Beale / Ortlund Redemptive Reversals and the Ironic Overturning of Human Wisdom

1. Auflage 2019
ISBN: 978-1-4335-6331-7
Verlag: Crossway
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 0 - No protection

E-Book, Englisch, 208 Seiten

Reihe: Short Studies in Biblical Theology

'But many who are first will be last, and the last first.' -Matthew 19:30 The Bible is full of ironic situations in which God overturns the world's wisdom by doing the opposite of what is expected-people are punished by their own sin, the persecution of the church is the catalyst for its growth, Paul claims to have strength through weakness, and more. In this book, biblical scholar G. K. Beale explores God's pattern of divine irony in both judgment and salvation, finding its greatest expression in Jesus's triumph over death through death on a cross. Unpacking this pattern throughout redemptive history, Beale shows us how God often uses what is seemingly weak and foolish to underscore his own strength and power in the lives of his people today.

G. K. Beale (PhD, University of Cambridge) is professor of New Testament and biblical theology at Westminster Theological Seminary. In recent years he has served as president and member of the executive committee of the Evangelical Theological Society. He has written several books and articles on biblical studies.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Beale, Gregory K.

Ortlund, Dane

Leseproben

1

God Judges People by Their Own Sin

[The Nazi War criminal Josef] Mengele did not entirely escape punishment. . . . The aging fugitive . . . “lived apprehensive and afraid, fearful of being found by Jews.” . . . He suffered migraine headaches and slept with a Mauser pistol by his bed. . . . Though there was never a punishment that would fit the dimensions of Mengele’s crimes, is it not peculiarly appropriate that he was condemned to a lifetime of fearing his own victims, and that his punishment should be inflicted by himself?

—Otto Fredrick, Time, June 24, 1985

One of my favorite pastimes in graduate school, after completing a big paper or final exam, was to go to the local ice cream shop and reward myself with a huge bowl of chocolate mint ice cream. This was the height of culinary delight. In reality, I found many excuses to reward myself with such treats. A few years later when I went to my doctor for a physical, he informed me that were I to continue over the years with this ice cream binge, my health would be seriously affected. I realized that the very thing in which I was finding great pleasure could at the same time be causing me, quite literally, “heartache” in the long run. But perhaps my biggest mistake was telling my wife what the doctor had said. I should have known that forever afterward, she would remind me of this sober truth. I have never been able to enjoy my huge bowls of chocolate mint ice cream since. Most of us are familiar with this kind of omnivorous irony. There are so many delicacies that do our taste buds good but simultaneously “do in” our bodies.

On a more serious note, punitive ironies transcend culinary bounds. There are many things people do purely for pleasure or self-interest even though they know it may hurt them in the long run.

A former student of mine, while taking a final exam on the subject of biblical ethics, tried to get a good grade by cheating. During the exam she approached me at the front of the room in order to get clarification about one of the questions. As she pointed her finger to the question on the exam paper, I saw answers written on her hand. The very way she attempted to succeed—through cheating—was the very way in which she failed.

From the political realm, many can probably recall the Machiavellian irony involving former President Richard Nixon. He attempted unjustly to become one of the most famous presidents in American history. He hoped to ensure his success by having all his conversations in the Oval Office recorded. Indeed, Nixon became our most infamous president because these very tapes exposed his underhanded attempts to defeat his political opponents.

These illustrations reflect an ironic moral principle, that when a person unethically schemes to succeed, often the scheme is discovered by the potential victims before it can be accomplished. The very way by which people attempt sinfully to get ahead often becomes the very means by which they fail.

This principle is at work in every level of life. An article in Time magazine some years ago made this observation about drugs: “People addicted to cocaine are out of control. . . . So it is a mean, symmetrical irony that cocaine’s effect is to mimic will and emotional focus, permitting the user to feel he is blessed with precisely the virtues he lacks.”1 I know a woman who drank excessively so that she would feel less inhibited when she socialized. This appeared to work for awhile until she had to quit drinking permanently because of a liver ailment. In her later years, because of the deadening effects of alcohol, she had no personality but sat and stared blankly in the midst of social gatherings. The very things in which people wrongly attempt to find liberation frequently become the things that bring them into harsher bondage.

This ironic principle of judgment is expressed well in the proverb, “There is a way which seems right to man, but its end is the way of death” (Prov. 16:25). When we set out to succeed at something in an unethical manner, circumstances often have an uncanny way of reversing so that we are forced to fail.

