The Lost Ark
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Welcome to Halting Toward Zion, the podcast where we limp like Jacob to the Promised Land and talk about life, the universe, and everything along the way. I’m Emily Maxson here with Greg Uttinger.
We’re talking today about the lost ark and the raiders thereof – maybe not so much the raiders, but the lost ark.
This actually happened. This is history. This is not an Indiana Jones movie. How did this come about? What’s the significance of this?
We’re in 1 Samuel now, and 1 Samuel overlaps with Judges. Samson has been busy battling the Philistines himself, but what he began he was not able to finish. At some point in here the Philistines begin a more aggressive stance toward Israel. They’re coming in and they’re attacking them. Israel is finally gathering together their militias and trying to resist, but things are not going well at all.
Let us fetch the ark of the covenant of the Lord out of Shiloh unto us, that, when it cometh among us, it may save us out of the hand of our enemies.
For those who may not know – which at this point would seem unlikely to be anybody in our audience, if they’ve stuck with us this long – this was a golden chest or a box of wood overlaid with gold where Moses put the 10 Commandments as he had brought them down from Sinai, the second time, having smashed the first set, with the golden calf and all that.
The chest had a cover or lid called the mercy seat – at least, that’s our English version of it. It had angels or cherubim on top with outstretched wings. And this ark, this box, this chest they were to store within the Holy of Holies, the holiest chamber of God’s tabernacle, his mobile home/temple that had been constructed at the foot at Sinai.
It had been there and it hadn’t done a whole lot, aside from travel with them and be the place where God revealed himself privately, except perhaps during the wilderness march when the glory cloud kind of hovered over Israel, light by night and shade by day and all that.
They knew it was special and they knew that they weren’t supposed to behind the veil that concealed the ark. Only the high priest could go once a year on the Day of Atonement on Yom Kippur, and sprinkle there the blood of the atonement goat and thus make propitiation for Israel’s sins. God would look at the broken law through the blood of the goat, through the blood of the substitute, and be content to dwell among his people for the next year. We’ve talked about some of this before in other podcasts.
Right now the tabernacle was at a place called Shiloh, and the ark was just there, doing what the ark was supposed to be doing – being left alone except once a year. The idea of grabbing it and using it as some kind of magical talisman was something that no one had ever thought of. It had gone into battle about once. That was in the siege of Jericho when it had been part of the procession that had surrounded the city a number of times, but the ark was not super-charged or super-powered. It didn’t shoot death rays or release death angels or anything like that.
It was sacramental. God had made promises concerning it, and God was pleased to manifest his glory in connection with it – not all the time, but as he pleased – so there was no reason to think, if you’re thinking biblically, that having this thing with you is going to help. What you want is God with you.
We don’t have a good New Testament equivalent, except maybe arming your soldiers with a bunch of Bibles and having them go up and slap the enemy.
Some holy water, toss some communion wine on them – it’s not designed to do that, and God made no such promises concerning it.
He did say, “Don’t touch it,” and on a later occasion someone will touch it and God will kill him, and he was a Levite. At the end of this episode some people will open and look in it, and that won’t go well for them either, but there’s no promise that this is some kind of magic box.
The line from Raiders of the Lost Ark is, “Oh yes, the Bible speaks of the ark leveling mountains and laying waste to entire regions. An army that carries the ark before it is invincible.”
The elders of Israel in their mentality had basically descended into a magical view of the world. “God reveals himself in things, and here is the greatest of the things and if we bring this thing it will be a channel of power and it will save us.”
So they send word back to Shiloh, a Levitical town, and the two priests, the young men Hophni and Phinehas, Eli’s sons, apparently decide, “Well, that sounds like a great idea. I’m sure there’s money in it for us someplace,” and they march right in, pull back the veil, go behind it into the Holy of Holies and pick up the ark and leave with it.
Now, it’s one thing to say, “Don’t touch the ark. Be afraid.” It’s another thing to say, “God let you touch the ark. He let you remove it.”
This is when you say, “No, be afraid. Be very afraid. This is not going well. You should have died on the spot. The fact that you didn’t means the judgement is just beginning,” and so it goes.
They take the ark back to the military encampment and the Philistines hear about it, as is their way. They have spies and an information network and they hear, “God has come into the camp.” Well, no, not really. I mean from their point of view you can see why they’re thinking this. They naturally think after a magical fashion, and that’s what the children of Israel say, and they know about Yahweh. They know about Jehovah. They know vaguely the histories and they say –
Woe unto us! Who shall deliver us out of the hand of these mighty gods? These are the gods that smote the Egyptians with all the plagues in the wilderness.
Not exactly the way it happened, but they know enough to have a healthy fear of the God of Israel. But so far the God of Israel has not shown himself. He has no images. He has no visual representations. They’ve looted and pillaged all throughout Israel and they haven’t seen any evidence of this God. They probably heard about Shiloh, and notice they haven’t tried to take it to this point. They probably left well enough alone. But now God, as it were, is coming out to meet them and they’re terrified because of these plagues that happened a long time ago. Their histories are not very accurate.
Their response is not to run away screaming girly screams. They rather say –
Be strong and quit yourselves like men, O ye Philistines, that ye be not servants unto the Hebrews, as they have been to you. Quit yourselves like men, and fight. And the Philistines fought, and Israel was smitten.
