Theology Thursday: Something to Sing About
Reading the Bible can be interesting sometimes, just trying to figure out what it is, exactly, I’m reading. There’s some history, which would seem fairly straightforward, but even then I know that this particular history was recorded for a reason, so there’s a didactic twist to it. And there are other apparent history portions that make me wonder if they’re written as history but intended only to teach a lesson.
And then there are the Epistles, where I’m conscious of reading someone else’s mail. And then there’s poetry. Reading Psalms, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, Song of Songs, and Job takes an extra bit of concentration sometimes, because the imagery and language style differ from Western Poetry.
And if the Epistles are like reading someone else’s mail, with all the challenges inherent there, what about Song of Songs? It’s like reading someone else’s love letters. Or even more than that, like spying on two lovers.
Throughout history, Blblical interpreters, uncomfortable with the idea that Song of Songs is basically about sex, have taken various approaches to allegorizing it. It’s about God’s relationship with Israel! It’s about Christ and the Church!
Yeah, it’s about sex. Which isn’t a bad thing, of course, because it’s nice to have a straightforward approval given, in the Bible, for sexuality in its proper place.
And yet, I’m still not sure what to make of it. I mean, it’s supposedly a celebration of married love, but isn’t it ostensibly penned by Solomon? Of the seven hundred wives and three hundred concubines? Doesn’t the whole polygamy thing dilute, somewhat, the specialness?
Then again, maybe I’m missing the point. Any tips on interpreting this book?
By the way, let the record show that I have now officially blogged about Song of Songs. One more crossed off The List, four more to go!
(Oh, and if you’re wondering why I’m in Song of Songs in February, it’s because I’ve been reading a chapter per day of Psalms and the other Poeticals. I’m saving Job for last.)
I believe I’m now out of topics for the foreseeable future, though I have a few theology books I could finish up and review. But if you wanted to lob me a topic, now would be a good time. (Use the Suggest a Topic!!! link!)
Theology Thursday: Redeemed
Back on New Year’s Eve, I engaged in a short debate-ish thing with my Esteemed Partner in Pavement Pounding about Jephthah, and specifically about whether he sacrificed his daughter in Judges 11. (Whoa, I just totally pulled that chapter reference out of my head! Sweet!) I took the negative proposition, that Jephthah did not sacrifice his daughter, though the wording of the passage seems to indicate he did. (You can go read it if you want. I’ll wait.)
Mostly my position is based in logic. And it goes like this:
- God does not approve of human sacrifice
- God approved of Jephthah (Hebrews 11)
- Therefore, Jephthah did not engage in human sacrifice
But then, a couple of weeks ago, I came across an additional bit of support for my position. (By the way, you’d probably like to know what I think Jephthah did sacrifice, right? The short answer is something acceptable.)
My new evidence came from Exodus 13, when the Lord commanded the consecration of the firstborn. Here’s the passage:
Exodus 13:12-13 (ESV):
12 you shall set apart to the LORD all that first opens the womb. All the firstborn of your animals that are males shall be the LORD’s. 13 Every firstborn of a donkey you shall redeem with a lamb, or if you will not redeem it you shall break its neck. Every firstborn of man among your sons you shall redeem.
The “shall be the LORD’s” part seems to indicate that they would be sacrificed. But not all species would be sacrificed. Only clean animals. Others would be redeemed with a lamb. And firstborn sons, in particular, were consecrated to the service of the Lord (see Numbers 3), though later the tribe of Levi was taken for that service (but all firstborn sons of other tribes still had to be redeemed).
But my main point here is that an Israelite couldn’t offer just anything to God. Even when bringing a clean animal to sacrifice, it had to be spotless. God seemed to be very particular about what could be offered.
In this passage, the example of a donkey is given. Checking Leviticus 11 (a lot of 11th chapters in this post), we note that the donkey doesn’t have cloven hooves, so it’s unclean. It has to be redeemed (or throttled, apparently).
So, back to Jephthah’s case. He promised to offer what came out of his tent to the Lord. But he was an Israelite, and knew that he could only offer something clean. Anything unclean, he would have to redeem. But it would still belong to the Lord.
