The debate over infant baptism at Doug Wilson’s blog continues. Pastor Wilson writes:

“The Gentiles were threatened with removal from the same tree the unbelieving Jews had been in. But if this were the tree of salvation, then the elect can lose their salvation — which cannot be defended biblically. And if this is the tree of the covenant, then the point stands” (To a Thousand Generations, p. 36)

This looks logical enough, but trees are a process of maturity, from seed to fruit. So is righteousness, and so is sin.

Israel was a trunk, a single genealogy stuck, stationary, in one plot of Land. Her history follows the feasts (see Bible Matrix, p. 189-191). In this structure, the coming of Christ brought the final harvest, Booths.

After Jesus’ Day of Atonement (tasting the cup for potential poison, for every man) there was wine for every man, both Jew and Gentile. The Jew-Gentile God-fest came after this High Priestly Day. All nations could now be Booths, as predicted by Zechariah.

During the Restoration era, the tree trunk sprouted branches, and when the Christ came He was looking for fruit. By and large, all He found was an Adam hiding in leaves.

What does a good farmer do? He cuts off the fruitless branches and, in this case, grafts in some stronger, wild ones, just as Rahab and Ruth were grafted in to bring new life to a weakly, inbred, barren tree.

Why was the tree weak? Not because of obedience, but because of disobedience. The Jews became elitist instead of being a house of prayer. They should have been made strong as the nations came to them for Atonement and shelter (Booths). But they came to rely on the empire instead of God for their strength.

In Romans, Paul refers to the Feast of Booths. The fruitless were cut off. Ingrafting requires two cuts: one of the tree (Christ) and one of the new branch. This second cutting was repentance.

Under the Old Covenant, males could be grafted in by circumcision, by adherence to the Law. But it was not about branches. Worship was fleshly and central. It was all about the trunk, about Israel connected to the Land. Males became part of that tree trunk that was always destined to be cut for the sake of the nations.

But, as with a tree, the Covenant grew up, from earthly country to heavenly country. Adam was a singular trunk. Eve is multiplied branches (and I reckon we can also see this in Old Covenant “singular,” stationary scrolls with wooden rollers and New Covenant, portable codices with many “leaves.”) Repentance and baptism grafts us in as branches.

Circumcision had been able to graft Gentiles in as part of the “fleshly” trunk. That was no longer possible because the Covenant had changed. Even when Jews were grafted back in, they had to be repentant. This, too, is no longer possible as there are, Covenantally, no more Jews (being a Jew was a priestly office which was decommissioned in AD70.) If Gentiles (and, logically, there are no more Gentiles either) were cut off because of unbelief, such a cutting came after harvest time. They were cut off because of lack of fruit. We see Jesus, the gardener, pruning the Lamp-trees in Revelation 2-3, warning the pastors that those baby sins would grow to resemble the eighth church He was about to judge, Old Covenant Israel. Paul’s context here is entirely first century. We can apply it now, through church discipline. We see an application of it in the Reformation, another harvest time.

So, under the Old Covenant, this tree was a promise of shelter and fruit. The stump was good, but as it turned out, not all the branches were. The New Covenant is not a trunk, it is a shelter, a Booth.

Covenant membership of infants is trunk stuff. Not only was it Adamic (males) but trunk stuff is over. We are into branch stuff, Eve, the history of a mature Covenant people post-Wedding Supper.

We have no business baptizing babies because they have not repented, they show no fruits of repentance, and they provide no shelter. The requirement for a New Covenant grafting in is repentance and faith. History has moved on, as trees tend to do. Salvation by faith has been constant, but the Old Covenant genealogical tree trunk has become a tree of salvation. The change in the requirements for membership, and in the Covenant sign, reflect this. Jesus can now have a branch in every neighborhood.

Are our babies left out in the cold? No. They shelter under the Covenant tree, “sanctified,” set apart, until they can be grafted in.

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Art by Erica Maule

Related posts on the Feast of Booths:
A Place Called Clouds
Time to Party – 1, 2 and 3
Seven Thousand Who Have Not Bowed to Baal – 2

Here’s the last installment of my answers to Brian Simmon’s 50 objections to a first century “coming in judgment” of Christ. You can find a link under Featured Articles that will list them all for you.

46. Abraham still hasn’t inherited the land God promised him (Gen. 13: 15; Acts 7: 5).

Joshua 21:43 “So the LORD gave to Israel all the land of which He had sworn to give to their fathers, and they took possession of it and dwelt in it.”

I don’t see the relevance of Acts 7:5. The Land was promised to his descendants.

