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The Use of the OT in the NT (Part 3)

Listen or read the following transcript as D. A. Carson speaks on the topic of Biblical Theology in this address from The Gospel Coalition Sermon Library


If we may change gears now and come back a little further to this matter of the use of the Old Testament in the New. To review, I began last day by surveying some of the topics that are touched by this larger subject, and then I turned in the second large place to what it means to speak of the fulfillment of the law, and we spent quite a lot of time on Matthew 5:17–18. I want to push that one just a wee bit farther before we turn to the third topic.

The outline is provided again on this day. If you’re following where I’m going, we’re still on the fulfillment of the law. I will say a bit more about that, and then we’re going to take one tough case, simply because it’s extremely useful to illustrate a number of points. After that, we’ll see how we get on with matters of typology and mystery, which are also important.

Now if you grant that the stance I took yesterday on Matthew 5:17–18 is correct, that is, the text says, “Do not think that I have come to abolish but to fulfill,” in the sense of bringing to fulfillment, bringing to accomplishment that which was predicted in the past rather than anything else, then this presupposes that the whole law is, in some sense, predictive.

We are already familiar with the notion of what we usually call the ceremonial law being predictive through typology, the sacrificial system, the priest of the tabernacle, and so on, but now we’re talking about the whole law, in some sense, looking forward. When one is in the domain of the classic tripartite distinction of law … moral, civil, and ceremonial … which comes from Aquinas and not from Jesus, Matthew, or Paul, then what precisely is meant by speaking of what we normally call the moral law being predictive?

Now how it might be predictive we’ll come to in a few minutes, but that it is predictive, it seems to me, could be considered along these lines. Let me approach the subject tangentially, coming in from the side, as it were. I began to raise this issue a couple of days ago in another connection. Now I want to come back at it again.

Will there be any signs posted in heaven forbidding murder? Presumably not, partly because it would be difficult to murder a resurrection body, but also because, at the end of the day, we will so be transformed that murder will not cross our minds. Hatred will be known no more. So the prohibition against murder, if placed within a given eschatological structure that already anticipates the perfection to glory, can be seen.

The warrant for seeing it this way we’ll come to in due course, but it can be seen. You can understand in principle how it fits into a pattern which anticipates something beyond itself. It anticipates a world order in which murder is no more, in which you no longer need the prohibition of murder. The prohibition is there, and it’s needed because the world is fallen, but implicitly it’s also anticipating a time when you will no longer need the prohibition because what is prohibited will no longer be done.

Now it’s at that point you see that this way of looking at things eschatologically overlaps semantically with the more traditional way of looking at things: seeing the law now being deepened by Christ, which is a typically Reformed way of doing things. When you get the exposition of law in the Puritans, for example.… You get Thomas Boston expounding the law or something like that. What do they do?

They come to the Sermon on the Mount, and then they look at all of the other passages that deal with murder and hate and so on, and they read back into the prohibition of murder everything that Jesus and other writers later draw out from it, in some sense. In other words, they would argue that the prohibition of murder already holds in itself in nuce all this other meaning.

When you come along to Jesus, then, what you are really getting is the unpacking of what is in principle already there. That’s the way it is expounded, which is why you can have these expositions of the Ten Commandments that go on for weeks and weeks and weeks, because you start saying, “Thou shalt not commit murder.”

Just a few words in Hebrew, and now it is unpacked to mean everything Jesus means in the Sermon on the Mount, everything that is said about hate in the New Testament, and so on. It means all of that, all the way to the flip side being, “Love your neighbor as yourself,” so you expound all of that. That one commandment not to commit murder suddenly means everything. That’s the way it has commonly been handled in Reformed circles, tracking down through the Puritans, and so on.

Now it’s not all bad. Conceptually, there’s some sense to all of that. There are some logical, coherent, structural ways in which you can tie the prohibition against murder to the command to love your neighbor as yourself. Yes, but notice what is missing from it is any sequential, temporal, eschatological dimension. It is an essentially static reading. The meaning is already there in the text. You’re merely unpacking it.

In other words, you’re reading the Bible as if it were structured as a systematic theology instead of reading the Bible as if it were structured as the prototype of a biblical theology. Now there’s a lot of dispute about the difference between systematic theology and biblical theology, but for our purposes, the fundamental difference is systematic theology tends to ask atemporal questions and tends to give atemporal answers.

