And they came to Jesus and saw the demon-possessed man,
the one who had had the legion, sitting there,
clothed and in his right mind, and they were afraid. - Mark 5:15
Rich Bledsoe’s old blog is a goldmine. Here’s an excerpt from The Dysfunctional Family of the Gadarene Madman.
In The Days of Vengeance [PDF], David Chilton did a great job of introducing many of us to the fact of Jesus’ use of “cosmic language” in Matthew 24 to describe the end of the Old Covenant. Not only is the idea of an actual, physical star falling to earth impossible (can you imagine the sun “falling to earth”?) but Jesus is quoting from a prophecy against Babylon. His audience would have realized this as a scathing attack against the Herods and their “government controlled” Temple worship. So, the language is clearly poetic, but why would the prophets—and Jesus and His apostles—deliberately cause so much confusion by using cosmic language to describe non-cosmic events? The answer is found in the mercy of God.
“Rivers of water run down from my eyes,
because men do not keep Your law.” Psalm 119:136
I might bag out [1] the Biblical Horizons crowd for their views on baptism, but otherwise they are giants. They have a hold on Scripture and history that enables them to understand the times.
Rich Blesdsoe recently made the observation that the unbelief which constantly confronts us Western Christians is quite a different animal to the demonism found in other cultures. We don’t suffer the full-scale “possessions” seen in pagan cultures. The rebellion is just as self-destructive, as crazed and zealous, and just as much a “nothing” as the idols of the pagans, but it is a different kind of nothing. What’s going on in our culture?
The word apocalypse does not denote the end of the world. It is literally a revelation, a revealing.
In his Pauline Theology paper, It’s the end of the flesh as we know it! A comparison of circumcision & apocalypse (2010), Steven Opp provides support for the identification of the book of Revelation as a Covenant lawsuit. Christ was circumcised, then Christ Himself was cut off. Israel was circumcised in Christ, then, in AD70, after decades of apostolic gospel witness, unbelieving Old Covenant Israel and its Temple worship, overseen by “the mutilation,” were cut off. On the final Day of Coverings, the flesh was exposed.
Creation: In part 1 we saw that the theme of the first stanza of 2 Thessalonians 2 was the “Sabbath” rest of the church. Paul writes to remove the alarm caused by the “conspiracy theorists” who attempted to disturb it.
Division: The second stanza concerned the splitting of the church into two — those who would persevere despite the growing threat of tribulation throughout the empire [1], and those who would succumb to their fears. The attacks would culminate in the completion of Herod’s Temple and the Nero’s burning of Rome in AD64. The first threw doubt upon the words of Christ concerning the Temple, and the second, though hardly believed, was an excuse to scapegoat this new Jew-Gentile sect, now legally separated from the protection afforded to Jews by Rome. The gospel tore Judaism in two. Then it united those believing Jews with Gentiles. But as in the wilderness, new Israel would be threshed and purified.
This post concerns the Covenant-literary structure of 2 Thessalonians 2. The context and audience are first century, but it amazes me how willing we modern Christians are to do intricate hermeneutical acrobatics to avoid the obvious conclusion that the particular “coming” of Christ referred to here was also a first century event - the end of the Old Covenant in AD70.
A reasonably close look at the text makes it inescapable. A very close analysis makes it inexcusable, especially once we are versed in the literary mechanics of the Bible Matrix. Continue reading
Remy Wilkins recently proposed a thesis about serpents and dragons in the Bible. Is there a difference? Are the words interchangeable? And even if they aren’t, how are these animals–and the spiritual truths they were created to represent–related?
Remy writes: Continue reading
“In Genesis 1, God creates the world in six days, through certain steps. Then He creates human beings out of ‘world,’ and human beings made out of world are going to live like ‘world’ does. They are going to go from darkness to light, formlessness to form; they are going to marry and take dominion. They are going to become like lights ruling over the earth. They’re going to live in 24 hour cycles. They will undergo times when God pulls them apart and puts them back together in new ways–all because they are made out of world. And these are all steps of glorification.” — James B. Jordan (The Bible You Never Read)
Some Christians assert that Adam was not the first man, only the first man in Covenant with God. [1] This means that the judgments upon such a Covenant could only be social, not “Creational.” They could only fall upon those under Covenant, not the “pre-Adamic” people from which this Covenant separated Adam. This assertion must be made to support the view that the Great Flood was only a local event, destroying only the “Adamites,” not all people on the planet. Does this assertion have any support in Scripture? Apparently yes, but factually no.
Micah Martin (brother of one of the authors of Beyond Creation Science), has kindly read Bible Matrix II and written about my adherence to the Genesis account of Creation as both Covenant and history (i.e. the account is not simply an account of the physical world being given a Covenantal purpose as a Temple, but also its actual Creation). There is much that we agree on, but the disagreement on this subject couldn’t be sharper, or of more importance.
One of the hyperpreterist/full preterist [1] gents made a keen observation after reading my article Covenant is the Key: Moses vs. Hyperpreterism. My argument was that since the Revelation follows the Covenant structure laid down in the Torah (and echoed throughout the Bible), we should expect the final section of the book to concern the future, otherwise known as Continuity or Succession.
The counterargument was that this section did concern the future when John wrote the book, but that we are living beyond that future now, and there is no final event or consummation. The only consummation was AD70.
This is a really good argument, but it does two things. Firstly, it makes nonsense of their own argument that Revelation 20 is another viewpoint of the events surrounding the end of Judaism in AD70. Also, it fails to take into account the structure and contents of Revelation 20 itself.