So, Jephthah’s daughter would have been redeemed, but would have been consecrated to the Lord. If this is so, and she was dedicated to service, she may not have been able to marry. This makes a good deal more sense when one considers that she lamented not her impending death, but rather her virginity. Jephthah’s grief would be explained by his knowledge that his line would end with her, since she was his only daughter.
This also seems to match the chronology of Judges 11, as one of the concluding verses says this:
Judges 11:39 (NKJV, just because it’s more word-for-word)
39 And it was so at the end of two months that she returned to her father, and he carried out his vow with her which he had vowed. She knew no man.
It might be stretching things a bit, it seems the “she knew no man” happened after Jephthah had fulfilled the vow.
BTW, I’m comfortably out of the mainstream with my interpretation here. Most commentators think that in the time of the Judges, the Law wasn’t observed particularly well, and so resorting to human sacrifice wasn’t be all that surprising, and Jephthah was honored for keeping a painful vow. But the writer of Hebrews doesn’t mention the sacrifice at all, so I think my explanation fits.
Now that we’re done with that, I’m shocked that my feeble little brain is just now really connecting the redemption of the firstborn with the fact that mankind was redeemed by the Lamb of God. The unclean redeemed by the clean. The broader idea of redemption by a lamb/bull is pretty well documented, but this specific idea is just now settling in for me. Guess I need to keep reading.
Theology Thursday: Original Guilt or Original Sin?
I love coming back to the beginning of a Bible read-through. There’s something comforting in reading Genesis again. Of course, that comfort usually wears off about the time I get into Exodus. But I still revel in the beginning.
I’ve thought a lot about Origins in the last few years, and at this point I’m decidedly undecided on what to make of Genesis 1-3. I’m definitely not a Young-Earth Creationist, but I’m not ready to throw Adam and Eve out, either.
I’m planning on doing a post on Origins at some point, but I’m not ready for it yet. If I run short of topics, I’ll double back and hit it later. Or I’ll wait until next year. That’s the kind of priority I put on the topic.
As I said (well, wrote), I’m not ready to throw Adam and Eve out, because I still have to deal with The Fall. It’s a topic I haven’t studied as much as I need to, and at some point I want to read Bonhoeffer’s Creation and Fall.
But what I do understand is this: something happened. I know. Profound, right?
Now, some people want to say that Adam’s sin is somehow inherited by all his progeny, and not in some vague spiritual way, but as a stain on the soul that makes even a newborn ineligible for Heaven. I reject this idea.
I also reject the idea that, somehow, Adam’s sin explains our tendency to sin. And I think I can explain why I reject it.
Quick, off the top of your head, come up with two names of people in the Bible who didn’t have a fallen nature. (Old Testament only, please. And I’m not sure Jesus would be a correct answer anyway. I know this gets me into trouble at times, but I believe He was like us. But come back next week for more on that topic.)
Did you come up with the names? Or were you distracted by my little parenthetical (and inflammatory) statement? The two names I was looking for were:
Adam and Eve!!!
Yes, here we have an example of two people who were born without any stain of Original Sin on them. And how did they fare? You got it. They still sinned. They didn’t need a Fallen Nature to make them fall. So Original Sin certainly isn’t a good explanation for Why We Sin.
I’m not any closer to understanding our sinful natures, because without recourse to Original Sin, there’s a disturbing possibility: God created us with the tendency toward sin and then expected us to battle that tendency. Or He just created in us the ability to choose and didn’t tip the scales toward obedience or disobedience and we all get to choose (seems to fit with Romans 5:12). It’s an interesting brain-burner anyway.
So when it really comes down to it, I don’t have a problem with the doctrine of Original Sin, even if I don’t understand it, so much as the doctrine of Original Guilt. Yes, our First Parents sinned. Yes, we all sin. But we bear the burden of our sins, and not the sins of our parents. And I think the weight of Scripture is on my side here, what with all the insistence that children will not be punished for their parents’ sins. (And no, I don’t think Exodus 20:5 proves me wrong here.)
Thoughts? Original Sin or Original Guilt? Are we born stained? I’m happy to be corrected here.
