa 52:13–53:12 and therefore depends on it for influence, not the other way around. But Peter seems to be working from a different starting assumption. This starting assumption can be seen more clearly in 1 Pet 1. Peter speaks to his audience about their receiving the goal of their faith, their salvation (v. 9). He then says, “The prophets, who long ago foretold the grace that you’ve received, searched and explored, inquiring carefully about this salvation” (v. 10). The Spirit of Christ was bearing witness beforehand “about the suffering that would happen to Christ and the glory that would follow (v. 11).

This, too, could be explored in far more depth than I have time and space to explore here. But whatever we make of the claims of Peter, we can certainly see that he presumes that the Spirit of Christ could communicate to and through people who were chronologically ahead of Jesus things that would come after. And this is possible because, theologically speaking, the events surrounding Jesus come before. That is, from the perspective of God, it is Jesus who provides the template for the servant, not the other way around. Both the suffering servant and the passion of Christ witness to the way of God in the world: God exalts the humble and the obedient who are wrongfully accused.

All of that is to say: Peter himself does not imagine that, say, Isaiah fully understood that he was speaking, in some sense, to the reality known in Christ. In fact, Peter says the opposite: those who spoke beforehand didn’t know what they were speaking of. It’s entirely possible that the prophet thought he was speaking of himself or some other individual, but that God’s Spirit knew that he was also and most fully speaking of the reality that would be revealed in Christ. The prophet’s words, in that situation, speak beyond what the prophet intended himself.

Conclusion

These two examples of explicit engagement with Isa 52:13–53:12 provide a few important points of orientation for how we might respond to the question of this series, Is Jesus the Suffering Servant of Isaiah? First, Acts 8 and 1 Peter 2 presume that the Spirit of Christ is the same Spirit that brought these texts about and continues to inspire readers of these texts. Accordingly, interpretation need not be bound by chronology. It is possible, therefore, to read a passage like Isa 52:13–53:12 in light of Christ.

Second, though, neither Acts nor 1 Peter offers an oversimplified presentation in which Isaiah “prophesied” about Jesus and then Jesus “fulfilled” Isaiah, especially if “fulfilled” means something like “bring to an end.” It would be a mistake to presume that the NT authors cited here think that Jesus, in filling out the vocation of the suffering servant, does something that no one else will be called to emulate.

In the next post, I sample Christian interpretations of the suffering servant passage in the centuries since the NT writings.

Below are the previous posts within this series:

Part 1: Introduction

Part 2: Why Do We Read Scripture in the First Place?

Part 3: Human Authors, Traditions, and the Divine Author

Part 4: The Text of Isaiah 52:13–53:12 and Its Location within Isaiah

Introduction

In the most recent post in this series, I turned (finally!) to the text of Isa 52:13–53:12. In particular, I focused on details surrounding the servant’s identity that can be culled from the text as well as how the text fits within the book of Isaiah. What we essentially see with those frames of reference is that more attention is given to what the servant does than who the servant is.

Part of the impetus for that focus seems to be that the vocation of the servant is not necessarily seen to be the vocation of a singular person. Even when the book seems to speak of a singular servant, that servant functions on behalf of the community, enabling the community to fulfill its vocation as servant.

In this post, I want to explore how Isaiah has been received and interpreted. I begin by looking at one Old Testament use. Then, I consider how interpreters outside the Old Testament read this text.

Isaiah 52:13–53:12 and Daniel 11–12

Though the suffering servant passage is not cited explicitly in the OT, scholars have noted a couple points at which its presence might be detected. The main one that I want to consider is Dan 11–12. In an article entitled “The Oldest Interpretation of the Suffering Servant,” H. L. Ginsberg makes a significant case for this connection.

He argues that the author of Daniel (whom he presumes to be writing in the second century B.C.) believed that the prophecy concerning the suffering servant was being fulfilled in his day. A group of people in Dan 11:33–12:10 is identified as the “justifiers of many,” which seems to come from Isa 53:11: “my servant shall justify the many.” The resurrection of large numbers of people in Dan 12:2 might be a development of the apparent resurrection of the servant in Isa 53. Beyond that, Ginsberg argues that the author of Dan 11–12 has identified the servant of Isa 52:13–53:12 with the “enlighteners” of his day. The word translated something like “enlightener” in Dan is the same word in Isa 52:13 often translated “succeed/prosper”: “my servant will succeed/prosper.” Further, Ginsberg argues that “the many” of Isa are identified with “the many” of Dan 11.

If these connections are sound, then what is perhaps most significant for our purpose here are the interpretive implications. If the author of Daniel was reading and interpreting Isa 52:13–53:12 in his day, then what he says and why he says it might influence how we talk about the passage.

First, the author of Daniel does not see the servant vocation as being limited to a singular person; instead, the vocation might be taken up by multiple people and might be taken up continually. Second, and related to the first, the author of Daniel does not see the vocation of the servant as substitution for the people; a particular person or group of people fulfills the vocation of servant so that others might fulfill it. Third, how that vocation is fulfilled seems to be tied to teaching—through word and action—the proper path in the face of persecution.

Isaiah 52:13–53:12 beyond the Hebrew Old Testament

The use of and reflection on the suffering servant passage in works outside the Hebrew Old Testament also indicate the sorts of interpretive decisions that readers were making as they interacted with this challenging text. According to Goldingay, in the Septuagint (LXX; a Greek translation of the OT before the time of Jesus) and in the Syriac (Syr; a dialect of Aramaic, the language spoken around the time of Jesus), the servant is presented more explicitly as an individual person who belongs to the future—essentially a messianic figure. This is an intriguing interpretive move, since the text of Isa 52:13–53:12 itself is not explicitly messianic, as I mentioned previously.

Along with LXX and Syr, Targum Jonathan (Tg; an Aramaic translation) opens this passage with, “my servant, the anointed one,” thereby making explicit a messianic interpretation of the passage. Further, Tg separates the description of the servant’s exaltation from the description of his suffering and humiliation; the servant is exalted, but it is Israel, and eventually all nations, who suffers and is humiliated. Tg seems to envision a singular, messianic person as embodying the role of servant fully.

Wisdom of Solomon 2–5 (Wis; a Jewish work written roughly around the time of Jesus) clearly appropriates Isa 52:13–53:12, too. In 2:10–20, a group of ungodly people stand against the “righteous poor man” (v. 10). They proclaim, “Let us lie in wait for the righteous man, because he is inconvenient to us and opposes our actions; he reproaches us for sins against the law and accuses us of sins against our training. He professes to have knowledge of God and calls himself a child of the Lord” (vv. 12–13, NRSVUE). Because this righteous man lived a life unlike others, the very sight of him offended the people (vv. 14–15). Then, they decide to “test him with insult and torture” (v. 19) and “condemn him to a shameful death” (v. 20) to see if God will protect him.

These statements complement several lines in Isa 52:13–53:12. “Just as many were appalled by you, he too appeared disfigured, inhuman, his appearance unlike that of mortals” (52:14); “he was despised and avoided by others . . . Like someone from whom people hid their faces, he was despised” (53:3); “He was oppressed and tormented, but didn’t open his mouth” (53:7); “He was eliminated from the land of the living, struck dead because of my people’s rebellion” (53:8). Whereas the ungodly in Wis 2 wanted to know whether God would protect the righteous one, in Isa the “righteous one” in Isa will “see light” (53:11), which presumes that God will vindicate him even after his death.

Perhaps the strongest connection comes between Wis 3:1–9; 5:1–5 and Isa 52:13–53:12. In Wis 3, the pattern of rejection-death/suffering-divine vindication, a pattern that marks the experience of the servant in Isa, now marks the experience of a wider group of the righteous. “In the eyes of the foolish they seemed to have died” (v. 2), “their hope is full of immortality” (v. 4). God has “tested them and found them worthy of himself” (v. 5). In Wis 5, the righteous will eventually stand in the presence of their oppressors, the unrighteous, who “will be shaken with dreadful fear, and they will be amazed at the unexpected salvation of the righteous” (vv. 1–2). They will say, “These are persons whom we once held in derision and made a byword of reproach—fools that we were!” (v. 4).

These two passages from Wisdom pick up threads and motifs found in Isa 52:13–53:12 and take them forward. They seem to speak now of eschatological judgment of those who have falsely condemned the righteous. The righteous experience eschatological restoration.

These examples of reflection on and interpretation of Isa 52:13–53:12 in books beyond the Hebrew OT show ongoing engagement with the subject matter of the text. They do not read the text simply as referring to one person who does something instead of others. Overall, the texts highlight the possibility that one figure, even a messianic figure, might be a full embodiment of the servant’s vocation, but again, the effect is to enable others to follow in that path and fulfill that vocation as well. None of these sources reads Isa 52:13–53:12 as portraying something that one person substituting for others’ need to fulfill the vocation.

Conclusion

In this post, I’ve looked briefly at only a few examples of how texts from elsewhere in the OT or even beyond the OT (but not yet in the Christian NT) engage the suffering servant passage. We see two lines developing at the same time. First, later generations of readers saw the text as providing a template for faithful obedience, especially in the face of oppression and persecution. They did not read the text as presenting something that only one person needed to do. The passage provided something of the essence of what it means for anyone to be a servant of the Lord in the face of opposition.

Second, we do see development of the possibility that one entity, one person, might in some sense provide the fulfillment of what this vocation of the servant entails. By “fulfillment” here, though, I do not mean “complete and bring to an end.” Rather, I mean, “demonstrate the fullest embodiment.” This person would instruct the people on how to live righteously before God by way of his or her own example, thereby enabling others to pick up the vocation as well. This person would show others what is possible, he or she would invite others to imagine what it would look like to live as a servant in their own particular situation. Some later readers saw this figure as messianic, even though, as I said previously, Isa 52:13–53:12 is not strictly messianic.

In the next post, I turn to examining how authors in the NT take up the suffering servant passage and read it, especially in light of their experience of Jesus.

Below are the previous posts within this series:

Part 1: Introduction

Part 2: Why Do We Read Scripture in the First Place?

Part 3: Human Authors, Traditions, and the Divine Author

Introduction

In this series, I’ve been considering some of the main issues that lay at the foundation of the question that this series asks, namely, Is Jesus the suffering servant from Isaiah? That I am three posts in and have not really talked much about the text itself says something about how complex the matter is!

In the last post, I highlighted the challenges for an approach to the text that assumes that the why behind our reading is to uncover “what happened” in history. The individual books in the Bible as well as the whole collection have been passed down and shaped over centuries to address newer communities and needs. Further, once we invoke God’s status as divine Author, we open space for our reading of the text to orient around what God intends to communicate through these texts. Both of these dimensions cause us to see that the texts can speak beyond what an original author intended for the original audience.

In this post, I want to move to the text of Isa 52:13–53:12 itself. In particular, I want to look now at the details of the text and how it fits within the book of Isaiah.

The Suffering Servant within Isaiah 52:13–53:12

I will not dive deeply into all the details of the text itself. That could be the basis of a whole separate series. Rather, I want to consider how the text itself navigates the issue of the identity of the servant.

The passage begins with a divine speech. In it, God speaks to an unnamed audience about “my servant”: “Look, my servant will succeed. He will be exalted very high” (52:13, CEB). The word “servant” has a rich history in the Old Testament. Figures such as Abraham, Moses, and David are referred to as the servant of Yhwh. The word occurs in key points in Isaiah, as well (as will be discussed below). This word provides some insight into the identity of this character.

At the same time, it remains ambiguous. Other than calling this figure “my servant,” most of the chapter identifies this character by what he experiences, not by who he is. He will succeed; he will be exalted; many were appalled by him; he will astonish nations. He was despised; he carried our sicknesses and bore our sufferings; he was pierced because of our rebellions. He bore the discipline that made us whole; by his wounds we are healed. In sum, he experienced these things on behalf of the speaker and those associated with the speaker, the unnamed “we.”

The pattern that emerges for this servant is one of humiliation and oppression that leads to exaltation. He experiences all these things, but Yhwh will “give him a share with the great” (53:12). This servant’s experience also represents Yhwh’s plans coming to pass through him (53:10). Somehow, his experience will be shared with others: “The righteous one, my servant, will make many righteous” (53:11).

On the whole, then, the passage seems more interested in identifying this servant by his vocation than by his personal identity. With the passage alone, interpreters find little ground for identifying a specific referent for the servant. Next, I want to explore how this passage fits within and connects to the rest of Isaiah.

The Suffering Servant within Isaiah

Isaiah 52:13–53:12 includes important connection points to the rest of Isaiah. John Goldingay, in his commentary on Isaiah, highlights connections to Isa 6, the well-known throne-room vision. I will look at two connections. In 6:1, the prophet Isaiah sees God “high and exalted”; in 52:13, God indicates that the servant will be “high and exalted.” In 6:9, Isaiah is supposed to deliver the following message to the people: “Listen closely, but don’t understand; look carefully, but don’t comprehend” (emphasis added). In 52:15, the servant will astonish nations and silence kings because they will “what had not been told to them they will see, and what they had not heard they will understand.”

More significantly, Isa 52:13–53:12 links with passages within Isa 40–55. Scholars have long discussed a series of “servant songs” found within this portion of Isaiah: 42:1–4; 49:1–6; 50:4–11. In these texts, God speaks of “my servant.” I want to look at each of these alongside 52:13–53:12.

Isa 42 opens, “Look, my servant; I uphold him. My life is delighted; I put my spirit on him. He will bring judgment to the nations” (v. 1, AT). As with 52:13–53:12, so here: what the servant does and experiences is more significant than who the servant is. The servant is presented in Isa 42 in ways similar to the presentation in Isa 52:13–53:12: he brings justice, he is God’s delight.

The language used here of the servant also echoes language used of kings elsewhere. Though these texts are not strictly messianic in the sense of using language that anticipates the future descendant of David ruling over God’s people, nevertheless they may be amenable to such a reading. (In fact, some later sources did interpret the servant in messianic ways, as will be discussed in the next post in the series.)

