Flee for refuge

In Ruth 2, Boaz blesses Ruth: "A full reward be given to you by Yahweh, under whose wings you have come to take refuge!"  The image of the bird spreading out its wings over its vulnerable chicks is tender and magnificent; it is heightened in Ruth 3 when Boaz himself agrees to spread the 'wings' of his garment over Ruth, becoming the answer to his own prayer, being the shelter of the Lord.

But what has been particularly striking me in the last couple of days is how much fleeing for refuge there is in the Old Testament.  The lectionary yesterday took me to Psalm 5 ("But let all who take refuge in you rejoice; let them ever sing for joy, and spread your protection over them, that those who love your name may exult in you.") and then to Psalm 7 ("O Yahweh my God, in you do I take refuge; save me from all my pursuers and deliver me").  In the evening at a church prayer meeting, Psalm 46 was read ("God is our refuge and strength, a very present help in trouble.")

Some reflections:

1.  This means life is hard.  Nobody flees unless they have to, nobody becomes a refugee willingly.  Life is hard.  Circumstances are difficult, ranging from mildly irritating to impossible to sustain.  Our own brokenness is hard, whether it is physical or mental health struggles or just the sense of homelessness that comes from being a human in a fallen creation.  The struggle with sin is hard, whether we're winning or losing.  Guilt is hard, hard to repress or ignore and even harder to acknowledge.  Flight to refuge is surely the experience of all of us at one time or another.

2.  The God who directs providence provides protection.  Surely the hardest thing in life is God himself.  I mean, the God who stands inscrutable behind providence; and more, the God who stands at the end of everything as Judge.  It is striking that the book of Ruth, which unless I am badly misreading it is primarily a story of providence, contains Boaz's blessing in the middle.  It is God who has directed the hard providence of Ruth 1, and yet it is God to whom Ruth has fled for refuge.  Is there a parallel here that needs to be thought?  It is God who sits on the seat of judgement and condemns my sin and wickedness, and yet it is this same God to whom we flee for forgiveness and a covering of righteousness.  The flood is his, but so is the ark.

3.  Jesus.  Where, other than in Christ, does any refuge appear?  Under whose wings can we take refuge, other than his?  Here in Christ we see that the direction of providence, the rule of the Judge, is by no means an impersonal fate or a harsh legalism.  Here I see God himself raising a lament over those who have resisted his grace: "How often would I have gathered your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings, and you would not!"  Here is the loving hand that guides even the darkest providence.  Here in the God who hangs on the cross is the fortress of my soul, the rock which is split so that I can hide within.  Here is refuge.

Other refuge have I none,

Hangs my helpless soul on Thee;

Leave, oh, leave me not alone,

Still support and comfort me.

All my trust on Thee is stayed,

All my help from Thee I bring;

Cover my defenseless head

With the shadow of Thy wing.

The land and the amen

As various people remember the centenary of the Balfour Declaration, which pledged the British Government to work towards the establishment of what would become the modern state of Israel, perhaps it's time to reflect again on what God's promises to ancient Israel mean today.  For some, like His Grace, Balfour represented God keeping his promise, that Israel would possess the land in perpetuity - and therefore the modern state of Israel and the whole Zionist enterprise is the fulfilment of God's word.  I can't agree.  I think this is a theological disaster (and note, this is a theological and not directly a political post; obviously one can't wholly unpick them, but this particular post is really about whether Zionism can be given a Christian theological justification), and I think I see how it happens.

Let's clear the decks a bit.  Did the God of all the earth particularly elect Israel, and particularly promise them the possession of a strip of land in the eastern Mediterranean in perpetuity?  Yes, yes he did.  You can read it right there in the Old Testament.  You can read the original promise to Abraham, you can read the reiterated promise to Moses, you can read the promise of a remnant and a restoration which the prophets bring even after Israel's exile from the land.  Now, if you pride yourself on reading the Bible literally, you will take those promises to mean just what they say at face value.  From there, you will have to assume that they remain unfulfilled, and you may conclude that they are in process of being fulfilled at the present time.  It makes sense.

But that sort of literal reading is not a Christian way to read the Bible.

