During this Lenten season, we are doing a series called Storytellers in which we are rehearsing the entire biblical story. We began last week talking about the purpose for creation. The Creator God made everything, but the Bible wants to emphasize that he made the world for a purpose: to be a temple in which he would dwell with his human creatures. He made human beings in his image precisely so that he would rule all of creation through them. But when human beings rebelled against God, the result was catastrophic, not just for them, but for all of creation.

This is how the biblical story begins: Creation (remembering, of course, the emphasis is on the purpose of creation) and Fall (remembering, of course, the emphasis is on the fall from the human vocation because of human rebellion against the Creator God).

What comes after Creation and Fall? The answer is Redemption: God purposes and executes his plan to save human beings and all creation with them from the catastrophe that has been brought on by human rebellion against the Creator.

It is easy enough at this point for Christians to rush straight forward to Jesus, but it is obvious that doing so leaves out way too much of the biblical story and perhaps leaves us somewhat confused about the redemption that Jesus does in fact accomplish. You see, in just the first three chapters of the Bible we have been told about Creation and Fall. What is all of this stuff that comes between Genesis 3 and Matthew’s Gospel? The entire Old Testament, that part of the Bible that Christians are often confused about and don’t quite know what to do with.

Some will more or less ignore it, except for a few favorite Psalms or Proverbs, or perhaps a memorable line from Isaiah, Jeremiah, or one of the Minor Prophets that goes nicely on a coffee mug or on a picture that you can hang on the wall of your home. Others will see in the Old Testament accounts multiple illustrations of the failed attempts at redemption. Still others will look for moral examples from the memorable characters we encounter in the pages of the Old Testament, or perhaps some characteristic from them that will be seen in better ways in the life of Jesus himself. The fact is that the Old Testament continues to baffle many Christians. Many simply don’t know what to do with it. If you’ve got the New Testament, and maybe the Psalms and Proverbs from the Old, then that’s good enough. Or is it?

How we understand the relationship between the Old Testament and the New also affects our politics. After all, what is the Old Testament? It is essentially the story of ancient Israel, and saying the name “Israel” in our day produces a lot of emotion. But again, ask “why?” Why is this ancient nation so important to the biblical story? That’s what I want us to consider this morning.

God’s plan of redemption, the story of salvation, begins with his selection of ancient Israel. That is what he chose them for. God does not rescue and redeem human beings and all creation unilaterally. He could do that, of course; but the story teaches that salvation will be carried out in and through Israel. And, by doing it that way, we come to see God’s love for his people, his victory through his people, and his faithfulness in his people.

God’s Love for His People

Here in Psalm 105, the psalmist calls on the “offspring of Abraham” and the “children of Jacob” to give thanks to the Lord and to praise him for “all his wondrous works.” What wondrous works are in view here? The works seen in the story of Israel. Israel’s story is where we are supposed to look to see the mighty, saving acts of God. It is in the story of Israel that we begin to learn about God’s love for his people.

The Covenant with Abraham and the Patriarchs

Israel’s story begins with a man named Abraham. God made a covenant with Abraham, confirmed it to his son, Isaac, and then to his son, Jacob. As we have seen in our study of Genesis, it is Jacob whom God renames “Israel.” It is Jacob’s biological family who will become the nation of Israel. And it is to Israel that God entrusted the covenant he made with Abraham “as an everlasting covenant.”

Christians are instructed by Galatians 3:8 that this Abrahamic covenant is the gospel message, and yet, why do we not usually say so? How is it we can explain the gospel without any mention of the Abrahamic covenant? This should at least give us some pause. We shouldn’t believe less than what the Bible tells us is good news, but we also should see the whole picture. And the picture we are given begins with God’s covenant with Abraham.