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Isaiah’s visions of Israel’s restoration have nothing to do with a future millennial golden age for the Jews, or even directly with the first century, except by the events of  the Restoration era prefiguring later history. His words were for his hearers, for both their condemnation and their hope in the near future. Why do we get him wrong?

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“The restoration period is the last era of Israel’s history as the people of God and the climactic period of old covenant. The kingdom of God has grown beyond Israel and spread to the nations, who are the God-appointed protectors of His priestly people. Israel’s loss of independence and submission to Gentile powers was not a backward movement in the kingdom program of God. Abraham had been chosen by God so that through him all the nations of the world could be blessed (Gen. 12:3). In the restoration era, this was fulfilled more than at any other time in Israel’s history. Through the dispersion Jews had spread all over the world and they brought with them the knowledge of the true God.

Though Daniel spent most of his life serving the king of Babylon during the time of captivity, he is still a good picture of what the restoration era is about, for he served “Darius the Mede” also. Daniel’s job was that of an advisor, the supreme advisor, to the king of Babylon and then head over the satraps and presidents in the kingdom of Persia (Dan. 6:1-3). Essentially the king intended to designate Daniel as the actual ruler in Persia, as Joseph had been in Egypt: “the king planned to appoint him over the whole kingdom” (Dan. 6:3). This was not a “secular” calling. To advise the king and aid him and the daily affairs of rule was one of the functions of a prophet, as, for example, the prophet Nathan did for David (cf. 2 Sam. 7).

In other words, during the restoration era, Israel as a nation would no longer have civil power, but she was appointed by God to serve as a prophetic witness to the world. It was Israel’s prophetic task to give godly counsel to the leaders of the Babylonian, Persian, Greek, and Roman empires who protected her and, through her position in the empire, spread the knowledge of the true God. The final era of Israel’s history, thus, was a prophetic era in which the word of God went forth more broadly than at any time in Israel’ history.

Her new temple in Jerusalem lacked the glory of the temple of Solomon (cf. Hag. 2:3), but, as was appropriate for a prophetic people in an international age, her real new temple was the “heavenly” temple that was revealed to Ezekiel (40-48). Jews in this era were given a glorious vision of Israel’s worship and its global significance that made explicit the purpose of the tabernacle and temple. Through the worship of the true God, the priestly nation was to bring blessing to all men.”

 

from Introduction to the Bible by Ralph Smith.

“And in that day His feet will stand on the Mount of Olives, which faces Jerusalem on the east. And the Mount of Olives shall be split in two, from east to west, making a very large valley; Half of the mountain shall move toward the north and half of it toward the south.”  Zechariah 14:4

Surprising as His ways are, the Lord always follows procedure. Like Ahasuerus in the book of Esther, anything that is done is done by decree. Although, in the case of Ahasuerus, he needed to consult his elders, whereas God only consults his maturing elders (like Abraham and David–and now the church) to bring us to greater maturity.

A decree is written in the Most Holy, the king’s garden court (head). The elders in the Holy Place respond with liturgy (body). And then they ride out into the world on the swiftest horses to incite a Holy War that divides the world to bring about a New Creation.

In the case of Christ, He is the Word from the throne made flesh. As the Word-Man, He spoke and an earthly priesthood gathered around Him, then rode out into the world and turned it upside down. Then Jesus returned to assess the infant New World and divide the sheep from the goats throughout the empire.

Whatever the Lord does as Word is carried out in His body. Jesus was the rock “divided” to allow living waters to flow into the Land of Israel, which was barren through her harlotry with Greek philosophy and Roman political power. As the husband in Numbers 5 brought his wife to the priest for inspection, Jesus not only sent the cup of testing, He was the cup, the bitter-sweet sword-water. A faithful remnant was made fruitful, a harvest of many children, and the rest were blinded–in fact, cursed with spiritual miscarriage forever.

What we miss is that this same scenario structures the book of Zechariah, and it helps explain one of the most debated texts in the Bible. I have already commented on it here, but have another point to add.

In Zechariah’s visions, a New Covenant (reviving the one made with David and Solomon) is measured out liturgically in the Garden court of the King. The High Priest is given clean robes by the Angel of the Lord, the preincarnate Christ. This results in a new priest-king crowned in the Land (as the High Priest becomes the caretaker of David’s crown until the Messiah comes). As with the consecration of Aaron, this imputed ‘clean’ came from the future death of Christ (as did the reckoning of Abraham’s faith as righteousness, etc). So there is a subtle reference to Christ as the rock broken in the wilderness to make revived Judah fruitful again. Remember, at the time of Haggai and Zechariah, Israel was again in the Land but still alienated from it.

