Bully's Blog

Here’s an [edited] excerpt from Toby Sumpter’s new book on Job, which I am really enjoying. It is a commentary with a pastoral heart, as evidenced below:
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Final excerpt from the early pages of A. T. Ross’ Hebrews commentary. Part 1 here.

Temple and Typology

The evidence that Hebrews was written before the fall of Jerusalem in A. D. 70 is strengthened by a few other observations. Timothy is said to be alive (13:23), and while it cannot be certainly determined that this is the same Timothy that traveled with Paul, there exists no good reason not to think it is the same Timothy to whom Paul wrote two epistles.

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“Meat is murder. Tasty, tasty murder.”

Finally received my hard copy of God’s Kitchen: Theology You Can Eat & Drink.

“The Old Testament is a violent, bloody book, but the more we modern Christians neglect it, the more our gospel loses its teeth. This little book will call you out, cut you up, lift you up, and set you on fire. It begins where all spiritual meat does: not at the dinner table, not in the kitchen, nor even at the market. It begins in the abattoir. The God of the Old Testament is a butcher only because the Christ of the New Testament is a chef.”

Here’s what’s on the menu:

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[Today and tomorrow I’m posting a couple of excerpts from the draft of a forthcoming book-length commentary by A. T. Ross, The Messianic Priest-King: An Exposition of the Book of Hebrews. His goal has been to take an approach to Hebrews similar to David Chilton’s concerning the book of Revelation, “paying close attention to the symbolic dimension and how the intertextual uses of the Old Testament impacted the argument.” Dealing with the chiastic structures and typology, and quoting all the best guys, Adam has really done his homework. I’ll keep you posted on publication.]

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Adam’s Challenge in Eden to Become the King He Was

by Mark Horne (reposted with permission)

“What we need to ask ourselves is, why might a righteous and sinless human need to ‘die’ in order to “live”?”

In basic Evangelical Christian teaching, “sanctification” is a process in which a believer, by the working of God’s Spirit, is able more and more to put off sin and live in more complete obedience to God. That way of summarizing the teaching can be misleading since perception is not always the same as reality. After all, one part of the process might involve discovering hidden sin, which means one might, at times in one’s life, be sanctified by (apparently) becoming more sinful, not less. Furthermore (or perhaps the same issue), new stages in life can bring new and more powerful temptations which one might initially fail to resist.

But another problem with “sanctification” as understood as the basic process and calling in the Christian life, is that Evangelical teaching cannot, on this definition, allow that Jesus, from the time he was born to the time he died, went through sanctification.

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An excerpt from Bible Matrix III:

Just as Esau was the line of Cain rolled into one, so Jacob was a true son of God. In fact, being blameless as Noah was, the Lord granted him a vision of the true Gate of God, a tower reaching to heaven.

In Bible Matrix, we mentioned the significance of Jacob’s “ziggurat” vision as it relates to the mountain of God. [1] Jacob was laid out on the ground like Adam. His slumber brings a “Bridal” vision.

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From Douglas Wilson’s Why Ministers Must Be Men:

Any discussion of women’s ordination will obviously revolve around the direct Pauline statements on the subject, and we will certainly spend the lion’s share of our space there. However, the Pauline instructions were not delivered in a vacuum and when he makes his appeals outside his immediate situation, he makes those appeals to the Old Testament, ground his appeals in both the history recorded there and the law given there.

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“Jacob didn’t steal the future. He rescued it from a Man who put food first and whose eyes were not yet opened.”

James Jordan has done the Church a great service by rehabilitating the reputations of Noah the drunk, Abraham the liar, Jacob the swindler and Moses the murderer. He has shown us that the context of these so-called sins and crimes mean that they are nothing of the sort. [1] By this, I don’t mean “cultural context” but Covenant context. The reason these great men of God (and their wonderful women) get such a bad rap is because their stories are treated like a bunch of separate things that occurred, from which we must draw obvious and disconnected morals, rather than a single narrative begun in Genesis 1.

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