So it had the opposite effect. The Philistines, rather than being frightened or blasted by lightning, actually rallied themselves to not lose, and in fact did not lose and they won. In the battle they brought about a very great slaughter. There fell of Israel 30,000 footmen and Hophni and Phinehas the two priests, and the Philistines took the ark of the Lord.
If you’re fighting with natural means, or what you see as natural/magical means, there’s always going to be a natural and magical response to it. “Yeah, you scared them real good and that was supposed to help you,” but it turns out an army that’s scared is much more dangerous than an army that is not scared.
Exactly, and much more unpredictable. Yes, they might run, or they might run right at you, so they did and they took the ark.
A messenger runs out of the camp and runs all the way back to Shiloh to announce to Eli, the high priest, what’s happened. He’s 98 and his eyes are dim. He can’t really see anymore. He hears this commotion and calls out to the messenger, “What’s going on?” and the message is -
Israel is fled before the Philistines, and there hath been also a great slaughter among the people, and thy two sons also, Hophni and Phinehas, are dead, and the ark of God is taken.
And it came to pass when he made mention of the ark of God, that he fell from off the seat backward by the side of the gate and his neck brake and he died, for he was an old man and heavy. And he had judged Israel forty years.
He’s the next to the last of the judges. Samuel will grow up and follow him in that office.
A couple things to notice. He reacts not when he hears his sons are dead, but when he hears that the ark is taken, because he understands exactly what this means. The covenant document that God had sealed at Sinai no longer is in Israel’s possession. This is on the equivalent of when Moses tore up the first copy, or smashed it to pieces at the foot of Sinai.
The Mosaic covenant is unraveling on his watch, on his shift, and largely because of his unwillingness to discipline not simply as a father, but as a high priest and judge, his two reprobate sons, so a lot of this is on him. We may see him in heaven, and he may have been a sweet devout man after a fashion, but with regard to what God demanded of him at that time he failed miserably and he knows it, and he’s shocked to hear that the ark is gone, and he falls and dies.
It says he was heavy. Earlier on, God through the boy Samuel had rebuked him and said, “You have become fat on my sacrifices.” Hophni and Phinehas, among their other crimes, were committing sacrilege by grabbing the best parts of the sacrificial meat and eating it themselves, and apparently passing it on to dad without exactly explaining where it was coming from, and he put on a lot of weight, fat, partaking in his son’s sacrilege.
Again, I’ll give him the benefit of the doubt and say he probably didn’t know exactly, but neither did he ask too hard of questions, so that comes back on him. The very weight he has gained by eating the fat of God’s sacrifices contributes to his fall and to him breaking his neck.
His daughter in law, Phinehas' wife, was with child, near to be delivered, and when she heard the tidings that the ark of God was taken and that her father-in-law and her husband were dead, she bowed herself and travailed, for her pains came upon her.
She didn’t care anymore. The midwives were saying, “Fear not. You’ve borne a son,” but she doesn’t care anymore. She names the child Ichabod, saying “The glory is departed from Israel.” The Ich- in English is just a “Waa!” and -abod is glory or weight. The beatniks of another generation would say, “That’s heavy, man.” It’s substance. It’s serious or, in this case, glorious, something to be taken very seriously, something holy/sacred/powerful. Her cry is loosely translated, as the margin does, “Where’s the glory? Oh my, the glory. Oh, waa!”
So the high priestly family had been robbing God of his glory and taking that weight to themselves, and now the Lord has removed it from them.
The Shekinah glory has vanished. You could look out across the battlefield and see people throwing the ark in the back of some kind of cart and carting it off the battlefield, and there’s no cloud or fire or death angels. It just looks like a shiny gold box being removed from the battlefield.
Where’s the glory? Where’s the system of mediation and revelation that God had set up at Sinai? The whole thing is coming unraveled. The whole thing is coming apart.
Having said that, however, this is severe judgement and there’s more – let’s do that ‘more’ first. We’re not told here, we’re told elsewhere as the prophets look back on this, that God proceeded to lay Shiloh waste. The Philistines, having conquered Israel, moved on further into Israelite territory and eventually got to Shiloh and leveled it.
Here’s the progression that we see a number of times in scripture and beyond in prophecy. God’s people in their apostasy commit abomination before his face. They pollute his worship. God, having rebuked them many times, finally withdraws his presence and abandons them, abandons his house, at which point he invites Gentiles to come in and level it and leave it desolate.
In Daniel and Matthew and other places we have the phrase “the abomination that desolates” or “the abomination that makes desolate.” We see it with the fall of Solomon’s temple. We see it at the fall of Herod’s temple in AD 70.
It ultimately spins around Christ himself, because he is God tabernacling in our midst, and his people commit abomination by blaspheming him and surrendering him to the Gentiles, so God lets the Gentiles take him and kill him. He is the central example of the abomination of desolation, but it’s committed against him, and of course he comes back from the dead, being much better, thank you.
So that has significance here because of where the ark is going. It’s going to Philistine territory. The Philistines are descendants of the Egyptians, as we know if we read the Table of Nations, one of those so-called boring parts of the Bible that no one ever reads. Philistia is an offshoot of Egypt, from Genesis 10. So here we have not God’s people going back into captivity, but God himself or God’s throne going back into captivity.
God promised that he would meet with Israel above the cherubim, so this is his throne. He goes along. How do we know he goes along? He could just abandon the throne, too, because once the ark gets there things happen.
They park the ark in the temple of their god, which was the way of things. When you defeated an enemy nation you took their gods and you put them in the temple of your god and they became lackies and servants and slaves for your god, because battle always meant that if you beat them, your gods beat up their gods, so you took them and they became servants to your gods.
