The Roots of OT Eschatology
The fourfold pattern of Biblical eschatology
The Destruction: A Reversal of Creation
Now, in the flood story itself, the interesting thing is how it is described. The flood story is not simply a disaster—a natural disaster—but, rather, the flood story describes the flood in the language of creation. In other words, God uses the language of the past to describe what would happen in the flood story itself.
For example, in the creation story, God creates through a process of separation and distinction. For example, He separates the waters that are below from the waters that are above. He separates the light from the darkness and creates day and night. He separates the dry land from the sea and creates places where animals and human beings can live. So the process of creation is a process of separation and then distinction.
In the flood story, all of those processes are reversed. For example, the rains came down, and the floods came up. So the waters below and the waters above meet once again, and they overflow the dry land, so the separation between dry land and sea is taken away. And the end result is the entire world is covered with water. And that simply means that the world returns to the condition it was in before creation. In other words, God takes apart His creation piece by piece until evidence of it is completely gone.
having brought a clean, complete end to the old world, a new world comes into play, and the language of that new world is again the language of creation. For example, in Gen 8, it talks about the reappearance of dry land. And in the Hebrew language, there’s a lot of different words you can use for “dry land.” But the specific words chosen here are the word that you find in chapter 1 regarding dry land. So you have a mention of dry land once again. You have, in 8:22, a renewal of the seasons which had been originated in chapter 1. You have, in chapter 9, a renewal of the covenant between God and the human race, and that echoes the language of the original covenant back in chapter 1. In chapter 9, God guarantees these distinctions. In other words, “I will never again destroy this world by a flood, but now things will continue in a new way.” The human race, in chapter 10, multiplies and spreads throughout the earth just as occurred in the first chapters of the book of Genesis.
From Noah’s point of view, eschatology meant that the world as he knew it had come to an end or would come to an end. That world ends, and then a new world comes into place, and that new world is created along the lines of the old. And God would use a remnant, which turns out to be Noah and his family. That remnant will be the basis for rebuilding the human race, rebuilding God’s relationship with that human race, and, ultimately, restoring the garden of Eden that was lost. So, when God comes to Noah, He meets him where he is. He describes the future in terms of his time and place. And Noah lived to see the fulfillment of all that.
First of all, there’s a proclamation of destruction. God will destroy the tower; He will scatter the people; He will confuse their languages. But then comes the promise of a remnant.
What is sometimes missed in this text is in that promise to Abraham [and] is a blessing for all the nations of the world. The previous reference to all the nations of the world is in chapters 10 and 11—the 70 nations, the Tower of Babel story. In other words, Abraham is called to be the blessing to the very nations that were under judgment in chapters 10 and 11. So the Abraham story is really the climax of the Tower of Babel story, so the promise to Abraham sets the foundation for a new eschatology.
God blesses the nations through the seed of Abraham. Through Abraham’s children, God was going to bless the world, so the world is seen as under the curse in the Tower of Babel story, but it is under the blessing in the children of Abraham.
You see, that’s a very different kind of eschatology from the one we saw in the flood story. It is more of a developmental eschatology, where God doesn’t simply reverse the curse of chapters 10 and 11 completely, but He sets the stage for a gradual blessing on the nations—that through Abraham and through his children, the nations would become blessed, and the end result would be a restoration of the garden of Eden.
The Relationships of Creation
You might say, “How on earth could that take place?” Well, let me quickly review something with you that we’re not going to cover in the course in detail, but you can go back and study them. If you go back to Gen 1, you will realize that in the original incident there, there’s three relationships that Adam and Eve have. They have a relationship to God—an upward relationship—a downward relationship to the earth—in other words, they mentor the earth the way God has mentored them—and then, third of all, they have a relationship with each other.
The Destruction of Relationships
And when sin comes in, in Gen 3, it undoes those three relationships. It breaks the relationship between Adam and God. It ruins the relationship between Adam and the earth. The earth produces thorns and so forth, and it attacks the relationship between Adam and Eve. There would be pain and childbirth and bickering and anger between them. So, in the fall of Gen 3, there’s an undoing of the three relationships that occurred in Gen 1 that God brought into being.
The Restoration of Relationships
When we come to the Abraham story in chapter 12, we see God giving Abraham three promises. And the interesting thing about it is those three promises correspond to the three curses of Gen 3. He promises him that he will be a blessing, that Abraham will have a special relationship with God. In other words, God restores the relationship with Himself that Adam and Eve originally had through Abraham and his children. Second of all, God promises a land to Abraham. And in the Hebrew, “land” and “earth” can often be the same word. So the barrier between human beings and the earth will be undone when God provides a land to Abraham’s seed. And then God promises that Abraham will become a nation, that he will have many children, and this is corresponding to the curse on childbirth and the pain in childbirth. So, you see, the three promises to Abraham directly correspond to the three curses of Gen 3, which corresponded to the three relationships of Gen 1.
When you read the story through Hebrew eyes, you realize that what God was promising Abraham was not just the friendly development of a people—that’s certainly what is there, and we certainly see that worked out throughout the OT—but there is something more here: that the promise to Abraham, ultimately, was intended to restore the garden of Eden, to bring back a condition that once was there but now has been lost.
So, even though Abraham’s story doesn’t contain catastrophes like the flood, even though there isn’t a language of re-creation in its ultimate sense, the language of creation is there. There’s a restoration of the relationships that were destroyed there. You could say, in a sense, this is a more spiritual eschatology, one in which the outcomes are seen more in relationship with God and relationship with each other than in catastrophic natural events.
Abraham’s Vision of the Future
So what is Abraham’s eschatology? It is the sense that, through him and through his seed, God would gradually restore the conditions of the world that were lost because of sin and that, ultimately, in restoring that through Abraham, God would bring about a restoration of everything that was lost as a result of sin.
So, as Abraham looks into the future, what were his convictions and his time and place? First of all, Abraham understood that God would use him in some way to bring about the end of the world in a positive way and that God would take him to a new land [and] that it was through that action of taking him to a new land that his eschatology would come. God would make a nation out of his children. He would use them to restore the garden of Eden.
You see, when you look at the story, you realize that Abraham’s vision of the future was a natural extension of his time and his place, just as Noah’s was. One of the things we will see as we go through all of these [is that] God meets people where they are. Eschatology, as God gives it to His prophets, is not something totally far into their time and place but, rather, projects the end out of the natural circumstances in which they begin. So as we work our way through the OT, we will get a clearer and clearer picture of just what eschatology means in the Bible.