In the light of what we have already discussed, we can define irony generally as the doing or saying of something that implies its opposite. What is done or said is really the reverse of what at first appears to be the case. God frequently deals with humanity in an ironic way. This is true in his acts of judgment and salvation, so that irony is one of the major thematic threads tying together the whole of Scripture. God repeatedly drives the events of history in the reverse direction from which they first appear to be moving. We look first at how God carries out his work of ironic punishment.

It’s a Turn-Around World

There was once a Persian prince named Haman and a Jew of low status called Mordecai. Mordecai had saved the king of Persia by revealing a plot to kill the king, although the king was unaware that it was Mordecai who had made the plot known. Haman hated Mordecai because he would not bow down and pay homage to him as vice president of Persia (Est. 3:1–5). As a result, Haman vented his childish anger by persuading King Ahasuerus to decree that all Jews in the empire be annihilated (Est. 3:6–15), and he plotted to have Mordecai hanged on the gallows (Est. 5:14).

As providence would have it, the night before Mordecai was to be hanged, the king could not sleep, so he ordered his servants to read to him for pleasure’s sake the recent records of the affairs of the kingdom. In these records the king heard it read that it was Mordecai who had revealed the assassination plot against him. Upon discovering that Mordecai had not been honored for this, he desired to make things right. Now at this very time Haman happened to be entering the king’s court to request permission to hang Mordecai. Before Haman had the opportunity to discuss Mordecai, the king asked him, “What is to be done for the man whom the king desires to honor?” (Est. 6:6). Haman, thinking the king was referring to him, answered,

For the man whom the king desires to honor, let them bring a royal robe which the king has worn, and the horse on which the king has ridden, and on whose head a royal crown has been placed; and let the robe and the horse be handed over to one of the king’s noble princes and let them array the man whom the king desires to honor and lead him on horseback through the city square, and proclaim before him, “Thus it shall be done to the man whom the king desires to honor. (Est. 6:7–9)

Haman was shocked and humiliated when the king commanded him to “do so for Mordecai the Jew” (Est. 6:10), especially since Haman was required to lead Mordecai’s horse through the city square. This was certainly an unexpected turn of events, but it was only the beginning of an even greater ironic reversal.

After the king had authorized Haman’s plot (Est. 3:8–11), Queen Esther, Mordecai’s step-daughter, informed the king about Haman’s plot to exterminate all the Jews (which included Esther) and to hang Mordecai. The king angrily declared that Haman should be hanged on the very gallows upon which he had planned to hang Mordecai (Esther 7), and he made it possible for the Jews throughout his land to destroy Haman’s allies who were planning to exterminate them (Esther 8–9). Therefore, “when the enemies of the Jews hoped to gain the mastery over them, it was turned to the contrary so that the Jews themselves gained the mastery” (Est. 9:1), and “it was a month which was turned for them from sorrow into gladness” (Est. 9:22). The Lord had designed that Haman’s wicked scheme “which he had devised . . . should return on his own head” (Est. 9:25). That the name “Haman” in Hebrew may mean “celebrated one” is likely not coincidence. He tried to win a victory over the Jews and celebrate, but he was the one defeated and celebrated over by his enemies (Est. 9:17–22, 27). In fact, this victory has been celebrated by the Jews as the festival of Purim for centuries ever since.

Surely the story of Mordecai’s rise and Haman’s demise exemplifies a more general principle whereby God “sets on high those who are lowly, and those who mourn are lifted to safety,” but “He frustrates the plotting of the shrewd, so that their hands cannot attain success” (Job 5:11–12), for “his own scheme brings him down. . . . And . . . a noose for him is hidden in the ground” (Job 18:7–10).

An Eye for an Eye

This story from the book of Esther is illustrative of the same idea found repeatedly in the Old Testament, where God punishes sinners by means of their own sin. The principle of ironic justice is lucidly summarized in Leviticus 24:19–31:

If a man injures his neighbor, just as he has done, so shall it be done to him: fracture for fracture, eye for eye . . . just as he has injured a man, so it shall be inflicted on him. (cf. Ex. 21:23–25)

The idea is that the form of a man’s punishment is to be patterned after the form of his crime or sin.2 So, for example, the very act of killing another shows the pattern of how the killer must be punished—he must also be killed. Hence, killing may seem the right way to act for a man, but its end is the way of death. Furthermore, the murderer will be punished by means of his own sin.

That this is not an atypical form of divine punishment is born out by the...