That was the Philistine idea. Their god was Dagon, the merman, a fish god. “Our god has defeated Yahweh. All we have is this vacant throne of his, so we’ll park it here as a reminder that our god is so much greater than Yahweh.”
Well, in the morning the idol of their god has fallen down before God’s throne, before something that no one can see, and like good pagans they take the idol and put it up again, because we do that with our idols. When our idols fail us, we reassert them. We don’t throw them away. We just make them more comfy.
It boggles the mind. “We went into battle. Our men shed their blood. Clearly that means that this god has defeated their god. But if it falls over in the temple overnight for no apparent reason, it just fell over. It’s fine. We can put it back up. Natural causes.”
Yeah. There’s a point where pragmatism just trumps mysticism at times, because we are used to living in God’s universe. We’re used to cause and effect, so they prop it back up.
In the morning it’s fallen down again, but this time its head and hands (apparently its hands were upraised) strike the threshold and fall off. So like good pagans they say, “Oh, the threshold will henceforth be holy.”
But while that’s going on, suddenly plague breaks out. The first city that the ark went to was Ashdod, and when the plague begins their lords start saying, “Let’s get this thing out of here! Hey, people in Gath, you’d love to have this. I mean who wouldn’t love to have one of these in his living room? Just $199.99. Come on down and pick it up. It’s great! Think of how much celebrating you can do over their weak puny god. Get it out of here real fast, please.”
It’s like the meme of the guy slapping the roof of the car. “Oh yeah, this can fit so many whatever in it.”
The hand of the Lord was against the city with a very great destruction, and he smote the men of the city, both small and great.
So they decide, “Well, let’s send it to Ekron.” Ever notice how things come in threes – punchlines and such? The men of Ekron say, “No, don’t bring it here! You’re bringing it to slay us!”
We’re not told a lot about this particular plague. The word that the King James uses is emerod, which is related to our word hemorrhoid. It means some kind of boil or tumor or something. It’s said to be in their ‘secret parts,’ and from this some medical people have said, “This sounds a lot like bubonic plague.”
There’s mention later of rats or mice kind of out of context. The mice are marring the land. Whether or not that’s an additional plague on their crops or whether the rats were actually spreading the thing we’re not told and it doesn’t matter. The simple fact is that God’s fingerprints are all over this.
Yes. They tried to capture God. He let himself be captured. It only gets worse from there.
They’re having all kinds of discomfort in all kinds of awkward and embarrassing places. People are dying. These rats or mice are running all over the place, and they’re beginning to turn on each other. “You take it!”
Finally they have a council and say, “We’ve got to do something. This is going to kill us all.”
There was a deadly destruction throughout all the city. The hand of God was very heavy there. And the men that died not were smitten with the emerods, and the cry of the city went up to heaven.
That’s an expression that only gets used a couple times in scripture – once for Abel’s blood crying out to God, another for the sin of Sodom and Gomorrah crying out to God for judgement – so this was kind of a big thing.
In Chapter 6 of I Samuel, the Philistine lords get together to parley, and they call all of their priests and their diviners and say –
What shall we do to the ark of the Lord? Tell us wherewith we shall send it to his place.
They’ve kind of got this figured all wrong. Why they’re talking to the sorcerers I don’t know, because they get the idea, “We’ve got to get this thing out of here.”
So they’re talking to the sorcerers and saying, “What is the proper magical ritual way of sending it back and not ticking off this god any further?”
The sorcerers are not totally hopeless and helpless here. They say, “You need to return a trespass offering,” and that’s the language of Mosaic law, Levitical law. The idea of making restitution to God is in that sense biblical. Their idea of what constitutes restitution is a little odd, although God doesn’t seem to mind.
Five golden emerods and five golden mice, according to the number of the lords of the Philistines, for one plague was on you all and on your lords. Wherefore ye shall make images of your emerods, and images of your mice that mar the land, and ye shall give glory unto the God of Israel. Peradventure he will lighten his hand from off you, and from off your gods, and from off your land.
So the glory of the Lord is not something to be borne lightly. I didn’t mean to do that. It’s not something to be invited without due thought. It seems this could be a really bad thing for you.
I had honestly never noticed before how much wordplay there is on the ideas of light, heavy, and glory, which means heavy, throughout this passage.
The emerod thing is interesting. The word that is used for emerod or boil or tumor or whatever it is is basically the same word that’s used for a fortified city. So apparently the Philistines see here a connection. They look at their boils and say, “Wow, this looks exactly like our city would if you see it from a distance. Isn’t that odd?” and now they’re putting two and two together.
“Okay, so we tried to encompass God in our cities and now he’s making little replicas of our cities pop up all over our bodies,” well, not all over, but in some very awkward and embarrassing places, actually.
And give them back to God and surrender in token and payment of what he’s done, and of the mice, because we will not say that this is a chance that happened to us, something the soothsayers suggested earlier. “If this doesn’t work, then it’s just chance that happened to you.” No, it’s not. The mice are not accidental. They are not mere phenomena that have sprouted up out of the irrationality of the universe.
This is the hand of God and we will acknowledge this by making little gold replicas and sending them back to God saying, “Yes, sir. Yes, Lord. You’re in charge. You did this. It’s all you, and please would you stop, because it’s really hurting and killing us a lot.” Then what they say to each other is encouraging.