The apostle Paul tells us that every promise of God receives its 'yes' in Christ.  This is the consistent perspective of the New Testament: that the story of Israel is recapitulated in Christ, and that the promises made to Israel are fulfilled in Christ.  Consider, for example, the promise that a descendant of David will reign forever over the Kingdom of Israel.  For the apostles, that promise finds it divine 'yes', its 'amen, amen', in the exaltation of the Lord Jesus to the throne of the universe.  To say that they are still looking forward to an earthly Kingdom is to deny that the Kingdom already belongs to Christ, and that is unthinkable to the NT authors.

A Christian reading of the Old Testament does not view it as a series of relatively disconnected promises, related to one another only in so far as they fit into some mysterious and as yet unfulfilled plan of God's will.  Rather, a Christian reading of the Old Testament sees the whole as moving towards one point, namely Christ.  In him, the promises find their fulfilment.  He is the Amen of God to all the promises of the OT, the meaning hidden in every part of the OT story.  So when the apostles look forward, they don't look forward to more redemptive history.  They look forward to the uncovering and revealing of the fulfilment that has already taken place in Jesus - in other words, they look for him to come again in glory.

The promise of the land is not in any sense independent of Christ - none of the promises of God are.  In fact, the promise of the land is fulfilled.  The Lord Jesus has, through his resurrection and exaltation, taken possession of all the earth.  He is in his person the recapitulation of the history of Israel in Canaan, just as he is the recapitulation of the history of Adam in Eden.  That this is not yet seen does not make it any less true.

There are not multiple storylines in Scripture.  There are not multiple words of God.  There is one Word, Jesus Christ.  He is the Amen to all God's promises, and the eternal possessor of the land.

Crucified

God promised that there would come a man who would crush the ancient serpent, defeating once and for all time the rebellion of men and angels - though he himself would be bruised.

God commanded Abraham to sacrifice his only son, the son on whom all his hopes for the future were pinned, the son who was himself the fruit of God's promise - and then at the last minute, when hope was gone, stopped the knife and sent a ram instead.

God rescued his people from Egypt, but not without blood, for in truth their firstborn were not better than the firstborn of Pharaoh, and an animal had to die - the slain lamb painting the doorposts of the house, death on the outside and life within,

God gave his people animal sacrifices, rivers of blood through the generations, hands laid on goats to transfer sin and guilt - so that sin could be done to death, and sinfulness sent away to the wilderness.

God spoke to his people through the prophet Isaiah, at the point of their great rejection of him, and told them of his servant, the one would who would himself be rejected by the people - and yet would bear sin and transgression to death.

God sent his own Son into the world.  Crucified, he achieved all that had been symbolised and promised.  Here is Satan defeated.  Here is the loving Father offering his only Son.  Here is the rescue from sin by blood.  Here is the sacrifice which does to death our rebellion and removes our guilt.  Here is the Servant who submits to taste death for all.

O love of God! O sin of man!
In this dread act Your strength is tried;
And victory remains with love;
For Thou our Lord, art crucified!

Hermeneutics in Romans 10:5-10

Have a read.

The funny thing about this passage is that Paul pits two quotations from the OT against one another.  It's not made clear in the ESV, for some reason, but in verse 5 he quotes Leviticus 18:5.  The Leviticus verse is clearly attributed to Moses, and is used by Paul to represent the sort of thing legalistic righteousness might say - basically, do and live (with the unspoken flip-side, fail and die).  In verses 6 through 8, we have a mixed quotation from Deuteronomy - mostly from 30:11-14, with an introduction taken from Deut 9:4, and of course interspersed with Paul's commentary.  The Deuteronomy quotation is not attributed, but is used by Paul to represent the righteousness that is by faith - basically, trust and live.

What is odd about this?

Firstly, Paul knows full well that the Deuteronomy quotation is from Moses; it forms part of the finale of his long farewell sermon on the plains of Moab.  If he is really pitting Leviticus against Deuteronomy, this is a weird intra-Mosaic fight which would seem to be difficult within Paul's apparent doctrine of Scripture.  (He has, of course, no recourse to the easy tools of modern critical scholarship; one suspects he would not have used them if he did).