Theology Thursday: Jesus, Joshua and Zombies
Working through the List, I’ve come down to Zechariah and Haggai. I’ll still have a couple of Old Testament books to hit next year, so look for those starting back up around April.
First, I need to get my Haggai bit out of the way. So it’s a history lesson of sorts. Most Biblically-literate folks know that Judah went into captivity in Babylon, which was subsequently conquered by the Medo-Persians. And then Cyrus let some of the Jews return home.
(This is covered in Ezra and Nehemiah. The last chapter of 2 Chronicles is also a good resource. Hmm…2 Chronicles is also on the List. But I’ll hit it next time around.)
During the rebuilding of the Temple and of the Jerusalem City Wall, a couple of prophets lent their encouragement (pointed and severe at times) to the builders. You guessed it: Zechariah and Haggai. Malachi probably figured in there somewhere, too.
Summary of Haggai: Build, folks! Build! And by the way, there’s a future Temple coming that’ll make this one you’re working on look pretty sad by comparison. (Might be referring to the Church.)
So that’s Haggai in a nutshell, although it’s not really in need of condensing, comprising only two chapters. Still, you will note that I’ve now included Haggai in a blog post.
Now, about Jesus and Joshua and Zechariah. I’ve actually already written a blog post titled The Three Joshuas, wherein I observed that there are three (at minimum) Important Dudes in the Bible who are named Joshua. The first is fairly obvious, being the Joshua of the Book of Joshua. The second, and the one mentioned in Zechariah, is Joshua the High Priest in the days of the rebuilding of the Temple after the Babylonian captivity. The third, to spoil my other post, is Jesus.
(I just re-read my old post and noticed that I’d already mentioned Haggai. Can you believe that? How’d I miss that when I did all my Bible-book-tagging?)
Now that I’ve gone back and read the third chapter of Zechariah, I’m reluctant to deliver on the Zombie promise. But a promise is a promise. But Chapter Three is absolutely beautiful. I think, and I may be way off base, that there’s a picture of Christ’s redeeming work being presented. It’s only ten verses, but I really don’t want to copy the whole passage in here. Brevity is the soul of wit and all that. Ship. Sailed.
But I’ll summarize (go read the full text if you like). Zechariah has a vision of Joshua (Jeshua) the High Priest standing before the Angel of the Lord, and he’s wearing filthy garments, and Satan is accusing him. Satan is rebuked, and Joshua’s filthy clothes are removed, along with his sins, and he’s clothed in fine priestly garments.
I wonder if this is a picture of Christ being clothed with our sins, then having them removed from him. The passage actually indicates that there’s symbolism at work here:
Zechariah 3:8 (NLT):
“Listen to me, O Jeshua the high priest, and all you other priests. You are symbols of things to come.”
The passage goes on to say that the Lord would one day remove the sins of “this land” in one day. I know from my past studies that “land” is the Hebrew word “erets,” which can also be translated “world.”
One other thing of note is that Paul encourages Christians, “clothe yourselves with Christ.” Maybe there’s a parallel with Zechariah’s imagery?
Well, that’s about all I have to say about that. Let’s move on to the much anticipated and probably very disappointing bit about zombies. Appropriate, don’t you think, that one of the “Z” books of the Bible should have a description of something sounding a bit like zombies?
Here’s the passage:
Zechariah 14:12-13 (NLT):
12 And the Lord will send a plague on all the nations that fought against Jerusalem. Their people will become like walking corpses, their flesh rotting away. Their eyes will rot in their sockets, and their tongues will rot in their mouths. 13 On that day they will be terrified, stricken by the Lord with great panic. They will fight their neighbors hand to hand.
It’s really quite vivid, isn’t it? Flesh and eyes rotting away, attacking people with their hands rather than weapons? Looks a lot like your standard Zombie Movie. I have really no idea how this prophecy was or will be fulfilled, though as a partial-preterist, I’m inclined to think that all of Zechariah 14 was fulfilled spiritually by the ministry of Christ and the Church. But I need to study the issue further.
