Tag: sermon

How to Read the Bible — Reading the New Testament as (modern) Christians

This series of posts was first a series of sermons I preached at City South Presbyterian and Coorparoo Presbyterian in mid 2026. You can, if it is your preferred medium, watch the video recording of this sermon here (Vimeo), or listen to the audio recording here (Spotify link).

I want you to bring me a coat next week.  Or a cinnamon scroll. Scripture commands it. 

When you come, bring the cloak that I left with Carpus at Troas, and my scrolls, especially the parchments.

2 Timothy 4:13

You can tell this is stupid, right, but why? 

How are we reading the Bible to decide these words don’t apply to us —  while others do?

Skimming 2 Timothy 4, where Paul begins by picturing himself standing before God, and charging Timothy to preach the word — this “charge” was used in my ordination — we can see how that applies to modern church life, and we apply it (2 Timothy 4:1).

Paul has just said the Scriptures make people wise for salvation through faith in Jesus, and God-breathed; inspired; and useful for teaching, rebuking and correcting (2 Timothy 3:15-17). Now he’s telling Timothy to do this work, with the Scriptures by preaching — in season and out of season (2 Timothy 4:2). 

We can map this onto life in our community where we are also inspired and shaped by God’s word as people speak it…

And Paul says do this cause some people will do the opposite; finding false teachers for their own desires (2 Timothy 4:3). Who peddle myths that will turn people’s heads from the Gospel (2 Timothy 4:4-5). Timothy is to keep his head; even if it means suffering as he does his duties as a servant (2 Timothy 4:4-5). 

Again, we can see a throughline to our time; and our church.

Paul says look at me; my example — I am being poured out; almost exhausted — I have finished the race (2 Timothy 4:6-7). I have kept my eyes on the prize — the crown given by Jesus to everyone who sticks with him (2 Timothy 4:8)… 

We stick with Jesus. We get a crown. Timothy takes up the baton in the relay; and, generations later, we have joined the race.

But then this gear change. It all gets so human and specific.  Come quickly. I am alone (2 Timothy 4:9-10). Bring my coat (2 Timothy 4:13). This instruction about a coat — it’s this reminder this is a letter; we are reading someone else’s mail.

New Testament letters are called ‘epistles’ — this word is built on the Greek for sent; and it shares a root with ‘apostles’; this is a useful analogy, because ancient letters were understood as a kind of substitute for a person’s presence.

About a third of the New Testament comes to us in this form. And they have all got very ‘human’ bits like this; it’s clear these words about a coat are not to us. They are personal. They remind us we are outsiders to the situations and relationships these New Testament letters come from. But they are still part of our Scriptures; they were not dropped off as this letter was received and circulated as God’s word.

And these personal bits could make the text feel more distant and less applicable; but they can do the opposite if we use them as a lens to read the whole letter; to picture the shape of the community; the church, who are writing, receiving, reflecting on and circulating these letters along with the Old Testament Scriptures; imagining the 3D “incarnated” humanity of the inspired community through what these letters describe and do amongst that community.

Reading the letters through the lens of these human bits has a payoff for how we read the trickiest bits; we are going to take a look at where Paul says he doesn’t permit a woman to teach in 1 Timothy 2, after we look at some nuts and bolts.

We have stacks of letters from the Roman world, so know things about their structure — or genre — and New Testament epistles follow this formula. Picking up Andy Judd’s book on genre again… First, he points out this bit about the coat should make us pause and check our assumptions about how letters work ‘for us’…

“Extremely specific instructions like 2 Timothy 4:13 remind us to pause and consider our assumptions about how the genre of New Testament epistle works…”

Andrew Judd, Modern Genre Theory

Andy’s big point is that genres help us not just see what words say, but what they do when they are put in a form, and looking at the formula these letters follow is an important step before we apply them to our lives now.

…genres are about more than what’s written on the page; they’re about who is trying to achieve what with the piece of paper.

Andrew Judd, Modern Genre Theory

So. An ancient letter conventionally opens by establishing the relationship between sender and receiver. Paul — an apostle of Jesus — is writing to Timothy — his dear son (2 Timothy 1:1-2). This is followed — especially in Paul’s letters — by thanksgiving. In the epistles this looks like Paul bringing the other person, or church, ‘before God’s throne’ in prayer; so God is part of the relationship.

…Paul usually finds something distinctively Christian to thank God for…

Andrew Judd, Modern Genre Theory

Here he thanks God for Timothy, and longs to see him to be filled with joy (2 Timothy 1:3-4).

The body of the letter doesn’t have to be an essay with one big idea, it can cover all sorts of stuff ‘in the relationship’ — and can be like a kind of scrapbook holding other types of writing.

…The letter genre allows for a rather wide-ranging and free-flowing discussion of a variety of topics…

Andrew Judd, Modern Genre Theory

They can also include mini-essays, or examples of ancient rhetoric or persuasion; there is evidence Paul occasionally structures his letters using these forms, and that he sometimes uses overarching metaphors to tie a bunch of ideas together.

Somewhere in the body, an ancient letter has this thing called the parenesis; this is where the writer gets to the point of why they are writing; and what they want the receiver to do.

…This is where the writer tells us what to do, attempting to influence how we think, feel, or act…

Andrew Judd, Modern Genre Theory

Working this out can unlock why a letter has been sent, and helps us make sense of the big picture; and of how to apply it.

So, in 2 Timothy, Paul — the spiritual dad — wants Timothy to follow in his footsteps; guarding the ‘good deposit,’ keeping the ‘pattern of sound teaching’ — that he learned (2 Timothy 1:13-14). Not following the false teachers (2 Timothy 3:14). He keeps coming back to this idea, before ‘charging’ him with doing it (2 Timothy 4:1-2).

And ancient letters close by reaffirming the relationship, and with a bit of situational small talk, or ‘family news’ — which is where we get the coat, and the visit, before winter (2 Timothy 4:9, 13, 21).

…a good closing reaffirms the interpersonal dynamic of the situation, often including a farewell or health wish…

Andrew Judd, Modern Genre Theory

So that is the form; and figuring out the ‘parenesis’ — the purpose of the letter — is helpful for how we weigh up bits of the content and their meaning and application then and now.

The other part of working out how to apply these letters is seeing what we can construct about the context or situation ‘behind’ the letter. At times the content will be specific about the context; winter coming is a straightfoward background situation behind Paul’s request for his coat (2 Timothy 4:9, 13, 21). Other times it’s harder.

Is there a specific situation Paul is addressing where he says a woman isn’t to teach or have authority?  Are these words like his specific timely request for a coat — particular to the relationship and circumstances… Or are they general and binding?

A woman should learn in quietness and full submission. I do not permit a woman to teach or to assume authority over a man; she must be quiet.

1 Timothy 2:11-12

How would we tell the difference?

I want to suggest neglecting the end bits of Paul’s letters — the human relationships and situation behind the text, and described in the text — has led to us projecting this verse onto any structure we create, or reading our structures back into these words; but bringing the ancient network of relationships from the end of the letter into 3D in our imaginations, as we engage with Paul’s letters as things written into a situation — might give us a different picture of what Paul is saying.

But we need to do a little more technical work first on how we recreate the ‘background’ situation. 

Reading any letter is like listening to one side of a conversation; there is a situation behind every letter where the author wants to be present in letter form. Sometimes — like with Corinthians — this is a conversation happening in correspondence (1 Corinthians 7:1). But often we are left trying to reconstruct the other half by looking at the side we have; which is called mirror reading. 

There are lots of scholarly rules for mirror reading, but it’s easy for us to fill in the blanks by making stuff up;  turning small historical facts into huge explanatory ideas, and this kind of speculation is great for PhDs or book deals… Or sermons… 

We do have some data though — whether that is information in the letters — like quotes, or when people or ideas are named — and we have got the book of Acts; but historical work can also be part of giving us a ‘3D’ lay of the land. 

But, our ‘mirror images’ can get in the way of carefully reading the text as ‘literature’ — paying attention to genre, and a good “boomerang test” of the genre (see the post on reading as literature) — where we recognise these letters are a type of writing that have a purpose ‘contained’ in the writing themselves, that might break what some people imagine in the mirror.

If the image doesn’t match with the purpose of the text, the image is probably wrong. 

This will all make a bit of sense if we look at how it works with Paul’s letters to Timothy. Let us reconstruct the world a bit using the data we have.

The ‘relational’ picture is pretty clear — in both letters, Paul calls Timothy his true and dear son (1 Timothy 1:2; 2 Timothy 1:2).

They met in Acts 16 in Lystra, and from there he joins Paul’s team (Acts 16:1).

They travel together, and go from Corinth to Ephesus with Priscilla and Aquila. Timothy and Paul sail off, then, eventually, head back to Ephesus, where Paul hits some massive opposition over the economic impact of the Gospel (Acts 18:19, 21; Acts 19:1, 23-24). 

Ephesus is famous for its idol temples; its craftsmen get rich on making metal idols of the god Artemis. Paul says these gods are hollow, and a local silversmith named Demetrius realises Paul’s teaching — that idols are not real — will send them broke, and he leads a riot against Paul (Acts 19:26-29). A local Jewish guy, Alexander, is brought out to speak; probably to make a distinction between Paul’s Gospel and Judaism (Acts 19:33)… And people start chanting “great is Artemis of the Ephesians” for 2 hours (Acts 19:34). It’s a riot.

Paul makes his last visit to near Ephesus in Acts 20; and this is the last time Timothy is mentioned in Acts (Acts 20:4). It appears from 1 Timothy; this is where Paul leaves him to keep false teaching out of the church (1 Timothy 1:3).

The cult of Artemis had women as priests; and some people use this as an image in the mirror — their idea — not without reason — is that Ephesus was home to a first century feminist movement that was women led and anti-marriage, that that this has infiltrated the church, and this is what Paul is asking Timothy to correct.

Another bit of speculation — more ‘from the text’ — is Alexander from Acts is the Alexander who comes up twice in Timothy; that maybe he converted after the riot, but then became one of the false teachers; who Paul ‘hands over to Satan’ (1 Timothy 1:20), and who is a deceiving hypocrite (1 Timothy 4:1-2). And that this is the guy Alexander the metalworker in 2 Timothy (2 Timothy 4:14-15). I think it’s likely it’s the same guy in both letters, but it’s a guess that he is the guy from Acts (Acts 19:33). 

We know what metalworkers in Ephesus make; idols — so this false teaching that makes people rich could be folks in Ephesus trying to have a foot in both camps; and Alexander who was in the church is now like his fellow metalworker, Demetrius. Timothy is there because this false teaching — speculation — whatever it is, is preventing the advance of God’s work, which is by faith (1 Timothy 1:4).

Now — this ancient and translated text — this phrase is the οἰκονομίαν Θεοῦ (oikonomian theou) — oiko means ‘household’ and ‘nomia’ means ‘rule,’ and this is the root of our English word “economy” (1 Timothy 1:4).

This false teaching that makes people rich is pulling people away from God’s new economy.

So here’s my thesis about the parenesis of the first letter which I reckon extends into the second — a boomerang to try out and see what comes back — Paul says he is writing so Timothy will know how people should live in God’s household; his ‘oikos’ — the church of the living God (1 Timothy 3:14-15). 

I am writing you these instructions so that,if I am delayed, you will know how people ought to conduct themselves in God’s household, which is the church of the living God

1 Timothy 3:14-15

He is writing to establish a pattern of relationships — not in church structures and leadership in an institution — but in a new kind of household (a household was more than a biological family); a household or ‘economy’ different to those in the first century Roman empire; and in Ephesus. And, ultimately, different to those in 21st century Australia…

This life together has a shape to relationships and a script that comes from the Scriptures.  Timothy has been entrusted with protecting it by preaching the Scriptures; bringing them to life in the community to shape a different economy; this new pattern of relationships. And we see this economy at work in the relationships Paul describes in his letters — and at the end of his letters.  Here is where I think we can project our picture of modern church life — an event on a Sunday where one bloke, ‘charged with preaching’ gives a sermon — back onto the text; but the text invites us to picture a network of people living as family, and speaking in quite different structures and dynamics.

Let’s do some work on 1 Timothy 2; these are translated words, and you need to know the Greek words for woman and wife are the same; same for man and husband, so context determines how we translate them; whether it’s “a woman” or “a wife” might not make heaps of difference if you are a woman, but I think it should say wife and husband (1 Timothy 2:11-12).

Some see one specific woman in the mirror here; an Artemis-emboldened female priestess causing trouble in the Ephesian church; so the Paul who wants ‘that coat’ wants ‘that woman’ not to teach.  I think that reconstruction has too much mirror, not enough letter — because Paul appeals to Genesis here, in a way that brings out some kind of general principle for the household of God (1 Timothy 2:13).

In the household of God, restored in Christ — the answer is not wives ruling and directing husbands, like priestesses of Artemis, but a new kind of pattern (Genesis 3:16; 1 Timothy 2:12).

The Greek word ‘authority’ here — αὐθεντεῖν (authentein) — is only used here; it’s never something permitted for men, husbands, or church leaders. Outside the New Testament it’s used for a kind of dominance that is consistent with its roots which mean ‘self-arm’; this pattern doesn’t fit God’s economy (1 Timothy 2:12).

Paul has already said — in the same chapter — the church should live “quiet lives” (1 Timothy 2:2), so, whether Paul has one woman in view, or is just talking about a pattern; this pattern, or the word ‘quiet’ is actually for everyone, and doesn’t mean silence (1 Timothy 2:12).

And in his second letter, Paul is going to name Timothy’s grandma Lois, and mother Eunice, as the origin of his faith; and he points out that Timothy learned the Gospel not just from him, but from infancy.

“I am reminded of your sincere faith, which first lived in your grandmother Lois and in your mother Eunice and, I am persuaded, now lives in you also.

2 Timothy 1:4

…continue in what you have learned and have become convinced of, because you know those from whom you learned it,and how from infancy you have known the Holy Scriptures…

2 Timothy 3:14-15

This is how the household of God works. Mums, and in Timothy’s case, his spiritual dad, teaching the household the Gospel in this new economy of every day life. Now Timothy has a role to play passing this on; standing against false teaching (1 Timothy 1:3-4), and teaching the word the way it was taught to him (2 Timothy 4:2).

Having the purpose — that Paul is giving instructions for the shape of the household of God (1 Timothy 3:14-15), and the context — both the opposition and idolatry of Ephesus — and the relational context described in the letters — in view as we picture these instructions and functions, and see how they are embedded in Paul’s purpose is quite helpful.

Paul’s example is a contrast to self-interested lovers of the world who live in other economies; he has faithfully run the race; been poured out as a living sacrifice (2 Timothy 4:6-7), because he is keeping his eyes on what is valuable in God’s economy; not worldly rewards, and he is passing on responsibility in the ‘family business’ to his ‘son in the faith’ (2 Timothy 4:8).

Paul wants to see Timothy again; but these words will sit with Timothy — and then the church — to say ‘hanging on is worth it.’ Do not sell out. Paul is ready for Timothy to come see him — winter is coming; he feels alone — deserted — he is leaning in to the reality of Timothy’s love for him as part of God’s family (2 Timothy 4:9-10). And also giving an update on where other people in the family are at — Luke is there, Mark should come too… Bring my coat, and scrolls (2 Timothy 4:11-13). Paul might have been alone in his first trial in Rome (2 Timothy 4:16), but he is like Daniel — protected form the mouth of the lion of this empire; his 4D view of reality is guiding him — and he trusts his church family will give flesh to this spiritual reality of God’s family by being there; even being there to bring him his warm coat for winter (2 Timothy 4:17).

These bits at the end — we can picture them in 3D; but they also create a web of connections, a kind of social map of life together in the household of God — that overlays the letters of the New Testament and the story of the church in Acts; which, as we see it, helps us imagine how we are connected to this family tree and the shape of its life… As we read their mail.

This helps us picture a new household where husbands and wives — men and women — all the members are invited into this new economy; gospeling each other in these new relationships ‘beside’ one another, rather than ruling or dominating; to advance God’s family not their bank balance.

We have maybe focused too much on what women can’t do in our structures; and not enough on how our structures; out community — might look like this one, the household in Ephesus, and the network in the early church…

Paul says greet Priscilla and Aquila — a couple of parents of the church who are presently based in Ephesus, and mentions Erastus, who is in Corinth (2 Timothy 4:19-20). Erastus is a high ranking public servant in Corinth; who was there with Timothy and Paul while Romans was being written (Romans 16:21, 23)… That’s where Paul first met Priscilla and Aquilla; they had come from Rome when Claudius kicked them out (Acts 18:1-2). We saw how they went to Ephesus with Paul and Timothy; and they are there hosting a church in their house when Paul writes 1 Corinthians (1 Corinthians 16:19). They are back home in Rome, presumably hosting the church there by the time Paul writes Romans from Corinth (Romans 16:3-4).

When Paul names them here; these are folks Timothy knows — husband and wife — who model leading the household of God together.

We read badly if we rob these letters of their humanity; these words of their life; and we can build all sorts of structures on top of this picture, obscuring the shape of life behind the words.

We read well by keeping their humanity; reading right to the end, so the relationships in this new economy frame the way we understand these words; and that they are written to make us wise for salvation as those brought into this family to hold on to these words and be shaped by them together (2 Timothy 3:15).

They remind us that the New Testament — God’s word — emerges from and shapes loving, connected, communities — an economy — God’s household brought to life and inspired by God’s word as we are made wise for salvation in Jesus; creating the kind of community where a son in the faith will travel across an empire to bring his spiritual dad his cloak for the winter (2 Timothy 4:13, 21). And face death with him, as they serve Jesus together eyes fixed on the prize (2 Timothy 4:8).

September 3, 2026 Add Comment

How to Read the Bible — As Literature

This series of posts was first a series of sermons I preached at City South Presbyterian and Coorparoo Presbyterian in mid 2026. You can, if it is your preferred medium, watch the video recording of this sermon here (Vimeo), or listen to the audio recording here (Spotify link).

There is a way of reading the Bible where Red Bull gives you wings.

Tim LaHaye wrote the Left Behind series; you might have read them, or seen the movies.

His golden rule of interpreting the Bible was:

“When the plain sense of Scripture makes common sense, seek no other sense…take every word at its primary, ordinary, usual, literal meaning.”

Tim LaHaye

The way this works — for him — is to read bits of the Bible others see as symbolic; where there are numbers and visuals, and take them very literally; which leads to interesting places when it comes to the book of Revelation.

I’ll unpack the Red Bull thing, but we can read the Bible as 100 percent truth while also recognising this is embedded in literature; and our job is not just to read it literally, but literarily; to ask what sort of writing we are reading.

Our nuts and bolts this time around is called ‘literary criticism,’ or ‘form criticism’ — we are looking genre, and why it matters.

Genre is a way of describing the forms words are put in; the formulas or structures we use.

This book by Aussie Bible scholar Andy Judd is a great intro on genre and the Bible, which we are drawing on here.

The Bible is a library of literature featuring stacks of genres — different books, and even bits within books — stories, songs, laws, and vivid symbols.

And every one of these forms is a choice and author has made. And this isn’t just a choice about form — it’s a choice of function. Different genres do different things.

…genres are about more than what’s written on the page; they’re about who is trying to achieve what with the piece of paper.

Andrew Judd, Modern Genre Theory

If I want to do things with words, there are some times literal, ready made, forms — like, when I conduct a marriage, I fill out some paperwork, other people will read it, and the marriage will be ‘official’.

Other people use forms or formulas to do things too. Council-issued parking tickets have a form we understand. So do no parking signs. These forms do things.

We also know they do not do other things; we should not treat a parking ticket as a love letter or a marriage certificate.

And, when we read the Bible we can’t just look at the words and ignore the form — asking what they say — cause the form, or genre, comes with a function, so we have to ask what this does.

We are not always told the genre of a text; and ancient texts are more like each other, than like modern texts.

Andy suggests a boomerang test for trying out genres, and working out what a text is meant to do; where we try different ideas and see what comes back.

Take up your guess about the kind of genre your text falls into, give it a throw, see what comes back. If the payoffs suggest it doesn’t work, try again.

Andrew Judd, Modern Genre Theory

Tim LaHaye’s rule makes assumptions about genre; that words mostly have a common sense, literal meaning. Let’s boomerang test his approach.

LaHaye’s Left Behind books are novels — this is a genre; but they are novels that are models of his understanding of writing; they are quite ‘literal’ while also being fiction.

In fancy theological terms, his books are about eschatology.

They tell a story about the end of the world he wants people to take seriously. You might also have heard the word apocalypse and think that is a word about the end of the world — but it’s not; that is a genre, which gets its name from the opening line of the book of Revelation (Revelation 1:1). This word is actually the Greek word apocalypse; which literally means revelation or unveiling; the genre is named after this, but originates in Jewish literary tradition — both in and outside the Bible.

Because he reads Revelation literally; LaHaye holds a theological position called premillenialism; which gets its name from what Revelation 20; this millenium — this thousand year period where Satan is bound and Jesus rules with his people.

He seized the dragon, that ancient serpent, who is the devil, or Satan, and bound him for a thousand years… They came to life and reigned with Christ a thousand years. (Revelation 20:2, 4)

Christians debate when this thousand years is; if it’s literal or symbolic; and what it symbolises.

So you get premillenialists who believe it has not happened yet; that Jesus will return and then this thousand years kicks off.

Postmillenialists who believe it has happened, and we live in this millenium now.

Amillenialists, who believe it’s all symbolic so there is no thousand years.

Folks called preterists — who believe all this stuff is written about Rome destroying the temple in AD 70 as a sign of God’s judgment on the nation of Israel for crucifiying Jesus.

And, millenials — people like me, born between 1981 and 1996… but we’re different.

Your position here is a sign of how you read the text; and this is ultimately — whether you know it or not — about what genre you think it is.

How we read the text; and “the millenium” shapes how we see the world, and the political or ethical positions we embrace. This is part of the boomerang.

Pre-millenials might find themselves looking for signs, or doing things to prepare for or hasten the return of Jesus as the fulfilment of prophecy, while some post-millenials work at transforming the world; discipling the nations under Christ’s rule and God’s law; hoping to end the age and launch the new creation.

Some read Revelation 17:9 and talk about capturing the seven mountains of our cultural and political order.

“This calls for a mind with wisdom: the seven heads are seven mountains on which the woman is seated” — Revelation 17:9

This vision drives Christian Nationalism — and some support for Trump — in the U.S.

”Finally we have a president that understands the seven mountains of cultural influence…”

Charlie Kirk, 2020

And — count the mountains — this Christian Nationalist conference here in Australia too.

But this symbolic reading misses how Rome was famously built on seven mountains; so the poet Virgil describes the god Mars saying “behold my son” Romulus, founding Rome with its seven hills.

Behold, my son, under his command glorious Rome will match earth’s power and heaven’s will, and encircle seven hills with a single wall, happy in her race of men

Virgil, The Aeneid VI, 1st century BC

One issue with seeing an apocalypse as describing the end of the world; eschatology — not the ends of the world — its purpose — is if the end has not happened, the text is about us, or the future; not the past.

So ‘battle locusts’ in Revelation (Revelation 9:2-3) are identified as combat drones — things totally removed from the human world of the author and audience of the text.

There is a legit way to use the text as a lens — 4D glasses — and see drones and wars as a continuation of the beastly kingdoms of the world; but we are not reading well if when we decode these words, we take them out of the hands of the first readers. Or, take up the challenge of fulfilling them; launching the thousand years when we are taken up to heaven with Jesus — getting our wings.

Some folks in Texas believe Jesus’ ‘millenium reign’ or ultimate return requires the building of a Third Temple in Jerusalem. So, they have been breeding perfectly Red Bulls.

Teaming up with some folks in Israel, who believe their Messiah will come for the first time when this happens.

Zechariah prophecies a new temple being built as people come from far away (Zechariah 6:15). The law requires an umblemished red heifer (Numbers 19:1-2), whose ashes are mixed with water to cleanse people, places, and things (Numbers 19:9).

Here is the boomerang coming back — with devastating political consequences in the Middle East.

In 2018, before becoming “Secretary of War” for Trump, Pete Hegseth spoke in Jerusalem about his hope of a Third Temple being built.

“There’s no reason why the miracle of the re-establishment of the temple on the Temple Mount is not possible.”

Pete Hegseth, 2018 (now US Secretary of War)

Texan cattle breeders have recently sent five red cows to Jerusalem to be assessed.

Temple mountain in Jerusalem is now home to the Al-Aqsa mosque.

These red cows were a red-rag to a bull. In a speech justifying the October 7 terror attacks — the “Al Aqsa Flood” — Hamas said the plan to knock down the mosque and build a temple was their motivation — and these red heifers were their proof.

“They did not hide their intentions of establishing their alleged Temple upon the ruins of the site of our Prophet Muhammad’s night journey, peace be upon him. They brought the red heifers to burn them, and to scatter the water of their ashes as a practical declaration of demolishing Al-Aqsa and building the Temple.”

Mohammed al-Deif, Hamas

The current horrific violence in the Middle East is linked to Christians reading Revelation literally.

That is some boomerang.

It’s either a sign the reading is on the wrong track; or that the end is near.

This could have been avoided by reading these texts as a different kind of literature.

A different reading isn’t compromise; or watering down the text — but grappling with how texts work. LaHaye’s principles are not how ancient humans thought about writing; or how the genre of apocalypse works.

Genre matters for the whole Bible; not just with apocalypses; from page 1 — reading Genesis beside other ancient creation stories and their functions; to Revelation — the Bible is written the way it is to do something, not just say something.

But our readings today are both apocalyptic; they are from a genre that has certain forms that people can play with to do new things — for parody or satire — but that only works if we know their form, and function.

Apocalypses share a formula; they tell a story of a revealing encounter — a journey or vision — usually led by an otherworldly being; inviting someone to see differently.

So… Daniel 7 is a vision in a dream (Daniel 7:1), while Revelation is a series of these visions for John — the one in chapter 20 begins in chapter 17, with an angelic tour guide showing John a bunch of stuff (Revelation 17:3; 20:1).

These encounters involve vivid symbolic imagery. Daniel sees these four beasts (Daniel 7:3). John has already seen a dragon — who we are told is Satan (Revelation 12:3, 9). And these beasts from the sea and land — who serve the dragon (Daniel 7:3; Revelation 13:1, 11).

In Daniel, the beasts run wild until the Ancient of Days crushes them (Daniel 7:22).

In John, both the dragon and beasts are destroyed in fire (Revelation 20:10).

These texts warp space and time; they take humans into heavenly realities, and their descriptions of the end of the world — eschatology — are an invitation to see where trajectories in the present are headed; inviting people to live towards different ends. Their symbolism — even of the end — unveils or reveal things about the author’s present; especially where it’s dangerous to speak plainly. Both Daniel and Revelation follow this form.

Daniel is troubled by these visions, and gets an explanation — which explains things for those reading the text as the events it describes are happening around them (Daniel 7:14-15). These beasts are four human kingdoms (Daniel 7:16-18). Daniel takes Israel’s experience in Babylon — and, in our reading — extrapolates and describes Israel’s experience under other empires — the Medes, Persians, Greeks, and perhaps nodding towards Rome; promising a Son of Man will enter heaven, and rule a kingdom that will last forever; beastly kingdoms will fall, his won’t.

“In my vision at night I looked, and there before me was one like a son of man, coming with the clouds of heaven. He approached the Ancient of Days and was led into his presence.” He was given authority, glory and sovereign power; all nations and peoples of every language worshiped him. His dominion is an everlasting dominion that will not pass away, and his kingdom is one that will never be destroyed.(Daniel 7:13-14)

In another vision, Daniel describes an abomination that causes desolation (Daniel 9:27).

One Maccabees, a Jewish source from between Daniel and Jesus reckons this happens when the Greek king Antiochus Epiphanes installs an image of himself in Israel’s temple…

On the fifteenth day of the month Kislev, in the year one hundred and forty-five, the king erected the desolating abomination upon the altar of burnt offerings, and in the surrounding cities of Judah they built pagan altars.

1 Maccabees 1:54

Jesus links to a more shocking event — I think the ‘destruction of his body, the temple’ — but others see it as the destruction of the temple in AD 70 — or an event we are still waiting for (Matthew 24:15-16).

He is talking about the coming of the Son of Man — where Daniel saw him entering the throne of heaven (Matthew 24:27). The catch for the literal folks looking to the future, is they take all this literally, except when Jesus says this will happen in his generation.

Truly I tell you, this generation will certainly not pass away until all these things have happened

— Matthew 24:34

What is the function of Daniel’s genre when we see it applied to political empires and these sorts of events in present and near future of his readers?

Andy’s book gives a handy guide to an apocalypse; they pull back the curtain; using descriptions of unseen realities to say true things about the physical world, and spiritual realities.

It is all about pulling back the curtain, often through dreams or visions, on the unseen spiritual realities determining human destiny.

Andrew Judd, Modern Genre Theory

They expose the pretension and even the spirit of rebellion behind these powers in a way that invites people they hurt to find meaning and hope amidst their distress.

To experience an apocalypse is to peer behind the curtain of history – to see through the pretension of unstoppable human powers and grasp reality as it truly is.

Andrew Judd, Modern Genre Theory

So Daniel, for example, is giving assurance to God’s people ruled by a series of violent regimes, that it will work out; that they are not ultimate, but God will vindicate them, so they should faithfully worship him, and live differently — like Daniel.

Daniel is providing assurance of an eschatological vindication for oppressed people

Andrew Judd, Modern Genre Theory

An apocalypse is spiritual resistance literature designed to cultivate fruitful faithfulness and hope in God.

Let’s try this boomerang out for Revelation — which picks up where Daniel leaves off; but after the Son of Man is enthroned in heaven.

It turns the 4D glasses onto Rome; a new beastly empire (built on seven mountains) — so we also see any empires like — where God’s people are being persecuted or facing the temptation to worship the culture’s gods and conform — as beastly.

It doesn’t just picture Rome as a beast following a dragon — it pulls the curtain back and says look at heaven and see the Son of Man ruling with the Ancient of Days; worship them; do not side with devilish powers.

This is how he starts his apocalypse from Jesus…

The revelation from Jesus Christ, which God gave him to show his servants what must soon take place. 

— Revelation 1:1

This could also be of Jesus — the unveiling of Jesus. For God’s servants — to show what will soon take place — not ‘what will take place in 2,000 years’ — but a picture that has meaning in their situation, if they see reality unveiled.

He calls Jesus the Son of Man (Daniel 7:13; Revelation 1:13). But also pictures Jesus as being like the Ancient of Days in Daniel 7 — with radiant white hair (Daniel 7:9; Revelation 1:14), and like this figure Daniel meets in a later vision… eyes blazing with fire (Daniel 10:6; Revelation 1:14), bronze feet (Daniel 10:6; Revelation 1:15), and a voice of rushing waters (Daniel 10:6; Revelation 1:15). This melting pot of images deliberately links his content and form to Daniel; which also connects the function of his writing. John is bringing all this together — and — seeing Jesus like he saw him at the transfiguration; face shining like the sun (Revelation 1:16).

John keeps fixing our eyes on this vision of Jesus; so despite the other images — the beastly machinations of the Empire chewing up and consuming human lives — especially God’s people, he wants us to see Jesus reigning and bringing justice.

The bad guys do not win.

This imagery is there right before our reading; Jesus — the dragon slayer who is named Faithful and True; whose eyes are blazing fire; who is named the Word of God… with a sword-mouth; who takes the beast, and the kings with it who want to go to war, and… He wins.

I saw heaven standing open and there before me was a white horse, whose rider is called Faithful and True. With justice he judges and wages war. His eyes are like blazing fire, and on his head are many crowns. He is dressed in a robe dipped in blood, and his name is the Word of God. Coming out of his mouth is a sharp sword…

Then I saw the beast and the kings of the earth and their armies gathered together to wage war against the rider on the horse and his army. But the beast was captured… (Revelation 19:11-15, 19-20)

The genre John uses calls people to live with hope; to keep trusting God; no matter how powerful the violent empires look, or how compelling their gods — and achieves this purpose for its first readers… and for us.

An apocalypse is like a set of 4D glasses to help us peer into heaven; to see the world — and even to properly read God’s word. Revelation is full of intertextual references to the Old and New Testament; it is reflecting and refining and integrating imagery from the whole story; by bringing together this data — these references, and allusions, and images — Revelation invites us to see the whole Bible as apocalyptic — a text given by God to unveil heavenly realities and call his people to be faithful in the midst of systems opposed to him that tempt and persecute.

The Genesis story reveals that Babylon’s stories and gods are hollow and destructive.

The prophets, like Daniel expose these empires and their worship as beastly.

The Gospels unveil Jesus as the ultimate son of God; not Caesar…

Now. You might disagree — you can definitely be a Christian and think LaHaye is right; or have a different view of the thousand years and Jesus’ rule and return.

But we intuitively know genre matters; we know there is no crystal vault in the sky separating heaven and earth; you can’t get to heaven in a rocket ship. We know if we drill down deep we won’t find a fiery pit full of demon ghosts.

We know genre matters, and that words can be true literarily not literally.

The genre — the form and formulas that shape every text — are part of how God speaks through humans to achieve his purposes; to keep us out of other kingdoms, and pull us towards an encounter with the glorious Jesus.

Genre matters with parking tickets and love letters, and it matters with every book of the Bible, and how we read has consequences.

One guy in Texas obsessed with Red Bulls can throw his boomerang and an evil regime will use it to justify a terror attack — now, geopolitics in the Middle East are more complicated than just Red Bulls; but politics and empire are always theological; always driven by a view of the end of the world and the ends of the world; and Christianity has a real impact.

Reading the text right was life and death for an Israelite in Babylon — or under Greek rule; or a Christian in first century Rome facing the choice of whether to bow down and worship Caesar, or stick with Jesus. Revelation is part of the Bible’s explanation for why people will choose the wealth and power of a violent empire; why they will crush and kill and destroy — cause of the sinister power behind the throne, and how it invites us into a different story to live towards different ends.

Let’s boomerang test this. We do not need to claim seven mountains, or build a new temple, or breed Red Bulls.

Zechariah is clear — God’s Messiah — the Branch of the family of David — builds the temple of the Lord and sits on the throne as a priest.

‘Here is the man whose name is the Branch, and he will branch out from his place and build the temple of the Lord.’ It is he who will build the temple of the Lord, and he will be clothed with majesty and will sit and rule on his throne. And he will be a priest on his throne

— Zechariah 6:12-13

Jesus doesn’t need water with bulls’ ashes; he makes purification by his blood; so his Spirit can dwell within his people.

And — here is my millenial card on the table — the new age begins; the Son of Man reigns, and the temple in Jerusalem is replaced, when the curtain tears, and God’s Spirit descends on and dwells in the church; so we are the living temple.

The destruction of the temple in AD 70 is a sign God is done with that spot — but also a sign the Son of Man is reigning in heaven; like Jesus promised, and John sees.

The thousand years tell us beastly empires do not last forever; those who choose them end with them; they might look like a path to prosperity or power or life — but they are a dead end. It’s the vision of Jesus reigning that holds us fast as empires rage, and the dragon thrashes about. Defeated.

Jesus already wins.

He reclaims the mountains and — as we saw last week — calls people from those powers and principalities; those mountainy empires.

We do not have to look for signs, or fulfil prophecies, or breed Red Bulls — in every moment we are called to look to the glory of Jesus, and then look at the world.

To not be tempted by beastly powers who rule now, but be ruled by Jesus; becoming a faithful resistance; living a fruitful alternative vision of life amidst death cause we peer into heaven, where Jesus reigns — and see the end and ends of the earth.

