Lesson 203

 

Just to get a running start on things remember that what we’re trying to do this year is finish what we didn’t do last year.  What happens is we get into the details of the Church, etc. and the New Testament period, which is not simple compared to a lot of the Old Testament material, so we had to go slow and we never got it finished so we’re going to go back and pick that up.  With that let me review where we’ve come and again remind everyone of the method that we’re using here, so that you don’t confuse this with an exegetical Bible course, it’s not exegetical Bible, it’s not systematic theology, and it’s not apologetics per se but it’s all three of them wrapped together into a Framework. 

 

The reason why I came up with this approach is my experience with college students who would grab pieces of the Bible as young people and then when they got in college have their faith totally smashed the first lecture.  It was because in many ways they were never taught properly in the first place.  The Bible cannot be taught in isolation from everything else.  When you do that you set up vulnerabilities in people so that either the Bible becomes compart­mentalized, it’s (quote) “the religious thing,” of to the sideline to be used from time to time when necessary and it has no connection whatever with normal everyday life.  Then we wonder why no one can apply the Bible.  It’s because it’s taught that way; it’s taught isolated from application to the large picture of life itself.  So when kids get into college, into the lecture hall, there are those people on college faculties who basically hate God and love to bash Christians and consider it quite high sport to see if they can destroy everybody’s faith in the first semester. 

 

Having watched this process go on, and having been in a place where young people would come, parents would be interested, they’d send them off to the university and then watch their young people, not all of them but many of them, really get hurt spiritually on the college campus.  That’s why we started approaching the Scripture this way, and what I found out was when people were taught this way not only were they able to defend their faith in the classroom, they were actually able to engage the attacks in such a fashion that people didn’t attack them again so it turned out to be a successful approach. 

 

That’s why we have looked at the Bible through a series of events and we have associated doctrines, the great orthodox truths, with those events.  The reason for that is that if you associate doctrines with events, if anybody tries to mess with events you now intuitively and immediately that they’re going to mess with the doctrine that is associated with those events.  For example, if people mess around with creation, then you know automatically they are going to affect the doctrines of God, man and nature.  You can’t have messing around with creation and not affect your view of who God is, what man is, and the idea of nature.  So that’s the idea; you protect Biblical truth by embedding it in a framework of history.

 

The second event we did was the fall, evil and suffering. So if you learn that and you learn that connection, then when there’s a problem, like was this horrendous automobile crash and some innocent baby died and everybody is saying why did this happen?  It’s an evil problem, so immediately the wheels should turn, evil problem, what’s that associated with?  The fall of man, so why does evil exist?  Because we have the fall of man, that’s why, and there’s a reason for evil.  It’s not because God is a meany, it’s because God gave responsibility to man and man abused it.  “Whatsoever a man sows that shall he also reap” and we’re reaping it corporately as a human race.  It’s not an answer that a lot of people like but that’s the answer that God gives, whether people like it or not. 

 

Then we went on and dealt with the flood, the flood of Noah, it wasn’t somebody’s bathtub that overflowed in the Mesopotamian flood plain, this was a global flood that covered all the high mountains, etc.  It’s a global catastrophe, and that picture of the flood is associated with a doctrinal truth, i.e. judgment/salvation.  It’s very easy to get off in the toulies in theology over this and that and so forth, all the details.  But if you will think in terms of the flood story, you automatically protect yourself theologically because it’s easy to sit without even the Bible in front of you and visualize the flood of Noah.  And when you think about the boat and you think about the fact that only the people that trusted the Lord and entered the boat were saved, and everybody else was killed, there you have a picture of judgment/salvation. There was only one way of salvation, there wasn’t two boats, there wasn’t three boats, there weren’t life rafts, there was only one ark, only one way of salvation. 

 

Again, what does this do?  It sets up the idea of judgment/salvation for you very neatly, very cleanly.  People always say well I think that’s pretty narrow minded to have only one way of salvation.  That’s always been the way; there’s never been more than one way of salvation.  So you start the precedent by these stories and by these events.  Then when you find people who want to deny a global catastrophe in the past in earth history, and you know that that event is connected with judgment/salvation, that reveals the motive of the person that wants to reconstruct earth history.  Why do people want to reconstruct earth history and make it into billions of years, etc. and have the effects of the fall all the way back, why is that?  It’s to erase, or try to erase personal responsibility before a Creator.  It’s to erase responsibility for the fall.  It’s to try to make the world as safe as possible for sinning.  It’s to exclude the idea of an interfering God who will invade history and judge and save, and it’s up to Him, not us to do the saving and judging work.

So because of that we know there’s an agenda behind all the intellectual difficulties that people have.  There’s a spiritual agenda and the agenda must always be remembered; it is to reconstruct reality such that I can live comfortably and keep on sinning, to make the world as safe as possible for sinning, i.e. eliminate consequences. 

 

Then we went to the Noahic Covenant; there’s the first time the word “covenant” is used in the Bible.  Therefore what does that do?  By remembering the rainbow, everybody has seen a rainbow, we know from the Scriptures what the rainbow is a picture of, the glory of God because Ezekiel says that when Ezekiel saw the throne of God he saw a bow around it, a circle, we only see half a bow unless  you’re in an airplane.  Ezekiel and John in the book of Revelation looked to this bow as God’s glory.  What God did, obviously, was construct the physics, the optical physics of raindrops and the regime of the atmosphere at the point after the flood such that the bow phenomenon would be visible.  He did that physical construction as a mirror of His own glory, so that when we see the rainbow, which by the way you always look at the bow with your back to the sun, that’s the way you can see it, you’re not going to see the bow toward the sun, so in the light of the sun you see the bow.  It’s an easy to remember lesson that God contracts.  The word “covenant” gets too religious, so if you want to grab the original Biblical force of that word substitute for it in your own mind and notes “contract.”  If you substitute the word “contract” for “covenant” you’ll grab the picture as it was originally intended to be communicated. 

What’s a contract?  A contract has certain parties to the contract.  In this case God and man.  Immediately, right here, right with this covenant we understand something unique to the Scriptures, unique to the Bible, unique to Biblical religion.  Do you know that all of the dozens of religions in the world, none of them, none of them have a contract between God and man?  That is utterly unique to Scripture.  W. F. Albright, Johns Hopkins, dean of Biblical archeology, said that.  He said in his book, Yahweh and The Gods of Canaan that the Hebrews and the Hebrews alone are the only people who in history had ever made contracts with their God.  Of course we would say God made contracts with them. 

 

But here’s what falls out of that simple idea of a contract. When you have a contract, a mortgage on your house, loan on your car, equity loan, whatever it is, and you sign a contract, think about what goes on.  Why do we have contracts anyway?  To bring stability into a relationship, it’s a measuring stick so that we can tell whether Party A and Party B are doing their part in the relationship.  Everybody sits down and agrees to a contract.  Are contracts interpreted literally or allegorically?  Wouldn’t it be delightful if you could interpret your mortgage agreement allegorically?  But we all know there’s not a contract in any of our human experience that is interpreted any other way than literally.  What does that tell you about interpreting the Bible?  That tells you that the Bible was meant to be interpreted literally.  By the way, what is the name of the Bible?  The Old Testament, a testament is a contract; the New Testament, a testament is a contract.  So right away the name of the Bible tells you you’ve got two contracts. 

 

The first time the word “contract” occurs in the movement of history is right here, God made a covenant with Noah and He promised certain things.  So in ensuing history it’s a testing ground; does God keep the literal words to Noah or not, because if He doesn’t, if for example the flood was a local flood, we’ve had lots of local flood since then, so if the Bible is talking about a once and for all local flood and there won’t be another one like it, God’s already broken His contract hundreds and hundreds of times.  The Bible is predicting a global flood, says a global flood, and says it’ll never happen again.  That has implications physics wise in the fact that in order to maintain the contract, think about it, what does God have to control?  The physics of motion of the planet, the solar system, but He can’t control the solar system unless He controls cosmic forces on the solar system.  You can go out and keep on expanding it; God can’t make a contract unless God can control all things.  If God cannot control all things He can control nothing.  

 

That was the foundation and that’s the foundation of the rest of the Bible.  That’s the foundation you get in Genesis 1-11 that nobody studies seriously and Christian colleges who are liberal always manage to deny, allegorize and get rid of, and then wonder why we don’t have a foundation for the faith any more. 

 

After that we come to the heart of the Old Testament, and we have some more events, and these events again are easy to remember; a child can remember these stories, you don’t have to be a theologian to remember these.  We have doctrines associated with each one of these events; the first one, the call of Abraham.  Associated with that event, with the call of Abraham, are three doctrines, election, justification and faith.  Everybody has this inherent, I guess its endemic particularly to Americans, this endemic reluctance to deal with the fact that God chooses how He wants to work, without consulting Congress, that He has no consultants available, that He ultimately chooses what He wants to do in history.  As a result of that He chose one man, Abraham, the first Jew.  Here’s the rise of the basis of anti-Semitism.  The reason for anti-Semitism in the world, whether it’s Hitler, Arafat, or whoever, is a hatred for the fact that God runs history His way.  So when God called Abraham this has profound implications with regard to comparative religions. 

 

What it means is there is only one valid religion in the world and that’s the religion of the Bible, and the reason, this is important, here’s why you want to remember the story; people say well, I think that’s pretty unfair, to only have one religion, that’s not being inclusive.  Well, God tried the inclusive approach with Noah and his sons and what happened?  You had the total paganization of early civilization.  That’s why when you go back, whether it’s the people in Southeast Asia or on the mission field, you always go back in the tribal motifs and if they have a good history in those tribes, in those people groups, eventually if you dig down, dig down, dig down, dig down, go back, back, back, back, and try to get back as far as you can, in most tribes they will tell you that a long time ago their forefathers worshiped this God who subsequently disappeared, and since He’s gone, God absconded us, He went away, since He went away we have had to worship the powers and principalities, an the demons, so forth and so on.  You have polytheism coming out of this early monotheism. 

 

That’s the story throughout the world and that’s the story of the remembrance of the fact that Noah brought Gen. 1-11 to every people’s group on earth.  There is no such thing as a people group today who live in the world who can’t be traced back to the sons of Noah. And since they can be traced back to the sons of Noah, it means at one time that line had access to Biblical revelation of at least the extent of Gen. 1-11.  That being the case, it’s not correct to argue that there are people who in their past didn’t hear until the white man came along. They heard centuries before the white man.  They heard centuries before the gospel was even announced through Jesus Christ.  They had lots of revelation available.  The problem is because of sin they suppressed that revelation and there was no way then, under that dispensation and economy for God to deal with it other than an interventionary mode. 

 

So God intervened and He intervened because He elected this man, Abraham, the first Jew, to be the pioneer of a divine counter culture.  So from this time forward history will always be split; history will be split in a conflict between the Semites, descendants of Abraham and the Gentiles at large.  It won’t go away; it’s going to continue all the way to the return of Jesus Christ.  There is an inherent problem with the Jew and with what he has brought into history, and the problem goes back to God; God wanted it that way.  Justification and faith, Abraham wasn’t saved by keeping the Law.  Why wasn’t he?  The Law wasn’t around, how could Abraham be saved by keeping the Law, the Law wasn’t given until Moses.  So Abraham was saved by justification by faith.  See how easy it is if you just line this up and learn to associate the doctrine with these events.  The theology just rolls out once you get the events.  Of course, you can’t get the events if you don’t read the Bible and very few people read the Bible seriously. 

 

Then we come to the Exodus; what does the Exodus teach?  Judgment/salvation, the same thing as Noah’s flood except the Exodus does what that the flood didn’t do?  The Exodus introduces another theme to judgment/salvation and that is blood atonement.  But like the ark, how many ways were there for people to be saved on the night of the Passover?  Only one.  It didn’t matter whether it was an Egyptian, a Jew, male, female, child or grandparent, the only way was blood on the door, period!  No discussion, no vote, no well I think it ought to be this way, only one way, God’s way and that was by blood atonement.  It wasn’t by good works, they didn’t hand a little trinket out in the mailbox and say I’ve got 1,242 brownie points, I hope you pass me by; none of that stuff, just blood on the doorpost.  That’s the Exodus.

