Bully's Blog

A while ago, Angie Brennan posted a quote from a Touchstone article on God’s apparent wastefulness when it comes to our natural talents:
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“The Sabbatarian vision is too small. This is why Paul chides the Galatians for observing ‘days and months and seasons and years.’ The Sabbath, along with the Torah administration as a whole, belonged to the stoicheia, the “elements of the world,” the things that constituted the first creation.”

From Tim Gallant’s blog:
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And every pot in Jerusalem and Judah shall be holy to the Lord of hosts, so that all who sacrifice may come and take of them and boil the meat of the sacrifice in them. (Zechariah 14:21)

Working on a post about the use of seals in Revelation, I was looking through the uses of the word “seal” throughout the Bible. Daniel 9:24, a very famous verse, showed up, and its structure struck me as worth some analysis. If structure is indeed part of the means of the Author’s communication, it is not an optional extra.
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“Now therefore fear the Lord (T)
and serve him in sincerity and in faithfulness. (H)
Put away the gods that your fathers served (E)
beyond the River and in Egypt, (O)
and serve the Lord.” (S)
Joshua 24:14

40 Years of Harlotry

Israel famously wandered in the wilderness for forty years. They were tested, offered as a sacrifice and refined with the holy fire of the Law of Moses. This “threshing” process appears at the centre of the Bible Matrix. It is pictured as the time of harvest (Pentecost – the giving of the Law), and as the burning eyes of the Lampstand watching over Israel (sun, moon and five visible planets). In the Covenant pattern it is the “Ethics,” the bit where God lays out the rules for success. Threshing is also a biblical euphemism for sexual relations. At this point, under the Lawful eyes of God, Israel is either shown to be a faithful bride or an adulteress. Is the fire of her desire true or “strange” (foreign). We can see this pattern in James 1:15. It is a sick parody of the Covenant process because it begins with a “false word.”

[This post has been refined and included in Sweet Counsel: Essays to Brighten the Eyes.]
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James Jordan maintains that Matthew’s Gospel was written first. Eugen Rosenstock-Huessey does too.

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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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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 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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James Jordan’s paper on capital punishment begins with the very first threat of death in history. The rest of the Bible shows us that the curse was subtly paired with a promise of a more abundant life:
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