Bully's Blog

“Recovering the Old Testament as a text in which Christians live and move and have their being is one of the most urgent tasks before the church. Reading the Reformers is good and right. Christian political activism has its place. Even at their best, however, these can only bruise the heel of a world that has abandoned God. But the Bible—the Bible is a sword to divide joints from marrow, a weapon to crush the head.”

–Peter J. Leithart, A House For My Name, p. 40.

“But one of the soldiers pierced His side with a spear, and immediately blood and water came out.” – John 19:34

The spear reminds us that Jesus was a victim of both Goliath, the Gentile Sea Beast dressed in chainmail scales (Leviathan), and Saul, the Israelite King turned Land Beast (Behemoth). He was executed as a Balaamite (false prophet) by an apostate Phinehas, the corrupted High Priest who wished to retain the Covenant. The spear was thrust by the conspiracy of the serpent/dragon (Rome), and Adam and Eve (Herod and ‘Babylon’).

The 70 foot high veil in the Temple was torn in two, from top to bottom. The veil was His body (Hebrews 10:20). In Passover/the Red Sea, and in Jordan/Jericho, blood and water opened the door.

“I am the door.” – John 10:9

An Examination of Both the Federal Vision and the New Perspective on Paul

http://www.biblelighthouse.com/covenants/within_the_bounds_of_orthodoxy.htm

by Joseph Minich – April, 2006

This essay is neither a defense nor a sustained critique of either the Federal Vision or the New Perspective on Paul. The exclusive aim of this presentation is to ask the question, “Can advocates of either of these positions be considered as within the bounds of Reformation orthodoxy?” That is, whether or not one agrees with one or the other of these movements, or whether or not one agrees with how they word certain things, can they nevertheless be interpreted in such a way as to be within the broad parameters of the Reformed faith?

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There is a lot of truth in theonomy. But things have changed since the time of Moses. At that point, the church and state were basically one.

After the exile, things were different. The role of the Jews was to be priests within the Gentile state. They no longer had the right to administer capital punishment. When they witnessed faithfully, there was a Jew at the emperor’s right hand, steering the empire for God’s people and their stand for the truth.

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James Jordan points out that when the Lord confused the languages of the Babel builders, the Hebrew term is ‘lip’, and it carries the connotation of scattering their religious profession.

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“The failure to understand the Babelic context of Israel’s history results in a failure to understand the purpose of tongues in the New Testament, and a failure to understand the historical transition that took place between A.D. 30 and 70. God judged Babel because if the people were united, nothing would be withheld from them (Gen. 11). Jesus prays that His people would be united, so that nothing will be withheld from us (John 17). It was necessary for Jewish and Gentile believers to overcome the Old Covenant bipolarity and be united, before the Gospel could really go forth in full power. After A.D. 70, with Jew and Gentile united in one Church, nothing can be withheld from us, unless we choose by our sin to be disunited. After A.D. 70, there is no longer any God-instituted historical disunity in operation.”

- James B. Jordan, The future of Israel re-examined
http://www.bullartistry.com.au/lastdays.html (articles 13-15)

“God told Noah to build the Ark with nests inside. The word qen {kane} is translated nests every other time it appears in Scripture, but most versions substitute the word rooms only for Noah’s Ark. Since there is no good reason to do this, we should take nests as the preferred option. Thinking in terms of nests rather than rooms, we begin to see a different view of how the animals may have been housed…

As nests, it would be inappropriate to imagine animals lined up on display or herded together in huge stalls. Neither option would suit animal transport anyway. Instead, we should be thinking of snug, private enclosures where an animal would hide and bed down. The enclosure should be comfortable, safe, private, warm and probably darkened. It should also be an area that is not routinely disturbed.”

from www.worldwideflood.com

If the ark prefigured the Temple and the body of Christ, a floating “house” mediating between the old world and the new, the congregations within His body are “nests.”

“…since we have so great a cloud of witnesses surrounding us…” (Hebrews 12:1)

NOTE: THIS POST HAS BEEN REMIXED AND INCLUDED IN GOD’S KITCHEN.

To defeat Satan is to expose his lies to the truth – to unmask him. We see lots of unmaskings in the Bible. Many of these use the saints as bait. The true natures of Pharaoh, of Job’s accusers, and of Haman and the enemies of God in Esther were all exposed when God’s people became weak. A corpse always brings out the dirty birds (Matthew 24:28), the ‘Edomite’ false brothers waiting to loot a razed Jerusalem.

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Passover was not a sign of salvation, but of coming salvation. Passover constituted Israel a “peculiar” people, particularly redeemed by God, and given a special priestly task. How were the gentiles related to Passover? By watching it, and putting faith in it. Someday, according to the promise of the covenant, they would be let in the House. For now, they were to stand at the doors and windows and look in. They watched the peculiar people eat the Passover, and they trusted that God would save them as well. They watched the peculiar priestly people circumcise their children, and they trusted that the benefits of that act were theirs as well.

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I get through more Bible in one scripture lesson with non-Christian high school kids than many church congregations get in 6 months. Why have we dumbed church down so much?

“A young man, who never really wanted to graduate from high school himself, gets hired as a youth minister. His task is to put together a wild and crazy time down at the church, with perhaps a little inspirational message attached. The driving assumption is that young people today will not tolerate serious instruction and discipleship, and so we must give them large amounts of what they do want, which is “fun, fun, fun, till her daddy takes the T-bird away.” The problem here is not that the kids in the high school group get together, but rather that we have assumed that their time together should consist largely of froth and vanity. As these children grow up, we find that they are unaccustomed to any kind of serious, sustained worship, and so the pressure mounts to make the worship service more and more like the youth group used to be. Because we have tolerated and encouraged the dumbing down of the faith amoung young people, we discover over time, as they grow up, that it stays dumbed down.”

Doug Wilson, Mother Kirk, p. 220. Available from www.canonpress.org