Ideally, it gives such answers in the framework and categories of the culture in which the questions are being posed, but, ideally, they should be faithful to Scripture itself. Biblical theology asks not, “What are the characteristics of God?” It asks, rather, “What does Isaiah contribute to the unfolding picture of God across redemptive history in Scripture?” It asks, in other words, about the sequence of things as the books unfold with time.

Now, ultimately, biblical theology will then ask a final question. Good biblical theology will not only be descriptive and inductive at the level of the individual book across redemptive history. If it’s good biblical theology, it will also ask for a whole Bible biblical theology rather than merely a piece-by-piece bit. In other words, it will ask how the pieces unfold, but then, if it has any sort of high view of Scripture at all, it will ask how in the unfolding of things do you get the big picture culminating at the end.

Thus you are beginning to formulate ways in which biblical theology properly ought to be tied to systematic theology. There’s a whole discipline to be worked out there of the relationships between biblical and systematic theology. In fact, Kevin Vanhoozer and I are writing a book on the relationships between biblical and systematic theology at the moment.

Now the question becomes.… If fulfillment means what I’ve suggested it means in Matthew’s gospel, if that’s what’s going on, then is it quite adequate to think of the exposition Jesus gives of murder here in the antitheses as being merely an unpacking of what is there? That’s an atemporal way of approaching things. Or because you’re talking about prediction and fulfillment and thus sequence, prophecy, in that sense, is it not better to think of things this way? The actual prohibition of murder looks forward to, anticipates, announces, predicts the abolition of hate.

You see, in terms of moral, ethical consequence, there’s very little difference between the two positions. In terms of the structure of how you put your Bible together, there’s quite a lot of difference. So I’m not saying that with my understanding of this text I’m going to revolutionize Christian ethics. God forbid.

I am saying this is a little more faithful to the categories Matthew himself is deploying, and on the long haul, I think it will give us a more nuanced reading of Matthew himself and thus his witness to what Jesus is saying. He sees himself and his teaching and the dawning of the kingdom as not merely the expansion upon the old covenant in an atemporal sense, but the fulfillment of it, that which has already been predicted by Old Testament Law and Prophets.

Now I think you can understand all of the antitheses in roughly that light in a variety of ways. These Old Testament patterns, which anticipate Jesus as the ultimate priest, Jesus as the ultimate temple, Jesus as the ultimate sacrifice, Jesus as the ultimate Passover, and so on, all coming from the law, anticipate love, faithfulness, fidelity, utter devotion to Christ, all coming from the Ten Commandments.

It’s not that they’re already buried in them in some atemporal sense. It’s that they’re pointing in that direction. The warrant for thinking they’re pointing in that direction we’ll come to in due course, but that’s the language of fulfillment. “Don’t think I’ve come to abolish. I haven’t come to abolish but to fulfill.”

Male: What you’re saying is the Ten Commandments are laid out in such a way that they anticipate a society where these things never happen?

Don Carson: Well, in terms of the negative prohibitions, yes. But they’re not all negative. After all, the first one is, “You shall have no other god before me.” It’s anticipating the ultimate perfection, not simply of a society in Matthew’s day, but ultimately of the consummated kingdom. In fact, a great deal of kingdom ethics really anticipates the perfection of the kingdom in such a way that the church today, Christ’s people today, the society of the kingdom today, is already an extension in time of the consummated kingdom as it will be.

That is precisely why you get in Paul the exposition of ethics very often along the line, “Be what you are. You already are this in principle; now be it.” That really turns on an eschatological thing. The final justification of the last day has already been pronounced in Christ, so now be what you are. That is at the base of so much of Christian ethics in the New Testament. Now that would take a fair bit of time to unpack, but there’s a huge amount of New Testament teaching that turns on that kind of structure.

Male: You made a comment about the Puritans and how they looked at things. I guess the document that would encapsulate [inaudible] would be the Westminster Confession. Right?

Don: In some ways, although the Westminster Confession is merely an encapsulation of the kind of stuff that Thomas Boston.… Almost all the great Puritans, at some point or other, expounded the Ten Commandments, and they all did it the same way. Let me risk a horrible generalization. I’m now going to give you 2,000 years of Christian history in about 45 seconds along a certain schematization here.

I will argue in a moment that Jesus, Paul, Matthew, John, in other words, the New Testament biggies, and Hebrews very strongly.… They read the Old Testament sequentially, in chronological sequence. I’ll come to that. I don’t think that’s refutable. That’s there on the face of it. I think you get that dominating in the first two centuries in the apostolic and subapostolic fathers on to about Irenaeus, although it’s weakening. It’s even there in Dialogue with Trypho, and so forth.