Between this so-called first servant song and the second servant song (49:1–6), the intervening chapters, Isa 43–48, identify the servant more specifically as Jacob–Israel. For instance, here is the opening of Isa 44: “But now hear, Jacob my servant, and Israel, whom I have chosen” (v. 1). Yet these chapters also demonstrate that Jacob–Israel seems unable to fulfill the servant’s vocation as presented in the servant songs. Scholars have seen this tension, along with the subsequent servant songs, as pointing to an individual who fulfills the vocation of the servant on behalf of the community.

The servant songs of Isa 49–50 seem to point more explicitly to an individual fulfilling the vocation of the servant on behalf of the community. At the same time, the work of this individual is never portrayed as something he does instead of the community. The community fulfilling the vocation seems always to be on the horizon. Therefore, these texts maintain a tension between the individual experience and the communal experience.

This can be seen, for example, in Isa 49. The servant speaks of what God has said to him: “You are my servant, Israel, in whom I show my glory.” This suggests that the servant is identified still with Jacob–Israel. Yet two verses later, the servant says, “But now Yhwh says . . . to restore Jacob to God, so that Israel might return to him” (v. 5). This implies that the servant is an individual who acts on behalf of and for the benefit of Jacob–Israel.

By the time we arrive at the so-called fourth servant song, Isa 52:13–53:12, the book has shaped our expectations for understanding the servant. The servant is connected to and sometimes identified with Jacob–Israel; the vocation of the servant seems to be something that Yhwh desires all Jacob–Israel to fulfill. However, Jacob–Israel seems unable at this point in Isaiah to do that, so an individual servant will fulfill that vocation on behalf of the community. None of this suggests that the individual is a substitution for the community, though. If anything, the individual servant enables the community to fulfill its vocation as it was called to do.

Immediately after our focal passage, the book explores the effects of the activity of this servant. Though not developed fully, the subsequent passages indicate that the servant’s activity participates in the redemption that Yhwh enacts. Amid the rhapsodic exploration of this redemption, Yhwh says in Isa 54:17, “This is the heritage of Yhwh’s servants, whose righteousness comes from me, says Yhwh.” The activity of the servant has enabled the people to be servants. The activity of the individual on behalf of the community enables others to take up and fulfill the vocation of servant.

Conclusion

By looking at the text of Isa 52:13–53:12 itself as well as its location within Isaiah, we have identified parameters around what we can, and cannot, say about the servant. The focus throughout seems to be less on who the servant is than on what the servant does. The servant is both communal and individual. In other words, within Isaiah itself, the vocation of servant is not put forth as something one, and only one, person should fulfill instead of others. Yhwh always calls others to come along and follow the path of the servant.

In the next post, I will explore how this text has been received by readers. I will begin by looking at the Old Testament. What does the rest of the Bible have to say about the servant of Isaiah?

Below are the previous posts within this series:

Part 1: Introduction

Part 2: Why Do We Read Scripture in the First Place?

Introduction

So far in this series, I’ve tried to lay the ground for exploring the identity of the suffering servant from Isaiah 52:13–53:12. In the last post, I asked why we read the Scriptures in the first place. I suggested that why we read is an important, though often underexplored question that affects everything we do with a text. If the goal of reading is to understand what happened at some point in history or to understand what some author had in his or her mind in initially writing a text, then that will shape how we read it.

Right away, things become more complex, for at least two reasons. First, these texts are a part of a tradition that has passed them down and reappropriated them. They do not simply speak on behalf of the “original” author any longer. Second, for Christians who read these texts as Scripture, alongside and above human authors is the divine Author. As I said in the last post, if God brought us these books, then they will say or do what God wants them to say or do—which might mean they go beyond what the original author could have even thought possible.

I want to explore these two matters—what I will call the traditioning of the text and the divine Author—in this post.

Texts and Traditions

Over the last several centuries, biblical scholarship has challenged the way we understand the origin and development of biblical texts. At some point, based on analysis of the text itself, scholars concluded that certain books—Isaiah being a prime example—include portions that were written by different people in different times and places. The texts, they said, were not simply products of one person who sat down and wrote the whole book.

Scholars posited that Isaiah included portions from at least two different time periods, but perhaps three: Isa 1–39, which is often called “First Isaiah”; Isa 40–55, “Second Isaiah”; and Isa 56–66, “Third Isaiah.” The first section, scholars said, was written during the life of the man Isaiah himself, especially during the eighth century B.C. The second part appears to have been written during the Babylonian exile, some 150 years after the first part. The third part was written after the return from exile, and thus at least several decades, if not more, after the second part.

For one generation of scholars, the goal of reading, then, was to understand how these parts of the text conveyed what their original authors intended them to convey to the original audience. Thus, for example, Second Isaiah (to which our target passage belongs) was read against the backdrop of Babylonian exile primarily if not exclusively. It must, and can only, make sense against that backdrop.

Along the way, however, scholarship morphed. With Isaiah, for instance, scholars realized that even if, say, Second Isaiah was written 150 years after First Isaiah, it seems clearly to have picked up First Isaiah and seen itself as an extension of it. In fact, it seems to have reshaped First Isaiah in certain ways to extend it into a newer time. We could imagine the same happening with so-called Third Isaiah, too.

In other words, even if scholarly conclusions about the origins of the parts of Isaiah are right—and these conclusions are hypothetical; we do not have a copy of Second Isaiah floating around by itself somewhere, as if it ever existed apart from First Isaiah—the later authors actively took up the older tradition and extended it into their own time. They do not seem to have been interested solely in reading First Isaiah against its original historical context; they seem to presume that it is alive and speaks to newer contexts.

The point is that if we think we can read, say, “First Isaiah” for how it speaks out of and back into the eighth century B.C., then we fail to acknowledge how what we are reading has already been shaped by an author or community that did not think about the text in those ways. The First Isaiah that we have has already been shaped by the later traditions that passed it on, and this passing on bears witness to a way of thinking about the text that cuts against the grain of the approach that attempted to read the text only for what the original author intended the original audience to hear.

The invitation, then, is to read Isaiah, the whole book, as an intentionally crafted text, beyond how and when it might have originated. This is not to say that those details regarding its origin are unimportant or unworthy of being explored. But it is to say that the very existence of the book of Isaiah as a single book invites us to take seriously what the compiler of that book intends it to say. Back to the analogy I used in the last post of a greeting card on Mother’s Day, it might be that the final compiler is using “First Isaiah” to say things that go beyond what the original author could have imagined.

Not only do individual books bear witness to a process of traditioning, but the whole canon also plays a formative role. The community that read and passed these texts down to us chose to pass individual books alongside other books. The collecting of books and the collection that resulted likewise play a role in shaping how texts within the collection function. The community saw these texts as speaking alongside and to one another. Further, the collection takes on a new, unique voice that is greater than the sum of the parts.

Because these books come to us in the form of a canon that a particular community put together and passed down, they do not come to us in isolation. Isaiah will be read alongside and in conversation with Jeremiah and Deuteronomy. For Christians, this collection also includes the New Testament. Christians cannot help but read Isaiah alongside Luke, for example. The compiling itself is an invitation to read these texts alongside one another. Because of that, the book Isaiah may say things that go beyond what any part of Isaiah or even Isaiah as a whole could say.

In sum: the idea that we would read a text to get into the original author’s mind and hear what he or she wanted to communicate to the original audience is complicated and perhaps not desirable as an ultimate goal. It’s complicated because we just do not even have the “original text” that’s supposed to enable us to get to the original author’s intent. It’s perhaps not desirable because the tradition itself has not simply passed onto us in a sterile manner a historical document. It has presumed that the text was alive and active; it therefore could be shaped to pull out its significance for newer audiences. That is, the ones who have passed the text to us do not seem to have approached the process by assuming that the goal of reading was to get back to an original author and original intent.

Divine Author

Not only does exploration of the human authors and compilers of Scripture complicate the matter, but for those who read these texts as Scripture, consideration of the divine Author also shapes and challenges how we approach the texts. In the last post, I began to explore this dimension. In particular, I said that if God has brought us these texts, then they will accomplish what God intends them to accomplish.

Beyond that, though, we might also consider the actual production of and passing down of the texts. If God was behind that process in some mysterious but real sense, then how might that affect the way we read these texts? If, for instance, God was influencing the author(s) behind what scholars have called Second Isaiah, then how would that affect the way we consider those chapters? I want to consider two effects.

First, let’s consider the traditioning process. The theological claim of inspiration, whatever else it might mean, surely indicates that God was involved, even if mysteriously, in the original writing down of the words that now belong to Isa 52:13–53:12. But God was also involved in their inclusion in the larger collection called Second Isaiah. Not only that, but God was also involved in Second Isaiah’s taking up of and shaping of First Isaiah. God then was involved in Third Isaiah’s taking up of that previous collection. God participated in the collecting of Isaiah alongside the other books that we call the Old Testament. God was even involved in bringing those books alongside what we call the New Testament.

Even beyond that, the claim of inspiration speaks to the Spirit of God’s ongoing activity in bringing together communities of readers. The Spirit is active in opening eyes and minds to understand Scriptures. God continues to speak. By calling these texts the Word of God, we should not imagine that we refer to them as a container of sorts, into which the “intent” of God was placed, an intent that is constrained by the original author or audience. These texts are alive; God speaks directly through them to people enlightened by the Spirit even today.

A couple preliminary conclusions on this first point, that God is active in the traditioning process. My comments here by no means suggest that the texts say something to modern audiences that go against the grain of the original author’s intent for his or her original audience. But I am certainly claiming that they can speak beyond what the original author intended. We must be open to these texts saying things beyond what even the original author could have imagined.

Second, I want to consider now the tension between the divine Author and the human author. If we embrace that a text such as Isa 52:13–53:12 is written by a human author and a divine Author, then how might that affect the reading of the particular passage? I would say that it invites us to consider both dimensions fully. We do not eschew consideration of the historical context into which and out of which the original author wrote. But we do not stop there. The text also comes fully from God.

If the text comes fully from God, then we cannot avoid discussing God’s relationship to time. If God is not limited by time in the way that we humans are (this is surely a complex conversation that goes beyond my expertise and time in this post), then it is possible that theological reality could supersede chronological reality. If God was inspiring the writing of Isa 52:13–53:12 from God’s existence outside of time, it is possible that chronology could collapse into theological reality.

I know that last paragraph probably didn’t make much sense to you; I’m not sure it made sense to me! Let me try to illustrate. Chronologically, Adam and Abraham and Isaiah all came before Jesus. No one denies that. Therefore, chronologically speaking, Jesus comes after them. Therefore, a perspective that is bound to our experience of chronology could only say that Jesus was shaped by those earlier figures.

However, in the church, our luminaries have realized how this breaks down once we invoke the divine Author. From God’s perspective, though the man Jesus is chronologically subsequent to Adam or Abraham or Isaiah, he is before them in the mind and perspective of God. So, though we might talk about Jesus as the “New Adam” in the sense that he comes after Adam, chronologically, in another sense, he comes before Adam. He is the template of the image of God according to which Adam was created. Christ came before, in the mind and perspective of God.

I’ll come back to these things and hope to clarify them more. For now, my main point is this: chronologically speaking, the author of Isa 52:13–53:12 could not have been thinking of the man Jesus, since Jesus came after him. However, if God was influencing and inspiring the writing of Isa 52:13–53:12, it is possible that God was thinking of Jesus.

If nothing else, my point here is simply that once we invoke a divine Author, we are invited to think beyond mere chronology. God is not limited to our experience of the flow of time. Therefore, God could be intending things in texts that go beyond what the original author could have intended because of the constraint that time places on him.

Conclusion

In this post, I have attempted to show that an approach to a text that aims to get to the original author and the original intent for the original audience is problematized both by our understanding of the development of these texts within the tradition as well as our consideration of the mind of God behind these texts. Sure, we might ask, “What did or could the original author of Isa 52:13–53:12 intended?” But we cannot stop there.

Introduction

In the first post (found here), I introduced this series, which will explore the interpretation of Isaiah 52:13–53:12 from a Christian perspective. In this post, I want to begin looking at the goal of interpretation. Like many activities in life, so with interpretation: we rarely stop to ask why and, therefore, how. Why are we reading Scripture? And how might that affect how we read it?

Claiming to read the Bible as Scripture is already a general answer to why we read, and, in turn, it affects how we read. Coming to Isa 52:13–53:12 with a commitment to reading the text as a Christian provides a particular aim for reading and affects which methods and strategies we will utilize in reading. These are the matters that I begin to explore in this post.

Reading for History?

This question often goes unasked, yet it never goes unanswered. We always bring with us to the text a goal for reading it. So, then, why do Christians read the Bible?

For many readers, the goal is primarily, if not exclusively, to learn about “what really happened.” The last few hundred years in the west have been marked by a preoccupation with history. This is true across the spectrum. Some read, say, the Gospel of Mark and conclude that it does not line up well with what happened in history. Others read the same Gospel and conclude that it does line up—it must line up. What is important to see is that both groups are playing the same game, the game of history. They just play for opposing teams.

With a text like Isa 52:13–53:12, the first question from this perspective is, What did the author think in his mind? What was the author trying to communicate to his audience? The assumption is that what we want to get from the text is some point that is anchored in history. The person who wrote this passage was speaking to a particular audience facing a particular situation.

We stand at a distance, eavesdropping over their shoulders. At best, we are trying to comprehend what they are saying to each other in their particularities. Perhaps what they say can have some significance for us, but only after we have carefully distanced ourselves from it. We are time travelers; and as we have learned from all the time-traveling movies over the years, we dare not interfere with the past. We are simply witnesses of it.

With this particular text, we know that whoever wrote it stood, chronologically, before the birth of Jesus, and therefore could not have possibly known of Jesus, much less intended readers to think that the text speaks of him. Thus, at most, we could say that the text in some sense “applies” to Jesus.

The main point: if the why that brings us to the text is to uncover history, then we have already prepared ourselves to find certain things and to rule out others.

