BITTERSWEET

“Gracious words are like a honeycomb,
sweetness to the soul and health to the body.”
(Proverbs 16:24)

If, in the language of biblical symbols, gold is solid light and oil is liquid light, then honey is liquid gold.

As the golden Ark contained the Ten Words, and the oil of the Lampstand lightened the path of the king, so honey is the Word of God in edible form. In the wilderness, manna tasted like honey wafers. In Canaan, the law of the Lord was even more desirable than its precious honey (Psalm 19:10; 119:103).

Bees are used to represent the hosts of the Land, a swarm possessed of a single mind, the Canaanites whose labors would be possessed by Israel. The gift of honey was part of Israel’s bittersweet inheritance. Thus bees and honey together perfectly picture the plunder and plagues meted out to Israel under the Law of Moses as blessings and curses, possession or oppression.

You shall inherit their land, and I will give it to you to possess, a land flowing with milk and honey. (Leviticus 20:24)

The name of Deborah, “a mother in Israel” who led a successful counterattack against the forces of Jabin king of Canaan and his military commander Sisera, means “bee.”1 For Israel, milk and honey are symbols of the promise of the motherland, the favor of the Father as edible gold for His faithful Son. But not all of Israel’s fathers were good.

Then Jonathan said, “My father has troubled the land. See how my eyes have become bright because I tasted a little of this honey.” (1 Samuel 14:29)

It is interesting that honey is found in the mouth of the blessed bride (Song of Solomon 4:11) and on the lips of the cursed harlot (Proverbs 5:3), images of a Covenant kingdom found faithful or unfaithful.

The ministry of bees also illustrates the eternal conversation between the Father and the Son by the Spirit. The Father commands and the Son brings His plans to fruition (John 1:3). The words of the Lord structure all reality, but it is obedience to them which brings life and glory. Just like the Creation of the world, the production of honey is a twofold process of forming and filling. Honeycomb is a many-roomed house. It is filled with glory through the “there-and-back-again” duties of faithful workers who “pollenate” the nations.

Theology should be a similar process. Sadly, so much of it is merely a haphazard collection of separate facts, ideas and opinions, without any consciousness of the wonderful “hive” pattern that is obviously inherent in everything if we have eyes to see.2

The fractal “matrix” of the Bible is a framework for understanding the world, and the Covenantal shape of all Scripture is the honeycomb within which all truth is contained. Every theological or natural observation is part of a process of transformation, which finds its origin in the to-and-fro of the Trinity. To be truly “filled,” theology must first be “formed” by the patterns in the words and works of God.

Douglas Wilson speaks of the “copiousness” of the writer. This is the practice of collecting and recording ideas for later use, much as a bee collects pollen.

Keep a commonplace book. Write down any notable phrases that occur to you, or that you have come across. If it is one that you have found in another writer, and it is striking, then quote it, as the fellow said, or modify it to make it yours.3

When you collect phrases, points, metaphors, and whatnot in this way, you are, as Cicero used to put it, loaded for bear. By linking “loaded for bear” up with Cicero, incidentally, I am providing another example of the previous point. But this last point is an important part of what the ancient rhetoricians called copiousness.

One time G.K. Chesterton, the rolypologist, was patted on the stomach by his adversary, George Bernard Shaw, a beanpole of an infidel, and was asked what they were going to name the baby. Chesterton replied immediately that if it was a boy, John, if a girl, then Mary. But if it turned out to only be gas, they were going to name it George Bernard Shaw. Now we hear that story and marvel at his amazing quickness. And it may well have been such, a prodigy of the moment. But I also wouldn’t be a bit surprised to find out that Chesterton had that particular pistol loaded beforehand, and concealed on his person. When copiousness is active, you not only know how to respond in the moment, but you can also see the moment coming, and prepare for it beforehand.

Your commonplace book is just a staging area. You are collecting things in order use them, to get them into your mind and heart, and thence into your writing.4

The writer’s life is a scavenger’s life. This should go also for pastors, teachers, fathers and mothers, and in fact any Christian: all our ministry is didactic and apologetic, discipleship and witness. We collect that we might not only pollenate but also build the kingdom. This means that copiousness alone is not enough. Only kingdom-shaped hearts can hold honey.

This process is exactly what is going on in the wisdom literature and the prophets, and I am constantly amazed at our failure to recognize it. Theirs was a biblical copiousness. Their guns were loaded, their pumps were primed, well before these remarkable minds fired and mouths gushed. All the writers had been Timothys waiting for a Paul to join the dots of the Law with the stylus of the Spirit. Every past event was ammunition for Israel’s future. This explains why the book of Revelation is an explosive spray of machine gun fire from a carefully collected and meticulously arranged cache of Old Testament texts.

