3. The God Who Writes His Own Agreements
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The God Who Writes His Own Agreements
How shall we think of the relationship between God and human beings? What kind of mental model do we have when we think of such relationships?
In the various cultures around us, many options are proposed. It might be useful to describe three of them.
Model 1: The Super-Soft Grandfather
God is a benevolent gentleman with a long, flowing beard whose primary job is to be nice. When I was a student in Britain many years ago, I went for a while to Germany to improve my German. While I was there in the language school, a young engineering doctoral student from French West Africa was also there to learn German. Because I was reared in French and he was from French West Africa, every once in a while—twice a week or so—we would go out for a meal together and talk in a language in which we were more comfortable, French rather than German, which was giving both of us headaches. As I got to know him a bit, I discovered that he was married, and while he was in Germany studying German to go back to finish his doctoral studies at a German university in mechanical engineering, his wife was studying medicine in London. It wasn’t too long before I discovered that once a week or so he would go to the red-light district in town and pay his money and have his woman. By this time I had gotten to know him pretty well, so one evening when we were out for a meal, I asked him, “I don’t mean to be too intrusive, but what would you say if you discovered that your wife were doing something similar in London?”
“Oh,” he said, “I’d kill her.”
I said, “That sounds like a bit of a double standard.”
“Yes,” he replied, “but you have to understand. From the part of the world I come from—in our tribal structure—she would be dishonoring me. It would be a matter of honor. I would have to kill her.”
I said, “But you told me that you were brought up in a mission school. You were taught the Bible. You know that the God of the Bible doesn’t grade on a curve—one set of standards for men and one set of standards for women.”
“Le bon Dieu,” he replied, “il doit nous pardonner. C’est son métier.” “God is good. He’s bound to forgive us. That’s his job.” Now in fact my friend was quoting the words of Catherine the Great. It’s a great line to get us off the hook and slither away from any sort of guilt, isn’t it? That is one kind of model of the relationship between God and human beings. He is a super-soft grandfather whose only job is to be nice and forgive us.
Model 2: Deism
God is spectacularly great. Think of the unmeasured eons necessary to travel from galaxy to galaxy at the speed of light. And how many galaxies are there? Where is the end? And God made it all! He is bigger than all of it, incalculably huge, transcendently glorious. So of course you cannot expect him to concern himself with your two-bit existence down here. You have as much significance to him as a nanoparticle has to us. Even if you have some genuine concern for the creatures on your farm, you do not usually give a lot of thought to the earthworms. Why should God give a snap about you? He may have wound the entire universe up like a big old-fashioned watch, but now it is running down without any input from him, doing its own thing.
Neither deism nor the grandfather model squares very well with the Bible. True, according to the Bible God really did make it all. Moreover, he is “big” all right, transcendentally glorious. But he is also portrayed as personal, interacting with and talking to the creatures he made in his image, intimately interested in their affairs, and certainly holding them to account. We shall discover that God as he is described in the Bible is incalculably loving yet simultaneously utterly holy, such that when he confronts rebellion, sin, and all that is tawdry and evil, he is—there is no other word for it—angry. So the God of the first model, which is very common, cannot be squared with Scripture because he is merely nice: there is nothing of justice in him, no moral fiber or judgment, no passion simply to be God and be recognized as such. The grandfather model leaves us at the center of the universe, and God’s role is to coddle us there. That is called idolatry. The second model cannot be squared with Scripture because its picture of God makes him out to be too distant, too unconcerned, too impersonal. God as he is depicted in the Bible is as intensely personal as he is utterly sovereign.
We might consider another model of the relationship between God and human beings.