Another Way?

But is that the only why for reading Scripture? Must our goal in reading Scripture be the discovery of history? I answer: no.

(To get ahead of a possible misunderstanding: I am not saying that we should not concern ourselves with history, that the biblical text does not correspond to history, etc. I think that these things are unavoidable. But more on that later.)

Why else might we read Scripture, if not for history? I want to begin by providing a few general comments and examples. Let’s just start with the obvious. What does it mean to read, say, Psalm 23 for history? Does this psalm intend to provide its audience with access to some historical event? That’s just a strange question to ask of poetry.

Does the psalm envision some sort of historical experience with God? Surely. Let’s imagine that the psalmist has some specific experience of God’s gracious shepherding and providence in mind. But even then, by reflecting on and communicating about that experience in poetry, the psalmist has already invited readers to see God’s gracious shepherding and providence as transhistorical—that is, the psalmist wants readers to envision God’s kindness as being something that certainly shows up in specific historical moments but is not limited to any one historical moment.

Beyond that, the fact that the psalm is poetry itself already suggests that the intended goal of the psalm is more than history. Poetry is not intended to communicate historical information. Again, approaching the psalm primarily with historical questions in mind is simply foreign and strange.

We could speak similarly about law. What does it mean to read law/instruction historically? This might mean comparing to other cultures and their laws. It might mean considering specific historical situations that would’ve led to or resulted from the laws. But even then, we can imagine that the main goal of law is not to convey history.

Along with these obvious challenges to prioritizing history when reading the Bible, we might consider another. Even when we are reading something like, say, a story that talks about specific people, places, and events, we read for more than history. A story is never “just history.” It’s always an interpretation of an event. The one telling the story is attempting to provide listeners with a particular way of understanding an event. The more important question, then, is, Why is this person telling this story?

This leads me to the main reason why I want to pursue another purpose for reading. For Christians, the main reason for which we even have access to these books is theological: God has brought them to us. That’s what holds them together. We do not read them simply because they exist in history. The value of these particular books is not historical. Other books exist; why focus our attention only on these?

God has gifted Scripture to us. We should be concerned, then, with asking why God has brought us this gift, what God intends to accomplish through it. Yes, real, human authors situated in real times and places produced these texts. But what ultimately brings us Christians to them is that God has brought them to us.

To put it more bluntly: these texts will serve the purpose that God wants them to serve.

A Gift from God

Let me use an analogy to highlight what I’m trying to say. Mother’s Day is rapidly approaching. Let’s imagine that you go to Target and search for a card for your mother. You find one that includes a message that you think is appropriate for your mother. You deliver it.

When you give that card to your mother, she will not ask, “What was the history behind this card? I need to know who wrote it and what prompted them to write it.” Her main concern will not be with the historical situation that prompted the original writing of the card.

Now, pursuing the historical situation that prompted the writing of the card is a possible pursuit. Someone did write this card. Let’s imagine that you decide that you want to track all of that down. Let’s imagine that you find the author; we will call her Lisa.

You look Lisa up; you email her to ask about the card. She tells you that she had a decent relationship with her mother. When she wrote the content for this particular card, she was thinking of one memory she had from a vacation with her mother during the summer when she was fifteen.

How she came to the writing of the card was not particularly glamorous: she had majored in creative writing in college. She had several freelance jobs that she performed to try to make ends meet. She didn’t particularly like writing cards, but it actually paid. She felt at times as if she was selling her soul just to pay the bills.

All of that might be fine and true. But we must ask again: is that the only way to engage the content of the card? Presumably, none of that actually matters much for understanding what you intended by giving the card to your mother. The purpose for which you intended the card was not historical. It was intended to communicate your care for your mother.

Lisa didn’t know you or your mom when she wrote the card. You could not have been on her mind at all. She couldn’t have envisioned what, specifically, you intended to communicate through it to your mom. Yet, because you have chosen to use Lisa’s words for your communicative purpose, they can now serve the end that you intend them to serve, even if that extends beyond Lisa’s intentions.

With this analogy in mind, we might see some correspondence to the point I’m trying to make in this post. Yes, real, human authors produced the texts of Scripture. They had real intentions in mind; they had historical realities that shaped and constrained what they were saying. What matters primarily for those of us who see Scripture as a gift given from God to us, though, is what God intended in giving these texts to us. And it’s quite possible that God intended more than the original authors could have intended in their own words.

Conclusion

This series will likely move slowly because of the stakes and the issues involved. Here, I’ve only begun to head in that direction. My main goal in this post is to call attention to the importance of determining why we read Scripture, in the first place. This is crucial because, as I’ve said, the why will determine the how. Just as with the example of the Mother’s Day card, so with Scripture: why we come to Scripture will affect what we do once we get there.

Ultimately, we will be asking, What is God saying or doing through Isa 52:13–53:12? Today’s post might prepare us to expect that though the historical author had intentions in mind and contextual constraints on what he could have known, his words might not be limited to those intentions or by those constraints. If God appropriates his words, then his words can say more than he event intended.

Introduction

In his commentary on Isaiah 52:13–53:12, Brevard Childs says, “It is hardly necessary to remind the reader that this passage is probably the most contested chapter in the Old Testament.” The interpretive challenges of this passage, often referred to as the “Suffering Servant” passage, range from establishing what the words of the text itself are to how to interpret this text theologically from Christian or Jewish perspectives.

At the same time, it is hardly necessary to remind readers that this passage is one of the most central chapters for Christian readings of the Old Testament. It looms large in the imaginations of Christian readers as they reflect on the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus. In fact, as I’m writing this post in the Easter season, it was only recently when I saw countless social media posts speaking about the death of Jesus by way of quoting parts of this passage.

All of that is to say: for Christian readers, interpreting this text is both daunting and unavoidable. Christians might be tempted either to avoid this text altogether because of the interpretive quandaries or rush too quickly into reading it as speaking of Jesus’s death without considering those same interpretive difficulties.

In this series of posts, I aim to hold both of those pressures together. I want to look at the interpretive issues that must be addressed, and I hope to do so in a way that is accessible to everyone. I also want to wrestle with how a particularly Christian perspective on this text can shed light on it. In all of that, I hope to avoid oversimplifying or overcomplicating. I’m going to do my best to model interpretive and intellectual humility. If/when I fall short, I ask for grace!

Challenges for Interpretation: Establishing the Text

We begin by looking at the text itself. And already, we run into complications. Not only is this text complicated to translate—it includes unique Hebrew words as well as strange forms—but it is also challenging from a text-critical perspective.

In a previous post entitled “Did God Finish Creation on the Sixth Day or the Seventh Day?”, I shared some of what is called textual criticism. Essentially, we have multiple ancient versions of the biblical text. Textual criticism is the process of comparing those texts and attempting to establish the text that one will use for translation and interpretation.

Unfortunately, Isa 52:13–53:12 presents several challenges here. In a class I once had on textual criticism, the text with which I worked for the final paper was this exact passage. The goal of the assignment was to identify and analyze all the text-critical issues. The final paper was forty pages! The issue is complex.

Given the nature of this series, I am not going to wrestle with all of those issues or even provide my own translation. Instead, I will work with the existing English translations. This is because (a) the translation of the text will not be the focus of my discussion and (b) I do not want to present an obstacle to readers who are unable to access those discussions. However, I did want to mention the issues here. I will discuss relevant translation issues along the way, as needed.

Challenges for Interpretation: The Goal of Interpretation

The main challenge on which I plan to focus is this: what is the goal of interpretation? How we answer that question will affect everything. Are we reading with the goal of uncovering “history”? Are we reading to discover what was in the mind of the historical person who wrote Isaiah? Are we reading to discern what was in the mind of God in producing this text and passing it down through the community? All the above? Something else?

The issue is significant. For many, the answer seems obvious, though “obvious” in diametrically opposed ways! For some, the goal is obviously to get into the mind of the historical person who wrote the text—what was he thinking about when he wrote this; what could he have been thinking? One implication, for this crowd: he could not have been thinking about Jesus, a man who didn’t live until centuries later. Therefore, any interpretation that sees Jesus in the text is misguided or limited, at best.

For others, the goal is obviously to read and understand this text in light of Jesus—the text so obviously and naturally reads as if it’s about the experience of Jesus, they say. Who else could it possibly have been about? Therefore, we cannot but read this text as pointing to something beyond. How we make sense of the details is to be determined, but we know that this text is about Jesus.

Do you see the conundrum?

Alongside this challenge and overlapping with it is the issue of readerly communities. This text is read within Christian communities, yes; but it is also a part of Jewish Scripture. Surely non-Christian Jewish audiences do not see this text as being about Jesus. But how do they read this text? Does the community to which one belongs affect the way one reads a text?

Following from this last point is the reality that this text is a part of Scripture. That is, in some sense, it is read within the worship context, with all the aims of such a reading. In other words, what does this text intend to do? Beyond the issue of interpreting the identity of this figure, what is this text trying to accomplish in its readers?

Conclusion

To reiterate what I said in the introduction, this topic is challenging, and the path forward is rocky. In this series, I will do my best to address these questions. I will be taking interpretive stands and presenting one way forward. I do not presume that everyone will agree with me! I am also open to conversation.

In the next post, I will begin to respond to the question, What is the goal of interpretation? I hope you’ll join me.

Introduction

This is the fourth post in a series of posts (here are the past posts: Part 1: Does an Animal Need to Die Instead of You?, Part 2: Does an Animal’s Death Address God’s Anger Toward Sin?, and Part 3: Feeding God). So far, I’ve said that the common understanding of the sacrificial system that many readers, especially evangelical Christians, bring to the text is skewed. The sacrificial system is not about dealing with God’s anger toward sin, it’s not about forgiveness of sins, it’s not really even about sin. Something else is going on.

I looked in the last post at what the sacrificial system is about. It is ultimately about communion with God. It’s a unique experience of God’s presence, marked by a meal—one in which even the one who brings the offering shares. It’s a meal with God. It’s an act of worship.

But what about sin? What about uncleanness? Surely readers aren’t inventing all of those things out of thin air. What’s the deal? In this post, I want to explore another component of the sacrificial system. I want to look at how the sacrificial system deals with uncleanness—what the problem is and what the solution is.

Much of what I have said and will say in this series of posts is highly indebted to those who have gone before me. In many ways, I am simply trying to condense what has been written and perhaps make it digestible to others. Here are a couple works that I would recommend consulting if you are interested in going into more depth.

Andrew Remington Rillera, The Lamb of the Free: Recovering the Varied Sacrificial Understandings of Jesus’ Death (Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 2024), ISBN: 978-1666703047. 356 pp.

Jacob Milgrom, Leviticus: A Book of Ritual and Ethics, Continental Commentaries (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2004), ISBN: 978-0800695149. 408 pp.

Being Unclean

One of the most likely places where modern readers’ understanding of the sacrificial system breaks apart is regarding concepts of cleanness and uncleanness. Evangelical Christians in the Western world tend to assume significant overlap between unclean and sinful/unrighteous. Someone who is unclean is sinful. Therefore, when they read of sacrifices that deal with uncleanness, they imagine that the central issue being addressed is sinfulness.

This is unfortunately a significant misunderstanding of cleanness/uncleanness. The problem is exacerbated by the fact that there is some overlap. It’s just not to the extent that the modern audience assumes and it’s not addressed by the sacrificial system in the way the audience imagines.

Let’s put it this way: sinfulness does cause uncleanness, but uncleanness is not only, or even primarily, attached to sinfulness.

What, then, is uncleanness? This is one of those realities that is just quite foreign to modern audiences, though perhaps not as foreign as we might imagine. Uncleanness is mainly a ritual category. It’s about worship space. When something is unclean, it means that it’s not suitable for the sort of encounter with God’s presence that is supposed to occur in that particular place.

One doesn’t have to look hard into Leviticus to see the distinction between sinfulness and uncleanness. Leviticus 12 indicates that a woman is unclean after childbirth. Instructions are provided for restoring her cleanness. As far as I know, there have been no serious attempts throughout Christian history to argue that a woman is sinful because of childbirth. Yet, here in Leviticus she is deemed unclean.

This is not a moral judgment; it is a ritual judgment. She’s not being shamed, she’s not deserving of punishment. It’s a statement that only makes sense in a world in which ritual uncleanness is a reality. As Rillera points out, throughout Leviticus, those things that cause uncleanness tend to be associated with issues of birth, sickness, or death—that is, the things that we humans experience, but God does not.

The point here: the problem being identified is not sinfulness. Therefore, the solution provided does not deal with consequences deserved for sin. That’s just the wrong framework. The problem is ritual uncleanness. Whatever solution is provided, then, must be dealing with removing the contaminant.

Offerings for Uncleanness

As I said in the previous post in this series, the focus of the whole system is to provide a unique and holy space for a special encounter with God. How, then, does uncleanness play into that? Uncleanness on people and on the sanctuary prevents this sort of encounter with God from happening.

This understanding overlaps with what people outside Israel thought, too. Again, this concept might feel foreign to us, but it certainly was not for Israel and its neighbors. When the people of Israel received instructions for how to deal with uncleanness, they would have had a more suitable framework available to them for making sense of it.

What might surprise modern readers further is learning that the primary issue with uncleanness isn’t even that people become unclean. Rather, the issue was that certain actions or experiences that people had brought uncleanness onto the altar and the worship space. The altar, the “table” on which the offerer would place the “food,” had become contaminated. And, perhaps even more strongly for us modern readers than ancient ones, we know how important it is to eat on a clean table in a clean restaurant.

How, then, is the problem addressed? Here is where animal sacrifice comes in. But as I said previously, sacrifice of an animal is not primarily about the animal’s death. The actual death of the animal was as quick and painless as possible. The text never dwells on the death itself. Instead, as we have already seen, the text focuses on the animal’s blood. Why?

