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In His infinite love for us, God involves Himself with
us personally amid our iniquities (Exodus 34:4-6, 8-9).
God shares the burdens of our sins and gave His Son for
our salvation, not for our condemnation (John 3:16-18).
Divine
favor and initiative
It is
God who initiates any encounter with Him. Moses had been
told to carve two tablets of stone like the first he
shattered in outrage at the people’s shameless worship
of the golden calf (Exodus 32:19). Their covenant with
God had been annulled. Upon the pleading of Moses, God
had instructed him to present himself at the top of
Mount Sinai, where He would inscribe once more the words
on the tablets.
In an
anthropomorphic narrative, God who manifested His favor
to Moses and revealed to him His presence (33:18-23).
God now descended in a cloud on Sinai to meet the man
and hand him His words. Symbolic of the divine
protective presence accompanying them, the people
followed the pillar of cloud in their journey through
the wilderness (13:21). Here on Sinai, the cloud
represented God’s merciful presence. In apocalyptic
literature, the cloud figured, too, in connection with
the triumphant presence of the Almighty wherein “one
like a Son of Man would come on the clouds” (Daniel
7:13). But the cloud as a symbol of the divine both
reveals and conceals; it remains merely intimating.
Covenant
renewed
Wanting
to reveal Himself more so that His people might really
know Him, God now made His name known—YHWH (the Lord)! A
name is believed to contain part of the very essence or
mystery of the person named. So, like an explanation of
what the name of God means, a description of the divine
essence followed, stressing the relational character of
what man knows of God and revealing the divine
dispositions to His covenant partners. God’s covenant
love is compassionate and merciful (rahum); it is
womb-love, the familial attachment a mother has for a
fruit of her womb or a sibling to another who came from
the same womb. Gracious and magnanimous to His people,
God is slow to anger and reluctant to rain down wrath on
violators of the covenant relationship. Abounding in
kindness (hesed) and fidelity (emet), God’s steadfast
love means He holds on to His covenant partners no
matter what.
Moses
prostrated himself in worship as a response to this
spectacular revelation. Trusting in God’s favor for him,
he pleaded for pardon for the iniquity of the people
with whom he identified himself. They were a difficult
people, stubborn and dense on directives, testing the
very magnanimous attributes of God. He asked God not to
remain aloft from them, but to be in their midst and to
take them “for His own.” Moses begged that God
reestablish Israel as His own people, taking them back
as His inheritance (nahala), His inalienable hereditary
property.
Redemption accomplished
The
marvel of God’s love is drawn by John in bold lines,
underscoring its scope and the price God was willing to
pay due to that love. Where Israel of old continually
wondered at God’s love for His chosen people, here
remarkable is the resounding declaration of God’s love
for the whole world. The entire world in its sinfulness,
created good but often in opposition to God and so in
need of redemption, it is this world God loved. And it
is into this sinful world God sent His only Son.
God’s
love for the world is so magnanimous, that for the
salvation of the world nothing is spared, not even the
only Son of God. God, in His immense generosity, “gave”
His Son as a true gift to the world so that “everyone
who believes in him might not perish but might have
eternal life.” God “sent” His Son into the world with a
sacred mission to accomplish for the deliverance of the
world. But this plan of salvation inevitably became
judgment for some, a condemnation for anyone who “has
not believed in the name of the only Son of God.” Faith
in the Son is the key to salvation.
Alálaong
bagá,
the ineffable God who is beyond our comprehension
revealed Himself to us in His love. To save us, God
reached down into the chaos of the world. The
unfathomable goodness experienced by Israel is the same
gratuitous love that sent God’s only Son as a gift in
the incarnation and gave Him in sacrifice in the
crucifixion. Divine compassion and mercy are not our
rewards because of our faithfulness to God. They are
offered us in our sinfulness. We are transformed and
saved through no merits of our own, but solely in the
saving grace of God. Jesus Christ summed it all up in
the greatest love story ever written because he was sent
to us by God, not to condemn us, but so that we all may
have eternal life through Him. Our faith is challenged
by such a love, immeasurable and unmerited, inexplicable
and unrequited. It is a love that will not be dismissed,
so unlike our human sentiments.
For more of my reflections and works, visit my blogsite:
http://alalaongbaga.multiply.com. |
