The Lost World of Adam and Eve - John H Walton

I've read a lot of Christian books that were okay – they didn't set the world alight but they might have reminded me of some important truths or put something in a slightly different way. This is not one of those; this could be a real game changer.

John Walton is professor of Old Testament at the bastion of US religious conservatism that is Wheaton College, and he's written this book to see what Genesis 1-3 really claims about creation, specifically the question of human origins. He doesn't bother with the science, because he isn't a scientist; he just sticks to what he is good at, which is Old Testament exegesis and cultural background. He doesn't even deal with Adam and Eve in the New Testament – he gets N.T. Wright to write that chapter. He also (quite rightly) recognises that the scientific arguments don't really matter much for Christians - we believe that God could have created the universe with the appearance of age and human beings with the appearance of being descended from a common ancestor with chimps; the question is whether he did.

Walton confirms what I have long thought; that Genesis 1-3 doesn't necessarily contradict the claims of modern science. Along the way he demolishes some of the things I'd already noticed were bogus (like the assumption that Adam and Eve were immortal in the Garden of Eden – if they were, they wouldn't have needed the Tree of Life) and some I hadn't spotted before (Adam and Eve are Hebrew nouns and Hebrew wasn't invented until Genesis 11, so they can't be the real names of the couple). He remains utterly committed to Biblical authority throughout; even while working on potentially controversial areas he gives clear, common sense, uncontroversial examples which show the validity of his position. Did several Old Testament authors believe in a solid sky? Yes, I suppose they did. Did the wine Jesus made from water in John 2 have the appearance of a potentially misleading history? Of course it did. Does the ancient belief that the heart was where a person did their thinking and feeling commit us to believe the same? No, it doesn't.

I'm not convinced by everything in the book – I think he over-eggs the concept of sacred space, for example, and there are some bits near the start of the book that badly need editing/rewriting. But I think that for the reader who can cope with his language and style, this book utterly demolishes the idea that you need to believe in young earth creationism to take the Bible seriously, and shows us just how much cultural baggage we bring into our readings of Genesis 1-3. Brilliant, eye-opening, thought-provoking.

Telling Right from Wrong in Old Testament Narrative

When we read stories in the Old Testament, sometimes it's easy to know what we're meant to think about the events, because God tells us. Sometimes, however, it's not always obvious who (if anyone) is in the right, and who is in the wrong. Take, for example, the story of Jephthah in Judges 10-12. He only agrees to fight for Gilead (part of Israel at the time) if they make him their leader; he defeats the Ammonites, sacrifices his own daughter to keep a rash promise, and then massacres a load of fellow-Israelites because they didn't fight with him against the Ammonites. Is he a good guy or a bad guy? And was he right to sacrifice his daughter or not?

Here are a few pointers for how to go about it when we aren't sure who is right and who is wrong.

1. Trust the Narrator's Perspective

As Christians, we believe that the Bible is inspired by God (“God-breathed” in the language of 2 Tim 3:16). But the way God has inspired Scripture is usually by using human authors, so that the words we read are simultaneously the words of a limited human writer writing thousands of years ago and also the eternal words of God. Peter describes it like this “prophets, though human, spoke from God as they were carried along by the Holy Spirit” (2 Peter 1:21).

That means that the narrator's perspective is reliable, but not exhaustive. They don't tell us everything that they know – they select what they think is most relevant. But nor do they necessarily know everything about the events they are describing, as Peter tells us in 1 Peter 1:10-12. For example, the author (or editor) of 1 & 2 Samuel probably didn't understand exactly how David would serve as a template for Jesus.

Sometimes the narrator tells us directly what God thinks of an episode. For example, at the end of 2 Samuel 11, the narrator adds in his own comment “But the thing David had done displeased the LORD.”

Sometimes the narrator leaves it quite a while before commenting – one example would be the history of the Northern Kingdom during the time of the divided monarchy. We're given occasional comments such as “X did evil in the eyes of the LORD”, but the narrator saves up a long exposition of what was wrong with the Northern Kingdom until just after its final destruction in 2 Kings 17.

Sometimes the narrator is more subtle, as in Ezra 4. In Ezra 4:1-5, the Jews get into an argument with their neighbours about rebuilding the temple. The neighbours claim they want to help; the Jews don't want them to. It isn't immediately obvious whether the Jews are getting it right by excluding other nations or whether they are being too exclusive and just creating unnecessary trouble for themselves. Except that in v1 the narrator slips in a single word – he describes the neighbours as “enemies”. Problem solved – the Jews were right on that occasion.

2. Look for comments elsewhere in Scripture

One of the main ways this happens is by a New Testament writer referring to an Old Testament story. Because we can trust the writers to be accurate in what they write, even if they don't always see the whole picture, we can use the extra information to help us figure out the OT story. Here are two quick examples:

In 1 John 3:12, John discusses Cain and Abel, and tells us that Cain murdered Abel because Cain's actions were evil but Abel's were righteous. That makes it easier to understand their story in Genesis 4.

In Joshua 2, we read the story of Rahab, a Canaanite prostitute who shelters Israelite spies. It isn't immediately obvious whether or not she is right to lie to her own people. However, James 2:25 tells us that it was an example of faith in action, which led to her being counted righteous. Likewise, Hebrews 11:31 also tells us that Rahab's faith shown in welcoming the spies saved her from the destruction of the city.