Secondly, in context - and we should never assume that we can ignore the context of Paul's quotations and allusions - both passages say much the same thing.  The whole point of the Deuteronomy passage is that Israel can and should keep the law - it is not a difficult of a distant thing.  And given that the verses cited by Paul are immediately followed by 'see, I have set before you life and good, death and evil', it would be hard to insert the thinnest of knife blades between this and the Leviticus quote.  On the other hand, the Leviticus passage itself, in the context of the book and of the whole Pentateuch, is hardly so legalistic as all that.  The law is given only to a people who have already been rescued from Egypt, something which is surely significant, and as Leviticus is continually reminding its readers, Israel is to be holy because YHWH their God - the God who has graciously made himself theirs - is holy.

So what is Paul doing here?

My suggestion would be that he is not pitting two Scriptures against one another, but two hermeneutics.  It is possible to read the OT and arrive at a legalistic conclusion.  It is possible to conclude that God requires you to establish your own righteousness, and that he has provided the law as a means to do it.  You can read it like that, and it will be broadly coherent.  Paul argues in 9:32 and 10:3 that this is exactly what Israel has done in his day.  This is their hermeneutic.

But it is equally possible to read the OT as teaching righteousness by faith.  The Deuteronomy quotation represents that option.  By interspersing the quotation with explicitly Christian emphases not present in the original text, Paul makes it clear why we should choose this hermeneutic over the other.  The facts of Christ's death and resurrection in our place as the culmination of the story of the OT decide once and for all what it was that Israel's story was all about, and it certainly wasn't about establishing our own legal righteousness.  We know the Old Testament was always about justification by faith because of Christ.

Worship Old and New

An important distinction that is drawn by most advocates of the Reformed Regulative Principle in one way or another is that between worship under the old covenant and worship under the new.  It is hugely important that this be kept in mind, but equally important that it not be over-emphasised.  For some Reformed theologians, the discontinuity and difference between the two forms of worship is such that musical instruments, which play a large role in the OT, are forbidden in NT worship.  This is, of course, an example of the Biblicism which I have suggested is an illegitimate use of Scripture.  Nevertheless, it reflects an important issue.

Here, as generally when thinking about the continuity and discontinuity between OT and NT, it is important to remember that we are dealing with one covenant under two dispensations, which finds its centre and unity in the person and work of Christ.  When it comes to worship, Hebrews 9 is useful on this.  The validity of the OT ritual was derived from its conformity to the action of Christ in the mode of foretelling.  The tabernacle/temple, all the festivals and fasts, and even the sacrificial system are all based on him, and serve to announce his coming in advance.  The need for foretelling being past, this mode of worship has also passed away.

So NT worship is to form the other half of the diptych, with Christ himself as the hinge.  Where on the left we have Christ foretold, on the right we have Christ remembered.  Both are forms of proclamation and of celebration; they are just in different tenses.  That will alter the form, but not the essential content of Christian worship.

Perhaps the most essential point to be made here is that we judge all these things from the centre; that is to say, we decide what NT worship looks like, and how it relates to the ritual of the OT, with reference to Christ himself, and his gospel.  We don't judge based on our preconceived ideas of what must be enduring (or what must not be enduring) in OT worship itself, or on our preconceived ideas of what the new spiritual, truthful worship ought to look like.  Rather, we seek in everything to look to the hinge which holds old and new together, and in which they both find their goal and meaning.

Jesus in the OT

Let's take it as axiomatic that the OT, as Christian Scripture, is about Jesus.  Of course there will be those who dispute this, but let's assume it for the time being.  The question then becomes: how do I see Jesus in the OT?  I think you have two basic approaches, which I will call the one-step and two-step interpretations.  The one-step interpretation goes straight to Jesus; the two step-interpretation stops off somewhere else along the way.  The one-step approach sees Jesus as the immediate meaning of the OT; the two-step approach sees Jesus as the ultimate meaning of the OT.

To illustrate, imagine you have just read Psalm 1.  You ask yourself: who is this blessed man?  The one-step interpreter says - this is Jesus.  This description could never match anyone but Jesus.  And then they will usually draw a link straight in to Psalm 2 and make the anointed man in that Psalm equal the blessed man in the other, and both of them identified as Jesus.  The two-step interpreter is more likely to read Psalm 1 as a wisdom Psalm - a text which establishes the categories of blessedness and wickedness, into which all people could broadly be allocated.  And then they would make the second step, pointing out that Jesus is of course the ultimate fulfilment of what it means to be the blessed man, and that this Psalm which deals in general categories only finds its grounding in human reality through Christ.

Or another example - suppose you are reading the Song of Songs (it's Solomon's, you know).  The one-step interpreter says that this whole Song is about the relationship between Christ and his church, and sets out to show how the details match up with that relationship.  The two-step interpreter says that the Song is an (often highly erotic) love song, telling the story of the relationship between a man and a woman.  And then they would make the second step, showing that marriage itself is a picture of Christ and the church, and therefore seeing Christ in the Song.

I've been back and forth on this, but I'm now pretty firmly in the two-step camp.  Here are some reasons why:

1.  One-step interpretation leaves us open to the charge that we are just making stuff up.  If we end up saying stuff which anyone with a basic grasp of comprehension would be able to expose as 'reading in', I think we're in trouble.  So, when Moses struck the rock he was really striking Jesus was he?  Then why is there no indication of that in the text?  Why do we have to explain (away) so much of the Song in order to make it about Christ, or resort to arbitrary allegorising?

2.  One-step interpretation undermines the uniquely revelatory character of the incarnation.  When Christ came into the world, so did light - see John 1.  The implication of this, and numerous other parts of the Old and New Testaments, is that the OT is full of shadows, which the one-step interpreter wants to disperse prematurely.

3.  One-step interpretation seems to want to make the Scripture about Christ by denying that the Universe is about Christ.  This is a bit obscure, but it's clear to me from the treatment of the Song.  Is marriage - all human marriage - ultimately about Christ and the church?  The Apostle says it is.  Well then, what is the difficulty with saying that the Song is about human marriage?  It shouldn't undermine the Christological and gospel importance of the Song in any way, unless you have a sneaking doubt that marriage really is about Christ, and feel that there is some need to short circuit this.

There's more, but I wondered if anyone had any thoughts on those?

Gospel, Law and the structure of Biblical narrative

I think we sometimes (often?) get the relationship between the Biblical narrative and our systematic theology quite badly wrong.  I suspect that our forebears were even worse at it than us.  We often assume that systematic theology must embody 'timeless truth'; narrative by definition is not timeless.  We also often assume that systematic theology takes priority over Biblical narrative; that means that we read the latter through the former more often than not.  I think something like this is going on when people say that the Law takes priority over the Gospel - whether they mean that temporally, logically, or evangelistically.

I would argue that close attention to the Biblical storyline indicates that Gospel always comes first.

Let's take as our main exhibit the foundational narrative of the OT, the Exodus from Egypt and the journey to Canaan.  It seems pretty clear from the narrative that there is no Law involved in the initial Exodus.  The people cry to Yahweh, who hears and rescues.  There is no record that they have to do anything to secure their rescue.  As they head out of Egypt (and my mind goes to the rather dramatic scene in The Ten Commandments) all they can do is rejoice that God has delivered them.  However, it is equally clear that their rescue was not without a purpose.  Israel was being delivered from slavery in Egypt in order to serve Yahweh (thus Exodus 3:12, 7:16 etc).  So Sinai is the logical destination, the place to go after the Exodus.  Once you get there, of course you get the Law - Israel was not being set free in order to wander aimlessly, but in order to receive a new and infinitely better Master.

The point is, structure-wise, it is Gospel, then Law.

That basic structure is repeated throughout Scripture.  I think the first example is creation itself, which is certainly presented as a Gospel, and certainly has a Law which follows it.  And I am sure it is significant that when you step out of the realm of narrative, into, for example, the Pauline epistles, you so regularly have a structure of Gospel first, followed by instruction.  (I will argue at some point that Biblically this instruction is Law - but not in this post).  Not only is this clear structurally, but it makes sense of the relationship between Gospel and Law which is described in the OT - but more on this at a later date.