Here, again, is where things get strange and seem foreign to us modern readers. For Israel, blood was life (Lev 17:11). It was pure life. Living things have blood coursing through their veins; therefore, blood is the source of life. The logic, then, was this: blood from a clean animal can decontaminate the unclean altar. An animal had to die, but not because something deserves death. Rather, it had to die so that its blood, its life, could be put on the altar to purify it.

The last comment I made leads back to what I said just a few paragraphs ago: the primary issue wasn’t even uncleanness on people, it was uncleanness on the altar and worship space. As Rillera thoroughly demonstrates, we can prove this simply by looking at where the blood is placed in these rituals. It is never placed on people. If uncleanness on people was the primary problem, then the blood, the life, would be placed on people.

But (thankfully!) that is not what happens. Where is the blood placed? It is sprinkled on the altar. It is put on the altar to decontaminate it. Once the blood has decontaminated the altar, the altar is now safe and clean, ready for the more central purpose for which it was created: to be the table on which the meal is placed as a part of the communion experience between God and people.

Dealing with Sin?

Implied in all that I’ve said so far is this: sacrificing the animal to deal with uncleanness is not about an animal dying to experience the punishment that I deserve. Again, that’s just not the logic behind the sacrificial system.

One further point solidifies this conclusion. As Rillera points out, throughout all the instructions for the sacrificial system, there is no ritual that deals with the uncleanness caused by what he calls “moral impurity”—that is, uncleanness that comes from things such as adultery, idolatry, or murder. If someone committed murder, for instance, there was no animal, no offering that could deal with that uncleanness. The system wasn’t designed to deal with it.

How, then, could they possibly deal with that uncleanness? Was there any solution? The only possible solution was falling on the mercy of the Lord and asking the Lord to make one clean. This can be seen, for instance, in Psalm 51, which has been attached to David, after the sexual sin with Bathsheba and the murder of Uriah.

In that chapter, what does the psalmist do? Does he say, “Let me offer X so that I can deal with my uncleanness”? No. All he can do is cry out to the Lord, “Create in me a clean heart.” His only hope of dealing with the uncleanness he has brought is for the Lord to wash the uncleanness away.

Let’s conduct a thought experiment. Let’s imagine that, as is often assumed by modern audiences, the sacrificial system is about killing an animal to deal with my sin and its consequences. And let’s assume it works: I kill an animal, and immediately my consequences for sinfulness are removed.

Apart from all the gaps that emerge from the reality that most of the things that, say, Leviticus talks about are things that we do not think are sinful (see childbirth, above), another deep problem arises: I don’t really need God to deal with my sinfulness. I just offer an animal, and I’m guaranteed to receive pardon. In a sense, the system now functions apart from (above?) God. I can just continue to offer sacrifices.

Conclusion

The Levitical sacrificial system is just not mainly about sin; it’s about ritual uncleanness. It’s also not mainly about uncleanness on people; it’s about uncleanness on the sanctuary space. When it deals with sin, it does so in the sense that it removes uncleanness caused by sin. It does not deal with sinfulness itself, and it doesn’t deal with every sort of sinfulness.

If the goal of the sacrificial system was to create a sacred encounter between God and people, then this other type of sacrifice was about bringing the life of an animal, the blood of an animal, into the sanctuary to decontaminate it from uncleanness to prepare for that sacred encounter.

Introduction

If you grew up in evangelical circles in the United States, especially in the 1980s or 1990s, then you know the song: “Zacchaeus was a wee little man and a wee little man was he…” Zacchaeus, desperate to see Jesus even though the crowds tried to prevent him, notoriously climbs a tree. Surprisingly, Jesus calls out to him, says that he needs to go to Zacchaeus’s house.

In this post, I want to focus especially on one translation issue in the text. The issue is one that dramatically affects how one understands the whole passage. It is, in other words, a perfect demonstration of an important reality: translation is interpretation. That is, how translators handle a particular phrase in this passage likely says something about the interpretive conclusions that they have brought with them to the text already.

The issue is found in Luke 19:8. The question is, Does Zacchaeus share with Jesus the actions that he plans to take in the future after having encountered Jesus, or is something else going on?

During a class session last night, we talked about this text. A couple students suggested I put the comments in a Substack post, so…here it is! This post is essentially a summary of and reflection on the commentary of Joel Green at this point. If you do not already have his commentary on Luke, I cannot recommend it enough. It has arguably been the most formative book in my own journey.

Joel B. Green, The Gospel of Luke, New International Commentary on the New Testament (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1997), ISBN: 978-0802823151, 1020 pp.

Zacchaeus, the Rich Tax Collector

Before arriving at v. 8, I want to summarize the first seven verses. Luke first introduces Zacchaeus to readers as a “ruler among tax collectors” and as “very rich” (CEB). For casual readers, these designations might not mean much. However, for close readers of Luke, both terms have been heavily loaded by this point in the Gospel.

Tax collectors have made multiple appearances in the Gospel so far (3:12; 5:27–32; 7:29; 15:1–2; 18:9–14). In fact, in the previous chapter a tax collector shows up in a parable. The parable, found in 18:9–14, tells of a Pharisee and a tax collector. There, the Pharisee that Jesus identifies represents those who “had convinced themselves that they were righteous and looked on everyone else with disgust” (v. 9). The Pharisee prays, from the center of the temple, “God, I thank you that I’m not like everyone else—crooks, evildoers, adulterers—or even like this tax collector” (v. 11). The tax collector stands at a distance. He says only the following prayer: “God, show mercy to me, a sinner” (v. 13).

In sum, tax collectors, though viewed negatively by many in their world, regularly respond positively to Jesus in Luke. Readers surely would call to mind the parable of the previous chapter when they come to Zacchaeus in Luke 19. When readers see that Zacchaeus is a tax collector, they might imagine that he’s the very sort of person who will respond appropriately to Jesus.

However, Luke also identifies him as rich. Unlike tax collectors, those identified as rich regularly struggle to respond positively to Jesus. In fact, in the immediately preceding chapter, a man comes to Jesus with a question: “what must I do to obtain eternal life?” (18:18). The man indicates that he has upheld the commandments since his youth. Jesus replies, “There’s one more thing. Sell everything you own and distribute the money to the poor. Then you will have treasure in heaven. And come, follow me” (v. 22). His response? Luke says, “When he heard these words, the man became sad because he was extremely rich” (v. 23, emphasis added). This prompts Jesus’s statement, “It’s very hard for the wealthy to enter God’s kingdom!” (v. 24).

So, when readers now experience a conflict: he is a tax collector, which, in Luke, typically means that he will respond positively; but he is also a rich man, which might suggest that he will struggle to respond appropriately to Jesus. The portrait is mixed. In some way, Zacchaeus’s response will break down easy assumptions that tax collector = positive and rich = negative. Luke doesn’t seem to work with such simple binaries.

Zacchaeus, the Little Man?

How, then, does Zacchaeus act? Well, Luke doesn’t leave readers in suspense. Immediately, Luke narrates that Zacchaeus was “trying to see who Jesus is” (v. 3, my translation). At this point, we arrive at the detail that has most captured the attention of readers and tellers of this story: that Zacchaeus was “short” or “small.”

Here is v. 3 in the CEB: “He was trying to see who Jesus was, but, being a short man, he couldn’t because of the crowd.” Joel Green highlights the problems with a translation that implies that his physical height is the issue. First, the Greek text may be speak not of shortness but of relative youth. But even if the text intended to indicate that he was short, he surely would not have trouble finding a view, since he’s a rich man and a ruler.

Second, the phrase “on account of the crowd” is presented with the force of cause: it is not simply that the crowd happened to be there, preventing his view. The crowd is an obstacle; it’s an active force trying to prevent him from seeing Jesus. Later in the passage, Luke tells us more about the crowd’s perspective of Zacchaeus. In v. 7, once Jesus has gone to Zacchaeus’s house, they say, “He has gone to be the guest of one who is a sinner.”

According to Green, it is because they have identified him as a sinner that they refused to let him see Jesus. Green says, “Whether short or young, then, Zacchaeus is presented as a person of diminutive status in Jericho, thus rendering him as a member of the unenviable association of the lowly in ch. 18, along with a widow, a tax collector, children, and a blind beggar.”

How much more significant, then, is Zacchaeus’s action: he climbs a tree, an act that would be shameful for a man of his prominence, all with the desire to see who Jesus is.

Zacchaeus: A Conversion? Or Something Else?

I now want to talk about v. 8. The verse takes place in Zacchaeus’s house, where he and Jesus are present together. Below are two representative translations, with the contested portion italicized:

“Look, half of my possessions, Lord, I will give to the poor; and if I have defrauded anyone of anything, I will pay back four times as much.” (NRSV)

“Look, Lord, I give half of my possessions to the poor. And if I have cheated anyone, I repay them four times as much.” (CEB)

Do you see the issue? In the NRSV (as well as some other modern English translations), the verbs used by Zacchaeus are translated as future—they indicate something that he is going to do. In the CEB (as well as some others), the verbs are translated as present—they show what Zacchaeus is already doing.

What is going on? When a conflict like this exists, it’s usually because of one of the following two options: (a) either the translations have decided to translate the same word differently, or (b) they are reading slightly different versions of the original language. In this case, the difference is explained by option A: translators make different decisions about how to handle the same Greek word.

That prompts us to ask: what’s going on in the Greek? Here, the two verbs that Zacchaeus uses are in the present tense. If one were to encounter these two Greek verbs “in the wild,” so to speak, out there in some other text with different context, they would naturally translate them, “I give . . . I repay.”

So, why translate them as future at all?

One explanation, according to Green, identifies these verbs rightly as present, but designates them as examples of the “futuristic present” or of having the nuance of “present resolve.” This means that though they are technically present tense, they function by pointing toward future action.

In this translation, essentially, Zacchaeus is talking about what he is going to do now that he has encountered Jesus. This is, quite literally, his come-to-Jesus moment. He is being converted from one who defrauded and cheated to one who no longer will do those things and will right his wrongs.

But the question remains: is that what the Greek is trying to say? Behind this question is another: why do interpreters feel the need to reach for the “futuristic present” or present with “future resolve,” in the first place?

I think that there is a clear answer to this question: the more straightforward reading of the text does not fit neatly with the theological framework that translators bring with them to the text. In those versions that opt for a future translation—I will give back, I will repay—Zacchaeus first encounters Jesus and is “saved,” and then he acts differently.

But for the more straightforward reading of the Greek, a different picture emerges: Zacchaeus is not speaking of what he will do in the future. He’s speaking about what he is already doing and plans to continue doing. That is, Zacchaeus is not being converted here, if by “converted” we mean moving from being one who defrauds to one who repays. Instead, before this episode, in some moment in Zacchaeus’s life outside the narrative, he had changed his ways.

Now, he presents to Jesus not his plan for future change but rather evidence of present change. We might paraphrase in this way: “Look, I’m already giving half my possessions to the poor, and if I defrauded anyone in the past, I’m already repaying them four times over and will continue to do so.”

Here’s how Green summarizes the matter:

Jesus’ reference to “salvation” (v. 9), then, signifies Zacchaeus’s vindication and restoration to the community of God’s people; he is not an outsider, after all, but has evidenced through his economic practices his kinship with Abraham . . . Zacchaeus thus joins the growing roll of persons whose “repentance” lies outside the narrative, who appear on the margins of the people of God, and yet who possess insight into and commitment to the values of Jesus’ mission that are exemplary.

Conclusion

As this discussion has highlighted, our translations, for better and for worse, already put our theological commitments on display. The Greek text of Luke 19:8 is actually quite straightforward; no complex grammar or syntax is present. The only real reason to provide a future translation of the key verbs is because one has already determined that the text cannot or should not be talking about what Zacchaeus is already doing. And that determination is likely based on the idea that Zacchaeus must first encounter Jesus and then his actions can meaningfully change.

In Luke, though, the process need not go in that direction. Zacchaeus, prior to meeting Jesus in Jericho that day, had already changed his ways. He now presents to Jesus as evidence of his changed commitments the actions that he is already carrying out and plans to keep carrying out.

In a sense, though, we could still say that Zacchaeus’s actions do follow from an encounter with Jesus. At some point outside the narrative, Zacchaeus became aware to some extent of who Jesus is and the sort of actions that mark Jesus and those who would become his followers. And at some point, this transformed him.

In Luke 19, though, he experiences the fullness of salvation not as the cause of his changed actions but as the consequence of his already-present demonstration of “fruit worthy of repentance” (3:8). Zacchaeus has already changed his life. But Zacchaeus desires to know who Jesus is.

Introduction

We in the western part of the church will be celebrating the resurrection of Jesus this weekend. Because of that, I want to consider the significance of the death of Jesus. Of course, we all know what Jesus’s death means. It’s clear and obvious. Right?

In this post, I want to look at the way we often talk about Jesus’s death. Then, I want to consider one point of view from within the New Testament that might challenge some of the assumptions we bring with us to the conversation.

This post is, in many ways, related to some other posts I’ve made. See especially Jesus Died “For All”? and Romans 6:23 Doesn’t Say What You Think It Says!. Further, for a more extensive conversation around the issue, I would recommend the previous series from Joel B. Green, New Testament professor, the first article of which can be found here.

Common Assumptions

If I were to ask a Christian walking down the street in the United States what Jesus’s death means, there’s a good chance that they would reply in the following way: Jesus’s death was the sacrifice that paid the penalty I deserved for my sin, and because of his sacrifice, my sins can be forgiven by God. The result of Jesus’s death is that I’m “cleared,” I’m declared “not guilty,” I can be reconciled to God.

But where does that come from? In all likelihood, the same person would list for me several different passages of Scripture. But behind all of these passages are some assumptions and some conclusions that already determine how we understand those passages.

One of the biggest assumptions is that all biblical texts talking about the death of Jesus blend together into one “meaning,” one point, which depends on a criminal justice metaphor: a righteous judge, a legal system that requires death as a punishment for sin, a requirement that the penalty be paid.

