Monthly Archives: June 2010

Story of the Bible 04

God wanted change in the world and he proves it by making the world dark and empty and shapeless and then illuminating, filling, and shaping it.

God’s work is unique but it is a foundation, not a capstone.  Even his work is not a complete filling.  He tells the birds and fishes, “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the waters in the seas, and let birds multiply on the earth” (Genesis 1.22).  So we know he only made a small population of both and wanted them to work at making more until the ocean and sky were properly utilized.

This is a hint of what is to come.  On the sixth day God makes humanity and here again they are to change the world further than God has done. “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over every living thing that moves on the earth” (Genesis 1.28).

So humanity is to change the world not only by filling it, but also by taming it. God has made the world wild in some way and humanity is to domesticate it in some way. While all the world is God’s, some of it is meant to be conformed to other parts of it.

Humans do this in God’s image.  They are God’s representatives and under-rulers. They are his ambassadors who change the world in a way that reflects how God changed the world, bringing light, order, and fullness. The world is meant to be humanified and thus brought into a more accurate reflection of God.

So before sin and death, there is already a mediatorial kingdom.  Later there will be a redemptive mandate to this kingdom, but it will follow the track God already put down for a transformative mandate.  Humanity is to rule and grow as God’s kingdom.

We are not better theologians than God

We are not better theologians than God. We must learn from Scripture … how to address God’s people … and call our congregations ‘God’s chosen people’ and assure them, as Peter and Paul and all the rest do, that Jesus died for them, that they are God’s temple, the temple of the Holy Spirit.” (John Barach, “Covenant and Election,” p. 34)

via We are not better theologians than God | Emmanuel Evangelical Church.

The Story of the Bible 03

I originally wrote:

God likes change and created a world that was supposed to do so.

He starts out with both an undeveloped area and an ideal or goal or model for the development that will take place.

We see a new hint of this in the second day of creation:

And God said, “Let there be an expanse in the midst of the waters, and let it separate the waters from the waters.” And God made the expanse and separated the waters that were under the expanse from the waters that were above the expanse. And it was so. And God called the expanse Heaven. And there was evening and there was morning, the second day (Genesis 1.6-8).

What is missing from this day is the evaluation present the other five or six days: “And God saw that it was good.”  The barrier between heaven and earth is not called good.

Of course, God doesn’t make anything evil. But somethings are so undeveloped that he doesn’t call them good either.  For example:

Then the Lord God said, “It is not good that the man should be alone; I will make him a helper fit for him” (Genesis 2.18).

Who put Adam in this “not good” state? God did. God could have created Adam and Eve in the same moment or in two successive seconds (taking Eve from Adam) if he had wanted to do so and avoid the “not good” state.  But he didn’t want to do that. He wanted Adam to experience loneliness, go through some time, and then be granted relief of his created problem.

Genesis 1.6-8 indicate the whole cosmos wants completion as well.  Jesus, we are told by Paul, did not just come to deal with sin and evil, but also to bring about this better arrangement.  In Ephesians we read about “the mystery of God’s will, according to his purpose, which he set forth in Christ as a plan for the fullness of time, to unite all things in him, things in heaven and things on earth” (Ephesians 1.9, 10).

Jesus was not only sent to rescue us from sin but to bring us to completion and maturity. Just like Adam was brought to completion with Eve through a deep sleep, Jesus too lay down to wait for God to raise him up to a new reality.

The Story of the Bible 02

We are told in Genesis 1.2 that the Spirit of God took a specific place before illuminating, shaping, and filling the earth.

The earth was without form and void, and darkness was over the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God was hovering over the face of the waters.

The Hebrew words for “without form and void” and “hovering” only occur one other place in the Pentateuch. Here is Deuteronomy 32.10, 11 in some context:

Remember the days of old;
consider the years of many generations;
ask your father, and he will show you,
your elders, and they will tell you.
When the Most High gave to the nations their inheritance,
when he divided mankind,
he fixed the borders of the peoples
according to the number of the sons of God.
But the Lord’s portion is his people,
Jacob his allotted heritage.

