“By the imperative, time is formed into a cup, still empty but formed for the special purpose of being filled with the content demanded by the order.”

The Imperative Comes First

Essay by John Barach

As many people have pointed out, in Christian ethics, the indicative precedes the imperative. First God says, “I am Yahweh your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage,” and then he gives the Ten Words (“You shall have no other gods before me…”). First Paul tells us what Christ has done and who we are in Christ, and then he summons us to act accordingly. First comes the good news of what God has done for us and then comes the summons to respond in faith and love and new obedience.

But when we look at the very beginning of Scripture, what we discover is that the imperative came first.  God creates the heavens and the earth, and then the first word God speaks is a command: “Let there be light” (Gen 1:3).  Now, that’s not the first word in the Bible — first comes the narration, the story of God creating the heavens and the earth, and the description of the earth at the time of creation — but it is the first word recorded that God spoke with regard to that creation. He creates the world. It’s dark, unstructured, and unpopulated, and the Spirit is hovering over the deep. The narrative reminds us that there’s always an indicative implicit in and before the imperative, so that the imperative assumes and develops a personal relationship between commander and commanded, so that the imperative is never mere imperative but rather is a vocation.  Nevertheless, in terms of God’s speech in history, the imperative comes first, and surely that’s significant.

With regard to man, something similar is the case.  In Genesis 2, which develops and expands the account of Day Six in Genesis 1, we learn that when Yahweh God placed Adam in the Garden, he spoke to him: “Of every tree of the garden you may freely eat, but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall surely die.” Here, the first thing Yahweh God says is indicative (“Of every tree of the garden you may eat”), but it’s an indicative indicating permission (as opposed to a mere statement) and is tied to the next clause in the sentence, which is an imperative disguised as an indicative: “you will not eat” is indicative in form but imperative in force, meaning “don’t eat.”  So the permission given in the first clause also shares something of that imperatival character. Again, there is a lot of implicit indicative here, including the personal relationship of Adam to Yahweh God who is his creator and the commander.  But the first thing Yahweh God says to Adam has the force of a permission and a command with regard to the trees, something imperatival in force.

Returning to Genesis 1, we find that God’s work with creation takes the form of a series of imperatives, moving through the days of creation up to the sixth day, when man is created, male and female. While the events in Genesis 2 take place first, before the creation of the woman, in Genesis 1 the first word of God to the pair, to man as the image of God, male and female, again takes the form of an imperative.  God’s first word to Man (male and female) is not a description of creation, not a presentation of all of God’s goodness, not a report about how God made man in his image, not a promise of what God would do for Adam and Woman.  Instead, it’s a command. Sure, it’s a blessing, but it’s a blessing in the imperative: “Be fruitful and multiply; fill the earth and subdue it; have dominion over the fish of the sea, over the birds of the air, and over every living thing that moves on the earth” (Gen 1:28).  Only after that does he go on, in the indicative, to say that he has given man the green plants and the trees for food (1:29). The first thing Adam and Woman heard from God was an imperative, and surely that’s significant.

In fact, we can go back before the creation of man to the first word God spoke, and again it is an imperative: “Let there be light” (Gen 1:3).  That’s not the first word in the Bible — first comes the narration, the story of God creating the heavens and the earth, and the description of the earth at the time of creation — but it is the first word recorded that God spoke with regard to that creation. He creates the world. It’s dark, unstructured, and unpopulated, and the Spirit is hovering over the deep.  But then comes the imperative and things begin to change (“And there was light”). Again, the imperative comes first, and surely that’s significant.

What does an imperative do?  Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy’s observations are helpful here:

The imperative not only commands the listener; it at the same time lights up an alley of time into the future. A trail into time is beaten by the logic of any order given. A high tension current places the moments following the order under the expectation: will this command be followed up and fulfilled? The term “fulfillment” used in this connection is significant. By the imperative, time is formed into a cup, still empty but formed for the special purpose of being filled with the content demanded by the order. The action following the order is not a blind accident of the moment. By having been ordered, it has become organized into one “time span” which stretches from the moment in which the order was given to the moment in which the report is echoed back: “order fulfilled.” Orders connect two separated human beings into one time span, of which the imperative forms the expectation, the report the fulfillment (The Origin of Speech, 46-47).

