Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 36:11 — 33.1MB)
Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | RSS
In this episode, we cover some basic principles of preaching and teaching. Should there be a distinction between Bible Teaching and Catechetical instruction? If so, are there ways to communicate differently in certain scenarios?
This is an instructive episode for those who teach and preach in the Church.
Guest Post by Samuel Parkison
As I write this, it is mid-morning in the Middle East. I am looking over a balcony at the ocean, with the Arabian Gulf just a two-minute walk across the street, getting used to the sights and smells and tastes (and heat) of my family’s new home. Some of you know that for the better part of the past year, we have been working to move here for a career transition of sorts. I have come here to be a professor of theology at the first ever evangelical seminary in the Arabian Peninsula. There will be other occasions for me to share more about this particular venture; I’m simply pointing out that this is my new home. I am, geographically speaking, about the furthest away from the United States as I can be. And yet, never have I felt more of a bond with my “kinsmen according to the flesh” (cf., Rom 9:1-2), my fellow Americans, than last night while walking around a giant mall in the UAE when I received a notification on my phone that the Supreme Court ruled to overturn Roe v. Wade.
Gratitude for God’s Mercy
The news stopped me dead in my tracks. My knees got weak, I felt woozy and had to sit down to concentrate just to keep the tears from coming out. So much gratitude. I never thought I would see this day. Of course, I have prayed for it. Hoped for it. Spoken and written about the need for it. But even when the now infamous draft-leak of Justice Alito’s opinion filled me with great hope, I confess it was difficult to keep my cynicism at bay. I have learned to brace myself for disappointment. But last night was real. So, while I am settling into my new home in the Middle East, I continue to rejoice with my countrymen.
No matter how you cut it, yesterday was a win for justice, which means it was a win for America, a people who have been incurring a mind-boggling amount of blood-guilt since 1973. We have been polluting the land with our wickedness and have been begging for the wrath of God Almighty. Think I’m exaggerating? Listen to how Psalm 106 describes child-sacrifice:
[Israel] served [pagan nations’] idols,which became a snare to them.
They sacrificed their sons
and their daughters to the demons;
they poured out innocent blood,
the blood of their sons and daughters,
whom they sacrificed to the idols of Canaan,
and the land was polluted with blood.
Thus they became unclean by their acts,
and played the whore in their deeds. (Psalm 106:36-39)
The blood of innocent children idolatrously sacrificed in demon-worship (which, I would remind you, does not require the conscious awareness of its worshipers for it to qualify as demon-worship, per 1 Cor. 10:20), pollutes the land. My beloved nation has been doing this very thing on a nation-wide scale since 1973, with the body count of some 67 million deaths. The blood of our innocent has been crying out from the earth, calling for the just wrath of God which makes yesterday so great a mercy I can hardly bear it. What do we deserve? We deserve for God’s holiness to be vindicated by a swift and decisive judgment. We deserve to be destroyed like Sodom and Gomorrah. We deserve to be decimated like Egypt was when God delivered Israel from captivity. We deserve for our walls to crumble like Jericho. And yet, what did we receive yesterday? Mercy. An invitation to repent.
Reactions from the Opposition
Now, as a reminder, we should keep in mind how modest of a ruling came down yesterday. This is important because I have seen a lot of curious reactions. There are two general reactions I want to call attention to here.
Reaction One: “You Aren’t Really Pro-Life Because You Don’t Care for the Vulnerable”
This reaction is represented in the memes and tweets that effectively deride pro-lifers like myself for not really caring about the babies, because if we did we would put our money where our mouths are, stop being so fiscally conservative, and get on board with big government policies that support women in need with medical care, adoption, foster care, etc. My favorite taunt along these lines is, “If you really care about the babies, would you support mandatory child-support for the fathers in every situation? Huh?” To which I reply with a hearty, “Yes! Absolutely! I am pro-expecting fathers to take responsibility for their offspring!”
To the challenge for pro-lifers to support the care of those in our society who are in desperate need of help, I simply agree. The question is, what is the best method for taking care of those in need in our society? My skepticism that big-government policies are the solution for taking care of the needy and vulnerable in our society does not come from my penny-pinching conservativism, it comes from the conviction that the government is intrinsically incompetent to do that work. I say “intrinsically” to emphasize that this is not a deficiency on the government’s part. That’s not what the government is supposed to do, and so it should not be surprising that it’s bad at it.