Model 3: Mutual Back-Scratching
This model is very common in the world of polytheism, that is, in religions where there are multiple gods. These gods are all finite. They all have personalities, and many of them have their quirks, weaknesses, evils, eccentricities, sins, and needs. They also have their spheres of interest, their domains of operation. So the way such pagan religion works is that you go to the temple of the particular god in question, and you give the god the kind of thing that the god wants. You scratch the god’s back (metaphorically, of course) by offering a specified sacrifice, or making a donation to the god’s temple, or engaging in some prescribed ritual. Then maybe that god will give you what you want. So you want to make a nice safe sea voyage in the first century in the Mediterranean world? You go to the temple of Neptune, the god of the sea. You offer the appropriate sacrifices, and you hope and pray that Neptune will keep the sea calm and you will have a safe trip. You have to give a major speech to your stockholders? Then you go to the god of communication, Hermes in the Greek world and Mercury in the Latin world. You offer the appropriate sacrifices. You scratch the god’s back, and the god scratches your back. So this form of religion is a kind of tit-for-tat arrangement: you scratch my back, I scratch yours. Under this sort of regime you may live in a certain kind of fear that you have not paid enough or scratched appropriately, or maybe that the god in question is particularly bad-tempered.
We must acknowledge that some people who think of themselves as Christians also think that their relationship with God is of this “you scratch my back, I scratch your back” sort. Provided you are good enough, you will get married happily. Provided you read your devotions every day, you will live a long life and will not get cancer until you are at least ninety-six. Provided you are honest at work, you will not lose your job as has happened to others, who deserve to lose them a lot more than you do. Provided you always say your prayers, your kids will never rebel. And one day you will go to heaven. You scratch my back, I scratch your back.
The problem with this model, of course, is that it presupposes that the God of the Bible has needs and, therefore, you really can offer him something that he needs and therefore wants. That is why the mutual back-scratching approach to religion is a barter system. That is why the system works in theory in polytheism. The gods are all finite, and they all have needs. But suppose you deal with a God who has no needs. What are you going to offer him?
God Cannot Be Manipulated (Acts 17:24)
The apostle Paul understands these matters. Paul was a first-century preacher who appeared on the scene shortly after Jesus was crucified and came back to life again. He wrote about one quarter of the New Testament. He was especially gifted when it came to announcing the God of the Bible to the polytheists who dominated the culture of the Roman imperial world. So we find him, for example, in the great city of Athens, carefully explaining what a difference it makes to see that there is but one God and that he cannot be manipulated. At the time Athens had the reputation of being the most learned city in the Roman world, followed by Alexandria in Egypt.
When Paul gives his address to some philosophers and teachers in Athens, he explains what he holds to be the truth. Theirs is a world of gods, and the very nature of their religion is “you scratch my back, I scratch your back.” But Paul says, “The God who made the world and everything in it [thus you find him articulating the Bible’s teaching about creation from Genesis 1–2] is the Lord of heaven and earth and does not live in temples built by hands” (Acts 17:24). Paul does not mean that God may not disclose himself in a temple if he chooses to do so. What he means is that God cannot be reduced to the temple where he is manipulated and domesticated by a priestly class. You cannot get him into a position where you can manipulate him to do your will by providing cash to a certain class of priests, connected with a temple, who are allegedly experts in figuring out what the gods want. The God of the Bible is too big for that; he made everything, he is sovereign over the whole lot, and he cannot be manipulated.
God Does Not Need Us (Acts 17:25)
Then Paul says this: “And he is not served by human hands, as if he needed anything” (Acts 17:25). Isn’t that remarkable? God does not need you. He certainly does not need me. He does not need our praise bands. It is not as if God gets to Thursday afternoon and starts saying, “Oh boy, I can hardly wait until Sunday when they crack out those guitars again. I’m feeling pretty lonely. I need to be stroked up here.” He does not need our worship. He does not need our money. He does not need us. He does not need anything. In eternity past, before there was anything else, God was, and he was entirely full of joy and contentment. Even then he was a loving God because in the complexity of God’s oneness (in categories we will see in due course), the Father loved the Son (we’ll come to those categories). There was an otherness right within God himself. He did not create human beings because he was lonely and thought, “You know, my job as God will be a little more palatable if I make an image-bearer or two who strokes me once in a while.” He simply does not need us. In this respect God as he is disclosed in the Bible cannot be compared to the finite and needy gods of polytheism.
