ROUGHLY EDITED COPY CONCORDIA UNIVERSITY EDUCATION NETWORK EXODUS DR. DAVID ADAMS #59 Captioning Provided By: Caption First, Inc. 10 E. 22nd Street Suite 304 Lombard, IL 60148 800-825-5234 *** This text is being provided in a rough draft format. Communication Access Realtime Translation (CART) is provided in order to facilitate communication accessibility and may not be a totally verbatim record of the proceedings. *** >> When I read in Chapter 34 Verse 7 that God will hold the third and fourth generations guilty of the sins of the fathers, I thought that God is being unjust. How could this God of love hold children, grandchildren and great, great grandchildren responsible for the sins of their ancestors? >> Well, Nick, this really is a critical text in the Old Testament. And it's closely related, of course, to the passage in the Ten Commandments where the -- a similar phrase occurs about God showing grace to thousands but not -- but visiting the inequity of the fathers upon the children to the third and fourth generation. I think the first thing that we need to do is to clarify what is being said actually in this text when God says this. First -- and this is a matter of translation so you kind of have to take my word for it. In Hebrew in these two passages here in Chapter 34 and in Chapter 20, there is no word for generation. The word in Hebrew is thirds and fourths, and thirds means the third group or the third generation and fourths means the fourth group or the fourth generation. And the same is true -- and here is where most English translations fail us because they don't treat this consistently. The text also says thousands. And we must understand that thousands in this context to mean a thousand generations. A thousand groups just as thirds means third generations and fourths means four generations. So thousands must be a thousand generations. Now, the reason I make this point and make it so aggressively, if you will, is that the way we usually translate this text leads us to misunderstand this text, to turn it exactly upside down of what it's trying to say. Because to us, we hear third and fourth generations as a lot. And a few thousand as not as much. So it seems to us that in the -- what's being said is that God will have mercy on a few thousand. But that he will hold generations upon generations guilty for the sins of the fathers. In other words, that God's judgement outweighs his grace and his mercy. And that's exactly the opposite of what the text is trying to do. This text is trying to draw a contrast between the meagerness of God's judgement that extends only to three or four generations and the tremendous extent of God's grace which extends to a thousand generations. And so in the -- this cosmic scale of God's justice, you've got three or four generations here and a thousand generations here. And so this text is trying to emphasize the great extent of God's grace and mercy, not his wrathfulness and his judgement. And in classical theology, we have sort of a name for this. When we say that the -- the judgement of God, the law, is God's foreign work and the Gospel, God's graciousness, is God's primary or rightful work. And so this contrast between the foreign work of God and the genuine work of God that we make in our systematic theology also comes in -- or is expressed in this text here. But almost everybody reads this the way that you read it, Nick. Because frankly, sloppy translation of the Hebrew which gives the exact opposite meaning of what's intended by the text. And it's simply just a matter of inconsistency, of the translator not translating the text in a consistent way here. Unfortunately, this has become one of the texts where everybody has heard it one way and, therefore, translaters hate to translate it any other way. Because people are so used to hearing it a certain way, that -- translaters are human, too. And so they think they read it when, in fact, they are only just repeating what they are used to hearing in the King James. So the first thing we need to do within this -- we need to deal within this text is to make sure we understand what the emphasis is. The emphasis here is not on God's judgement. But the emphasis -- he's using the generation thing as a way of emphasizing the greatness of God's grace versus the meagerness of his wrath. And that point is reenforced by what God says directly when he defines the name Yahweh here. So let's look at the definition of the name Yahweh. We were talking about Chapter 34. We pointed out that there God says he was going to define for Moses the meaning of the name Yahweh. Now, this is at least the third time in the book of Exodus in the text that we've looked at that we have had what we might call divine self revelation passages. We had that one in Chapter 3 where we had, you know, "I will be who I will be." The emphasis was on preserving God's illusiveness there. We had the one in Exodus 6 about the name Yahweh. And the emphasis there was on connecting the name Yahweh to the redemptive mission that God was in the midst of at that point. And now we come to the third of these revelatory passages that we are going to look at here in this class. And this is in some ways -- well, I was going to say it is the most important. It balances the other two. And the other two were in the first part of the book. So they were important, too. The theological point about Yahweh as redeemer. This one is in the second part of the book and it deals with a different subject. Namely, Israel's relationship to Yahweh. So this is the most important one in the second part of the book because it's here in this text that Yahweh -- that Israel finally learns who Yahweh is and what it means for them to be his people. So let's read it. Exodus Chapter 34 Verses 5 to 7. "Yahweh descended in a cloud and stood with him there." And again, the English translations usually say "proclaimed the name Yahweh." But I'm going to translate it correctly. "Yahweh descended in a cloud and stood before him and defined the name Yahweh. Yahweh passed before him and Yahweh proclaimed" -- and here we have the quotation following Yahweh is "a God of mercy and gracious, slow to anger, abounding in grace and truth, extending grace to a thousand generations, forgiving inequity and transgression and sin. But who'll by no means clear the guilty visiting the inequity of the fathers on the children and the children's children to the third and fourth generation." Now, the emphasis throughout this text is on God's grace. And the note at the end about God inflicting judgement upon three or four generations is just as a reminder as St. Paul says in the New Testament "Shall we continue to sin so grace may abound? By no means." That's not the point that