You really need to think like an Israelite to get what's going on in the Old
Testament.
You need to think like a first century Jew to process a lot of what's going on in
your Bible.
And that is really difficult for us because, obviously, we're not first
century Jews.
We're not ancient Semites.
And because we're not, there's a lot in the text that just goes right over our
heads.
It just goes right by us.
It's not because we're not good readers, we're not smart.
None of that.
It's just we are not immersed in the culture.
We are not immersed in the way of thinking.
We haven't had traditions, accrued traditions, rabbis, teachers, whatever,
generations long, informing us how to think about the text.
Well, a Jew in the first century had that.
An ancient Israelite had that.
What they knew was passed on to them.
And it was passed through certain filters.
And those are missing for us.
We have our own filters that don't really help.
We have filters like the Reformation.
It's not that the Reformation was bad, but it was the 16th and 17th centuries,
which is considerably removed from what it meant to be an ancient Israelite,
an ancient Semite.
And I'm saying all that to say this.
I'm going to say some things tonight, and I'm necessarily going to go quickly.
But I'm going to say some things tonight that are going to sound really strange.
I'm forewarning you in a good way, in a positive way, because there was a
time in my own education, my own self-education, that some of the things I
will say tonight would have sounded really strange to me too.
But I want to try to show you enough that you can sort of internalize the culture
and internalize the mindset, the worldview, that will help us become
informed as to how an ancient reader would have looked at this stuff.
And by doing that, you will begin to see patterns.
You will begin to see connections.
What you might have been thinking is that we would talk about things like this.
Yeah, I'll hit on some of these things.
Maybe not tonight, maybe in successive weeks.
But these things, as familiar as they are, are just a tiny, tiny portion of Jesus'
relationship to the Old Testament.
They're just a tiny portion of what an ancient person would have been expecting,
would have been thinking when a New Testament writer wrote something,
or when Peter or Paul or whoever it was would have said something and quoted the
Old Testament.
There's a very wide context that I want to use this session to sort of set and
overview where we're going to go in the process.
Now, I put this passage up.
You can find my Job reference here.
These two verses, 7 and 8, you'd think, why in the world would you start there?
I think you'll be able to figure that out after a few minutes.
But these are, theologically, two of the more theologically pregnant verses in the
Old Testament.
Are you the first man who was born?
One of Job's friends asks him.
This is in the dialogues about trying to assess Job's situation and trying to pin
down why he's suffering.
Of course, he's defending himself.
And they ask him, are you the first man who was born?
Well, who is the first man who was born?
He wasn't born, but in their mind, he had a beginning.
Were you brought forth before the hills?
Well, no, that's again creation language, the mountains and the hills and all that
stuff.
Have you listened in the counsel of God?
Do you limit wisdom to yourself?
Now, next week, we're going to talk a lot about wisdom.
But you can store this reference away for that time.
There was this idea that the first man had listened in the counsel of God.
The first man was right there with God in Eden.
And this idea of being intimately related with God begins all the way back with
Adam.
And that's where I'm going to begin tonight.
Some things going on in Eden with Adam.
Believe it or not, I'm going to try to go from there all the way to the end of the
Old Testament in one hour.
But I'm going to hit certain motifs, certain threads that run through the Old
Testament.
All of which in some way relate to national Israel and Jesus.
And they get merged together in the end of the story.
So let's go back here and jump in here.
Humanity and Eden.
All the slides are going to look the same.
At least for the first maybe ten or so.
On the left hand, we have ruler or father.
Who is in charge?
Who is the ruler of everything that there is to rule?
Who is being ruled?
And I'm using the words subjects.
Because that denotes rulership above.
But also family.
God has a family.
God is naturally going to be the ruler.
He has a family.
But he also has an administration, a bureaucracy.
We fit into both those categories.
And then there is human mediation.
I'm going to trace these three topics through the Old Testament.
And point out some things along the way.
In the beginning, God who is a spirit.
God is a spirit.
Jesus tells us that.
His present ruling.
And I have the word embodied in purple here.
When I talk about divine embodiment, that's going to be in purple.
And I'm getting that from Genesis 3.
And I'm going to go quickly.
If you have questions, you can write them down.
And we'll take questions at the end.
And I won't be able to really pause and lay all this stuff out for you.
At least in this week.
But if you recall back in the garden in Genesis 3.8.
They hear the sound.
It takes a physical object to make a sound.
Scientifically.
They hear the sound of the Lord walking in the garden in the cool of the day.
There are certain terms in Genesis 3.
Associated with just that simple verse.
That show up later in the Old Testament.
In the Theophany appearances.
Who knows what a Theophany is?
Right.
It's some sort of appearance of deity.
And in many cases, I know we don't often think of it.
But in many cases, there is actually embodiment going on.
There are some terms all the way back to Genesis 3.
That show up later.
When God is in the whirlwind with Job.
And God is on the mountain at Sinai.
There are links.
Believe it or not.
That begin all the way back in Genesis 3.
Humanity at this time.
Well, yeah, we are servants.
Because we are under God.
And everybody is a servant under God.
But we are also co-rulers.
And I get that from Genesis 1.26 and 27.
Humanity is created.
Our translations say in the image of God.
I think a better translation is as the image of God.
We are created as divine representatives.
We are to represent him.
We are to do what God wants us to do.
As though he were physically there present with him.
Everybody is together though.
There is no sort of negative connotation between being a servant.
You are a servant.
But you are also a co-ruler.
Theologians like to say that the original humans were servant kings.
Which I kind of like.
It has a nice picture to it.
That is the way everything starts out.
We are, the humans were children of God.
Sometimes because of the Old Testament culture, the phrase is sons of God.
Because it is patriarchal to that extent.
But it is inclusive.
It means children, male and female.
He created them.
Their task was to administer the kingdom of God on earth.
Think about Eden.
Eden is where God lives.
It is his address in the beginning.
It is also where he issues decrees.
He is there with his heavenly host.
Who existed before humanity did.
Elsewhere in the Bible, the heavenly host is referred to as a council.
A divine council.
It is basically a bureaucracy.
But it is also a family.
We get plurals in Genesis 1, 26 and 27.
Let us create humankind in our image.
But then we also get singulars.
So God, singular, created them in his image.
You get singular and plural.
There is an interchange there between God and this group, the heavenly host.
And somehow humans come on the scene and we are like them but we are different.
But we are sort of doing the same kinds of things.
We are working for God.
The kingdom of God is on earth.
It is just situated in this place called Eden.
Because this is the beginning.
The human mediator really is Adam.
Because, frankly, at the beginning he is the only one mentioned in that role.
We go back to Job.
Are you like the first man who listened in the council?
So Adam is attending the council meetings, so to speak.
He has access to wisdom.
And a week from tonight we will talk about wisdom in Proverbs 8.
It gets personified, gets pictured as a person who is a co-creator with God.
That might be new to some of you.
Look at Proverbs 8, verses 22 to 31.
Wisdom is the co-creator with God.
And the Old Testament authors do something with that.
And the New Testament authors do something with that.
I will preface next week's talk by asking this question.
Where did the New Testament authors get the idea that Jesus was the co-creator?
I mean, you look at Genesis 1.
There is like nobody else there.
You look at some of the other creation passages in the Psalms.
Where is anybody else?
You look at that and you have to wonder.
And people have asked.
Where did they get that idea?
Because it is in Colossians 1.
It is in 1 Corinthians 8.
It is in Romans 11.
It is in John chapter 1, of course.
Where did they get that?
That is a little preview.
They are getting it from their Old Testament in some fairly cryptic ways.
Now, there was a problem, of course.
We have the fall.
Humanity is removed from where God lives and where God works.
Where God and His heavenly host, His counsel do their thing.
Humankind is driven away.
So we have a change in status.
Human beings are, after this point, they are not going to be co-rulers
anymore.
That has been disrupted.
It has been ruined.
It has been put on probation.
What we have is we have a change in status.
But God forgives them.
Forgives Adam and Eve.
And says, amid the curses, You know, what we are going to have to do here is
someday, one of your seed, Eve, somebody who is going to come from you and
you are human, so that would be a human being.
Someday there is going to be a human being that comes along that undoes what you have
just done.
It is going to reverse what you have just done.
But until that point, see you later.
We have got to get out of here.
We are not going to let you in Eden anymore.
But it is not the end of the story.
So we have a sense of a deliverer who has to be human.
The deliverer is going to, again, because they are human, they are going to
be some kind of servant.
I want you to tune into the language I am using.
Deliverer.
Servant.
Human.
There is a bloodline.
There is a royal bloodline.
Because Adam was a co-ruler.
Humans were initially, in the Old Testament story, designed to be co-ruling.
They had royal status with God, with the king.
So there is some sense of that going on too.
And we have the emergence of evil.
We have a competing interest over against the interest of God.
If we move it up to Eden, from Eden to the flood, we get some of the same things.
Who is the ruler?
Well, God.
There is also the language of embodiment here, very early in the Old Testament.
And I have here Genesis 5, 22, 24, and 6, 9.
This is going to sound really odd, but go look it up.
You are going to be a little surprised like I was when I first saw this.
These three references refer to people who, quote, walked with God.
Now, we use that phrase all the time.
If you actually look that up, walk with God, like in your Logos software,
you are going to find that that phrase only occurs three or four times in the
entire Bible and none in the New Testament.
Zero.
Nobody is said to walk or have walked with God in the New Testament, even though we
use that all the time.
Now, humans are commanded in both Testaments to walk before God and be
obedient, but when God is doing the walking, when he is participating in the
walking, that is a really rare phrase.
And since the first occasion of this was Genesis 3, the sound of the Lord God
walking in the garden, and that has theophanic language that occurs elsewhere
in the Old Testament.
Scholars contend, and I would agree, that this language here, walking with God,
used twice of Enoch and once of Noah, that that has something to do with a
direct divine encounter and a direct divine relationship.
It's very unusual.
But we have it in this period of these three people.
Deuteronomy 23, 14, I don't have a link to it.
You're going to see this language used two more times here in Leviticus and
Deuteronomy.
And it refers to what's going on in the camp of Israel, where God says,
I'm walking, I will walk in your midst.
Well, what was going on in the camp of Israel during the Pentateuch period?
You know, Moses, Sinai.
Was God completely invisible?
No, he wasn't.
There could be a pillar of fire, there could be a pillar of cloud,
and even more dramatically, a human form.
We're going to talk about the human form tonight.
But while all that's going on, God refers to what he's doing there,
or what the embodied Yahweh is doing there, saying, I'm going to walk in your
midst.
So obey, that sort of thing.
It's a very unusual circumstance.
Humans, of course, are servants as a result of the fall.
We've lost sort of that upper status.
We're still children, or the family of God, because there aren't that many
people.
The population is growing, though.
But it's becoming wicked in the wake of, or in concert with, a divine rivalry or
rebellion.
Now that harkens back to Genesis 3.
But it also speaks of Genesis 6.
Regardless of what your view of Genesis 6 is, when the sons of God go into the
daughters of men, and they father children known as the Nephilim, the mighty men of
renown, and so on and so forth, from that point, that passage is going to
get referenced in both Testaments.
And when it does, it's the idea that you again have a competing human and
quasi-divine opposition to what's going on with the human promise.
Remember the human one that has to come and fix all this stuff.
And that bloodline...
and human warfare that extends from it as well.
Because when you get to the wars of Joshua, those things are blurred and
mixed.
So you have a competing interest going on.
The interest now is preserving what we have.
Who are the human mediators?
Well, it is anyone who can be defined as a prophet.
Anyone who... and I'm defining prophet very loosely because Jesus does.
Remember here in Luke 11, 51, Jesus refers to the prophets all the way from righteous
Abel to Zechariah, who was slain at the altar.
He goes all the way back to Abel.
Basically, a prophet is someone who has had a direct encounter with God and who
speaks for God.
That's it.
Not somebody who predicts the future.
It's very wide and open.
And if you look at who we have here, we have Abel, who is the one that Jesus
starts with.
We've already seen Adam when he was the only one there.
Seth, we've never... the text doesn't call Seth this, but Seth is viewed as sort of
an initial fulfillment of the seed promise in Genesis because Abel was killed and God
replaces him.
Eve says, I've gotten another man.
I've gotten a man with the help of the Lord.
Because for sure, the good line ain't going through that cane.
That ain't going to happen.
So God replaces Abel with Seth.
So I'm including him here.
But we do have Enoch and Noah.
Again, direct divine encounter.
They speak for God.
Both of them in Jude 4 and 2 Peter 2 are called heralds or prophets.
They prophesy.
They speak for God.
Again, I want you to start noticing patterning.
Patterns.
The Bible is... I don't know if you know what fractals are.
But sometimes we get stuck in a real simple sort of relationship like typology.
Typology is interesting.
It happens, of course, in Scripture.
But what's even more deep and more meshed and more... sometimes you got to dig for
it.
It's patterning.
Vocabulary.
Words, phrases, ideas that just pop up all over the place throughout the history of
the story.
Of course, we have a problem here.
We have Genesis 6, 5.
Humankind is generally evil.
There's a pollution of humanity's line.
There's a reason why Noah is singled out.
Because he walks with God.
And he was pure in his generations.
Whatever's going on in Genesis 6, verses 1-4, Noah is not part of it.
There's a reason why Noah shows up in the genealogy of Jesus.
Because Matthew, or Luke in this case, wants to be very clear that Jesus not only
goes back to David and back to Abraham.
He goes through Noah and Enoch to Adam.
You have to establish this line.
There's a reason for that.
Babel.
This is one of the critical moments of the Old Testament story.
We have a state of chaos.
There's no mention of divine embodiment.
There is a divine sort of conversation or decree to the council.
This is the other passage where you get plural language when God sees what's going
on at Babel.
He just told them to disperse and multiply.
You know, do that Noahic covenant thing, like I told you.
And God sees that they're not, and he says, Yahweh goes down,
and then he says to his council, let us go down and put a stop to this.
There's a little sense of urgency there.
Because if we don't, nothing will be impossible to them.
It's just like Genesis 3 in some sense, where the fallout as well is the knowledge
of good and evil.
We can talk about that a little bit later, but basically it's a presumption of
authority that you don't have.
You're an imager of God, but you are not at the status of those who decree fate and
calamity, good and evil for humanity.
You are not at that level.
You share the authority given to you, but you ain't got this.
You are not, as Genesis 3.22 says, when after the fall it says, now that the
man has become as one of us, knowing good and evil.
It's the same thing here.
If we don't put a stop to this, humankind is going to be able,
or they're going to try to assert this authority before it's time, before God
decreed when they should have it.
So, we have a decision made by God to disperse humanity, but that isn't all he
does.
That might be how we're familiar with it.
Because there are other passages that talk about what happened at Babel.
Deuteronomy 32, 8 and 9.
And I have here a note that I'm reading with the LXX and the Dead Sea Scrolls.
If you have an ESV, good for you because you'll agree with me.
The ESV says, when the Most High divided up the nations, he divided them up
according to the number of the sons of God.
Most English Bibles do not say that.
Most of them have the sons of Israel.
And there's a textual difference there.
Dead Sea Scrolls, Septuagint, which is the Greek translation of the Old Testament,
has sons of God.
It has to be sons of God because if you go back and look at the table of nations,
Israel isn't there.
It doesn't exist yet.
It can't be sons of Israel.
But there was a later change made to the text in that tradition.
But the correct text is preserved for us by Providence.
We also have Deuteronomy 4, 19-20.
Basically, in a nutshell, what happens at Babel is God says, look, we've tried to
rule with human beings first as co-rulers and then try to sort of reestablish my
rule on earth and get back to Eden and it just isn't working.
You're disobedient again.
And so what I'm going to do is I'm going to confuse your languages and scatter you
over the earth.
And not only that, but I'm going to divide you up and I'm going to assign you to one
of the sons of God.
I'm going to put lesser beings who work for me, members of the heavenly host,
you're going to report to them and they're going to report to you.
You're made for each other.
I'm done being your sovereign.
I'm disinheriting you from the family because I'm going to start over.
And that's why chapter 12 of Genesis right after Babel is what?
The call of Abraham.
God disinherits the nations and this is the Old Testament rationale if you go to
Deuteronomy 4, 19 and 20, it says that the nations were allotted to these other
beings and they were supposed to worship them not worship Yahweh.
I've had enough of you.
It's the Romans 1 event of the Old Testament.
God giving them up to their own desires.
I'm going to start a new family.
So long.
Bye.
Now you can have these for gods.
And they work for me so I want them to do a good job.
And yeah, I can rightly say I'm the only deity, I'm the only God who is preexistent
creator, deserves to be worshipped.
But you're under them now.
I've had enough.
Now in the back of God's mind, God knows that the nations are rightfully
His.
And He's going to have a plan to get them back.
But for now, He's had enough.
He's up to here.
So God has no human heir at the moment.
So there we have a issue.
And there's no kingdom among men.
There's no mediator.
No one's a prophetic figure in the era.
We have a divine disinheriting and God decides to start over with Abraham,
who not coincidentally the writer makes sure to tell us that he comes from the
line of Noah and Enoch.
Just want to make that clear.
Because we're still going back to Adam.
Patriarchs.
God again is the ruler, the father figure.
And here you get a lot of divine embodiment.
God shows up in human form to the patriarchs with some regularity.
Either referring to Himself or He's referred to as the Word.
Doesn't that sound familiar?
Or as some sort of man who we find out later in the narrative isn't really a man.
It's called Elohim.
A couple of examples.
With Abraham in Genesis 12.
It says, The word of the Lord came to Abraham.
Now we think, Oh, Abraham must have heard a sound.
Well, if you read the rest of the narrative, if you read Genesis 15,
if you read some other passages that refer back to that event, you find out that
Abraham saw Yahweh.
It wasn't just in his hearing, it was seeing, it was visual.