3. Pay attention to Prophets

Most human characters in the story are fallible. But not quite all. In particular, the books of Joshua, Judges, 1&2 Samuel and 1&2 Kings were originally classified as “Prophets” not history. Modern theologians tend to describe them as “Deuteronomic history”, because they tie in so strongly with the priorities of the book of Deuteronomy. I've argued elsewhere, and am still largely convinced by it, that most of the Old Testament prophets saw themselves as preaching God's word largely as they had read it in Deuteronomy. (For this view from a more liberal perspective, see, e.g. Holladay's massive commentary on Jeremiah.)

Deuteronomy is Moses' farewell speeches/sermons to Israel. One passage that's of particular interest for understanding Joshua – 2 Kings is Deut 18:14-22. Moses tells the people that God will raise up a prophet “like him” for the Israelites, and that they must listen to him. The marks of the true prophet are that he will speak God's word, he will point the people to God and not to other gods, and that what the prophet speaks “in the name of the Lord” will happen. Prophets who claim to speak “in the name of the Lord” but who aren't really doing so are to be put to death.

In the books of Samuel and Kings, in particular, the major characters are often prophets. In fact, arguably the two biggest characters in the story from the Northern Kingdom in 300 years are Elijah and Elisha, both prophets and both of whom get more attention than any of the kings.

We're told that some of the prophets are false, for example Zechariah son of Kenaanah. We're told that other prophets are true prophets, such as Elijah, Elisha and Samuel. 1 Samuel 3:19 tells us that God was with Samuel and let none of his words fall to the ground. The author of 1 Samuel is also at pains to show that Samuel fits the description in Deut 18 of the prophet who succeeds Moses. We can therefore trust Samuel's words because we can trust that he is speaking from God.

The same is true of Elijah and Elisha. The author again takes pains to link them with Samuel and hence with Moses' promise of a prophet. For example, at Samuel's farewell he calls on God and God answers with thunder and rain (1 Sam 12:16). When Elijah turns up in 1 Kings 17, he declares that it will not rain, then several years later, he prays and there is thunder and rain. The signs show that he is a true prophet, therefore his words can be trusted.

Of course, that doesn't mean they are perfect at all – Samuel is a poor father; Elijah gets very depressed in 1 Kings 19, and so on. The Bible loves to show that God uses normal people with normal human failings, and even that he can use them to speak for him.

4. How does it fit into the big storyline?

It often pays to be aware of how the passage you are reading fits into the big story.

For example, Genesis 12 is one of the key passages in the storyline of the whole Bible. God makes a series of promises to Abram – that his descendants will become a great nation, that God will give them the land of Canaan, that God will bless them and make them into a blessing to the nations. Those promises are a major theme right through the Old Testament and into the New.
But straight after that, in Genesis 12:10-20, you get an odd incident. There is a famine in the land, Abram and his wife go to Egypt; Abram pretend that Sarai isn't his wife and she joins Pharoah's harem, God sends diseases on Egypt because of them, but it's not obvious what God thinks of Abram's action until you compare it with the promises that have gone before.

Abe has become a curse to the nations, not a blessing. He has left the land that God promised to give him and has stopped treating his wife as his wife, therefore putting the idea of children at risk. Why? Because he failed to trust God's blessings. Ultimately the passage shows that when Abe fails to take God at his word things go worse for him and for the world than they would otherwise have done. But God won't let Abram's unfaithfulness de-rail his promises...

In the same light, Elimelech and his family leaving Israel for Moab due to a famine at the start of Ruth is seen in a negative light. It's part of the big pile of mess which Naomi is carrying and which God redeems in the story.

Or take the book of Judges. It's part of a huge story arc, running from Joshua to 2 Kings, which shows that despite starting with every advantage, ultimately God's people fail to live up to God's standards and so lose their place in the Promised Land. Joshua is mostly positive – the people obey God as long as Joshua and Eleazar live. But Judges marks the point where the rot starts to set in. From Judges 17 onward, the refrain “In those days there was no king in Israel. Everyone did what was right in his own eyes” keeps coming up. In fact, what we see in Judges is a descent from well-ordered obedience to God to vicious anarchy, where the author sees the best solution as being the need for a strong central government – a king. The next big stage of the story, in Samuel & Kings, shows that though the kings start well and solve the problem of anarchy, they don't solve the problem of disobedience to God. Ultimately, that takes Jesus's redemption and the Holy Spirit's transformation...

Knowing the shape of the book of Judges explains why it misses out the last and probably greatest judge (Samuel) – because it runs from the ideal judge (Othniel), through the pretty good ones (Ehud, Deborah) to the really-not-very-good-at-all ones (Jephthah, Samson) and then into chaos. That means that when we see the horrific events towards the end of the book (chs 17-21), we shouldn't necessarily expect anyone to be in the right. It's depicting the anarchy that ensues when human sinfulness runs riot without even the restraining influence of central government.

5. How does it fit with God's character as revealed in Scripture?

The fifth criterion we can use to get something of God's perspective on an event is to compare it with what we know of the character of God from elsewhere in Scripture. This is probably the hardest criterion to use well, because it's easy to have our ideas of what God is like, then reject anything in the Bible that doesn't fit with them.

An easy example would be where someone in the Old Testament does something expressly forbidden in the Old Testament Law, like marrying a non-Israelite or where Onan abuses the tradition of Levirate marriage to sleep with his brother's widow while avoiding the responsibility of having children (Gen 38:8-10, and Deut 25:5-10).

But there are big principles too, like mercy triumphing over judgement and knowing that God does not desire the death of sinners but rather that they turn from their wickedness and live (Ezekiel 18:23).

Back to Jephthah

So what about Jephthah? We're told in Hebrews 11 that he had faith in God, which helps a little. But last time I preached on him, I described him as “a bastard in every sense of the word”, which still seems about right. He is one of the later judges in the book, so we should expect him to be very flawed, but still used by God to rescue (like Samson).