God is trying to make here. If forced to do so by our continued unrepentance and rejection of Christ, God will judge those who are separated from him. But it's not his desire to do so. That's why Christ became man, to bring God's grace to the whole world. So there are a couple of things that involve translation here. Most English translations mistranslate Verse 6 and they translate something like "Yahweh passed before him and said, 'Yahweh, Yahweh is a gracious God.'" I won't bore you with the details of that. You'll just have to take my word for it that it's a slight mistranslation. It doesn't really effect the meaning here. But it is a sort of clumsy translation of the text. The text should read "Yahweh passed before him and Yahweh proclaimed," quote, "'Yahweh is a God gracious and merciful," et cetera, et cetera. So this text completes the answer to the question that we posed at the beginning of this course: Who is Yahweh? It completes the answer to the question: What does it mean for Israel to be the people of Yahweh and for us to be the people of Yahweh? And it shows Israel and it shows us that the understanding of what it means to be the people of God can only be comprehended in the light of the former question. In other words, who is Yahweh. We can only understand what it means to be the people of God by understanding who Yahweh is. So in this text which defines Yahweh. In fact, Martin Luther refers to this as a sermon on the name Yahweh. And Luther has got it exactly right. This is really the place in the book of Exodus where the name Yahweh is defined in the technical sense. And it is defined in this way: "Yahweh is a gracious and merciful God. Slow to anger, abounding in kesid" -- that word we've talked about before -- "and truth. Keeping kesid for a thousand generations" and so forth. This is who God is. God is the merciful and gracious one. The one that is faithful in maintaining his grace. The one who relates to his people in terms of kesid. In fact, that's why this passage, Exodus 34 Verses 5 to 7, is the most quoted confession of faith in the Old Testament. This section is quoted eight times in the Old Testament. Not always verbatim. But almost verbatim. It's quoted in Psalm 86 Verse 15. It's quoted in Psalm 103 Verse 8. It's quoted in Psalm 145 Verse 8. It's quoted in Numbers 14 Verse 18. It's quoted by the prophet Joel in Chapter 2 Verse 13. It's quoted by the prophet Nahum Chapter 1 Verse 3. It's quoted by Nehemiah, Chapter 9 Verse 17. And it's quoted by Jonah, Chapter 4 Verse 2. And all of those are direct or almost direct quotations of this Verse. As I said, it's the most quoted passage in the Old Testament. It's also alluded to one way or another in passing probably 100 other times in the Old Testament. This really is the core of Israel's understanding about who Yahweh is and about how they live in the presence of Yahweh. This is the basis of all of Israel's later reflection upon Yahweh's identity and his deeds and upon their and our relationship to him. And so it's not surprising then that the Gospel of John applies this passage to Jesus. And I want to make sure that we call our attention to this. Because it's -- it's one of those things that's very easy to miss because the difference between reading Greek and reading Hebrew. So here I'm going to translate a phrase of the Hebrew very literally for you. It's not the way that most English translations have it. Because most English translations try to smooth it out a bit. But I'm going to translate it very literally here. From Exodus 34, the end of Verse 6, there we read "Yahweh is a God gracious and merciful, slow to anger." And here is the part I want to translate carefully. "Abounding in grace and truth." Okay? Now, the Gospel of John picks this up in John Chapter 1 Verse 14 when God says, "The Word became flesh and dwelled among us. And we have seen his glory, the glory of the only Son from the Father full of grace and truth." And again three verses later, Verse 17, John says, "The law was given through Moses. Grace and truth came from Jesus Christ." What John says here -- in fact, the language in Greek ***plaras karatos ki alathias, abounding in grace and truth, reflects the Hebrew language abounding in kesid ***wa imeth. The language isn't the same. Obviously I used different words. But even the phraseology is similar here. These are the -- this is the point I want to make for you. Here in Exodus 34 and in John Chapter 1 in the two places I quoted, these are the only places in the entire Bible where this phrase "abounding in grace and truth" occur. And most of the time we don't make the connection between them because of the failure of translaters to -- you know, to translate the Hebrew in Exodus 34 precisely enough. They tend to try to smooth it out because it's a complex passage. But in this case, the -- you know, God is in the details, if you will, here. And the detail is a crucial one. Because what John is saying is that the God who revealed himself to Moses as full of grace and truth, as keeping kesid with his people, is revealed to the whole in Jesus Christ. So this passage, Exodus 34 Verse 5 to 7, is made by John. It's one of the most important christological passages in the entire Old Testament. Because he quotes this, this self definition of Yahweh, and says, "If you want to see he who Yahweh is" -- remember in the context Moses had asked to see God's glory and God says, "I will show you my goodness." And if you want to see God's goodness revealed to the world, John says we see that in the one who became flesh to reveal God's kesid ***imeth, his grace and truth to us. By the way, this phrase "grace and truth" both in the Old Testament and the New Testament are a little clumsy sounding. What does that mean, grace and truth? The two words don't quite seem to go together. This is a grammatical construction that in Hebrew we call ***hinditis. Hinditis means using two words to express a single idea. And so true grace is what is meant by grace and truth. The phrase grace and truth means true grace. So Yahweh is true grace. And the true grace of God is revealed to all mankind through Jesus Christ. And that's why this passage here in Exodus 34 Verse 5 to 7 is not only the central confession of faith in the Old Testament, it's not only the clearest expression in the Old Testament of who Yahweh is and what it means for us to be the people of God, but also for us the clearest, one of the most important christological passages in the entire Old Testament. *** This text is being provided in a rough draft format. Communication Access Realtime Translation (CART) is provided in order to facilitate communication accessibility and may not be a totally verbatim record of the proceedings. ***