By the time you get to the third century and you get to Origen and people like that, it’s just about gone. Now more and more of the Old Testament is being read flatly, so more and more you’re getting Christian ministers as really Christian priests, and so on. You’re getting a flattened reading instead of reading it chronologically. There are exceptions all along the line, and even if you’re a systematician along those lines, you have to distinguish between the Old Testament and the New. The question is how you manage that, how it works out in your structure.

There are blips up and down, more or less, but it seems to me that one of the things the Reformation did was recover a sequential reading. It did it in different ways. Luther does not do it the same way Calvin does, but, on the other hand, they both do it. Although on some points I think Luther is better than Calvin, I think on this point Calvin is better than Luther. One of the reasons is he is not only a systematician; he’s a systematic commentator who really keeps his finger on the text pretty closely.

By the time you get to Melanchthon, I think it’s already weakening. By the time you get to the Reformation structures of the late seventeenth century and on, by the time you even move from William Perkins, who’s one of the transitional figures into Britain, I think it’s disappearing again. When it reappears the next time in the rise of the biblical theology movement.… The first time the phrase biblische theologie was used was in 1607 in a little book that is no longer extant in German. All it was was a pastiche of proof texts to prove Lutheran orthodoxy. That’s all it was.

By the time you get this in the Gabler sense at the University of Altdorf 1764 address, then it is being connected with the trajectory that becomes liberal theology. As a result, the conservatives dig in and say, “No, we are suspicious of this.” Many responses of the conservatives were, in fact, misguided because they were suspicious of this more historical approach. They wanted their dogmatics.

Now there were some wonderful exceptions. For example, in the nineteenth century, von Hofmann wrote a superb biblical theology. There were some really wonderful exceptions. So now you have two streams of reading biblical theology, but a lot of the conservatives are instead more concerned to preserve systematic theology.

Then you have the biblical theology movement in the middle of the twentieth century, which was based on different principles, and it eventually died. Now you’re getting the flowering of biblical theology again, as you get more confessional Christians returning to the authority of the text and trying to read the text in those sorts of terms while nevertheless preserving the insights of a structured systematic theology.

I am always suspicious of people who want biblical theology and not systematic theology, as I’m always suspicious of people who want systematic theology and not biblical theology. They are slightly different domains of discourse. Sometimes that sort of thumbnail sketch of all of Christian history, although it’s not very nuanced, it’s obviously a scattered sketch, can nevertheless help put some of this together.

I wrote about an 18,000-word essay on the history of New Testament theology in the Dictionary of the Later New Testament and Its Developments. The article in there, “New Testament Theology,” gives a kind of thumbnail sketch of the history of biblical theology from about 1604 on.

Female: When you’re talking about chronological or sequential reading of the Old Testament and the model for doing biblical theology, would you compare it with the unfolding and categories of salvation history?

Don: It’s tied to salvation history. Often the two disciplines intersect. The trouble is salvation history means different things in different circles as well, and that’s part of the problem. Heilsgeschichte has been used by some people. It means history (historia in Latin). That is to say, it becomes different from what really takes place in the temporal, spatial world order. It sort of happens in a kind of ethereal, theological domain, and that makes me very nervous.

There is a doctoral dissertation on the history of salvation history by a chap who I hope will come over here sometime. I don’t know anybody who’s better on the history of nineteenth-century European theology. He’s very, very good. Robert Yarbrough. His dissertation has never been published, but it’s on the history of salvation history.

I hope we’ll get him here at some point to deal with that subject. He speaks German fluently and spent years on this side of the big ditch, and he understands that stuff pretty well. He has just never gotten around to rewriting it for publication. I hope he’ll do so eventually.

Female: May I ask when your book comes out, the one you mentioned with Kevin Vanhoozer?

Don: Oh, I don’t know. I’ve given up predicting things like that.

Female: Is there anything else you would suggest to read in that area?

Don: Oh, the literature is vast. It is a vast subject. In fact, I teach a doctoral seminar once every four or five years on the relationships between biblical and systematic theology. We’ve just finished one now. The literature is ghastly nowadays. It’s terrible. You can’t get ahold of it all.

Male: [Inaudible]

Don: Yeah, for some people that’ll help, it’s sort of middle level. It’s called the New Dictionary of Biblical Theology, NDBT, edited by T.D. Alexander, Graeme Goldsworthy, Brian Rosner, and myself. It might be useful for some people. Yes, I’d forgotten that. Then I edit a series, too, called New Studies in Biblical Theology, NSBT. There are 14 volumes in that which are out now, and some of those volumes give reasonably good models of what can be done.

