JD
In a message dated 2/14/2005 7:18:22 AM Pacific Standard Time, [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes:
Lance,
This is the memorable _expression_ of TFT which I could not remember! It is in chpater 4 of The Mediation of Christ (first reference p 74)
We normally think of the covenant as having two parties, God and Abraham, or God and Israel. And that is certainly in accordance with the Word of God in the institution of the covenant partnership. 'I am the Almighty God; walk before me and be perfect.' 'I will walk among you, and be your God and you will be my people.' 'I am holy, be you holy.' 'I will be his Father, and he will be my son.' There is another factor to be taken into account, however, a middle term between the polarities of the covenant, God and Abraham, or God and Israel, namely a covenanted way of response, such as a divinely provided sacrifice replacing the best that the human partner may think he can offer, as in the paradigm case of the offering God provided instead of Isaac, Abraham's beloved son. The pattern became very clear in the grounding of the covenant between God and Israel at Mt Sinai. He knew that Israel would not be able to fulfil the covenant provisions, that Israel could not walk before him and be perfect, be holy as God was holy. Nor would Israel be able to draw near to God and worship him as it ought. Hence within the covenant which, as we have seen, God established and maintained with his people in a unilateral way, and as part of its sheer grace, he freely provided them with a covenanted way of responding to him, a vicarious way in which the covenant might be fulfilled in their midst and on their behalf, so that Israel could come before God forgiven and sanctified in their covenant partnership with him and be consecrated for their priestly mission in the world.
This remarkable feature of the covenant was elaborately presented in the ordinances of worship that are described in the Pentateuch. Not only the general pattern of the cult but the details of the liturgy were clearly designed to bring home to the people of Israel that they were not to appear before the Face of God with offerings embodying their own self-_expression_ or representing their own naturalistic desires, or with kinds of sacrifice thought up by themselves as means of expiating guilt or propitiating God, for that was how the heathen engaged in worship, as ways of acting upon God and inducing his favour. Thus no unprescribed oblation, no uncovenanted offering, no strange fire, no incense of their own recipe, and no ritual of their own inventing, were to be intruded into their worship of God. Everything about the sanctuary and everything that was prescribed to be done within it as the place where God had recorded his name, the holy place of meeting and witness between God and his covenanted people, was designed to testify to the fact that God alone can expiate guilt, forgive sin and bring about propitiation between himself and his people Israel. Hence the very priesthood itself, the sacrifices, offerings and oblations which the priests alone were consecrated to take in their hands, together with all the liturgical ordinances, were regarded as constituting the vicarious way of covenant response in faith, obedience and worship which God had freely provided for Israel out of his steadfast love.
The institution within Israel's peculiar relations with God of this divinely inspired cult as its way of liturgical witness to God's revealing and reconciling purpose, once for all set forth in the Torah and steadily interpreted by the prophets, had the effect of reinforcing Israel's separation from the other nations of mankind as a people imprinted with a priestly character and invested with a vicarious mission. It was not good enough, however, for Israel formally to engage in the prescribed ordinances of worship, far less to rely upon God's gift of sanctuary, priesthood and liturgy as guarantees of immunity from divine judgment upon its way of behaviour, apart from obedience to the Word and Truth of God, for by its very nature the covenant envisaged that God's laws would be put into the minds and written on the hearts of his people. That is to say, the covenanted way of response had to be worked into the very flesh and blood of Israel's existence. It had to be impregnated in its understanding and sculptured into its very being. It had to be built into the reciprocity between God and Israel and be allowed to control the whole pattern of its life and mission in history.
An embodiment and mediation of the covenant along these lines governed the profound Old Testament conception of 'the servant of the Lord'. In the Isaianic prophecies particularly the mediatorial and priestly figures of Moses and Aaron and the notions of guilt-bearer and sacrifice for sin were conflated to provide the interpretative clue for the intercessory and vicarious role of the servant in the redemption of God's people. The servant of the Lord was the hypostatised actualisation within the flesh and blood existence of Israel of the divinely provided way of covenant response set forth in the cult, which indicated rather more than it could express. A messianic role was evidently envisaged for the servant in which mediator and sacrifice, priest and victim were combined in a form that was at once representative and substitutionary, corporate and individual, in its fulfilment. As the prophet struggled to bring his vision into focus something emerged which is rather startling. Time and again he spoke about the ebed Jahweh, the servant of the Lord who is identified with Israel, and about the goel, the Redeemer who is the Holy One of Israel, in the same breath. Thus the servant of the Lord and the Redeemer, the Holy One of Israel, were brought together in his prophetic utterance, and yet held apart but only by a hair's breadth, so to speak. It is as though the prophet wanted to say that the real servant of the Lord is the Lord himself who as goel-Redeemer has bound himself up in such a tight bond of covenant kinship with Israel that he has taken upon himself Israel's afflicted existence and made it his own in order to redeem Israel. Now of course if the servant of the Lord and the Holy One of Israel had been identified, that would have implied a state of incarnation, but the Gospel of the Old Testament, as the second Isaiah is sometimes called, could only hold them closely together without actually identifying them.
