Bully's Blog

or Insanity and Spiritual Songs

Van Gogh’s work has been regarded by some as “hallucinatory,” however his letters show that few artists were as intelligent and rational. His work was not the product of his dark times but of his struggle against them.

“I am feeling well just now… I am not strictly speaking mad, for my mind is absolutely normal in the intervals, and even more so than before. But during the attacks it is terrible—and then I lose consciousness of everything. But that spurs me on to work and to seriousness, as a miner who is always in danger and makes haste in what he does.” [1]

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From James B. Jordan’s Trees and Thorns: [1]

The water in the ground of the garden is associated with Eve.

What Adam was to guard was the Garden, and preeminently Eve, its mistress. This is precisely what he refused to do. Later in the Bible, new Adams meet their Eves at wells, and defend them there. Eliezar met Rebekah at a well, and brought her home to Isaac (Gen. 24:11ff.). Jacob met Rachel at a well, and unsealed it for her — a sign as it turned out of his coming marriage to her (Gen. 29:10-11). Good Shepherd Moses met Zipporah at a well and defended her against bad shepherds (Ex. 2:16-19).

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From James B. Jordan’s Trees and Thorns: [1]

The land and garden of Eden were watered by a spring. Why call attention to the fact that God did not send rain? Why not just mention the spring and leave off the statement about rain? The reason, I believe, is to call our minds back to Genesis 1:2-9. We find in Genesis 1:2 that there was an ocean over the original earth. Then God created the firmament, and separated the waters above from the waters below. On the third day God gathered the waters below into areas below the surface of the land.

Now we have a clear distinction between waters above the firmament, the source of rain, and waters below, which would have to come up from under the earth. Both Genesis 1:2-9 and 2:5-6 set up the distinction eschatologically; ground water comes first, and then heavenly water.

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or Behold, I Make All Things Bloody

A critic wrote that Mel Gibson, with The Passion of the Christ, invented a new cinematic genre: the religious splatter film. This was intentionally disrespectful, but of course there is some truth to it. Perhaps more truth than we realise. God desired a world covered by blood.

The content of this post has been revised and included in Bible Matrix II: The Covenant Key.

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[1] A summary of James B. Jordan, Re-Creation in the Ascension Offering. Notice that the Tabernacle furniture itself, of course, also aligns with this structure of events, being a microcosmos.
[2] See Half the Blood.
[3] See also The Whole Bloody Bible.

or Mutton Dressed Up as the Lamb

Doug Wilson recently made a distinction between what usually passes for hypocrisy in Christian circles, and the kind practiced openly by the self-righteous:

One of my central pastoral responsibilities is that of keeping Christians away from hypocrisy, of the kind described in the New Testament. But this task, not surprisingly, is often misunderstood — and the reason it is misunderstood is that there are always lots of people who don’t want to be kept out of that kind of hypocrisy, and misdirection is that name of the game.

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[Some thoughts on Peter Hitchens’ The Rage Against God (and some great quotes) from Mark Thompson’s blog.]

I have been reading an immensely interesting book in the last couple of weeks. It is by Peter Hitchens, British journalist, author, broadcaster and brother of celebrated ‘new atheist’ Christopher Hitchens.

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From Tim Nichols:

Gregory the Theologian said, “What is not assumed cannot be healed,” and this is true.  For exactly that reason, Jesus Christ, the Second Person of the Triune God, assumed full humanity at His incarnation. In Jesus, we have a spectacular demonstration that man, the image of God, is an accurate image, and can partake in the divine nature.  Nothing human is foreign to Him; there is no part of you that you can point to and say, “Jesus didn’t have to deal with this.”

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Does the Bible really contain everything the man of God requires? The curve balls of history call the church to greater and greater wisdom, but the principles remain the same. What if one of the oddest books of the Old Testament contained crucial advice for modern western culture and the Christians attempting to deal with its tragi-comic apostasy? Continue reading

Conspiracy theories sell books and DVDs. Anti-Christians love to dig up dung the church dealt with long ago, dung that didn’t stick, and reheat it. They present it as steaming hot, something freshly exposed that the church has previously succeeded in hiding away, for consumption by moderns desperate for reasons to ignore the Law of God. James Howells writes:

“…texts and history and science are regarded as great friends of the vast majority of us in Christianity, not perilous foes to be feared and silenced.

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A lot of very smart Christians believe that the Creation account was written as a foil for Ancient Near Eastern creation myths. It was written by Moses to rally Israel culturally, to set a boundary between the Hebrew identity and that of the nations.

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