Biblical copiousness is one thing we love about C. H. Spurgeon. The Bible was his muse. The biblical texts are high walls but they are not lonely, cold, disjointed bricks. Spurgeon preached from the fiery turrets of inspired literature with apparent ease while modern boffins do dog paddle below him in a moat of footnotes and call it scholarship. To these illiterati, the “apostolic hermeneutic” is a marvel and a mystery, an impenetrable keep, when it is simply the result of their biblical copiousness. The cinematic Covenantal ironies of the prophets are lost on the blind guides of today. Jesus and His prophets are far cleverer—and funnier—than even Chesterton. But so many of us do not get their inspired, bittersweet jokes.

Jesus, the Word, created a world where everything “speaks.” Every physical object is also mirror and metaphor and lyric and rant; every Covenant-historical event is a self-referencing innovation. Our Lord is the Master of Allusion, and we, as we read the Bible, are to be His commonplace books.

If God can quicken and glorify stone by writing on it with His own finger, then how much more will human hearts be glorified, quickened, made alive, and regenerated when the finger of God, the Holy Spirit Himself, writes on them? What is it to be born again? It is to become the Holy Spirit’s commonplace book.5

The defining feature of the New Israel is legal witness, and as you may be aware, the Greek word for witness is the source of our word “martyr.” Honey from the hive is life and death to those who hear it, for it ministers a blessing to the head and a curse to the body. It brightens the eyes but is a sting to the flesh. This was the case with Jonathan, and also with Ezekiel and John.

And he said to me, “Son of man, eat whatever you find here. Eat this scroll, and go, speak to the house of Israel.” So I opened my mouth, and he gave me this scroll to eat. And he said to me, “Son of man, feed your belly with this scroll that I give you and fill your stomach with it.” Then I ate it, and it was in my mouth as sweet as honey. (Ezekiel 3:1-3)

And I took the little scroll from the hand of the angel and ate it. It was sweet as honey in my mouth, but when I had eaten it my stomach was made bitter. (Revelation 10:10)

Ezekiel and the Revelation are sister books, following the same structure and serving the same purpose: the destruction of Israel, a witness to the nations, and the resurrection of Israel, renewed and made heir to a greater glory. Their message was both bitter and sweet, law and grace, plagues and plunder, death and life. John the Baptist ate locusts and wild honey because his prophecies to a lawless king would bring the consuming armies of Rome and a heavenly country for the “beheaded” saints.

When Christ shared bread and wine with His disciples at Passover, He began their commission as witnesses of things they had heard and seen. The Lord’s supper is a bittersweet scroll, honey with a sting, manna for a mustering host. Christ brightens our eyes that we might bear His two-edged sword. We taste and see that He is good, and go out to take possession of His inheritance, the nations.

I hope these short essays not only brighten your eyes but kindle the fire in your belly.

Michael Bull
Katoomba, September 2014

______________________________________________
1 See also the discussion concerning Samson’s honey in “Out Of The Eater,” God’s Kitchen: Theology You Can Eat & Drink, 289.
2 See the charts at the end of this book.
3 Douglas Wilson, Seven Basic & Brief Pointers for Writers, www.dougwils.com
4 Douglas Wilson, Uncommon Commonplaces, www.dougwils.com
5 Douglas Wilson, Against the Church, 132.

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION: BITTERSWEET

CREATION
1 THIS TIME IT’S PERSONAL
2 WAR OF THE WORLDVIEWS
3 JENGA BIBLE
4 RETURN OF THE RAVEN
5 THE ETERNAL PEOPLE

COVENANT
6 IMAGES OF GOD
7 SIMPLY IRRESISTIBLE
8 INTERNAL LAW
9 CASH AND COVENANT
10 I WILL KILL HER CHILDREN WITH DEATH

BIBLICAL THEOLOGY
11 BETTER ANGELS
12 DOGS AND PIGS
13 A TONGUE OF GOLD
14 SCALES OF JUSTICE
15 SNAKES AND CHAINS

SECULARISM
16 ARMED WITH DEATH
17 NO COMMON GROUND
18 GOD GAVE THEM UP
19 LAMECH’S PATSY
20 THE EXORCISM OF CHRIST

HERMENEUTICS
21 THE PERILS OF DEEP STRUCTURE
22 TECHNICIANS AND INTUITIONS
23 CURING THE MINDBLIND
24 MERCURY RISING
25 TOMBOYS AND TOTEMS

COVENANT-LITERARY TEMPLATES

Blogger Kiersten writes:

Good books wound the reader. Great books leave scars that the reader will carry and revisit throughout life, and that is precisely why we have chosen to allow our children to begin to bear these wounds while they are relatively young.

