The Preparation
Read: Isaiah 53:1-12 Psalm 22:1-31 Micah 5:2 Deuteronomy 18:15-19 Genesis 14:18-20 Genesis 22:1-14 Joshua 5:13-15 Exodus 12:1-8
The history that God reveals in the Old Testament is not history for its own sake. This history relates the fallen condition of all humanity as it passes through a continual testing, being subject to a continuous, behind-the-scenes war between God and Satan over the salvation or destruction of the human race.
God selected a particular people, the Hebrews, through which He would effect the salvation of mankind in the person of the coming seed of the woman who would be called the Messiah. Some of the prophets prophesied that this Messiah would accomplish salvation for humanity through His suffering. Psalm 22:14-16 and Isaiah 53:5-7 relate that the Messiah must shed His blood in a terrible ordeal in order to provide the means for man's salvation. For these reasons, God commanded the Hebrews to sacrifice certain animals in worship as a sign or symbol that this coming Messiah would Himself suffer for man's salvation. God typified this truth in that the ram was sacrificed but Isaac was spared, and a lamb was sacrificed but the Hebrews were spared. In His secret war with Satan, God did whatever He thought necessary in order to make sure that His Messiah would come into the world and alone accomplish man's salvation.
On the other hand, Satan constantly worked to destroy mankind and prevent the Messiah from coming. Satan knew that if he could nullify the power of God's Love, then he could separate mankind from God's Love, invalidate some of God's Ideas and thus cause the eventual permanent death of God Himself. Satan's constant tactics are the same as he employed in the garden of Eden; that is, lie about God's Word, try to get man to deify himself, and try to get man to believe that he can effect his own salvation. If Satan could ever get the whole human race to believe that they do not need God, then he could break the power of Love, and thereby eventually destroy God.
In this war, God is testing Himself. God means to prove that Love can never be destroyed. Love can be injured but never destroyed. Love can be hurt, disappointed and grieved. Love can be nailed to a cross. Love can be subjected to the worst anguish and humiliation, but as the Apostle Paul so accurately stated: "Love never fails." Read I Corinthians 13:8.
Mankind is caught in the middle of this war; condemned to the freedom of a choice between life and death. Most people would prefer to ignore this choice, but this is impossible. To attempt to ignore this choice is to choose death. Those who choose to love and follow God must do so by repenting of their sins and accepting the free gift of everlasting life that God's Son came into the world to provide for them through His self-sacrifice and resurrection.
Satan believes that God's gift of free will to mankind was a mistake that Satan can exploit to bring about the complete destruction of mankind by his own choice, and therefore, the ruination of God's Love. Satan believes this because when he was Lucifer, his free will brought about his own invention of sin and evil which he believes he can use to kill God. Like all criminals, Satan sees love and kindness and gifts from benefactors as weaknesses which the criminal can exploit to his own advantage. Satan's whole aim is to cause God's Love to fail, and if God is ever a failure then He can no longer be God.
The difference between Satan and humanity is that Satan gave himself wholly to evil, and therefore, cannot be saved. Man was created in God's image and fell when he ate of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. The knowledge of evil is often greatly emphasized whereas the knowledge of good is often ignored. The goodness of Eve's fall inhered in the fact that she became an innocent victim of a superior evil force. The goodness of Adam's fall was that he sacrificed himself in order to maintain love and fellowship with his wife. This retained goodness was a part of God's plan to save humanity. This retained goodness made man not worthy of, but susceptible of God's salvation, not because of man's goodness which can never be enough, but because this retained goodness reflected the very Goodness of God's Son.
Read Jeremiah 17:9. Man's retained goodness is far to weak and finite to effect his own salvation. Therefore, man has been completely ruined by the fall. Man needs an all-powerful Love and Innocence and Self-Sacrifice to come into his lost being and re-create him to eternal Goodness and eternal Life. God assigned this necessary project to be accomplished by His Son.
As the Old Testament unfolds this history of the preparation, sometimes Satan intervened in this history to try to destroy mankind completely. When he did this, God countered with His own intervention in order to preserve mankind for the coming Messiah. The Bible relates that God was very patient and long-suffering with sinful man by waiting for him to repent and love Him, but when His patience became exhausted because of man's willful stubbornness, He often effected a massive destruction of sinful mankind in order to preserve those who had chosen Him. At one time, near the beginning of this history, the whole human race had chosen to cling to evil except for eight righteous persons in the family of Noah. Noah preached righteousness but no one repented for hundreds of years. When God's patience became exhausted, He destroyed all of the evil race with a world-wide flood, but saved the eight righteous persons by means of an ark which He commanded Noah to build.