This isn’t just about the politics of empire — or how we participate in politics; it’s about the way I live in my relationships; in my work; in my home — an apocalypse teaches us there are ‘4D’ spiritual stakes in every moment; and to live in reality seeing Jesus as the victorious king who wins by dying and rising — being faithful to God — so that when we see him this way, we can faithfully die to our grasping selves and the kingdoms we build; and take up our cross daily, trusting that it will work out in the end; that we too will be raised up.

That is a boomerang that works for me, and I hope, for you.

August 31, 2026 Add Comment

How to Read the Bible — Reading in 4D

This series of posts was first a series of sermons I preached at City South Presbyterian and Coorparoo Presbyterian in mid 2026. You can, if it is your preferred medium, watch the video recording of this sermon here (Vimeo), or listen to the audio recording here (Spotify link).

3D movies were the next big thing… Until 4D.

If you head to a 4D movie, your seat will move, there will be fog and lightning and wind and smells…

We are reading the Bible in 3D… Or 4D today.

This image would be 3D… If you had 3D glasses.

We’re getting straight into our nuts and bolts — looking at how the Bible is not just words on a page; but an immersive experience where we are invited to see, or imaginatively dwell in the world of the text, by acting the story out with our bodies.

Gordon Wenham — one of my favourite Old Testament scholars — suggested we have flattened communication with God, through the Bible, into ‘just words;’ a two-way conversation; reading and praying. This is our 2D model…

“For a long time Christians have imagined that communication between God and man is essentially verbal, merely a matter of words…

God speaks to man through the prophets or through the Bible: man replies in prayer. We view communication with God as a sort of two-way radio.”

But God does not restrict himself to words, he uses ritual such as sacraments: ritual is more like colour TV than radio. Ideas are made visible…

Gordon Wenham

And this is a problem, because, by his words and in his word — God creates a 3D world, and a way of life in for human bodies — including rituals, like the sacraments, which make ideas visible in the spaces, places, and geography they are set in. Engaging the text in 3D requires some imagination; an openness to being pulled into the text, rather than pulling the text on the page apart.

This will require imagination and sensitivity, but I think would be worth the effort…

Gordon Wenham

This is part of jumping from English to Hebrew; from the modern model of reality to the ancient.

Our Western minds love facts; we live in a material world some have described as disenchanted; closed off to the supernatural; but this was not how ancient authors or readers saw.

We are going to read paying attention to how 3D places have spiritual — 4D — significance; to what some call “cosmic geography.”

The events of the Bible happened on the map; not a 2D map, but a landscape with mountains and valleys and water and sky; and the settings matter; they have meaning.

In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. Now the earth was formless and empty, darkness was over the surface of the deep…

Genesis 1:1–2

The very beginning of the Bible presents a map to us; inviting us not just to think about physical space — earth — but the overlap of spiritual space — heaven — with the sky.

The ancient imagination sees the sky in 4D — same with bodies of water; like the deep; which is home to “tannin;” sea monsters. (Genesis 1:21).

This map of reality sets us up to see moving upwards as moving upwards as moving towards heaven — mountains matter — while moving down into a valley or water is moving towards the realm of death.

Ezekiel tells us the Garden of Eden is on a mountain — Genesis 2 hints at this as it describes rivers of life flowing down into other regions…

And a serpent invades, leading people to grasp the fruit of the tree of knowledge (Genesis 3:6), so they are sent down the mountain, and the way up is guarded by heavenly gatekeepers (Genesis 3:24).

This 4D story of disconnection from heaven is reinforced in the 3D spaces — the tabernacle and temple, that are described in the text, and are at the heart of Israel’s rituals, where they act out being excluded from the Holy of Holies, where God rules from his heavenly throne; pictured in the ark and its cherubim.

When the Bible gives architectural plans for 3D spaces, these teach a story about the cosmos as people follow the plans, building and interacting in those spaces.We do not have the spaces, but we have the plans, and can picture them the way ancient readers would…

Like the first century AD Jewish historian Josephus, who says the floor plan ‘imitates the system of the world,’ so the place behind the curtain is heaven.

Now the room within those pillars was the Most Holy Place: but the rest of the room was the Tabernacle, this was open for the Priests. However this proportion of the measures of the Tabernacle proved to be an imitation of the system of the world. For that third part thereof which was within the four pillars, to which the Priests were not admitted, is, as it were, an Heaven, peculiar to God. But the space of the twenty cubits, is, as it were, sea and land, on which men live: and so this part is peculiar to the Priests only.

Josephus, Antiquities

While the curtain — with its colours, and embroided cherubim and stars — is also a micro-cosmos — an image of spiritual, 4D, reality.

It was a Babylonian curtain… a kind of image of the universe… This curtain had also embroidered upon it all that was mystical in the heavens…

Josephus, The Jewish Wars

The tabernacle travels from Mount Sinai to Mount Zion, where a permanent house — the Temple — is built using the same floorplan.

This 3D space built on the 3D mountaintop place taught God’s people about the 4D reality of heaven and earth; complete with cherubim guarding the barrier between realms.

Picture this as we read our story in Genesis 6; where these sons of God ‘saw’ human women were pleasing to the eye, and they took them…

…the sons of God saw that the daughters of man were attractive. And they took as their wives any they chose.
The Nephilim were on the earth in those days, and also afterward, when the sons of God came in to the daughters of man and they bore children to them. These were the mighty men who were of old, the men of renown.

Genesis 6:2, 4

These are the same words as when Eve saw the beautiful fruit and took it; it’s a fall story for heavenly beings; happening in 4D as heaven and earth come together. It creates these beings called Nephilim; these children of gods — ‘heroes of old’ — literally mighty men of name; they are gibborim in Hebrew — that is plural — the same word is used for Nimrod, he is a gibbor — (Genesis 6:4; Genesis 10:8).

He builds Babylon… (Genesis 10:8, 10). And we get the story of the construction of the tower of Babel — Babylon — in chapter 11. This city built on the plain of Shinar (Genesis 11:2), with a tower linking heaven and earth, so the humans ‘make a name’… Gibbors of name.

“Come, let us build ourselves a city, with a tower that reaches to the heavens, so that we may make a name for ourselves; otherwise we will be scattered over the face of the whole earth.”

Genesis 11:4

There are 4D parallels here back to the sons of God’s heavenly fall. Those sons of God come down to earth from heaven, creating these mighty warriors of name — like Nimrod — who leads humans from earth to heaven as they build a man-made mountain to make a name.

But between these stories there is the flood, which was meant to wipe out the Nephilim who are linked to the earth being filled with violence (Genesis 6:11–12); in the flood God opens the vault so the waters of earth and heaven separated re-combine and everything is de-created except Noah and co (Genesis 7:11), who land on a mountain and restart (Genesis 8:4).

So what is with Nimrod the gibbor?

He is maybe part of a giant problem involving Nephilim-like folks after the flood. As Israel are moving from Sinai to Zion — Moses sends spies into the land, who report it’s inhabited by giants; Anakim who are descendants of the Nephilim (Numbers 13:33).

There are more giants; more Anakites aka the Rephaites… (Deuteronomy 2:11). Their king is a giant named Og of Bashan — his bed is 9 cubits — 13 feet — long. (Deuteronomy 3:11). We will look at Goliath in a couple of weeks — but David and his merry men go head-to-head with a bunch of giants, including Goliath’s brother, they are descendants of Rapha, “Rephaim” (2 Samuel 21:16, 19, 22).

This word Rapha has got two separate dictionary entries; one says giant and the other ghost — whether they are linked is debated. I reckon they are — cause when Isaiah uses the word about ghosts, these Rapha are in the realm of the dead — Sheol (Isaiah 14:9). Picture our map.

Isaiah says they are the dead leaders of the world; probably guys like Nimrod and Og the giant — not nepo-babies, but nepho-babies (Isaiah 14:9). Isaiah says Israel has been ruled by these lords, but these children of cosmic rebellion against God are dead; their Rapha do not rise (Isaiah 26:13–14). God wiped them out (Isaiah 26:14). Let me tell you this story.

The rebellious sons of God are the origin story of giant, violent warrior kings of the nations; the kinds who call themselves images of God, who rule the nations who oppose God’s people, and tempt God’s people to worship. But Isaiah says ‘do not worship these giants, they are ghosts in Sheol, which is where they will take you.’

Then Israel is exiled because the gods of these nations become Israel’s gods, their kings become like the nation’s kings (and so the nation’s kings become Israel’s kings); the violent attempts to bring heaven and earth together displayed in Babylon lures Israel in; but their path ends down in the grave, not up in the sky.

Here is where we bring back some more nuts and bolts to see how Deuteronomy 32 gives us a 4D map of this… In the NIV it says the Most High gave the nations their inheritance; dividing mankind (Deuteronomy 32:8), literally the sons of Adam — setting up their boundaries — the scattering he did at Babel… according to the number of the sons of Israel (Deuteronomy 32:8).

When the Most High gave the nations their inheritance, when he divided all the sons of Adam, he set up boundaries for the peoples according to the number of the sons of Israel.
For the Lord’s portion is his people, Jacob his allotted inheritance.

Deuteronomy 32:8–9

But remember textual criticism — from part one — and the Dead Sea Scrolls; and the Greek translation of the Old Testament.

The NIV and other translations say sons of Israel here and the Masoretic Hebrew from the medieval age says “sons of Israel.” But. Earlier Greek translations say either angels of God or sons of God… And Hebrew manuscripts from the Dead Sea Scrolls — the writings used by a Jewish sect located outside Jerusalem — say sons of God…

When the Most High gave the nations their inheritance, when he divided all the sons of Adam, he set up boundaries for the peoples according to the number of the sons of God.
For the Lord’s portion is his people, Jacob his allotted inheritance.

Deuteronomy 32:8–9

The ESV follows this translation. And, if it’s right and the LXX and other manuscripts are right, when God divided up the sons of Adam into nations, he did it according to the number of sons of God; heavenly beings like those in Genesis 6, while keeping Israel — Jacob — for himself.

So, what is the original?

The “sons of God” text thing fits with Psalm 82, where the Most High God — (Deuteronomy 32:8; Psalm 82:6)

God presides in the great assembly; he renders judgment among the “gods”
“I said, ‘You are “gods”; you are all sons of the Most High.’ But you will die like mere mortals; you will fall like every other ruler.”

Psalm 82:1, 6–7

God — literally Elohim — judges an assembly of other gods Elohim — (Psalm 82:1), who are called sons of God, but told they will die like mortals; perhaps becoming ghosts like their giant children.

And it fits with a source; a kind of 4D map, the book of Enoch, that isn’t in our Bibles, but is a source quoted by New Testament writers…

And the angels, the children of the heaven, saw and lusted after them, and said to one another: ‘Come, let us choose us wives from among the children of men and beget us children.’

Enoch 6:2–3

It’s a commentary on Genesis 6 and the sons of God; it uses the Greek word angels.

And again the Lord said to Raphael: ‘Bind Azazel hand and foot, and cast him into the darkness: and make an opening in the desert, which is in Dudael, and cast him therein.

Enoch 10:4–5

They lead humans into violence, and God binds them and casts them into darkness in a grave in the wilderness;

And place upon him rough and jagged rocks, and cover him with darkness, and let him abide there forever, and cover his face that he may not see light

Enoch 10:5–7

Covered forever, until they are hoiked into an abyss of fire, with their followers.

In those days they shall be led off to the abyss of fire: and to the torment and the prison in which they shall be confined forever.

And whosoever shall be condemned and destroyed will from thenceforth be bound together with them to the end of all generations.

Enoch 10:13–15

If that sounds familiar it’s cause Jude and Peter quote Enoch; Jude calls him the seventh after Adam, then quotes this bit… (Jude 1:14). Compare:

“See, the Lord is coming with thousands upon thousands of his holy onesto judge everyone, and to convict all of them of all”

Jude 1:14

“And behold! He cometh with ten thousands of His holy ones. To execute judgement upon all…”

Enoch 1:9

Peter talks about Jesus preaching to dead spirits from the time of Noah (1 Peter 3:18), and God punishing fallen angels… (2 Peter 2:4–5), and Revelation describes a fiery end for rebellious spiritual beings in league with the serpent (Revelation 20:10) — both draw on this picture from Enoch.

Enoch connects the two meanings of Rapha a bit; these spirits of dead rebels become demons — evil spirits — who come up from Sheol to afflict, destroy and attack humans.

And now, the giants, who are produced from the spirits and flesh, shall be called evil spirits upon the earth, and on the earth shall be their dwelling. Evil spirits have proceeded from their bodies…

And the spirits of the giants afflict, oppress, destroy, attack, do battle, and work destruction on the earth, and cause trouble…

Enoch 15:8–9, 11

The book of Enoch describes these sons of God landing on Mount Hermon.

And they were in all two hundred; who descended in the days of Jared on the summit of Mount Hermon…

Enoch 6:6

Rebellion on a mountaintop…

Let’s tie some Old Testament threads together; Og the giant king of Bashan rules Mount Hermon (Joshua 12:4–6); Bashan is the land of ghost giants — Rephaim — and Hermon is the highest mountain in the region (Deuteronomy 3:13).

There’s a Psalm about this mountain of Bashan being jealous of Zion, because God chose it. This Psalm also promises God will bring people out of captivity from Bashan, and the depths of the ocean. The mountain and the deep…

Mount Bashan, majestic mountain, Mount Bashan, rugged mountain, why gaze in envy, you rugged mountain, at the mountain where God chooses to reign, where the Lord himself will dwell forever?
The Lord says, “I will bring them from Bashan; I will bring them from the depths of the sea…”

Psalm 68:15–16, 22

Jewish folks in the first century had this story of Mount Hermon being where the rebel sons of God launched their heaven-meets-earth program — birthing giants, ghosts, demons and violent god-kings of the nations; where those nations were ruled by these powers and principalities after Babel. It would be cool if Mount Hermon showed up in the New Testament…

Hey?

Let’s set the scene for a 4D reading of the transfiguration.

At Caesarea Philipi Jesus asks “Who do people say the Son of Man is?” Peter answers “You are the Messiah” — the Son of God… This son of Adam is the Son of God. Jesus says Peter — you rock — and on this rock I will build my church, and the gates of Hades won’t overcome it (Matthew 16:13, 16, 18)… Hades is the Greek for Sheol; the gates of Hades won’t open up so death overcomes life; they won’t prevent Jesus bringing heaven and earth together in his kingdom.

Josephus says Caesara Philippi got it’s name cause Caesar gave the region to one of Herod’s sons, who built a temple for Caesar at Panium — named after the goat god Pan.

And when Caesar had further bestowed upon him another additional country, he built there also a temple of white marble, hard by the fountains of Jordan: the place is called Panium…

Josephus, Wars 1.404

Caesarea Philippi is at the base of a huge mountain; and features this cave, with a kind of bottomless pit of water, immeasurably deep…

…where is a top of a mountain that is raised to an immense height, and at its side, beneath, or at its bottom, a dark cave opens itself within which there is a horrible precipice, that descends abruptly to a vast depth; it contains a mighty quantity of water, which is immovable and when anybody lets down anything to measure the depth of the earth beneath the water, no length of cord is sufficient to reach it…

Josephus, Wars 1.405

It’s called Pan’s grotto; where people make sacrifices sending stuff through the water to the underworld… Interesting place for Jesus to talk about the gates of Hades… (Matthew 16:18).

Just plot this water pit on this map as we go…

This is where Jesus says the Son of Man will be a human who enters the Father’s glory; with his angels — people will see him entering heaven on God’s terms; it’s a kind of Babel; or a reverse of sons of God coming down.

For the Son of Man is going to come in his Father’s glory with his angels… Truly I tell you, some who are standing here will not taste death before they see the Son of Man coming in his kingdom.

Matthew 16:27–28

Then — Matthew mentions no change in location, just that six days later Jesus takes Peter, James and John up a high mountain (Matthew 17:1) — want to guess what the mountain at Caesarea Philippi is called?

Mount Hermon.

The mountain where serpenty rebellion occurs from heaven, to lead humans away from God… under these powers.

And he was transfigured before them, and his face shone like the sun, and his clothes became white as light.
He was still speaking when, behold, a bright cloud overshadowed them, and a voice from the cloud said, “This is my beloved Son, with whom I am well pleased; listen to him.”

Matthew 17:2, 5

This is where Jesus is transfigured, so the disciples see him in 4D — gloriously uncovered as a heavenly human straight out of Old Testament visions… where God’s voice booms from the clouds of heaven — like at Sinai — imagine the 4D cinema experience… saying “This is my Son.”

Jesus the Son of God and Son of Man who will bring heaven and earth together — restoring the nations under God’s rule is revealed; on this mountain; reclaiming the territory for the Most High.

He comes down the mountain and there is this kid who keeps falling into fire or water — maybe the gates of Hades are beckoning — (Matthew 17:15) And Jesus rebukes this demon — maybe a Rapha-ghost — and restores this boy (Matthew 17:18).

Then — with Hermon in the background he says prayer doesn’t just drive out demons, it moves mountains — specifically “this mountain”: the jealous Mount Bashan, where God will gather people back to himself, and from the deep. Jesus is going to call people back from darkness; from the rule of these nations and the powers behind them. People will no longer be held captive to demons or powers — the stuff associated with Mount Bashan or Mount Hermon…

“Because of your little faith. For truly, I say to you, if you have faith like a grain of mustard seed, you will say to this mountain, ‘Move from here to there,’ and it will move, and nothing will be impossible for you.”

Matthew 17:20

And, again, he foreshadows his death as where this will happen (Matthew 17:22–23).

When Jesus quotes Psalm 22 — ‘my God, my God, why have you forsaken me’ — from the cross; this Psalm pictures Israel’s Messiah being attacked by ‘strong bulls of Bashan’ and lions — beastly pictures of rebellion; trusting God to rescue him from the lions and bulls.

My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?
Many bulls surround me; strong bulls of Bashan encircle me. Roaring lions that tear their prey open their mouths wide against me.
Rescue me from the mouth of the lions; save me from the horns of the wild oxen.

Psalm 22:1, 12–13, 21

And the transfiguration — on the mountain — reveals Jesus as the Son of God — who, through the cross, brings people home to God; anticipating when Jesus will stand on a mountain (Matthew 28:16), and say all authority has been given to me, sending his disciples into all the nations to baptise people into God’s life; gathering us from Bashan and the deep; so the gates of Hades won’t prevail; Sheol has lost its grip. (Psalm 68:22)

“All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Therefore go and make disciples of all nations…”

Matthew 28:18–19

If we put on our 4D glasses we find this thread through the New Testament.

In Athens Paul says God distributed the nations (Acts 17:26), but we are all God’s children and should stop worshipping other gods (Acts 17:29), cause God overlooked this, but now calls all people to repent (Acts 17:30). Reversing that Deuteronomy 32 ‘distribution’ of the nations.

In Ephesians, Paul writes about ‘us’ or ‘we’ the chosen inheritance of God — Israel — adopted as his children… (Ephesians 1:4–5) And then a ‘you’ — the Gentiles — who are rescued from the power of the serpent and included in Christ; given an inheritance; receiving the Holy Spirit; brought into 4D life with God (Ephesians 1:13–14). He says ‘you Gentiles were excluded’ (Ephesians 2:11–12) — now included (Ephesians 2:19).

He even uses the map of reality in the temple floor plan to make the point — once Gentiles were separated by a dividing wall of hostility (Ephesians 2:14); now we are included as bricks in the temple; members of God’s household (Ephesians 2:21–22); adopted as heirs so that in this mystery (Ephesians 3:6). God is making his victory known to the powers and principalities; that divine court room.

His intent was that now, through the church, the manifold wisdom of God should be made known to the rulers and authorities in the heavenly realms,according to his eternal purpose that he accomplished in Christ Jesus our Lord.

Ephesians 3:10–11

Paul even quotes Psalm 68 — the one about Bashan — when he says Jesus is taking people as captive to give us as gifts to each other (Psalm 68:18; Ephesians 4:8–9).

In Revelation, John pictures Jesus in heaven as he saw him on the mountain top.

“His face was like the sun shining in all its brilliance.”

Revelation 1:16

And then sees God’s throne atop a crystal sea (Revelation 4:6); the vault. He sees God destroying the powers who align with the serpent — and the serpent (Revelation 20:10) — and the deep and Hades — Sheol — death itself — before creating a new mountain where heaven and earth meet and the sea — no deep; no barrier, so humans can dwell with God in a new garden city; on a new mountain.

The sea gave up the dead that were in it, and death and Hades gave up the dead that were in them, and each person was judged according to what they had done. Then death and Hades were thrown into the lake of fire.


Then I saw “a new heaven and a new earth,” for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away, and there was no longer any sea.

And he carried me away in the Spirit to a mountain great and high, and showed me the Holy City, Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God.

Revelation 20:13–14; 21:1, 10

Turning this…

Into this…

When we read in 4D we are tracking this thread.

You might feel like reading in 3D — or 4D — needs special glasses… that this is special knowledge only mystical, professionaly, priestly types can reveal… And that is a real risk. But all of us need guides in a foreign land.

We don’t know Greek or Hebrew so we are guided by translators already.

Maybe we need map translators not just word translators.

But also, this isn’t new.

Jude names Enoch. It’s ‘in the Bible’…

It’s possible that guides from our time — committed to disenchantment — have led us away from this reality; flattening the map; pointing us at words not the world they create; away from the mountains.

We modern readers flatten the Bible into 2D cause we are committed to the idea that comprehension is about getting the right answer; the facts.

Shifting from 2D to 4D shifts us from comprehending and certainty to contemplation. Away from analysis of words to a humble, inquisitive, imaginative curiousity…

Even if some of this wild stuff is speculative; sitting and thinking about the imagery and the vision it creates and not knowing the answers, or admitting we do not know, or we are confused so we reflect and wrestle more takes us into a richer conversation with the God we are too tempted to domesticate and explain.

Even if we have been reading the Bible our whole lives — most of you longer than me — this is a posture that cultivates wisdom, not just knowledge.

We can picture this reorientation as moving away from grasping the fruit of the tree of knowledge using our own power for ourselves, to sitting and examining the beauty of the tree God made, and his word about what it’s for, so that contemplation itself is a gift from God that grows us — and we get to enjoy this sort of contemplation of glorious things for eternity.

This sort of reading involves a different lens; and we might need to act some of it out in our bodies — and we might need guides who will take us from 2D to 4D.

Here are three suggestions.

First, this is how people through church history and outside the west view the world. It’s only disorienting for us moderns who have turned the vault into a closed dome; shutting ourselves off from the heavens. Guides from outside our time and place can help.

Second, I’ve drawn lots of this from an Old Testament scholar named Mike Heiser; his work is disputed; he spent his career writing and podcasting about this stuff; and he might have been wrong about plenty, but he is a good example of taking the Bible seriously, while seeing differently.

Third, C.S. Lewis is less controversial, mostly cause we have domesticated him; turning him into a ‘safe’ Lion… He is not safe, but he is good.

His metaphor for seeing differently is to picture yourself in a dark tool shed; a sunbeam shining through a crack.

When you look at the beam you can see it lighting up specks of dust, and that it’s “the most striking thing” inside the shed.

Our 2D readings are like this.

Lewis invites us to stand in the beam and look along it; picture looking along the beam out the hole; seeing green leaves on trees, and further — the sun — a bigger reality than the shed. Looking at the beam and looking along the beam are different experiences…

But once we start looking along the beam, it changes how we see the shed; or life on earth, so, like Lewis says elsewhere…

I believe in Christianity as I believe that the sun has risen: not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else.

C.S. Lewis

If we can — by God’s Spirit — see the world through radiant glory of the transfigured Jesus on the mountain top; as he invites us out of darkness and into his wonderful light — reclaiming us from ground once held by rebellious powers — as the eyes of our hearts are opened and his word helps us see the world this way, it changes everything.

August 28, 2026 Add Comment

How to Read the Bible — As Ancient and Translated but Timeless

This series of posts was first a series of sermons I preached at City South Presbyterian and Coorparoo Presbyterian in mid 2026. You can, if it is your preferred medium, watch the video recording of this sermon here (Vimeo), or listen to the audio recording here (Spotify link).

Have you heard Eskimos have 50 words for snow?

This is used to support a disputed theory that our thinking is limited to the words in our language called “linguistic determinism” (it turns out we also think in images and through experiences). But, while debunking this theory, scholars have discovered ways language orients us to the world.

The Kuuk Thaayorre (cook thai-oar) people of North Queensland have been big here.

They do not use ‘self-oriented’ descriptions of space — like ‘left’ or ‘right’ — no matter which way they are facing they talk about east or west, and think of time moving east to west, and instead of saying ‘how are you going’ they say ‘where are you going’… and it turns out they have incredible spatial awareness. This is an example of how language helps us know where we are; mapping out reality; and making sense of it all…

I wonder if you can make sense of these words. This is the Hebrew of Bereshit 1:26; that is Hebrew for “in the beginning.”

וַיֹּ֣אמֶר אֱלֹהִ֔ים נַֽעֲשֶׂ֥ה אָדָ֛ם בְּצַלְמֵ֖נוּ כִּדְמוּתֵ֑נוּ וְיִרְדּוּ֩ בִדְגַ֨ת הַיָּ֜ם וּבְע֣וֹף הַשָּׁמַ֗יִם וּבַבְּהֵמָה֙ וּבְכׇל־הָאָ֔רֶץ וּבְכׇל־הָרֶ֖מֶשׂ הָֽרֹמֵ֥שׂ עַל־הָאָֽרֶץ׃

Genesis 1:26

Or these ones — the Greek of Pros Kolasseis — Colossians 1:15…

ὅς ἐστιν εἰκὼν τοῦ θεοῦ τοῦ ἀοράτου, πρωτότοκος πάσης κτίσεως

Colossians 1:15

When we translate and read these words from ancient Hebrew and Greek into English we are also making a jump across time — and across ways of being oriented to the world; and sometimes we need a map.

When we read the words of the Bible they are ancient, timeless, and translated.

For our nuts and bolts we are considering translation — how we get our English Bibles — and how to understand ancient words.

The Old Testament is written in Hebrew, with a bit of Aramaic, which shares an alphabet and some vocabulary.

About 200 years before Jesus it was translated and read in Greek, the LXX.

The New Testament is written in a form of Greek called Koine…

In the early church, by about 300AD, people are working with both Hebrew and Greek texts — and we have got Greek Bibles collated in book form from this time.

The Roman Empire splits into the Greek speaking East, and Latin speaking West in 395AD, and ten years later a guy named Jerome translates the Greek and Hebrew into a Latin version called the Vulage.

The Latin speaking Catholic Church embraces this, while the Eastern Orthodox church uses Greek. Languages in the Western half of the empire fragment, so Latin is mostly used by royalty and clergy, but not the ‘common language’ of the people.

About 1,000 years later, this guy Wycliffe translates the Bible into English.

The Latin-speaking church hated this so much that after he died, they declared him a heretic, dug him up and burned him… 100 years later, Jan Hus translated the Bible into Czech; he was burned at the stake.

This was not just because they translated the words; their translations allowed them to be critical of the church in the language of the people. Both Wycliffe and Hus translated from the Vulgate.

This set the scene for Martin Luther; who translated the Bible into German in the 1500s, and used the printing press to get the Bible, and his criticisms of the church, into the hands of the common person. He translated from the authoritative Hebrew Old Testament — the Masoretic Text, which was circulated from around the 7th century — that is AD — and Luther a Greek New Testament put together by a Catholic contemporary, Erasmus.

100 years later the Reformation had gained political traction in England, and the King James Version — also translated from the Hebrew and Greek — was released.

Almost all modern translations are working from the original languages; differences are not so much about the source material — text criticism stuff, when decisions are made on those issues they are usually footnoted; the differences are about translation philosophies; translations are built on this spectrum from formal to dynamic equivalent.

The formal side can be clunky and literal. The dynamic tries to capture the meaning of words, even some of the style.

The ESV is on one end of this spectrum, the NIV is on the other…

Translating is tricky.

Hebrew and Greek structure sentences differently to English, and there are less words in their vocabulary, which gives more room for wordplay and double meanings, and words have a broader range of possible meanings than English, where we are so specific.

Hebrew and Greek have tens of thousands of words, while English has more than 170,000 words.

Translators do an incredible job getting the word of God into our hands so we do not have to learn Hebrew and Greek to read it…

But. Translation always involves interpretation; and cause English is familiar to those of us who think in English, sometimes we can domesticate the Bible; imposing our orientation onto it, or we can be guided by or reoriented by translation decisions, and the layers of meaning that build up as the church talks about words and concepts, that move us away from the ancient meaning and to read well, sometimes we have to dig away these layers to get back to the text.

To show what I mean we are going to do what is called a word study together on the word image.

Let us make mankind in our image, in our likeness
The Son is the image of the invisible God

Genesis 1:26; Colossians 1:15

We are made in the image and likeness of God.

Jesus is the image of the invisible God — or rather we are tselem Elohim, and Jesus is the eikon Theou.

When the Old Testament is translated into Greek, this word tselem is translated into eikon — which is used in Genesis — actually the Greek name for the book, and Colossians.

When it is translated into Latin, Image of God is “imaginem Dei” — or imago Dei.

This meme landed in my feed recently.

It says “it’s a key doctrinal belief that humans are created in the image of God” — we “reflect his character in unique ways, through rational thought, moral awareness, rational capacity, and dominion over creation” and “every person you encounter,” regardless of their status or identity, carries this imprint which is why human life is sacred and worthy of dignity.”

Now whether you think “imago Dei” or “Image of God” this is probably what you think, right? But — this is an example of layers of meaning — both the integration of biblical ideas, and the way language moves beyond the ancient meaning over time.

The Deity beholds and hears all things, and searches all things out: you too have the power of apprehension of things by means of sight and hearing, and the understanding that inquires into things and searches them out.

Gregory of Nyssa, On the Making of Man, 379AD

So, this guy Gregory of Nyssa wrote a Greek book about the nature of humans in 379AD; he said because God sees, hears, and knows and we do too; the essence of the eikon is in this rational capacity.

“It is clear, therefore, that intellectual creatures alone, properly speaking, are made to God’s image.”

Aquinas, Summa Theologia, 1260s AD

Plenty of people write about imago Dei; maybe the most influential is Thomas Aquinas, in the 1200s, who also saw it being our intellect.

These are major authorities shaping the Catholic tradition, so in Vatican II — in a Latin document titled ‘Gauium Et Spes’ — Joy and Hope — this section — “On the Dignity of the Human Person,” and chapter “On humanity as the image of God,” says authentic freedom is the sign of the divine image; especially to know and choose right from wrong — intellect, freedom, dignity — this is basically the meme right?

“True freedom, however, is an exceptional sign of the divine image in the human person.”

Man achieves such dignity when, emancipating himself from all captivity to passion, he pursues his goal in a spontaneous choice of what is good

Vatican II, Gaudium et Spes

But is this what a tselem is in Genesis?

There are rich truths in the meme, and these traditions, and thousands of years of reflection on the imago Dei in Greek, and Latin — in church tradition, but church traditions can add these layers; and we do not just have tradition or doctrines, we can look at the way words are used through the story of the Bible in their original languages — we will call this internal intertextuality — and across the ancient world — external intertextuality.

Translators are not typically being intertextual like this; they are working to make a sentence make sense within its meaning unit; they are not as literary or intertextual as the authors of the Bible. Let me show you this with two famous stories you might think are unrelated.

First — Noah — the earth is full of violence and evil; God chooses Noah to build a floating box; an ark — from trees and tar — to preserve life (Genesis 6:14), so God’s people can be fruitful and multiply. Noah’s family are saved through the waters (Genesis 9:1).

Second — Moses — God’s people are fruitfully multiplying in Egypt, and Pharaoh fills the earth with violence; killing babies (Exodus 1:7); but Moses’ mum puts him in a box — a basket, made of reeds and tar — to preserve his life on the water, so God’s people can be fruitful (Exodus 2:3).

You might think I am forcing the links here; but the same Hebrew word is used for ark and basket; but this literary link is lost in translation cause they are literally a boat and basket.

Anyway. Let us look at tselem…

The writer of Genesis develops our picture of a tselem — an image of God — by zooming in to God breathing into a dust shape to make it live (Genesis 2:7), in this garden in Eden (Genesis 2:8), where there is water flowing from the Tigris and Euphrates (Genesis 2:14).

When Adam had lived 130 years, he had a son in his own likeness, in his own image; and he named him Seth.

“Whoever sheds human blood, by humans shall their blood be shed; for in the image of God has God made mankind.

Genesis 5:3; 9:6

Tselem is used two more times in Genesis — Genesis 5 throws back to the beginning in order to tell us Adam makes a son; his own image, in his likeness — part of being an image is being offspring… Then the tselem Elohim idea is used, after the flood, where God prohibits taking human life, cause it is sacred.

Once of rats and tumors (1 Samuel 6:5), but mostly for idol statues — in Numbers (Numbers 33:52), 2 Kings (2 Kings 11:18), and Ezekiel (Ezekiel 7:20). Which is interesting given Israel is commanded not to make or worship idols of other humans, or any form they are made to rule over (Deuteronomy 4:16–18), this is the first two commandments (Deuteronomy 5:8–9)… and these laws use language from Genesis 1; part of the idea is that the living God has made his own living statues to represent him — and worshipping dead statues — being ruled by them — makes us dead.

Here is where we go intertextual elsewhere — in part 1 we looked briefly at the Dead Sea Scrolls; these jars of Jewish manuscripts in Greek and Hebrew that help us understand how contemporaries of Jesus read the Scriptures.

Archaeologists have also found a treasure trove of stone inscriptions — book tablets — from Israel’s ancient neighbours, Babylon and Assyria — mostly written in Akkadian; a language with a different alphabet, that often has similar sounding words — these tablets are from the library of an Assyrian king named Ashurbanipal.

In one tablet Ashurbanipal — boasts like Solomon, about “learning wisdom”; mastering reading and writing so he could read Akkadian — he “had the joy of reading inscriptions on stone from before the time of the flood…”

‘I Ashur-bani-pal, within the palace, learned the wisdom of Nebo, the entire art of writing on clay tablets of every kind. I made myself master of the various kinds of writing. . .

I read the beautiful clay tablets from Sumer and the Akkadian writing, which is hard to master. I had the joy of reading inscriptions on stone from the time before the flood.’

Ashurbanipal inscription

There is an Akkadian flood story called the Gilgamesh Epic.

I asked if you could read Hebrew…

How about Akkadian cuneiform?

What about when it is translated into our alphabet? This is an inscription about Assurnasirpal — king 200 years before Library guy.

ṣalam šarrūtišu ina dmūt pānišu epušma ana dNinurta ušziz

Inscription from Assurnasirpal, King of Assyria

It uses the words salam and damut; related to the Hebrew words tselem and demut — image and likeness… The king boasts he made an image of his kingship in the likeness of his face, installing it in his God’s temple.

“I made an image of my kingship in the likeness of my face and erected it for Ninurta, my lord.”

Inscription from Assurnasirpal, King of Assyria

Throughout the ancient world kings would make idol statues of themselves and put them in temples — and act as guardians of these statues, only the king was the image of God. Eventually, as you encountered these statues in temples, you would worship them too. There are lots of overlaps between these sources and the Bible; and they are helpful guides for understanding what words mean; this overlap in language and stories makes sense…

Abram — the father of Israel is called out of Ur of the Chaldeans — that is Babylon — we should expect these cultures to share stories and words (Genesis 11:27–28); and these same stories and words — and images — become the basis of Israel’s temptation to worship the gods and god-kings of the nations that lead them to exile in Babylon; where, again, Babylon’s stories and images of God compete for their hearts.

