The analogy between human beings and animals, seen throughout the Bible, means that in the animal world there are some who represent the whole.

A Brief History of “Sacrifice” According to the Bible: Part 5

by James B. Jordan, Biblical Horizons No. 253 (subscribe at www.biblicalhorizons.com)

And Noah built a communion-site (altar) to Yahweh.
And he took from every clean animal and from every clean bird,
And caused ascensions to ascend on the communion-site.
And Yahweh smelled the pleasing aroma.
And Yahweh said in His heart, I will never again curse the ground (’adamah) because of the man (’adam)… (Genesis 8:20-21a)

This is the first altar, or communion-site, we see built by anyone in the Bible. Likely Seth and Enoch and Noah before the Flood had places where they brought their gifts to God, and these might have been elevated mounds reminiscent of the high ground of Eden, but it is only now, after the Flood, that we see the notion of some kind of communion between God and man. And this communion is linked to the sending up of sacrifices to God. The ascension from the top of the mound (altar) creates a ladder to heaven and makes possible this communion.

It is communion at a distance. Noah is on earth; Yahweh is in heaven. Much closer communion comes with Moses, so that a Peace meal is added to the Ascension, and the Ascension itself takes on the meaning of going up the ladder to be next to God. This is because God will come down and put His presence on the earth in the Tabernacle. This has not happened yet.

Noah sent up “clean” animals and birds. Noah had been told to take on the ark seven pairs of these clean animals, and only one pair of the “not clean” animals (Genesis 7:2). We should denotive that these are not “unclean” animals. The technical term “unclean” (tame’) does not show up until Leviticus 5, where it means something associated with death when in the presence of the tabernacled-presence of God or His special people. Here at the Flood the difference is between representative and non-representative animals. The clean animals are those who can be sent up to God to represent all the rest of the world.

This notion of representation has been hinted at already. It is clearly the line of Seth that is the priestly and representative portion of the human race (Genesis 4:4, 25-26). The analogy between human beings and animals, seen throughout the Bible, means that in the animal world there are some who represent the whole. We don’t know what animals and birds this group consisted of. Later on, chickens and deer are considered clean, but are not put on the altars of Israel, and it seems that the limitation of animals to just five happens with Abraham (Genesis 15). Noah may well have caused many different animals to ascend.

These clean animals are sent up to God in Ascension as signs that Noah is giving the whole world to Him. Noah can do this because he is the first true king under God. He has passed through death and resurrection in the Flood and has been given, thereby, a true foretaste of the benefits of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. He has become “like God,” and will “know (judge) good and evil” when his “eyes have become open” (Genesis 3).

Noah has ascended through the Flood-exodus to a new world. He is on a mountaintop, like the original high ground of Eden. Like God, he plants a garden. This garden is a vineyard, producing a more advanced kind of fruit that will become wine, the symbol of kingly rest in the Bible. There comes a time when Noah retires from the scene to rest, as God did on the seventh day, leaving Adam and Eve alone. Noah returns to his sons, his eyes open from sleep, and passes godlike judgments on them, determining the course of their futures—creating their futures as it were.

Noah can do this because God has announced the coming of limited human kingship. People are now officially permitted to eat animal flesh (Genesis 8:3-4). Godly people may have been allowed to eat meat before the Flood, but now it is made official and part of God’s covenant with man. The blood of animals, however, may not be consumed; only the “blood of grapes” (Genesis 49:11). Moreover, men in kingly positions are now authorised to pass judgment of life and death (8:5-6), just as God passed a death judgment on humanity in the beginning.

This is Noah’s new position, it is what qualifies him to be the first to offer up an Ascension to God. Adam gave the world to the devil. Now, since the king has given the world to God, it belongs to Him, so He will not destroy it again even though men are as wicked as before. After Noah, all people are allowed to send up smaller Ascensions to God, one animal at a time, thereby giving their own small worlds to Him.