Wherefore then do ye harden your hearts, as the Egyptians and Pharaoh hardened their hearts? When he had wrought wonderfully among them, did they not let the people go, and they departed?
There’s a little more to the story than that, actually. They kind of let them go, then they kind of didn’t. Yeah, they departed and then the Egyptians tried to grab them, and it went downhill from there.
“The point is that if we release this, it is not the track record of this God to stay and fight it out with us. If we release him from bondage [ha ha], if we invite him to leave our precincts and go home, he will and he’ll take his wrath with him. That’s the way he’s behaved, so hardening our hearts and being stubborn…”
Again, we see their memory of what happened in the exodus is a little foggy, but they know enough to know that this God does act in history. He does bring judgements on nations. They can be catastrophic, but this God is also gracious. If you let him have what he wants he will leave you alone, at least for now. He will take his people or his stuff and he will go.
Their plan is to find a new cart, because God deserves the best, and two milk cows that have never plowed, so everything is fresh, everything is new. They’re going to put the ark in the cart and attach the cart to the milk cows and take away the milk cows’ calves – normally they would stand around and low and moo for their calves – and they’re going to put the jewels of gold, the trespass offering, in a coffer in the cart, then let it go.
“If it goes the way it’s supposed to, back into Israel, to Bethshemesh, then it is indeed God. But if not, then we will know it is not his hand that smote us but a chance that happened to us.” There’s the scoffer again, the natural law person.
Well, no sooner do they let the cows go than the cows take off right along the highway, lowing as they go.
And the kine took the straight way to the way of Bethshemesh and went along the highway, lowing as they went, and turned not aside to the right hand or to the left. And the lords of the Philistines went after them unto the border of Bethshemesh [to make sure they were going where they were supposed to].
They come to people reaping the wheat harvest, so despite all of the military stuff that’s been going on, some life in Israel continues. They’re actually doing wheat harvest, which means we’re in the final months of harvest. We’re coming up on the Feast of Tabernacles, and just before the Feast of Tabernacles is the Day of Atonement, so we’re in that range someplace, when having the ark might be a good thing. The people see it and they rejoice.
We’re told that it comes into the field of Joshua, a Bethshemite, and stood there at a great stone. This is odd. The man’s name is Joshua [Jeshua]. It is not a name that appears very often in the Old Testament, and the two major characters who bear it – Joshua the son of Nun, and Joshua the high priest, the son of Jozadek – are both major figures of Christ. This is just almost a castoff, and I may be reading too much into it, but I’ll tell you my thoughts nonetheless.
The ark, the last of the remnants of the Mosaic covenant, comes right up to a stone that is identified with Jesus, and it stops and that’s that. The law and the prophets were to John. Christ is the end of the law. I think there may be a hint there. Maybe I’m reading too much into it, but honestly why do we care who owned it? Why is his name so special if there’s nothing going on here? Maybe you can come up with some other ideas.
I have some thoughts, but I’m going to save them for later because it’s kind of a tangent.
All right. So there’s a great stone there and they take the wood from the cart, and the cows, and they offer a burnt offering to the Lord. It is apparently a Levitical town. The Levites come and take down the ark and the coffer with the jewels and all of that, and they offer burnt offerings and sacrifices – those were peace offerings – the same day to the Lord.
So far, so good. They receive it with rejoicing. The right people are doing what they can. The five lords of the Philistines see this and go home, and there’s much rejoicing in the Philistine towns.
Again there’s a mention of this stone. They mention the golden emerods, one for each of the cities – Ashdod, Gaza, Askelon, Gath, and Ekron.
And the golden mice, according to the number of all the cities of the Philistines belonging to the five lords, both of fenced cities and of country villages, even unto the great stone of Abel, whereon they set down the ark of the Lord, which stone remaineth unto this day in the field of Joshua, the Bethshemite.
And he smote the men of Bethshemesh, because they had looked into the ark of the Lord. Even he smote of the people fifty thousand and threescore and ten men, and the people lamented because the Lord had smitten many of the people with a great slaughter. And the men of Bethshemesh said, Who is able to stand before this holy Lord God? and to whom shall he go up from us?
And they sent messengers to the inhabitants of Kirjathjearim [a Gibeonite city], saying, The Philistines have brought again the ark of the Lord. Come ye down and fetch it up to you.
The system of worship that God had set up at Sinai that involved his presence manifesting itself in the Holy of Holies, the Day of Atonement when God allowed the high priest to draw near and offer the goat of atonement and reconcile and propitiate – all of that, all that made the tabernacle what the tabernacle was supposed to be, besides just simply being an altar, was gone now.
The function of the priests and the Levites would now be minimal. There would still be an altar, but as we go into I Samuel we see that even that altar was being bypassed oftentimes. Samuel offered sacrifices at places that were not the tabernacle altar, because the system was broken. It will be about this same time that Israel will demand a king, because that will fix everything, because political solutions always fix basic spiritual problems, right?
What we see here is the unraveling of an old covenant, and if we have any sensitivity at this point we should expect that it is time for God to move and institute a new covenant. That, of course, leads us into the story of David.
Let’s step back for a second and just see, first of all, what happened, what it should remind us of, and what it points forward to.
What happens is that God’s people commit abomination of worship. God abandons his house and invites the Gentiles to come in and level the place and leave it desolate. But rather than send his people into exile, he goes into exile, bearing their curse and their judgement.
