Sept. 20, 2015
Asher Lev was an immensely gifted painter who grew up in an ultra-conservative Jewish home. His artistic endeavors often brought him into conflict with his family, who really didn’t understand what he was doing or why he was doing it. He had a strong inner compulsion to keep painting, despite the problems it caused in his life, and as a result, he became increasingly alienated from his family. But he was especially concerned about his mother, who often intervened between him and his father, and he portrayed this by painting a crucifix, with his mother on the cross and Asher and his father nailing her there. This was the final straw, and his family ended up disowning him.
Asher Lev is a fictional character from a book by Chaim Potok (My Name is Asher Lev). I wasn’t even aware of the book, but it came up in one of my college classes. A local rabbi spoke in our class and someone asked about it. Up to this point, he had been very open-minded and liberal, but when the name of Chaim Potok came up he became angry and said Potok was a horrible, arrogant person and then went on to assert that no Jewish person would ever paint a crucifix. It was simply unthinkable. But, of course, this was exactly the point Potok was making. No Jewish person would ever paint a crucifix, but if one did, this is how the community would react. The rabbi, despite his liberal, open-minded posturing, found himself acting like one of the characters in Potok’s novel. He was so incensed by the whole idea that he missed the point of the story.
This often happens to us: we get so caught up in our own concerns, or stuck on particular details, that we end up missing what is really going on. And this is also true when we read Scripture. When we’re reading the early chapters of Genesis, if our perspective is limited by a particular theory of how God carried out His work of creation, we’re likely to miss the point. The purpose of the early chapters of Genesis is not to give us a detailed cosmology or satisfy our curiosity about how it all took place. There are lots of unanswered questions in these early chapters, and there is no attempt, on the part of the biblical authors, to clear everything up for us.
The point of Genesis 1-11 is to get us to where we are today, the call of Abraham. In chapters one and two, we learn that God created the world and placed humans there to bear His image. In chapter three we learn of the Fall, that these humans have rebelled against God’s command, and chapters 4-11 show something of the disastrous effects of this choice. And it’s in the context of this world that’s alienated from God and from one another that God calls Abraham. When we meet him here he’s called Abram, but God later renames him Abraham, which means “father of a multitude.”
The first thing to notice is that God calls Abraham to make a major change in his life. God calls him to leave his own country, the place where he grew up, the place where he is comfortable, to leave behind all the people he knows. This involves two things: he’s being called to separation from the alienated, divided world into which he was born. God is telling him to turn his back on everything that has been important to him up to this point in his life. Remember the context here. The world is in a state of rebellion against God, the Creator; Abraham is being called to separate himself from this world that is on the wrong track and to identify himself with God, the One against whom the world is rebelling.
God’s call also leads Abraham into a state of insecurity and uncertainty. He’s being called to leave behind everything that he knows, all his sources of comfort, and to make a journey “into the land that I will show you.” Responding to God’s call on his life meant saying good-bye to his family, his friends, and his country, everything that’s been a part of his life up to this point. Not only saying good-bye to all that, but setting out in an uncertain direction; the author of Hebrews says “By faith Abraham obeyed when he was called to set out for a place that he was to receive as an inheritance; and he set out, not knowing where he was going” (11:8). He didn’t know where he was going, but he set out anyway, because he trusted God who had called him. So this work of God in building a nation begins with His call to a specific man in a specific place who was going about his life with other things in mind. There’s no reason to think that Abraham had life-goals that differed from those around him; the thing that made the difference was that God called him to leave all that behind and he obeyed. We too easily assume that the biblical characters were special people, different from the rest of us, but if you continue reading about Abraham you’ll see that he had very significant weaknesses. He was a man seeking to get through his life like others around him, but God called him to something different than what he had in mind for himself.
The second thing to notice is that God promises to bless Abraham: “I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you, and make your name great, so that you will be a blessing.” The central idea here is that God is going to bless him, which will result in Abraham himself becoming a blessing to others. What does it mean for God to bless him? Does it mean that God will give him good things? Well yes, it does mean that – it says that he is going to become a great nation and that his name will be great -- but it means much more; in fact, getting things from God is not the main thing at all. It means that God will be his God, that God will identify with him in a special way. What is happening here is the beginning of the undoing of the effects of the Fall. The world is in chaos because of sin; people are alienated from God and from each other, and God comes to Abraham and says “I will be your God.”