“Things ain’t cookin’ in my kitchen
Strange affliction wash over me
Julius Caesar and the Roman Empire
Couldn’t conquer the blue sky…” [1]

Today, the Australian government’s carbon tax repeal bills cleared Parliament’s lower house. They will be voted upon in the Senate next year. To see this reported as an act of climate vandalism by the media isn’t a surprise. What is surprising is the consternation of many Christians.

One facebook acquaintance summarized some data from the national broadcaster’s “vote compass,” a site which was set up prior to the recent federal election. The voter enters their leanings on certain issues and the site tells them which party best represents their views. He writes:

Compared to other religious affiliations, Protestants are the least welcoming of asylum seekers, least concerned about climate, least supportive of foreign aid, most supportive of increasing military spending, least supportive of mining tax increases, least supportive of constitutional recognition of indigenous Australians, least supportive of a faster NBN, least supportive of public services, most supportive of CSG and least supportive of workplace protections.

NB Before anyone complains, the results have been weighted by census data, so with a huge sample size (1.4m), it is basically irrelevant that it was a self-selected sample.

This gentleman is concerned about the future of the planet, mostly for the sake of his young son. He has spent years reading the science concerning climate and is understandably worried. But for the Christian, there ought to be some biblical “pillars” undergirding one’s worldview. The first one is Bible history and the second one is Bible prophecy. That probably sounds boring, but if you’ve been around this blog long you should know by now that I rarely take the reader where he expects. Because that’s boring.

Bad Science

When it comes to climate science, we have more data than we know what to do with. As someone who loves to look for patterns in things, I can understand the desire of scientists not only to figure out what is going on, but also to predict future weather.

Looking for patterns begins with past records, and it is here that modern climate science is revealed as the victim of modern philosophy, that is, Darwinism.

We are told that 97% of scientists believe in anthropogenic climate change. But 98% of palaeontologists believe in evolution, and they are wrong. What is more relevant is that these two consensuses are related.

I don’t deny the data used to support climate alarm, just as I don’t deny the stuff palaeontologists dig out of the ground, or pretend that the devil put it here. What I deny is the story of how it came about. The stories told by modern science are all based upon their deluded revision of the history of the planet. If we deny the historicity and reliability of the book of Genesis, all our science will be wrong. We will be basing our models upon a past that never really happened. How so?

The Creation event itself is fundamental, but the catastrophic global flood seems to have a direct bearing on climate data. 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.

So, the stupidity of evolution and the stupidity of modern climate science are directly related. They both misinterpret the data because they both base their interpretations on uniformitarian assumptions.

Bad science doesn’t exist in a vacuum. It is a result of something. Evolutionists constantly tell us that their science is constantly under review “because that’s how science works,” while they desperately protect their failing dogmas from real scientific criticisms. Bad science is the product of bad philosophy, which is in reality a bad religion, a religion which goes way back.

Bad Religion

98% of palaeontologists might be evolutionists, but 98% of westerners are now statists, and they, too, are wrong. Statism is believing the government is god, and in control of prosperity, and now it seems even the weather. A climate action rally in Sydney last weekend was rained on, creating a sea of colourful umbrellas. This action was most likely the peak of effectiveness for this endeavour, the weather equivalent of putting a paper bag over one’s head in a nuclear attack.

It is bad enough seeing Christians sucked into a “science” which cannot tell the future because it rejects the past. It is worse when these intelligent Christians believe the government can do anything about it. If Protestants are the least concerned about the left wing issues mentioned above, the reason might not be that Protestants don’t care about them, but because Protestants are far less likely to fall for statism and its pretenses. They know that government is rarely the solution, and usually the problem. There’s a reason that good government and prosperity flowed from Christianity, and then Protestantism. God blesses obedience. The entire world was blessed through the principles of the British Empire, which brought good government when it arrived and left it as a blessing when it departed. But Protestants understand that good government is an extension of Christianity, and not itself the spring of life. Without Christ, Western Culture cannot be “progressive.” It amazes me how incapable these progressives are of perceiving their progress as a reversion to paganism.