This happens to Isaac as well.
In fact, in Acts 7.2 Stephen's speech, Stephen says point blank that Yahweh
appeared to Abraham.
Just uses the point blank term, appeared.
Happens to Isaac.
Happens to Jacob.
The three patriarchal figures.
So we have God ruling.
Why do I keep referring to embodiment?
Because God is there.
He's supervising.
He's the sovereign.
But when God wants to interact with people, He has to... He has a problem.
God's problem is, well, you know, if I really showed you what I am,
you wouldn't know what to do.
You wouldn't know how to process it.
Because I am so other that it would just be pointless.
Not only that, but what else do we hear in the Old Testament about if people really
see the presence, if they really see the glory, what happens to them?
You die.
So God has a problem.
I don't want to kill you.
I'd like to converse a little bit.
And I'd like you to know that somebody's there.
But if I just kind of show up, you're going to die.
So that's just kind of pointless.
So what God does is He appears in ways that human beings can process with their
senses.
Sometimes it's a cloud.
Sometimes it's a fire.
In other cases, it's a human form.
You know, this is different than the Incarnation.
But you can see where the relationship is.
This is different from the Incarnation in that the Incarnation has God upping the
ante a little bit.
God is actually born a human with all the frailties associated thereof.
This is why the Incarnation was such a shock when the New Testament writers would
speak of it.
The Jews, they knew their own Bible.
They're used to this idea of divine embodiment.
Yeah, God shows up as a person and there's conversations.
But the idea that God would, for lack of a better word, risk actually being born as a
human being.
That was a little...
That was kind of scary.
But if they were tracking with the Old Testament, when we get to the end of this
tonight, you'll see why that was the only way it could have happened.
That's the only way all the things converge.
It was a necessity.
But God comes to the patriarchs.
He says to Abraham, guess what, you're going to have a kid.
Yeah, yeah, I know you can.
Don't worry about it.
I'll take care of it.
So there's a miraculous birth with Isaac.
Out of that comes Israel, the nation.
Jacob's name change and all that.
So in a very real sense, the Israelites are God's children.
He's responsible for them being there.
And they're also spiritual children as well.
God now has a line on earth and a kingdom.
Now our figures, of course, are the patriarchs.
It's kind of interesting.
Who are the enemies that Abraham runs into in Genesis 14?
Come on, this is a Bible verse.
I expect all of you to have memorized that list of nations.
Genesis 14.
It's kind of interesting if it's weird or boring, it must be important.
In the days of Amraphel, so on and so forth.
Who does Abraham run into?
Verse 5.
The Rephaim, the Zuzim, the Amim, and the Horites, the Amalekites,
and also the Amorites.
Are those names familiar?
They're the same names that show up where?
In the days of Moses and Joshua.
And it turns out that there's something unusual about those people groups.
Something else happens to Abraham.
He meets Melchizedek.
Of course, we know Melchizedek from Genesis 14.
We know him from Psalm 110.
That's pretty much it.
Hebrews 11.
Hebrews 8 actually throws a few things in there about Melchizedek.
Why is Melchizedek noteworthy?
He is the priest of Salem.
Salem.
In Semitic it would be Shalem.
What is Shalem?
It means peace, but it's also Jerusalem.
Hebrews 8 tells us, Psalm 110 says that he was unique.
He was noteworthy because he had an eternal priesthood.
To have an eternal priesthood, I would suggest that you probably need to
be eternal.
And this is the way Melchizedek was taken in 1st century Judaism and Middle Judaism,
the 2nd Temple period.
Melchizedek was viewed as a divine figure, a divine being.
Because we can't have all these other... and when we get to the end, it will
converge for you.
But the fact that we have a priesthood that is not from Aaron is important
because Messiah is never connected with Aaron.
He's not from that tribe.
He needs a priesthood that sort of operates out here to do all those things.
What does Melchizedek offer Abraham, by the way?
Bread and wine.
What a coincidence.
Moses, Aaron, and Israel.
God is still the ruler.
Again, lots of divine embodiment here.
Exodus chapter 3.
Who is in the bush?
God's in the bush.
Yeah.
Who else?
The angel of Yahweh is in the bush.
And you go back to Acts chapter 7, Stephen's sermon.
He tells you the same thing because Stephen's reading his Old Testament.
The angel is in the bush.
We get lots of appearances of the angel.
Exodus 33 1-11 is kind of interesting.
Moses used to take the tent, pitch it outside the camp.
Far off from the camp he called it the tent of meeting.
Again, Moses has lots of experiences here with a direct encounter with God.
When Moses entered the tent, the pillar of the cloud would descend and stand at the
entrance of the tent.
The Lord would speak with Moses.
When all the people saw the pillar of the cloud standing at the entrance of the
tent, all the people would rise up and worship.
Each at his tent door.
Thus the Lord used to speak to Moses face to face.
And here we have Joshua.
When Moses turned again to the camp, his assistant Joshua, the son of Nun,
a young man, would not depart from the tent.
That's going to become important because Joshua is going to have the same divine
encounters that Moses did.
Exodus 23 also associated somewhat with the pillar.
God tells Moses when they're heading out into the wilderness after they leave
Sinai, he says, I'm going to send my angel with you.
And you better listen to him because my name is in him.
He will not forgive sins.
My name is in him.
Deuteronomy 4 37 helps us understand what that means.
Because he loved your fathers and chose their offspring after them and brought you
out of Egypt with his own presence.
The name is the presence of God.
It is the glory.
It is what God is.
And that thing, what God was, was inside this angel.
The angel was the embodiment of Yahweh.
And it went with Israel for the whole trip.
Every day.
Everybody got to see it.
At least if you could see the front of the camp.
Everybody got to see that.
So much so when you get to the book of Judges, Joshua's died and it's like,
we still haven't taken the land like we were supposed to.
The angel shows up at a place called Boquim, which means weeping.
Why is it weeping?
Because the angel says, you still haven't done what you're supposed to do.
I'm out of here.
And he leaves.
And the people sat there and wept.
That's why the place is called Boquim unto this day.
Because they'd had it for 40 years.
Every day.
Divine embodiment.
Yahweh in human form.
Right there on the scene.
And they still didn't do it.
All this stuff happening again in Moses and Joshua's day.
Moses is called the servant.
God's servant.
He represented the nation at large.
He was also a prophet.
Remember Deuteronomy 18, prophesying that there would be a prophet someday that
would rise up to the level of Moses.
Of course, the New Testament applies that to Jesus.
It's also during Moses' time that God calls Israel as a whole, as a nation,
my son.
When they go into Pharaoh, God tells them, when you go into Pharaoh, here's what you
say.
Let my son go into the wilderness that he can offer sacrifice to me.
Israel is called my son.
Makes sense, because that's God's family.
Israel is reborn and redeemed from Egypt, which restarts the kingdom among men.
Our mediator, again, is Moses.
We're going to skip the whole law dispensed by angels, which is mentioned
four times, three or four times in the New Testament.
Where do they get that idea?
They get it from the Old Testament.
Kingdom of priests.
Aaron gets to see divine embodiment as well.
So he becomes a prophetic figure of importance.
But God reminds them that, look, what I really want you to do is,
I want you all to be priests.
I want you to be a kingdom of priests.
I want you to all be this.
Problem.
They fail at Kadesh.
This is when they're going to go into the land and they send in the twelve spies.
They come back and two of them say, yeah, let's go get it.
Ten of them say, forget it.
Why do they get scared?
Because the Anakim are in the land.
Numbers 13, verse 33.
The Anakim are descendants of the Nephilim.
Where do we get them?
Genesis 6.
Here the whole competing human and quasi-divine bloodline thing starts to
emerge again.
They are standing in the way of the kingdom.
They are standing in the way of God's son.
They are standing in the way of kingship.
They are standing in the way of fill in the blank.
All these motifs.
And they fail.
We can't do it.
So, they get sent out in the wilderness.
Joshua is going to be the leader.
God is still in charge.
Joshua was with Moses on a few of the divine encounters that Moses had.
And in a few of them, God actually commissions Joshua.
Takes a portion of the spirit that's on Moses, puts it on Joshua, tells Joshua,
you're the next leader.
But Joshua has his own special encounter apart from Moses.
Which is Joshua 5.
The captain of the Lord's host.
Now, I have angel here in the notes.
Because I think it's pretty, at least it's clear to me, that the captain of the
Lord's host is the angel.
That has been leading them for the whole time.
Why do I say that?
Because the angel is described, or excuse me, the captain is described as
v 'karbo shel u'fa be'edo with his sword drawn in his hand.
That phrase, that concatenation, occurs two times elsewhere in the Old
Testament.
I have the verses here, Numbers 22-23, who's that?
Numbers 22, Balaam.
It's the angel of the Lord in the Balaam incident.
And 1 Chronicles 21-16 is also the angel of the Lord.
Joshua has the same, again, status.
The same divine encounter.
We have the same God's ruling, God's observing, but God is meeting with
Israel as an embodied human figure.
Same as before, during Joshua's time.
Joshua replaces Moses as the heir to the servant prophet role, but not the ultimate
fulfillment, and that was Jesus.
Israel is still God's son, his children.
That role, the role of, again, the servant prophet, was supposed to be a
king, and also the son of God role was supposed to be filled by a king once they
had kings.
Once you get in the land and set up the monarchy, we get kingships.
How do I know that?
Because when they actually get in there and have a king, that's what the kings
call.
The Lord said unto my Lord.
You have those passages, but you also have psalms that refer to the king as my,
God says, my son.
Because the king now embodies, the king sort of subsumes, he stands in
the place of the entire nation.
The king is the nation.
The nation is the king.
Yeah, God knows that there's corporate and individual, but in the language that's
used, we have a human being who's royal, who is there to protect and establish
divine kingship, the kingship of Yahweh among the nations at a specific
geographical place.
He's supposed to be a servant, and he's also supposed to rule according
to the law.
The king again becomes the new Moses.
He replaces, you have Moses, you had Moses over, and then underneath Moses you had
prince for each tribe, you had 70 elders.
70 is kind of an interesting number, because that's the same number of nations
that were disinherited back at Babel.
God's son, God's family is replacing the family he disinherited.
There's 70 elders.
Get to Jesus, Jesus does something associated with that number too.
But the king ultimately was supposed to have all these things sort of fuse the
prophetic figure, the person who spoke for God.
All these things were supposed to be focused on the king.
And the king was supposed to carry the program through to its eschatological end.
The king fails.
Joshua, of course, goes in, does what he's supposed to do, and if you actually look,
I'm not going to, we don't have time to do this, any one of these is like a two or
three hour talk.
If you actually plot the places, there are only four, five, six,
something like that.
Places that are put under the param in the Old Testament.
That's when everything living, every person living, sometimes even the
animals, are to be killed.
That isn't the usual mode of conquest.
Usually the verb is drive them out, possess their houses.
God says, you're going to live in houses you didn't build, you're going to have
fields you didn't plant.
Everything's there for you.
But on a few occasions God said, go in there, and they have to be wiped
out.
If you plot those cities on a map, and then you go back to the list of people
groups that are mentioned, I don't know, seven, eight, nine times, Rephaim,
the Amorites, the Zuzim, the Amim, all these Im, that all of them trace their
lineage back to the giant clans, the Nephilim in Genesis 6.
They live at those places.
Those are population centers of those bloodlines.
Now, I've never seen that in print, but just do it yourself.
You will find out.
Even the Amorites.
The Amorites are kind of a generic term when Joshua goes in to Ai, and they lose
because of what Achan does.
He laments, he tears his clothes, and he says, we came all this way,
and now we are going to get beat by these Amorites.
Amorites, according to the prophet Amos, were unusually tall.
Even them.
It's a pattern.
In their thinking, there is something demonic going on here.
And God says, those are the places you go in, and they are kerem.
They are offered up as a burnt hole offering to me.
Other places, if they run out of time, fine.
These are the places that are put under kerem.
And it's about bloodlines.
It sounds kind of weird, but that's what it is in the Old Testament.
So they don't complete the conquest.
We finally get a conquest under David.
Of course Samuel is around when David is around.
Divine embodiment continues into the time of Samuel.
Samuel is the last judge.
There were a few judges that witnessed the angel or again some form of divine
embodiment.
Gideon is probably the obvious example.
The Gideon passage is interesting because Yahweh and the angel are both in the same
episode at the same time.
So there are two individuals.
In fact one leaves and the other is still there at the end of the story.
But with Samuel the same thing happens.
This is one of my favorite passages in the Old Testament.
I can't resist skipping 1 Samuel 3.
Now the young man Samuel was ministering to the Lord, to Yahweh under Eli.
And the word of the Lord... the what?
The word of the Lord was rare in those days.
Oh you mean they just didn't hear God?
No there was no frequent vision.
First verse.
It's something you see.
Not just hear but something you see.
At that time Eli whose eyesight had begun to grow dim so he couldn't see was lying
down in his own place.
You know the story.
Samuel goes to lay down and hears a voice and he thinks it's Eli and he runs over
there a couple times and Eli finally figures it out and says well it's not me.
So if it happens again you say speak Lord for your servant hears.
I'm all ears.
I know it's not Eli.
And that's what happens.
We go down here.
Verse 10 And the Lord came Yahweh came and stood he stands in front of Samuel calling
as at the other times Samuel Samuel Samuel said speak for your servant hears and then
Yahweh pronounces the judgment on Eli's family.
And you get to the end of the chapter it's just great.
And Samuel grew and Yahweh was with him and let none of his words fall to the
ground and all Israel from Dan to Beersheba knew that Samuel was established
as a prophet of the Lord.
He had a divine encounter.
Of course he's a prophet.
That's what prophets are.
That's what makes them prophets.
They knew that he was established as a prophet of the Lord and the Lord appeared
appeared again at Shiloh which is where Samuel and Eli were living for the Lord
and the Lord revealed himself to Samuel at Shiloh.
How?
By the word of the Lord.
See the word sometimes in the Old Testament is a human figure who is Yahweh.
It's right there in the Old Testament.
When John writes John chapter 1 he's not like Now which Greek philosopher should I
quote here?
I need some help from pagans.
How do they talk about God?
No.
He knows his Old Testament.
But that's what you'll hear in a lot of commentaries.
John, heavily influenced by Greco-Roman philosophy, writes his gospel.
I'm not saying he was totally uninfluenced.
I am suggesting though that he knew his Old Testament pretty well.
David is called the servant.
He's the king.
The king is the servant.
He's my son.
He's the son of God.
Israel is now a kingdom of God on earth.
David himself had a divine encounter.
You look at these passages up, 2 Chronicles 3.
He meets the angel.
The passage says that Yahweh appeared to David, the father of Solomon.
And it connects it with Ornan, the Jebusite, back at the threshing floor.
Go look at that passage.
It's the angel.
Solomon sees the same thing.
Again, they're kings, but they're also in this long line going all the way back to
Adam.
People who meet God and speak for God.
Long line of the prophets.
We have a failure under Solomon.
Here, the word of the Lord is even rarer.
Other than Solomon, we don't really get too much divine embodiment.
We don't get it with kings at all after Solomon, because most of them are bad.
But we do get it with prophets.
What we think of as the classical prophets.
And the prophets are called servants.
My servant, the prophets.
My servants, the prophets.
Look at that string of verses in Isaiah.
Everywhere you see servant in Isaiah, pretty much everywhere, it refers to the
nation of Israel.
It can refer to the prophet, which is why Jewish interpreters think that the
suffering servant of Isaiah 53 is probably Isaiah.
They don't want to see messianic overtones there.
So they're not making that up.
They're using the precedent of the rest of the book.
But you also get a couple pagans referred to as my servants.
Cyrus and later Nebuchadnezzar.
Isn't it ironic that when it's time for Israel to get punished and it looks like
the kingdom is over again, kind of just like Babel, it's just not going to work.
You know, I disinherited the nations back then, now I got to disinherit my own kid.
Isn't it ironic that when it comes to that time, God calls two pagans from the
foreign nations who had been disinherited and said, get up on your horse,
I have a job for you.
What it told the astute reader of the text is that, now wait a minute, that means
God's still in charge of everything.
Including the nations that they're telling us that their gods beat our God.
And we're in exile and they're not.
They conquered us.
And we're like, what are we doing here?
The whole thing is over.
You know, wearing a hand basket.
It's over.
And God says, well if you think that, then figure this out.
Why is it that I'm commanding them?
They're the only ones around to do my work that'll actually do it.
So I gotta use them to bring you out of the muck where you're at.
So there's a lot of irony there.
Even after the exile, Israel is still called in Hosea the sons of the living
God.
They're still God's children.
He accepts them back.
But the kingdom is in exile.
And the prophets get various messages to the exiles.
Isaiah is sent to Israelites.
He sees the throne of God.
It's a direct divine encounter.
Jeremiah.
Jeremiah chapter 1.
Read it.
Read it closely.
The word of the Lord came unto Jeremiah.
Then like two verses later, that word of the Lord is called Yahweh.
And then in verse 7 it says, and the Lord, Yahweh, reached out His hand and touched
me.
He's embodied.
And it's a literary, it's a theological signal that I'm still here.
Just like I was in the old, I'm still here.
Ezekiel.
Ezekiel sees a man, a figure of a man enthroned.
All the weird stuff he sees, that's pretty clear, that part.
Now, where does this wind up?
Here's the situation we have at the end of the exile.
You have the corporate servant dying.
Israel's in exile.
Israel's toast.
Rightly punished for sin.
The corporate servant, though, is raised anew by anointed human agency,
Cyrus in this case.
Corporate resurrection.
The nation, Ezekiel 37, goes through a whole picture of how the nation,
who is clearly dead, you're like really, really dead.
When the bones have to be reassembled and the veins and all that stuff, you're dead.
But the dead will come to life again in a very vivid way.