Like all series, some volumes are better than others. I can talk about the series since I didn’t write it. I just edit it and write rude remarks to the writers now and then. But there are some volumes in that that are very good. There’s a volume in there by Andreas Kostenberger and Peter O’Brien on mission theology. It is superb. It is really, really good. And there’s a volume in there by Craig Blomberg, Neither Poverty Nor Riches, on how wealth runs throughout the Scripture, and again, it is superb. It is really very good.

There are several volumes in there that are very useful indeed. The latest one just released is by Hays on how races are viewed throughout Scripture. You ever deal with things like the curse of Ham and so on? It’s all put within a kind of biblical theological framework. It’s a very good piece of work. So as I say, the literature in that area nowadays is very, very large indeed, I’m afraid.

Male: What is, in your point of view, the relationship of history and the history of salvation and how Christians could superimpose salvation history on history without becoming fundamentalists?

Don: Well, let’s start with what a fundamentalist is, because the term is ambiguous. In English it has had three distinguishable meanings. It’s really important to see this. When the term was first coined at the beginning of the twentieth century, it was coined by a group of believers from many different denominations, just mainstream believers, who wrote a series of books called The Fundamentals. This was over against classic liberalism of the time, which was denying the historical reality of the virgin birth of Christ, denying the deity of Christ, and so on.

They wrote a series of books simply called The Fundamentals, which were really trying to articulate the kinds of things that confessional Christians have always believed across 19 centuries. I have them. I’ve read them. It was by and large unexceptionable. There were a few little tweaking things here and there that were a bit esoteric. It was not written at a high level. It was sort of a semi-popular level, but they were just trying to say, “These are the fundamentals without which Christianity is not Christianity.”

In that sense, I’m a fundamentalist. You lose certain things and it’s not Christianity anymore, no matter how liturgically interesting it is or how ecclesiastically structured it is or what denomination you belong to. I really don’t give a rip. At the end of the day, you lose certain kinds of fundamentals and you don’t have Christianity anymore.

But then the people who held this sort of view came to be called rather dismissively in the press by fundamentalist, and as late as 1957 in the English-speaking world, fundamentalist and evangelical were almost equivalent terms. What eventually happened.… I could tell you why it happened, but it would take too long.

What eventually happened was that the more conservative wing culturally and socially of this group of confessional Christians became more and more defensive in posture and less and less engaged, and thus became sort of reactionary, more defined by what they were against than what they were for, and sometimes using pretty dismissive and vituperative language, not very nuanced.

Because they had lost an awful lot of the major schools.… I mean, as late as 1880 or 1890, Princeton was, in that sense, a fundamentalist school, with the exception of the odd professor there, but gradually, these people lost the mainline seminaries and then started all over again with small Bible institutes. They became less educated, less informed, more right wing culturally, and so on.

Eventually there came a divide, and then the labels became evangelical and fundamentalist. Now the evangelicals were, by and large, equally fundamentalist to the fundamentalists in terms of the 1900 expression, but the two terms began to divide more and more. There are all kinds of contexts now in which I don’t want to be called a fundamentalist, because I just don’t belong to that sort of social grouping. I just don’t.

Now the term has gone through another metamorphosis, especially in the media. Now fundamentalist has no doctrinal content whatsoever. None. It can be applied to any religion. In fact, it can be applied to non-religious movements. It simply means the extreme right wing of any group that wants to protect itself and might be given to violence and nastiness and hatred and so on.

So you have Hindu fundamentalists who will be prepared to kill Christians in northern India, and you have Muslim fundamentalist, and you have Christian fundamentalists, and they all belong to the same group. You can understand why there are tensions, because there are still Christians who call themselves fundamentalists who think in terms of the first category, so when the media call them Christian fundamentalists and identify them with Muslim fundamentalists, in their view, the Muslim fundamentalists are the ones who put the planes into the towers.

Sometimes you can’t avoid the labels. You can try to explain them, but people are always going to label you. That’s just the way it is. But it is worth, nevertheless, unpacking the labels to understand where they came from. I understood your question. I was just trying to make sure we’re on the same playing field in terms of the labels themselves. Let me get on with this question if I may. I’ll come back to that one, but let me finish this question first.

Within that framework, we return to something I said in the domain of postmodernism, the distinction between narrative and metanarrative. The postmodern world loves narrative. It loves stories. It is always suspicious of metanarrative because that seems to be imposing a frame of reference for understanding the whole, but that is precisely what the Bible’s big storyline does, in fact, give us. It gives us a metanarrative for understanding the whole.