On a panel TV show on the national broadcaster recently, entitled “Dangerous Ideas,” one panelist jokingly said that abortion “until the age of 30″ might be a good idea. Without realizing it, these fools have become basically pagan, albeit in a new guise. Sacrifice your children and give your wealth to the weather gods. Whatever their “scientific” pretense, the only real option to true Christianity is baalism. Science without God promised to make Man into god, the manipulator of nature. Modern man got more than he bargained for apparently—anthropogenic climate change. Frustratingly, the weather is not a vehicle we know how to drive properly. It possesses a seemingly infinite number of variables. Like your average shopping cart on swivelling wheels, it seems to have a mind of its own. It does have a mind of its own but it is not mechanistic. The weather is the chariot of God, and He never takes His hand off the wheel. [2]

Covenant Science

As Gary North observed, “power religion” assumes control over nature through “stimulation,” whether that be oblations to the gods, infant sacrifice, or religious prostitution. Nature is Man’s to manipulate. Man makes the miracles.

“Dominion religion,” however, is a different process. The blessings of abundance, of “increase,” are to be gained miraculously, but at the hand of God, not through manipulation but through obedience. This is what we see in the life of Joseph. Wherever he served, his faithfulness resulted in abundance. His masters recognized that the Spirit of God was with him.

Modern science was the direct result of men who submitted to God. The amazing discoveries and advances we enjoy were all gifts to the minds of men by the Spirit of God. Because we were made in the image of God, we can use these gifts as blessings or as curses. Nuclear fission and genetic modification of food are prime examples. This is because every gift is intended to bring greater judicial maturity.

Our leaders do esteem “ethics,” but not God’s ethics. They intend to do what is right, but what is right in their own eyes, not the eyes of God, who can see much further and whose sight is far keener.

Watching commentators from the Right and the Left argue about how much taxation is right, and where those dollars should be spent to solve our problems, is frustrating. An example might be the current desire to spend untold millions on mental health. Nobody ever mentions sin. Why does no one ever mention that infidelity costs Australia between 3 and 6 billion dollars every year, not to mention the resulting delinquency of children and burgeoning mental health problems? If anybody, even jokingly, suggested that it would be good if we all tried to keep the Ten Commandments, they would be ridiculed and shouted down. Religion is a private matter, they would say. And what goes on in the bedroom is nobody else’s business.

Turns out it is everybody’s business. These educated people are extremely stupid.

Based on the blessings and curses of the One who rides a chariot of fire in a cloud of glory, anthropogenic climate change is indeed possible. In Deuteronomy 28, Moses gave Israel a great list of blessings for obedience and curses for disobedience. These cover the natural realm (the Land and the womb) as well as Israel’s economic status in relation to other nations. Land, womb and nations sounds very Abrahamic. That’s because it is, and it is also the reason Israel suffered so many famines in her history. It was always the result of the shedding of innocent blood.

And if you faithfully obey the voice of the Lord your God, being careful to do all his commandments that I command you today, the Lord your God will set you high above all the nations of the earth. And all these blessings shall come upon you and overtake you, if you obey the voice of the Lord your God… Blessed shall you be when you come in, and blessed shall you be when you go out. The Lord xwill cause your enemies who rise against you to be defeated before you. They shall come out against you one way and flee before you seven way. The Lord will open to you his good treasury, the heavens, to give the rain to your land in its season and to bless all the work of your hands. And you shall lend to many nations, but you shall not borrow. (Deuteronomy 28:1, 6, 7, 12)

But if the Covenant, through Jesus’ death and resurrection, now includes all nations, is it beyond possibility that God would bless a faithful, obedient nation or culture with good weather, with rain in due season, with a decrease in mutating diseases or problems like food allergies, diabetes, autism and cancer? Is it beyond possibility that the reason for our food allergies may be deeper than we think, and related to the fact that we no longer say grace before our meals?

