How the Bible Actually Works

by Peter Enns

  This would be accomplished by the Messiah (“anointed one”)—a king in the line of David—taking his rightful place on the ancient throne in Jerusalem and thus reestablishing Israel’s ancient monarchy. At least this is how Mary, the mother of Jesus, and Zechariah, the father of John the Baptist, see it. God has brought to Israel a mighty savior in the line of David, who will bring down the proud (Rome) and rescue Israel from all its enemies and haters (Luke 1:51–53, 69–73).

  This was how at least some Jews thought about God’s future deliverance, and all four Gospels are on board with it—the king is here, the exile is about to end. But as we continue reading the Gospels, ending the exile by being crowned king in Jerusalem is about the last thing on Jesus’s mind. And the resurrection at the end of the story isn’t the reconstituted nation’s, but Jesus’s and the establishment of the kingdom of heaven on earth.

  Let’s call that a rather significant shift in domestic and foreign policy.

  Furthermore, rising from the dead, which is barely hinted at in the Old Testament, comes into its own during the Greek period—I’m thinking here about 2 Maccabees 7, which we’ve looked at. God will show his commitment, faithfulness, and justice to his people by raising them from the dead at the end of the age, so they too can take part in the kingdom of God.

  To be raised from the dead as a reward for faithfulness to God and the Law was a given for many Jews (though not for the Sadducees, who thought that idea was rather ridiculous). But the Christian claim that Paul never tires of making, that “God raised Jesus from the dead,” is a major twist in the plot—in fact, it was off script altogether.

  God raising the dead wasn’t a remarkable idea at the time. But God raising one person from the dead, as something that already happened—well, that’s a head-scratcher.

  The massive end-time resurrection has now become the resurrection of one man in the present time. And this is where it gets really confusing for readers of Paul (as if we needed more confusion about Paul’s letters). Paul came to the conclusion that God’s raising of Jesus is Phase 1 of the “end times.” Phase 2 will come at some future time when all will be raised in the normal Jewish way of thinking about it. But (more confusion coming) the final judgment that God would announce at the future time (Judgment Day, we often call it) has, for Paul, already been announced for believers in Jesus now.

  I know. Hang with me.

  When Paul says to the church in Rome, for example, that they are now justified by his [God’s] grace (Rom. 3:24), the earth-shattering part of that claim isn’t justified or even grace, but the word now. It has already happened for believers in Jesus. The future is brought into the present time through Jesus.

  Think of the resurrection as God unexpectedly going off script and bringing into the present time a bit of the future.

  Jesus has experienced already (physical resurrection) what others will experience later at the “end.” But for now, all those who are in Christ (Paul’s rather mystical way of talking about the deep tie between Christ and believers; for example, Rom. 8:1; 2 Cor. 1:21) already take part in the future reality through being united with Jesus (as Paul puts it in Rom. 6:5). And so we read that believers have been raised from the dead, have been justified, and even have been seated with Christ in the heavenly places, not literally, but spiritually (Eph. 2:4–6).

  To sum up, all that future stuff of Jewish theology is already a present spiritual reality for believers in Jesus, because Jesus has delivered a piece of that future to our front door.

  It’s okay to take some time to wrap our heads around all this. My point here isn’t to get into all the nuances in the convoluted sentences of Paul’s writings and figure it all out. My point is that Paul is thinking about resurrection (and God’s judgment) in ways that simply aren’t part of the Old Testament mindset or Jewish tradition up to this point.

  Explaining Jesus’s resurrection required an act of reimagining God to keep up with this unexpected move. Paul and other New Testament writers had to tie it to Israel’s story somehow rather than dismissing it. Reading Paul’s letters is like having a front row seat to watch the wheels turning in his head, for example, in Romans 5:12–21.

  Israel’s entire story both in the Old Testament and after the exile turns on the idea that obedience to God’s Law brings life and blessing. Disobedience brings death and a curse. The solution to that problem brought on by disobedience is, understandably, to be more deeply committed to obeying the Law.

