Originally posted on September 1, 2013
The way we believe as Christians currently is very conceptualistic, especially compared to the legalism of orthodox Judaism, as manifested in Jesus’ day, and before. The Old Testament Torah is rife with hundreds upon hundreds of commandments, statutes, ordinances, and judgments that the children of Israel had to follow according to Moses, and those who put the oral tradition to paper, beginning in King David’s time.
Every day, Priests of the house of Aaron, of the house of Levi, had to offer, morning and evening, a fresh, clean, animal for sacrifice to atone for the people’s sins. Not only could the common folk not come before the LORD, they could not even come near the tabernacle of meeting except to make their sin and peace offerings and tithes to the Priests and the Priests helpers. And even Aaron and his sons and descendants could only go behind the veil to minister before the mercy seat–the actual presence of God–once per year, on the Day of Atonement.
It was necessary for the Messiah to come and to deliver man out of that impossible state. Not only was it a blood bath daily, but the judgments handed out, even by Moses, were cruel, reminiscent of Hammurabi’s “eye for an eye, tooth for a tooth” law, carved into a code for the masses hundreds of years before.
So when Jesus came, and was accepted (eventually) as the perfect propitiation for our sins, and the sins of the whole world forever, what a relief it must have been!! As the perfect Lamb of God, it became no longer necessary to sacrifice innocent animals daily to make man worthy. Man was still unworthy, but Jesus made man new if man would only accept that Jesus was taking the place of the sacrificial beasts, and taking sin upon himself by dying willingly.
Jesus also preached a fresh message about God’s Love. God in the OT was harsh and a discerning taskmaster more than he was a loving forgiver. Oh, yes, he forgave the Hebrews much grumblings and times when they fell away from Him in the Wilderness, but God was definitely a harsh Elohim who could and would punish those for even questioning His rule; and He did it time and time again, as illustrated in the Old Testament.
It wasn’t that God became loving after Jesus, it is that when man first came to be monotheistic, it was in an atmosphere of polytheism where kings had godly attributes and could strike anyone down for anything; it was a harsh environment in which man lived. So, the early tradition of the patriarchs saw God as the the One True God and divine, but in a way that replaced the all powerful impulsive pagan gods, but still held the basic aire of awesomeness and fearfulness that man had regarding his god; a primitive superstition that it is hard for us to understand across the deserts of time. They were truly God-fearing.
Not many today would say they were God-fearing. We have watered God down so that He is not so miraculous and wonderful as he was in the ancient times of our religion. Men attributed almost everything to God’s signs and wonders in the early days of our faith, which is evident in the mythical stories of the Bible. But now we place God somewhere in the middle of that great continuum and give him attribution and glory when WE feel it’s due; He doesn’t smite people anymore, He doesn’t have the ability (according to many) to heal miraculously anymore, He just sort-of hangs out loving us and watching us go about our way, without intervening in too fearful or too wonderful a way.
What happened to evoke this change in our outlook about God? The are many reasons, but for now I want to focus on this part of it: I think it was in large part due to our taking God out of our daily reality and putting him out of graspable bounds, into an abstract world we rarely have to contemplate. The Hebrews had their tabernacle set in the midst of them. Their whole world revolved around worshiping God daily through the Priests, making offerings of restitution and peace to the Priests, confessing to the Priests, and asking the Priests for atonement with God and judgments for conflicts in daily life. Via blood sacrifice of animals and laws they could not overlook, like never eating blood, because the blood of an animal was too sacred for man to eat; and never eating fat because the fat was a sweet offering for the LORD; and laws like these, it was hard for man to escape his responsibility to God, and his role as congregant.
When Jesus came on the scene, he unbloodied the atonement ritual, which needed to happen. Blood sacrifice smacked of pagan roots, though it was a necessary bridge for man being humbled before the LORD because the life is in the blood. Ancient man revered this right of ceremony, and needed that to make atonement for their souls. But Jesus did not erase all the Law, as much as he refined it.
Later, men came to start regarding Jesus as God, and this was a cemented decree at the Council of Nicaea in AD 325. If Jesus replaces God, then it follows that everything Jesus said could replace everything in the Old Testament. There is no surprise then that Christians rely too heavily on the New Testament, leaving the wisdom of the Old Testament to the dust of the ages. Many Christians today cite the Two Great Commandments as the only ones needing to be followed. They ignore the hundreds of other laws in the OT that God said, “This will be a statute for future generations, forever”!, and they allow any common folk to come directly before the LORD, no matter what sins they may have committed or whether they have sought proper restitution and forgiveness with a holy Priest. Unless they are Catholic, they don’t even confess their sins anymore, and it’s doubtful most Catholics even still do attend confession.
They took liberties with Christ’s mission, and made Christ a thought and an action in place of God, whereby all that is required now in the eyes of most Christian doctrine is that one believes in Christ as Messiah and falsely, Christ as God, and all will be well with that person spiritually. That one simply understands the concept of Christ for their life, and it will all be made right.
For nearly two millenium we have had man believing in the One True God. Man was God-fearing and God, through Moses, made a lot of laws (some not from Moses) to keep man obedient. Now for nearly two millenium we have man believing that the One True God is divided into three pieces and that just understanding that concept is enough to be obedient, that God is Loving.
The fact is that there is One True God. He is to be feared and to be as friend. He has laid out many laws for us to follow in every realm of our lives–spiritual, personal, familial, relational, financial, and societal, which can keep us obedient and successful. We need those laws to be tangible and in our daily lives just as we need to understand they are sometimes intangible. Jesus is not the answer. God is the answer! Jesus is a new bridge to God. We cannot replace God with Jesus. We cannot replace Priests with people. We cannot replace daily worship to God merely with mindfulness of Jesus.
It takes love for God, faith (holding fast to Him at all times), and obedience (to walk in His ways), to come into the realm of God. That is the holy trinity.
Love,
~Mary
~Song of Mary~ 