144,000 are sealed, 12,000 from 12 tribes of Israel (Revelation 7:4-7). Those are consecrated for martyr sacrifice. Immediately John sees a great multitude from every tribe and tongue and nation and people (7:9), holding palm branches. It reminds one of Elim, with its 12 springs and 70 palm trees (Exodus 15). The 144,000 martyrs become the springs of living water that give life to the palm trees of the nations. Read more
On the “Downloads” page (click above), I’ve just posted a paper from a 2010 ETS meeting entitled “Sacrifice and Worship after the Stoicheia .” It’s an exploration of some of the hermeneutical questions surrounding the use of Old Testament ceremonial texts as patterns for Christian liturgy. Read more
JW Hewitt calls the prayer of Cyrus recorded at the end of Xenophon’s Cyropaedia “the loftiest and purest thanksgiving I have found anywhere in Greek literature.” Curious that it is put into the mouth of a Persian. The prayer reads (in Walter Miller’s translation): “O ancestral Zeus and Helius and all the gods, accept these offerings as tokens of gratitude for help in achieving many glorious enterprises; for in omens in the sacrifice, in signs from heaven, in the flight... Read more
Aaron Cummings writes: “In response to your post on cherubic faces corresponding to temple furniture. One significant item missing is the golden altar. We know from Hebrews 9:3-4 that the golden altar was a part of the HOH even though it was placed in front of the veil. Thus the altar of continually-burning incense prayer was the ever accessible portion of the HoH. The invisible throne was made present to the priest through prayer (significant lesson, no?). To get back... Read more
Some more chants and outlines of the Old Testament. The books of Judges and 1-2 Samuel narrate the transition from the Mosaic to the Davidic covenants, from the age of priests to the age of kings, from the age of the ox to the age of the lion. As so often in the Bible: God tears down the world so He can build an oth er . Bad as the time of Judges was, it was not the end of... Read more
For the ancients, the week was a tuned cosmos. According to ancient astronomy, the planets were in crystal spheres that formed a seven-stringed lyre in the sky. Moving from earth outward, the seven strings are: moon, Mercury, Venus, sun, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn. If you ascended from earth all the way up to the sphere of fixed stars, you’d pass through those seven spheres. Now, tune that list by fifths. (more…) Read more
Developing some observations and ideas from James Jordan’s lectures and writings on Revelation. Cherubim have four faces: ox (sometimes calf), lion, eagle, man. And from Ezekiel we learn that these four faces correspond to the four points of the compass: The ox stands at the east and looks west, the eagle is south and looks north, the lion is west and looks east, the man at the north and looks south. Because of these positions on the compass, we can... Read more
Leviticus 2:4: When you bring an offering of a grain offering baked in an oven, it shall be of unleavened cakes of fine flour mixed with oil, or unleavened wafers spread with oil. The Lord’s Supper fulfills the feasts and sacrifices of the Old Testament. Long ago, Israel offered tribute offerings of grain on the altar. Now God shares the final tribute offering, Jesus the Living Bread, with us. God doesn’t want raw plants on His table. The grain of... Read more
If you stop breathing for a few minutes, you’ll die. If you don’t eat or drink for a time, you’ll die. You are porous. Bits of the world go in and out of you all the time. If they stop, you can’t last long. This physical fact is a clue to what it means to be human. We are dependent creatures ultimately dependent on God. Man does not live by bread alone. We live only because the Spirit, the Lord... Read more
Bonnie MacLachlan ends her fascinating The Age of Grace (p. 147) by suggesting that the starting point for the Greek idea of charis is that it is a “social pleasure.” In some of the poetry she examines, though, “the accent was placed on the element of reciprocity, on the obligation created by the giving of social pleasure to give social pleasure back, in return. The element of reciprocity sometimes takes such prominence, in fact, that the notion of social favors... Read more
Leithart
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