I am a postmillennialist, and thus an optimist. This is not only because of the way in which I interpret Scripture but also my faith in the character of God. Peak oil and a climate tipping point don’t seem to fit with Jesus’ plan for the world. He kept fingers off red buttons during the Cold War and He will continue to restrain evil until His work is done and His words are vindicated before all nations.

Things this side of the final judgment will never be perfect, but things are getting better, thanks to the many blessings brought about by the incarnation and resurrection, the Scriptures, and two millennia of Christianity. All improvement comes from the Spirit of Christ, whether it be in medicine, technology or even widespread literacy (another problem which the idiot statists believe can be solved with money). If we do not wish to lose these blessings, we need to humble ourselves and repent before God as a culture. Stopping the murder of the unborn, the shedding of innocent blood, is the first place to start. The goddess of “sexual freedom” behind these murders would be next. This cultural repentance can only occur if it begins in the Church, the source of all new spiritual life, and the guardian of the sacred heart of any nation.

Certainly, climate science is not a simple issue, and we must keep our wits about us, but we must not surrender to the baalism of the secular state, which calls us to sacrifice our children for prosperity and give our wealth to the weather gods. These people have unimaginable amounts of data at their fingertips, yet they interpret it all in the dim light of their naturalist fantasy. CO2 is a “Day 3″ blessing from God, oil (and other fossil fuels) is a “Day 4″ blessing from God. As history moves from Garden to City, who knows what our good God has in store for us next. The 20th Century brought blessings and curses which would have been unimaginable in the 19th. Like Joseph, we just need to trust and obey, let the Pharaohs be humbled by their bad dreams, and let God bring the increase. Our Joseph is always one step ahead of the weather.

________________________________
[1] The title refers to the song “Weather With You” by Crowded House.
[2] For some more thoughts on the weather, concerning “the sons of thunder,” see Jesus’ New Broom.

“And the Lord was sorry that he had made man on the earth, and it grieved him to his heart.” (Genesis 6:6)

“But concerning that day and hour no one knows, not even the angels of heaven, nor the Son, but the Father only. For as were the days of Noah, so will be the coming of the Son of Man.” (Matthew 24:36-37)

The relationship between the Father and the Son is an eternal to-and-fro. It is this primary “chiasm,” a “there-and-back-again,” a forming and a filling, which gave shape to the Creation Week and every facet of the Word of God and of human life.

This post has been slain and resurrected for inclusion in my 2015 book of essays, Inquietude.

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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.

“In Genesis 1, God creates the world in six days, through certain steps. Then He creates human beings out of ‘world,’ and human beings made out of world are going to live like ‘world’ does. They are going to go from darkness to light, formlessness to form; they are going to marry and take dominion. They are going to become like lights ruling over the earth. They’re going to live in 24 hour cycles. They will undergo times when God pulls them apart and puts them back together in new ways–all because they are made out of world. And these are all steps of glorification.” — James B. Jordan (The Bible You Never Read)

Some Christians assert that Adam was not the first man, only the first man in Covenant with God. [1] This means that the judgments upon such a Covenant could only be social, not “Creational.” They could only fall upon those under Covenant, not the “pre-Adamic” people from which this Covenant separated Adam. This assertion must be made to support the view that the Great Flood was only a local event, destroying only the “Adamites,” not all people on the planet. Does this assertion have any support in Scripture? Apparently yes, but factually no.

The problem is that, although all Covenants are social in one sense, that is, between God and people, there are differences in the domains. Covenant history looks like this:

CREATIONAL

SOCIAL

PERSONAL

SOCIAL

CREATIONAL

This first Covenant was between God and the world. World stuff was shaped, brought to life, and walked and talked in Adam. This Covenant was Creational.

ALL FLESH

The Covenant-making in Genesis 1 was not a Covenant made with heaven and earth. It was a Covenant that made heaven and earth, and the final step in its glorification was the Creation of Man. This was a Covenant made with “all flesh,” and if all flesh failed, all flesh would die. Did all flesh sin? No, but its representative did.

