Today I was thinking again about Tolkien’s Fellowship of the Ring. Do you remember the scene where the fellowship enters the land of Lothlórien? Gimli is the only dwarf in the fellowship and he is singled out by the elves. Their hatred for the dwarves causes them to see him as an enemy when his labors are with them as a friend.

As a result, they single him out to be treated inhumanely, wanting to blindfold only him as they travel through Lothlórien. He despises the mistreatment and threatens to leave the fellowship and Lothlórien over it. To this, the elves respond that it is too late, and that he will die should he try.

The elves’ hatred for dwarves causes them to see only a caricature of the real Gimli. Truly a friend and an ally, they choose to treat him as an enemy, a criminal. In this, they are wrong and eventually concede the reality of the situation based on the testimony of Elrond, who surely had come to love him. Later, Gimli would look into the eyes of Lady Galadriel and note that he looked “suddenly into the heart of an enemy and saw there love and understanding.”

We can often be guilty of the same behavior ourselves. When we fail to love our neighbors—our enemies, even!—we are susceptible to seeing only caricatures of them rather than the reality of who they are. We see enemies where we should see friends. We see fools where we should see the wise. We see obstacles where we should see shoulders to lean on or needs to be met. We see books, and we are judging them by their covers.

Sometimes we are guilty of such blindness, and we’ve justified it. We argue that we don’t hate the person, we just like him less than others. To make such a mistake, we must first assume that hatred is an emotion opposite of love, a difference of kind, not of degree. From a Christian perspective (which isn’t necessarily to preclude it being the perspective of others as well), hatred is a difference of degree not of kind. To love less is to hate.

In the twenty-ninth chapter of Genesis, Jacob has married Rachel and Leah. Scripture records in verses 30–31:

So Jacob went in to Rachel also, and he loved Rachel more than Leah, and served Laban for another seven years. When the LORD saw that Leah was hated, He opened her womb, but Rachel was barren.

Jacob’s loving Leah less than Rachel is a difference of degree, not kind—a difference that God describes as hatred. Thus, when I use the word hatred, think of it as “loving less.” To hate your neighbor is to love him less. To hate your enemy is to love her less. Less than whom? Less than anyone else—including yourself—excepting the Lord.

In our hatred of others, we do not see who they really are, we see deformed images of them, the results of our imagination. Our loving others less, our indifference toward them, our lukewarmness toward them, are all a kind of blindness that prevents us from seeing in full color, high definition. Instead, we see gray-scale, blurry, snowy pictures that we pretend are the full image.

Blogger Kiersten writes:

Good books wound the reader. Great books leave scars that the reader will carry and revisit throughout life, and that is precisely why we have chosen to allow our children to begin to bear these wounds while they are relatively young.

…it is important to us that we help the children learn how to process the griefs, pain, sin, brokenness, injustices, and immoral behavior of the human race. We want them to ask the questions: “How can we let this happen?” “Why does it have to be this way?” “Where is the justice in this?” “What kind of people do/allow/turn a blind eye to this?” “How do we function in this kind of society?”

More importantly, we want to teach the children to cultivate hope. That seems a little contradictory to the questions above, but they are crucially linked. Yesterday, Pat and I discussed the gamut of reactions that people have to the sort of injustice and plain wrongness he/she encountered in the book [Of Mice and Men], and that is a true reflection of some aspects of society. We talked about the pain he/she was experiencing and contemplated multiplying that pain over and over as a person experiences more and more painful injustices in their life. We talked about the ways people have chosen to deal with that pain, including drugs, fatalism, destructive relationships, and isolation.

The pain is a result of our deep desire for the world to be fair and just. We want the weak to be taken care of and for the strong to be merciful and gentle. We want crimes avenged, and we want injured parties to be restored. We want law applied, and we also want law flexible enough to take into account all the circumstances that provoked a criminal’s action.  Reality is that injustice is everywhere and it cannot be escaped, and that hurts.

When I talk about cultivating hope in the children, I mean that I want them to have their eyes open to the reality of sin in the world, and I want their longings for justice to be directed to the judge of all the earth, who will do right. I want them to be agents of justice and mercy as they are able, but I want them to know and operate in faith that some injustices, some hurts, will only be healed when the King finally puts all things to rights.

