Bully's Blog

“I could never believe a book that starts with a talking snake!”

The fourth beast was stronger and more terrifying than the others. Its huge teeth were made of iron, and what it didn’t grind with its teeth, it smashed with its feet. It was different from the others, and it had horns on its head – ten of them. Just as I was thinking about these horns, a smaller horn appeared, and three of the other horns were pulled up by the roots to make room for it. This horn had the eyes of a human and a mouth that spoke with great pride. Daniel 7:7-8

The Bible begins with Adam, Eve and a serpent in the garden, and ends with a false prophet (Adam), harlot (Eve) and beast (serpent) squatting in God’s house. The seed of man’s rebellion was now a fullgrown tree – a tree of death (James 1:14-15).

Animals are the tutors in the Old Testament. Man was created in God’s image, but instead imaged a beast. Adam was covered in animal skins and their blood temporarily covered his sin. The law was administered by angels, and the symbols God uses are mostly animals. As mentioned in a previous post, the three major covenants were symbolised by an ox, a lion and an eagle. The New Covenant symbol is the Man who is bread and wine. The New Covenant era is administered not by angels but by men, Christians.

But as this New Covenant era arrived, so did a false man: a being who had the eyes and mouth of a man but was really a man-mask for the Roman beast. Revelation refers to Jews as ‘men’ because, like Noah, they were the mediators. The gentiles are the ‘beasts’ who are called to submit and enter the ark of Christ (Acts 10:11-12).

As Israel’s history completed Day 6 (the Land animals and the Man predicted in Daniel 7), this false man, a beast who spoke like a man, was squatting in God’s garden. The Herodian line was a talking snake.

You can trust the Bible. There is always method in any apparent madness. God doesn’t do or allow anything without a reason.

(Balaam the false prophet was also a ‘talking snake.’ He was blind to God’s word, so God used a talking donkey to get through to him.)

The Bible contains some patterns that are frequently repeated. Sometimes these are inverted or reversed to make a point.

There are many books on Revelation that draw out some excellent applications. But when it comes to interpreting the finer details, they fluff it.

They are reading Revelation through frosted glass. General shapes can be made out – the “universals” – but their audience ends up with a showbag full of ideology, a religion set adrift from the shore of reality, a Jesus whose feet never quite touch the ground. The Bible speaks in symbols, not ideology, and the symbols are anchored in reality. Joseph and Daniel are historical figures, but they are also symbols.

Joseph and Daniel interpreted the dreams of their kings. Then, as wise men, with the king’s seal of authority, they brought their prophecies about in history. Jesus opened the mystery of the New Covenant at His ascension (the seven-sealed scroll). Then, He measured out its consequences in history.

This is no mere ideology—no fluffy generic truth. It happened in the first century – the seals, the trumpets and the bowls.

No more reading Revelation through frosted glass. Interpretation first, then application.

I’ve seen every movie ever made… or one very much like it.

I posted last week a quote from Jordan’s worship series which observed that all western culture flowed from the church. I took my daughter on Saturday to see Cavalleria rusticana & Pagliacci at the Sydney Opera House. Christian (and Catholic) symbols abound, most notably the spilling of wine on a white table cloth as a challenge to a duel. The loser’s body was later laid on the same white cloth.

The final scene of the movie Fight Club (a film based on a book which is both ingenious and perverse) is more biblical than the author or producers might imagine. [Don't read the following if you haven't seen the film].

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Revelation can become a mere distraction. Charles Spurgeon wrote about prophecy buffs:

“He is great upon the ten toes of the beast, the four faces of the cherubim, the mystical meaning of badgers’ skins, and the typical bearings of the staves of the ark, and the windows of Solomon’s temple: but the sins of business men, the temptations of the times, and the needs of the age, he scarcely ever touches upon. Such preaching reminds me of a lion engaged in mouse-hunting, or a man-of-war cruising after a lost water-butt.”*

That’s a fair comment if study of symbols becomes an end in itself, but they were intended to convey crucial information. Surely the symbolic passages have more authority than our own anecdotes when trying to communicate abstract truth? There is nothing in Revelation that isn’t also elsewhere in the New Testament. It was not intended to be an isolated book, and the better it is understood, the more powerfully it can be incorporated into our teaching and preaching.

*Charles Spurgeon, Lectures to My Students, p. 76.

The refusal of modern scholars to take typology seriously to any great extent limits their ability to interpret the Bible. Some passages only make sense in the light of previous literary structures.

The Bible is a pop-up book in glorious 3D. But they maintain they can tell us all about it with one eye shut.

