Think Wink.

I had looked over J. J. Hiehaus’ work God at Sinai and wanted to post on a text that I found quite amazing. Niehaus argued that in Genesis 3:8 we don’t see God walking in the cool of the day in the garden but rather was coming in the wind of the storm based upon word studies done in Akkadian that line up with the Biblical Hebrew (Kind of makes one wonder about this past weekend’s tornadoes in Oklahoma, Missouri, and Georgia that killed 22 people at my last count). You can refer to this post for the citation. Niehaus offers an interesting translation of 1 Kings 19:12 which reads in the ESV,

And after the earthquake a fire, but the Lord was not in the fire. And after the fire the sound of a low whisper.

This post will summarize the arguments and then posit some thought on the translation. You can find the arguments in detail in Niehaus’ book God at Sinai on pages 247-248.
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In the Cool of the Day?

Dr. Jerry Falwell

What to do?

I read an interesting article summarizing J.J. Niehaus’ translation of Genesis 3:8. Niehaus offers a rather different translation of this verse and the theophany it reveals to the reader. Genesis 3:8 in the ESV reads,

And they heard the sound of the Lord God walking in the garden in the cool of the day, and the man and his wife hid themselves from the presence of the Lord God among the trees of the garden.

The key phrase that is retranslated by Niehaus retranslates in his 1995 work entitled God at Sinai is “the LORD God walking in the garden in the cool of the day.” I find the new translation interesting and I want to ponder it in this post after briefly summarizing his arguments that are found on pages 155-159 in the book.
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A Thunderous, Roaring, Crushing Voice?

Dr. Jerry Falwell

What to do?

Isaiah 43:10-13,

You are my witnesses,” says the Lord, “my servant whom I have chosen, so that you may consider and believe in me, and understand that I am he [ἐγώ εἰμι]. No god was formed before me, and none will outlive me. 11 I, I am the Lord, and there is no deliverer besides me. 12 I decreed and delivered and proclaimed, and there was no other god among you. You are my witnesses,” says the Lord, “that I am God. 13 From this day forward I am he [ἐγώ εἰμι]; no one can deliver from my power; I will act, and who can prevent it?” (NET, emphasis mine)

John 18:3-6,

3 So Judas obtained a squad of soldiers6 and some officers of the chief priests and Pharisees. They came to the orchard with lanterns and torches and weapons. 4 Then Jesus, because he knew everything that was going to happen to him, came and asked them, “Who are you looking for?” 5 They replied, “Jesus the Nazarene.” He told them, “I am he [ἐγώ εἰμι]”…6 So when Jesus said to them, “I am he [ἐγώ εἰμι],” they retreated and fell to the ground. (NET, emphasis mine)

The Great I AM!!

No related posts

Tomorrow I will again meet with some missionaries from the LDS church. This makes my fourth pair since I have relocated here to KC-MO. I have since done some more research into Mormonism and specifically the Book of Mormon (here on out referred to as BoM). I noticed a massive inconsistency with what I heard from last week’s missionaries and what I read in BoM. I will briefly summarize what the missionaries stated about Heavenly Father, Jesus, and Holy Ghost and compare it to the BoM.
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Changing A Single Word…

Can a Person say that?

Two Unexpected Visitors

Today I had an appointment with some more LDS missionaries. We went to McDonalds for some fastfood and to discuss our theological differences. You know, I always feel weird asking God to bless that stuff we call fast-food, but then again it reminds me that I have to believe in miracles to even ask. My good friend Shane Griffin gave me a very good book to read, Letters to a Mormon Elder by one of my favorite teachers/scholars James White. They came on last Tuesday to speak with me and I didn’t have the time last week. Shane gave me to book on Thursday, but I was busy all weekend. Friday and Saturday I was in Lee’s Summit with my Uncle Dwight. Sunday I was at Union Station here in KC, MO to see the Bodies Revealed exhibit. It was a good exhibit but I felt they didn’t need to identify the gender of every body in the exhibit. Of course I was with my youth group too.