I want them to be inoculated with hope as they encounter the world.  This is why I have been and will continue to be an advocate of literature as a core tool in the raising of strong and capable Christian men and women. In books, the children get a glimpse of the realities of the outside world while still in a nurturing and safe environment. They learn to process what they see and become more and more equipped to engage the world with knowledge and hope.

You can find this over at Doug Wilson’s blog. I’m reposting it here because I’ve just spent over an hour responding to Doug R. and John B.’s good objections to comments on Shakin’ The Tree, so I’ve not got time to write anything new. Also, posting it here means I can find it more easily in future! So, at the risk of becoming the anti-paedobaptist/anti-hyperpreterist blog…

Baptism Points Away

Doug writes:

“The meaning of Abraham’s circumcision was not, ‘Abraham got saved.’ Rather, it was, ‘Salvation will come to the world!’ It is true that Abraham was personally saved, and that he was saved by faith. But he was saved because he believed in the objective promise — that is, in the coming Christ . . . We must always reject the natural tendency to make the covenantal signs into a seal of our own personal righteousness” (To a Thousand Generations, pp. 44-45).

Certainly.

But would a repentant, Spirit-filled, baptized baptist ever mistake his or her baptism for a seal of their personal righteousness? Highly unlikely.

Baptism is like a knighthood. It means you’re ready for service with the authority of the king’s court and you’ve got a job to do as a New Covenant priest-king. Circumcision only got Israel as far as the Altar, and that was only the males, who were all Isaacs. It was about physical offspring.

Baptism gets males and females past the Laver into the actual tent, the Holy Place, the inner court, where God’s advisors bargain with Him in prayer as Abraham and David did. No place for babies. It is about spiritual offspring, which is why all those who believe can be the children of Abraham. “Offspring” has been set alight and is no longer fleshly. Even an Ethiopian eunuch can serve in the new court, and have such offspring.

I think this is exactly where the problem lies. As I have mentioned before, the New Covenant sign has nothing to do with parenting. Circumcision had everyone crowding around the delivery room, waiting to see what came out of the womb. Was it the Messiah?

Baptism sees Jesus grown up and baptized, and then imparting all of this to us. Then He tells us to go out and bring lost people in as believers. The New Covenant is not so much about a people as it is about a unified army. Baptism is not an initiation. It is a commission.

Infant baptists are still crowding around the womb. This errant doctrine, to some extent, keeps them celebrating in the flesh, like barren Abraham. You can crowd around the womb forever, but Christ has dealt with the flesh. He is not here. He is risen. Baptism moved us from the womb to the tomb. That’s where we Baptists crowd around, and the party is much more fun.

Yes, children are a blessing. Christian parenting is a blessing. Children who actually come to faith are even more of a blessing. But the New Covenant has moved way beyond all of that. It allows us to do more than simply maintain the status quo in our physical succession.

Paedobaptism, in that sense, doesn’t really point away at all.

Doug Wilson writes:

“When it comes to child-rearing, between the Old and New Testaments there is total and complete continuity on the subject of godly parenting. There is no discontinuity. It needs to be emphasized again that there is continuity in the promises of God with regard to parenting. Not surprisingly, this has ramifications for the subject of infant baptism” (To a Thousand Generations, p. 10).

I am currently reading this book. Lots of good stuff in there, even for a Baptist. BUT…

Raising godly kids is a Covenant responsibility (or ‘Ethic’). But I don’t think there is a direct link between the Covenant sign and godly parenting. Unless, under the New Covenant, we are now also required to parent our little girls. The sign is for the mediators of the Covenant. Males mediate a succession of flesh. Warrior Bridegroom. Now Spirit-filled males and females mediate a succession of Spirit. Warrior Bride. [1]

This doesn’t mean there are no promises for the kids. The sign highlights the promises, not the kids. Among other things, a Covenant is a shelter.

The Old Covenant promised salvation through a manchild. It came. The New Covenant promises resurrection for the converted, which is what baptism pictures. Better promises.

The Old Covenant was for the immature: structure and discipline for children, for the born. In some sense, our kids are still under the Old Covenant, or what it pictured, until they are born again. Children of flesh are symbols of children of God. Forming, then filling; natural, then spiritual.

Reviving an emphasis on godly parenting is crucial, and highlighting the efficacy of baptism is too. But conflating parenting (a Covenant responsibility) with the Covenant oath only causes confusion. Ask any ancient Jewess.

