love others, and obey God’s law, our lives are blessings to our family and friends, but when we do evil and break God’s commandments, our lives become the opposite. Our sins and failings bring down evil consequences on those around us, including our children. David’s sin harms not only himself, but his whole family tree. Even though God “puts away” his sin, in justice the punishment must be administered. David, his family, and his nation suffer because of his evil choices. Punishment is not silly or random; rather it restores the order of justice. God teaches us that punishment reveals something about who we are, about who he is, and about how the universe works. In fact, we’ll see that God’s justice teaches us by design. He intends to reveal himself through his intervention in human history.
Chapter 4
God the Teacher
If I woke you up by shining a flashlight in your eyes, you probably wouldn’t thank me. If I tried to teach you differential calculus before you knew how to add and subtract, we probably wouldn’t get very far. If I chose to teach you a foreign language only by talking quickly in complex sentences in that language, you probably wouldn’t pick it up. Underlying these problems is an important principle: good teaching follows good order. You have to learn one thing before you can learn another. Start with the basics and proceed to more complex ideas. Turn the light up slowly.
Since he’s a teacher, God knows this principle. In fact, as the only omniscient being, he’s the best teacher. But if you think about what it would be like to be an infinite being trying to communicate with limited, finite, problematic beings like us, you can see that there’s a bit of a gap. Just imagine Albert Einstein trying to teach his theory of relativity to kindergarteners. For anything to stick, God has to teach us according to our capacity—and our capacity is very limited compared with his. Fortunately, God is not a disconnected college professor type. He’s not a mere subject-matter expert with quirky habits and lousy social skills; he’s perfect in every way. So he makes for a great expert and a great teacher, the best combination.
Gradualism
The central idea in God’s pedagogy is gradualism. The Catechism of the Catholic Church teaches, “The divine plan of Revelation…involves a specific divine pedagogy: God communicates himself to man gradually.”22 This may seem like a nobrainer—that education has to happen in stages—but when we reflect on the history of salvation, sometimes we would prefer for there to be no stages at all. Why didn’t Jesus come right after the Fall? Why did God put the Tree in the Garden of Eden in the first place? How come he let his people languish in sin and suffering for so long before he put the final stage of his rescue plan into effect? These questions all get at the nature of God’s teaching, his pedagogy. The Old Testament displays the divine pedagogy in action. God slowly, over the course of time, reveals more and more of who he is to humanity.
The central idea in God’s pedagogy is gradualism.
A lot of the Old Testament stories that perplex us as “dark” passages can be understood through the principle of the divine pedagogy. For example, the ten plagues, which the Lord sends against Pharaoh and the Egyptians, show his teaching style. The Exodus story is very familiar to us—God sends his servant Moses to Pharaoh to ask that the enslaved people of Israel be freed for a few days to go into the desert and worship the Lord (Ex 5:1). It is a simple enough request, but Pharaoh resists God and refuses to allow the people freedom to worship. In order to convince Pharaoh, the Lord sends a series of plagues against him and the Egyptians (Ex 7–12). The plagues start out as mere demonstrations: water turning to blood, annoying frogs. But as Pharaoh refuses after each plague to let the people of Israel go, the plagues get more and more severe. The livestock die, the people are afflicted with boils, and eventually, when Pharaoh persists in his obstinate refusal, the Lord sends the angel of death to wipe out the firstborn of Egypt. While there are a lot of interesting questions to probe in this story, the main point I want to focus on is that God is gradually punishing Pharaoh for his resistance. He does not send the angel of death right away, but slowly turns up the heat as Pharaoh refuses again and again to let the people of Israel go and worship.
Jesus, in the course of his own three-year ministry, uses the same method that the Holy Trinity uses throughout the Bible: teach gradually.
Lessons in Order
We see a similar teaching method in the life of Jesus. He doesn’t jump up right away as a baby and tell everyone, “I am the light of the world!” Instead, he waits until he is thirty years old to initiate his ministry, and even then he teaches much of the time in shrouded, mysterious parables. St. John Paul II spoke of this aspect of Jesus’ teaching:
In his preaching to the crowds he used parables to communicate his teaching in a way that suited the intelligence of his listeners. In teaching his disciples he proceeded gradually, taking into account the difficulty they had in understanding. So it was only in the second part of his public life that he expressly announced his sorrowful way and only at the end did he openly declare his identity not only as the Messiah, but as the “Son of God.” We note also that, in his most detailed dialogues, he communicated his revelation by answering the questions of his listeners and using language their mentality easily understood.23
Jesus, in the course of his own three-year ministry, uses the same method that the Holy Trinity uses throughout the Bible: teach gradually. Just like any good teacher, God communicates truths in a particular, designed order. We’re not ready to hear about a Savior until we know we need saving. We’re not ready to hear about repentance until we know we’ve broken God’s law. We’re not ready to hear about God’s law until we know that there is a God and that he has authority over our lives.
As human teachers and learners, it is easy for us to miss steps along the way, to forget to present the truth in the proper order, but God knows the right way to do it. We might think that things would always proceed from easy to hard, or from less severe to more severe. In some ways this is true, but in others it is backward. What I mean is that, early on in the biblical story, God teaches simple lessons in simple ways. As salvation history proceeds, he teaches more and more difficult lessons in ways that are harder to understand. So, for example, to tell Adam and Eve not to eat from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil is a very simple lesson, but for Jesus to teach the apostles that they will be persecuted and need to remain faithful under torture and even death is a much harder and more complex lesson. We can grasp the meaning of these lessons by taking into account what Vatican II calls the “customary and characteristic styles of feeling, speaking and narrating which prevailed at the time.”24 The infinite God, in his effort to teach finite beings, simplifies his message to be able to reach us within the limitations of our cultural circumstances. In the ancient world, this meant teaching people who lived in a relatively primitive culture. When we see biblical laws dealing with animal sacrifices, ox-goring, ritual purity, eating blood, taking vows, leprosy, and child sacrifice, we can get a sense for the kind of culture they lived in. Life was harsher, shorter, and involved a lot of messy things. War was frequent and involved personal combat with bronze swords, spears, and bare hands. Infant mortality was normal. Plagues and famines were common. Laws were simple because life was brutal.
Preachers often talk about how reading the New Testament is like reading someone else’s mail, but reading the Old Testament is like reading someone else’s storybook, prayer book, law book, and prophecy book. It is not easy to read because of the vast change in cultural circumstances from Old Testament times to our own. Imagine trying to explain how to use an iPhone to an ancient Israelite. Then imagine him explaining to you how his family and clan relationships work. It’s complicated. God enters into human history, but he does it on the sly. He knows our limits, our sins, the smallness of our perspectives, and he works with that. We often talk about “meeting people where they are at.” God does that. He knew where the ancients were and brought them closer to himself one step at a time.
The Law of Moses
St. Paul talks about how the Old Testament law of God, the law of Moses, was like a “schoolmaster to bring us unto Christ” (Gal 3:24. Sometimes the King James puts it best!). The Greek word he uses, paidagogos,