Now it’s not a metanarrative in some simple sense that it unpacks like a modern novel, each piece in its place. Clearly it’s mixed in all kinds of ways. You have 1 and 2 Chronicles repeating and giving from another point of view what you get in 1 and 2 Samuel and 1 and 2 Kings, and the Synoptic Gospels from different perspectives, and you have different genres. I mean, what do you do with Ecclesiastes? It’s not exactly in a certain slot in a storyline, or you get the big framework and then you can slot it in somewhere.

So it’s not a story in a simple narrative prose sense, but in terms of the fact that you begin with creation and human beings and the fall and all of its consequences, and then God invading history to do all kinds of things until you get the high point in the coming of Christ and an overlap of the age to come and a final consummation in the glory at the end, this is a metanarrative that gives a whole.

In that sense, the Bible is a biblical theological salvation historical reading. Salvation historical almost means the same in that context as metanarrative. But it is claiming to be telling the truth. It is not a fictional metanarrative. Now how any particular piece of the story uses language in terms of literary genre and how much it is chronicle versus symbol-laden approach.… It is nevertheless saying some important things about the whole story and then fits all the little stories …

It is claiming that it explains human existence in Kamba tribes in Kenya and Slovakian tribes as well. It’s claiming a universal history, in a sense. It is a metanarrative. That is why anybody who comes from a strong postmodern perspective will always view those who hold that view as some kind of fundamentalists in a bad sense. You can’t avoid it, because we are claiming there is a kind of universal truth here. Every knee will bow. That’s part of Christian faithfulness.

If the alternative to that is, “Well, you have your religion, and I have my religion. We all have our religion religion. It all depends on a point of view …” In that sense, I would say the Bible is against you. If you want to go that route, that’s fine, but then don’t pretend you’re a Christian. That’s not what the Bible says.

I want to argue there has to be respect, because, after all, we’re all lost. We’re all by nature children of wrath, as Ephesians says, and Christians should never see themselves as anything other than poor beggars telling other poor beggars where there is bread, so there’s no excuse for triumphalism, and there’s no excuse for condescension. We must all live and work out our ethics under the cross. Those things are all true. Christians make terrible mistakes and sin horribly in this regard and need to repent.

All that’s true, but at the end of the day, in terms of the given of the revelation, I want to say that the Bible’s big storyline, its metanarrative, its portrayal of the universal history, is the portrayal of God’s invasion of salvation in history to be consummated at the last day. The salvation history is merely another way, in that reading of salvation history, of summarizing what biblical theology is and its relationship to metanarrative. If that earns me the title fundamentalist in some circles, I will wear it.

Male: Is there a history?

Don: Is there a history just generally?

Male: Yeah, in relationship to salvation history, is there a history?

Don: Well, again, the term history is becoming very plastic too. Some people use …

Male: From my point of view there is no history without salvation history.

Don: Well, it depends what you mean by history. It’s a definitional question at the end of the day. That’s all it is, because for some people, history is what happens. For some people, history is the report of what happens. Now there’s a sense in which if you say there’s no history in the first sense you’re saying nothing happens, and surely you don’t mean that.

Now there are some people who do mean that, put it all into clouds, but on the other hand, it’s all in the vision of dreams. Most of us aren’t that and can’t live like that in any case. But if you mean is there history in the sense of report of history, if you’re a postmodernist, there are many, many, many histories, and there is a sense in which we want to say that, because all of our interpretation of what takes place is necessarily a limited interpretation. It’s always an interpretation from a point of view.

Then I come back to the models I drew in the postmodern section in any case. That does not mean everything you say is false. It means you can have an asymptotic approach to what is described in the past in any case. When we write our histories, there are degrees of quality to them, but nevertheless we can know some things about what truly did happen, even if we cannot be exhaustive and perfect and omniscient in our understanding of what happened.

Even biblical history is, in this regard, selective. We’re told about the Jews being carted off into exile and coming back. You read the biblical accounts of the return from the exile and it almost sounds for a while as if they’re the only ones who ever returned from exile. Who would ever guess that it was a Persian policy to reverse the previous imperial policy?

That’s because the history is being told from a certain point of view. It doesn’t mean it’s false. It means it was told from a certain point of view to make certain points. And they’re true points, and they did happen, and you have to read the metanarrative within the light of those selective points. They’re anchored down in what really did happen. The report, history, is true to what really did happen, history.