But even if you disagree with that position, we should point out that it is not as if pro-lifers have been neglecting care for the needy and vulnerable in our society. We have been accepting the challenge to care “holistically” with our dollars and time for decades. On every meaningful metric, it is the religious and pro-life demographics that are the most generous with their time and resources to non-profit organizations that do the work of caring for the orphan and widow without compulsion from their neighbors or government. This is the demographic overwhelmingly represented in foster care and adoption. This is the demographic that starts and funds and operates crisis pregnancy centers whose agenda are not simply to “end abortion,” but rather to care for families in general and needy and vulnerable mothers in particular. However, even if that were not the case, this reaction is a poor argument in favor of abortion. In my recent book, Thinking Christianly: Bringing Sundry Thoughts Captive to Christ, I interact briefly with this line of thinking. Here’s an excerpt from that section:
Let it be known that there is no necessary social prerequisite for getting to speak out against abortion. We should decisively put to death that foolish notion that says before objecting to murdering babies under the banner of “pro-life,” one must satisfactorily establish “pro-life” status by being on the forefront of orphan care, adoption, refugee ministries, homeless ministries, etc. These things are clearly consistent with being “pro-life,” but the increasingly common dichotomy of “pro-life” vs. “pro-birth” should be laughed out of the room. How, pray tell, is it possible to be “pro-life” without first being “pro-birth?”
This is a smokescreen, and to put the matter plainly, Christians who play along are suckers. The goal-post will always change for what constitutes as caring for enough issues to get to care about abortion. Hating “baby-hacking” requires no credentials, especially if those credentials are handed out by those who have no objection to “baby-hacking.” Frankly, I’m quite sure I do not want the approval of such individuals anyway. They can keep it.[1]
Reaction Two: “The Government Has No Right to Control the Bodies of Women“
This reaction seems to assume that what happened on June 24 is the making of a law to illegalize all abortion. But the Supreme Court did not outlaw abortion. All they did was deny that it was a “constitutional right,” which means that if a state chooses to enact legislation that prohibits abortion, that state is not being unconstitutional in doing so. States are not infringing on constitutionally recognized rights by enacting pro-life legislation.
Now, I actually do think abortion should be nationally prohibited, and not only for moral and theological reasons. There is a strong legal argument for the abolition of all abortion on the grounds of, at least, the 14th amendment (this has bearing on the “my body, my choice” argument. Abortion is not merely about a pregnant woman’s body, but also the body of her infant). But the point is that yesterday’s ruling did not force any state to stop performing abortions.
So, think about the mindset that lies behind, for example, protestors in California marching the streets with signs demanding the right to abortion. What exactly are they mad about? What are they protesting? They are mad about the fact that not every state must make abortion legal. That the citizens of a state like Oklahoma maintains the right to elect the representatives they want to reflect their values, which includes a high value for the unborn, is intolerable for these protestors. They do not want Oklahomans to have the ability to establish representatives who will establish and elect those laws. Protestors in California have lost literally nothing by way of “ability.” Their state has enshrined abortion with legislation in anticipation of the reversal of Roe v. Wade. But they are so passionate about mothers having the “right” to kill their pre-born babies that they are protesting other states having the ability to prohibit pre-born-baby-killing. Their own state protecting their ability to kill their babies isn’t enough: they demand that every state everywhere be obligated to do the same. Such a response, frankly, is madness.
Behind the Veil: What’s Really Going On
As a Christian theologian, I have to also point out that this is not only irrational, it is demonic. I’m not calling people on the other side of this issue demons, mind you. No, they are not demons or sub-humans, they are image-bearers of God himself, having more dignity and worth, and value than they themselves could possibly imagine. I am saying, rather, that the spirit that possesses a group to take to the streets in angry opposition to the verdict, “baby-killing is not a constitutional right,” is not a spirit of love and goodness and justice, but rather a spirit that arises from the domain of darkness (cf., Col 1:13). I am quite certain that most of the individuals vehemently opposed to yesterday’s ruling “do not know what spirit they are of,” but that does not make their clamor for abortion any less demonic. The crowd that boils over with rage over the prospect of mothers losing the ability to kill their children is possessed by a dark mindset indeed. What we see (and will continue to see in the coming days) with violent threats and attacks on churches and crisis pregnancy centers is the removing of the veil. The veneer of love and gentleness and justice is being peeled back and the darkness of the culture of death is showing its true colors. It is losing all motivation to be seen as loving and is perfectly content with showing its rage.