And we even have third day imagery in Hosea, Hosea chapter 6, verse 2.
Israelites are lamenting their situation.
They say, well, even at the third day, you can still raise us up.
The corporate servant can be raised up even on the third day.
So you have the nation resurrected, but the glory and the kingship have not
returned.
And so, you have more prophecy come.
This time, of a single servant whose ministry will mimic, here's the part I
want you to catch.
The single servant's ministry, Jesus' ministry, mimics the corporate
servant.
Death because of the nation's sin, and then resurrection.
Once raised and resurrected, following the pattern that we've seen up to this point,
what else would a Jew have expected?
Well, we need a king.
If we have a kingdom resurrected, we need a king.
And those nations, too, they still need to be brought into the fold because God
disinherited them, but yet He's still clearly interested in them.
He's told us a couple times He's going to bring them back, and they're going to
worship Him.
He will be their God.
We need a prophet like unto Moses, because that's still hanging out there.
We need a priest who isn't from the Aaronic line, but, oh yeah, there's that
guy, you know, Kislevich.
We need a return of the glory of the presence of Yahweh, and we still need the
original prophecy that started the whole ball rolling.
We still need a human being that will undo the effects of the fall.
I want you to just look at this visually.
We have here Jesus' bloodline back to Adam.
Again, in parallel with some of the other bloodline issues that emerged in the
primeval history.
That's followed by a miraculous birth.
Abraham, Sarah, and Isaac.
Well, the Gospels have that too.
And then Israel, my son Israel, is taken out of Egypt.
So is this son out of Egypt.
In fact, Matthew says, yeah, he came out of Egypt.
Because, like Hosea says, out of Egypt have I called my son.
Corporate individual, corporate individual.
The same things going on.
You have deliverance under Moses.
At the baptism of Jesus.
I mean, you have again, you can talk about the water imagery or whatever.
What's really going on at the Exodus is a victory over the gods of Egypt.
And a rebirth of the nation as God's son.
To start the kingdom again.
It's interesting, at the baptism, God says, this is my son.
So everybody can hear it.
Of course, he comes to fulfill the law.
We have the law at Sinai.
The law, of course, points to Jesus.
Jesus administers righteousness to his people and nations.
And look at the passage quoted at Jesus' baptism.
Isaiah 42.
My servant.
Then it's Israel.
This time it's not.
Because his life is mimicking, is echoing, what happened to the corporate
son.
And they go into the wilderness.
The corporate son fails.
Goes into the wilderness, which is associated with chaos and demonic forces.
Jesus goes into the wilderness.
We have a victory over Satan.
Satan offers him the nations.
Isn't that curious?
Bow down and worship me.
It's not an empty promise.
I'll give you the nations.
Jesus says, I don't think so.
I've got another way to get them.
I don't need you to give them to me.
What does Jesus do right after he defeats Satan in the wilderness?
Luke chapter 10.
He sends out disciples.
How many does he send out?
70.
Now there is a textual disagreement, 70 and 72, that goes back into the Old
Testament, 70 and 72.
If you look in Genesis 48, the count there is given at 70, but the problem was how to
count Ephraim and Manasseh and all this kind of stuff.
The tradition at 70 is very strong.
And not only that, it lines up everywhere else.
Over here, after we get to wander around the wilderness, then we go into the land
under Joshua.
Joshua's holy wars.
He defeats all human and all semi-divine opposition.
Well, Jesus does the same thing.
The ministry of the 70 begins and coincides with the casting out of demons.
The 70 cast out the demons.
The only time in the Bible where demons are cast out is the New Testament.
It begins with the Gospels.
Why?
Because it marks the inauguration, the beginning of the restoration of the
kingdom of God.
In this case, it ain't going to get overturned like it did before.
Why not?
Because all the other iterations in the Old Testament who was God depending on?
The corporate servant.
You know those Israelites that kind of mess up a lot?
He's not dependent on the corporate servant anymore.
He's depending on the servant.
Who is him?
His, but isn't him.
And he can guarantee that he'll pull it off.
Transfiguration is interesting.
Do a little study on the transfiguration.
Where did it happen?
Church tradition has Mount Tabor.
If you look at your better commentaries they will show why that doesn't work.
There's actually no textual support for it.
If you follow the geography the transfiguration would have happened
somewhere near the foot of Mount Hermon.
Anybody know where Mount Hermon is?
Mount Hermon.
Up in the Golan.
What territory was Hermon in?
Dan.
Dan overlapped with the region known as Bashan.
Deuteronomy 3.
Bashan was home to giant clans.
Hermon was also in Jewish tradition in the book of Enoch.
It was the place where the angels from Genesis 6 descended before they did what
they did.
Mount Hermon.
And it's that place that Jesus picks to go and be transfigured.
If you're a Jew and you know your Old Testament and you know all this other
stuff that's written about the Old Testament in the intertestamental period,
you don't miss that.
That is what's the phrase that we like to use now?
Not holy war, but what's the phrase that's kind of spiritual warfare?
That is spiritual warfare.
Jesus showing up at these places.
By the way, in the Semitic world, Bashan in Hebrew is a geographical term,
but it's also a noun, a common noun for serpent.
Who would have thought that?
At Ugarit, they had a dialectical difference.
Their word for serpent was Bethan instead of Bashan.
It's a little T-H-S-H interchange going on there.
They actually described the region, and they considered it the gateway to the
netherworld.
The gates of hell, if you will.
So that's where Jesus shows up.
I just want to let you know who I am.
We have the demise of the kingdom over here due to apostasy and unbelief.
The Son, Israel, is surrendered to the nations and their gods by God.
Over here, the kingdom being offered is rejected along with its king, but that was
God's plan too because he needs resurrection.
The single servant needs to be resurrected to fulfill the imagery of the corporate
servant who died and was resurrected.
That's not the only reason God did that, but it's there in the text.
So here we have, again, the whole thing with Cyrus, the anointed, the servant dies
but yet lives.
It's not the nation there.
Prophecies of resurrection.
And here we get, again, the shepherd, the Messiah, the servant, brings
deliverance and dies, but is raised on the third day.
The nation of the kingdom is revived with him.
Israel rises with him, because he is Israel.
Progressing toward an unstoppable, and that's the key idea, an unstoppable
eschatological culmination.
This one won't fail, because we're no longer trusting on mere human corporate
servants.
This time we have the servant.
And if you stop to think about it, how else could it have all been pulled
off?
You've got servant thread meets in Jesus.
You've got divine embodiment.
It's as though, and I think it is, Jesus is there the whole time.
Just shepherding it along, knowing full well back in Genesis that the only way
we're going to get this back is if a human being does all this stuff to reverse the
effects of the curse.
Which one of them that you know is going to do that?
I'm going to have to become incarnated.
I'm going to have to become them to flip the whole thing around.
Everything converges in this one individual and his life mimics
deliberately.
The New Testament writers, this isn't an accident, this is an intelligent mind
guiding the New Testament writers to arrange the material as they did so that
the readers would get the point.
Now, Dax has been going through, I'm going to put this up real briefly,
there's a lot more that could be hit on.
Even before we get to the history of Israel, Abraham, there are a lot of other
parallels that are more primeval.
But Dax has been talking, preaching through Ephesians and this was the thing
that shocked Paul.
He's astonished that the Gentiles are included in this.
Why?
Because they're the ones that were the competing line.
They're the ones always opposing this.
Even by God's own design, God's own choice, God's own judgment.
So in other words, for this whole thing to work out and to have redemption and to
reclaim the nations, God is going to have, something God did is going to have to be
undone.
Frankly, only God can do that.
And so, you have an incarnation.
You have the wall of separation of the Gentiles being torn away.
He is Israel, but the Gentiles are also His body.
Just think about it.
Think about all the terms.
The epistles use words like adoption.
That's a really pregnant term against the backdrop of all this.
It's a family term.
There are lots of things in the New Testament that I'm going to encourage
you...
I'm going to encourage you to filter through.
Look for repetitions.
Look for patterns.
In academies, we call this intertextuality.
It's not a fancy word.
We're just saying, look at the text real closely where they use the same things.
I think it'll give you a really solid backdrop so that when you read through
your Bible, you'll be able to sort of pick out why writers are doing what they're
doing.
What they're telegraphing.
What they're picking up.
Little threads they're picking up and they're going to take it a little further.
And they're going to drop it somewhere and the next guy will pick it up.
But it's a story.
Just like a good novel.
Except it's not a myth.
It's the myth that's true.
Stealing that from Tolkien.
It's a good story.
I want to focus tonight on Jesus as co-creator.
And this is a obviously familiar idea for Christians.
And I think the longer we're Christians, we sort of take this for granted.
But I want you to ask yourself tonight this question that you see on the slide
behind me.
Essentially, where in the world do the New Testament writers get this idea?
Now, I think the easy and I don't want to call it a cop out because there's a
certain level of legitimacy to it.
You could say, well, they got that because they were inspired to write what they
wrote and God just gave them that information and that's the answer.
Well, I'm obviously not going to rule that out.
But what I wanted to get you to consider and realize is that the idea of God having
a co-creator is not new to Christianity.
It comes from the Old Testament.
And I personally as a scholar and as someone who has taught many undergrad
classes and I get to interact with a lot of people who's, I think, predominantly
their questions are sincere.
But sometimes you get people who just enjoy picking on Christianity and
agitating.
And one of the things that they like to harp on is this notion that Christianity,
the writers of the New Testament, just basically sort of made things up.
Or that they're dependent in some way on pagan literature, pagan religious
literature from the ancient Mediterranean for their ideas.
If you've been exposed to the Da Vinci Code at all, you know that to be the case.
In fact, I'm going to bring up the Da Vinci Code tonight once or twice.
Because what we're going to cover, some parts of what we're going to cover,
have been used in pop culture and that's probably the best example in what I would
call heretical ways and also very antagonistic ways.
I want you to be a little sensitive to the fact that you really...
there's an importance attached to being able to show that the New Testament and
the Old Testament are not these things that you can drive a wedge between.
That there's continuity of thought between the two.
And that would be reasonable since we believe that there's the same divine
author.
And this is a good example because you read certain statements in the New
Testament that are pretty clear that have Jesus as the co-creator.
Here's one in Colossians, perhaps the most familiar, Colossians chapter 1.
He has delivered us from the domain of darkness, God specifically, and
transferred us to the kingdom of his beloved son.
So there's a reference to Jesus.
In whom we have redemption, the forgiveness of sins.
He is the image of the invisible God, again still speaking of Jesus,
the firstborn of all creation.
For by him all things were created.
Pretty clear statement.
In heaven and on earth, visible and invisible.
Whether thrones or dominions or rulers or authorities, those are all terms for
divine beings, what we would think of as angelic beings.
So it covers a lot of ground.
Everything in heaven and earth, visible and invisible, Jesus is given
credit for at least being participating in the creation.
He is before all things and in him all things hold together in verse 17.
You get the same idea in 1 Corinthians 8.
For although there may be so-called gods in heaven or on earth, as indeed there are
many gods and many lords, yet for us there is one God, the Father, from whom are all
things and for whom we exist.
So God gets the credit in that part of the verse.
And one Lord, Jesus Christ, through whom are all things and through whom we exist.
This is actually a little more precise in terms of the idea because when you talk
about giving Jesus credit for creation and of course God gets credit for creation and
we think of God as the creator from the Old Testament.
The language in the New Testament sometimes, as in this verse, distinguishes
between sort of God as an ultimate creator and Jesus as the agent of creation,
the means by which everything was brought into existence.
We'll be talking about that language as well.
Now, let's go here to...
I actually want to skip ahead here.
Let's go to Genesis 1, 1 to 3.
If you look at this verse, very familiar, actually three verses, what's the answer
to the question?
What is God's agent or means of creation?
Because when you think of creation this is the passage you think of, right?
Genesis 1.
So what would you say is the answer?
I hear the word coming from verse 3.
And God said let there be light and there was light.
So the word isn't actually in the passage but God is speaking.
So there you have this association with God who is a spirit.
The Old Testament tells us God does not have a body.
The New Testament tells us God does not have a body.
God doesn't have vocal cords that can vibrate and make sound.
This language is anthropomorphic and it suggests that God is doing something and
the result of his activity, the result of his speaking in some way brings about
everything that there is.
Now, we know from the New Testament, you know, we have John chapter 1 in the
beginning, you know, was the word and the word was God, was with God and all that.
So we know that there is a conceptual connection between what's going on.
But I want to show you that the idea, and we had a few of these last week and
for the sake of those who weren't here I'm going to go quickly through these.
The idea of the word as an embodied entity, an embodied person in human form,
on occasion the description gets to that level.
That idea is very familiar to the Old Testament.
And I mentioned last week and I'll say it again this week that I think that is what
John is drawing on in chapter 1 of his gospel.
Here we have Genesis 15.
After these things the word of the Lord came to Abram in a vision, in something
visual.
Fear not Abram, I am your shield, your reward shall be very great.
Goes down a few verses.
Behold the word of the Lord came to him, he comes back, and he says to Abram,
this man shall not be your heir, referring to Eliezer of Damascus,
your own, your very own son shall be your heir.
And he brought him, in other words he, the word, brought him, Abram, outside and
said, look toward heaven and number the stars if you are able to number them.
Then he, the word, said to Abram, so shall your offspring be.
And Abram's response is, according to the biblical writer, he believed Yahweh.
That is who is talking to him.
So again you get this mixing of the divine name Yahweh with the word.
And the narrative reads as though Abraham is seeing another individual who takes him
outside and talks to him.
If the writer wanted to make it clear that Abraham wasn't seeing anything,
that he has this thing in his ear, maybe like this, he has this thing,
this sound or something, sensation in his ear or in his head, he could have made it
a lot clearer than this.
Because this is the language again of visual appearance and embodiment as though
another person is there.
1 Samuel 3 we talked about.
The young man Samuel was ministering to the Lord under Eli and the word of the
Lord, there is the phrase again, was rare in those days.
There was no frequent, what?
Vision.
Again something you see.
So there is a connection between a thing seen and the word of the Lord.
The Lord came and stood calling us at other times.
So you know the story.
I am not going to rehearse too much of it.
Samuel hears this voice several times.
Eli says, hey if it happens again you say speak Lord for your servant hears.
And here in verse 10, the Lord came and stood and if you are just a spirit,
it is kind of an odd word to use of you.
If you don't have some sort of person personality or some sort of maybe not
necessarily substance.
Although there are embodied passages where there is a tactile thing going on.
We are going to see one in a moment.
But there is at least another person there in the room that is visual.
And it is Yahweh.
The Lord came and stood calling us at other times, Samuel.
Samuel.
Samuel said speak for your servant hears.
Now the key here is the phrase at other times.
Because in the very first verse the writer says, hey the word of the Lord was rare in
those days but I am going to tell you about a story.
I am going to tell you something that happened to Samuel.
And he connects that back to this word of the Lord being rare.
And when you get to the end of the passage, he ties it together there too.
Beginning of chapter 3, the word of the Lord is rare.
At the end of the chapter we read this.
And Samuel grew and the Lord was with him.
Yahweh was with him and let none of his words fall to the ground.
And all Israel from Dan to Beersheba knew that Samuel was established as a prophet
of the Lord.
A prophet of Yahweh.
And Yahweh appeared again at Shiloh for the Lord Yahweh himself revealed himself
to Samuel at Shiloh by the word of the Lord.
So again, it is all connected to a visual presence.
Something Samuel can see.
And that thing, that person that Samuel is seeing is called the word.
Jeremiah 1 The words of Jeremiah the son of Hilkiah one of the priests who were in
Anathoth in the land of Benjamin to whom the word of the Lord came in the days of
Josiah.
This is how the prophecy of Jeremiah begins.
Verse 4 The word of the Lord came to me Jeremiah is the speaker now, saying Go
down to verse 6 Jeremiah says, Then said I, Ah Lord God, it is Adonai
Elohim So Jeremiah is referring to this word who came to him as Yahweh Yahweh
Elohim Adonai Elohim Lord God, behold I do not know how to speak He gets
his commissions like, I don't know what I am going to do Verse 9 Then Yahweh put out
his hand and touched my mouth It is a corporeal physicalized embodied presence
and that physicalized person is the word So there is a lot of Old Testament
antecedents to this In fact, if you are interested in this kind of thinking among
Jews I would advise you to do a little work in the Targums.
Now the Targums are Aramaic translations of both Old and New Testament,
and for our purposes we are interested in the Old There are a number of passages in
the Old Testament where you can't really tell, there is somebody else with Yahweh
and it might be the angel, but it might be just somebody else or that God refers to
himself in the third person, which is kind of odd.
And whoever put the Targums together, the translations, used the Aramaic word
Memra, that is the word Aramaic word for word it shows up in all sorts of passages
that you won't find in the Old Testament It is interpretive, and so here you have
Jews, and all you have to do is Google the word Memra M-E-M-R-A and it is going to be
fascinating for you, because here you have Jews looking at their own Hebrew Bible,
and seeing Yahweh, and then this Memra guy in different passages and they have this
sort of consciousness, because they are very in tune with their text, and they
have a sense that there is Yahweh invisible and there is this other Yahweh
out there and sometimes they are in the same passage at the same time and so that
is part of their theological consciousness Of course, going back to the New Testament
John picks up on this idea and he has the word as the agent of creation the first
three verses of John and if you go down around verse 14, we have the word made
flesh, the word was made flesh and dwelt among us again, very clear reference to
Jesus, and so this is one means, and probably the one most familiar to you,
even though if you were not familiar with all those Old Testament passages,
the ideas I think were familiar to where the New Testament writers would get this
but there is actually another one that is probably less familiar and which might be
kind of surprising Now, let's go to the second creation passage there are more
than two creation passages in the Old Testament but this is the one for our
purposes that we want to focus on Who is the agent or what is the agent of creation
here?