When a sky above had not (yet even) been mentioned, (And) the name of firm ground below had not [yet even] been thought of…

Enuma Elish

The tablet library contained a Babylonian creation story — the Enuma Elish — about the creation of the heavens and earth. Consider how this text compares or contrasts to Genesis 1.

“In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. Now the earth was formless and empty, darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters.”

— Genesis 1:1-2.

(When) only primeval Apsu, their begetter, And Mummu and Tiamat—she who gave birth to them all— Were mingling their waters in one

Enuma Elish

Apsu is the deep; Tiamat was a ‘sea-goddess of chaos’. The Enuma Elish continues. But in Babylon’s story, their god-king, Marduk creates through violence; making humans from the blood and bone of dead gods (including Tiamat), not in their likeness, to rule, but to serve the gods. Babylonian kings are then become images of Marduk.

Genesis says, “Let us make mankind in our image, in our likeness, so that they may rule…” (Genesis 1:26).

The Enuma Elish says:

Blood I will mass and cause bones to be, I will establish a savage, “man” shall be his name. Verily, savage-man I will create.

He shall be charged with the service of the gods, That they might be at ease!

Enuma Elish

Then it tells the story of the building of Babylon.

Build Babylon, ​the task you have sought. Let bricks for it be moulded, and raise the shrine!”

They raised the peak of Esagil… They built the lofty temple tower…

Be-l seated the gods, his fathers, at the banquet. In the lofty shrine which they had built for his dwelling…

Enuma Elish

The Enuma Elish describes Babylon being built with moulded bricks, a lofty temple tower reaching the sky; that is what Esagil means — so the gods could party. Genesis describes people making bricks (Genesis 11:3) to build the lofty tower of Babylon (Genesis 11:4)… and this power play being frustrated by Israel’s God (Genesis 11:8–9).

There are plenty of Babylonian kings who like bricks and building projects — none more than Nebuchadnezzar; a fan of the Enuma Elish, who built big temple towers, in Babylon, with bricks stamped with his name… And who Daniel describes building a giant tselem — this time in Aramaic; on the plains of Babylon (Daniel 3:1), that he commands people of all languages to bow before and worship — he is trying to reverse the scattering at Babel (Daniel 3:4–5).

“I added to the palace and raised it as high as a mountain with bitumen and baked brick…”

Nebuchadnezzar, Brick Inscription

There are also inscriptions describing rituals for giving life to images of God — selems.

We meet Library Guy’s grandfather, Sennacherib, and his father, Esarhaddon in 2 Kings, a couple of generations before Nebuchadnezzar takes Judah into exile (2 Kings 19:37)… Sennacherib trashed Babylon’s temples and statues — so, Esarhaddon set about restoring the deity’s presence to these images through rituals described in these inscriptions.

…the wisdom which Ashur and Marduk entrusted to me when they made me aware of the renewal of the the statue of the great gods…

Esarhaddon inscription

Esarhaddon claims Marduk chose him to restore them — the selems of the gods —

I processed with joy before him. I brought him joyfully into the heart of Babylon, the city of their honour. Into the orchards, among the canals and parterres of the temple

Esarhaddon inscription

He parades the selem into a temple orchard in the heart of Babylon; where it is renewed through these rituals.

…they entered by means of the office of the apkallu, mouth washing, mouth opening, washing and purification, before the stars of heaven.

Esarhaddon inscription

We have stone tablets outlining these rituals — by we I mean ‘the British Museum’ — water is brought from the pure spring — from the Tigris and Euphrates (remember Genesis 2)…

Water of the Apsû, brought from the midst of Eridu, water of the Tigris, water of the Euphrates, brought from a pure place…

Mis Pi ritual

Into this pure orchard where water flows — sounds like Eden —

…in the garden of the canal of the pure orchard build a bīt rimki. Bring him out to the canal of the pure orchard…

Mis Pi ritual

And the statue’s mouth is purified and opened, to eat and speak; as they say ‘this selem is made by the gods’. They are cleansed, restored, and repositioned to work as ‘images of god’…

This is the statue that Ninkura, Ninagal, Kusibanda, Ninildu, (and) Ninzadim made.

Mis Pi ritual

The Genesis 2 story sounds like the inversion of this; God making a living image by opening its mouth and nose.

Now. Here’s a couple of warnings — people go crazy with these connections; scholars describe this as parallelomania… and the guy who coined this label calls it a “disease”…

It seems to me that we are at a junction when biblical scholarship should recognise parallelomania for the disease that it is.

Samuel Sandmel, “Parallelomania,” 1962

And Robert Alter — an expert in both Hebrew and literature who has translated a beautiful version of the Old Testament, and written about the art of biblical narrative and the art of translation; he worries we can obsess about borrowed Akkadian words and miss the artistic Hebrew story…

“Bible scholars spent all their time hunting down Akkadian loanwords hidden in the text, but they didn’t know how to read a story…”

Robert Alter

And — especially as Christians, we do not want to miss how the big story is fulfilled in Jesus.

Which is all to say rather than ‘rationality’, an ancient reader of Genesis are going to see God forming living statues — tselems — that are male and female, where a statue is formed and made alive in an orchard where the waters of the Tigris and Euphrates bubble up from the ground as quite different to the picture of violent male kings who claim to be gods.

So it is not these kings who are God’s representative children; but all humans are made to represent God and rule, and fruitfully pass this on in his family.

They will read this embedded in a story that warns about worshipping breathless statues — those made by these kings — that make us dead; in contrast to the stories and inscriptions of Babylon and Assyria.

Let us track the shift from tselem to eikon… there is a text included in the Greek Old Testament, and in the Apocrypha — but not our Bibles — which Paul seems to use in Romans 1 — called the Wisdom of Solomon.

…for God created us for incorruption
and made us in the image of his own eternity…

Wisdom of Solomon 2:23

For the idea of making idols was the beginning of sexual immorality,
and the invention of them was the corruption of life, for they did not exist from the beginning,

Wisdom of Solomon 14:12–13

After tracking threads through the Prophets and Psalms, this text describes the making of eikons as the root of human corruption… This is very Romans 1…

Then the ungodly custom, grown strong with time, was kept as a law,
and at the command of monarchs carved images were worshiped.

Wisdom of Solomon 14:16

And it follows this thread through history from kings making carved images to be worshipped, to people making images of these kings to honour them from a distance… flattering them.

When people could not honour monarchs in their presence, since they lived at a distance,
they imagined their appearance far away and made a visible image of the king whom they honoured…

…so that by their zeal they might flatter the absent one as though present.

Wisdom of Solomon 14:17

Then the ambition of the artisan impelled even those who did not know the king to intensify their worship. For he, perhaps wishing to please his ruler, skillfully forced the likeness to take more beautiful form…

Until honour became worship…

…and the multitude, attracted by the charm of his work, now regarded as an object of worship the one whom shortly before they had honoured as a human.

Wisdom of Solomon 14:18–29

With misspent toil, these workers form a futile god from the same clay— these mortals who were made of earth a short time before and after a little while go to the earth from which all mortals are taken. But the workers are not concerned that mortals are destined to die or that their life is brief, but they compete with workers in gold and silver and imitate workers in copper, and they count it a glorious thing to mold counterfeit gods.

Wisdom of Solomon 15:8–9

These eikons — whether of gods or kings — are counterfeit gods. We would never see a pastor championing a gold-coated image of a political ruler to ‘honour them’ would we… This is fine.

Nothing could go wrong… There’s nothing in what this pastor from the U.S said that resonates with that ancient document…

This statue was not created for worship. It was created as a symbol of resilience, patriotism, courage, and gratitude. It was created to honour a man…

Pastor Mark Burns

When Jesus is born, Roman Caesars are following the game plan; making images of themselves, installing them in temples; being called gods and sons of God.

“His image was placed among the gods, and he had an altar dedicated with the inscription to the genius of Julius …”

Suetonius, Life of the Caesars

…the birthday of the god Augustus was the beginning of the good tidings for the world that came by reason of him…

Priene inscription

Mark opens, “The beginning of the good news about Jesus the Messiah, the Son of God…” (Mark 1:1).

The New Testament authors are very conscious of how icons are tied to worship not just politics.

That is what is going on with the coins featuring Caesar’s icon and inscription, where Jesus says give God what has got his image on it…

“Whose image is this? And whose inscription?”
“Caesar’s,” they replied.
Then he said to them, “So give back to Caesar what is Caesar’s, and to God what is God’s.”

Matthew 22:20–21

And it is there at Jesus’ trial and crucifixion; he is under Roman law, for claiming to be king — the son of God — as Israel’s leaders bend the knee to Caesar’s image: “Anyone who claims to be a king opposes Caesar” and “We have no king but Caesar” (John 19:12, 15).

These are pictures of two kingdoms; two images of God — going head to head.

The cross being contrasted with the sword of Rome. Caesar’s statues being compared with the living image of the God of the Bible.

So Colossians tells the big story of the Bible — and the gospel — as a culmination of the story of images of God; revealing what a true human is restored and re-made for; when we are restored from captivity and darkness.

Paul says God has filled the church with the knowledge of his will that comes from the Spirit (Colossians 1:9); made us alive with his breath so we can be fruitful (Colossians 1:10), while the “Son is the image of the invisible God” in whom all things were created; that he is the “head of the body, the church” and that “all God’s fulness dwells in him” (Colossians 1:12-16)… in chapter 3 he will say we are renewed images of God (Colossians 3:9–10).

He says we have been repositioned, out of the kingdom of darkness, into God’s presence as his children in the kingdom of light (Colossians 1:13-14). Repositioned. Redeemed. Restored as image bearers. Revivified by the ‘breath’ or Spirit of God in our bodies.

Think of the ancient king restoring a desecrated image…

As our sins are forgiven and we are purified so we can dwell with God again, and represent him; following the template we see in Jesus, the eikon of the invisible God.

Jesus is the one who actually shows us who God is; the radiance of his glory; the word made flesh — the firstborn — there is that sonship idea again — and also the ruler and the representative of what God is like…

He is not just like God though; all things were created in him, through him, and for him; and our image bearing is not separate to him but through being united to him, living as his body. We are reconciled to God cleansed through his blood shed on the cross. Brought from exile into Eden-like proximity — before God’s face — restored, and repositioned (Colossians 1:22).

The image of God isn’t just about dignity and rationality — it is about relationship and function. It is eradicated through idolatry, which leads to exile and death, and restored through Jesus, our king, who cleanses us and leads us through the valley, into the temple of God’s presence, and who by God’s Spirit, restores our souls — recreating us to live as God’s children who dwell in his house forever. This calls us from the lure of other images of power, into something glorious and life-giving.

We do not need the Ancient background for this message to be timeless; but, when we remember the Bible is translated and look under the surface, it is rich.

August 27, 2026 Add Comment

How to Read the Bible — As fulfilled in Jesus

This series of posts was first a series of sermons I preached at City South Presbyterian and Coorparoo Presbyterian in mid 2026. You can, if it is your preferred medium, watch the video recording of this sermon here (Vimeo), or listen to the audio recording here (Spotify link).

Someone at church asked if this series would explain ‘why we cover the whole Bible every week…’

This is the post.

The Bible contains lots of words. Around 730,000 in the NIV or 757000 in the ESV.

We can do more than count them, we can analyse how frequently words are used; after the ands and thes — lord, king, and son are up there.

Image Source.

Source: Bible Word cloud tool

We can visualise which words are used most in the Bible, or its individual books — noticing how how Father — 208, and God — 224 — are the most common word in Genesis.

Is frequency meaningful?

How do we get from data — words — to meaning?

Imagine you have got a shopping list of ingredients. Are the items and their quantity meaningful themselves?

They become more meaningful arranged in a recipe; instructions to combine them into something new…

Thanks to recipe blogs — we know stories are what really makes meaning.

And a cake is most meaningful when it’s enjoyed in relationship as a “birthday cake”…

When we read the Bible we can look for meaning in the ingredients, the words, or the recipe — sentences, passages or books — and miss the story, or forget to eat the cake.

We want to have our cake and eat it too.

The Bible is not just ingredients — words — to analyse, or sentences to diagram… Its words come in this hyperlinked, multi-scroll collection connected by 63,799 cross references.

If you remove the filler words — ands and buts — ten percent of words are hyperlinked. And Jesus says these hyperlinked words tell one story.

“How foolish you are, and how slow to believe all that the prophets have spoken!Did not the Messiah have to suffer these things and then enter his glory?” And beginning with Moses and all the Prophets, he explained to them what was said in all the Scriptures concerning himself.

Luke 24:25–27

He tells his friends they should have read the words of the Prophets saying the Messiah had to suffer ‘these things’ — the cross — then enter his glory. And ‘beginning with Moses’ and all the Prophets, he explains what all the Scriptures say about him.

Then, he says fulfilled everything written about him in the Law, the Prophets, and the Psalms; the Jewish Scriptures: the Tanak — the Torah, Prophets, and Writings, though it’s interesting he says Psalms not Writings. Jesus opens their minds so they can understand the Scriptures… he unveils this meaning (Luke 24:44-47). Jesus claims the Scriptures are about and fulfilled in him — specifically that he would suffer and rise; so forgiveness of sins comes — through this story — the gospel — to the whole world.

Notice he is fulfilling everything written about him, not saying every word is about him; an important distinction; we do not have to jump to Jesus from every word or moment…

But these words of Jesus are a guide for reading the Scriptures; our job is to work out how a fully human, fully divine, text is fulfiled in him.

Which is where our nuts and bolts come in.

Today we are looking at hermeneutics — the word for finding the message in a text.

This is harder than it sounds. Especially treating it as fully human; embedded in and emerging from the lives of real humans. There is an art seeing the text fulfilled in Jesus without eradicating the meaning of the words in their time; so their humanity enriches our reading.

Some hermeneutical methods deliberately erase humans — whether that is the post-modern idea of “the death of the author,” where readers make our own meanings — or ancient approaches importing the idea from Plato that human stuff is dirty, so we should strip it away to find the spiritual, figurative, meaning; treating the Bible as God’s timeless word. You might see problems with that — context, right — but modern — or modernist — ways of reading can do the same thing.

Our default is probably a thing called the historical-grammatical method — the idea words have specific meaning, connected to their context — in a sentence, and in history — solving a sentence is like a science; there are rules.

But these rules are new; and the text is old. Mostly we are guessing or reconstructing the historical world of the author and the readers; and we see words and the world differently to pre-modern people, who were way more comfortable with supernatural and symbolic meanings, so even in the Bible, writers make connections from older texts symbolically, or through what is called typology, that we wouldn’t.

Our modernist rules reinforce a natural rather than supernatural reading of the text, that is outside the human approach of the authors.

Ok — onto this principle from Jesus that the right reading of the Old Testament involves seeing it fulfilled by him (Luke 24:44).

Scholars debate how this works — including a tension between reading christocentricly or christotelicly.

Again, big words — Christocentric readings look for Jesus on every page of the Scriptures; reading the end back into the start — and, as an observation — seem more likely to connect words or phrases to Jesus as divinely intended, in ways the humans involved might not have… The ‘true’ reading is the one that helps you see Jesus.

So — you will go from Samson’s improvised weaponisation of a donkey’s jawbone (Judges 15:15) — or where he saves God’s people with his arms outstretched, while dying — to the improvised weapon of the cross and Jesus’ outstretched arms (Judges 16:29–30)… This preaches well — It’s better than asking what the donkey jawbone in your life you can use to slay your enemies (Judges 15:15). But it erases the way the Judges depicts super-flawed figures spiraling towards darkness; because there is no king (Judges 16:6).

Christotelic is from the Greek word ‘telos’ — ‘fulfilment’ or end — Christotelic readings follow the way God authors history and the narrative arc of the Bible from the start to bring everything to fullness in Jesus, its end.

Stories in the Old Testament can be events that lead to the climactic moment that are not just types or shadows; and can reveal the hopes and expectations — and tensions — that are answered by Jesus.

Christotelic readers will describe a first reading tracking with the humans, and then read a ‘second time’ knowing how God fulfills it, noticing how the New Testament authors use the old. It’s worth observing that different types of Old Testament writing, and different things in Israel’s history have different types of fulfilment; fulfilling a Law is different to fulfilling the meaning of a sacrifice or holy space, which is different to fulfilling a prophecy.

Our hermeneutic of fulfilment in Jesus needs to be flexible enough to recognise different texts — and that all the information we have about those other bits also comes to us embedded in a narrative; a curated, organised collection of writings; not just random ingredients, or a cookbook — but as literature; that, to quote the Bible Project: “is a unified story that leads to Jesus.”

There is another big question around the relationship between what is called biblical theology and what is called systematic theology.

Biblical theology is the idea of paying attention to the narrative shape of the Bible; connected to God’s work in history, we interpret a passage asking where it is in the big story.

Systematic theology is the idea the Bible reveals big truths on topics like who God is, and that we should collect all those ideas and read the Bible through this lens. At its best it weighs up words on where they are in the narrative, at its worst, it flattens the story and treats anything said about an issue as equal; or it reads philosophical ideas — even good ones — from the position of the reader into the text — like Greek philosophy, or humanism, or inclusivity.

Biblical Theology asks “what time is it”; Systematic theology emphasises timelessness. Do we read the words shaped according to our system, or doctrine, or have the story build our system? The relationship between these two fields is complex; especially when people are always working to understand the texts better, while doctrines tend to remain fixed in different traditions.

Kevin Vanhoozer’s book Mere Hermeneutics tries to resolve this complexity. He is big on how words do not just say things, they do things; and the idea we are not just meant to look at the ingredients, or even the recipe, but the intended purpose of the words; we are meant to enjoy the cake; that the purpose or telos of the text isn’t just within the text, but what it’s meant to do to us; the community of people shaped by the text.

So, back to the words of Jesus — the telos of the Scriptures isn’t just to tell a story about his death and glorification, but for this story to transform us

The Scriptures are not just ‘christotelic’ — pointing us to Jesus, but crucitelic — pointing to the crucifixion; and cruciforming — persuading us to take up our cross to follow Jesus (Luke 24:26, 46).

They are doxatelic — the Greek word for glory, pointing us to his glory, and doxaforming; inviting us into his glory as we are raised and seated with him (Luke 24:26, 46).

Whether we read words ‘christocentricly’ or ‘christotelicly’ doesn’t matter if the words are not achieving their purpose in us.

Vanhoozer suggests a transfigural interpretation; built from the story of the transfiguration — where Jesus is revealed as both fully human and radiantly divine.

…transfigural interpretation attends to the letter of the text in order to discern in it the light of Christ…

Kevin J. Vanhoozer, Mere Christian Hermeneutics

He reckons our hermeneutical process is to see the biblical letter in a glorified way that brings us face to face with Jesus for our glorification.

Transfigural interpretation stands for the whole hermeneutical process of glorifying the biblical letter for the sake of the reader’s glorification.

Kevin J. Vanhoozer, Mere Christian Hermeneutics

In the last two weeks we have seen an analogy between the written word, and Jesus the ‘word made flesh who reveals God’s glory’ (John 1:14), as the ‘radiant image of God’ — his Son (Hebrews 1:3).

The transfiguration — where Jesus takes his disciples up a mountain and his shining glory is revealed — vividly displays Jesus’ two natures; fully divine and fully human; as he stands with Moses — representing the Law, and Elijah — representing the Prophets — who have both previously encountered the glorious presence of God on mountaintops — and is called God’s Son (Luke 9:28–35).

We are seeing a snapshot of the the fulfilment of scriptures; what happens when God’s Spirit unveils their meaning; bringing us into an encounter with the glory of God revealed in the face of his Son — his word. If our reading of the Scriptures isn’t bringing us into the glory of Jesus — the crucified Messiah — illuminated through the work of the Spirit, we are not eating the cake, we are playing with eggs and flour.

A couple of New Testament passages support this… Paul draws an analogy between Moses shining face being veiled after his mountain-top transfiguration (2 Corinthians 3:13), and the Old Testament being veiled to readers without the Spirit — until Jesus opens our minds — now it’s unveiled for us, so — we now in these Scriptures — come face to face with Jesus’ glory, up the mountain, becoming transformed as God’s Spirit works through his word to reveal Jesus to us. We read the Bible as human words inspired by God expecting the Spirit to transfigure them, so we experience them as heavenly words brought to life by the Spirit, to transfigure us… To transform us into the image of Jesus in ever increasing glory.

But their minds were made dull, for to this day the same veil remains when the old covenant is read. It has not been removed, because only in Christ is it taken away. Even to this day when Moses is read, a veil covers their hearts.


But whenever anyone turns to the Lord, the veil is taken away.
And we all, who with unveiled faces contemplate the Lord’s glory, are being transformed into his image with ever-increasing glory, which comes from the Lord, who is the Spirit.

2 Corinthians 3:14–16, 18

Peter describes the transfiguration as God’s glory being shone on Jesus, as God declared “This is my Son, whom I love, with whom I am well pleased…” A quote from Psalm 2; which we will pick up in a minute (2 Peter 1:17) — while they were on the sacred mountain (2 Peter 1:18). He pivots from the shining transfiguration to the Prophets whose words are like a light shining to enlighten our hearts (2 Peter 1:19); the Spirit was bringing this light; inspiring their pens, to illuminate our hearts — as they wrote words from God, for this purpose (2 Peter 1:21).

Here’s three ways this shapes the way we read the Bible…

First, the Law, the Prophets and the Psalms are collections of writing that emerge through Israel’s story, and are hyperlinked to each other. The Prophets and Psalms reflect on the Law as God relates to Israel through history, and inspires this writing. If you are a reader sitting at the point of Israel’s history where they have all been compiled and composed; you are never just reading the Law; you read the Law with the language and imagery and interpretation of the Prophets in your ears — with the words of the Psalms on your lips as your songbook. These Writings are brought together in the life of a word-shaped community, and they shape each other. Jumping straight from the Law — or the Prophets — to Jesus — misses this rich dynamic; the way the words are received along the way. Old Testament readers did not read these texts in isolation in their time, and neither should we, reading from where we sit, after their fulfilment.

Second, the sermons recorded in the New Testament — including in Luke part 2 — Acts — interpret the Scriptures this way. There are 15 sermons in Acts, give or take… All of them draw from multiple texts from the Law, the Prophets, or the Psalms — except Paul’s sermon to Greek philosophers in Athens, where he quotes their poets; there he begins with creation, and his logic on idolatry comes straight out of the Prophets and Psalms.

In Acts 13, Paul arrives heads to the synagogue — the scripture-reading community — in Pisidian Antioch (Acts 13:14). They read the Law and the Prophets, then invite Paul to speak… (Acts 13:15). He begins with Torah; the Exodus story (Acts 13:17) — moves to the Prophets —Israel’s desire for a king (Acts 13:20–21), David — hinting at God’s promise for a Messiah from the line of Jesse (Acts 13:22); and says this story leads to Jesus (Acts 13:23); quoting Psalm 2 to announce it’s been fulfilled by Jesus being “raised up”… (Acts 13:32–33). Law. Prophets. Psalms. Fulfilled — a model sermon.

What God promised our ancestors he has fulfilled for us, their children, by raising up Jesus. As it is written in the second Psalm: “‘You are my son; today I have become your father.’

Acts 13:32–33

The book of Hebrews — which many think is a sermon script — is soaked in the Scriptures; it quotes or alludes to the Law around 20 times, the Prophets around 15 times, and the Writings and Psalms 30 times; building out its picture of God speaking through these sources, but now speaking through Jesus — the radiant example of his being (Hebrews 1:1–2), through this living and active word (Hebrews 4:12).

If the Scriptures are this hyperlinked collection, and the New Testament models how to read them — this is how we should read too. Not by breaking a passage into dry ingredients — its words or components — line by line; but connecting words in this unified story fulfilled in Jesus, with this purpose of being transformed; transfigured; glorified; as God reveals himself to us in his word; his glorious Son who radiates with his presence.

Third — it’s rich.

Let us test it out — bringing our three weeks of work, and this heremeneutic to Psalm 2 — which is quoted at Jesus’ baptism, the transfiguration, in Paul’s sermon, and in Hebrews 1… It’s also a pivotal Psalm in the deliberate structuring of the Psalms as a five-part book. We noticed how this structure emerges in Israel’s history last week… but this is a handy visual.

Source: I can’t actually remember where I found this. Will attribute it when I locate it…

Here are some big picture implications of this structure.

They are deeply connected to David, the annointed Messiah — almost half of the 150 Psalms are titled ‘of David’ — the book is collated and sung after David has failed, and the throne is empty, so they are an invitation to reflect on God’s promises through the Prophets that a forever king would come from David’s line. There are songs where the Messiah cries out as he suffers (Psalm 22:1–2). Songs yearning to be shepherded into God’s house, like an anointed lamb (Psalm 23:5–6), followed by the question “who can ascend God’s mountain”… into his presence. Someone with a pure heart… (Psalm 24:3–4)

There are songs about exile in Babylon; remembering this mountain (Psalm 137:1), picturing exiles singing songs of Zion — presumably other Psalms… (Psalm 137:3) This song book is with them through exile (Psalm 137:4) — songs asking how long God will keep punishing his people; having them surrounded by enemies (Psalm 80:4), that wait for a Messiah; a Son of man to be raised up… (Psalm 80:16–17)

The hinge Psalms between books are important. Psalm 89 — the end of book 3 — recalls the promises about David’s line (Psalm 89:3–4), but notes God has turned his back; the kingship failed; the crown is in the dust (Psalm 89:38–39); and the song asks God to remember (Psalm 89:46, 47). The mood shifts in Book 4; Psalm 90 is a Psalm of Moses; a throwback to the Law (Psalm 90:1). The book still asks how long (Psalm 90:13), but turns from failed human kings to a series of Psalms declaring God reigns; he is pictured robed in majesty; enthroned… (Psalm 93:1–2), ruling Israel and the nations (Psalm 96:10) — the whole earth (Psalm 97:1); from the heavens… (Psalm 99:1). Book 4 ends trusting God will save — gathering his people back to his mountain; where they will praise him (Psalm 106:47).

Book Five begins with this return (Psalm 107:2–3); and expresses hope God will enthrone another figure; a Messiah (Psalm 110:1); who will rule from Zion; his mountain (Psalm 110:2). Book Five features these Psalms of ascent people sang while climbing Zion; heading to the temple; longing to enter God’s glorious presence with this Messiah enthroned (Psalm 121:1). Then a series of Psalms of David where a suffering Messiah is crying out to God (Psalm 143:7). The book closes with five songs of praise (Psalm 146–150); the God of the mountain — Zion — reigning forever… (Psalm 146:10)

When you sing these songs; or read this book after exile, it creates this image of a suffering king; but also God enthroning a king with glory, bringing his people back to dwell on the mountain of the Lord. But, there is no king on the throne; the Psalms are waiting for fulfilment. Psalms 1 and 2 work as a prologue for this reading; depicting this king. Psalm 1, which we read a couple of weeks ago — describes a blessed one (Psalm 1:1), who delights in God’s word; meditating on it day and night (Psalm 1:2); They are a fruitful Eden person — an image of God (Psalm 1:3) — the Law instructs God’s king to dwell on God’s word like this; writing their own copy, keeping it with them always (Deuteronomy 17:18, 19).

Psalm 2 pictures the nations raging against God and his anointed — his Messiah (Psalm 2:2) — this king is installed on God’s mountain; Zion (Psalm 2:6). God’s Son. Words echoed in Jesus’ baptism; at the transfiguration and as Hebrews describes him enthroned in glory (Psalm 2:7).

The kings of the earth rise up
    and the rulers band together
    against the Lord and against his anointed…
“I have installed my king
    on Zion, my holy mountain.”
I will proclaim the Lord’s decree:
He said to me, “You are my son…”

Psalm 2:2, 6–7

When Jesus says he fulfils the Psalms this is what he means.

When we read and sing these songs, we picture Jesus glorified and exalted as the king who suffered and is glorified; enthroned, reigning beside God; inviting us to ascend the mountain — singing these songs — entering his glorious presence; by his Spirit; to become transfigured — radiant — as we encounter him and respond with praise.

The task of reading Scripture is not just about analysing the ingredients — or recipe — in them, our king says “let them eat cake;” he invites us to come to him and to taste and see that he is good and glorious.

August 26, 2026 Add Comment

How to Read the Bible — The Incarnate Word

This series of posts was first a series of sermons I preached at City South Presbyterian and Coorparoo Presbyterian in mid 2026. You can, if it is your preferred medium, watch the video recording of this sermon here (Vimeo), or listen to the audio recording here (Spotify link).

Last year Donald Trump launched his ‘Walk of Fame’ — portraits of past presidents — ultimately — to throw shade at Joe Biden, whose portrait is an autopen.

Trump’s mad, because he reckons whenever a robot signed, Biden’s signature should not count as his word.

The Scriptures are God-breathed — inspired — and they do speak to us (2 Timothy 3:16). But if we pick them up as though they’re divine dictation directly speaking to us — we reduce the human authors of the Bible to God’s autopens; robots producing words disconnected from their own humanity.

We read the Bible best when we remember it’s from God through humans and human processes for human readers — like those Luke describes in our reading.

Luke has written an account — like many others — probably including Mark and Matthew — taking these, and accounts from other eyewitnesses who he calls “servants of the word” — researching, collecting sources, and carefully crafting an orderly account.

He does all this for an original human audience; Theophilus — a human reader — whose name means lover of God — he could be a symbolic “every person” — but Luke chooses to present his account to a named person for a specific purpose — so Theophilus — and other readers — can know the certainty of what they have heard (Luke 1:1-4).

And though both Luke and Theophilus are Gentile names, Luke also tells he is writing about the fulfilment of another source — the Old Testament. At the end of his book he records Jesus saying the law, the Psalms, and the Prophets — the Old Testament — are fulfilled in him, because they are written about him (Luke 24:44).

Luke is not an autopen — he is involved — and there are humans like Luke involved in composing, compiling every page of the Scriptures. They are put together and passed on for particular readers, in particular times and places — the Scriptures are fully human — while also being profoundly and fully divine.

God is speaking “various times in various ways,” working towards ultimately revealing himself in Jesus — his Son — who was there before the beginning and everything is in the end… both the Scriptures and creation are fulfilled in him (Hebrews 1:1-2).

This idea of the humanity of the Scriptures will take us to some interesting places over the next few weeks — but it is not new or novel, or outside the Reformed tradition. In fact, two original reformers provide some helpful foundations for this morning.

First — John Calvin’s whole theological framework is built on God needing to bridge the gap between his infinite nature and our finite humanity, including in how he reveals himself. He calls this accommodation.

“Because our weakness does not attain to His exalted state, the description of Him that is given to us must be accommodated to our capacity so that we may understand it… Such forms of speaking do not so much express clearly what God is like as accommodate the knowledge of him to our slight capacity… He has accommodated Himself to men’s capacity, which is varied and changeable.”

— John Calvin, Institutes

And it includes how God reveals himself through his word by using humans, using human words to describe concepts in ways human minds comprehend; factoring in our limitations as little brains embodied in little bodies in various times and places, with limited knowledge about the world.

So, writing about Genesis and how the moon does not actually give light, and the “modern astronomers” of his day — he is a contemporary of Copernicus — understood the motion of planets differently, Calvin says Moses was not writing to Calvin’s contemporaries — but to his own, in a popular style, to common people of his day, drawing on their framework; God’s word being accommodated — adapted — to their humanity, through their humanity.

Our second big idea from a reformer is this one from Martin Luther — who observed that the Scriptures are the word of God put into letters — just like Jesus is the word of God put into humanity.

“The Holy Scriptures are the Word of God, written and (as I might say) spelled out and set forth in letters, just as Christ is the eternal Word of God veiled in the human nature…”

— Martin Luther, Commentary on Psalm 22

Last chapter we explored how the inspiration of God’s word is similar to his breath and word creating in the beginning, and the re-inspiration of humans, by the Spirit, through Jesus.

This time our heavy-lifting theological word is incarnation. We can think of the Bible as God ‘incarnating’ his words through humans, so we understand it as fully divine and fully human — just like Jesus.

This is expressed in the way the writer of Hebrews compares God’s speech through humans to his speech in Jesus (Hebrews 1:1-2)— and how John describes Jesus as God’s word made flesh (John 1:1, 14).

If you eradicate either Jesus’ divinity or humanity rather than holding them together you create big messes and lose fundamental truths — and it is the same if we see the Bible as just human, or as just divine, with the humans as autopens. God reveals himself through these human words and human processes — through people who write, receive, edit and adapt words as God worked in their history, and inspired them by his Spirit.

The Scriptures contain references to the processes that produce these words; we are going to look at some of these. This is a different kind of Bible reading where we will look at the medium, not the message — the seams and threads rather than the garment — this morning, the medium is our message.

Before we dig in, we are going to do some nuts and bolts — some technical stuff.

Last time we looked at textual criticism — the way ancient manuscripts are compared to work out what wording is most accurate and original. This time we are going to look at how people handle the idea the Bible has sources and what is called a ‘compositional history.’

There is an assumption in some scholarship that the original sources are the truest thing and everything else is ‘redacted’ — like when the government edits files before release, or changes them — with an agenda, so to find the true original we have to strip away these edits. This is called source criticism. It is helpful to know this stuff because it comes up in books written about the Bible.

We are going to get our heads around this using cutlery.

Imagine the Old Testament as a fork. We know what a fork is for — but was there a primitive fork from the land before tine? That is funny cause the prongs of a fork are called a tine.

Turns out ancient forks had two.

Some scholars picture the Scriptures — even books within them — coming together over time; from one prong to four, as writers react and respond; as they become more enlightened, or encounter foreign ideas so edit, or even rewrite bits later in Israel’s history. There is some evidence for some of this where vocabulary from languages outside of Israel, from later cultures, creeps in to some books.

Others see the Old Testament as full of competing traditions within the community fighting over who is in charge — so sources from different groups with different concerns — and different names for God — are cut and pasted together in ways they reckon are unsophisticated, so it is like one community had these two prongs, and another a different two, and one three — and maybe nobody wanted four; and you pick your favourite tradition to be the authentic one — usually based on who had the power, and who did not.

Source critics want to figure out who did the editing — and want to uncover the ‘authentic’ fork under the layers of human editing.

These views still crop up, but have become less popular — especially because Hebrew experts — Christian and Jewish — and literary scholars rather than engineering types — have point out the artistry uniting the final form of Scriptures — the bits source critics loved to pick apart, like seams, and the repetition — these folks see as deliberate design decisions; where patterns and cross-references reflect careful choices by authors and editors through Israel’s history.

If we are not autopen people, the Scriptures themselves invite us to see the text we have as the product of humans preserving and passing on written words by deliberate decisions through history, at times imposed by limitations of the medium.

The Scriptures were scrolls made of perishable material, that could only hold a limited number of words. The words had to be passed on, generation to generation, over thousands of years, through major political upheavals and conflicts as Israel’s story unfolded. Words that did not do anything for the community did not survive; while the Scriptures were a living document within the life of God’s community — growing as their story grew.

The humans putting the Scriptures together regularly refer to their sources. Search for ‘Book of the’ on Biblegateway, or the Hebrew word Sepher — the word for scroll — and you will get references to scrolls that become Scripture, and more than twenty other documents — sources — from Israel’s history.

These references reveal a human process; giving a picture not just of authors, but editors who work like Luke — polishing, rewriting, or adapting older sources, including or excluding information — or adding to centralised scrolls according to their purposes over time. This process of editing begins with Moses — he writes thousands of years after the Eden story, and five hundred years after God called Abram out of Babylon. He made editorial selections from oral and written sources, and his own encounters with God.

Where Genesis recounts the ‘genealogy of Adam’ (Genesis 5:1), it is literally “the scroll” — he is quoting a pre-existing written source.