Having crammed as much James White in my head as possible, I wanted to discuss the Mormon doctrine of God. Mormons are polytheists, Heavenly Father, Jesus, and the Holy Spirit are all separate gods. This is not what the Bible teaches. However, I found that due to my lack of time to really ponder what was in Dr. White’s book, I really couldn’t articulate what I wanted to say. If I had pushed the issue of justification by faith alone and salvation by grace alone, I would have done much better. Justification I can walk through a given passage, exegeting it. Expounding the doctrine of God is more difficult because there is no passage I can just walk through.

I will make these observations. 1.) They did not hide a lot of Mormon theology from me. They spoke of pre-existence and God being an exalted man and them being polytheistic. I really appreciate that. 2.) I did not find their “one in purpose” a very satisfying exposition of Mosiah 15:1-5 from the Book of Mormon. Purposiveness is not in the text, they read it into the document. 3.) The missionaries did not want to stay in Isaiah very long and came back to their own theology. For example, I pointed to Isaiah 45:5-7 and Deuteronomy 6:4 and said there is only one God, how can they say their is three gods? 4.) They really had not answer to John 5:17-18 and John 10:30-33 and the Jews wanting to stone Jesus for claiming to be Yahweh. However, I messed up on that because I had not established the fact that both Father and Son are referred to as the one God, Yahweh. So with out that being argued, I can’t really hold that against them.

I am to meet with them next week and hopefully God will grant me to be better prepared and that I can share who the God of the Bible is, or may be I might tackle the issue of justification and grace from Romans 3-5 and Philippians 1-3. However, I do know that the little bit of truth I did mange to sneak in God can and does use for his glory, either to harden hearts or to save souls. I pray the latter for these men.

Inconsistency with in Mormonism

This Time Next Year…

A Blissful Headache

Liberalism, Jesus, and Eschatology

That is much better!

The Demands of the King

Continuing through the lesson I gave my Sunday school class this past Sunday, we come to the second question: How does this “gospel of the glory of Christ” save sinners? We now know what it means when Paul says, “the gospel of the glory of Christ.” He is saying that the gospel of Jesus Christ–his death and burial and resurrection that Paul preached to the Corinthians–puts on display the very glory of God for us to see. In the midst of all of the horror of Golgotha that Good Friday, in the midst of the depression during those hours Jesus lay in the tomb, during the joy of seeing the resurrected Christ and his victory over sin and death, what we saw was the very glory, beauty, splendor of God that Moses was shielded from seeing but told (cf. Exodus 34:1-9). It is that beauty, that splendor, that delight and joy that the human soul was made to enjoy and we have now been able to see it. So how does seeing God’s glory in the cross save us? How does this gospel save sinners? Let’s get the text back in front of us one more time,

4 In their case the god of this world has blinded the minds of the unbelievers, to keep them from seeing the light of the gospel of the glory of Christ, who is the image of God. 5 For what we proclaim is not ourselves, but Jesus Christ as Lord, with ourselves as your servants for Jesus’ sake. 6 For God, who said, “Let light shine out of darkness,” has shone in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ.

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No Doctrine But Love?

Three Requests

When I Was Napping…

This is the first of a series that comes from what I preached during Sunday School on February 10, 2008. The “talk” was entitled “The Gospel of the Glory of Christ” take from the text that I spoke from, 2 Corinthians 4:4-6. I had four questions, two were exegetical and two were application questions that made up my points for my forty-five minute sermon. Each post will look at each question so that the posts will be reasonably brief. Let us get the text before us before we look at the first question. Even though I really like the NET, I think they got this text wrong and so I take my text from the ESV (I still like to preach at church with the ESV because the pastor uses it and most people either use the ESV, NASBu, NKJV, KJV, or NIV and the NET is just too different from them to help them identify with the text). Paul writes,

4 In their case the god of this world has blinded the minds of the unbelievers, to keep them from seeing the light of the gospel of the glory of Christ, who is the image of God. 5 For what we proclaim is not ourselves, but Jesus Christ as Lord, with ourselves as your servants for Jesus’ sake. 6 For God, who said, “Let light shine out of darkness,” has shone in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ.

