The Fire Among Us: Exodus 25–31
Reading for Sunday 4.3 – Wednesday 4.6
It can be easy to subjugate God to our specific ways of worshipping or talking about God. In God’s grace, patience, and willingness to condescend to us, we can forget that Yahweh is also the fiery God of emancipation. As we edge closer to Easter, we should hold in tension the terrifying power, authority, and strength able to wrest sin and death to the ground, and Yahweh’s insistence on accomplishing this through His own debasement, and humiliation. All at once, at Jesus’ crucifixion, the humility and the power of God are most clearly disclosed.
//
Read Exodus 25–31
“I’ll move in and live with the Israelites. I’ll be their God. They’ll realize that I am their God who brought them out of the land of Egypt so that I could live with them. I am God, your God.”
Exodus 29:45-46 (The Message)
//
The Fire Among Us
The first half of Exodus seems to almost clash with the second. The fiery God of emancipation and power (1–24) is now directing the finer points of a tent in which He will dwell. The liberating God (1–24) and the dwelling God (25–40) seem at odds. One depicts a sovereign wildling of a God, relentlessly active. The other displays a passive, content, dwelling God concerned with Israel's rest.
Yet Exodus makes it clear. The Emancipating God and the dwelling God are one and the same. The fiery God of the Red Sea is content to dwell among a people, a people of no status at that. As Walter Brueggemann puts it, this is a God who moves "from sanctuary to confrontation back to sanctuary." The God of liberation insists on being taken on God's terms.
In this sense, the particular nature of Israel's cultic practices are rooted in the God whose authority and power over the earth have been made clear. It might have been easy for Israel to forget—to mistake Yahweh for some tame, dull, lush of a diety.
We, too, can find ourselves in the comfort and familiarity of our routines, bored by God. We slowly, over time, fashion a God of our liking. Borrowing from the God who resides among us, we dare to think we can say what God is and is not.
As we enjoy our coffee and contemporary worship, we can easily forget that the dwelling God may awaken at any moment and go about God's work of liberation among us. Or that the liberating God may seek to dwell and rest and take residence among us.
We are rightly comforted and put at ease by the love of God, fully displayed by Jesus. But let us never confuse Jesus' reassurance with the tameness of Yahweh. The God who comforts us and insists on dwelling among us has, and always will be, a consuming fire.
//
Reflect with a friend
In what ways does who God is confront you? Is this unsettling or comforting?
Do you feel that you are overly comfortable (bored) in your worship of God? Why do you think this is? How might you change or maintain this?
Do you feel you’ve left room in your understanding of God for God to freely move and act as God wishes? In other words, do you tend to view God as more of a personal being, or as a construct of ideas? Has this always been the case? Do you feel one way of thinking about God is better than another?
//
Next Reading
Thur 4.7 – Sun 4.10
Exodus 32–34