…it is important to us that we help the children learn how to process the griefs, pain, sin, brokenness, injustices, and immoral behavior of the human race. We want them to ask the questions: “How can we let this happen?” “Why does it have to be this way?” “Where is the justice in this?” “What kind of people do/allow/turn a blind eye to this?” “How do we function in this kind of society?”

More importantly, we want to teach the children to cultivate hope. That seems a little contradictory to the questions above, but they are crucially linked. Yesterday, Pat and I discussed the gamut of reactions that people have to the sort of injustice and plain wrongness he/she encountered in the book [Of Mice and Men], and that is a true reflection of some aspects of society. We talked about the pain he/she was experiencing and contemplated multiplying that pain over and over as a person experiences more and more painful injustices in their life. We talked about the ways people have chosen to deal with that pain, including drugs, fatalism, destructive relationships, and isolation.

The pain is a result of our deep desire for the world to be fair and just. We want the weak to be taken care of and for the strong to be merciful and gentle. We want crimes avenged, and we want injured parties to be restored. We want law applied, and we also want law flexible enough to take into account all the circumstances that provoked a criminal’s action.  Reality is that injustice is everywhere and it cannot be escaped, and that hurts.

When I talk about cultivating hope in the children, I mean that I want them to have their eyes open to the reality of sin in the world, and I want their longings for justice to be directed to the judge of all the earth, who will do right. I want them to be agents of justice and mercy as they are able, but I want them to know and operate in faith that some injustices, some hurts, will only be healed when the King finally puts all things to rights.

I want them to be inoculated with hope as they encounter the world.  This is why I have been and will continue to be an advocate of literature as a core tool in the raising of strong and capable Christian men and women. In books, the children get a glimpse of the realities of the outside world while still in a nurturing and safe environment. They learn to process what they see and become more and more equipped to engage the world with knowledge and hope.

A rejection of Biblical history and its chronology of the planet might be the cause for one of science’s greatest mistakes.

My friend Tas Walker writes:

I just listened to a podcast by climate scientist Murry Salby to the Sydney Institute entitled “Global Emission of Carbon Dioxide: The Contribution from Natural Sources.”

During question time toward the end of the recording (55min 15sec) he says:

Just a historical note, the guy who started this was a Swedish chemist whose lab I used to work at Stockholm by the name of Arrhenius. He won the Nobel Prize for chemistry and for his understanding of the temperature dependence of chemical reactions he got the Nobel Prize. He got into this and he started the whole global warming thing because he was actually trying to explain ice ages and he saw CO2 varied and temperature varied and he figured maybe CO2 caused the Ice Age. Now I don’t think anyone believes that anymore …

In other words, the whole idea that global warming is caused by CO2 came out of the need to explain what caused the Ice Age—a mystery that still eludes modern scientists.

In the Wikipedia entry on Arrhenius it says:

He was the first person to predict that emissions of carbon dioxide from the burning of fossil fuels and other combustion processes would cause global warming. Arrhenius clearly believed that a warmer world would be a positive change. From that, the hot-house theory gained more attention. Nevertheless, until about 1960, most scientists dismissed the hot-house / greenhouse effect as implausible for the cause of ice ages as Milutin Milankovitch had presented a mechanism using orbital changes of the earth (Milankovitch cycles). Nowadays, the accepted explanation is that orbital forcing sets the timing for ice ages with CO2 acting as an essential amplifying feedback.

Note the term “amplifying feedback”. This means that Milankovitch cycles are not enough to explain the Ice Ages, which is understandable considering the relatively small variations in orbital parameters for the earth. So, they added a positive feedback mechanism from CO2. A positive feedback means the system is unstable, which explains why many scientists today are concerned about global warming and the earth reaching an unstable tipping point.

The problem is that these scientists have ignored the huge climate catastrophe of Noah’s Flood. By ignoring the Flood they cannot explain the post-Flood (Pleistocene) Ice Age. The Ice Age was the earth’s thermal response to the massive climate shock caused by the biblical Flood. It was largely the volcanic activity during that year-long event that produced the necessary conditions—warm oceans and volcanic dust high in the atmosphere. But the earth returned to equilibrium in about 700 years, demonstrating that it is a stable system. The biblical Flood provides the only explanation for the Ice Age.

See how a wrong understanding of the true history of the earth leads to a misunderstanding of what is happening in the present. And a wrong understanding will lead to wrong decisions about what we need to do.

“I am against religion because it teaches us to be satisfied with not understanding the world.” — Richard Dawkins

Well, there’s one statement I don’t understand, unless Mr Dawkins means every religion except Christianity. Modern science was born of a distinctly Christian worldview. This next quote is one I understand to a point, but only because Mr Dawkins has a broken worldview.

“The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully.” — Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion.

