The disintegration of the EU is not the end of the world. It is a sign that the end of the world is anything but nigh.

Western culture as we know it is dying at the hands of usurpers, traitors and prodigals. Even the worst rulers throughout Christian history at least paid lip service to Christ and the Bible, but in Europe today that heritage is openly disparaged.

Race, tribe and religion were rightly identified as the causes of the region’s regular and escalating conflicts and rejected in favor of reason and solidarity. But it turns out that these are not enough to satisfy the hunger for identity in even the most civilized societies. “Blanket” utopian theories of all stripes, left, right and center, have now failed. The prosperity which the secular West aspired to and finally achieved has been quickly exposed as nothing but a means to the same end, and that end is death. Man cannot live on economic theory alone. The voices of the past – ethnicity, territory and faith – still lay claim to the future, and are calling us to violence once again.

Continue reading at Theopolis Institute.

“…who were the Pharisees in their real setting? Where did they come from? There are no such people in the Old Testament, but when we get to Matthew they seem to be hiding behind every rock and shrub.”

Essay by Daniel Hoffman

If people today know anything about the Pharisees, they know them as the villains of the New Testament. Those who know a little more probably have a conception of the Pharisees as overly strict, eating their gruel with a scowl and casting condemnation in every direction, while Jesus was open and chill. Some might go beyond this and imagine the Pharisees as the perfect (or perfectly bad) model of self-salvation: The Pharisees wanted to save themselves by their good works, but the New Testament (it’s thought) is all about salvation through faith, and works are no big deal.

But who were the Pharisees in their real setting? Where did they come from? There are no such people in the Old Testament, but when we get to Matthew they seem to be hiding behind every rock and shrub. What was their reason for being? What was their agenda? If they were so awful, why does Jesus seem perfectly friendly toward Nicodemus? Why were there Pharisees in the Christian assembly (Acts 15:5)? Why did Paul still consider himself a Pharisee even after his conversion (Acts 23:6)? The goal of this post is to provide some context on who the Pharisees actually where, to help us better understand their role in the biblical story.

When the Jews began returning to their homeland after the Babylonian exile (2 Chron 36:23), they were not really getting their independence, and they were certainly not experiencing the kingdom of God. Cyrus was the messiah of Yahweh, a shepherd for Israel (Isa 44:28; Isa 45:1), but he was a Gentile; surely not the true messianic king. Israel had been rescued and redeemed from Babylon (Mic 4:10), and that was well and good, but Israel was far from subduing the surrounding nations who had been gathered against her (Mic 4:13). In fact, it wasn’t long after the return that the Persians themselves were superseded by the Greeks under Alexander, and Israel fell victim to the power struggles resulting from Alexander’s early death. You can read about this in 1 Maccabees chapter 1. The point most relevant here is that the Greeks and their culture came to so dominate the whole Mediterranean world that the Jews were faced with the question of conformity: Adopt Greek customs or not? Adopt only some? Which ones? Conform outwardly while maintaining inner separation? Prove your zeal for the Law by violent resistance and revolution? Retreat from society to live in a pure, isolated community?

In 164 B.C., the family of Judas Maccabee (Judas “the Hammer”) successfully revolted against the Greek ruler Antiochus, and for a while Israel had its independence. The family of Judas became the new ruling dynasty (called the Hasmonean dynasty after one of the family members), and it was not without its problems. There was often collusion with pagan powers, there was the blurring of distinction between priestly and kingly functions, there were assassinations and cruelties galore. If the return from exile hadn’t given way to the promised kingdom of God, the successful Maccabean revolt hadn’t done it either, despite being celebrated still today at Hanukkah and despite serving as a beacon of hope for many Jews in subsequent decades who still harbored dreams of throwing off the pagan yoke.

It was in that situation that the Pharisees arose. As noted above, the great and immediate questions of the day had to do with issues of conformity. How exactly was Israel to maintain its distinction as Yahweh’s covenant people? What stance could a faithful Jew take with regard to the ever-encroaching Gentile ways of life? It’s easy to imagine that in this climate, a party would take shape that saw itself as defending the old ways—the traditions of Israel—against both Gentile encroachment from outside and compromising corruption from inside. Such a group did arise, and that group was the Pharisees.