We can see he is angry and jealous at earlier rejections because he is illegitimate (Judges 11:1-11). We can say that his father should have done a better job of providing for him, and also that he should have learnt to be more gracious in his responses.

He does trust what God has done in the past and therefore rebukes the Ammonites. We are told that God's Spirit came on him and enabled him to defeat the Ammonites. (11:12-29)

He made a rash promise to God to sacrifice whatever came out of his house first when he returned. His daughter came out of the house first, so he sacrificed her. (11:30-39) We can tell from elsewhere in the Bible that bargaining with God is a bad idea, and from Deut 12:31 that God hates the thought of people sacrificing their children to him – the Canaanites sacrificed children to their gods and that is one of the reasons God drove them out of the land. Jephthah had two ways out of it as well – he could have broken his rash promise to God and thrown himself on God's mercy, or he could have bought his daughter back – Leviticus 27 strongly suggests that Jephthah could have bought his daughter out of the oath for 30 shekels of silver. That he did not shows us that either he was ignorant of the law or that he was exceptionally bloody-minded.

As for what happens in 12:1-7, with the massacre of the Ephraimites, it's obviously against God's character, though the author remains silent about it. There's probably a deliberate parallel with Joshua 22, where there is another quarrel between the same two groups of people. But there, just as they are ready for war, they discuss it first and end up agreeing and rejoicing together. Here, they don't bother listening to each other and it just descends into civil war.

Conclusion

These tools give us a pretty good way forward with understanding what God's perspective on narrative events in the OT is. It's an important first step for understanding the significance of the events, why they are recorded in Scripture and what they mean for us - I'd recommend a book like “The Word Became Fresh” by Dale Ralph Davis for taking the next couple of steps...

There are also some events this doesn't really help with because I don't think we're meant to see them as clear cut right or wrong. Was David right to let Absalom back in 2 Samuel 14? I don't know – it's part of a sequence following on from David's adultery with Bathsheba which shows how that has left him less capable of leading his own family, and I think that's closer to being the point of the story. It's understandable, and it has bad consequences, but not everything recorded in the Bible is clearly right or clearly wrong. It's messy - much like life.

Old Testament Source Criticism

I spend quite a bit of my life digging into details of the text of the Bible. I love doing it, but I didn't love studying large parts of the OT at university, and I don't like the way it's often taught today. The main reason comes down to two words: source criticism.

Source criticism is about trying to understand the history of a text. A source critic might read Lord of the Rings, for example, and try to work out how the text came to take the form it did. It's much easier if you've got copies of earlier versions, or of the author's working. We don't have those in the case of the Bible, though.

Source criticism can be a useful tool to have when studying the Old Testament. There are a few places where it produces helpful insights. For example, Psalm 89 seems to have been a Psalm about God's goodness in creation, to which someone has added a bit in a different style about God's goodness in making promises to David, to which someone else has added in another style a complaint that God isn't keeping those promises and prayer that he would. Or Amos 4 & 5 seem to be a speech Amos gives in the (Northern) temple, interspersed with some verses of a hymn that's being sung, creating an effect a bit like Simon & Garfunkel singing Silent Night over the evening news. Seeing those aspects of a passage actually help us to understand the meaning of the passage better.

Where Source Criticism gets annoying is when scholars treat it like the main tool they should be using to understand a passage. This is especially true in the Pentateuch, and especially with a theory called the Documentary Hypothesis (JEDP). In that theory, Genesis - Deuteronomy somehow contain the full text of four older documents, called J, E, D and P, and probably the majority of non-evangelical Pentateuch scholars seem to spend most of their time (and most of the space in commentaries) arguing about precisely which bit comes from which source. The result is rather as you'd expect if you read a novel with your main concern being trying to work out how the author had drafted it - you completely miss the point.

C.S. Lewis, who was both an author and an expert on old texts, writes this on Biblical source criticism:

This then is my first bleat. These men ask me to believe they can read between the lines of the old texts; the evidence is their obvious inability to read (in any sense worth discussing) the lines themselves. They claim to see fern-seed and can't see an elephant ten yards away in broad daylight.

...

My impression is that in the whole of my experience, not one of these guesses [of reviews where others try to reconstruct how he wrote things] has on any point been right; that the method shows a record of one hundred per cent failure. You would expect by mere chance they would hit as often as they miss. But it is my impression that they do no such thing. I can't remember a single hit.

...

They assume that you wrote a story as they would try to write a story; the fact that they would so try explains why they have not produced any stories.

(from Fern Seed and Elephants)

Let's backtrack for a moment. The main reason that the JEDP hypothesis came about in the first place was because the Pentateuch really doesn't read like history as written by a modern westerner. Here's an example:

4 Then the Lord said to Moses, ‘I will rain down bread from heaven for you. The people are to go out each day and gather enough for that day. In this way I will test them and see whether they will follow my instructions. 5 On the sixth day they are to prepare what they bring in, and that is to be twice as much as they gather on the other days.’

6 So Moses and Aaron said to all the Israelites, ‘In the evening you will know that it was the Lord who brought you out of Egypt, 7 and in the morning you will see the glory of the Lord, because he has heard your grumbling against him. Who are we, that you should grumble against us?’ 8 Moses also said, ‘You will know that it was the Lord when he gives you meat to eat in the evening and all the bread you want in the morning, because he has heard your grumbling against him. Who are we? You are not grumbling against us, but against the Lord.’

9 Then Moses told Aaron, ‘Say to the entire Israelite community, “Come before the Lord, for he has heard your grumbling.”’

