Top 12 of CiHD: #6

For a summary of what I’m hoping to accomplish in this blog series (the first week of every month of 2018), I recommend reviewing my explanation here.

The next post in our series examining the Top 12 Blog Posts at Covered in His Dust is a teaching on the Tabernacle. I called it “Falling on Joyful Faces” — and you can find it here.

In this series, as we look at each post, I want to ask three questions: why, what, and what else? Why do I think this post got so many views; why were others drawn to it? What do I hope people found when they got here; what do I hope they heard? Finally, what else have I learned about this; what else would I say about these ideas?

WHY THIS POST?

To be honest, I don’t have many ideas as to why this teaching made the list — let alone so high up. I do know this is one of my favorite lessons to teach in person, either in the classroom or on my trips in Israel. There is a built-to-scale model of the Tabernacle in the Negev desert and I love to take my students there. I know that it communicates well in person, but I never felt like written teaching was the way to go here. Maybe I’m wrong.

I also remember this post being shared by others more than usual. Many have pointed out that there is no science behind why something gets shared and some others do not — there is no correlation to quality of content — but I imagine those shares were a big part of the view count.

The only other idea I can come up with is that if people were searching the Internet for Tabernacle and Temple and their relationship to each other, this post would have shown up on the search.

WHAT DO I HOPE THEY FOUND?

Obviously, this is one of my more “poetic” pieces, so it would be safe to say I hope people found inspiration and a compelling call to engage the missio Dei in the world.

I hope it challenged readers to pause and consider the reaction of the people. Growing up in the Church and being exposed to the Bible routinely had caused me to make some assumptions about God and His presence. I had picked up the idea that God is scary; when people meet God, they fall down terrified. Without a doubt, there are those instances in the Text. But with that being my go-to assumption, I read over instances like this one — so much so that I remember having to give serious thought to what it would have looked like to “fall on their faces in joy” when I first heard this teaching.

WHAT ELSE WOULD I SAY?

I would certainly point out how much the original lesson impacted me and provided the basis for my own teaching. I first heard this lesson in 2008 from Ray Vander Laan while we were spending time in the Negev desert. Later, I was able to revisit the lesson when it was produced by Focus on the Family in the That the World May Know series (Volume 10, “With All Your Heart,” Lessons 1–2).

If I could, I think I would have added more to the idea of the corporate “we” being the Temple of God. It’s a common idea and so I think I just assumed it at the end of my original post, but I would have been wise to let more of the Text speak there. I would have included passages from the New Testament like 1 Peter 2:4–5:

As you come to him, the living Stone — rejected by humans but chosen by God and precious to him — you also, like living stones, are being built into a spiritual house to be a holy priesthood, offering spiritual sacrifices acceptable to God through Jesus Christ.

I would have also included 1 Corinthians 3:16–17:

Don’t you know that you yourselves are God’s temple and that God’s Spirit dwells in your midst? If anyone destroys God’s temple, God will destroy that person; for God’s temple is sacred, and you together are that temple.

Connecting this idea to Pentecost is a powerful way of reminding the readers that we all — as the corporate Body of Christ — are a new Temple, opened on that day. If we are familiar with how people responded to the grand openings of God’s other spiritual houses, it would be an easy assumption to make about how they ought to respond when they meet us. In order to make this point even more poignant, one could hear this idea of God using us as living stones as a call back to Isaiah 51:

“Listen to me, you who pursue righteousnessand who seek the LORD:Look to the rock from which you were cutand to the quarry from which you were hewn;look to Abraham, your father,and to Sarah, who gave you birth.When I called him he was only one man,and I blessed him and made him many.”

It would be a powerful consideration to think about the qualities of Abraham and Sarah that we studied early in the series. If they are people of radical hospitality (referenced by Jesus himself!), it would give us an indication of the missional methodology behind the reaction of people who see the goodness of God and the enduring nature of His love.

COLOSSIANS: Gnostic Heresy

Paul also pens a letter to the church in Colossae, a small city off the main road that runs through Hierapolis and Laodicea. I’ve always found the conversation that surrounds Colossae moving, because this church is the recipient of one of Paul’s letters, and yet the entire city doesn’t survive but a few decades after the establishment of the church. We have mentioned before the many earthquakes that decimated cities throughout the Roman empire. Many of these cities would be central to Roman infrastructure; unfortunately for the people of Colossae, their city did not make the list. The earthquakes of the AD 60s leveled the city, and it was never rebuilt. To this day, the tel of Colossae — a small hill in the Turkish countryside — sits unexcavated, if not nearly forgotten.

