Got the Picture?

Back in the “olden days” we used cameras that required film. And one year at a Lutheran summer camp in Vermont, I learned how to develop that film.

A crucial element in this process involved keeping an eye on the clock–because timing was everything.

The film itself revealed “the negatives.” No one spent time studying or appreciating the negatives because they were not accurate representations of the picture’s subject.

Negatives made people look abnormal or even sinister. The point was to transfer and invert that negative image onto a special paper that then revealed the “positive” photograph, the realistic image made visible and permanent.

Film development, including the time involved, mirrors reasonably well what happened between the Old and New Testaments, resulting in the inversion of our understanding of God’s nature. It took Jesus’s lifetime–including everything He taught and all He accomplished in His crucifixion and resurrection—before anyone could “see” what God looked like.

Historically, many of God’s representatives, including Moses (by striking the rock in anger instead of speaking to it in faith) had erroneously portrayed God as primarily wrathful, solely concerned with rules and obedience.

In this pre-resurrection “negative,” God appeared spiteful, fearsome, legalistic.

But the underlying current cunningly hidden in obscure or unexpected verses of the Old Testament, the point that virtually all the Jews missed, was that God’s grace and compassion far outweigh His righteous indignation.

In Jesus’s first message in Mark 1:14-15 He declared,

“The time is fulfulled, and the kingdom of God is at hand; repent and believe in the gospel.”

What time? The time of Jews having to live under the curse of the Law and impending judgment.

The time had come to reveal the true nature of God.

Few in Jesus’s generation understood what this meant. Jesus came with a revolutionary message: God was about to eradicate the sin problem, the cause of all conflict between Himself and His creation, for every person who would believe, for all time.

In other words,

Jesus came to develop and invert the Old Testament “negative” into the New Testament “positive.”