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Pic: Christina Ramos Art

[1] New Covenant baptism has more  in common with the Nazirite vow (Numbers 6) than it does with circumcision. “When either a man or woman…” (Numbers 6:2). Baptism is for warriors:
“But when they believed Philip as he preached the things concerning the kingdom of God and the name of Jesus Christ, both men and women were baptized.” (Acts 8:12 ); “I persecuted this Way to the death, binding and delivering into prisons both men and women…” (Acts 22:4)

The recent Australian federal election resulted in a hung parliament, with the balance of power held by a small number of elected independents. Not being forced to toe the party line, each of these men is free to stand for the needs of his own electorate. This can certainly slow down the process of government in the courts of men, but not in the courts of God.

As Christians, we are taught to toe the party line. This is a false piety. Our Father actually loves a lively, argumentative parliament. The process of maturity is supposed to bring us to the point where we are wise judges whom He can include in His government (pictured in baptism), standing on the crystal sea as joint heirs with His Son, Great Prophets whose very words change history.

Back room deals and bargaining with God are an abuse of prayer. Or are they? Not when those disputing with God are men whose hearts are like those of the Father. Abraham and David did it. God’s desire is that we should be like them.

As Covenant heads, Christ, the ministers, the husbands and the fathers to whom He has given authority, have the same responsibility as the ascended Son of God: advocacy. Sadly, our lack of perseverance in prayer becomes an unspoken fatalism. As is the way with our appointed political advocates, the church culture’s party line is to pray like Sir Humphrey Appleby in Yes, Minister. Doug Wilson says,

There is a great difference between complaining about God and complaining to God. Arguing with God, complaining to God, is not inconsistent with piety. We must let the Bible teach us how to relate to God.

When the children of Israel are in the wilderness complaining about the food; when you’re driving around downtown in the rain and the windshield is fogged up and the kids are irritating you from the back seat, and you are muttering under your breath, you are not bringing your concerns to God.

We all understand that such murmuring is sinful. We don’t want to be like the Israelites whose bodies were scattered in the wilderness because they displeased God. But if we turn to the Psalms, we find that David and the other psalmists bring their complaints, concerns and agonies to God. They let God know all about it.

If you try to avoid murmuring about God by not saying anything at all, you are actually trying to be holier than the Bible, holier than the men whom God has set before us as a godly example.

We should all know what happens to those who murmur, complain, moan and grumble. Their bodies are scattered over the desert. But the alternative to this is not stiff-upper-lip stoicism.

In Psalm 55:2, David makes a noise so that God will hear him. If you want to pray like God’s saints in the Bible, lay out your case before Him. Reason it through. Don’t pray like you were a block of wood or you will get answers of the sort that would satisfy a block of wood: tepid, anaemic responses.

The Psalms teach us to sing and pray and argue rightly. The faithful servant in prayer does not want to simply “say the right words.” He wants an audience. He wants God to hear, and prays as though he wants God to hear. He wants to offer up prayers that cannot be refused. You come like the widow who wanted justice from the unjust judge: she wouldn’t leave him alone. Jesus said, “Be like that!”

But we, thinking that it reveals a high doctrine of the sovereignty of God, fall into, not Calvininsm, but stoicism. “Whatever was determined from the foundation of the world is going to happen and I can’t stop it.”

But that is a distortion of the sovereignty of God. He does not teach us to pray, “I am the sovereign God. Just sit there like a block of wood and take it.” That is not what we are called to do.

The great Puritan Goodwin said that when we pray to God we should “sue him” for things. A Puritan said that? Yes, they were Biblical people.

Now, we shouldn’t sue God in the court of the devil, or in the court of the world. But we should go into the courts of heaven and plead our case with God. You might say, “I’m not competent to plead a case of any complexity.” Well, John Bunyan said it’s better that your heart be without words than your words be without heart. It’s not prim and proper words that count. It’s heart.

This is the first thing we learn from Psalm 55. David is in trouble, and he itemises his troubles to God. He wants to tell God all about it and he wants God to do something about it. He pleads his case with Him. “Lord, hear me. Give ear to my prayer, O God, and hide not thy face from me.” Where are you going, God? Don’t hide! Hear me out, here. Attend to me, I tell you!

Now, does that sound godly to you? No it doesn’t, and the reason is that we have our own tradition of what a pious prayer sounds like:

“Dear Father in heaven, Whatever happens, happens. And bless everybody indiscriminately in such a way as I can’t tell whether or not anything has ever happened.”