When God speaks to man for the first time and uses the imperative instead of the indicative, he is creating what Rosenstock-Huessy calls a “time cup.”  There is now a dramatic tension in the story: Will Adam and Woman obey God? Will they be fruitful and multiply? Will they have dominion over the animals? What will they do in response to God and to his commanding word? His order now orders their lives, revealing to them their calling, their responsibility, their relation to God and to the world– revealing how they are to use and order time.

The imperative creates the story that follows: by creating the expectation and setting the standards for judgment, it makes the story that follows what it is.  Without the imperative, it would just be a story of God creating man and then man doing, well, whatever he felt like. There would be no tension, no expectation, no hope, no sense of satisfaction at a job completed, no disappointment in failure and rebellion, and no corresponding joy at redemption and restoration — by which I mean: restoration to the original task and calling, the calling of maturation, fruitfulness, multiplication, and dominion.

But there was an imperative, an expectation, an impetus forward, creating the story.  It’s a story in which, in an important sense, the indicative does precede the imperative: God takes the initiative (as he does even in the Creation narrative) and man responds; God acts on our behalf so that we then can and do respond to him in trust and obedience.  In all imperatives, there’s at least an implicit indicative that underlies it, as I’ve said above.  But what makes it a story is that it’s a time cup, an imperative-created expectation awaiting fulfillment. We still look forward to man’s fulfilling of the mandate given in Genesis 1 (and so does God), with the joyful certainty because of Christ (here’s the all-important indicative!) that it will be fulfilled. In fact, even the imperative that was God’s first word in his creation (“Let there be light”) has not yet been fulfilled to the fullest extent, and all of history — and all of our lives — are meant to be aspects of that fulfillment until the earth is full of God’s glorious light.

History — the history of the world, and our history — is a time cup, formed by God’s imperatives.

What do the Psalms mean when they speak of the Lord “bowing the heavens”?

“Bow thy heavens, O Lord, and come down: touch the mountains, and they shall smoke.” (Psalm 144:5)
“He bowed the heavens and came down; thick darkness was under his feet.” (Psalm 18:9)

The language is architectural, based on the original and greatest Temple of them all, the cosmic “house” constructed in Genesis 1.

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

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Priolo presents two family models, inviting you to determine which one best matches your family.

The first one is the “Child-Centered Home.” In this home, children are allowed to interrupt adults, use manipulation to get their way, dictate the family schedule, demand excessive time and attention, escape consequences of their sins, be coddled (rather than disciplined) out of a bad mood, and so forth. Priolo writes: “A child-centered home is one in which a child believes and is allowed to behave as though the entire household, parents, siblings, and even pets exist for one purpose — to please him” (24).

The second one is the “God-Centered Home.” In this home, “everyone is committed to pleasing and serving God.  God’s desires are exalted over everyone else’s” (27). This home, as Priolo presents it, doesn’t permit the sort of behavior the child-centered home allows. Instead, the children are taught to joyfully serve others, obey parents the first time and do so cheerfully, adapt to the parents’ schedule, and so on.

Here’s what jumped out at me. You might expect that the opposite of a child-centered home would be a parent-centered home, but Priolo spends no time at all on that possible family model.

Read more…

or The Disunited State of Samaria

“…and they are seven kings;
five have fallen,
one is,
the other has not yet come;
and when he comes,
he must remain a little while.” (Revelation 17:10)

Time for another weird one. Although it’s probably only weird to the conservative evangelical Bible scholars among us. [1]

Albert’s post on marriage the other day allows us to see the context of the sin of the Samaritan woman. James Jordan observes that this woman was most likely a victim of this unjust system, hence the other Samaritans’ readiness to believe her testimony.

Firstly, whenever the Spirit leaves a woman unnamed, we are to see her as a type of The Woman Whose Offspring Would Crush The Serpent’s Head. There is the millstone woman, Samson’s mother, and many others. When Jesus refers to His mother as Woman, that is what He is referring to. Now, she is not that woman, but the historical narrative orchestrated by God will show us some aspect of the Woman. And the story of the Woman Samaria does just that.