For these same reasons, God destroyed Sodom and Gomorrah, the first born of the Egyptians, and used the Israeli army to wipe out whole cities of evil people in order to ensure that His righteous people would be preserved. Someone has truly stated that in the Old Testament God destroyed the wicked in order to save the righteous, but in the New Testament God allowed the murder of the Righteous in order to save the wicked.
God never directly interferes with any individual free choices in life. As the Bible relates, God never forces anyone to either serve Him or reject Him. God waits for every individual to make their own choices in life.
Nevertheless, though God allows individual freedom to have its way, He still retains the power to channel history in His direction. God made sure that His Messiah would come, and He directed history so that every prophecy that He sent by His prophets would come true exactly as He said that it would. This is one way that believers know that the Bible is true. Another way that believers know that the Bible is true is that one can read that while God never forces anyone to serve Him, yet despite this fact, the Bible reveals that He also was quite able to constrain history in the directions that He wanted it to go. This constitutes a definite miracle that runs through the whole Bible. If the Bible were written by mere men and not by the Holy Ghost, then how could so many different writers think to maintain this same theme throughout the whole Word of God?
How was God able to direct history to fulfill His own purposes, while at the same time leaving individual freedom alone? Some of the answer is hidden and mysterious, but the Bible reveals some of the ways in which God was able to do this. In the first place, God sent preachers and prophets to preach righteousness to the people in order to persuade them to repent and serve the Lord. Then, God used those believers' choices to obey Him to cause history to move in God's direction. In the second place, as Genesis 15:16 relates, when God said that a certain people's time was "full," He meant that His patience with their wickedness had become exhausted, and He then was ready to effect a wholesale destruction of the wicked in order to eliminate them as a hindrance to the fulfillment of His will. Those who criticize God by saying He was cruel to do this do not take into account that the wicked offend the very Being of God, and that God has determined that it is better for Him to save some of the human race through the work of His Son than to allow the entire race to perish. Note that according to Jesus' own prophecy in Luke 21:24, God will not end the history of mankind until "the times of the Gentiles be fulfilled."
In the third place, God proved able to correct those of His followers who failed, at times, to do His will. One can read how God punished, or in other ways corrected, such of His followers as Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Moses, Samson, King David, the Apostle Peter and many others in order to cause them to repent and to return to doing His will. In addition, God demonstrated His ability to replace those of His followers who proved unable to accomplish His will with others who could. For example, God replaced King Saul, who deluded himself into believing he was doing God's will when he was not, with King David who knew exactly how to repent when God punished him for his wrongdoing.
In the fourth place, God proved able to punish evildoers, not to force them to do His will, but to persuade them that it was in their best interests to submit to His will. For example, Pharaoh demonstrated an extreme stubbornness to obey God when Moses demanded that he allow the Israelites to go free. Pharaoh allowed Egypt to endure nine violent judgments before he finally allowed the Israelites to go free after the judgment of the deaths of the firstborn. Even after this, he changed his mind and went after the Israelites with his army. This story clearly shows that Pharaoh retained his free will throughout this whole ordeal. The only question was: How much was he willing to endure? Pharaoh could well have continued to defy God even after the tenth judgment, but God knew that the Egyptian people would not allow him to do so.
In any case, one should note that at no time in the entire Bible did God send any preacher, prophet or angel to tell any person that they must do God's will. God gave commandments that he knew would be disobeyed, and sometimes He used forceful means to accomplish His will, but He never abrogated the free will of any individual. The only possible exception to this rule was when the Holy Ghost miraculously impregnated the virgin Mary with the baby Jesus. However, Luke 1:38 clearly teaches that Mary was quite willing to do God's will.
In the fifth place, from time to time, God performed great miracles in the sight of all men, believers and unbelievers alike. God meant these miracles to be sufficient to show that He is real, and that all men should submit to His will simply because He possesses the requisite power to accomplish His will. Despite all this, sinful men, such as the Pharisees, stubbornly clung to their evil ways even when they personally observed the love and compassion of their God in the miracles that His Son performed.
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