 

Then after the Exodus we come to Mount Sinai and God reveals the Law.  Look at the sequence.  When did the Jews get the Law?  Before the Exodus or after the Exodus?  After the Exodus, so they couldn’t have been delivered from Egypt by the Law either.  The Law is not a means of salvation.  You can see it in the outline of history.  What happened at Mount Sinai, and we associate three ideas of the Bible with that, revelation, inspiration and canonicity.  Revelation means, this is very important because this is denied, it’s this doctrine that lies at the heart of why liberal clergymen do what they do.  On Mount Sinai, if you can visualize this, you’ve seen Charlton Heston, you’ll probably be disappointed, Moses doesn’t look like Charlton Heston and Pharaoh doesn’t look like Yul Brenner, but the point is that if you can visualize Mount Sinai with God speaking, and Cecil DeMille did an excellent job long before computer animation with showing the supernaturalness of God speaking at Mount Sinai.  He did it with cartooning, that was all done…, Cecil B. DeMille’s sister taught many years cinema at UCLA.  I had a friend who took a course with Cecil DeMille’s sister and he said Cecil DeMille hired thousands of people that did nothing but cartoon; those were drawn by hand.  All the sequences had to be done by hand in those days because they had no computer animation.  That was the way Cecil DeMille had of making the Sinai event supernatural, the fire came down, God wrote the Ten Commandments on the rock, and He spoke, because in the movie you could hear the voice of God. 

 

Now here’s the thing to remember about Biblical revelation. Get this down.  The Bible claims God speaks publicly.  He can speak privately but no one outside of the Scriptures believes in a God who speaks publicly, such that if you were there with a tape recorder, you could have tape recorded His voice.  That’s a question, if you ever get into a discussion with somebody and it’s squishy and you can’t get a feeling, one of the questions you could ask to clarify where this person is at is: do you think that God speaks such that on Mount Sinai if you were there with your video camera, could you have recorded it and play it back to me?  Do you believe that?  If they don’t, you’ve got a problem with the doctrine of revelation.  If they do, they shouldn’t have any problem with the Bible, because if God can speak publicly in the Hebrew language, in the 14th century before Christ, then He can speak any time in history, and then we don’t have any problems with language and theology and the philosophy of linguistics.  All that’s solved because God can speak publicly in a known human language.  It’s not a spooky language; it’s the language of Moses.  He could speak in other languages too, Pentecost being a good example. 

 

Then we come to the conquest and settlement.  This is the bloody conquest of what is now Palestine.  I have picked up propaganda over the years from the Arab countries in which they just get on this one and ride it: see those Jews, how nasty they were, you can even read it in the Bible, they came in and they slaughtered the Palestinians.  That’s right.  Why?  What was the conquest and settlement all about?  God gave the land to the Jew.  He didn’t run it by the U.N.  He gave it to the Jews.  Furthermore, He waited to give it to the Jews until what had happened?  What did He tell Abraham, it would be 400 years of so before all this would take place, because the iniquity of the Palestinian occupants had to become full.  In other words, a civilization had to tube out completely, gross out spiritually.  So the conquest is an invasion of a group of people who had to be eliminated from human history lest they would have corrupted the rest of the human race.  In fact, the people associated with the Canaanites, by the way, they’re white, not black, they were white inhabitants of Palestine, they’re associates of the Phoenicians who are associated in history in history with the Carthaginians who were so gross the Romans couldn’t stand them.  This went on for centuries, the se people just to have a propensity to get involved in all the filth of the world.  That’s not to say that we don’t, that’s simply to say they’re specialists; they take things all the way.  So that’s the group of people God conquered.

 

But what do you suppose conquest and settlement pictures?  Why do devotional writers down through the centuries of church history, where do they go for their stories for inspiration for devotions?  Joshua; the conquest.  Why?  Because it’s war, war in a fallen world where there’s opposition, there’s enemies, there’s powers that have to be displaced and we’re going to get into that with the ascension of Christ.  These were physical people that had to be displaced.  In the Church Age it’s spiritual principalities and powers that have to be displaced. 

 

We come down to the rise and the reign of David.  Now we come to the introduction of the monarchy in the Old Testament, and with the introduction of the monarchy we have a new thing happen.  Now we have an office, a position in society that is going to become a vehicle for revealing the nature of Jesus Christ.  But that monarchy came about in a crazy way because if you think about conquest and settlement it never was finished.  You go from Joshua to Judges and what’s the theme of Judges?  Everybody did what was right in their own eyes, total collapse.  Now Judges, here’s where you want to connect the Bible with the big ideas all around you.  In political theory democracy assumes that the majority is always right, or most of the time is right.  What does the book of Judges say about democracy? What does it imply?  It implies that the majority aren’t always right.  In fact, the vast majority can be absolutely wrong.  So the book of Judges is a refutation of the political idea of a democracy.  Democracy is approximate but it’s not the way to be saved.  Democracy isn’t going to save any one.  We learn that as we tried to impose democracy on Third World nations and it never works because they don’t have the foundation we had in Massachusetts, the Bay Colony, etc., mainly a group of Christians made it work.

 

After you leave the book of Judges now what do you come to in the Bible.  You come to Samuel and Kings.  What are Samuel and Kings talking about?  This new office, the monarchy. And after you get through reading all of Samuel and all of Kings, what is your impression of the monarchy?  It doesn’t work either.  So now what we have is a refutation of a democracy and we have a simultaneous refutation of totalitarian government.  The greatest political document in the Bible, by the way, is Samuel’s speech in 1 Sam. 8.  That ought to be taught in every political science course because it’s a warning of what happens when you entrust a few with power over the all.  So here you have a simultaneous undermining of the idea of democracy and a simultaneous under-mining of the idea of the totalitarian state.  So both fascism and anarchism and all the rest of it just go down the drain, Marxism and everything with it.  This is powerful stuff and the tragedy is we don’t think enough about these stories to draw out the conclusions we should be drawing out, with the result the world end runs us and turns us into blubbering idiots that are somehow excluded off to the periphery of society. 