Still, I can’t help but suspect that many of the most passionate men and women clamoring for more death are driven by shame and guilt. They shout for abortion as an effort to shout down their own consciences. They have the blood of abortion on their own hands, they know it deep down, and they wish to silence that part of them that accuses. So they stop their ears and cry out that the evil they participated in is “good,” and the good that would have protected their children from execution is “evil.” Rather than applying the balm of grace to their sinful self-inflicted wound, they ignore the wound and try to convince themselves that there is no sin to repent of. They may be throwing rocks at the windows of crisis pregnancy centers, but they are aiming at that part of their souls that knows what evil they have committed. To those, I would simply say, “Give up trying to silence your conscience. It won’t work. You know what you have done. So go ahead and let your conscience speak. Let it call the sin, sin. Then, and only then, will you be in a position to hear a better word, spoken by the blood of Christ. He does not silence the accusation by pretending like it’s not there, he silences the accusation by answering it with his own blood. He does not invite you to ignore your sin. He invites you to let him deal with it in a decisive way. You are not beyond redemption and forgiveness and healing. But it is only those who know themselves to be sick who will seek out a Doctor. So, seek him out; he is not far.”
Concluding Prayers
What now? Well for starters, we should unflinchingly celebrate this surprising mercy that God has shown us. We should praise God that at least some states in this country will slow down on racking up the unfathomable debt of blood-guilt they have been incurring since 1973. We should praise God for the lives that this will save. We should thank God for the gift of sacrificial saints who have worked tirelessly for decades to see this ground made (while many of us cynically doubted that their efforts would succeed). We should thank them for their faithful endurance, and say, “You were right; God bless you and your longsuffering work!” We should thank God for the common grace of a justice system that does some good (even if it is imperfect).
And we should pray for revival. We should pray that our culture of death would disintegrate and that righteousness be established. We should pray that the hearts of those possessed by the spirit of rage and bloodthirstiness would be turned. We should pray that such individuals would have ears to hear their cries for death afresh, and that they would be shocked by the revelation of what their own voice sounds like; shocked into repentance. We should pray that they receive the cleansing blood of Christ for the forgiveness of their sins (both the sin of abortion and the sin of celebrating abortion). We should pray that God would hallow his name, and make his Kingdom come and his will be done here on earth as it is in heaven.
He could do it, you know.
Don’t forget that Nineveh was converted with a five-word sermon. I can’t think of a better invitation to pray for big things like this than the (previously) unthinkable reversal of Roe v. Wade.
[1] Samuel G. Parkison, Thinking Christianly: Bringing Sundry Thoughts Captive to Christ (H&E Publishing, 2022), 105.
*The image for this post is a depiction of Pharaoh demanding the death of Hebrew babies in Exodus 1. It seemed fitting.
Samuel Parkison received his Ph.D. in Systematic Theology from @MBTS). He is the Associate Professor of Theology (Gulf Theological Seminary in the UAE). You can find him on Twitter at https://twitter.com/samuel_parkison
Covenants and contracts have been a part of human history since its beginning. From God’s covenant with the creation and man in particular to two men agreeing with a handshake on the sale of property, words have created bonds between God and man and men with men. Those words are only as good as the character of those speaking them. If one or both parties lack integrity, then the relationship is vapor. Integrity in character revealed through speech is the mortar that binds us together.
As Solomon instructs his king-in-waiting son, one concern is the character of his speech. Because a king’s words are powerful, holding in them the power of death and life (Pr 18.21), the son must be careful in speech. At the root of all of his speech must be integrity. “Better is a poor person who walks in his integrity than one who is crooked in speech and is a fool” (Pr 19.1) “Walking in integrity” is contrasted here with being “perverse in speech.” Just as God reveals who he is through his Word (Jn 1.1-2, 14, 18), so we also reveal our character through the way we speak. Out of the abundance of the heart, the mouth speaks (Mt 12.34), and the heart is command central for our total being; the heart is where our deepest affections and allegiances lie, where we reason, and where we decide what to do. Our heart is revealed in our speech along with our actions. Our hearts must be integrous. When they are, the integrity will be evident in our speech.
(more…)
The heart of the wise makes his speech judicious and adds persuasiveness to his lips.