The point of the covenant with Israel, and the whole of scripture, is that it is the means by which God is rescuing the children of Adam and so restoring the world. It is not a side issue or a different point. … Adam's sin is the problem: God's covenant with Abraham, which will be fulfilled in Jesus the Messiah, is the solution.[1]

We simply cannot forget this, or we may well misinterpret the biblical message.

God’s Choice of Israel

What is this covenant with Abraham that is the possession of the nation of Israel? The covenant emphasis in this psalm is on “the land of Canaan,” which God says is to be Israel’s “portion for an inheritance.” This is a truncated version of the Abrahamic covenant. We recall that God promised not just land to Abraham, but also a multitude of descendants that he would bless and thereby make a blessing to all the nations of the earth.

So the Abrahamic covenant soon enough becomes the sole possession of Jacob and his family tree, the ancient nation of Israel. And the Old Testament tells us the story of that ancient nation. But before we take a quick survey at that history, we dare not forget why such history is important to us in the first place. It is to Israel that God has committed himself. It is through Israel that God has promised to bring about the redemption of all creation.

This is what lies behind the doctrine of election in the Old Testament. God chose this group of people, we are told in Deuteronomy 7, “to be a people for [God’s] treasured possession, out of all the peoples who are on the face of the earth” (v. 6). Why did God choose them? “It was not because you were more in number than any other people,” God says, denying that there was something about Israel itself that forced God’s hand. In fact, God says, “you were the fewest of all peoples.” It’s as if God, in deciding to choose a people through whom he would bring salvation to the world, chose the smallest and least powerful group of all.

Why would he do that? Why would he tell Gideon that he had too many warriors to defeat the Midianites? God tells the Corinthian Christians that “God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong” for this reason: “so that no human being might boast in the presence of God.” (1 Cor 1:27, 29). Human pride is a big reason why the world needs saving in the first place, so God, wanting to save the world, chooses to do so in a way that prohibits it. So, God chose Israel precisely because they weren’t so big and mighty, so that whatever salvation, whatever victory would come through them, the only boast would be a “boast in the Lord.” (1 Cor 1:31; Jer 9:23-24).

For God So Loved the World

It is quite scandalous today to even consider a concept as this, that God has his “chosen” people. After all, chosenness means that God has his favorites; he refers to ancient Israel as “his treasured possession” (Deut 7:6). It is upon ancient Israel that God “set his love,” suggesting that he did not “set his love” on the rest of the world. At least not in the same way.

This might tempt us to think of God being arbitrary and unfair, but it would be better to let it instruct us about something extremely important about God, namely, that he interacts with humans in a profoundly personal way. “The notion of God’s mysterious love for Israel, far from being simply a blunt assertion of unbridled ethnocentrism, is intimately bound to Israel’s conception of how God lovingly interacts with the [rest of the] world.”[2]

To paraphrase a famous verse in the Bible: “For God so loved the world that he loved Israel most of all!” Deuteronomy 7 makes that case as well. The Lord chose Israel and loved them because he “is keeping the oath that he swore to your fathers.” (v. 8). God’s love for Israel is all about God keeping his promise to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, the promise which is not just for Israel’s benefit but for the benefit of the rest of creation as well.

God’s Victory through His People

This is why the story of Israel contained in the Old Testament shows us not only God’s love but also God’s victory, his victory through his people.

God Wins His World

Salvation, victory, triumph, prevail, overcome, deliver—words like this are found and illustrated throughout the story of ancient Israel. We trace Israel’s history in the Old Testament and find time and time again that Israel prevails over their enemies, and that’s because Israel’s God is winning the battle, the battle that must be won for the sake of us all.

Psalm 105:12-15 speak of how God defended his people, “when they were few in number, of little account.” As they wandered “from one kingdom to another,” God “allowed no one to oppress them” and “rebuked kings on their account.” These verses refer to the story found in Genesis 20. They are about Abraham and the threat to God’s promise to Abraham when Abimelech, king of Gerar took Abraham’s wife.

