The Training from God
February 27, 2022
A woodworker has many tools she can use—saws, chisels, planes, etc.—but it’s important for the tools to be sharp. Unfortunately, sharpening is a little complicated. Take a hand plane blade—the cutting edge needs set to roughly 25 degrees; the edge needs to be straight or with a slight curve, so that the corners of the blade don’t dig in and mar what you’re flattening; the bevel needs to be reasonably flat—if it’s too rounded the cutting edge won’t contact the wood and it won’t cut.
So it’s incredibly unhelpful to tell a novice, “Eh, just go sharpen it. You’ll figure it out.” Some might, but not without immense frustration. Sure, a blind hog will still get an acorn, but not nearly as quickly as one that can see.
That’s why most people who teach woodworking say, “There are a lot of ways to do it, but this is how I do it. If you’ll do it just like this, you’ll get similar results.” “Sharpen a plane blade like this.” “Chop out a mortise like this.” Once you’ve been trained, then you can be set free to go off on your own and you can be trusted to do good work, even if you leave the old methods behind. The old methods aren’t bad. They work really well but they don’t necessarily fit your new situation.
Perhaps it’s a similar situation with the Law. When God chooses Abram, he kind of just lets him loose in Canaan. Abram is told to wander around the land, and he meets God in the process. The same goes for Isaac and Jacob. That sort of haphazard, “Eh, you’ll figure it out,” works well when it’s these few people in this small region, but it’s not going to cut it for everyone.
Plus, there’s no real opportunity for God to reveal himself. That takes the Exodus, which takes freeing this entire nation from slavery. But now that God has this entire nation, now what? He shouldn’t just set them free to figure things out, the way he worked with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. The quantity of people requires structure. It’s not just a family anymore, it’s an entire society.
So God gives the Law. “If you’ll do things just this way, you’ll get good results.” There’s still some amount of variation within the Law, some amount of figuring it out. Some people hold the plane blade one way, others another, even if they’re doing the same thing overall. Think about the Sabbath in light of creation (in Exodus), or think about the Sabbath in light of the Exodus (in Deuteronomy), you’re still observing the Sabbath. Just so, the Law has some variation, but it’s all oriented the same way.
But at some point, God determines the training has gone on long enough. He gives us one final, ultimate lesson (Jesus), he empowers us (the Spirit), and he sets us loose on the world. Some of the old methods we’ll keep, others we’ll let go of, but may we never forget those years in the workshop at God’s feet.
—John Coffey
