The endangered and reaffirmed promises of God: a fruitful framework for biblical theology

In the Exodus narrative there is a marvelous intertwining of the external opposition to God's promises to Israel in the form of Pharaoh and internal opposition in the form of Israel's lack of faith. The focus comes to fall exclusively on the latter after the actual rescue, and is, of course, a major theme of the wilderness narratives in Exodus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy, in stories that manifest Israel's lack of faith at every turn. Paradigmatic is the Golden Calf (Exod 32), which leaves God in such a state of anger that God is ready to blot the Israelites out. Likewise, the Former Prophets' history and the pre-exilic prophets (e.g., First Isaiah, Amos, Hosea) interpret and predict the threats to the promise in light of Israel's turning away from God and the covenant. The interplay between promise and endangerment is especially clear and compelling in the story of David, which contains not only a new and even more elevated form of God's promise to Israel in Nathan's oracle (2 Sam 7), but also displays plainly the way in which David's subsequent behavior leads to devastating results (2 Sam 11-20; 1 Kgs 1-2). The rest of the Deuteronomistic History interprets the splitting and eventual destruction of the kingdom as a result of Israel's relentless unfaithfulness. Finally, the pre-exilic prophets offer some of the most scathing, even vitriolic pronouncements against Israel, likening it to an unfaithful wife (Hosea), or rejecting even its worship of God (Amos, Isa 1-2), and foretelling its imminent destruction.

It is hardly surprising that the Pentateuch and pre-exilic prophets focus on Israel's unfaithfulness as threats to God's promises, since those parts of the First Testament were collected and edited in the wake of Israel's exile experience, and thus form an amazing and powerful self-critique. An unfortunate feature of Christian appropriation of Israel's Scriptures has been the tendency to see Israel's story as a history of failure, and faithless Israel as the prelude to the church, which has responded with the requisite faithfulness and reaped the consequent rewards (Ruether). But an equally important source of endangerment, expressed mostly in post-exilic writings but not absent from the rest (e.g., Exod 4:24-26), arises from things seemingly outside of Israel's control. The speculative wisdom tradition comes to mind immediately, of course--Job, Ecclesiastes, many of the Psalms; also the book of Lamentations, and even some aspects of the prophets. Here it is often God's own self that is taken to task for apparent lapses in covenant faithfulness-as in Psalm 89, where God is accused of reneging on God's promises to David; Psalm 44, which accuses and derides God for having forgotten what God did for and promised to Israel in the past; or in Job, which is filled with expressions of the hurt and confusion that arise when pain and suffering defy understanding and explanation.

Thus the tension between God's promises of life and blessing and their endangerment in the reality of suffering and confusion is fundamental to the biblical narrative. Indeed, one of the strengths of approaching the Scriptures with an eye for this pattern is that the artful, compelling, and especially realistic way in which these two aspects are held together comes into view.