Starting in verse 16, we jump forward to the end of the book of Genesis, where the psalmist remembers how God “sent a man ahead of them” to provide for his people when “he summoned a famine on the land.” Although Joseph had been oppressed, “sold as a slave,” he would gloriously triumph, becoming ruler of all the possessions of the king of Egypt (v. 21). The psalmist is reminding his audience of how God, time and time again, delivers his people from oppression and leads them to great victory. And this is all because God is keeping his promise made to Abraham for the sake of the world.

Let me say this again. The story the Bible is telling is the story of the Creator God and the world he made. It is therefore all about what is happening in God’s world. Telling the story compels Christians to never allow it to become an account of how God “is rescuing people out of the world” or we will have “abandoned something extremely fundamental” to the story we are trying to tell.[3]

Exodus and Conquest

Rehearsing Israel’s story (i.e. the Old Testament) is a really good way to keep us on track. Beginning in verse 23 and going through verse 38, Psalm 105 takes us back to that decisive moment of victory in Israel’s history: the exodus from Egypt. It is this story which forms so much of the backdrop through Israel’s history. It tells of Israel’s God dramatically delivering his people from the oppression of a real flesh-and-blood oppressor. At the same time, the Exodus was about the undisputed sovereignty of Israel’s God. “Since Yahweh’s people had no land of their own, no army, and no independent status, Pharaoh though that Egypt’s gods were much greater” than Israel’s God.[4]

The Ten Plagues, therefore, are as much a spiritual contest as anything else. But this spiritual contest is still all about the battle for God’s world. The plagues demonstrate that “a cosmic struggle was in progress, and they challenged [Pharaoh’s] ability to maintain that cosmic order.”[5] They were not simply the means by which to get Pharaoh to relent; they were the means by which Israel’s God showed that he and his people were the only ones who could achieve the great utopian hope of global salvation. So we are reminded again, there in verse 42, that God’s care for his people Israel, even after their exodus from Egypt, is all about God keeping the “holy promise” he made to Abraham.

Eden Again

As Psalm 105 comes to a close, it speaks briefly about God bringing his people into the Promised Land. Notice that God “gave them the land of the nations” so “that they might keep his statutes and observe his laws” (v. 44). The Mosaic Covenant with Israel was meant to be the further outworking of God’s covenant with Abraham.

We are told in Exodus 15:17 that Israel’s residence in Canaan was a parallel to Adam’s residence in Eden.[6] It is also here that the Deuteronomy passage, which speaks of Israel as God’s treasured possession, brings us “back to the divine image in Genesis 1:26-28. Israel has inherited an Adamic role, giving the devoted service of a son to an honored king in a covenant relationship.”[7]

God is doing what he said he would do. He is bringing about the fulfillment of the Abrahamic covenant through Israel. God is here bringing about the Kingdom of God. It is nothing like any other kingdom. “God desires to rule in the midst of his people as King. He wants to direct, guide, and instruct their lives and lifestyle. Yet he want to do this in the context of a relationship of love, loyalty, and trust.”[8]

God’s laws found in the Mosaic covenant were not arbitrary rules one had to follow to earn his way into the kingdom of God. The word torah means instruction, and the Mosaic Law was there more like wedding vows, committing a person to show love, loyalty, and trust to his or her spouse.

And so to live happily ever after, right?

God’s Faithfulness to His People

But what happens when a spouse violates the wedding vows? One might wish that Israel’s history had reached its climax with their entrance into the Promised Land, but you know what comes after Joshua, and that next chapter in Israel’s history is quite dark. The story goes on and is indeed quite tragic, yet it serves to demonstrate God’s faithfulness to his people. Isreal might violate the covenant with her God, but God would never violate the covenant with his people.