10 While Aaron was speaking to the whole Israelite community, they looked towards the desert, and there was the glory of the Lord appearing in the cloud.

11 The Lord said to Moses, 12 ‘I have heard the grumbling of the Israelites. Tell them, “At twilight you will eat meat, and in the morning you will be filled with bread. Then you will know that I am the Lord your God.”’

Exodus 16:4-12, NIV

The passage clearly says things more than once. It reads like there are two accounts of the same event with slight variations in the same passage. It does not read like it was written by a modern western historian. But there's a simple reason for that - it wasn't written by a modern western historian - it was written by an ancient Israelite, and they wrote rather differently from us.

Take the Psalms, for example. The basic literary technique in Psalms is that you say something, then you say it again using slightly different words - sometimes giving a little more information, sometimes not.

Come, let us sing for joy to the Lord;
let us shout aloud to the Rock of our salvation.
2 Let us come before him with thanksgiving
and extol him with music and song.

3 For the Lord is the great God,
the great King above all gods.
4 In his hand are the depths of the earth,
and the mountain peaks belong to him.
5 The sea is his, for he made it,
and his hands formed the dry land.

Psalm 95:1-5, NIV

No-one in their right mind would suggest that "the Lord is the great God" must have been written by a different person from "the great King above all gods". That's how Hebrew poetry works. So we shouldn't be surprised if Hebrew prose shows some of the same structures. There's often repetition; there's often clarification. It may well be linked to the fact it was originally written in a non-literate culture, so was written to be remembered easily.

But they don't just repeat randomly; there are all kinds of interesting structures in Hebrew prose. One of the most common is the chiasm, where the passage repeats itself in a mirror image around a central verse. Exodus 16 is one of those:

The whole section is exposing the fact that the Israelites are doubting that God is with them. The passage points to the fact that God will show his presence among them by providing them food. It's a carefully constructed work of literary art rather than a badly meshed together group of extracts from sources.

Now a decent commentary will spend more time on the important aspects of the structure rather than JEDP, but most won't. Decent teaching material on the Pentateuch will spend more time discussing structures like that than JEDP, but most doesn't. And that makes me sad.

Christians and the OT Law

Here are 10 quick tips on how to apply and understand the Old Testament Law as Christians.

1. The Law isn't just commandments. The Jewish word usually translated "law" - Torah - actually refers to the first 5 books of the Bible. What we read as commandments are set within the context of story, and are inseparable from it.
2. The Law was always about how to respond to salvation. Just before the 10 Commandments are given comes the wonderful Exodus 19. The Law, for the people of Israel, was about how to respond to the fact that God had already saved them, and how to continue as God's saved people.
3. The Law was given to the nation of Israel - it was given in a specific time and context to a specific group of people to show them how to respond to God saving them from slavery in Egypt. It wasn't given to 21st century Gentile Christians living in the UK (or anywhere else). So it doesn't apply directly to us.
4. The Law was given in the knowledge it wouldn't be kept. Just after the commandments finish, in Deuteronomy 32, comes a wonderful song from Moses responding to the law. And in it, he recognises that the people won't keep the law and will need saving again. Jesus isn't therefore a Plan B, he is part 2 (or 3, or whatever) of Plan A. The Law shows us that we are incapable of keeping it, despite the best possible carrots and the worst possible sticks. The problem is the human heart.
5. Jesus is the perfect Law-keeper. But Jesus kept the Law perfectly. He did what we could not do.
6. Jesus embodies the character of God as revealed in the Law. He doesn't just fulfil the Law by not breaking it - he shows us more clearly the God who gave the Law.
7. Jesus is the answer to the problem posed by the Law. The problem the Law shows is that even if God rescues us, we still can't live up to it. Jesus solves that by rescuing us from our own inadequacy, from God's right anger against that inadequacy, and by giving us his Spirit to live in us and transform us.
8. The Law reveals the character of God our Father, especially in the importance of love - loving God and those around us, as well as showing us worked examples of what that love looks like in the culture of the time. We can therefore apply it to how we should respond to God's greater salvation in Jesus, but to do that takes work. There's a great outline of how to go about it in CJH Wright's book Old Testament Ethics for the People of God.
9. The Law leads us to God the Son, and shows us our need of his sin-bearing sacrifice.
10. The Law shows us our need for transformation by God the Holy Spirit. In New Testament thought, the Spirit replaces the Law. That is why there are so many parallels between Pentecost and Sinai.

What have I missed off? Anything important?

Review - OT Ethics for the People of God by Chris Wright

I used to dream of one day writing a book about how Christians should understand the Old Testament Law. It wouldn't make the mistake of saying the OT Law was a covenant of works rather than grace, nor would it make the mistake of assuming either that we should obey the OT Law or that we could ignore it. Instead, it would see what it meant for the OT Law to be Israel's response to God saving them by grace, and then apply it to us today. Only I'm not going to bother now, because I've discovered that Chris Wright did it years ago and did it much better than I could ever do.

Wright goes beyond the usual bounds of thinking about OT ethics. He stresses the importance of understanding the society and community as a whole (rather than just the rather Western individualism) and of understanding the ethics not just from the statute law but also from the more theological and narrative sections.

The distinctiveness of Old Testament ethics is ... the distinctiveness of a whole community's ethical response to unique historical events in which they saw the hand of their God.

Wright is superb on so many topics - the politics and economics of OT Israel, the role of family life, the implications for fellowship in the Church, attitudes to slavery, etc.