Secondly, this woman had had five husbands, and was now in a de facto relationship. That is six men. It is the five-points of a broken Covenant, with a non-Covenant Man on Day 6. What we see here is a division between the legal side of Covenant and the relational side. Ralph Smith writes:

“Marriage, the very first covenantal relationship among men and the foundation of all others is the quintessential covenant. The relationship binds — ‘till death.’ It is a structured relationship with authority and roles distributed between husband and wife. It is a personal relationship— ‘husbands love your wives as Christ also loved the Church and gave Himself for it.’ A man and woman living together without the bond of the covenant may have a personal relationship, but they are guilty of fornication. A man and woman married may fulfill the structural requirements of the covenant bond, but fail to love one another, separating the personal from the structural aspect of the marriage covenant.

The covenant oath, the personal love, and the structures of authority and responsibility are all required for a Biblically righteous marriage. What the marriage covenant illustrates is that the covenant is a ’social structure.’ As Jordan points out, in the Biblical notion of the covenant, law and love, form and freedom, are in harmony. The love of the covenant is expressed not in spite of the oath or in spite of fulfilling the duties of the covenant, but precisely through the solemn taking of an oath and the faithful fulfillment of one’s duty.” [2]

Jesus turns up, and He, typologically, is the seventh Man. He is not only the Covenant of Torah (five books, and Ten Words soon to be broken at the foot of the mountain), He is going to replace the false Adam and his whole house.

There is also the division between the two mountains, Zion and Gerizim, Judah and Samaria. Not only is this woman with her sixth man, but the sixth matrix step concerns blessing and cursing, the two goats of Atonement (the bride) and the two mountains between which Israel passed into Canaan (Ebal and Gerizim). Jesus is going to supersede both these mountains with a new worship, one that is not divided. (Note: He was also going to rip Olivet (Judaism) in two for the church to pass through “unmolested” as a smoking firepot body to His blazing torch head.)

Now, this poor woman was a picture of division. In a sense, she was the woman in Eden, torn between two lovers, the true Word of God in Adam, and the delightful un-word of the serpent. (Just another thought here on the purpose of having a physical animal: God’s people fought with flesh-and-blood until the Spirit was given. Now we can fight the very spirits.) She is divided between her legal protector who is content to watch and see if she dies, and a seducer who shows her an inordinate amount of “affection.”

The Samaritan, like Mary Magdalene, symbolizes for us the Bride redeemed from the false seven-eyed “Lampstand” Law of the evil one. Jesus casts out the seven demons. Used and abused by men, Eve, the mother of all, became a Legion, a haunt of jackals. That is humanity, divided and filled with the wrong spirit.

Also, her five broken marriages might possibly be the five major Covenants (Adam/Noah/Abram/Moses/David+Restoration). That makes Herod the sixth Man, the man who lived with her without a Covenant, and Jesus the seventh, her Kinsman redeemer/avenger, the one who would free her from the Adamic curse and reunite her split personality by the Spirit into one new Man.

Some have said that this woman cannot picture the people of God. She is not innocent. But she is really TWO women isn’t she, like the two prostitutes in one house? The flesh lusts against the Spirit. So Jesus is Solomon, “bring me a sword,” and she is suddenly no longer bipolar. The seventh Man casts out the seven demons, the false Shekinah, and she is clothed and in her right mind (That chapter in Matthew follows the same pattern. See Why Jesus Healed Some.) In Christ, Judah and Samaria were reunited on one mountain.

On the BH list, John Barach also commented:

Mike points out that Jesus, here, is the seventh man.  Note, too, that it’s not only that the woman has been married to or involved with SIX men. It’s also the case that it’s the SIXTH hour … but Jesus tells her that “an hour is coming…” (Earlier, of course, we’ve seen Jesus turn SIX jars of Old Covenant purification water into New Covenant celebration wine.) [4]

Something else to notice, if you’re so inclined: According to Fowler White and Warren Gage, in their John-Revelation project (which you can still find online somewhere), John and Revelation are chiastically related, so that this woman is parallel to Babylon, the great harlot (“five have fallen, one is, the other has not yet come”). Whatever that means.

It means that the breaking of the Covenant in the Garden of Eden has structured every part of history and biblical revelation since the beginning. It is written into us, and it is written for us, if we have eyes to see.