If at this point you're thinking either 'I'm not sure you can make this sort of doctrinal point from the shape of narrative' or 'but in the grand scheme of things, doesn't the Law of Moses come before the Gospel of Christ in the Bible?' - let me just point you to Paul's argument in Romans 4:9-12 and Galatians 3:15-18.  Paul makes a great deal of the order of events, and argues explicitly that the Gospel was preached to Abraham centuries before the Law of Moses was promulgated.

The storyline of the Bible is Gospel first, then Law.  What impact should that have on our doctrine?

Reading along the book of Job

A preliminary note - Job really challenges our standard Evangelical reading practices. We typically read with a magnifying glass, taking a short passage and probing into all the details. That won't work with Job (I would question whether it's the best way to approach any book of the Bible!) because most of the dialogue expresses ideas which are explicitly condemned by God at the end of the book. So we need to read the whole. And when we read the whole, we will get a feel for whose viewpoint we ought to credit. I would suggest that we ought to not to credit entirely any of the human characters in the book. Only the Lord's speech is entirely true. However, Job's speech is to be given more credence than any of his friends on the basis of 42:7ff. With that in mind, we can attempt a Christological reading on the basis of the four methods previously explained...

1. Explicit prediction of Christ is found in Job 19:25-27. It is, of course, possible to explain this prediction away. But looking back from the far side of the life, death and resurrection of Christ it seems extremely arbitrary not to refer Job's confidence to his coming. "I know that my Redeemer lives, and at the last he will stand upon the earth". We don't have to suppose here that Job understood and expected the incarnation; merely that Job has put his trust in the God who will come. That faith, in a God who intervenes and will intervene, is obviously crucial to Job in his situation. God's general providence is not a sufficient ground of his hope, since it is precisely that general providence against which Job is railing (apparently with justification). Job's faith is in a resolution - we know that resolution came (and will come) in Christ. Consider also Job 9:33, which although not a prophecy per se is pretty clearly crying out for Christ.

2. Job himself, I would suggest, is a type of Christ. (Note the limits on typology previously mentioned here!) Job is repeatedly described as a righteous man, and yet we see him suffering terribly. Of course, Christ also suffered, but the deeper resonance is in the fact that both Job and the Lord Jesus are explicitly forsaken by God. They are exposed to this suffering by the God they have served faithfully, in whom they have trusted for protection. By the end of the book, Job is restored - on which more momentarily. Suffice to say here that Job thus displays both sides of the OT picture of a righteous man: at the beginning and end of the book he prospers because of his righteousness, in the middle he suffers for it. That sets up point 3...

A slightly tangential point, though, before moving on. At the end of Job, the Lord informs us that Job has spoken rightly. In other words, he has maintained his innocence (not just protested it!) throughout. This is in contrast with his friends, who are forced to ask Job to intercede for them and to make sin offerings. Now, for anyone who has read the book carefully, I think this will come as a surprise. Frankly, Job is the only character who has not stood up for the honour of God throughout the long chapters of dialogue. True, we are told that he declined to curse God, but that hardly seems heroic. For most of the book, he complains bitterly about the way God has dealt with him. Is part of the point here that righteousness is not just about what is visible? We only know Job is righteous because he is vindicated in the end. In that sense, also, he is a type of Christ.

3. Job displays the pattern of suffering and resurrection very well. I don't know about you, but I always found the last seven verses of Job hugely unsatisfactory. Job receives back his health, his wealth and his standing in the community, and gets a shiny new family to replace the old one upon which a house unfortunately fell. It's almost as bad as if it had said 'then Job woke up and it was all a dream'. There is no logical link between what goes before and this ending. The only link there seems to be is Job's faith. Can I suggest that the same is true of the resurrection? It is a eucatastrophe. Everything is turned around, for the good. There is a difference though. In the story of Jesus, the resurrection makes sense. Although it doesn't follow logically, it does follow in terms of character and theme - in that sense it is a real eucatastrophe, and not just a case of deus ex machina (see the link for euchatastrophe for explanation). With the resurrection in mind, and only with the resurrection in mind, we can make sense of what happens to Job. Of course the righteous must suffer and be raised again. That is almost the definition of righteousness in the Bible.