~Proverbs 16.23
Everyone is trying to sell you something, promising you a taste of the good life or, at the least, the avoidance of the worst life. Advertisers spare no expense to peddle their wares. In 2020 advertisers spent $225.8 billion, and that number is expected to rise to $322.11 billion by 2024. From soap to app subscriptions, people are trying to persuade you that what they’re selling will give you a taste of glory.
Merchandise is not the only thing being hawked. Politicians, constantly in campaign mode with a 24/7/365 news cycle, are trying to sell you on their vision for the future. Political ads use ominous music and black-and-white visuals to frame their opponents and their positions, and then switch to lighter music and color visuals to frame themselves. They lay out their plans for the economy, justice, climate change, the sexual issues du jour, and a plethora of emotional topics to have you buy into their agenda.
(more…)
The doctrine of Biblical inspiration is central to any effective defense of the Christian faith and serves a foundational element in any discussion on why the Bible is a reliable source of truth. Yet many Christians today undermine the doctrine of inspiration by either rejecting its claims flat-out or by neglecting attention to what such a doctrine requires – namely infallible and inerrancy. As Rev. JI Packer points out in his commentary on the Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy “We affirm that canonical Scripture should always be interpreted on the basis that it is infallible and inerrant.” (Link to Chicago Statement text)
In the New King James version, St Paul’s words in 2 Tim 3:16a are translated as “All Scripture is given by inspiration of God…” The phrase “inspiration of God” is related to the idea of breath and implies that Scripture is God-breathed (Greek: θεόπνευστος) and while this word itself only appears but once in the New Testament, the idea of God’s breath can be found elsewhere in the text of the Bible.
Starting in Genesis we find Adam brought to life with two actions.
First, “God formed man from the dust of the ground” and Second, “breathed into his nostrils the breath of life.” The phrase “breath of life” in the Greek translation of the Book of Genesis shares the word for breath employing πνοήν ζωής to describe how God made Adam alive. The word for breath will also be used throughout the Bible in describing the third person of the Blessed Trinity as the Holy (ἁγίου) Spirit (πνεύματος). Christians recognize this connection between the breathing out of Scripture as spoken words by the Holy Spirit in the very words of our Creed when they proclaim, “And I believe in the Holy Ghost… Who spake by the Prophets.” And it is claimed in the New Testament itself by St. Luke (Luke 1:70) and the author of Hebrews (Heb. 1:1).
Beyond this we have the Hebrew collection of his spoken utterances collected into the medium of written books which were publicly breathed out before the people. This Scriptural tradition of God’s breathed word through prophets and repeated back to the congregation is therefore a type of re-creation of mankind. Christ himself speaks of the power of resurrection by speech in both his examples of Lazarus called from the dead and his words in John 5 where he assures his listeners with, “Verily, verily, I say unto you, The hour is coming, and now is, when the dead shall hear the voice of the Son of God: and they that hear shall live.” (John 5:25). “For the word of God is quick…” writes the author of Hebrews in 4:12. ‘quick’ here is the archaic English phrase for living just as Adam’s first breath from God might be referred to as his quickening. The idea of God’s word as life-giving is drawn from the narrative of Adam’s creation, but also in the sense that men find life worth living as they live by his word. A sentiment echoed by our Lord who proclaimed, “Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of God.”
The Hebrew culture operates around the paradigm that God’s word and our covenantal faithfulness to its demands determine our outcome as stated in the Book of Deuteronomy, “…that thou mayest obey his voice… for he is thy life…” (30:20) There is therefore a clear connection in Hebrew literature itself to the idea of God’s spoken word and the gift of Life.
It is with this background on the significance of God’s breathed out word, that we move to understand the context of St. Paul’s doctrine of inspiration. Primarily, what St. Paul is interested in describing with the phrase “inspired” or “God-breathed” is that God is the one who is breathing out words. Dr. RC Sproul once quipped that a more accurate terminology would therefore be “expiration” because our God is more about the exhalation from God. While we can certainly draw out implications for the way God has communicated, St. Paul’s emphasis is on God as the authority, origin, and impetus behind the Scripture.