He found him in a desert land,
and in the howling waste of the wilderness;
he encircled him, he cared for him,
he kept him as the apple of his eye.
Like an eagle that stirs up its nest,
that flutters over its young,
spreading out its wings, catching them,
bearing them on its pinions,
the Lord alone guided him,
no foreign god was with him.
He made him ride on the high places of the land,
and he ate the produce of the field,
and he suckled him with honey out of the rock,
and oil out of the flinty rock.

Moses is describing how God led Israel through the wilderness.  The text has shown us that God did so leading them by a pillar of cloud by day and a pillar of fire by night. That cloud stationed itself on Mount Sinai. Moses went up into it to receive the Ten Commandments from God. The cloud moved into the Tabernacle with great fire and glory (Exodus 40).  Moses compares God’s actions to that of an eagle but he is also appealing back to the original creation.  God flying above Israel in the wilderness in a cloud is like the Spirit hovering over the original chaos of creation in order to bring new light and life.

This opens up a lot of significance to the reader. For example, one sees that, when Pharaoh and his army pursued Israel at the Red Sea, the cloud came between them, bringing light to Israel and darkness to the Egyptians. Then the waters were moved and new dry land appeared.  This is a powerful reminder of the first and third days of creation and designate Israel, in its founding, as a new creation.  Thus Isaiah explains that Israel is a kind of new creation:

I am the LORD your God,
who stirs up the sea so that its waves roar—
the LORD of hosts is his name.
And I have put my words in your mouth
and covered you in the shadow of my hand,
establishing the heavens
and laying the foundations of the earth,
and saying to Zion, “You are my people” (51.15, 16).

It also clearly establishes that the Glory Cloud that led Israel through the wilderness and that moved into the Tabernacle (and later Solomon’s temple) is especially a manifestation of God’s Spirit.

When Israel returns from Babylon to rebuild the Temple, many are overwhelmed with sadness about it:

And all the people shouted with a great shout when they praised the Lord, because the foundation of the house of the LORD was laid. But many of the priests and Levites and heads of fathers’ houses, old men who had seen the first house, wept with a loud voice when they saw the foundation of this house being laid, though many shouted aloud for joy, so that the people could not distinguish the sound of the joyful shout from the sound of the people’s weeping, for the people shouted with a great shout, and the sound was heard far away (Ezra 3. 11-13).

This led to discouragement and, for awhile, the exiles gave up on rebuilding the Temple. The prophet Haggai was sent to rebuke them for this, and to encourage them that, even though small, the Temple was important.

Speak now to Zerubbabel the son of Shealtiel, governor of Judah, and to Joshua the son of Jehozadak, the high priest, and to all the remnant of the people, and say, “Who is left among you who saw this house in its former glory? How do you see it now? Is it not as nothing in your eyes? Yet now be strong, O Zerubbabel, declares the Lord. Be strong, O Joshua, son of Jehozadak, the high priest. Be strong, all you people of the land, declares the Lord. Work, for I am with you, declares the LORD of hosts, according to the covenant that I made with you when you came out of Egypt. My Spirit remains in your midst. Fear not” (2.2-5).

So after Sinai God’s Spirit moved into the Tabernacle so that God could dwell among his people, and God is telling the people that he also dwells in the Temple they are making even though it isn’t as visibly glorious as Solomon’s was. The same Spirit that hovered over the waters at the original creation was with the exiles to re-create them.

The Story of the Bible 01

God likes change and created a world that was supposed to do so.

He starts out with both an undeveloped area and an ideal or goal or model for the development that will take place.

In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. The earth was without form and void, and darkness was over the face of the deep.

So the earth is the area that needs changing, not the heavens. God starts changing the world by bringing it form, fullness, and illumination.  Included in this change are the creation of stars in the “heavens.” This indicates that the initial “heavens” of Genesis 1.1 is not some place you can travel in a spaceship.  All the area filled by stars is technically part of the “earth.”  The initial “heavens” of Genesis 1.1 is God’s throneroom and his angels. That dimension was made instantaneously complete (at least compare to the earth).  It is the model and the source of change on “the earth.”