The phrase “all died in Adam” wasn’t limited to people. Animals died too. What would be the point–Covenantally, let alone practically– of the Lord gathering animals into an ark if the animals were not under Covenant. Adam had named them as their global representative.

The flood judgment involved the entire physical world because Adam was the representative of the entire physical world. He was not simply the representative of “the Adamites.” His Creation was a part of the Creation, which is not the case if the Adamic Covenant was not only ceremonial (as all later Covenants were) but also Creational.

Adam was made of world. He was the world “doing Covenantal stuff.” He was not only in the world but of the world. So, when the time came for judgment, the entire world had to be destroyed.

Adam’s sin was temporarily covered. Cain’s sin was temporarily covered. But the time came when sin could no longer be covered. When all domains (Garden, Land and World) were corrupted, the world, not just the people, had come to maturity. The world, not just the people, was fruit ripe for judgment. Was it good to eat?

The Great Flood was the end of Adam’s representative role of the physical creation. Noah was invested as the new representative, again, not merely over a certain people among other nations, but over the world. The Flood was not simply a local judgment of a certain people. A local flood means that all did not die in Adam.

Noah’s Covenant was also a Covenant made with all flesh. As Adam’s Covenant failed in Garden, Land and World, Noah’s succeeded in the Garden (judging Ham’s offspring) but failed in the Land (Babel). Before another Flood could occur (World), God stepped in and tore humanity in half. By His word, he called a Man out of the world. Abram would be in the world but not of the world.

IN THE FLESH

Just as the Sethites and Cainites were divided, so now Jew and Gentile would be divided. This time, God would keep the Covenant carriers from intermarrying with unbelief and abdicating their Covenant office.

This calling out put a temporary barrier, a veil, a wall, between Adam and the physical Creation. The first Covenant not made with “all flesh” was not until Genesis 12. Instead of cutting off all flesh, the flesh of Abram was cut off. It began the process of putting sin to death in the flesh. The Covenant scope was narrowed from the created order to a social order. Humanity was put into a deep sleep, and blood was spilt.

THE POINT OF CIRCUMCISION

Unlike the first two Covenants, the Abrahamic Covenant is what I call “social” because it set one nation, one genealogy, apart from all the others. Abram was called out from other men. That is what some Christians want to do with Adam. But was Adam simply called out from other men? No. We can’t take the traits of the Abrahamic Covenant and apply them to the Adamic and Noahic Covenants. The latter two were global in scale. They were not social divisions, otherwise circumcision has no significance whatsoever.

Circumcision, the cutting of Abraham’s flesh, was the “division” of Adam on a global scale. Being a bloodied, sacrificial wanderer meant there was a pure Adam mediating between heaven and earth, a place that was set apart between the throne of God and the physical world, moving about like the Tabernacle, a flying scroll, a bit of physical world stuff cut off–quarantined–from the physical world. In the grand scheme of things, Covenant had moved from the court of the Gentiles (nations) to the Holy Place. The Creation Temple was protected from judgment by a substitutionary, microcosmic Temple, a veil of flesh.

SOCIAL FLOODS

The prophets often used Creational terminology for this Holy Place which represented the Creation and kept it from being destroyed. When Israel’s sins were filled up, mature, it was the Tabernacle and Temple, not the physical world, that were torn apart. The “floods” under this social Covenant were floods of Gentiles: Babylonians and Romans. To conclude that because these “social” floods were local the Great Flood was also local  is to miss the “mediatory” point entirely. Israel was the bulkhead between God’s wrath and a physical, Creational judgment.

Adam’s and Noah’s Covenants were global. They concerned dominion of the physical Land and Sea. Abraham’s Covenant was social. This social, symbolic “Land and Sea” (Jews and Gentiles) didn’t begin in Adam but in Abraham. And it ended in AD70. AD70 was the end of Israel’s representative role for the nations, and the end of a “social” Land and Sea.