I can understand this coming from someone raised in a Christian culture, where humanism has become secular. The values of the Law of Moses are still recognizable (compared to, say, certain tribes where young females’ teeth are knocked out so they don’t look like pigs, or Asian cultures where graveyards are guarded by malevolent ancestral spirits.) The problem with a humanism that is secular is its failure to take the existence and nature of sin into account, and to comprehend that a cultural awareness that sin needed to be dealt with was what made our great culture possible. Secular humanism requires superhumans, and the only truly super humans are Christians, those governed internally by the Law of God.

Jealous and proud of it
God is jealous as a husband is jealous for his wife and his children. This is not a difficult concept to understand, unless of course you intend to slander God, and hope none of your sycophants reads Bible passages in context.

Petty
The Old Testament Laws are very detailed, and the details mattered. However, the Law included a “when you sin” clause. The sins that were punished severely were the “high-handed” ones, where the sinners had not been led astray but openly, deliberately, repeatedly rebelled against what they knew.

Unjust
God is entirely just in the Old Testament. Certainly, Israel in the wilderness (and later, but particularly in the wilderness) was an object lesson to the nations, and to nations for all time. As a “childish” nation, when they sinned, they were spanked immediately. This is not the case once they were in the Land. But in no case is God ever unjust.

Unforgiving control-freak
Neither is God unforgiving. Israel knew what they signed up for. They said, “Amen” to the blessings and the curses of the Covenant. Then they directly went and sinned. The Jews who crucified Jesus made a similar Covenant with Pilate: “Let His blood be upon us and upon our children.” Jesus forgave them, but those who hardened their hearts like Pharaoh bore the curses. Josephus tells us what happened to their children. They were free to obey the gospel or disobey, as Israel was in the wilderness. Now, one might say, “What about the other nations?” Judgment begins at the house of God. The light exposes the darkness in God’s people first of all. We are given “sacramental doses of death” to keep us alive and able to minister. But the cup given to the godless nations is not a dose, it is a tsunami. Where are the Canaanites today? The Babylonians? All the great nations, and the up-and-coming ones, since Christ, have had this purifying yeast of God’s people within them.

Vindictive
God takes vengeance on the unrighteous. He waits for people — usually corrupt leaders — to fill up their sins, then moves in to rescue the oppressed. Yes, this is vindictive. God avenges the shedding of innocent blood. The reason Dawkins and his ilk can think of God as vindictive is because He is currently working in the nations like yeast, behind the scenes, as prefigured in the books of Esther. But we all know how Esther ended, don’t we?

A bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser
This one is laughable. Abraham proclaimed the Lord to the Canaanites, then God gave them 400 years to fill up their sins. Their execution under Israel’s sword was no different to the retribution in Egypt for the slaughter of Hebrew infants. It was judicial. And atheists who parrot “controversial” Bible verses like these seem to overlook the fact that God used Babylon to wipe out old Israel for their own bloodthirsty decadence. Only, Israel rose again.

Misogynistic
Dawkins — and moderns — don’t understand the different liturgical stations of men and women and what they image. Science can tell us what things are made of, but it cannot tell us what they are for. Nature is a feast, and moderns think a knife and a fork are the same thing. On top of this, which nations are the ones which do not mistreat women? Christian ones. Which people in Christian nations show a contempt for women (though often disguised)? Those who hate the Bible, hate God and despise His Christ.

Homophobic
I don’t think God fears gays any more than He fears liars, adulterers, murderers, shoplifters and the rest of us lawless bunch. He tells us that these things are destructive. Certain sins carried the death penalty in Israel because it was a church-state. The Jews did not have this power after the exile. The church only has the power to excommunicate. But the testimony remains that these sins are the serious ones because they are the most destructive, and they bring a culture to an end.

Racist
God split humanity in two when He called Abraham. In a sense, Adam was torn into church and state, to be united, married, by the Spirit of Christ. The bloodline was important only until the Christ, the promised Seed. Race was not the issue. Covenant was the issue. And the New Covenant multicultural people of God was promised and prefigured many times in the Old Testament — that is, if we are not so blinded by our hatred for God that we don’t understand what He was doing.

Infanticidal
Alright, the Lord asked Abraham to sacrifice Isaac. But He also stopped him from doing it. He was testing Abraham’s faith in God’s promise that all nations (there it is again) would be blessed through Isaac. Abraham obviously believed God would raise Isaac from the dead if He had to. He was, at one level, probably excited to see what God would do next. By this time, he had plenty of experiences with God to bolster his faith. He trusted him implicitly.
In Egypt, God’s “murder” of the firstborn was judicial, a payback for the Hebrew infants. And the Lord gave Pharaoh plenty of warning, didn’t He?