Give Us a King

Psalm 105 doesn’t rehearse the dark period of the Judges, and it doesn’t rehearse the establishment of Israel’s monarchy and covenant with David. Other psalms do that. But most of us are aware of the downward spiral of Israel as a collective nation in covenant with God. When they demanded “a king to judge us like all the nations,” God knew that this was a rejection of his own sovereignty over them. It had been long in the making, “from the day I brought them up out of Egypt even to this day,” God said, “forsaking me and serving other gods” (1 Sam 8:5-8). What is remarkable is that God doesn’t turn his back on them. He gives them the king they want, Saul, then succeeds him with the king they need, David, a man after God’s own heart.

Unfortunately, none of this seems to have changed Israel’s heart.

Cosmic Separation

Psalm 106 is also a retelling of Israel’s story, but it focuses on many of Israel’s covenant failures, the violation of the wedding vows they made with their God. “Both we and our fathers have sinned,” verse 6 says. “We have committed iniquity; we have done wickedness.”

There is a sense in which there were plenty of “natural consequences” for Israel for their covenant infidelity, consequences from which God showed his “steadfast love” and delivered them. But Israel’s history can be told as a long story of provoking their God to anger (v. 29). Verse 39 uses this marital covenant imagery when speaking of Israel’s sins: they “played the whore in their deeds.”

This is the context in which we are to understand “the anger of the LORD” in verse 40 and indeed, throughout the Bible. God’s wrath, God’s anger, is the anger of a spouse who, in spite of their own unwavering love and loyalty, is cheated on over and over and over again.

The result? Exile. “He gave them into the hand of the nations” (v. 41). “Their enemies oppressed them” (v. 42). Israel’s deportation to Babylon might look like one nation winning a war against another, but the Bible describes it as an act of cosmic marital separation.

Hope for Restoration

Psalm 106 ends with this prayer: “Save us, O LORD our God, and gather us from among the nations, that we may give thanks to your holy name and glory in your praise” (v. 47).

There simply is no way, in reading the Old Testament for what it is, to turn a word like salvation into the promise of a disembodied life after death in a place called heaven. Plenty have read the New Testament that way, and then tried to import that understanding back into the Old Testament. But it simply will not do.

We need to tell the story better.

By the time we come to the end of the Old Testament, Israel’s hope is that her God would do again what he had done for her in the exodus, only with even more magnificence.[9] Because of God’s promise to them made all the way back to Abraham, Israel’s hope is our hope, too.

The Old Testament ends, then, like a story that demands a sequel simply because it is unfinished. What comes next is essentially what comes finally, at long last—eschatology, the climax to the covenant made to Abraham and to Israel.

Will God be faithful to his covenant? If so, how will he do it? How will Israel’s great story come to its intended fulfillment? How will God save his world through his faithfulness to his people?

That is where the story of Jesus comes in.

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[1] N. T. Wright, “Justification: Yesterday, Today, and Forever,” Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society 54, no. 1 (March 2011): 53. Emphasis original.

[2] Joel S. Kaminsky, Yet I Loved Jacob: Reclaiming the Biblical Concept of Election (Eugene, Oregon: Wipf & Stock, 2016), 194.

[3] N. T. Wright, The New Testament and the People of God, Christian Origins and the Question of God, vol. 1 (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1992), 135.

[4] Leon James Wood and David O’Brien, A Survey of Israel’s History, Revised and Enlarged (Grand Rapids, MI: Academie Books, 1986), 101.

[5] James K. Hoffmeier, “Plagues in Egypt,” The Anchor Bible Dictionary, ed. David Noel Freedman (New York: Doubleday, 1992), 377.

[6] Peter John Gentry and Stephen J. Wellum, Kingdom through Covenant: A Biblical-Theological Understanding of the Covenants, 2d ed. (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2018), 341, note 5.

[7] Gentry and Wellum, Kingdom through Covenant, 356.

[8] Gentry and Wellum, Kingdom through Covenant, 394.

[9] N. T. Wright, Jesus and the Victory of God, Christian Origins and the Question of God, vol. 2 (London: Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, 1996), 127.