Against the bizarro syllogism for going Roman Catholic

I am reading stuff in the blogosphere that I would think that I made up in order to mock Roman Catholics, except that I didn’t do it, being promoted by Roman Catholics as great reasoning.

So, for anyone cares what this Protestant thinks…

You are not impressing anyone when you claim that you don’t have the ability to read the Bible for itself but you do have the ability to study all of Christian history and identify the supernatural office that can tell you what to think.

OK, you are impressing a bunch of Roman Catholic apologists.  Way to go.

If you can really read and argue from history in the hope of persuading others, then why not simply argue for your views from Scripture?  If you aren’t following your own authority in deciding which church to submit to then how are you following your own authority when you read the Bible and believe what it says? If you are willing to argue over the meaning of the last papal writings, why not argue over the meaning of Scripture?

Frankly, I’m sympathetic when people get fed up with their churches. Paul did all the time. But he never threw them away.  And these weird self-defeating rationalizations for jumping into the RC church as the only possible place to go seem awfully close to doing just that.

And, while I’m not Eastern Orthodox, pretending you can dispense with their claims in two sentences and prove that we should all submit to the Pope is rather breathtaking. I don’t see any reasoning in Jack Chick tracts that is really any more shallow than that.

Steven Wedgeworth on the 2 Kingdoms

The past few years have seen a number of publications putting forth the thesis that the Protestant Reformation held to a belief in natural law and advocated a socio-political theory known as the “two kingdoms.” This has been construed as a move away from a previous consensus that the Reformation and Calvinism in particular believed that their faith was for all of life and that Christ’s mission required a transformation of culture. That concept, it is argued, should be understood as “neo-Calvinism” and is actually a step away from the Reformation tradition. Complicating the discussion is the fact that this is not merely a historical debate, but indeed a competition between contemporary political programs.[1] In what follows I will argue that the Reformation did indeed advocate natural law and a distinction between two kingdoms, but this was not a precursor to modern political Liberalism. In fact, the Reformers’ understanding of the two kingdoms served as a primary apologetic for the reform of the church by the civil magistrate.

Read the rest at Two Kingdoms Critique.

Is anything in the Great Commission invisible?

16 Now the eleven disciples went to Galilee, to the mountain to which Jesus had directed them. 17 And when they saw him they worshiped him, but some doubted. 18 And Jesus came and said to them, “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. 19 Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, 20 teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you. And behold, I am with you always, to the end of the age.”

via Passage: Matthew 28 (ESV Bible Online).

So Jesus is about to visibly ascend to heaven. Before doing so he visibly and audibly declares to witnesses that they are to follow his instructions. They are to visibly go out into the whole world, visibly baptize people, and visibly teach them to follow all Jesus’ commands.

A false understanding of “the invisible Church,” as if it was a whole description of the Church or as if it was the only true Church, is really messing up the lives and thinking of Christians.

Jesus wants Satan and all his works to become invisible. We, on the other hand, are supposed to be the light of the world.

Invisible light is not the Gospel.

RePost with edits: God Won’t Share His People With Another

In Isaiah 48 we read:

Behold, I have refined you, but not as silver;
I have tried you in the furnace of affliction.
For my own sake, for my own sake, I do it,
for how should my name be profaned?
My glory I will not give to another.

In the context of a prophecy that God will deliver his people from Babylon and the nations, Someone recently pointed out to me the text of Jeremiah 13.11:

For as the loincloth clings to the waist of a man, so I made the whole house of Israel and the whole house of Judah cling to me, declares the Lord, that they might be for me a people, a name, a praise, and a glory, but they would not listen.

This chapter in Jeremiah is full of severe judgment. But here in the midst of it, God himself tells his people that their sin strips him. His loins are uncovered and his glory has been taken away.

It is astounding that God tells us that we are his inheritance, and shows us in Scripture the saints praying to God to remember his inheritance and protect his people–as if God were some pauper hoping to come into a fortune. As if we corrupt sinners were his fortune. Jeremiah 13.11 is of the same sort. The all-glorious God considers himself naked without us–we who are by nature sinful and ashamed and prone to trade God for fig leaves.