  But if a crucified and raised Messiah is how God finally shows up—if that is God’s unexpected “solution”—it makes you wonder, “What is the problem God is solving this way?”

  Paul is about to turn the Jewish storyline inside out and upside down.

  Failure to keep Torah, Paul argues, is not really the problem. If it were, the solution would have centered somehow on keeping Torah better. But since God’s solution was to defeat death, maybe the deeper problem that God is interested in solving is death?

  And death, after all, is something all humans share. And so defeating death is not God’s response to the Jewish failure to keep the Law. It is a response to the universal fact of death, which is the story of all humanity, Jew and Gentile alike, rooted in the story of Adam and the forbidden fruit, long before Moses and the Law ever appeared on the scene.

  Paul essentially responds to Israel’s main storyline by saying, “All that was just prelude to what God is really up to—reversing the curse of death for everyone.”

  No one would arrive at a conclusion like that simply from reading the Old Testament. Rather, you have to start with seeing Jesus as the “solution,” read the Bible backwards, so to speak, and reimagine God to account for this surprising turn of events.

  The central event of the Christian faith, the resurrection of the Messiah and the defeat of death, isn’t part of the Old Testament trajectory. To see God doing such a thing is to radically reimagine what kind of a God we are dealing with.

  No, Seriously, What Is God Up To?

  “Jesus died on the cross for you.” Sort of rolls off the Christian tongue like rain off a metal roof. But here too we are looking at a significant act of reimagining the God of the Bible.

  God raising the Messiah from the dead was enough to think about. But why did he have to die the way he did? It’s not enough to say, “So he could rise from the dead.” Jesus could have died any which way, at an old age, of some disease people got back then, trampled under a chariot by accident. But why a bloody and beaten mess on a Roman cross, a symbol of torture, intimidation, humiliation, and the unquestioned authority of the empire?

  Perhaps Jesus had to die in this ritualistic and bloody way to be a sacrifice for our sins—which plays off the very prominent Old Testament idea of blood sacrifice. Paul uses Old Testament sacrificial language to describe the crucifixion, such as God’s offering Jesus as a sacrifice of atonement by his blood (Rom. 3:25).

  Seeing the crucifixion as a kind of sacrifice makes sense and it is certainly part of the New Testament vocabulary—though that raises the uncomfortable possibility that we are dealing with a human sacrifice to God, which is about as big a no-no in the Old Testament as anything. In Jeremiah 7:30–34, child sacrifice is what tipped the scales and led God to send the Babylonians as punishment.

  In the Old Testament the tribe of Levi is a kind of “sacrifice” (Num. 3:12–13, 40–46). God claims repeatedly that the firstborn of the flock “belongs” to him. And this goes for every firstborn—humans too (see Exod. 13:2; 22:29). But God specifies that the Levites can serve as substitutes for all the firstborn. Instead of receiving a tribal allotment of land, the Levites will be God’s own by serving as priests in the sanctuary. Elsewhere, animal sacrifice is the substitute for the firstborn, as in Exodus 13:13–15.

  But there is no room for literally sacrificing a human, child or not, to atone for the sins of others, which is what we are dealing with in the crucifixion.

  So the question is still out there: How can the blood of one
sacrificed person atone for other people’s sins? For that, we need to look elsewhere, starting with the prophet Isaiah.

  Isaiah 52:13–53:12 speaks of a “suffering servant.” This servant is in rough shape. He is so beaten he doesn’t even look human. He is a man of suffering who, we read, has borne our infirmities and carried our diseases, . . . was wounded for our transgressions, crushed for our iniquities (53:4–5).

  Many Christians are familiar with this portion of Isaiah, because it sounds so much like Jesus. In fact, who else could it be? No one else in the Bible suffers for us. It must be Jesus.

  Well, I get it, but not so fast. Elsewhere in Isaiah, the servant is identified as Israel (41:8–9; 44:1–2, 21; 45:4; 48:20; 49:3; though in 63:11 he is Moses). The servant is certainly not some mystery person in the far distant future, but Israel here and now.