Before the kingly vision, the prophet sees horses and chariots riding out into the New (Restoration) Covenant world between two bronze mountains. The old Ark-Israel has been split in two so the new Lampstand-Israel can govern the world as mediator. Solomon’s two bronze pillars have become Mount Ebal and Mount Gerizim, split to allow the living water in the Temple chariots to flow into the empire, which had become the new Promised Land, a bigger territory to conquer.

Chapters 12-14 of Zechariah follow the same pattern. Only here, in chapter 14, it is the fiery bronze legs of Christ, greater Solomon, that split the rock, and the rock is the poor old, worn out, abused and compromised Restoration Covenant, the final form of the Old Covenant ready to pass away.

Just as Christ was split to allow living waters to flow, so the Altar-rock of barren Judah was also split until AD70 to allow the gospel to flow into the entire World, as Jesus had promised. Sinai was finally thrown into the sea by the faith of the apostles (Matthew 21:21; Revelation 8:8).

The Word was spoken as a decree (Christ), echoed by the elders (first century church) and the Holy War culminated in a New World Order. And, as in Esther, all Israel was saved.

As the saints minister the gospel water and baptism throughout the world, we come from the side of Christ. The blood of Herod’s old Adam (High Priest) split in the garden was followed by a marriage feast.

One of the big problems with modern theology is its habit of categorising parts of the Bible into literary genres. For sure, the Bible contains historical prose, visions, poetry and songs. But many passages won’t actually fit into these neat little pigeon holes without hamstringing their intended purpose. And as it turns out, these “genre-lisations” are excuses to compromise with humanistic pop-philosophy and pop-history.

The three main gripes I have are misuses of the genres poetry, polemic and apocalyptic.

Poetry

There’s plenty of poetry in the Bible. But Genesis chapters 1-3, or even 1-11, are not poetry. Yes, they are carefully structured and often chiastic (symmetric), but they do not possess the forms of Hebrew poetry.1 Classing them as such is an excuse to relegate them to the realm of ideology instead of history. Yes, the Hebrews were “event orientated” in their literature, but the jury is still out on whether this was actually an oral tradition. Maintaining that Adam couldn’t write (or that Christ’s disciples didn’t write a gospel immediately, a la Dr. John Dickson) is a view based on pop-history, not the Bible.2

Polemic

“A polemic is part of the prophet’s speech, but not the speech of a king. Not to imply it is ‘beneath’ the king, but it seems to be a rhetorical crowbar to pry open ears.”3

The prophets were the Lord’s lawyers, bringing a covenant lawsuit to covenant breakers. This is not technically polemic. Or, it was as polemic as a sheriff turning up on your doorstep to serve papers.

It seems that certain passages of the Bible are classed as ‘polemic’ because we have problems with the actual history, at least, the parts that embarrass us because they ride against pop-history.

The same goes for early Genesis. None of Genesis is polemic for the benefit of Moses’ people. It is not addressed to them, and shows no signs of being an attack on ancient gods or a modification of Ancient Near East suzerainty covenants. Genesis is very clearly the original. The problem is our unbelief.

Neither is Revelation a polemic against Rome, despite what Richard Bauckham says.4 It concerns the Old Covenant people and their compromise with Rome. They were Covenant-breakers, and the Covenant structure is laced throughout the Revelation like brandy in a Christmas pudding (Get a review copy of my book Totus Christus to see this in action).

The only real polemic in the Bible might be the speeches of Job’s accusers, as they stitch their case together to scapegoat him. And they were the bad guys, the snakes in Job’s wilderness.

Apocalyptic

This one applies mainly to Isaiah, Ezekiel, Daniel and Revelation. The parts of these prophecies that don’t fit our interpretation of history get relegated to ideology, akin to the Jewish fables of the intertestament era. They lose their grip on actual history.

Sometimes this is understandable. Those who rightly refused to see Ezekiel 38-39′s Gog and Magog as a future battle still found it hard to pin it on something historical (including David Chilton). Jordan figured out that it was fulfilled in the book of Esther, and the Covenant “Egypt to Canaan” structure of Ezekiel confirms this (among many other more minor proofs). The prophecies of Isaiah concern the Restoration Covenant era, but this was an expansion of Israel’s spiritual influence. Because history doesn’t record a physical Jewish empire, the oracles are misunderstood and applied to the first century directly, or to some future Israel (applying oracles that concerned the Restoration of ancient Israel to modern Jews who are actually outside the Covenant!).

The apocalyptic sections of the New Testament suffer that same fate. Dispensationalists don’t understand that these concern a major change in the spiritual realm that was played out upon the first century Jews and the Roman empire, but the confusing imagery used is all firmly rooted in the Bible’s Covenant structure. It speaks a language we don’t understand.