Genocidal
I suppose this is the Canaanites again. If we could send Mr Dawkins back in time to live with the Canaanites, he might understand why they were being cut out of history like a cancer. And we know the cancer spread to Israel. In Judges, God allows Israel to suffer under the nations whose gods they had worshipped, to get a better understanding of why this was prohibited. The God of the Bible is not anything like these false gods.

Filicidal
See Homophobic and Genocidal above.

Pestilential
The results of obedience or disobedience are “multitudes.” The choice is plunder or plagues. God plagued Egypt and Israel plundered Egypt. God plagued Satan’s house at the cross and Jesus is plundering his house. Atheism is thus a temporary pestilence.

Megalomaniacal
Megalomania: A psychopathological condition characterized by delusional fantasies of wealth, power, or omnipotence. Richard Dawkins vs. God. What can I say?

Sadomasochistic
It please Abraham to circumcise his household. It was a “sacramental dose of death.” It chased the Covenant curses away. It pleased the Father to bruise the Son. It pleased Him because it was a purchase. Most people could understand this even if they chose not to believe it. Only someone who was seriously deluded could misunderstand it.

Capricious
Yes, God changes His mind. He fully intended to destroy Nineveh, but then they repented. Some of these issues are purely historical-Covenantal. God forbade Israel’s eating of certain foods, but then He changed His mind. Childhood object lessons were over. Dad says you can’t travel on the train to the city on your own, but when you turn 16 he changes his mind. This is not caprice. It is parenting.

Malevolent
God has a long fuse, but He has a fuse nonetheless. The reason Jesus is my Saviour is because I needed saving from something called God’s just wrath. As someone wise put it, the real wonder is not that God sometimes lashes out and kills people, it’s that He doesn’t do it all the time.

Bully
How is this bad? Oh, wait.

Because he has believed the modern fiction, Mr Dawkins has God all wrong. Anyone actually familiar with God knows this very well. He claims to be a humanist, but he has misclassified humanity. By advocating the removal of the curses of God, he removes the blessings. Ours is a culture without hope, focussed on the short term, and unable to understand the Covenantal nature of reality.

Dawkins’ rage against God has inspired many people to be more vocal about their atheism, but he and they will all discover that the longevity of his ideas is a fantasy. The Dawkins meme has the logic of the darkened Adamic mind. It pontificates about God’s behaviour, and ends up as bones spread under the sun, moon and stars. The Jesus meme has the quickening Spirit of resurrection. It aligns our behaviour with God’s, whose followers become the sun, moon and stars.

God doesn’t fear atheism. Neither should we.

“The entire free world could be shipwrecked by a teleprompter.”

I remember Carl Sagan commenting on the oddness of books, a collation of leaves covered in squiggles, in symbols. This is only odd if you are a godless fool (biblically defined) whose worldview is entirely at odds with reality.

Sadly this applies to many Christians, who have compromised the foundations of their faith, and pass this corruption on in many Bible colleges.

Man makes symbols because God makes symbols. Man is God’s symbol, God’s logo, pointing to God. Man chose to become a defaced symbol and made bad symbols. God became man to point man back to God, to restore the image. Redemption is the high art of the Logos. It is the men without true symbols who are weak, who are, in the end, less-than-men, men with symbols that mean nothing, despite the chaos and carnage they create in the meantime. James Jordan writes:

The study of symbolism is seen by some as a curiosity, rather far removed from the central matters of life. Anyone who spends time studying Biblical symbolism may well be getting into a “dangerous” area. Persons who engage in an “overly symbolic” interpretation of Scripture are to be regarded with suspicion. What matters is the study of reality; symbolism is secondary.

From the Biblical point of view, however, the reverse is the case. Symbolism is more important than anything else for the life of man. Since this is a manifesto, let me repeat that statement in italics: Symbolism is more important than anything else for the life of man. Anyone who does not understand this has yet fully come to grips with the philosophy of Cornelius Van Til, or more importantly, with the biblical doctrine of creation.

How can I write this so confidently? Simple. The doctrine of creation means that every created item, and also the created order as a whole, reflects the character of the God Who created it. In other words, everything in the creation, and the creation as a whole, points to God. In short, everything is a sign or symbol of God. The idea that everything is a symbol of God, His character, nature, ways, etc., is the foundation stone of the philosophy of Cornelius Van Til. The doctrine of creation ex nihilo is the basis of the Vantillian doctrine of natural revelation.

And not only so. Just as everything in creation is a general symbol of God, so also man is the special symbol, for man and man alone is created as the very image of God (Gen. 1:26). Each individual human being, and the race as a whole (Gen. 1:27), symbolizes God in a special way. What is this special way? Theologians have debated the issue, and no one will ever fully understand it (since to do so we should have to understand fully the nature of the God whose symbol we are). All the same, this much can be said: Man is the only symbol which is also a symbol-maker. Since this is a manifesto, let me say that again: It is of the essence of man’s divine imagehood that he is a symbol-making creature.

