Psalm 78:69 says something amazing about Israel’s Temple: God “built the sanctuary like the heights, [He built the sanctuary] like the earth which he has founded forever.” this tells us that in some way God modeled the Temple to be a little replica of the entire heaven and earth. Yet, in Is. 66:1 God says, “Heaven is my throne, and the earth is My footstool. Where then is a house you could build for me?” God never intended that Israel’s little localized temple last forever, since, like the Eden temple, Israel’s temple was a small model of something much bigger: God and His universal presence, which could never eternally be contained by any localized earthly structure.
Israel’s tabernacle and temple were a miniature model of God’s huge cosmic temple that was to dominate the heaven and earth at the end of time. That is, the temple was a symbolic model pointing not merely to the present cosmos but also to the new heaven and earth that would be perfectly filled with God’s presence. That it was a miniature symbolic model of the coming Temple that would fill heavens and earth is evident from the following figurative features of the three sections of the temple: the holy of holies, the holy place, and the outer courtyard.
G. K. Beale
Category: Quotes & Commentary
Christianity is Worth Fighting For … Rushdoony
Chrysostom, in dealing also with the conflict w/ Caesar warned his people in his sermon “Concerning the Statutes” Homily III 19
“This certainly I foretell and testify, that although this cloud should pass away, and we yet remain in the same condition of listlessness, we shall again have to suffer much heavier evils than those we are not dreading; for I do not so much fear the wrath of the Emperor, as your own listlessness.”
“Here Chrysostom put his finger on the heart of the matter: the threat was less the Emperor and more a listless and indifferent church. The same problem confronts us today. The greater majority of church members do not feel that Christianity is worth fighting for, let alone dying for. They only want the freedom to be irrelevant, and to emit pious gush as a substitute for faithfulness and obedience. In soap opera religion, life is w/o dominion; instead, it is a forever-abounding mess, met with a sensitive and bleeding heart. Soap opera religion is the faith of the castrated, of the impotent, and the irrelevant. The devotees of soap opera religion are full of impotent self pity and rage over the human predicament, but are devoid of any constructive action; only destruction and negation become them.”
R. J. Rushdoony
Roots of Reconstruction — pg 27
Chesterton On Equality
(The Englishman) “may realize that (American) equality is not some tale about all men being equally tall or equally tricky; which we not only cannot believe but cannot believe in anybody believing. It is an absolute of morals by which all men have a value invariable and indestructible and a dignity as intangible as death.”
G. K. Chesterton
What I Saw In America
If Chesterton had lived to see what I’m seeing he would have to believe in men believing that all men are equally tall and equally tricky and equally intelligent and equally creative. The lie of egalitarianism is that all men and all peoples are equal in talent, skill and ability. It is the lie that all men, regardless of nurture, nature, and belief are the same. This lie leads to the elimination of all God given and God honoring distinctions.
The American belief in equality was never intended to be equivalent to this lie. For Pete’s sake the Declaration of Independence refers to Indians as “savages,” clearly something that would not have been said by those who were intending equality to mean a bland sameness. The American belief in equality is just what Chesterton noted combined with the belief that all men bore the imago Dei.
The equality of 21st century America is the equality of the French Revolution, the equality of the gulag, the equality of the sex change. It is the pursuit of the leveling all distinction, ability, and accomplishment. It is the pursuit of equality of both opportunity and outcome – a notion that is absurd even on its surface. If the West should ever go from flirting with this modern concept of egalitarianism to a full conjugal embrace of such a fantasy the result will be the equality of the damned.
Bavinck On R2K
“Scripture is the Book of the Kingdom of God, not a book for this or that people, for the individual only, but for all nations, for all of humanity. It is not a book for one age, but for all times. It is a Kingdom book. Just as the Kingdom of God develops not alongside and above history, but in and through world history, so too Scripture must not be abstracted, nor viewed by itself, nor isolated from everything. Rather, Scripture must be brought into relationship with all our living, with the living of the entire human race. And Scripture must be employed to explain all of human
living.”Herman Bavinck,
“The Kingdom of God, The Highest Good”
HT — Mark Van Der Molen
Queen Victoria On Feminism
“I am most anxious to enlist everyone who can speak or write to join in checking this mad, wicked folly of ‘Women’s Rights’, with all its attendant horrors, on which her poor feeble sex is bent, forgetting every sense of womanly feelings and propriety. Feminists ought to get a good whipping. Were woman to ‘unsex’ themselves by claiming equality with men, they would become the most hateful, heathen and disgusting of beings, and would surely perish without male protection.”
— Queen Victoria, 1870