Proverbs 8, 22
Anybody know what the passage is about?
Wisdom.
If you go back to Proverbs 1, read up through chapter 8, you are going to see a
character known as wisdom and the character is spoken of in female terms in
other words, there would be pronouns that refer back to wisdom like her and she and
then you get to chapter 8, and wisdom is speaking at the beginning of the chapter
and you get down to verse 22 and we read Yahweh, the Lord possessed me at the
beginning of his work the first of his acts of old ages ago I was set up at the
first before the beginnings of the earth when there were no depths I was brought
forth, again this is language drawn from Genesis when there were no springs
abounding with water, before the mountains had been shaped, before the hills I was
brought forth before he had made the earth with its fields, or the first of the dust
of the world now I have possessed in blue and at the bottom you've already noticed
the word translated possessed here in the NIV is translated brought forth NRSV has
created and the NLT has formed, we're going to come back to the
terminological difficulty there but to continue on with Proverbs 8, look at what
wisdom says when he, God established the heavens, I was there when he drew a circle
in the face of the deep, when he made firm the skies above when he established the
fountains of the deep, when he assigned to the sea its limit, again this is all
Genesis language so that the waters might not transgress his command, when he marked
out the foundations of the earth, then I was beside him like a master
workman and I was daily his delight rejoicing before him always rejoicing in
his inhabited world and delighting in the children of man Wisdom is cast as a
co-creator in the Old Testament and wisdom is also cast as a female now I want you to
keep that in the back of your mind and I'm going to I'll probably hold discussion on
why female, I'll mention something now and if you want to talk about it later we can
during Q&A the reason for the feminine in reality is that the word wisdom,
chokmah in Hebrew is feminine it's grammatically feminine if you've ever
studied a foreign language you know that nouns especially have gender it's a means
of classification so that nouns and adjectives and verbs and subjects can be
matched up in grammatical agreement it really has nothing to do with biology
sometimes it can, for instance a young man that's going to be masculine young maiden
young girl that's feminine sometimes there's a congruence Greek though,
I'll give you an example where these don't have congruence Greek, the word technon,
little child is neuter German, Mädchen little girl is neuter don't look
for a biological rhyme or reason to the way languages work but because chokmah is
feminine that's why the translators will reflect feminine terminology, plus wisdom
in Proverbs is set over against lady folly you'll hear commentators talk about lady
wisdom and she is set her ways are set over against the salacious whorish woman
in Proverbs that you're warned to stay away from so there's this opposition and
so to pull that off in literary terms, you have to cast both of them as females
keep that in the back of your mind we see that wisdom was the agent but who or what
was wisdom in the period between the Old Testament and the New Testament which we
so cleverly call the intertestamental period
the better term is second temple period because of what happens at the end of the
Old Testament they rebuild the temple and then that one lasts until the first
century but in the intertestamental period there is a very large body of literature
that's written by Jewish rabbis and scholars and thinkers ...religious
authorities on all stripes.
And they know their Old Testament.
And they comment and produce a lot of material that deals with wisdom.
Now what I want you to track with me here is that we've looked at what the Old
Testament does.
There's this character wisdom out there that's co-creator.
Now we're going to look at what Jewish thinkers, before we get to the era of
Jesus and the New Testament, thought about that.
And then we'll go back to the New Testament.
And you'll find, again, a correlation that the New Testament writers are tracking all
this, but they do some important things that translate to theological differences
with mainstream Judaism.
And when you hear what those are, I think they're going to be kind of
striking to you.
It'll put the context of Paul's preaching, especially, in a new light.
One of the books that was produced during this period is the Wisdom of Solomon.
It's typical wisdom literature.
It goes off into some theological tangents, just like we saw Proverbs do.
But the writer here, again, these are all Jewish writers, I will tell you what
wisdom is and how she, there's the feminine language, came to be.
And I will hide no secrets from you, but I will trace her course from the
beginning of creation and make knowledge of her clear.
I will not pass by the truth.
Another chapter, the same writer, same book, says, for wisdom, the fashioner
of all things, again, he's getting that from Proverbs, taught me.
For she is a breath of the power of God and a pure emanation of the glory of the
Almighty.
Therefore nothing defiled gains entrance into her.
For she is a reflection, and I have a Greek word there that we're going to pick
up in a few minutes, apogasma.
She is a reflection of eternal light, a spotless mirror of the working of God,
and an image of his goodness.
Chapter 9, O God of my ancestors and Lord of my, Lord of mercy, who have made all
things by your word, isn't that interesting, you made all things by your
word, then he's going to talk about wisdom, and by your wisdom have formed
humankind to have dominion over the creatures you have made, and rule the
world in holiness and righteousness, and pronounce judgment in uprightness of
soul.
Give me the wisdom that sits by your throne.
That's an odd phrase.
Wisdom that sits by your throne.
That implies well, there's another throne.
Kind of wonder if that's the right hand of God.
Okay, do not reject me from among your servants.
With you is wisdom.
With you, speaking to God again, she who knows your works and was present
when you made the world.
She understands what is pleasing in your sight, and what is right according to your
commandments.
Send her forth from the holy heavens, and from the throne of your glory send
her.
There she is at the throne.
That's more like she's getting her assignment.
So she's sent by God right from the throne.
That she may labor at my side, that I may learn what is pleasing to you.
Chapter 10.
Wisdom protected the first formed father of the world.
Now this is a reference to Adam.
When he alone had been created, she delivered him from his transgression,
and gave him strength to rule all things.
But when an unrighteous man departed from her in his anger, he perished because in
rage he killed his brother.
It's a reference to Cain and Abel.
You back up a little bit.
The Jewish writer is crediting wisdom with the redemption of Adam.
Okay, you can see how the lines, if there is a line, in at least this
writer's mind, between God and wisdom, and his throne, and like the other throne,
and the right hand, you know, all this kind of stuff, they tend to be blurred.
They tend to be blurred.
Just like, you know, in our thinking.
Have you ever listened to other Christians, especially when they pray?
I don't mean to be critical.
This is just an observation because I do it too.
We mix the word God and Jesus all the time.
It's just a habit.
It's just a reflex.
You know, listen to yourself pray or listen to someone else, but you'll do it.
You're just bound to do it.
We just have it fixed in our mind that they're just interchangeable.
And they are.
We know that they're not the same person.
I like to say Jesus is but isn't God.
What I mean by that is he is God, but he isn't the Father.
You know, there's this thing going back and forth, like how do I parse that?
But we have this interchangeability of the names.
And you're seeing that right here.
Wisdom and God.
When the earth was flooded because of him, again, reference to Genesis 6 flood,
wisdom again saved it.
Way to go, wisdom.
When you look back in your Old Testament, you don't see wisdom in Genesis 6 through
9, do you?
But again, they're thinking that it's the same as saying Yahweh, so what's the big
deal?
Steering the righteous man by a paltry piece of wood.
Another intertestamental book, Sirach, reads this way.
Wisdom praises herself.
That's kind of interesting.
Isn't God the only entity that should be praised?
You know, the Shema, the Lord our God is one, and all this sort of again,
thinking within Judaism, here wisdom praises herself, tells of her glory in the
midst of her people.
In the assembly, this is a reference to the Divine Council, which I mentioned last
week, and again, for those that that term might be unfamiliar to, it's just a
reference to God surrounded by his heavenly hosts, sort of God's
administration or bureaucracy that he runs the affairs of the cosmos with.
In the assembly of the Most High, she opens her mouth, and in the presence
of his hosts, she tells of her glory.
That's an interesting meeting.
I came forth from the mouth of the Most High.
Now, wait a minute, I thought the word came forth from the mouth.
Again, now we're seeing that blurred.
I'm telling you this deliberately.
There's this blurring of wisdom, word, and even God.
I came forth from the mouth of the Most High, and covered the earth like a mist.
I dwelt in the highest heavens, and my throne, oh you're gonna love this,
my throne was in a pillar of cloud.
Where have we seen that language before?
Alone I compassed the vault of heaven, and traversed the depths of the abyss,
over waves of the sea, over all the earth, and over every people and nation I have
held sway.
Before we get there, cut to the chase a little bit.
I could produce a lot of texts for you about wisdom more generally.
Think of Proverbs.
I'm gonna use this as an analogy.
If you read through the book of Proverbs, and you probably have many times,
you may have not even thought about what you were reading in chapter 8,
that all of a sudden wisdom is a person that's a co-creator right there at
creation.
In other words, you didn't have this this sort of backdrop to sort of have the radar
for that.
You probably thought, and for really good reason, and this is accurate as well,
that wisdom is about right living.
It's about obeying the commandments of God.
In fact, wisdom, literature, is the commandments of God.
It's God laying out his will.
It's giving you the repository of how you are supposed to live, and not just in a
heavy-handed way, but really that if you live according to this way, it's good for
you.
It's the best for you.
God knows what's best.
The Jews thought of Proverbs that way, and they thought a wisdom that way.
In fact, if you really did an in-depth study of this, to the Jew, wisdom was the
Torah.
Wisdom was the law.
They believed that the law was eternal, that it was there when God was there,
that the law given to people and scripturated, put down in writing,
was the mind of God.
That's why you'll hear rabbis or you'll read rabbis write that everything in the
world that can ever be known and you need to know is in the Torah.
It's in there.
Now, that's quite a bit different than what the New Testament writers are going
to do with it, because the Jew takes all of that person language and embodiment
language and transfers it to the Torah, the law.
It used to be the case in Judaism, in Jewish theology, and we could spend a
lot of time talking about this.
I have, in fact, probably next week or the week after we'll get into this.
Judaism used to have a doctrine of two powers in heaven, two Yahwehs,
visible, invisible, two gods, both Yahweh, so it wasn't polytheistic.
But that's how they initially parsed some of this stuff.
That changed when Christianity came along.
In the second century, the two powers idea became a heresy with the birth of the
early church.
And even before that, especially after it became a heresy, Jewish thinkers and
authorities went back to books like Sirach and the wisdom of Solomon and the idea
that this wisdom should be equated with Torah.
And they made the law just the focus of all that they were about.
It was the law.
The law was eternal.
It was as though the law had an existence and a personality all of its own.
It was an extension of Yahweh.
All these ways we think about Jesus.
So they don't want to go there for very obvious reasons.
They don't want it to be a godhead because that's what Christianity is going to do
with it.
It becomes focused on the law.
Now Paul and some of the other New Testament writers, what are they
constantly talking about?
That righteousness doesn't come by the law.
It comes by this person, Jesus.
And Paul and other writers are going to say, that person, that second person right
there is God.
He is wisdom.
He is the Word.
He is the angel.
All these things that we associate with embodied deity in the Old Testament.
So you can see that the conflict is just transparent.
It's Christ and the law.
Okay, which wisdom is it?
Which word is it?
Is it this person, Jesus of Nazareth, or is it the Torah?
You know, Jesus says, I didn't come to like do away with the Torah.
I came to fulfill it.
I am the embodiment of it.
Okay, so it really casts some of the New Testament confrontations that you read
about in a little bit different way.
It gives a little bit more flavor.
Now look at this.
We have a synoptic passage.
Luke and Matthew.
I want to give you a minute or two to read through these and see if you can pick out
the difference.
I've highlighted a section in blue in each, and there's a real subtle difference
between the two.
Take a minute.
Passages are the same context.
It's pretty easy to tell that.
I should step in the middle here.
I don't know where to go.
I will go.
I will go astray here a little bit.
What's the difference?
Anybody find it?
Talk about it.
Tell me about it.
What do you see?
Who's this?
Let's go with Luke.
The speaker is Jesus.
Jesus said, woe to you lawyers also, for you load people with burdens hard to
bear.
He's getting at the law.
You load people with burdens hard to bear, and yourselves do not touch the burdens
with one of your fingers.
Woe to you, for you build the tombs of the prophets whom your fathers killed.
So you are witnesses, and you consent to the deeds of your fathers, for they killed
them, and you build their tombs.
Therefore also the wisdom of God said, that thing you think is the Torah.
Therefore also the wisdom of God said, I will send them prophets and apostles,
some of whom they will persecute and kill.
You just killed the people that wisdom sent.
Now if that wasn't bad enough, if that wasn't stick your face in this
enough, you get to Luke.
And what does Luke do with it?
Jesus is cast, he is equated with wisdom by virtue of the personal pronoun.
It's no longer wisdom sending the prophets.
Jesus said, I sent them.
Now if you read the synoptics together, this is a synoptic equation between wisdom
and Jesus.
The quotations, everything, it's the same.
And they both rule out the Torah, by the way, or at least put the Torah in
its proper place.
Book of Hebrews.
Wisdom of Solomon, you'll note we had this verse prior, says wisdom is a reflection,
apogosma, of eternal light, a spotless mirror of the working of God, and an image
of his goodness.
Now the passage below is Hebrews chapter 1, the first few verses.
Long ago, at many times and in many ways, God spoke to our fathers by the prophets.
But in these last days he has spoken to us by his Son, whom he appointed the heir of
all things, through whom also he created the world.
Very clear statement of Jesus, the agent of creation.
He is the apogosma of the glory of God and the exact imprint of his nature,
and he upholds the universe by the word of his power.
Apogosma in the New Testament is used one time, right here.
Now the question is, did Paul pluck that out of his working lexicon of Greek,
or is he citing something?
I would suggest he's citing or alluding to Wisdom of Solomon 726, because Wisdom of
Solomon 726 is part of the Septuagint, and it's the only place that that word
occurs.
There is no other place for Paul to quote, to get it, than that passage.
And again, it is an equation pushing the Torah aside.
The Torah is not the co-creator.
The Torah is not God's agent for everything.
Okay, Wisdom is, but Wisdom is Jesus.
He is the co-creator.
Again, drawing a very, to this audience, a very clear equation between the two.
Now I'm going to show you a couple slides, and I'm going to stop.
We can talk about some of the heresies that I'll bring up, or we can talk about
some of this, but I wanted to leave plenty of time for Q&A.
What I just gave you is in kernel form.
If anybody asks you, where did the New Testament writers get this?
It's the word and wisdom.
Okay, that's there.
The New Testament writers are getting their theology from the Old Testament,
but they're not, and you notice, they're not accepting the interpretation
or the spin that Judaism put on it.
It's not the law.
It's this guy.
It's Jesus.
Very clear divergence, but yet the divergence comes from a shared continuity
of thought.
Okay, they're just taking it a different direction, but that much information has
led to a number of things that you will be exposed to on TV, magazines, various
either scholarship or popular culture.
And I might as well just, I'm going to say this, how presuppositions, agendas,
and imprecise thinking can turn the biblical text toward heresy.
Here's the presupposition one.
If you read much in archaeology, in the history of Israel, archaeology of
Israel, you will come across this idea.
Wisdom, sometimes in scholarly literature referred to as lady wisdom or woman
wisdom, is the name of a biblical goddess.
Now that's in my favorite reference work, DDD, Dictionary of Deities and Demons in
the Bible.
It's just wonderful, but I disagree with that.
And in the very same article, he has this, same writer, we cannot provide much
evidence for the existence of a goddess by the name of wisdom in the ancient Near
East.
No kidding.
Okay, then why did you say that?
I'll tell you why he said it, because everybody says it.
It's a reflex based on the presupposition that Israel began its journey
polytheistically.
There just isn't really much evidence for it when it comes to this particular
argument.
The only possible evidence is the Aramaic Ahikar story, which is much later than the
Old Testament.
Wisdom, Chokmah, is of the gods.
This is a quote.
Indeed, she is precious to the gods.
Her kingdom is eternal.
She has been established by Shemayim, which means the heavens or the heavenly
one.
Yes, the Holy Lord has exalted her.
Well, yeah, that sounds a lot like what's going on in Proverbs 8.
You get some of the same language, but it's later than the Old Testament.
I'm having a little trouble here.
I don't know why.
Doesn't look like anything's going on.
Let's go back here.
Here's the problem that comes from agendas.
Anyone know who Langdon and Sophie are?
Sophie's... somebody said it?
Yes, that's absolutely correct, and that's deliberate, because this
quotation comes from a novel where the lead female character's name is Sophie,
because he wants you to think of Sophia, or wisdom.
This is from the Da Vinci Code.
Robert Langdon is the male protagonist, and he's conversing with Sophie Nouveau,
who is a detective.
Early Jews believed that the Holy of Holies in Solomon's Temple housed not only
God, but also his powerful female equal, Shekinah, where the Shekinah is how we
usually say it, really.
Well, not only would you have trouble proving that, because Shekinah is really
another term for the glory.
Okay, that's what it means.
It's the glory cloud.
It has nothing to do with a goddess, but Shekinah in Hebrew, the noun is
grammatically feminine, so that's the only connection.
And he's trying to equate it with wisdom in that book, and then run with it,
which he does.
But if Dan Brown would have been smart enough, or if he actually had spent some
time in the New Testament, he might have picked up something like this.
There are New Testament texts where Jesus may be seen as the glory.
The conjunction Chi in Acts 7.55 may be something scholars call exegetical.
He saw the glory of God, Chi, Jesus, standing at the right hand of God.
You could translate that, he saw the glory of God, namely Jesus, standing at the
right hand of God.
That might be what Luke is intending there, equating Jesus with the glory.
Another one, the idea of Jesus being seated at the right hand of the power in
Mark 14.62, Luke 22.69, however, may be taken to imply that he was
enthroned alongside the glory, since the mystical texts use power as a
synonym for glory.
In Ephesians 1.17, we find the phrase, the God of our Lord Jesus Christ,
the Father of the glory.
Now that is a literal rendering.
I don't know what the ESV has, but in Greek it's hapater, the Father,
teis, that's the definite article, the word the, and then dogseis,
glory.
If you just literalize that, you have the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father
of the glory.
Is that what Paul meant?
Maybe.
You could say the Father of glory.
Does that make as much sense as the Father of the glory?
