Posted on 10/26/2009 11:16:29 PM PDT by Gamecock
Hello and welcome to another edition of the White Horse Inn as we are thinking through what is means to be Christians in a post-Christian culture. You know, every time a debate comes up on homosexual marriage or on war, a whole host of topics; on one hand conservatives sometimes invoke the theocratic promises, commands, and threats of the old covenant as if they could just be lifted from the context of Israel's covenant with God and apply to any modern country. While liberals and secularists simply dismiss these Old Testament passages as morally offensive "texts of terror."
But there is a third option: namely, to interpret the Bible as it interprets itself. The Bible isn't a manual of timeless ethics, but a history of redemption. Within that unfolding history, there are different covenants that include their own structure of laws. To be sure, there are universal moral laws that God inscribed on the human conscience in creation, as in the Ten Commandment and Jesus' summary. But the civil and ceremonial laws of the Mosaic covenant were attached, as Calvin calls them, as appendices of the Ten Commandments for the era in which he had taken Israel under his wing as his special nation. This is a unique, unrepeatable, and non-transferable relationship. As long as Israel obeyed these laws that separated the nations as holy from among the other nations, it would be blessed. If the nation disobeyed, it would be sent into captivity. However, the promise that God made to Adam and Eve of a coming redeemer, which was solemnized in the covenant with Abraham, was an unconditional covenant. As Paul declares in Galatians, the later covenant that the nation of Israel swore at Mount Sinai to obey all of the words of the law could not annul the earlier covenant that God swore to Abraham: namely, salvation by grace alone, through faith alone, in Christ alone.
In different eras of redemptive history, God descends to dwell with a particular people, creating a small-scale copy of his heavenly temple. During these eras, when every aspect of life-civil and religious-is declared by God to be holy, there are frequent suspensions of ordinary providence and common law in favor of God's direct miraculous acts of judgment, deliverance, and reigning. The Garden of Eden was just such a holy sanctuary, then the ark in which God carried Noah and his family to safety, then finally the land of Canaan. There is God's demand to sacrifice Isaac, which God withdrew just before Abraham was to plunge the knife into his only beloved son. There is the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah. Only begrudgingly did God accede to Israel's demand for a human king, since God alone was the direct ruler of his people. And then there are the holy wars in which God himself led armies to cleanse the land of wickedness, idolatry, oppression, violence, and immorality. An analogy might be the declaration of martial law, in which some constitutional liberties are suspended. During these Old Testament episodes, when God directly intervens in executing his judgment and establishing his righteous rule, we have previews of Christ's ministry as prophet, priest, and king. The whole apparatus of Israel's theocracy, including its distinctive laws, was not to last forever but to foreshadow Christ's kingdom and his work of redemption and his return in final judgment of the whole world.
Take Christ out of the center of this history, and the Old Testament becomes a strange book of laws written by a primitive people to justify their own land-grabs through ethnic cleansing.
So now we go back to these so-called "texts of terror" and what do we see? We see the serpent corrupting God's holy garden, and Israel as God's viceroy called to cleanse it from impurity. We see God standing in personal judgment over creatures he made in his own image who have nevertheless turned their gifts against him and each other. In their idolatrous religion, they sacrifice children to the gods and raid neighboring peoples in merciless violence, leaving a trail of blood and tears. Folks, if you have trouble with the righteous wrath of God in these Old Testament portraits, you are not going to do any better with Jesus, who spoke of everlasting punishment in hell more vividly and repeatedly than any prophet.
But for now, Jesus repeatedly explained in his earthly ministry, it is not an era of martial law but of common grace. In the Sermon on the Mount, he takes the place of Moses at Mount Sinai: "You have heard it said, 'Hate your enemies,' but I say, 'Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you...For God sends rain upon the just and the unjust alike.'" Far from saying these laws were wrong, Jesus fulfilled the law in every detail. In fact, during his ministry he said, "I saw Satan fall from heaven like lightning." Not only his earthly emissaries, but Satan himself was now dethroned, cast out of the heavenly sanctuary where he accused the brethren day and night. James and John want to call down fire from heaven upon a Samaritan village that rejected the gospel, but Jesus "rebuked them sharply," we read, and reaffirmed the purpose of his mission: namely, to preach the gospel and indeed to be the gospel by his death and resurrection. Jesus certainly warned of a final judgment up ahead, but this is the Day of Salvation.
Because of this regime-change, there are no holy wars because there is no holy land-except for the spiritual war in heavenly places that we fight with the Word of the gospel and the holy temple "made without hands" which is Christ and his body. As we read in Hebrews, the old covenant has been rendered "obsolete" by the arrival of the perfect prophet, priest, and king: our Lord Jesus Christ. We don't need a holy land or a geopolitical realm because now the reality has arrived. Although the New Testament repeats the moral laws that he gave to humanity in creation and to Israel at Sinai, the laws that form the unique constitution of the old covenant theocracy are no longer in force. With the apostles, therefore, we read the Old Testament in light of its fulfillment in Christ, which is revealed in the New Testament. We do not flatten out the biblical commands as general, timeless, universal principles, but follow the New Testament's own approach as it interprets the old covenant in light of the new. This is a very big topic and we are going to be taking a closer look at it, how do we interpret the Old Testament-especially Old Testament commands and laws-in the light of the New Covenant?
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IOW, it's not about "What Would Jesus Do?" but instead "What Has Jesus Done?"
"Baptism is the sign and seal of the parousia of the Sprit in judgment."
I haven’t listened yet, wating on the extended version that comes on the CD, which hasn’t arrived yet.
wating on the extended version that comes on the CD
If I had the bucks...
Love your tag line.
One of the best quotes in all of Christianity.
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