An excerpt from The Misunderstood Jesus
by Clyde Fant

“Do your best,” God said to Israel. But Israel, like us, didn’t always do its best. Israel was favored, but also flawed (Isa 63:7-10). If Israel had been measured strictly according to its laws, it never would have made it to the Promised Land. The agony of the story of Israel was its human failures. The ecstasy of the story of Israel was not its experience of paradise, but its experience of grace. When Israel was most broken and despairing hopeless, the lovingkindness of God (chesed), God’s merciful grace, was given again and again.

Grace is not a new concept in the New Testament. From the journeys of Abraham to the wanderings of the children of Israel, from the sins of Moses to the sins of David, the story of the family of Israel is eminently a story of grace. In the Hebrew Scriptures the actions of Yahweh repeatedly made plain God’s willingness to forgive wayward Israel. Likewise, the words of the prophets, from Amos to Isaiah to Malachi, make clear the prominent place of little people, the widows, the poor, and the outcast. Those who believe that the Old Testament is a story of law and the New Testament is a story of grace have overlooked the central message of every Old Testament story. Even the book of Leviticus is about the meaning of grace.

We were humans from the beginning: favored but flawed. Our attempts to “do our best” as brothers and sisters to one another, and to serve as caretakers of God’s beautiful creation, soon broke down into struggles for pre-eminence and power. But still we were God’s Children. So God dealt with us with justice, but justice tempered by grace. Because grace was God’s nature from the beginning, grace was God’s plan from the beginning. That was not always understood by every actor in the Old Testament story. Yet grace alone made possible God’s blessings in the Old Testament, just as in the New. The same God who was the loving parent of Jesus Christ was also the parent of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, of Sarah, Rebecca, and Leah.

By the New Testament era, however, for most people the key to grace had been lost, buried under the mountains of religious and political intrigues of the past four centuries. God’s lovingkindness has been buried deep under the Jerusalem bureaucracy, the legalistic wranglings of religious parties, and the cynicism of the Roman-controlled high priesthood that had been bought and sold for years under foreign domination. Greed and revenge became active players in Israel’s religious struggles. The aristocracy controlled the high priesthood and the temple, providing, of course, that they did not arouse the ire of Rome. The common people increasingly found themselves at odds with this hierarchy that mockingly referred to them as “people of the land,” those whose daily labors made it impossible for them to follow the myriad rules of cleanliness and scrupulosity of the religious establishment.

Nevertheless, when foreign rulers squeezed Israel’s hierarchy for money, they in turn squeezed the people. The peasant class in Israel, to which Jesus belonged, resented the aristocracy and its high-living and high-handed treatment. Galilee was notorious for such feelings. But actually Judea, surrounding Jerusalem, was more of a hotbed of rebellion than Galilee. Finally, in the years 63-66 A.D., thirty years after the death of Jesus, the peasants launched an all-out war against the aristocracy and the temple establishment. Only the crushing power of Rome finally settled the argument. It annihilated the Jewish state in 70 A.D., leveling the temple and destroying the priesthood forever. Only the synagogues and rabbis of the countryside survived.

Clyde Fant is the author of "The Misunderstood Jesus." To order, go to the online bookpage or call 1-800-747-3016.

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