We’re afraid of getting a “no,” so we build escape hatches into all our prayers. If you get a “no,” you are getting some feedback and you are learning how to pray. What you want to do is submit yourself to the text of Scripture, pray the way God’s people prayed, and as you do so you will discover that you are imitating it rightly in some instances and wrongly in others, and you make adjustments.

Remember the acronym, G.A.S.P. God Answers Specific Prayer. If that doesn’t sound pious, then we have something wrong with our definition of piety. And I submit that we have allowed ourselves to drift into these misunderstandings of piety because we have not been singing the Psalms. We are not steeped in the Psalms. If kids in the Christian church were steeped in the Psalms, marinating in them for ten or fifteen or twenty years as they grew up in the Covenant community, these false traditions of piety could not take root. You could not get away with telling people, “This is how you pray. Don’t say anything specific.”

There are actually seminars for aspiring politicians which teach them how to answer questions without saying anything. When someone on television talks for three or four minutes and nothing clear ever comes out, that’s not natural. One has to study to do that, and they do study. And we have our own schools which teach Christians how to pray that way.

Argue like David did. Argue like the apostle Paul did. Don’t complain about God. Bring your case to God. [1]

For me, one of the most striking examples of such prayer comes from the life of John G. Paton. What made it so memorable for me was the common, uncomplicated and very achievable ministry of advocacy it portrays, and the results that simple, persistent dealing with God can have as a foundation for the courageous faith of those for whom we advocate, and for the sovereign God in changing the history of His world. John Piper writes:

John G. Paton was a missionary to the New Hebrides, today called Vanuatu, in the South Seas. He was born in Scotland in 1824. I gave my Pastors’ Conference message about him because of the courage he showed throughout his 82 years of life. When I dug for the reasons he was so courageous, one reason I found was the deep love he had for his father.

The tribute Paton pays to his godly father is, by itself, worth the price of his Autobiography, which is still in print. Maybe it’s because I have four sons (and Talitha), but I wept as I read this section. It filled me with such longing to be a father like this.

There was a “closet” where his father would go for prayer as a rule after each meal. The eleven children knew it and they reverenced the spot and learned something profound about God. The impact on John Paton was immense.

Though everything else in religion were by some unthinkable catastrophe to be swept out of memory, were blotted from my understanding, my soul would wander back to those early scenes, and shut itself up once again in that Sanctuary Closet, and, hearing still the echoes of those cries to God, would hurl back all doubt with the victorious appeal, “He walked with God, why may not I?” (Autobiography, p. 8 )

How much my father’s prayers at this time impressed me I can never explain, nor could any stranger understand. When, on his knees and all of us kneeling around him in Family Worship, he poured out his whole soul with tears for the conversion of the Heathen world to the service of Jesus, and for every personal and domestic need, we all felt as if in the presence of the living Savior, and learned to know and love him as our Divine friend.” (Autobiography, p. 21)

One scene best captures the depth of love between John and his father, and the power of the impact on John’s life of uncompromising courage and purity. The time came for the young Paton to leave home and go to Glasgow to attend divinity school and become a city missionary in his early twenties. From his hometown of Torthorwald to the train station at Kilmarnock was a 40-mile walk. Forty years later, Paton wrote,

My dear father walked with me the first six miles of the way. His counsels and tears and heavenly conversation on that parting journey are fresh in my heart as if it had been but yesterday; and tears are on my cheeks as freely now as then, whenever memory steals me away to the scene. For the last half mile or so we walked on together in almost unbroken silence – my father, as was often his custom, carrying hat in hand, while his long flowing yellow hair (then yellow, but in later years white as snow) streamed like a girl’s down his shoulders. His lips kept moving in silent prayers for me; and his tears fell fast when our eyes met each other in looks for which all speech was vain! We halted on reaching the appointed parting place; he grasped my hand firmly for a minute in silence, and then solemnly and affectionately said: “God bless you, my son! Your father’s God prosper you, and keep you from all evil!”

