Next, as to God's purpose in regard to the Jews having been a failure. This is only partly true. No doubt they were, on the whole, a sinful nation; but they were not worse than, or even so bad as, the nations around them; it was only the fact of their being the chosen race that made their sins so serious. They had free will, just as men have now; and if they chose to misuse their freedom and act wrong, that was not God's fault.
Moreover, the Jewish nation was not selected merely for its own sake, but for the sake of all mankind; as is expressly stated at the very commencement, 'In thee shall all the families of the earth be blessed.'[150] Thus God did not select the Jews, and reject other nations; but He selected the Jews in order that through them He might bless other nations. The religious welfare of the whole world was God's purpose from the beginning; and the Jews were merely the means chosen for bringing it about. And to a great extent the purpose has been fulfilled; for however sinful the nation may have been, they preserved and handed on God's revelation, and the Old Testament remains, and will always remain, as a permanent and priceless treasure of religion.
[150] Gen. 12. 3.
The last part of the objection may be dismissed at once. For if the Jews regarded Jehovah as their special God, it was merely because He had specially selected them to be His people. He must therefore have had a power of choice, and might, if He pleased, have selected some other nation, so He could not have been a mere national God, but the God of all nations with power to select among them. And this is distinctly asserted by many of the writers.[151]
[151] E.g., Exod. 19. 5; Deut. 32. 8; 2 Chron. 20. 6; Isa. 37. 16.
We conclude, then, that God's so-called partiality to the Jews does not, when carefully considered, form a great difficulty. To put it shortly, if a revelation is given at all, some individuals must be selected to receive it; if it is given gradually (and God's methods in nature are always those of gradual development) these men would probably belong to a single nation; and if one nation had to be selected, there is no reason why the Jews should not have been the one chosen. While, if they were selected for the purpose of handing on God's revelation to the world at large, the purpose has been completely successful.
(2.) Its human element.
The next difficulty, is that the Jewish idea of God was thoroughly human, the Deity being represented as a great Man, with human form, feelings, attributes, and imperfections. Thus He has hands and arms, eyes and ears; He is at times glad or sorry, angry or jealous; He moves about from place to place; and sometimes repents of what He has done, thus showing, it is urged, a want of foresight, on His part. And all this is plainly inconsistent with the character of the immaterial, omnipresent, omniscient God of Nature. The answer to this objection is twofold.
In the first place, we must of necessity use analogies of some kind when speaking of God, and human analogies are not only the easiest to understand, but are also the least inappropriate, since, as we have shown, man resembles God in that he is a personal and moral being. Therefore likening God to man is not so degrading as likening Him to mere natural forces. Such expressions, then, must always be considered as descriptions drawn from human analogies, which must not be pressed literally.
While, secondly, it is plain that the Jewish writers themselves so understood them, for they elsewhere describe the Deity in the most exalted language, as will be shown later on. And this is strongly confirmed by the remarkable fact that the Jews, unlike other ancient nations, had no material idol or representation of their God. Inside both the tabernacle and the temple there was the holy of holies with the mercy seat, but no one sat on it. An empty throne was all that the shrine contained. Their Jehovah was essentially an invisible God, who could not be represented by any human or other form; and this alone seems a sufficient answer to the present objection.