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[1] Never watch a clever film with a conservative Bible scholar. He won’t get it. He might have Hebrew, Aramaic and Greek under his belt (and I most certainly envy that), but it is becoming more and more apparent to me that each one of these guys should have failed English. They have no imagination whatsoever. I guess that’s the way God works. We each have our gifts. We are all splinters of The Door. There, did anyone get that reference? We need to read the Bible like children. (“Kids these days. They just don’t get scared like they used to.”) Anyone capable of simple analysis of poetry, music or film, or recognizing a subtle allusion in any of these (my kids play Can You Guess Where This Film Or TV Quote Is From? in the car) can cope with the Bible’s themes. But these gents I am coming across (it’s Sydney Anglicans for me) amaze me. They lack the intuition which comes from reading or watching a long-running series. Their compromised worldview stops them from entering the world of the Bible (which is actually the world in which they live). But the kids in my high school Bible classes do get it, which means that due to a combination of postmodernism and good Bible teaching, the next generation of Bible scholars will be as incredibly perceptive as the current crop are bovine and unimaginative. (See also Typology Is Female , Exegetical Blinkers 1, 2 and 3, Cross-eyed Exegesis and Systematic Theology.) Now, I believe systematic theology is important, but it is a theology that is formed and not filled, just like the incomplete theology of Nicodemus. The Bible communicates truth through our imaginations, especially the bits that scholars entirely mishandle and then pat each other on the back as though they have actually dealt with the text as a text. (While I’m at it, see also Mercury Rising).
[2] Ralph Allan Smith, James Jordan’s Trinitarianism, www.trinitarianism.com
[3] John’s gospel is also following the Tabernacle pattern (at three levels!). In the secondary pattern, we are up to the Laver. The woman is by a well, a bride found by Abraham’s “oldest servant.”

From John Barach’s blog:

In the introduction to the sixth volume of G. K. Chesterton’s Collected Works, while working toward some explanation of The Man Who Was Thursday, Denis Conlon quotes Chesterton’s Introduction to the Book of Job (1907):

“God comes in at the end, not to answer riddles, but to propound them. The other great act which, taken together with this one, makes the whole work religious instead of merely philosophical, is that other great surprise which makes Job suddenly satisfied with the mere presentation of something impenetrable. Verbally speaking the enigmas of Jehovah seem darker and more desolate than the enigmas of Job; yet Job was comfortless before the speech of Jehovah and is comforted after it. He has been told nothing, but he feels the terrible and tingling atmosphere of something which is too good to be told. The refusal of God to explain His design is itself a burning hint of His design. The riddles of God are more satisfying than the solutions of man.” (Cited on p. 43).

For more on Leviathan, see SuperCroc.

or The First Shall Be Last

Yesterday’s post concerning Jesus’ message to John had some discussion about lepers becoming New Covenant priests. Those who were condemned to live outside were made clean and invited in. Of course, there is Jesus’ own condemnation of those who watched harlots and tax collectors enter the kingdom but defiantly stood outside themselves.

Right up until the end of the Jewish war, the Jewish leadership got their clean and unclean, their inside and outside, more and more wrong. The gospel turned their world upside down–or, in fact, rightside up. 

John Barach observes how Mark applies this to Jesus’ own family using literary structure:

Who’s Standing Outside?

Mark 3:20-35 is one of Mark’s typical sandwiches, in which a story starts, gets interrupted by a second story which relates to it in some way, and then finally comes to its conclusion. Here, we are told that, having heard about Jesus’ behavior, some of “His own people” come to seize him, saying, “He is out of his mind” (3:20-21). Then we have the second story, Jesus’ confrontation with the scribes from Jerusalem who claim that he casts out demons by the ruler of the demons (3:22-30). Finally, we return to the first story, when Jesus’ brothers and mother come and send for Jesus and when Jesus identifies those who are doing God’s will by sitting around him as his brother and sister and mother (3:31-35).

That structure is obvious even in an English translation. But a look at the Greek reveals an interesting play on words. At the beginning, when Jesus’ “own people” say that he is “out of his mind” (3:21), the word used literally (or, rather, etymologically) means “standing outside.” (Perhaps that’s roughly equivalent to our English expression “beside himself.”) But at the end of the story, Jesus’ brothers and mother come, and “standing outside” they call him (3:31; cf. 3:32, which stresses that they are “outside”).

