The difference between separation and preparation…

In a post on Kuyperian Commentary entitled Baptism Is God’s Work, my friend Steve Jeffery writes:

My friend Fred Thompson made a tremendously illuminating comment about baptism recently. With his permission (thanks Fred) I wanted to say a few words about it. Here’s what he said:

“I keep thinking of the Red Sea baptism, a baptism of a nation, a mixed multitude, a nation that did not know where she was going, a nation that did not understand baptism. It was a new nation that left Egypt and she needed grace above all else, grace given through water and manna to all.”

Fred has in mind the well-known typological connection between baptism and the crossing of the Red Sea during the exodus (e.g. 1 Cor 10). Pressing this point, it becomes obvious that many evangelical assumptions about baptism are at best only a part of the biblical picture.

For example, we readily treat baptism as an expression of our faith towards God, part of our response to him. But baptism is in the first instance an act of God’s grace towards us. Though of course Israel was called to trust the LORD, it would be a strange reading of the Red Sea crossing that placed the emphasis on the faithfulness of the Israelites’ response to God.

Steve makes some good points about the over-emphasis on baptism as a human act. But over-emphasising God’s work in baptism is simply falling off the other side of the horse.

As a “credobaptist” I believe the Bible clearly teaches that baptism involves both God’s work and the work of the baptizand (the one being baptised). It is a combination of both the subjective (credo) and the objective (baptism). I believe that baptism is a lay ordination. This means that pitting the objective and subjective against each other is going to minimise the scope of the rite as something which is not only a legal relationship (objective) but also a loving relationship (subjective). To help us understand Christian baptism we could consider the rites of marriage and knighthood. Do getting married or being knighted actually do anything? Most certainly! Must the ones being married or knighted have some idea of what is going on? Most certainly. That is the whole point. In the New Testament, baptism is presented to us as a vow which has similarities with marriage and with knighthood, and indeed with the Nazarite vow (which both men and women could take). All of these vows were (or are) taken voluntarily (subjective), yet each vow bestows some form of authority for service (objective). In each case, one submits to authority that one might receive authority. This is not rocket science. Even a centurion can understand a rite that requires both the work of God and the work of Man (Matthew 8:5-13).

So, what did Israel’s passing through the Red Sea have to do with authority? Paedobaptists love to quote 1 Corinthians 10:2 as evidence for paedobaptism, but not one of them stops to ask why Israel needed baptism. Just like Roman Catholics, they have a rite to defend, and as soon as they see something which looks like proof, they stop thinking. They fail to ask a number of crucial questions.

Firstly, “How did Israel’s baptism relate to Israel’s circumcision?” The events at the Red Sea and the Jordan River were not Israel’s circumcision. Passover was certainly a corporate vindication of the circumcision (all Israel as God’s firstborn), but baptism prepared Israel for ministry as a sacrificial nation. Separation is not preparation any more than choosing a “son of the herd” was the same as cutting it up according to the Levitical requirements. Circumcision and baptism were part of a sacrificial process which culminated in the offering of Christ. When Christ died, the “separation” of circumcision finally became meaningless. But what about Israel’s baptism? Did that also become meaningless? The answer is found in another question which paedobaptists fail to ask.

So, secondly, “Why was Israel baptised all at once, yet Christians are not?” Christians are not baptised “corporately” but one by one, and we must ask why there is this difference under the New Covenant. When reading the Bible, in all cases, we must observe not only what is the same, but also what is different. This is something we must do even within the first book of the Bible, let alone in our comparison between the various historical covenants. Dry land rose up out of the waters twice in Genesis, but there are differences as well as similarities. There is repetition but also development and maturity. The same goes for Israel’s baptism. After the “national baptism” came the Levitical ordinances and the establishment of the priesthood. The “one baptism into Moses” was expressed in a “many” baptism as the Mosaic law was administered. Christian baptism in the Gospels and the book of Acts resembles the individual baptisms of the Levite priests who had to wash their bodies and their clothes as mediators between God and men.

The overall question is this: What makes the Church less like national Israel and more like the Levites? The answer would be that the “national” division (circumcision) was torn down by Christ, and all that remains is ministry among all nations. In 1 Corinthians 10, Paul is not claiming that the Christians had escaped either nationally or geographically from a physical nation like Egypt. He is simply claiming that just as Israel’s preparation for ministry involved personal faith and accountability to a Covenant oath, so also does Christian baptism. Did those whose bodies fell in the wilderness understand the Covenant oath when they took it? Most certainly. This is why their children were spared.¹The fact that my friend Tim Gallant sees the sparing of the children as evidence for a continued focus on children through baptism reveals how distorted our thinking can become when we make the Scriptures fit our agenda: we begin to see the opposite of what is actually there.

Reading too much into our baptism from Israel’s Red Sea baptism can lead us into error. Paedobaptism is a confusion of circumcision and baptism which was not even found in Old Testament Israel. Baptism is a delegation of Christ’s prophetic authority with accountability to Him. It is neither God’s work nor Man’s work, since in the regenerate, these become as indistinguishable as they are in the incarnate Christ.

The Falling Architecture of Luke 12:49 – 13:35

An online friend noticed that the tower of Siloam in Luke 13:4 killed eighteen people, and only a few paragraphs later, in 13:11, the bent-over woman had been disabled for eighteen years. Is this a coincidence? Not likely.

I think this repeated number is a clue to the literary structure of this part of Luke’s gospel. If we see a “double witness” like this, very often the identical points are indicators that we are near the centre of a symmetrical arrangement. If we see two flags on the beach, the lifeguard should be somewhere in the middle.