Moses also writes — in Exodus — a scroll to be remembered; especially by Joshua (Exodus 17:14). The account of the wilderness wanderings of Numbers includes a description of geography from the scroll of the wars of Yahweh — a source we no longer have (Numbers 21:13-14).

By the end of Deuteronomy, Moses writes about ‘this scroll of the law’ whether that is just Deuteronomy, or his scrolls that begin with Genesis — the Torah (Deuteronomy 30:10, 31:26). It is to be kept with the ark, which holds the ten commandments, as a living word at the heart of the community.

And in Joshua the book, Joshua the man is told to keep this scroll — from Moses — on his lips (Joshua 1:8). Joshua refers to a book of Jashar (Joshua 10:13), which also comes up in 2 Samuel — that seems to be a living collection of songs and oracles, edited around these events (2 Samuel 1:17-18).

Eventually Joshua is recorded in a scroll adding to the scroll of the law — the story of Israel renewing their covenant with God; for us their words are recorded in Joshua, not the Torah (Joshua 24:25-26).

In the accounts of Israel and Judah’s kings in 1 Kings to 2 Chronicles — there are constant references to other records of the kings of Israel, or Judah — probably centralised official documents (1 Kings 14:19, 29), and other specific scrolls like the annals of Solomon (1 Kings 11:41).

Chronicles opens with an updated genealogy from Adam to the exile, recorded from these sources (1 Chronicles 9:1), and also mentions the scroll of Isaiah the prophet in that same set of records (2 Chronicles 32:32). And — there are other sources named using different Hebrew words — the records of Samuel, Nathan and Gad (1 Chronicles 29:29) — or Shemiah, and Iddo (2 Chronicles 12:15).

With the prophets — the scroll of Jeremiah describes Jeremiah dictating — probably the scroll of Jeremiah — to Baruch (Jeremiah 36:4). And, in the book of Daniel, Daniel is exiled in Babylon — under Darius the Mede — reading Jeremiah as Scriptures — actually this word “scroll” that he has in Babylon. Daniel is in a scroll reflecting on a scroll that describes the writing of that scroll… that is all very meta (Daniel 9:1-2).

After exile, in Nehemiah, there is a list of names of Levites — folks who can work in a new temple — drawing on records from the time of Darius the Persian — probably a different Darius — and other books of the annals (Nehemiah 12:22-23).

As well as these sources, there are editorial seams through the texts stitching passages within scrolls, and then linking scrolls together. One ‘seam’ people notice is the two creation accounts placed together in Genesis 1 and 2. There are others, like the way the start and end of scrolls in the Torah are linked — So Moses is outside the tent at the beginning of Leviticus (Leviticus 1:1)… Situated at Sinai at its end (Leviticus 27:34) — And then inside the tent in Sinai at the start of Numbers (Numbers 1:1).

Or, there is the way the Psalms are organised into five books, each ending with a formula where God is praised and the people say Amen (Psalms 41:13, 71:19, 89:52, 106:48) — until book five, which ends with five Psalms where the last words are “Praise the Lord” (Psalms 146:10, 147:20, 148:14, 149:9, 150:6). The ordering of Psalms within the book is deliberate design, organising songs from across Israel’s history, so the structure tells a story.

This pattern of drawing on various texts — adding, expanding — selecting what to record because it will fit — for human purposes and human audiences located in a time and place continues in the New Testament.

We saw it in Luke (Luke 1:1-2). John tells us he picked stories to tell so readers will believe Jesus is Israel’s promised Messiah who gives life (John 20:30-31) — he says the world could not fit all the books if he recorded them all (John 21:25).

There are source critics of the New Testament too. Matthew, Mark and Luke are so similar they get called the Synoptics — a mashup of the Greek word syn — together — and optics — they share a view — and are probably sources for each other.

Source critics — looking for the original sayings of Jesus — search for a missing source they call ‘Q’. People with more literary sensitivity recognise these human authors make distinct and deliberate decisions — drawing on sources and selecting stories — even reordering events — for different audiences.

So John has Jesus overturning the tables in the temple in chapter two (John 2:15) — while the synoptics put it at the crucifixion (Matthew 21:12). This is not a contradiction; it is a decision.

Authors of the Bible are open about the human processes and purposes shaping their texts and their decisions. These texts are then received and circulated cause the community recognises them as credible and inspired.

If we embrace that both divine inspiration and incarnation through humans works across this human process, then God’s word — the final form of this collection of texts — are reflected, refined and reflected on. It is this profoundly rich and intertextual multi-scroll collection woven together with seams and threads, into something beautiful and coherent.

This graphic charts sixty-three thousand, seven hundred ninety-nine cross references across the span of the Bible — thousands of moments where inspired humans connect their words to other parts of God’s story; a rich tapestry of human reflection and artistry, inspired by the one authoring his story to be fulfilled in Jesus; who is both the model for God’s accommodating incarnate revelation of himself, and the fulfilment of revelation.

Here are some implications of this for how we read the Bible.

First, the Bible is not merely human — but it is fully human. The seams and processes we have observed challenge the idea it is merely divine; God’s word directly to me through an autopen. It is fully divine — inspired — and fully human — incarnate.

The humanity of Scriptures is not embarrassing to God or us, but something we can embrace, enjoy and get excited about. The Scriptures are produced by careful design and reflection by generations of people who lived and breathed by these words.

If we think we are finding internal contradictions, thousands of years later — or seeing an evolution from primitive to sophisticated, or searching for lost sources, we are missing that we are receiving the outcome of their work; words selected and handed down with a purpose. Noticing seams and sources; the work of inspired editors, not just authors does not undermine God’s word; these observations — for example, meditating on the shape of the Psalms — is rewarding.

Second — God accommodates and incarnates to reveal himself through humans in their time, helps frame our expectations of the Scriptures in our times. Ancient Scriptures — including prophecies — do not have to be about modern issues or political moments.

We should remember the first human Theophilus before we turn up as modern ‘lovers of God’ — not eradicating their humanity; paying attention to their context, before applying Scripture to ours. This is not to say God’s timeless words can’t speak in timely ways; but they had to speak in timely ways then.

Recognising God speaks through their humanity, to their moment, might bring a bit of humility about our own — that we are not superior just because we are modern. Reading these ancient words — the product of thousands of years of inspired contemplation — with humility and curiosity — can provide perspective on our moment, and our shared humanity.

Finally, the Bible is fully God’s word, but the humans involved are not autopens. Neither are we.

Enjoying the humanity of God’s word helps us be humans of God’s word — humans like John, or Luke — or the servants of the word he mentions. We are how God puts his signature on this moment — and we are not autopens.

As we dwell in the inspired and incarnate word about the inspiring and incarnate word; becoming humans inspired by his Spirit; united to Jesus as his body; incarnate in our world — our lives and the words of life we speak and write are how God accommodates himself to our time, through us.

August 25, 2026 Add Comment

How to Read the Bible — The Inspired and Inspiring Word of God

This series of posts was first a series of sermons I preached at City South Presbyterian and Coorparoo Presbyterian in mid 2026. You can, if it is your preferred medium, watch the video recording of this sermon here (Vimeo), or listen to the audio recording here (Spotify link).

Are you a fan of the inspirational Bible verse?

Old School — in cross-stitches — or printed posters hung on the back of the toilet door?

Or — Inspo 2.0 — daily Bible verses like this on Instagram.

Biblehub.com even lets you generate your own inspo — so you could share this — which sounds great and comes from the Bible — but is the words of Satan. Which highlights a bit of a problem with reading the Bible this way.

My Bible app — YouVersion — interesting name — lets you click for a verse related to your present circumstances, where you can find ready-made graphics.

The Bible is inspirational.

But is this how to read the Bible for inspiration?

In this series we are going to build a bit of a toolkit for reading the Bible — starting with the familiar and moving towards some slightly more challenging concepts. This week our foundational idea is that the Bible is God’s Word — which is why we read it. This means we come to it as though God is speaking, so our job is to listen and respond, not as authorities, but as though he is the Author. So we want to work out what he is trying to say and trying to achieve.

Here is this chapter’s big claim: God is trying to inspire us. So if we are not inspired, we are not reading it right. One of the ways to test if the Bible is God’s Word involves letting it inspire us — testing it on its own terms, seeing if it is life-giving, not just analysing it as words on a page.

So let us dig in. This is one of those verses that might become a poster.

All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness, so that the servant of God may be thoroughly equipped for every good work.

— 2 Timothy 3:16-17

We will take the second bit first — what does God-breathed mean?

And then the first bit — where Scripture is the words breathed by God. Or — you might say — inspired by him.

You might have heard people talk about the Bible being the inspired word of God — not just the inspiring word of God — this doctrine comes from this verse.

The Bible is God-breathed.

God inspired.

Have you ever thought about where the word inspired comes from? It is about breath. Its origin goes back to the Latin word spirare, which means ‘to breathe’, and the ‘in’ is — well — in.

While to expire is to die. To breathe out.

Spirare is also related to the Latin word for spirit — spiritus — which works nicely with the Bible, where God’s word is spoken, written, and animated by his Spirit — given life and breath.

Spoken words are ‘animated’ by our breath. Try emptying your lungs, then shouting without breathing in again. Words are carried into the world — given life — by breath — just as our breath gives our bodies life — inspired.

This relationship between spirit or breath and word and inspiration is there on page one of the Bible. In Genesis 1:2-3, God’s Spirit — or breath — hovers — filled with potential, and then he speaks. Creation is God-breathed — inspired, then filled with life.

And then humans — who are blessed and told to fill the earth with life (Genesis 1:28) — when the camera zooms in on God making a living image, he breathes the breath of life into dust, inspiring it — filling it with life.

Then the Lord God formed a man from the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living being.

— Genesis 2:7

The creation story is the paradigm for understanding God’s Word and life in God’s world — it is inspired by his inspired breath.

In the Genesis story, not being inspired can be about disobedience (Genesis 2:16-17), or twisting God’s words — like the serpent saying ‘Did God really say’ then saying something he does not (Genesis 3:1).

Or like adding extra rules — like Eve — God did not say ‘do not touch it’, just ‘do not eat it’ (Genesis 2:17, Genesis 3:3).

Or it can involve missing the point — there are two trees in the middle of the garden, and God only says they cannot eat from one of them. The humans have missed the best bit; the life-giving bit about eating from the tree of life and enjoying life with God, so they choose death. ‘He must not be allowed to reach out his hand and take also from the tree of life and eat, and live forever’ (Genesis 3:22).

This was the point — right — they were meant to enjoy life with God, inspired by him — listening to his inspiring word.

This story frames how we understand God’s Word — we will see that in our psalm — God’s word inspires when we plant ourselves in it, with him — and we expire when we read it wrong.

This story is written by humans — in a text — showing inspiration comes from God.

The claim our reading makes is this text was also inspired; breathed by God.

There is a link between Spirit, Word and human image that starts in the beginning and culminates in Jesus, God’s Word made flesh who speaks as God.

We are going to look at the humanity of the Bible next time — how God incarnates his word in and through humans. But here we are looking at this idea of inspiration — that these are God’s words — that there is a link between how we think of God acting in creation and redemption, and in how he reveals himself to us through what Hebrews calls his living and active word.

For the word of God is alive and active. Sharper than any double-edged sword, it penetrates even to dividing soul and spirit, joints and marrow; it judges the thoughts and attitudes of the heart.

— Hebrews 4:12

And this inspiration comes through his Word-made-flesh, Jesus.

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us.

— John 1:1, 14

Who comes baptising with the Spirit (John 1:33); who breathes his Spirit into humans (John 20:21-22); as though we are the dry bones from Ezekiel, waiting to be inspired not just by breath, but by God’s Holy Spirit — his eternal, divine, life (Ezekiel 37:4-5, 14).

The Scriptures — breathed by God — are our invitation into life. They are inspired so we might be inspired, filled with God’s life. This is their purpose from page one to the end. This is the big idea here: for us to be image-bearers who represent God — who are inspired by his Spirit — given life — God’s Word also gives us life. It is inspired so we might be inspired. All Scripture is God-breathed.

But what are the Scriptures?

Through this series we are going to look at some technical stuff — nuts and bolts — to help us read the Bible. And today we are going to do a bit of history to understand how our book — or app — gets into our hands.

The Scriptures are not just written by inspired people but recognised by inspired people as words inspired by God. Inspiration is at work in both reading and receiving through a process within the community of God’s people.

Even though we now recognise his words as Scripture — in the New Testament — when Paul writes ‘all Scripture’, he is picturing the Jewish Scriptures — what we call the Old Testament. It is not clear which books are included for Paul; that is still being established in first century Judaism, and it takes a while for the Church to figure out too. Different Christian traditions — Catholic, Orthodox and Protestant have different answers.

For Protestants, our Bible is a collection of 66 books.

The Catholics recognise 7 additional books in the ‘Deuterocanon’ — plus extended editions of Daniel and Esther.

Various Orthodox traditions rename some and add more — the Ethiopian Orthodox Bible has 81 books.

Our Presbyterian tradition says these books ‘are not inspired’, have ‘no authority’, and should only be used like other human writings.

The books commonly called Apocrypha, not being of divine inspiration, are no part of the Canon of Scripture; and therefore are of no authority in the Church of God, nor to be any otherwise approved, or made use of, than other human writings.

— Westminster Confession, 1.3

Now — I think human writings are actually super useful for understanding human thinking and the world Jesus appears in — the language and imagination and framework the authors of the New Testament draw on, and even quote.

Anyway, here is where we get more technical. Any Scriptures we have are a product of communities copying earlier manuscripts — generation by generation, because paper — or papyrus — does not last forever — and neither do scrolls made of silver.

The Old Testament Scriptures are also a product of human authors writing down spoken traditions, and copying and editing earlier documents as their history unfolds.

At one point, the ‘written Scriptures’ were kept in the Temple. 2 Kings refers to this moment where the ‘book of the law is’ rediscovered during repairs of the temple (2 Kings 22:8), so it is reintroduced into the life of the community.

This is Scripture written about Scripture — which reveals something of the process. This account is recorded after the destruction of the Temple at the end of 2 Kings (2 Kings 25:9).

Your average Jewish citizen exiled in Babylon did not have the whole Book of the Law. They may have been literate and written inspirational bits down. It is more likely they memorised and discussed God’s word in community gatherings — or that they heard a prophet speak.

At some point, after exile, the law and this history are being copied and circulated and recognised. There is a group, or person, responsible for collating, compiling and editing words into a coherent big story spanning from Genesis to 2 Kings — they make connections and making editorial notes. This phrase ‘to this day’ occurs about 50 times, about place names or practices — we do not know which day or days these words are written from, but a handful of them are in 2 Kings, which is finished after the last events it records (the Southern kingdom’s exile to Babylon). The last ‘to this day’ is about how the Northern Kingdom — who were exiled to Assyria — are perpetually idolatrous.

The reflections of the editor give a bit of a picture of their purposes as they compile and decide what is recorded and recognised. Other Old Testament writers, writing alongside these history books — the Prophets, or song writers in the Psalms — often reflect on or quote bits from these texts, so we get a picture of them inspiring the community as the story unfolds.

We do not have original manuscripts of any of these books. We have copies and fragments that show they were recognised and circulated. The number of copies from different times and places reflects their recognition in communities of God’s people. As archaeologists dig up new very old copies or fragments, if there are differences in wording — scholars do what is called textual criticism to work out which words are more reliable — older, more original, or more recognised by communities. There are so many texts circulated so widely that we can be very confident the words we have are accurate — and they get more accurate over time.

But here is our big textual criticism question as we think about what Paul pictured when he said ‘all scripture’ — that explains why different traditions have different Bibles. The Hebrew manuscripts we have tend to be more recent than manuscripts of the Greek translation of the Old Testament. There is question of whether Paul and other New Testament authors picture Greek or Hebrew documents when they say ‘the Scriptures’ — or quote from them — it is probably both.

Through Israel’s history, the language they speak and write changes — from Hebrew to Aramaic — so big chunks of Daniel and Ezra are in Aramaic — and when Alexander the Great conquers the region, Greek becomes the common language.

There is a legend — from this 2nd century BC ‘Letter of Aristeas’ — that the Great Library of Alexandria commissioned a translation of the Old Testament, and 72 scholars took 72 days to produce identical translations, so this translation is called the Septuagint or LXX — roman numerals for 70. It is more likely this letter is propaganda promoting the Old Testament to the Greek world, and the translation probably just happens naturally as faithful Jewish Bible readers wanted the Scriptures in their language — and started writing other books in Greek too, that are part of the LXX — and the Catholic and Orthodox Bibles.

The New Testament writers, who speak and write Greek seem to quote Greek phrasing of the Old Testament, rather than the Hebrew. While the Hebrew documents we use in our translations, the Masoretic Text, was compiled a long time after Jesus — we do have older Hebrew manuscripts that are used in textual criticism for that text.

You might have heard of the Dead Sea Scrolls — a library of Greek and Hebrew manuscripts of Old Testament books and other writings found in clay jars in caves — from the Qumran community, a Jewish group from the time of Jesus.

Even with these manuscripts, whether in Greek or Hebrew, there is no document in any language, with a table of contents for the Jewish Scriptures before Jesus saying which books are part of a collection called ‘Scripture,’ and which are not. The Scriptures were a collection of books reflecting and referring to each other, that were recognised over time as having authority as God’s Word. In the Jewish schema, as it developed after the exile, the Scriptures came in categories — the law — or Torah — Genesis to Deuteronomy, the Prophets, and the Writings.

Jesus sums up the Scriptures this way in Luke (Luke 24:44) — and this is how Jewish collations of the Scriptures tend to organise the books over time as a table of contents develops.

In the Hebrew language tradition, the Old Testament ends with 2 Chronicles — where the last word is about exile ending and God’s people being sent to rebuild (2 Chronicles 36:23). The Greek tradition — translated into Latin in the early church and in our table of contents — ends with Malachi, whose last words are about a new Elijah, who will bring a day of the Lord with salvation and judgment (Malachi 4:5-6).

The New Testament is formed through a similar process. Documents were written and circulated amongst the people of God — and some were ‘canonised’ — recognised as sacred and inspired — because they were connected to an apostle, consistent with each other and the Old Testament, and copied and circulated in the Church. Peter writes about Paul’s writing (2 Peter 3:15) and, though he disses him, compares his words to the other Scriptures — the Old Testament — mentioning that Paul’s letters contain some things that are hard to understand, which unstable people distort as they do the other Scriptures (2 Peter 3:16). So now the Church includes Paul’s words in ‘all Scriptures’.

And while lots of documents could have been included — the major traditions — Catholic, Orthodox, and Protestant — all recognise the same New Testament. This recognition happened over a hundred years, as documents were copied and circulated around the early Church — an often underground network in the Roman empire — a community of living people shaped by God’s living and active Word; inspired to follow a crucified king in the midst of the crucifying empire.

These words inspired a different way of life which ultimately turned the empire upside down. The words that give life were the words passed on — and, like the Old Testament — these were words that pointed to life through the living Word; words about the one who gives life — by laying down his life and then by giving us God’s Spirit to inspire us.

So — why have we looked at these nuts and bolts?

First, because when we say the Bible is God-breathed we do not just mean dictated as though God’s word drops from heaven on stone tablets. It comes through inspired humans and is recognised by inspired humans so that it animates the community of God’s people.

Second, seeing this helps us know how to read the Scriptures. If we want to read and recognise God’s inspired and inspiring word, consistent with this process, we would have to treat it as though it is alive and inspiring.

For the word of God is alive and active. Sharper than any double-edged sword, it penetrates even to dividing soul and spirit, joints and marrow; it judges the thoughts and attitudes of the heart.

— Hebrews 4:12

Take these two images from Hebrews. If the Bible is living and active, we are probably not meant to approach the Bible like scientists dispassionately dissecting a lion, where we only understand it by pulling it apart — so that it dies.

We want to watch it move and breathe and do things.

And if it is sharper than a two-edged sword — made for cutting — we probably will not understand it breaking it into a parts diagram.

It is made for cutting — not others out there — but for cutting away the parts of ourselves — penetrating our soul and spirit, cutting away the dead bits inconsistent with God’s image — with Jesus — in us — as individuals and a community.

So we should read it so it inspires us — as the community of God, for the things Paul says it is useful for.

And how from infancy you have known the Holy Scriptures, which are able to make you wise for salvation through faith in Christ Jesus.

— 2 Timothy 3:15

Timothy has been instructed in the Scriptures since he was a toddler, so knows they make us wise for salvation — this is not just about knowing or believing. Wisdom is enacted; it is a way of life.

Blessed is the one who does not walk in step with the wicked, or stand in the way that sinners take, or sit in the company of mockers; but whose delight is in the law of the Lord, and who meditates on his law day and night. That person is like a tree planted by streams of water, which yields its fruit in season and whose leaf does not wither—whatever they do prospers.

— Psalm 1:1-3

This is the picture in Psalm 1 — where the blessed, fruitful life — comes from not sitting or standing or walking with other voices — shaped by the serpent, or idols — these lead to expiration. Inspiration comes from being planted in God’s word — the ‘law’ — Israel’s Scriptures when the Psalm is written, including Genesis. Life is found meditating, delighting and applying God’s word — not pulling it apart, but using it for life; seeking inspiration — seeking to be God-breathed humans listening to God-breathed words.

This person is like a fruitful tree planted by water (Genesis 2:8, 10) — like the trees in Eden, planted by water — including the tree of life.

Humans animated — inspired — restored — filled with God’s life — this is what salvation is. And these fruitful, inspired humans give life to the world. And Paul says this is what the God-breathed Scriptures do — through Jesus Christ — the living Word — who gives us God’s life; his Spirit, in fulfilment of the Scriptures.

God’s word is useful as it inspires. We should wield it to teach, to correct, to rebuke, to train in righteousness — to equip us for the work God created us for — fruitfulness.

We can test whether it is inspirational by looking at Jesus, at history, at the lives of the inspired community — and our own life — asking ‘does this work’ — does this inspire me; does it give life to me and through me producing goodness and fruitfulness? And if it is not — you might not be reading it right.

God’s word — fulfilled in God’s Word made flesh — is a tree of life; inspired to inspire; to recreate us as those filled with God’s Spirit, so through us he might inspire others.

August 24, 2026 Add Comment

Being Human — Chapter One — The Trinity

A few years ago (2022) I preached a topical sermon series exploring what it means to be human in an age that seems to be built to disintegrate us — I mean that in the sense of fragmenting and pulling us apart as we are moved in many directions away from our embodied reality and away from God. I’ve been meaning to turn these into posts for a while — blogging has taken a back seat for me (obviously).

I preached this series when the most ‘AI’ thing I’d played with was thispersondoesnotexist.com and very early Midjourney image generation. Over the next little while I’m going to turn the sermons into posts here. This was talk one — you can listen to it as a podcast here, or watch it on video. It’s not unhelpful to think of this series as a ‘book’ preached chapter by chapter.

And, a note — there are lots of pull quotes from various sources in these posts that were presented as slides in the sermons, but not read out above.

This is a different sort of sermon to normal — and a different series. I just want to warn you up front, because I am wanting to set the scene a little for us as we tackle this series. There will be a little more talking about the world, and a little less working through a passage like we did through Matthew, and then through Genesis.

We are just coming off the back of our Origin Story series where we saw how God is the author of a story — a complex and integrated story that runs through the whole Bible; and how we were made to live lives shaped by this story. But it is a story we have lost in the modern Western world; and this loss is coupled with the loss of God, as the author of life — not just life in general, but our lives.

We are living in a world more like Babylon; where our neighbours are trying to make a name, and a story, for ourselves. We are the authority over our own lives, the authors of our own stories. But there are some movers and shakers in modern Babylon who are starting to realise we have lost a grand narrative — and that maybe Babylon needs one to survive.

So the World Economic Forum is inviting us to discover The Great Narrative for a Better Future.

Now, I do not think the U.N, or the E.U, or the World Economic Forum are the only “towers of Babel” around. Any of us can try to build things where we are little gods in little kingdoms — and you are probably more likely to be impacted by an Instagram influencer, or your family and friends, than by a bunch of faceless boffins in global think tanks.

But there is something about an organisation trying to unite the world to alter the future, creating a sort of trans-national heaven on earth, without God, that is Babylon-esque.

This book is a product of political and thought leaders from around the world — looking for a new story, especially as we have been so shaken by the pandemic.

“Narratives are how we make sense of life; they provide us with a context, thanks to which we can better interpret, understand and respond to the facts we observe.”

— The Great Narrative, Klaus Schwab, Thierry Malleret

They recognise that stories are powerful — they provide us with meaning-making and a context we use to make sense of the world. They recognise that the loss of a coherent and integrating narrative has created many of our problems.

And just like Rome and Babylon and Egypt there is wisdom in the thoughts of these leaders — and there is idolatrous guff — and it is our job to figure out what is gold that is worth integrating into our own thinking, or, rather, where they are thinking true things about God’s world.

“Complex systems are often characterised by an absence of visible causal links between their elements, which makes them impossible to predict.”

— The Great Narrative, Klaus Schwab, Thierry Malleret

Their analysis of life in the modern world is that life now is complex — everything now seems multi-factorial, and all the systems out there are integrated. You change one thing in one place, and this integrated complexity flows through to all sorts of unexpected places.

We are seeing this with the price of lettuce with the floods, and the price of fuel with the Ukraine conflict, and the empty shelves at the supermarket when different global supply chains are disrupted.

Supply chains for complex products — like electronics, or a computer — look like this when you map them. And we live in these systems — like one of these dots in the supply chain for a single Dell laptop — and we are in danger of being pulled apart by this web of forces we do not see.

Life is complex.

And, as The Great Narrative puts it:

“Everything is happening much faster than it used to, because technological advances and, to a lesser extent, globalization have created a culture of immediacy… This new culture of immediacy, obsessed with speed, seems to be in all aspects of our lives… It is so pervasive that some thinkers have called this new phenomenon the ‘dictatorship of urgency’.”

— The Great Narrative, Klaus Schwab, Thierry Malleret

Now I think this is a reasonable analysis that lines up with how I am feeling about the world, and about life.

How about you?

This is not a new idea. The French philosopher Jacques Ellul wrote about our technological age — our obsession with using technique and technologies to solve our problems — back in 1954.

He argues that technology does not just change our environment; by doing that it changes us — modifying our essence. We have to adapt to this new world that is of our making; a world where the tools we have made to extend our limitations push us beyond our limits.

Here is a quote:

“Technique has penetrated the deepest recesses of the human being. The machine tends not only to create a new human environment, but also to modify man’s very essence. The milieu in which he lives is no longer his. He must adapt himself, as though the world were new, to a universe for which he was not created.”

Jacques Ellul, The Technological Society

That is one of the key ideas in this series — that our limits, as humans, are actually a good gift to us from an unlimited God, and maybe we should embrace them more.

Ellul says we are made to walk — our bodies — at 6 kilometres an hour, but now machines fly us around at a thousand. We are made to live in a rhythm with the natural world, but we obey a clock. We use electric lights, and screens, to stay up late and sleep less.

And here is the kicker — we were created, he says, with a sort of essential unity — an integrity or coherence — but all these forces of the modern world are fragmenting us. They are disintegrating us. And that is what many of us are feeling, seventy years later.

Disintegrated.

Technology always extends us beyond our natural limits; sometimes in good ways, but always in ways that change us — it lets us push against the limits of being bodies who live in space, and time. Our technology can move us faster around space, or throw our images or voices to the other side of the world in an instant.

Making technology is part of being made in the image of a maker — but our technology — like Nimrod and Nebuchadnezzar’s bricks — can make us feel like gods.

The writer Yuval Noah Harari is one of the thought leaders the World Economic Forum loves.

He has a slogan: “History began when humans invented gods, and will end when humans become gods.”

He is the first person to present a TED talk as a hologram — or digital avatar — a picture of time and space being warped by technology.

He believes we are moving into a new phase of existence — a move he writes about in his best-seller Homo Deus — Latin for “divine human” — where he says now technology has lifted us from beastliness, the next stage is going to be chasing immortality, and bending the world to our will — upgrading us humans into gods. We will become the authors of our own destiny; our own lives.

“…having raised humanity above the beastly level of survival struggles, we will now aim to upgrade humans into gods, and turn Homo sapiens into Homo deus.”

— Yuval Noah Harari, Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow

He is not alone.

Jeremy Rifkin is an economic advisor to the European Union. Back in the 1980s he wrote about life beyond God:

“We no longer feel ourselves to be guests in someone else’s home and therefore obliged to make our behaviour conform with a set of pre-existing cosmic rules.

It is our creation now. We make the rules. We establish the parameters of reality. We create the world, and because we do, we no longer feel beholden to outside forces.

We no longer have to justify our behaviour, for we are now the architects of the universe. We are responsible to nothing outside ourselves, for we are the kingdom, the power, and the glory for ever and ever.”

Recognise those words?

Part of what has caused the loss of a grand narrative, in the West, is this decision to position ourselves as God and to push and push God out of the picture. It is Babel, only now we are not building a tower into the heavens; we are saying the heavens do not exist.

Our model of reality used to be a cosmos, where the heavens and the earth exist and God is present in both. That shifted to a belief that there was a secular realm, where God had no interest, and a sacred realm — where we get ideas like the separation of church and state, or secular work and God’s work. To now where there is only the secular; the universe; us and our technology in a material world.

The philosopher Charles Taylor wrote a book called A Secular Age — he calls this process “disenchantment.” That is a word that is going to come up a bit in this series.

He says:

“Disenchantment dissolved the cosmos, whose levels reflected higher and lower kinds of being… which contained spirits and meaningful causal forces… In its stead was a universe ruled by causal laws.”

Lots of people have stories for how we ended up here — disenchanted, and with this secular frame as the default. He calls these subtraction stories — the idea that we have shed bad stuff and elevated ourselves by removing superstitions that held us back. The “science killed God” story. But he believes the process is more complex than just enlightenment.

“What I call subtraction stories… I mean by this stories of modernity in general, and secularity in particular, which explain them by human beings having lost, or sloughed off, or liberated themselves from certain earlier, confining horizons, or illusions, or limitations of knowledge.”

And it is also that we have added new things and ideas and practices that have made this move possible; through new technology; migration and the opening up of multiple religious stories. We are not just subtracted, but pulled in lots of directions, and this stops us having one big shared story.

Taylor again:

“Western modernity, including its secularity, is the fruit of new inventions, newly constructed self-understandings, and related practices.”

This is part of what is happening with the decline of Christianity in the Western world — that we have seen mirrored in the Australian census results where in every hundred people there are about this many Christians.

Stan Grant wrote this fascinating analysis for the ABC. He says:

“…the West is not the world. Indeed in many parts of the world the turn to religion is connected with a rejection of colonialism and Western values…
The West is a place beyond history. The past is another country. Tradition is seen as stifling, old fashioned. No doubt some traditions are well rid of. Which woman or person of colour would want to return to the white, male-dominated 1950s?”

This ‘subtraction’ phenomenon is only really happening in the Western world — people are actually becoming more religious in places where Western values are not part of the story, while we in the West are cutting ourselves off from history and tradition. Also, just as a disclaimer — noting Grant’s points — just as adopting some new technology into our lives is good for us as humans, some rejecting of old ideas is good, especially for people who are not white, or male.

Grant points out that while historically the West was built on a shared version of the Christian story; the modern West is shaped by a breakup with God where God is not sovereign, but people are. Where liberalism — individual freedom — our self-authorship — where we are the authority over our lives — is the chief good. And now we are free to re-imagine and re-invent ourselves, untethered from the past, from our family, and from faith — and that sort of liberation has a fundamental goodness to it so long as we are escaping a bad story, and finding ourselves in a better story.

There are people here who have come from other faith traditions, or who have escaped abusive family or church traditions, or who are enjoying the benefits of a Western world where women, and sexual minorities, and non-white people have increasing dignity… and this is good liberation; freedom from bad authorities — bad authors. We want to be able to see the goodness in liberation, while questioning the narratives we are moving to; the stories on offer in the world — whether that is the Great Narrative, or the promise offered by technology companies, or our entertainment, or advertisers, or Instagram influencers, or the stories we make for ourselves. We have to ask if authoring our own stories — being our own authorities; belonging to ourselves — is actually liberating.

Are the modern West’s God-free stories — whether we become gods, or choose God’s role in our lives as a personal choice — better than what we have rejected? We will look more at this next week in terms of what the idea that “we belong to ourselves” does. This week we are going to tackle a different starting point: asking what the God our world has liberated itself from is actually like.

See, here is the other thing that is true about the West — and you will see this in “how did we get here” stories — from Stan Grant, or Charles Taylor, or the secular historian Tom Holland who wrote a book about exactly this. Because the West was first shaped by belief in the Christian God, before rejection of the Christian God, developments in how we understand God, the world, and humanity in the West are often what you might call Christian heresies. Secularism itself is made possible by Christianity in a way it is not by Islam.

Heresies are often a failure to hold two — sometimes more — paradoxical ideas in tension.

The writer G.K. Chesterton wrote a book in the early 20th century called Orthodoxy. He is a fun writer, and he talks about this inability for us to hold tensions.

He says the way to avoid heresy in these situations where there are furious opposites is not to pick one, or to find some middle ground, but to hold both truths, and to hold them furiously:

“Christianity got over the difficulty of combining furious opposites, by keeping them both, and keeping them both furious.” — G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy

Christianity is a belief system built on these tensions — Jesus being fully God and fully man; the Bible being God’s word, but also human; and God being three and one, and also infinite and glorious and so not “in” the universe as a creature, but also knowable through his work in the world — and paradoxically, through the Word becoming flesh, entering the world as the creator in the creation — the author writing himself into the story.

The shift from cosmos to universe — disenchantment — the modern West as we see it and experience it is built on a Christian heresy; it starts with a warped view of God.

Part of the flattening of the cosmos to the universe is a product of us wanting to live and act as though God is a creature; a being we might find through our human observation. When we could not find God with a telescope, or space travel, suddenly “science had disproved God.” But this happened through the removal of the idea that there is a transcendent overlapping spiritual reality; a heavens and an earth.

This emphasis on the natural world meant rejecting the Bible as God’s word — it became human utterances about an unknowable God, pasted together by evolving human processes. People started looking for the historical Jesus behind all the spiritual stuff in the Gospels, and rejecting the idea that Jesus is divine — that he is the Word of God come in the flesh. And in the same theological schools there was a rejection of the idea of the Trinity, because God was either fully beyond our reach, never engaging with the world, or unknowable from the incarnation or the Bible. And this all started first in the church.

We can do another thing in the church where we emphasise the opposites of all these moves — seeing Jesus as fully divine, and not really human, or seeing the Gospel just as spiritual, with no bearing on life in the world, or the Bible as only divine and not a product of human authors embedded in the community of God’s people, and in history. We even saw a thing in the last few years where Christians jumped up to support a footballer who rejected the Trinity — who saw humanity as just a skin God was wearing for a bit — but said some things about sexuality people liked. Many of us saw him as a Christian saying bold things, and the Trinity as too hard and not important. It has only been — in the West — when Christians have failed to hold tensions and hold them furiously that we have been able to conceive of ourselves as gods, and tell stories using the language of the Bible, without God in the picture, but really, truly, being human does not start with a world with no God in the picture. When we ask what it means to be human — real knowledge of ourselves — it does not actually start with us; it starts with knowing God as God is.

This is our project in this series — and really in our life as a church — not just in the sermons, but in all our time together: in our songs, when we say the Creed, when we pray, when we read the Bible, when we share communion, when we eat together over lunch, and when we go out into God’s world. We are wanting to know God more, not just know more about God, but know God as God is.

