Joe Rigney has a great piece on the Trinity House website. With apologies to Joe, I’ll give it to you in a nutshell, then make some brief observations. But make sure you read the entire article.
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“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.
“That very day Pilate and Herod became friends with each other, for previously they had been at enmity with each other.” (Luke 23:12)
Getting a grip on the Tabernacle layout helps us understand the architecture of Creation, the history of mankind and the structure of the entire Bible. After reading Mark Steyn on the Islamic/secular conflict in Europe, I was thinking that the same “Tabernacle” categories can be found in the world today. Whatever we do, however much we distort the truth, we are still bound by the walls and furnitures set up in Genesis 1. And, in my humble opinion, the light this sheds on the current conflict is not only revealing concerning its true nature, but it also helps us to predict its future.
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.
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]
Must be wizards week!
For the word of God is living and powerful, and sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing even to the division of soul and spirit, and of joints and marrow, and is a discerner of the thoughts and intents of the heart. (NKJV) Hebrews 4:12
But someone will say, “You have faith, and I have works.” Show me your faith without your works, and I will show you my faith by my works. (NKJV) James 2:18
The firmament was a veil to hide God’s throne from Man until he was ready to see God face to face. Of course, we see types of this throughout the Bible, Job, Jacob and Moses being notable examples. But no man had seen God until after Christ ascended and was presented as Facebread.
Your face is a veil of flesh that hides your brain, the source of your intentions. Your head is a microcosm of the Tabernacle at one level, and your entire body at another. You are a Garden and a Land.
Deceivers mask their true intentions with facial expressions and body language. Good spies can even pass a lie detector test. Between their true intentions and the flesh that is supposed to be communicating it, there is a deliberate disconnect. As in the Garden, it is the mind of a beast speaking with the eyes and mouth of a man.
NOTE: THIS POST HAS BEEN REMIXED AND INCLUDED IN GOD’S KITCHEN.
The Old Testament is a bloody book. Beginning with Adam’s “dissection” to build Eve and the animals the Lord made into tunics, it culminates in Revelation with the massacre of saints under Herod/Nero (Revelation 14) and then the massacre of Jews under Vespasian and Titus.
“For then there will be great tribulation, such as has not been since the beginning of the world until this time, no, nor ever shall be. And unless those days were shortened, no flesh would be saved; but for the elect’s sake those days will be shortened.” Matthew 24:21-22
The context of Matthew 23-25 is very clearly first century. Many interpreters are forced to put gaps and parentheses and qualifiers into Jesus’ warnings because they won’t recognise what happened in the last years of the Old Covenant.[1]
by Colin Phelps
There can be few people who know anything about missions in the 20th Century who have not heard the story of the five young men who died, January 8th, 1956, in their attempt to reach the Woarani [1] Indians of Ecuador. Jim Elliot, Nate Saint, Ed McCully, Pete Fleming, and Roger Youderian were cut down in the prime of their lives as they waited on a sand bar in the Ecuadorian jungle; waited for further contact with a people unreached with the Gospel and hostile to anyone from the outside world. The Christian world, particularly in the West reeled as it tried to make sense of this incredible tragedy. “Why would God allow such potential to be destroyed?” Even the secular press couldn’t ignore this tale. LIFE magazine ran a 10 page article featuring journal entries from the men themselves. Their headline? … “‘Go Ye and Preach the Gospel’ – Five Do and Die.”
“Look now toward heaven, and count the stars if you are able to number them.” And He said to him, “So shall your descendants be.” And he believed in the LORD, and He accounted it to him for righteousness.
—Genesis 15:5-6
Abraham didn’t sleep in on the day he was to take his beloved son, his only son, to Moriah, kill him and offer him as an ascension. He got up early. By this stage in the narrative, Abraham had been tried and tested many times, but this seems just a little too keen.
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