When we turn to the pages of the New Testament, however, we find that Jesus Christ was recognised and presented both as the Servant of the Lord and as the divine Redeemer who had come to bear and bear away the iniquities, transgressions and guilt of his people, and yet not of Israel only but of the whole world. That was an identification which was regarded as of the very essence of the Gospel. As the incarnate Son of the Father Jesus Christ had been sent to fulfil all righteousness both as priest and as victim, who through his one self-offering in atonement for sin has mediated a new covenant of universal range in which he presents us to his Father as those whom he has redeemed, sanctified and perfected for ever in himself. In other words, Jesus Christ constitutes in his own self-consecrated humanity the fulfilment of the vicarious way of human response to God promised under the old covenant, but now on the ground of his atoning self-sacrifice once for all offered this is a vicarious way of response which is available for all mankind.
It is surely in that light that we are to understand the twofold ministry of Jesus, from God to man and from man to God. In biblical language, he fulfilled the covenant from both sides: 'I will be your God, and you will be my people.' 'I am holy, be you holy.' 'Iwill be your Father and you will be my son.' Our immediate concern in this chapter is with the fulfilment of that covenant in the body and blood of Christ, from the side of human beings toward God the Father as the divinely provided counterpart to God's unconditional self-giving to mankind. There are, then, three factors to be taken into account, God and mankind, or God and his people, the two parties of the covenant partnership, but within that polarity, the all-important middle factor, the vicarious humanity of Jesusâ
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âactual fulfillment in the incarnate life and self-offering of the Son of God, Jesus Christ embodied in himself in a vicarious form the response of human beings to God, so that all their worship and prayer to God henceforth became grounded and centered in himâ
In that perspective we must think of prayer as taking place within the relations of covenant partnership and reciprocity between God and mankind, but of Christian prayer as grounded in and governed by the fact that through his Incarnation Jesus Christ has stepped into that relationship as the Mediator, who not only brings God and man and man and God near to each other in propitiation but who in doing so stands in our place where we cry in prayer to God and makes himself our prayer, a prayer not in word or even in an act only but a prayer which he is in his own personal Being. Just as in Jesus Christ God addresses his word to us in such a way that he himself is wrapped up in his word in the form of personal being, so in Jesus Christ God has provided us with prayer that is identical with the personal self-offering and self-oblation of Jesus Christ to the Father on our behalf. It is as such that Jesus Christ stands in our place where we pray to the Father, so that from deep within our humanity, where he has united himself to us, and from out of it, assimilated to his own self-consecration to God, he prays: 'Our father who art in heaven. Hallowed by thy Name. Thy Kingdom come. Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven ...' That is to say, where we are unable to pray to the Father as we ought or in any way worthy of him for all our prayers are unclean, Jesus Christ puts his prayer, prayed with us to the Father, into our unclean mouth that we may pray through him and with him and in him to the Father, and be received by the Father in him: 'Thou art my beloved Son in whom I am well pleased.'
We do not come before God, then, worshipping him and praying to him in our own name, or in our own significance, but in the name and significance of Jesus Christ alone, for worship and prayer are not ways in which we express ourselves but ways in which we hold up before the Father his beloved Son, take refuge in his atoning sacrifice, and make that our only plea.
'Nothing in my hands I bring;
Simply to thy Cross I cling.'
In worship and prayer Jesus Christ acts in our place and on our behalf in both a representative and a substitutionary way so that what he does in our stead is nevertheless effected as our very own, issuing freely and spontaneously out of ourselves. Through his incarnational and atoning union Jesus Christ has united himself with us in such a reconciling and sanctifying way that he interpenetrates and gathers up all our faltering, unclean worship and prayer into himself, assimilates them to his one self-oblation to God, so that when he presents himself as the worship and prayer of all creation, our worship and prayer are presented there also. When the Father accepts us in Jesus Christ his beloved Son, who then can distinguish our worship and prayer from Jesus' worship and prayer, for they are one and the same, wholly his and wholly ours in him?
Thus in all our worship and prayer, private and public, informal or formal, we come before God in such a way as to let Jesus Christ take our place, replacing our offering with his own self-offering, for he is the vicarious worship and prayer with which we respond to the love of the Father. We pray and worship in such a way as to make room in our prayer and worship for the living presence of Jesus as our Mediator in whom Offerer and Offering are one and the same, but in whom we are gathered up, with whom we are inseparably united, so that with him we pray and worship as we could not otherwise do.
At the end of the day when I kneel down and say my evening prayer, I know that no prayer of my own that I can offer to the heavenly Father is worthy of him or of power to avail with him, but all my prayer is made in the name of Jesus Christ alone as I rest in his vicarious prayer. It is then with utter peace and joy that I take into my mouth the Lord's Prayer which I am invited to pray through Jesus Christ, with him and in him, to God the Father, for in that prayer my poor, faltering, sinful prayer is not allowed to fall to the ground but is gathered up and presented to the Father in holy and eternally prevailing form. At the same time, I recall that the Father has promised to send the Spirit of his Son, mediated through the name and vicarious humanity of Jesus, into our hearts, crying, Abba, Father; and I am assured that as I pray in the name of God's beloved Son I am caught up with all my own infirmities within the inarticulate intercession of the eternal Spirit of the Father and of the Son from whose love nothing in heaven or earth, nothing in this world or in the world to come, can ever separate us.
