Life of Christ in Five Phases 5

Factors Requiring the Revelation of the Son
Text Ref. 8
God became dissatisfied with His relationship with His people on two counts that were interrelated: 1) His people did not know Him as intimately as He desired; and 2) they were in general only an outwardly righteous people. They would often fail even in their outward show of righteousness because their inner man (their heart) was not changed from its old sinful nature, the nature that all men have inherited from Adam. The Law had brought a certain outward conformity to God’s standards, but it had failed to make them a truly righteous nation. That is, they did not have a righteousness that started on the inside and mani¬fested itself outwardly in their daily activities.
God had known this would happen. Nevertheless He did not give up on the Israelites quickly nor easily. This has been true of God through the centuries. He has wanted so greatly to have a very close relation¬ship with man. Before the Israelites (both kingdoms) ( ) finally compelled God to reject them, He had been trying to establish that rapport with them as a sort of lead-in to close communion with the entire race of men. The Israelites were to be the people to bring God’s truth to the world.
It did not work out according to God’s temporary blueprint and He had to use every stratagem of love to bring all Israel back to Him. It was not successful, as He knew it would not be. But before casting Israel aside, God pled with them as though His very existence depended on their faithfulness. It was only the love of God that made Him pursue them, entreat them and cling to them. And even now that love is straining at its self imposed restrictions, wanting so much to restore the Jews to a richer and fuller relationship with God. But the time for that is not quite yet except for individual Jews who acknowledge Jesus Christ as their personal Savior.
During the years of Israel’s backsliding, God never gave up on His plan of unfolding His ineffable person to all mankind.( ) The plan had at its center the simultaneous revealing of His plan of salvation for all mankind. And no amount of defection by the Israelites could turn the plan aside nor could any power of darkness derail it. God’s wisdom and love and power had yet to be disclosed to a world that desperately needed such a revelation.
It seems that, after man’s fall in the Garden of Eden, the same Elohim who had said in the beginning, “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness” (Gen. 1:26a), had said within His multi dimensioned Self, “Let us RE-make man in our likeness.” But in reality God had decreed this an eternity ago because He knew just that long ago that man would fall from his position of favor and innocence. But the mercy and love of God operate in spite of the existence and pervasiveness of sin. It is, in fact, sin that makes it all so necessary.
God indirectly foretold the fulfillment of His plan of salvation when He told the Israelites through Moses, “The Lord (Jehovah) will raise up…a Prophet from the midst of thee, of thy brethren, like unto me: unto him ye shall hearken.” Deut.18:15. This Prophet, Moses informed the people, would be God’s answer to their plea made in sheer terror that God should not speak to them anymore out of His terrible glory on Mt. Sinai. Ex. 20:19. The coming Prophet would be an intermediary between them and Jehovah.
In his day Job also needed an intermediary. But unlike the Israelites on Mt. Sinai, Job had chided God because he (Job) could not argue his case before God as he might before mere men.
“Oh that I knew where I might find him!” Job cried in his abject misery. “I would order my cause before him and fill my mouth with arguments.” (Job 23:4)
But he had to concede finally, “Behold, I go forward, but he is not there; and backward, but I cannot perceive him.”
Job spoke rashly in the bitterness of his spirit, but if God had actually come down before Job as He had before the Israelites on Mt. Sinai, Job would have been terrified speechless like his counterparts on Mt. Sinai. Job needed what the Israelites and all men need: a daysman, an intermediary to represent him to Jehovah because no man in his own right can stand before the consuming glory of God. Man is totally unfit and altogether unworthy to argue his case before this divine Supreme Court.
This presents a problem, a very serious and even fatal problem. If we cannot come before Jehovah who “will by no means clear the guilty” (Ex. 34:17)( ), if we cannot plead on our own behalf, what can we expect from Him who is Holiness and Righteousness personified? We who have lied and cheated, stolen, hated, perverted justice, been adulterers and sodomites ever since the expulsion from the Garden? All of us were all of these things by nature if not by actual practice. Sin is sin. It is not “great” or small”; it is SIN, utterly reprehensible.
But, just as the Spirit of God brooded over the face of a devastated world in its infancy and brought order out of chaos, God was determined to wrest peace and righteousness out of the havoc of sin into which man had plunged. Had He not been everything else to His children — Provider, Leader, even their Peace and Righteousness (which they forsook)? Could not God now, in Israel’s and all men’s most urgent and consummate need, fill that need? Could not this Jehovah tsidkenu, our Righteousness, cure their natural tendency to reject Him and in truth be their righteousness? Could not He who was Jehovah shalom, our Peace, be a source of true and lasting peace to them and beyond them to all men?
Considering the ultimate state of Jehovah’s righteousness and the woeful, sinful condition in which the Israelites and all men found themselves, God had to be all of these: peace, righteousness and salvation. If not, there could be only eternal damnation for every creature made in the image of God. This would be irony indeed!
Mankind was definitely at a continually worsening crisis, with Satan doing his best to destroy the only creature who bore a resemblance to his Maker.( ) The deteriorating crisis was symbolized graphically in backsliding Israel. Israel, along with all men, was wrapped up, laced and bound tightly by the very thing that God hates so much: sin. Jehovah was, and is, compelled by His own righteousness to eradicate sin. This is a death sentence for man because sin is part and parcel of his being. He was, and is, headed toward total and irrevocable destruction.
But Jehovah is an infinitely many-sided Person. Consider how two of these many sides pertain to man’s tragic situation. The first we have just seen: God’s utter abhorrence of sin. The second, which is seemingly opposed to this side of vengeful righteousness, is the love of God. We have read how God thundered His righteous demands from Sinai, frightening the Israelites out of their wits. But that is only one side of God. The same Jehovah showed His tenderness and, yes, His vulnerability when He spoke so soothingly to the Israelites through Jeremiah, “Yea, I have loved thee with an everlasting love: Therefore with loving¬kindness have I drawn thee.” (Jer. 31:3)