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The unexpected God

God comes in ways we don’t expect, for example:

  • A chosen nation descended from a couple unable to have children (Abraham and Sarah)
  • A deliverer of his family initially scorned, nearly killed and ultimately sold into slavery by his own older brothers (Joseph)
  • Another deliverer initially rejected and often resisted by his own people (Moses)
  • A line of scorned and rejected prophets, culminating in a rejected Messiah
  • The true deliverer and ruler of humanity, first executed by them as a criminal on the accusation of dishonoring the emperor by claiming to be king
  • Even today, God often does more through the lowly and unseen than through what seems biggest and best to his own church (and certainly to the world)

Only the truly humble (or duly humbled) recognize and embrace his work. We dare not judge his gifts by the paper they come wrapped in. And when we’re dealing with God, we can expect the unexpected—God will work out what is best, but often not through the means that we expect.

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Thinking about some characters in Exodus

Recapping some of the character development so far in Exodus (in the earlier Bible studies):

(1) Moses. Moses seems perfectly understandable from a human point of view. Imagine that you have heard of the God of your ancestors, but you’ve never seen a miracle. Your people have been enslaved by another people who claim that their gods are much stronger. But you are now old and you have made peace with your life, giving up on youthful dreams of changing things. Suddenly the God of your enslaved people appears to you and commissions you and ruins your satisfied life. You’re told to confront the most powerful leader in the world, who claims to be backed by lots of powerful gods. God gives you some signs, but these are fairly low-level magic tricks as far as the leader’s own paid signs-workers are concerned.

Nevertheless, under duress from your ancestors’ God you confront the powerful leader and give the best signs that you’ve got. Sure enough, he’s not convinced, and things get even worse for your people. Your own people realize things are worse and turn on you. Do you think you would be happy with your commission?

How many of us are ready to give up sharing our faith, or praying for someone, etc., when something does not go the way we want? Do we really have much more faith than Moses? Before long, Moses does grow in faith (although his people take a lot longer). That means that there is hope for us too. We can learn from the example of Moses because many of us are a lot like him.

(2) The Hebrew foremen. The Hebrew overseers also are perfectly understandable from a human point of view. Say someone comes to you promising deliverance and working a few tricks. You trust them and stick your neck out, but then you get burned. Things get worse for you rather than better.

We all know there are false prophets, and we’ve all been burned by sales gimmicks that turn out to have strings attached. Once burned, twice shy, as the saying goes. Moses, who has been away for years while you have been laboring as slaves, confronts Pharaoh. And as a consequence, you get loaded with more work and eventually get whipped. Would you still trust Moses? Of course, Hebrews have less excuse for their unbelief after the plagues start, but as of Exodus 6, you can see why Moses is still in the doghouse with his people.

The Hebrew foremen are a reminder to us of our own need to trust God’s plan beyond what we can see or even be sure about on a human level.

(3) Pharaoh. It might be harder to imagine Pharaoh’s point of view. If you’re arrogant enough to think the universe revolves around you, as Pharaoh presumably did (with the encouragement of his supporters), you probably wouldn’t be reading Bible studies or devotionals. But imagine somebody who from childhood has been groomed to believe that his destiny is to rule the world’s greatest empire. The gods supposedly support this, and Pharaoh himself is supposedly divine.

You think that the pitiful deity of the Hebrews has let them stay in slavery for generations. Thus he seems weak, in contrast to the splendor of Egypt’s gods displayed in monuments and artwork all around you (never mind how much of it was built by slaves and other conscripted workers). The only way to answer impudence and laziness is to crack down. Given his context, Pharaoh’s incalcitrance is not too unbelievable. It is nevertheless misinformed and deadly.

The narrative focuses especially on Moses; he is the protagonist with whom we are most invited to identify. The main driver of the action throughout, however, is a different character: YHWH. YHWH works, sometimes behind the scenes and yet now in often obvious ways, to fulfill the promises he made long ago to Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. He doesn’t stoop to speak to arrogant Pharaoh directly; he raises up instead a descendant of the patriarchs (also a descendant of Levi, who with Simeon was not a particularly nice guy in Genesis). It’s God who stretches Moses and proves that God was right all along in calling him.

It’s God who predicts Pharaoh’s obduracy, and who shows himself more powerful than Pharaoh’s gods at each step (cf. Exod 12:12). (At the same time, he shows himself more merciful than Pharaoh in allowing reprieves each time that Pharaoh backs down, until Pharaoh reneges on his word each time and escalates the conflict.)

It’s God who has the long haul planned out, when his servants are ready to give up in the short run. We don’t imagine things from God’s point of view, but we can see God’s plan unfold in Exodus. Indeed, we already see part of it promised in Genesis.

When the world and your own life seem out of control, remember that God has a plan that’s bigger than we can see from our finite, time-bound perspective. That’s not an excuse to stay in slavery or to be content with injustice. It is a challenge to grow in faith and cooperate with God’s plan to change things, even when that plan extends far beyond what we can see. Let’s be ready for whatever God calls us to do. And most certainly, let’s be obedient to what God has already called us to do, sometimes individually in prayer, and always, corporately and individually, in his Word.

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Brief Comments on the Passion Translation

Lacking time to engage the Passion Translation thoroughly, I offer just two comments here, one positive and the other negative.

First, in the passages that I surveyed, the author captured the spirit of the text well, communicating it in contemporary language. In this, the work can function like The Message or other paraphrases. The more a translation or paraphrase tends toward dynamic equivalents, the greater the risk of the translator’s interpretation being highlighted in a passage. The value of such renderings, though, is allowing hearers to experience and engage the text from a fresh angle, though I would recommend always having a more literal rendering handy, especially where the text is developing a detailed argument.

Second, and unfortunately, there is a fatal flaw that pervades the entire translation: its dependence on Aramaic. Although Jesus spoke Aramaic, that was not the language of Jews in Asia Minor, Greece or Rome, areas to which most of the New Testament is addressed. It is not the language of our Greek New Testament (with a few snippets of Aramaic words or phrases here and there), which Christians take to be canonical. Scholars are virtually unanimous on these points because a massive quantity of inscriptions, graffiti and other sources from antiquity renders them beyond dispute.

This pervasive dependence on Aramaic throughout makes the Passion Translation unreliable. It could be revised, with a great deal of effort, by going back through it and correcting any dependence on Aramaic by translating solely from the Greek text. Barring such revision, however, one cannot recommend it for devotional or other use, because the level of distortion is too high.

I note this with regret, since the ideal of the project—to bring readers to hear God’s voice in the text afresh—is a commendable goal (emphasized repeatedly in my 2016 academic book, Spirit Hermeneutics). But for this goal to be properly achieved, it must be closer to the voice actually communicated through the Greek New Testament, rather than depending heavily on a later and interpretive version other than the Greek New Testament. Perhaps, with sufficient labor, the work can be revised to better achieve the purpose for which it was designed.