St. Paul includes the phrase ‘all’ to emphasize that divine source of inspiration applies to all of the Scripture. For the Christian, this all is significant in that the Old Testament canon is varied in the types of Scriptures it contains history, poetry, and prophecy. St. Paul is affirming the validity of these texts and without qualification. As a student of St. Peter and the Apostolic tradition, we can also infer that the historicity of the Old Testament was not in doubt during the life of Christ. Critics of the Reformation are quick to point out Dr. Martin Luther’s comments on James as the “epistle of straw” as the Great Reformers evaluated the theology of the letter through his narrowed lens of Reformation theology. In a similar vein, it would be unsurprising to see a figure like St. Paul, who struggled with Judaizers, taking opportunity to critique or even nuance his acceptance of the Old Testament canon to fit the distinctives of the Christian sect. Remarkably, St. Paul instead maintains a complete continuity of the entire Old Testament canon and takes it one step further by claiming that they, “are able to make thee wise unto salvation through faith which is in Christ Jesus.”
Claiming that the Hebrew scriptures point to Jesus is quite the claim for the former Pharisee who trained under Gamaliel. St. Paul’s conviction that the scriptures are God-breathed is therefore spoken from a mind with complete confidence in what is contained therein. The notion that the word of God had faithfully spoken to God’s covenant people is a conviction inherited from his devotion to them as an ancestral document, divinely preserved by real men in history, and confirmed by his experiences with Christ himself at the Damascus Road.
St. Paul, of all men, best understood the claims the Old Testament makes for itself insofar as it claims to speak as God’s revealed word and his own conversion experience with “scales” falling from his eyes he is able to see the Christ and hear his voice in these same traditional scriptures of his ancestors. Similarly, he is able to encourage Timothy, “from a child thou hast known the holy scriptures,” largely because this is his own experience. What Paul learned as the child called Saul is now the wisdom of Christ sufficiently revealed in ages past.
It is often pointed out that the canon of the New Testament is beyond the scope of St. Paul’s claims of inspiration in 2 Timothy 3 use of the word “scripture.” One primary evidence for this argument is the lack of a completed New Testament at the time of Timothy’s reception of this letter. Timothy may not at the time of Paul’s writing even have a copy of a Gospel and no piece of the New Testament would fit St. Paul’s expectation that Timothy had been trained in it since his childhood. Others argue that St. Paul’s “all” demands an acknowledgement of a completed canon which the New Testament and apostolic writers did not have sufficiently organized at this point in Church history. Yet these details do not prevent St. Paul from believing and teaching that Scripture beyond the Old Testament is inspired. As we can see in his letters to the church at Corinth, St. Paul believes he speaks with a divine authority. “If any man think himself to be a prophet, or spiritual” writes Paul, “let him acknowledge that the things that I write unto you are the commandments of the Lord.” (1 Corinthians 14:37). An individual with experience in rabbinical tradition would recognize that no previous spiritual leader could lightly take the mantle of prophetic voice, yet Paul clearly aligns his own words with the same weight as Isaiah or the like. St. Peter confirms Paul’s place as God’s mouthpiece in describing Paul’s writing as Scripture in his own Epistle. (2 Peter 3:14-16)
Beyond this Paul’s use of New Testament quotations as Scripture imply that he believes them to also possess a like authority. St. Paul’s doctrine of the Lord’s Supper communicated to the Church at Corinth is based on quotations from the Gospel of Luke. Comparing 1 Corinthians 11:23–26 and Luke 22:19–20 reveals that St. Paul considers the Gospels to be authoritative as well. One of the more significant of these New Testament references is St. Paul’s statement, “that he rose again the third day according to the scriptures.” (1 Corinthians 15:4). Yet where is this “third day” citation of the Scripture? St. Paul’s is looking to St. Matthew’s written testimony that, “For as Jonas was three days and three nights in the whale’s belly; so shall the Son of man be three days and three nights in the heart of the earth.” (Matthew 12:40).
Common objections to inspiration are related to the idea of Biblical inerrancy. If the Bible is God’s breathed word, it would be reasonable to expect it to reflect its author in perfection. Yet many struggle to accept the Bible as God’s word because of suspected errors or additions in the transmission of the text.
The Christian position is that the Scripture breathed from God is inerrant in its original manuscripts, often described as autographa, and this sense of perfection does not apply to translations and copies.
