The Puzzle of Christianity. Peter Vardy

eternity.

       Some shuttles are filled with silver threads

       And some with threads of gold,

       While often but the darker hues

       Are all that they may hold.

       But the weaver watches with a skilful eye

       Each shuttle fly to and fro,

       And sees the pattern so deftly wrought

       As the loom moves sure and slow.

       God surely planned the pattern:

       Each thread, the dark and fair,

       Is chosen by His master skill

       And placed in the web with care.

       He only knows its beauty,

       And guides the shuttles which hold

       The threads so unattractive,

       As well as the threads of gold.

       Not till each loom is silent,

       And the shuttles cease to fly,

       Shall God reveal the pattern

       And explain the reason why

       The dark threads were as needful

       In the weaver’s skilful hand

       As the threads of gold and silver

       For the pattern which He planned.

      History is not a mere series of events; still less is it simply based on decisions made by human beings. For Jews, God’s hand lies behind the whole of human history and it was God who took the fledgling people of Israel into Egypt. Once there, the group of families settled and grew prosperous, only to find with the emergence of a new ruler that they were seen as immigrants and resented. Their numbers increased, but they were made into slaves and their lot was a miserable and unhappy one. Still the Scriptures record God as being with them and that they maintained their faith, hoping against all expectation for deliverance. This eventually comes with the extraordinary story of Moses, a Jew but raised as an Egyptian. God is recorded as taking this outsider and using him as an instrument to lead the people of Israel back to the land promised to their forefather Abraham.

      This is another theme constantly recorded in the Hebrew Scriptures – that God does not favour and choose the strong and powerful but often works through those who are seen as weak and who are outsiders to power structures. God does not depend on human strength and ingenuity nor does God value people on the same basis as human beings. Moses was an unlikely outsider and had to stand against the might of the Egyptian ruler, the Pharaoh, but with God on his side was able to free the people of Israel. They fled from oppression in Egypt and, in later times, persecuted Christians remembered God’s hand working to save the people of Israel. Christians were to come to see themselves as ‘the new Israel’ and, therefore, stories of deliverance and salvation in the Hebrew Scriptures became related to Christian concerns.

      Figure 2: This painting by Nicolas Poussin, The Adoration of the Golden Calf (1634), is an imaginative re-creation of the god in the image of a golden calf created by the people of Israel when they felt abandoned in the Sinai desert (Exodus 32:1–4).

      Although the people of Israel successfully left Egypt, protected by the direct action of God, their lack of faith is not disguised in the Scriptures. They wandered for many years in the harsh environment of the Sinai desert and many felt initially that it would have been better to remain as slaves. God appeared to have become an absent God. Having lived in Egypt, they were used to the Egyptian gods that were visible, so they made an idol – a golden calf. This seemed much more real and immediate than the remote God who appeared to have deserted them and left them to be wandering nomads. In other words, they lost faith; they did not realise that God’s timescale was not theirs. The Hebrew Scriptures are frank in recognising the continuing disobedience of the people of Israel, but always God remains faithful. So it proved in this story, and after many years of hardship and wandering in the desert, as their numbers increased still further, they were eventually led back to the place they considered home, the land they believed to have been promised them by God through God’s promise to Abraham.

      It was on the way out of Egypt that God is recorded as giving the people of Israel the Ten Commandments which are the cornerstone of Jewish law, although this law is amplified by many other commands given by God over the centuries. They eventually arrived back in Palestine, only to find it peacefully settled with strong and powerful cities, and their presence was resented and opposed; the locals certainly did not recognise any rights of this strange and alien people. However, the people of Israel had been through great hardship and they maintained their unity, moulding themselves into a formidable fighting force and conquering, in a series of wars, much of the land that was to become Israel.

      The new land of Israel was divided between twelve tribes, representing the twelve sons of Jacob. They were surrounded by neighbours who wished to destroy them and the identity of the people of Israel was under constant threat. Only in loyalty to God, they believed, could their identity be safeguarded, and the Hebrew stories contain myriad accounts of men and women and the whole nation being preserved by God in times of crisis when all hope seems to be at an end. Indeed, the preservation of hope and trust when all the evidence runs in the opposite direction is another feature of the Hebrew Scriptures.

      There is no single piece of territory that can be described as ancient Israel – the borders were fluid and changed over time. When the people of Israel came out of Egypt they described this as an Exodus and Jews saw themselves as ‘coming home’ to their forefather’s land. During this time they were led by a series of great leaders or Judges (one of them was a woman, Deborah; see Judges 4:4–5:31). The tribes of Israel retained their own identity, living in different areas and, initially, they avoided the cities. Yet the Judges could call them together in time of war to unite against a perceived military threat.

      The prophets have a vital role to play in understanding Jewish history. They were often lonely and isolated figures, harsh and unyielding. However, they continually spoke up in the name of God, standing for justice and goodness in the face of power and corruption. Above all, they stood for the necessity for God to have a central place in the life of the Jewish state and for high moral standards as well as concern for those who were weak and vulnerable. The prophets did not speak on their own authority. The Word of God came to them and they were, effectively, the mouthpieces of God, sometimes speaking with reluctance because they often faced death or persecution from those in power. However, the reality of God’s Word to them was so great that it was almost impossible to resist. The prophets, however, could also be wrong; the story of Jonah is the story of an insular prophet, obsessed with the rightness of the people of Israel and the wrongness of everyone else and convinced that God favoured only Israel. The whole book is a wonderful story to make it very clear that, whilst God is the God of Israel, God is also the God of the whole world and that good and righteous people are to be found beyond Israel’s borders. Jonah is forced to recognise this, for him, uncomfortable truth. Never, except in the early days, did the people of Israel see their God as one amongst a number of local gods. They were convinced that the whole created order depended on God alone and that all other gods were merely human creations with no significance or power at all.

      Initially the people of Israel were wanderers. Abraham and his descendants would have been like modern Bedouin and, even when they came with their extended families into Palestine after leaving Egypt, they were essentially a tribal and pastoral people. Settling into cities came later. There was suspicion not only of a king but of any central capital and even of a temple. Their God was an invisible God, the Lord of the