I don't know.
Could be what Paul's after.
This one's more familiar, Titus 2.13, may be translated, the glory of our great
God and Savior Christ Jesus.
Here Christ Jesus may be the glory of our great God and Savior.
James 2.1, a notoriously difficult verse to translate, may in effect say,
our Lord Jesus Christ, the glory.
Now I know some of you have had some Greek in here, so this is holding or having or
holding the faith of our Lord Jesus Christ, the glory.
That would be literally what the Greek says.
Now what, I don't know, I think the ESV has holding holding fast the faith of our
Lord Jesus Christ, period.
Our Lord Jesus Christ, and then something, it does something else with the glory.
You'd have to look it up.
Lord Jesus Christ, something like that.
But there's no, you know, punctuation is an issue there, and there was no
punctuation originally.
So is James 2.1, is this another sort of oblique reference to Jesus being the
glory?
Could be.
I'll tell you what it isn't.
It isn't a goddess.
And even if you wanted to link wisdom to it, we've just seen the New Testament
writers say wisdom is Jesus.
So like, what else do you want to talk about?
Imprecise thinking.
Arian Christology and the verb of Proverbs 8.
Remember this, I brought this up early.
The Lord possessed me at the beginning of his work, the first of his acts of old.
This is Proverbs 8.22, and I noted you get a real difference in translation here.
Obviously our Christology does not depend on the translation of one verse,
but this verse became an item of discussion, you could imagine,
in the Nicene Era, okay, where the debate was, Arian Christology said that Jesus was
the very highest of all things that God ever brought into existence.
Higher than anything else, but he was created.
In other words, the Arian Creed was, there was a time when the Son was not.
Okay, whereas Orthodox theology, what came out of the Nicene Creed,
said no, no, no, there wasn't a time when the Son was not.
The Son is eternal.
And Proverbs 8 became a focus of this, because it's like, well look, if Jesus is
wisdom, here you have this verb, in Hebrew it's kanah.
I just want to see if this will open here.
Hebrew is kanah, and it actually does have a very wide range of usages.
My software here... there is, notice number one and number two, this lexicon
believes that there are two kanahs, they're homonyms.
Hebrew has homonyms just like English does, just like any other language does.
And you'll notice some of the options.
Kanah can mean acquire, it's used of acquiring a field.
Kanah, a field.
It's used of buying,
purchasing.
Buy as a wife, God redeemed, it can be used for that.
Again, there's an exchange there.
Down here, with this kanah, it can mean create.
Genesis 14, God is called, El Elyon is called the kanaher.
The kanah, the creator of heaven and earth, so it means create there.
And a few other passages.
And Eve says, I have kanahed a man with the help of the Lord.
So, produced, given birth to.
Loosely created, okay, obviously.
It's new life.
So, this became a real focus of debate.
And I like to think of it this way.
All of those are legitimate translations, but you have to translate in context.
And what's the overall context?
With wisdom, you see the ESV has possessed, that comes from the acquired
idea.
I don't really like that one, because it implies that there was a time when God
didn't have wisdom and he had to either possess it or keep it in, like it was kind
of escape.
Brought forth is kind of nice language.
God had wisdom and he brought it forth when he needed it to use it, the agent of
his creation.
What they really came down to was the difference between being born and being
begotten.
Now, in our parlance, we don't really distinguish that.
But the language of the day, they did.
I like to say it this way.
Is wisdom eternal or not?
Okay, wisdom is an... you look at Proverbs, it's an attribute of God that
gets personified, as we've just seen tonight in Proverbs 8 and elsewhere.
So, I think the question should be, as to which is the right translation,
should take this into context.
Was there ever a time when God lacked wisdom?
And if there was, then my next question is, how was he still God?
In other words, you have a God who doesn't have wisdom at some point.
That doesn't make much logical or theological sense.
And that was the view, that was really the question, the issue that won the day at
Nicaea, because we can't have God not having wisdom.
Wisdom has to be eternal, because God's eternal.
How can it be an attribute of God and it isn't eternal?
Because if he didn't have it, then he wouldn't be God.
It doesn't make any sense.
And so, Athanasius championed that explanation.
And so, that he became in history, the articulator of what we have as
Orthodox Christology now.
And you have to match that against a whole lot of other verses that do talk about
Jesus being an eternal being, all these Godhead verses and whatnot.
So, the context is full and it's there, it's not contrived.
But tonight, we want to focus on Matthew's use of Isaiah 7, Isaiah 7 more broadly,
the whole virgin birth question.
This is one of those topics that I'll just telegraph this up front.
Now, the critics, you know, we would call them theological liberals.
The critics of the virgin birth idea have some legitimate points to make.
But really, only because the way we talk about the virgin birth is very easy for
them to pick at.
I file this topic in my folder that is titled, Affirming the Obvious,
but then Extrapolating to the Unnecessary.
And that is what liberal, theologically liberal critics do with a lot of what
we're going to talk about tonight.
I'm going to show you where their thinking comes from.
And in many respects, their thinking is rooted in the text.
But like I said, it's affirming the obvious, what's there, and then
extrapolating to the unnecessary because of their presuppositions.
So here's Isaiah 7.
I want to take a little time for you to read through it.
I'm going to read through it.
You can follow along.
I'm going to try to do this for the sake of the audio.
And I have certain things highlighted that I will come back to that I want you to pay
special attention to or fix in your mind.
In the days of Ahaz, that's the first thing, first line that you need to fix in
your mind, the son of Jotham, the son of Uzziah, king of Judah, reason,
the king of Syria and Pekah, the son of Remaliah, the king of Israel, came up to
Jerusalem to wage war against it, but could not yet mount an attack against
it.
When the house of David was told, Syria is in league with Ephraim,
the heart of Ahaz and the heart of his people shook as the trees of the forest
shake before the wind.
And the Lord said to Isaiah, go out to meet Ahaz, you and Shear Yashuv,
your son, at the end of the conduit of the upper pool on the highway to the washer's
field.
So here we are.
We're in a specific point of time, the reign of King Ahaz in Judah,
which is the eighth century BC, 700s for round numbers.
And he's under threat.
The narrative continues and say to him, Isaiah say to Ahaz, be careful,
be quiet, do not fear and do not let your heart be faint because of these two
smoldering stumps of firebrands.
It's very pejorative against the enemy.
You know, don't worry about these two smoldering stumps at the fierce anger of
reason in Syria and the son of Ramaliah, because Syria with Ephraim and the son of
Ramaliah has devised evil against you saying, let's go up against Judah and
terrify it and let us conquer it for ourselves and set up the son of Tavael as
king in the midst of it.
That was their threat.
And God says, don't worry about that, says the Lord God.
It shall not stand.
It shall not come to pass for the head of Syria is Damascus and the head of Damascus
is reason.
And within 65 years, Ephraim will be shattered from being a people.
You don't even have to worry about him anymore.
Ephraim, of course, is the northern kingdom, also in the Old Testament known
as Israel.
This is after the kingdom has split into two.
The monarchy is divided, 10 tribes in the north, two tribes in the south.
The 10 northern tribes, northern kingdom, are referred to as Israel or Ephraim or
Samaria in your Old Testament.
So when you see those terms in books of the Old Testament after the death of
Solomon, that's what it's talking about, that northern kingdom.
65 years from now, the northern kingdom is going to be history.
And the head of Ephraim is Samaria, and the head of Samaria is the son of
Ramaliah.
If you are not firm in faith, you will not be firm at all.
And again, the Lord spoke to Ahaz, ask a sign of the Lord your God.
Let it be deep as Sheol or high as heaven.
So Ahaz is threatened.
God says, Isaiah, come here.
I got a message for you to deliver to King Ahaz.
Tell him not to worry.
It's not going to happen.
He's going to be okay.
And if he's a little dubious of that, a little nervous, tell him to ask for a
sign.
And it can be anything.
Sheol, the lowest, it's up to the highest heavens.
Tell him to ask for a sign.
But Ahaz said, I'm not going to do that.
I will not ask, and I will not put the Lord to the test.
Now, whether he was being really pious here or not, you know, we don't really
know.
This might be out of piety that he's saying, I'm not going to do that.
And he said, God said then, through Isaiah, hear then.
Okay, you're not going to ask for a sign?
Okay.
Hear then, O house of David.
It's a reference to the dynasty of which Ahaz is a part.
Hear then, O house of David, is it too little for you to weary men that you weary
my God also?
Therefore, the Lord himself will give you a sign.
Behold, the Alma, translated here in the ESV as Virgin.
Behold, the Virgin shall conceive and bear a son and shall call his name Immanuel.
He shall eat curds and honey when he knows how to refuse the evil and choose the
good.
Because by the time this child is old enough to eat solid food and know the
difference between right and wrong, again, it's within that 65 year range.
For before the boy knows how to refuse the evil and choose the good, the land whose
two kings you dread will be deserted.
They're going to be deserted.
And again, in 65 years, they're both going to be toast, as we read before.
The Lord will bring upon you and upon your people and upon your father's house such
days as have not come since the day that Ephraim departed from Judah.
The king of Assyria.
Now, here are the questions to start with.
We read through the bulk of the chapter, the important part.
If the prophecy was for Ahaz, that's what the text says, in the days of Ahaz,
speak unto Ahaz, say to Ahaz, do the... okay.
If the prophecy was for Ahaz, why would he assume, why would Ahaz assume the woman
was a virgin?
Does he have any reason to do that?
Do we need a virgin for the prophecy?
In other words, if the prophecy was for Ahaz, number two, would he have expected
the child was deity?
In other words, is there any reason to expect that the child, who is the sign,
would be incarnate deity?
Now, we have the name Immanuel given here, so we need to talk about that.
Regardless of what Immanuel means or can mean, the question is still there.
Is there any reason Ahaz would expect incarnate deity to be the fulfillment of
this prophecy?
Third, does the word translated virgin, Alma, mean virgin?
Or does it mean something else, like the RSV has young maiden,
it's a very common translation.
Four, if the prophecy was fulfilled in Isaiah's, and of course Ahaz's own day,
if it was fulfilled in their lifetimes, how could Matthew quote it as referring to
Jesus?
Okay, those are the four fundamental questions.
I think you can already see that if someone wanted to be an antagonistic
toward this tenet of Christianity, of the Christian faith and doctrine,
critical of the virgin birth, it's pretty easy to do that.
Because all you got to do is go back to Isaiah 7 and read it and ask these
questions and say, you know, you tell me when the prophecy was supposed to be
fulfilled and who it was for.
And it's very easy to sow the seeds of doubt about what Matthew's doing.
You know, it's easy for us on the other hand to say, well, you know, God just told
him, you know, hey, that prophecy over there, you need to apply that to Jesus.
And in the context of inspiration, there's nothing wrong with that.
But it doesn't actually answer the other questions, is the point.
So we get websites like this, a religious Santa Claus tale from BeliefNet.
I know you're probably thinking we ought to call that unbelief net, but it is
BeliefNet.
BeliefNet is a, it's not a Christian site, it's pretty much a kind of a hodgepodge of
spiritual anything.
And in this particular article for the Christmas season, the birth narrative of
Jesus shouldn't be taken literally.
And it's going to go in to all these questions.
And the writer of this particular article quotes a lot from a fellow named Bishop
John Shelby Spong.
I don't know if any of you have heard of Bishop Spong before.
He gets quoted practically every season in Time and Newsweek and, you know,
major news periodicals because they always have to truck out some sort of article
about the Christmas season, you know, to sort of make fun of it or cast the
seeds of doubt about it.
And Spong, who is Episcopalian, I believe, is sort of a chief proponent of
the idea that the virgin birth account is just nonsense.
And so he gets quoted a lot.
He's very widely published and read.
In this article, we have this paragraph.
And here's sort of the crux of the matter.
This text, Isaiah, and of course, Matthew, Isaiah 7, Matthew 2, has two
problems.
First, Matthew did not apparently read Hebrew, which is really a dumb thing to
say, but I'm going to try to get through this paragraph without poking fun at other
things.
I'll just stick to it.
First, Matthew apparently did not read Hebrew.
So he quoted his text or this text from a Greek translation.
If he had gone to the Hebrew original, he would have discovered that the word
virgin is not in the book of Isaiah.
Isaiah used the Hebrew word Alma, which means simply young woman.
He did not use the word Betula, which means virgin.
Isaiah's text announces that the woman is with child, which hardly qualifies her to
be a virgin.
Of course, the presuppositions there are very transparent.
When Isaiah was translated into Greek, the translators rendered Alma with the
Greek word Parthenos.
Only in that Greek word does the hint of virginity enter the text.
And that is the key sentence.
Only in that Greek word does the hint of virginity enter the text.
So basically, they're saying Matthew got this idea from a mistranslation of the Old
Testament.
There is no virgin birth doctrine.
Of course, he's referring to the Septuagint.
You know, all you got to do is just go back to the Septuagint.
Yeah, it's Parthenos.
And you know, it would be very easy to say that's what Matthew's quoting.
That dismisses the Jewishness of Matthew, which is very, very clear in other
regards.
But, you know, let's just say that he quoted from the Septuagint.
Fine.
Let's talk about Alma.
Other than Isaiah, chapter 7, the word Alma in the feminine, Alma is the feminine
noun, there is a masculine elem, which refers to a young boy, as Alma
refers to a young girl.
But other, let's stick with the feminine.
It occurs six other times.
Now, I want you to see a few things here.
This search, rather than you just taking my word for it, here we have the lemma,
it's elem there, because that is the form.
And we'll see where this occurs.
I want you to just take a quick note of where the feminine occurs.
We have Genesis 24, 43.
That is Alma.
Exodus 2, 8.
This is the story of, you know, the little girl following the basket,
Miriam.
So that's the feminine.
1 Samuel 17, there is the masculine reference.
1 Samuel 20, that's David and Jonathan, that's the masculine reference.
1 Chronicles 15 is the term used in a proper name of a place.
Same thing with 46.1.
Psalm 68, 25.
Proverbs 30, 19.
These are Alma.
Song of Solomon 1, 3.
Alma.
Song of Solomon 6, 8.
Alma.
There's Isaiah 7, 14.
And Ezekiel 22, 26 is sort of a verbal use of the term.
So, you don't have very many occurrences of Alma.
Now, here's the question.
We're going to go back to the verse.
Is there any indication in all the occurrences of sexual status?
In other words, is there anything in the context of any of these that tells you the
sexual status of the person in question?
You can write them down.
You can look through them as I go through the presentation here.
The answer to that question is no, with one exception.
The exception is Song of Solomon 6, 8.
There are 60 queens, 80 concubines, and virgins without number.
On the surface, that doesn't look like a sexual reference.
What I mean by this, the point I'm angling for here is the word itself doesn't
telegraph, doesn't point to virginity, the word in and of itself.
It also doesn't telegraph non-virginity.
You need the context.
You need some sort of context for what's going on.
Now, in Song of Solomon 6, 8, we have the plural, a la mote, 60 queens, 80
concubines, and virgins without number.
And I'm going to go to Exodus 2.
Let's see if I can just click there.
Because there's a very similar idea, let me enlarge this a little bit,
to that breakdown here.
And I want you to be able to follow my thought here, my thinking.
I'm going to make it even bigger.
This is Esther's, you know, tryout, trial period.
And the same kind of grouping, queens, concubines, virgins, is going to
show up in this passage in a significant way.
After these things, when the anger of King Ahasuerus had abated, he remembered
Vashti, what she had done and what had been decreed against her.
I'm just going to set a link here.
Then the king's young men who attended him said, let beautiful young virgins be
sought out for the king.
Now, if we go to the reverse inner linear, let's go to Esther 2.
Again, I'm doing this because I don't want anybody who's watching the video later to
just take my word for it.
I'm going to show you the Hebrew underneath.
The king's young men who attended him, let beautiful young virgins be sought out
for the king.
Here for the word virgins is betula.
Now that is the word, if you remember the quote from Beliefnet, where the writer
said, you know, Isaiah didn't use betula, he used Alma.
Betula is the word for virgins.
Betula is a more precise word for virgin.
Even in some context for betula, it's not clear what the status is,
but there are certain instances of betula.
For instance, some of the laws in Leviticus and Deuteronomy, where it's very
clear that the betula has not known a man.
Okay, it's kind of a familiar reference, the familiar euphemism for sexual
intercourse.
So there's a point to be made there.
And we have naara, so we have naara and betula, young virgins, beautiful young
virgins.
In verse two, we read on, let the king appoint
officers in all the provinces of his kingdom to gather all the beautiful young
virgins, there we have it again, betula, naara, to the harem in Susa,
the capital, under custody of Haggai, the king's eunuch, who's in charge of the
women.
Let their cosmetics be given to them.
Let the young woman, singular, naara, who pleases the king, be queen
instead of Vashti.
Again, you're probably familiar with the Esther story.
This pleased the king and he did so.
Now there was a Jew in Susa, the citadel, whose name was Mordecai, the son of Jair,
son of Shemai, son of Kish, a Benjamite, who had been carried away from Jerusalem
among the captives, carried away with Jeconiah, king of Judah, so on and so
forth.
He was bringing up Hadassah, Esther, the daughter of his uncle, for she had
neither father or mother.
The young woman, the naara, had a beautiful figure and was lovely to look
at.
So he said, we'll try Esther out.
So when the king's order and his edict were proclaimed, when many young women,
naara, were gathered in Susa, the citadel in custody of Haggai, Esther goes into the
custody of Haggai.
Esther was also taken to the king's palace, put into the custody of Haggai,
who had charge of the women.
And the young woman pleased him and won his favor.
And he quickly provided her with her cosmetics, her fortune of food,
all the stuff she needed.
Esther had not made known her people or kindred, for Mordecai had commanded her
not to make it known.
Every day Mordecai walked in the front of the court of the harem to see what was
going on, how everything's going.