If I were to criticise the book, I would say that it is too short at (only!) 500-odd pages. He doesn't have space to think about how the New Testament handles the OT Law, or to go into much detail in areas like sexual ethics, feminist critiques of Israel, the implications of the OT village elders for church eldership, ... Having established his principles, he only has the space to pick a few examples and apply them. But given all that, this is a magnificent place to start to think on a deeper level about the ethical implications of the Old Testament for the church, and to engage with more academic scholarship on the issue.

The most fun (and encouragement, and challenge, and encounter with God) I've had reading an academic book for years!

Tattoos and the Body of Christ

Following on from my previous post, one of the obvious markers of social class (round here at least) is tattoos.

Working class men, especially of my age, tend to have obvious tattoos. Middle class men don't. I don't live in an especially rough area, it's certainly a lot nicer than some places I've lived. But it's a fairly traditional working class housing estate, and I'm conscious that I'm about as middle class as it is possible to be, and I don't really fit in.

Q. What proportion of men aged between 25 and 60 have noticeable tattoos?
A. According to this US page, 40% of people aged between 25 and 40 have tattoos. I can't find stats for Britain. I'd guess at least 50% of men on this estate do... There are 3 or 4 guys in the congregation with noticeable tattoos, and a few women as well.

Q. What proportion of male clergy aged between 25 and 60 have noticeable tattoos?
A. I'd guess very low. I know hundreds of male clergy in that age bracket, and I can hardly think of any with noticeable tattoos. Isn't there a question there about being incarnational?

Because of the way the C of E works, I only get three years here. If I knew I was spending my life trying to reach this sort of estate, I'd seriously consider getting a tattoo, maybe like Pete Postlethwaite's in Romeo + Juliet (see above). Don't know what my wife would say though!

Theologically, tattoos were banned for Israelites in the OT Law (Lev 19:28). But we're not Israelites, and in the NT, we're told Jesus has a tattoo (Rev 19:16), which is probably symbolic rather than literal.

School of Theology 3

The third School of Theology session was a Bible overview from the point of view of God's promise to Moses.

Audio available here, powerpoint here.

Shortened audio (CD length) available from the church office.

Tamar and Judah - Genesis 38

It tends to be omitted from people's pattern of the regular reading of Scripture - for example, it doesn't feature at all in the RCL. It is entirely surrounded by the Joseph story, yet it's almost always omitted from that too. But it isn't just a random bit of story from somewhere else that got caught here.

A few quick thoughts about Genesis 38...

See, the Joseph story ends in Genesis 50 with two sons being blessed - Joseph and Judah. It's actually the story of both of them - Joseph goes on to be the father of the largest number of Israel, and Judah becomes the ancestor of its kings. Judah's last action before Gen 38 was in chapter 37, where he suggests selling Joseph into slavery rather than killing him. That wasn't motivated by compassion for Joseph at all - it was rather because you can make more money by selling your own half-brother into slavery than you can by murdering him. He next features in chapter 44, where he offers his life in place of his half-brother Benjamin, who he thinks is guilty, and in doing so becomes a type of Christ.

In Genesis 38, Judah has three sons. The first one, Er, marries a girl called Tamar, but he dies. The second one, Onan, marries her in accordance with ancient custom, but he dies too because he is wicked. Judah won't let her marry the third son, and instead sends her back to her father. She recognises this as an abandonment, pretends to be a prostitute, and seduces Judah, taking his seal, staff and cord. It's also just the sort of story that would get decent viewing figures on daytime TV and sell quite a few books if it was turned into a novel well. Are we missing out by the way we try to sanitise the Bible and just present the "nice" stories. (Hint: the answer is yes).

In chapter 38, Judah is good at calling others to fulfil their responsibilities, even his own son Onan (v8-9), who fails because he doesn't want to endanger his own inheritance. But Judah himself fails to fulfil those same responsibilities because he doesn't want to endanger his own inheritance (v11, 14).

Tamar tricks Judah into sleeping with her. This leads to Judah pronouncing the death sentence on her, and then we get the stunning denoument.

About three months later Judah was told, "Your daughter-in-law Tamar is guilty of prostitution, and as a result she is now pregnant."
Judah said, "Bring her out and have her burned to death!"

As she was being brought out, she sent a message to her father-in-law. "I am pregnant by the man who owns these," she said. And she added, "See if you recognize whose seal and cord and staff these are."

Judah recognized them and said, "She is more righteous than I, since I wouldn't give her to my son Shelah."

In the space of just two verses, Judah goes from saying "put her to death" to saying "she is more righteous than I". He understands for the first time just how much of a sinner he is, and that realisation transforms him.

It frees him to forgive Tamar. It frees him to offer his life for Benjamin. Little though he knows it, it enables him to become the ancestor of both David and Jesus, because they were descended from the twins that Tamar was carrying!

God reaches into the messy, mucky situation of this world, and uses it to transform Judah, to bring status to Tamar, and ultimately to redeem the world. That's the sort of God we serve and worship!/p>

School of Theology 2

The second School of Theology session was on Saturday, this time looking at the whole Bible through the lens of God's promise to Abraham. The main problem that came up in feedback was the poor acoustics, which are reflected in the quality of the recording - sorry! It'll be sorted for next time!

Slides and audio available.

Jesus Fulfilling the 10 Commandments

I was pointed to this yesterday, and thought it was rather cool. "Jesus is not only a perfect law-keeper (according to his humanity), but that according to his deity he is the one we honor and worship when we keep the law." Here are (slightly modified) versions of John Frame's comments on how Christ fulfils the 10 Commandments interspersed with the actual commandments (Exodus 20, NIV).

You shall have no other gods before me.