So Jesus’ “own people” think Jesus is the one “standing outside” (= crazy).  But Jesus’ family members turn out to be the ones literally “standing outside,” while Jesus identifies those who are *sitting inside* as his true family, those who, in obedience to God’s will, are “sitting around him” (3:32, 34).  To be his true family — his true mother and brothers — his natural mother and brothers ought to come inside instead of calling him out.

But in a sandwich story, the middle story also relates to the story that frames it.  And so here it is not just the frame story that involves standing (and sitting).  In 3:24-25, Jesus says that a divided kingdom or a divided household cannot “stand.” And in 3:26, he speaks of “the satan” as “standing up” against himself.

The reference to the divided household that doesn’t “stand” might resonate with the frame story: Jesus’ natural household won’t stand if his mother and brothers are divided against Jesus. If they continue to “stand outside” instead of “sitting around him,” then their household won’t stay standing. That makes sense to me.

What about the reference to Satan’s “standing up” (a term for both resurrection and insurrection) against himself (3:26)? I’m not sure how—or if—it relates, though it does provide one more verbal echo in this passage. For that matter, Mark’s Gospel is full of references to “standing”: in every healing, people “stand up,” until at the end the same terms are used for Jesus’ resurrection.

But the repetition of the word “stand” and especially of words having to do with “standing outside” sets up a whole set of questions: Who is really “standing outside”? If Jesus’ family thinks Jesus is “standing outside” in the sense of being insane, then their household won’t “stand.” And if you think Jesus is “standing outside” in that sense, then you end up “standing outside” yourself, here literally but, as Jesus’ words make clear, also in a deeper sense. The family is sitting inside, sitting around Jesus and with Jesus. That’s God’s will, Jesus says. You’d have to be insane to be “standing outside.”

 

“Try your own selves, whether ye are in the faith; prove your own selves.
Or know ye not as to your own selves, that Jesus Christ is in you?
unless indeed ye be reprobate.”  2 Corinthians 13:5 [ASV]

John Barach writes:

In Mark 13:32, Jesus says, “Of that day and hour no one knows, not even the angels in heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father” (cf. Matt. 24:36). That’s somewhat puzzling. Is it a limitation on Jesus’ omniscience, as if God the Father knows things that God the Son doesn’t? That can’t be. So is it saying that Jesus as a man doesn’t know things that God the Son knows? Even so, that’s still puzzling.

A friend of mine argued once for a different approach: When Jesus says that even the Son does not know the day and hour, he said, he is speaking of knowing something in order to pass it on to others. Neither the angels nor the Son has been given the knowledge of the day and hour in the sense that neither is commissioned to reveal it and make it known to us.

I haven’t studied this passage and so I won’t claim that this is the right interpretation. But the other day, I was reading Augustine’s exposition of Psalm 10 (Psalm 9, part 2, for Augustine). In that exposition, he mentions those passages in Mark 13 and Matthew 24. Lo and behold, he says exactly what my friend said:

What, then, is so hidden as that which is said to be hidden even from the judge himself, not as far as his knowing it is concerned, but as regards his revealing it?   (Expositions of the Psalms, 1:158, emphasis mine).[1]

Perhaps the answer is even simpler. A dispensationalist friend sent me a link to some online prophecy talk shows, and hidden among the tired, rehashed sensationalism and context-defying exegesis was a gem of an observation. Jesus was possibly referring to the Jewish wedding tradition:

V. After the wine is drunk, the young man says the words of John 14:2-3.  He will go away and prepare a room for them–adding on a room to his father’s house.  He promises that when the room is finished, he would come back for her, and she would forever be with him.  She belongs to him now, for she has been “bought with a price’, and this purchase has been witnessed and confirmed.

VI. The young man goes to prepare a chador (chamber) in his father’s house, sometimes called a “chuppah” (honeymoon bed).

VII. The girl must now spend her time learning how to be a wife and mother, and to learn how to please her husband.  He may be gone for as long as 2 years or more. The young man, if asked when the day of his wedding will be, often gets rid of nosey inquirers by saying: “No man knows the day or the hour, only my father knows”.  (Matthew 24:36/Mark 13:32)  Thus he puts the responsibility of dealing with nosey friends and family off on his father. It is a personal thing with him, and he only talks about the timing of his coming for His Bride with his father.

It’s certainly plausible.

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[1] John Barach, What the Son Doesn’t Know