Category: Scripture – Hermeneutics

Biblical Theology Snippets

Genesis 3:15

When Israel was in Egypt the crowns of the Pharaohs had a serpent prominently displayed. So, as the representative of the seed of the serpent he battled with Israel, the seed of the woman. Via the individual seed of the woman (Moses) God crushes the head of the Egyptian serpent and drowns the seed of the Serpent in the Red Sea, just as the seed of the serpent intended to drown the seed of the women in the Nile when he gave instructions to the Hebrew Midwives. This drowning of the seed of the serpent is a recapitulation of God previously drowning the seed of the serpent in the flood.

Once delivered from Egypt Israel complained against God about many things including the lack of water, and so God provides water for them at Massah and Meribah (Ex. 17:1-7). God tells Moses,

“Behold, I will stand before you there on the rock at Horeb, and you shall strike the rock,and water shall come out of it, and the people will drink.” (vs. 6).

The Psalmist, later singing this event (Ps. 78:15-20), may be inspired to understand that the struck Rock was God Himself.

“They remembered that God was their Rock (78:35).

Paul may well see the Lord Christ as a Christophanic Rock that was struck so that all might drink,

“And did all drink the same spiritual drink for they drank of the spiritual Rock that followed them: and the Rock was Christ.”

It is not a stretch to find a picture here of God standing before the rock, Moses striking the Rock, and God / Christ being identified with the Rock out of whom / which flowed streams of living water so that God’s people might drink and live. God is struck, at His own instruction, by the rod so that His people might live.

Such a understanding provides light for later passages in the Gospels where the Lord Christ calls people to Himself in order that He might provide waters of living water wherein they will be satisfied (John 4:10-14, 7:37-39).

Finally, when being struck the Lord Christ’s side flows with blood unto His enemies and water unto His people. The water and blood throughout the Scripture being both judgment and life to both the righteous and the wicked.

Genesis should be read as a record of the ongoing battle of the two seeds.

In the covenantal structure that Genesis gives its readers, people are either the seed of the serpent, on the side of the Covenant head snake in the garden, or seed of the woman, on the side of the Covenant keeping God and trusting in His promises.

In this structure one finds the Snake’s people opposing God’s people,

Cain vs. Abel
Ishmael vs. Isaac
Esau vs. Jacob
Son’s of Israel vs. Joseph

In this structure one finds also a battle being done between collective entities. The covenant people of the Serpent vs. the covenant people of God.

Pharaoh and Egypt vs. Abraham and Sarah
Kings of the World (Sodom) vs. Abraham & his household, Lot, Melchizedek
Abimelech & Philistines vs. Abraham & his people
Abimelech & Philistines vs. Isaac & his people
The men of Schechem vs. Simeon, Levi, & Israel (Dinah)
Sons of Israel vs. Joseph

Goodwin & McAtee — Adam & Christ … Fall & Redemption

“Adam’s fall, you know, was in the garden; Satan there encountered him, and overcame him, led him and all mankind into captivity to sin and death. God now singleth out the place where the great redeemer of the world, the second Adam, should first encounter with His Father’s wrath, to be in a garden, and that there he should be be bound and led away captive as Adam was… Because by a temptation let in at the ear man was condemned, therefore by hearing of the word men shall be saved. “Thou shalt eat thy bread in the sweat of thy brows” that was part of Adam’s curse; Christ he sweat drops of blood for this, it was the force of that curse that caused it. ‘The ground shall bring forth thorns to thee;’ Christ he was crucified with a crown of thorns. Adam his disobedience was acted in a garden; and Christ both his active and passive obedience also, much of it was garden; and at the last, as the first beginning of his humiliation was in a garden, so the last step was too; he was buried, though not in this, yet in another garden. Thus the type and the thing typified answer one another.”

Thomas Goodwin
Christ Set Forth (Works vol. 5, pg. 198

The cheap knock off version.

There in the Temple Garden, filled with the Presence of God, Adam fell to Satan’s fiat law word, and so brought upon all of his generations a captivity to sin and to death. In a recapitulation of the that first Temptation in the Garden — a garden that was characterized by the Father’s presence — the Lord Christ is tempted in a waste land Wilderness. But whereas the first Adam fell despite being supported by the Sanctuary Garden, the second Adam resisted the devil, despite a barren wilderness that announced God’s absence. The Greater Adam quoted God’s fiat word against the fiat word of the devil as he counterfeited God’s voice and so resisted the Devil. Also, it is of interest to note that as Adam fell to the Serpent’s wrath in the Garden so the Son first encountered the Father’s Wrath there in the Olive Press garden of Gethsemane. In each case both Adam’s are bound and led away as outlaws to the Father’s favor.