He goes amongst his own enemies, wages war against them and their gods, and comes out again victorious, with spoil, and returns to his people, where his people, after a brief rejoicing, still get it wrong, still don’t honor his word, still commit sacrilege, and still treat the ark as if it’s something magical, a matter of superstition and curiosity. So God lets them leave him alone and he goes and his ark establishes itself among the Gibeonites.
This time in mercy, because these were the pagans, the heathen, the Canaanites, Hivites actually, who had tricked Joshua and the first generation into believing they were from far away. They formed a peace treaty with them, and suddenly Joshua and everyone finds out, “Wait, you live right over the next hill!”
“Sounds good to us, because that means we’re not going to be exterminated, so yay.”
Exactly, and it was successful. Here they are 300 years later still faithfully serving, and when the Israelites don’t want to draw nigh to God because God is scary and God is holy and God is dangerous, they say to the Gentile converts, “You come and take him to yourself. We don’t want to draw too near right now,” and for 20 years that’s what happens. God makes his home amongst the Gibeonites, amongst converted pagans, God-fearers, which is an amazing thing. When God’s people no longer want to worship God properly and are stubborn about it, God will abandon them and he will go elsewhere. He will go to the Gentiles.
So on the one hand we are now looking back toward Egypt, where God went down into Egypt in the person of Moses and Aaron, brought plagues upon the land, brought his people with much spoil, and then brought them to Sinai where he covenanted with them.
That thing now has unwound itself. It’s fallen apart through the faithlessness of God’s people, and yet God has not given up. God is reaching out to a Gentile people. There’s a huge hint here that this is how God will do things.
Of course, now we can look forward to Messiah, who will surrender himself to God’s enemies, will bear the curse that belongs to God’s people, and will raid the kingdom of darkness and come out with great spoil – that would be us and our world. And when his people reject him, when the Jews will not receive him, he will turn to the Gentiles and continue to gain spoil for himself there.
So now on the eve of God’s new covenant in David, we are to look back and see what God has done in the past. We’re to look forward and see what God will do in Messiah. And in the meantime we’re to understand that God is not to be toyed with. God cannot be manipulated with magic. He is not bound to the things of this world in such a way that we can twist his arm, force his hand, get stuff from him by inserting a certain amount of prayer or ritual or obedience, or pull a lever and get a blessing.
God is sovereign in history, and God is more gracious than we can possibly imagine. He had every right to send his people back into Egypt, surrender them to the Philistines, but instead he marches forward. He moves the dial a little more to the right, and rather than sending them back, he goes back and he comes out having warred against the Philistines very successfully. It was one more step toward ending Philistine oppression. The next step will be David, so God is moving forward.
This is why the nature of sacrilege is what it is. It’s not refusal to worship the Lord Yahweh. It’s refusal to worship him on his terms. Paul talks about this in Romans 2. He says this was exactly what the Jews of his day were doing. He says, “You who abhor idols, do you rob temples?” Phinehas and Hophni had robbed the temple and sent it away, so there’s this tendency that I think we also have to be on our guard against, of treating the gifts of God as things to be used.
This is what I was actually thinking about when you mentioned the stone of Joshua. This is “so far and no farther” the old covenant was meant to go. In the same way, the Jews of Paul’s day were taking the law and the Judaizers of that day were taking the law and trying to go farther with it. They were rejecting worship as God has defined it.
Yeah. It’s important to tie this now into the new covenant, because we don’t have an ark. We don’t have a menorah. We don’t have a table of shewbread. We don’t have a tabernacle or temple. We don’t have two giant pillars. We don’t have sacrifices of that sort. It would be easy to say, “Well, that was then, but this is now and it’s different. It doesn’t exactly apply, but if it did I’m sure we would all be good and not commit sacrilege.”
The presence of God in the new covenant is wrapped up in the gospel. It is in the gospel that Jesus comes to us.
And it’s in our very selves. We are indwelt by the Holy Spirit. We are the temple. I think Paul again in I Corinthians is saying, “So it’s not that what you do with your body doesn’t matter. It’s because you don’t have these physical things. You have to remember that you are the physical thing. The thing that you do with your body is the thing that reflects on how you interact with God.”
And in that context he particularly points to fornication. “Shall I take the members of Christ and join them to a harlot? God forbid.”
We read that and we often go off on proper exercise and diet, which of course have their place, but that’s not quite what Paul has in mind there, if you read carefully. He’s talking about something very particular. He’s talking about forming covenant alliances, even in the casual way of sexual encounter, with unbelievers.
If that, then how much more when we bring pagan ideas and practices into the very preaching of the gospel, and we declare the gospel to now be some existential or New Age or rationalistic or health/wealth/good news sort of thing. That is in fact abomination to God. That is no honor to Christ and to his sacrifice, but it is all about us and satisfying our own lusts. Will not God in time say, “Enough is enough.”
Now, God is a lot more patient than we are. I’ve spent a good part of my life hearing the warnings of sometimes very godly people and sometimes just raving conservatives who have said, “By such-and-such a year, the United States is going to be destroyed.” We’ve gone through economic collapse, and nuclear first-strike attack by the Russians, and a New World Order taking over and now the plague, and we’re still here, but for how long.
Even if it’s another 100 or 200 years, we have lost a lot. The church is becoming more and more ineffectual, and the way to fix that is not anything political. It’s not something intellectual or scholarly. It’s not harnessing new technologies, although there may be a place for all of those things, but it’s about getting the gospel straight. Who is Jesus?