The Pharisees as a whole were not idiots. Greek (and very soon Roman) power was the reality, and it had to be responded to in some sort of realistic manner. As N.T. Wright suggests,

“[F]aced with social, political, and cultural ‘pollution’ at the level of national life as a whole, one natural reaction . . . was to concentrate on personal cleanness, to cleanse and purify an area over which one did have control as compensation for the impossibility of cleansing or purifying and area—the outward and visible political one—over which one had none. The intensifying of the biblical purity regulations within Pharisaism may well therefore invite the explanation that they are the individual analogue of the national fear of, and/or resistance to, contamination from, or oppression by, Gentiles.“

The Pharisaical focus on things like purity and Sabbath-keeping were thus driven, at least at the level of ideology, by a strong desire to maintain Israel’s distinction from the surrounding nations. It’s also important to realize that Pharisees had no official power. They weren’t even official teachers of the Law. They had no legal authority as Pharisees, although people in positions of power could have been Pharisees. They existed as a pressure group. An analogy which may be helpful is today’s Tea Party. The Tea Party is a “pressure group” which tries to do what it can in society to push for conservative politics—especially with regard to economics and foreign policy. The “Tea Party” as such has no legal authority, but they have succeeded in getting some of “their people” elected to office and they do exert considerable pressure on the Republican Party. Wright again:

“The Pharisees sought to bring moral pressure to bear upon those who had actual power; to influence the masses; and to maintain their own purity as best they could. Their aim, so far as we can tell, was never simply that of private piety for its own sake . . . Their goals were the honor of Israel’s god, the following of his covenant charter, and the pursuit of the full promised redemption of Israel.“

Thus Saul, for example, when he wanted to arrest Christians in Damascus, needed letters of authority from the high priest (Acts 9:1-2). In the early years of the Pharisees’ activity, the Hasmonean rulers were still interested in maintaining some appearance of ruling in accord with Israel’s Law. The Romans and Herods didn’t care so much about this, and so by the time of Jesus the Pharisees perhaps had less influence with the ruling elite, but could still hold themselves up as models for the common people. Their goals could take on different practical forms: Supporting armed resistance on the one hand, or withdrawing into Torah study and on the other (this second option is illustrated by Gamaliel in Acts 5:34, who recommended that the new Christian sect be left alone. Saul, already mentioned, would have been more in line with the first option of using physical violence).

It is certainly the case that the Pharisees’ insistence on maintaining the purity and separateness of the covenant people was driven by the belief that such a condition would find favor with God. What could be wrong with seeking to enforce—and with compelling others to enforce, either with violence or moral influence—Yahweh’s own Torah? But an official or theoretical ideology is a far cry from understanding and applying the Torah rightly, and it’s a far cry from the condition of the heart. Jesus rebuked the Pharisees for both of these things, for allowing the Tradition to usurp the injunctions of Scripture (Matt 15:5-6), and for the hypocrisy of their hearts (Matt 23:25).

Was Pharisaism wrong in principle? It doesn’t seem so. Yahweh had given his people the Law, and had called them to be separate from the nations. In the Gospels, the Pharisaical problem was that they were not following the Torah in truth, and were not following it in its true intent, which was to serve the Love of God and neighbor. They had allowed their practices to take over and usurp these overriding concerns. Many of them also were in fact lovers of money and privilege (Luke 16:14-15). Jesus rebukes them for this hypocrisy and for misunderstanding the Scriptures they claimed to believe and defend, and their wickedness was real and profound—it lead them to plot the murder of Christ (John 18:3).

Republished with permission.

Some excerpts from Ben Witherington’s long summary of William A. Johnson’s short book, Readers and Reading Culture in the High Roman Empire:

Let me be clear that this book focuses on people like Pliny or Aulus Gellius or Galen, or Fronto or Lucian, but there is much to be learned from this book that can be applied, mutatis mutandis to literate Christians, their scribes, and early Christian communities of reading and writing…

Bookrolls were generally the product of scribes, not of private persons. “Making a bookroll involved no more than taking a premanufactured papyrus roll, writing out the text, attaching additional fresh rolls as the length of the text required, and when finished, cutting off the blank remainder.” (p. 18). Or not. It is entirely possible that what happened with Mark’s Gospel is that the original ending of only a few verses about seeing the risen Jesus after Mk. 16.8 was lost, since the outermost edge of the end of the text was left exposed to the elements (no they didn’t heed the exhortation—be kind and rewind, that we used to hear during the videotape era), so more papyrus was added to the end, and the result was the production of no less than three alternative endings, including the so called long ending of Mk. 16.9ff. (of course here in Kentucky it can only be seen as bad news that Mk. 16.9ff is not an original part of Mark’s Gospel since it provides the only possible endorsement of snake handling and poision drinking as tests of faith)…

Johnson describes the bookroll as an icon of elitism (p. 26), and he is right about this. And texts required not only scribes but lectors, those who could read the text fluently. Sometimes slaves served as lectors, but this was a different function from being a scribe, and a still different function from being a scholar. In part because texts were rare and precious and expensive, and written in scriptum continuum or as Johnson calls it scriptio continua, training children to read focused on their memorizing Greek and Latin syllables, not merely letters. That way when they looked at a continuous flow of letters their minds were condition to see at least syllables if not words in the maze of letters.