4. The big problem in Job is that righteous people suffer. Note that it is righteous people, not just good people. It is not the fact that moral or innocent people suffer that raises the issue here, it is that people who know, love and serve God suffer. That problem is unanswerable in OT terms (which is why the end of Job seems such a cop out). It is only answerable when we see the suffering of the righteous concentrated in the only really righteous person as Christ dies. In fact, it only really makes sense when we understand that Christ is vindicated in the resurrection, and everyone who trusts him is vindicated there too.

How does this help us to read Job verse by verse? It explains why the friends are wrong when they accuse Job of sin; it explains why Job can trust the God who apparently abandons him; it explains why we cannot read God's character from the events that occur in our lives. It makes the problem of Job point us to Christ. Therefore, our own problems - the apparent God-forsakeness of our own lives - can point us to Christ also, as we look along the book of Job to the suffering and vindicated Messiah.

"It came out of nowhere"

We sometimes talk about the Old Testament as being preparation for Christ, and at some level that must be right. Jesus came at just the right time, when everything was ready to be fulfilled. But at some other level I want to ask a question. Who exactly was prepared by the OT?

When you look at the characters in the gospels, none of them get who Jesus is on the basis of the OT. That's a pretty strong statement, but I advance it as a hypothesis - can anyone contradict it? Think of Nathanael in John's gospel - he needs a miracle before he believes; Peter in the synoptics has Jesus' identity revealed to him by the Father; the people who are really well trained in the Scriptures actually cite them to show that Jesus cannot be the Christ (a prophet from Nazareth?!) The big one for me is the beloved disciple, looking into the empty tomb. He 'saw and believed' but 'as yet they did not understand the Scripture, that he must rise from the dead' (John 20:8,9). The miracle came first, and only then did they go back to the Scriptures and understand them.

Outside the gospels, I think Paul is a test case. His conversion is related by Luke three times, and I can't help thinking that is because Luke wants us to see this as a paradigm of someone coming to Christian faith. Paul knows his OT, no doubt about it. But it takes a personal intervention from Christ before he understands that those Scriptures speak of Christ.

For all these people, despite centuries of careful preparation and witness to Christ in the OT, revelation came out of nowhere and bowled them over.

I think that's important for our understanding of how revelation works. Revelation is always grace - if anyone sees Christ, it is because he freely reveals himself to them. That means revelation is never something that I can get hold of, possess, tame, and call my own. It is always something that can jump out at me, as something new and quite possibly alarming. In that sense, the relation between the OT and Christ is a chronological representation of the relationship that always exists between the Scriptural witness as a whole and Christ.

But when they have seen Christ - and in particular, when they have seen the risen Christ - all these witnesses understand the OT to be all about Christ. They don't think they are significantly reinterpreting it. They are not reading Christ into the OT. But their understanding has changed. They see now, in the light of the resurrection, that Jesus is Lord. Specifically, that means Jesus is, and always has been, Lord over and in Israel's history. The resurrection vindicates Christ, shows that he is the Messiah and the culmination of Israel's hopes and dreams, and in the process shows what those hopes and dreams really were. It always was about him.

That means that when I approach Scripture - Old or New Testament - I approach it as something that genuinely is about Jesus. I do that even for the bits which don't immediately seem to be about him, and the bits which I just don't understand. I study it, wrestle with the content, try to work out what it is saying about Jesus. But I do all that on the understanding that my study and work is not able to produce a view of Jesus which will prompt me to faith and adoration. That would require a work of grace. Jesus is Lord, even over the Bible.

So as a Christian - as someone who has encountered the risen Christ through the Biblical witness applied by the Spirit - I have to read the OT this way. And yet every time I do, there is the possibility (in God's grace) that I will be bowled over again.

Reading along the Old Testament

Oops. I accidentally didn't write on the blog for a month. Well, there will now follow a series of thoughts on reading the Bible in a Christocentric manner. Nothing too original, but just to get me back into the habit!