Do not misunderstand: the truth that God does not need us does not mean that he does not respond to us, that he cannot delight in us, that he might not be pleased with us. He does respond to us, but he responds not out of some intrinsic need in his own being or character but out of the entire volition of his perfections and will. He interacts with us not because he does not foresee the future, not because he has let things get out of control, not because he has abandoned his sovereignty, not because he never was sovereign, not because he is psychologically damaged, not because he needs something—but out of the perfections of all that he is with all of his characteristics and attributes. He always responds in line with all of his attributes. He is never less than God.
Can you imagine how hard it was for Paul to get that point across to sophisticated academics whose entire notion of religion was bound up with a form of “you scratch my back, I scratch your back” polytheism?
We Need God (Acts 17:25)
To make the distinction between God and the gods of the Athenians even sharper, Paul adds another line: “Rather, he himself gives everyone life and breath and everything else” (Acts 17:25). God does not need us, but we need him. Paul’s point comes directly out of Genesis 1–3: we are dependent on him for “life and breath and everything else.”
When the Lord Jesus was on earth, he taught that not a sparrow falls from the heavens without God’s sanction and that the very hairs of your head are numbered (see Matt. 10:29–30). In my case that means God is keeping a rapidly subtracting account, and he knows them all, even the disappearing ones. And every breath I draw is by his sanction. I am dependent upon him, Paul reminds us, for life and breath and everything else—for food, for health. I am an utterly dependent creature. I am not the Creator.
So how are you going to have a relationship with a God like that? He is not some soft-hearted grandfather; moreover, he is not safely distant. He is intensely personal, but he has no needs. That means you have nothing to barter with. The only reason you are still around is because God sanctions it.
Last week one of my friends who taught at a seminary in Dallas—a good man, a teacher of the New Testament, author of major books, father of three children, one a missionary in Siberia, one a missionary in Russia, and one a missionary in Afghanistan—was out jogging. He came home, lay down, and died. Not a thing he could do about it. If your heart keeps beating, it is because God sanctions it. And if he says, “Come home, my child. Now is the time. Your work is done,” you go. Or if he ever says, “You fool, tonight your soul will be required of you,” you die. How are you going to barter with a God like that? “God, I’ll give you ten percent.” But he owns you and all you are and have. “Lord, I’ll become a missionary.” “I’ll become a deacon in church.” Are you trying to bribe God? Will that make you a better person?
No, there is only one way you are going to have a relationship with this kind of God, and that is if he displays sovereign grace to you. We have nothing with which to barter.
The way sovereign grace—God’s decision to be gracious to some people—works out in the Bible lies in a number of different structures. Sometimes God graciously promises what he is going to do so that people learn to believe what he says, to trust his Word, and to look forward to what he is going to do. Sometimes God enters into formal agreements with them. These formal agreements are called “covenants.” We might, I suppose, think of them as a kind of contract, a legal agreement—except that modern contracts are negotiated by both parties. The covenants in the Bible often mirror covenants that were well known in the ancient world. In some cases a regional superpower would impose a “covenant” on a vassal state: it was all top-down. Similarly with God: he is the God who writes his own agreements, his own covenants, and here his grace is spectacularly displayed.
The Bible speaks of several covenants that God draws up. We begin with God’s covenant with Abraham.
Genesis 12
What has taken place in the intervening chapters—that is, between Genesis 3 and Genesis 12—is not particularly pretty. Abominations have multiplied until God has wiped out nearly all on the planet with a flood. Just a handful of people are spared, but the leader, Noah, promptly gets drunk. By chapter 11, a rebellion is towering through the land again, defying God. And now in Genesis 12 we are told, “The Lord had said to Abram [his name is later changed to Abraham—I’ll keep calling him Abraham], ‘Go from your country, your people and your father’s household to the land I will show you’” (12:1). At the time, Abraham had been in a place called Ur in ancient Babylon; then he moved to a city called Haran. Now God is telling him to go to what would eventually become the land of Israel. God promises him these things:
2I will make you into a great nation
and I will bless you;
I will make your name great,
and you will be a blessing.
