Excerpt from Chapter 2 "Plato or Moses?" from
What the Bible Says About Covenant
by Mont W. Smith
Ideas about God
Greek and Hebrew ideas about God were very different. Such Greeks as were religious had many gods. The Hebrews had one. The Greeks had a grand system of inferior and superior gods. They had their myths explaining the seasons. The Hebrew had none. The gods of the Greeks were much like the Greeks. They had virtues and vices; the won and they lost conflicts; they were a mixture of good and evil. The Greeks attributed "causes" to the gods. One caused springtime, another happiness. There was a god of wine. Idols, pictorial representations of these mythical gods, were accorded an honored place in the family. For the more philosophic Greek, the idol was not a god and did not represent a god at all. It represented an idea such as love or hope, or personal honor, or enduring friendship, and the like. The Hebrew was to have no image of God. Man and mankind alone was in the image of God.
The Greeks and Hebrews also differed in a more fundamental way. It had to do with power and its use. While many potential contrasts between Green and Hebrew thinking are possible, none are more important than the one related to power.
For the Greeks power was the greatest divine attribute. Greeks loved and longed for power. They idealized this longing in their gods. Power became a more important attribute than morality. You see, if a god were to submit to some moral code, he would be inferior to that code. He would be inferior to the author or enforcer of the code. Thus a Greek god, to be god at all, must practice both good and evil. That will show him to be the greatest power in the universe. it was in this vein that the serpent suggested to Eve that being like God was "knowing both good and evil." "Knowing" for the Hebrew meant active and intimate participation in!
In the very act of approaching Abraham with a covenant, God was offering to seriously limit His power. For when one makes a promise, he has eliminated a great many possible future actions. He must do that one act. God was committed to a whole series of actions as a result of the covenant with Abraham. His ethic forced Him to do what He had promised. God's option to bless the world or not bless the world in Abraham's seed was gone. His only option now was to bless the world. That is a limitation.
When one thinks about it, God made a habit of limiting His power. it may be that God wanted to convey the notion that "restraint of power" is a greater attribute of character than power!
God's Restraint of Power
God gave up some power when He made the universe. At least he was restricted from interference and still have nature proceed on its normal course. It was a voluntary restraint certainly, abut creation itself constituted a limitation on God's future potential actions. As long as He permitted nature to exist God had to make room for it.
God gave up considerable power when he made man with a spiritual nature: thinking, feeling and willing. He risked becoming the laughing stock of heaven in giving man free will. Allowing man to sin and to choose contrary to God's own stated will placed upon God a limitation. As long as man existed God had some accommodations to make. God did not get His own way about the fruit His man ate. To not get one's own way is a limitation certainly. The reader ought not be offended b talk like this - unless he also believe, as did the Greeks, that power is God's greatest attribute!
God limited His power when He communicated with man in language. He and Adam talked in words. If Adam was as human then as he is now, the conversation had to be out loud! They talked together. God taught Adam language. At least they named the animals. They created vocabulary. Note that language is a type of covenant. We each agree that a given word means the same thing. Two can not have conversation unless the pattern of sounds is meant to convey what both agree. If one party to a conversation were to exercise some power and redefine all the words, and then forget the original, the two could no longer talk! God's Spirit communicated through words. This is the root source of the Hebrew high theology of "word of God." What God speaks is what God's Spirit is saying. God must also confine His revelation to human syntax. He must use verbs correctly. he must submit to the rules of grammar. is that a weakness as the Greeks would believe? Or is it God's true glory and honor? Is the limiting of one's power a type of Godliness?
The greatest way God had limited His power was in covenant. He made commitments for a very long period of time. His hesed limited Him to fulfilling these. he could do nothing else, for as Paul said, "He cannot deny Himself" (II Tim. 2:13)
Sin, Righteousness, and Restraint of Power
Adam was limited in the garden. As long as he was content to live with that limitation he was godly - Godlike. When he exercised his power to chose either good or evil, he lost his godliness. Thus sin became, for the Hebrew, some aspect of unrestrained exercise of power. For instance, saying anything - the truth or lies, is free exercise of power. Limiting one's speech to the truth is restraint of power of speech. Unrestrained and free use of sex was sin. Limiting sex to marriage was righteousness. Possessing things b any means, whether manufacture, borrowing, or stealing is an example of free and unrestrained use of ability. Limiting the gaining of possessions to "lawful gain" is righteousness. it is difficult to think of any sin listed in either the Old or the New Testaments that does not involve the excessive use of power or ability. It is also difficult to find a matter regarded as righteous that does not require some sort of restraint of one's full powers.
Moses challenged the basic assumptions of the Greeks, through their forebears, when he produced Genesis for all to read. he challenged what was thought about God's relationship t nature, how nature itself worked, and what God's true power and glory were.
Persuasion and Programming
God set about repairing the ruptured relationship caused by the deliberate rejection of God's word and therefore rejection of His very nature. Adam had but one flaw. It was his lot to have been created. He did not choose his relationship to God. And when he sinned, he chose not to remain in fellowship with God. From then until now, God determined that none should have His fellowship except those who sought it. Renewed fellowship would be with only such as wanted it. God was generous to man. If man did not want fellowship with? God he was not forced into it. He could suffer, as Paul later put it, "Eternal separation form the presence of the Lord, and form the majesty of His power" (II Th. 1:9), but if he disliked God's company he wasn't forced into it.
The offer of a covenant to Abraham was consistent with God's nature and the situation. God, in grace and compassion, offered to mankind, through Abraham, an opportunity for reconciliation. But man must agree. That problem was solved in the idea of covenant. God had a part and man had a part. This set the style of relationship from then until now. In every dealing with God, man has a responsible part and God has a part. To be sure, God's part is by far the greater and full of good will, but man must join the hand of God and exercise his mind, and use his will, and move his body and enter the covenant. God will not program man to say, "I love you." He is willing to persuade man with mercies. He is willing to warn man with prediction by programming man to think, feel or will anything. He will use the medium of history, objective revelation, and words to reach man. God uses mediation. A covenant stands between God and man and joins together all who accept its terms and it separates all who refuse.
When viewed in that light, it takes more power to persuade than to program a reconciliation with free human beings. It took much more risk on God's part to make man with free will than with a spiritual reflex system. God risked something when He populated the earth with potential enemies. It would have been no risk to have programmed man to obedience. It was a superior God who revealed Himself to Moses. Lacking God's revelation, the Greeks did the best they could. They made their gods in their own image. (page 47-52)
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