And though it comes as something of a surprise to us, the function of becoming literate was not so one could read silently for one’s own benefit, but so one could become part of a community of readers who read to each other out loud and as Quintilian urges the goal is to become an orator, a rhetor, and so eloquent.  “Reading out loud is intimately tied up with learning the phrasing– for everyone, not just budding orators– and phrasing is naturally linked with accurate apprehension of the meaning of the text.” (p. 29).  Quintilian himself says “As regards reading, it is only possible to show in actual practice such things as knowing when to take a breath, where to place a pause in a line, where a new sentences ends of begins, when the voice ought to be raised or lowered, what inflection should be used with each phrase, and what should be spoken more quickly or more slowly….[In order to do all this] “he must [already] understand” the text (Inst. Or. 1.8.1-2).

Exactly, and so the notion that Paul would just send letters off to be deciphered afresh by bewildered semi-literate converts is a nonsense. This is not how ancient literary texts were normally treated. To the contrary, it is far more likely that Paul had someone take the text his scribe had written, already knowing its contents, and then orally deliver the text at the destination, with full ability to comment on and explain the text. Otherwise, it was just a bewildering maze of letters that could be parsed in various ways.  Texts in an oral culture do not function like texts in our world.

Texts that are worthwhile or important would not merely be read out once, but repeatedly read, repeatedly digested, and in part would be memorized, and the first person to do this would be the lector, tasked with delivering the text orally at the destination. Notice for example the distinction made between ‘the reader’ (singular) in Rev. 1.3 and the hearers (plural) to whom he would speak. The reader is not the audience! The reader is the emissary of John of Patmos, sent to orally deliver his apocalypse not just once, but to seven different churches. That’s a lot of reading. What is striking about early Christianity is the sheer volume of texts, some of which bear the marks of eloquence in Greek. The social world of early Christianity involved learning circles, some literate leaders or readers, and their texts were oral texts…

A text had to be popular enough, copied enough, circulated enough to inspire the desire to emulate, imitate, and in general rip off.  Producing texts was an expensive business, and furthermore, there was a whole ethical code involved in the literate production of texts. The ancients who were well trained could smell a forgery a mile off…

It is unlikely in the extreme that there was any sufficient interest in the first century A.D. when Christianity was just emerging to create forged texts attributed to a Paul or a Peter or others. The Christian community was small, its social networks were tight, and the usual motive for forgery was to make money. Thus, while it is not impossible there were some ancient forgers of Christian documents in say the second century and later (in fact we know there were some), the social, and economic, and indeed the moral setting of earliest Christianity, makes this an unlikely hypothesis if applied to the canonical texts.

A very interesting BBC documentary from 2011.

James B. Jordan discusses the Confessions and Confessionalism with Steve Wilkins.
“Open the Bible and let the lion loose…”

“The Left has now won, and Leftism is an auto-immune disease. It has nothing to do with any of the diseases of paganism. It is completely and wholly a reaction to Christianity.”

In an article on the Trinity House blog, he makes some helpful observations concerning the ability of humanity to turn anything into rebellion against God — including many of the blessings of Christianity.

Victimhood and the Gospel

The texts of Christianity have been slowly at work, under the power of the Holy Spirit for 2000 years now. If we could be magically transported back into the world of two millennia ago, modern Americans would be shocked at the cruelty of that world. There was no concern for the victim. Now things have reversed, and it is necessary to shroud oneself in the garb of victimization in order to have any aura of moral respectability. One can see satanic cleverness in the evolution of the modern world. As the victim has been rehabilitated, it is now possible to exploit very old fashioned possibilities from that position. The Gadarene madman of the modern world might have been able to use his life and experience as a platform for new acts entirely unknown to antiquity.

Fredrick Nietzsche, from a profoundly anti-Christian perspective, spoke of a “transvaluation of values.” His claim was that Christianity universalized and further developed what he saw as the perversions of Hebrew “slave mentality” and morality.