Here is where the problem creeps in. In the language I used above to try to capture what this hypothetical Christian would say to my question about what Jesus’s death means, I used the following words: sacrifice, paid, penalty, forgiven, reconciled. Even with only these words in front of us (I could’ve added more), do you see the problem? The problem is this: each of these words actually comes from different, unrelated metaphors.

What do I mean? Well, sacrifice is worship language; paid is economic; penalty might be criminal justice; forgiven could be economic or relational; reconciled is relational. All of these could be valid ways of reflecting on the significance of Jesus’s death. I’m certainly not questioning that. What I am challenging is blending them all together.

When, say, a New Testament author talks about Jesus’s death as sacrifice, they are invoking the Old Testament sacrificial system, which is all about worship (see my ongoing series here). Sacrifice is not a criminal justice word, it’s not a relational word, it’s not an economic word, etc. When they talk about Jesus’s death as payment or ransom, they are invoking an economic metaphor. Payment or ransom is not a worship word, it’s not a relational word, it’s not a criminal justice word, etc.

You see where I am going, I hope. The bigger point is this: the New Testament authors do not think of Jesus’s death as having only one meaning. They think of it having virtually endless meaning. Because of that, they can approach it from many different, non-overlapping angles. They can approach it, say, from a worship angle. Then, returning to square one, they can explore it from an economic angle. And so on.

A problem arises when we try to condense all the separate paths or metaphors into one. Not only does meaning break down, but it becomes misconstrued. To think of a criminal justice metaphor when talking about sacrifice breaks both metaphors down. We should at least say that mixing the metaphors can become dangerous.

Back to the hypothetical Christian’s response to my prompt. They call attention to many right and good metaphors for thinking about the death of Jesus. However, in my experience, they often have collapsed them all into one, with the result that the unique significance of each metaphor has been missed and a Frankenstein-esque metaphor that combines the body parts of each unique metaphor stands in place.

With all of this preliminary discussion in mind, I want to turn now to looking at one specific metaphor that Paul uses: the relational metaphor.

Reconciled to God: 2 Corinthians 5

I want to look at one example, 2 Cor 5:18–20 (CEB):

All of these new things are from God, who reconciled us to himself through Christ and who gave us the ministry of reconciliation. In other words, God was reconciling the world to himself through Christ, by not counting people’s sins against them. He has trusted us with the message of reconciliation. So we are ambassadors who represent Christ. God is negotiating with you through us. We beg you as Christ’s representatives, “Be reconciled to God!”

At the center of this passage is reconciliation.

In 2 Corinthians, this seems to be Paul’s focus. In the cross, God reconciles. But what stands out to you about how he discusses reconciliation?

To begin, what sort of word is reconciliation? What metaphorical framework does that word speak to? It’s not a sacrificial word; it’s not an economic word. It’s also not a word that has anything to do with legal issues or with crime and punishment. It’s a relational word.

Think of a relationship in your life. What might cause the relationship to become strained or possibly even broken? Surely you wouldn’t say, “The relationship was strained because the other person broke a law that merited a punishment.” (I suppose someone breaking the law might cause your relationship with them to strain…)

Breaking of laws and merited punishment—this sort of language is simply not relational language. No, in all likelihood, you might say, “They lost my trust,” “They were acting in ways that were unhealthy for me,” etc. These are the sorts of things that are more at home in relationships.

When a relationship is broken, there is the possibility of reconciliation. What is involved in reconciliation? It surely involves the one harmed being willing to reconcile. They have to be willing to move beyond the thing that caused trust to be broken in the first place. They have to determine that, in some sense, they will not hold up the thing that caused relational strain. They can heal beyond it.

By talking of reconciliation, Paul is invoking relational dynamics. He wants his audience to think about relationships, not about legal infringements and due penalties. He could talk about those things elsewhere if he wanted, but that’s simply not what he has in mind here in 2 Cor 5.

Notice a few important details about how he talks about reconciliation. He emphasizes that reconciliation is from God. God reconciled us to himself through Christ. God was reconciling the world to himself. Reconciliation is God-initiated.

Most important for our purposes is v. 19. It says that God worked toward reconciliation “in Christ.” And he did this by “not counting people’s sins against them.”

What you might hear (again because of the common understanding of Jesus’s death) is that because of Jesus’ death, God no longer looks angrily at our trespasses.

I don’t think that Paul is saying that. What is he saying?

He’s saying that even in sending Christ, God already demonstrated that he was not counting sins against people. Christ’s death was the fullest demonstration of the fact that God was not counting their sins against them. But his death wasn’t what allowed God to decide to forgive. Christ’s death itself was already a demonstration that God had decided to forgive.

The sins in mind aren’t legal infractions. They are relational infractions. In sending Christ, then, God has demonstrated his willingness and desire to forgive. God didn’t need Jesus to die for God to want to forgive.

Related to that comment, Paul does not say that the reconciliation needed is on God’s end, that God needs to be appeased and swayed to think that reconciliation should happen. Rather, it was the world that needed to be reconciled to God. People do not need to pursue God and convince God that reconciliation is a good thing. God had to pursue people to show them that he wanted to reconcile with them.

Conclusion

In 2 Cor 5:18–20, Paul reflects on Jesus’s significance in relational terms. He does not have a criminal justice system, with its laws and due penalties, in mind at all. When we shift metaphorical registers, it changes the way we see the problem and its solution.

If the problem is relational fracture, the solution is not that one must pay a penalty. I assure you, from personal experience, if/when you break trust with a friend or a spouse, the brokenness cannot be healed by paying a fine. No, the solution involves both parties expressing their desire to forgive, rebuild trust, and recommit to one another.

In thinking of Jesus in this framework, Paul expresses the solution thus: in Christ, God already demonstrated that he wasn’t going to hold our sins against us. He was willing to forgive. It wasn’t Jesus’s death that caused God not to hold our sins against us. It was God’s very act of sending Jesus that demonstrated that he had already determined not to hold our past sins against us.

Introduction

In the first two posts in this series (Part 1 can be found here and Part 2 can be found here), I identified what is perhaps the most common understanding of the sacrificial system held by Christians, namely, that it’s a system designed to deal with human sin, and God’s anger toward that sin, by having an animal receive the punishment of death that humans deserve. I challenged this perspective from a couple different angles. I discussed how the sacrificial system is not intended to address God’s anger toward sin. I also discussed how sacrifice isn’t about an animal dying.

I want to pivot now to talk about what the system is. In short, there are two broad types of sacrifice. One type, the main type, was brought as a gift to God, often with the intent of sharing in that food gift in a special experience of communion with God. But because of uncleanness brought onto the sanctuary space, another type was performed to make the place ritually clean so that the special communion/meal with God could take place. Today, I’ll discuss the first type, the gift type.

Much of what I have said and will say in this series of posts is highly indebted to those who have gone before me. In many ways, I am simply trying to condense what has been written and perhaps make it digestible to others. Here are a couple works that I would recommend consulting if you are interested in going into more depth.

Andrew Remington Rillera, The Lamb of the Free: Recovering the Varied Sacrificial Understandings of Jesus’ Death (Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 2024), ISBN: 978-1666703047. 356 pp.

Jacob Milgrom, Leviticus: A Book of Ritual and Ethics, Continental Commentaries (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2004), ISBN: 978-0800695149. 408 pp.

Gift Offering: The Burnt Offering

I want to return to Lev 1. As I indicated in my first post, Lev 1 does not present a sacrifice that the LORD introduces to the people and then commands them to observe. Rather, the LORD is speaking to people who already knew about offerings of this sort and apparently already participated in them and would continue to be inclined to do so. Therefore, the LORD presents instructions on how to do it.

In this particular chapter, the instructions provided are for an offering that’s called the burnt offering (NRSV) or the entirely burned offering (CEB). In Hebrew, this is called the olah, which comes from the word that means “go up.” It would go up in smoke, so to speak. By going up, it was going to God.

With this particular type of offering, the first one in the book, the one who brings the offering can bring an animal from the herd (v. 3), from the flocks (v. 10), or from the birds (v. 14). In all likelihood, the differences account for differences in socioeconomic status for those who bring the offering; those who are poorer can bring a bird since they probably cannot afford an animal from a herd. The specific type of animal is obviously not the point.

I do not want to dwell on the details regarding what happens to the blood and body parts of the animal that is offered, though these details are important. What I want to focus on, instead, is the purpose for which the animal is brought: to be a “food gift of soothing smell to the LORD” (vv. 9, 13, 17, CEB). Right here in the text, the purpose is stated, and the purpose is NOT “so that the animal can take the punishment you deserve for your sins.” Instead, the purpose is to provide savory food for God.

The idea that an offering would be a pleasing meal to a god was held in common with other people groups from around Israel. The smell of the food would draw the god close to the one offering the food, so that this person might experience the presence of that god. Among many of those groups, the ones offering actually believed that they were feeding their god. Within Israel, this is not what they thought. Rather, they continue to use the idea metaphorically: bringing the offering will create a space where you can know that God is near. The main point: the offering was presented as a gift, a meal. It was not presented to deal with sin.

With this type of offering, the entire animal was offered up in smoke. It was presented entirely to God. But as we will see now, this was not the only type of gift offering. With other gifts, the gift-giver also shared in the meal.

Gift Offering: The Thanksgiving Offering

Instructions for a type of offering called the offering of well-being (NRSV) or the communal sacrifice of well-being (CEB) are given in Lev 7:11–36. In Hebrew, this offering is called the sacrifice of shelamim, which is related to the word shalom. It has something to do with well-being, wholeness, and peace.

As with the olah above, so with the shelamim: the LORD does not command that it be offered; rather, the LORD provides instructions for how to offer it. The offering can be made on different occasions. It can be offered simply for thanksgiving—a “just because” offering (v. 12). The assumption behind this offering is that people will simply want to express their thanks to God by way of an offering. Again, this couldn’t be further from the idea that the sacrifice is required to deal with sin.

It can also be offered as payment for a previously made vow (v. 16). Regularly, people would make a vow to God either as a part of a request that God would act on their behalf or in response to God already having acted on their behalf. It was an act of devotion. This type of offering, then, would be a part of that vow.

Readers might be surprised by what is and is not described in detail. This type of offering includes a bread component, not just an animal component. Specific details are provided for what type of bread and how to include it. What is not specified in detail is the type of animal to offer.

What might be most intriguing to the casual passer-by of Leviticus is that the one who makes the offering also shares in eating the offering: “The flesh of your communal thanksgiving sacrifice of well-being must be eaten on the day you offer it; you cannot save any of it until morning” (v. 15). The offering was, essentially, a communal meal with God.

The Passover

One particular expression of sacrifice that merits attention within the context of the sacrificial system is the Passover sacrifice. The initial Passover event takes place in Exod 12. On the night before God delivers the people of Israel from slavery in Egypt, God instructs the people to partake of an elaborate ritual that involves certain kinds of food, certain actions, certain clothing. It is on this night that God will strike down the firstborn in Egypt.

For the purposes of this series, we must recognize that the original Passover was not a sacrifice at all. That’s the improper framework for making sense of it. Yes, the blood of the lamb put on the doorposts requires the death of an animal. But the death is not a sacrificial death. Sacrificial death is a particular type of death associated with the ritual of sacrifice. Not every death was a sacrifice, even if every sacrifice of an animal involved death. In the Passover, there is no altar, no priest, and no attempt to present something to God.

The main point: the Passover simply is not a sacrifice.

However, during the Passover, the LORD indicates that the people will commemorate the Exodus event in subsequent years. They will celebrate every year that the LORD brought them out of Egypt. On each subsequent Passover, they will bring a sacrifice. After the initial experience of the Passover, then every future remembrance of it and thanksgiving for it would involve sacrifice (Exod 12:25–27).

To summarize: the original Passover was an event of deliverance, not a sacrifice. But each year after, they would offer a sacrifice of thanksgiving to the LORD to remember the deliverance. This was a sacrifice.

More important for the current discussion is what type of sacrifice the Passover remembrance is. It does not have anything to do with a person’s sin. It is to give thanks for and remember God’s deliverance. The Passover event itself as well as subsequent commemorations of it were not intended to address the sins of the people. The original act was God’s gracious act of deliverance. The remembrance of the Passover was an expression of thanksgiving.

Conclusion

I’ve looked at a few examples of offerings/sacrifices that fit in this category of gift offerings to God. In view of previous discussions about what sacrifice is not, we see here that these sacrifices have nothing to do with a person’s sin, God’s anger, or the need to right any wrongs. Again, I must restate an earlier claim: I am not suggesting that people do not sin, that God doesn’t get angry, or that there are no wrongs to be righted. I’m simply saying that the sacrificial system is not addressing those things.

Instead, these offerings were brought either to express general thanksgiving to God or to give thanks for specific experiences of God. They were intended to create space for the givers to experience deep communion with God. The offerings were not the means to merit God’s favor. They were a response to experiences of God’s favor.

Introduction

This is the second in a series of posts about the sacrificial system in the Old Testament. You can find the first post here. You’ll want to read that before reading this post. Here, I want to keep the conversation going.

If the dwelling tent (tabernacle) and related sacrificial system did not center on dealing with people’s sins through the death of animals, and if the setting up of the tabernacle itself as well as the subsequent bringing of offerings were both voluntary, and if God can relate with people before and apart from the sacrificial system, then the foundation of the common understanding of the sacrificial system becomes shaky.

Before getting more into what the sacrificial system is about, I want to continue to describe what it is not about. That’s what I will be doing in this post.

Much of what I have said and will say in this series of posts is highly indebted to those who have gone before me. In many ways, I am simply trying to condense what has been written and perhaps make it digestible to others. Here are a couple works that I would recommend consulting if you are interested in going into more depth.

Andrew Remington Rillera, The Lamb of the Free: Recovering the Varied Sacrificial Understandings of Jesus’ Death (Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 2024), ISBN: 978-1666703047. 356 pp.

Jacob Milgrom, Leviticus: A Book of Ritual and Ethics, Continental Commentaries (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2004), ISBN: 978-0800695149. 408 pp.