So, these passages may be classed as apocalyptic, but unlike the Archibishop of Canterbury, we cannot conclude that John did see Jesus but it made him insane, and Revelation was the result!5 Nor can we cop out and say Matthew 24 jumped to the end of time, or that Revelation is just a general picture book of the church in the world. These prophecies commanded a moral response from their first audiences. All was to happen soon, upon this generation. Anything after that is just application, however helpful and important this may be. The prophecies are rooted firmly in history (a point which Bauckham makes, despite his misunderstanding of the purpose of the Revelation).

Apocalyptic is by definition a revelation of near historical events. It is not ideology from the subconscious of man for the purpose of rallying the troops or defining cultural identity.

None of these genres are an excuse for gnosticism, which, according to Jordan’s definition is this:

“Throughout history, the Christian Church has had to guard against the heresy of gnosticism. Gnosticism is not an ordinary heresy, because it does not manifest itself as a set of defined beliefs. Rather, gnosticism is a tendency: the tendency to replace the historic facts of Christianity with philosophical ideas. Gnosticism is the tendency to de-historicise and de-physicalise the Christian religion. Gnosticism transforms history into ideology and facts into philosophy. Gnosticism tends to see religion as man’s reflections about God and reality instead of as God’s revelation of Himself and His Word to man. As a tendency, gnosticism has always plagued the Church, and it is alive and well today, openly in ‘liberalism’, and in a more concealed fashion in ‘evangelicalism’.”6

So why is the Bible written the way it is? Peter Leithart writes:

As much as pragmatic Americans might wish it to be otherwise, the Bible is not an answer-book.  It includes advice, and laws, and rules, but a lot of it consists of puzzling prophecy, ancient history, obscure parables and apparently abstract theology.  What are we supposed to get from that?  We ask for an answer key, and God gives us poetry. Can’t we just skip the story and get to the moral?

No we can’t.

God gave us the Bible to guide us, but also – more fundamentally – to form us. By studying the Bible, hearing it, reading it, learning from it, we are being remade.7

So, it is we who are being recategorised, reformed according the Covenant. But we fight against it, and use literary genres to mask our unbelief and make the Bible palatable to an unbelieving world.

I guess this article is a polemic against gnosticism.

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1. “Given the ratio of verbal forms, the statistical evidence for the text [of Genesis] being prose is overwhelming.” See Francis Humphrey, “The meaning of yôm in Genesis 1:1–2:4”, Journal of Creation 21(2):52–55, August 2007. Article online at www.creation.com
2. See James B. Jordan, Toward a Chiastic Understanding of the Gospel According to Matthew, Part 1, Biblical Horizons Newsletter No. 94. “Matthew is the first of the gospels; there can be little doubt of this. The notion that Mark was first because Mark is shorter is nonsensical. Matthew was one of the disciples and was a man of letters. Who better to take notes during Jesus’ lifetime? Moreover, immediately after Pentecost there would have been a demand for a book containing the teaching and works of Jesus. The Jews were a people of the book. Each time God did a great work, a new part of Scripture was written to tell about it. The 3000 converts on the day of Pentecost would have expected such a book, and we can be pretty sure that Matthew set right down to write it. Doubtless he spoke with the other disciples, and perhaps Matthew’s gospel is to some extent a joint work. It is perfectly reasonable to assume that within a month after Pentecost copies of Matthew’s gospel were in circulation.”
3. Sorry, can’t remember where I found this quote.
4. Richard Bauckham, The Theology of the Book of Revelation.  The use of “commercial imagery” to describe worship that is used in Revelation begins in Genesis 2 and appears many times throughout the Old Testament. See Worship as Commerce. If you want a handle on that, get into James Jordan’s lectures.
5. “The rantings of John the Divine about his theological rivals are part of the by-product of the very vision of the Living One that shows these ravings for what they are, by showing the radical and unconfined purpose of God in Jesus Christ” … ” we aren’t called to believe and endorse all they say, only to ask ourselves what we are taught here about the strangeness and sometimes the terror of the Word of God to fragile minds.“  Rowan Williams, Open To Judgment, p. 115-116. (Thanks to David Field for this).
6. James B. Jordan, Creation in Six Days, A Defense of the Traditional Reading of Genesis One, Chapter 4: Gnosticism Versus History.
7. Peter J. Leithart, Exhortation, Second Sunday of Trinity.

De-Ascension – the Temple judged

The third angel blew his trumpet, and a great star fell from heaven, blazing like a torch, 

After the ascension of Christ, Satan was expelled from his “ministry” before God as the Accuser of man. Like the evil twin of the blazing torch that measured Abram’s sacrifices, he was then used by God to bring an end to the Covenant.

and it fell on a third of the rivers and on the springs of water. The name of the star is Wormwood. A third of the waters became wormwood, and many people died from the water, because it had been made bitter.