The unexcavated tel of Colossae

From a literary perspective, Colossians mirrors the structure of Ephesians point by point. Most scholars believe they were penned together. While Paul didn’t have the ability to use the “copy and paste” function, he definitely uses the same literary technique in the two letters. Here’s what I mean.

Ephesians is six chapters long and Colossians is a little shorter at four chapters. If you look at the first half of both letters, you will notice that Paul talks theology, or what I like to call ‘orthodoxy’ (removed form it’s cultural usage, the etymology of the term refers to “right belief”). The last half of each letter speaks very deliberately of ‘orthopraxy’ (“right practice or behavior”). If you compare Ephesians 4–6 to Colossians 3–4, you will see an identical pattern. Paul speaks about household behavior as it relates to husbands and wives, parents and children, and masters and servants.

It’s the first half of the letters that differ in content. This is because of the context of the recipients. I say that based on assumption because there is so much we don’t know about Colossae (since it lies unexcavated). What we do know comes from the few finds that were scattered along the fields of the local farmers and other things like currency. However, one of the things that seems apparent is the struggle in Colossae with the dangerous teachings of Gnosticism.

Now, the moment you begin talking about Gnosticism, you have entered into tricky waters, because the word can refer to so much and a student of philosophy and Greek belief has many strong opinions about the topic. I’m no expert, so I’ll quote one of my favorite excerpts on the issue from NT Wright. In Surprised by Hope (p. 88), Wright describes Gnosticism as it relates to biblical theology:

For Plato, the present world of space, time, and matter is a world of illusion, of flickering shadows in a cave, and the most appropriate human task is to get in touch with the true reality, which is beyond space, time, and matter. For Plato, this was the reality of eternal Forms.

To oversimplify once more, we may say that Plato’s picture was based on a rejection of the phenomena of matter and transience. The mess and muddle of the space-time-matter world was an offense to the tidy, clean, philosophical mind, which dwelt upon eternal realities. […]

The Platonic strain entered Christian thinking early on, not least with the phenomenon known as Gnosticism. Since the Gnostics have been making something of a comeback recently, a word about them is appropriate. The Gnostics believed, like Plato, that the material world was an inferior and dark place, evil in its very existence, but that within this world could be found certain people who were meant for something else. […] The Gnostic myth often suggests that the way out of our mess is to return to our primeval state, before the creation of the world. In this view creation itself is the fall, producing matter, which is the real evil. I hope it is clear both how closely this view parodies some aspects of Christianity and how deeply and thoroughly it diverges from it.

Wright will go on to explain how some Bible students will go to great lengths to show how some elements of this thought are preserved in the New Testament, but he will spend the rest of the chapter showing how dangerous this way of thinking is to biblical theology.

Paul seems to agree. His first half of the letter to the Colossians talks very directly about this false idea propped up by Gnosticism. Consider the following passage:

He has delivered us from the domain of darkness and transferred us to the kingdom of his beloved Son, in whom we have redemption, the forgiveness of sins.

Notice the tense of the statement. Paul says not that God will deliver us, but that He has. The next verses continue even further into this.

He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation. For by him all things were created, in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or authorities—all things were created through him and for him. And he is before all things, and in him all things hold together. And he is the head of the body, the church. He is the beginning, the firstborn from the dead, that in everything he might be preeminent. For in him all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell, and through him to reconcile to himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven, making peace by the blood of his cross.

Paul makes sure to use the most inclusive language possible for the incarnation and reconciliation of all things. He speaks of all things and makes sure to clarify that these are from heaven and on earth, visible and invisible. He speaks of how all these things were created through him. He speaks of how all of creation is held together in him. And, for good measure, adds that the complete fullness of God dwelt in the Christ.

Paul will go to play with this idea in the second chapter, at times very tongue-in-cheek.

It certainly behooves the Church today to consider the words of Wright above, that these Gnostic ideas “deeply and thoroughly diverges from” the teachings of the Apostles. The truth is that far too much Gnosticism has crept into Christian theology. The idea that we are spirits trapped in prisons of flesh, walking in a world that is doomed to destruction, just waiting for “some glad morning,” is not the mission God called us to and is not congruent with the teachings of Jesus, let alone Paul and the New Testament.

The Kingdom of God is here — deeply engaged with this world of flesh and blood, soil and spirit.

