Clinic, Part 1: A New Family

If you were a doctor with a group of patients who didn’t believe they were sick and didn’t trust you to diagnose or treat them, what would you do? Forcing a treatment on them would be unethichal, but doctors sometimes do this when patients are at great risk of self-harm. Imagine, however, that the fundamental cause of the patients’ illness was distrust of you. In that case, forcing some kind of treatment on them would only increase their distrust, which would make their condition worse.

This was the predicament that God was in after the Corruption in Genesis 3. Humans were infected with the disease of sin, and the disease was only getting worse over time. God had a rescue plan to cure human nature and to bring humans back into right relationship with himself, each other, and Creation, but he needed their cooperation to enact that plan. If he had tried to force some kind of treatment on humans, who hadn’t yet realized the extent of their sickness, it would only increase the distrust they had towards him, which was the cause of the illness in the first place.

Abraham and Sarah

For God’s rescue plan to succeed, he needed a group of humans who would work in partnership with him. These people would act as a kind of focus group, trying out a demanding health regimen that would heal human nature. They would act as a clinic for the rest of the human race, open for anyone to join and experience restoration so long as they were also willing to submit to the healing process.

As the first step, God recruited Abraham and Sarah. Abraham and Sarah were, for the most part, ordinary people, but God had great plans for them and their family. God entered into a covenant with Abraham: a special, relational promise that Abraham and Sarah would become the father and mother of a great nation, with descendants as numerous as the stars, based out of the land of Canaan.

At first, they struggled to believe God’s promises since they were elderly and had no children. They tried to solve the problem their own way by using Sarah’s servant, Hagar, to have a child by Abraham, but that was not God’s plan. God wanted to show them that he could bring life out of death. And they could only experience that life if they were faithful to God and to each other. Though they were skeptical that their reproductively dead bodies could produce a child, they acted in faith, like a restored Adam and Eve, and God gave them a son, Isaac.

In order to experience God’s covenant promise, Abraham and Sarah had to cut away cultural attitudes and practices that clouded their eyes from seeing God’s vision. Like Abraham and Sarah, all humans need a spiritual surgery to live fully as Images of God. To help remind Abraham and Sarah’s family of that, God required for all male members to be circumcised. Everyone needed to cut away the sinful part of their hearts, by submitting to God’s healing, in order to bear the hope for restoration and pass it on to the next generation.

From Family to Nation

Abraham and Sarah’s response marked a new beginning towards the restoration of the relationship between God and humans. But, as we have seen, humans had broken relationships with more than just God. If Abraham, Sarah, and their descendants were going to become a kingdom of priests and a holy nation, an emergency clinic in the midst of a pandemic of corruption and sin-addiction, they would first need to focus on the healing of their relationships with each other.

The rest of Genesis details this process of spiritual formation for Abraham’s family. Some highlights are listed below:

• Parenting

  • Cain manipulated his son into serving him, but Abraham gave up his selfish desire to control his sons. This allowed them to freely serve God and experience the life God desired for them.
  • Parental favoritism led to sibling conflict on multiple occasions. Jacob relinquished his favoritism of Benjamin, which was key to his sons’ reconciliation.

• Sibling Relationships

  • Cain killed his brother, but Abraham elevated his nephew, Lot, to the status of brother. He directly advocated for Lot’s protection, which led God to remove Lot and his family from an abusive community.
  • Leah and Rachel, though they spent much of their life in competition, moved towards reconciliation and compassion towards one another.
  • Jacob and Esau, though they spent their early life in conflict, eventually came to partial reconciliation after Jacob was willing to humble himself before his brother, who he had wronged.
  • Joseph, though he was initially sold into slavery by his envious brothers, forgave them upon their reunion. Joseph also challenged his brothers to demonstrate that they were capable of acting on behalf of one another. He and his brothers, and their respective wives, became Israel’s twelve tribes, as their respective families became a unified people.

Of course, Abraham, Sarah, and their descendants did not live perfect lives. There is much in their stories that even the narrator of Genesis criticizes, but this was only the beginning of Israel’s formal story. In these people, God worked to halt the downward spiral of sin and corruption, planting the seeds of restored relationships and a healed human nature.

While Joseph was in Egypt, God used him to help the Egyptians make a new sort of Garden of Eden, which drew the surrounding nations together during a severe regional famine. In Joseph’s generation, God readied the family to become the nation of ancient Israel. By leading them to Egypt, God gave Israel an opportunity to build positive relationships with the people around them.

Israel’s Slavery and Rescue

Unfortunately, the state of friendship between Egypt and Israel did not last, as told in the second book of the Bible, Exodus. After Israel began growing in population, the Egyptian ruler (Pharaoh) feared that they would try to take power, and he enslaved them to prevent this. Over time, it became clear that Pharaoh was not going to free the Israelites on his own, so God stepped in. He used Moses to confront Pharaoh, and when Pharaoh doubled down and refused to let the Israelites go free, God sent a series of plagues against Egypt, starting with turning the Nile River red. As Pharaoh continued to deny freedom to God’s people, the plagues got worse and worse: bugs, disease, famine, and finally, the death of the firstborn son of any family that did not mark their door for God’s protection.

Many of the plagues were, in some sense or another, a reflection back to Egypt of the ways which the Egyptians had harmed the Israelites (for examples, see discussion question 3 in The Anastasis Center’s bible study on the Ten Plagues) and jeopardized the future coming of Jesus. Each of the plagues challenged the power and legitimacy of the Egyptian gods. This is a frequent theme in the Old Testament. Every group of people in the ancient world was facing the same human condition. God would eventually help the Israelites to correctly diagnose the problem as the corruption of human nature, but other nations had their own ideas about what the problem was and how to fix it. They created their own gods and systems of religion to fit their understanding of the world and the human condition.

The message that God sent to the Egyptians by the plagues was clear: "your gods are false and will lead you to death. My way is the only path to true life." This was one of many cases where God demonstrated his real, effectual power as the Author of Creation over the powerless, inert, created gods of the ancient nations. And it worked. Not only did Pharaoh let the Israelites leave Egypt, but some of the Egyptians and other peoples joined them. That demonstrated a key point: God’s blessings were not limited only to the people who were related by blood to Abraham. The others became related to God and each other by walking through a doorway marked by the life-blood of the Passover lamb. They recognized God’s power over Creation and wanted to participate in his plan to restore humanity to a new garden land, and they were welcomed do so. This was an open invitation throughout the Old Testament time period. Anyone who saw God’s goodness and participated in his plan to restore human nature and relationships could join Israel and become a member of Abraham’s family.

This was a foundational event for the Israelites. They would refer back to it many times in their nation’s history to remind themselves of God’s goodness. He had proven to them that he cared for them and had their interests at heart. He desired their freedom from slavery–not just to other humans, but to the disease and corruption of sin in their nature. He desired that they live in a garden land, albeit a pale reflection of the original Garden of Eden. By his actions, God helped the Jewish people to trust him, and they were ready to stand on this foundation to join with God in a process of deeper healing and restoration of relationships. That part of the story will be discussed in Clinic, part 2: A New Promise.