(The safest way to precede is to note what is said about God in the preceding verses of Genesis 1. This is the context in which it is then said that man is the image of God. God has been presented as one who determines, creates, evaluates, names, takes counsel among Himself, etc. These things are what man uniquely images.)[1]

If you believe Pink Floyd, the only factor that differentiates humans from apes is our ability to talk. [2] In fact, it’s not near impossible for this to have evolved, it is absolutely impossible. If natural selection were actually capable of producing progress (it isn’t) and might is right, why do words have so much power? It is because they did not come at the end; they came at the beginning, “at the (river)head” as Genesis 1:1 says. Adam could hear, speak, and, most likely, write. Language is not a new development. It is the way it has always been. Fear of God is the beginning of wisdom, and this practical knowledge of the truth brings dominion. Fictional 12-year-old prodigy (and atheist) Paloma Josse notices this discrepancy between evolutionary theory and reality, and writes,

“The strong ones
Among humans
Do nothing
They talk
And talk again”

“…nothing is harder or more unfair than human reality: humans live in a world where it’s words and not deeds than have power, where the ultimate skill is mastery of language. This is a terrible thing because basically we are primates who’ve been programmed to eat, sleep, reproduce, conquer and make our territory safe, and the ones who are most gifted at that, the most animal types among us, always get shafted by the others, the fine talkers, despite the latter being incapable of defending their own garden or bringing a rabbit home for dinner or procreating properly. Humans live in a world where the weak are dominant. This is a terrible insult to our animal nature, a sort of perversion or a deep contradiction.” [3]

In the beginning was the Word. The Creation order was spoken to, delegated to, the Son, by the Spirit. The Son’s obedience bore fruit, by the Spirit. Ideas have consequences precisely words take on flesh, because electricity moves the muscle; the elite control the workers.

All of God’s speeches are carefully deliberated and meticulously structured. When the Father issues a command, He never wishes He hadn’t pressed “Send.” All His Words, even the curses, are blessings in the long-run. The words of sinful man also build up and cut down. Words are power; words are crucial. The entire free world could be shipwrecked by a teleprompter.

The 5-fold Covenant model and the 7-fold matrix each have words at every point. The source-Word from God to His delegated Head, the delegate’s word to the body, the body under the word, the body’s witness to the truth of the word, and the totus’ oath at the marriage supper on the garden spring, leading to children carrying the word as rivers into the nations. God-Dad-Mum-Kids, God-Dad-Mum-Kids, God-Dad-Mum-Kids…

James 3:1-12:

Creation – Source of Word (Genesis)
My brethren,
…..let not many of you
……….become teachers, (Law given)
……………knowing that (Law opened)
……….we shall receive (Law received)
…..a stricter judgment.
For we all stumble in many things.

Division – Delegation of Word
If anyone
…..does not stumble in word,
……….he [is] a perfect man,
……………able also to bridle the whole body.
……….Indeed, we put bits in horses’ mouths
…..that they may obey us,
and we turn their whole body.

Ascension – The Altar-Land above the Gentile Sea (man as Covenant Head)
Look also at ships:
…..although they are so large
……….and are driven by fierce winds,
……………they are turned by a very small rudder
……….wherever the pilot desires.
…..Even so the tongue is a little member
and boasts great things.

Testing – Discerning the Spirits
See how great a forest a little fire kindles!
…..And the tongue [is] a fire,
……….a world of iniquity.
……………The tongue is so set among our members
……….that it defiles the whole body,
…..and sets on fire the course of nature;
and it is set on fire by hell. (BAD Shekinah)

Maturity – Swarms/Armies (Covenant Body)
For every kind of beast and bird,
…..of reptile and creature of the sea,
……….is tamed and has been tamed by mankind.
……………But no man can tame the tongue.
……….[It is] an unruly [lawless] evil,
…..full of deadly poison. (Cup of Sanctions)

Conquest – Coverings and Sanctions/Oath
With it we bless our God and Father, (Transcendence)
…..and with it we curse men, (Hierarchy)
……….who have been made in the similitude of God. (Ethics)
…..Out of the same mouth proceed blessing and cursing. (Sanctions/Oath)
My brethren, these things ought not to be so. (Continuity)

Glorification – Covenant Succession
Does a spring send forth
…..fresh and bitter [water]
……….from the same opening? (Singularity)
……………Can a fig tree,
……….my brethren, bear olives, (Plurality)
……….or a grapevine bear figs?
…..Thus no spring yields
both salt water and fresh.

Our words are barrenness or fruitfulness, Eve offspring or serpent offspring.