Read more…

Image by Doug Hayes (I think)

“At every paedobaptism,
earthly kingdom trumps heavenly priesthood,
and the blood of the prophet Abel cries from the ground.”

Chapter 1 continued

See the Baptism links page for all articles in this series.

The Social Contract

Dr Leithart continues by pining for the Middle Ages, the days when baptism defined both religious and civil membership for every member of society, both great and small, men and women, adults and infants. He states that the Anabaptist idea that baptism was a purely religious rite was “novel and revolutionary.” Perhaps it was novel in the Middle Ages, but it wasn’t new. We must ask, what inspired it? The answer is not history or tradition but the Scriptures. I have come to understand the relationship between Church and State from other writings of Jordan and Leithart, so I don’t understand Leithart’s failure to apply those definitions here.

The domain of the Church has always been the heart and the mind and the home, the source of all behavior. The Church deals with those things which are hidden from the public eye, things which are unseen but nonetheless real. The domain of the State is those things which are seen: lawmaking, provision of food and shelter, public acts of lawlessness, wars with other states. These two domains are Priesthood and Kingdom, in that order.

Submission to God deals with the “insides” of men, and when men will not submit to God, God uses the rulers He has put in place to bring such men in submission to men who are submitted to God. If the kings become unrighteous (as all Gentile kings were before the priesthood of Christ), then God raises up prophets from the Church to speak to them and bring even these men into submission to God. If the roles of Church and State are conflated, the Church by definition cannot have this prophetic power, and this is frequently the case. If Samuel must answer to Saul, or Nathan to David, rather than directly to God as His emissary, then Samuel and Nathan have no authority and therefore nothing to say to the king. Prophets come from God’s table (where they listen) to the king’s table where they speak.

Now, when Israel received the Law of Moses and the priesthood of Aaron, she was a nation cut off from other nations. It was for the purpose of creating a Church-State, a microcosmic world. Church and State were administered by the Levite brothers and their qualified helpers. This is why it is impossible to untangle Israel’s “religious laws” from her “secular laws.” Israel was a nation whose king was God, and whose people were all to be blameless sacrifices on behalf of all nations.

Things developed when Israel desired “a king like the nations.” But Israel could not have “a king like the nations,” whose kings answered only to themselves (paying lip service to their gods). This would work fine when Israel’s king behaved like the Son of God. But Israel’s kings, like Cain, usurped the authority of their priestly brothers. When this more defined Church-State relationship was corrupted, God sent His prophets and eventually dismantled the entire nation, which leads us to my point. When Israel was finally “resurrected” under Ezra-Nehemiah and Zechariah-Haggai, the nature of the new nation was prophetic. She was now a Church whose members served as witnesses throughout the Gentile state (the oikoumene) in which they had been scattered. Adult Jews were citizens and they were prophets. But of course not all citizens were prophets, were they?

Just as the reunion of North and South as “Judaism” led to adult Jews becoming prophetic witnesses, so an even greater reunion, that of Jew and Gentile, led to the establisment of a Jew-Gentile body of prophetic witnesses, which in this case were called Christians. Citizenship still tied all men, women and children to the laws of the oikoumene, but with the coming of the Spirit, the old wineskin of circumcision was thrown away. There was no longer any need for a sign that represented the curse upon the Land and the womb, because the blessing to all nations had come.

I hope you can understand the progression, the process of maturity, here. It is beautiful. The Restoration era was a sort of halfway house between the Old Covenant and the New. The progression was 1) Church-State, 2) Church and State, 3) Churches in every State, for the purpose of 4) Every State in the Church.

So, to tie “religious membership” to civil membership is to confuse heaven and earth. To link baptism with the borders of any particular state is to say that Jesus is not the king of all nations, all states. In Israel, this would have been like limiting circumcision to the offspring of Levi. Circumcision was “statewide,” the blood border between Israel and the other nations. The “water border” was the boundary of the priestly and prophetic body within the state of Israel. These two were never conflated, as Leithart does here.

“Whatever their political allegiances, Christians who baptize babies implicitly confess that religion and society are inseparable.” (p. 8 )

And they also bind the Church to the government of the day, and define “Christian” as natural rather than supernatural, someone who is to “hear” from God rather than “speak” for God. This is not how the New Testament defines the Church. When Moses expressed his desire for all the Lord’s people to be prophets, he was not desiring that all of them should receive some special new unisex Covenant sign. He was impatient for the kind of Covenant witnesses that could only come after the pouring out of the Spirit.