The primary, most-important content of God’s blessing is God Himself. God created people in His image, to walk with Him in the garden and to know His companionship, and all that was lost at the Fall. God is calling Abraham to become the person he was created to be, to begin the process of transformation that will lead, in the end, to full restoration. This will be a blessing not only to Abraham himself, but also to those around him: “so that you will be a blessing.”
This leads to the next thing, which is that God’s call points far beyond Abraham himself: “in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed.” It’s not that God looked at Abraham and said, “he seems like a really good guy; I think I’ll do something nice for him.” It’s that God is at work fulfilling the promise He hinted at when He was cursing the serpent in the garden and said: “I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your offspring and hers; he will strike your head, and you will strike his heel” (3:15). God is at work restoring the brokenness of His creation, and the call of Abraham is the point in history when the process begins. The whole remainder of the Bible can be seen as the outworking of this promise in the lives of God’s people over many centuries.
Through Abraham, God builds a nation called by His name, and over the centuries He demonstrates His faithfulness to His promise, despite their persistent unfaithfulness. But His purpose in building a nation, like His call to Abraham, is not an end in itself; He’s preparing this nation to be the people through whom He will bring a Redeemer into the world, One who will finally undo the effects of the Fall and restore God’s creation. As we read today in our gospel reading, Jesus said to a group of Jewish leaders who opposed His ministry: “Your ancestor Abraham rejoiced that he would see my day; he saw it and was glad” (John 8:56). The call of Abraham points forward to the ministry of Jesus. The ministry of Jesus is the fulfillment of God’s promise that through Abraham all families of the earth would be blessed.
The final outworking of this is described near the end of the book of Revelation in this description of the New Jerusalem: “Nothing accursed will be found there any more. But the throne of God and of the Lamb will be in it, and his servants will worship him; they will see his face, and his name will be on their foreheads. And there will be no more night; they need no light of lamp of sun, for the Lord God will be their light, and they will reign forever and ever” (22:3-5). This is the point we don’t want to lose sight of when we’re reading Scripture. Whatever else happens along the way, and whatever conclusions we come to about the details of biblical history, what is happening is that God is restoring the creation to Himself, and the final result will be what we see portrayed at the end of the book of Revelation.
What does this mean for us living in the 21st Century? First, we need to know that our faith is deeply rooted in history. There’s a tendency in our culture to despise the past and assume that we are wiser than all the people who have gone before us. C.S. Lewis called this “chronological snobbery,” the assumption that whatever is most-recent must be better. We need to know that God’s work of redemption didn’t start with us. He has been at work over the centuries preparing the way for us to be restored. The idea that things started out badly and have been steadily improving over time is a very weak assumption. It’s not terribly difficult to find people in the past who are much wiser than we are. Our technological advances have increased our access to information but have not made us wiser. T.S. Eliot described this well:
All our knowledge brings us nearer to our ignorance,
All our ignorance brings us nearer to death,
But nearness to death no nearer to God.
Where is the life we have lost in living?
Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?
Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?
The cycles of Heaven in twenty centuries
Bring us farther from God and nearer to the Dust. (Choruses from ‘The Rock’).
God has been at work over many centuries to bring healing to us from the results of the Fall. Our hope for the future is rooted in the past, and we owe a great debt to those who have responded to God and have preserved the message for us, often at great cost to themselves.
The other thing is that we need to keep in perspective what God is doing. He’s not terribly concerned about whether we are Lutherans or Presbyterians or Baptists or Roman Catholics; His concern is with preparing a people for Himself to live in His presence throughout all eternity. It’s easy to get so caught up in the concerns of our particular group that we lose sight of God’s ultimate purpose in His work of redemption. He has been at work preparing a people for Himself to live in His presence and has graciously included us. When we gather for worship, we are joining with all those who went before us and are now worshiping before God’s throne in heaven.
The rabbi I mentioned at the beginning got pulled into Asher Lev’s story in spite of himself, but in Jesus we are truly part of this story that we’re reading about. God’s promise to Abraham, “in you all nations of the earth will be blessed,” includes us. We are part of that great body gathered in heaven, which includes Abraham, Isaac, Jacob and all the rest. May God enable us to remember this as we read His Word and go about our lives in the coming week.