  In Isaiah 52 and 53, then, this suffering servant is not a person, but Israel—specifically, those Judahites exiled to Babylon. The fact that the servant is referred to as “he” doesn’t mean that Isaiah’s suffering servant is one person. The language is poetic, as when God calls Israel his wife (as in Hos. 2:16–20). The suffering servant refers to those who actually suffered for all the other Judahites who were left behind in the land. Their return from exile meant healing and forgiveness for all.

  Some suffered, and others benefitted.

  This idea gets more explicit in 4 Maccabees, another Greek-era book of the Apocrypha. Toward the end, the author talks about the tyrant king Antiochus IV Epiphanes and those whom he martyred. These, the author says, are special—they have been consecrated and honored for giving their lives on behalf of the nation, allowing the homeland to be purified (from Antiochus’s desecrations of the Temple mentioned earlier). The author sums it up this way:

  These, then, who have been consecrated for the sake of God . . . having become, as it were, a ransom for the sin of our nation. And through the blood of those devout ones and their death as an atoning sacrifice, divine Providence preserved Israel that previously had been mistreated (17:20–22).

  Isaiah talks about the suffering servant, Judah, who experiences a kind of death, though that death is metaphorical. The servant is cut off from the land of the living (Isa. 53:8), which (obviously) does not describe the literal death of Judah in exile, but the very fact of exile itself—they now live outside of the land, which is the place of death.

  But now in 4 Maccabees, the physical death of individual martyrs is the focus. The nation as a whole is ransomed and its sins atoned for by the death of the martyrs.

  As in the Old Testament, “to ransom” means to “buy back,” as when a price is paid to have someone released from captivity, and “to atone” means to supply satisfaction for an offense or injury, as when you make up for or make amends for your sins. How exactly to tie these metaphors to Jesus’s crucifixion continues to be a tough nut to crack for Christian theology, but that’s not our focus. We just need to see that Jesus individually is described in similar ways as the martyrs are in 4 Maccabees. He gives his life as a ransom for many (Matt. 20:28; also 1 Tim. 2:6; 1 Pet. 1:18; Rev. 5:9) and to be an atoning sacrifice for our sins (1 John 2:2; 4:10; also Rom. 3:25; Heb. 2:17).

  There is no way that that New Testament writers were flipping through 4 Maccabees and thought, “Wow, what a novel idea. This will fit perfectly.” Rather, 4 Maccabees shows us that the idea that sin can be atoned for by the suffering of others was already “in the air” by the time we get to Jesus. What Christian theologians call “vicarious” or “substitutionary” atonement (Jesus died instead of you and for you) isn’t a new idea in the New Testament.

  The new element, though, is that suffering and dying for others is all focused on one martyr’s death, Jesus’s.

  Like resurrection, seeing Jesus’s death as a sacrifice for others is tied to Old Testament imagery (Isaiah 52–53), but at the same time works off a later act of reimagining what this God of old is about.

  In Jesus, martyrdom and messiahship merge. The death of the king redeems and atones for the sins of the world—a radical act of reimagining what God would do.

  If we miss the surprise of all this, we miss the drama of the gospel.

  A new thing is happening, something that goes beyond the familiar language of old. God is being reimagined. New wineskins are needed.

  * * *

  The gospel doesn’t match up with Israel’s story, as if it were an index at the end that lined up with what came before. The gospel is an act of reimagining God in view of an unexpected and ground-shifting development—not exile to Babylon, as formative as that was for Judaism, but a Messiah who challenged central elements of Israel’s identity (Law, Temple, land), but who also died a shameful, dishonorable, criminal’s death and then was raised.

  The New Testament story is, in other words, one big act of wisdom—a response to God’s surprising presence here and now.

  If we think of the gospel as simply rolling right off the Old Testament tongue, we will be wrong. And we will fail to appreciate how creative the New Testament writers were in working out the day-to-day real-time implications of all of this.

  Which brings us back to Paul, the most polarizing figure of the New Testament.

  Chapter 13

  Figuring It Out

  Reading Someone Else’s Mail

  We got a new mail carrier a while back. Nice guy. Apparently has trouble reading, though.