_______________________________
[1] James B. Jordan, Symbolism: A Manifesto. [PDF]
[2] Pink Floyd, “Keep Talking,” The Division Bell.
[3] Muriel Barbery, The Elegance of the Hedgehog, p. 53.
Thanks to my atheist friend, Mitch Griggs, for pointing out the video.

“There is a curse on Mankind.
We may as well be resigned.
To let the devil, the devil
take the spirit of man.”

War of the Worldviews

I first heard Jeff Wayne’s musical version of The War of the Worlds when I was 11. My brother and I and some cousins listened to it in a dark room. It was electric and terrifying. Hearing it again years later, the worldview behind the story is much more apparent. One song in particular lays it bare, The Spirit of Man.

[This post has been refined and included in Sweet Counsel: Essays to Brighten the Eyes.]

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My composer friend Walter Robins’ oratorio Breath of God: A Walk Through the Bible will be world premiered by Capitol Opera Harrisburg PA in May 2011 (visit www.capopera.com)

I love Walter’s music because it has an angular beauty, just like the Bible. It constantly hints through its structure that there is more going on than immediately meets the ear.

Here’s a few segments for your listening pleasure. As you probably know, much composing is done these days on computer, allowing the composer to hear a synthesised version that indicates how the live orchestration will sound. So the first two tracks are synthesised.

Out of the Void

Sea of Crystal

The third link is to Walter’s The Lord’s Prayer, which contains eleven key changes (thus twelve keys, one for each disciple). It is performed in this recording by “The Lowly Stable Quintet,” Blue Mountains NSW.

The Lord’s Prayer

The full track listing is:

Out of the Void

The Garden & The Fall

O Promised Land

Ruth & Naomi

David & Jonathan

Psalm 23

There All Streams Flow (from Ecclesiastes)

From Now On (Mary’s Song – Luke 1)

Advent

Fishers of Men

Sermon On The Mount

The Lord’s Prayer

I N T E R V A L

The Cross & The Stone

Sons & Daughters Will Prophesy (Pentecost)

If I Don’t Have Love (1 Corinthians 13)

The Open Door (Letters to the seven churches)

Introduction to Revelation & The Throne

The Sea of Crystal

The Four Living Creatures

The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse

Worthy Is The Lamb

BREATH OF GOD (subtitled ‘A Walk Through The Bible’) – a 150 minute Symphonic Oratorio by Australian Composer Walter Robins © Copyright 2009. Not to be copied or performed without the permission of the composer. www.capopera.com TO BE WORLD PREMIERED BY CAPITOL OPERA HARRISBURG PA IN MAY 2011 VISIT: www.capopera.com

Veritas Hall westlake – Christian Education from Darren Doane on Vimeo.

Now no chastening for the present seemeth to be joyous, but grievous: nevertheless afterward it yieldeth the peaceable fruit of righteousness unto them which are exercised thereby. (Hebrews 12:11)

It becomes apparent that every one of God’s curses in the Bible sooner or later turns out to be a blessing. Every judgment has one eye on the present, which is usually grievous, and another eye on the future. Every discipline is a pruning to bring greater fruit. You just want to make sure you are one of the good figs, not a bad one. God’s justice is always visionary.

“There’s no such thing as a dead-end job. There are only dead-end people.”
—Zig Ziglar

Work seems like a curse, but even before the Fall there was work. After the Fall, work was a curse-cloud with a silver lining. Imagine a world where people didn’t have to work? Imagine what all those idle hands would get up to? There are places in the world where this is the case; depressed places where nothing ever changes, nothing improves; where people look at our western rat race with envy.

By faith, we understand that all employment is part of the glorification of the world.

Many Christians view work as something holding them back from ministry. This is not only incorrect, but a terribly gnostic way of viewing the world. Our work is actually not only central, but something extremely important to God. I read this old article I posted in Be Still years ago, adapted from a book by Dallas Willard. I have one of the best jobs in the world and I still grumble, so I really needed to hear this again. Here’s an excerpt:

Let us become as specific as possible. Consider just your job, the work you do to make a living. This is one of the clearest ways possible of focusing upon apprenticeship to Jesus. To be a disciple of Jesus is, crucially, to be learning from Jesus how to do your job as Jesus himself would do it. New Testament language for this is to do it “in the name” of Jesus.

Once you stop to think about it, you can see that not to find your job to be a primary place of discipleship is to automatically exclude a major part, if not most, of your waking hours from life with him. It is to assume to run one of the largest areas of your interest and concern on your own or under the direction and instruction of people other than Jesus. Most professing Christians today are left with the prevailing view that discipleship is a special calling having to do chiefly with full-time religious activities.

