The creator God desired to work within his own world in order to heal it. No solution imposed from a great height would have done. That would have resulted only in the obliteration of the world by a sweeping declaration of justice, or a totally unjustifiable and immoral wiping of the slate clean in a display of sentimental mercy, with God declaring that humanity’s wrong choices didn’t really matter, human freedom wasn’t really significant, and that all along these human creatures had been puppets, whose strings he could pick up and tweak back into obedience any time he chose. He was therefore bound to work the salvation of the world from within; and that meant operating within tension and ambiguity.

Note, I do not say that only Israel, God’s people, had to live with ambiguity. It seems to me clear that God himself had to do so. This, indeed, is one of the things that the New Testament writers wrestle with, following the example of Jesus himself. If you commit yourself to helping someone out of a bog in which they are stuck, you can shout good advice from the dry land, but the only way you’re actually going to do any good is by going in yourself, getting wet and muddy, and indeed risking getting stuck yourself. Those who think God shouldn’t take such risks have a certain logic on their side, but it’s a logic which makes nonsense of the Bible, the gospel, Jesus and the Spirit. We may become accustomed to thinking of faith as a risk that we have to take. What we don’t so easily realise is that it was a risk for God himself - just as much a risk, in fact, as his making a world that was other than himself to begin with.

And that shows us what we’re dealing with in the Old Testament: we are observing the results of there being such a God, such a creator, whose very nature is love of such a powerful and creative calibre that it cannot but give itself, pour itself out, into ever new moulds and forms. In the beginning God said ‘Let there be.’, and there was. When humans rebelled, he didn’t shut up shop, call in the accounts, and start to play it safe, preferring a logical but loveless existence to the risky
enterprise of creation. He took the risk of new creation. And the means of this new creation was Israel, herself part of the creation that had rebelled.

Alastair, what do you think?