What Is The True Christian Religion?/Chapter 5
CHAPTER V
GOD DECLARES SUBSTITUTION IMPOSSIBLE
When the Israelites under Moses came out of Egypt they were obviously merely a race of slaves, without culture or education or knowledge of a cultural kind. They had been kept in the most abject slavery. How could God reveal Himself to them? Only by talking to them in language they could understand. They were primitive in their feelings, totally unspiritual. The revelations that came to them through Moses had to picture God in the terms of a man such as they could respect, capable of anger and revenge. Therefore God was presented to them then, and in later writings of the Old Testament, as one who took vengeance of their inventions. The law proclaimed from Mt. Sinai was given in a tempest of flame and thunder in order properly to impress a savage race.
But the basis of the covenant which God made with them through Moses was the Ten Commandments. If they kept the Ten Commandments, they would be prospered and happy. If they did not, the curses outlined in Deuteronomy would fall on them and their children. A tabernacle was built expressly under the direction of Moses to provide a holy place for the Ten Commandments. God said He would dwell with them there. It was a picturization of the fact that God would dwell with them as they kept the Ten Commandments. Let us keep in mind that Israel agreed keep the Ten Commandments and that was the basis of the covenant.
But they kept the Commandments no better than we do. They had to have something external in the way of worship to satisfy the savage love of the spectacular, something to appeal to man's love of the sensuous. Their father Abraham had worshipped God back in Ur of the Chaldees by means of animal sacrifices. He kept it up when he came into Canaan. He had also been an idolater, but was called upon to worship One God in the new land into which he came; yet it was not possible for him to have the true name of the Lord as Jehovah revealed to him. He was still too external despite his high quality of implicit obedience. Abraham's decendants still kept up the worship of God by animal sacrifices. it was a heathenish custom expressing the idea of reconciliation with God by shedding blood. It too often resulted in the shedding of human blood as expiation for offenses to Deity, under the superstitious belief that Deity could be pacified, appeased only by the vicarious yielding up of precious life. As we read of those ancient peoples trying to appease Deity in this way we have a deep pity for their grossly superstitious idea of what God requires of His children. Surely we have gone far beyond any such superstitious idea of God. Or have we?
Through Moses God gave the children of Israel many laws regarding health and sanitation and social relationships, but, in order to keep them from worshipping heathen idols, like those of Egypt and neighboring lands, and reverting to gross idolatry. He permitted them to have a worship through animal sacrifice; but, mark this, He utterly changed the spirit of it, making the animals to represent the offering up of their good affections, for animal life represents the emotional life of man, and making the meal offerings from the vegetable kingdom to represent their good thoughts; for the vegetable kingdom, represents the intellectual life of man. In this way worship through sacrifices was made possible, possible to a savage people unable to appreciate true ethical ideals. Their plural wives and easy divorce and spirit of revenge show how external they really were. They had the spirit of a savage race, but were held to some degree in check by Divine law.
To them God had to reveal Himself in the best way possible, but their spirit was not greatly changed ever after they came into the land of Israel. They did each man that which was right in his own eyes and worshipped the gods of the land. However, we perceive that as the centuries passed by the mark of a faithful Israelite was the performance of worship through animal sacrifice. Yet Christian worship has gone little further. While animal sacrifices were abolished for Christians following the founding of the Christian Church. the spirit of it was continued. The writers of the New Testament having been brought up in the remembrance of the worship of God through animal sacrifice tried to interpret the work of Christ wholly in the spirit of such worship. Paul especially dedicates himself to the task of explaining the work of Jesus in the language of mysticism, of Hebrew mysticism, based on the significance of the sacrificial system, which was, as we have shown, not the real basis of Old Testament religion, but a system permitted by the Lord because of the external nature of the people. And yet Paul caught the true idea when he said: "God was in Christ reconciling the world unto himself, not imputing their trespasses unto them." That being true God did not have to be propitiated. It was men who had to be reconciled to God.