ALL THINGS NEW

The substitutionary structures were fulfilled eventually in the body of Jesus, in a deep sleep. In Jesus, the Covenant moved from the Holy Place into the Most Holy, from a social Covenant to a personal one.

In Jesus, all Creation was legally slain and legally resurrected–not just Adam, and the people, but the physical order also. He is a three level ark. At Jesus’ ascension, the “world stuff” was now in heaven, the physical body of Christ, justified flesh doing “three-level” Covenant stuff on our behalf, and on behalf of not just the people but of the entire Created order.

Now that those “social” substitutes are gone, as well as the body of Jesus (“personal”), all men everywhere are commanded to repent, but the outcome will not be limited to the world of men.

At Pentecost, Christians began representing the social (Jew-Gentile) world in the courtroom of God. This new Creation broke down the old social divide, the “wall of enmity,” until the Covenantal “Land and Sea” were again the physical land and sea. The world groaned until its firstfruits–the first resurrection, the revealing of the true sons of God, the Christians. Yet it groans still, because the harvest is not complete.

The new physical world, contained in Jesus, created a new social order. This Spirit-filled social order will mature eventually into a new physical order. As mediators, we are in the world but not of the world, yet the world will be ours. The CREATIONAL – SOCIAL – PERSONAL – SOCIAL – CREATIONAL chiasm will be finished in the physical world at the second resurrection. [2] The remaining physical disconnect is temporary. One day, the often venomous physical world will no longer be trying to kill us. The last enemy to be destroyed is death.

History will end as history began, with a Creational judgment. The entire physical realm will again be ripe, mature. The Lord will taste it and see that it is good. In fact, He will judge it to be very, very good.

“…in the chiasm of redemption
the first shall be last, and the last first.”
Peter J. Leithart.

____________________________
[1] See also Biologos’ Jenga Bible.
[2] See A New Heavens and a New Earth.

Micah Martin (brother of one of the authors of Beyond Creation Science), has kindly read Bible Matrix II and written about my adherence to the Genesis account of Creation as both Covenant and history (i.e. the account is not simply an account of the physical world being given a Covenantal purpose as a Temple, but also its actual Creation). There is much that we agree on, but the disagreement on this subject couldn’t be sharper, or of more importance.

He writes:

I received a copy of Bible Matrix II by Mike Bull.  (I would like to thank Mike publicly for sending me a copy free of charge. I very much appreciate it.)

Like Bible Matrix, Bull relies heavily on James Jordan’s approach and has the same un-questioned young earth creationist presupposition.  On a positive note, this book will open the full-preterist door to many astute readers.

However, I found this incredible quote on page 229:

Covenant is the key to Creation.  The original firmament [which I thought was the atmosphere according to the YEC paradigm, my own comment] is the outer shelter, the physical elements, the macrocosmic “Temple”… [1]

The next paragraph begins:

So, all Creation is Covenantal, but we cannot divorce Covenant from history.  It began with the physical world and will end with its physical restoration: (Emphasis his)

Haven’t we heard that before?

I would note that Bull never backs up this claim.  At one point he cites Chilton regarding 2 Peter but then just adds that it foreshadows the “real” new heavens and earth.  Again, with not exegetical proof.

It is becoming apparent that the entire Partial Preterist world is precariously positioned on the incredibly weak foundation of YEC fundamentalism.  It is even more hilarious when one considers the connections between YEC fundamentalism and Dispensationalism.

Add to that, the fact that the people who are winning the origins battle (like Pete Enn’s, biologos.org, John Walton) do not have an eschatology that fits their protology and I would say invest in Covenant Creation/Eschatology.  Eventually it will have cornered both markets! There really is no where else to go.

In the book, I included a slightly revised version of the chiasm of history presented here, plus an expanded explanation of it. The problem with the Covenant Creationists is their insistence that the Creation account and the Noahic flood were not global Covenantal events, but only local Covenantal events.