But if you look for a literal fulfillment of this, there may well be a Zombie Apocalypse in store for the world.
Theology Thursday: Prophetic Pop-ups, Part Z
(Bible-Reading Update: Finished with the Once Through the Old, Twice Through the New Read-Through! Now I just have to go back and finish reading Halley’s Bible Handbook.)
I’ve always thought that whoever put the Minor Prophets in their current collected order did us all a favor by having four of the last five alternate their first letters. Habakkuk, Zephaniah, Haggai, Zechariah is fairly easy to remember. Though I suppose one still has to remember which H and which Z goes where…
You know, this introduction worked much better when I had it titled “Catching some HZs.” I love coming up with titles, and since I probably won’t use it next week, I just had to tell somebody, because I really liked it.
Of course, I’m still trying to write Theology Thursday posts about all the books of the Bible I’ve managed to miss. Habakkuk I’ve covered. Reeeeallly tangentially, or to use a word I’ve seen used by such persons as myself, orthogonally. Actually, to be honest, I really just wanted to write that word again. Because if you follow the link I provided, you’ll find the Habakkuk passage is quite important, even material, to the argument I make.
I’ll save Zechariah for next week, and even throw in a bit of Haggai because they go together really nicely. But what a smattering of topics one finds in Zechariah. Jesus and zombies. Seriously. Tell your friends.
But for this week, it’s just Zephaniah. (I was going to do Haggai and Zephaniah, hence the defunct “HZ” title, but they just don’t play well together.)
Side note: Thinking of nicknames for Zephaniah, I thought “Zeph,” which reminds me of either third or sixth grade (Mr. Sayles for both), when we had two girls named Stephanie, and Mr. Sayles called one of them “Steph” for short. Which sounds a lot like “Seth” when you’re not really paying attention. Not that I was ever not really paying attention. I was just paying attention to thinking about Star Wars or something.
I also may have been called “Zeph” by microcephalic baseball coaches. I know Zeke and Zed were employed as approximations of my extremely difficult name. And I definitely had a boss (my rock-crushing job) who called me “Zeth.”
(A Theology Thursday post is like a box of chocolates, don’t you think?)
One thing you find when reading the prophets is that, after predicting judgment on Israel or Judah, there’s generally a ray of hope in there, too. Zephaniah prophesied only a short time before Babylon came and sacked Jerusalem in 586BC. But he promised them that it wouldn’t be the end of them:
Zephaniah 3:15 (NLT)
15 For the Lord will remove his hand of judgment
and will disperse the armies of your enemy.
And the Lord himself, the King of Israel,
will live among you!
At last your troubles will be over,
and you will never again fear disaster.
The interesting thing you notice here is that the last line I just quoted seems to fly in the face of what we know of the rest of the history of Israel. In 70AD, the Romans sacked Jerusalem, and later made a complete mess of the rest of the country. And need I mention the dreadful things that befell the Jews at the hands of the Nazis? Or any of the other pogroms executed against them in various places?
So what’s this supposed promise that they’ll never see trouble again?
Mightn’t it be that this prophecy applied to a certain group and not the nation as a whole? The believing remnant, perhaps? Those who would eventually follow Christ? It would certainly make the “King of Israel will live among you” part make more sense.
For the sake of balance here, a premillenialist would apply this to a Future Millennial Reign of Christ, which manages to handle the literal interpretation quite well. The problem with this interpretation is that this prophecy really doesn’t seem to be a far-future prediction, given that Judah hadn’t even been exiled yet.
Either way, it seems this prophecy was targeted at something that would be fulfilled after the return from exile. I just favor a past/present fulfillment of it.
So, that’s one HZ down, one to go!
Theology Thursday: Prophet Pop-ups, Part the First
I really wish that when I compiled my List of Uncovered Books of the Bible, that there wouldn’t have been so many close together. What’s a guy to do when, in a three week span, he’s supposed to read basically all the Minor Prophets and the last few Epistles, and they’re all on the List?