Right now we’re back again to the video that I keep coming back to and can never remember the name of.
That’s it, the second one. Do we even know who God is anymore? Do we know what it means for Jesus to be divine? Do we know what propitiation and atonement actually are? Or is Jesus just kind of a good guy who was kind and loving and accepting and set some kind of good example for us? “Yeah, it’s something like that, because God would never ever ever kill his own Son to deal with sin.”
I love what Jesus says when he’s been talking to the Pharisees about the meaning of the Sabbath and blaspheming against the Holy Spirit. He says, “Lord, I praise you that you reveal these things not to the wise, not to the sages, but to the babes, to the children.”
You don’t have to be old enough or smart enough to know God. There’s no point where, “Ah, we have to be so politically clever. We have to have the right theological training. We have to have the right intellectual training.” No, it’s totally apart from that. It’s knowing God personally.
When my Hayley was about three, she’d walk around the house and at random times look at me and say, “Daddy, Jesus is God.”
“Amen, daughter. Yes, he is.” I don’t know what got into her at that point.
It would seem the Holy Spirit because it was just this random thing and that was her mantra. “Daddy, Jesus is God.”
In some ways, the gospel is really simple. We complicate it sometimes, in complicating it to match our proud sophisticated adult opinion of ourselves when we distort it. “You must do this, and know this, and follow this right, and keep these rules and so on, and then you will have the blessing of God.”
Most of the New Testament was written to say, “No, and here’s why. Let’s look at it from this angle and this angle and this angle and all these angles.” Pick any of the Pauline epistles. Pick Peter and John and Hebrews. It’s all the same thing. “No, all those ways of trying to foment a new gospel that makes you feel good about yourself and that downplays Jesus, they’re all wrong.”
It’s just that simple. Jesus is God. He’s a complete and total Savior. You can’t add to that. You can’t take away from that. You can just fall down before that. You can embrace Him. You can cling to Him. You can trust Him, and anything else is not going to work. To try to bring anything else into the public worship of the church is to commit abomination.
In the original article that I wrote along these lines I point to North Africa, Ethiopia, Syria, Palestine, and Turkey (Asia Minor). This is where the church began. There were once very strong Christian congregations here, but in many of these places they adopted Arianism, Monophysitism, and Nestorianism, all heresies that downplayed Jesus’ true divinity or the connection between his humanity and divinity – basically, another Jesus.
God gave them a long time and eventually said, “You like Unitarianism so much? Have it unsheathed. Have it in full force. Say hello to Islam.”
As Jesus warned in Revelation 2 and 3, and in Romans 11, there comes a time where he prunes his church, when he takes away candlesticks, and it’s often not for the things we think. It’s for denying who he is, for making his worship abominable because we’re no longer worshiping him for who he is and for what he has done.
Yeah, it’s not that, oddly enough. There are a lot of things where we, as good Reformed Presbyterians and such, would say, “No, this is how it’s supposed to be done,” and yet if someone doesn’t do it that way it doesn’t mean that they’ve committed this kind of abomination. It’s when anybody, even under the title of Reformed or Presbyterian, starts inserting another Jesus and tries to draw our allegiance toward that made-up Jesus – that’s abomination that will bring about desolation.
They may do it while still quoting the Westminster (with their fingers crossed)…
Or quoting the Bible instead of Westminster. That’s the Transcendentalist’s playbook.
To try to end on a happy note – because we have this bad habit of ending on not-happy notes – the ark did go and live among the Gentiles until it was time for revival, until it was time, in fact, for David to call for it and to restore godly worship, until God’s Messiah is set up in the center of a new covenant which will drive back the Philistines once and for all, and which will set a direct line toward Messiah. So there is still some of the Christmas story in all of this.
There is redemption in the midst of horrible oppression, violence, warfare from the enemy, warfare in the most literal bloody sense. Yet God packs away his promise in this little sleepy town of converted pagans and just leaves things alone for 20 years. I’m also surprised that the city wasn’t called Hazareth, because God’s not in a hurry. We are, too often.
Just to go back to what you were saying, Greg, about how often there’s the tendency to add error by means of addition to the gospel – I think that is probably one of the primary issues that I see today in the church, is the addition of law into what the gospel is.
This will probably get mixed reactions, but I listened through the entire Rise and Fall of Mars Hill podcast, more so to just say that I had.
Something like that. I’m not necessarily commending the podcast as a whole. There were good parts, but I remember one thing that they focused on was how when Mark Driscoll preached, pretty much every sermon was like, “All right, all right, we’re going to pay this little bit of lip service to Christ and to the cross, but now the real meat of the sermon is here’s how you become a better dad. Here’s how you can be a Christian mom. Here’s how you honor your parents,” and that was the sermon. The focus was on what you do and how to be a better person.
That has an application. You can definitely take probably a good chunk of what Mark preached and say, “Yeah, that’s good orthopraxy,” but the preacher’s job, the pastor’s job, the priest’s job if you come from a tradition like that, is to preach the gospel and to remind you that merit is found only in Christ.
There have been miniature Mark Driscolls and there have been precursors to Mark Driscoll that are all guilty of the same thing. They all have the same problem.
Other people who will remain unnamed, but whose name rhymes with Rug Dilson.
Yes, they are very much in the same vein. But to draw it to the point, this has been around since Paul, this error. I always remember this line from Martyn Lloyd Jones that I just love, where he says, “If you aren’t every once in a while accused of being antinomian, you’re not preaching the gospel of free grace well enough,” because it runs counter to human intuition.