God uses symbols not only to reveal the spiritual character of physical people and events, but also to demonstrate their relationships to each other.

For instance, when Satan is called a serpent, it is because he is using the weapon of deceit, spewing it out of his mouth like counterfeit living water. When Satan is called a dragon, he is using the weapon of death, inciting a mob or government to kill God’s people.

The land and the sea are the physical land and sea in Genesis, but once God narrows His focus down to a priestly nation, Israel becomes the Land, and the Gentiles become the Sea. This demonstrates the boundary set by God between Jews and Gentiles. When Israel sins, the Gentiles rush in like a flood.

There is no other world to compare God’s world to. There is no “music” except God’s. It can be “played” well or perversely, but there are no other raw materials at hand. God’s personality is fully displayed in the world, but it is easy for us to become deaf to this fact.

The Bible tells us that this deafness and blindness is sin: “For though they knew God, they did not glorify Him as God, or give thanks; but they became futile in their speculations, and their foolish heart was darkened (Romans 1:21). This verse describes the origin of secular philosophy. The sinner does not want to see God’s personality displayed in His works, and so he comes up with alternative explanations of the universe. The “universe simply is.” In philosophy, this “is-ness” is called “Being.” Ultimately, all non-Christian philosophy assumes that the universe is uncreated and made of neutral “Being.” Such a universe is silent.

For the Christian, however, the universe is created by God, and constantly speaks of Him… All the world has been made with God’s stamp on it, revealing Him.

The universe and everything in it symbolises God. That is, the universe and everything in it points to God. This means that the Christian view of the world is and can only be fundamentally symbolic. The world does not exist for its own sake, but as a revelation of God.

James B. Jordan, Through New Eyes, p.22-23

 No Bible commentary is the last word, but James Jordan’s seven-year effort gets the ball through the hoop on Daniel. Here’s an excerpt from David Field’s review:

The approach of the book is marked by

1. Immersion in and informed reference to the rest of the Hebrew Scriptures. The use of Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Ezra-Nehemiah, Esther, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and Zechariah is astonishing and enriching at every turn. Use of or comment upon other books along the way are unfailingly stimulating and this applies to NT books as well, not least to Revelation which is greatly illumined by this work on Daniel.

2. Confident deployment of redemptive-historical paradigms which have themselves been recognized through close and repeated study of the whole Bible. In particular, theologico-spatial zones, old creation /new creation eras, and prophet /priest /king roles feature heavily and often have real power to unlock or clarify the subject in hand.

3. The closest of close structural analysis of the sort that comes from multiple readings. Chiasms and parallels and other patterning devices are attended to with great care and in such a way as positively informs the interpretation rather than being mere observations along the path.

4. Seriousness about chronology. This is one of the characteristics of Jordan’s work overall, since he sees emphasis on “ideas” at the expense of history as revealing and strengthening the gnosticism of much contemporary Christianity. The detailed chronological work lying behind his interpretation of Jeremiah and Ezekiel and his resolution of some of the Daniel “difficulties” is awesome.

5. Interpretative weight given to what still gets called “inter-testamental” history. Inter-testamental history is redemptive history and Jordan emphasizes that God speaks to and about that period in the patterns of Daniel 1-6 and in the prophecies of Daniel 1-7.

6. Attention to numerics: word-counts, significant numbers, and the meaning of numbers. There is work here to compare with Bauckham’s work on Revelation.

7. Typology. This is not a “typological” commentary as such because although half of Daniel is narrative, half of it is apocalyptic prophecy. But when you attend to redemptive-historical patterns and to literary structures and sequences and to the importance of history as Jordan does, then, in some sense, all your work will be typological. At the macro-historical this means that Daniel is one of God’s major interpretative words for the entire second phase of the first creation. The first creation has a former days and a latter days and then gives way to the new creation. Daniel tells us about the last centuries and decades of the latter days of the old world.

8. Cheerful (and sometimes curmudgeonly) unfashionableness. Early dating, traditional authorship, defense of biblical chronology, unashamed constant reference to Christ (how could it be otherwise?!), impatience with “unbelieving scholarship”, utter lack of interest in being respected and consistent resolve to be useful. This may be a difficult example for young scholars (like those in Daniel 1!) to follow but it is thoroughly refreshing.

9. Theological creativity at level “Genius”. I thought I knew Jordan’s work reasonably well but over and over and over again there are “aha!” moments. In my copy now there are almost more sentences and paragraphs marked than unmarked!”

“The Handwriting on the Wall” is available from www.americanvision.com
Also available as an e-book.

“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