This Book: In Between (Amos 8 v11-14)

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There is a time in human history that people sometimes call ‘the great silence’ or ‘the intertestamental period.’ 

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The Old Testament ends with the words of the prophet Malachi: 

The LORD of Heaven’s Armies says, “The day of judgment is coming, burning like a furnace. On that day the arrogant and the wicked will be burned up like straw. They will be consumed—roots, branches, and all. But for you who fear my name, the Sun of Righteousness will rise with healing in his wings. And you will go free, leaping with joy like calves let out to pasture...  Look, I am sending you the prophet Elijah before the great and dreadful day of the LORD arrives. His preaching will turn the hearts of fathers to their children, and the hearts of children to their fathers. Otherwise I will come and strike the land with a curse.” Malachi 4 v1, 5-6 

I think when most of us hear the word ‘curse,’ we have something in mind. Like I am going to wish harm on someone. Something bad will happen to you because I have ‘put a curse’ on you.  

The original word here is cherem which refers to something that is irrevocably set apart as holy, either for sacred use or for complete destruction. It might be a person, like a priest in the Old Testament, set apart to serve God. The furniture or the equipment set apart for use in the Temple, and not for anything else. The animals that were raised for sacrifice, to surrender their lives on behalf of the people of Israel. It could refer to land given to God. Something that is cherem is exclusively set apart. Removed from ordinary human claim. It belongs entirely to the Lord. There are no take-backs. No changing your mind. Something cherem is God's to do with as he decides. And that is never random.  

That's the mic drop. That's the end of the Old Testament. Malachi is the last prophet, last spokesperson for God for 400 years. For me, this period feels like the Saturday between Good Friday and Easter Sunday. We don't hear anything happening. We don't see anything happening. We don't know what we're waiting for. We don't even know if we're waiting for something. But under the ground, behind the scenes, God is working. God is moving. God is making things happen so that when the curtain rises on the next scene, we're ready.  

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Before the beginning of the ‘silence,’ the Persian empire defeated Babylon which had held the family of Israel captive for 70 years. Persia’s king Cyrus ruled his world differently. He allowed religious freedom. He allowed slaves and exiles the choice of returning to their homelands.  

Many Jewish people made the journey back to Jerusalem and began to rebuild the city and the Temple. This era sees the beginnings of the people we came to know as Pharisees and Sadducees; they were back in Jerusalem and figuring out how to live in this new reality. They began to split, and follow God differently.  

Persia was defeated by the Greek empire under Alexander the Great. That was not what his mom called him; it's what we've come to call him in hindsight.  

In contrast to Cyrus’ approach, the Greek perspective was all about assimilation. Become one of us. Become a good Greek citizen. For a lot of people that was not a tough sell because there's a lot that's appealing about the Greek culture and language. They were big on medical advances and on science. This was a very intelligent empire. As they travelled the world, they gathered all that everybody else had learned and accomplished, and bring it home. Like the Borg in Star Trek. Everything they found, they translated into Greek so their people could learn. Including the Old Testament. Partly because of the whole assimilation thing. Partly because they wanted to know what everyone else knew. Partly because the kids of the Jews scattered through the Greek empire grew up speaking Greek. To keep their kids connected to their faith, they needed to keep their kids connected to their faith writings: their law and their prophets. So they helped to translate it into Greek for their own future generations. 

The Greek empire started to shrink partly because Alexander the Great died young, and with no heir. So there followed civil war and division.  

In the end Greece was defeated by the Roman empire: powerful, massive, and long-lasting.  

That was the world Jesus was born into. Jerusalem was just a teeny, tiny little thing, but important. If you didn't want to travel across the water, you had to go through Jerusalem to get anywhere.  

Rome was strong. Violent and cruel. Not nice people. But Rome was in charge. Rome put into Jerusalem—that important tiny little space—a paranoid puppet ruler, backed by the military might of Rome, as long as he could keep them happy.  

So Rome ruled, but the Greek language, the Greek culture, Greek thought was still everywhere. In the groundwater and in the air. In people's everyday lives. Greek was still the language that pretty much everybody could speak 

So if Greece contributed to the world language, culture, and education, what was Rome's main contribution? Roads. They built an incredible network of roads everywhere, and very well. Some of those roads are still travellable today.  

At the end of the 400 year ‘silence,’ 400 years after Malachi dropped his mic, a stage is set for the next act.  

• A massive, contiguous empire of Rome on 3 continents.  
• Military control and good roads that make travel a lot safer and faster than it used to be.  
• A dispersion of diverse peoples connected by a common language.  
• Jewish believers everywhere, coming and going from Jerusalem on festival days like Pentecost and Passover.  
• Copies of the Hebrew scriptures all over that empire in Hebrew and in Greek... and speaking of Messiah.  