The first commandment teaches us to worship Jesus as the one and only Lord, Savior, and mediator (Acts 4:12, 1 Tim. 2:5).

You shall not make for yourself an idol in the form of anything in heaven above or on the earth beneath or in the waters below. You shall not bow down to them or worship them; for I, the LORD your God, am a jealous God, punishing the children for the sin of the fathers to the third and fourth generation of those who hate me, but showing love to a thousand {generations} of those who love me and keep my commandments.

In the second commandment, Jesus is the one perfect image of God (Col. 1:15, Heb. 1:3). Our devotion to him precludes worship of any other image.

You shall not misuse the name of the LORD your God, for the LORD will not hold anyone guiltless who misuses his name.

In the third commandment, Jesus is the name of God, that name to which every knee shall bow (Phil. 2:10-11; cf. Is. 45:23).

Remember the Sabbath day by keeping it holy. Six days you shall labor and do all your work, but the seventh day is a Sabbath to the LORD your God. On it you shall not do any work, neither you, nor your son or daughter, nor your manservant or maidservant, nor your animals, nor the alien within your gates. For in six days the LORD made the heavens and the earth, the sea, and all that is in them, but he rested on the seventh day. Therefore the LORD blessed the Sabbath day and made it holy.

In the fourth commandment, Jesus is our Sabbath rest. In his presence, we cease our daily duties and hear his voice (Luke 10:38-42).

Honor your father and your mother, so that you may live long in the land the LORD your God is giving you.

In the fifth commandment, we honor Jesus who has brought us to be adopted as sons of the true Father (Rom 8:23).

You shall not murder.

In the sixth commandment, we honor him as the life (John 10:10, 14:6, Gal. 2:20, Col. 3:4) Lord of life (Acts 3:15, the one who gave his life that we might live (Mk. 10:45).

You shall not commit adultery.

In the seventh commandment, we honor him as our bridegroom who gave himself to cleanse us, to make us his pure, spotless bride (Eph. 5:22-33). We love him as no other.

You shall not steal.

In the eighth commandment, we honor Jesus as our inheritance (Eph. 1:11) and as the one who provides all the needs for his people in this world and beyond.

You shall not give false testimony against your neighbor.

In the ninth commandment, we honor him as God’s truth (John 1:17, 14:6), in whom all the promises of God are Yea and Amen (2 Cor. 1:20).

You shall not covet your neighbor's house. You shall not covet your neighbor's wife, or his manservant or maidservant, his ox or donkey, or anything that belongs to your neighbor."

In the tenth commandment, we honor him as our complete sufficiency (2 Cor. 3:5, 12:9) to meet both our external needs and the renewed desires of our hearts.

I'm not at all saying it exhausts the meaning of the 10 Commandments for us today. But it's kind of nice...

More Wordle Images

I've spent a bit of time today tinkering with Wordle, as previously featured here. Here are some of the results - all were created using Wordle, all use the ESV.

The Pentateuch:

The "historical books" (Western classification rather than Hebrew one):

Wisdom literature:

Prophets (Western classification):

And here's the whole Old Testament:

Sermon on Creation

Here's a sermon I preached recently on the topic of creation.

MP3 downloadable from here.

Joseph

Some scholars like to claim that as few of the events described in the Bible actually happened. It isn't at all rare to find people who say that Biblical history starts at about the time of Hezekiah (2 Kings) or David (2 Samuel), and that the earlier stuff is all myth. There are even some people who claim that the history starts in Ezra.

Of course, I don't agree with them, and I think it's a very cavalier approach to history to ignore the only documents we have that describe much of the earlier history. But outside the Bible, there isn't much evidence either way for events before David - Israel wasn't settled then in a way that produces much in the way of archaeology. There's some from the time of Joshua, but that's contested because it isn't clear and could be made to fit half a dozen very different scenarios.

And then something like this comes along. They've found some coins in Egypt from the right sort of time which seem to refer to Joseph. That's Joseph the son of Jacob (as in Genesis) rather than Joseph the husband of Mary. If these are real, they blow massive amounts of liberal Biblical scholarship out of the water. I believe the previous record for the oldest Biblical character referred to in an archaeological inscription was David (c. 1000 BC), but that was from a while later referring to the kings of Jerusalem as "sons of David". If this is the same Joseph, it pushes it right back to about 1600BC...

Right Use of the Old Testament

I was reading 1 Timothy 1 this morning, and realised that it could have been written to some modern Biblical scholars.

As I urged you when I went into Macedonia, stay there in Ephesus so that you may command certain persons not to teach false doctrines any longer or to devote themselves to myths and endless genealogies. Such things promote controversial speculations rather than advancing God's work—which is by faith. The goal of this command is love, which comes from a pure heart and a good conscience and a sincere faith. Some have departed from these and have turned to meaningless talk. They want to be teachers of the law, but they do not know what they are talking about or what they so confidently affirm.

We know that the law is good if one uses it properly. We also know that the law is made not for the righteous but for lawbreakers and rebels, the ungodly and sinful, the unholy and irreligious, for those who kill their fathers or mothers, for murderers, for the sexually immoral, for those practicing homosexuality, for slave traders and liars and perjurers. And it is for whatever else is contrary to the sound doctrine that conforms to the gospel concerning the glory of the blessed God, which he entrusted to me.

1 Timothy 1:3-11, TNIV

People shouldn't waste their time on myths, endless genealogies, or source criticism of the OT. The purpose of the Law (and Paul's examples all seem to be related to the 10 Commandments here) is not to give us insight into its sources or its relation to other ANE codes of law, but to tell people who are living wrongly how to live rightly.