3I will bless those who bless you,
and whoever curses you I will curse;
and all peoples on earth
will be blessed through you.
Genesis 12:2–3
That’s a promise. Later on the promise is further elaborated on. Abraham’s descendants would be as numerous as the sand of the sea. A son was promised to him, and this promised son through whom all of these blessings would spring would be born in Abraham’s old age. At this point Abraham is already seventy-five years old. His wife is getting up there too, but nevertheless, the promise is that this child will come from the union of Abraham and his wife Sarah. Abraham goes through periods of doubt and uncertainty. He tries to short-circuit things by sleeping with somebody else. It is a pretty messy story. But ultimately God keeps his promise. They have a child, a son named Isaac.
Isaac eventually marries, and his wife gives birth to twins. Before the twins are born, God says to the mother, “You have twins inside you. Let me tell you: the older will serve the younger” (see 25:23). In that culture such ordering was not the normal way of things, but God in his sovereignty chose the younger one before either child had done anything good or evil. Out of sovereign grace God chose one above the other and predicted what would happen. God then preserved a certain line down through the years, generation after generation, until the tribes multiplied and eventually possessed the land.
In the midst of all of these promises, this one stands out: “all peoples on earth will be blessed through you” (12:3). God is not only choosing Abraham and his descendants but insisting that through these tribal descendants all peoples on earth will be blessed. This is God graciously, sovereignly promising something, unconditionally.
Genesis 17
But then comes not only promise but covenant. In Genesis 17 we read,
1When Abram was ninety-nine years old, the Lord appeared to him and said, “I am God Almighty; walk before me faithfully and be blameless. 2Then I will make my covenant between me and you and will greatly increase your numbers.”
3Abram fell facedown, and God said to him, 4“As for me, this is my covenant with you: You will be the father of many nations. 5No longer will you be called Abram; your name will be Abraham, for I have made you a father of many nations. [There’s a pun in the Hebrew.] 6I will make you very fruitful; I will make nations of you, and kings will come from you. 7I will establish my covenant as an everlasting covenant between me and you and your descendants after you for the generations to come, to be your God and the God of your descendants after you. 8The whole land of Canaan, where you now reside as a foreigner, I will give as an everlasting possession to you and your descendants after you; and I will be their God.”
9Then God said to Abraham, “As for you, you must keep my covenant, you and your descendants after you for the generations to come. 10This is my covenant with you and your descendants after you, the covenant you are to keep: Every male among you shall be circumcised.
Genesis 17:1–10, emphasis added
This is all very remarkable. This is not simply promise but covenant—a covenant imposed by God but leaving both parties with some obligations. God will be the God of Abraham and his descendants; he will secure the land for them and guarantee that entire nations will spring from him. For their part, Abraham and his descendants are to keep the covenant—that is, they are to maintain allegiance to God and seal their acceptance of this covenantal arrangement with the rite of circumcision. At the end of the chapter, we are told, “On that very day Abraham took his son Ishmael and all those born in his household or bought with his money, every male in his household, and circumcised them, as God told him” (17:23).
Genesis 15
So here is first a promise (Genesis 12) and then a covenantal structure (Genesis 17). In between Genesis 12 and 17 is another chapter that speaks of the covenant: Genesis 15. At the beginning of the chapter, God says, “Do not be afraid, Abram. I am your shield, your very great reward” (15:1). Then later in the chapter, Abraham falls into a deep sleep (15:12), and he experiences a spectacularly weird vision. The setup for it comes when Abraham asks God a question:
8“Sovereign Lord, how can I know that I will gain possession of [the land]?”
9So the Lord said to him, “Bring me a heifer, a goat and a ram, each three years old, along with a dove and a young pigeon.”