  I keep getting letters that are clearly intended for someone else, judging by the names and addresses clearly marked on the front of every piece of mail. This is a problem, big enough, perhaps, for even the US Postal Service to take notice. “Yeah, hi. Listen, I have a letter and small package here for Martha J. Thomson of 418 S. Richardson Avenue, which does not remotely resemble my name or address. Please advise.”

  That’s what I would like to say if ever I actually got a live person on the phone at the local branch of the USPS. But instead, I either have to lurk in the bushes and pounce or, if pressed for time, simply stuff it all back in the mailbox and hope the new guy figures it out the next day or two. Still, in an act of petty vengeance, I dug up my curbside mailbox and affixed a new one fifty feet farther away at my front door. That’ll learn ’em.

  And I hope that whoever might be getting my mail—probably a grubby thirty-five-year-old gamer who never helps around the house and lives off his poor wife’s waitressing check—will pay it forward and be diligent and upstanding in returning my mail to me unopened.

  Reading someone else’s mail is a bit tempting, I have to admit, but if you stop to think about it, apart from being illegal (it is a crime carrying a three-year jail sentence), it is a complete waste of time. And even if the letter lets you in on some sordid personal details, it doesn’t matter. What good does it do to know that, say, someone’s marriage is falling apart or that kids threw up at Six Flags?

  Letters have a context that the sender shares with the addressee. You are neither. The information does you no good. Cut it out.

  With that in mind, it has struck me over the years that some of the most important pieces of literature in the entire Bible are

  personal letters

  written two thousand years ago

  by people I’ve never met named Paul, Peter, James, John, and some others

  and intended for people I absolutely know nothing about

  in places I am not remotely familiar with

  in a culture I really cannot hope to grasp.

  As one of my seminary professors said, “Reading the New Testament is like reading someone else’s mail.” That might be the most valuable thing I ever learned in seminary. And now I pass it on to you, at a far lower cost.

  And yet, this is not mail we are supposed to stuff back in a mailbox. We are supposed to read these letters—and not only read them, but find some way to draw them into our own lives.

  Think about that for a minute. I think about it a lot.

  And it doesn’t really matter that we might think these lette
rs are inspired by God. That still leaves the question of why God would decide to inspire context-dependent personal correspondence and expect us to “get it” two thousand years later in a very—I will say it again, very—different time and place.

  Doesn’t God realize that we don’t share the common understanding that, say, Paul shares with the people in Corinth or Thessalonica? Doesn’t God realize that making twenty-one of the twenty-seven books of the New Testament letters means that we will have to think—really think—about what these letters were meant to do and then be really thoughtful and intentional, maybe even humble, about how to engage them for ourselves?

  Doesn’t God know that we will have to exercise tremendous—what’s that word again? Oh, yes—wisdom in order to know how or even if these words will apply to others in their own context-dependent situations?

  Leaving the snark aside, I think that letters are the perfect format for a sacred book that is not intended as a helicopter-parenting manual, but as a source of wisdom. We can’t simply just drag these letters into our own life as is. We have to work at finding the connection between then and now.

  I don’t think the value of these letters lies in our ability to ignore their time and place and make believe they were written with us in mind every bit as much as the ancient Jews or Roman citizens they were written to. We get something out of them only by wrestling with their “historical particularity” (as some put it) and then doing the hard work of accepting the sacred responsibility of discerning how all of that works out here and now in whatever situation we find ourselves.

  The letters of the New Testament are, to revisit the theme of this book, wisdom documents. We are watching some of the earliest followers of Jesus working out what it meant to walk with God in their moment in time. When we read these letters we are watching wisdom in action.

  These letters are not one-size-fits-all documents detached from their ancient moments, ready to touch down just anywhere and anytime without a moment’s reflection. We read these letters wisely not when we simply graft the words before us onto an entirely different time and place, but when we study them to see what they are about, for there and then we can see more clearly, guided by wisdom, how we are to bring that biblical wisdom into our here and now.