Sacrifices Do Not Address God’s Anger Toward Sin

At the foundation of the common misperception about the sacrificial system is that the whole system revolves around addressing God’s wrath against sin. Here’s the late John MacArthur, in a sermon entitled, “The Sacrifice that Satisfied,” puts this theory on full display. (I’m not picking on MacArthur particularly. But he does demonstrate clearly what this theory asserts.) Here’s MacArthur:

This is really important to understand. God was angry with sinners. The Bible says God is angry with the wicked every day. And if God was going to forgive sinners and God was going to remove their judgment and deliver them from eternal damnation, He had to be appeased. He had to be satisfied. He had to be placated. Symbolically, God demonstrated the need for that placation with the prescriptions regarding the Ark of the Covenant and the mercy seat.

…

God’s wrath will be satisfied. In some cases, by sinners in eternal hell, paying a just penalty for their sins. But God’s wrath will be satisfied. But in the case of others, His wrath over sin will be satisfied by a special sacrifice pictured in the whole Old Testament sacrificial system.

…

Say it another way, all the holy attributes of God once arrayed against us in wrath give way to all the holy attributes of God now arrayed for us in mercy. And God can’t be changed from a God of wrath to a God of mercy unless He is placated, propitiated, and satisfied. God wants to take the flaming sword of justice raised over our heads to strike us and melt it into a shield raised to protect us. And He can do that because there is a sacrifice that satisfied God, that paid the full penalty for sin.

Here’s the logic: God is angry at sin. This leads to the sacrificial system, which placates God’s wrath.

This position has multiple flaws, a couple of which I will examine. To begin, the book of Leviticus never once mentions God’s wrath or anger! You can search for yourself. If the sacrificial system were the means of addressing God’s wrath against sin, we might expect at least one occurrence of the language—if not regular usage. How, then, can we conclude that the sacrificial system addresses God’s wrath when wrath/anger language is absent?

Another flaw is that the sacrificial system does not even primarily address sin. The word “sin” occurs primarily in Lev 4–7. It shows up a few times beyond that. Even these occurrences need to be discussed in more depth. But for now, the main point is this: the book of Leviticus is 26 chapters, and of those 26 chapters, only a few even mention sin. How could the sacrificial system be the thing that placates God’s anger toward sin when it rarely talks about sin?

Related to the previous point, the next flaw with the logic of this common understanding is that there are no sacrifices that address certain serious types of sin—murder, idolatry, and adultery. Regarding murder, Lev 24:17 says, “If anyone kills another person, they must be executed”; no sacrifice is discussed. Regarding idolatry, Lev 19:4 repeats the command not to commit idolatry, but no sacrifice is described. Regarding adultery, Lev 20:10–14 lists all sorts of sexual arrangements, each of which results in execution; no sacrifice is mentioned.

In none of these situations is a sacrifice provided as a “solution” to the problem of sin. Of all sins, these are surely the ones that would most anger God, yet sacrifices are never proposed as the solution. Further, in these situations where some form of execution is mentioned, no animal’s death prevents that from happening.

(As a side note, in none of these situations is God’s anger mentioned. The issue here for Leviticus isn’t the sin per se; it’s the uncleanness caused by the sin that must be addressed. Even here, then, the logic of Leviticus is not that God is angry toward sin and therefore punishes with death.)

In sum: the sacrificial system is not presented in Leviticus as being the solution to dealing with God’s anger against sin. That’s just not the point. I am not saying that the Bible does not present God as angry toward sin. That’s a separate conversation. I’m saying something more limited: the sacrificial system itself, from beginning to end, does not seem to be primarily concerned with dealing with God’s anger toward sin.

Sacrifices Are Not about Animals Dying

I don’t know where I first heard it, but I do know that virtually since the beginning of my serious engagement with the Christian faith, I have heard some form of, “Sin deserves death. And until there is death, sin can’t be forgiven.” One text that often gets brought in to support that statement is Rom 6:23, “for the wages of sin is death.” I discuss that in more depth here.

This claim is problematic, in general. It’s based on extremely weak foundations (Rom 6:23 being one of those foundations). Throughout the Bible, God can forgive sin simply because God wants to forgive sin. But this claim is specifically problematic when it is tied to the sacrificial system.

What I think has happened is that readers have brought two entirely independent structures together. First, they have activated a criminal justice metaphor for thinking about sin: sin deserves consequences/punishment. Then, they take that to and read it into the sacrificial system. The result? They treat the sacrificial system from within a criminal justice metaphorical structure.

The sacrificial system is not a criminal justice system. That’s the incorrect domain. Rather, worship is its proper domain. Again, I’m not challenging, per se, that sin might merit consequences. I’m simply saying that the sacrificial system is not the place to do that.

Let me restate it more bluntly: people participating in the sacrificial system would not have thought that they were “doing” something about consequences that they deserved for their sin. That just wasn’t what they saw happening in the system.

This is an important point to which I’ll return probably on multiple occasions. For now, the main reason for making this claim is narrower: the sacrificial system is not even about the death of an animal. This statement likely feels counterintuitive to many. It just seems so obvious that the sacrificial system is about death to many of us.

This is because we have brought the conclusion with us to the task of reading. We have been shaped to think that the sacrificial system is about death, so that when we read about it, we see what we have been told to see.

In fact, once we are enabled to step back, take off those lenses, and approach the matter afresh, we see how painfully obvious it is that the sacrificial system is not about the death of an animal. Yes, animals die as a part of the sacrificial system. But that’s not the climax or the point. If anything, the death portion of the ritual is downplayed, muted.

Here are a couple examples. In Lev 1:5, a bull is slaughtered as a part of what’s called a “burnt offering.” All that the verse mentions is that the animal is slaughtered. Then, the rest of that verse and subsequent verses describe what is done with the blood and the parts of the animal. The death is penultimate to the important parts of the ritual; it’s not the focus.

In Lev 4, which describes what is sometimes translated as a “sin offering” (this is a highly debatable translation; I’ll be discussing it eventually). The chapter begins by talking about a situation in which someone “sins unintentionally.” The bull is slaughtered in v. 4, but again, the death is only mentioned briefly. What happens after, in vv. 5–12, focuses on what to do with the blood and the body parts again.

So what? These two examples show clearly what is seen throughout the book of Leviticus: the point is not the death of the animal. The focus is on the blood and the body parts. Yes, death must take place to get access to the blood and the body parts. But the death is not central. If these texts were designed to show that the animal’s death serves as a substitute for the death that humans deserve, then the death would be central.

Conclusion

In this post, I have continued to talk about what the sacrificial system is not. Despite the pervasiveness of the common understanding, sacrifice is not about addressing God’s anger toward sin. If it were, then we would expect Leviticus to mention God’s anger/wrath, yet it does not. Sacrifice also is not about the death of an animal. Yes, animals die as a part of the sacrificial system. But that’s not the focus. Rather, the death is only so that participants can gain access to the animal’s blood and body parts.

Until next time!

Introduction

Of all the details of the Bible that seem foreign to modern audiences, sacrifice might be the most foreign. When readers encounter all the elaborate rituals surrounding this practice, they might do a couple things: they might avoid thinking about or reading them, or they might try to squeeze them into categories that do make sense.

I’m not surprised when interpreters work hard to fit sacrifice into familiar categories. It’s understandable. However, even though the intentions behind this act could be pure, that does not prevent readers from making some interpretive mistakes. Unfortunately, when sacrifice is misunderstood or misinterpreted, it can have dramatic effects.

I am going to spend a series of posts looking more closely at the tabernacle and the sacrificial system.

A Common Misunderstanding

I want to begin by talking about what is undoubtedly the most common misunderstanding of the sacrificial system among evangelical Christians in the western world. In short, many Christians think that the sacrificial system is about an animal dying so that a human does not have to die. An animal dies as a substitute for a human, who apparently deserved to die. And somehow, this death “counts” on behalf of the human. Once the animal has died, the human can then relate with God.

Several threads run together here. I want to pull them apart to look a little more closely at them. This conception of sacrifice assumes: (a) that the “problem” being addressed by the sacrificial system is the punishment that humans deserve; (b) that the punishment humans deserve is death; (c) that humans cannot relate with God until the punishment has been addressed; (d) that sacrifice is about an animal dying; and (e) that the animal’s death is substitutionary.

I plan to discuss each of these throughout the conversation. In short, I want to say at this point that there are problems with each of these assumptions, especially as they are pulled together in the context of sacrifice. The popular concept simply doesn’t fit with what the sacrificial system is about.

The Tabernacle

Let’s start with the tabernacle. The Hebrew word translated “tabernacle” simply means “dwelling place.” It was a portable, tented structure. For this post, I’m going to call it the “dwelling tent,” just to shake off familiarity.

The dwelling tent is introduced in Exod 25. Here is where the instructions for making the dwelling tent begin. Here’s what the LORD says at first: “Tell the Israelites to take for me an offering; from all whose hearts prompt them to give you shall receive the offering for me (v. 2, NRSV). The instructions begin with a voluntary collection of materials. They do not begin with a command to take possessions; rather, they assume that people will be moved to give gifts.

This detail provides insight into the whole process. From the beginning, the dwelling tent and its activities involve people freely giving. This is not an obligation. The construction of the place will depend on the goodwill and motives of the people.

This one detail might stand at odds with the general conception of the dwelling tent among evangelical Christians especially. As stated above, the conception often involves the necessity of the sacrificial system that took place in association with the dwelling tent for God to be able to deal with people’s sins. If the matter were this urgent, then we might expect God to issue commands about how to build the structure. But that is not what we see here.

That’s one detail from the beginning of the experience of the dwelling tent. We might also talk about the details throughout. I won’t go into much detail here; I’ll save it for later in the conversation. But I only want to note here how elaborate the dwelling tent is. The material used, the patterns, the design, the items—this is an ornate structure. We might ask, at this point, why the structure would need to be so ornate if the purpose was essentially for criminal justice. If the main goal was to kill an animal as substitutionary punishment, then why not come up with something that would seem much more appropriate and suited for such an occasion?

Also from the details throughout, we might notice that the part of the structure that is associated with animals is actually not the whole of the structure and it certainly is not the heart of the structure. The blood of the animal is typically placed on the altar. But the altar is not the center of the structure. More on this later, also. In short: the structure does not seem to center on the dead animal at all.

Now let’s look at the culmination of the instructions around the dwelling tent. In Exod 40, the people, having gathered all the requisite items and prepared them for the tent, set the tent up. Then, in v. 34, “the cloud covered the tent of meeting, and the glory of the LORD filled the [dwelling tent]” (CEB). Once the dwelling tent is set up, the LORD comes in to take up residence. At the climax of the building of the dwelling tent, the people do not, say, offer a sacrifice so that they can deal with their sins and thus have the LORD draw near to them finally. Instead, the whole process culminates with the LORD coming to dwell in their midst.

That is the purpose of the dwelling tent. I mean…it’s in the name! It’s a place of dwelling. The purpose of the tabernacle was so that God could dwell among the people. It was not described as the place of dealing with people’s sins. No obligation was placed on the people to build it. God expressed no urgency about needing to build it so that he could deal with their sins to be able to relate with them.

In fact, because of our starting assumptions about the purpose of the dwelling tent, we may miss a glaring issue: in Exodus, God did not need to deal with people’s sins through the death of an animal to be able to save them. God responded to their cries of injustice (Exod 2). As God was delivering them from Egypt, the people regularly reverted to actions that we surely could call sinful: they doubted and they complained (see, e.g., Exod 14:10–12!). God saved sinful people before any animal was sacrificed. (You might be inclined to mention the Passover lamb here. I’ll discuss it later. But for now, I’ll say that it was not a sacrifice that saved them from sins. That wasn’t its purpose.)

In Exodus, as well as in Genesis before it, God apparently did not need to deal with people’s sins through the death of an animal to be able to relate with them, either. We read of God relating with the man and the woman in the garden, just after they have disobeyed. We read of God relating with Noah. We read of God relating with Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and Joseph. We read of God relating with Moses. In none of those instances, did God indicate that he must first deal with their sins by way of an animal sacrifice to be able to do what he did with them.

If nothing else, that might at least cause us to pause and reflect on the conception of the dwelling tent and the sacrificial system that we bring to the text.

“When You Bring an Offering…”

Above, we looked at the final chapter of Exodus, the one that presents the glory of the LORD coming to dwell in the dwelling tent. Let’s turn now to the next chapter, Lev 1. Though the break between books might cause us to see a break in the narrative, if we look at the text we see that Lev 1 immediately picks up where Exod 1 left off. No time has taken place. In fact, in 1:1, the LORD calls to Moses from the dwelling tent after the LORD had just entered it.

Here is what the LORD first says to Moses: “Speak to the people of Israel and say to them, ‘When any of you brings an offering to the LORD…’” The LORD then goes into instructions about what to do in that situation.

But for my purposes, the quoted portion provided here is enough. In particular, I want to look at the opening word, when. At the beginning of instructions regarding offerings, the LORD describes a situation that he apparently presumes will take place, namely, that the people will bring offerings.

What is interesting to me is that he does not begin with a command to bring offerings. The LORD does not say, “You must bring an offering, and it should look like this.” The LORD seems to take for granted that the people will choose to bring offerings.

One important point here, especially for modern readers. For most of us, a system of offerings, especially one that involves animals, is extremely foreign. Because of that, we are being introduced to it here for the first time perhaps. It’s new to us. We do not come to Lev 1 with the assumption that we will bring offerings. Therefore, we tend to think that the main point here, and in the rest of Leviticus, is introducing us to a radically new system.

But this is not the case for ancient people. Outside the people of Israel, other people groups regularly practiced similar systems. This was not unique to Israel. It was seen as just a part of what it meant to relate with God.

But even in the Bible we see offerings before Leviticus. In fact, in Gen 4, one of the first main accounts in the whole Bible, we read of one man killing his brother over offerings. What stands out for our purposes is that Cain and Abel were never commanded to offer. They simply did it. It was a common response to God. And this happened before the giving of the dwelling tent and the sacrificial system. Likewise, Abram (Abraham), when he entered the land of promise for the first time, set up an altar (Gen 12:7). God did not tell him to do it. He just did it.