And that means knowing God as triune — knowing that God is both a community of persons, and three persons who are working in perfect harmony with one another without losing their personhood — and holding these two truths furiously. When we pick one side of this paradox we end up in bad places, but this profound idea we proclaim, maybe without really thinking about it, whenever we say the Creed together — that God the Father is God, that Jesus the Son is God, and that the Spirit is God — is at the heart of our faith and at the heart of being truly human, images of God.

“So God created mankind in his own image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them.” — Genesis 1:27

How can we bear the image of God without knowing what God is like? How can we live an integrated, coherent life without knowing the author of life — especially if God is actually the one who has authority over us, the one we actually belong to?

Which is Jesus’ point in that test with the coin, about authority — give to Caesar what has his image on it, but give to God what is God’s (Matthew 22:21).

Being human means holding the truth that we are individuals — that we should be liberated from the authority of people and systems that are harmful — with another furious truth: that we are only truly human in communion; with each other, and with God, because we are images of the God who is triune — a God who is three persons, Father, Son and Spirit — but one God. A God who is love.

This is one of the implications of the statement we find here in our reading — it comes up twice — that God is love (1 John 4:8, 16). God cannot be love — at least not eternally, and without being contingent on other beings or things — if God is simply a single person. Part of what is caught up in this statement is that God is love within the life of God, it is caught up in the dynamic of the life of the Trinity, and even in the names of the persons of the Trinity.

That God the Father is called the Father only makes sense if he has eternally been the Father — eternally the Father, and eternally loving the Son. If there was a time that the Son did not exist, then there was a time that the Father was not the Father — and that he was not loving the Son. But Jesus, in his prayer in John’s Gospel, talks about God’s love for him from before the creation of the world; from eternity past (John 17:24).

Michael Reeves has a couple of nice little devotional books if all this abstract thinking about the Western world does not resonate with you — or even if you just want to think about God and not the world. One is called Delighting in the Trinity. It is about how essential the Trinity is to how we understand God. He says:

“Here is a God who is not essentially lonely, but who has been loving for all eternity as the Father has loved the Son in the Spirit. Loving others is not a strange or novel thing for this God at all; it is at the root of who he is.”

He lands the book with this quote from an influential Russian theologian, Vladimir Lossky, who has shaped a whole heap of modern interest in the Trinity after a bunch of Germans told the world the Trinity was a waste of time:

“If we reject the Trinity as the sole ground of all reality and all thought, we are committed to a road that leads nowhere; we end in despair, in folly, in the disintegration of our being, in spiritual death.”

“The disintegration of our being” — that is the world we find ourselves in now; a world that has lost its foundation; a world decoupling itself from the author of life; the God who is love.

Jesus’ words in John’s Gospel are part of his prayer that we might be swept up into the life and love of God — that we might be one, have communion with God and each other, just as the Father and Son do (John 17:20–21). And part of what binds us together — as we come to know God — is this love; God’s love — the love that flows around within the triune God — might be in us too (John 17:26).

There is a big debate about how much we can apply the dynamic love of the Trinity into human relationships; whether there is a possible analogy we can draw between God’s eternal and divine life and our finite relationships. The idea is not to collapse the gap between God and us — creator and creatures — but for our lives, and our love, to image the life and love of God. Part of being made male and female is that God’s life and love is represented not just by individuals but by individuals and communities — those furious opposites. And that is the product of another furious opposite — we are both drawn into oneness with God — made to be like God — and not God. We are limited creatures — embodied, and mortal — living in time and space.

When John, reflecting on these words of Jesus, says God is love it is not just about the Father, it is a Trinitarian statement. He is overwhelmed by the way that we, children of God, are swept up into the life and love of the Trinity; not in a way that means we ever fully grasp what God is like; not in a way that collapses God’s life and love into something finite, but in a way that does teach us how to be human; how to reflect God’s life and love in our lives.

God’s love overflows from within the life of God — in the heavens — into the earth, as the triune God creates — Father, Word, and Breath; Father, Son, and Spirit, all caught up in the creative act together — as a community, and each playing his part as individuals. And it is the same in the incarnation — the life, death, resurrection, and ascension of Jesus as an act of love from God, and as an act of love within the communal life of God, and in God drawing us back into life with him, through the death of Jesus and the Spirit dwelling in us. These acts of God that we experience show us what love is.

In our “world without God” imagination we have turned love into a god; without really knowing what it means — without an integrated basis for how we define it. So we can also say “love is love” as though that makes sense; as though whatever you put on either side of the “is” is simply the same by virtue of our authoring things that way. John says we know what love is because we have experienced it in Jesus laying down his life for us; and that this is meant to shape our lives, and our love (1 John 3:16).

“This is how we know what love is: Jesus Christ laid down his life for us. And we ought to lay down our lives for our brothers and sisters.”

So in his letter not only does he say that denying that Jesus — the Son of God — has come in the flesh is the spirit of the antichrist (1 John 4:2–3), he says that Jesus is the way we know what love is; in fact, he is the way we know what God is like (1 John 4:9–10). This is because of another set of furious opposites — he is both God and human.

In his other great book — Rejoicing in Christ — Reeves says:

“Here, then, is the revolution: for all our dreams, our dark and frightened imaginings of God, there is no God in heaven who is unlike Jesus.”

God shows us what love is like by sending Jesus that we might have life — the life of God. He shows us what love is like by acting first to bridge the gap between him and us — loving us first — and sending Jesus as an atoning sacrifice for sins. We know what love looks like when we look at the cross, and contemplate it, and understand it in its fullness. Because in that act we are seeing the persons of the triune God co-operating in their fullness.

We see the lengths that the Son will go to to show his love for the Father — the oneness of God. And in the resurrection we see the lengths that the Father and Spirit will go to show their love for the Son. Then in the Father and Son pouring out the Spirit on humans as a gift of love — to dwell in us — we see the lengths that God will go to to love us. Jesus even stays human; stays in the flesh. John is not just writing about people who deny the incarnation, but the resurrection and the ascension — that Jesus “coming in the flesh” is an eternal act of loving, gracious generosity to us, as an overflow of his love for the Father.

Jesus shows his love for God — and for us — in his life, in his sacrifice, in his giving of himself to God as the author of life, in order that we might be brought into the life of God. That we might not just be images of God, who bear the image of God in how we relate to each other as humans together — individuals and in communion — but that we might do this because we live in communion with God; drawn into the life and love of the Trinity.

Jesus — the God-Man — shows us what God is like, while showing us what humanity should look like — what it means to be human and to be like God. It is to love like God. Did you catch that in the reading? John says we should love each other the way God has loved us. Because God takes the initiative and loves us before we are part of his family — we should love others this way too. Generous. Prodigal. Hospitable. Sacrificial love. Given without any guarantee of reward — as we live in a story. This is not just a set of individual responsibilities — John is describing a new communal life in Jesus; as, in this world, we live and love and are like Jesus, because Jesus has brought us into this family.

You want to know what it looks like to truly be human; to bear the image of God? To be like God — in relationship with him — without acting as though you are God? Look at Jesus, and love like him.

We can be like him as we love one another, taking up the character of God’s relationships in our relationships — but holding this as a furious opposite with the truth that we are not God, and our love will have human limits.

We can run into big problems when we try to map our life onto the life of God. We are brought into the Trinitarian life and love of God — but we are not the Trinity. We are not God the Father.

We can end up trying to live without limits; trying to be infinite when we are finite; trying to be God — or to use our tools to become gods — when we are not. We can stop sleeping, and dissolve boundaries between ourselves and others. We can stop self-care. We can be pulled by technology to care for things a world away where we cannot offer the same embodied love God demonstrates in the incarnation. We can be disintegrated by thinking we are God, rather than being still and letting God be God. We have limits and these are good and God-given.

We do not need to learn to be gods from God — we need to learn to be human, from Jesus; and yet, we are not Jesus. We are not the Messiah — we are not crucified for people, nor can we save, nor are we the authors of the lives of others. We do not even have to self-justify; because Jesus’ love for the Father, and his coming in the flesh, in birth, death, and resurrection, justifies us, and liberates us.

We are not the Spirit; who conforms anybody to the life and pattern of God, or unites people under our own power. We do have the Spirit working in us to unite us to God, and to each other so that we can love one another with love that comes from God.

Our relationships are loving; like God’s, but we can get into trouble if we try to map the Trinity onto the life of the church, or into gender roles — there are stacks of books that try to do this but almost always end up crafting a God in our own image, who justifies our own social program or ideals.

We live in a world that the triune God created, that is sustained by his love, through his powerful word, and that is being reconciled by him as God authors the story. You do not have to be in control. His is the kingdom, the power and the glory. Life is found in being connected to the God who is love, and this is actually freeing — it frees us to enjoy God; to love; to be still and know that he is God, even when everything around us is complex and fast moving and threatens to disintegrate us.

We cannot solve complex issues like how to get all the raw material, or parts, for your computer, or smartphone. And it is all going to get faster and more complex as more stories are told that offer more visions for how to be human, and more choices for you to make to help you be you. And that is a storm that might tear us apart or overwhelm us if we are not standing somewhere solid.

We either need to recognise that we belong in a complex system that is going to disintegrate us by pulling us in hundreds of different directions, or find life in a complex and dynamic system that is love and gives you your personhood.

Tish Harrison Warren is a writer I love, who writes columns for the New York Times, exploring the way the pace of modern life — our need to self-author in the midst of complexity, and the way technology works — pushes us beyond our limits. She is brilliant. She will come up a bit in our series. Here is her answer for how to shape ourselves to be truly human in a world pulling us away from God, a world of complexity, fast pace, noise, and technology: rejecting the complexity and noisy pace of the world and responding by embracing our limits and drawing near to the triune God in contemplative silence and prayer.

“Contemplative silence and prayer becomes the means by which we learn the limits of words and action, and where we learn to take up the right words and actions. It’s where we learn to slow down and then to work again at the mysterious pace of the Holy Spirit.”

— Tish Harrison Warren, ‘Want to Change the World? First, Be Still,’ New York Times

This teaches us that God is God, and we are not. It is through gazing at the God we meet in Jesus, speaking to him, and meditating on his word that we live as those who come to the Father, because we have been made children by the Son, and are now shaped by the Spirit living in us, and drawing us into God’s life and love. Our prayers are how the prayer of Jesus is answered.

This is not just a practice for time together in corporate worship, but something we maybe need to build into the rhythms of each day as an act of resistance: a way of recentering ourselves in God’s story, when we feel the pressure to author our own, or be swept up in someone else’s — or the pressure to buy into one of the many heresies flying around our heads.

Part of being human is delighting in the Trinity and rejoicing in Christ — finding ourselves caught up in the life and love of God.

August 27, 2025

Red Letter — Prayer that gives life

This is an edited transcript of a sermon on Matthew’s Gospel from City South Presbyterian Church in 2022. You can listen to the sermon here, or watch here. The running time for those options is 35 minutes.

What are you praying for — and what would the world look like if your prayers were answered?

If, as the old saying goes, our eyes are a window to the soul, our prayers, I think, are a window on what we think heaven, whether God’s version or ours, looks like…

Our prayers, like our eyes, shape how we live, the heaven we are hoping to create on earth. You might have heard people dismissing “thoughts and prayers” as an alternative to actually doing something to fix problems with the world.

But Jesus challenges that idea…

He has been talking about the good news that the kingdom of heaven is arriving (Matthew 4:17, 5:3, 10, 19, 20).

And now he is talking about what that means when we pray (Matthew 6:5-7).

And how to pray as part of his kingdom (Matthew 6:9).

That is what the Lord’s Prayer is — a prayer for God’s kingdom to come — and a description of what that will look like — his will being done on earth as it is in heaven (Matthew 6:9-10).

Is this how you pray?

Not just repeating the Lord’s Prayer as a ritual — but praying the way Jesus teaches us to pray — for God’s kingdom to come?

There is lots to unpack here, starting with where Jesus locates the Father — and so directs our hearts and eyes and words as we pray…

Our Father in heaven…

Now we have done plenty about heaven and earth in the last couple of years — this idea that there is this realm — the heavens, where God rules as the Most High, and where there are beings who do his will in heaven — and some who have rebelled — and there is this mirror situation on earth.

God created both “the heavens” and “the earth” in Genesis 1, and both are brought together in Revelation 21… And the story of the Bible — and the Gospel — is the story of how that happens.

And when we pray “your kingdom come,” it is an acknowledgment that this has not fully happened yet, but that this is the story we are brought into.

We are not just praying for the end of the story, though, but the here and now, as well — for bits of God’s bringing heaven and earth together to break out in little pockets…

Little cities on mountains…

We are praying that God’s will might be done on earth as it is in heaven — through people partnering with him, representing him as image-bearers who reflect the heavens in the earth.

We have seen how mountains play an interesting role in the story of the Bible — that Jesus is on a mountain while showing people how to pray is significant…

The short version of what we have seen so far is that mountains, high places, are meeting points between the heavens and the earth.

And through the story, mountains are where people go to be in God’s presence…

Even right from the beginning in Eden — which the prophet Ezekiel calls the holy mount — have you pictured Eden on a mountain (Ezekiel 28:13-14)?

When Israel passes through the Red Sea in Exodus, escaping Egypt and starting their journey to live as God’s people among the nations — his kingdom — they sing about how God is going to plant them on a mountain — the dwelling place God made for his dwelling… A sanctuary (Exodus 15:17).

And on the way, we get those mountaintop scenes, meetings between Moses and God, where Moses speaks to God, then brings his shining glory down to earth (Exodus 19:11).

Then, when Solomon builds the temple on the mountain in Jerusalem — God’s dwelling place on the mountain he chose as Israel’s dwelling place — God’s glory descends into the holy of holies.

He prays that God’s name would be present and glorified — that God’s eyes would be opened toward the temple on the mountain so that he would hear prayers people pray towards the temple. The temple is a sort of meeting place with God, so prayers make their way through it, to the heavens as people prayed mountainwards (1 Kings 8:29).

Solomon asked God to hear, from his throne in heaven, the voices of his people when they pray, and then to forgive (1 Kings 8:30).

The kingdom of God comes down from heaven, and in the Old Testament, the mountain is a sort of bridge where his dwelling place is placed so he can hear our prayers…

And this might seem like just a little geographic detail we get, a physical setting, but Jesus, the new Moses, a son of David who will bring a new temple and kingdom, is on a mountain talking about the kingdom of heaven turning up…

And a “town on a hill” — which is a pretty understated way the NIV puts it. It is actually the same word used for where Jesus is sitting — and this could be translated city on a mountain — which is a good name for a church (Matthew 5:1, 14).

This is a heavenly city that Israel anticipated, not just coming out of Egypt in the Exodus, but coming out of exile…

Jesus is talking about a restored holy city, a place where heaven comes down to earth… God’s kingdom come (Matthew 6:9-10)… Like in Revelation… but people who live as citizens of that city now…

He is talking about the prophets being fulfilled.

You are either bored with this mountain talk, or you cannot wait to go climb one… but here is a fun thing: where Ezekiel, who gets called the son of man, is told to prophesy, not to the people, but to the mountains themselves (Ezekiel 36:1-2).

The enemy thought he had the ancient heights — and maybe we saw a little of this in Satan’s mountaintop temptation of Jesus. But God is still in control. And he has plans to reconnect the heavens and the earth.

Plans for the mountain dwelling of God — where people will be fruitful and multiply as they dwell on the mountain (Ezekiel 36:11-12). This is Eden language; A mountain garden where people live — and fruitfully multiply.

We skipped this bit of the Lord’s Prayer — hallowed — holy — be your name — but it is also a picture of what God’s kingdom does, like the temple — glorifies God’s holy name.

God’s people failed to make God’s name holy. And this is exactly why they are in exile…

Ezekiel says Israel was booted from the mountain, dispersed down into the nations for worshipping idols, instead of drawing the earth up the mountain to God (Ezekiel 36:19-20). Then, out in the nations, they kept profaning God’s holy name rather than glorifying him; they gave him a bad name on account of their actions, and the consequence is exile. Now, the restoration of the kingdom will be God’s doing. He would bring them back; they would not choose to make his name great. God acting to save means all glory would clearly be for him — so that his name would be hallowed once again — he says, “I had concern for my holy name,” and, “I am going to restore you for the sake of my name, as a witness to the nations where Israel has been profaning it” (Ezekiel 36:21-22).

He will show the holiness of his great name — which is why this is something we pray for, rather than something we do to get a pat on the back (Ezekiel 36:23).

It has to be God’s doing so that the nations will know that God is the Lord.

As he gathers back his people — those exiled from the Eden mountain and the Jerusalem mountain — and recreates them as his city on a mountain (Ezekiel 36:24).

He will put his Spirit in people — so it is clear he has done the recreating; the restoring; the saving (Ezekiel 36:27-28).

That it is not on us, it is not our choice, there is no glory for us in this… God will recreate. God will put his Spirit in people. God will put them in the land — just like he did in Eden and Jerusalem…

God will be God. And everyone will know it. His name will be hallowed. And the mountains will become like Eden, there will be this new city (Ezekiel 36:35). A new Eden; heaven and earth merging together under God’s rule. And if we repent and prayerfully follow God’s King, we will get to live there. With God.

But now, like Israel between Egypt and Jerusalem, we live with that hope, but also with God’s presence leading us on a journey. We are not exiled from God anymore, or even exiled and being trampled by the forces of darkness. We are citizens of heaven on a journey with God to this destination, which means, like Israel in the wilderness, we rely on God to sustain us, providing our daily bread (Matthew 6:11).

This can be read literally — that it is about food. And it is not less than food; Jesus will go on to talk about God delighting in providing for our needs.

But bread in the Gospel stands for God’s good provision for his people. Jesus gives heavenly bread through the story, like when he feeds the 5,000. And the literal wording of this verse is actually something like “give us the bread of tomorrow today” — and that can be read eschatologically — as though it is about the future — the feast with Jesus in the kingdom. And that is also a good thing to be praying for.

And it can also be read Exodusly—as a prayer for provision of heaven in the here and now. There is already bread from heaven in the story of God bringing his kingdom of heaven to earth; back when that was Israel’s job. In the Exodus, when God sent bread from heaven to provide for his people (Exodus 16:4).

In this story, there was even a bread of tomorrow—bread collected the day before the Sabbath as a reminder of the holiness of God’s Sabbath rest (Exodus 16:23); a little taste of Eden and God’s provision to his people without their need to work the ground.

On that day, God gave “bread for two days”—the “bread of today” and the “bread of tomorrow” — bread of rest (Exodus 16:29-30). So maybe that is part of the ‘bread of tomorrow today’; a prayer for not only provision but Sabbath rest; a prayer for Eden-like “heaven on earth” — relying on God’s provision and hospitality, to take His presence into the world—like when God gave people fruit trees and said “be fruitful and multiply” and “take and eat.” Even this prayer for bread is not simply a prayer for food—but a prayer for heaven to break into earth, for Sabbath-like Eden life with God. For God to give us life.

We will see a couple more ways this is fulfilled as Jesus shows us what an answer to His own prayer looks like. But just briefly — Jesus’ prayer moves into how God’s kingdom coming for us— via forgiveness of sin — impacts how we live as his people as we pray this prayer, as forgiven people who forgive others (Matthew 6:12). And how life in the kingdom means following his example, rather than Adam’s and Israel’s—the examples that lead to exile from the mountain — and left Satan thinking he was king of the mountain — right up till his failure to tempt Jesus — so we pray that we might not fall into temptation, but be delivered from evil, by God, in order that his name be glorified (Matthew 6:13).

I wonder if you have ever pondered—whether reading or praying these words—what it would look like for your life if God answered them.

Well, an easy answer is that it would look like the Sermon on the Mount being put into practice… because it looks like Jesus. God’s King, arriving to end our exile from God and restore God’s kingdom — God with us — bringing the forgiveness of sins, and restoring God’s name.

Jesus is both the pray-er and the first picture of what the answer to the prayer looks like.

We might pray for the bread of tomorrow, the bread of heaven, a taste of the heavenly feast, salvation—like in the Exodus—at the Passover.

Jesus gives us the bread of heaven, not only the bread on the table at the meal, but his body, given for those who will join his kingdom; God’s life (Matthew 26:26).

We might pray “Your will be done” when we pray the Lord’s Prayer; these words are on the lips of Jesus as he prays before he goes to the cross (Matthew 26:39).

To bring the forgiveness of sins — God’s forgiveness of us — through his blood, the blood of the covenant, poured out for many for our forgiveness (Matthew 26:28).

For Jesus, prayer is not empty. It is not doing nothing. These words shape his life. They see him give his life to seeing God’s kingdom coming… to fulfill the prophets, as a new King, who leads us on a new Exodus as we journey with him until the end of the age. When Jesus teaches us to pray, it is not a choice between praying or doing something; it is about praying in a way that gives ourselves to God, because God gives us the bread of tomorrow — his life in us.

And one more bonus Ezekiel fulfilling fun fact—it is not in Matthew, but in the story of Pentecost.

Pentecost was a festival of bread. At Pentecost, the people who have put their trust in the risen and ascended Jesus, who rules in the heavens, are filled with the Holy Spirit (Acts 2:1, 4, 33).

And Peter says if we hear Jesus’s command to repent and be baptized in the name of Jesus, we receive both the forgiveness of sins and the Holy Spirit; becoming bridges between heaven and earth (Acts 2:38). The prayer is answered in us as God’s kingdom comes.

We do not have a tradition in our church community—or, so far as I have gathered, in the Church of Christ—of praying the Lord’s Prayer in our gatherings, or probably regularly in our lives. So let’s come back to what you are praying for.

Do your prayers look anything like the prayer Jesus teaches? Does your version of the kingdom of heaven breaking into earth look like His?

Does your life—shaped by your prayers—look like His life?

If it does not—and when I think of my own prayers—they sound nothing like the prayer Jesus teaches—they are often not even shaped by the prayer Jesus teaches, let alone my life lived as I seek to see my prayers answered.

And if that is you too, then we need to repent.

It is one thing to try to avoid the empty ritual of praying the Lord’s Prayer, thinking it is a template for fresh expressions of prayer—that we can do better in our own words—that might be fine if we actually were doing better.

So maybe we need to ask if what we have pushed away as empty rituals are actually practices and words—a bit like the creed—that give us a reality-defining, life-shaping language. What if these are words that give life?

Maybe it is not the repetition of these words that makes them a dead ritual, but that we do not have the incredibly rich reality behind the words in mind as we pray for a new Eden, for the end of the world’s exile from God—for our lives to be radically transformed as God’s kingdom comes on us, by the Spirit, so we might do his will and radiate with his glory.

If you want one take-home application from today—one practice—try praying the Lord’s Prayer multiple times a day, with this big vision—this story of heaven and earth being fused together shaping your heart as you pray; not dead letters or an empty ritual, but a living word that will shape your life as God answers your prayer. See what happens to you.

The idea that prayer does nothing only works if, when we pray, God does nothing to us, but also if, when we pray, we then do nothing from lives and hearts shaped by God answering our prayer…

This is a prayer embedded in the Sermon on the Mount; praying like this is a practice we are commanded by Jesus to embrace. As God’s city on a mountain — his kingdom coming as we prayerfully seek his will—bringing glory to Him through our good deeds as we are freed by Jesus to practice his righteousness as we imitate the way he lives as citizens of his kingdom.

The reason Jesus gives for praying like this is to live for God’s kingdom and glory, not our own. It is to avoid the hypocrisy of those claiming to live for the kingdom of heaven, but really living for the kingdom of earth—the hypocrites we will meet in Matthew (Matthew 6:9).

Prayer is an action, but this prayer without action—the sort of action commanded by Jesus for those in God’s kingdom—is another form of hypocrisy.

Jesus will go on to say that our eyes are what let light in—what shapes our hearts… so that we can reflect the light out (Matthew 6:22).

Prayer is a gazing into the heavens—it is approaching God—and, by the Spirit, it is us entering his court to ask our Father for things…

This is such a profound part of the Lord’s Prayer—that not only does Jesus call God Father, but he teaches us to approach heaven calling God Father… to enter the heavenly throne room and call God Father…

And to do this knowing God is not distant from us, but with us— he sees us, he knows us, and our needs, he rewards his children, he forgives us, he feeds us, and he delights in giving good gifts to us—in giving us a kingdom and his presence with us for eternity as his beloved children (Matthew 6:4, 6, 7, 14, 26, 32, 7:11); and all this brings him glory because he is the one who acts.

God will not just give us bread; he will give us himself—his Son, the Spirit, life with him, a kingdom (Matthew 7:11).

For his glory. What would it look like in our lives if we prayed not just any prayer that looked like the Lord’s Prayer—but if we consistently prayed the Lord’s Prayer?

If we gazed into heaven at God, our good Father, and in seeing his glorious light, reflected that in the world… Setting our hearts on heaven, and so treasuring life in God’s kingdom, storing up treasures there, investing our time and energy there, rather than investing ourselves in the kingdom of earth and things that will fade (Matthew 6:20-21).

We would look like people who seek first his kingdom and his righteousness—the first action in seeking God’s kingdom—to bring heaven to earth, is to enter God’s presence—to pray (Matthew 6:22).

We would look like Jesus. Prayer like this is one of the commands of Jesus we are to practice and teach—as we seek to be “great in the kingdom of heaven”—to be like our King, bringing God’s glory to earth as people saved by him to represent his name (Matthew 5:19).

The Sermon on the Mount ends the way it begins—with Jesus calling us to the wise life; the life lived hearing his words and practicing them (Matthew 7:24).

Seeking his kingdom and living lives shaped by prayerfully fixing our eyes and hearts on heaven, as we await the day when heaven and earth become one and we live with God in a new Eden.

Maybe if you are out of practice praying like this, or praying this prayer, you might join me in doing it in a moment as we share communion together.

September 7, 2024

Red Letter — Cutting to the heart of the Sermon on the Mount

This is an edited transcript of a sermon on Matthew’s Gospel from City South Presbyterian Church in 2022. You can listen to the sermon here, or watch here. The running time for those options is 35 minutes.

If you were given the ability to cut out anything in the modern world to fix it, where would you be pointing your blade?

What political issue or system would you tackle to bring about righteousness?

Maybe, this week, you are feeling like it is religious freedom? Maybe it is modern economics?

What would you cut down that gets in the way of heaven on earth? Jesus has been talking about the kingdom of heaven at every turn (see Matthew 3:2), and he keeps going in this passage today. Jesus is still speaking on the mountain (Matthew 5:1-2), as the new Moses.

Moses would meet God on the mountain (Exodus 19:3, 24:18, 34:4). Mountains are a meeting place between heaven and earth. Mountains are places where God’s people would meet with God (like Jerusalem would become with the Temple) and then take God’s kingdom down to earth. When Moses did this, over time, he was transformed by being in God’s presence, till he began shining with God’s glory (Exodus 34:29).

And now Jesus describes a restored Jerusalem — a whole city of shining Moseses — people who are the light of the world (Matthew 5:14-15), whose light shines, visibly — so people see our good deeds, they get a glimpse of heaven and of God and instead of glorifying us for our goodness — they see God in us and with us — and glorify Him (Matthew 5:16). He’s come to create a kingdom of Moseses.

One way to think about “glorifying” is the idea of “shining the light on” — our good deeds do this because we are carrying the light of heaven — radiating God’s character, imaging Him. This is a little picture of the kingdom of heaven; this shining people. Jesus keeps using this phrase the kingdom of heaven (Matthew 5:19, 20). It’s what Israel is waiting for. Jesus says he has not come to get rid of the old, not to replace Moses, or the Old Testament law — or to get rid of the prophets — but to fulfill them (Matthew 5:17); fulfilling their hopes for a Kingdom.

Now, we might file these bits of the Bible — law, and prophets — separately, but Jesus groups them together and says both have a purpose or a telos — or something, or someone they are pointing to — and he is it.

What follows is one of the most intense bits of Jesus’ teaching — it looks like he takes the law and makes it harder to obey — or some people think it is to teach us how impossible the law was to keep, so we rely on grace alone — and it is true only one person has fulfilled the law perfectly… and that he offers us forgiveness for where we fall short, by grace, through faith.

Jesus says those people who want to set aside these commands will be called least in the kingdom, while those who practice them and teach them will be called great in the kingdom of heaven (Matthew 5:19).

Jesus is not changing the law. He is showing how the law has been misunderstood — to show people are not pursuing righteousness, because they are not pursuing God. They are not a bunch of rules with nothing to do with being the kingdom of heaven — the city on a mountain — They are not an impossible standard to ignore. They are a way of life we are invited to practice in the freedom that comes from being God’s children; those liberated to join Him in His kingdom.

Sometimes in our rush to reduce the gospel to the good news about how we are saved by Jesus — “justification,” we miss that the gospels — like Matthew — are a story that is also about what we are saved for, “sanctification,” how we are called to become like Jesus as we imitate him. This idea that we should teach these commands — and obey them — comes up again in the Great Commission — we are not just told ‘make converts by preaching the Gospel’ — we are told to take people through a new exodus — baptism — and to make disciples who will obey these commands (Matthew 28:18-20).

Back on the mountain Jesus drops this bomb. He says the kingdom of heaven requires a righteousness that surpasses the Pharisees (Matthew 5:20).

He is playing with the expectations first century Israelites have about the kingdom. The Pharisees believed God would not send a Messiah to end the exile until Israel was cleansed. There is a document from the late first century BC called the Psalms of Solomon, reflecting their thinking about Israel’s restoration and the end of Roman rule. For this to happen God had to cleanse Israel before this day of mercy and blessing when he would bring back his anointed:

“Behold, O Lord, and raise up unto them their king, the son of David. At the time in the which thou seest, O God, that he may reign over Israel, thy servant. And gird him with strength that he may shatter unrighteous rulers.”

“And that he may purge Jerusalem from nations that trample her down to destruction. Wisely, righteously he shall thrust out sinners from the inheritance.”

“And he shall not suffer unrighteousness to lodge any more in their midst, nor shall there dwell with them any man that knoweth wickedness, for he shall know them, that they are all sons of their God.”

For this to happen, Israel would have to cut out their unrighteousness. The wicked would be removed and only children of God would remain — there would be no more enemies. No Romans.

This idea of righteousness meant the Pharisees created a bunch of extra laws going beyond the Old Testament — to create a righteous Israel, so the Messiah would come. There were other groups too.

The Zealots; they hated the Romans, and some of them even started assassinating them in the streets using a special sort of knife called a Sicarii. They wanted to bring the kingdom by literally cutting out God’s enemies.

The Essenes, who cut themselves off from those they saw to be a corrupt Israel — waiting for God’s king to lead them home. The Dead Sea Scrolls found in a place called Qumran — were probably from the Essenes. They were waiting for a priest-king who would bring a shining, glorious, kingdom. Here is an excerpt from one of the scrolls (4Q541). This Messiah would speak words from the heavens, bringing a shining light that triumphed over darkness:

“His utterance is like the utterance of the heavens, and his teaching is according to the will of God. His eternal sun will shine, and his fire will burn in all the ends of the earth, and over the darkness it will shine.”

And the Sadducees were wealthy rulers who ran the priesthood in Jerusalem. They were pretty legalistic, and it seems they majored on the Torah — the Old Testament law. They were prepared to cut out sin, literally. There is an ancient source that talks about a book of decrees they had with guides for how to literally apply the “an eye for an eye, a hand for hand” law from the Torah (Exodus 21:23-25). Other groups had tried to put a money value on restoration, the Sadducees wanted to get the knives out.

All these communities came with different pictures of what a Messiah — the promised king — would be like; how he would wield the blade; and who would get cut. When Jesus says he is fulfilling the Old Testament, all these groups have different ideas (Matthew 5:17). Jesus starts unpacking where they have got it wrong. He repeats this little pattern six times in the chapter — “you have heard…” “but I tell you” (Matthew 5:21-22, 27-28, 31-32, 33-34, 38-39, 43-44).

And the stakes on getting the kingdom right are high — not just about the political future of Israel, but cosmic questions of heaven or hell (Matthew 5:19, 20, 22). There is even what we might call cosmic geography built into some of the commands — do not swear by heaven — God’s throne — the earth — his footstool — or Jerusalem — the mountain city of God’s Messiah — when he talks about oaths, there are kingdom categories we do not typically have in mind when swearing an oath with our hand on a Bible (Matthew 5:34-35). And then Jesus goes into some examples to reveal the heart of the law — the way God’s people were always meant to understand it. Starting with anger (Matthew 5:44-45).

Righteousness is not just about actions, but about the heart — the inner person — Jesus is not coming to cut away at people’s actions, or different political groups — he is coming to cut hearts.

We can be like the Pharisees, thinking about righteousness in terms of controlling our actions, making rules or systems to stop ourselves sinning — and self-control is great — but the kingdom does not need new rules to shape your behaviour, new systems in place — it needs new hearts.

It feels odd to need to point it out — but harboring anger in your heart is absolutely less sinful than murdering them. He is not saying ‘if I am angry I may as well do more.’ Jesus is not equating the two — there is a whole heap of intersecting sins caught up in the murder of a person involving the theft of a life — a person who belongs to God and others — that means both the consequence and the offence is greater — that is not actually Jesus’ point.

Jesus is revealing that the law was always about the heart; not about being righteous through actions, but becoming righteous through the pursuit of God.

Think of it like a house — the “do not murder” a law — is the floor of the house. When you cross that barrier you are not part of the house. You are unrighteous. But walking around not murdering people is not the same as righteousness. It is the floor when it comes to writing a law, but God’s law was not just written to define the floor. In the law, and the story the law is embedded in, in the Torah, we are meant to meet the righteous and loving God behind the law — and to become like Him.

That is the ceiling.

Jesus is not changing the rules as much as saying that by looking at the floor, and making sure you do not fall through it, you have missed the ceiling.

And maybe anger is an area where you are happily not violating the floor — not murdering — maybe even putting up laws or strategies that stop you getting angry — but how are you going at loving people, rather than being angry at them.

It is the same with lust (Matthew 5:28) — adultery is much more costly than lusting after someone in your heart — but lust is already a failure to love. We are already missing the principle at the heart of the law about being like God and seeing other people like God does; we are already slipping into seeing people the way Satan wants us to see people.

God’s law is actually — and has always actually — been about hearts that are devoted to God, that produce lives that look like God, that reflect and bring glory to Him. That is the righteousness the law requires — that we actually be image bearers of God.

And this stuff is serious — it is worth cutting out. Jesus even says we should be prepared to take the knife to ourselves (Matthew 5:29-30).

Now — there have been people in history who have taken this idea of cutting off body parts that lead to sin quite literally with drastic consequences — and maybe they would be appropriate if our eyes or our hands actually caused us to sin…

But we know they do not. Do not we?

In fact, Jesus is going to say that all this stuff — anger — lust — the stuff we might blame our hands and our eyes for — murder, adultery — and other sins — comes from the heart (Matthew 15:19-20).

It is our hearts that need to go under the knife.

Blessed are the pure in heart.

The Pharisees wanted to change Israel — to produce righteousness —through new laws governing behaviours, but they missed the heart… The Zealots thought the problem to be cut out was other people — fix the system and righteousness would flourish… Get rid of the Romans…

And the Sadducees — they would chop bits of sinners to produce righteousness rather than their own bits… Jesus upends their expectations too… In case the crowd watching on has not got the point Jesus goes straight for the bit in the law the Sadducees loved (Matthew 5:38-39).

And maybe the idea driving the Zealots in their pursuit of justice through violence — and he says do not — and even — do not resist.