Tracing the subject matter both backwards and forwards from this centre seems to give the following outline, which is as grand as it is profound. It begins with a five-fold Covenant and ends with a seven-fold Creation. The Covenant scroll is opened by the worthy Lamb. The middle points all seem to be “three-level” houses, like the primeval world, the ark of Noah, the Tabernacle and the Temples. Eighteen is 6+6+6, that is, a triune failure in Garden (Adam), Land (Cain) and World (Sons of God). At Passover we have allusions to the sins of Adam and Cain, and at Atonement the Great Flood. The instances of eighteen appear at the Bronze Altar (earth) and at the Incense Altar (heaven), with Israel as the mediator between them as the light of the Lampstand obscured by unfaithfulness, or, in Old Testament terms, harlotry.

SABBATH – Rest disturbed
No Peace on the Land – De-Creation/Ark

PASSOVER – End of the Old Creation
Not Peace But Division – Division/Veil
3 – World (family divided – Noah and family)
2 – Land (harvest times – Cain and Abel)
1 – Garden (theft and the accuser – Adam)

FIRSTFRUITS – Bloodied House
Repent or Perish – Ascension/Altar+Table
Pilate’s human sacrifices (un-Altar)
6+6+6 men slain by falling tower (un-ascension)
Adam dies for all three domains.

PENTECOST – Hearts Revealed
The Barren Fig Tree – Testing/Lampstand
3 years – Pentecost to Holocaust – Spirit

TRUMPETS – Resurrected House
The Upright Woman – Maturity/Incense Altar
6+6+6 woman in bondage – Eve rises and enters into rest

ATONEMENT – Days of Noah – Beginning of the New Creation
High Priest and Mediating Animals
1 – The Mustard Seed in the Garden (Adam shelters Eve: Priest)
2 – The Leaven in the Land (Eve brings forth righteous sons: Priest and King)
3 – The Narrow Door (Righteous sons safe behind the door: Priest, King and Prophet)

BOOTHS – INGATHERING – Rest Removed
The lament over Jerusalem – the Tabernacle destroyed

This last stanza seems to work through the Ten Words. Also, the reference to Herod as a fox might be because the Idumeans (Edomites) were descendants of Esau. He was thus red, hairy, unclean, and a conniving predator.

AERIAL VIEW

If that’s all too much, here’s how this passage represents the entire story of Christ and the Church in the first century:

Breathtaking! It would be interesting to see where this structure fits in the shape of the entire Gospel.

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[1] This Herod is the Tetrarch under whom John the Baptist was martyred.
[2] The placement of the falling tower ties this passage to the tower of Babel, a false “ascension” to the heavens, and thus to the Herodian “Babylon” of the Revelation.
[3] See the chapter on the sacrificial meaning of “binding and loosing” in God’s Kitchen.

If you are familiar with the various threads of the matrix, there is a great deal here upon which to meditate. For a start, there is the pattern of events from Canaan to Egypt to Canaan, the pattern of death and resurrection in the rite of sacrifice, and also the sevenfold festal calendar. We also have circumcision at Hierarchy, where Abraham’s household is set apart as a priesthood for the nations, and baptism at Sanctions, where Jew and Gentile are reunited in the death of Christ.

Here’s four talks given this week in London by James Jordan. Let him clear away the clutter for you, especially if you are in ministry and have been taught some of the incredibly dumb things invented by those well-meaning but misguided modernist dunderheads in the academies. Learn to read the Bible with new eyes…

How To Read The Bible For The First Time … Again

Thanks to Steve Jeffery for making these talks available for free.

Augustine has some frankly astonishing things to say in his On Christian Doctrine about how to understand the Bible.

Here he is explaining how we should go about the task of studying Scripture:

And in pursuing this search the first rule to be observed is, as I said, to know these books, if not yet with the understanding, still to read them so as to commit them to memory, or at least so as not to remain wholly ignorant of them.

So then: the very first thing you need to do is to learn the Bible. Don’t worry if you don’t understand it all yet; just make sure you know it by heart. Commit it to memory. Know it so well that it oozes from your pores and pours from your lips.

Or, failing that (quite a likely prospect, you might think), at least make sure we’re not “wholly ignorant of them.” But before we all breathe a huge sigh of relief at this convenient get-out clause, let’s remind ourselves what he probably means by this: If memorising the Scriptures is at least conceivable, then we can be sure that this slightly lower standard of familiarity still means more than just a vague awareness that there was a guy called Isaiah and some other geezer called Moses and they wrote some stuff with laws and prophecies and stuff. More likely, Augustine is assuming that we’ll have a fairly good idea of what’s in every chapter of the Bible. And, probably, we’ll have memorised quite a lot of the important bits – like the Psalms we sing every Sunday, for example.

Augustine’s assumption of deep familiarity with the word of God has implications not just for how guilty we feel about our 7-minute three-times-a-week quiet times snatched on the Tube. Crucially, our biblical awareness (or lack of it) also affects how we are likely to interpret even those parts of Scripture which we know well.

Here’s the key: If we know the Bible anything like as well as Augustine seems to encourage us to, then we are likely to spot scores of allusions and half-quotations and typological echoes and so on that will simply pass us by if our biblical knowledge is more sketchy. Moreover, even if such allusions are pointed out to us, we are likely to find them less persuasive than if we knew the Scriptures deeply and thoroughly, because literary echoes always sound more loudly in the ears of one who heard the initial chimes and therefore knows what he is listening for.

In other words, patchy biblical knowledge is likely to feel a minimalist biblical hermeneutic. By contrast, deep Scriptural familiarity will feed a maximalist, echoes-in-every-corner perspective on the text of Scripture.