Micah, Nahum, Zephaniah, Haggai, Zechariah, 3 John, and Jude. I’ve read them all now. I have no idea how I’ll manage to cover them all. Oh, I could leave a few for next year, but that’s just not something I’m prepared to do. Besides, if I did it, I’d be in the same boat next year. I’m all for procrastination, but this would eat away at me for a year.
(By the way, I haven’t done a Bible-Reading Update recently. So here it is: I’m done with the OT, and up to Revelation on my second pass through the NT. So I’ll finish next week if not earlier.)
Micah’s not difficult, really. There’s the famous Micah 6:8 passage from a song that reminds me of college. Love that one. Nahum’s a bit more difficult, being a prophecy against Ninevah. No being swallowed by a big fish to make it more Sunday Schoolish.
The nice thing is that I think the Prophets, particularly the Minor Prophets (or the Book of the Twelve in the Hebrew Bible) are probably the least-read of any books of the Bible. So anything I write might actually seem insightful. If only I had some insight.
I think I’ll just pull a couple of key quotes out and see what happens. First, Micah. I couldn’t go with the more known passage. Although this one isn’t exactly unknown, either:
Micah 4:3-4 (NLT):
3 The Lord will mediate between peoples
and will settle disputes between strong nations far away.
They will hammer their swords into plowshares
and their spears into pruning hooks.
Nation will no longer fight against nation,
nor train for war anymore.
4 Everyone will live in peace and prosperity,
enjoying their own grapevines and fig trees,
for there will be nothing to fear.
Sometimes, we Christians wonder how the Jews could have missed that Jesus was their Messiah. We point to the Virgin Birth and his Suffering Servant role in fulfilling famous passages from Isaiah. What we don’t recognize is that Jesus didn’t do the things they expected. This passage from Micah is one that doesn’t seem to have been fulfilled, and this is what many Jews were looking for. Peace. Prosperity. This certainly hasn’t happened.
Christians often point to a future Millennial Reign of Christ for fulfillment of this prophecy. But since the Old Testament really doesn’t predict the whole Rapture/Millennium/Second Coming timeline (defaulting to premillennialism here), the argument fails to persuade.
For someone like me, who doesn’t look for a future Millennium, I look at this in a non-literal way and say that Christ did fulfill it and that the peace and prosperity are spiritually fulfilled in the Church. So if you haven’t heard that before, you’ve heard it now.
By the way, Micah was evidently from Moresheth, which is how “More of Seth” would sound if you held onto your tongue while saying it. I’m not suggesting you try it, but you’re wondering if I’m right, aren’t you?
Now, to Nahum.
Nahum 1:7-8 (NLT)
7 The Lord is good,
a strong refuge when trouble comes.
He is close to those who trust in him.
8 But he will sweep away his enemies
in an overwhelming flood.
He will pursue his foes
into the darkness of night.
This one reminds of Paul’s “Behold the kindness and severity of God.”
I don’t have any further insight on this though. Tune in again next week for non-insight on one of the other dangling uncovered books.
Theology Thursday: Jonah’s Complaint
Most churchgoers are pretty familiar with the story of the prophet Jonah. They could probably tell you that Jonah was instructed by God to go and preach a message of pending destruction against Ninevah, capital of the Assyrians.
And most could probably tell you that Jonah didn’t want to go, so he ran. And that along the way he ran into nasty weather aboard ship, got thrown into the water, swallowed by a big fish, then mended his ways and went and did his preaching.
But none of that stuff is really the important part of the story. Why didn’t Jonah want to go and preach against Ninevah?
Answer: He was afraid the Assyrians would repent and that God would forgive them and not carry out His judgment against them. (According to Jonah’s own words in 4:2)
This strikes me as pretty cold. And he doesn’t stop at just complaining. He takes it up a level:
Jonah 4:3 (NLT)
3 Just kill me now, LORD! I’d rather be dead than alive because nothing I predicted is going to happen.
So he was seriously emotionally invested in God wiping out Ninevah. He really wanted to see it happen.
Perhaps Jonah wouldn’t have objected to prophesying against Ninevah if he’d been allowed to do it from home. You know, to walk around Israel, telling everybody that Assyria was going down!!!
