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Israel continues to exist as God’s people only as a result of God’s gracious saving actions in the deliverance from Egypt. The story of God’s people is rooted in grace. Israel’s life before God is one of response to grace. This is the heart of covenant. God reaches out and offers Israel a special relationship. The Creator God who delivered Israel from Egypt now invites God’s people to discover the purpose of their deliverance. Israel’s response to God’s grace may be summarized by the phrase faithful obedience. Through faithful obedience, God’s people begin to embody an ethos that reflects God’s character before the watching world. The call of God on his redeemed people is a call to holiness, but it is a holiness in the service of mission. The Sinai Covenant serves as a testament to God’s people of the centrality of mission, holiness, and community. The Sinai Covenant instructs and shapes God’s people into a missional community that reflects God’s character to/for/in the world.

The Sinai is the third explicit covenant in the Pentateuch. Several scholars, Frank Moore Cross and his student S. Dean McBride, Jr., have observed that five explicit covenants (Noah, Abraham, Sinai, Phinehus, and Moab) are embedded within the Pentateuch, which give these books an even greater interconnectedness. These five covenants form a chiastic structure with the Sinai covenant at the center:

A Noahic Covenant (Gen 9:9-17)

B Covenant Grant to Abraham (Gen 17:1-14, cf. Gen 15:1-21)

C Sinai Covenant (Exod 19:1-Num 10:10, esp. Exod 19:1-34:28)

B’ Covenant Grant to Phinehas (Num 25:11-13) – Ps 106:30-31

A’ Covenant in Moab (Deuteronomy, esp. 29:1-32:47)

The outer bracket (A and A’) focuses on the issue of stability. The Noahic covenant is with all living things and guarantees the stability of the heavens and earth. The covenant in Moab is made between God and Israel and serves to sustain Israel’s life in the land without Moses through the presence of God in the Torah. The inner bracket (B and B’) focuses on issues of land and priesthood. God’s land grant to Abraham guarantees Israel land whereas God’s grant to Phinehas (the savior of Israel at Baal-Peor) provides for a perpetual priesthood for Israel’s life in the land. The Pentateuch then centers on the Sinai pericope which focuses on Covenant and the institution of the proper worship of God.

Covenant is the rubric used by God to communicate his vision for God’s people’s life and work in the world. The idea of covenant is not unique to Israel. It is drawn from the wider Near Eastern culture of the day. The use of covenant is another example of the way that God incarnates himself into the culture as a means of communicating to humanity and redeeming discrete human cultures. God borrows an element common to a culture and uses it as a platform for communicating the divine will for humanity. Covenant teaches God’s people the true nature of reality—in particular the transcendence of God and the high value and worth of all human beings including women and other persons whom cultures tend to marginalize. At the center of the covenant’s portrait of God stands God’s holiness. The covenants also reveal God’s desire for men and women to live in an exclusive relationship with God rooted in trust and faithful obedience. God is holy and desires his people to likewise reflect his character in their corporate life together and in their engagement with the nations.

In particular the Sinai covenant and its recapitulation on the Plains of Moab in Deuteronomy offer God’s people a polity for shaping life according to God’s will. In Genesis 12:3, God called Abram to lead a family that existed as agents of blessing for the nations. The Torah as a whole details what this looks life. It is crucial to read the various laws, lore, and instructions for worship within the missiological framework provided in Genesis. The goal of the Sinai Covenant is not obedience, but the creation of a missional community that would reflect God’s character in the world, to the world, and for the world.

© 2011 Brian D. Russell

God acts unilaterally. God actions in the Exodus do not depend on human power or prerogatives in any way. God does for God’s people what they are powerless to do for themselves. Salvation is dependent on the grace and actions of God. There are no competing gods and goddesses from whom God must seek permission. Humans play only minor roles in the drama of the Exodus. Moses and Aaron serve chiefly as God’s visible representatives and speak for God, but they like all other human characters are merely spectators to the power of the LORD. Likewise God’s people, the objects of God’s liberating work, play no direct role in their own liberation. Salvation belongs wholly to the Lord.

The God of Israel is beyond compare. Although our world is full of idols and competing claims to deity, Exodus demonstrates decisively that there is only one being worthy of the title of God – the LORD. Exodus 15:11 points to the LORD’s incomparability: “Who is like you, among the gods, O LORD? Who is like you, mighty among the holy ones? Awe-inspiring in praises, doing wonders.” The deliverance from Egypt is the Old Testament’s preeminent display and pronouncement of God’s saving power and character. No other deity in the ancient World or modern world alike can make the claims that the
God of the Exodus can.

God can even use human intransigence and rebellion to reveal his character and power. The core struggle in Exodus is the showdown between Pharaoh king of Egypt and the LORD, god of Israel. Pharaoh asserts his authority and steadfastly refuses to recognize the LORD’s. But God reduces the most powerful “king” in the world to the status of a puppet as a means of declaring God’s name in all of the earth (Exod 9:16). This is an important word because it reminds the people of God that God can achieve his purposes even in the darkest moments when God’s people are facing the most stalwart of opponents.

God’s deliverance is inclusive of outsiders. God acts for God’s people against Egypt, but this must not be interpreted as God against the world. Egypt and the Egyptian people experience divine wrath because they attempted to thwart God’s mission in the world by oppressing God’s people and acting murderously toward them. This does not mean that God is against Egypt simply because they are not Israelites. When Israel leaves Egypt, a mixture of people follows them out (Exod 12:38). The message is subtle but important. Membership in God’s people is rooted in grace and not in race. The text does not tell us anything more about the identity of these people, but the implication is clear: outsiders are welcome to become insiders. The inclusion of outsiders reminds God’s people of the mission given to Abram (Gen 12:3). God’s people exist to serve as blessings for all peoples.

