Something for a rainy day

Panel Discussion on Preaching from the Old Testament, Featuring Tim Keller, John Piper, Crawford Loritts, Don Carson, and Bryan Chapell - TGC 2011 plenary session

War & Suffering in OT (reading)

A friend asked:

i was wondering if you know any good books about why God allows/ initiates so much war and suffering in OT

All I could think of to say was:

I'm struggling to come up with anything fantastic on exactly that.

You might try looking at:

D A Carson, How Long O Lord? Reflections on Suffering and Evil (IVP / Baker, 1990)

John Dickson has a book If I Were God I'd End All The Pain (Good Book co.) but I think he gives a rather unhelpful form of the Free Will defence.

You might like bits of Williams and Cooper, If You Could Ask God One Question (Christianity Explored)

It's worth saying that the problem is not confined to the OT. OT - mean God, NT God of love is a caricature.

It's also key to remember that all sinners deserve hell. Holy war is just a minor foretaste of that.

The cross shows God using suffering for good etc.

Sorry not to be more help.

Any other suggestions? What should I have said?

The Law our former primary school teacher

In Galatians (3:25) Paul says that the law of Moses was a pedagogue, a schoolmaster / tutor / guardian for the people of God in their infancy to lead them to Christ, in whom they find maturity and come into their inheritance.

Thinking of the law as our one-time primary school teacher might help us to understand how we should relate to it today. For example, if you met your old teacher today you would not put yourself under his regime of try to re-enroll in his class, but there would still be much to learn from a wise teacher.

Adults do not expect their former teachers to tell them to sit up straight, be quiet, put their fingers on their lips and raise their hand if they have something to say. Neither does the teacher want to treat his former pupils in this way. The point of all that primary school stuff is that the lessons might be learned and internalized. The school aimed to produce the habits of self-discipline, respect, politeness, good order and so on which the specific rules of the classroom embodied for little people at that time.

Similarly, the OT Law does not legislate for every eventuality but gives case law to teach patterns and principles which need to be applied anew, not least in the changed circumstances of maturity in Christ under the (re)New(ed) Covenant.

(Thanks to my STMTC group and especially Phil for thinking through this stuff with me).

Nice idea

Marc Lloyd is totally ignorant of all this and hasn't read the article (or indeed Nahum 1 recently!) but likes this idea which he thinks was a little long for a Facebook Status Update. He also likes theological journals free on the interweb.

Thomas Renz, 'A Perfectly Broken Acrostic in Nahum 1?' Journal of Hebrew Scriptures Volume 9: Article 23 (2009)

Abstract

Responding to recent scholarship which discounts apparent traces of an alphabetic acrostic in Nahum 1 as purely coincidental, this essay argues that earlier scholarship was right to detect a tendency towards an alphabetic acrostic in Nahum 1. But while previously the disruptions to the alphabetic sequence were considered an imperfection caused by lack of concern on the part of the poet or a later redactor or as the result of copying mistakes in the transmission of the text, I suggest that the tendency towards an acrostic and the irregularities belong to a single purposeful design. This design communicates a message of disrupted order and fits well with the remainder of the book of Nahum.

The OT retired?

"The Old Testament is not the Word of God Emeritus!"

Douglas Wilson, The Blenheim Lectures, 'The Gospel and Your Government'

Sacraments in the Law

Here's another slice of Zachman on Calvin:

The covenant with Abraham, and the renewal of that covenant in the Law of Moses, is confirmed by many visible signs and symbols, which confirm the faithful in the divine origin and truth of the covenant, especially in times of trial. Calvin understood some of these forms of visual confirmation, such as visions and miracles, in an explicitly sacramental way, though all forms exhibit the mutal relation of sign and word that Clavin takes to be essential to any living icon of God. The word is the soul animating the visual representation, even as the visual representation gives force, clarity and vividness to the word. Both image and word confirm that the Law is indeed the self-manifestation of God to the Israelites. However, the Law also contains within itself images, symbols and types of the Christ who is yet to come. (p163)

Image and Word in the Theology of John Calvin

The Hermeneutics of High Church Puritanism

Granted we are not under the Old Covenant, Rev'd Dr Peter Leithart rightly identifies a very important question: how, if at all, may the ceremonial, ritual and cultic aspects of the Old Covenant be used to govern the practices of New Covenant worship?