The laziest person in the world will still think, “I can make myself better, and I can improve my situation by sheer grit, sheer determination, whatever,” but that doesn’t hold any water when your standard is the eternally just and infinitely holy God.
In light of that remark, not too long ago one of the people I work with made a remark to my wife that I wouldn’t like such-and-such a thing because I get nervous or something anytime the word ‘law’ is mentioned. I took that as a compliment. It’s not true, but I took it as a compliment because of this person’s perception, because in my conversations with this particular person they are constantly asking for, “What’s the rule? What rule should we have here? What rule should I impose here?”
You don’t need no rule. This person needs to repent of their sins and trust in Jesus, needs to see Jesus, find Jesus, cling to Jesus. You need the grace of the Spirit.
My friend would always say, “Amen, amen, amen,” and yet keeps coming back with, “Okay, next situation. What rule should we…”
“I don’t use a rule here! You’re talking about human relationships. You’re talking about man’s walk with God. Rules? The ones in the Bible, if you must ask.”
Now, this is terribly ironic because anyone who has been my student long enough, or has known me long enough, knows that I probably write about the law of God and teach about the law of God more than most people they know.
If you want to talk about what the law says about this or that, I probably know. I probably can tell you where to find it and I can probably tell you how it fit into the whole system of old covenant obedience and how it carries over into the new covenant. Having said that, those are the guidelines once we have the power up and running, and the power is in Jesus. The power is not in going back and trying to keep these rules.
What’s happened in a number of inter-related sectarian groups within Reformed Presbyterian evangelical Christianity has been to say, “Where are the rules? If you keep these rules about male headship, about educating your children at home, about courtship, about female submission, about particular sorts of liturgy, about limiting federal government or state government or county government, just about any kind of government except maybe patriarchy…” – there’s this long list of things where you could go to seminars, and they weren’t all Reformed or Presbyterian. They were of various sorts.
Some were about the family, some were about American’s cultural Christian history, some were about whatever, but the idea was that if you do these things – “This is the thing the church has lacked. If we would only start doing this again…doing this…then God will pour out his blessings. Oh yeah, and we should preach the gospel in there someplace.”
That is exactly what it is, and people do not recognize that. They will say, “No, because ours involves the sacraments.” Oh, that just made it better. Now it’s a Roman Catholic conservative social gospel.
“…it will save us. If we tar the name of God all over this social movement, then everything will be okay because we’ll have God’s blessing.”
Remember Micah in Judges. “Now I know God will do me good, seeing I have a Levite to my priest.” If I just adopt a little bit of God’s way of doing it then God’s going to bless this thing and we’re going to take off politically and financially.
No, it’s this constant lust for something other than Jesus, because we want the outward external benefits of the covenant, which are secondary at best. The primary blessings are justification and the gift of God’s Spirit, but then God promises to do stuff beyond that, too, in his time and his way. But it’s that we want.
We want cultural success and domination. We want money. We want healthy large families. We want respect of the pagan community, and more. “If we just do these things then our churches will be full, we’ll have lots of money, and then we can go preach the gospel.” I wonder at that point what gospel we’re preaching anymore.
It’s like when people say, “Well, you know, we really need to safeguard Christian thought and value, and if we can ensure that we have this Christianized [that’s my term for it; they would call it Christian] social view and outworking, then everything will be great. And in order to bolster this social outworking, which we think is really the key here to making…”
Not quite, because it’s a subset of the entire worldview, but maybe for the purposes of this so I actually have a word for it – social worldview. We say, “All right, we’ve got this. This is the key. This is something we’re going to focus on real hard, because this is what’s going to help us achieve cultural power for Christianity.” But then the thing you do to defend that is messing with the Trinity.
Oh no, I have nothing particular in mind [crossing fingers]. It’s like by the time you’ve finally achieved your broader conservatism – and I have nothing against conservatism – but this broader social and sociological resurgence of conservative thought and views, then you’ll be able to do great things for the gospel, at which point you don’t have the gospel because you’ve already abandoned who God is – what scripture tells about who God is, and what the church has confessed who God is for the past 2,000 years – 1700 if you count Nicaea as the start of that.
You could back up further to creation, because the church didn’t start at 0 A.D.
Yeah, we tried. So here we are talking about social and cultural issues, and it seems that every time we end up not ending with, “Well, the law of God says…” but ending rather with, “Isn’t Jesus a wonderful Savior?” Imagine that.
The problem is not that the church used to only talk about Jesus, the problem was that they didn’t see that when they were talking about Jesus there were lots of other things they were talking about by implication.
And I think that maybe that’s what we’re doing. No one should ever come to any of us and say, “So, what do you really think the gospel is?” If they’ve listened to two or three podcasts and they don’t know what we think the gospel is, either they’re deaf or there’s something really bad with us.
I’m reminded of a certain person who had to withstand an extended interrogation by his elders on the nature of his views on justification by faith, to prove to the world that he really believed in it. What the…??
How long does it take to actually say, “Look, this is it. I’ve got nothing but sin. Jesus has righteousness. He gives it to me. Faith and faith alone plus nothing. You name it and I’ll say, ‘plus not that, plus not that, no not that, no, nothing.’ If you want me to sit here for three hours and tell you, ‘No, not that either,’ I will, but can we just wrap it up and say Jesus is my righteousness?”
