Leviticus 18 is about sex. Leviticus 20 goes over the same ground, but it’s about death. The phrase “dying you shall die” from Genesis 3 is used repeatedly in the passage, nine times. The verb “die” is used 20x. Let’s look a bit at the structure of chapter 20. Verses 1-5 form the first unit, flanked by references to Molech. The first line of verse 1 warns against giving seed to Molech, while the last uses the phrase “play the... Read more
Fragments from lectures given at the recent Biblical Horizons Summer Conference. The notes that follow examine the opening verses of Leviticus 18. 1) “I am Yahweh” or some equivalent phrase is used 49 (7 x 7) times in Leviticus. The phrase is never used before chapter 11, when the “holiness” section begins, and the concerns turn away from the rules of the sacrificial liturgy to the rules of cleanness and the land. Of the 49 uses in Leviticus, 24 are... Read more
William Everdell’s The First Moderns: Profiles in the Origins of Twentieth-Century Thought is one of the most satisfying and insightful books of cultural critique and history that I’ve read in a long time. It is impressively broad. Everdell writes with easy and often witty grace about quantum mechanics, the foundations of mathematics, “pantonal” music, cubism, stream of consciousness narrative, vers libre , etc. His central thesis is that modernism (beginning in the last decades of the 19th century) broke with... Read more
INTRODUCTION Jesus has condemned the scribes and Pharisees as hypocrites, and warns that Jerusalem ’s house is going to be left desolate (Matthew 23:37 -39). Just as Yahweh destroyed the abominable sanctuary at Shiloh (1 Samuel 4-6) and Solomon’s temple in Jerusalem (2 Kings 24-25), so Jesus will return to take vengeance against Herod’s temple (Matthew 24:1-3). THE TEXT “O Jerusalem, Jerusalem , the one who kills the prophets and stones those who are sent to her! How often I... Read more
Romans 3:25-26: God displayed Jesus publicly as a propitiation in His blood through faith. This was to demonstrate His righteousness, because in the forbearance of God He passed over the sins previously committed; for the demonstration, I say, of His righteousness at the present time, so that He would be just and the justifier of the one who has faith in Jesus. “It profits a man nothing when he is pleased with God.” That is Job’s complaint about his situation... Read more
We come here every week to give praise and honor to God. We also come because God promises to give us gifts – to cleanse us from sin, to speak a word of encouragement and conviction, to feed us at His table. The Triune God is a giving God, and He invites us into His house to offer Himself to us. As we worship, the Spirit draws us up into the life of the Trinity, and that means that the... Read more
Stephen Long ( Speaking of God: Theology, Language and Truth (Eerdmans Ekklesia) ) summarizes Alain Badiou’s complaint against the subordination of “truth to a liberal politics ruled by the language of rights and diversity”: “For Badiou the language of ‘rights’ requires that our political bonds are grounded in evil because we must first be victims who need protection before we can be political agents. ‘Diveristy,’ ‘the other,’ and ‘inclusivity’ merely repeat what already is. This language only tells us what... Read more
Why a crown of thorns? A sign of the curse, obviously. But thorns grow from the ground, and specifically grow from the ground when there are no people to cut them back. Thorns replace vines, grain, olive trees when Israel is driven into exile. A king with a crown of thorns is a king suffering the curse on his land, the curse of exile. Read more
Some partial, exploratory, perhaps incoherent thoughts on imputation. 1) A recurrent charge against imputation is that it seems to rest on a legal fiction – someone being treated as guilty who’s not, someone being treated as just who’s not. 2) There are hints within the Levitical system that imputation is not just a strange exception to the standard way of doing things, but that some act of imputation is always at work in any sinful action. (more…) Read more
In Genesis 9:11, Yahweh promises not to “cut off flesh” by water. That is the covenant with Noah. A few chapters later, Yahweh tells Abram that he must cut off the flesh of all male children of Israel, not by water but by a knife. That means that Abram’s children receive the “cutting off” that all flesh deserves, and got, in the flood. Or, it means that Abram’s cildren are the people who live beyond flesh, the people who have... Read more
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