10Abram brought all these to him, cut them in two and arranged the halves opposite each other; the birds, however, he did not cut in half.
Genesis 15:8–10
So now you’ve got a heifer cut into two halves, a ram cut into two halves, a goat cut in two halves, one bird on one side, and one bird on the other.
11Then birds of prey came down on the carcasses, but Abram drove them away.
12As the sun was setting, Abram fell into a deep sleep, and a thick and dreadful darkness came over him. 13Then the Lord said to him, “Know for certain that for four hundred years your descendants will be strangers in a country not their own and that they will be enslaved and mistreated there. 14But I will punish the nation they serve as slaves, and afterward they will come out with great possessions. 15You, however, will go to your ancestors in peace and be buried at a good old age. 16In the fourth generation your descendants will come back here, for the sin of the Amorites has not yet reached its full measure.”
17When the sun had set and darkness had fallen, a smoking firepot with a blazing torch appeared and passed between the pieces. 18On that day the Lord made a covenant with Abram.
Genesis 15:11–18
What’s going on? This strikes the modern reader as bizarre. When we speak today of writing our own agreements, this is not usually what happens at the final signing ceremony.
Covenants in the Ancient World
There were different kinds of covenants in the ancient world. As I’ve already indicated, sometimes covenants were established between a sovereign regional superpower and small vassal states. The regional superpower—the Hittites at some points in time, the Assyrians at others, the Babylonians at still others—would arrange an agreement, a covenant. Basically, the covenant said, “We will look after you. We will secure your borders. We will make sure that you are protected against enemies. And you—you will pay your taxes and show allegiance to us,” and so on. It was an agreement between the two parties. The covenant specified that if either side did not fulfill the terms, certain disgusting things should happen to the offending party. Obviously, the regional superpower had the power to impose the nasties, not the other way around, but that is the way the covenants were written. Sometimes one of the signs of this covenant agreement and corresponding threat was to take animals, tear them apart, and put them side by side with a kind of bloody alleyway between the two parts, and then the two parties of the covenant would walk between the divided animals so as to signify “May this be done to me if I break this covenant. May I be torn apart. May I be cut in half.”
So Abraham prepares the animals. Obviously, however, God is not a human being to walk beside Abraham between animals. Abraham falls into a deep sleep, and in his sleep he sees a firepot, something to represent the presence of God. What is so stunning is that instead of the firepot moving between the animals side by side with Abraham (so that the two of them are saying, in effect, “May it be done to us if either of us breaks the covenant”), God goes down this bloody alleyway all by himself. He takes the full responsibility for the fulfillment of the covenant all by himself. That is grace.
Abraham will sin. Isaac, his son, will be a wimp. The next son, Jacob, learns some lessons on the long haul, but he is a trickster and a deceiver all the way through. Jacob has twelve sons: one of them sleeps with his father’s concubine; another sleeps with his daughter-in-law; ten of those sons cannot figure out whether to murder the eleventh or to sell him into slavery. And these are the patriarchs! And still God does not wipe them out. He has sworn in this symbolic act that whatever curses fall, they are to fall on him. Of course, the descendants of Abraham, later called Israelites, are to practice the sign of the covenant to show that they are the children of the covenant—and so they practice circumcision generation after generation. But then as the years go by and the moral tide swings up and down, one marvels at how much damage and destruction are done, while God still forbears because he promises to keep his covenant. He will protect them. He will bring them into this land. And from their seed will come someone through whom all the nations of the earth will be blessed.
There is one more chapter in Genesis to think about.
Genesis 22
Genesis 22 takes place after the favored son Isaac has been born. There we are told:
1Some time later God tested Abraham. He said to him, “Abraham!”
“Here I am,” he replied.
2Then God said, “Take your son, your only son, whom you love—Isaac—and go to the region of Moriah. Sacrifice him there as a burnt offering on a mountain I will show you.”
Genesis 22:1–2
So he gets there. The son, who is about thirteen, says,
7“Father?”