How hard is this? But in our generation apparently it’s very hard, because people want to play games with their words and with the confessions and with the creeds. And yet what we find, oddly enough, if Jesus is indeed as he claims to be the truth, and we talk about him, we find ourselves, as you say, talking about life, the universe, and everything along the way.
There’s always implications. The mistake is to think that the power is in talking about the implications, that we’re more relevant, we’re more powerful, we’re more cool, more trendy, more whatever, because we talk about cultural implications.
We talk about cultural implications largely because it’s fun, because that’s who we are, that’s how God has made us and we do this kind of stuff, but those peripheral things are not the gospel. Even if we don’t talk about these things directly, the gospel will deal with them eventually because the gospel produces new people with new hearts who will, one way or another, submit to Jesus. So there’s your good news.
The rest is fun and interesting and maybe we’ll streamline some thought and speculation that sometime in the future maybe people will profit from this, or at least skip through some university classes or dinnertime conversations a little more easily because they listened to us. But if there’s anything that people should take away it’s Jesus is the only Savior there is, and faith is the only way to lay hold on him.
Amen. Shall we wrap up with some recommendations? Do you have one ready, Bryan?
All right. I am going to recommend something that’s totally extra and luxurious, and that is a temperature-controlled electric gooseneck kettle.
It’s a kettle with this long very precise pouring spout. I grew up with the one that sits on your stove and water kind of dumps out of it, and of course it whistles when it’s boiling, but other than that you don’t know how hot it is.
I always thought I hated chamomile tea, and it turns out the whole time I was just scalding my leaves and that’s why it turned my stomach. It wasn’t until I got the fancy kettle that lets me heat the water to exactly 176o F that I discovered that chamomile tea is really great, so there you go.
I do. I have two. The first one is just frivolous to an extent, and the recommendation is to do what I was prohibited by circumstances from doing, and that is Christmas shopping ahead of time, more than three days ahead of time, as a matter of fact. The reason I didn’t is because I did not have employment until last week Friday.
I get my first paycheck next week because I’m on a part-time basis right now and they’re going to write me a check. I start full-time the first Tuesday of the new year, which I’m very excited for.
My second recommendation is actually a thing that you could go watch if you wanted to, and it will be slightly late by the time this episode is published, but there’s a little-known Dr. Who Christmas special that I still don’t think a lot of people saw for some reason, because I never hear anyone mention it. It’s called A Christmas Carol and it stars Dumbledore, Michael Gambon.
It’s A Christmas Carol in space and it’s amazing. It’s actually my wife’s and my favorite Dr. Who Christmas special, hands-down. None of the others compare even a slight amount. It is very good.
That’s funny. It sounds like I should have seen it. Who was the Doctor at that point?
It’s very fun. They’re very, very much on the nose about the fact that he’s completely copying Charles Dickens, because at some point he says, “I need to figure out how to make a very grumpy man nice in less than an hour, in time for Christmas day. What do I do?”
Then music starts playing in the background and the companion is on the other end going, “Doctor, we’re going to crash! You need to help!” and he’s like, “What’s the sound behind you?” and he goes, “It’s a Christmas carol.”
For my frivolous suggestion, that leads me necessarily into the Leverage Christmas not-so-special, but the episode called “The Ho Ho Ho Job.”
That’s the one in the mall starring Will….and all Star Trek fans are now yelling his name, and I’ve blanked. He played the young man on Star Trek. He comes back in Leverage as Chaos, Hardison’s arch-nemesis. It’s about stealing Christmas, as it were.
The last line is classic. As the Leverage team has defeated their enemy, Hardison looks at him and says, “And you forgot…”
So that’s an absolutely frivolous recommendation, because not everybody likes Leverage.
It’s so good to see Parker excited about something, though. It’s just genuinely happy.
Along the lines of something more serious, I think I may actually have done this before, but I’m going to re-recommend it and that is telling your children the Christmas story. Read it from the text. Don’t read it from a Bible storybook.
Please don’t, especially a Little Golden Book or anything like that, or even most things that pass for something you would do in Sunday School. Tell them the story as it historically happened.
I did this with my students a few days back. They were supposed to take notes, and for a bonus point they were to guess, “Why did I do this?” and a lot of them honestly didn’t know. They just took a stab at it, but a few of them got it.
“You wanted us to understand that this was not some kind of romantic…” – they didn’t say Gnostic, but that’s kind of what they were implying, a Gnostic kind of thing – “…that this really happened in real history.”
One said, “This wasn’t a Bible times, Bible land, Bible people kind of event. You want us to understand these were real people struggling with real emotions, real pain, real blood, that this is God reaching into our history.”
So tell the story that way so that they understand it’s not a fairy tale. The baby didn’t glow. It wasn’t a silent night, but it was a very holy night as God came down and became one of us.
Happy New Year, Merry Christmas. For some people, Christmas hasn’t probably come yet. What’s the latest it comes in Eastern Orthodoxy? Is it January something?
Happy whatever. My aunt had a cross-stitch in her house when I was growing up that said, “Happy Everything” and it had a picture of all the different personifications of holidays, and it was fun.
So yes, Merry Christmas, Happy New Year, Happy Valentine’s Day, if we’re at that point.
No, President’s Day is not a thing. It is George Washington’s birthday. I’m not dying on that hill or anything.
Thank you, guys, so much for this conversation. It’s been a pleasure. Thanks also to you, our listeners. We appreciate you tuning in. Thanks to David, our producer and my lawfully-wedded husband.
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