The Old Testament and Christian Spirituality

Michael E. W. Thompson

• Publisher: Pickwick Publications
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781532673108, 9781532673115
• eBook ISBN: 9781532673122
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Biblical Studies

Spirituality is a major concern in the modern world, although its meaning is not easy to pin down. In Scripture, it concerns human life lived out in relationship with God. In this book Michael Thompson explores aspects of Old Testament spirituality. He considers the spiritual life through what the Hebrew Bible says about creation and covenant, deliverance and judgment, worship, living in community, inhabiting an ever-changing world, with questions about suffering, yet also with ethical concerns, and a future in God's possible ongoing care. Each chapter concludes with a section exploring the ongoing relevance of Old Testament spirituality for Christians today.

6

Life with Questions

I cry to you and you do not answer me;

I stand, and you merely look at me. (Job 30:20)

The sheer reality of sufferings that come the way of apparently innocent peoples inevitably raises deep questions about the meaning and purpose of earthly life. If, further, those who are suffering are believers in a loving and caring God to whom they have entrusted their lives, the problem—at least theologically, spiritually—becomes the greater. For if God is believed to be all-loving, all-caring, all-powerful why do his people, his worshippers, his followers experience setbacks in their lives, some of them at times going through deep experiences of suffering? The above words come from the last of the many speeches of the suffering man Job in the Old Testament book named after him, and Job’s continued complaint is that in spite of his many words to him, God does not seem to respond; rather the Lord appears merely to look at Job, neither to change his situation for the better, nor to give some explanation of why he is suffering so deeply. We shall return to the remarkable book of Job and all that it has to say through its various voices, but first we ought to consider what we may think of as some rather gentler Old Testament voices on this subject of human suffering, some perhaps rather less intense contributions to the subject.

So first, we go to the book called Ecclesiastes, which in the Hebrew is called Qoheleth, a name, or perhaps a title, or even a nom de plume, and which traditionally has been translated either as Teacher or Preacher. Qoheleth—for so we shall call him in this work—complains that there is a certain emptiness about life, a mysteriousness about it; things seem just to go, as we might express it, round and round in circles. There is a sense of emptiness, indeed vanity about life, thus in Eccl 1:2 we have (in the NRSV translation), “Vanity of vanities, says the Teacher, vanity of vanities! All is vanity.” This is very much the theme of ch 1 of Ecclesiastes. Then in Eccl 3:16–22 the subject of justice comes up, for, says the writer, justice is not there in the world when you would expect it. What rather there is in the world is wickedness—that is in the place where one might have expected there to be realities like justice and righteousness. Thus,

Moreover, I saw under the sun that in the place of justice, wickedness was there, and in the place of righteousness, wickedness was there as well. (Eccl 3:16)

Qoheleth’s observations continue, in ch 6 coming to give expression to the observation: “There is an evil that I have seen under the sun, and it lies heavy upon humankind: those to whom God gives wealth, possessions and honor, so that they lack nothing of all that they desire, yet God does not enable them to enjoy these things, but a stranger enjoys them. This is vanity; it is a grievous ill.” (Eccl 6:1–2) And something of a climax of this comes in 7:14 with its friendly advice, “In the day of prosperity be joyful, and in the day of adversity consider; God has made the one as well as the other, so that mortals may not find anything that will come after them.” (Eccl 7:14) Life, Qoheleth seems to be saying, is like that; it has that unpredictable strain within it.

Yet it also has to be said that in spite of his questions and observations about life in the world with all its mysteries and much perplexity, Qoheleth continues to direct his reader’s gaze towards God, and to a real sense of humility and reverence in their approach to him. Thus in 5:1 he counsels “Guard your steps when you go to the house of God”, going-on to say that because God is in heaven and you are upon earth let your words be few (5:2), and somewhat climaxing his advice with the word “fear God” (Eccl 5:7).

Now the word fear in much of the Old Testament—and surely so in this passage—as we have already seen is not about being simply “scared” of God, but rather is about our being in awe of him, reverencing him. It is a fundamental word of the Old Testament about our approach to God, and it is also there in the New Testament. This is surely the sense of those followers of Jesus being “afraid” in what seems to be the last words St Mark wrote in his gospel account of Jesus (Mark 16:8), the reaction of the women who came to the tomb and found it empty, “and they said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid.” (My italics).

Surely, Mark intends to convey to us that the women were filled with a sense of awe and reverence, for although they were in an earthly, geographical, physical setting yet they were receiving a great manifestation of the almighty and amazing work of God that had taken place. We are not surprised that they are recorded as having a deep, deep sense of awe!

And I suggest that there is this sense of awe in the short Old Testament book of Ecclesiastes expressed in the midst of all Qoheleth’s somewhat agonized thoughts about the Lord and his ways on earth. Indeed Qoheleth ends his work on this note, with its

“The end of the matter; all has been heard. Fear God, and keep his commandments; for that is the whole duty of everyone.” (Eccl 12:13)

It should be noted that that final word places us firmly in our lives in the physical world, and at the same time suggests to us that our deepest understanding of things in the world will come from our orientation towards God, and what we today might call the spiritual aspects of our lives—in short our spirituality.

So we turn to the book of Psalms, in particular once again to that very large number of psalms in which an individual person laments the fact that for them so much in their lives seems to be going wrong, with so little going well. These have—very appropriately—been called Individua...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Preface
• Introduction
• Life in Creation and Covenant
• Life with Deliverance and Judgment
• Life of Worship
• Life in Community
• Life in a Changing World
• Life with Questions
• Life with Ethical Concerns
• Life with a Future
• The Old Testament and Christian Spirituality
• Further Reading