Asher Lev was an immensely gifted painter who grew up in an ultra-conservative Jewish home. His artistic endeavors often brought him into conflict with his family, who really didn’t understand what he was doing or why he was doing it. He had a strong inner compulsion to keep painting, despite the problems it caused in his life, and as a result, he became increasingly alienated from his family. But he was especially concerned about his mother, who often intervened between him and his father, and he portrayed this by painting a crucifix, with his mother on the cross and Asher and his father nailing her there. This was the final straw, and his family ended up disowning him.
Asher Lev is a fictional character from a book by Chaim Potok (My Name is Asher Lev). I wasn’t even aware of the book, but it came up in one of my college classes. A local rabbi spoke in our class and someone asked about it. Up to this point, he had been very open-minded and liberal, but when the name of Chaim Potok came up he became angry and said Potok was a horrible, arrogant person and then went on to assert that no Jewish person would ever paint a crucifix. It was simply unthinkable. But, of course, this was exactly the point Potok was making. No Jewish person would ever paint a crucifix, but if one did, this is how the community would react. The rabbi, despite his liberal, open-minded posturing, found himself acting like one of the characters in Potok’s novel. He was so incensed by the whole idea that he missed the point of the story.
This often happens to us: we get so caught up in our own concerns, or stuck on particular details, that we end up missing what is really going on. And this is also true when we read Scripture. When we’re reading the early chapters of Genesis, if our perspective is limited by a particular theory of how God carried out His work of creation, we’re likely to miss the point. The purpose of the early chapters of Genesis is not to give us a detailed cosmology or satisfy our curiosity about how it all took place. There are lots of unanswered questions in these early chapters, and there is no attempt, on the part of the biblical authors, to clear everything up for us.
The point of Genesis 1-11 is to get us to where we are today, the call of Abraham. In chapters one and two, we learn that God created the world and placed humans there to bear His image. In chapter three we learn of the Fall, that these humans have rebelled against God’s command, and chapters 4-11 show something of the disastrous effects of this choice. And it’s in the context of this world that’s alienated from God and from one another that God calls Abraham. When we meet him here he’s called Abram, but God later renames him Abraham, which means “father of a multitude.”
The first thing to notice is that God calls Abraham to make a major change in his life. God calls him to leave his own country, the place where he grew up, the place where he is comfortable, to leave behind all the people he knows. This involves two things: he’s being called to separation from the alienated, divided world into which he was born. God is telling him to turn his back on everything that has been important to him up to this point in his life. Remember the context here. The world is in a state of rebellion against God, the Creator; Abraham is being called to separate himself from this world that is on the wrong track and to identify himself with God, the One against whom the world is rebelling.
God’s call also leads Abraham into a state of insecurity and uncertainty. He’s being called to leave behind everything that he knows, all his sources of comfort, and to make a journey “into the land that I will show you.” Responding to God’s call on his life meant saying good-bye to his family, his friends, and his country, everything that’s been a part of his life up to this point. Not only saying good-bye to all that, but setting out in an uncertain direction; the author of Hebrews says “By faith Abraham obeyed when he was called to set out for a place that he was to receive as an inheritance; and he set out, not knowing where he was going” (11:8). He didn’t know where he was going, but he set out anyway, because he trusted God who had called him. So this work of God in building a nation begins with His call to a specific man in a specific place who was going about his life with other things in mind. There’s no reason to think that Abraham had life-goals that differed from those around him; the thing that made the difference was that God called him to leave all that behind and he obeyed. We too easily assume that the biblical characters were special people, different from the rest of us, but if you continue reading about Abraham you’ll see that he had very significant weaknesses. He was a man seeking to get through his life like others around him, but God called him to something different than what he had in mind for himself.
The second thing to notice is that God promises to bless Abraham: “I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you, and make your name great, so that you will be a blessing.” The central idea here is that God is going to bless him, which will result in Abraham himself becoming a blessing to others. What does it mean for God to bless him? Does it mean that God will give him good things? Well yes, it does mean that – it says that he is going to become a great nation and that his name will be great -- but it means much more; in fact, getting things from God is not the main thing at all. It means that God will be his God, that God will identify with him in a special way. What is happening here is the beginning of the undoing of the effects of the Fall. The world is in chaos because of sin; people are alienated from God and from each other, and God comes to Abraham and says “I will be your God.”