“Yes, my son?” Abraham replied.
“The fire and wood are here,” Isaac said, “but where is the lamb for the burnt offering?”
8Abraham answered, “God himself will provide the lamb for the burnt offering, my son.” And the two of them went on together.
Genesis 22:7–8
But in a horrendous scene, Abraham eventually stretches his own son out on this altar and is about to kill him—to sacrifice his own son.
11But the angel of the Lord called out to him from heaven, “Abraham! Abraham!”
“Here I am,” he replied.
12“Do not lay a hand on the boy,” he said. “Do not do anything to him. Now I know that you fear God, because you have not withheld from me your son, your only son.”
13Abraham looked up and there in a thicket he saw a ram caught by its horns. He went over and took the ram and sacrificed it as a burnt offering instead of his son. 14So Abraham called that place The Lord Will Provide. And to this day it is said, “On the mountain of the Lord it will be provided.”
15The angel of the Lord called to Abraham from heaven a second time 16and said, “I swear by myself, declares the Lord, that because you have done this and have not withheld your son, your only son, 17I will surely bless you and make your descendants as numerous as the stars in the sky and as the sand on the seashore. Your descendants will take possession of the cities of their enemies, 18and through your offspring all nations on earth will be blessed, because you have obeyed me.”
Genesis 22:11–18
Now, you might begin by asking, “What kind of God wants someone to sacrifice his own son?” In the pagan religions of the time, it was not all that uncommon for parents to sacrifice their own sons. One particular pagan god called Moloch was pictured as holding a big stone pot in its hands, and a fire would be built under the pot until it was glowing red. Parents would sometimes throw their screaming children into this pot. That was not all that uncommon. It was a mark of devotion. But the whole point of this account is that this is not what God wants. How can you possibly please God, the God of the Bible, by destroying your children?
In one sense we should see this as a kind of test in line with the cultural norms of the day: “Do you have the kind of trust in me that the pagans seem to have in their gods—their false, murderous gods to whom they are willing to sacrifice their own sons?” But when push comes to shove, God says, in effect, “Don’t you understand? I provide the sacrifice! How can you ever please me by sacrificing your son?” Just as in Genesis 15 God alone walks down the bloody alleyway and takes the curse of the covenant on himself, so here he provides the sacrifice. Prohibition of child sacrifice was in due course enshrined in law in the Old Testament. Child sacrifice was to be seen as an idolatrous crime, regardless of the cultural pressures of the day. The God who is there does not demand that we sacrifice our children; instead, in sovereign grace he provides a sacrifice. What he wants of us is that we turn to him wholly and say in effect, “You are God. You are Lord. You are sovereign. I am dependent upon you. I need you. I will trust you. I will obey you.”
For all the failures in Abraham’s life and in your life and mine, God provides the sacrificial lamb. The stories and the accounts begin to multiply through the Old Testament pages in anticipation of the time when God would provide a sacrifice that far exceeds the value of some ram caught in a thicket.
Concluding Prayer
We confess, Lord God, that in a digital world full of countless material blessings, in a world of nuclear physics and an astonishingly fast pace, it takes an effort to think our way through these passages. But we begin to glimpse that you are the sovereign God to whom we owe everything. The very heart of our rebellion is the desire to be God instead of you, to run things ourselves, to barter with you. We make messes that are damaging to ourselves, to our family, to the culture at large, and to the relationships among nations, everything from petty one-upmanship to racism and genocide and everything in between. Yet at the heart of all of it, we confess, is this horrendous rebellion, this idolatry that demands that we be our own gods.
Open our eyes, Lord God, that we may see your sovereign independence, your glory, your patience with us so that we are not destroyed, the way you took time across countless generations to show what a gracious sovereign God you are until in the fullness of time you sent your own Son to be the Lamb of God who really does take away our sin. Open our eyes and our hearts, Lord God, that we may be drawn inescapably to him. In Jesus’s name, Amen.