Unable to say more, his lips kept moving in silent prayer; in tears we embraced, and parted. I ran off as fast as I could; and, when about to turn a corner in the road where he would lose sight of me, I looked back and saw him still standing with head uncovered where I had left him – gazing after me. Waving my hat in adieu, I rounded the corner and out of sight in instant. But my heart was too full and sore to carry me further, so I darted into the side of the road and wept for time. Then, rising up cautiously, I climbed the dike to see if he yet stood where I had left him; and just at that moment I caught a glimpse of him climbing the dike and looking out for me! He did not see me, and after he gazed eagerly in my direction for a while he got down, set his face toward home, and began to return – his head still uncovered, and his heart, I felt sure, still rising in prayers for me. I watched through blinding tears, till his form faded from my gaze; and then, hastening on my way, vowed deeply and oft, by the help of God, to live and act so as never to grieve or dishonor such a father and mother as he had given me. (pp. 25-26)

The impact of his father’s faith and prayer and love and discipline was immeasurable. O fathers, read and be filled with longing. [2]

Quite a few people have asked me for a more clear definition of what Ascension means in the Bible Matrix. This is it. A Covenant head who is bread and wine: the ceaseless, specific advocacy of an upright man in the throneroom of God for those whom God has given him as a body. After twenty-six years of being a Christian, I feel like I am only just beginning in prayer.

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[1] Doug Wilson, Psalm 55: Mischief in the Midst of It. Christkirk sermon podcast, 12 October, 2010.
[2] John Piper, John G. Paton’s Father.

“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.

I was expecting a sort of British Dead Poets Society, which it is, but from a different angle. In DPS, a heartless military-minded “bully” of a dad led to the suicide of his son who wanted to be an actor. In THB, the teacher again becomes a substitute for a father figure, but in this case there are two teachers, one at the end of his career and one at the beginning. Both are brilliant, but both are what the school’s headmaster might politely refer to as “shrinking violets.” One loves poetry and old movies and the other loves history and “devil’s advocate” debate. The students initially find it difficult to reconcile these two approaches to learning.

The history boys are a deliberately varied bunch. At least in this one there is a token Christian, and he’s not a hypocrite. But his faith is basically ineffectual, of no real benefit. The main focus is on one student who, due to his looks and his brazenness, is always the centre of attention. Every film has a message to preach, and in this picture, it mostly boils down to courage. What is wrong is that his boldness is demonstrated in destructive ways: sleeping with the school secretary and blackmailing the bullying, philandering principal. He also (absurdly) attempts to “reward” the gay teacher whose intellect he admires, with the argument that he should not just debate courageously but live courageously. Just as those Christian films where the “preachy” scene makes you cringe, the gratuitous preaching of perversity in this one is just as artificial and cringeworthy. And the student’s weak-willed “human projects” capitulate in pretty much every case. (The one true victory of the film is when the younger teacher perceives that the central student’s academic mindset is a sublime meld of the strengths of the opposite approaches of the two teachers.)

The only character with any real balls is the female history teacher, who regards history as a sad record of male incompetence. Ian Smith writes:

Francis de la Tour is in many ways the traditionalist amongst the teaching staff, somewhat worn down and disillusioned by the misogynist world she lives and works in. She’s achieved success in getting the boys to the point where they’re being considered for Oxbridge, but there’s a recognition that she can achieve no more because her strict regimen of learning the facts, writing the essays and doing the hard work of learning the basics is not enough in a world that wants original thought and ideas.

Her sharp eyes and measured wit cut through the smokescreens the various males use to excuse their spectacular failures in character, but she knows they won’t listen. In Western Culture, the best man for the job sometimes is a woman, but that’s not how the world is meant to be.

We all need to see films where people, men in particular, are seen to make costly decisions to do what is right, and despite their character flaws. That is true heroism. Courage, like love, is not an end in itself. It must be discerning and selfless. We need father figures who are neither bullies nor shrinking violets nor the cardboard cutout examples of “perfect fatherhood” from old TV shows. We find these true father figures in the Bible, but there are rare examples of this protected species alive today.

Darren Doane made some helpful comments in an article for Epistula, after making Collision with Doug Wilson and Christopher Hitchens.

…I came to Christ about six years after I graduated high school. I was a budding young filmmaker fully steeped in the ways of the world—Hollywood to be specific. That means I was a very bad man. Through God’s grace He grabbed me one day, threw me to the ground and claimed me as His own, and commissioned me to keep making films and talk about Him. (For those of you already assessing my potential run-on sentence, I would appeal to the Pauline epistles for my defense.)