Religion and society are most certainly inseparable, as the flesh of a man is inseparable from his spirit while he is alive. But each has its domain. Physical maturity and spiritual maturity are not the same thing, as witnessed in Eden.

What is the blood border today? In a sense, there is none, but in another sense, it includes all human bloods. All men everywhere are now called to repent. What is the water border? Credobaptism, the sign of repentance. All the Lord’s people are prophets, or, to put it another way, the prophets are the Lord’s people among the nations. Prophets have never known any boundaries. Conflating Church and State membership confuses the speakers with the hearers.

Based on this misunderstanding, Leithart then asserts that our modern views of baptism have been distorted by political individualism. He sees baptism as a sort of “carry all” for those under the authority of the Gospel. He misses the point that the entire world is now under the authority of the Gospel. God is no respecter of persons. All nations are under the New Covenant, men, women and children, so paedobaptism is redundant. Whatever paedobaptists hope to achieve with this rite has already been achieved in Christ for every human on the planet.

But credobaptism is by its very nature individualistic. Why is this a problem? In the same way that we differentiate between circumcision and baptism, or between citizenship and prime ministership. Circumcision and citizenship put one under the Law. It is for the purpose of instruction, a time of ethical childhood. Baptism and any kind of ministry make one a minister of the Law. The Law has done its work, and baptism or swearing-in make one a representative of that Law. We see the same process in microcosm between the time when Israel was “under the angelic sword” in Egypt, and wielding that sword in Jericho as God’s representatives. And further back, in Eden, it seems the plan was for Adam to carry the flaming sword out of the Garden into the Land as God’s representative, rather than being exiled by the sword in the hands of angels. In both cases, the process began with a single angelic sword over a “corporate flesh,” and ended with a new kind of body, a body made of individuals who all wielded an individual sword. Likewise, Israel’s “baptism” through the Red Sea was a single event, a baptism of “one natural flesh.” That is why it included their children. New Covenant baptism is for the purpose of giving every warrior a sword. The Church is a swarm of armed angels who “ev-angel-ize” with the testimony of Jesus.

Thus, to conflate citizenship with religious membership is to make a dog’s breakfast of the way in which the Church (vertical mediation) and State (horizontal mediation) have always been designed to work. It is to say that no mediator, no ambassador, no Christ, is required between heaven and earth, and every member of a Christian state is a “saint” and has prophetic authority. This is gross error. Thankfully, as Dr Leithart wistfully observes, “we are all Anabaptists now.” He writes:

“Anabaptists … aimed to uncouple religious and political affairs and undermine the foundational structure of Christendom.” (p. 8 )

I believe he has misread the situation. Whatever their other errors, the Anabaptists “uncoupled” a whoring church from a beast who desired to mix his natural seed with her supernatural sons. At every paedobaptism, earthly kingdom trumps heavenly witness, and the blood of Abel cries from the ground.

I am convinced, quite contrary to a great deal of pious wisdom on the subject, that the possession of certain gifts, even in abundance, is not necessarily a sign that one will have the opportunity to employ them in this life, or the blessing of God in their attempted use. This is because I, and many others I know, have certain powers whose use I firmly believe we have been forbidden—which must apparently remain latent indefinitely, at least in this life. There are other gifts I regard as far smaller and less important I have been forced to exercise, much to my irritation and chagrin, consistently. It would appear, if not from our lives, then those of the martyrs, that from a strictly pragmatic point of view God is a great waster of his best resources.

We don’t, however, have access to the Grand Scheme of Things, don’t know precisely what we’ve been made for, don’t know what God values most in us, or what we shall become in glory. We are like Jane Studdock, who wanted to be admired and valued for her intellect, but finally had to come to grips with the fact that those whose valuations she really cared about in the end valued her for other qualities. In evaluating our own gifts and callings we need to take this consideration into proper account. While lack of aptitude provides adequate reason to forego some ambitions (a pig gains no glory from the attempt to fly), its possession, alas, does not necessarily demand its exercise–although, of course, it might.

(S. M. Hutchens, Touchstone, Nov. 10, 2004)

In a Bible study many years ago, a friend brought our attention to the fact that it was Cain’s line that produced all the innovators: tentmaking, metalwork and music. Being young and ignorant, the best reason we could come up with was that God’s people often aren’t very talented.

Of course, I now know that God keeps the best until the end. Babel is always built in a hurry but Jerusalem takes time (James Jordan). Sunflowers don’t last but oak trees do.