(Just because I’m working through the List, I’ll point out that perhaps Obadiah’s prophecy against Edom was more of the type Jonah wanted to do. And it certainly came true, as the Edomites ceased to exist not long after. In fact, Herod Agrippa II is generally thought to have been the last Edomite. There, now I’ve mentioned Obadiah, too.)
Anyhow, I want to bring the whole Jonah thing around to Universalism. As I’ve mentioned before, I’m not a Universalist, though I’m attracted to the position to some extent, though more emotionally than Scripturally (and I’m planning to read a good book about it just to see what the Scriptural case is).
In the last chapter of Jonah, while Jonah is in full-emo mode, God makes a vine grow to provide shade for the Pouting Prophet as he sits pouting outside the city. Then God causes it to shrivel and die. Once again, Jonah is mighty put out by the whole thing. He’s vexed, seriously vexed.
God reminds him that the plant came up in a day and died in a day, but Ninevah was a city of thousands of people. Shouldn’t He care for a such a great city much more than Jonah cared for the plant? Not to mention the fact that God made both the people in the city and the plant about which Jonah seemed to care so much.
One common objection to Universalism is that it’s not fair. After all, why should we suffer through this life, denying ourselves, if ultimately even those who reject God their whole lives will be saved.
And maybe I’m stretching Jonah a bit to say that if God chooses to save people, in whatever way he chooses to save them, we have no right to object to it.
Just a thought. Objections? Rebuttals?
BTW, my Esteemed Partner in Pavement Pounding (EPPP), this is where you can enter your comment from our Monday (or was it last Friday) run…
Next up on the List will have to be Micah, and I really have a hard time believing I haven’t blogged about Micah before. But databases don’t lie. (Though queries can be poorly designed.)
Theology Thursday Lite: The Prophetic Heads-Up
Still working through The List. This time, it’s a bit of meandering about Amos.
At some point I need to strictly define what constitutes Theology Thursday Lite. Because I’m pushing five hundred words here, and that’s only lite compared to some of my more brevity-challenged musings.
I don’t have really defined thoughts on my topic this week, and I’m hoping to get some discussion going. It would probably help if I had more readers, but I appreciate everybody who does read my stuff. So if you’re out there, lob me your thoughts on this.
First, our text:
Amos 3:5-7 (NLT, emphasis mine)
5 Does a bird ever get caught in a trap
that has no bait?
Does a trap spring shut
when there’s nothing to catch?
6 When the ram’s horn blows a warning,
shouldn’t the people be alarmed?
Does disaster come to a city
unless the Lord has planned it?
7 Indeed, the Sovereign Lord never does anything
until he reveals his plans to his servants the prophets.
So, to my discussion question. Does verse 7 indicate something that’s true for all time, or something that applied only to the particular audience of Amos’s prophecy?
If it’s true for all time, then it invites the question, “Where are the prophets today?”
Of course, there’s no shortage of charlatans (I originally wrote ‘morons’) on Christian TV who claim to be prophets. Even worse, there are those who, after a disaster, claim that it was God’s judgment, without providing any reason to take them at their word. (They’d get more benefit of the doubt if they’d perhaps uttered a prophecy about the event before it happened.)
So we’ve got two questions for discussion. Does God truly not act without revealing His will to prophets? And if so, where are these prophets?
A couple of thoughts from me, or at least what passes for thought around here:
First, about the question of Amos uttering a universally true statement. I’m not even sure he meant it as anything other than generally true. Because verse 7 is in a list of truisms which don’t have to be taken in a wooden, literal sense. After all, can’t a trap spring shut on its own? Can’t a bird get caught in a trap out of sheer bad luck (or good luck for the trapper)?
And maybe there’s something lost in translation.
And second, about the question of where the prophets are. There are those who would say that under the New Covenant there are no prophets. However, to those inclined to so opine, I would point out a certain Agabus, mentioned twice in Acts (Acts 11 and 21), in addition to Philip’s four daughters, who are described as at least having the gift of prophecy (Acts 21).
And perhaps that’s the question: Are there prophets today, or merely people with the gift of prophecy? (Oh, and to those inclined to say that the gift of prophecy has ceased, your position is not supportable. If you think it is, I’d welcome the explanation.)
