A critic wrote that Mel Gibson, with The Passion of the Christ, invented a new cinematic genre: the religious splatter film. This was intentionally disrespectful, but of course there is some truth to it. Perhaps more truth than we realise. God desired a world covered by blood.
“So he drove out the man; and he placed at the east of the garden of Eden Cherubims, and a flaming sword which turned every way, to keep the way of the tree of life.” Genesis 3:24
“And Nadab and Abihu, the sons of Aaron, took either of them his censer, and put fire therein, and put incense thereon, and offered strange fire before the LORD, which he commanded them not. And there went out fire from the LORD, and devoured them, and they died before the LORD.” Leviticus 10:1-2
From Doug Wilson, Cutting Off The Buttons:
The world around us is an unfolding story. The world around us is not a plastic diorama behind the glass in a museum. The kind of objective truth that the faithful Christian insists upon is not to be found in plastic objects that never move, even if their immobility might be a catechetical aid to the bus tours of schoolchildren who come through.
“And the posts of the door were shaken by the voice of him who cried out, and the house was filled with smoke.” Isaiah 6:4
“The temple was filled with smoke from the glory of God and from His power, and no one was able to enter the temple till the seven plagues of the seven angels were completed.” Revelation 15:8
Step 5 in the Bible matrix appears to be the trickiest. Out of the seven points, it was the last one James Jordan figured out (see his article Re-Creation in the Ascension Offering.)
This step concerns the Covenant “body.” It is fundamentally “plural.” It concerns armies, or “hosts.” The symbols all picture multitudes, so some unlikely companions are tied together here: birds and fish, incense clouds, brothers, soldiers, and cold, hard cash.
There’s some weird stuff in Leviticus. It is deliberately so, forcing us to chew on it, which in turn forces us to see the world in terms of symbols, as God intended. Most of us moderns can’t be bothered with it. It’s beyond our capacity. We think such notions are childish when in fact they require an uncommon wisdom.
6. Jesus Christ was not judge of the quick and the dead, because (according to preterists) He only judged the dead.
Jesus judged between the living and the dead in AD70. The true bride and the false bride were bodies of living people. Of course, part of the true bride was the Old Covenant saints (those “under the Altar”) who were dead.
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Victor left some comments on Mother of Invention which I think deserve a new post:
Hello Mike!
I’m a student of typology - endlessly fascinating endeavor! - and am not and never have been Catholic myself. I would like to comment on your point about the Ark of the Covenant. (I just noticed that MS Word wants to capitalize “ark of the covenant”!)
I understand that you recognize the many parallels between the “Visitation” account in Luke 1 and the Ark’s journey narrated in 2 Samuel 6. The cumulative effect of the many commonalities between them makes the typological connection impossible to be denied. I can’t help but recognize its validity.
OTOH, I understand that you’re trying to say that in the specific context of Luke 1 the Ark should be interpreted as an image of Christ, not of Mary.
I can see a link between the person of Christ and the Ark, but, in the precise context of Luke 1, it seems inescapable to me that the comparison is made between the Ark and the person of Mary the mother of Jesus. That’s the whole gist of the correlation between the stories of 2 Samuel and Luke.
Matthew 1-10 follows the Dominion pattern. After Jesus’ testing in the wilderness, in 4:18-8:13 Jesus called His disciples and began mustering a new holy army - the “next generation”.[1] It was reported to Him that the last Old Covenant Nazirite (holy warrior) was dead. It was time for new warriors. Jesus healed the uncleanness of many, creating a new priesthood. His success in the wilderness as a new Head made possible this new body. Peter Leithart writes:
There are two kinds of whiteness in the Bible, and an understanding of this explains a great deal. There is the whiteness of covering and the whiteness of uncovering. And, as mentioned, the Bible makes a great deal out of the concept of covering.
Bone Collector
Purge me with hyssop, and I shall be clean; Wash me, and I shall be whiter than snow.
Touching a corpse made an Israelite unclean. The remains of those slain in battle were marked with lime for two reasons: so that they could be avoided by the clean, and so they could be gathered up and burned to lime by the bone collectors. Jesus said that the righteousness of the Pharisees was like a whitewashed sepulchre. Not only were they full of the ceremonial uncleanness of broken Covenant, their so-called righteousness was actually a mark from God upon them. They would be gathered to their people not by the Father sending His angels to the four corners of the Land, but by the father of lies and his scavengers sent by God to clean the wound.
This image goes right back to Genesis. Like the angels, the Covenant scavengers, though demonic, are also God’s servants. They are the raven of Noah surviving on floating corpses until the water goes down; they are the scavenging dogs that lick up Jezebel’s blood; they are the maggots in misused manna and abandoned grapes (false bread and wine); they are the unclean birds and animals that screech and howl inside the corpse of a defeated Babylon; they are worms inside Herod ‘enthroned’ as a human Gehenna.
The whiteness of the Pharisees was the whiteness of Miriam’s and Gehazi’s skin-plague. It is the whiteness of flesh and bones exposed as unclean to the eyes of God. Satan himself appeared as an angel of light, but like the Pharisees, he was a false lightbearer, a tutor guiding his children the wrong way.
Rieu’s theory of Jesus as a ‘man of letters’ is borne out by the structure of the Sermon on the Mount. As with many of the prophets, His “book” begins with a preamble that follows the themes of Israel’s 7 feasts in Leviticus 23.
Jesus begins with the Sabbath rest of those who have a humble spirit, works through those who mourn for their sins at Passover, and ends with the Atonementcovering of the blood of those who would be persecuted yet to be shed on the Land. And at Tabernacles, their reward is in heaven.
An example would be the seven feasts listed in Leviticus 23 which provide a common literary structure. Revelation 1-11 follows this heptamerous pattern, with Jesus’ ascension in 4-5 as Firstfruits. Revelation 12-19 also follows this pattern, with the rise of the false prophet and harlot as an ironic counterfeit of Firstfruits.
In Revelation 16, in the second major cycle, the “Ascension” section concerns the fall of Babylon and its internal structure is upside down to make the point. Reaching the end of this second cycle, the “Atonement” section is even more tricksy. Because the seven feasts are chiastic (symmetrical) with Pentecost at the centre (actually the scorching fire of un-Pentecost), Passover (Red Sea) and Atonement (Jordan) correspond (feast 2 and feast 6). So even though the seven bowls deconstruct the Old Covenant feasts - running through their order backwards - the “un-Passover” of bowl 6 is actually the “Atonement” Joshua-conquest of the church, the new Israel. So this bowls section is a subtle see-saw, working from 7 down to 1 for the Old Covenant, and from 1 to 7 for the New. This becomes apparent at bowl 6, when, at Un-Passover, (the new church’s day of covering) old Israel is exposed, uncovered, before God.
Amazing.
