Over the years, I have been consistently interested in how we all view God. By all of us, I mostly mean, as the Quran puts it, the People of the Book, Jews, Christians, Muslims, Mormons, etc. I’ve been reading and hearing plenty about the God of the Torah; God the Father; the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob; I Am, Yahweh; the Old Covenant God; the God of Israel. We all share the same origins, the same God, and still somehow we cannot agree on what he’s actually like. We cannot come to consensus on the characteristics of God.
But if we look at those first five books of scripture, the pentateuch, and the rest of the Old Testament, the history, law, and prophets, there are a number of characteristics attributed to God. God describes himself in Exodus 34, and is echoed throughout the Psalms and the Prophets, when he says, “The Lord, the Lord, a God merciful and gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness, keeping steadfast love for thousands, forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin, but who will by no means clear the guilty, visiting the iniquity of the fathers on the children and the children’s children, to the third and the fourth generation.”
God is gracious. God is merciful. God is understanding and forgiving, loving and faithful. God is pure. God is sovereign. God is demanding. God is fair. God will have justice. However, among all of these traits I’ve encountered in my reading of the Old Testament, one characteristic stands out among the rest: God is absolvent.
God continually forgives his people’s responsibility to live according to his rigorous requirements. He gives commandments. We fail to live up to his expectations. He forgives us and exhorts us to return to him. We return to him. We fail to live up. The cycle continues. And after centuries of humanity’s ongoing inability to follow his demands, God refocuses our myopic aim and reminds us, “I desire steadfast love and not sacrifice, the knowledge of God rather than burnt offerings” (Hosea 6:6).
That’s hard to believe. I struggle with it, and I think we all struggle with it. He is a just God and a demanding God. He gives us commandments, and we must abide. We may even know that we cannot, and still we vainly seek perfection through our own efforts.
But when we come to the end of our striving, or even before we begin our striving, God gives examples of his absolvent nature in the scriptures. In fact, I contend that it’s the theme of the entire Bible, from the Torah, to the Psalms and Prophets, the Gospel, and all the way through to Revelation. God is a forgiving, just, and loving God.
I think one of the most gut-wrenching moments in the Bible is when God asks Abraham to sacrifice his miraculously begotten son Isaac as a burnt offering. Abraham answers God’s call with a faith that sours the stomachs of loving parents and angers the consciences of those of us with basic respect for human life. We cannot understand. But Abraham’s steadfast faith is undeniable.
So also is God’s grace. Upon seeing Abraham’s faith, God provides a sacrifice in place of Isaac, whose safety, from the beginning, was as assured as God’s provision:
Abraham lifted up his eyes and looked, and behold, behind him was a ram, caught in a thicket by his horns. And Abraham went and took the ram and offered it up as a burnt offering instead of his son.
(Genesis 22:13)
God imposed a requirement of Abraham, one which he knew he would rescind, in order to test Abraham’s faith and demonstrate his redemptive nature. God deplores human sacrifice. He made that very clear in the balance of the Old Testament. He asked Abraham to trust Him, to obey a command that made no sense, so that God might have an opportunity to demonstrate his love and provision.
Further on in his story, God saves the Israelites from the pains of a life of slavery in Egypt. In commemoration of his steadfast love for those whom he called, God asks that the Israelites dedicate to him all firstborns, every human or animal to open the womb (Exodus 13:1-2). Just a few chapters later, however, God allows his people to redeem their firstborn sons with a sacrificial offering that would take their place (Exodus 34:19-20). And as he is still in the process of handing down the law to His people, God releases Israelite families from this burdensome obligation by instating the Levites as his consecrated priests, forgiving the debt of a nation and blessing the tribe of Levi (Numbers 8:14-19). God saves his people. God establishes a contract to make Israel his chosen people. God loosens his people’s obligation to the covenant twice while in the process of establishing the law. His absolvent nature is on display.
From the beginning of time, God has mercifully been making it possible for a broken, sinful, and ungrateful people to commune with him, the essence of perfection and holiness. From the beginning, he has accommodated our inability to hold up our side of the bargain. That absolution has never done anything to dilute his purity or sovereignty or justness; it has always required redemption through compensatory sacrifice. Rather than endangering his godliness, his forgiveness fortifies his mercy and grace, his steadfast love and faithfulness.
And now we come to the payoff.
The God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob finds no enjoyment in seeing his beloved people languish under the law. He desires perfect communion and unadulterated praise, not stale and failing commitment to obligatory sacrifice. And since imperfection is all we have ever offered, he intervened in human history to end our obligation, once again mercifully providing a substitute, one that would be eternally effective. As he provided the ram for Abraham to redeem Isaac, as he provided the Levites to redeem Israel’s firstborns, and as he annually provided the scapegoat to redeem the Israelites from their sins, God provides a sacrifice to redeem us from our failure to honor the covenant.
This sacrifice, as all must be, “was pierced for our transgressions; he was crushed for our iniquities; upon him was the chastisement that brought us peace, and with his wounds we are healed” (Isaiah 53:5). This sacrifice was the only means by which our redemption could be complete. This sacrifice’s absolute purity could only come from God himself. This sacrifice assures our salvation, returning us to perfect communion with the perfectly divine.
Jesus Christ simultaneously acts as our high priest and our sacrifice. He gave himself for our sake, freeing us from guilt and obligation so that we may serve God more perfectly (Hebrews 9:11-14). We demonstrate our faithlessness in that while God’s presence thundered on the mountain we worshiped temporal treasures. “But God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us” (Romans 5:8). Christ’s life and death complete the arc of God’s redemptive story. As he said, “Do not think that I have come to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I have not come to abolish them but to fulfill them” (Matthew 5:17).
My words cannot encapsulate the beauty of scripture and the wholeness and ubiquity of God’s love and the spirit of this Advent season. The meaning of Christmas is not alone the importance of sacrificial giving. It is not alone the significance of communing with those we love. It is not alone the remembrance of the birth of the most impactful human in history.
Christmas is all of those things, but even more, it is this; God demonstrated his indomitable mercy and grace, his crazy love and faithfulness in the fulfillment of a promise given to a broken world. His promise is that our faith will not be in vain. His promise is that he will provide. His promise is love. And we ought to respond in love.
For those who think we see a vastly different God in the Old and New Covenant, for those who refer to the “Old Testament God,” for those who cannot reconcile a God of love with a God of justice, please look at the whole of scripture and pursue God’s story of redemption and rest in his love. This Christmas let love and justice reign by realizing we desperately need a God like the God we see in the Bible.
God did not, in the end, require Abraham’s wondrously begotten son because he knew all along that he would sacrifice his own, training our focus to the cross. The advent of Christ is the rustling of a ram caught in a thicket.