I guess that was somewhat Lite.
(Oh, and Happy Thanksgiving!)
Theology Thursday: God of the Living
This week, I finished reading through Luke for the second time this year. I came across two questions I considered running by Steve Gregg on The Narrow Path. But since his show is during my workday, I don’t call very often. And, I figured, why not just try to noodle it out on my own?
The passage in question is Jesus’ discussion with the Sadducees about the Resurrection, after the Sadducees asked Jesus who a multiple-times-married woman would be married to in the Resurrection. Jesus replied that there isn’t marriage in Heaven, but then elaborated further on his opponents’ mistaken views of the Resurrection. Here’s the key passage:
Luke 20:37-38 (NLT):
37 "But now, as to whether the dead will be raised, even Moses proved this when he wrote about the burning bush. Long after Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob had died, he referred to the Lord as 'the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob.' 38 So he is the God of the living, not the dead, for they are all alive to him."
What I’ve been pondering is this: In what sense is Jesus implying that Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob are “alive to [God]”?
Are we to understand that the Old Testament saints were dwelling with God in Heaven? That’s possible, I suppose, even if the Traditional View of the Church has, as I understand it, always been that Heaven was not opened until Christ rose from the dead. (I’m not sure if this is Biblical, since Elijah and Enoch apparently got in a bit earlier.)
I suppose it could also be that Jesus isn’t actually implying any such thing, but is rather just pointing to the fact that Abe, Zack, and Jake would eventually be resurrected. (If we posit God’s being outside time, then I guess we could just say that from God’s perspective, they’re already there. But I’m also not sure about that bit of doctrine, although it make some sense.)
I guess what I’m saying here is that I don’t really know what Jesus was saying, and I’d like some help.
Interestingly, I came across a great pro-Resurrection passage in Isaiah this morning, and I’d be curious to ask the Sadducees how this could be any clearer:
Isaiah 26:19 (NLT)
19 But those who die in the Lord will live;
their bodies will rise again!
Those who sleep in the earth
will rise up and sing for joy!
For your life-giving light will fall like dew
on your people in the place of the dead!
I suppose there’s room to look at this passage in a non-literal sense (and I actually tend to do that with quite a bit of Isaiah). But it seems pretty unambiguous.
(I’ve just realized that the Sadducees only held to the first five books of the Bible. So they wouldn’t have accepted Isaiah as authoritative.)
Thoughts? Any help here?
Theology Thursday: Atonement by Faithfulness
Okay, true, I may have recently written about how the Book of Proverbs (and individual proverbs) shouldn't be taken as absolute or literal, but I thought I'd ramble about this:
By fearing the Lord, people avoid evil.
On the face of it, there might be two ways to read this. The two options, in the New Revised Seth Version, might look like this:
God's love and faithfulness result in atonement for sin.
OR
A man finds atonement through his faithfulness and love.
The question is, are we talking about God's love and faithfulness or man's? Because if the latter, isn't that looking like salvation/forgiveness through works?
I did a quick look at NETBible, and the various translations mostly agree with my latter translation (though the NKJV, my favorite, seems to imply the God-centered one).
The key thing to look at here is the second half of the proverb:
And since Proverbs and Hebrew poetry are distinguished by, among other things, parallelism, we know that the second half has to basically mean the same as the first half. So we're definitely talking about man's actions here.
That being said, I'm not sure this is really implying that man can gain God's favor or atone for his sins by acting in a certain way. In fact, I'm more drawn to the conclusion that what's being suggested here is that unfailing love and faithfulness lead to atonement between people. The second half of the verse would then instruct further that the fear of the Lord avoids the conflict in the first place.
I'm not stuck on this interpretation, of course, because the verse may simply be instructing in the proper attitude one should take toward God. In this case, it wouldn't be saying atonement was being purchased by such actions, but that the kind of person who obtains atonement will be one who is characterized by love and faithfulness to God and His Commandments.
I'm still up in the air about this, so I'd appreciate anyone else's thoughts.
I really need to hurry up and read that book about the various views of The Atonement.