Whenever I start to read in the Old Testament, I should expect to see Christ there. By 'see Christ' I do not mean that I will always find explicit reference to Christ, or that the OT is shot through with appearances of the preincarnate Word (although there are plenty of both occurrences there). What I mean is that my reading of the OT should be a 2 Corinthians 3:16 experience (read the whole passage to get what I mean). Now, to a very great extent whether in fact I have such an experience is not down to me, but is a work of the Spirit. But it is promised, and therefore the action of faith is to read properly, with expectation, and await the Spirit's work.

So what reading practices do I employ as I set out to read by faith, to 'turn to the Lord' as I read the OT? Here are a few.

1. Look for explicit forward-looking references to the Messiah and his work. Despite all the sceptical work of OT scholars over the last 150 years, these are plentiful. Where you find them, consider whether they might not be the key to the understanding of the particular part of the OT you are reading. It's helpful to consider the particular import of each of these 'previews' of the person and work of Jesus - don't just think 'here's a prophecy of Christ', think through what in particular about Jesus this is highlighting. I personally find it very useful to try to imagine what it would be like to look forward to this as an initial step in understanding.

2. Look for types of Christ. A type is a character who, through their own life and actions, plays out some aspect of the life and work of Jesus. Whenever we look for types, we are engaging in an imaginative process. After all, nobody measures up to Jesus or strictly speaking does anything remotely like what he does. It is more of a case of catching the echoes of the life of Jesus - except these echoes are cast backward through history. Where we do see types of Christ, we should focus first on the particular aspect of Jesus' life and work that we have been reminded of; then (more cautiously) we should ask whether we are being commanded to show that aspect in our lives also (and the type can help us here to think what that might look like).

3. Look for patterns of events which recall Christ's work. Just like the characters who serve us as types of Christ, so events can serve us by bringing to memory different aspects of what Jesus has done. In the OT, we see the work of Christ refracted, as it were, through the history of Israel. Often that refraction will help us to bring out and focus on a particular side to Jesus' ministry which might otherwise get lost in the whole.

4. Look for problems which cannot be solved in OT terms. Where we see a passage which sets up a paradox - especially one of which the author seems very conscious - we will more often than not find that paradox resolved in Christ. These sorts of problems will more often become clear if we read longer passages, or try to fit particular passages into the OT as a whole.

I want to work this out in a particular example - the book of Job - before the end of the week. But I have an intervening post for those who react by saying something like: 'what a terrible hermeneutic! You've already decided what the text will be about before you even read it!'

...Although probably not many of those sorts of people read this blog.

Of kings and temples

I'm intrigued by the way Israelite kingship works. Permission to appoint a king "like all the nations that are around" is given in Deuteronomy 17, along with some laws about the king's behaviour. These laws do serve to differentiate Israelite from pagan kingship. The king of Israel is the Lord's deputy, bound by his law. But a king nevertheless. The book of Judges seems at first glance to add to the impression that Israel is not only permitted a king, but needs a king. Without a king, everyone does what is right in his own eyes, and social and religious chaos ensues. Gideon's misgivings (Judges 8:23) seem to be the minority report.

But when the people ask for a king, using words that are almost a citation of Deuteronomy 17, they are condemned as having rejected the Lord as king over them (1 Sam 8:7). Odd. And even more odd that they are granted a king anyway. The first two kings - Saul and David - in different ways embody the ambiguity attached to the office. It is never absolutely clear whether it is good for Israel to have a king or not.

Something similar happens with the temple. When David suggests building it, his court prophet is initially in favour. But God's reaction is essentially to say 'whoever said I wanted a house?' (2 Sam 7). It sounds like a rebuff. The Lord doesn't need a house; he's happy in his tent. And yet it is followed by the promise that, although David cannot build the temple, Solomon his son will do just that. The ambiguity surrounding the temple is in many ways deeper than that surrounding the king. This is God's house, but even the king who built it must confess that heaven and the highest heaven could not contain the Lord - how much less a human building! As the history of Israel rumbles on, the clearing of the temple by good kings and its desecration by bad ones becomes a running theme. And behind that, the presence of the temple fosters false security. Is the temple, at the end of the day, good for Israel or not?

A couple of theological questions off the back of that:

1. If this isn't about Jesus, what on earth is it about?

2. Is there something inherently dangerous to God's people about fixed structures and 'settling down'? (Think about the tabernacle vs. the temple, the judges vs. the king).