 

Now we come to the end of the Old Testament, you have the deterioration; you have the golden era of Solomon, again looking at sanctification.  What does the golden era of Solomon teach us, by the way, apart from the corruption, on the positive side?  What books of the Bible were written by the David-Solomon group, that whole group of men, men that surrounded them? The parts we go to all the time, Proverbs, Psalms, Ecclesiastes, Song of Songs, the wisdom literature all came out of this period of time.  What does that tell you?  Think about it, what are the subjects in the book of Proverbs?  Marriage, family, personal relationships, lessons from nature, money, all these, the whole realm of life is discussed in wisdom.  So what does that tell you? It tells you that when you have, even in this approximate Old Testament version of the Kingdom God and the Kingdom of God concerns every sphere of life: economics, personal relationships, so forth and so on; it’s not excluded to a little corner in the back closet called the religious corner.  It encompasses every area of life.

 

Then we have the kingdom divided, the kingdoms in decline and the exile, all this again sanctification, and what does it show?   This is a very important lesson too.  If people would just grasp this they wouldn’t have a problem with eternal security.  I’m going to say this several times as we go through this, when the Protestant Reformation made the big breakthrough and Luther and Calvin argued that you are holy and completely justified in one package deal at the time that you believe in Jesus Christ, the Roman Catholic Church threw a fit.  Their argument against the Protestants was this one, and by the way, this Roman Catholic argument appears in our own evangelical churches right now.  The Roman Catholic argument was that you can’t preach justifi­cation by faith alone without encouraging licentious living.  Did you ever hear that argument?  Oh, don’t teach eternal security because that’s an excuse for people to go out and raise hell, because they’re saved, they can do anything. 

 

The Protestants, sadly, in the 2nd and 3rd generation did a little tap dance around this one.  Instead of going back to the Scriptures and grabbing the necessary doctrines that would have protected a justification by faith gospel, what they said was well if so and so professes to be a believer and doesn’t have any fruit in their life they never believed.  Well, there’s a grain of truth to that, but here’s where it’s wrong.  What it led to was what you will find if you study Puritanism, 500-600 page books to tell whether you’re saved or not.  How do you tell whether you’re saved?  Fruit inspection.  Well I’m sorry but if you examine your fruit you’ve got a lot of rotten stuff, I have rotten stuff, we all have rotten stuff, that’s what drew Luther to Christ.  As a priest he did do a fruit inspection of his heart and he found it was desperately wicked and deceitful, so he looked around then, if my heart, even if the Holy Spirit works in my heart it’s never a finished work, there’s always sin, so if that’s the basis of my salvation I never can tell I’m saved. 

 

So what happens here is philosophically you wind up with something called empiricism and you have an empirical approach to the Christian life where everything depends on the last five minutes whether I’ve produced any fruit or not and the ultimate conclusion is I can never know whether I’m elect or not until the final judgment, because you never know how much fruit is enough.  It was a stupid thing and frankly I think Roman Catholicism won the day here.  When they went back against the Protestants, the Protestants pulled this retreat business; they’ve been retreating ever since and have not given a clear picture. That’s why even today we have evangelicals going along with Roman Catholicism and saying oh, there’s no difference because Roman Catholics will use the word justified by faith except they mean something different.  They mean by justification what you and I would mean by sanctification.  They’re talking about the work of the Holy Spirit inside, and so they say yeah, you’re justified by faith, you walk by faith, the Holy Spirit does things in here.  Excuse me, but that’s not the basis of salvation.  What’s the basis of salvation?  What Jesus Christ has presented to the Father up there.  That’s what Luther said, get your eyes off yourself and get your eyes on Christ where He’s ascended at the Father’s right hand. That’s your security. 

 

You say but doesn’t that lead to licentious living? Aren’t the Roman Catholics right in arguing against Protestantism on this point, the Protestantism unleashes licentious living?  Before I get to the answer, let me point out something.  If the salvation package is, as Luther and Calvin said it was, as Paul says it is in Rom.5 and Rom. 3, what is the motivation in living the Christian life, gratitude or fear?  Gratitude!  If I can’t tell whether I’m saved or not, what is the motivation?  Fear!  That’s it, chose one or the other, either the motive that drives the Christian life is gratitude or the motive that drives the Christian life is fear.  And if it’s fear then go to Rome because that’s where you belong. Gratitude is the Protestant gospel.

 

There’s a protection device that sadly the Reformers didn’t bring up when all this was going on and it’s right here.  What did God do with His elect nation?  Did He permit His elect nation to sin? Well, He let them sin a little bit, and then what did He do?  He beat their butt, didn’t He?  He took care of them, and they suffered and suffered and suffered.  Psalm 119 some scholars believe was written on the road of the captives, that Psalm 119 every verse is about the Word, “Thy Word have I hid in my heart,” etc. on and on and on; they’re talking about people that were POW’s walking along with the Assyrian and Babylonian soldiers beating them and killing them when they fell by the wayside. That’s why the Word of God was so precious to them. 

 

The Jew down through history has suffered and suffered and suffered to the point where many of the modern Jews today hate God, they are secular Jews; they don’t even want to be identified as Jews.  They have sought over the centuries in Europe to hide themselves.  Every time the Jew seeks to amalgamate himself with the Gentile culture, whether it was in France, then all of a sudden you have the Dreyfus trial, army captain, French army, he’s accused, He’s a Jew and the French go after him, and the Jews are sitting in the courtroom watching the Dreyfus trial and there’s a guy in the back, he’s the guy who says that’s enough, there’s no home for the Jew any longer in Europe, we need a homeland and thus was born Zionism.  So the modern Zionist state is the result of the Jew suffering in every country on earth, having no place to go except to his homeland, and he can’t even go there without getting blown up so this thing is a very sobering. 

 

But on the other hand you say, well isn’t that fear?  It’s fear of a different kind; it’s a fear in the sense that God is not releasing them.  It’s not God throwing the Jew out, that’s some Reformed theology, amillennialism.  It’s rather that God holds onto the Jew and that’s why He keeps on suffering.  That idea is brought over into Heb. 12 where it says if you be without chastisement you are bastards, you are not legitimate children of God, you’re phonies, he says, if you don’t have discipline in the life.  We all know that, we’ve suffered: “Whatsoever a man sows that shall he also reap,” and it’s a sign of ownership. The reason God is doing that is because He wants to get us in shape for eternity, and He’s going to get us in shape and He’s going to do it the easy way or the hard way, but He will do it.  I often use the illustration of the drill sergeant; in six weeks you will be trained.  We all know what that means; some of us know what that means, and what it doesn’t mean.  But that little glint in the drill sergeant’s eye is six weeks and you’re going to be in shape, I’ll see to that.  And you kind of get the idea that he means what he says.  And it can be easy or it can be rough but it will happen. And that’s the way God runs the ship.  So that’s what the whole Old Testament restoration, the restoration is that He still loves Israel and He still has a claim upon her and He will bring her back. 