The introduction of the sacrificial system presumes that people will offer; they do not need to be told to do it. Instead, what follows are instructions on how to offer properly.

Conclusion

In this post, I’ve tried to make a couple important points for this discussion. First, the dwelling tent, or tabernacle, was not built primarily as a structure for dealing with people’s sins by way of animal sacrifice. It was built to be the dwelling place of the LORD. That should affect how we think about the whole system.

Second, the giving of offerings was not something being commanded. It was, rather, something that people simply wanted to do, and therefore God was providing instructions on how to do it. Nowhere at the beginning of Leviticus does God indicate that the people must offer, and that they must do so to deal with their sins so that God can relate with them.

In fact, third, we see God relating with people before the giving of the system and apart from animal sacrifice. If we take those accounts seriously, then they might cause us to question the familiar logic: an animal must die to deal with my sins so that God can relate with me. At least based on the Bible, that does not seem to be the case.

This conversation will continue in a series of posts.

Here is Romans 8:6–17 (NRSV):

To set the mind on the flesh is death, but to set the mind on the Spirit is life and peace. For this reason the mind that is set on the flesh is hostile to God; it does not submit to God’s law—indeed, it cannot, and those who are in the flesh cannot please God. But you are not in the flesh; you are in the Spirit, since the Spirit of God dwells in you. Anyone who does not have the Spirit of Christ does not belong to him. But if Christ is in you, though the body is dead because of sin, the Spirit is life because of righteousness. If the Spirit of him who raised Jesus from the dead dwells in you, he who raised Christ from the dead will give life to your mortal bodies also through his Spirit that dwells in you.

So then, brothers and sisters, we are debtors, not to the flesh, to live according to the flesh—for if you live according to the flesh, you will die; but if by the Spirit you put to death the deeds of the body, you will live. For all who are led by the Spirit of God are children of God. For you did not receive a spirit of slavery to fall back into fear, but you received a spirit of adoption. When we cry, “Abba! Father!” it is that very Spirit bearing witness with our spirit that we are children of God, and if children, then heirs, heirs of God and joint heirs with Christ—if, in fact, we suffer with him so that we may also be glorified with him.

Once upon a time in the U.S., reading these words of Paul may not have seemed too challenging. For hundreds of years, we in the United States of America prided ourselves on our ability to tug on the ol’ bootstraps and make the life we want for ourselves. We have long told ourselves, and our children, “You can be what you want to be.”

Life is a blank canvas; make of it what you want. We might head off to college to pursue our dream career. I wanted to be an engineer when I first arrived. Then I wanted to work in business. And then I wanted to become a doctor. And then…well, you get the point. We get to choose who we want to be. We might hear Paul as saying that we, as independent, free-thinking people, just need simply to choose a certain path.

But reading these words has gotten more complicated over the decades and centuries. We have learned more in the last one hundred years about humans than we had learned in all previous years, essentially. And one aspect of what we have learned is about how genetics work. Everything about us is, to some extent, determined by our parents. Thanks, Mom and Dad! What color is your hair? That’s determined by your parents. What color are your eyes? That is determined by them, too. What about more serious matters, such as heart and kidney health? Those are influenced by your parents, too. In fact, we continue to learn more and more about the brain. And it turns out that even the way you think and act are influenced by genetics. I mean, we’ve really known this through experience for a long time. We say things such as, “You’re acting just like your mother!”, “I get my temper from my father.”

It might be tempting to go to the other extreme, then: everything we do simply flows out of our genetics. We are a series of chemical reactions. We cannot be blamed for anything, no expectations can be held over us for, as the eminent philosopher Lady Gaga puts it, “I was born this way.” How on earth could we read the exhortations of Paul to act and to think in certain ways when we are, simply, “born this way”? Perhaps unfortunately for Ms. Gaga, this is oversimplifying the matter. Over the last decade, I’ve gotten highly interested in reading about the human brain. And I’m no expert, but I have had my mind blown…pun intended…by what I have learned.

For instance, do you know how many neurons (nerve cells) the average human brain contains? It is estimated to be around 86 to 100 billion neurons. Or how about this: how many feet of blood vessels do you think that the brain contains? It contains roughly 400 miles of blood vessels. And how many thoughts do you think that the average human brain has per day? 50,000. What a complex, powerful organ! It truly is the most spectacular known object in the universe.

One dimension of the brain that has become increasingly interesting to me is something called plasticity. To understand plasticity, you have to understand how the brain functions. In simple terms, the brain functions through what are called synaptic connections.

Let me illustrate. Let’s imagine that you are a young child. And you find yourself walking around the kitchen of your house, when you look on the table to find a bright, yellow, fruity-looking object. You have had similar colorful objects—oranges, strawberries, peaches—and every time you have had such an object, you have experienced sweetness.

Seeing this yellow object triggers the various electrical connections in your brain that cause you to anticipate sweetness. You start to salivate. You reach out, grab this yellow object, shove it in your mouth, and…BAM! An unexpected sensation hits your tongue! You feel as if your face will suck inward onto itself! This is not sweet at all! This is something your mother calls a “lemon.”

Now, to a greater or lesser degree, your brain has created a network of electrical connections that will identify yellow fruity-looking objects as not-sweet. Over time, your brain will activate this network when it encounters a lemon. You will know that it is not sweet, and, likely, not tasty by itself.

So this is how the brain functions. But that’s not all. As some of you have likely experienced for yourselves, perhaps for the first ten years of your life you connect the sight of yellow, fruity-looking objects with unpleasant experiences. But then something happens. One day, you walk into your grandma’s house, and she has on the table what she calls a lemon pie. The first word grinds; but you know the second word, and you know what a pie looks like, and you know that pie is a pleasurable experience.

Despite a minor alarm sounding in your brain, you accept the offer to receive the pie. You take a bite, and you immediately notice the familiar taste of lemon, but with it is a pleasurable experience. This is good! So now, your brain creates a network of connections that associates lemons at least partly with a positive experience, at least when they are in pie form. Perhaps over time, you get to where you can enjoy lemons in your water. Maybe you will even get to where you like eating lemon straight.

What happens is this: those electrical networks that your brain creates—starting from the sensory data and leading to your reaction—can actually change. On a physical level, your brain will quite literally change. And this is called plasticity.

I read about a fascinating study done in plasticity. It involved people who suffer from serious obsessive–compulsive disorder (OCD). We often throw around this disorder lightly: “Oh, you’re so OCD! Quit worrying about vacuuming every day!” But if you or someone you know suffers from severe OCD, you know that it is a serious matter. For instance, these people might feel compelled to wash their hands twenty, thirty, or more times daily. Their brains misfire, leading them to think that they are experiencing dirtiness, and this leads to the compulsive need to wash. Their brains are essentially misfiring.

The study that was conducted wanted to determine if patients with OCD could actually change the way their brains were operating. They were given instructions on how to handle the compulsions. First, they were to reattribute them: they were to take steps to be mindful in the moment of those feelings that the feeling was a “brain glitch.” Second, they were to refocus: they were to substitute a “good” behavior for the compulsion. Third, they were to revalue: they were to give careful, “wise” attention to seeing matters as they really are.

At the conclusion of the study, the scans of the patients’ brains revealed that legitimate change had occurred. They had begun to change the physical makeup of their brains. In other words, by changing how they respond to the stimulus, they were changing the way that their brains receive the stimulus in the first place. They were forming new habits.

What does all of this have to do with Paul and Romans, you ask? Well, I by no means want to suggest that Paul had some sort of access to this knowledge. In verse 6, Paul talks about the “mind” of the flesh and the “mind” of the Spirit. For Paul, mind refers to an attitude, an outlook, a way of seeing the world. He suggests to this divided congregation that the way forward would involve choosing one of two possible ways, or mindsets: one that is set on the flesh, and one that is set on the Spirit. The one set on the flesh is marked by death, selfishness, and slavery; the one set on the Spirit is set on life, freedom, and peace. He invites this Roman congregation to see their congregation with eyes attuned to the ways of the Spirit.

From that, he talks about living according to the flesh and living according to the Spirit. He challenges his audience to see that they are living according to one or the other. What they do matters. And what they do is intimately connected to how they see the world. All of this is, of course, because of the Spirit.

But we would certainly be short-selling Paul here if we imagined that he didn’t expect his audience actually to behave in certain ways. Yes, they’ve been freed and empowered by the Spirit. But this is no justification for doing nothing. It is, rather, impetus to do something.

I think it would be fair to summarize Paul overall in Romans, as well as his other letters, as at least saying that he expects his Spirit-empowered audience to start living in certain new ways, ways that break from their older habits. And because they start living in these new ways, they will become different people. They will be transformed.

It turns out that what Paul says is certainly hospitable to what we know about the way human brains work. At any point, if we decide to set our minds in one direction, on the things of the Spirit, then we might actually cause our brains to be reconfigured. We can be transformed even at an anatomical level. And out of such transformation, decisions that are oriented toward life and peace become more “natural.”

In many ways, what Paul is saying and what modern neuroscience is saying challenge the assumptions we have. It’s common in the church for us to assume that the way to transformation is by, first, receiving certain content in our brains which will lead, second, to transformation. We imagine that we will go to church, hear a sermon on, say, loving our neighbor, and then we will go out and start doing it. As you likely know, this approach has limited success. We might grasp something mentally with no problem, but we do not actually do anything different.

Imagine if you wanted to learn to play basketball. What would you do? Would you have someone explain proper shot form to you and then just assume that you’re now a good shooter? It’s highly unlikely. Instead, what do you do? You…go play basketball. At first, it’s not pretty. It’s awkward. But as you play, you learn how to play. You’re training your body to play.

What if, in light of both what Paul and neuroscience are saying, our common approach is actually backward? What if we learn to love our neighbor by actually practicing it? What if we learn to love God by practicing it? It might be awkward and forced at first, but as we practice it, not only does it become easier, but it also becomes natural, so to speak. We are quite literally re-forming our brains as we do it.

God has sent the Spirit to free us and to empower us to live new lives. But living those new lives requires us to begin practicing new ways of life. As we put these new patterns into practice, they will slowly become our own.

Introduction

Psalm 139 provides a rich reflection on God’s extensive knowledge of the psalmist. There is no escape from God’s knowledge and presence. This statement leads to philosophical discussions about God as omniscient, God as all-knowing. That might sound like a leap into the abstract. But I want to sit with this psalm and this statement about God to reflect on why it matters.

Psalm 139:1–6 and Hebrew Verbs

Here are the first six verses of the psalm. The translation is my own:

LORD, you search me and you know me.

You—you know my sitting down and my standing up;

You comprehend my plan from far away.

My journeying and my lying down, you study;

With all my ways you are acquainted.

When there isn’t even a word on my tongue,

Look! LORD, you know it all.

Behind and before, you bind me; you place your hand on me.

Too wonderful is that knowledge for me; it is so exalted that I’m not able to grasp it.

One thing that jumps out at me is the repetition of “know.” Twice the verb occurs, and once the noun, “knowledge,” occurs. The one who knows is the LORD. The speaker goes to great lengths to emphasize that the LORD thoroughly knows him.

In English, we use what is called tense. When you were learning English in school, you were taught the basics of tense: past, present, future. Tense is about pinning down an action in time. Past means that, from the perspective of the one speaking, the event happened in the past; present, it is happening right now; future, it is still to happen. The main point: when you’re using a verb, you determine when it happened and pin it down accordingly.

Hebrew doesn’t work exactly that way. Hebrew isn’t based on tense. Rather, it’s based on something called aspect. What is aspect? An oversimplified explanation is this: aspect relates to how an event is portrayed—either viewed as a whole or viewed from within (and thus still unfolding).

With Hebrew, you’re not mainly worried about pinning an action down in time, even though you’ll inevitably do it. You’re trying to answer the question: is the action being portrayed as a whole, or is it being portrayed as still unfolding before me?

I’m going to try to give an English example to illustrate this point. (Also, please stay with me. I promise I’m going somewhere). Tonight, I will cook dinner as I often do. If I were talking about that tomorrow, I might say, “I cooked dinner”—past tense. Or if I were to take a phone call while I’m reading the recipe, I might say to the person on the other line, “I am cooking dinner”—present tense. Or, back to my setup for this example, I mentioned that tonight I will cook dinner—future tense. English verbs are focused on when the cooking will happen in relation to the present moment.

But if we were to apply the concerns of Hebrew verbs, the focus is on if I’m speaking of the event of cooking as a whole or if I’m speaking about it from within. Tomorrow, I could say, “I cooked dinner last night.” That would be the event as a whole. I could then immediately say, “While I was cooking,” which views the event from within.

Now, the first statement, “I cooked dinner last night,” uses an English past tense, because I can’t get away from tense when I’m using English. But not only does that statement convey when something happened, but it also speaks about the event as a whole. The second statement, “While I was cooking,” is also speaking about something that happened in the past, but it’s spoken from within: the cooking is unfolding before me. So there, even though I’m speaking about something that happened in the past, I’m doing so as if it’s still unfolding.

The main point: Hebrew is built to focus on how the event is being viewed, not when it happened.

So…why am I taking you down this trail?

You Know Me

Let’s get back to the word “know.” LORD, you search me and you know me. When we encounter word such as search and know, we might be inclined to view them temporally: when did the searching and the knowing happen? The words themselves that I’ve chosen suggest that the actions happen in the present: you search me and you know me right now. But if Hebrew is not based on when an action happened but on whether it is viewed as a whole, we have to ask: which form of the Hebrew word is used here?

As it turns out, the words used here are the ones that indicate that the searching and the knowing are each viewed as a whole. They are not unfolding still. God is not presented as being in the process of searching, but still having something to discover; in the process of coming to know, but still having knowledge to gain.