Now when the turn came for each young woman, naara, to go in to King Ahasuerus,
after being 12 months under the regulations for the women, since this was
the regular period of their beautifying, six months of oil of myrrh and six months
with spices and ointments from... look, these were not ugly women.
They didn't need six months for this.
What was the 12-month trial period for?
See if they're pregnant, okay?
Easy test.
We'll just keep you here for 12 months.
Can't fake your way out of that, all right?
When the young woman went into the king in this way, she was given whatever she
desired to take with her from the harem to the king's palace.
In the evening, she would go in, and in the morning, she would return to
the second harem.
She doesn't go back to the same group.
In custody of Sha'ashgaz, different custodian, the king's eunuch, who was in
charge of the concubines.
Esther is now no longer a virgin.
She is a concubine.
She started out as a betula.
Na'ara is all over the place.
Okay, that just means young woman.
She starts out with the virgins.
She's there 12 months.
Goes, has her night with the king, the tryout, as it were, because this is
what kings did.
Okay, you didn't make the rules if you were the woman.
Next morning, she goes to a different location, under a different guard,
because now she belongs with the concubines.
She would not go into the king again, unless the king delighted in her,
and she was summoned by name.
Go in unto the king.
Okay, again, it's the language of euphemism for sexual activity.
Now let's take a look here.
We've got virgins, concubines, and we're trying to find a queen.
So we have the same idea that when it comes to the harem, remember Song of
Solomon 6-8, we're talking about Solomon, king.
Okay, he's talking about the members of the harem, how his beloved is like better
than any of them, better than any of the queens, any of the concubines,
any of the Alamot, third category.
Now conceptually, the Alamot there would be a virgin.
Alma would be a virgin in that context, with that, again, the cultural mirror
imaging going on here.
That's why Song of Solomon 6-8 sort of gives you a sexual status context.
You look at what's going on in Esther, you sort of get the cultural flavor for
it, but it's not really airtight.
Okay, we have to be honest there.
It looks like Alma there is a virgin.
Let's go back here and take a look at some of the other terms here.
And particularly, I want to show you betula.
So let's click on that, search for where betula occurs.
Now a little quiz, see who's paying attention.
There's one hit in this list that's really, really important because you've
seen it before.
Which one is it?
24-16.
Genesis 24, remember Genesis 24?
Back here with Alma, Genesis 24.
This is the description of Rebekah.
And lo and behold, Rebekah in Genesis 24 is called betula, Alma and Naar.
All three words are used of the same person.
Now that is textual proof that Alma does indeed overlap with a very clear term for
virgin.
And in fact, if you go to back to Genesis 24, the narrative is very, very painful in
detail that she, Rebekah, had not known a man.
It's very clear.
If you're looking for it, you can't miss it.
Now I would suggest that maybe Bishop Spong didn't look very hard.
Either that or he's just really sloppy.
So you're either incompetent or you have an agenda.
Take your pick, Mr. Spong.
Alma, the point is that Alma, when a Hebrew Israelite, when an Israelite,
someone familiar with the Hebrew Bible, when they saw the word Alma, heard it or
read it, they certainly had the category possibility of virgin for that word.
Now they know their own language well enough to know that it might not be
virgin, but it is absolutely incorrect to say that it cannot be, that that meaning
cannot be part of that word.
And that is exactly what was on BeliefNet and what's in Spong's books and anybody
else who picks them up.
It is simply textually fraudulent to say that.
Now, you know, let's do a little practical thinking here.
Scholars are not necessarily known for their logic all the time.
I once made the comment in a graduate seminar class that I thought a course in
logic should be required for every graduate student in biblical studies.
I didn't make many friends that day, but I believe it.
Let's do a little thinking.
Okay, I have four children.
I have three daughters and one boy.
My daughters are 17, 15, and the youngest is the daughter.
She's eight.
Now, in a patriarchal culture, in the Semitic culture, as Dax pointed
out, I can't remember if it was this week or a week ago, a woman was of marriageable
age when she hit puberty because now you can start having babies.
Okay, and that's 12, 13, 14, you know, somewhere in the early teens.
I have two almas.
They're young women of marriageable age and they just happen to be virgins because
I'm a ruthless patriarch.
Okay, you know, now I say that because if in today's culture, unless we're going to
conclude that every girl after the age of 12 is not a virgin, that's what you'd have
to say for Spong to be right, that kind of absurdity.
Unless you're going to say that, which would be totally obvious,
you've got to conclude that, hey, a lot of almas, a lot of women of
marriageable age, they're still virgins.
Yeah, they are.
And in a patriarchal culture, like in the Old Testament, where they really did
exercise a very tight control over their daughters, that number would probably even
be higher.
Okay, so again, just simple logic tells you that when a Semite thought of alma,
he didn't think, yeah, a woman that can get married now and she's not a virgin
either.
It's just stupid.
Okay, it's just not, it doesn't conform to the reality of the culture and it doesn't
conform to the reality of the text either.
Now, in the New Testament, you can throw all that away because in the New
Testament, see if I put in the correct link here, the text is really clear again
about the birth of Jesus.
In Matthew, you have the whole series of wonderfully exciting begets, if you're
reading the King James or the New King James, so-and-so begets, so-and-so begets,
so-and-so begets, so-and-so.
And you have a whole string, there's over 30 of them.
And then when you get down to Mary, it says, okay, Joseph, the husband of
Mary, of whom Jesus was born.
The wording changes because, for those of you who've had a little Greek,
if you can actually see that morphological reference, we have a relative pronoun,
genitive singular, feminine.
In other words, the writer of the text wants it to be clear that Jesus came from
only the woman.
It's a feminine pronoun.
It's not the male begat so-and-so like it is the other 30 sometimes.
When you get here, the whole thing switches.
Of whom, of her, Jesus was born.
Okay, you just really can't get, I mean, honestly, if I wanted to make the
point that Jesus only came from Mary, I really don't know any other way to make
it that explicit.
I mean, right down to the little particle that you're using in Greek so that you
can't miss it.
There's no ambiguity.
That's how detailed the writer's being.
So, the Alma thing is a red herring.
Certainly can mean virgin.
Now, doesn't necessarily mean that Ahaz would have thought of that or that the
original prophecy was about a virgin.
We still haven't, you know, we're gonna get there.
But the word itself can mean virgin.
Immanuel is actually three parts.
The preposition im, with.
New is the suffix pronoun us.
And el is God, either small G God or big G God.
It's used as a common noun and a proper noun.
So, together they form the sentence without a verb.
There is no verb.
The words are literally with us God.
So, you can translate that God with us, God is with us, or a God is with us.
All three of those are completely legitimate because that's all you have.
Now, God with us is probably the most familiar.
God is with us would probably be the most grammatically correct.
God is with us, though, doesn't necessarily mean deity incarnate,
though.
Because I can say, hey, God's with us.
Ahaz, God is with us, meaning God's on our side.
Doesn't have to mean that like God is going to be present, that this child is
going to be God when he's born, that's God.
It doesn't mean that at all.
You know, we look at that because of what happens in the New Testament as being sort
of where our mind goes.
But to Ahaz, Ahaz doesn't have any of that.
It's a sign for him that God is going to take care of the problem.
And by the way, sometimes I think we miss in Isaiah 7 that the point of the sign is
not the woman.
Okay, you know, a lot of ink spilled about, you know, virgin birth and all that
stuff.
Point of the sign is not the woman, it's the child.
Yeah, we kind of get that a little messed up.
Now, here's also from BeliefNet.
The second problem in their article with this text is that when Isaiah wrote it,
the city of Jerusalem was under siege from the combined armies of the northern
kingdom in Syria.
Isaiah suggested that the birth of this child would be a sign to the king of Judah
that his nation would not fall to these enemies whom Isaiah described as,
quote, the tails of two smoking firebrands, unquote.
A reference to a child born 800 years later would hardly have been relevant to
that crisis.
Well, I would agree with that.
You know, if you're Ahaz and you're basically trembling in your boots and
Isaiah comes up to you, I got great news, I got great news.
Don't panic.
800 years from now.
It's like, what?
I mean, come on.
Oh, thanks.
I feel so much better.
It's just not going to work.
All right.
There's an original context for what he's saying.
It's really interesting.
There are some things going on even in the original prophecy that Ahaz could have
latched on to and fought, catch my wording here, and fought a little bit beyond his
own time.
One of those possibilities is that there is a cognate term, a related term in a
different language, the language is Ugaritic, for Alma.
Now, in Hebrew, it's Alma.
The letter is pronounced in the back of the throat.
And that's why it gets transliterated sometimes with a G in certain books,
like Gamora.
Gamora.
It actually begins with the same letter that Alma begins with.
But it sounds like a G.
This word actually is very, very rare.
And it refers to the sacred bride.
And it's restricted to royal women and goddesses in that culture.
Now, that was a pagan culture.
But the city of Ugarit is right next door to Israel.
There's a lot of Ugaritic crossover within the Hebrew Bible, too.
Other words.
That's kind of interesting, because it might mean that when Isaiah comes to Ahaz
and says, behold, the Alma will conceive and bear a son, that he could have been
talking about Ahaz's wife.
And if you were Ahaz, what would be the first thing that crossed your mind?
How do you know that?
Like, is there something I should know about?
If there is, tell me now.
How do you know that my wife, and it actually could be that she is pregnant or
is going to conceive.
We don't know who the woman was.
That's one possibility.
If it is, Ahaz's wife.
That means, and then Isaiah says, and when she has the child, you're going
to name it, God is with us.
Why is that important to Ahaz?
If that turns out to be, you know, we don't really know.
Because it tells Ahaz what?
Whose family does Ahaz belong to?
David.
Okay, it means that Ahaz is sitting there thinking, we're going to get wiped out.
The Northern Kingdom, he said, you know, is going to be gone,
you know, in a few decades.
What about us?
We're going to get wiped out.
What about us?
Because I'm the line of David, and God gave David this promise that like,
we're always going to be here.
And there's this everlasting dynastic commitment and fulfillment.
And Isaiah is saying, yeah, I know, I know.
God is with you.
If it is his wife, it's a sign that the Davidic covenant will not die.
Okay, you are, it's not going to go away.
It's not going to end.
Okay, God will remain loyal to it.
Now, again, let's just play with it.
If that's the case, if there was royalty involved with the woman, why is that
important for what Matthew does?
Mary is a member of what line?
So there's these boring genealogies.
Again, I know, and I know they're boring.
Okay, and I don't spend my time with genealogies, please.
Don't think that of me.
But there is a point to them.
Mary is also in the line of David.
So is Joseph.
I mean, this is something that Matthew, if this is what he was tracking on,
it would have been a link back to Isaiah 7.
Because, I mean, think of what Matthew's doing here.
Here's the quotation.
And I have two questions here.
This is where Matthew quotes Isaiah 7.
Put yourself in Matthew's shoes.
Is it reasonable to believe that Matthew and Mary never met?
I mean, good grief, they lived with Jesus for three and a half years.
Do you think he might have met his mother?
Is it reasonable to believe that the disciples never heard Mary tell the story
about how Jesus was born?
I mean, I can tell you, if I was one of the 12 and we were, like, sitting around
dinner at Jesus' house someday and he, like, wasn't in the room, I'd say,
was there anything unusual about him when he was little?
Because there's some really unusual things going on right now.
Can you tell me about that?
I mean, anything at all.
Anything, like, amiss?
Anything, like, did he do something really weird?
Because you're beginning to see this man do incredible things.
I think that would be a very natural conversation.
It would be very natural for Matthew to have heard about the circumstances of
Jesus' birth.
What I'm getting to is this.
Why is it so fantastic for Matthew, who knew his Old Testament really well,
to hear the story of Jesus' birth and Mary's going, oh yeah, an angel came to me
and said, you know, the baby you're gonna... I mean, Joseph and I weren't
even...
we were betrothed, but we had never, you know, what.
I mean, we were loyal to each other, we were faithful to each other,
and all of a sudden I'm pregnant, and, you know, gives all the stories.
And then she gets to the part where they had to take the child down to Egypt to
protect him from Herod.
And Matthew, then the lights are going on.
Ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding.
Why?
Because Matthew knows Hosea 11, verse 1, because Matthew quotes it,
out of Egypt, I have called my son.
Remember the first week we talked about how my son was the nation and the servant
and the individual, you know, who would do these things in Isaiah.
And he starts thinking about Isaiah, and it's like, wow, you know, Davidic
dynasty out of Egypt, really, you know, virgin birth, holy cow, you know,
virgin birth.
Well, that's just like Alma.
I mean, it's not quite the same, but it's like, it's... there's an analogy
there.
Look what God was up to.
I'm gonna put this down.
Okay, there is such a thing as fulfillment of prophecy by analogy.
You know, too often we have been trained to think that prophecy works one way.
Old Testament guy says, A, describes it in a few sentences with specific nouns and
verbs.
And then the New Testament, well, A has to happen exactly the way A is
described.
There is no fulfillment, you know, so long we got to look for all these
literalisms and all the...
Word has to... Hey, if you spend any time in prophecy, that just doesn't happen that
often.
Most of the time there are analogous situations.
Or one is a type, the Old Testament is a prefigurement, either in terms of an event
or an institution or a person.
And that Old Testament thing or person mirrors or telegraphs or is an analogy to
something that goes on in the life of Jesus, something he says or does or quotes
or whatever.
Think back to the first week, all these analogies.
This is absolutely deliberate on the part of the New Testament writer to make Jesus'
life analogous to the corporate servant, the corporate son, the individual son.
Okay, that's deliberate.
It's not accidental.
It happens dozens of times.
We just took an overview the first week.
This is one of them.
So for people to say, well, Matthew was just misunderstood, Isaiah just
misinterpreted, he just wasn't very scholarly, come on.
You need to wake up, you need to take a good look at your New Testament.
And more than that, you need to think about what's going on in Jewish literature
of the same period, because they look at prophecy the same way as the New Testament
writers do.
Matthew, his methods would have been completely familiar to any scribe,
any Pharisee, any priest, anyone literate in terms of biblical material of his day.
He's not doing anything new.
They get it.
And again, I'm back to either the critics don't get it, or they don't want to get
it.
And I'm gonna let them pick, because that's really what it comes down to.
Matthew is not botching the New Testament.
He's not goofing his way through the book.
He is seeing analogies.
And if you walked up to him and said, hey, Matthew, I get that analogy with
Isaiah 7, but you know, some of the words, you know, some of the meanings of the word
back here wouldn't really be true of Jesus and vice versa.
He'd go, well, like, duh, I know.
Where did you go to school?
I mean, I'm a tax collector, and I know better than that.
I mean, come on.
This is nothing new to the culture.
This is how they do it.
So if your head spins, you can always watch the video.
You can always get the slides from Dax or Dale, but this is a topic I had planned to
do.
And then I think it was the first week I mentioned the idea of two powers in heaven
and two Yahwehs.
And that prompted a question afterwards, like, what in the world are you talking
about?
Well, this is the week for that.
I want to go through this because this is fundamentally one of the more important
things that we can learn about contextualizing Jesus against the Old
Testament.
And I also think it's one of the more important things that if you're familiar
with, it has a strong apologetic value, a strong evangelistic value for Jewish
seekers, Jewish friends that you might have, and Messianic Christians.
And I think, frankly, just for us as well, because sometimes we get either caught
with a question or maybe in our own mind, we wonder, well, where in the world did
they get this stuff?
I mean, yes, again, we can appeal to revelation.
And I've mentioned this before.
Well, God just told them that information.
No kidding.
I mean, God can do that.
But there's a lot to be said for continuity between the Testaments.
And I think this is one of the most striking examples of it.
And I'm going to take you through a number of passages tonight again quickly to try
to introduce you to the answer for a really basic question.
That is, since Christianity was born out of Judaism and the first converts were
naturally Jewish, how is it that God-fearing Jews could wrap their minds
around the notion of worshiping and praying and speaking of the God of Israel
as God and in the same breath doing the same thing to Jesus?
Why did they not see that as a problem?
Why did they not think it was a violation of monotheism or of the Shema,
the Lord our God is one?
The answer to that comes from the Old Testament, because they had a two Yahweh's
mental backdrop from their own scriptures.
That when Jesus came along, it was very easy to move toward him being the second
Yahweh, the second power.
And I'm going to show you a little bit about how this works in Judaism up to the
second century AD.
And then of course, apply that to the New Testament and the Old Testament.
Now, this is an important book.
If you wanted to really read in this subject, this is the one I recommend,
written in 1977 by Alan Siegel.
He's a Jew.
He's a Jewish professor of Jewish studies.
I think he still teaches at NYU, Two Powers in Heaven.
Now, he views the two powers teaching as a heresy, because he's Jewish.
But his book is about the fact that it used to not be a heresy.
That's what drew him into the topic.
This is actually a publication of some work he did on his dissertation way back
when.
Siegel says the basic heresy involved interpreting scripture to say that a
principal angelic or hypostatic manifestation in heaven, in other words,
another character, was equivalent to God.
Okay, that was the basic issue.
The idea of the second power was not considered heretical until the second
century CE.
That's AD.
It means the same thing.
So sometime during the 100s, Jewish theology changed.
Prior to that, it was okay to talk about two gods, two Yahwehs in heaven.
But after that, it was not.
Other scholars have made similar observations, namely that the rabbinic
polemic of late antiquity, again, their arguments against Christians against
two powers in heaven, arose from rabbinic unease about much material in the Hebrew
Bible which seemed too close to paganism for comfort.
In other words, it seemed non-monotheistic.
So the rabbis were a little uneasy about things in their own scriptures that seemed
inconsistent.
I'm not describing Zoroastrianism.
I'm not talking about a good Yahweh and a bad Yahweh, good and evil.
I'm not talking about that kind of dualism.