There is also a liturgical reason why Cain’s line received all the gifts. Pentecost brings gifts. Gifts are kingly and prophetic. The priestly line was not made of innovators. By design, they were servants of God. Of course, when Israel matures, as servant kings, she receives gifts, but their use is still priestly in a sense — church architecture, great literature, church music, technology, etc. Before Christ, glory belonged to the pagans. Since Christ, His Church has been the only source of innovation. It is the “nursery of culture” (Jordan again).

Now, to my point. It also seems that in the Covenantal process of maturity, our “latent” gifts must go on the altar for purification. And I suppose some of them don’t come out of the fire. The gifts with which we are born are natural, raw. The natural man is incredibly gifted, but the natural is simply raw material. It requires cutting.

Just like the sons of Cain, those gifts are worthless to God until He gets His “gift” — a firstfruits. Then He can pour out lasting glory. In the big picture, Jesus is that great gift, and the centre of the glory poured out is His Church.

But Judas Iscariot, one of his disciples (he who was about to betray him), said, “Why was this ointment not sold for three hundred denarii and given to the poor?” He said this, not because he cared about the poor, but because he was a thief, and having charge of the moneybag he used to help himself to what was put into it. (John 12:4-6)

See also The Significance of Jabal and Jubal.

“Typologically speaking, life on other planets would be Creational ‘polygamy,’ something outside the character of God.”

Aliens and Sojourners

…and there was not a man to till the ground. (Genesis 2:6)

The Bible does not simply record events. It presents them in sequences, as acts which have consequences, and in doing so it also shows us how God works. Unfortunately, most Christians are not taught to read the Scriptures with an eye on the processes going on in each narrative, let alone in the big picture. So when a question is asked such as, “Is there life on other planets?” even the best theologians can only reply, “The Bible doesn’t tell us.”

Well, in truth, the Bible does tell us, but only if we are paying attention. The Covenantal pattern inherent in every part of Scripture shows us precisely how God works, and identifying this structure not only enables us to interpret the Bible and history correctly, but also to predict the future.

The Seed

Biblical history is all about seed and fruit, barrenness and fruitfulness, gathering and scattering, in every domain—physical, social, and ethical—and this is achieved through the process of Covenant. God creates or calls a man, gives him a job to do, shows him the method for success, then leaves him alone until the time is right and the land is ripe. This is why Israel’s harvest calendar is a picture of all Covenant history in microcosm.

The modern mind passes over this often repeated theme of sowing and reaping, limiting it to the historical concerns of subsistence farmers (Land) and their tribal life (womb), both cursed by unfaithful Adam in Genesis 3, and promised to faithful Abraham in Genesis 15. In once sense, through technology and its resulting prosperity, we moderns have indeed moved beyond an existence tied so closely to the ground, but God’s Creation is a fractal. This means that although we move from a day of small things (such as “Do not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil”) to greater exploits, every advancement carries similar risk and similar promise. The process of growth in farming and families can also be perceived in investment banking, global demographics, software development, and even in spiritual warfare. “Increase” is always achieved through some kind of delayed gratification, an act of faith in a promise that the sacrifices made now will result in greater rewards down the track. We pray in secret that God might reward us openly. Paul chose personal suffering that he might receive a greater resurrection.¹1 Based on what we know of Paul, I suspect that he was not referring to a more glorious resurrection for himself, but a more numerous one from among the nations through the preaching of the Gospel. We fast privately that we might enjoy a greater feast in company with others. Indeed, Israel’s final annual feast, a party for all nations, followed the culmination of her purification through fasting and self-examination prior to the Day of Atonement.

One World

With such an understanding, is it possible to extrapolate an answer from ancient documents written for tribal farmers to the question of whether life exists on other planets? If the Bible is true, surely we must begin with the establishment of life on this planet.

The Spirit hovered only over this world, just as He overshadowed only Mary, and descended only upon Christ at His baptism. It is in our God’s character to choose the one from the many, that the one might become many. Mary had other children, and Christ gave the Spirit to the saints at Pentecost.

Adam was given Eve that he might be fruitful. The “Land” is always feminine, given seed by Man but made fruitful only by obedience, with the increase coming directly from God (1 Corinthians 3:6). It seems to me that womb and the Land were only “opened” to Adam following the shedding of sacrificial blood, albeit with limiting curses intended to humble him.

All the famines in Israel were judgments according to the curses in the Law of Moses (Deuteronomy 28:15-24). Only the Land of Israel was subject to blessing and cursing under the Law. Yet God chose Israel from among the nations not only that Israel might be blessed by the nations but that all nations might eventually be blessed through one nation, Israel.

