Bully's Blog

In the book of Esther we have in type the wisdom of God that had Paul in awe as he wrote the letter to the Roman Christians. By sending the gospel to the Gentiles, the enemies of God were exposed. When the new bride was persecuted, the Jews were forced to endorse either the New Covenant people or their attackers. In this process, “all Israel” was saved (Romans 11:26). The old Jerusalem was purified and redeemed. Because of Mordecai’s disobedience in failing as a witness, Esther was able to obtain mercy (Romans 11:30-32). Peter Leithart writes:

“…the book is more about Mordecai’s exalation than about Esther. Esther’s exaltation to queen is part of the means by which Mordecai and the Jews are ultimately saved, and the story climaxes with Mordecai at the right hand of the king (like Joseph and Daniel—Esther 10:2). Further, the key moral transition in the book comes when Mordecai stops urging Esther to hide her identity. A disappointment for feminist interpreters perhaps, but the book is more the book of Mordecai than the book of Esther.”

“…the conquest of Jerusalem corresponds to the initial battle of the conquest of Canaan, the destruction of Jericho. This comparison is true not only in the generic sense that both cities came under God’s condemnation, but in the more specific sense that both marked the first battle of a war of conquest. By Jesus’ day, many Jews had become Egyptians and Canaanites (Rev. 11:8). During the first generation, the church was like Israel in the wilderness, awaiting permission to enter on their full inheritance and letting the sins of the Canaanites become full. Conquest there was in the first generation, as there was before Jericho; but it was the second generation, those who lived through and beyond the destruction of Jerusalem, who first entered fully into the land of the new creation. The wilderness imagery of Hebrews 4 is, on this reading, applicable specifically to the generation living between 30 and 70. When that generation had passed, Jericho was destroyed and the conquest of the whole Abrahamic inheritance began in earnest.”

Matthew quotes Isaiah 53:4 to explain how Jesus removes illness and uncleanness (Matthew 8:17). Jesus radiates life, and that life heals the sick and raises the dead. Jesus also accepts death and uncleanness on Himself, to be borne away on the cross. This latter process shows Jesus as temple. Milgrom says that the tabernacle is Israel’s “picture of Dorian Gray,” the magnet where the uncleanness and sin of Israel registers. Jesus the new temple is the new picture of Dorian Gray.

“Typology is a philosophy of history.

It is also a theory of meaning.

Typology is a historical theory of meaning, a theory of historical meaning.

That Matthew can say “Out of Egypt I called My Son” is fulfilled in Jesus isn’t evidence that Matthew was a midrashist. It’s not merely a hint about how to read the Old Testament. It’s a pointer to the character of history and the nature of meaning. Texts mean the way Matthew says Hosea’s text means; history’s contours are the contours that Matthew discerns in Hosea’s reference to the exodus.

Typology is the beginning of wisdom.”

–Peter J. Leithart, www.leithart.com

“Recovering the Old Testament as a text in which Christians live and move and have their being is one of the most urgent tasks before the church. Reading the Reformers is good and right. Christian political activism has its place. Even at their best, however, these can only bruise the heel of a world that has abandoned God. But the Bible—the Bible is a sword to divide joints from marrow, a weapon to crush the head.”

–Peter J. Leithart, A House For My Name, p. 40.

The Bible is a complex book. Consisting of sixty-six books written over several millennia, it describes a bewildering array of characters and events. The Bible seems especially complex and difficult to modern Christians, because, however hard we try to think biblically, we have been subtly but deeply influenced by modern philosophy and science. Often, even when we have rejected the explicit conclusions of science, we unconsciously adopt a scientistic mind-set. One example of this is our tendency to operate on the modern assumption that all ideas can be defined with infinite, scientific precision, and that concepts can and should be distinguished very sharply.

The more you study the Bible, the more you will find that it cannot be forced into this mold. Ideas and symbols in the Bible meld together, overlap, and stretch out in a thousand different directions. This is not to say that the Bible is irrational or unscientific, or that we cannot make any meaningful distinctions. But a modern reader cannot escape the sense that the Bible speaks a very different language than he learned in “Chem. Lab” or Philosophy 101. As theologian Vern S. Poythress has noted, the biblical world view acknowledges the reality of “fuzzy boundaries.”

–Peter Leithart, The Kingdom and the Power, p. 93.

“Union Card”

E. Miner wrote, that “the ability to declare typology absent is a kind of proof of sound modern critical method.”

Which translated means, “Skepticism about typology is the union card of serious biblical scholarship.”

Peter J. Leithart, www.leithart.com

Both the Red Sea and Jordan were doors of water and blood. They were two-edged flaming swords at the doorway to God.

or Understanding the Restoration Era

Peter Leithart writes:

NT Wright has long argued that first-century Jews considered themselves to be in a continuing exile. The canon of the Hebrew Bible suggests as much.

If we take our arrangement (the LXX arrangement), the Hebrew Bible ends with Malachi, who certainly doesn’t see a gloriously restored Israel when he looks around him.

If we take the MT arrangement, the Hebrew Bible ends with the decree of Cyrus; it’s as if the return has never happened.

Either way, the canonical arrangement supports Wright’s contention.1

I had a long debate with my friend Matt who holds Wright’s view. I see the point. But regardless of the arrangement of the canon, what does the Bible teach?

I subscribe to Jordan’s view that the exile/restoration prophecies actually concern the exile/restoration. When Jeremiah predicted a New Covenant with Israel and Judah, it was the one ratified at the beginning of Zechariah. It came to pass, no bull. Those who apply the prophecies of restoration directly to the first century get it wrong.2

The Jews may have thought they were still in captivity. But they also thought the second Temple was less glorious than Solomon’s. Ezekiel’s Temple was a vision of an empire-wide temple made of people, synagogues spread throughout the empire. It was a picture of a restored Israel’s greater spiritual influence, in the same way that Revelation’s new Jerusalem is a picture of the church.

Like many Christians today, they were impatient for the Messiah to come and “wash behind their ears”, fix all their problems, when He had commanded them to conquer the world with their witness. The exile was long over, and atoned for as well. The Jews failed to understand the times they lived in, and so do we in many cases. Like Israel in Ezekiel 37, the first century church was an Israel resurrected for warfare.

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1 Peter J. Leithart, Continuing Exile and Canon.

2 Doug Wilson’s excellent new commentary on Hebrews, Christ and His Rivals, still does this from what I have read so far. To be sure, the apostles quoted the prophets because they prefigured the first century, but the details of the prophecies anchor them in previous history.