Bully's Blog

Red Blood, Blue Blood

Behold, when we come to the land, you shall bind this line of scarlet thread in the window from which you let us down… Joshua 2:18

Each Israelite was to wear blue tassels on the four corners of his robe. The tassel was a blue cord that unraveled into threads, a “one” that became many. Using the “systematic typology” of the Bible Matrix, we can see that these four blue tassels correspond to the four rivers the flowed down from the spring under the Garden of Eden. [1]

So, what’s the deal with the “red cord” that Rahab was commanded to display in her window in Jericho? Firstly, the Hebrew word isn’t the same word as the “cord” in Numbers 15.

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“There are enough people around who can verbalize orthodoxy on paper.”

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“Jordan lays out all of the theological and typological issues connected to worship, and more specifically to the Lord’s Supper itself.”

Adam Ross, who I reckon gets through five books on a slow day, has reviewed James Jordan’s From Bread to Wine: Toward a More Biblical Liturgical Theology on goodreads.
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“We steadily covet more than our humble (but beautiful) selves can ever contain.”

A thought-provoking post from Matthew Jepsen. (Reproduced here with permission).

Below, Lewis articulates a contemporary rendition of Augustine’s “God-shaped hole”:
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Excerpt from James B. Jordan, Babylon and the Babel Project, Biblical Horizons Occasional Paper No. 39. Available from www.biblicalhorizons.com

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or The Undeserved Immunity of Devilish Talmudism

“For they bind heavy burdens, hard to bear, and lay them on men’s shoulders; but they themselves will not move them with one of their fingers.”
Matthew 23:4

One of the great benefits of understanding the “preteristic” nature of the New Testament is the way the many supposedly “generic” apostolic warnings in the epistles are suddenly grounded in their Jewish context. The destruction of the Temple barely gets a mention in any church today, yet when the letters of Paul, Peter, James and John are understood to be aimed at Jews outside the Church and Judaizers inside it, the New Testament doesn’t become less relevant to us, but more relevant.

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“These are the generations of the heavens and the earth…” Genesis 2:4

The word “generations” is toledot. Some scholars believe this indicates earlier sources for the texts of Genesis, ancestral documents that were collated and assembled. But this view reflects modern distrust in the deliberate, careful process of revelation throughout Bible history. The eye of faith sees that these texts were always “Covenant texts.” God is a documentary God. Nothing is left to chance. The toledot are not only historically but also Covenantally significant.

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Come, you blessed of My Father … for I was hungry and you gave me food; I was thirsty and you have me drink; I was a stranger and you took Me in; I was naked and you clothed Me; I was sick and you visited Me; I was in prison and you came to me. (Mt. 25:34-36)

NOTE: THIS POST HAS BEEN REMIXED AND INCLUDED IN GOD’S KITCHEN.

In an affluent society, the debate between welfare and generosity gravitates towards cold, hard cash. But Jesus’ call goes beyond our bank balances into hearts and even, gasp, into our homes. Steve Wilkins writes:

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The love of the world is an abstraction, and one that is very easy to talk about. Anyone can say, “I love the poor,” and most of them can even be sincere. But they mean that they love the poor whom they do not know. They love the poor across town, who will never come to their door. They love the poor whom they will never touch.

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or Music of the Spheres

Peter Leithart recently posted about ancient astronomy’s “lyre in the sky.”

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.

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“The Left might be godless, but the Right has only the form of godliness.”

Just chucking some ideas around here, so comments are welcome (especially from actual Americans.)

From the New York Times (April 2008)

U.S. prison population dwarfs that of other nations

The United States has less than 5 percent of the world’s population. But it has almost a quarter of the world’s prisoners.
[This post has been refined and included in Sweet Counsel: Essays to Brighten the Eyes.]
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