This is Part 2 of the Understanding the Whole Bible series. (Formerly called Hope for Humanity.)
The Story so far...
Which brings us to the calling of Israel...
In Christian circles we often jump straight from Adam and Eve’s fall in the garden straight to Jesus dying on the cross for our sins. But that’s a shame because it skips over three-quarters of the bible!
How does the bible itself tell the story? Well Genesis 3-11 outlines humanity’s downward spiral into more and more rebellion against God. So what does God do in response to humanity’s increasing failure and corruption?
Does he give up on humanity and look for a new creature (perhaps dolphins?) to represent him? No.
Does he send Jesus right away to die for everyone’s sins? No. (He waits a couple thousand years to do that.)
Genesis 12 tells us what God does: God picks a group of people within humanity to represent Him to the rest of humanity, so that humanity in general could be rehabilitated to fulfil God's original hope for them. Specifically, God calls Abraham’s family (who becomes the nation of Israel).
God doesn’t choose Abraham’s family (Israel) as his special nation just to spoil them and dote on them because he likes them more than everyone else. He chooses Abraham’s family for the sake of everyone else - the rest of the world. God tells Abraham that his hope for Abraham is that “all peoples on earth will be blessed through you” (Genesis 12:3). Through Abraham’s family, God hopes to draw people back into right relationship with himself so that they can properly be his image-bearers (representatives).
A little later in the story God says something similar to the people of Israel on Mount Sinai: “Although the whole earth is mine, you will be for me a kingdom of priests and a holy nation” (Exodus 19:5-6). In Israelite culture priests were the go-between people for God and the Israelites. So what priests were for the nation of Israel, the whole nation of Israel was to be for the nations around them.
How was Israel supposed to be a “blessing” and a “kingdom of priests” for the nations around them? God doesn’t explain all the details for them right away, but hints are scattered through the Old Testament. For example, if Israel kept the commandments that God gave to them, the nations around them would see the wisdom of the commandments and the wisdom of the God who gave them (Deuteronomy 4:6). When reading some of the commandments regarding how Israelites were to treat the poor or foreigners among them, it is not hard to imagine that they would have stood out to the surrounding nations for their compassion (see Leviticus 19:10, 33-34).
Similarly, surrounding nations may have been attracted to the sacrificial system of Israel. To an ancient near eastern person who fearfully sacrificed to unpredictable gods that may or may not be pleased with their sacrifice, God's assurance to Israel that he would respond to Israel’s sacrifices with the total forgiveness of their sins would likely have been appealing (see Leviticus 16:30).
As we’ll look at in more detail in the next blog post, Israel largely fails at this task and therefore the theme of being a “blessing to the nations” often gets pushed to the sidelines throughout the Old Testament. Yet however subdued Israel’s mission in the Old Testament gets, passages like Psalm 67, Isaiah 60:1-3, and Malachi 1:11 (just to name a few) show that Israel's prophets never fully lost sight of it.
Additionally, any time a Gentile (non-Israelite) character in the Old Testament encounters or serves God, this “blessing to the nations” theme should light up on your dashboard. Although the authors of the Old Testament will rarely draw our attention to it directly, when characters like Jethro (Moses’ father-in-law), Rahab, or Ruth have a positive encounter with God or his people, we as readers are supposed to interpret those encounters as mini-fulfillments of what God desires to do for all Gentile nations at large.