Now my question is: What does Paul mean by “the gospel of the glory of Christ” in 4:4? This is what I am going to address in this post. I have five steps that I followed to arrive at the answer and step one is also why I ask the question.
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No Doctrine But Love?

Three Requests

When I Was Napping…

Earlier this week I argued that we should not see a distinction in the way God operated in the Old Covenant and the New the way many people tend to do. The distinction usually falls like this, “In the Old Testament, God was wrath. In the New, God is love and mercy and grace.” In that previous post, I looked at Revelation 14 and the wrath of God depicted there being more intense than the wrath seen in the Old Testament. I want to do the same thing today, only this is looking at God’s love being cranked up and more intense than in the Old Testament.
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I have now read Dr Witherington’s two posts (“For God so loved Himself?” Is God a Narcissist? and Did Christ Come to Please Himself?) critiquing the Edwardsean world view that God created this world for his glory. The posts themselves, especially the first one, did not do a fair job of representing the Edwardsean view (You can read this post for more on Witherington misrepresenting the view). Edwards, and those who have followed him (like Dr. John Piper and myself), taught and believed that God created this world not so that he could have more glory but so that he could manifest his glory to the world and so that the world could know that glory and be satisfied in it and enjoy it forever. As Piper has stated, “God is most glorified in us (his glory is most clearly seen) when we are most satisfied in him.” But having read both of Witherington’s posts, I don’t think that he would disagree with the way he does in the posts with what is actually being stated. It is funny, Witherington said this in the second post as he concluded,

I don’t ask those out there in the blogosphere to take my word on this. Go and read some good commentaries on Isaiah by legitimate scholars who know the honor and shame cultures of the Ancient Near East, and know how this sort of language functions in such cultures. It is not sufficient to rely on old texts or textbooks on systematic theology whether by the Spurgeons or Owens or the like of this world, or by John Wesley for that matter. These men were not experts in ancient near-eastern culture, and they did not know how the language of honor and glory functioned in such cultures.

A good place to start would be to read two recent more conservative but well informed commentaries on Isaiah— say Brevard Childs’ on the one hand and John Oswalt’s on the other. When you do that, you will discover that ‘a text without a context is just a pretext for whatever you want it to mean’, and always there is the every present danger of reading one’s own theology into the text, especially if the only commentaries one reads on the matter are those of ancient systematic theologians, or even worse, you read no sources other than an ancient English translation of the Bible.

I completely agree. Many of the great theologians were not aware of the cultural background of the biblical writings to understand a lot of what is going on. I am always very weary of many of these older exegetes and what they had to say of a biblical text. But I do not hold to this Edwardsean view because of some ancient scholar. I read Piper’s book The Justification of God which is his attempt to understand γὰρ in Romans 9:15 when he was on his sabbatical when he was a professor. It was on the basis of this work that I came to hold to this view.

Over the last few weeks since BW3 started this blogosphere discussion, I was thinking about how to critique BW3. I was going to go to John 11 and the death of Lazarus and how Jesus waited for a while longer so that when he arrived Lazarus would be dead. The reasons being is that Lazarus illness was to show the glory of God and Jesus’ love for Mary, Martha and Lazarus. Thus when Jesus shows his glory he is showing them his love for them. I also thought about Daniel’s pray in Daniel 9 or Yahweh’s discussion of the new covenant in Ezekiel 36:22-27. But Witherington discussed in his posts about how this is shame language and God does not and will not allow his people to shame or dishonor his name. God’s honor is of top concern because all that he does is grounded in the honor of his name. But I will say that if God’s primary purpose in instituting the new covenant is to uphold his name, then doesn’t that mean that Jesus came to repair the damage mankind has done the honor of God by dying on the cross (cf. Romans 3:25-25)?

However, BW3 has really affirmed one of my primary concerns in trying to articulate my Edwardsean world view. People may misconstrue what I am saying very easily. I am not saying that God wants to get more glory for himself as if he is deficient in any way. So when I say God’s primary motivation in all his actions is to glorify himself, BW3 and others are taking it to mean that God is trying to get more glory or honor for himself. That just simply isn’t what I am saying. God is infinitely glorious and has infinite honor. There is no more honor to give him, for him to have.