Then the silence ends.  

Not with the angels in the sky. Not in halls of power. Not in some guru's remote spiritual wilderness retreat.  

The silence ends with an ordinary man doing his job. An ordinary priest, basically in a downtown church—the Temple in Jerusalem. One very ordinary man, faithfully serving Yahweh God at the center of the center of the world, as close to as an ordinary man could come to the Holy of Holies, where God had met his people in days past.  

In the time of Herod king of Judea [the paranoid puppet] there was a priest named Zechariah, who belonged to the priestly division of Abijah, and whose wife Elizabeth was a descendant of Aaron [the brother of Moses]. Luke 1 v5 

The angel who came to meet Zechariah promised them, ‘You are going to be the parents of an ordinary human child, conceived in the ordinary human way.’ 

But...  

...he will be filled with the Holy Spirit even from his mother’s womb. Many of the children of Israel he will turn back to the Lord their God.  And he will go on before the Lord in the spirit and power of Elijah, to turn the hearts of the fathers to their children and the disobedient to the wisdom of the righteous—to make ready a people prepared for the Lord. Luke 5 v15-17 

Sound familiar? 

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The silence whose beginning was prophesied by Amos: 

• I will send a famine on the land, not a famine of bread and water, but a famine for the word of the Lord.  

The silence whose ending was prophesied by Malachi:

• I will send you a prophet. 

That silence has ended. And the New Testament—God’s new way of redeeming his people—the new covenant begins to take on flesh and form and begins to walk through the world and speak with a human voice, because the Word is here.  

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I received a question in my mailbox a couple of weeks ago. 

Are we not all created by God--his children? Does he not want to save everyone?  

That question has two parts.  

First: Are we not created by God, his children?  

Well, yes and no.  

Genesis 1 tells the story of how we were created by God: 

So God created human beings in his own image. In the image of God he created them; male and female he created them. 

Which means that we are created to represent God on earth. To resemble God. To follow him. To do the things that he does in the universe on a so much bigger scale, but here on earth. We were made to resemble him in every way that actually matters, so we can do his work in this world, because we are part of this world.  

Then throughout God's unfolding revelation, God plays it out for us little by little, helping us walk towards who we will discover Christ is.  

I looked in the Old Testament for references to God calling people his children.  

All of the Genesis language that God uses towards humans is about partnership and service, working together.  

The first instance I could find of God calling humans his children is in Exodus: 

Then you will tell Pharaoh, ‘This is what the LORD says: Israel is my firstborn son. I commanded you, “Let my son go, so he can serve me.”’ Exodus 4 v22 

God does not tell Moses, ‘You are my son.’ God says, ‘Israel is my son. They are my child.’ 

The second part of the question is, “Doesn't God want to save everyone?” 

The answer? Absolutely yes. 

Everyone who has heard of Jesus makes a choice, reflecting all the way back to Moses: life and death. Eternity with God, eternity without God.  

When the time had fully come, God sent his son, born of a woman, born under law, to redeem those under the law so that we might receive our adoption as sons and daughters. Because you are family, God sent the spirit of his son into our hearts, crying, 'Abba!' (Father! Dad!) So you are no longer a slave. You are an heir. Galatians 4 v4-7  

We are not created children of God; we become children of God by receiving that adoption when we say yes to Christ. When we say yes, I will follow and I will become part of this family.  

Underlying this question (Doesn't God want to save everyone?) is the question of what are we saved from.  

Amos chapter 8 v14 talks about those who swear by shameful idols, who take oaths in the name of false gods. Malachi talks about the arrogant and every evildoer being like dry grass burned off in a controlled burn so that things can grow. 

What are we saved from? We are saved from wasting our lives pursuing pointless individualism. We are saved from worshipping things that don't last and don't help. We are saved from being arrogant doers of evil. We are saved from choosing death, choosing outer darkness where there is weeping. We are saved from finding ourselves standing on the wrong side of a closed door.  

We are saved for God. We are saved to be set apart—cherem —to be his to use as he sees fit.  

We are set apart and saved for community. For relationship. For forgiveness. For reward, peace, joy, feasting, and family.  

Does God want to save everyone? Yes, absolutely. 

Will God save everyone? Heartbreakingly, no.  

Because we all have that choice. We have all been given the choice between life and death.  

The plan all along—God's working behind the scenes for those 400 year—was to make it possible to offer that choice to as many as possible.  

The choice to not be dependent on the arbitrary mood of a fickle god who we have to try to keep happy. On our ability to keep that god happy. Hoping and wishing that when we die, we die just at a moment when he doesn't happen to be angry at us so we won't be punished.  

We have a choice: to choose life, beginning now, offered through the life and death and resurrection of a man born into that empire at just the right time. When God had broken his silence because it was time for the Word to be heard.