We find other parallels between the Fall and the Restoration. As Adam fell by the temptation of the false Word so man is restored by the hearing of the true Word. Whereas in the Sanctuary Garden Adam was cursed with the promise that “Thou shalt eat thy bread in the sweat of thy brow,” now in the Garden of Gethsemane, Christ, who is the bread from Heaven, bears Adam’s sweaty curse by sweating drops of blood. Note also that the consequential curse for Adam was the certain promise that ‘The ground shall bring forth thorns to thee’ while Christ bears on his brow a Crown of Thorns thus providing a poignant reminder that Christ is bearing Adam’s thorny curse come to full growth.

As Adam’s death barred him from the Tree of life because of his sin, so the tribe of Christ is restored by eating Christ whose tree of death has become to us a tree of life.

The Garden theme comes to play again as Christ’s humiliation reaches its apex as He is buried in the garden tomb. This humiliation apex though is answered by the beginning exaltation of the Lord Christ where He is vindicated there in the Garden by resurrection.

The Worldview Machen On The Modern Age — A Rebuff To Hart’s R2K Machen

“The truth is there can be no real progress unless there is something that is fixed. Archimedes said, “Give me a place to stand, and I will move the world.” Well, Christian doctrine provides that place to stand. Unless there be such a place to stand, all progress is an illusion. The very idea of progress implies something fixed. There is no progress in a kaleidoscope

That is the trouble with the boasted progress of our modern age. The Bible at the start was given up. Nothing was to be regarded as fixed. All truth was regarded as relative. What has been the result? I will tell you. An unparalleled decadence—liberty prostrate, slavery stalking almost unchecked through the earth, the achievements of centuries crumbling in the dust, sweetness and decency despised, all meaning regarded as having been taken away from human life. What is the remedy? I will tell you that too. A return to God’s Word! We had science for the sake of science, and got the World War; we had art for art’s sake, and got ugliness gone mad; we had man for the sake of man and got a world of robots—men made into machines. Is it not time for us to come to ourselves, like the prodigal in a far country? Is it not time for us to seek real progress by a return to the living God?

J. Gresham Machen
The Creeds and Doctrinal Advance

1.) Notice how integrated Machen’s worldview here is in this excerpt. He starts with the necessity of the absolute given-ness of the Scriptures and the Historic Christian Doctrine that they convey. From there he segues into the reality that without the Archimedian fixed reference point there can be no progress. And the progress which Machen is referring to is not merely progress in the Church but progress in culture and social order. Machen explicitly says because of the loss of fixity that is provided with and by Scripture and the Christian doctrine that flows from it, “there is decadence, there is liberty prostrate, there is slavery stalking almost unchecked upon the earth, the achievements of centuries crumbling in the dust, with sweetness and decency despised.”

    Now clearly this is worldview thinking at its best.

Machen, writing as a Christian Minister, and a Doctor of the Church, tells the Christian community that unless they return to Scripture not only will all hope of progress is abandoned but also regress into old chaos and dark night is guaranteed.

2.) Notice also, how Machen connects the teaching of Scripture to what some style the “common realm.” Machen, like all good worldview thinkers, explicitly notes that when we embraced Science apart from Christian doctrine, Art apart from Christian doctrine, Man apart from Christian doctrine the consequences were war, ugliness gone mad, and robots. Machen clearly sees a connection here between Scripture, Christian Doctrine and all of life. Machen’s faith is not a privatized faith that is cordoned off from the public square. Machen’s faith is not a faith that appeals to Natural Law to govern science, art, and man. Machen’s faith is not a faith that would keep him from boldly speaking as a Christian minister to the life issues of the time. Machen’s faith was a wholistic integrated faith as this quote clearly reveals.

3.) In his appeal to return to the living God is implied the idea that should man return to the living God then the problems he makes mention off will find themselves receding. Man will no longer be a robot and a machine but instead will discover again his manishness. Art will no longer be ugliness gone mad but will once again find its proper place and role in God’s world. Science will no longer be prone to producing War but will be harnessed for the glory of God.

Machen finds in God’s Word and Christian doctrine not only the resolution to individual men’s hostility to God and God’s hostility to them, but Machen also found in God’s Word and Christian doctrine the resolution to a world gone mad and a civilization undone by sin.

And for that R2K must re-invent the Machen of History so that he is, as one R2K advocate recently put it one who believed that, “fighting these (cultural) battles was not the ministry of the visible church.” Quite to the contrary this piece reveals a man of the visible Church fighting with an eye not only to the Church but also to the cultural issues in the world.