God is consistent in all His works, since they image Him. Out of all the worlds, God chose to bless only this one, and the sevenfold process of Filling in Genesis 1 is recapitulated in every Covenant which follows.²The sun, moon and stars (which include other worlds) were not created until Day 4, prefiguring a time of priestly training (the Land and its grain and fruit bearers) before kingly dominion. The Scriptures often use the heavenly lights as images to describe earthly rulers, including the saints. Deuteronomy 4:19 condemns the worship of the stars, but also suggests that they were, and perhaps also will be, a part of our inheritance.

So it is not entirely speculative to assert that while the other planets are currently barren, only this one has many children. Typologically speaking, life on other planets would be Creational “polygamy,” something outside the character of God.

But neither is it a stretch to imagine that the separation, sanctification and fruitfulness of this world is intended to be a blessing to all worlds. Like the nations at Pentecost, they have already been Formed and are waiting to be Filled. But when might this be?

 The Sower

God could certainly have put life on other planets, but the Bible shows us that He always works through mediators. The fruit of the Land and the womb depended on the fruits of the Spirit in Adam.

Some Christians believe the world existed long before the creation of Adam (if indeed Adam even existed!) but according to revelation and our own experience, the world is not self-sustaining. Like Israel, as a people set apart in Abraham and trained under the Law of Moses, nature itself requires guidance, or cultivation.

In social terms, circumcision was a kind of pruning, not a cutting off (or cutting down) but a cutting intended to lead to greater fruitfulness—a sacrifice now for a great blessing in the future. However, Abraham seized a firstborn via Hagar in the way Adam seized the fruit in the Garden. But Abraham matured until he was even willing to offer his firstborn to God, as a kind of firstfruits, and he was given many more children. The physical Creation by God, and the subsequent social Creation delegated to the charge of Adam, are inseparable. Fruitfulness in Land and womb depend not only on cultivation by the Man, but also cultivation of the Man. Where Adam failed, Noah succeeded. In a preliminary sense, Noah was the first “interplanetary” colonist.

Thus, it is not in the nature of God to make a self-sustaining “wilderness.” Nature has its laws but that does not make nature sovereign. Nature itself requires “training.” Since the world was created to be cultivated, the world cannot be fruitful without Man. Man can most certainly damage the world through exploitation, but a world without Man would not be the pristine utopia imagined by environmentalists. Gary North writes:

The earth was never designed to be autonomous. Neither was the garden. Though the creation was able to function without man’s immediate presence, it could not achieve its full flowering apart from man… Nature was allowed to operate briefly without man for five days. Man was allowed to operate briefly without woman for less than one day. Neither could be fully comfortable without its complement. Nature needed subordination under man. Man needed subordination under God… Like nature, he had been created good but incomplete. He knew from the very beginning that he was not self-sufficient.³Gary North, The Dominion Covenant: Genesis – An Economic Commentary on the Bible, Volume 1, 84-85.

The care with which God had planted the Garden was to be noticed and replicated, imaged, by Adam in the Land. Tending and guarding the Garden as God’s representative was training for dominion of the Land and then the entire World.

Although the Creation is still under the curse of death, we see the dominion of Christ working in the social realm, through the Gospel, expanding throughout history. “Covenant faithfulness” is now entirely wrapped up in one glorified Man, but working through all nations. If we do indeed colonize other planets, it will not so much be “by Covenant” but “in Christ,” with technologies given to us by the Spirit of God, and through the sacrifice of individuals with the desire for new frontiers built into the Great Commission.

Shining Like Stars

So, there is no life on other planets. Not yet. Based on how God has worked in the past, it is likely there may well be in the future. The Spirit will overshadow other worlds, but not as He did in Genesis 1. Since the Spirit now indwells the Sons of God, making us co-workers with the Son in the maturity, conquest and redemption of mankind, it seems that the glorified redeemed will be “governing lights” in the eventual conquest of Creation. Perhaps this task will be carried out by the saints in ways we cannot yet imagine, but we have already made a start, have we not? Despite the trials and tragedies that plague humanity, in many respects this world is a better place now than it has ever been.

One day, the phrase “the new world” could be used quite literally, with exploration motivated by more than mere exploitation, a desire for cultivation rather than plunder, a sustainable harvest established upon just measures. God’s increase always begins with obedience and wisdom. The universe displays the glory of God, but like the earth, it is a gift which requires tending by Adam for it to reach the full potential of that glory.

See also The Obedient Planet.

This is an essay from Inquiétude: Essays for a People Without Eyes.

