Jesus as Israel Re-Enacted

Some scholars believe the first five chapters of Matthew feature four re-enacted episodes from the history of Israel in the OT. The most direct link between Israel’s history and Jesus’ life is the quotation of the exodus passage Hosea 11:1 in Matthew 2:15 [“Out of Egypt I called my son”]. From this direct link, scholars believe Matthew has set the stage for four re-enacted episodes:

• The exodus from Egypt (Matt 2:19–20).
• The crossing of the Red Sea (Matt 3:13–17).
• The desert temptations (Matt 4:1–11).
• The arrival upon Mt. Sinai to receive the Law (Matt 5:1–2).

If this re-enactment motif is accurate, “Jesus appears, not just as the Savior of Israel in fulfillment of prophetic expectation, but also as an embodiment of Israel as they should be” [S. Motyer, New Dictionary of Biblical Theology (IVP, 2000) pp. 584].

The Preacher’s Clothes

“Except a duck in pattens, no creature looks more stupid than a Dissenting preacher in a gown which is of no manner of use to him. I could laugh till I held my sides when I see our doctors in gowns and bands, puffed out with their silks, and touched up with their little bibs, for they put me so much in mind of our old turkey-cock when his temper is up, and he swells to his biggest. They must be weak folks indeed who want a man to dress like a woman before they can enjoy his sermon, and he who cannot preach without such milliner’s trumpery may be a man among geese, but he is a goose among men.”

—C.H. Spurgeon, Spurgeon’s Practical Wisdom: Or Plain Advice for Plain People (Banner of Truth, 2009) p. 19.

Judging Sermons

“Everybody thinks himself a judge of a sermon, but nine out of ten might as well pretend to weigh the moon. I believe that, at bottom, most people think it an uncommonly easy thing to preach, and that they could do it amazingly well themselves. Every donkey thinks itself worthy to stand with the king’s horses.”

—C.H. Spurgeon, Spurgeon’s Practical Wisdom: Or Plain Advice for Plain People (Banner of Truth, 2009) p. 15.

Ruth and the Proverbs 31 woman

In our English Bibles the book of Ecclesiastes follows the book of Proverbs. But in some of the Hebrew orderings of the OT the book of Ruth immediately follows Proverbs. The original order makes theological sense. The Hebrew noun translated “excellent wife/woman” (אשת־חיל) is used only three times in the OT, twice in Proverbs (12:4, 31:10) and once in Ruth (3:11). Ruth is the living example of the Proverbs 31 woman, a connection our English OT arrangement makes difficult to see.

What has Horace to do with the Psalter?

“Abelard raised a very foolish question when he asked: ‘What has Horace to do with the Psalter, Virgil with the Gospel, Cicero with the Apostle?’ The answer is simply that Horace, Virgil, and Cicero clarify the human situation to which the salvation of God is addressed through Psalter, Gospel, and Apostle.”

—Roland M. Frye, Perspective on Man: Literature and the Christian Tradition (Westminster Press, 1961) p. 59.

Fictional Reality

“People are always complaining that the modern novelist has no hope and that the picture he paints of the world is unbearable. The only answer to this is that people without hope do not write novels. Writing a novel is a terrible experience, during which the hair often falls out and the teeth decay. I’m always highly irritated by people who imply that writing fiction is an escape from reality. It is a plunge into reality and it’s very shocking to the system. If the novelist is not sustained by a hope of money, then he must be sustained by a hope of salvation, or he simply won’t survive the ordeal.”

—Flannery O’Connor, Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1969) pp. 77–78.

The Meaning of the Pentateuch

From Justin Taylor:

John Piper on John Sailhamer’s just-published magnum opus, The Meaning of the Pentateuch (IVP, 2009):

To all pastors and serious readers of the Old Testament—geek, uber geek, under geek, no geek—if  you graduated from high school and know the word “m e a n i n g,” sell your latest Piper or Driscoll book and buy Sailhamer.

There is nothing like it. It will rock your world. You will never read the “Pentateuch” the same again. It is totally readable. You can skip all the footnotes and not miss a beat.