 

Then we moved on to the person of Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ is a subject that demands a lot of concentration and Biblical knowledge.  Just thinking of Jesus in sentimental terms doesn’t cut it.  Jesus wasn’t revealed until after the Old Testament.  Look at your Bible and see how much of your Bible is Old Testament, and how much of it is New Testament.  Think about it, the Holy Spirit did not bring Jesus onto the scene until after all that Old Testament revelation had occurred.  Does that tell you something?  Yes it does, it tells me that I have to know a lot of stuff to appreciate who Jesus Christ really is, and to understand His work on my behalf and your behalf. 

 

We divided the life of Christ up into four parts, four events, and did the same thing we did in the Old Testament.  We associated certain key doctrines with certain parts of Christ’s life.  We dealt with the birth of Christ; Jesus Christ was virgin born, Jesus Christ had a miraculous conception and birth.  That miraculous conception and birth is associated with something we call the hypostatic union.  The hypostatic union says Jesus Christ is undiminished deity united with true humanity without confusion in one person forever. That’s the doctrine of the hypostatic union; it summarizes four hundred years of discussion of the person of Jesus Christ.  Every word in that sentence means something.  “Undiminished deity” means it wasn’t diminished in any way, Jesus didn’t give up omnipotence, He didn’t give up sovereignty, He didn’t give up omnipresence, He didn’t give up love and justice.  “Undiminished deity united with true humanity,” Jesus wasn’t a human skeleton that God walked around in.  He had a body, He had a soul, He had a spirit just like you and I have, and that’s important for reasons we’ll develop. 

 

So the hypostatic union, Jesus Christ is God-man.  That’s why Jesus Christ is better than Mohammed. Besides being a murderous pedophile, Mohammed cannot equal the person of Jesus Christ.  No prophet, no religious leader, Buddha, put them all up against Jesus Christ and compare.  Do it and you can see the difference in the character of these people. So Jesus Christ is God and man and He proves that God can dwell with people.   And there’s no thing like the liberal theologians say ooh, there’s a big barrier between God and man and we can’t really cross the barrier, we can’t really know God.  Well then that would make Jesus a schizo.  What does it say, “undiminished deity united with true humanity without confusion,” didn’t mess up the Creator/creature distinction, “in one person,” not two, “in one person forever.” 

 

Then we have Jesus Christ’s life and we went through some rather complicated doctrines here which we’ll just touch on in passing. That is kenosis, impeccability and infallibility.  The idea of kenosis comes from Phil. 2:5-8, He humbled Himself.  What do we mean He humbled Himself?  Theologians had to deal with that humbling, does that mean He gave up kind of the use of His attributes?  No, He gave up the voluntary use of His attributes.  In other words, if Jesus were to encounter Satan, say at a trial… remember one of Satan’s temptations of Jesus, what did he say when Jesus was hungry?  Turn these stones into bread.  Could Jesus in His omnipotence have done that?  Yes.  Jesus, however, would not exercise His omnipotence to turn stones into bread unless it was the Father’s plan.  So He could have gotten out of that one with a simply pfft-boom, okay, Satan, I’ll make enough bread so you’ll be walking on it for the next thousand miles.  But He didn’t because it wasn’t in the Father’s plan for Him to do that.  So Jesus voluntarily said Yes Sir, and submitted to the Father. That’s kenosis, that’s what it means.  He gave up the involuntary use of His attributes in the sense that independent… the word independent is better, He gave up the independent use of His attributes, He had to get clearance from the Father before He could use any of His divine attributes.  Why is that important?  Is this nitpicky, it this a little theological stuff for guys getting their doctorate?  No-no!  This is Phil. 2, what’s the context of Phil. 2?  The local church.  What’s the problem Paul’s dealing with when he brings in kenosis?  [blank spot]

 

… teach today he’d be so bent out of shape with the state of most churches, because he probably didn’t sing, he didn’t stroke a banjo, wouldn’t sing 50 verses of something to entertain everyone before he got to the Word of God.  What he did was deal with a mental attitude problem in the local church directly with this heavy stuff.  Do you know why he used heavy stuff?  Because life is heavy, you need strength to encounter the difficulties of life, not pabulum; you need something strong to put iron in the backbone.  So that’s why he brings in heavy voltage here with kenosis, saying that if you can understand when you’re frustrated that the Lord Jesus Christ had such humility that He was willing to endure what He endured all through His life, when as God He could have stopped it right there.  Think of how many times we get irritated.  Think of the tension, the temptation of the Lord Jesus Christ every time, He humbled … that’s what humility is, see humility doesn’t mean weakness.  Here’s God, He’s not weak, He’s obedient to an authority, He understand what authority is, another revolutionary concept for our culture.  So the Lord Jesus Christ submitted to the First Person of the Trinity, that’s kenosis. 

 

Then we have impeccability which has to do with the fact that Jesus Christ as God could not sin but as man He could sin, so how do you fuse those two together.  We had a big Q&A about that one.  The point there is that Jesus Christ was successful in a genuinely way in encountering temptation; the temptations weren’t fake theater, they weren’t made up for TV kind of stuff, they were genuine temptations.  Theologians have had a hard time getting into understanding how the God-man could be genuinely tempted.  That’s what that’s doctrine is all about.