Andy Stanley On Scripture & Infallibility

Recently a video of a question and answer format with Rev. Andy Stanley was on youtube. That video has since been taken down. In that video Rev. Stanley said,

“The foundation of our faith is not the Scripture. The foundation of our faith is not the infallibility of the Bible. The foundation of our faith is something that happened in history.

Bret responds,

Here Rev. Stanley tries to rip apart revelation from redemption. Sure, the foundation of our faith is something that happened in History (i.e. — Redemption — Christ’s work on the Cross) but I could not know about Redemption apart from Revelation (Scripture). So Stanley introduces a false dichotomy between Redemption and Revelation suggesting that our foundation is the Redemptive act but denying the foundational nature of the Revelation that communicates to us the reality of the Redemptive act and its meaning.

Elsewhere in the vanished video Rev. Stanley could say,

“You can believe that the Adam and Eve were a creation Myth. That’s OK.

Bret responds,

Rev. Stanley goes on to say that he doesn’t believe the Creation myth because the Bible says so but because Jesus talks about Adam and Eve and since Jesus has credibility because he rose from the grave therefore Rev. Stanley says he can believe what the Bible says about Adam and Eve.

Of course the problem here is that the place where we read that Jesus talked about Adam and Eve is the Scriptures. So if you don’t believe the Creation myth because the Bible says so, then why would one believe it because a Jesus believes it? After all, the Redemption acts of Jesus are recorded in the Bible as well. Could not the resurrection account be just as mythological as Adam and Eve?

The Enns Hermeneutic

For a few years now Peter Enns and his “doctrine of inspiration” has been making waves in the Reformed / Evangelical community. Of course the fact that Enns could, with this “doctrine of inspiration” spend years at Westminster East should wave red flags for Christians in terms of supporting these institutions. I wish I could say that Westminster East was some kind of exception in regards to putatively White Hat Seminaries harboring significant error.

Anyway, I thought I would dip into the controversy and read something that explained a little bit what it was all about. Imagine my surprise when I picked up G. K. Beale’s, “The Erosion of Inerrancy in Evangelicalism,” and discovered that all Enns is pushing is a variant of neo-orthodoxy with a “History of Religions” school twist. There is nothing new in what Enns is thumping. This drivel has been pushed for decades. The fact that somehow this is seen as “new,” or, “innovative,” by some people speaks more of those people’s collective historical unawareness then it does to the fact that Enns has discovered a new and innovative Hermeneutic.

Beale, at least, recognizes that Enns has hardly come up with something new under the sun. In a trenchant critique Beale has this to say about the failure of Enns “Myth Hermeneutic.”

1.) Enns affirms that some of the narratives in Genesis, e.g. of creation and flood, are shot through with myth, much of which the biblical narrator did not know lacked correspondence to actual past reality.

2.) Enns appears to assume that since biblical writers, especially, for example, the Genesis narrator, were not objective in narrating history, then their presuppositions distorted significantly the events that they reported. He too often appears to assume that the socially constructed reality of these ancient biblical writers, e.g., their purported mythical mindsets, prevented them from being able to describe past events in a way that had significant correspondence with how a person in the modern world would observe and report events.

3.) Enns never spells out the model of Jesus’ incarnation with which he is drawing analogies for his view of Scripture.

4.) Enns affirms that one cannot use modern definitions of truth and error in order to perceive whether Scripture contains truth or error. However, this is non-falsifiable, since Enns never says what would count as an error according to ancient standards. This is also reductionistic, since there were some rational and even scientific categories as the disposal of ancient people for evaluating the observable world that are in some important ways commensurable to our own.

5.) Enns does not follow at significant points his own excellent proposal of guidelines for evaluating the views of others with whom one disagrees.

6.) Enns’s book is marked by ambiguities at important junctures of his discussion.

7.) Enns does not attempt to present to and discuss for the reader significant alternative viewpoints besides his own, which is needed in a book dealing with crucial issues.

8.) Enns appears to caricature the views of past evangelical scholarship by not distinguishing the views of so called fundamentalists from that of good conservative scholarly work.

Enns’s hermeneutic is basically a hermeneutic of post-modern tolerance. When embraced the consequence is that the reader of Scripture is the one judging Scripture (what is myth and what isn’t) as opposed to being the one who is under the judgment of Scripture. Enns himself might be comparatively “conservative,” but allow his hermeneutic to be officially sanctioned in the Church (and it already is sanctioned in a defacto way in most churches … for Pete’s sake if it could live for years and years at Westminster East, clearly it is hard to see how it wouldn’t already be ensconced in the Church now) and the consequence will be all kinds of novel postmodern conclusions as putatively drawn from Scripture.