Guilt Offerings

Random obscure OT details I found encouraging... And here it's some of the laws for cleansing from infectious skin diseases!

The LORD spoke to Moses, saying, "This shall be the law of the leprous person for the day of his cleansing...

And the priest shall take one of the male lambs and offer it for a guilt offering, along with the log of oil, and wave them for a wave offering before the LORD. And he shall kill the lamb in the place where they kill the sin offering and the burnt offering, in the place of the sanctuary. For the guilt offering, like the sin offering, belongs to the priest; it is most holy. The priest shall take some of the blood of the guilt offering, and the priest shall put it on the lobe of the right ear of him who is to be cleansed and on the thumb of his right hand and on the big toe of his right foot.

Lev 14:1-2, 12-14, ESV

Now what is really striking here is that leprosy seems to require a guilt offering for cleansing - it isn't just that people thought lepers were guilty, it was that God's law said that they needed a guilt offering to cleanse them. Now lets link that in with Jesus' attitude to lepers, and his ability to heal them...

Abraham, Sarah, Science and Human Rights

An interesting thought from Genesis about attitude to rights...

In Genesis 15 and 16, there is a real contrast between Abram and Sarai’s attitudes to their childlessness. Abram sees that his attitude is that he deserves nothing and everything is God's gift to him.

And Abram said, "You have given me no children; so a servant in my household will be my heir."
Genesis 15:3, NIV

This attitude and his trust in God’s provision results in his faith being credited to him as righteousness (15:6).

By contrast, Sarai’s attitude is one of seeing herself as entitled to “the normal course of events”.

"The LORD has kept me from having children.”
Genesis 16:2, NIV

Sarai’s unbelief results in the messy Hagar and Ishmael saga. She sees having children as her natural entitlement rather than a gift of God.

How does this reflect their attitudes to science? If we believe that God just set the universe up, and now it runs without him, then we could believe that we are entitled to nature working in the normal way. We would feel hard done by if we were kept from something normal. This is exactly how Sarai felt.

If, however, we recognise that everything in nature happens because God does it, then we see that everything good that happens to us happens by God’s grace. We already have a relationship with God, and we have already deserved his judgement and condemnation because of the way we reject him. So we do not deserve anything good from God, even if it is what he normally does. This leads to an attitude like Abram’s where we are grateful to him for what he gives us, and do not resent him not giving us what he has chosen to withhold.

Walking Tall

Apologies if this post sounds a bit American...

Now there was a famine in the land—besides the previous famine in Abraham's time—and Isaac went to Abimelek king of the Philistines in Gerar. The LORD appeared to Isaac and said, "Do not go down to Egypt; live in the land where I tell you to live. Stay in this land for a while, and I will be with you and will bless you. For to you and your descendants I will give all these lands and will confirm the oath I swore to your father Abraham. I will make your descendants as numerous as the stars in the sky and will give them all these lands, and through your offspring all nations on earth will be blessed, because Abraham obeyed me and did everything I required of him, keeping my commands, my decrees and my instructions." So Isaac stayed in Gerar.
Genesis 26:1-6, TNIV

How would Isaac have been feeling if he'd taken this to heart?

He is living as a nomad in the land. His father was the one who knew God and followed him. But his father was dead, and his sons were squabbling. His eldest and favourite son didn't even seem to care much about God and his promises. We don't have much record of Isaac's feelings towards God - the Bible doesn't go into anywhere near the detail it does with either his father Abraham or his younger son Jacob. So here is Isaac in the land, and there is yet another famine.

But God appears to him and tells him that he will bless him, and he will give the land to his descendants, and even bless all nations through his offspring!

What sort of confidence would Isaac have had? What sort of love for the land, knowing that even though for now he was a wanderer, one day his family would own all of it? As he climbed a hill and saw the view and knew "God has given this to me", even though he didn't actually have possession of it yet?

But surely in Christ, we have an even greater confidence than that! We are those to whom he says "You will inherit the earth" and "Yours is the kingdom of heaven." We can look at the world and say "My Father made this, and he owns it, and one day we will inherit it renewed when we finally come of age." We need bow to no man; we are sons and daughters of the Most High God, made as his and bought back with the price of the blood of his only Son, with God's own blood.

So how much should we walk tall, and have confidence in this world!

Paul and the Old Testament Law

I think I learnt to explain this more clearly this week...

On one hand, Paul clearly sees the obligation to obey the Law as having been abolished in Jesus (e.g Galatians 4:21-31). On the other hand, he clearly sees the Law as undergirding a lot of his arguments and his ideas about what is moral.

I think Colin Kruse summarises the situation well.

The Mosaic law was not their law, any more than the Mosaic covenant was their covenant. However, the OT in its entirety, including the law, was their Scripture, and that meant that it was useful for ‘teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness’ (2 Tim. 3:16 NIV), as long as it was read paradigmatically and not applied literally.
New Dictionary of Biblical Theology

So the Law in the Old Testament isn't our Law, but it is still our Scripture. It can still tell us what sin is, for example, and what God is like and what people are like, but it isn't a Law that we have to obey. Paul's description of what Christians are to do to the Law isn't obedience - it's fulfilment.

1 Corinthians 10 is a great example of this. Paul can say all of the following things to a group of (largely) Gentiles:

• The ancient Israelites are "our forefathers" v1
• They drank from Christ v4
• They are (counter-)examples for us v6, 11
• The Bible was written for the Church v11
• The fulfilment of the ages has come upon us v11.

We are not under the Law. But the Law is still our Scripture, and it still tells us what sin is, and we should not sin. It still tells us what God is like, and we should not disregard that.