It is interesting that God doesn’t say that he never really loved Israel whom he must now judge. Quite the opposite.  And while Jesus warns people who hear him but are too self-satisfied to follow him that he won’t remember people who merely listen to his preaching (“I never knew you”) he doesn’t have that message for those who enter covenant with him and then abandon him.  The mystery is not that he claims to never know them but that they don’t know him:

Hear, O heavens, and give ear, O earth;
for the Lord has spoken:
“Children have I reared and brought up,
but they have rebelled against me.
The ox knows its owner,
and the donkey its master’s crib,
but Israel does not know,
my people do not understand.”

Ah, sinful nation,
a people laden with iniquity,
offspring of evildoers,
children who deal corruptly!
They have forsaken the LORD,
they have despised the Holy One of Israel,
they are utterly estranged.

Get that? It is “my people” who “do not understand.”

We might ask if it is accurate in pastoring Christians to tell them that, if they reveal themselves to have disbelieving hearts, that this is because God has not done anything for them and doesn’t really love them.  The author of Hebrews, for example, follows Isaiah and Jeremiah for blaming such people for rejecting God’s well-meant gifts to them:

Therefore, brothers, since we have confidence to enter the holy places by the blood of Jesus, by the new and living way that he opened for us through the curtain, that is, through his flesh, and since we have a great priest over the house of God, let us draw near with a true heart in full assurance of faith, with our hearts sprinkled clean from an evil conscience and our bodies washed with pure water. Let us hold fast the confession of our hope without wavering, for he who promised is faithful. And let us consider how to stir up one another to love and good works, not neglecting to meet together, as is the habit of some, but encouraging one another, and all the more as you see the Day drawing near.

For if we go on sinning deliberately after receiving the knowledge of the truth, there no longer remains a sacrifice for sins, but a fearful expectation of judgment, and a fury of fire that will consume the adversaries. Anyone who has set aside the law of Moses dies without mercy on the evidence of two or three witnesses. How much worse punishment, do you think, will be deserved by the one who has spurned the Son of God, and has profaned the blood of the covenant by which he was sanctified, and has outraged the Spirit of grace? For we know him who said, “Vengeance is mine; I will repay.” And again, “The Lord will judge his people.” It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God.

Notice, the author of Hebrews doesn’t say that some of us have confidence or that the blood of Jesus might have opened the new and living way for us, or for some of us.  The same people he warns about continuing in sin are the people he tells that they have a confidence.  Just like God told Jeremiah that he wanted to wear Israel as close to him as possible, but they rejected his offer, so the author of Hebrews tells the readers that God has given them access to the holy place.

Of course, Romans 9 and Proverbs 16.4 tell us that God fore-ordains all things including apostasy into unbelief. But that doesn’t change the fact that God gives real gifts that are rejected, including the gift of his love and intimate covenant relationship with Him through Christ. Jesus warns that some will be cast out of him (John 15, Revelation 3.16). When that happens, God doesn’t accept references to lacking his invincible grace as an excuse:

Let me sing for my beloved
my love song concerning his vineyard:
My beloved had a vineyard
on a very fertile hill.
He dug it and cleared it of stones,
and planted it with choice vines;
he built a watchtower in the midst of it,
and hewed out a wine vat in it;
and he looked for it to yield grapes,
but it yielded wild grapes.

And now, O inhabitants of Jerusalem
and men of Judah,
judge between me and my vineyard.
What more was there to do for my vineyard,
that I have not done in it?

When I looked for it to yield grapes,
why did it yield wild grapes?

And now I will tell you
what I will do to my vineyard.
I will remove its hedge,
and it shall be devoured;
I will break down its wall,
and it shall be trampled down.
I will make it a waste;
it shall not be pruned or hoed,
and briers and thorns shall grow up;
I will also command the clouds
that they rain no rain upon it.

For the vineyard of the Lord of hosts
is the house of Israel,
and the men of Judah
are his pleasant planting;
and he looked for justice,
but behold, bloodshed;
for righteousness,
but behold, an outcry!

For further reading: “What More Could I Have Done”