Overcome evil with good. If they slap you on the right cheek, turn the other one…

Now again, this is the teaching of principles — It is not actually a good idea in a whole bunch of situations to let people punch you or hit you — the point is to not retaliate with retribution, or even with justice, but with love and mercy. Taking the cost of making peace upon yourself — And, if someone wants to sue you for your shirt, give them your coat, and go the extra mile when someone is forcing you on a journey (Matthew 5:40-41).

You sense the Zealots going cold here.

The Messiah has not come to destroy Israel’s enemies — but to love them (Matthew 5:43-44).

He has not come to chop up sinners or stab Romans. He has not come leading a rebellion with swords and spears, but to lead people — even Gentiles — even the Romans, back to God.

The Pharisees might have thought Israel needed to be cleansed of wickedness — of enemies — in order for the children of God to be revealed (Psalms of Solomon). Jesus teaches that it is those who love their enemies — those who persecute us — who will be children of God (Matthew 5:44-45). And then, here is where Jesus reveals what the law was always about — the ceiling — Jesus says the task here is to be perfect as our heavenly Father is perfect (Matthew 5:48).

Or as Leviticus puts it — be holy, because God is holy (Leviticus 20:26). It is this reflecting the nature of God that was meant to set Israel apart as God’s kingdom.

There was never a way we could hit the ceiling. The law was designed to produce godliness, by driving people towards God; depending on His grace and mercy and forgiveness. Moses became shinier the more he went back to God after Israel sinned, after he had failed, trusting in the goodness of God.

Jesus fulfills the law and the prophets (Matthew 5:17) by bringing heaven and earth together — mediating between us and God, and speaking for God, the way Moses and the prophets did.

He fulfills the law by more than just keeping the law — even being perfectly holy and like God — he fulfills the law in the same way he fulfills the prophets.

He is the one the law points to — the sacrificial system, our need for God to save, the Exodus story and the idea of a kingdom of image bearing priests who would fill the earth with God’s presence.

He even fulfills the idea that the knife needed to be turned on our own hearts. Moses promised a return from exile would happen when God changed hearts — circumcised — cut them — so we might actually love God, and in loving God, find life (Deuteronomy 30:6-7). We will see Jesus pick up this language in Matthew. Then the idea of new hearts and a new covenant was picked up by the prophet Jeremiah (Jeremiah 31:33).

Who said God’s law was going to be written on his people’s hearts — recreating a people, a kingdom, for himself — which is what Jesus comes to do, as he brings heaven and earth together by baptizing with the Holy Spirit and bringing the kingdom of heaven. Showing us it is our hearts that need cutting first — not others. Ultimately the Pharisees and Sadducees will throw their lot in with Rome — staging an insurrection against God’s king. Coming with swords to arrest him and turn him over to the Romans.

And they do this at the exact the moment the Zealots have their own insurrection — an uprising — against Rome going on in Jerusalem — that is what Barabbas, the guy whose place Jesus takes, and the thieves crucified next to him were guilty of —

And as Israel reveals what it thinks the kingdom of heaven is going to look like,

Jesus is revealing God’s kingdom. In his death and resurrection we see the heart of God, as Jesus fulfills the law and the prophets —

You want to know how the law is fulfilled, or the prophets, look at Jesus.

You want to know what the kingdom of heaven looks like, and what righteousness looks like, and what God requires in an image bearing person who radiates his glory, look at Jesus. Crucified.

This is where we see him as the one who fulfills the Sermon on the Mount — loving his enemies, praying for those who persecute him, turning the other cheek.

He does not cut up the enemies of God, but has his own skin pierced, to love his enemies and make us God’s children — bringing those who receive him as king and savior into his kingdom.

Jesus comes to show us that the problem with the world is not out there — it is not just the Roman Empire and Satan pulling the strings. It is in us. It is our hearts. He brings forgiveness of sins — cleansing — and new hearts; fulfilling the Law (Deuteronomy 30), and the Prophets (Jeremiah 31).

Whatever bringing the kingdom looks like, it is not fixing some out there thing first, but having the knife applied to our hearts, having God’s law written on our hearts, so that we pursue the God we meet in Jesus and are transformed to become his shining children, the light of the world; a heavenly city of shining ones, whose transformed lives, and utter dependence on God to save — will glorify God (Matthew 5:14-16).

Right at the end, as Jesus sends his disciples into the world — people who follow and walk with the king — he takes them up a mountain (Matthew 28:16), and sends them — and those who came after them — into the world teaching one another to obey his commands; as shining ones (Matthew 28:19-20).

When we think about how we would fix the world, we can operate like Pharisees or Zealots or Sadducees. We can be keen to reach for the knife, to take out our enemies, or cut off bits of people who have wronged us, to do our bit to create laws that will fix things; fighting some culture war, and so forgetting about the real battle, as Jesus frames it; to live lives from hearts that have been cut by God so that we obey him.

Are you prepared to make the cuts to your own heart?

To live as shining people who practice and teach the commands of Jesus, not because they save us, but because we are saved to live this way as those whose lives reflect the glory of our God and his king.

Imagine what we would look like if we practiced these commands from the Sermon on the Mount; not perfected them, but just making them practices that drive us to the heart of God (Matthew 5:44-45).

Imagine if we worked hard at being peacemakers when we have conflict with our brothers and sisters in Christ — as a training ground for how we love our enemies.

Imagine what it would look like if the church had a reputation not only for sexual purity — which we often do not — but for being a place where we do not objectify and lust not only after those in our communities — our brothers and sisters — but those outside.

Imagine if we took Jesus’ words seriously on porn, or our thought worlds, and worked harder to cut out that habit? Not chopping your hand off when it causes you to sin, or gouging out your eyes but having God change your heart, so you see those men and women as those made in the image of God who are meant to reveal his glory, but more, so that you hunger and thirst for righteousness; for God.

Imagine if we cared about our own hearts, and bringing them into alignment with the heart of God, more than the actions of others.

Imagine if we were not known for using courts or legislation to protect our rights and police the righteousness of others, but for being generous, including to those persecuting us.

Imagine, for a moment, one of the more popular scenarios in the culture wars — a Christian baker being forced to make a cake for a gay wedding cake at the threat of legal action… Whether being asked genuinely, or as part of the culture war being fought by others.

Imagine if that baker instead of doubling down and refusing to give his shirt, made two cakes, or catered for the wedding.

Imagine if we took these words of Jesus seriously, rather than putting them in the too hard basket.

Obeying them will look different for different people in different contexts — these are little stories that are not likely to happen to you tomorrow, but the principle is what we are trying to figure out. Those are the sorts of good deeds that shining people might do as we reflect a little bit of heaven on earth.

April 18, 2024

Red Letter — Blessings on a mountain

This is an edited transcript of a sermon on Matthew’s Gospel from City South Presbyterian Church in 2022. You can listen to the sermon here, or watch it on video here. The running time for those options is 35 minutes.

We took the kids to the Brickman exhibition at the museum last week. Amazing. The wonders of the world, built in Lego — recreations of icons from human kingdoms built around the world and through history — it was crazy clever.

Here are the crown jewels made from Lego.

We do not think much about belonging to a kingdom anymore. Rumblings about a republic are getting louder, in part because this idea of royalty seems so passe. Because the royals do not seem to do anything for us. They just make trouble.

But I wonder what you would do if you were king or queen for a day — or if you actually had power and could rebuild the world. Creating wonders.

Or maybe if someone turned up promising to rebuild your life for the better.

If a king or queen — or a politician — or a CEO — or a pastor — turned up tomorrow and said they were going to rebuild the world. Or rebuild your world. And they could build a kingdom like Brickman and his team build Lego.

What would they build?

Who would it serve? Would it be like Egypt?

Where the people of the kingdom enslaved others to build their wonders… and where only the Pharaoh was the “image of God”… Or like Babylon? With its hanging gardens — built from plunder and wealth pillaged from the surrounding nations…

Who would it serve? What sort of kingdom would you build with your blood, sweat, and tears — your time, and your money?

What does fullness — or fruitfulness — or happiness look like for you, or for others made in the image of God there with you? And maybe more importantly — who is missing out? Who is pushed to the margins? Enslaved. Dominated? Not recognised as the “image” of God…

These are questions about kingdoms, really — places where our gods are revealed as images of these gods represent them in the world. We saw how the kingdom idea is there in Genesis 1 last week.

What if you imagine God building a kingdom now — what would he fix?

Who would he exclude?

And what might that reveal about your heart — how much do you think your picture aligns with the character of God?

This “kingdom” language might feel foreign for us now but it is a very real question in the first century when Jesus turns up preaching that God’s kingdom has come near (Matthew 4:17). Now, at this point in the story we readers know where this is heading — the cross, and Jesus declaring that all authority has been given to him (Matthew 28:18). But, for those who have just started following Jesus, they are wondering what it is going to look like and imagining what is coming for them in their immediate future; building little kingdoms in their minds.

They are thinking they are on their way to the top. I want you to imagine that you are the disciples. Living under Roman rule — after many generations living under foreign kingdoms — hearing Jesus announce blessing is coming with this kingdom that you get to be part of, God’s heavenly kingdom (Matthew 5:3,10).

What you would be imagining — and how different that might be to what Jesus offers?

They have got certain things they are imagining here — as first-century Jewish people — but their picture falls to pieces pretty quickly as Jesus speaks. His words are about to expose their hearts, because he is going to expose God’s heart, and show that his kingdom is turns their expectations upside down.

Matthew sets the scene for these words with some vivid Old Testament imagery — first up, geography matters — Jesus has just been in the Jordan, where Israel’s exodus into the land happened. He has been in the wilderness. He has been in the temple and on high places.

And all this scenery matters because it is part of him reliving big parts of Israel’s story. Here Matthew wants us to see Jesus as a new Moses — someone arriving to lead God’s people into God’s kingdom. When Jesus goes up a mountainside (Matthew 5:1-2). This might seem like a good decision to make for acoustics or something, but it is significant too. It is Moses-like. This phrase in Matthew is one that occurs just over 20 times in the Greek version of the Old Testament — and 11 of those times are about Moses on Sinai. It is the same phrase we get here — when Moses goes up a mountain and meets with God (Exodus 19:3), before being sent by God to his people to deliver the law — the basis of the covenant.

He hears the Ten Commandments — then God tells him to come up the mountain again and meet him and he will get the Ten Commandments written on stone as he meets with God on a high place — a little bridge between earth and heaven. He is there 40 days and 40 nights (Exodus 24:18), like Jesus in the wilderness. He gets the tablets and comes down from the mountain after and finds Aaron leading the people in idol worship with the golden calf, and when he finds out Israel has broken the covenant — the promises that mark them out as God’s kingdom — he goes up the mountain again; to make atonement for sin — to try to turn God’s judgment aside as he represents their cause to God (Exodus 32:30). And he goes up the mountain again for another forty days and forty nights as the one who does not live off bread, but off God’s presence (Exodus 34:4, 28). Just like Jesus, who spent 40 days and 40 nights fasting and then quoted Moses to tell Satan that we do not live off bread alone, but God’s word.

Moses receives God’s words of the covenant — his description of how to be God’s partners in the world — his kingdom. And all this happens on a mountain — a leader of God’s kingdom goes to meet God, so that he can speak for God, and he comes down from the mountain representing God and inviting people into partnership with God in the world. Moses becomes more and more the shining image of God; a mediator between heaven and earth. He gets to see God’s goodness and hear God’s name from God himself. And Israel is waiting for a new Moses — because way back in the words of Moses, in his second reading of the law (that is what Deutero — two — nomos — law — means), Moses says when God’s people are trying to figure out how to get back to God, another intercessor will come along, to represent humanity’s case to God, and God to humanity. Another prophet will come along, speaking God’s word — and when he does, they have got to listen (Deuteronomy 18:15). Because he is going to speak for God. He is going to speak God’s word (Deuteronomy 18:18-19). He is going to be like Moses — the same Moses who went up a mountain, over and over again, and then met with God. Matthew uses this phrase, off the back of Jesus quoting scripture — quoting Moses — after forty days and forty nights of fasting. Going up mountains and down mountains and then up a mountain. Where he begins to teach.

The Moses bell is meant to be ringing in their heads.

Moses is not just the law receiver, or law giver, he is a mediator who goes to bring heaven and earth together by meeting with God, interceding with God on the people’s behalf, and then offering the terms by which heaven is going to get brought down to earth as God’s glorious, shining, image-bearing people represent him. We will see this again in the transfiguration later on — another scene on a mountain, where Moses actually shows up. And Jesus shines with God’s glory.

But here we have got the guy Matthew has called God with us, teaching people on a mountain. Teaching people about God’s kingdom. Speaking God’s word. Bringing a new covenant.

And whatever little brick picture they have built with their metaphorical Lego, he shatters it into pieces. Because here is a little glimpse into what God’s people are expecting — from the words of Moses — they were the people of blessing — in the land — their idea of being “God’s kingdom” is being “set high above all the nations on earth,” (Deuteronomy 28:1-2). It is about blessing and prosperity and power. Moses tells them they will receive blessing over and over again — and if you wanted a summary — this is a pretty good one — abundant prosperity. It will be like Eden and like being fruitful and multiplying (Deuteronomy 28:11). And the nations around them will fear them (Deuteronomy 28:10).

Maybe this is what we imagine when we think of being blessed as God’s people too? If they do not obey, they will get curse (Deuteronomy 28:15). It will all turn upside down, instead of prosperity and fruitfulness there will be poverty and famine (Deuteronomy 28:18). Hunger, thirst, nakedness, poverty (Deuteronomy 28:47-48). They will be cursed and turfed. Sent out of the land — captured and dominated by nations like Egypt — like Babylon. And this is what happens — as we saw last week — exile. A powerful nation coming against them, and Israel is hoping for a reversal.

Israel is hoping for a king who will come and upend the status quo — turfing out the enemies who oppress them and restoring their fortunes. It turns out Israel wants an Eden without God — they do not want to listen to, or worship him. They want something that looks a whole lot like Babylon. A worldly picture of prosperity. And maybe that is us. They want a king like Pharaoh, rather than God ruling as king.

And they get it. That is what exile is… And when Jesus says the kingdom of heaven has come near (Matthew 4:17). And he starts teaching about who it belongs to — they are thinking “yes please”…

They have all these projects they are imagining. Only the picture of the kingdom he paints in his words — it does not sound like the blessing they have been hoping for…

It sounds more like curse…

And it turns out that the people pursuing blessing like Deuteronomy describes it, on their own terms — without God in the picture — they end up looking a whole lot like Egypt and Babylon.

We have already met Pharaoh… I mean Herod… But the message Jesus wants his disciples to take out into the world, bringing fruitful relationship with the world as he mediates between heaven and earth — like Moses did — and represents God, and is with us always; the message he wants his disciples to teach as they invite people into a new exodus — through baptism — is the message he teaches them. The message he begins to teach them — his disciples (Matthew 5:2) — here on a mountain as the new Moses, revealing God to his people. Only, this is not just a human mediator, this is God with us. And Jesus’ teaching begins with this series of blessings (Matthew 5:3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11).

Now — I have referred to the Greek version of the Old Testament a couple of times — because it is the Old Testament it seems most people at the time of Jesus were familiar with, and the New Testament authors often quote from it, as they are writing in Greek, this word blessed that he uses a bunch of times in a row, it basically means “happy” — and it is not the word for blessing from Genesis 1, or even the one that is commonly used in Deuteronomy — where this one is used just once, towards the end of Deuteronomy, in Moses’ last recorded words. Words about being a people saved by the Lord, and a promise that God will deliver them (Deuteronomy 33:29). It is the word that launches the Psalms — and is used over and over again in the Psalms to speak of the people who listen to and delight in the word of God (Psalm 1:1-2). An idea picked up in Psalm 119 — that famous psalm about the place of God’s word — his law — in the heart of his people (Psalm 119:1-2). In those who celebrate God’s rule as king, who kiss his son — who take refuge in him (Psalm 2:11-12).

And remember it is this that Israel absolutely fails to do — they want all the pictures of blessing from Eden, without the presence of God, without him there as the source of blessing. Without listening to what God says he requires.

And I wonder if that is us sometimes?

Jesus goes up a mount as a new Moses, and then he speaks words loaded up with royal meaning — the Psalms are connected more to David, than Moses — which is interesting, a bit, because God’s king — the son of David — was meant to lead God’s people to blessing in God’s kingdom, by taking his word to heart — carrying a copy of God’s word everywhere… So here, God’s word who gives life, turns up looking like Moses, to speak a word about life in God’s kingdom, listening to his word…

And the disciples are thinking blessing is going to pour out as the king turns up.

But Jesus is going to flip their ideas upside down.

They think being in the kingdom of God means receiving material blessings from God — Jesus says, actually, blessing — happiness — in the kingdom of God is about receiving God.

Just like people do not live by bread alone, but by the word of God, so people are not really blessed or even wealthy, unless they get God — blessing, happiness, is grounded in God, so that you can endure anything the world throws at you. It is not going to be those who think they have it all, and can build God’s kingdom on their own back, that will bring God’s kingdom.

God’s kingdom is going to come from God, and for those who realize they bring nothing to the table; the “poor in spirit” (Matthew 5:3). It is not those who find joy in the state of the world — exile from God — and try to build happiness on their terms — who will receive comfort, but those who mourn the state of the world, the oppressive empires, and their own sin, who will be comforted (Matthew 5:4).

It is not “happy are those who are happy” either — blessing, paradoxically, comes not from seeking our own happiness, but seeking God. It is not those who seek to dominate others — who use power to secure their kingdom who inherit the task of ruling the earth with God, but those who love and serve — God and neighbor — without trampling others (Matthew 5:5). It is not those who hunger and thirst for the things of this world, but for the character of God — righteousness; and that righteousness filling them so it might fill the earth — it is those people who will be filled (Matthew 5:6). We have just seen Jesus demonstrate this hunger in his temptation.

The kingdom cannot belong to those who hunger and thirst for the things of this world — the hunger that led to exile from Eden for Adam and Eve, to sin in the wilderness for Israel, and to exile for Israel as they hungered after the gods of the nations — and it cannot belong to us when we are hungry for the things that lead us to sin, and away from God — because the very nature of God’s kingdom is receiving life from God himself — hungering for him.

And I wonder if that is how any of us can describe ourselves? It is not those who take revenge and act harshly who display the character of God’s kingdom — but the merciful (Matthew 5:7). Jesus will pick this up later when he says we will be judged by the standards we used, and forgiven when we are able to forgive others. It is those who are pure in heart — not operating from divided hearts, hearts that love other gods, or people, or the world in the place of God, who will see God (Matthew 5:8). And those who bring peace — peace with God, and with others — who will be called children of the God who seeks peace (Matthew 5:9). And here is the real sting in the tail — the second time Jesus promises the kingdom of heaven to those who will be made happy by God — and this time it is those who are persecuted because of righteousness (Matthew 5:10).

That is not the picture of happiness a Deuteronomy reading Israelite has in their head, and Jesus doubles down on this one with his summary of the upside-down kingdom he is bringing. I want you to imagine you are one of the disciples who has just started following Jesus hearing this. You think he might be the Messiah. You have heard him say the kingdom is coming.

You have been schooled in Deuteronomy and the vision of the blessing and kingdom of God being abundance and prosperity and you are hearing Jesus saying “you have missed the point” — the point of blessing and the kingdom was not the material fruit of your belonging, but the relationship with God and your love for him.

And here is Jesus promising they will be insulted, persecuted, and people will say evil about them (Matthew 5:9), but they should rejoice and be glad while they suffer, because the fruits of this pursuit are life with God in the kingdom of heaven — and faithfulness has always looked like this because just look at how Israel treated the prophets. Jesus gives a whole list of the characteristics — the posture and character and virtues of those whose lives align with God and his word — the characteristics of a person who knows that God is God. And what God is like.

It is a list that does not sound like the victorious and materially prosperous fruitful people of Deuteronomy 28 — but that is because that fruitfulness flowed out of covenant relationship with God, expressed in these characteristics — and what people get if they are blessed like this — is God.

The disciples might be thinking happy are those who are wealthy and feared by all the nations. But Jesus says happy are those who are marked by God’s glorious presence in the world.

And when that list is full of stuff we do not want — maybe it reveals something about our hearts, that we do not want God — we do not want his kingdom — just the benefits. Happiness. Prosperity. And we want it now. Because Jesus says who live with this character — the object of this way of life is God, and relationship with him — that is what drives these behaviors — a heart given to God. Theirs is the kingdom of heaven. They will be comforted. They will inherit the earth. They will be filled. They will be shown mercy. They will see God. They will be called children of God.

The key to blessing is a relationship with God — receiving comfort and an inheritance. Being filled by God — rather than their own hands, or Satan — compare all this to the promises of Satan in chapter 4, from last week — receiving mercy from God. Seeing God, like Moses — who only saw God’s back, but face to face — as God’s children in his kingdom of heaven.

This is what it looks like to be part of God’s kingdom — it is to receive God as our God. The alternative — the alternative way of living — pursuing happiness without God — it will produce an alternate set of qualities. Imagine an anti-Matthew. Anti-beatitudes. Flip the qualities and you see both why Jesus’ words are so revolutionary and so compelling.

Imagine a world built on these values.

Blessed are the proud. Those who cause mourning. The powerful. Those who are self-righteous and hunger for glory. The harsh. The self-seeking in heart. The warriors. Victorious because of unrighteousness. Theirs is the kingdom of Satan.

You actually do not have to look hard — because it is the world around us — and it is the world our heart often wants to build for ourselves without God — if we are honest and we are sitting there with the Lego blocks of our lives imagining the world we would like, and the way other people would view us and treat us. And our success.

But these are the behaviors that lead to curse. To exile. To death. Flip those promises that God will give us himself — and all the benefits and blessing that flows from that — and you get a picture of the sort of life Jesus comes to save people from as he brings God’s kingdom.

Cursed. Theirs is the kingdom of Satan. They will be rejected. They will be cast out. They will be emptied. They will receive justice. They will be cast from God’s face. They will be called children of Satan. Theirs is the kingdom of Satan. But here is the thing — the dilemma for the Old Testament people of God is that it is their hearts, not the politics of the world around them — that lead them away from God. The empires outside Israel are just empires built from the human heart — attempts to build Eden without God — and Israel does not love or listen to God — so they do not live according to his word.

The dilemma for a world living in exile from Eden — and for Israel living in exile from the land is that heaven and earth are at odds with each other. And our hearts just keep wanting the things of earth instead of the things of heaven. Which is what led humanity, and Israel, into exile.

We keep trying to build heaven-away-from-heaven. Heaven-without-God.

And so we need a new intercessor — someone to go up the mountain and meet with God, to reveal what God says and to lead us — but we also need God to come down onto the mountain to meet with us to speak, and to invite us into life with him — and in Jesus we get both — the son of God, and the son of Man — the king of heaven and earth.

And so in this moment, as he goes up the mountain, and speaks these words from God, and as God — as this mediator between heaven and earth — he is giving us a picture of what it looks like when heaven breaks into earth, and we get swept up into the kingdom of heaven. It looks like God’s character shaping people who want God. Not what God gives, but God. And then these words become the pattern he displays as he lives an obedient human life, life in the image of God, life listening to God.

As we work through Matthew these are going to be themes that come up in his teaching — teaching we are called to obey — but they are also patterns that come up in his life. This could easily be a description of Jesus’ trial — as Matthew records it — where Jesus is beaten, mocked, crowned with thorns, found guilty of claiming to be exactly who he is — by both the Roman Empire and Israel’s leaders — persecuted just like the prophets. Jesus turns up and lives the life of the kingdom, as the new Moses, and the new David — the king who will lead God’s people home to God.

But the people are not interested in this sort of upside-down kingdom. They want the kingdom of the earth, the kingdom of Satan. They want Eden without God’s presence. Babylon’s gardens or their own little kingdoms. And just like Herod tried to kill Jesus as an infant — a new Pharaoh — the Israel who will not get with the program of the kingdom conspires to kill Jesus. This is what happens any time we have a picture we want to build of the world — the life — we want to build for ourselves that does not treat God as God, that is not us joining in his kingdom.

We look for a leader who will give us what we want — like Satan — or we will become that leader. Jesus is the righteous one who brings God’s righteousness and is persecuted for it because he pursues the kingdom of heaven — and the bringing together of heaven and earth — above all else. Because he is the one who truly mediates — truly bridges the gap between heaven and earth — and is truly the righteous one who fulfills God’s word.

What we get a taste of as he goes up the mountain in our passage, like Moses, we see fulfilled when he bridges the gap between heaven and earth on the cross. Where he goes up to make atonement for sin through his death; a death he takes that models the meekness of the beatitudes in the face of Satan’s power, and the world’s might, so that he might model receiving the kingdom of heaven, and so he might inherit the earth.

And a death he takes on to invite us to cross over from the kingdom of Satan — the kingdom of this world — into the kingdom of heaven through him, and through the baptism of the Spirit, where we receive forgiveness of our sins, and God’s presence, and new hearts, and the ability to start listening to God and living a life of repentance — a life that sees God’s kingdom through eyes given to us by God.

And he is the one who does this so he can bring in God’s kingdom as the one who has all authority in heaven and earth — the new Moses has arrived to lead a new exodus — are we going to listen to him? And the words of Jesus from chapter 4 should be ringing in our ears as we see the character of God’s kingdom spelled out in the red letters of the beatitudes, and poured out in the red blood of Jesus on the cross.

This is what God is like. He would go to these lengths out of love for you because he is not like Satan, and his kingdom will not be like the grasping and destructive kingdoms of the world. This is what his kingdom is like. He is the God who gives life because he gives his life to people.

And when we see God this way, and his kingdom. We need to repent. We need to have our false values and dreams and kingdoms exposed. Of our Babylon projects — attempts to build Eden without the presence of God.

Attempts to secure blessing without the word of God having anything to do with how we live. Repent of the gods we make in our own image — just like Israel with the calf — gods delivering blessing on our terms, according to our designs, rather than us imaging God as we listen to him and live according to his design.

And for Christians — this means repenting of our Lego Jesus’s — the Jesus’s of our own making who come to bless our own wondrous building projects. The ones we build and shape to justify the kingdoms we want.

If we have a plastic Jesus — a Jesus of our own making, and not the Jesus we meet in the gospel, and at the cross, then we will end up with a plastic kingdom. One that has no substance and will not deliver happiness or blessing, or life with God. Smash all those pictures, and see life and God’s kingdom through God’s eyes, and join his building project.

The things you build are likely to disappoint you, likely to damage people around you, and unlikely to last — unlikely to be memorialized in a Lego exhibition in thousands of years — and even if they do, it is God’s kingdom that lasts for eternity; and life pursuing God’s kingdom — because God has pursued you — that delivers happiness for you, and it delivers blessing to those around you, and it delights God.

Smash those false images of false gods, and false kingdoms, or a false Jesus and realize that we bring nothing. When we come to Jesus in the spirit of the upside-down kingdom we are pursuing his righteousness, not our own. When we pursue our own righteousness we become self-justifying and self-righteous. When we come to Jesus and his kingdom as it is these words do not just become words fulfilled by Jesus, but give and shape our lives. Words that help us realize the pictures of happiness and fruitfulness the world gives us are empty because they are not just disconnected from God, but they take us away from God.

And follow Jesus towards the heart of God, love him with all our heart, and mind, and strength, so that his heart is revealed in our actions. And when we repent — when we turn to Jesus from false kingdoms — when we are saved from those kingdoms and their consequences.

We will not live up to the standards of the Sermon on the Mount, or the beatitudes — we will fail — and we are not saved by displaying these characteristics. We are saved because Jesus did. We are not saved by these characteristics — not in ourselves — but we are saved for these characteristics, saved in order that God might produce these characteristics in his people as heaven breaks into the world, led by the king who is God with us, as his disciples — his image-bearing people who represent God to the world because we are reconnected to the heart of God — as we receive God’s Spirit — and as we obey all that our king commands. Then we will share in this blessing, this happiness — to live in his kingdom, to be happy, as our love for God — our union with him — changes us as we become disciples and listen to his teaching and are changed. Because of Jesus, and because if we trust him and follow him as the king who brings heaven and earth together, we become one with him. In communion with him. Ours is the kingdom of heaven, and this can shape the lives we build here on earth.

April 3, 2024

Revelation — A letter to seven (real) churches

This is an amended version of a sermon I preached at City South Presbyterian Church in 2021. If you’d prefer to listen to this (Spotify link), or watch it on a video, you can do that. It runs for 38 minutes.

Imagine getting a letter like the book of Revelation in your mailbox — or read out at your church one Sunday. In the last post/sermon I suggested Revelation is a mix of three genres — it’s an apocalypse — which means an unveiling; it starts by pointing a lens at heaven, and then looking at the world and its events from a heavenly perspective. It’s a prophecy — John positions himself as someone bringing a word from God — Father, Son, and Spirit. It’s a letter to seven real churches in the province of Asia — but because the number seven to signifies completeness, it’s also a letter to all the churches (Revelation 1:4); to every church Jesus represents in the heavenly realm as the Son of Man — the Priest King — who walks among the (seven) lampstands (Revelation 1:12-13, 20).

The book opens with seven meta-letters within the letter (Revelation 2-3). These seven letters follow a common structure. Each mini letter opens with this reference to the angel of the church in — and then the gap is filled in with the city from Asia Minor — modern-day Turkey and surrounds; these are all significant regional centres within this province (Revelation 2:1, 8, 12, 18, 3:1, 7, 14). There are two ways you can read “angel” — it literally just means messenger — it could be addressed to the human leaders who would pass on these messages to each church, except that chapter 1 has just said that the seven stars held in the hands of Jesus are the seven angels of the seven churches, and given us this picture that they might be spiritual beings lined up in the heavens to act on behalf of the churches (Revelation 1:20), that said, for a long, long time I just read this as “messenger” — and you should feel welcome to do that if you don’t want to go down a rabbit hole where these are spiritual beings who have some sort of relationship with each church. This spiritual being is addressed on behalf of the churches, which is interesting because the contents of each letter speaks directly to the earthly life and behaviour of the humans in the churches.

There’s more to the formula. In each letter to each church, John grounds what he has to say by pointing his lens not at the church, not at its problems, but at Jesus picking up descriptors of Jesus from his vision in chapter 1.

When he speaks to Ephesus it’s to remind them that Jesus is the Priest King walking with his church (Revelation 1:13, 16, 2:1).

To Smyrna it’s that Jesus is the Living One — the First and Last — who died and rose (Revelation 1:17-18, 2:8).

To Pergamamum it’s that Jesus wields a heavenly double-edged sword (Revelation 1:16, 2:12).

To Thyatira it’s this picture of the glorious Son of God who is just like God — eyes blazing and burnished feet (Revelation 1:14-15, 2:18).

With Sardis, John does something a little different. He pictures Jesus not just holding the seven stars that are seven angels — but the seven spirits — which we saw last week is a picture of the Holy Spirit before the throne of God. Jesus is the one who spiritually unites the church to God’s Spirit (Revelation 1:4, 16, 3:1).

With Philadelphia, well, now he goes off script a bit. He pictures Jesus as the one who opens and shuts doors that no one else can with “the Key of David” (Revelation 3:7). The figure in Revelation 1 held different keys; the keys of death and Hades (Revelation 1:18).

Finally, in Laodicea, it’s Jesus the “faithful and true witness;” the ruler not just of the kings of the earth, but all God’s creation (Revelation 1:5, 3:14).

The lens becomes more expansive, but John is also showing each church an aspect of Jesus’s rule — his dominion — the way he triumphs over the beastly powers threatening to steal their hearts. He shows them things about Jesus that are particularly relevant to each church’s situation. But then the lens is turned onto the churches, and we get Jesus’ vision of the churches. He “knows” (Revelation 2:2, 2:9). He “sees.” In a creepy horror movie vibe, for Pergamum, he “knows where they live” (Revelation 2:13). This refrain is repeated (Revelation 2:19, 3:1, 8, 16); “I know…” Jesus knows and is about to unveil some key things in each church.

There’s a pattern within this set of seven churches; the first and last are in big trouble. They’ve utterly compromised and need to repent to avoid sharing the same judgment we’ll see dished out to the beast; their lamps will be removed, while the second and the sixth churches have got things pretty together. They just need to hang on. The third, fourth, and fifth churches are a mixed bag — in danger of losing their light if the compromisers in their midst aren’t brought to repentance, or if their bad influence spreads. Five out of the seven churches are unhealthy so they are called to repent.

Let’s have a look at the diagnosis of these churches; and the things that pull the church away from Jesus.

Ephesus has forsaken its first love (Revelation 2:4-5). It’s at risk of losing its lampstand. Just like the lamp of Israel’s temple was removed; they’ll be exiled, and no longer God’s priestly people.

Smyrna is holding on. They’re facing persecution from not just the Romans, but the Jews, those who because they have rejected Jesus, their king, because they teamed with Rome to crucify God’s anointed one. They’re now not the house of God, but the house — or synagogue — of Satan (Revelation 2:9-10). This isn’t about Jewish people — John, himself, is Jewish — it’s about the political and religious system of the first century that failed to hear the words of the prophets, failed to recognise the coming king; failed by turning to Rome to remove the threat Jesus posed to their earthly kingdoms and so now have had God’s kingdom pulled from their grasp.

And so the same people who made Jesus suffer are now persecuting his church, and the church in Smyrna is wearing the cost. Pergamum is experiencing the same pressure; they’re like the home city of Satan, where he has his throne (Revelation 2:13), but they’re holding on. And we know “Satan lives in their city” in this apocalyptic sense because faithful witnesses to Jesus, like Antipas, are being executed. That’s a pointer to things being not ok. But it’s not all good in the church. There are compromisers; people standing in the tradition of the Old Testament character Balaam — the guy with the donkey — who tried to convince Israelites they could be God’s people while worshiping foreign idols and joining in their religious approach to food and sex (Numbers 22-24, Revelation 2:14-15). It seems the Nicolaitans might be a group doing that too — the name “Nicholaus” means “conquerer”, and it’s possible there are some people saying you can be fully Roman and fully Christian; citizens of both kings. Worshippers of both gods. And Jesus says no.

The church in Thyatira has the same issue; there are compromisers in their midst. Here Jesus throws back to another Old Testament character — Jezebel — another false teacher who led Israel to destruction through idolatrous worship (1 Kings 16). There’s a modern-day Jezebel in their church doing the same thing; luring Christians away from Jesus through false worship, calling them to give their hearts and their bodies to someone else while seeking heavenly pleasure on earth (Revelation 2:20).

Sardis looks alive but is dead (Revelation 3:1). It’s like a whitewashed tomb. While the other two churches have some bad eggs amongst the good, Sardis has some faithful people, amongst the bad (Revelation 3:4). The rest have to learn from them what it is to be pure — to worship Jesus — to be clothed in white and worthy (Revelation 3:5). The point here’s they should become like them — repenting — so they don’t worship their way out of the kingdom of God and into the kingdom of the beast, and worse, into the judgment of Jesus.

Philadelphia is another church facing persecution from the Jews, but Jesus promises them vindication if they just keep holding on and not denying his name (Revelation 3:8-9).

But Laodicea. It’s in trouble. The citizens in this incredibly wealthy city are comfortable. Rich. They don’t feel like they need anything because they are materially sorted. But the spiritual reality — when the heavenly lens is applied; they’re wretched. Poor. Blind. And naked (Revelation 3:16-17).

They need to see things God’s way and store up heavenly treasures — to be dressed in heavenly clothing. There’s an interesting throwback to Genesis 2 and 3 here with the idea of shameful nakedness, where to be restored to God is to not be naked, but clothed in the glorious white clothes we see heavenly creatures wearing, and that we see Jesus wearing. The Laodiceans need to see the world differently; to see Jesus differently; to stop being lukewarm and get their stuff together.

The lens being turned on all these seven churches — it’s a lens being turned on God’s church — isn’t it? We know by looking. Looking not at other churches “out there,” though there are plenty that aren’t healthy. Looking not at others in this room. But by turning and applying this lens to ourselves — our own lives. We know that there are times we want to go with the flow of the world; to avoid hard things by joining the world, not holding on to the name of Jesus like we should. We know that we want to worship and give our lives to all sorts of other little gods for the sake of their little promises of pleasure and comfort. Sex… Food… Parties… Money… Power. Not just at a national level, but in the workplace, or in our relationships.

What do you think Jesus would write to us?

To the church in ______?

To our gathering — and to you — if we were unveiled. What would Jesus say to the 21st century Australian church?

Jesus knows where we live. He knows when we live. He knows the pressures we are facing. He knows what beastly regimes are pulling the strings of our hearts to tempt us to renounce his name.

He knows.

He knows what you’re watching that is forming your imagination — whether that’s the news you’re consuming that shapes your vision of people and events, or the entertainment that shapes your vision of the good life and feeds your desires, and your fantasies.

He knows what you’re browsing online — the stuff you want to buy to bring happiness. The people and their naked bodies you want to consume thinking a little sexual immorality won’t hurt. That nobody is getting hurt. That there’s nothing beastly here. That you can have a foot in both camps and give your heart to both God and your fantasies.

He knows what you’re spending your money on as you buy your own little Laodicean kingdoms. He knows how we store up wealth for ourselves and build our own little castles — our own little heavens — our own little dragon piles of treasure that we won’t share with others.

He knows who we’ll include or exclude from our communities as we use power — where we might turn into little synagogues of Satan by seeing Jesus’ victory only occurring for people like us, so we build little church communities of comfort and create cultures and behaviours and set ourselves up as judges who won’t let others in.

He knows the little values we hold that don’t come from him, but from human cultures and practices that we put up as barriers; the idea that people have to be, or look, or dress a certain way before they can be welcome here.

We might think we’re afflicted and impoverished — and we might think this reminder that we are spiritually rich — in Christ — is for us. But we’re not. Mostly. Some of us — this is true — that we’re in poverty.

But many of us are profoundly wealthy. Rich. Caught up in capitalism and consumerism and individualism as beastly empires we don’t want to walk away from. Living without needs — just with wants and a beastly empire that tries to tell us — with its impressive propaganda machine — that uses algorithms to tell us our wants are needs.

But we’re blind.

And the dangers in these warnings for the churches pulled off the rails by the world — they’re not just dangers when Nero is stomping around with an army.

They’re dangers when Bezos and Musk and our billionaire pinup boys are sending wealthy people into space, and getting us into electric cars using batteries made from resources pulled from the world’s poorest countries while exploiting their workers. They’re dangers for us.

When we love all this stuff — it pulls us away from loving God.

We’re in just as much danger of being pulled away from faithfulness to God in an individual era of sexual liberty — where we want sex with a swipe right, or simulated stimulation as we project our wildest fantasies into a search bar and have them projected back to us by our screens; or even just sex where we consume others like objects, without the deep covenant commitment to mutuality and service of one another in the context of marriage.

In (an earlier series on the wisdom literature that I may eventually post) we saw that sex outside of marriage isn’t God’s design. It’s not wise, it’s not what will produce flourishing. Sex that we pursue for ourselves, or to wilfully satisfy some other person, outside of marriage – sexual immorality — is also idolatrous disobedience that’ll pull us from God. Even if our sexual immorality isn’t in idol temples, like the first century, it still has the same impact on our hearts. The world bombards us with idolatrous messages about sex — and we want to believe them.

We want to be like the first century citizen hanging out at a pagan temple, enjoying some idol food and some sexual debauchery while also claiming to follow Jesus.

Heaven on earth.

A foot in both camps.

It’s not on.

For so many churches — and so many of us — we might have a reputation for being alive — but when we try to have it both ways — serving the beauty and the beast — we’re dead (Revelation 3:1).

Just like the beast.

And the cost of lukewarmness — what you get when you try to live in both worlds, which means you’re not actually worshiping Jesus; it’s serious.

Jesus will spit you out (Revelation 3:16-17).

You can’t serve both God and Money.
You can’t serve both Jesus and Caesar.
You can’t worship Jesus and Satan.
And Jesus knows.

He knows not just the behaviors we are pulled away by, but where they are pulling us.
He knows the empires that tempt us to bow the knee in order to secure their benefits.

One way to think of empires or kingdoms is to think of them as systems.

Where have we bought into the systems — the isms — of our day that aren’t the system built on the rule of Jesus? What are the isms that claim your allegiance?

This is what idols do. They create isms. Systems. As people join together in worship.

Capitalism. The worship of money. The idea that security and happiness come from amassing wealth; that greed is good. That perpetual growth is sustainable and desirable. We tend not to critique that. You won’t find many Christian lobby groups pushing for the end of systemic greed. We’re often too busy talking about sex.

And yet sex is a god too — especially one tied to hedonism — the worship of pleasure, and individualism, where we decide we are the gods of our own little kingdoms and others exist to serve us. Where nobody defines or owns me but me. Where I don’t belong to anybody so I don’t answer to anybody, so I’ll chase what I want, have sex how I want to have sex, live how I want to live.

This individualism, combined with capitalism, creates a sort of consumerism where we believe the things we buy, the objects we possess, will deliver heaven for us. But we turn people into possessions and use power – whatever power we can, whether it is purchasing power or social capital – to make others do what we want, regardless of the cost to them. We consume media and use technology without considering what that media is doing to us – our brains, imaginations, our hearts, let alone what it is doing to those on our screens – their bodies, their mental and spiritual health.

This behavior is beastly.

So is racism. It is not just the idea that you, as an individual, treat other people differently based on their race, but also that you fail to recognize how different groups benefit from the historic and ongoing mistreatment of various ethnic groups. It is not just Australia’s history regarding the dispossession of our First Nations people, or the stolen generation and how our government systemically traumatized whole groups of people, but also how inherited wealth compounds while inherited dispossession does the same, creating a gap that needs to be closed, possibly requiring sacrifices from us.

And it is not just our First Nations people. One thing COVID-19 has revealed is the inequality in our system. Workers on the frontlines in vulnerable places, such as aged care, or working as security guards in hotel quarantine, or delivering our comforts to us in our suburban homes, are often migrant workers. They work for low salaries, live in high-density housing, making them more susceptible to a transmissible virus than the middle class.

Sexism is also a problem. It is the idea that one sex is superior to the other, ingrained in our society where might makes right. Men can use their physical strength to dominate women, whether it’s related to patriarchy and its impact at home, on sex, on sexual violence, or in the workplace, or even in the management of churches. Strong men can impose their strength on others in a room, not with an explicit threat of violence, but just in the way that domineering personalities get rewarded so that narcissism produces success.

Nationalism, especially Christian nationalism, is problematic too. It is the idea that everyone should act like they are part of the kingdom of Jesus, even if they are not, and we sometimes pursue this by acting politically just like those around us.

All sorts of -isms have captured the church in our age. All of these are forces, systems of sin, synagogues of Satan, used by him to pull us from God, and into exile, through false worship. We need an unveiling. We need to be exposed. We need to repent. This is Jesus’ call to 5 of the 7 churches (Revelation 2:5, 16, 22, 3:3, 19).

Repent – turn from false gods; from the things that pull you away from Jesus. Turn back to the glorious one we meet in chapter 1, and faithfully hold on (Revelation 2:10, 25, 3:11). Cling to him. Worship him. This is his message to his faithful people. Citizens of his kingdom.

Stay the course. Remain faithful. Do not be lured by the bright lights, the false gods, the counterfeit gospels, or the threat of harm. Trust the one we meet in chapter 1 to deliver you, even as you step back from the beastly world and its glamorous promises. Remember chapter 1 – those who hear and take to heart what is written to the church, from God, are blessed (Revelation 1:3).

Each letter concludes with a call to listen. To hear (Revelation 2:7, 11, 17, 29, 3:6, 13, 22) and so to be blessed if they hear what Jesus is saying. What they hear is to worship Jesus, not false gods. What they hear is to stop thinking you can have one foot in Caesar’s world; the material world; the beastly world following the beastly pattern of grasping hold of the things that tempt you; a life of consuming or devouring. You can’t have one foot there and one foot in God’s world — the kingdom of Heaven.

You have to choose.

And the choice is not just about pointing the lens at Jesus in the past. In each letter the lens is pointed forward to the hope that Jesus brings as the living, resurrected, king who will make all things new.

Each church gets a promise for what life with God will look like if they stay the course—and each picture— each little vignette — is a scene from the end of the book and John’s vision of the New Creation; that vision of God’s blessing; the benefits of his victory overflowing to those who share in the victory of the king; those who repent and turn to him as king—worshipping him—and then hang on and so become victorious (Revelation 2:7, 11, 17, 26, 3:5, 12, 21).

For Ephesus, it is a promise they will eat from the tree of life; a picture not just from the Garden of Eden, but the new Eden that God will bring (Revelation 2:7, 22:2).

For Smyrna—those who repent will not be hurt by the second death—which Revelation 21 says is the fate that awaits those who are lured by false worship—idolaters and those who are disobedient—destruction and death in a lake of fire (Revelation 2:11, 21:8).

For Pergammum. Well. This one comes out of nowhere a bit. In fact, just about every bit of this verse (Revelation 2:17), with its reference to “hidden manna” and “white stones” and “new names” has been unpacked and debated and packed up again and filed in the too hard basket. Obviously, the manna is a reference to the wilderness wanderings and God’s heavenly provision in times of suffering — and so there is a promise of heavenly provision — a feed — and people do see this as a nod to the wedding supper of the lamb at the end of the book. But the white stone is just weird. I have read 20 theories and am convinced by none of them, or all of them. The symbolism is lost on me, and maybe it is a dead metaphor. It could be a Roman meal ticket — you would sometimes get a stone as a ticket for a temple banquet. It could be a jury stone, where you would be found guilty or innocent in a vote given using white or black stones. It could be a jewel — it kind of means ‘bright stone’ — and a reference to a part of the priestly garment. It could be a nod to the stones Israel painted white — with lime — in Joshua when they entered the promised land.

And then the name could be their name — a new name for individuals — it could be a new name for God’s people, or it could be a new name for God, or a new function of that name. The “known only to the one who receives it” could be about the name only being known by the person who gets the extra-special new name, or it could be about the people who get the rocks will know this new bit of information from God.

I am inclined to think that some clearer bits about names from the surrounding passage help give us a picture of the significance of this promise—not only that God knows our names, and has written them in the book of life (Revelation 3:5). And that Jesus will write God’s name and the name of the city — which will come down from heaven like manna, and his own new name on us (Revelation 3:12). So I think it is a new name for Jesus connected with a new reality of life of provision in God’s new Eden

And there is another scene later in the book where Jesus is presented as a warrior king defeating Satan and his beastly minions — with a name written on him that nobody knows but himself — and then we are told his name — his name is the Word of God; the King of Kings and Lord of Lords (Revelation 19:12-13, 16). Now. We do know this name because we are in churches that have been reading this book for two thousand years, but this was an unveiling moment. This is another put the lens on Jesus moment. This means I think there is a pulling through of an image from the end of the book here in the letter to Pergammum too, where the at-this-point-in-the-letter-unknown name of Jesus is written on the foreheads of those who will dwell with him forever (Revelation 2:17, 22:4). Whatever the symbolism that we lose in the dead metaphor, the meaning is connected to God providing for us because his name is written on us, so that we are his and he is ours. It is this name rather than the name of the beast marking the faithful churches who have not denied the name of Jesus.

For Thyatira, it is a promise that they will rule with the king of kings and lord of lords, as part of the victory of Jesus and the vindication of God’s people against all those who persecuted him—a promise that we will be given the morning star—which is another potentially weird image, but something Jesus uses to describe himself right at the end of the book (Revelation 2:26-28, 22:16). The iron sceptre image comes from the Old Testament, but also gets picked up as the absolute victory of Jesus is described—with his army dressed in white, in chapter 19 (Revelation 19:15).

For Sardis, it is the promise that we will be this army — but also the bride of the lamb — those at the wedding feast who are dressed in white (Revelation 3:5, 19:7-8), and those whose names are in the book of life (Revelation 21:27).

In the letter to Philadelphia, it is a promise that the church will be part of the eternal temple of God — part of the building — never leaving God’s presence, with his name on us, as the new Jerusalem comes down from heaven (Revelation 3:12, 21:2).

The image of the father and son sharing a throne is all through the book — and here Jesus promises that his faithful people — those united with him so that we share in his victory, will share in his rule. We will be part of the royal family, not just servants who are more like slaves, but worshippers who will be with the God we love, and who loves us and gives us abundant life (Revelation 3:21, 22:3).

In each letter to the seven churches John puts the lens on Jesus — his vision of the victorious King of Kings who rules from heaven from chapter 1, then he puts the lens on the churches to show how destructive worshipping other gods or living in other empires can be because they are tools of Satan and his beasts, then on the future secured by the certain victory of Jesus and our share in the kingdom he creates. For John, this is a victory already won by Jesus’ death on the cross, his resurrection, and his ascension. John is inviting his readers to overcome whatever temptation we might feel to worship other kings and gods; whatever temptation we might feel to become beastly, and to listen to Jesus. These letters to the seven churches are letters to those churches—but they are also a letter to us.

All seven churches got to read what John said to each of them; so did all the churches this letter circulated to, and we know it circulated pretty widely because we are reading it today. Each letter ends with the call for “whoever has ears, let them hear” (Revelation 2:7, 11, 17, 29, 3:6, 13, 22).

So.

Are you listening?

Are you hearing?

This is God speaking, through John, to his church.

If we — those of us in God’s church — hear his words and take them to heart; if we are prompted to worship; to repent — which means to turn from false kingdoms, false gods, false isms — by turning to Jesus and his kingdom, if we hang on to him then we will receive a place in his kingdom. The kingdom of the crucified, risen, and ascended Jesus who gave his life for ours, and gives God’s Spirit to us so we share in God’s life. If we cling to him, then he clings to us and we receive the blessings secured by his victory — the new creation, where there is no more curse.

Jesus asks us to choose.

Will you turn from false gods and worship him with your whole heart? Your whole life?

January 15, 2024

Revelation — A lens to use to see the world fully

This is an amended version of a sermon I preached at City South Presbyterian Church in 2021. If you’d prefer to listen to this (Spotify link), or watch it on a video, you can do that. It runs for 38 minutes.

Last time round we set the scene for Revelation by looking back through the Bible at the way some of its key language ties up a big storyline thread. The idea is that we humans are either destined to become beastly, like the serpent, Satan, or beautiful, reflecting the glory of God. We saw that this choice boils down to who, or what, we worship — Jesus, and through Him, the God who created the heavens and the earth, or beastly rulers of the earth, and through them, Satan.

And we saw that this was a real and present challenge facing John’s first readers — those he wrote this strange book to. The challenge for us now is not seeing the big story this book fits into, but figuring out how to read it in our circumstances here in Brisbane, two thousand years later.

Just what sort of book is Revelation? What place does it have in our lives as followers of Jesus? What is its message for us?

The book gets its name from the first line — this opening — the ‘revelation from Jesus Christ’ (Revelation 1:1). There is a lot to unpack here as we figure out how to read it, and the first thing to note is that this word is literally ‘apocalypse.’ It is ‘the apocalypse from Jesus Christ.’

Now, we think we know what an apocalypse is, right? You have probably got an escape plan you have figured out for the Zombie apocalypse — especially after Covid — right? Or maybe that is just me.

We know an apocalypse is about the end of the world. Don’t we?

Only, that is just what we have made this word mean because of one way this book has been read, and I’m pretty convinced that is not the right way.

An apocalypse is not about the end of the world like ‘how it all falls apart,’ It might be more connected to the ‘ends of the world;’ the way philosophers talk about purpose, or like some of you might have learned, ‘the chief end of man is to glorify God and enjoy Him forever.’ But the thing is, this word more literally means something like revelation; an unveiling. It is about truth being revealed that helps us see events around us — to see the world — the right way — and in the sense it is used in the Bible, it is like a veil pulled back moment where we see earth and its purpose — and our purpose — from the perspective of heaven.

Now, it is possible this apocalypse is all about the fire and brimstone end of the line for the earth — that it is an ancient document predicting events in the far-off future. That is one possible reading of the book. The locusts could be Apache helicopters, and the mark of the beast could be bank cards — but these are readings of the book that always put present or future generations in the audience seat, at the expense of the past.

And that can be tempting.

The Biblical scholar Michael Gorman has a book called ‘Reading Revelation Responsibly,’ which has this great graph to explain how people read the book. He reckons all of us naturally fit somewhere on this graph.

We can treat — from top to bottom — the book as though it only describes events in the past, or as though it is about the present or the future, or a thing that encompasses all points in time. On the left right axis, we can treat the vivid apocalyptic symbols as codes that describe particular phenomenon located at a certain time (the up-down axis), or we can use these symbols like a lens; a way of seeing the world, and events either everywhere on the up/down axis or in a particular spot. So we either approach the book decoding symbols to discover precise moments they correspond to in history, or see the symbols as analogies that will explain various things that might happen at any moment — giving us a language to understand reality.

You might remember how I’ve got these colour-blind lenses that allow me to see colours I did not know existed; reds and greens like never before. These lenses change the way I understand the world by revealing things I could not see without them.

I am going to suggest — like Gorman — and like a couple of other people I will reference along the way — that we should be thinking of Revelation as supplying us with a set of lenses to see the empires of the world with God’s eyes — and that this had a particular and urgent meaning in first-century Rome (where the symbols do have a coded meaning), but we can use these lenses today too.

Part of what this book does, as a lens, is it sits us in the heavenly courts — in the heavenly realm — away from the day-to-day trenches of normal life and it invites us to see that not only is that realm real, it is the one that matters — because what goes on in the heavens, in the Bible, shapes what happens on earth.

And this means we get a bunch of vivid language, and out-there pictures, to try to disconnect us — dislocate us — from earth.

But we also get earthly things described in caricatures that expose or unveil them as what they are.

There is a good analogy for this in a piece by Aussie theologian George Athas, where he talks about how Revelation and other literature like it functions like political cartoons that exaggerate certain features to expose them.

For now, let’s imagine that when John writes his revelation, his goal is to give us a lens that unveils the world for us and invites us to see it as God does. Also, it can be so easy for modern readers to think Revelation is a coded message book about evil beings and spiritual opposition and all the bad stuff that applies — that these are the focus; but Revelation points the lens somewhere else. First and foremost, and from start to finish (like the rest of the Bible), Revelation is about Jesus.

It is not just from Jesus (Revelation 1:1). The way Greek works mean this could either be a ‘from’ or an ‘of.’ You will find English translations that do this — it is an unveiling that does not just come from Jesus, but it is a book that unveils Jesus for us and invites us to see the world anew, having seen Jesus as he is.

Revelation zooms in to the throne room of God where Jesus now rules from the throne as King of Kings and the Lord of All Nations.

But that is not all John tells us, and here is one of the first reasons I think the book sits where it does on that graph. John tells us that this vision of Jesus, from Jesus, was given to him, by God, to show his servants — his people — what must soon take place (Revelation 1:1). Now, we might think that ‘soon’ applies to us; that we are the generation these words have been waiting for. But, it is much more likely that this is a letter that first applied to the present and very near future of its first readers — and that it drew on analogies and imagery from the whole Old Testament to reframe their understanding of life in Rome.

Revelation is absolutely soaked in Old Testament references or allusions — one scholar who tabled them all up — Stephen Moyise – did up this graph of the books John draws from. He found Revelation draws extensively on the whole Old Testament as it paints a vivid picture using big cosmic language.

One scholar says there are more allusions to the Old Testament in Revelation than the rest of the New Testament put together. This depends a bit on how you define an allusion, but what cannot be denied is how richly Revelation sits in that tradition and applies symbols and language from the Old Testament to a particular moment in time.

Or that the central message is the idea that Jesus is the fulfillment of the Old Testament expectation that God would reign as king.

And that is what John has come to testify — to the things he saw — and John can sum up his vision by saying that what he is testifying to — is the Word of God and the Testimony about Jesus (Revelation 1:2).

And it is this same testimony that Jesus is King, not Caesar that has John in a prison island — on Patmos. He is there because of ‘the Word of God and the Testimony about Jesus’; the same thing verse 4 says is the heart of this message he has passed on in this book (Revelation 1:4, 9).

And this book — it is not just an apocalypse — an old bloke yelling at clouds about a broken world — to nobody; it is a mix of genres. John is like an Old Testament prophet. There is a prophetic dimension to the book.

John describes himself being in the Spirit; of being taken up to see things from heaven and being told to write down what you see. This is the classic way that an Old Testament prophet, like Ezekiel, or Daniel, would introduce an apocalyptic vision or prophecy like this. John is plonking himself down in that role (Revelation 1:10).

But it is also a letter sent to particular churches at a particular time (Revelation 1:4). It is like any other New Testament letter. We have to figure out what it says to a church in its immediate context before we apply it to our moment in the sun.

And while the number 7 gets a fair bit of air time in Revelation as a symbol of completion or perfection — even in our passage today — these seven churches were real churches, and John names them: Ephesus, Smyrna, Pergameum, Thyatira, Sardis, Philadelphia, and Laodicea. John’s vision is for them (Revelation 1:10-11).

So this apocalyptic prophecy is, first of all, a letter to real churches, in real cities living under Roman rule. It’s a mix of genres, but it’s written by a person, to other people, at a particular point in history.

Whatever we want to make of it — wherever we want to see Revelation speaking, it feels odd if we say it has nothing immediate to say to these seven churches.

I reckon this means we can’t think so much of the text as a code that speaks to the present or our future, as though what John saw corresponds directly with events still to come that had nothing to say to these churches. And yet, at the same time, John uses the number seven over and over again in the book as a number of completeness. There would’ve been stacks more churches just in the towns and cities of the provinces he mentions, but he picks seven because seven is a way to say “this is for the full church.”

It has a particular and immediate audience who received the written work, who it must be meaningful to — just like Daniel and Ezekiel were to their first readers — but also a sort of ‘universal’ audience as well.

These churches are soaked in the religious and political messaging of Rome — churches called by the bright lights of the big cities, and by the bread and circuses of Rome to worship the emperor.

Which, if you remember last post — was an empire whose “proper procedure” was, at certain points, to execute those who would not worship Caesar.

So John dips back into Old Testament imagery that is used as a lens to look at Old Testament empires and says “hey, have a look at this Roman power from God’s perspective,” but more than that, it says “have a look at Jesus from God’s perspective and choose who you’ll worship.”

And the last thing to notice from the intro is that it’s not a book that is meant to be read and atomized — primarily — into verse by verse ‘pull apart the grammar’ stuff like we modern people like to do — and one of the reasons we do this — that we have to — is that the symbols in this book all mean something to the first hearers based on how familiar they are with their own context, and with the Old Testament. We don’t have that familiarity, or that context.

But it’s a book to be experienced — to be read aloud and heard (Revelation 1:3). The symbols are meant to come thick and fast, like a good audio-visual experience; leaving us a bit breathless and overawed by what we hear.

But also hearing the message and taking it to heart, and as one more hint that John has immediate concerns, he says the time for applying this is near (Revelation 1:3).

This decision to take this unveiling to heart, to re-see the world through the lens it supplies is what leads to blessing, that’s going to be a big theme the book picks up right at the end as it returns us to a picture of a world not marked by the curse of sin and death.

Revelation — this apocalypse — is meant to do a work on its hearers reframing the way they see the world, and its rulers.

And if, as we saw last week, the presenting challenge for these first-century churches is choosing who to worship and what kingdom to serve, the apocalyptic letter opens by framing our vision by pointing the lens firmly not at Rome, but at the heavenly courts.

John is writing on behalf of the Ancient of Days — the one who was and is and is to come (Revelation 1:4-5). John uses a whole lot of different titles for God in this book, and he uses them really deliberately in patterns that help structure the book, but this is such a big way to describe God.

God isn’t just a being in creation, he is the I Am — that ancient name for God, and he always has and always will be. John plays with the I Am name in his language here to say God always is, and God the father is giving grace and peace to his church.

And so is the Holy Spirit — and here’s another time the number seven pops up in this book and most scholars see this “Seven Spirits” reference as a reference to the completeness of the Holy Spirit (Revelation 1:4), but also as a way of saying this is the Spirit at work in the seven churches, because it’s the Spirit at work in all the churches.

And John is also writing from Jesus Christ, the faithful witness and ruler of the kings of the earth (Revelation 1:5), these are hints that for John, Daniel’s vision that we saw last week has been fulfilled already.

And then John, overwhelmed by this sense of God speaking to his church, breaks out in a moment of spontaneous worship (Revelation 1:5-6). This is what some of you might know as a doxology — which is a word that means words giving glory to God.

John is giving glory to Jesus, and to the Father, because Jesus has created a kingdom; not a beastly kingdom but a priestly kingdom; a reference to what God made Israel to be in Exodus (Exodus 19) but applied to the church.

Not a kingdom of violent dominion but a kingdom of servants of God, for his glory, secured by his blood.

John grounds his vision — his unveiling of reality — in the victory of Jesus that has already happened; the victory of God over sin, and death, and Satan and all the beastly kingdoms and humans who follow the way of the serpent into beastliness.

And here’s one of those points where John just combines Old Testament references. You’ve got Daniel 7, which we looked at last week, and Zechariah chapter 12. But here is also where John starts giving us the perspective of the heavenly courtroom where the Son of Man is coming with the clouds — the ascended Jesus is taking his seat, fulfilling Daniel’s vision (Revelation 1:7).

Where God the father, the Almighty — the one who was and is and is to come — now calls himself what John called him in verse 4 and adds that he’s the Alpha and the Omega — the first and the last (Revelation 1:8). This is a big picture of the God who sits on the throne of heaven and rules all nations; the one in whom we live and breathe and have our being, who has the past, present, and future in his hands.

And so the message for God’s people is that they have to pick their king.

They have to choose a kingdom.

They have to choose between this God’s beautiful forever kingdom and the violent and beastly kingdoms of the world.

And John, as he looks into this heavenly court, doesn’t just hear God’s voice — he sees the voice coming from someone, and when he turns he sees this figure like a “son of man” among these seven lampstands (Revelation 1:12-13).

We’re told later are churches (Revelation 1:20), but this lamp imagery also comes from the temple, and a heavenly vision of the temple in Zechariah; and this speaking figure is in this cosmic temple present with the churches, and he’s dressed like a royal priest and looks like the Son of Man from Daniel’s vision.

When John describes him he says:

“The hair on his head was white like wool, as white as snow, and his eyes were like blazing fire. His feet were like bronze glowing in a furnace, and his voice was like the sound of rushing waters.”

This pulls all sorts of Old Testament imagery about God together — the ‘voice like the waters’ bit comes from Ezekiel, and there’s a throwback to Daniel here too (Daniel 7:9).

John brings Daniel’s vision of the Ancient of Days, God, together with Daniel’s vision of the Son of Man arriving, so that God and the Son of Man are brought together in this rich new way where the Son of Man is speaking as the voice or word of God.

He sees Jesus as this glorious bright glowing light. White and bright.

Just like animal skins were a code for beastliness in Genesis 3, this sort of imagery is a code for glory; for a heavenly being; we see it at a few points in the story of the Bible.

Like at the transfiguration — another unveiling — where the disciples see Jesus as he really is — one shining like the sun, and dressed in white (Matthew 17:2).

And it’s the same imagery at the resurrection, this time with an angel of the Lord whose appearance is “like lightning” and his clothes as white as snow (Matthew 28:2-3).

Hebrews talks about the son, Jesus, as the “radiance of God’s glory;” another shining word (Hebrews 1:3). John’s point with all this language is that he is the glorious ruler of the heavens and the earth — the heavenly bodies that were viewed as being divine beings in the ancient world reflect him, rather than the other way around.

John is picturing the Son of Man as this triumphant and victorious heavenly king who is glorious — shining with the light and life of God himself and who rules the heavens and the earth — the seven stars — if seven is about completeness are a picture of Jesus’ authority over the heavenly bodies as well as the earthly ones (Revelation 1:16). John tells us at the end of the chapter that they are a picture of the angels, or heavenly beings, being in Jesus’ authority.

Whatever all this means, whether we understand the imagery or not, it is intended to be beautiful, glorious, and terrifying in its over-the-top glory. It pulls together threads of similar unveilings in the Old Testament to emphasize that Jesus, whom Christians might follow as king, is divine.

John concludes this by describing Jesus as the first and the last (Revelation 1:17-18), in the same manner he has been describing God. He connects Jesus’ victory over death, Hades, the dragon, and his curse to Jesus’ own death and resurrection. Jesus is the living one.

John’s testimony about Jesus is that the crucifixion and resurrection reveal God to us, for in them the God-man, the son of God and Son of Man, is unveiled and victorious.

When we see Jesus this way, John’s response is to fall down in awe, worship, and submission (Revelation 1:17). No other king or god commands John’s devotion through their presentation of their glory.

Remember Trajan, the emperor whom Pliny wrote to. He agreed with the notion that citizens must worship Roman gods, including the emperor, or face death. However, he offered salvation from death, a pardon, through repentance and worship.

The choice facing first-century citizens was to repent and worship Caesar and his empire to receive his pardon and life in his kingdom, or repent and worship Jesus and receive life in His kingdom.

John’s vision is the lens he wants the church, the seven churches he is writing to, and all the churches they represent, to see the world through. This lens challenges us to look beyond any other pretenders to the throne, anyone or anything else that might command our worship.

How can other empires compete with the glorious one? How can we worship anything else?

This lens is something we might want to use in our own times too, as we look at empires, agendas, and objects of worship that offer us life and call us to give ourselves up, pulling us away from God and His kingdom.

Choosing between God-kings should be easy if this is what the throne room of heaven looks like, and who the one on the throne appears to be. Jesus isn’t a distant king; He is Lord of His church.

The Jesus John sees is not just in heaven, absent from the concerns of His people. He is present with His church, operating as a priest for the church in the heavens. This is a theme we see elsewhere in the New Testament. He brings us into God’s presence, which is where the book will lead.

He is the faithful witness who shows us what God is like and what faithfulness to God in the face of beastly empires looks like, trusting God to win and bring blessing. This is where the book will go.

Jesus, the living one, was dead and is now alive, offering hope of new life and resurrection to His people. This is where the book will go. As the first and the last, he will return to make God’s victory and his kingdom absolute, bringing all other kings to their knees because God is the Most High, and Jesus is his voice and chosen ruler (Revelation 1:17-18).

He has freed us from our sins, from the curse, death, and the claws of Satan by His blood, through His death and resurrection. Like in the Exodus with Israel on the mountain, He has made us a kingdom of priests, acting as our priest before His Father (Revelation 1:5-6), even as he, himself, is God. He is the one to be worshipped and glorified, with His Father.

In doing so, we too will be clothed in glory; we too will be swept up in the beauty of God’s vision for His people (Revelation 7:9).

This vision will drive what John has to say about politics and economics — about how we live as people, as the church.

Is it your vision, your lens for looking at reality?

Does it shape your worship?

Your life?

January 12, 2024

Revelation — The Beauty or the Beast

This is an amended version of a sermon I preached at City South Presbyterian Church in 2021. If you’d prefer to listen to this (Spotify link), or watch it on a video, you can do that. It runs for 39 minutes.

I have received more phone calls from strangers this year (2021) asking about the Book of Revelation and the end of the world than about anything else. Revelation is a strange book full of dragons, beasts, and chaos. Its message is coded, and we feel like we have to crack it, and we are tempted to make it about us.

Revelation chapter 13 has this famous picture of a dragon being worshiped because he has given power and authority to a beast who is also worshiped (Revelation 13:4); and we want to know who this beast is and whether it might be around now. Revelation depicts two kingdoms: the inhabitants of the earth who worship this beast and those marked by the Lamb. The Lamb has a book of life (Revelation 13:8). The beast writes a book of death. Whoever refuses to worship the beast is killed by its power (Revelation 13:15).

Whatever the code is in Revelation, whatever it means, it asks readers to consider whom we worship, what kingdom we belong to, whether we worship the dragon and its beastly minions, or the Lamb; Jesus. And the question has consequences. Deadly consequences.

Beastly kingdoms bring death to those who will not jump on board here on earth. The Lamb who was slain on earth offers life in his heavenly book.

As we delve into the Book of Revelation which reveals heavenly reality, opening the curtains between heaven and earth, we are being asked to choose between an earthly kingdom and a heavenly kingdom, a question of life and death.

And this choice has other implications in places where people rule in beastly ways; real-life implications, economic implications, political implications. Because despite what some might say, there is actually no separation between religion and politics. If you take one thing home from this series, it is not that Christianity is political, though it is, it is that all politics is religious, because all politics happens around this fundamental choice between kingdoms.

The beast, or the beauty of the slain lamb, shapes the political and economic behavior of its people. In this famous passage, one that is getting a run in the media at the moment, the beast uses a mark, an imprint—the word here is often used for images stamped on coins (Revelation 13:16-17). In this vision, if you do not have that mark, you do not participate in the economy, you do not benefit from the kingdom of the beast.

And the mark is the number or name of the beast, and we get this famous number, 666 (Revelation 13:18). Now, we will dig into this more in a few weeks’ time, but the key to understanding all this apocalyptic stuff is to read it carefully. And John, who is writing, says discerning what he is talking about requires wisdom (Revelation 13:18), and that while we might think this is going to be supernatural and demonic, it is actually natural and demonic. It is about a person, a man beast, who is on earth doing the will of the dragon.

So it is very unlikely that COVID vaccines or credit cards or all sorts of things that people have identified with this passage over the years are the fulfillment of the events depicted in Revelation.

Revelation is an apocalyptic text that stands in a tradition — an Old Testament tradition — that frames the world this way, from the perspective of heaven, to invite us to consider how we live, what kingdom we belong to, who we are and will be as people, as we choose what to worship.

It is a book that is the fitting conclusion of the story of the Bible because John’s vision is incredibly grounded in the image and story of the Bible. This choice between beauty and beast goes right back to the beginning.

Right back to the serpent — Satan — a beastly wild animal. People were meant to rule over wild animals as God’s image bearers, but the serpent slides into their direct messages (Genesis 3:1).

Adam and Eve were clothed in the glory of God, naked and unashamed, reflecting his goodness and love, and then the serpent claws them away from God. They become people ruled by a wild animal.

And we get a hint that the fall is a turn toward beastliness as Adam and Eve are clothed in animal skins. They become like the animals (Revelation 3:21).

But now, humans are caught up in a fight with the wild things. But there is hope. There will be a fruitful line, a line of seed, offspring, who will be opposed to beastliness and crush the serpent (Genesis 3:15).

There will be a battle that will determine if people are human as God created us to be, beautiful reflections of his image who rule over the wild things, or humans ruled by the animals, beastly humans.

We see this beastliness take hold in the next story, the story of Cain and Abel.

Abel has mastery over the animals. He cares for the flocks. But Cain is at risk of being mastered by the animals, becoming beastly.

God warns him, “Sin is crouching at the door,” like a beast waiting to pounce. It desires to have him. He must rule over it, not be ruled by it (Genesis 4:6-7).

But instead, Abel’s blood soaks into the ground, and Cain is exiled to live like the beast-man he has become.

In the story, his descendants go out and build cities, full of technology, tools, and instruments, but they are cities of death, where within a handful of generations, this fellow Lamech is boasting about bringing death and destruction to his enemies.

And that is the story of human empires produced outside the line of seed that will lead to the Lamb. Genesis has these stories of humans and empires who become beastly as sin takes hold. They are cities of order and technology and even art and culture. The trains would have run on time. But they are cities like Babel, Babylon, disconnected from God’s presence. Beastly kingdoms ruled with violence.

But throughout the story, there are little glimpses of both the hope and the fight against beastliness.

One example is David, the shepherd king who tends a flock, who rules over the wild animals, lions, and bears who come to kill his sheep (1 Samuel 17:36).

That is interesting, right?

But here is something even more fun, courtesy of the Bible Project.

Goliath, the giant, is presented not just as a beast but as a giant serpent.

Every time the narrative mentions his bronze armor, scaly bronze armor, it is a serpent pun. The Hebrew word for bronze uses the same letters as the word for serpent. They are related to the same root. He is bronze and scaly. He is snakey. He is beastly. He uses human power and strength, weapons, to mock God and his people. He comes with sword and javelin and snake armor (1 Samuel 17:4-6), while David comes against him in the name of the Lord.

And we know the story.

David defeats this beast-man, and his head is crushed (1 Samuel 17:41). David becomes king. He launches a “city of peace.” He uses his strength to crush beastly kingdoms, like a shepherd. The catch is that in his own temptation, his grasping, his use of the sword, especially with Bathsheba and Uriah, David grasps and kills those in his care. He is rebuked for being a predator rather than a shepherd, and he is told the sword will not leave his household. He got too close to beasts and became beastly.

The closest parallel to Revelation and the book where the beast theme really gets unpacked is the Book of Daniel. There, before the vision we read, there is a story where someone is dressed like an animal as a picture of beastliness.

The Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar, he has a dream, and Daniel interprets it. He says Nebuchadnezzar will go live with the wild animals until he worships God’s authority as the Most High. He becomes like a cartoon beast, an apocalyptic figure, an ox, an eagle, with hair like feathers and claws like a bird (Daniel 4:20-33). This is a picture that portrays Babylon and its power in beastly terms. If Israel in exile is tempted by the beauty of Babylon, here is a view of that beauty from a heavenly perspective revealing its ugliness.

Then Daniel has this vision of four great beasts (Daniel 7:2). And, like with Revelation, we are tempted to try to see these four great beasts as kingdoms still to come, pictures of the end of the world. We might look at ISIS or America or all sorts of modern kingdoms and try to make the hat fit.

But there is a more immediate fulfillment for this apocalyptic vision because this apocalyptic genre is a way that people can speak about present moments from a heavenly perspective.

Daniel’s vision is explained straight away. The four beasts are actually four kings who will arise from the earth (Daniel 7:17), and they might look powerful and victorious as they destroy or dominate God’s people, these beastly regimes, but actually, God is going to win, and he is going to give a kingdom to his people forever.

And these empires around Israel were overtly and deliberately beastly. Their gods were presented as animals, serpents, dragons, weird hybrid animals, like this Babylonian picture. Their stories were violent and bloody. The kings of these nations were seen as supported by beastly gods, who triumphed, tooth and claw, over other beastly gods.

Babylon’s creation story involved the Battle-God Marduk creating the world from the dead body of the serpent God Tiamat — who was also a symbol of the chaotic waters. Marduk then built Babylon as the seat of the gods on the earth; the bridge between heaven and earth. There is this idea that goodness and peace and cities of order and beauty are built out of death and destruction and violence.

Daniel’s vision — and in the narrative that goes with it in the book of Daniel — pictures a beastly empire with a beastly king. When the king of Babylon, Nebuchadnezzar, is sent into beastly exile as an animal it’s a picture of Babylon’s beastliness. When the Medes take over from Nebuchadnezzar’s son in the story of Daniel, Darius the Mede is the beastly ruler who throws Daniel to the beastly lions because he will not worship him and his gods. Then a third kingdom, the Persians take over, with Cyrus mentioned just before Daniel’s vision is described in the book; a vision is set back under Babylonian rule; back before the events of chapter five. Daniel’s vision features beast… after beast… after beast… until Daniel pictures a fourth beast; a super-power who will come in and do horrible things to God’s people (Daniel 7:21-27). And it is very likely that this superpower he pictures is Greece, and that it is pointing Israel to Antiochus Epiphanes, a Greek king who marched on Jerusalem, setting up a statue of himself on the altar in the rebuilt temple; a moment the Maccabees, a Jewish text, calls the abomination that causes desolation.

And the thing all these regimes have in common — according to Daniel — these regimes opposed to God is that they are beastly, and though they look victorious and powerful and majestic from an earthly perspective, they do not win. They swallow each other, and, ultimately, God swallows them up. These beasts represent kingdoms; earthly kingdoms that devour and trample and crush; kingdoms marked by kings who will lead mighty armies. These beastly kingdoms are violent. They wage war against each other, and they wage war against God’s holy people. These are dominion systems pounce on and devour the weak.

And these beastly kings will set themselves up in opposition to Israel’s God. They are earthly pictures of cosmic rebellion against God’s rule. And the only hope for God’s people amidst these beastly empires is for God — the Ancient of Days — the Most High — to step in and put things right in the heavens and on earth. So Daniel has this vision of the heavenly court sitting and ruling on the actions of this beastly regime, and the Most High taking the reins both in heaven and in the kingdoms under heaven, and launching an everlasting kingdom where all rulers will worship him (Daniel 7:26-27). We will see Revelation picking up lots of this language.

In Daniel, the beasts get slain at this moment when God is revealed as the rightful God of the nations (Daniel 7:11), and his king, the Son of Man is enthroned in heaven (Daniel 7:13), and in Revelation chapter one, in John’s vision of Jesus in the heavenly throne room, this has already happened. In Daniel’s vision the total victory over all other empires in the heavens and the earth is secured as the Son of Man is given an eternal kingdom covering all nations that will never be destroyed. He is worshipped in the place of the beast (Daniel 7:14).

So as we approach Revelation and its picture of beastly regimes, there is a whole lot of this symbolism that is being drawn from the story of the Bible. Beastly regimes are those empires — military and economic and political systems — religious systems — that set themselves up in opposition to God’s people as people are pulled away from glory into beastliness by the serpent.

And as we read Revelation we have to remember that while we might want to make it about us, here and now, it is first a real letter to real churches facing their own beastly regime (Revelation 1:4). One that looks like it has crushed the serpent crusher. There is a new violent and beastly kingdom serving the agenda of the dragon, Satan, but whose false beauty, the “peace of Rome,” is secured by violence, and the worldly power and beauty of Rome is tempting people to worship its gods (and emperors).

This is the regime responsible for executing Jesus who will now set about not just persecuting Christians at various times — but worse, even — it will set about asking to be worshipped; proclaiming itself and its kings as the good economy, the good empire, with the mightiest army and the best gods. Rome is not all stick, there is plenty of carrot; plenty of temptations luring people to beastliness.

It looks impressive and wealthy and powerful; it offers pleasure and peace and prosperity. That is the temptation for Christians; it is not just about martyrdom, but about the same choice that faced Israel in Babylon — do they worship God or the beast?

John is writing to people with an immediate message, presenting an important choice. And that choice will end up being life and death, because beastly empires do not tolerate opposition — they use the sword to build their kingdoms.

The Roman empire will require worship. Revelation is probably written around the time of Nero — I think probably just after his death, but it could be any time in the first century. By the end of the first century, Rome is ruled by the emperor Trajan. One of his governors, Pliny writes a letter to Trajan asking what to do with these pesky Christians springing up in his province, Bythinia — it is a region in modern day Turkey — right on the border of the province of Asia (where the letter is addressed).

Pliny says when people are accused of being Christians he interrogates them, when they confess he interrogates them again with the promise of punishment, and those who will not recant he executes. That is beastly, right? But it is just a matter of course — it is a procedure. It is like he is trying to give these Christians an easy way out too. All they have to do is worship the beast. He says:

“…in the case of those who were denounced to me as Christians, I have followed the following procedure: I interrogated them as to whether they were Christians; those who confessed I interrogated a second and a third time, threatening them with punishment; those who persisted I ordered executed.”

He says the path out of execution is conforming to the Roman gods — worshipping their gods, including the image of the beast-king:

“Those who denied that they were or had been Christians, when they invoked the gods in words dictated by me, offered prayer with incense and wine to your image, which I had ordered to be brought for this purpose together with statues of the gods…“

And Pliny writes back…

”you have observed proper procedure”…

This is the context Revelation is written to; an empire that demands worship and lures Christians away from faithfulness with bright lights, and the ‘peace of Rome’ — a peace won through violence. And so the invitation is there: Choose a kingdom; Choose a king.

Worship the image of the beast, carry his mark (Revelation 13:15); and know that you are really worshipping Satan — the dragon (Revelation 13:4) — and so will become beastly… Or worship God, and be marked by the Lamb.

The beauty or the beast…

It is interesting to think back to that moment when the Pharisees test Jesus with the coins at this point… the Pharisees, who will end up teaming up with the beast to kill the Lamb. They come asking about paying taxes to Caesar (Mark 13:16-17), bringing little metal disks marked with the beast’s image — the face of the empire — little marks that allow people to buy and sell. And they ask “should we pay tax to Caesar” — should we participate in this empire?

Jesus’ answer has often been interpreted as saying that we should participate in this empire — pay these taxes — take part in the politics of the day because Caesar has the right to tax us, and there are all sorts of reasons — like Romans 13 — to think that is true. But there is more to his answer. When you ask yourself “where is God’s image”; how do we then give our whole selves to God?

Our participation in human empires — as people who belong to God — stops when these empires ask us to worship. We see that in Daniel, we see that in Jesus, and we will see that in Revelation.

Jesus calls us to worship God, with your whole life; to give God what is God’s — and be marked by Him, not to be swept up in a beastly empire.

We live with our own beastly regimes that call us to worship — that invite us to become serpent-like.

The former US President, Dwight Eisenhower, described a “military industrial complex” at the heart of the U.S empire. It is the heart of the Western world and the peace and prosperity we enjoy — a vicious cycle where the economy and the military and the politic systems are deeply enmeshed — producing an empire built on the capacity to be mighty and violent.

Image Source.

Now. We might feel a step removed from the U.S as a ‘middle power’ here in Australia, but the news recently of an AUKUS alliance does not let us bury our heads in the sand. We are marching in lockstep with this empire, and this approach to the economy.

And we do it thinking we are the good guys, just like the Romans and the Babylonians, bringing peace because we have a bigger sword. And this is not to say that governments should not wield, or buy, swords — the Bible literally describes them as a sword. Beastly governments are the ones that call for our worship, and pull us away from life shaped by the crucified Lamb, and think that salvation and redemption and peace lies in the way of the sword, rather than the beautiful way of the cross.

There is a Pentecostal theologian named Walter Wink who describes the modern world and its military industrial complex as a domination system — another way of talking about this is to label it as it is… beastly. He says The Myth of Redemptive Violence is the real myth shaping the modern world. It, and not Judaism or Christianity or Islam, is the dominant religion in our society today.

He sees this myth as essentially Babylonian — tracing our stories about heroes using violence to secure peace back to Babylon’s creation story, and to the Roman idea of peace. This myth is everywhere from Marvel movies to the stories we tell ourselves about peacekeeping as we send armies into places like Afghanistan. Wink says the Babylonian story has clear implications, that ultimately produce an ethic for kingdoms who follow the story:

“The implications are clear: “human beings are created from the blood of a murdered god. Our very origin is violence. Killing is in our genes.“

That we cannot imagine a world without armies — the sword — or solutions without domination of the will of the ‘good’ over the evil, secured through violence, demonstrates this. This myth — the idea that violence can be redemptive — that the sword wielded by government can save — is how beastly powers dupe us into complying with the system. Wink says:

“By making violence pleasurable, fascinating, and entertaining, the powers are able to delude people into compliance with a system that is cheating them of their very lives.”

This myth takes hold of our imaginations … it shapes our politics and our relationships and gets us participating in the machine — because the benefit of being complicit is that our security and power gets us cheap stuff from those we exploit, but this is how we lose our souls and become beastly.

The thing about democracy, too, is that we kind of all end up as kings and queens of our own little empires. We all have the capacity to be beastly as we choose what to worship — especially when that choice happens in a violent system shaped by this mythology, and in a global capitalist system where greed is good and we are disconnected from the production of the things we buy and enjoy.

I read this story this week about the environmental and economic destruction brought about by our need for cobalt — did you know you need cobalt? It is a vital part of the batteries in all our smart things — and this destruction is not in your backyard, but it is literally in the backyards of people in the Congo, whose lives are being devoured by our consumer behaviour. Or Lithium; the other vital component in batteries — the ones that power smartphones and electric cars, where the rapacious mining for these commodities destroys the environment in countries like Chile.

This sort of thing is much more the mark of beastliness than a vaccination. Maybe it will get harder and harder to buy stuff or participate in the modern economy without a smartphone in your pocket. But it is easier not to think about that, and not to think about how our military might — or China’s in the case of cobalt mining — or the economic power of the first world might perpetuate this issue and guarantee the supply chains and the exploitation by preventing revolution.

Maybe we think it is better to be in the empire, worshipping its idols than opposing it and being thrown to lions. Maybe we think we can have a foot in both camps?

But here is the thing.

You have to choose.

The beast, or the beauty.

You have to choose your kingdom and your king.

Choose who to worship and serve.

And doing that has to shape your politics and your economics and your approach to the sword… to power and violence. Because actually your politics and economics show what you have really chosen…

Jesus has created a kingdom — not a beastly kingdom but a priestly kingdom… Not a kingdom of violent dominion but a kingdom of servants of God, for his glory, secured by his blood.

He is the serpent-crushing son of man — the King of Kings — who brings the beautiful heavenly kingdom Daniel saw in his vision, and that John describes here… but he does not do it through violence… he does not crush the serpent with a sword… but with his blood. His story is not one of redemptive violence but redemptive sacrifice, where even if he slays the dragon, he does this through his death, absorbing the dragon’s blows. He is not just the shepherd king, but the lamb slain; he turns the myth of redemptive violence in on itself. He does not live by the sword.

His kingdom, as we will see through Revelation, looks very different to the grasping and devouring kingdoms of this world.

John grounds his vision in the victory of Jesus that has already happened; at the cross, and in the resurrection and ascension of Jesus, the son of God and son of man, as king of heaven and earth.

The story of the Bible is the story of the victory of God over sin, and death, and Satan — and ultimately the beastly kingdoms and humans who follow the way of the serpent into beastliness… through the sacrificial love of his chosen king… the serpent crushing seed… the lamb slain before the creation of the world.

And now we have to choose. And you really only have two choices — Satan, who loses, or Jesus, who wins. The beast, or the beauty.

January 10, 2024

Origin Story — East of Eden (and the path back)

This is an amended (and extended) version of a sermon I preached at City South Presbyterian Church in 2022. If you’d prefer to listen to this (spotify link), or watch it on a video, you can do that. It runs for 38 minutes. I’m going to be honest, 90% of the reason I started posting these sermons is that I think the title of this post is pretty great.The original introduction to this sermon, which was preached the day after the Federal Election in 2022, I’ve adapted that slightly for this blog version

In Genesis 4 we meet two brothers; two brothers offering two paths in response to humanity losing access to the Garden of Eden. We see a branching of the family tree; a choice between two lines of seed, with two ‘parents’ shaping the tree and the fruit it produces.

Like a good origin story this is where we start to set up the tension that is going to drive the narrative, we’ll see threads that take us to the end of our chunk of Genesis, but that pay off at the conclusion of the story, so we’re going to take up a couple of these threads — first by really looking at where the human family we’ve got our lens zoomed in on find themselves, and then by following them through the story of the Bible all the way up to Jesus. We’re seeing the start of two feuding family lines; the beastly line, children of the Serpent, and the line that might produce an image bearer who’ll lead people back past the guardian cherubim, into the presence of God and to the Tree of Life (Genesis 3:24).

Genesis chapter four deals with a major change of scene that came about in the events of chapter three; this human family find themselves exiled; outside of the Garden — the eastern entrance to the garden has been sealed off by a cherubim wielding a sword (maybe imagine this as a gate).

This move east, away from Eden, is going to be a significant repeated thread that’ll take this family all the way to Babylon in chapter 11; it’s a device to pay attention to, and to have in our imagination that the gateway back to God’s presence, his heaven on earth space, sealed off by cherubim is reached by heading west. Gates on the east of places like this will repeat over and over again through the Bible’s story. We’re going to be on the look out, ultimately, for both God’s presence returning to a place like Eden, and a Son of Adam leading the way back into God’s presence, and the seeds for both these storylines start in this origin story.

The cherubim guarding the way — people being kept out of the Holy of Holies where God dwells on earth — is a big obstacle to be overcome through the unfolding narrative, so is the idea that people now are going to approach God with a gap that requires sacrifice, and that’s where we land in chapter four. Adam and Eve failed to act as one in chapter three, but now they become one, so that Eve, the mother of the living (Genesis 3:20), brings forth a son, Cain (Genesis 4:1). They’re being fruitful and multiplying — and the question framed by the narrative so far is, has she brought forth an image bearer, who will rule the wold representing God, and maybe lead people back towards the Garden, or a beast? They’re fruitful and multiply again, and along comes Abel (Genesis 4:2). Two Sons of Adam; sons of man; that’s what Adam’s name means.

Abel shows a mastery over the animals, keeping flocks, while Cain does what humans are made to do in the garden; the task required for the uninhabited and unpopulated land to become fruitful; he works the ground (Genesis 4:2). He’s an earth man working the earth. So far so good.

They both bring the fruits of their labours to God as a sacrifice. Abel brings the firstfruits — the good, fatty, portions of his first born animal, while Cain just brings “some” fruit of the ground; the narrative doesn’t suggest its anything particularly special.

We’re not told where Cain and Abel are taking their sacrifice; but at this point it seems this human family is dwelling outside of the garden, but still in Eden, by the gates with the cherubim. There’s some fun stuff we’ll get to below around the Tabernacle that means I reckon readers of the Torah, tracing the development of some imagery, would imagine Cain and Abel taking their sacrifices up to the dwelling place of God, the Garden, to the barrier, to the cherubim guarding the way to God’s presence, knowing they can’t get in, but maybe seeking to restore themselves to being God’s representative people through sacrifice.

But it doesn’t go so well.

If you read the rest of Genesis you’ll see a type-scene beginning here; a conflict playing out between brothers. Humans were made to represent God together, and it’s not just husband and wife turned against each other from the curse in Genesis 3, but siblings, as firstborn and secondborn compete to be the child of promise. This type-scene repetition includes Jacob and hairy-beastly man Esau; and maybe later stories from the same big story can shape the way we read the dynamic here as these two brothers compete to represent God as the serpent-crushing line by offering a sacrifice. Or maybe only one brother is competing: Cain. Maybe that explains why there’s a little bit of implied tension between them as God receives Abel’s sacrifice and rejects Cain’s (Genesis 4:4-5). We’re not told why God favours one gift and not the other here; the New Testament book of Hebrews gives us an interpretation that says Abel was acting by faith, and so produced a better offering (Hebrews 11:4).

When his offering is rejected, Cain, the ground-worker gets a test; will he be a son of dying-beastly Adam? A son of the serpent? Or Eden-gardening Adam? Will he repeat his parent’s failure in response to his disappointment. Will he know Good from evil? God says “Sin — is crouching at the door” — like a beast — wanting to devour him — like the serpent wanted to devour his parents (Genesis 4:7).

And before we find out where Abel, the younger son, might be able to lead his family after his sacrifices are accepted, Cain makes a sacrifice of Abel in a field (Genesis 4:8). Abel makes an animal sacrifice then Cain acts like an animal and sacrifices his brother. Where he’s meant to sow life, he sows death. Abel’s blood, his flesh, is given back to the ground; dust to dust. 

This sacrifice shows sin has devoured him; he’s been swallowed up and become a bloody swallower of life; beastly; opposed to God’s plans for fruitfulness and multiplication. Now the land isn’t just desolate and empty, or a source of fruitful human life, it’s soaked in blood. Cain has become part of the seed of the serpent, its ‘striking’ offspring attacking the seed of his mother, Eve.

And just like in the garden, where God came to see his folks after their sin and asked “where are you?” now he asks “where is your brother?” (Genesis 4:9). Cain knows, but he pretends he doesn’t, he gets shifty — his dad owned up when God came looking, but Cain doesn’t. “Am I my brothers keeper?”

Well. Yes. He’s meant to be. Humans are meant to be one in their task of representing God; cultivating and guarding his presence in the world; defeating the crouching beast, and yet, he has become his brother’s killer; he is his brother’s keeper at this point; he knows exactly where he has hidden Abel, but he can’t hide what he’s done. God says his brother’s blood is crying out from the ground — telltale blood — calling out for justice (Genesis 4:10).

As a result, instead of Abel leading the family back towards the garden through his acceptable sacrifice, Cain’s unacceptable sacrifice means he’s sent further east; out of God’s presence, away from Eden, and the ground he once worked turns against him (Genesis 4:11-12, 16). Cain becomes a picture of the human condition in our exile from God. This serpent-like line is marked by violence, grasping, and vengeance. The ground has received Abel, but it will not receive Cain.

The garden was made as a place to rest with God and enjoy his hospitality; there’ll be no rest for Cain (Genesis 4:12, 14). People were blessed to be fruitful and multiply (Genesis 1:28), Cain is cursed (Genesis 4:11). He becomes a “restless wanderer” at war with the world — the ground is not going to yield fruit for him; he’s pushed out of God’s hospitality into an inhospitable world — further east (Genesis 4:16).

There’s more than a hint in this chapter that there might actually be other human families out there — outside of Eden, away from the Garden-temple, God’s dwelling place on the earth. Cain is scared people out there will kill him… He’s being driven from God’s presence, and he’ll be devoured. He’s got this picture of other people acting like animals. Violent killers who take vengeance. A world ‘out there’ that is red in tooth and claw.

At the moment with our camera zoomed in on Adam and Eve and their two boys there aren’t other people in the picture; we’ve been looking at this is the family tasked in the story with bearing God’s image in the Garden Temple and perhaps cultivating that life to spread it out into the world where the people Cain is scared of live. It’s a conundrum the narrative gives us, but doesn’t resolve — it just assumes killer people are going to be out there, outside the borders of God’s lands.

There are other ways to try to resolve that narrative conundrum, like they could be a bunch of siblings who’re about to go out into the world along with Cain, who might kill him, but they seem to be out there already, and I think it’s worth just sitting with the story the way it works, keeping the lens firmly on this family line we’re zoomed in on.

But here’s the point of the narrative — it’s not the people who are the real obstacle or threat to life, it’s being hidden from God’s presence (Genesis 4:14). Cain is sent out, exiled, with a mark from God protecting him. God promises that anybody who kills him will suffer vengeance (Genesis 4:15). We get this cycle of bloody violence, rather than people guarding and keeping with one another, ruling together, they’re murderous and celebrating their viciousness (Genesis 4:19-24). Cain goes out from God’s presence into this world. He’s exiled. He lives in the land of Nod, which is the Hebrew word for homelessness. He becomes homeless East of Eden (Genesis 4:16).

Cain finds a wife, out there away from his family, and he founds a city — a home away from home — a city in the land of homelessness away from God’s presence. If Eden, as a garden, was a walled enclosure marking out God’s presence and hospitality this city is an echo of Eden but without God’s presence (Genesis 4:17). In the midst of the story of a family tree we start getting some culture; some cultivation of creation; some fruitfulness and creativity; a weird origin story for instruments and farming tools and methods of farming livestock (Genesis 4:20-22). They’re taking the raw matter of creation and making stuff; they’re ruling. This city might look nice; the music might be good and the tools might help humans overcome the cursed ground, but there are makers of death in this family line. Cain might be avenged seven-fold; his descendant Lamech is a violent avenger who’ll kill a man just for wounding him (Genesis 4:23-24).

This is a beastly city; a city of violence and bloodshed and vengeance, in a land of ‘no-home’ — it’s the furthest thing you can get from the Garden in Eden; the home of life and generativity and God’s fruitful presence.

But the narrator takes us back to the land of Eden, outside the garden. Eve, the mother of the living, celebrates — God overcomes Cain’s beastly attempt to end the line of seed from Eve — he grants her a son, Seth, who has a son. We’re also told that at this point, people begin to call on the name of the Lord — while those out in Nod are shedding blood, there’s a little note of hope in this line (Genesis 4:25-26).

And we get a re-cap around the line of seed that the narrative is going to follow. Cain’s line is a dead-end that creates death, but this recap goes back to the beginning. God created mankind in the likeness of God, blessing them, male and female, and calling the earthling, Adam, then Adam’s son Seth is made in Adam’s own image and likeness — a chip off the old block. We’ve seen how an ‘image’ in the ancient world was an idol statue, or the king as an embodiment of the gods, part of being the image of or the likeness of someone, or of God, is also caught up in this idea of being a son or daughter (this idea gets picked up in Luke’s genealogy of Jesus, which calls Adam the “son of God.”) (Genesis 5:1-4).

A line of image bearing humans continues. God works despite human beastliness towards creating a serpent-crusher who will lead humanity back from the east, from restless wandering and a sense of homelessness into rest in a garden-like home.

These threads get picked up through the narrative of the Bible. People keep heading further east. People keep acting more like Cain — and the Serpent — than Adam’s purpose in the garden. We’re landing this series in Genesis 11, with another move east, to the Plain of Shinar, where humans build a tower called Babel (that’s Babylon), which, as it turns out, is also due East of Jerusalem. When the southern kingdom of Judah is exiled, like Cain, they’re sent eastwards again. The Genesis origin story is a story that helps exiled Israel understand their own predicament; they, too, have behaved like Adam and Eve, and Cain, like children of the Serpent.

Through this origin story God’s also going to call his people out of Babylon; starting with Abram, who comes from Ur of the Chaldeans — that’s Babylon — to begin a people of promise; a nation of priests; calling people back into his presence. In that nation of priests we get little Edens; little pictures of the paradise lost, not just the fruitful land around the garden, but the garden itself. We meet a bunch of people who look like they might lead people back to life with God; Abraham, Moses, The priests, David, Solomon and all their stories have echoes of this story.

Moses enters God’s presence, on the mountain and then builds a tabernacle, where there’s an atonement where blood from sacrifices would be taken up to two cherubim, who were sitting, guarding, the Ark as they guarded the garden. The Ark is the symbol of God’s heavenly throne, where he says he’d meet with his people “between the Cherubim” (Exodus 25:22). The ark was placed behind a curtain embroided with Cherubim (Exodus 26:1, 31) who are guarding the way, separating the Holy place, like Eden, where God’s people could dwell from the most Holy Place, God’s dwelling place — like the Garden. The curtain was a barrier like the gateway separating the garden from the rest of Eden.

The entry to the Tabernacle is on the eastern side of a courtyard (Exodus 27:13-19). To come towards God was to move from the east, back towards the curtain and the Cherubim; towards his dwelling place. Moses and his priestly family end up guarding the tabernacle; living to the east of this door; a bit like the Cherubim guards Eden; living at the doorway to God’s presence and caring for the Sanctuary.  Anyone else who approaches the way to life; to God’s presence, was to be put to death (Numbers 3:38, note the word for “caring for” or “keeping” here in Numbers is the same word used in God’s instructions to Adam in Eden).  Once a year, a priest — starting with Moses’s brother Aaron — would sacrifice animals (like Abel) to make atonement for sin — to bring God and his people together again. He couldn’t come past the Cherubim whenever he wanted; or he’d die — but this time it’s the presence of God in the cloud, above the ark and between the Cherubim, that’s the risk (Leviticus 16).

One day a year that priest would go behind the curtain; entering the Eden-like place, or specifically, the Garden-like space, where God is present, in order to sprinkle the blood of animals on the atonement cover, under the Cherubim. There are even two goats where ones blood is spilled and the other is exiled into the wilderness. There are echoes of the Cain and Abel story here, and throughout the story of the Old Testament. Sacrifices to God are offered where God dwells as an expression of a desire to be one with God again; to dwell with him in the Garden. For Cain and Abel these sacrifices are made in Eden, outside the Garden excluded from entrance, for Israel, it’s in the Tabernacle, then the Temple. In all these places the barrier remains.

And people in Israel keep acting so much like Cain that they get tossed to the east.

At one point in the story, and this’ll be significant below, Israel acts almost exactly like Cain, killing the people who are meant to lead them back to God in the temple. There’s this guy named Zechariah — who’s different to the Zechariah the book of the Bible is named after… they kill him in the Temple courts (2 Chronicles 24:20-21). Chronicles tells the sorry story of Israel becoming like Babylon, and so being sent east to Babylon; when that happens Babylon takes the whole Temple set up with them (2 Chronicles 36:15-21).

When Ezekiel the prophet talks about this moment he talks about God departing from Israel’s Temple with the cherubim; the presence leaves, heading to the east, first of the temple, then the city (Ezekiel 10:18-19), stopping on the mountain to the east of Jerusalem (Ezekiel 11:23), which is called the Mount of Olives. According to Ezekiel, Israel won’t come back to God, from the EAST, from exile in Babylon and back into God’s presence until God’s presence has first returned to Jerusalem. Ezekiel is brought, in a vision, to a gate facing east where he sees God’s glory returning to his Temple through an eastern gate (Ezekiel 43:1-4). Once that happens humans — first Israel, then the world, can be restored to garden-like life with God in a new Temple as the world becomes a picture of Eden restored; centred around a mountain temple facing East, where living water flows out to give life to the nations (Ezekiel 47, note Ezekiel 28 has earlier pictured Eden as a garden on a holy mountain in verses 13-14).

By the end of the Old Testament, via the prophets, we’re waiting for God’s presence to return to a Temple in Jerusalem; an Eden space, in order to dwell with people again and we’re waiting for someone like Abel, or a priest, to come and make a sacrifice God will accept; one who will get us past the Cherubim and re-open access to life in his presence; a human from the line of Serpent-Crushing seed who is not, like Cain, a beastly child of the snake. We’re waiting for someone who might bring us back into life with God; the paradise we lost.

And the New Testament picks up these threads ties them together in the person of Jesus. Luke tells us he’s from this line of seed; he’s the image bearing son of Adam, and Seth (Luke 3:23-38, especially 38). At the climax of the Gospel story Jesus heads towards Jerusalem. John’s called him God’s glory tabernacling in flesh and a walking Temple (John 1:14, 2:19-20). As he approaches Jerusalem, he approaches from the East; from the Mount of Olives (Matthew 21:1). He comes in to the city via the eastern gates and then enters the Temple court — moving from east to west towards the Holy of Holies, and he sets about cleaning up the sacrificial system, because people’s sacrifices — their sin offerings — have been corrupted by those running the temple (Matthew 21:12-13). He enters the Temple to proclaim judgment on the people running it, including the woes he pronounces on the Pharisees who ‘sit in Moses’ seat, who aren’t ‘keeping the Temple’ like Moses’ family, or leading people to God, they’re shutting the door of the kingdom of heaven on them (Matthew 23:13). He calls them a brood of Vipers — serpent children — who imitate Cain, throwing back to both the murder of Abel and of Zechariah the priest between “the altar and the sanctuary,” which is maybe how we should picture the location of both Zechariah’s death in the Temple, and Abel’s death at the gateway to Eden (Matthew 23:33- 23:35).

The blood of these innocent people is on the hands of Jerusalem’s leaders because they have become like Cain; like the Serpent; a violent and oppressive people whose city has become like Babylon.

Then he talks about himself as the Son of Man; the true son of Adam; who’s going to come like “lightning from the East” (Matthew 24:27) to give a place in God’s kingdom to those who are blessed by God; a kingdom prepared from the creation of the world (Matthew 24:30).  He’s going to enter God’s presence and sit at his right hand (Matthew 26:64), but before he gets there there’ll be more blood on the hands of the humans who take up Cain’s line; the line of the Serpent. Jesus will become like Abel, and like Zechariah; as he’s put on trial the priests are joined by the people of the city baying for blood, and they crucify him.

But Jesus’ arrival in the city, and even his death, is a demonstration of God’s glorious presence returning to Jerusalem to judge the city and its Temple, making access to life with God possible through the sacrifice of a firstborn. So the Temple curtain tears (Matthew 27:50-51); the curtain embroided with Cherubim, separating humans from the Holy place and containing God’s nominal dwelling place on earth (he doesn’t return to dwell in the Holy of Holies in the rebuilt Temple in the Old Testament). This Temple in Jerusalem has been replaced with one that will make people holy, bringing actual atonement so we can come in to God’s presence again.

This is how the book of Hebrews picks up what happens in the death of Jesus picking up the threads that run from exile from the Garden, to Cain and Abel, through the Tabernacle and the curtain and the altar — it says we’ve been made holy through his sacrifice; restored to being the kind of people who can live in his presence (Hebrews 10:10-11) by this one human who can lead us back into the Garden. Jesus replaces the sacrifices that couldn’t take away our sins in the temple and he has entered heaven to sit with God, having made one sacrifice for sins (Hebrews 10:12). His entering this Most Holy Place; the place behind the curtain makes him — his body through his sacrifice — a new and living way; a way past the cherubim and into life with God. Through his sacrifice we can draw near to God because atonement has been made and we have been washed and purified (Hebrews 10:21-24). His blood “speaks a better word than the blood of Abel” because while the tell-tale blood of Abel cried out for justice his sacrifices, even his death, did not bring humanity back into the Garden; Jesus, on the other hand, brings us into the city of the Living God, his heaven-on-earth dwelling place (Hebrews 12:22-23); the new Jerusalem the prophet Ezekiel saw as the end of Exile, and that John pictures for us in Revelation (Revelation 21-22). Jesus becomes the way maker; the mediator of a new covenant who brings us back to God; the media or way we use to come back to God, Jesus’ blood as the first born son sacrificed on our behalf is what Abel’s faithfulness anticipated. All those threads from the start of the Bible’s story  are tied together in our origin story, the Gospel. This is the story that shapes our lives; the story of how we find ourselves back in the promised land; the garden.

We might pin our hope on all sorts of leaders to carry us back to the promised land; modern politicians promise lots and deliver little. This can be disappointing, but our politics is not exhausted in our vote; we practice politics in where we give our time, our money, our energy, to building the city — the ‘polis’ — we want to live in; whether it’s Babylon or the New Jerusalem — and we do this knowing that it’s actually Jesus who builds the city, we’re just ambassadors popping up little embassies in our households and the communities we start, or occupy. Our businesses. The kids we educate.

We have to choose our family — our story — not red or blue, but Jesus or the Serpent.

Our politicians won’t lead us back to a promised land; they’ll make plenty of promises, but the world offers cities built by Cain, by children of the Serpent; Babylons, and old Jerusalems when we humans turn to violence to solve our problems, or live seeking our own way to heaven-on-earth.

But if we plant ourselves in the story of Jesus; in his family tree, as children of God, people living as God’s Images in the world, knowing that we are now located in Eden; the new Jerusalem; raised and seated in the heavenlies with Jesus; this story will produce fruit in our lives.

It’ll change the way we think about politics and participate in the polis; our city. Our desire to not be violent people of vengeance, but people of peace, will shape the way we vote; certainly, but it’ll also shape the causes we support with our time and money.

We’ll see ‘politics’ as going way beyond voting for a blue team or red team — Scomo, or Albo — who just offer more of the same; scratch a western liberal democracy and you’ll find violence and greed and individualism lurking below the surface; the coils of the Serpent — even if there are Christians in the corridors of power; and we should be participating in our city, our politics — this story will shape the alternative city we build within our city; our communities, our households we participate in and the way we use our tables. We aren’t nomads living in exile in the land of nod; or exiled in Babylon; we’re citizens of heaven, or the New Eden, called to live as those who are home, not those who’re wandering.

December 15, 2023