Bully’s Blog

Doug Wilson writes:

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

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

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or What Can You See?

“In them He has set a tabernacle for the sun, which is like a bridegroom coming out of his chamber, and rejoices like a strong man to run its race.” Psalm 19:4-5

The Bible Matrix is found throughout Scripture and Creation at every level. It is the foundation for the best novels and movies because they resonate with us at every level. Like the Bible, the best literature, art, music and movies show us something new every time we review them.

A prime example is a movie I discovered last week, Sunshine, directed by Danny Boyle. It follows the basic pattern, but after some thought, there are many more elements within it that illustrate the history of Adam than immediately meet the eye.

“Our sun is dying. Mankind faces extinction. Seven years ago the Icarus project sent a mission to restart the sun but that mission was lost before it reached the star. Sixteen months ago, I, Robert Capa, and a crew of seven left earth frozen in a solar winter. Our payload: a stellar bomb with a mass equivalent to Manhattan Island. Our purpose: to create a star within a star. Eight astronauts strapped to the back of a bomb. My bomb. Welcome to the Icarus Two.”

If you don’t want the movie spoiled for you, watch it before reading this post. You won’t really get the post anyhow if you haven’t seen it.

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Just watched the movie Gattaca again (with daughter Olivia). It begins with a couple of quotes, one of them being:

“Consider the work of God; For who can make straight what He has made crooked?” Ecclesiastes 7:13

This is one of those movies that delivers more upon repeated viewings.

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God took on a body, from the dust, in Adam. A trillion particles of inanimate, dead stuff pulled together and organised into the most complex system in the cosmos, an organic machine capable of feats we are yet to discover.

Adam, as Covenant head, also took on a “body.” A Divine Handful of flesh and bone, dead or dying by any human measure, organised into a being more palatial and lavish than any male eye is worthy to behold.

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or What’s Wrong with this Picture?

“When I began to edit the film, something happened. I found I was being educated. And not just with arguments. I was watching a Christian life. I was seeing a Christian man.” —Darren Doane

Just watched The History Boys, a film based on an entertaining but self-indulgent West End play by Alan Bennett. Despite the fact that under Course Language and Sexual References it should also have a “gay theme” warning (but I guess that’s not politically correct), the film is hysterical is places and unwittingly highlights a fatal flaw in our culture.

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“I indeed baptize you with water unto repentance, but He who is coming after me is mightier than I, whose sandals I am not worthy to carry. He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and fire.” Matthew 3:11 

I remember a scene from X Files where they printed out a binary code and laid the pages out on the floor. When viewed from a distance the ones and zeros made the image of a face. There was a similar scene in one of the Indiana Jones movies, where there was a search for a secret passage and it turned out to be a large X on the floor when viewed from above. This is just my view, but it seems a lot of theologians spend a great deal of time walking in circles in the jungle, lost in the details of prooftexts when we have Old Testament “Google maps” at our fingertips.

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or A World of Magnets and Miracles

Just saw Avatar with the kids and thought I’d post some thoughts.
[WARNING: CONTAINS SPOILERS.]

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Just watched The Nativity Story with our seven-year-old son (the girls have seen it). Bawled my eyes out at many points, particularly now that I have a better understanding of the typological significance of many of the events since I last saw it.

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“If you strike me down, I shall become more powerful
than you can possibly imagine.” —Ben Kenobi

Herod and Vader are maggot-filled men. They are the living dead. Christ and Kenobi are willing to die. They become the dead living.

One factor the Bible matrix continually brings out in its various occurrences throughout Scripture is the transformation of knowledge into wisdom — through death. In some profound way, knowledge is singular but wisdom is plural.

The Lord gives Adam the knowledge of the Law, and Adam is expected to obey and become wise. We can see, in his failure to confess his sin, that he was no wiser than before.

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or The Modern Absence of Quest

A review of the movie of Maurice Sendak’s classic children’s book observed that the absence of a quest, something to be overcome or achieved, makes the film bland. It has everything else: family issues, fantastic characters and first-rate special effects. But at the end of the day, without a “holy quest” all that is left is a lot of bumming around discovering how cool the world is. Or, worse, like much modern infants’ education, how cool we are.

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