Bully's Blog

“The apocalyptists said, The world is coming to an end: Give up! The Biblical prophets said, The world is coming to a beginning: Get to work!”

Is it only me that has to restrain himself from violence when someone refers to the Revelation as “Apocalyptic”? I guess using a long word derived from Greek is a handy way of disguising the fact that you have little idea of what’s actually going on in the book.

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or The Holy Hymen 101

Blood on the doorpost of the al-Qiddissin Coptic Church in Alexandria, Egypt.

“This, like many things in the Torah, sounds pretty barbaric. But, like many of the weirdest things in the Torah, we see these laws, which are personal types, played out in corporate antitypes right to the end of the Bible.”

“But if the thing is true, and evidences of virginity are not found for the young woman, then they shall bring out the young woman to the door of her father’s house, and the men of her city shall stone her to death with stones, because she has done a disgraceful thing in Israel, to play the harlot in her father’s house. So you shall put away the evil from among you.” (Deuteronomy 22:20-21)

In a recent debate about Greg Bahsen’s woeful review of Chilton’s The Days of Vengeance, an online friend took interpretive maximalism to task.

For instance, because doorposts could be likened to legs, Jordan claims that the passover blood smeared on doorposts corresponds to the blood of circumcision—which in turn is equivalent to the tokens of virginity from the wedding night (I am not kidding; cf. The Law of the Covenant, pp. 82-83, 252-258). [PDF]

Yes, this sounds weird, but it isn’t at all. Bahnsen didn’t have an imagination fully informed by the Bible.

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Doug Wilson writes:

“The Levitical administration brought strong curses for disobedience (Heb. 2:2-3); the New Covenant administration brings much greater curses (Heb. 10:29; Heb. 12:25). Christians commonly assume that the really terrifying curses for disobedience were given in the Old Testament, and that under the New Testament all is grace. But this is precisely the opposite of the New Testament’s teaching on the subject” (To a Thousand Generations, pp. 28-29).

This is certainly a side of the New Covenant that Christians are never taught. The first time I ever heard of it was in David Chilton’s Revelation commentary The Days of Vengeance in 1989. But along with baptism (just had to throw that in), a rediscovery of the Old Covenant hammer makes everything in the New Covenant look like a nail. The Revelation is, after all, a book about the end of the Old Covenant.

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Revelation can’t be fully appreciated without attention to its literary structure. I’m no expert, but have a gander at this…

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“There is a very important connection between the Church’s worldview and the Church’s hymns. If your heart and mouth are filled with songs of victory, you will tend to have an eschatology of dominion; if, instead, your songs are fearful, expressing a longing for escape—or if they are weak, childish ditties—your worldview and expectations will be escapist and childish.

Historically, the basic hymnbook for the Church has been the Book of Psalms. The largest book of the Bible is the Book of Psalms, and God providentially placed it right in the middle of the Bible, so that we couldn’t miss it! Yet how many churches use the Psalms in musical worship? It is noteworthy that the Church’s abandonment of dominion eschatology coincided with the Church’s abandonment of the Psalms.”

—David Chilton, Paradise Restored.

or Eclipsing the Temple of Doom

“Because narrow is the gate and difficult is the way which leads to life, and there are few who find it.”  Matthew 7:14

Oh dear. This verse proves postmillennialism wrong. It also proves the rest of the Bible wrong because that is postmillennial too. Fortunately, this problem seems almost as simple to deal with as Irenaeus’ ambiguous text that non-preterists use to “unfound” preterism.[1]

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“For as the new heavens and the new earth [Land] which I will make shall remain before Me,” says the LORD, “So shall your descendants and your name remain.”  Isaiah 66:22

If you’ve been around preterism for a little while, you will know that this phrase is Covenantal. It refers to a new firmament (blood covering) and new mediators (on the Land); a new crystal sea government (Laver) and a restored four-cornered Israel (Bronze Altar).

So, Isaiah’s and Peter’s references to a new heaven and a new earth refer to looming Covenantal events, events which were contemporary to the respective authors. Isaiah spoke of the Restoration of Israel from Babylon. Peter spoke of the full inauguration of the kingdom in AD70.[1]

But extreme preterists want to divorce the term from physical reality altogether. I do follow them up to a point, but I think the solution is that, yes, all Creation is Covenantal, but it began with the physical world and will end with a restored physical world:
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Or, Adam as bread; Christ as bread and wine.

“Now when He had spoken these things, while they watched, He was taken up, and a cloud received Him out of their sight.” –Acts 1:9

“Jesus went through everything He went through, His incarnation, His life, His death, His resurrection, in order to ascend as man to heaven in the cloud… The glory cloud is God’s mobile home, a chariot-throne in which He drives around and manifests His presence, glory, grace and judgment.