Yet St. Paul did also imagine that the inspiration of God was for a purpose and outlines this in the phrases, “profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness.” Profitable for doctrine explicitly outlines that God is knowable through his scripture and that Scripture itself is the tool that God has appointed for teaching who he is. The idea of reproof in the second statement relates to the power of Scripture to bring about conviction and serves as the means by which the Holy Spirit may persuade man to believe. St. Paul’s idea that the Scripture is for reproof echoes Jesus’s command to “Search the scriptures; for in them ye think ye have eternal life: and they are they which testify of me.” (John 5:39). The authority of the Scripture is also seen in St. Paul’s perspective that the Scripture have a sanctioning authority over against the conscience and life of a man. When he teaches that Scriptures are for correction, he is also claiming that they may be appealed to straighten (as a literal translation of correction would be rendered) a man’s waywardness.
Finally, Paul’s view of inspiration is confirmed in that the Scriptures are places as model records for “instruction in righteousness.” It is this last characteristic that makes our Scripture the “Holy” Bible in that their contained wisdom reflects the divine approval of the author. St. Paul’s final piece conveys the idea that the Scriptures are not only good for us, but because they are from God, they represent the standard of God’s judicial approval.
The turbulent world of textual criticism has been unable to shake scholarly confidence in the Scripture largely due to the work of faithful scholars who have been able to demonstrate the historic integrity of our received manuscript tradition. At the same time, it is the confidence gathered by St. Paul’s firm commitment to divine inspiration that encourages scholars to press forward against the doubts of liberal and neo-orthodox critics. St. Paul’s devotion to the Scriptural tradition is a reflection of his devotion to the God who speaks. Princeton theologian BB Warfield explained the significance of our doctrine of inspiration best in this succinct definition: “In a word, what is being declared by this fundamental passage is simply that the Scriptures are a divine product, without any indication of how God has operated in producing them.” As did St. Paul believe, so does the faithful church believe.
Many Christians know little about the Church Calendar, which means that many evangelicals will treat this Sunday like any other day. But this Sunday marks the beginning of the “Ordinary Season” (not in the mundane or common sense, but the term comes from the word “ordinal,” which means “counted time”). This season–called the season of Pentecost (or Trinity Season) is composed of 23-28 Sundays, and it fleshes out the mission of the Church. It begins tomorrow and continues all the way to November 26th. To put it simply, Pentecost is the outworking of the mission of Jesus through his people by the power of the Spirit. The Pentecost Season emphasizes the unleashing of the Spirit’s work and power through the Bride of Jesus Christ, the Church.
Liturgically, many congregations wear red as a symbol of the fiery-Spirit that befell the Church (Acts 2). The Season brings with it a renewed emphasis on the Church as the central institution to the fulfillment of God’s plans in history. As such, it brings out the practical nature of Christian theology. Joan Chittister defines Pentecost as “the period of unmitigated joy, of total immersion in the implications of what it means to be a Christian, to live a Christian life” (The Liturgical Year, 171).
The evangelical church has offered a Spiritlessness teaching and worship. We have acted afraid of the mighty rushing wind for fear of its mystical presence. However, Pentecost exhorts us to be spiritual (Spirit-led) while emphasizing the titanic involvement of the Third Person of the Trinity in beautifying the world to reflect the glory of the Father and the Son. We must worship Spirit-led and in truth (Jn. 4:24).
The Spirit is crucial to the forming and re-forming of any environment. It communicates our thoughts, emotions, and prayers to our Meditator. The Third Person of the Trinity emotionalizes rightly and intercedes on our behalf in the midst of our ignorance (Rom. 8:26-30). Further, the Spirit draws individuals (John 6:44) to enter into one baptized community of faith. The Spirit, in the words of James Jordan, is the “divine match-maker.” He brings isolated individuals into a Pentecostalized body, a body that has many parts, but one Head.
So, let us embrace this Season! Let us join this cosmic Pentecostal movement and embrace the mission of the One, Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic Church.
Reading through Psalm 110, one cannot but help notice that by the end of the psalm, the dead bodies are piling up. In verse 1, Christ’s enemies are made into a footstool for his feet. In verse 2, he rules in the midst of his enemies — and has a scepter to smite them. In verse 5, he shatters kings on the day of his wrath. In verse 6, he executes nations and fills them with corpses.
And yet right in the middle of this “messiah on the warpath” imagery, we have a reference to Christ being an eternal priest after the order of Melchizedek. It is perhaps easier for us to see how the battle imagery of the psalm fits with Jesus’ kingship. After all, we expect kings — especially Davidic kings — to be battlefield heroes. Jesus does not disappoint in that way. He strikes and smashes his enemies from the beginning to the end of this psalm. The psalm paints the portrait of an utterly victorious king.