Often, to convey that sense in English, we can use the simple past tense: You searched me and you knew me. It’s slightly misleading, because it makes us think that the Hebrew speaker is concerned with time. In response to this translation, we might ask, “So did God quit searching me, quit knowing me? It was only in the past?”

That’s not what the Hebrew is conveying. Again, its focus is on the event being viewed as a whole. Why this matters is because the knowledge to which the psalmist refers is not something that is still unfolding. He’s saying that God’s knowing him is viewed as a whole.

God’s Omniscience

People smarter than I have discussed and debated God’s knowledge for millennia. I will do my best to do justice to the topic while admittedly providing a limited understanding of it.

Augustine argued that we humans, because of our limited capacities, might mistakenly think of God as being bound by time. We might think that God, like us, is caught up in the flow of time, so that, say, God was sitting there one day in the past and knew what would happen in the future, even though it had not yet come. God is like us, bound by time, but God simply knows what’s coming next.

As Augustine realized, this is too limited a view of God. God created time. God cannot therefore be restricted by it as we are. For God, all things are eternally present. God was never standing at a past moment in time, thinking about the future. Or God doesn’t look back to the past as if it is no longer real.

Naturally, this should give you a slight headache if you contemplate it deeply enough. From our human perspective, yes, it seems strange or impossible. But it is simply the logical conclusion to who God is.

Later thinkers would refine or critique Augustine. But I think it’s fair to say, for my purposes, that God’s omniscience is bigger of a claim than we might at first think. To speak of God as all-knowing isn’t to make a claim about God’s simple grasp of details about events that are past, present, and future. It is much bigger than that.

Psalm 139 and Omniscience

With this idea in mind, I want to return to the psalm. I think that the doctrine of omniscience complements Psalm 139 and even helps us see what the psalm is getting at. This stands out especially in v. 4. Before there is even a word on my tongue, the psalmist says, you know it completely. The psalmist isn’t saying that God will know it once it has come out of my mouth. He’s saying that God already knows it as a present reality.

Let’s think about God’s knowledge in relation to our experience of time. We might say that the LORD knows my present completely. What I’m thinking, feeling, and experiencing are present realities to God. God knows them from outside time. This is precisely what the psalmist seems to be pointing to: God knows my standing and my sitting, God comprehends my plans, God studies my movements.

We could also say that the LORD knows my past completely. My past is not some distant memory to God, as it is to me. It’s a present reality. Everything I’ve done, said, or even thought, the LORD knows even now. Beyond even knowing my past completely, the LORD also knows my future completely. The LORD knew it, we might say, just to highlight the strangeness of it. The LORD doesn’t know merely in the sense that the LORD can anticipate what I will say, do, or think next, but it is a present reality to the LORD.

Know Thyself

This is not some abstract philosophical discussion; it’s a potentially terrifying reality!

Most people don’t know the real “you.” I assume that there are very few people on this planet whom you would describe as knowing you well. But even among this group, it’s unlikely that those people know us as well as we think. We put on masks, we play roles.

Let’s take it one step further: we may not even really know ourselves. We think we know ourselves—our desires, our loves, our longings. But even here, we deceive ourselves.

In high school, I saved enough money to buy a nice leather jacket. When I finally had saved enough money, I went to purchase it. At the store, I sought the one that was the right size. The employee removed it from the security wire that kept it connected to the rack. I put it on. And the shoulders of the jacket were hanging off my shoulders. It was clearly a couple of sizes too big.

The employee asked me, “Should we try one a smaller one?” I looked at him and said, “No, this size will work. I plan to put on a lot of muscle this year.” To his credit, he held a straight face. I purchased the jacket. It hung in my closet for years, never fitting my shoulders.

I thought I knew myself. But I was deceiving myself.

Not only does the LORD know me, but the LORD knows me better than I know myself. In the words of Augustine, you, O LORD, are closer to me than I am to myself. In the words of Psalm 103, God knows that we are dust. God knows your weaknesses, your eccentricities; God knows what makes you happy, what motivates you. God knows you down to the atom.

Again, this could be a reason to panic. I intentionally keep my true self from others because deep down, I think that if they were to know the “real” me, then they would reject me. How much more so, then, should I be afraid, because nothing is hidden from God!

Compassion Because

Yet the witness of Scripture is that God loves us. Striking here is that God loves us even though God knows us. But Scripture goes further than that. In Psalm 103:13, the psalmist speaks of the compassion God feels for God’s people. Then v. 14 opens with the word because: because God knows how we are made, that we are dust. It’s precisely because God knows us that God feels compassion for us.

That’s revolutionary. God doesn’t love the hypothetical best version of you, the “you” that might exist if the planets align and if the wind blows in just the right direction and if you squint. God knows you as you are and loves you.

But let’s take this even further. Let’s bring in the earlier discussion about God’s omniscience. All things exist as present realities to God. That means that even though you came into existence at a certain time, you—in your totality, your whole life—exist as a present reality to God. Along with that, orthodox teaching insists that God cannot grow in knowledge; that would logically entail that God is not all-knowing. God doesn’t have a new thought today that didn’t exist yesterday. If so, then God was not truly omniscient before getting that new thought (and, presumably, the next new thought, and the next one, etc.).

If those things are true, then here’s what that means: you—in your totality, your whole life—have always been a present reality to God. Before you were born. Before you were conceived. Before God created anything. You have always been a reality to God. There was not a moment in time when God first learned about you, thought about you. Following from that, you have always been loved by God. There was not a moment in time when God started loving you.

The Creator of the universe knows you always. And the Creator of the universe loves you always.

“When I look up at your skies, at what your fingers made . . . what are human beings that you think about them; what are human beings that you pay attention to them?” (Psalm 8:3–4)

Introduction

In Luke 11:1–13, the disciples ask Jesus how to pray. The content of this text is familiar to most Christians. In fact, a significant portion of Christians recite the “Lord’s Prayer,” as it’s called, every Sunday (or even every day). I want to reflect a bit on this text today.

Our Father

Jesus begins his prayer by inviting his disciples to call on God as “Father.” As many interpreters have pointed out, the identification of God as Father might be the most crucial part of the prayer. He could have invited them to call on God as King. He could’ve said that God is Lord. But he said Father.

Jesus clearly intends to focus on this name for God based on what comes after the prayer proper (as I will discuss below). That Jesus begins by identifying God as Father initially and then reflecting on God as Father after the prayer suggests that central to what he is doing with his disciples is inviting them to reflect on their portrait of God. How do they see God? Who is God? His instructions to them on prayer necessarily flow out of a certain image of God.

A Friend

After the prayer itself, Jesus gives two pictures to the disciples to get them to reflect on their picture of God. First, he asks them to imagine a friend. But he asks them to imagine the friend in a particularly extreme situation. The situation is this: you go to your friend in the middle of the night, asking for food because another friend has shown up from a long journey (vv. 5–6).

He then asks them to imagine that the friend you’ve just disturbed is unwilling to help. Now, I’m here to tell you, if you came to my house at midnight asking for bread for a party, I too would not be inclined to help! It’s certainly an extreme situation. We might not fault the friend for being unwilling initially to help (v. 7).

Jesus then says that even if the sleeping friend wouldn’t help initially, he would eventually help because of the friend’s persistence (NRSV) or brashness (CEB) (v. 8). Have you ever been on the giving or receiving end of something that breaks social norms or conventions? I think of a child who boldly, innocently asks someone in a grocery store about their body size.

You, who have had a friend show up, have now gone to your neighbor’s house in the middle of the night to ask for food. That’s…bold! I wonder whether the disciples became uncomfortable while imagining this scenario.

What’s Jesus’s point with the friend? Essentially, even if he does not heed your request initially, he would eventually give in just because you are annoying him!

Now what on earth is Jesus’s point in sharing this immediately after the prayer? Well, he tells us: ask, and it will be given; search, and you will find; knock, and the door will be opened. For everyone who asks, receives; everyone who seeks, finds; everyone who knocks will have the door opened (vv. 9–10).

Do you see how this well-known statement about asking, seeking, and knocking, which we often rip out of this passage and allow to float around on its own, is actually connected to the story? He had just talked about asking for a favor; he had just mentioned a door being locked.

What’s his point? He seems to be saying that if even a friend who isn’t inclined to help will eventually help simply because you are annoying him, then how much more is God willing to heed your requests, since he’s not just a human friend, but he is the eternal Father, and since he’s not annoyed, but quite the opposite: he wants to help! Everyone who asks, seeks, knocks—not just close friends. The key is willingness to ask, to seek, to knock. Not only is God motivated by joy rather than by annoyance, but God’s giving isn’t limited to his friends—he will even give bread to his enemies.

A Father

After sharing a picture of a friend, Jesus shares a picture of a father. He asks them, “How many of you, who are human parents, would give a child a snake when she asks for a fish, or give a scorpion when she asks for an egg?” (vv. 11–12).

The implied answer is: none of you would! All of you, as human parents, know enough about what is good and desire what is good for your children enough to be able to give good gifts and not harmful ones. (Caveat: Jesus is speaking here in generalizations. Both then and now, we could easily find examples of parents who do evil things to their children.) This picture has a similar force as the first one, the friend: if you humans are even capable of good, then how much more the Heavenly Father?

In other words, the force is not to say that God is like an earthly parent exactly; rather, it’s that God is infinitely beyond. So, how much more…?

I want to go on a bit of a detour to talk about bad earthly parents. Certainly, the parental analogy in general and the paternal analogy in particular have been challenging for some people who have had harmful experiences with their earthly parents/fathers. Some have been unable to use these analogies for God because of their experiences. By no means do I intend to tell those people what to do. I can imagine the difficulty.

But I would like to offer one way of framing the situation that might shed different light on it. I would surmise that the pain these people experience is because they begin with the harmful image of a parent that they’ve encountered and then apply that image to God. In other words, the movement is from the earthly parent to the divine parent.

But what if that movement was reversed?

Imagine if you had never tried a peach. You’ve seen them, but their fuzzy texture detracted you. Finally, one day, a friend convinces you to grab one at the grocery store. You get home, you cut into it and take a bite. It’s nearly as hard as a rock. It tastes bland. You decide in that moment that you hate peaches. Fair enough!

One day, you have an opportunity to go to a peach festival at a local farm. You go along for the fun of it, but you already know that you do not like peaches. You arrive. Peaches everywhere. The horrible taste comes back to mind. Left and right, people are offering you peaches. Your friends urge you to try one. You resist.

Finally, after pestering you for some time, you give in, just to stop them. You approach the local farmer, who hands you one of his peaches. This one feels a bit different than the one you remember; it feels softer to the touch. Its scent hits you; you don’t remember that happening before. You sink your teeth into it—no firm resistance.

As your teeth tear a bite off and the juice hits your tongue, your mind nearly explodes. This is nothing like the peach you bought at Walmart! This peach is….delicious. You now know what a peach can taste like. You’ll now be able to recognize bad peaches from good peaches.

What if we allowed our image of father to be formed first by the divine parent? Then, we would be able to see what a good father is. We would also be able to tell bad fathers from good fathers. But again, I’m not in the situation previously described. I know it’s hard.

Gifts from God

Interestingly, Jesus specifies what it is that God will give. He does not say, “how much more will God give you whatever you want,” but rather, “how much more will the Father give the Holy Spirit to those who ask.” He pins down what it is that God will give. Jesus doesn’t portray God as a cosmic genie. He’s portraying a loving father. A loving father doesn’t give a child whatever the child wants.

Think of it this way. Imagine if we looked at the requests for gifts from above in reverse. How many of you earthly parents, when your child asks for a snake or a scorpion, would give them a snake or a scorpion? In other words, how many of you would give a child something that is harmful to them, just because they asked for it?

Presumably, the answer is: none of us. How much, more, then, of God? How much more unlikely is God to give us a gift that would be harmful to us?

It is important to see that Jesus is not giving them a “principle” or a “truth” about prayer to hold on to. He’s not speaking about a transactional or mechanical reality, whereby we pray, God gives. Instead, he’s inviting them to look into the eyes of the Father and imagine how good he is. If even we can talk about what is good, then how much more must the Father be able to do what is good?

It’s an invitation to hopeful imagination.

How Much More?

Back to the peaches for a second. Imagine that you, after having tasted what a peach can do, go home as a newly minted peach fan. You now wonder, “How good can a peach be?” Is the one you had at the farm the absolute best peach you’ll ever have? You now set out to try to find the best peach. That one is for you a 10/10. But is it possible to find one that breaks the ten-point scale?

Jesus isn’t putting a cap on how good God is. If they can see in their minds how good they think God is, then they’re operating with a limited scale. God’s goodness goes beyond what they can envision. How much more?

In inviting his disciples to call upon God as Good Father, Jesus is inviting them to see themselves as beloved children. You cannot truly call on God as Good Father until you truly see yourselves as beloved children.

If you have a healthy relationship with your parent or with your child, my question is this: how would you know if the child believes in you, trusts you? What if the child came to you and sat silently? What if the child only told you what you wanted to hear? What if the child was so terrified to ask you even for a glass of water or food?

Does that child believe that you are their loving parent?

George MacDonald, in a sermon entitled “The Higher Faith,” says, “What should I think of my child, if I found that he limited his faith in me and hope from me to the few promises he had heard me utter!”

Jesus extends an invitation to his followers: to believe in God as Good Father. If God is a Good Father and you are son or daughter, then how do you approach God?

Do you worry about asking for the wrong thing?

Do you worry about annoying God?

Do you worry that you are not worthy?

Do you know that you are beloved children of God, as you are?

I would argue that asking God for something that is not good for you or goes beyond what you might imagine God has promised demonstrates more faith than coming to God, terrified that you might ask for the wrong thing.

I’m not intending to shame anyone.

But I am suggesting that you might not yet believe in God as your Father. You do not yet see yourself as a beloved child of God.

If God is your infinitely loving, infinitely good Father, then how would you truly approach him? What could expect from him? What wouldn’t he do for you?

“Taste and see that the LORD is good.” (Psalm 34:8)