Was Adam Immortal?

When I was younger, I used to spend a fair bit of time looking at and refuting lots of alleged contradictions in the Bible. They were mostly really really easy, which gave me confidence that the people arguing against the Bible didn't really have any good arguments. Here's an example of one of the better ones.

Now I'm studying academic theology, it turns out that there's a different set of poor arguments for contradictions in the Bible (though there are a few overlaps, such as the Abiathar one). It's not that they are any better - they're just more difficult to see. One of them is the question of whether Paul saw Adam as being immortal or not before he sinned, and the resolution is kind of interesting.

The Problem

If people want to argue that Paul saw Adam as immortal before he sinned, they tend to use Romans 5:12.

Therefore, just as sin came into the world through one man, and death through sin, and so death spread to all men because all sinned
Romans 5:12, ESV

In context, that verse is clearly talking about Adam, and death entering into the world because he sinned. (In the context of Romans 5, it's obvious it's human death, which means that it's a poor argument for a Young Earth, but that's not really relevant here. The point is that Adam died because he sinned.

And if they want to argue that Paul thought Adam was necessarily mortal, they tend to use 1 Corinthians 15.

So is it with the resurrection of the dead. What is sown is perishable; what is raised is imperishable. It is sown in dishonor; it is raised in glory. It is sown in weakness; it is raised in power. It is sown a natural body; it is raised a spiritual body. If there is a natural body, there is also a spiritual body. Thus it is written, "The first man Adam became a living being"; the last Adam became a life-giving spirit. But it is not the spiritual that is first but the natural, and then the spiritual. The first man was from the earth, a man of dust; the second man is from heaven. As was the man of dust, so also are those who are of the dust, and as is the man of heaven, so also are those who are of heaven. Just as we have borne the image of the man of dust, we shall also bear the image of the man of heaven.
1 Corinthians 15:42-49, ESV

Paul's argument is a little involved, but his main point is contrasting Adam's body, which was "dusty" and perishable with Christ's resurrection body, which was "spiritual" and imperishable, the implication being that Adam was intrinsically mortal, even before he sinned.

So what do we make of it?

The Solution

In Genesis, God says that Adam and Eve will die when they eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. They eat the fruit, God judges them. But he doesn't kill them immediately, and his words to them don't have anything to do with death. Instead, after the "curse" in Genesis 3, we see this:

And the LORD God said, "The man has now become like one of us, knowing good and evil. He must not be allowed to reach out his hand and take also from the tree of life and eat, and live forever." So the LORD God banished him from the Garden of Eden to work the ground from which he had been taken. After he drove the man out, he placed on the east side of the Garden of Eden cherubim and a flaming sword flashing back and forth to guard the way to the tree of life.
Genesis 2:22-24, NIV

In other words, the death sentence on Adam is by stopping him from getting access to the tree of life. He never was intrinsically immortal, it was only because he had access to the tree of life. And that manages to neatly fit with what Paul says in Romans 5 and 1 Corinthians 15. Adam was mortal, but he had access to the tree of life, which would have enabled him to live forever. But when he sinned, he lost that access.

I was encouraged by seeing quite how neatly that works. Hope others are too.

Christians and the Old Testament Law

One of the questions I am most often asked in my capacity as person who knows something about theology is what the point of the Old Testament Law is for Christians today. I've got to do a lot of reading about this in the near future, so my opinions might change, but here's roughly what I think after however many years it is of thinking about it so far...

There are two main purposes of the Old Testament Law, and both of them function for us as Christians.

First Purpose - Modelling a Response to Salvation

The first purpose is to model a response to God's salvation. Exodus 19 and Deuteronomy are very clear that the Law was how the Old Testament people of God were meant to live in response to God saving them. Of course, it's going to be different for us now, for loads of reasons, the biggest of which are:

• We've got the Holy Spirit indwelling us now
• We know about Jesus
• We aren't a theocratic state but a group of Christians living in countries that aren't Christian

That means it's often going to be hard work applying aspects of the OT Law to us today. Some areas are easier for others. For example, one of the big areas in the OT Law is a concern for social justice, and though the categories of who are oppressed are different today (due to a welfare state, less respect for the elderly, family breakdown and abortion legislation among other things), some of the ideas are still applicable. An even easier example would be commandments such as "do not murder", which pretty much just apply straight (though the punishments don't necessarily, given the different nature of the state).

A more difficult example would be some of the food laws and ceremonial laws which are about showing how holiness applies to every area of life. The OT Law doesn't apply directly to us, but it's all still relevant if we're willing to do the work.

Second Purpose - Showing Us We Need a Greater Salvation

The OT Law also points forwards to Jesus. It shows us that we are sinful and need to be forgiven - that we continually need God's grace, the indwelling of the Holy Spirit and the forgiveness that comes by the blood of Jesus.

Civil, Ceremonial, Moral?

The traditional way of doing this (I think Calvin used it, but he might have got it from somewhere) was to split the Law into civil, ceremonial and moral, and say that the ceremonial law was fulfilled in Christ, the moral law is still binding and the civil law is a model for how society should be, or something like that.

I don't like that distinction, for the simple reason that it isn't in the Old Testament, and it ends up being an arbitrary decision of the interpreter which bits are which.

Much better to ask questions like this of the whole OT Law:

• How does this point forwards to Jesus?
• What does this tell us about God?
• What does this say about how we should respond to our salvation in Jesus?

We don't have to obey the OT Law - it has been fulfilled in Christ, but it can be very useful in showing what it meant for the Israelites to be God's saved people, and hence point to what it means for us.

The discussion continues here.