I'm also not talking about Gnosticism with the true God, the ethereal, non-personal
God, and then the Demiurge, the Creator, the God of the Bible, which Gnostics view
as evil.
I'm not talking about that either.
This is not good and evil.
These are both good guys, both positive, holy figures.
A couple examples of texts that the rabbis talked about.
Genesis 19-24.
Take a quick look at that, and I will ask you, what seems odd about the verse?
Yahweh reigned upon Sodom and Gomorrah, saw first fire from Yahweh out of heaven.
Well, what's odd is that Yahweh occurs twice.
So Yahweh rains down fire from Yahweh.
It's just awkward.
And there were some rabbis that thought, that just sounds really odd, or I don't
know how we would handle that in the context of the Shema.
Again, the Lord our God is one.
Amos 4-11.
I have wrought destruction among you as when God destroyed Sodom and Gomorrah.
Now, wait a minute.
The speaker at the end of the verse is Yahweh.
And he's saying, I did this, and this, and this, just like when God did that.
So like, who's Yahweh referring to?
He's referring to himself and then God.
Like we have two figures.
There they are.
Isaiah 13.
Behold, I stir up the Medes against them.
And Babylon, glory of kingdoms, proud splendor, the Chaldeans shall
overcome, or shall become like Sodom and Gomorrah, overturned by God.
There's the same thing.
I stir up.
Okay, then we have God like a third person reference.
And what's really unusual, if you go to Jeremiah, the parallel passage,
it's very clear that Yahweh is the one doing this.
And then there's this other reference to God along with the first person language.
There are actually a decent number of these in the Old Testament, where God is
speaking, then refers to God in the third person.
It's just very odd, very awkward.
Prior to the time of the rabbis, this is... Rabbinic Judaism is something
we sort of view as
formulating, or as we think of it, forming after the New Testament era.
It actually has roots that are older than that in some of the sects of Judaism,
like the Pharisees and the Sadducees and things like that.
So prior to what is properly the Rabbinic era, back into the New Testament era and
in the Second Temple period, intertestamental period, there was a lot
of speculation about who the second power was.
Some thought it was Jacob.
I'm going to run through these texts really quickly.
This is the prayer of Joseph.
It's a pseudepigraphical text.
Jacob is... these are all Jewish, okay, and they're all intertestamental.
So this is prior to Christianity.
I, Jacob, who is speaking to you, I'm also Israel, an angel of God and a
ruling spirit.
So there, Israel is called an angel.
Jacob is like an angel now.
I am he whom God called Israel, which means a man seeing God.
The next section, I, Israel, the archangel of the power of the Lord and the chief
captain of the sons of God.
So Jacob becomes an angelic figure and he becomes the lead of all the heavenly
hosts, in some Jewish thinking.
Adam was sort of viewed this way by others.
In 2 Enoch, and on earth, I assigned him... again, God is speaking about...
the writer is speaking about Adam, first person language of God.
And on earth, I assigned him to be a second angel.
Well, wait a minute, Adam, a second angel?
Honored and great and glorious, and I assigned him to be a king to reign
on the earth and to have my wisdom, which is an interesting phrase considering
week two when we talked about wisdom.
Adam is also elevated higher than a principal angel in another text,
Life of Adam and Eve.
In this text, he's called... Satan has demanded... it's called to worship Adam,
the image of God, Testament of Abraham.
Abraham is shown a man seated on a golden throne who has a terrifying appearance,
like the masters, like God's.
And he finds out this is the first form to Adam.
So Adam becomes this exalted sort of number two or right there with God kind of
figure.
Enoch himself, in one text, gets sort of taken to heaven.
Like we have, you know, the language of Ezekiel, some of these visionary
experiences of biblical characters.
Enoch, in the book of 1st Enoch, this happens to him.
And he says, you know, he falls on his face before the Lord of Spirits.
I saw countless angels with them the Ancient of Days.
Again, that's right out of Daniel.
Then an angel came to me and greeted me and said to me, you son of man.
Okay, right there, you can see there's something going on.
Because if you're familiar with Daniel 7, which we discussed a couple of weeks
already.
In Daniel 7, you have the Ancient of Days, who's the enthroned God.
And then the Son of Man comes to him.
Something like a human, you know, human being comes to the Ancient of Days.
And under that human one is given the everlasting kingdom.
Well, here in 1st Enoch, Enoch becomes the Son of Man, which is, of course,
a title that Jesus has in the New Testament.
But this is before the New Testament.
He says, you son of man who are born in righteousness, and so on and so forth.
He says, Enoch, don't be frightened, stand up, stand in front of my face
forever.
The Lord said to Michael, go and extract Enoch from his earthly clothing and get
rid of that flesh stuff.
And anoint him with my delightful oil and put him into clothes of my glory.
And at the end, Enoch says, I looked at myself and I had become like one of his
glorious ones.
So even Enoch himself, in the book that bears his name, becomes this sort of
exalted figure, right there with the enthroned Yahweh.
Moses, this is an interesting passage, on Sinai's peak I, Moses, saw what seemed
a throne.
Again, those are familiar biblical passages.
I made approach and stood before the throne.
He handed over the scepter and bade me mount the throne and gave me the crown.
Then he himself withdrew from off the throne.
Now, if you have some Jewish thinkers and religious authorities in between the
Testaments viewing Moses to this level, it makes it kind of interesting when Paul
and Jesus and other New Testament writers are making a contrast between Jesus and
Moses, between the gospel and the law.
Again, you have this sort of friction that's just going to happen.
But for some, Moses was like a second deity.
Other people thought it was angels, not humans who become angels or humans
that just get to sit on the throne.
Some people thought it was Michael.
Michael is called in Daniel, the chief intercessor for Israel.
And in the Testament of Dan, another pseudepigraphical book.
Now, fear the Lord, my children, be on guard against Satan and his spirits.
Draw near to God and to the angel who intercedes for you because he is the
mediator between God and men.
Sounds a lot like 1 Timothy, doesn't it?
Okay, but in this case, that mediator is Michael.
That's a little bit of a rabbit trail.
One of the traditions in Seventh-day Adventism is to identify Michael with
Jesus.
And it's because of, you know, maybe passages like this.
I don't know how much awareness there is of it, but there's a whole body of
tradition that creates and argues for and articulates similarities between Jesus and
Michael.
And it's because of this number two position.
Yahoel is an angel that gets a name in pseudepigraphical literature.
You'll notice the name Yah is short for Yahweh.
That actually occurs in the Old Testament.
El, of course, another name for God.
So we have an angel that bears two divine names.
And Abraham is commanded to worship God in one text.
And here, Yahoel appears to be the God of Israel because look at all these titles,
Eternal One, Mighty One, Holy El, God, Autocrat.
You get to the verse 13, El, El, El, El, Yahel.
But you have other passages that sort of muddy those waters.
The same figure appears in life of Adam and Eve.
They, the angels, came to God and said, Yahel, Eternal King, command that fragrant
incenses from paradise be given to Adam.
Here, Yahel or Yahoel looks like the God of Israel.
But here, in a third passage, they're distinguished.
I heard the voice of the Holy One speaking.
Okay, now this is God speaking.
Go, Yahel, of the same name, through the mediation of my ineffable name.
So God is commanding Yahoel to do something.
So they're different characters now, even though Yahoel has all those
attributions, all those epithets of deity, of the God of Israel.
Lo, I am sent to strength, sent to you to strengthen you and to bless you.
The last line in bold there, I am Yahel, and with me Michael blesses you forever.
Isn't that interesting?
Michael's distinguished.
So in heaven, according to this writer, you've got God, this Yahoel guy,
and Michael.
The three of them are distinguished.
But one of them is described in the same terms that you would reserve for the God
of Israel.
So you have the God of Israel and then like another one, or what?
What's going on here?
That's the point.
There's a lot of confusion, a lot of... to us it's confusion, and to them,
I'm sure they wrestled with it.
But there's a lot of effort being put in to identifying who is actually at the top
in heaven, and yet they're Jews.
You would think, well, that shouldn't even be a question.
But it was.
Philo, another Jewish writer, he wrote a lot in Greek, and he uses the word Logos,
which of course, later on in the New Testament, gets attributed to Jesus.
Philo says of the Logos, God sustained the universe to rest firm and sure upon the
mighty Logos, who is my viceroy.
So the Logos here is God's vizier, God's vice regent, his co-ruler,
sort of in the description.
The Logos is, quote, that power of his, that power of God's by which he made and
ordered all things.
That sounds very New Testament.
Remember, we talked about how Jesus was the agent of creation in a number of New
Testament texts.
Not only is God between the two primary powers, that's picking up with a different
context, but so is the Logos.
While God is indeed one, there's an affirmation of the Shema on Philo's part,
his highest and chief powers are two, goodness and sovereignty.
And in the midst of between the two, there's a third which unites them,
the Logos, for it is through the Logos that God is both ruler and good.
So here we have like God's attributes funneled through this other guy,
which sounds really odd.
And to a Jew today, it would sound almost blasphemous.
Like God doesn't need anybody else.
What's this language about, you know, the attributes are in this other being.
Philo also refers to the Logos as God, Theos.
He uses the term Deuterosteos, the second God.
And he refers to there being two gods, a synonym for two powers in Jewish
thought.
That's a quote from Siegel, citing Philo's writing.
So what I want you to see here is that these are Jews.
None of these people, none of these writers, none of these books were ever
anathematized as heretical.
This was a commonly accepted speculation about who is at the top in the heavenly
realm because of something we will see in a moment,
because of certain things that are going on in the Old Testament.
And the rabbis knew their text really well.
And they picked up on some of the odd passages like Genesis 19, some of this
language where God is speaking and then refers to God.
They knew that really well.
And so between the Testaments, they're coming up with candidates.
Afterwards, though, after they declared a heresy, they need to come up with some
other explanation because we can't accept that there's two, because we've made that
a no-no now.
So later rabbis did this.
Exodus 15.3 was sort of their beginning proof text.
Yahweh is a man of war.
Yahweh is his name.
So what they said, and Siegel cites one of the later rabbis, and here's his
explanation or his exegesis.
Yahweh is a man of war is to be interpreted as a descriptive statement
referring to God's manifestation as a young warrior when he destroyed the
Egyptians at the Red Sea.
Yahweh is his name.
That's necessary because at Sinai, he reveals himself as an old man.
So what the rabbis are saying is, look, all this stuff that looks like two
Yahwehs, it's really one Yahweh, but manifested in two ways.
It's two modes.
It's two manifestations.
It's two sort of appearances.
Is God ever described as an old man on Sinai?
No, he's not.
Okay, I'll just plant that seed right now, because this is going to break down pretty
quickly.
But this is today, this is the rabbinical view.
Okay, that we're talking about one person in two modes of existence, and they're
going to try to go to their scriptures to demonstrate that.
And the real, the major text is Daniel 7.
Segal notes, again, the proof text used by the rabbis.
As I looked on, thrones were set in place, the ancient of days took a seat,
his garb was white as snow, hair, head like lamb's wool.
So there, there he's old.
Throne was tongues of fire again, just like Ezekiel 1.
It's God, we know who that is.
The court sat, the books were open, one like a human being came with clouds of
heaven, he reached the ancient of days.
And so there's this, there's this other one who's a man.
Okay, so the rabbis say, Aha, we've got an old God, and a God who's, who's a man
figure.
But they're really just two, they're really the same guy.
But depending on like, where you were at, and looked in the scene, you would see
one, and then you'd see the other.
And, you know, this one symbolizes this, and that one symbolizes the other.
Problem, there are other places that I'm going to show you, either at Sinai or not,
where you have a description of God.
And this breaks down, there's no old man in Exodus 3, Exodus 3 is the burning bush.
There are two figures in there, and neither of them are old men.
We'll show that passage in a moment.
The warrior man who's elsewhere identified as the angel of the Lord, who's in the
burning bush with Exodus 3 is with Yahweh.
So how can they be the same?
You could ask the same for Daniel 7.
If they're both there at the same time, how are they the same in just different
modes?
And there's another passage that we'll look at that really creates problems for
that.
And third, the son of man in Daniel 7 is never cast as a warrior.
So the rabbinical explanation of same God, two different modes might sound like it
works, but there are problems.
These are three initial ones.
Segal admits this.
He says, well, you know, in his mind, this is the answer, because he's Jewish.
But he says, I have to be honest, it may easily be describing two separate
divine figures anyway.
So like, what do you gain?
Well, not a whole lot.
Let's go back to the scriptures, actually, and I'll show you what leads up
to all this and show you how the rabbinical... the Jews were better off
saying, hey, there's two, just like they did before they declared it a heresy,
because that's going to become apparent when I go through this.
They're better off doing that than after they declared it a heresy and saying,
oh, it's just one guy in two forms.
That one is really hard to defend.
The other one is pretty much apparent.
Now, go back here.
The word I'm not going to spend any time on, because we've hit this for two weeks.
There's the word of God who comes to certain individuals, and he is embodied at
times.
At times, the language of physicality is attributed to the word.
Okay, we've seen those passages.
Let's talk about the name.
Sometimes God is referred to as the name, or the name of the Lord does things,
and then later he's referred to as God.
The idea comes from Deuteronomy, specifically this chapter.
Do not worship the Lord your God in like manner, but look only to the sight that
the Lord your God will choose amidst all your tribes as his habitation,
to establish his name there.
Now, this is God, through Moses, telling Joshua and the people what they're
supposed to do when they get into the promised land.
One of the things that they're going to do is they're going to build a temple.
They're going to build a central site at which God is worshipped.
And you see this phrase occur in Deuteronomy a lot.
The temple is referred to as the place where the Lord thy God shall choose to set
his name.
Now, we know from descriptions of the temple that the idea wasn't, well,
when you build a thing, then you take some sharp object and scratch, you know,
the four consonants in the door, or something like that.
It was never commanded, it was never done.
It's language that says, this is where I'm going to decide to live, okay?
I'm going to be there.
I'm going to set my name there.
Now you think, well, if that's the point, why doesn't God just say, hey,
I'm going to live there?
Okay, because God's telling you somewhat cryptically that I'm going to put myself
there, but I'm still everywhere else.
It's the language of localization, but yet God can't just be at only one
place.
It's sort of an expression for God's essence.
His glory is going to inhabit the temple.
And we know that's, you know, how it was because we read through the books of Kings
and all that, and other passages.
So is the name just another way of referring to Yahweh?
It is in most instances.
Here's an example.
May the Lord answer you in the day of trouble.
May the name of the God of Jacob protect you.
Okay, now names aren't alive.
They're not persons.
They're not entities.
They can't do anything.
Okay, but the God of Israel is a person who's active and powerful.
And so the idea isn't that somehow, you know, four letters are going to come
to your assistance, rather the being that those four letters represent.
Okay, that's who you're trusting.
And so it's another way of referring to God himself.
Some trust in chariots, some in horses, but we trust in the name of the Lord our
God.
Pretty straightforward.
It gets a little strange though, as this gets articulated.
Second Samuel.
Most English translations really cheat on this one.
David again gathered all the chosen men of Israel.
This is when they're moving the ark.
David arose and went to all the people who were with him from Baal Yudah to bring up
from there the ark of God, which is called the name.
The ark is called the name, the name of the Lord.
Now, the ESV has the ark is called by the name of the Lord of hosts.
Now, I'm sorry, that is just wrong.
Because here's what the Hebrew says.
It says, Asher Nikra Shem, who is called the name, the name Shem Adonai Tzevaot,
the name of the Lord of hosts.
Okay, name occurs twice in the verse.
It's very clear.
The ark was called the name.
Now, why would, why would, what does that mean?
Anybody?
Why would you associate the ark with the presence of Yahweh?
Right.
The tablets are inside.
What are some other reasons?
What is it about the ark?
Cherubim on top, the mercy seat.
This is where God was perceived to sit or be.
Okay, the tent of meeting, all that, all that Old Testament imagery.
This is the place where God was.
Okay, just like the temple, which is why they put the ark in the temple later on.
Actually, they put the whole tabernacle in the temple, but we don't need the rabbit
trail there.
Isaiah 30, 27.
Sometimes the name is personified as though it were a person.
Because again, it's just a substitute for Yahweh.
Behold, the name of the Lord comes from afar.
Well, like names don't travel.
In blazing wrath, with a heavy burden, his lips, his lips full of fury.
Well, again, that's language of personification.
The name is now cast as a person.
His tongue like devouring fire.
Now the name theology becomes important when you start looking at the angel of the
Lord, which is why I always begin with it.
Exodus 3, familiar passage.
Who's in the bush?
God.
Yeah, he is.
Who else?
He's not alone.
Okay, verse 2, an angel of Yahweh appeared to him in a blazing fire out of a bush.
It's Moses.
He says, boy, I'm going to turn aside and look at this.
And then in verse 4, when Yahweh saw that he, Moses, had turned aside to look,
God called to him out of the bush.
So you got angel, Yahweh, and God, all three terms used in the passage.
Now, either the angel is Yahweh, or the angel and Yahweh are separate.
And what I'm going to suggest to you through the rest of the time tonight is
the answer to that is yes.
The angel is Yahweh, but he's not.
He is, but isn't Yahweh.
And I've used this language before, and we use it, but we don't maybe think
about it when we talk about Jesus.
Jesus is God, but he's not.
Okay, he's not the Father.
In other words, we distinguish persons within the Godhead, but yet they're all
equal in essence.
That's what's going on here.
And in a number of other passages, they have the category of a Godhead,
where you've got different, not the same, different entities who are Yahweh,
but are still distinct.
Okay, that's the point you need to fix in your mind.
And it comes right out of the Old Testament.
Exodus 23, this is the key passage that goes back to the name.
God tells Moses, when they're embarking to go to the land, I am sending an angel
before you to guard you on the way, and to bring you to the place that I have
made ready.
Pay heed to him and obey him.