I can see their argument, but there are two problems with it. Firstly, Creation and Noah are brackets around one era, an era that defines the terminology of the rest of the Bible. After the failure of Babel, history moves to a “social” definition of Covenant, a nation that is separate from the other nations, a national “Land” raised above the international “Sea.”

So, although there are parallels between the flood and AD70 (as Jesus states), this is because there are other structures going on within this chiastic history. The Gentile “flood” of AD70 and the Gentile “flood” of Babylon are equivalent floods. And guess what? Both of them use Noahic symbols. [2] So to claim that the Great Flood and AD70 are equivalent events shows an ignorance of the Old Testament.

So, where dispensationalists understand the Great Flood as a physical judgment, and misunderstand Matthew 24 as physical judgment, Covenant Creationists understand Matthew 24 as social, but misunderstand the Creation and Flood as basically social.

If we remove the physical element from the initiation of Covenant history (to open the door to bogus science based on Baalistic philosophy) and from the end of Covenant history, we make the death and resurrection of Christ at its centre unnecessary. If the original curse of death wasn’t physical, and somehow death has already been defeated, actual physical history is stuck in an eternal rut of death.

And a rut is just a grave with the ends kicked out.

Covenant Creationism makes a mockery of the Bible, of the death and resurrection of Christ, and of the very physical hope of mankind. It asserts that there will be no future union of heaven and earth.

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[1] The Noahic firmament did come down, but there is obviously a greater one. This would be because the Creation-to-Noah Covenant was a microcosm of all history, a world within a world. But both these “Veils” are physical. See A Firmament of Flesh.
[2] See The Wolf and the Lamb.

“And God said, ‘See, I have given you every herb that yields seed which is on the face of all the earth, and every tree whose fruit yields seed; to you it shall be for food. Also, to every beast of the earth, to every bird of the air, and to everything that creeps on the earth, in which there is life, I have given every green herb for food’; and it was so.” Genesis 1:29-30

“‘Every moving thing that lives shall be food for you. I have given you all things, even as the green herbs.’” Genesis 9:3

We can’t accurately imagine what the pre-Fall world was like. If there was no death for Adam, was there animal death? And if there was animal death, was there death for things like bacteria?

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“…if the Lord creates something new, and the ground opens its mouth and swallows them up with all that belongs to them, and they go down alive into Sheol, then you shall know that these men have despised the Lord.” (Numbers 16:29-30)

Daughter Jerusalem kept up an outward show of respectability, but under her Temple veils and military skirts her legs were open for anyone. [1] In a vision, Ezekiel dug a hole through this wall of “whitewash” as a legal witness to her crimes against the Covenant.

Ezekiel also prefigured King Zedekiah’s escape attempt by digging a hole in the wall of his own house in captivity, and climbing through it with luggage. He would be taken in the Lord’s snare, carried captive to a land he would never see and die there, wrapped in darkness.

If this follows the symbolism of the previous “hole in the wall”, Zedekiah, as the final king of Israel, prefigured the Herods. He was an anti-Christ, a hybrid child of the false gods—a Land beast with a man’s eyes and mouth. As soon as he was “born” from the wall he was swallowed by the Babylonian dragon, the reverse of the ascension of Christ in Revelation 12:2-5.

Like Christ, Zedekiah “ascended” before the emperor, not as the right hand of the power, but in chains like King Manasseh. Unlike Joseph and Daniel, he did not open “the mystery.” Like Haman, his judgment (sight) and rule were taken away.[2]

When Israel’s kings were faithful, they devoured Pharaoh’s “dragons”. However, when they behaved like dragons and devoured the innocent, Pharaoh’s dragon swallowed them and they sank into the deep. Compromise, “intermarriage” on Gentile terms, always brings a flood.

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[1] See Gate Rape 1, 2 and 3.
[2] Both Zedekiah and Haman lost their sons – a failed “Covenant succession.” See Haman Hamstrung.