These first three trumpets concerned the Land (Judah), the Sea (the world empire) and the springs of water (the Temple). This same order began the song of ascension, Psalm 24:

“The [Land] is the Lord’s and the fullness thereof, the world and those who dwell therein, for he has founded it upon the seas and established it upon the rivers.”

These three levels describe the garden of Eden as it was recreated in the Restoration. The firmament above the empire extended over the Land of Israel and the Sea of the nations. Springs of water came up from under the Land (Genesis 2:6) to support the life of the Temple. From there, a single river flowed from the Laver towards the east, towards Babylon. Like Solomon in his marriages, Judah began imitating the daughters of men instead of converting them by her witness. The doctrines of the empire were flowing upstream into the Temple. But with the coming of Christianity, the inadvertent sin became “high-handed”

and God gave them up to their demonic teachings (Mark 7:7; Titus 1:14). James Jordan writes:

“The bitter waters are the poisonous doctrine that flows from the corrupted Temple, in contrast to the laver of cleansing water that God had put there. Here also we find the first of the seven names of Satan in Revelation: Wormwood, a poisonous plant.”1

The reference to wormwood is high calibre and loaded. It takes us back again to the curses upon idolaters in Deuteronomy 29 (v. 18). It also brings the Edomite (Esau) Herods into the picture as the visible cause of the bitterness through their “marriages” with the daughters of men—Hellenistic Rome (Genesis 26:35)2. In Exodus 1, Pharaoh made the Hebrews’ lives bitter with hard bondage. In the wilderness, the Israelites faced death because the waters were bitter (Marah). In Ruth 1, Naomi wanted to be called Mara (bitter) because the Lord had made her barren. There are others, but the most significant might be Numbers 5. The priest administered “the bitter water that brings a curse” to the woman suspected of adultery.

Joseph’s Mara (Mary) was innocent, but Herod’s harlot was guilty.

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1  James B. Jordan, The Vindication of Jesus Christ, p. 49-50.
2  Literally translated, Esau’s wives were “bitterness of spirit” to Isaac and Rebekah.

“Now when He rose early on the first day of the week, He appeared first to Mary Magdalene, out of whom He had cast seven demons.” Mark 16:9

The relationship of the Ark to the Lampstand is important. The Ark is the single ‘light’ in the darkness of the Most Holy Place. It rules the first three days of creation. The Lampstand is the seven governing lights (sun, moon and five bright planets) and it rules the next three days of creation. The Ark is the Adam-light (Sabbath) to the Eve-lights (Pentecost). The Ark ascends first (head) and the Lampstand ascends later (body). This might sound weird but it runs right throughout the Bible. (For this pattern in the exile and restoration, see here.)

Now to the New Testament. The Sermon on the Mount follows the Creation Week/Tabernacle pattern. When Jesus gets to the Lampstand, He says this:

“The lamp of the body is the eye. If therefore your eye is good, your whole body will be full of light. But if your eye is bad, your whole body will be full of darkness. If therefore the light that is in you is darkness, how great is that darkness!” (Matt. 6:22-23)

Now I want to relate that to this statement in Matthew 12:45:

“Then he goes and takes with him seven other spirits more wicked than himself, and they enter and dwell there; and the last state of that man is worse than the first. So shall it also be with this wicked generation.”

Jesus had cast the evil spirit (false Ark – “Adam-light”) out of the house of God, and the Temple had remained intact. It was completed and glorified by the Herods. Covered in white marble and gold, it dazzled the eyes when it reflected the early morning and late afternoon sun. It was finished in AD64, and the demon returned with seven others worse than itself (false Lampstand – “Eve-lights”) to a house that was clean, decorated and empty (Matthew 12:45). How great was their darkness! (Matthew 6:23). The Jews had blasphemed both witnesses—the Son (bridegroom) and the Spirit (matchmaker)—and the true glory-light had departed. They had substituted the prophets with their own traditions, and received the “Emmanuel” they deserved—the Accuser instead of the Advocate.

Just as the Lampstand “conquered” Belshazzar and led the vessels to Ezra’s restored Temple, Herod’s house was a counterfeit Restoration. His seven-fold demonic Lampstand was a false Pentecost. In the darkness, he could not see the writing on the wall (Matthew 6:23).

Jesus cast seven demons out of Mary Magdalene, picturing the Jewish ‘greater Eve’ who would believe. But the harlot who refused was blinded and her kingdom taken away. TAOTA