Manna From Heaven (4) November 12 What say we say then? Are we to continue in sin that grace may increase? Romans 6:1 NASB Sin YHWH is a God of order. The Genesis account of creation is a bugle blast sounding order in the cosmos. Everything that YHWH does demonstrates ordered purpose. And the patterns that YHWH puts into place within His creation all proclaim order. Just for a moment, imagine yourself living in the 16th Century BC. You have come out of a culture where chaos, fickle gods and fate rule life. Now Moses tells you that YHWH is not like that. He loves His creation. He instructs His creation. He sets patterns in place to govern His creation. Would it come as a surprise to you that your religious and spiritual life is also patterned, ordered and purposeful? I don’t think so. Grundmann notes that “The shift from the legal to the religious use [of sin] is important inasmuch as it shows that the religious life, too, is seen to be ordered, i.e., that dealings with God must follow a pattern. ”[1] That is the entire point of the rituals established in Torah – patterned behavior. That is why Shabbat comes every week, why the appointed times follow agricultural patterns, why the new moon is important, why all of these ordered experiences are eternal commandments. The continuity of the community depends on the exercise of ordered existence and YHWH provides precisely the ordered existence needed for His people to claim that they belong to Him. To violate the pattern, to ignore its practice is hatah. At least that’s what the word means in the Tanakh. Of course, you see where this is going, don’t you? When we lift the words out of their cultural context, we alter the patterns they established. And after awhile (say several centuries), we forget that we even changed the meaning. Now the words become our words; words that we define according to our practices and culture. So when Grundmann says, “For the OT as a whole, then, sin is a legal and theological term for what is against the norm, ”[2] we ignore the fact that the “norm” is Israel’s practice and rituals. Instead we think that the “norm” is what we do now. We think that the pews, the altar, the stage, the praise d worship music, the sermon, the prayers and the offering (let’s not forget that) are the norm. And since church history verifies our thinking back to the 3rd century, we don’t ask anything about the meaning of the words as Yeshua understood them. Actually, it’s just too threatening, too disconcerting, too risky to ask, “What if sin really is not following the patterns God established in Israel?” That would cause me to change a lot of things. No, better to simply pretend that sin is only about all those moral mistakes that I am certainly not guilty of doing. But YHWH is a God of patterns, isn’t He?
Posted on: Fri, 02 Aug 2013 16:15:00 +0000
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