ROMANS: According to the Spirit

“For it is not through a standard of morality or a system of rules that we will ever experience freedom from the struggle Paul describes, a struggle you and I know all too well. No, it is only through trusting in the promises of God, following in the example of the Christ, and displaying the faith of Jesus that we find a unique kind of victory and freedom — a life where this ongoing struggle does not lead to condemnation.

“Wouldn’t that be nice? Wouldn’t it be great if this struggle with our sarx didn’t always end with our own guilt and shame and the weight of the cry of rescue from our wretched selves?”

These were the closing words of our last conversation. And in fact, not only would it be nice, but according to Paul, it’s actually the way it really is. Paul tells us this struggle does not lead to condemnation, because if the promises of God — which we looked at earlier — are true, then there isn’t anything to hang over our heads.

There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus. For the law of the Spirit of life has set you free in Christ Jesus from the law of sin and death. For God has done what the law, weakened by the flesh, could not do. By sending his own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh and for sin, he condemned sin in the flesh, in order that the righteous requirement of the law might be fulfilled in us, who walk not according to the flesh but according to the Spirit.

This is actually the very promise we trust in when we trust the story. By witnessing the life of Jesus, we see the unadulterated love of God made flesh. His life showed us many things about the flesh: It showed us how to live with victory over the flesh; it showed us what really matters in God’s economy and what doesn’t. And his life even showed us an awful lot about God. It showed us God is not angry, full of wrath and judgment; instead, this God is full of love and recklessly pursues the outsider, the unloved, and the screwed up.

If we believe this to be true — if we have faith and trust in these promises — then we are set free from any cloud of condemnation (self-imposed or otherwise). This freedom allows us to see things and call things what they are and walk in truth.

For those who live according to the flesh set their minds on the things of the flesh, but those who live according to the Spirit set their minds on the things of the Spirit. For to set the mind on the flesh is death, but to set the mind on the Spirit is life and peace. For the mind that is set on the flesh is hostile to God, for it does not submit to God's law; indeed, it cannot. Those who are in the flesh cannot please God.

It’s what we set our minds on that seems to make all the difference in the world. If we set our minds on the things of our sarx (our animal appetites and our beast-like nature), then we reap that paycheck of death. However, if we set our minds on the things that are most true about us, it sets us free to lay down our lives for others. Our lives become a practice of self-sacrifice instead of self-preservation. It is this self-sacrifice that pleases God, not because of His system of rules, but because it’s who He is.

You, however, are not in the flesh but in the Spirit, if in fact the Spirit of God dwells in you. Anyone who does not have the Spirit of Christ does not belong to him. But if Christ is in you, although the body is dead because of sin, the Spirit is life because of righteousness. If the Spirit of him who raised Jesus from the dead dwells in you, he who raised Christ Jesus from the dead will also give life to your mortal bodies through his Spirit who dwells in you.

It is this very truth of Christ that gives life to our mortal bodies, which seem to be driven by the sarx. It is the power of the resurrected Christ that takes something which seems so dead and breathes so much life into it.

So then, brothers, we are debtors, not to the flesh, to live according to the flesh. For if you live according to the flesh you will die, but if by the Spirit you put to death the deeds of the body, you will live. 

Paul says that because of this truth we are debtors; by this term he speaks primarily of being bound up in relationship. In our culture, we see debt through the lens of bondage and slavery. While this was true in some ways in the world of Rome, debt created much more of a covenantal and relational connection. Paul is saying we are all bound up in a relationship as a debtor. And yet he also wants it to be clear, it is not a relationship of harsh slavery.

For all who are led by the Spirit of God are sons of God. For you did not receive the spirit of slavery to fall back into fear, but you have received the Spirit of adoption as sons, by whom we cry, “Abba! Father!” The Spirit himself bears witness with our spirit that we are children of God, and if children, then heirs—heirs of God and fellow heirs with Christ, provided we suffer with him in order that we may also be glorified with him.

Paul says God would not have given this Spirit for the purpose of slavery, but the purpose of sonship. It is this relationship with the Father, this debtor-patriarch relationship, that paves the way for our adoption. I think of how we spoke in Galatians about being adopted into the family of God as children of Abraham. Paul says it is this Spirit of God, this way of love and forgiveness, this free gift of grace that allows us to be adopted into the family as daughters and sons. (While in Galatians we were speaking of Gentiles, here in Romans I think he speaks of Jew and Gentile alike.)

But Paul also speaks of suffering being a necessity in our walk with the LORD...