The Reformed would generally assume some continuity between the covenants while recognising differences: e.g. they circumcised their children, we baptise ours.

If you assume NT only worship you may end up in a rather different place than if you are willing to learn from the OT: e.g. you might ban musical instruments (which many Reformed people have), which you'd never do if you thought the Psalms taught New Testament believers the practicalities of how to worship.

See further Peter Leithart, 'Sacramental Hermeneutics' in Greg Strawbridge (ed.), The Case for Covenant Communion (Athanasius Press, 2006)

Ceremonies that point to Christ

No doubt there’s more to say here, but I’ve been helped by the way Revd Dr Paul Blackham of All Souls’, Langham Place, analyses the 3 ceremonies Luke mentions in chapter 2 that might shed light on the coming Messiah:

Circumcision (v21). In Genesis 17 the giving of circumcision as the bloody sign of the covenant and its implementation sandwiches the renewing of the promise of the seed through Isaac. It is perhaps in part a way of looking forward to the birth of the Messiah.

Redemption of the Firstborn (v23). In the Passover all the people deserve judgement but the first born male stands in for or represents the nation, bearing the wrathful punishment of God, unless a lamb dies in the place of the firstborn. Exodus 13 commands that firstborn males always have to be redeemed, just as if the people of God were still in captivity in Egypt. The firstborn Son is still to come to die as a substitute in the place of the people, bearing the wrath of God, releasing God’s people from slavery.

The ceremonial purification of Mary after childbirth (vv22, 24, cf. Leviticus 12). The pain of childbearing comes from God’s curse against sin in Genesis 3. It is through the birth of a child that the curse will be removed. Jesus will, of course, bring cleansing to his people and access to God.

Blackham’s sermon, The Child Who Divides (sermon code D040/03, 29th Dec 2002) is available on the All Souls’ website.

Glory and Beauty in NT worship?

It is interesting to note that Exodus 28 repeatedly points out that the priestly garments are given "for glory and for beauty" and are to be skillfully made in a variety of spelendid colours.

Granted that the Lord Jesus Christ is our supreme and final High Priest and that the Old Covenant is fulfilled and the ceremonial law radically changed, how do the OT cultic laws regulate New Testament worship today?

Of course there is great glory and beauty to the New Covenant and all of it is fulfilled in Christ (2 Cor 3 springs to mind), but what are the implications for our church buildings, our clothing and our collective public worship today? Is it still appropriate to look for glory, beauty and skill on a Sunday morning?

Surely such things are not necessarily Judaizing returns to the Old Covenant shadow-lands? The Book of Revelation would suggest such symbolism in heaven and in the New Creation too. So why not a little foretaste of heaven coming on earth too?

It feels quasi-Marcionite to say that the OT no longer regulates public worship and semi-Gnostic to say that simple invisible spiritual worship is best.

Ritual, buildings and clothes would seem inevitable. Neutrality would seem impossible.

So what should it look and sound and feel and smell like?

Pictures, please

Mrs Lloyd and I have been reading through Exodus together and we could do with some lovely coloured pictures, please. We'd like a labeled diagram of a priest (Ex 28). And surely someone must have made a model of the tabernacle and all its kit for teaching purposes (Ex 25-27).

Mrs Lloyd wanted to know what an Ephod is, and I'm very sorry to say that the IVP Bible Dictionary, to which I directed her, doesn't seem to have an entry for it.

I'm glad to say there is an entry for the Urim and Thummim though it does say: "Almost everything about this provision [for giving guidence, esp. to the leaders of the people] remains unexplained. The words Urim and Thummim have recieved no satisfactory etymology..." (p1219)

I need to gen up on my gems too (Ex 28:17-20). And I couldn't really have picked out "filigree" either, though now I am much the wiser: my dictionary tells me its "ornamental work of fine wire formed into delicate tracery" or some such.