 

The last one, infallibility, the Lord Jesus Christ was perfectly infallible.  He said which of you convict Me of sin?  Can you name a religious leader that could dare say something like that?  Go ahead, pick a sin, no one in all of His lifetime ever accused Him of sin in the sense that He was questioned.  Furthermore, the Lord Jesus Christ gave testimony to the Old Testament validity.  What is one of the commandments about witnessing?  It was used in the courtroom. Why in the courtroom today does the judge say swear on the Bible?  Of course it might be the Koran tomorrow but the point is that you swear on something.  What is the point of swearing? Because the courtroom wants to be sure that we’re getting the truth.  What is it called when you don’t tell the truth in a courtroom?  Perjury.  Can anyone think of the Ten Commandments, the one commandment that’s against perjury? “Thou shalt not bear false witness.”  Now if the Lord Jesus Christ said something was true in the Old Testament and it wasn’t, like a literal Adam for example, He’s committed perjury.  You can’t get around it, you can make all the excuses you want to about Jesus accommodating the 1st century understanding, but ultimately fabrication of history is perjury.  Do you know why I can say that so strongly?  Because Paul, in 1 Cor. 15 says that if the Lord Jesus Christ didn’t rise from the dead, if there’s not such a thing as resurrection, and I said there is, then I have borne false witness.  Look at the text.  Paul was remembering the commandments; see there’s a moral reason for the infallibility of Scripture, a moral reason, an ethical reason underlying the philosophical reason of inerrant Scripture. 

Then we have the death of the Lord Jesus Christ and the death of the Lord Jesus Christ iterates again substitutionary blood atonement. Christianity is a bloody mess and it’s unavoidable.  And it’s offensive to people, in the 20’s and 30’s people got all bent out of shape with this substitu­tionary blood atonement thing.  When liberalism came in and took over most of the mainline denominations in the 20’s and 30’s one of the things that they argued against the fundamentalists was that you fundamentalists have a slaughter house religion.  That’s what the gospel is called, slaughter house religion.  Why did they call it slaughter house religion?  Because it is. 

 

You see, the point is, in this substitution blood atonement, there are only two ways to take the cross of Jesus Christ.  Both of these have been articulated through church history.  One way follows Aberlard.  Aberlard argued that the reason that Jesus went to the cross was to inspire us, dying nobly for a noble clause.  In other words, the benefit of the cross is its subjective influence on your heart.  That’s not denying that the cross has a subjective thing, but the subjective benefit isn’t because He’s dying for a noble cause.  The subjective effect is another reason.  Anselm, Anselm’s argument was that the reason that Christ went to the cross was to resolve something between God and man independently of whether we liked it, disliked it, was influenced by it or not influenced by it, something objectively was done on the cross and that’s the satisfaction doctrine of the cross.  So those two ideas come all the way down today. 

 

Liberals will talk about the cross of Jesus Christ and you’ll sit there in the pew and think oh gee, this guy is good, but they’re not talking about what you’re talking about.  Don’t be misled by common vocabulary.  What they mean by the cross of Christ is a martyr’s inspiring act, like the guys that bomb buses in Israel and the mothers go clap-clap and get $25,000 from Saddam Hussein.  It’s an inspiring event so all the little Arab kids can clap their hands and consider him to be a saint. That’s the way the cross is viewed in liberal theology.  But that’s not the way we view it, that’s not the way the Bible views it.  The Bible says that Jesus Christ didn’t go there for movies; He’s not selling something to Hollywood.  Jesus goes to the cross in order to accomplish something for man’s salvation.  That’s substitutionary blood atonement.  

 

Then we come to the most amazing thing of all, the resurrection.  The resurrection is the space-time invasion of the eternal universe.  In other words, the eternal universe yet to come will be made up of the matter and material that Jesus’ body is.  Jesus’ body, when He rose from the dead is the first piece of the eternal universe to come that will replace this one.  There’s only one part of it now, it’s the resurrected Lord Jesus Christ.  So His resurrection body is an amazing thing.  It also tells you that the universe forever and ever, the new universe, the heavens and the earth, were designed in a remarkable parallel to this world and that the human body to come, the resurrection body to come is going to be remarkably similar to the bodies we have, without the aches and pains of course.  No health care system in the eternal state needed!  So we have the resurrection body. 

 

Now we come to the next act in the grand drama and that is the act of the ascension and session of the Lord Jesus Christ.  When we presented this, many of you know the Apostle’s Creed; you’ll notice how much of the Apostle’s Creed is dedicated to the ascension and session of Jesus.  Look at all this in red, that’s how much in the early church they devoted to the ascension and session of Jesus Christ.  How much do you hear about it today?  Did you ever hear a sermon on the ascension and session of the Lord Jesus Christ?  I’ve heard very, very few; I think one or two over 20-30 years that I’ve listened.  So let’s look at this.

Here’s the Apostle’s Creed: “I believe in God the Father Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth; and Jesus Christ, His only begotten Son of God, He was crucified, dead and buried.  The third day he rose again from the dead: He ascended into heaven, and sits at the right hand of God the Father Almighty: From thence he shall come to judge the quick and the dead.”  In other words, He’s been invested with authority of a position.

 

In our time remaining, we will just introduce the location of where that ascension happened and point out that it has remarkable parallels with the Old Testament.  This little piece of real estate called Jerusalem is quite remarkable because things keep happening in the same places.  Here’s a map of the temple in the Old Testament times, and imposed on that is modern buildings and if you were to go there tonight here are some of the buildings you would see.  The Intercontinental Hotel is sitting right there on top of the mount of ascension.  Jesus didn’t have the hotel, the disciples didn’t either.  They went over to a place here, see where the road comes like this; this is a valley here, the Kidron Valley.  Over here is high ground and on that high ground is the Temple. It’s still there; the temple mount is still there. The Arabs think they own it, the Jews actually own it.  But this is the place where Jesus Christ had the experience that He did in the Gospels; this is where the Shekinah glory dwelt in the Old Testament. 

 

Then across this valley is a ridge line that runs down this road, this road that you see is right around the top of that ridge line; the whole thing is known as the Mount of Olives, it’s also known as the mount of ascent because both of them are there.  On this side is where the Olive grove was where Jesus was arrested and taken for His trial. Around the bend is a little place called Bethany.  I don’t have the scale of miles on here but this is probably only a mile or two.  In the Gospels how many times does He spend the night at Mary and Martha’s? You get the impression that He did it quite a bit.  Now you can see why, He just went out of the city, went around here and stopped off over here, a convenient stopping place. 