A quick historical summary of the destruction of Jerusalem for your non-preterist friends:

In AD64, Herod’s Temple was completed, and Nero burned Rome. Both events led to the persecution of Christians — the Great Tribulation.

The first Jewish Roman War broke out in 66AD. It began with religious tensions between Jews and Greeks, but the Roman response to this opened a can of worms. The Jews were mad that the Romans hadn’t intervened, and the dispute rapidly turned into a Jewish protest against Roman taxes. Jewish rebels attacked Roman citizens, and possible traitors, and overran the Roman military garrison.

Gessius Florus, the Roman governor, intended to teach them a lesson by sending troops to break into the Temple and seize gold as a tribute for the emperor. The Jews mocked him and the unrest only escalated. Florus hit back by arresting and crucifying some of the city’s leaders, even though many of them were Roman citizens.

We must remember that this was only a short time after the completion of Herod’s Temple. Jesus said it would be torn down, not one stone left upon another. We can have little doubt that those words hung over the city for decades, so the Jews felt vindicated in its completion. They were the sons of God, the eternal people. Jesus was a false prophet and they were invincible. And they weren’t going to take Roman abuse any longer.

King Herod Agrippa II, who was pro-Roman, must have figured that things weren’t going to get any better. He and all the Roman officials in Jerusalem fled the city for Galilee.

The Romans sent in their Syrian legate to quell the revolt, but the Roman leadership was shocked when the Jewish rebels ambushed them and sent them packing. Not good. Any defeat like this would undermine Roman authority throughout the Empire. Things ramped up even further.

Emperor Nero commissioned General Vespasian and his son Titus to deal with the escalating problem. They assembled four legions and began their purge in Galilee in AD67. Vespasian crushed the rebellion in the north, with the help of the armies of Agrippa II and other allies.

But, by AD68, Nero’s erratic behavior led to the senate declaring him an enemy of the people. He fled the city and committed suicide. His successor, Galba, was assassinated, which led to civil war in Rome. The throne of Galba was usurped by Otho, and then by Vitellius, which is why AD69 is known as the year of the four emperors. The entire world was now in upheaval.

By this stage, Vespasian was so popular that he was hailed as emperor by his own legions. His support only increased, so he headed for Rome and began a new dynasty of emperors. This left Titus, his son, to finish the Jewish war.

Titus pitched camp to the north of the city, with a force of 80,000 legionaries. Inside the city were 2400 trained Jewish warriors who defended the walls. There was also an incredible number of Jews who had traveled from across the empire to celebrate Passover. They had been been caught in the siege and trapped in the city now for three years.

Jerusalem had been besieged early in the war, but it was so well fortified that things had fallen into a stalemate. What was the Roman solution? Dig an enormous trench around the city wall, and then build a Roman wall around the trench.  Anyone caught trying to escape the city was crucified, and there were as many as five hundred in a single day.

Despite the crucifixions, increasing starvation, and disease spreading from the corpses, the Jewish zealots rejected every offer of terms of surrender. Infighting, famine and disease were destroying the city from within. Two thousand rotting bodies were later discovered in the subterranean vaults of the city. On July 17 in AD70, the daily sacrifices stopped because there were no priests left to offer them.

Inside the city, rival zealot factions only stopped fighting each other to join forces when the Romans began building ramparts. Herod the Great had built an enormous military barracks called Antonia Fortress in 19BC. Titus captured it and had it leveled to allow access to the Temple complex for siege materials. Some believe that what is now called the Temple Mount is actually the remains of Antonia fortress.

Finally, the Romans breached the city walls. They ransacked and burned most of the city. Six thousand women and children died in one terrible moment when the cloisters collapsed.

Roman soldiers slaughtered Jews until they were too tired to continue. Blood flowed in the streets. The great altar of sacrifice was heaped with the bodies of the slain. Roman soldiers cut open Jews who had attempted to escape, dead or alive, to retrieve any gold they might have swallowed to smuggle it out of the city.

Jewish historian Flavius Josephus tells us that 97,000 Jews were captured. The best and brightest of the young were taken as trophies. Many of those over the age of 17 were sent to work in Egyptian mines, sold as slaves, or doomed to be slain by wild beasts or gladiators in provincial amphitheaters.

That was the living. Estimates of the total number of deaths vary, but the Jewish historian Flavius Josephus indicates it could have been well over a million.

All the trees had been cut down during the siege. The once stunningly beautiful and impregnable city was now unrecognizable. General Titus declared that he saw the hand of God in his victory.