But how, exactly, is one to make one’s job a primary place of apprenticeship to Jesus? Not, we quickly say, by becoming the Christian nag-in-residence, the rigorous upholder of all propriety, and the dead-eye critic of everyone else’s behaviour. This is abundantly clear from a study of Jesus and of his teachings in the Sermon on the Mount and elsewhere.

A gentle but firm noncooperation with things that everyone knows to be wrong, together with a sensitive, nonofficious, nonintrusive, non-obsequious service to others, should be our usual overt manner. This should be combined with inward attitudes of constant prayer for whatever kind of activity our workplace requires and genuine love for everyone involved.

As circumstances call for them, special points in Jesus’ teachings and example, such as nonretaliation, refusal to press for financial advantage, consciousness of and appropriate assistance to those under special handicaps, and so on, would come into play. And we should be watchful and prepared to meet any obvious spiritual need or interest in understanding Jesus with words that are truly loving, thoughtful and helpful.

It is not true, I think, that we fulfill our obligations to those around us by only living the gospel. There are many ways of speaking inappropriately, of course—even harmfully—but it is always true that words fitly spoken are things of beauty and power that bring life and joy. And you cannot assume that people understand what is going on when you only live in their midst as Jesus’ man or woman. They may just regard you as one more version of human oddity.

I knew of a case in an academic setting where at noon one professor very visibly took his Bible and lunch and went to a nearby chapel to study, pray and be alone. Another professor would call his assistant into his office, where they would have sex. No one in that environment thought either activity to be anything worth inquiring about. After all, people do all sorts of things. We are used to that. In some situations it is only words that can help toward understanding.

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One who does not know this way of ‘job discipleship’ by experience cannot begin to imagine what release and help and joy there is in it.
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But, once again, the specific work to be done—whether it is making ax handles or tacos, selling automobiles or teaching kindergarten, engaging in investment banking or holding political office, evangelising or running a Christian education program, performing in the arts or teaching English as a second language—is of central interest to God. He wants it well done. It is work that should be done, and it should be done as Jesus himself would do it. Nothing can substitute for that. In my opinion, at least, as long as one is on the job, all peculiarly religious activities should take second place to doing ‘the job’ in sweat, intelligence and the power of God. That is our devotion to God. (I am assuming, of course, that the job is one that serves good human purposes.)

Our intention with our job should be the highest possible good in its every aspect, and we should pursue that with conscious expectation of a constant energising and direction from God. Although we must never allow our job to become our life, we should, within reasonable limits, routinely sacrifice our comfort and pleasure for the quality of our work, whether it be ax handles, tacos or the proficiency of a student we are teaching.

And yes, this results in great benefit for those who utilise our services. But our mind is not obsessed with them, and certainly not with having appreciation from them. We do the job well because that is what Jesus would like, and we admire and love him. It is what he would do. We “do our work with soul [ex psyche], to the Lord, not to men” (Col. 3:23). “It is the Lord Christ you serve” (v. 25). As his apprentices, we are personally interacting with him as we do our job, and he is with us, as he promised, to teach us how to do it best.

One who does not know this way of ‘job discipleship’ by experience cannot begin to imagine what release and help and joy there is in it. And to repeat the crucial point: if we restrict our discipleship to special religious times, the majority of our waking hours will be isolated from the manifest presence of the kingdom in our lives. Those waking hours will be times when we are on our own in our job. Our time at work—even religious work—will turn out to be a ‘holiday from God.’

On the other hand, if you dislike or even hate your job, a condition epidemic in our culture, the quickest way out of that job, or to joy in it, is to do as Jesus would. This is the very heart of discipleship, and we cannot effectively be an apprentice of Jesus without integrating our job into the kingdom among us.

Adapted from The Divine Conspiracy: Rediscovering Our Hidden Life in God by Dallas Willard. (Adaption PDF)

Tim Nichols recently posted concerning whether Christians should participate in martial arts that have a pagan background.[1] I suggested that postmillennialism naturally sees what can be salvaged from pagan cultures and “redeemed”, rather than writing it all off as corrupt, as many Christians do. His response was worth repeating:

“I agree that postmil ethics trend in that basic direction, but I believe the real crux in this case is taking the dominion mandate seriously. A premillennial view that misses the dominion mandate trends toward seeing everything as corrupted, a sort of neo-gnostic “everything pagans have touched is evil” idea, and miss the whole concept of growth into maturity.

Postmil guys, God love them, don’t have that problem; their parallel temptation is to miss the concept of growth into maturity, and try to ring in the kingdom by this time next week — a thing which has had disastrous consequences every time it’s been tried to date. Oddly, the two errors tend to produce the same result, the one by neglect and the other by violent backlash. Or maybe not “oddly.” Fail to relate biblically to the culture, and we lose the culture every time.”

[1] Should Christians Imitate Animals?