The things they don't teach you at vicar factory!

Update: Thanks to Ros for mentioning that she heard about this at vicar factory:

http://www.thefeltsource.com/Tabernacle-Felt-Set.html

I was rather hoping for something free on the interweb somewhere, though?

The guys at the Temple Insitute are wasting a lot of time, money and effort re-creating stuff for the temple they expect to see rebuilt in Jerusalem, when they should be trusting in the Lord Jesus Christ and making him known, but nevertheless, they've got lots of pictures and some interesting stuff at:

http://www.templeinstitute.org/gallery.htm

A few more labeled diagrams would have been helpful.

Perspectives on Love & Holiness in OT

Rev’d Dr James Robson gave his excellent Tyndale House paper on ‘Forgotten Dimensions of Holiness’ in the Oak Hill Masters Seminar this week. He argued that it can be shown from the text of the Bible that love is a dimension of or is linked to God’s holiness in the Old Testament, though some texts might not make it seem so. Yahweh’s holiness and love are shown through his self-disclosure, his saving activity (including his hearing of prayer) and his presence. This rightly takes account of narrative and contexts as well as including word studies and depending on explicit statements.

All this seemed impressive and true, and fits in with a few systematic perspectives. For example, by the time one has said that God is simple and that all things are related, it is unsurprising to say that love and holiness are related or even that they are perspectives on one another. Interesting that the Old Testament should make this so obvious. The question is exactly how they are related. There is some danger in saying everything in that one will end up saying nothing. God’s holiness needs to be sharply defined if it is to be distinguished from other aspects of his character (and likewise with love). If holiness is simply seen as the Godness of God or that which makes God unique and separate then not much has been said.

In other words, the systematican will want to ask both how are we to distinguish God’s holiness and his love and how we are to relate them.

A few random vaguely relevant thoughts:

All the attributes of God are strictly incommunicable. No one is powerful as God is powerful, for example.

All talk about God is analogical. Love is not the same in God as it is in the rest of experience.

I think James suggested that interestingly in the economy of revelation there is a sequence that we know God’s holiness first and other things are holy since they are declared so by God or are somehow related to him. With Fatherhood, human fathers play a much greater part in the order of our knowing. Perhaps. God is always the prototype and standard. I reckon if you took holiness to mean specialness or set apartness, or even purity / cleanness, this would be much less obvious since we can think of human or creaturely analogues which we could and often do know before knowing much of God or having a Word from him.

Having said that, James rightly argued that we must first of all be attentive to the language and narrative in which God has chosen to reveal himself. Systematic questions of how we might categorise and integrate or summarise all this in various ways are secondary, even if necessary, and indeed influencing our first reading of the Bible. The old virtuous hermeneutical spiral agaisn.

The systematician can be encouraged that the Bible seems to speak in a way which is wonderfully appropriate to the simplicity of God and perspectivalism. The attributes and actions of God are not hermetically sealed by flow from his nature and though each has a “core” they flow into one another. The picture is clear at the centre but the colours at the edges are beautifully run into each other. Indeed, that’s something like how words (including the language of Scripture) work, having a semantic range and being defined by usage and difference from other words.

No single attribute of God is to be totalised or used to exclude others. Even God’s wrath is loving and his love is wrathful. One might even say that God is wrath with respect to sin but a distinction could be made here since God is not wrath in the inner Trinitarian life considered without respect to creation. Yet creation and therefore wrath is in a way “necessary” given who God is and chooses to be, but that is another story.

It was good to hear a systematically informed biblical scholar using arguments about the immanent Trinity, simplicity and analogical language, and obviously knowing his Hebrew and his Bible a billion times better than I! No surprise there either. Here’s to such conversations at Oak Hill and elsewhere.

Shadows in their place

The Old Testament types and ceremonies are shadows. They helpfully foreshadowed Christ. In the presence of his absence they were helpful outlines. If reintroduced today wholesale they would be unhelpful shadows casting darkness on the light of his presence.