 

We must get into the text at least for a minute so let’s turn to the end of Luke, the last few verses in Luke.  We want to visualize this as an event, this happened.  If you were there with a movie camera you could have taken the picture.  Luke 24:50, “And He led them out as far as Bethany, and He lifted up His hands and blessed them. [51] And it came about that while He was blessing them, He parted from them. [52] And they returned to Jerusalem with great joy.”  Flip over to Acts 1 because that’s where we’ll start next time, and Acts 1:9-10, which is the same author, Luke, the same guy did both volumes.  Verse 9, “And after He had said these things, He was lifted up” notice it’s passive voice, “He was lifted up while they were looking on, and a cloud received Him out of their sight.”  As a meteorologist I’ve often wondered what the cloud looked like. 

 

However, an interesting thing, in the Old Testament the Shekinah glory, which was the presence of God, was physically appearing as a cloud.  In the book of Ezekiel, guess where the Shekinah glory departed the earth?  Chapter 8, chapter 10, and the other chapters of Ezekiel trace, Ezekiel in his vision watches the Shekinah glory, with all the corruption, all the pollution, the Shekinah glory leaves the temple, comes up to the temple wall, goes across the valley, goes up the mountain east of Jerusalem and goes into heaven.  Now isn’t that interesting.  The exact place where the Old Testament Shekinah glory departed into heaven is the exact place the Lord Jesus Christ also ascended to heaven, because He was there; the Shekinah was the preincarnate Jesus Christ, He’d done that once before. So here He does it again, this time as the God-man. 

And “the cloud received Him out of their sight.” And verse 10 adds a little footnote to this, “And as they were gazing intently into the sky while He was departing,” notice it took some time so Jesus isn’t just disappearing like He used to on the road to Emmaus or in the room, you know, He pulled this appearance/disappearance boom boom, here it’s not like that.  If you look at the text Jesus is actually leaving them, physical motion, going up.  Now how far up He went we don’t know except for the fact that in verse 10 it says they gazed “intently” which suggests they were squinting, they were concentrating on this, watching this happen.  So it must have taken some time for this to occur, He didn’t just go pfft boom, He gradually withdrew.  Now whether it was a big hole in the sky or what it was we don’t know.  I’ll get into a little bit of suggestion next week. 

 

Verse 10, “…behold, two men in white clothing stood beside them; [11] and they also said, ‘Men of Galilee, why do you stand looking into the sky?  This Jesus, who has been taken up from you into heaven, will come in just the same way as you have watched Him go into heaven.”  What does that mean?  It means that the Lord Jesus Christ is physically in His resurrection body going to appear and descend to the earth.  Talk about being a picture, a story, how about that one!  All these people say well, I don’t believe in Jesus. Well, hang around a little while, watch what happens in the next chapter.  So here He comes and He’s going to come back physically, not subjectively but actually physically.

 

So what does that look like, we’re going to close with a photograph, there are two things I want to show you before we end the class. One is a picture, here is a road that’s down the Kidron Valley, you’re looking from the temple across the Kidron Valley at the mount of ascension.  You can see it’s not much of a mountain; it’s all bare over there.  That’s because on the other side of the green line this is how the Palestinians handle the land, they just leave it that way.  It’s the Jews that put all the olive groves up and try to grow something on the land, you know, most land is for growing things.  So here’s the mount of ascension and somewhere along that ridge line, on the other side of this is Bethany.  Somewhere along there the disciples were there watching this whole thing take place.  I wanted you to visualize it as a place.


In the Middle Ages artists sometimes painted pictures; this is a medieval type of art from and I’m not an art historian and I don’t particularly care for medieval art, but it tends to be a theological poster; if you can think of it as a poster.  Do you notice something about that picture; think of the story you just read in the text.  How man men were talking to the disciples?  Two. Do you see the two down there; here are the disciples there are the two, Jesus is ascending.  Notice something else that the artist put in this picture.  How when he painted Jesus ascending did he paint Him such that he conveyed to the viewer of this painting the truth that in the New Testament He rose far above the principalities and powers?  Do you see what the artist tried to do here to get that idea across?  There are the angelic beings and on this painting what the artist… He drew Jesus piercing that level, so Jesus’ head here is higher than the heads of the angels and has Him ascending through the domain of the angelic beings. That will come back because that’s a critical truth of the ascension and session of the Lord Jesus Christ.  

 

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Question asked: Clough replies: The question, if you go back to the call of Abraham, God promised that Abraham not only would be father of a great nation, i.e. father of Israel, but he would also be father of many nations, so where does that put the “many nations” in the covenant.  That answer comes by watching the narrative of succession in Genesis. That’s the significance of the Abraham, Isaac, Jacob sequence because when God is identified after that period in history he goes by that name.  How often do you hear that name, the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob?  In fact, even Jesus refers to that.  There you have the delineation of the domain of the covenant of salvation, the redemptive covenant coming through Abraham doesn’t go to all his physical seed, it goes through that line.  And so it’s a restricted subset of all of his progeny. That’s not to say that the progeny can’t, as individuals, be saved; we’re just saying that the identifiable nation, the great nation is the one through whom God will bring Christ, through whom God will reveal the Scriptures and it’s through whom that God will bring world peace, finally, in the setting up of the kingdom.  So God has that instrument confined to those who come out of the Abraham, Isaac and Jacob line.  But there are other nations.

I have a friend that I work with a lot who I am not sure is a Christian and he recently saw a film on the Middle East, the story of Abraham, and came back and said gosh, you know, they talked all about Isaac and Ishmael and Jacob and Esau, it sounds to me like that’s still going on.  We’d been commenting about it.  And that’s right, that’s the problem, Isaac and Ishmael are still going at it, they’re both out of Abraham, so the modern Arab-Palestinian person could well be Semitic.  You can’t really accuse them technically of anti-Semitism because they themselves, many of them, are Semites themselves.  It’s just that the Shemites that are closest to the Jew are actually the ones that are most hostile, if you think about it in Scripture.  The Moabites, they were always turning against the legitimate Jew and so the anger and the hostility and the depth of opposition that just is appalling in our day because we see the suicide kids, the training that the families go through, and mamma thinks her 16 year old son was a great hero because he blew everybody up on a bus.  You wonder what is going on.  What is going on is the same thing that’s been going on for centuries, it’s just that in the TV and the media today we kind of get it in our face.  It’s been there fomenting all along and what you’re seeing is the anger and the animosity that you read about in the Old Testament. 

