the Scriptures that tell of the dealings of God with the Israelites. They tell of the many ways in which in the past God’s purposes had been frustrated by the rebellions and the intransigence of the Israelites. They also record, however, the promises God made and the praises with which the people glorified their God on account of His fulfillment of the promises.
To come to terms with Paul’s Gospel it is essential to recognize that Paul is concerned with an existential problem. Anyone who looks at what takes place in the affairs of men and women in the world has great difficulty finding manifestations of the righteousness of God. This was already the case at the time of the exile of the Jews in Babylon. The prophets had been proclaiming the gospel of God’s retributive justice. Those who do good are rewarded for their goodness and those who do evil are punished on account of their evil deeds. Looking at what was happening when Jerusalem was destroyed by the Babylonians and the Israelites were in exile in Mesopotamia, the prophet Habakkuk understandably found the situation confusing. That the Israelites should be punished for their sins was taken for granted. Their exile was, therefore, quite understandable. That the Babylonians, a people who were famous for their cruelty, were being rewarded by giving them the spoils of Jerusalem and its wealth was totally incomprehensible. Habakkuk was therefore quite confused and asked the obvious question. Where is God’s justice to be seen?
The atmosphere that gave rise to Habakkuk’s question was the incubator that gave birth to a new understanding of history. The Hebrew prophets were the first to find meaning in life by looking at it in terms of its development in time, rather than its moorings in nature. This gives them the honor of having been the ones who discovered that history, rather than nature, provides the scenario where human life is to be understood. According to the prophets, God guides the affairs not only of the people with whom He had made a covenant but also of the other nations. For Israel to be prosperous and happy it had to demonstrate covenant loyalty. As long as experience confirmed that the righteous prosper and the wicked suffer, life in God’s world made sense. If, on the other hand, the wicked prosper and the righteous suffer, life ceased to make sense. The fact that history contained ample evidence that the righteous suffer and the wicked prosper gave rise to new developments in theology.
Among the Israelites these developments took two basic forms. One was the Wisdom movement among the cosmopolitan elites who were quite aware of the cultural currents of the Mediterranean world. It answered Habakkuk’s question by establishing a great gulf separating God from humankind. This was informed by the philosophical awakening taking place in Greece. Notions of God as if he were a man with the same desires, passions and virtues were thoroughly critiqued and abandoned by the emerging Hellenistic intellectuals. Among them it could no longer be argued that human beings were capable of understanding God’s ways. Thus, the wise men of Israel distanced themselves from the prophetic understanding that human history is God’s handiwork. God’s activity is beyond any human capacity to understand. That is the message of the books of Job and Ecclesiastes.
The other attempt to answer Habakkuk’s question brought about the development of a new way to understand history, that is, by the apocalyptic twist to the prophetic movement. The transformation of the prophetic view of history into its apocalyptic step child took some time developing. The prophetic conception of history took the cyclical view of time, prevalent in societies bound to the celebration of feasts attached to a yearly routine, and opened it into a linear time-line extending to an open future. This had been a radical departure from the understanding of time as an unending annual return to the beginning accompanied by the repetition of the human labors that pertain to the seasons that are marked by the solar and lunar movements. The prophets pointed to the future Day of the Lord, when God’s retributive justice would have its ultimate manifestation. According to them, the Day of the Lord would be a day in history. In that future day God would gather all the nations and establish Himself as King in Jerusalem.
The apocalypticists, on the other hand, bent the prophetic time line back to the beginning, and conceived the Day of the Lord as the day in which history came to an end, making room for a new beginning. Instead of a yearly cycle, the apocalypticists made a cycle of the whole of human history. The destruction of historical time was necessitated, they asserted, by the enormity of present evil. History could not be repaired by the establishment of God’s throne in Jerusalem as the prophets had predicted. It required a more radical solution, a return to a totally new beginning.
Apocalypticism answered Habakkuk’s question relying on the doctrine of the resurrection with which the Israelites had become acquainted during their contact with Zoroastrianism in Babylon. God’s retributive justice is not in evidence in this life. It will be operative in the life to come. It is possible to maintain that God’s retributive justice works when rewards and punishments are given in an afterlife, after the dead are raised from their tombs. Thus, in spite of the fact that in this life the just may unjustly suffer, they will receive their just reward at their resurrection when God establishes a new beginning.
In the process of finding an answer to Habakkuk’s question which affirmed God’s retributive justice, apocalyptic visionaries came to a new understanding of the world in which humans live. Instead of the world created by God which, according to Genesis 1, God had declared good in every way, and which, as the prophets said, was under God’s direct control, apocalypticists saw the world corrupted and no longer under God’s direct control. They introduced the doctrine of the Fall of creation. On account of the sin of Adam and Eve, the whole of creation has fallen into corruption and is under the power of “the rulers of this world,” Satan and his evil angels. The expulsion of Adam and Eve from the garden of Eden was not just a historical event in the life of the first couple. It was a cosmic event with universal consequences. It placed the whole of creation under the power of Satan, “the god of this world.”
This new theology developed at a time when the conquests of Alexander the Great propagated Greek culture in the Near East. Greek philosophers had questioned anthropomorphic understandings of the gods and had relegated the order of the divine to regions that were beyond human reach. These developments also influenced the Wisdom movement in Israel, as noted above. The separation of the human and the divine that had been developed within Hellenism, and which was used differently within different thought currents, was conceived by apocalypticism as the space occupied by the fallen angels and their leader. From the heavenly spheres they exercised their evil influence on humanity. This made it possible to affirm that the evil amply evident in the world is due to the fallen state in which God’s creation is now found. Under Satan’s direct control, creation has been corrupted. The world is under the power of evil.
The preponderance of evil in the world is what necessitates the destruction of the present fallen world before humans may live in a good world. On the Day of the Lord not even God will be able to repair the damage caused by Satan and his angels. God will destroy His creation and start all over with a New Heaven and a New Earth. This new beginning gave the apocalyptic visionaries the opportunity to retrieve the language of the ancient myths of creation in which battles between heavenly beings are waged in order to destroy the forces of evil and make possible the creation of a good world for humans to inhabit. Descriptions of the Day of the Lord in which goodness triumphs over evil and God’s justice is vindicated gave apocalyptic visionaries ample room to expand their theological imaginations. The descriptions that have come down to us are quite varied and testify to their appeal. Still, most of them have at their core the notion of the Two Ages: This Present Evil Age and The Age to Come.
The difference between the two ages is like night and day. Contrasting them became a major undertaking in Pharisaism and in Rabbinic Judaism. Such a radical transformation of reality could not possibly be accomplished in one day. As a consequence, the Age of Messiah was introduced into this scheme, a time in which the details of this transition could be accomplished. One of the main events in the Age of Messiah would be the resurrection of the just so that they could receive their reward, and demonstrate that God’s retributive justice works. The conception of Messiah, however, was not firmly established. Messiah means “anointed,” and in Israel persons had been anointed for different functions. Judges were anointed with the spirit
