Bully's Blog

Well, here’s Day 6 at last, and the end of Genesis 1 (this is a really bad chapter division!)
Here’s the rest of this series:   1 2 3 4 5

In this final act of Creation, the Lord puts the lords in the palace. As James Jordan observes, ancient kings sat on thrones of beasts. As king, Solomon was enthroned over lions. His priestly government, imaged in the bronze sea, was enthroned over twelve “tribal” sacrificial bulls, carrying the living water to the nations. And in the Revelation, we see the four beasts filled with eyes beneath the throne of God. The animal kingdom was, in some important sense, to become Adam’s throne.

If you’ve read Bible Matrix, you’ll also have seen that Israel’s history follows the Creation Week, with the four Gentile “beast” empires preceding the final “empire of The Man” Christ Jesus (Daniel 7). Using the matrix, we can also see that the initial history in Daniel 1-6 follows the same pattern, with Daniel’s “dominion” over the lions (turning them into “mutes”) situated at Day 6. And, of course, Noah was also enthroned over those “from afar off.” And then, looking at the entire biblical history, at the Last Day, Jesus will be the one fully enthroned over every enemy, with every “beastly” mouth stopped.

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All of God’s Covenant quests involve risk. If we attempt to avoid the danger of the mission, and seek results through the false safety of our own wisdom, we are prone to far worse perils.

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Crafty Beast

There Can Only Be One

The Nursery of Culture

A New Perspective on Sin

For the Sick and Afflicted

or Holy Smoke

Doug Wilson writes:

“The debate in the early church was not whether the Jews should stop circumcising their sons; it was whether the Gentiles had to start. The decision of the Jerusalem council was not that individual Gentiles did not have to be circumcised. If circumcision had been required of them, it would have obligated them to live as Jews under the Mosaic law — which included the circumcision of all subsequent generations. Circumcision was not being waived for individual Gentiles; circumcision was being waived for Gentiles and their seed. So the Christian church did not insist that Gentiles circumcise their infants — not because they were infants, but because they were Gentile infants” (To a Thousand Generations, pp. 68-69).

Since there is no ex-plicit proof of infant baptism, Pastor Wilson’s self-stated, continuing goal here is to find im-plicit proof. My goal in the following is to show that not only do circumcision and baptism not correspond, but also that the solution to the dispute in this passage he refers to is given in the passage, leaving no room for an im-plicit reference to infant baptism.

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How can we fix modern worship? Nearly all debate on this subject overlooks what the Bible has to say.

In From Silence to Song, Peter Leithart justifies the practice of finding patterns for our worship in the Levitical rites in the fact that King David did precisely this.

“…sacrificial worship did not cease with the coming of the New Covenant, but was transformed into a “spiritual sacrifice” and “sacrifice of praise.” We now do different things than ancient Israelites did, but those actions have the same meaning as the actions in the Levitical ceremonies.

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From Wine, Women and Song, James B. Jordan lectures, Biblical Horizons Conference 2010:

“[Wine, women and song] are three things which are essential characteristics of the New Covenant glory which the Church has done a bad job of affirming over the centuries, and are three things which are hated by Islam. Islam is the scourge of Christendom, and a mirror of Christendom. It’s as if all the mistakes the Church makes are magnified in Islam or in some way directly perverted in Islam. Then, there is a fourth characteristic of the New Creation order: holy war.

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We receive baptism, but is membership of the visible New Covenant body entirely objective? The Old Covenant church, “the Body of Moses,” was Adamic. The Tabernacle was a Babelic tower, a ladder to heaven, laid out prostrate on the ground. The New Covenant Body, the Body of Jesus, is Evian. As a Temple filled with the Spirit of God, it stands upright and walks on the Crystal Sea.

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Doug Wilson writes:

“This objection misses the point that Peter is making. The issue with Cornelius and his household was not whether they were old enough to receive water baptism, but whether they were Jewish enough. If this household had contained an infant, the members of the ‘circumcision’ who were there would not have objected to baptism on the grounds of infancy, but rather because the infant was Gentile and uncircumcised” (To a Thousand Generations, p. 55).

Certainly, the issue was whether Gentiles should be baptized, but it was never a pitting of circumcision against baptism. They understood that circumcision was a beginning and baptism was a new beginning. Circumcision was replaced not by baptism but by the death of Christ, which united Jew and Gentile. Jesus tore down that wall, and paedobaptism unwittingly puts it up again. Circumcision marked out flesh as a plot of Land. That is entirely done with. Spirit water overflows all human barriers, it wipes out every distinction with a new one – Repentance and Faith.

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Another gem from Tim Nichols:

Consider Daniel 9, the prayer of the just man Daniel. Go ahead and read it; I’ll wait.

Did you notice that Daniel identifies fully with his people? “We have not obeyed the voice of the Lord our God, to walk in His laws,” he says — although Daniel himself did, in fact, keep them.  “We have not made our prayer before the Lord our God” — although Daniel did so daily, even at risk of his life.  “Neither have we heeded your servants the prophets,” he says — although he himself was a close student of the prophets, especially Jeremiah.

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