Old Testament comes out of Jewish history

We have simply to remember that the Old Testament comes out of the life and experience of hundreds of years of Jewish history, in which the sensitivity of the people is deepened, and through the course of which God makes himself more fully known to them as they are able to bear it and respond to him. God reveals himself to people where they are, and not somewhere else. He comes to their clouded vision, in the midst of their imperfect cultures, in their sin and idolatry, and they respond to his demands as they understand them, then and there. Their response is not perfect, for they are men and not God. Consequently, they bequeath to us insights that are not of uniform worth and significance. The Christian, who has seen this process of revelation come to its culmination in Christ, can use him as the "measuring stick" by which to judge all events within the Biblical revelation. We would not want to emulate many of the bloodthirsty things which the Israelites did in response to what they felt was the will of God for them. But we have this at least to learn from them -- that just as they were trying to be obedient to God's will as it came to them in their time, so we have a similar obligation to be obedient to God's will as it comes to us in our time.

Likewise, when we come across references to "other gods" in the earlier Biblical writings, we must place this belief in the context of the later firmly established Jewish belief that there is one God and only one, and that all men are to give allegiance to him. "Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God is one Lord" ( Deut. 6: 4) is the basic affirmation of mature Old Testament belief, and all else must be judged in the light of it.

In what follows, then, let us remember the danger, the difficulty, the directive, and the diagnosis. The story of the "evolution" of ideas about God is an interesting story, but it is not our concern here. We shall try to see the living God entering into the lives of the people of the Bible, so that we may be prepared for him to enter into our lives also.