This cloud shows up a lot more often in Scripture than you would think. We all know that the cloud brought the people through the wilderness, but the cloud is all over the place in the Bible. Sometimes you only get a hint that it’s there by the sound that it makes, its voice, a sound like a rushing mighty wind.

The cloud was at the Creation, at the Red Sea crossing, at Mount Sinai, in the wilderness, in the Tabernacle and in the Temple. It is God’s throne room, His sanctuary. This is where Jesus Christ ascended. The ascension marks the climax of what the Word was made flesh for. God created man for the purpose of ascension and transfiguration.

When Paul talks about the natural body versus the spiritual body, he doesn’t mean physical versus non-physical. He is contrasting the physical body with which Adam was created with the ‘supra-physical’ body which Christ now has…

Christ divested Himself of the glory of His divinity, in order to receive the glory that He had before, but now to receive it as Man, and to share it with us.”

“The first man Adam became a living being. The last Adam became a life giving spirit” –1 Corinthians 15:45

– David Chilton, Ascension and Kingdom, Basilean Lectures 1990. Available from www.wordmp3.com

There are conflicting traditions concerning John. A widely held opinion is that he was banished to Patmos by the Emperor Domitian who reigned from AD 81 through 96. If so, this makes preterism a paper tiger.

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A Blazing Torch and a Smoking Firepot

Moses spent 40 years in the wilderness, then Israel did. God’s prophet lives through the pattern, then God’s people follow him in a larger pattern. The head of the sacrifice, then the body. The Adam, then the Greater Eve. Jesus, then the church.

James Jordan observes that the Promised Land failed to support Abram both during the famine and also later concerning the flocks of Abram and Lot. Only after the Lord “purified” the Land with a sacrifice was it again a garden for the people of God. Like Adam, a deep sleep fell upon Abram, but it was animal substitutes that were divided.

The Lord passed over Abram, but in the darkness, a smoking firepot and blazing torch passed through the divided animals. God structured this event to follow Israel’s feasts, with Passover and Atonement at each end, and the Lord’s prediction of the Hebrews’ slavery in Egypt at the “wilderness” centre.

The blazing torch and smoking firepot are the Lord’s chariot throne. The blazing torch (the head) is His throne, the Ark. The smoking firepot is the Incense Altar, the cloud of angel elders in His train (the body), the Holy Place positioned ‘underneath’ the Most Holy (see Ezekiel 1).1

Revelation 8

After the ascension of Christ, Satan was expelled from his “ministry” before God as the Accuser of man. Like the evil twin of the blazing torch that measured Abram’s sacrifices, he was then used by God to bring an end to the Old Covenant upon the Land.

And the fifth angel blew his trumpet, and I saw a star fallen from heaven to earth, and he was given the key to the shaft of the [Abyss]. He opened the shaft of the [Abyss], and from the shaft rose smoke like the smoke of a great furnace, and the sun and the air were darkened with the smoke from the shaft.

The seven trumpets are a chiasm, with the third and fifth corresponding symmetrically. The “de-Ascension” of Satan mirrors his fall in the third trumpet. Like Christ, he was given a key. His throne-coming was also accompanied by clouds of smoke, but as false High Priest, instead of a sweet-smelling aroma it was the sulphur of Sodom. As Pentecost’s fire came from the Altar of Incense in heaven, its evil twin bore an army of unholy mighty men—the “smoking firepot” body of Satan’s blazing torch head. It was the children of Satan (John 8:44), an army of Judaisers, locusts who would devour the Land. As in Daniel 7, the winds of the Spirit raised up beasts.

“as with Tyre of old, the Abyss is being dredged up to cover the Land with its unclean spirits. Apostate Israel is to be cast out of God’s presence, excommunicated from the Temple, and filled with demons. One of the central messages of Revelation is that the Church tabernacles in heaven; the corollary of this is that the false church tabernacles in hell.”2

As the preaching of the seven-sealed Gospel to the Land began with a white horse, so at the destruction of Judaism, the preaching of the Gospel to the World began with the white horse passing through the divided pieces of the Land (Zechariah 14:4). However, this time, Christ did not ride alone but with His bride. He was a blazing torch, and She was now the smoking firepot—a permanent part of His Ark-chariot. A government of ascended men had replaced the government of angels. Together they passed through the midst of a divided Land to carry the seven seals to the World.

“Then passing through the midst of them, He went His way.” Luke 4:30

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1 Note also that in Exodus 25-31, the Ark is the Light of Day 1, and the Incense Altar is the “swarms” of Day 5 – birds from above and fish from below. The Tabernacle was both a portable Sinai and an image of the chariot of God.
2 David Chilton, The Days of Vengeance, p. 244.