Within the first few months of my Christian life I was given an audio debate between Greg Bahnsen, a Christian apologist, and noted atheist Gordon Stein. I was amazed at what I heard. Greg’s defense of the Christian faith was just music to my ears. I loved it. Some people love football or gardening or Halo3. I just loved hearing people argue. A mentor later in my life would say arguing is a virtue when done with respect and kindness. So back to that audio tape. Over and over I listened to it. It became my new Christian Led Zeppelin. This was my “Stairway to Heaven.” I would imagine what it would have been like to film the debate. How I would have done it. The music, the angles, the back-story. As the years rolled on I began to think about recreating the debate with actors. They do it with those Lincoln/Douglas debate things, why not this?

Fast forward.

About a year and a half ago I was having dinner with David Hagopian. I had met David at a memorial dinner for Greg Bahnsen. We were at the same table. David was the moderator for the Bahnsen-Stein debate. So that put him in the rock star category for me. I knew his voice from those tapes, and now I knew his face. Around that time my wife and I began to have children. This led quickly to books on children, marriage, education, church, etc. I ran into Doug Wilson’s books and had my life shattered. But that’s another story. Then education. I knew David Hagopian had experience in this area and was the closest guy I could get some advice from. We met and started talking debates and how boring they are. I had suggested that a pure cross examination debate style would be really what people want. Get to the good stuff. See people defend their positions.

Jump Ahead a Few Months.

David and I keep talking about filming debates. We start talking about Doug Wilson and his online debate with Christopher Hitchens, and before we know it, we are all talking about making a film. Wilson, Hagopian, Gary Demar, Aaron Rench, and Nate Wilson quickly became the players. Aaron Rench had set up the original debate with Doug and Christopher and was continuing to develop a relationship with Hitchens. Aaron lays it out, and Hitchens agrees to spend three days with Wilson, debating, hanging out, eating, and traveling. So the film is ready to be made, and the players are lined up.

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. I was experiencing interaction with ungodly men who want to see Christianity destroyed and exposed as ancient Stone Age myths. I could see Doug’s reactions, his temperament, his smile, his grace, his picking and choosing, and the outcome of what he did. I was being educated in a way that a book had never done. It was like meat being applied to bones. I did not have a Christian upbringing. A godly man to imitate was hard to find.

The triune Christian life is earthy and dirty. It is action. It moves and gets involved. It engages. And it takes dominion. I have spent more time with Doug Wilson by way of an editing bay and looking at footage of him living the Christian life than I have in person. But what has been captured in the film is Doug Wilson loving anti-theist Christopher Hitchens and looking to win the man, not the argument. And that is something I needed to learn—something I needed to be educated on how to do and what it looks like.

It is interesting that Doug Wilson has not only been accused of being a bully, but also of not dealing with certain situations harshly enough. He’s a leader without being a militaristic bully and he’s a man of letters without being a shrinking violet. He lives, writes and debates boldly, and sings and laughs just as boldly. He’s the full picture. Our culture really hates him sometimes, but he shrugs off criticism that would keep lesser men (like certain Democrat Presidents) up at night. I think he’s a great example of what they are looking for, a signpost to the only real Man, Jesus Christ, the perfect image of the Father.

Someone should take the ideas in Wilson’s wonderful book, Future Men, and make a movie. Imagine the West revived by godly fatherhood, where the problems in sad films like these are not just communicated in confused rhetoric but also seen to be solvable. As “old movies” they will be the history of a broken culture that had no future and is truly dead.

One of the best things you get from James Jordan is a big handle on the Tabernacle.[1] It was a miniature of the creation. It was also a further development of the Garden of Eden, being more glorious than the Garden itself (the trees were now worked timber, and the wood was covered in precious metal).

Jordan’s theory that Satan was to be a tutor to Adam and Eve, but fell in the moment he deceived them, finds support in the Tabernacle layout. (Angels tutor God’s people throughout the Old Testament.) Satan was the secondary lightbearer, the Lampstand, facing north.

Adam was to be broken bread and poured out wine, the Face of the Man, facing south, the Table of Showbread (the facebread).

Between them, Eve, the mother of all living, was the Altar of Incense. As element 5, Day 5, she is a “multitude” in one body. She is awesome as an army with banners. Women possess all their ova from birth.[2]

So, we have Eve between the serpent and the Man in a tug-o’-war where Adam doesn’t even pick up the rope. It is victory by default for the serpent.