The liberation of Israel is for the world. God’s actions in the Exodus have creation wide implications. God frees God’s people from bondage and oppression so that God’s mission in and for the world can advance. The emphasis in Exodus is not merely Israel’s liberation from Egypt but on Israel’s liberation for God’s purposes of blessing and redeeming the nations.

What do you think?

Copyright 2011 Brian D. Russell

Over the last decade or so, Christian leaders in Western world have become acutely aware of the decline of the Christian faith in its former centers of power and influence. The numbers show a loss of roughly 5000 Christians every single day. Alex McManus has summed up the irony of this retreat aptly: “The Western world has lost its faith in the shadows of church steeples.” In response to this reality scholars, writers, and activists such as Lesslie Newbigin, Alan and Debra Hirsch, Michael Frost, Neil Cole, Donald Guder, and Reggie McNeil have helped to inspire and describe a paradigm shift in ecclesiology.

Missional church refers to a broad and loosely unified movement committed to recapturing the apostolic ethos of the New Testament era Church. The essence of missional is the recognition of the need of the Christ following movement to reengage the world with the Gospel by embodying a “go” and “sent” mentality. Missional churches come in all shapes and expressions: liturgical, organic, house church, multi-site, traditional, etc. But they share a commitment to incarnate the Gospel among those currently outside of the Christ following movement instead of waiting for such persons to be attracted to existing communities. The launching of new faith communities is at the forefront of the missional movement.

Here are five emphases common to those self-identified with missional:

Church as the Sent People of God
Missional churches seek to cultivate an apostolic DNA of “go” rather than “come.” The focus of discipleship is the mission of God. Christ followers see themselves as ambassadors or equippers of those engaged in mission. Discipleship is not separated from mission. In fact, evangelism and mission are construed as the shared values rather than the spiritual gifts of a select few.

The World as the Locus of Ministry
Missional churches consciously embody an “outside of the four walls of the church” posture. Ministry is practiced in the neighborhood rather than on the campus. Missional churches adopt local schools, feed the hungry, hold bible studies in public places, and other practices that present a visible witness to a watching world.

Churches as Mission Outposts
Missional churches see themselves as outposts on the frontier between heaven and hell rather than as safe refuges from the world. Communities of faith exist as training and equipping bodies that gather for worship in preparation for doing God’s work in the world. Missional churches avoid a siege or bunker mentality. Communities of faith exist in and for the sake of the world.

Pastor as Resident Missiologist
In missional churches, pastors see themselves primarily as the resident missiologists. They eschew old understandings of the pastor as chaplain, resident theologian, or ceo. Such identities represent artifacts from the past. Instead, missional pastors focus on equipping all Christ followers to engage fully in God’s mission in the world. They empower the people of God for service in the world.

New Measures for Evaluating Success
In the past, communities of faith judged vibrancy and health by means of maintaining membership rolls, tracking average attendance in worship services and Sunday school, and counting baptisms and confessions of faith. In the emerging missional context, what counts is the impact that a community has on the world around it—e.g., how well have we eradicated hunger among children in the local elementary school, how much of our budget is spend on the community, how many members do we lose to new church plants and other missional projects?

To what extent has your community of faith been impacted by the missional movement?

Who are the people whom God has called us to reach? What are their stories? What worldviews are held? What causes matter to them? About what do they care? A missional hermeneutic must be attentive to these questions. Obviously we are committed to encountering the Scriptures in all of their richness, but if we hope to share its message with others, we must be willing to engage people at a deep level as well. Biblical studies professors often use this quotation to remind students of the centrality of reading the Bible within its literary context: “A text without a context is a pretext for saying anything that an interpreter wants to say.” But it is likewise true that a biblical message apart from a local context of people becomes a pretext for misunderstanding and wasted words. We must be committed to shaping our speech, metaphors, and images in light of the context to which we are communicating. When we combine a rich understanding of the biblical story with a deep connection with the people to whom God has sent us, we find ourselves in an environment in which we can truly speak to fellow humans about biblical message of (re)alignment. We find ourselves with the crucified and risen Jesus calling Christ followers to join fully in God’s mission and inviting those on the margins to become part of God’s work of ushering in a different world.

Moreover, we must also gain a sense of the gods that bind the hearts and minds of the women and men in our ministry context. Only when we understand the idols that capture the hearts of the world will we be prepared to proclaim the Lordship of Jesus in ways that subvert the claims and practices of those idols. A missional hermeneutic recognizes that idols exist within both the church and world. They are easy to spot: sex, consumerism, power, family, security, pleasure, and freedom among others. But these have different localized expressions. A missional approach to Scripture listens to the text in light of the idols who reign over our culture.

What do you think?

The goal of biblical interpretation is conversion. The key part of this process is learning to find our place in the biblical story. God desires to unleash a missional community to reflect and embody God’s character before a watching world. True conversion involves the subversion of our preChristian stories so that they are reshaped and reconfigured within God’s story. Short of this subversion we may never fully embrace and find the true humanity that God wants us to experience through the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. As interpreters of Scripture for Church and World we must be teachers and preachers who boldly and cogently paint a new world for our hearers. The biblical text is our portal to the reality that God desires for us to embody.