Resisting redemption
What happens when we do not comply with God's saving action?
“[T]he people who left Egypt were perhaps unfit for redemption, incapable of hearing God’s word in any real fullness…God’s hopes and the people’s hopes are profoundly different.”
-Avivah Gottlieb Zornberg, The Particulars of Rapture: Reflections on Exodus, pg. 11
God’s people do not consistency act like the people of God.
They are God’s own possession, the object of his missional love, and yet, they rarely act like they like it. As with the Israelites, so goes the Church. The ones God loves rarely love God in return.
The book of Exodus is a book of response. In its beginning chapters we read, “The Israelites groaned in their slavery and cried out, and their cry for help…went up to God. God heard their groaning and he remembered his covenant with Abraham…So God looked on the Israelites and was concerned about them” (Exodus 2:23-25).
The people are suffering. They cry out to God. God hears. God responds.
God’s style of response involves an ex con named Moses. After committing murder and hiding out near Horeb, God meets him, calls him, and commands him to be the agent of intercessory liberation for Israel to get out from under the Egyptian Pharaoh’s foot.
After Moses is given miraculous signs to build his trust in Yahweh, his brother Aaron meets him in the wilderness and Moses tells him everything. The two of them decide to return to the Israelites to share the good news: redemption is coming.
“29 Moses and Aaron brought together all the elders of the Israelites, 30 and Aaron told them everything the Lord had said to Moses. He also performed the signs before the people, 31 and they believed. And when they heard that the Lord was concerned about them and had seen their misery, they bowed down and worshiped.”
-Exodus 4:29-31
The first time you see a miracle you think anything is possible. This is another way of saying you are given faith and hope—trust that things will be OK and a certain understanding that the best is yet to come. Faith and hope are natural responses to good news of liberation.
But so is suffering.
The entire next chapter (Exodus 5) is a painful narrative of evil’s increase. Pharaoh catches wind of Moses’ wondrous works and the encouragement of the Israelites and he pushes the boot down even more on his slaves. His pride goes through the roof: “Who is the LORD, that I should obey him and let Israel go? I do not know the LORD and I will not let Israel go” (Exodus 5:2). Israel suffers because of an insecure, prideful man in leadership.
It is at this point, as suffering increases in the people of Israel, that Moses lodges a very understandable complaint:
“Why, Lord, why have you brought trouble on this people? Is this why you sent me? Ever since I went to Pharaoh to speak in your name, he has brought trouble on this people, and you have no rescued your people at all.”
- Exodus 5:22-23
Yahweh spends the next section offering assurance that he, in fact, will bring the people out. He could not be more clear: “I will bring you to the land I swore with an uplifted hand” (Exodus 6:8).
This is it, Moses must think, This is all the people need to hear. So he goes back to the people and tells them the good news: “Moses reported this to the Israelites, but they did not listen to him because of their discouragement and harsh labor” (Exodus 6:9).
Less than two chapters earlier, the people heard about God’s activity and “bowed down and worshipped” (Exodus 4:31). Now, in 6:9, they can’t even listen. Suffering, delay, and injustice often sidetrack a worshipful heart. This world is too much to bear.
This begins Israel’s long road of trust and worship followed by discouragement and despair. The cycle repeats so many times. And every time, the remarkable thing is that Yahweh is there. The less the people act like the redeemed ones, the more the Redeemed One steadfastly commits to them through his gracious action. In a summary of God’s character, the Apostle Paul will say, “if we are faithless, he remains faithful, for he cannot disown himself” (2 Timothy 2:13).
We know how Israel’s story ends. The people are miraculously delivered from slavery. They are redeemed despite their rejection of it.
The greatest part of reading your Old Testament is allowing it to illuminate your reading of the New Testament. Suddenly, you see Israel’s story is the Church’s story. Jesus’ ministry included doubt, betrayal, and pride all around him. He was tempted for forty days in the wilderness. One of his closest students killed himself. His inner circle fell asleep at the moment he needed them. God’s people do not act like “the people of God.” Peter and Paul—the two pillars of the church—were not exactly the most humble, helpful members of Israel when Christ Jesus converted their hearts to him.
God’s people do not always act like the people of God. And yet. They are God’s people. We are faithless, he remains faithful, for he cannot disown himself.
Have you thought about what God cannot do? It seems from our story in Exodus and our verse in 2 Timothy 2 that God cannot be…not God. He cannot not save. He is Savior, so he will save—at the greatest lengths and depths, apparently.
The best news in the world is that you and I are not the most active agent in our redemptive story, neither can our actions do much to derail what God is doing in Christ. Apparently, “nothing can separate you from the love of God in Christ Jesus” (Romans 8:38-39). Try as we might, there is no resisting redemption. Once we are elected to be liberated by Yahweh, liberation is coming.
When God is explaining this to Israel in Deuteronomy, he tells them, “Understand, then, that it is not because of your righteousness that the Lord your God is giving you this good land to possess, for you are a stiff-necked people” (Deuteronomy 9:6). This, then, might be the strange mystery of salvation: it happens to you. Being saved was never really your idea in the first place. The most common emotional experience of grace is surprise. You never see it coming, but once it arrives, you can’t see anything else.
The middle of the book of Jonah tells us “Salvation belongs to the LORD” (Jonah 2:9)! This is exclaimed (sung?) by a man dying inside of a large fish. He was thrown overboard and eaten alive. This same man, by the way, was also resisting God’s redemptive act in his own life and in the life of his enemies. It’s a good picture of salvation: a man stuck inside a fish, awaiting his death saying, “Only God can save me!” That’s always true. Only God can save. Salvation belongs to him and him alone. And that is why Jonah’s life is eventually spared. It’s all grace and it’s all God. But we resist this all the time. We want to play some part of our own redemption…sometimes.
As evangelicals spin their wheels about “who is saved” and “who isn’t” and consider all the ways in which we can reconcile hell and heaven and life in between, we miss the enormous sovereignty of God. That God can be trusted with life and death is the final domino to fall in the life of faith. Do we really believe God saves or do we think it’s partly up to us? We say we trust God with our life, but then we get a lot of anxiety about who is saved or not (including ourselves!), forgetting that God is the author and perfecter, the Alpha and Omega, the beginning and end of it all. If he takes up this much room, has that much power, works with such stiff-necked people like us, and inhabits that much redemptive space, I wonder why we spend so much time worrying about it?
It’s almost as if he’s God…and we’re his people. We just rarely act like it.