But since the psalm also pays homage to Jesus’ priesthood, an astute reader might wonder where priestly imagery shows up in the psalm. I would contend that the battlefield imagery fits not only with the motif of Jesus as reigning king but also with him as everlasting priest. In the Bible, priests are warriors just as much as kings. Waging holy war has been a priestly calling from the beginning.
There is a lot of biblical evidence for this truth, and we will only survey a fraction of it here. Start with Adam. Adam was a priest, serving in the sanctuary of Eden. We know this because the verbs used to describe Adam’s task in Eden, “tend and keep,” or “serve and guard” (Gen. 2:15), are used later to describe the tasks of the priests at the tabernacle, e.g., Num. 3:7-8. A priestly vocabulary is used for Adam’s task from the very beginning; he is to guard and keep Eden, just as the later priests would guard and keep the tabernacle. Of course, this also came to mean that he was to guard and keep the woman (the embodiment of Eden) after she was created, just as the priests were to guard and keep the people of Israel (the living tabernacle).
When Adam was told to guard the Garden, he should have deduced that there would be an invader. And sure enough, an intruder shows up. As soon as the serpent started questioning God’s Word to the woman, Adam should have stepped between the serpent and the woman to protect her. He should have silenced the lying serpent by crushing its head. That was his priestly task, and because he failed at that priestly task, he lost both his priesthood and his sanctuary. Adam should have piled up at least one corpse in Eden; he should have made the serpent a footstool for his feet. He should have ruled in the midst of his enemy (the serpent) by shattering and executing the serpent in a show of righteous wrath. Unfortunately, he did none of those things. What should have been the day of his power became a day of weakness and failure. He failed as a priest because he failed to fight. He refused to exercise holy violence and so he lost his holy status and access to the holy place.
(more…)
When the Spirit comes, he creates bonds; he binds people together. He does this as the Spirit of the Word, and, therefore, he binds us together with words. When we share the same language and confession, we are able to know one another and work together in a common mission. This is why Pentecost has always been associated with words. When the children of Israel came out of Egypt after the Passover and Exodus, Pentecost was the time that God gave his Law through Moses to Israel to bind them together as a new nation. Pentecost was memorialized every year in a feast that culminated in the giving of the Spirit after the great Passover and Exodus accomplished by Jesus. God gave his Law, his word, to the nations and formed a new holy nation, the church, through the preaching of the gospel as every man heard that word in his own language. The Spirit created new bonds with the word of the gospel so that the church might be able to work together in our common mission to disciple the nations.
Words are spiritual tools and weapons to build and to fight. When we walk in the Spirit, we speak words that build. Our words may also be used to do evil just as any tool or weapon may be used. When we speak evilly, we grieve the Spirit because he is the Spirit of unity who creates bonds of peace.
(more…)
Guest Post by Gary Demar
The House of Representatives and Senate are considering more expansive gun control bills considering the latest school shooting in Texas. These school shootings are horrific and evil. The parents of these children are devastated as I would be. I can’t imagine the anguish they must feel.
Some Republicans joined past gun control bills and some of them are working with the Democrats to enact even more restrictions. Criminals laugh at these laws. Do members of Congress believe that such laws are going to stop criminals from purchasing and using firearms? How well has it worked with drugs? Elected officials take an oath to uphold the Constitution. How many obey that oath? They, too, laugh at the built-in restrictions of the Constitution.
Every day people kill other people with guns, knives, automobiles, and even water by drowning. These are not going to stop with new laws. Murder is already against the law. People are the problem, not guns. Recent surveys have determined that around 40% of adult Americans own a gun or live with someone who does. More than 99+ percent of all gun owners have never shot anyone. Mentally disturbed people are going to do disturbing things. Better to eliminate soft targets like schools. Why this hasn’t been done is insane. Parents need to take control of their schools. Demand physical security for your children!
To show that guns are not the problem, decades ago, many public schools had shooting clubs. According to John Lott:
Until 1969 virtually every public high school—even in New York City—had a shooting club. High school students in New York City carried their guns to school on the subways in the morning, turned them over to their homeroom teacher or the gym coach during the day, and retrieved them after school for target practice. Club members were given their rifles and ammunition by the federal government. Students regularly competed in citywide shooting contests for university scholarships.