Last week, when Piper got the book, he tweeted: ” I feel like a greedy miser over a chest of gold.”

Dust

Last night I lay awake in bed unable to fall asleep as my active mind protested my tired body. So my mind wandered and wondered, eventually arriving at Psalm 103:13–14, two verses I have focused my attention upon these past two days. The following words came to my mind. I played them over in my head until sleep arrived—

Dust

I am collected dust
bound together for a time
into this mud
formed by liquid soul.

How often I forget this frame
and attempt to live as gold
or diamond
or granite.
Anything, everything, but collected dust.

But He never forgets.
He never forgets.
His tenderness speaks it so.

Quoteworthy

For a bibliophile (me) reading an exceptional book is satisfying, if for no other reason than because outstanding books are so uncommon. But to finish one superb book and begin another in the same night—to go back-to-back—is quite a rush, quite a blessing, quite a rarity. Yet that’s what happened recently when I read the final page and closed the cover to The Killer Angels and picked up and began page 1 of Evening in the Palace of Reason.

For his historical novel of the battle at Gettysburg—The Killer Angels: A Novel of the Civil War (Modern Library, 2004)—Michael Shaara was awarded the Pulitzer Prize. This book left me with munition dust in my hair and dirt on my face and a cold downpouring thunderstorm washing over the final quieted battle scene. Shaara’s concluding words were the perfect capstone to his literary feat, a work filmmaker Ken Burns would later write, “changed my life.” It was very good.

Quoteworthy 1: In the final paragraph of The Killer Angels, the bloody closing day of battle has finished and all is quiet. Shaara writes—

The light rain went on falling on the hills above Gettysburg, but it was only the overture to the great storm to come. Out of the black night it came at last, cold and wild and flooded with lightning. The true rain came in a monster wind, and the storm broke in blackness over the hills and the bloody valley; the sky opened along the ridge and the vast water thundered down, drowning the fires, flooding the red creeks, washing the rocks and the grass and the white bones of the dead, cleansing the earth and soaking it thick and rich with water and wet again with clean cold rainwater, driving the blood deep into the earth, to grow again with the roots toward Heaven. It rained all that night. The next day was Saturday, the Fourth of July. [p. 330]

With the rain still falling in my imagination, I grabbed Evening in the Palace of Reason: Bach Meets Frederick the Great in the Age of Enlightenment (HarperCollins, 2005) by James R. Gains, the former managing editor of People, Life, and Time magazines. He sets the stage for a clash of worldviews: a Lutheran, theologically-minded musician (Bach) against one enraptured with the enlightenment (Frederick the Great) for a single meeting one evening in 1757 where “belief collided with the cold certainty of reason.” The story is masterfully retold.

Quoteworthy 2: For a little taste (or smell), here are a few of Gains’ words from an early chapter in Evening in the Palace of Reason—

For all its spires and watchtowers and red-roofed houses, its cobblestoned market square bordered by church, town hall, and castle, the residents of Eisenach would not have called their hometown charming. To get a sense of Eisenach as it was when Sebastian Bach was a boy, one must conjure up the scent of animal dung from the livestock that shared its streets and walkways, the putrid breeze that wafted from the fish market and slaughterhouse in the square, and, under those red-tiled roofs, a general atmosphere strongly redolent of life before plumbing. The homes of all but Eisenach’s wealthiest residents were small—close and hot in the summer, frigid and smoky in winter—and crowded. … What Eisenach had in great abundance, the solace and balm of its six thousand souls, was music. … [pp. 39–40]

Two excellent excerpts from two books written by masters who paint through their prose.

On the Prosperity gospel

Today I feature two videos on the prosperity gospel. The first documents the prosperity gospel in west Africa (specifically); the second contains a theological response to the prosperity gospel (generally).

(1) Here is a new Christianity Today video (9 minutes) documenting the prosperity gospel in Ghana [HT:JT]:

(2) Here is John Piper’s 11-minute video summary of concerns titled “Why I Abominate the Prosperity Gospel”: