Israel condensed into One

"Jesus is... Israel condensed into One. The obedient and faithful Israel... Matthew emphasises that Jesus is to be seen as Israel. Jesus recapitulates and and fulfils Israel's history. As for example he is called out of Egypt and tested for a period of forty in the wilderness"

(Paul R. Raabe, 31:20, MP3, Delighting in the Good Law of Yahweh: An Old Testament Perspective)

The Son of God in Luke 1-4

Listening to: The Creation (Haydn - no really I am)

The first four chapters of Luke seem to constantly be asking the question "whose son is Jesus?" There is barely an episode involving Jesus where that question isn't asked.

Luke 1:32-35: The angel declares to Mary that she will bare a son who will be called the "Son of God"

Luke 2:41-52: The family visits the Temple and they lose Jesus. When they find him Mary tells Jesus "Son...your father and I have been searching for you". He responds by explaining that he must be in his "Father's house". They don't realise whose Son he really is. But he doesn't grasp at his sonship to the Father but is "submissive" to them. Perhaps you could say that although he is the Son of God, he is willing to count himself "Son of Man" (although that title has Daniel-vision-of-glory-connections it is also regularly linked to suffering in the Gospel).

Luke 3:22: The Father declares from heaven that Jesus is his "beloved Son".

Luke 3:23: The very next verse Luke begins his backwards genealogy by noting that many people "supposed" Jesus to be the Son of Joseph.

Luke 3:37: After running back through the line of sons Luke concludes that Adam was "the son of God".

Luke 4:3, 9: The very next episode after this declaration is the the temptation of Jesus where Satan says "If you are the Son of God, command this stone to become bread." With his third and final temptation Satan again challenges Jesus "if you are the Son of God..." Unlike Adam, Jesus resists the temptation.

Luke 4:22: The next episode in the Gospel recounts Jesus preaching the good news of his coming, and people question "Is not this Joseph's son?" and drive him out of time. They don't think he is the Son of God.

Luke 4:41: Jesus heals casts out some demons the first of whom confesses him to be "the Holy One of God" and the other "demons also came out of many, crying, 'You are the Son of God!'"

A few refections:

• It now makes perfect sense that Luke's genealogy is not at the beginning of the book as in Matthew. If you ignore the section headings and chapter numbers it is crystal clear that in functions as a link between the Father's declaration of Jesus' Sonship with him being the perfect Son of God that Adam never was when tempted by Satan.
• No humans confess Jesus to be the Son of God. Angels do, the Father does, and demons do. Impliedly even the devil does. Why can humans not see it? (perhaps 9:35 + 10:22 provide a hint)
• Perhaps Luke's genealogy is not meant to be Jesus' genealogy at all, except as he takes it upon himself. This would solve the problem of harmonising it with Matthew's geneology. He assumes the inheritance of death that comes from Adam, even though he is a new Adam who obeys his Father in heaven.

This post is prompted by a facebook comment from Chris and is the fruit of barely any thought on my part. Please contribute any reflections you may have, particularly about the temptation (although in the other Gospels I see it more as a "new Israel" than a "new Adam" episode, it is clear that Luke sees the link primarily with Adam).

Crayons v. Prayer

We pray to the real Jesus where he is now. We reach children's hearts not by offering them crayons to draw Jesus, but by showing them how to talk to him. He is real, and is not a picture.

(p.32, Edmund Clowney, How Jesus Transforms the Ten Commandments)

A false dichotomy but you get his point.

The Trinity in Salvation

I think this diagram represents how I think of our salvation.

I want to use it to explain a few things in future posts if I get the time. For example:

• The differnce between how contemporary Evangelicals and the Reformers view the marks of the church/Christian
• How in the 'law' God works in an sub-Trinitarian way (will have to be careful with that one)
• How Stuart Olyott, and not Luther, got it wrong (with all due respect)
• How the cross both is and isn't where Christ is glorified, and why weakness is and isn't where Christians are strong
• Where we should find our assurance
• The dangers of ritualism, and anti-ritualism

But firstly I'll just throw my big-picture out there for you to point out my heresies.

As a bit of clarrification, what I'm trying to communicate in the diagram is a whole range of things, such as:

• How all three persons are at work in our salvation, at every stage
• How Christ and the Holy Spirit are inseperable
• The Father's initiative
• The centrality of the cross and resurrection
• How the humbling of the Son was both going in the opposite way to getting glory, but also the way to glory
• The ultimate end of salvation being the glory of God
• That works come from faith which comes from the external word which comes from Christ's death and resurrection. They are all of an ordered piece.
• and probably a load of other random things I've forgotten

The right question to ask about Jesus

The right question is not:

• What is Jesus; man or god?

But:

• Who is Jesus; the God of Israel, or someone else?

That is what Richard Bauckham argues in his awesome book God Crucified, which is now part of Jesus and the God of Israel: God Crucified and Other Studies on the New Testament's Christology of Divine Identity. No apologies for typing out a big passage of the book:

This [Jewish] kind of practical monotheism, requiring a whole pattern of daily life and cultic worship formed by exclusive allegiance to the one God, presupposes a god who is in some way significantly identifiable. the God who requires what the God of Israel requires cannot be merely the philosophical abstraction to which the intellectual currents of contemporary Greek thought aspired. Jews, in some sense, knew who their God was. The God of Israel had a unique identity. The concept which will be the central focus of the whole argument of this chapter is that of the identity of God.

[...]

The term identity is mine, not that of the ancient literature, but I use it as a label for what I do find in the literature, which is not, of course, necessarily a notion precisely the same as modern ideas of personal identity, but is nevertheless clearly a concern with who God is. The value of the concept of divine identity appears partly if we contrast it with a concept of divine essence or nature. Identity concerns who God is; nature concerns what God is or what divinity is. Greek philosophy, already in the period we are discussing and in a way that was to influence the Christian theological tradition significantly in the period after the New Testament, typically defined divine nature by means of a series of metaphysical attributes: ingenerateness, incorruptibility, immutability and so on. My point is not that the biblical and Jewish tradition had no use at all for statements about the divine nature. Some Jewish writers in the later Second Temple period consciously adopted some of the Greek metaphysical language. But in these writers the dominant conceptual framework of their understanding of God is not a definition of divine nature - what divinity is - but a notion of divine identity, characterized primarily in ways other than metaphysical attributes. That God is eternal, for example - a claim essential to all Jewish thinking about God - is not so much a statement about what divine nature is, more an element in the unique divine identity, along with claims that God alone created all things and rules all things, that God is gracious and merciful and just, that God brought Israel out of Egypt and made Israel his own people and gave Israel his law at Sinai and so on.

(pp. 6-7, "God Crucified" in Jesus and the God of Israel)

But because Christianity is missionary, and because Jesus Christ makes the claim to be Lord of all the world, we do need to answer the first question, even if it is the wrong question. However, because it is the wrong question we will find ourselves in dangerous territory before we even get going in answering the question. In answering the first question we are going to have to talk about metaphysical attributes whether we like them or not. What we then have to do is gradually lead the questioner down the road to the safer ground where the second question can be asked and answered.

This is risky. It would be safer to stay in our ghettos. In fact wouldn't it be safer if we didn't use English at all to describe God? Or even better, lets stop talking about God at all! But then again, perhaps if God is bold enough to speak to us, and incarnate himself with us, perhaps we should be bold and follow his lead.

As an interesting example of this, I often think of how bold it was of bold it was of the Israelites to say that Yahweh is El. I can't imagine being bold enough to do that. I would want to totally avoid using the language of El in the ANE context.

What Jesus had to say about himself

I was kept up last night reading an old set of lectures by James Denney I had just picked up for £1.50. One in particular was excellent entitled 'The Witness of Jesus to Himself'. I have tried to give get down an outline of what he had to say in his own words:

1. The 'present, permanent, and all-embracing significance of Christ is the mark of the Christian religion in all its historical forms'.

2. 'Jesus, in all the accounts we have, speaks much about Himself. He knows that He is a problem to those by whom He is surrounded, and that on the true solution of the problem everything depends.'

3. 'What, I think, strikes every reader of the gospels, and what must have been immensely more striking to those who heard Him speak, is the moral authority claimed and exercised by Jesus.'

1. 'Christ claimed, authoritatively, to be the consummator of the old religion.'
2. 'it was part of the moral authority exercised by Jesus that He criticised, and where He thought fit, abrogated, even what had hitherto possessed divine authority.'
3. 'But Christ's authority is principally exercised, in the first instance, in the demand for personal obedience and personal confidence. Follow me is a summary of all He has to say to men.'

4. 'He claimed a unique knowledge of God, and claimed it on the basis of a unique relation to Him. He revealed God as the Father, and He was able to do so because He knew Himself as the Son [of God].'

5. When Jesus referred to himself as "the Son of Man" 'He intimated to those who were able to understand it His consciousness of being head of a new, universal, and everlasting kingdom, in which all that was truly and characteristically human should have authority.'

6. 'with all His identification of Himself with our interests - making common cause with us as men to the very utermost - Jesus, it is plain on every page of the gospel, was conscious of the immense interval which separated Him from us.'

7. 'Jesus often puts Himself forward [with] the character of a Judge [...] Jesus looked into the future, but what He saw there was not the coming of another, but His own coming again.'

You may notice the overlap with John Stott's three points.

Three points on the claims of Jesus

John Stott says he finds it helpful to think over the claims of Jesus under three headings (are you surprised it is not four?):

• Fulfilment - of OT promises
• Authority - in teaching, over death, demons and illness, to forgive sins etc
• Intimacy - with God the father (e.g. Matthew 11:27)

The Transfiguration on the Mountain

One of the puzzles people consider when reading the account of the transfiguration (Matthew 17:1-13) is what are Moses and Elijah doing there?

The most common answer is to represent the Law and the Prophets, or the Law and the Eschaton (Bock). However, while I think there is some truth in that I wonder whether the thing that elicits their mention is the setting on a "high mountain". Moses and Elijah to my poor memory were the only people to have ascended Mount Sinai/Horeb to talk with God.

All the classic marks of God's presence appear in the Gospel narrative (the cloud, the transfiguration like Moses experienced). The disciples were no doubt thinking at first that we would have a second law giving like Moses received, or perhaps a second message and commission like Elijah received. However all they get is 14 words, "This is my beloved Son, with whom I am well pleased; listen to him". God then promptly disappears. Except he hasn't. He is present with the disciples in Jesus. Jesus is not a second Moses, or a second Elijah, such that people looked forward to. He is someone quite different. He is not the messenger of the word, but the word himself. As Jesus himself says to the disciples coming down the mountain, he is not Elijah come again (John the Baptist is). He is the one that the second Elijah is not even worthy to untie the sandals of.

[Incidentally I wonder if Paul's comment in Galatians 1:17 "I went away into Arabia, and returned again to Damascus" is meant to be a demonstration of how he received the gospel that he explains in 1:11-12 was "not man's gospel" because he "did not receive it from any man, nor was [he] taught it, but [he] received it through a revelation of Jesus Christ." i.e. he went to Mount Sinai and was given his message by God in Christ (Note to self: it is probably time to read Tom Wright's essay on Galatians 1:17)]

Jonah and Jesus in the midst of a storm

When people look at the parallels between Jesus and Jonah focus is usually (rightly) on the sign of Jonah. However I was reading Mark yesterday and read the passage in which Jesus calms the storm (Mark 4:35-41) and my thoughts drifted to the story of Jonah. Jonah is one of my favourite parts of the bible and my thoughts often drift there (I even 'commissioned' my brother to do a print about it once, see picture). Strangely though when looking through my commentaries not all pick up on it and when they do it is only a slight mention which considers the power of God over the weather. However, while Jesus is taking the place of YHWH in this episode I think he is also taking the place of Jonah.

Jesus suggests that they cross the sea of Galilee to go to "the country of the Gerasenes" described by D Bock as "predominantly Gentile, although it had a substantial Jewish population". Although it was unlikely to have been a gentile mission, nevertheless to the Gospel readers that must have come to mind in the light of later events. In contrast Jonah boards a boat to Tarshish to flee the presence of YHWH and the mission he had been given.

Like in Jonah, "a great windstorm arose, and the waves were breaking into the boat, so that the boat was already filling." This was no minor squall; as with Jonah the ship was likely going to sink. Obviously though there is no sense that this is God's discipline of Jesus, although in the light of Jesus' later comments it may be discipline of the disciples.

"But [Jesus] was in the stern, asleep on the cushion." just as Jonah had slept in the midst of the storm. "And [the disciples] woke him" as the mariners woke Jesus. The disciples question Jesus, "Teacher, do you not care that we are perishing?" There seems no reason to believe that they were calling on Jesus to stop the storm, perhaps they wanted him to help bail out the ship, or like Jonah's shipmates to call on God to still the storm.

"And he awoke and rebuked the wind and said to the sea, 'Peace! Be still!'" Jesus stops the storm as quickly as YHWH does once Jonah has been thrown overboard. As in all the gospels the the main story is Jesus, who has the same awesome power as YHWH of the OT. The disciples demonstrated they had "no faith" in Jesus to be in control of the weather itself, yet Jesus with a word could rebuke the wind as there was no reason for judgment of the Christ and those with him.

The disciples ask "Who then is this, that even the wind and the sea obey him?" and the answer is provided by the demon (!) a few verses later. Jesus is "Son of the Most High God" but he is also is the man who completed the mission that Israel was too sinful to complete.

Like Jonah he eventually comes to gentile dominated territory. He cleanses the country he finds himself in. The man from the tombs with the "unclean spirit" is healed and the unclean pigs driven into the sea. The Kingdom of God is expanding and driving out the rule of the Devil. Unfortunately unlike the Ninevites the people reject Jesus and drive him back to Galilee. But Jesus does not write off the territory and returns in Mark 7. But I don't know what to make of Jesus' permission to the man to "Go home to your friends and tell them how much the Lord has done for you, and how he has had mercy on you", which seems to conflict with the theme in Mark of Jesus' refusing to allow people to speak of him. Bock thinks this is because "in a Gentile region there was less chance of misunderstanding". Perhaps it is because Jesus was only visiting and so not risking his life in allowing the news to spread.

Anyway, despite my rambling hopefully we see two things about the identity of Jesus in this passage:

• Jesus as YHWH with power over creation.
• Jesus as Israel should have been, the Kingdom of Priests who bring God's rule and God's message to the world.