Even today there are “more than 2,000 high-school rifle programs across the United States. In 2015, 9,245 students in 317 schools across three states participated in the USA High School Clay Target League. In 2018, participation had increased 138% with 21,917 students from 804 teams in 20 states.”
(more…)
“When he arose, he took the young child and his mother by night, and departed into Egypt: And was there until the death of Herod: that it might be fulfilled which was spoken of the Lord by the prophet, saying, Out of Egypt have I called my son.”
St. Matthew ii:14-15
The prophetic witness of the Old Testament is a central theme of the gospel writers and appears throughout St. Matthew’s work as evidence of Jesus’s status as the Messiah. Through textual quotations, allusions, and implicit references St. Matthew offers his Hebrew audience dozens of examples of how Jesus fits the messianic qualifications of their own Scriptural tradition. Yet, St. Matthew often handles these references in ways that seem out of context with their original narratives. Established stories and characters are recast from their historical plots to take on symbolic or even typological meaning in the life of Jesus. While St. Matthew’s interpretation of the Old Testament is under the inspiration of the Holy Ghost, it is unlikely that his contemporaries or even the prophets themselves always understood how their words pointed to a future Messiah. One example is the fulfillment of “Out of Egypt have I called my son” cited by St. Matthew from the Book of Hosea. St. Matthew understood how the phrase fulfilled Scripture in terms of messianic prophecy, but also informs our interpretive lens for the Old Testament.
Basic to the idea of Biblical prophecy is the doctrine of providence by which we understand the divine governance of God in history. God fulfills his purposes as he unfolds the natural years of human history. Dutch-American theologian Louis Berkhof describes providence as, “whereby He rules all things so that they answer to the purpose of their existence.” a God’s sovereign orchestration of history is clearly explained in passages like Psalm 103:18 where we read, “The LORD has established His throne in heaven, And His kingdom rules over all.” The mechanism of messianic prophecy demonstrates the special promises possessed by the Hebrews as they expected the God over their history to also superintend a savior in their future. Contrast this with the writings of Sophocles and his Delphic oracles that entrap man’s future into an Oedipal tragedy.
St. Matthew’s use of messianic prophecies is therefore primarily a matter of demonstrating God’s power in time and not intended to be mere proof texts for qualifying Jesus’s own messianic candidacy. We see in the messianic prophecies God’s fingerprints of providence and signposts of his imminent work in establishing his renewed Kingdom. Dr. Edmund Clowney of Westminster Seminary explains in his popular book Preaching Christ in All of Scripture that the patterns that seem to repeat and find fulfillment in Jesus point to the magnifying work of Israel’s Messiah. “God will not merely repeat his deeds of the past; he will do greater things, climatically greater: a second exodus, involving spiritual deliverance; a new covenant, a new creation, a new people, including Jews and Gentiles; and a greater than Moses, than David, than Elijah.” b We should then expect that the interpretive methodology that St. Matthew will employ in relation to the fulfillment of the Old Testament will cast a greater weight to prophetic statements and allusions that point to the Messiah’s greater role in the destiny of the covenant People.
The narrative employed in Matthew 2 functions to highlight God’s past faithfulness and connect it to the greater promises that come through or are fulfilled by His Son. St. Matthew’s emphasis on the holy family’s refuge in Egypt employs not only a reference to Old Testament scripture, but invokes the historic symbolism of Moses and Hosea. Harkening back to an Exodus-like story, St. Matthew introduces Herod as a new Pharaoh and Jesus as a new Moses. The Messianic prophecy itself attempts to connect or memorialize a past event in redemptive history to the life and ministry of Jesus. This method of weaving pictures of previous covenantal epochs into the successive stages of Israel’s growth matches the entire pattern described as “covenant renewal” in James B. Jordan’s book Through New Eyes. Jordan explains that, “…time is opportunity.” and the Covenant history builds in a linear-spiral fashion. c The connections between messianic prophecy and their fulfillment point to God’s work at fulfilling his promises through successive covenantal renewals with mankind (e.g. Adam, Noah, Abraham, Moses, David). With each successive Patriarch’s renewal, God reveals more of his glorious plan to be fulfilled in the future Messiah. Here St. Matthew appeals to Jesus as a new stage of covenant renewal.
(more…)
Kuyperian Commentary Podcast
