I just had an interesting conversation with a fellow Christian. He was surprised to hear that I believe that God has some special plan for an ethnic, national Israel, and that it involves actual land. Among reformed types (I know some of them), it is customary to dismiss this idea as dispensational pre-millenialism of the Tim LaHaye/Hal Lindsay variety. Don't we post-millenialists (okay, amillenialists too) know that the promises of the Old Testament have been universalized to include all ethnic groups? Don't we know that the New Earth is going to include the whole planet, not just Israel? Don't we know that he is a Jew who is one inwardly and not outwardly (and, if we're honest about what we really think, that this really applies slightly more to gentile Christians than to real, ethnic, bloodline sons of Abraham)?
I recognize that this notion of God loving an actual place could throw a kink in a fellow's systematics. But when I read the Bible - the Psalter, the Prophets, Paul - I can't ignore God's passionate insistence on how much he loves that little strip of land over there on the eastern Mediterranean.
Is all that "curse those who curse you" and "bless those who bless you" business really just rhetorical?
How about when God says to Israel, "Can a woman forget her sucking child that she should not have compassion on the son of her womb? yea, they may forget, yet will I not forget thee." Is this just "symbolic"? Something that has to be interpreted "spiritually" by twenty-first century evangelicals (who are undoubtedly the most spiritually enlightened group of people ever to exist)? Is this something God was really adressing to the New Testament church but allowed the Jews to believe applied to them for a time? Because whatever you and I may say about it, the Jews were certainly convinced that these things applied to them. Otherwise, why was Jeremiah so hurt and confused that he blurted out, "Ah, Lord God, surely thou hast greatly deceived this people and Jerusalem, saying, Ye shall have peace; whereas the sword reaches unto the soul." Oh, Jeremiah, you silly thing - none of that ever really applied to Israel any way. God was talking about us, not you. So see? No reason to get all huffy.
An even more disconcerting interpretation is that God really did feel that way about Israel back then, but now that the Old Testament is "obsolete" he's just kind of moved on, just kind of forgotten all those declarations of love he made to Israel once upon a time.
No, guys. This is one of those times where rigorous sytematics has to be tempered (as logical and philosophical constructs must ever be) by the overall ethos of scripture. Simply put, we must not allow our love for systematization to render us up a God who writes love poetry that he doesn't really mean. That would be the foolishness of Aaron: I ran these verses through the machine, and out came this god.
Do a little thought experiment with me. First, try to forget for a minute that the Old Testament has been made perfectly persipicuous to us. Set aside for a moment the knowledge that contemporary American evangelicals have exhaustively plummed the depths of the Hebrew scriptures and have analyzed away all of their mysterious, eastern, pre-democratic and pre-industrial elements.
Next, try reading the Old Testament as if it were a parchment just delivered to you in the desert by a fiery seraphim after you've eaten nothing but grasshoppers for a month (instead of a textbook with explanatory notes sold to you by a nerdy librarian and that you've done twenty semester hours on in an upper-middle class seminary run by a bunch of white folks). Read it as if it were the thundering oracles of a jealous oriental diety who was known to the surrounding pagans (and feared by them) as a mountain dweller.
Lastly, check out Romans 11. Romans is of course where the bulk of the ammo comes from for the other side of this argument. But isn't it just like God to throw down something in the middle of someone's airtight, proof-texted case just in order to, you know, mess it up? Paul doesn't appear to be taking the everybody-is-spiritually-a-Jew angle in Romans 11, folks (or, as it is otherwise known, the doctrine of Isreal-really-means-the-Church). No, he is very consciously, deliberately, and overtly contrasting Jews and Gentiles in this passage.
Now then, it must be obvious that I am not a master guru scholar of the scriptures. I am not a trained theologian in any sense. I do not know the languages, and I have not taken the classes (although I have the highest regard and deference for anyone who does and has). But I can read English passably well; and insofar as our English translations are reliable vessels of God's Word, I've read it a good bit. And the God that I read about in there loves rivers, and mountains, and valleys - not only that, but he loves particular mountains, rivers, and valleys. The Bible says so, over and over and over. It's not just in there to sound pretty, either. It's true. It's a real part of God's character.
What about you? Is there some place, some locality, some region, some culture, some town, some family home, some neighborhood, some acre of backwoods, some creek, some beach, some stretch of backroad that you love? That you miss? That you draw a great degree of your personal identity from? That you weep for, because it's been sold to strangers, or turned into a development, or flooded by a lake for fat cats on ski-doos, or neglected and allowed to dilapidate? I bet there is. Even if you don't think so right now - maybe you were a military kid, or maybe you just don't get all mushy and sentimental like other folks (or could it be that you cynically regard what is most human about you as sentimentality and mush?) - even so, I bet if you meditate on it honestly for an hour, you will realize there is some place like that for you.
Where does it come from, this mysterious attachment to place? Is it just a freak of human nature with no significance? Is it just something poets and songwriters go on and on about to justify their careers or maladjustment (or both)? Pffffffffft. Come on. You love some place because God loves some place. In fact, the fact that you love someplace is Him loving that place through you. Loving a place is an indicator of human-ness. People with no attachment to place are deficiently human. And that's just another way of saying that their imago Dei is messed up. We are bearers of God's likeness, and everything that is essentially human is his image in us. To love a place is a fundamental element of being a person. Read The Lord of the Rings again if you don't believe me. Or Faulkner. Or Dostoevsky. Or the Old Testament.
Anyway, just so all of you know, in the dispensation of the fullness of times, the eschaton, the millenium, whenever all of that gets straightened out, I plan on receiving the state of Alabama as my especial province. My duty will be to restore her to her Edenic beauty. I love Alabama. It's my home, even though I haven't lived there in some years. It's where I first dwelled among mountains and rivers and fireflies and sycamores. It's where I first heard fiddles and banjos and sawmill blades buzzing on green lumber. It's where as a child I was called in to wash up for dinner.
Chesterton once said something about loving a place - something about an insane asylum, or a slum - something to the effect that even that place would have been beautiful if someone had just loved it. That's precisely why Israel is going to be like the Garden of the Lord someday - because God loves it.
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