The Marvelous Wisdom and Love of God

Below is a very thought-provoking section from T.F. Torrance's The Mediation of Christ. It led me to marvel at the great wisdom and love of God. Enjoy! It's well worth the necessary time it takes to read it.

“The covenant between God and Israel was not a covenant between God and a holy people, but precisely the reverse. It was a covenant established out of pure grace between God and Israel in its sinful, rebellious and estranged existence. Hence, no matter how rebellious or sinful Israel was, it could not escape from the covenant love and faithfulness of God… There were evidently critical moments in Israel’s history when it seemed ready to do anything to flout the will of God in hope of breaking loose from the grip of his unswerving love and of escaping from the painful transformation of its existence that relations with ‘the Holy One of Israel’ involved. No, the covenant was not made with holy people, nor did its validity depend upon a contractual fulfillment of its conditions on the part of Israel, for its was a unilateral covenant which depended for its fulfillment upon the unconditional grace of God and the unrelenting purpose of reconciliation which he had pledged to work out through Israel for all peoples. And therefore…it depended upon a vicarious way of response to the love of God which God himself provided within the covenant—a way of response which he set out in the liturgy of atoning sacrifice and which he insisted on translating into the very existence of Israel in its vocation as ‘servant of the Lord.’

“…the more fully God gave himself to this people, the more he forced it to be what it actually was, what we all are, in the self-willed isolation of fallen humanity from God. Thus the movement of God’s reconciling love toward Israel not only revealed Israel’s sin but intensified it. That intensification, however, is not to be regarded simply as an accidental result of the covenant but rather as something which God deliberately took into the full design of his reconciling activity, for it was the will and the way of God’s grace to effect reconciliation with man at his very worst, precisely in his state of rebellion against God. That is to say, in his marvelous wisdom and love God worked out in Israel a way of reconciliation which does not depend on the worth of men and women, but makes their very sin in rebellion against him the means by which he binds them for ever to himself and through which he reconstitutes their relations with him in such a way that their true end is fully and perfectly realized in unsullied communion with himself.

“That is the way in which we are surely to interpret the Incarnation, in which God has drawn so near to man and drawn man so near to himself in Jesus that they are perfectly at one. In Jesus the problematic presence of God to Israel, the distance of his nearness and the nearness of his distance, which so deeply trouble the soul of the psalmists and prophets alike, was brought to its resolution” (T.F. Torrance, The Mediation of Christ, pp. 28-29).