What I am speaking of, what Piper and Edwards are speaking of, when I talk about God’s glory or δόξα is God’s moral perfections, his holiness, his beauty. I speak of what makes him God. His honor is part of that δόξα, but so is his self-sacrificing love for others as well.

I am reminded of the Gospel according to John. In John 1:14 we read about Jesus, the Word, “And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we have seen his glory, glory as of the only Son from the Father, full of grace and truth.” Jesus came and revealed his glory to us so that we could see it. Us seeing Jesus’ glory is the reason why he came to earth. But what is so striking to me is what Jesus (and by extension John the author) considered him being glorified, “The hour has come for the Son of Man to be glorified” (John 12:23). Jesus here is speaking of the cross. Jesus viewed his crucifixion as the hour when the Son of Man was to be glorified. On the cross Jesus’ glory is most clearly seen. The righteousness of God, the love of God, the holiness of God, the faithfulness of God are all seen on the cross of Jesus Christ. Paul calls Jesus “the Lord of glory” (1 Corinthians 2:8).

When I am thinking of δόξα I think of Paul’s discussion in 2 Corinthians 3-4. In 2 Corinthians 3:18 Paul says, “And we all, with unveiled face, beholding the glory (δόξα) of the Lord, are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another. For this comes from the Lord who is the Spirit.” The δόξα spoken of here is that which made Moses’ face shine so bright after being in the very presence of Yahweh that it had to be covered with a veil. But it is a greater δόξα here that Paul says we are “beholding” or “reflecting.” And that δόξα changes us, transforms us into the image of Christ (cf. Romans 8:29). Piper compares this with the idea of a telescope. A microscope takes objects that are small and makes them appear big. A telescope takes an object, like a star, and makes it appear closer so that we can see it more clearly. We are to telescope God’s glory (cf. Psalm 96:1-5). We are to make God’s glory visible to the world and in doing so we become more like it!

Then there is 2 Corinthians 4:4 where Paul says that the gospel, the good news, that Satan blinds us from and causes us to perish (2 Corinthians 4:3) is the glory of Christ who is the image. But when one looks a 1 Corinthians 15:3-4, that person would see that Paul says that the gospel, or good news, is that Jesus died for sins and was raised to life according to the Scriptures. Thus Paul understands the gospel as being both Christ’s glory (δόξα) and Christ crucified and raised. They are the same thing. Satan doesn’t want us to see the light of this gospel of Christ’s glory. And in 2 Corinthians 4:6, that is exactly what God has shone forth into the heart of Paul, “the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Christ Jesus.” God made Paul see his glory and Paul preached to the Corinthians Christ crucified and became a servant of the Corinthians for Christ’s sake.

The δόξα or glory that I speak of, when beheld by a person, transforms that person. It changes them from a God-hating and darkness-loving sinner to a God-loving, light-loving, sin hating saint. It isn’t just the reputation of God that is seen in the glory of God, but the very essence of God. It is seeing Exodus 34:6-7 in Christ Jesus on the cross (it is very important to note that Exodus 34:6-7 is God exegeting his name, Yahweh, which he told Moses is his glory (cf. Exodus 33:18-19)).

In conclusion, I want to thank BW3 for really underscoring the need to make myself absolutely clear in my world view. It took his misrepresentation of my view to make me realize how careful I have to be when I articulate what I am saying because the words I chose could convey an idea that I don’t intend to convey. So let me state as clearly as I can what I mean when I speak of God glorifying himself: God makes known his personal beauty/holiness/moral perfections to the created so that the created will be fully satisfied by them. God gives himself, in the person and work of Jesus Christ, in order to bring about the greatest joy and happiness of the created. In doing so, God is seen as most glorious, perfect, beautiful, and the creature is the most happy and joyous.

Are God’s glory and love at odds with each other?

BW3 and The Seer’s Tower

More Time with LDS