The primary, most-important content of God’s blessing is God Himself. God created people in His image, to walk with Him in the garden and to know His companionship, and all that was lost at the Fall. God is calling Abraham to become the person he was created to be, to begin the process of transformation that will lead, in the end, to full restoration. This will be a blessing not only to Abraham himself, but also to those around him: “so that you will be a blessing.”
This leads to the next thing, which is that God’s call points far beyond Abraham himself: “in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed.” It’s not that God looked at Abraham and said, “he seems like a really good guy; I think I’ll do something nice for him.” It’s that God is at work fulfilling the promise He hinted at when He was cursing the serpent in the garden and said: “I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your offspring and hers; he will strike your head, and you will strike his heel” (3:15). God is at work restoring the brokenness of His creation, and the call of Abraham is the point in history when the process begins. The whole remainder of the Bible can be seen as the outworking of this promise in the lives of God’s people over many centuries.
Through Abraham, God builds a nation called by His name, and over the centuries He demonstrates His faithfulness to His promise, despite their persistent unfaithfulness. But His purpose in building a nation, like His call to Abraham, is not an end in itself; He’s preparing this nation to be the people through whom He will bring a Redeemer into the world, One who will finally undo the effects of the Fall and restore God’s creation. As we read today in our gospel reading, Jesus said to a group of Jewish leaders who opposed His ministry: “Your ancestor Abraham rejoiced that he would see my day; he saw it and was glad” (John 8:56). The call of Abraham points forward to the ministry of Jesus. The ministry of Jesus is the fulfillment of God’s promise that through Abraham all families of the earth would be blessed.
The final outworking of this is described near the end of the book of Revelation in this description of the New Jerusalem: “Nothing accursed will be found there any more. But the throne of God and of the Lamb will be in it, and his servants will worship him; they will see his face, and his name will be on their foreheads. And there will be no more night; they need no light of lamp of sun, for the Lord God will be their light, and they will reign forever and ever” (22:3-5). This is the point we don’t want to lose sight of when we’re reading Scripture. Whatever else happens along the way, and whatever conclusions we come to about the details of biblical history, what is happening is that God is restoring the creation to Himself, and the final result will be what we see portrayed at the end of the book of Revelation.
What does this mean for us living in the 21st Century? First, we need to know that our faith is deeply rooted in history. There’s a tendency in our culture to despise the past and assume that we are wiser than all the people who have gone before us. C.S. Lewis called this “chronological snobbery,” the assumption that whatever is most-recent must be better. We need to know that God’s work of redemption didn’t start with us. He has been at work over the centuries preparing the way for us to be restored. The idea that things started out badly and have been steadily improving over time is a very weak assumption. It’s not terribly difficult to find people in the past who are much wiser than we are. Our technological advances have increased our access to information but have not made us wiser. T.S. Eliot described this well:
All our knowledge brings us nearer to our ignorance,
All our ignorance brings us nearer to death,
But nearness to death no nearer to God.
Where is the life we have lost in living?
Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?
Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?
The cycles of Heaven in twenty centuries
Bring us farther from God and nearer to the Dust. (Choruses from ‘The Rock’).
God has been at work over many centuries to bring healing to us from the results of the Fall. Our hope for the future is rooted in the past, and we owe a great debt to those who have responded to God and have preserved the message for us, often at great cost to themselves.
The other thing is that we need to keep in perspective what God is doing. He’s not terribly concerned about whether we are Lutherans or Presbyterians or Baptists or Roman Catholics; His concern is with preparing a people for Himself to live in His presence throughout all eternity. It’s easy to get so caught up in the concerns of our particular group that we lose sight of God’s ultimate purpose in His work of redemption. He has been at work preparing a people for Himself to live in His presence and has graciously included us. When we gather for worship, we are joining with all those who went before us and are now worshiping before God’s throne in heaven.
The rabbi I mentioned at the beginning got pulled into Asher Lev’s story in spite of himself, but in Jesus we are truly part of this story that we’re reading about. God’s promise to Abraham, “in you all nations of the earth will be blessed,” includes us. We are part of that great body gathered in heaven, which includes Abraham, Isaac, Jacob and all the rest. May God enable us to remember this as we read His Word and go about our lives in the coming week.