 

So Abraham is the father of a lot of nations and tragically he shouldn’t have been father of some of them. Again it goes back to the fact that God does tend sometimes to take our disobedience and the fruit of our disobedience, and its embarrassing and humiliating to get it in our face, but He sometimes will do that, you know, you want it to go away, you want the consequence of your sin to go away and for some reason He’ll take a piece of it or a chunk of it and just keep stabbing you with it, kind of.  It’s just to remind us that whatsoever we sow, that shall we also reap.  That’s His method, fortunately, to be “absent from the body and face to face with the Lord” it’s all over, so it’s not eternal.

 

Question asked: Clough replies:  The question is in the creation story is the story of the serpent meant to be taken literally or is the serpent actually a figurative picture of Satan.  I think the way to answer that is first of all in the text, what we call a snake, the serpentine kind of thing, is what the serpent looked like after the curse.  Remember what God said in the curse, you’ll crawl around on your face.  So evidently what we call the serpentine thing is an abnormal version of what originally was there.  What originally was there we don’t know what it looked like, but we know what it looks like now.  Let’s talk about correspondence between forms.  I take that as a literal entity that Satan spoke somehow, he had evidently the power to perhaps take upon him some animal being, body.  That shouldn’t be astounding actually when you consider the demons took over the swine in the Gospels; the angel of the Lord took over a jackass, to Baalim, so animals that have a developed central nervous system beyond a certain state apparently biologically and physiologically capable of sustaining an indwelling spirit of some sort.

 

But as far as correspondence, I think there’s a good point raised in this question: apart from the literalness, okay yeah it’s literal, but what’s the correspondence between animal forms and angelic powers.  If you look in the book of Revelation and you look at the throne of God, the angels have animal parts to them.  What’s remarkable about this is, and Old Testament scholars have commented on this, is that in the ancient world the gods and goddesses were often pictured zoomorphically.  In the Old Testament what did God insist to His people that they never do?  No image of Me, and there was always this tendency.  I mean, Aaron, for crying out loud, Moses is up on the mountain and he’s already doing a graven image, it was just inherent that they had to have a biological zoomorphic humanoid form of God to visualize Him.   And God refused to allow that. 

 

So what then do we do with zoomorphic forms?  I think from the revelation that you see in the Bible the, what we call incorporeal angels have some sort of corporeal form when we’re seeing them and the forms they have, and have had for all history, correspond to what we see in human and animal form.  So to get back to the question, I believe that the biological form, the physiological, zoomorphical form of the serpent today corresponds to what Satan would look like if we could see him, one of his forms, he evidently can transmute because he can appear as a person, he can appear as [can’t understand word], but it’s serpentine, there’s something that God wants us to see in the serpentine animal form that is revelatory of Satan. 

 

This occurs in the book of Judges, there’s a satanic image of Egypt that’s called the leviathan, we don’t know what leviathan is, some people think it was kind of like a dinosaur reptilian form again that appeared in the book of Job.  But why is there this constant theme through Scripture of a reptilian type analogy with Satan.  I don’t know, it just seems to be there.  You conclude that every part of creation is revelatory of God in some respects so it must be that the reptilian form has some correspondence with Satan.  I don’t believe… and this is one of the things where we would differ as creationists from an evolutionist, the evolutionalist views animal forms, by the way, as almost biological accidents borne of natural selection, and we view animal forms as revelatory.  A great example of this was when I lived in Texas I knew someone who raised sheep; people who raise sheep can tell you all kinds of stories about the weird behavior of sheep and how helpless they are.  These animals couldn’t exist without a man, they’d fall over and get gas and it takes a human being to put them up or they bloat and die, they’re amazing.  So that animal called a lamb or a sheep is designed biologically to reveal things.  That form is not a cat, it’s not a dog, it’s a sheep and the reason the way it looks the way it does and acts the way it does is because God said I want an animal that does those things that looks that way because I’m using that animal as a prop to teach My people. 

 

That’s why to me… another manifestation of this is how can somebody ever be bored living in this world with all the revelatory chunks and pieces around us.  You can’t be bored because every one of these things, if you think deeply enough about it is revelatory.  Why, for example are dogs the way they are?  There something about the dog in the wolf/fox form, hostile to the lamb, and Gentiles are called dogs.  Jesus called a lady a dog once; not very Christ-like we would say in our evangelical circles.  But He referred to her as a dog. Why? Because there’s something about the dog nature that is revelatory.  I know, we all like our pet dog, but there’s something about that that’s revelatory and it’s neat to see.  And you see, if you approach things from an evolutionary point of view you can’t say anything like that because it’s all biological accidents, it’s all statistical, there’s nothing inherently logical or rational about it. 

 

Question asked: Clough replies:  The question is about animals being demonically controlled.  In the Hebrew there’s no distinction between nephesh, which is the word translated in the English for “soul” as it is used for animals and man.  The distinction is not between the fact that animals have souls, the word “soul” in the Hebrew is not a specialized thing, it’s more like life, it’s almost a synonym for life.  The distinction, if you go back to the creation narrative, is not that animals don’t have life and we do or they have [can’t understand word] and we don’t, the difference is that whatever our spirit/soul is it is made in God’s image.  The famous church apologist, Tertullian I guess it was, who had a meditation on the Garden when God created man and he said when God sat there and He worked the first man in the clay of the earth, He had in mind the incarnation.  He made us in His image that He could become the God-man. That’s why the human form is the way it is, not because it’s evolved.  It is designed from the very beginning to be a vehicle of the incarnation. 

 

So animals, it appear at times that they can be controlled and act as inhabitants.  One of the interesting things is that capital punishment in the Mosaic Law Code was any animal that kills will be capitally punished, or with any man, you know, I mean, what’s that mean, it means something weird, something’s connected there.  I think our time is running out, next week we’ll start with the ascension and go into some of the fallout of the ascension and Pentecost.  For the first few weeks it’ll be review but I think it’s worthwhile to review.