We have seen that Torah, God's levitical law, is a gift to his people, and to the world. It gives them hope that they will re-enter Eden, they are further enlisted and involved in God's war against flesh and death. God's commitment to kill flesh in one people, the people of Abraham, for the sake of the world, is going forward.
Of course, we know from the New Testament that this picture of the law is much more ambiguous. We find Paul saying to the Galatians: "For all who rely on the works of the law are under a curse, as it is written: "Cursed is everyone who does not continue to do everything written in the Book of the Law." Clearly no one who relies on the law is justified before God, because "the righteous will live by faith." (Gal. 3:10-11)
What this is describing is the phenomena that Torah, Israel's link to God, has now become the greatest obstacle to Israel meeting with God.
How can this be?
What happened to the tabernacle (and later temple) as a picture of the marriage between God and his people Israel? What happened to the festival schedule as a calendar of romantic rendezvous? What changed between then and Paul's time? How did Torah turn from a means of communion with God to an instrument of torture, driving Israel farther and farther from God.
The best way to capture this is to look at part of that levitical law from the book of Deuteronomy:
"They have made Me jealous with what is not God; They have provoked Me to anger with their idols. So I will make them jealous with those who are not a people; I will provoke them to anger with a foolish nation." (Deuteronomy 32:15-21)
We see here that Israel has made God jealous with her pursuit of foreign gods and has provoked him. This is a reference to Israel's desire to be like other nations. God's response is to make them jealous and to provoke them. He shows favor to Assyria and Babylon, idolatrous nations in themselves, who bring Israel and Judah into the grave of exile to hope for resurrection. God has to remind Israel again of what he is doing: putting flesh to death, putting death to death. He has to send Israel into the grave of exile because Israel, God's warriors against flesh, have become flesh. God's warriors against the curse of death, have become agents of death. Israel is no longer part of the solution. She has made the problem even more intractable.
This is a problem for the world because the ultimate end and destination of what God is setting out to accomplish is through Israel, to allow all nations to have flesh and death put to death in order to regain entry into Eden. But Israel, supposed to be the leader in this journey, has caused a big wreck, and no one else can get through.
Remember Abraham. The lesson he must learn throughout his life is that God will not bring redemption through the flesh. Everything that God accomplishes through Abraham is life from the grave. He must trust God to fulfill his promises in a way that doesn't reek of fleshly boasting. Otherwise, Abraham is no different than anyone else. In the same way, Israel must trust God to fulfill promises through life from the grave, and not through sinful flesh. This is what circumcision and the rites of the tabernacle are all about.
But flesh has come to dominate even Torah. The very signs that God used to set Israel apart, Israel now uses to revert back to the life of flesh. Peter Leithart writes: "Though many faithful Jews kept the humble faith of Abraham, teachers in Judaism turned Torah itself into a weapon of bondage. Jews came to boast in the absent flesh of circumcision; they used purity rules to exclude other Israelites and Gentiles; they imposed burdens rather than relieving them. Torah was good and spiritual, but in the hands of fleshly Israel it became an instrument of oppressive injustice. In practice Torah did not control flesh but intensified its desires and violence. Instead of combating and overcoming the Edenic and Babelic curses, Israel sharpened those divisions and so came under the curse of Torah." (Delivered, 284)
By reverting to flesh, by not being obedient, Israel not only doesn't resolve the curses, but adds another one to it. Remember that God has given up floods. He isn't engaging in open warfare against flesh and death. Instead, he has chosen a "narrow stream," the stream of Abraham to bring blessing to the nations. And the very law that was supposed to help Israel achieve this mission is now another curse, blocking up the stream. (Delivered, 200)
Until this stream can come unblocked, until the "traffic jam" can be cleared, blessing cannot come to the nations. (N.T. Wright, quoted in Delivered, 198) We see with Paul that, ultimately, Christ will get the stream moving again, and will unclog the roadway:
"Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law by becoming a curse for us, for it is written: "Cursed is everyone who is hung on a pole." He redeemed us in order that the blessing given to Abraham might come to the Gentiles through Christ Jesus, so that by faith we might receive the promise of the Spirit." (Galatians 3:1-14)
Until then, the nations are in turmoil:
"...filled with destructive violence, cursed, divided, far from God and separated from one another, dominated by sin and death because ruled by fleshly passions. The nations are formless, void and dark, but God promises to send out his hovering Spirit to nurture the world back to order and beauty."
This leads us to the threshold of Christ. Christ must renew the best aspects of the story that's been told, and bear the brunt of the worst. He must illuminate the dark corridors of the temple again. He must make a new tapestry out of all that's unraveled, so that everything that has come before him will turn out to be merely a shadow of the one light we were meant to see all along.
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