Do not defy him, for he will not pardon your offenses or forgive your sins,
more literally.
Why not?
He won't do that since my name is in him.
My essence, my glory, what I am, me, I'm in him.
He is me, and I am he.
Okay, I mean, try to parse the language here.
My name is in him.
And if you go, this is Exodus 23, you go through the Pentateuch,
you got the Ark, you got Deuteronomy language, the name was considered to be
Yahweh.
So the angel is an embodiment of Yahweh.
And guess what?
Sometimes Yahweh and the angel are both in the same scene.
Deuteronomy 4 is a nice backup verse for the essence.
Yahweh says, I brought you... the writer says that Yahweh, the Lord, brought you
out of Egypt with his own presence.
We just saw it was the angel here, it's the presence.
Exodus 33, God says, my presence will go with you, and I will give you rest.
Judges 2, the angel of Yahweh came up from Gilgal to Bochim.
This is when they're in the land, they're supposed to be getting the job
done.
The angel shows up.
The angel's been with them the whole time.
He led them into the land, and he shows up in a number of episodes.
I brought you up from Egypt.
Look at the use of I.
I brought you up from Egypt.
I took you into the land, which I had promised on oath to your fathers.
And I said, I will never break my covenant with you.
And you, for your part, must make no covenant with the inhabitants in the land.
But you have not obeyed me.
Look what you've done.
Then he basically says, I'm out of here.
You're not going to obey, bye.
That's why they call the name of the place Bochim, because they sat there and cried,
because the angel's gone.
Isaiah 63.
Again, we have the angel.
Who led the children of Israel out of Egypt into the land?
Was it Yahweh, or was it the angel?
And the answer is
yes.
Isaiah 63.
In their affliction, he was afflicted.
The angel of his presence saved them.
Now, back to the scene at the Red Sea.
Yahweh went before them by day in a pillar of cloud to lead them along the way.
Again, very familiar passage.
So Yahweh's in the cloud.
Then the angel of God, who was going before the host, so he's out in front,
moved and went behind them.
And the pillar of cloud moved from before them and stood behind them as well.
They're both again, they're both at the same scene doing things.
Joshua 5.
This is the captain of the Lord's host passage.
Once when Joshua was near Jericho, he looked up and saw a man standing before
him with a drawn sword in his hand.
Joshua went up to him and asked, are you one of one of us or for our
enemies?
He replied, no, I'm captain of Yahweh's host.
Now I have come.
Joshua, of course, goes prostrate.
What does my Lord command his servant, the captain of the Lord's host?
Answered Joshua, remove your sandals from off your feet for the place in which you
stand is holy.
Where have we heard that before?
Burning bush.
Not only that, and the angel was at the bush.
Not only that, but the reason I have this in Hebrew is this phrase of three words,
the carbo shelofa beyado, and his sword drawn in his hand is used two other places
in the Old Testament.
They are in the Chronicles account of David taking the census.
There's a parallel account there and they're both used explicitly.
The person described with the sword drawn in his hand is the angel of the Lord.
It's the only two places where it occurs.
Other than this one.
Again, the writers are not, this doesn't happen by accident.
They're telegraphing something to you.
Judges six, the angel of Yahweh.
This is one of my favorite passages on this because it's just, it's just unusual.
The angel of Yahweh came and sat under the terebinth at Ophiroth.
Terebinth is a tree.
So fixing your mind, who's sitting under the tree?
The angel.
Okay.
He has a conversation with Gideon.
The angel of Yahweh appeared to him and said, Yahweh is with you.
So the angel speaking of Yahweh as a different person.
Gideon says, well, yeah, you know, boy, if he's with me, why is all this bad
stuff happening?
You go to verse 13.
You know, why has all this stuff befallen us?
Yahweh turned to him.
Where did he come from?
How did he get there?
I thought it was the angel.
Well, it was.
Now it's Yahweh.
Yeah.
Right.
Yahweh turned to him and said, go in this might of yours and save Israel
from the hand of Midian.
Aren't I sending you?
And then of course he has this conversation.
Verse 16, Yahweh says to him something else.
Again, Yahweh speaks to him again.
I'll be with you.
And he, Gideon, said to him.
Now we don't know who the him is because we've got two characters.
So that's why I have angel and Yahweh with a question mark.
Who's he talking to?
We're not really clear.
If now I have found favor in your eyes, show me a sign that it is you who speaks
with me.
Please do not depart from here until I come to you and bring out my present and
set it before you.
And he, whoever he is, said, I will stay until you return.
So Gideon went to his house, prepared a young goat, cakes.
He brought them to him.
There's the him.
Where?
Under the terebinth.
Now, is it right for anyone else but Yahweh to accept an offering or a
sacrifice?
No, it is not.
But you can see what happens.
It's the angel who accepts the sacrifice.
But now, wait a minute, wasn't Yahweh also there?
Well, yeah, he was.
Is there a problem?
No, the writer didn't see any problem.
The angel of Yahweh reached out the tip of his staff that was in his hand,
touched the meat and the unleavened cakes.
Fire sprang up from the rock, consumes it, and the angel of Yahweh vanished from his
sight.
Okay, my job's over, bye, see you later.
Gideon perceived that he was the angel of Yahweh.
A brilliant insight there.
Gideon said, alas, O Lord God, for now I have seen the angel of the Lord
face to face, but Yahweh said, Yahweh's still there.
So this is the passage that I would take a Jewish friend and saying, look,
you can't have it both ways.
Yahweh wants two modes or two forms, and you got them coming and going here.
You got two different characters.
What's the point?
You know, and at this point, we could launch into how this is similar,
how this bears similarity to other ancient Near Eastern ways of describing deity.
It's just a necessary thing to have, to speak of deity as embodied on occasion,
because of we have to be able to detect deity with our own senses.
And so that just gets built in.
But the issue here is that you have both things happening at the same time,
and they're clearly separate characters.
And sometimes they're so closely identified, you can't tell them apart.
And even more than that, the same descriptions are used of both.
And there's no blasphemy going on here.
This is normal discourse for Israelite religion, Israelite theology in the Old
Testament.
These are not non-canonical books.
This is the Torah.
This is the Tanakh.
It is what it is.
Genesis 31, the angel of God comes to Jacob, comes to him in a dream.
Jacob says, here I am.
And in verse 13, the angel says, I am the God of Bethel.
I mean, how much clearer can it be?
He didn't say, hey, the God of Bethel has a message for you.
Or like, I was there with him.
He says, I am the God of Bethel.
Jacob had an episode back there at Bethel earlier in his life where he made a pillar
and made a vow.
Genesis 48, this is when Jacob is blessing his sons.
He stretched out his sons of Joseph.
He stretched out his right hand, laid it on Ephraim's head.
And then, you know, he crosses his hands with Manasseh.
And here's his blessing.
Here's the point.
Jacob says, the God, and in Hebrew, it's Elohim.
The God in whose ways my fathers, Abraham and Isaac, walked.
The God who has been my shepherd from my birth to this day.
The angel who has redeemed me from all harm.
No incongruity in Jacob's mind.
And the kicker is, may he bless these boys.
The verb is singular.
You can't tell them apart.
And the writer doesn't want you to tell them apart, because if he did,
he would have used a plural.
He would have said, may they bless these boys.
But he doesn't.
He says, may he.
Which one?
God or the angel?
The answer is, yes.
Okay.
The cloud rider.
He who rides the clouds.
Now, Baal, this is the title of Baal.
I like to use, to reference this for a couple of reasons.
But one is, sometimes you get into discussions with people and they say,
well, one was God and the other one was like, not really God, just sort of divine
or something like that.
Well, okay.
Let's talk about Baal.
Baal was not mistaken by anyone for being other than a deity across the ancient
world.
There are Baal shrines practically everywhere you go.
Hundreds of them.
Baal was a to lots of people all the way into Roman times.
They're still worshiping Baal.
Baal is not an angel.
He's not something else.
He is a God to the ancient people.
One of Baal's titles is the one who rides the clouds.
This title, because it was so clearly identified with the deity, this title is
used in the Old Testament four or five times.
It is always used with one exception of the God of Israel, because what the
Israelite writers are doing is, look, there seems to be some confusion,
like the confrontation with Elijah.
Who are you going to worship, Baal or Yahweh?
Like, make up your mind.
The problem was, is that the seat of Baal worship was next door in Syria.
And so there was a big problem with keeping the Israelites worshiping Yahweh
and not Baal.
So a couple of times the biblical writers say, okay, Baal's the one who rides the
clouds.
We're going to use that title and attribute it to Yahweh to make it clear in
our readers' minds of just who rides the clouds.
Who's the one who brings rain?
Who's the one that grows our crops?
You know, all these things that they associated with Baal.
So here are some examples.
Deuteronomy 33, there's none like God, O Jeshurun, who rides through the heavens
to your help.
Again, Deuteronomy 33, talking about the God of Israel.
Psalm 68, sing to God, sing praises to the Lord, to him who rides in the heavens.
Psalm 104, O Lord my God, you are very great.
He lays, you know, this description, covering yourself with light as garments,
stretching out of the heavens like a tent.
He lays the beams of his chambers on the waters.
He makes the clouds his chariot.
There's, you know, this reference to the rider on the clouds again.
Isaiah 19, behold, the Lord is riding on a swift cloud.
Yahweh's riding on a swift cloud.
So they're doing this to reinforce that it isn't Baal who does this, who does all the
things that we associate with the God who governs the clouds, or who controls things
up there.
It's Yahweh.
It's not Baal, it's Yahweh.
Here's the exception.
As I looked, thrones were set in place again.
Ancient of days takes his seat, the court sits, divine counsel again.
I saw in the night visions and behold, upon the clouds of heaven there came one
like a son of man.
Who's the cloud rider now?
It's not the seated God of Israel, it's somebody else.
There are two deities in the passage.
This is why this became a critical text for not only the discussion of a second
power, but also we have to be able to answer Daniel 7, where we're sunk,
because there's clearly two.
Everybody in the ancient world knew this was a title of deity, the one who rides
the clouds.
And here it ain't the God of Israel, it's somebody else.
Yahweh gets described in human form as well.
Genesis 18, he's one of the three men who sit down and Abraham brings them a meal
and in verse 8, they eat.
So he's clearly embodied.
Exodus 24, Moses, Aaron, Nadav, and Abihu and the elders go up to Sinai
and it says, point-blank, they saw the God of Israel.
Under his feet there's pavement, like sapphire stone.
This is actually coming from Baal literature as well, because this is a
stock description of Baal's palace.
And again, they want to be clear, it is not Baal who inhabits the heavens
and rules everything, it's Yahweh.
This stuff happens a lot in the Old Testament, and it's for theological
reasons.
They're trying to do a theological corrective to the people who are reading
their text.
Ezekiel 1, famous passage Ezekiel, likeness on the throne, human appearance.
Now let's look at Jesus against all of this.
If you were a Semite, if you were a Jew living in the first century, if you were
familiar with your Old Testament, you knew all the stuff that I just
covered, and there's more.
You had this idea in your mind that there's Yahweh, but there's actually two.
There's the Yahweh who's invisible that we never see, and then there's this other
Yahweh that we can see, because a lot of times he's in human form.
And they're not two gods, we're not worshipping two gods, we're worshipping
one, the Lord our God is one, there's unity there.
But there's two, and there's still one, and there's two, and they're different.
I mean, they had these things in their head that they could sift information
through.
It was their grid, their interpretive grid.
So along comes Jesus, and not only that, but they had all the other Second Temple
stuff, where Jewish thinkers are trying to identify the second one.
They have all this.
Then Jesus comes along, the New Testament writers, and they write stuff like,
in the beginning was the Logos, and the Logos was with God, and the Logos
was God, and the Logos became flesh and dwelt among us.
We've seen his glory, okay, the presence.
Glory is of the only Son from the Father, full of grace and truth.
No one has ever seen God, the only God who's at the Father's side.
Now, wait a minute.
I thought God was the Father, so how can God be at the Father's side?
Well, it's easy if you have two.
Piece of cake.
The angel, Jude 5.
Now, I want to remind you, although you once fully knew it, that Jesus,
who saved a people out of the land of Egypt...
Well, wait a minute.
I thought that was God.
No, no, no, it was the angel.
Maybe Jesus, like, angel was the embodied Yahweh, and the word became... Oh,
okay, I get it.
I'm tracking.
John 17, the name.
I want you to think about what Jesus is praying here.
I have manifested your name to the people whom you gave me out of the world.
What?
The Jews didn't know the name of God before Jesus got there?
Hello?
They had... What do you mean they didn't know the name of God?
They had the Torah.
In Exodus chapter 3, God tells you what his name is.
I am that I am.
Yahweh is used like, oh, I don't know, 3,000 times in the thing.
Jesus is not praying that, hey, you know, when I came here, it was really
an important part of my job to tell you God's name.
How could they not have known that?
That isn't the point.
I have manifested your name.
I have made known your presence to the people whom you gave me out of the world.
Yours they were, and you gave them to me, they have kept your word.
While I was with them, I kept them in or by your name.
So when we got in trouble, I just said, Yahweh, remember that's God's name.
You didn't know that before I got here.
That's not what he's saying at all.
He's saying, I kept them through your power, through who you are, through what
you are, because I and the Father are one.
I made known to them your name, and I will continue to make it known.
This is just another way of Jesus saying that you have never seen the Father unless
you've seen me.
You've never known the Father unless you've known me.
It's the same way of saying, I am him, but I'm still me.
Again, it's this language of fusion and dichotomy at the same time.
One who rides the clouds.
I saw in the night visions, again, Daniel writing, son of man riding on the
clouds.
Matthew 26.
This is Jesus at his trial for Caiaphas.
Those who had seized Jesus led him to Caiaphas, the high priest.
The priest stands up and says, don't you have an answer to make?
What is it that these men testify against you?
But Jesus remains silent.
The high priest gets a little fed up with that and says to him, I adjure you by the
living God.
Tell us if you are the Christ, the son of God.
Quit beating around the bush, say something.
Jesus said to him, you have said so, but I tell you from now on, you will see
the son of man seated at the right hand of power and coming on the clouds of heaven.
His answer to Caiaphas is he quotes Daniel seven.
Like what kind of an answer is that?
I'll tell you what kind of an answer it was.
It was a punch in the face is what it was.
He's saying, I am the son of man.
This is Jesus' favorite title for himself through the New Testament.
Most of the time it's just a reference to being the human one, but isn't that kind
of curious?
I mean, honestly, if you met a guy at work that referred to himself as the human one,
wouldn't you think he was a little odd?
I'm like, no kidding.
You know, most of the time it's a reference to humanity, but here he quotes
Daniel seven point blank, and he puts himself in it and Caiaphas gets it
immediately because look at what he does.
Then the high priest tore his robes and said, he has uttered blasphemy.
He just made himself the second Yahweh.
He just made himself the second power.
What further witnesses do we need?
You have now heard his blasphemy.
Caiaphas isn't saying, oh, we got to get rid of this guy because he called himself
human.
What?
No, we got to get rid of this guy because he just called himself the second Yahweh.
He's claiming to be God.
I mean, it's easy to see when you have the backdrop that the first century Christians
did.
Now, what I'm not claiming is I'm not saying that in the old Testament you have
a full blown, full orbed Christology, Trinitarian Christology, like we think of.
There are hints of Trinity in the Old Testament.
It's easy to show two.
There are hints of three.
All I'm saying is that the Jews, the Jewish people, it was part of Judaism
to have a God head.
It comes right out of the Old Testament, right out of Israelite religion.
And when Jesus comes along, we need to view him, and they did view him against
the backdrop of the Old Testament.
When Jesus starts going around saying some of the things he's saying, some of it
falls, you know, on deaf ears on our end, not because we don't care, but because we
just lack the connections.
But when they heard him say things like, you know, calling himself the son of man,
and you know, this or that quotation, they knew exactly what he was saying.
And some of them believed it, and others didn't.
Some of them were really offended.
The problem was not the two powers teaching.
The two powers teaching was part of Judaism.
What made it indigestible is that this candidate for the second power,
according to the New Testament writers, was not some dead guy from the Bible,
you know, from the Old Testament, a guy who lived thousands of years ago.
Well, yeah, he sounds like a good candidate, wonderful, whatever.
Instead, this was a guy who was alive now, and who was doing things that were pretty
spectacular.
And not only that, but he was running against the grain of the religious
authorities of his time in his tradition.
And he's claiming to be the one that they've been speculating about for
centuries.
That was a little hard to take.
The other problem was, to be that person, you had to, he had to have been born,
you had to have Yahweh born of a woman.
In other words, he had to be human with all of the frailties associated with all
of the somewhat distasteful things associated with it.
Jesus had to be potty trained.
Jesus puked up his lunch from time to time.
Okay, I mean, he just did the things kids do, because why?
He was human.
We know he could bleed, we know he could die.
He was human.
He wasn't like mostly human.
It's not princess bride theology.
Okay, he was human, all right?
He's whole.
And that really bothered people.
But you know, how could God stoop to that?
I'll throw in a third thing.
The other problem was the crucifixion.
Because if you're saying, if you're trying to convince a Jewish audience of this
after the crucifixion, they have to say, in order for them to look at you and say,
you know, I believe it, I think you're right.
They would have to get over the hump of acknowledging that we just killed him.
Boy, that was a big mistake.
That sure looks like a boo-boo now.
You know, and Peter is real quick in Acts chapter 2 to confront them with just that.
But he's also just as quick to say, well, this was part of God's plan.
You didn't realize it, but you're still accountable.
You did it.
And you had to get over that hump.
And that was a little too much for a lot of Jews to accept.
But many Jews did.
Many Jews could look at Jesus and say, this is entirely consistent with what we
see in the Torah, with what we see in the Tanakh.
It's not a big leap.
We're willing to take that leap that it was this one and not these other ones.