What is even more interesting is that the pillars the Lord told David to build at the Temple entry correspond to the Table and the Lampstand. Priests were anointed by Jachin, the northern pillar. Kings were anointed by Boaz, the southern pillar. Jordan points out that over time these bronze pillars would have weathered and become a shade of green. Here are the two great trees at the centre of the garden. Adam was given access to the Tree of Life (Jachin, priestly bread), and Satan offered access to the kingly Tree of Judicial Knowledge (Boaz, a king’s “decree” cup of wine). [3]

What was at stake was the future of humanity. Nazis, Communists and the radical left understand that education is the future. The future is stolen when children are removed from their believing parents (as happened recently in Sweden, I believe) to indoctrinate them.

Children are the future. Satan understood this. Through Adam’s failure as Covenant Head to judge Satan, the future was filled with widows and orphans. And in Adam’s place, Satan became the corrupt tutor of all living, the father of lies.

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[1] Jordan’s Garden of God lectures available here.
[2] The High Priest reflected this structure as well, with the 12 gemstones (tribes) on his chest. As a “better” Adam, he carried the children before God—on his bosom— as an advocate. For more on the High Priest as Tabernacle, see Gold, Onyx and Bdellium. For Greater Eve as a “Trumpets” army see Ish and Isha.
[3] The laver symbolised the “springs of water” under the garden, and the bronze altar the outlying land. At a more complex level, the Tabernacle layout also symbolised heaven and earth. See the diagram from Totus Christus in Trinitarian Judgments.

I saw in my dream, that the Interpreter took Christian by the hand again, and led him into a very dark room, where there sat a man in an iron cage. Now the man seemed very sad. He sat with his eyes looking down to the ground, and his hands folded together, and he sighed as if his heart would break.

Then said Christian, “Who is this?”

“Talk with him and see,” said the Interpreter.

“What used you to be?” asked Christian.

“I was once a flourishing professor, both in my own eyes, and also in the eyes of others,” answered the man. “I was on my way, as I thought, to the Celestial City and I was confident that I would get there.”

“But what did you do to bring yourself to this condition?” Christian asked.

“I failed to keep watch,” the man replied. “I followed the pleasures of this world, which promised me all manner of delights. But they proved to be an empty bubble. And now I am shut up in this iron cage—a man of despair who can’t get out.”

No further explanations were given. No one said who put him there. But the Interpreter whispered to Christian:

“Bear well in mind what you have seen.” [1]

.  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .

Another thought related to the ideas in Behind Closed Doors.

The whole aim of the construction process, whether in sex, foetal development, education, business, art, music, family or state government, is the ultimate revelation of a mature glory. We are given the opportunity to create, and that involves certain God-given freedoms. If the freedoms are abused, what we construct for ourselves is a cage. Lust is a cage. A dysfunctional family or state is a cage. Enforced egalitarian socio-economics is a cage. Undisciplined children are a cage.

Jesus laid down His life for this world, and the freedoms of western culture have been a direct outcome. In its final stages, we have rebelliously inverted each of these freedoms (including the economic ones) and turned both our Christian protection (including our God-given wealth) and Christian mandate into a cage. Ancient Israel did the same. Why does this inversion process seem such a logical path for fallen human nature?

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“I gave the sermon on Hagar and Ishmael today… I began my remarks by pointing out the similarity between the stories of Hagar and Ishmael sent off into the wilderness and Abraham going off with Isaac to sacrifice him, as he believes. My point was that Abraham is in effect called upon to sacrifice both his sons, and that the Lord in both instances sends angels to intervene at the critical moment to save the child. Abraham’s extreme old age is an important element in both stories, not only because he can hardly hope for more children, not only because the children of old age are unspeakably precious, but also, I think, because any father, particularly an old father, must finally give his child up to the wilderness and trust to the providence of God. It seems almost a cruelty for one generation to beget another when parents can secure so little for their children, so little safety, even in the best circumstances. Great faith is required to give the child up, trusting God to honour the parents’ love for him by assuring that there will indeed be angels in that wilderness.

I noted that Abraham himself had been sent into the wilderness, told to leave his father’s house also, that this was the narrative of all generations, and that it is only by the grace of God that we are made instruments of His providence and participants in a fatherhood that is always ultimately His.”

 

Reverend John Ames, in Gilead by Marilynne Robinson, p. 128-129.

“Since I was a little girl, friends, relatives and neighbours would bring their problems to Mother. She had a rare combination of being completely moral and completely nonjudgmental at the same time — the exact opposite of liberals who have absolutely no morals and yet are ferociously judgmental. 

You could tell Mother anything, get good counsel and not end up feeling worse about yourself.”

–Ann Coulter