These sorts of issues are talked about in history departments all over Europe. At the risk of a generalization, though.… This is a generalization again. I’m sure individual countries can slap me on the wrist for this one. Western history departments are facing more pressures from postmodernism than Central and Eastern departments. That’s changing. I have a good friend, for example, who’s doing a PhD on Hungarian history at Cambridge University but spent two years of his time at Budapest.

He kept arguing it was a different world, because at least quite a few of his colleagues in Budapest were still trying to describe what happened in the past, whereas a lot of his people in the history department at Cambridge were still talking about how you create history. Again, you have different degrees of intensity of the postmodern impact, depending on where you are in different universities.

Now we’ve gone all around the mulberry bush. I don’t have time to unpack this at length, but let me draw your attention to chapter 11 in Matthew so that you understand this is not something that crops up in only one passage in Matthew. I wish I had time to expound the whole flow from chapter 2 to verse 19. It is really important to understand the flow.

When you get two-thirds of the way through, you come to verse 13: “For all the Prophets and the Law prophesied until John.” There it is again. It’s not that the Prophets prophesied and the Law legislated. It’s the Prophets and the Law prophesied until John. It is a fairly common theme in the New Testament.

Now come to the passage we looked at in the third morning exposition, Romans 3:21. Do you remember how it begins? “But now a righteousness from God apart from law has been made known …” I think that means, as I tried to expound, “But now a righteousness from God has been made known apart from law.” “… to which the Law and the Prophets bore witness.” Again, it is not cast as the moral law continues unabashed as law. It’s cast rather as a new covenant that has come along.

The law covenant, nomos in that sense (nomos is the law covenant) has gone and now a new covenant has been revealed. It’s apart from that law covenant, but the law covenant bore witness to it. It anticipated it. If we understand it along these sorts of lines, then when you get to verse 31, you read verse 31 a certain way. “Do we, then, nullify the law by this faith? Not at all! Rather, we uphold the law.”

If you understand the law as merely lex, that is, demand, then to uphold the law merely means that the demand continues, but if instead you have already now understood that the law, nomos, is the law covenant, which in some sense has come apart from the law, to which it bore witness, then you are precisely upholding the law by showing how that law anticipates what is coming and is fulfilled in what is coming and is pointing to what is coming and is unpacked precisely in what is coming.

That is what it means to uphold the law. Otherwise, you are going to have a hard job understanding why Paul can be as flexible as he is with respect to all kinds of demands of the law. For example, a lot of people quote one half of 1 Corinthians 7:19, but they only quote one half. Take a look at 1 Corinthians 7:19. “Keeping God’s commandments is what counts.” What’s the first half? What would a Jew say to the first half? “Circumcision is nothing and uncircumcision is nothing. Keeping God’s commandments is what counts.”

Wouldn’t he say, “But circumcision is God’s command. Paul, you’re playing with words.” Isn’t that what he would say? But clearly, Paul does not see a problem, because he does not see himself under the law covenant. Keeping God’s commandments is what counts, but the issue is, then, what for Paul are God’s commandments that bind him at this point in redemptive history?

Or 1 Corinthians 9:19–23. Look at this passage. Again, if I had time, I would set it within the larger framework. Verse 19: “Though I am free and belong to no man, I make myself a slave to everyone to win as many as possible. To the Jews I became like a Jew to win the Jews. To those under the law I became like one under the law (though I myself am not under the law).…” He does not see himself as under the law.

Nevertheless, he says, “To those not having the law I became like one not having the law (though I am not free from God’s law …)” Wait a minute, Paul. I’m getting a headache. On the one hand you say, “I am not under the law.” On the other hand you say, “I am not free from God’s law.” What do you mean? Well, he explains. “I am not free from God’s law, but I’m under Christ’s law. I am ennomos Christou.” That’s a hapax legomenon.

The little expression ennomos is, in fact, found in other Hellenistic Greek literature, and the genitive that follows it is always the authority base for what it means to be in that law. So “under Christ’s law” isn’t a bad translation. Do you see what he’s saying? He does not see himself in this context as a Christian Jew who normally obeys all the full structure of Mosaic demand, the kosher food laws, circumcision, the whole bit, who then has to flex now and then when he becomes an apostle of the Gentiles. He sees himself in the tertium quid, in the third position.

He’s a Christian, so he flexes to act like one who is under the law so as not to cause unnecessary offense. “I become like one under the law.” So he goes to Jerusalem, and he offers the money for the young men who were taking the vow, and so on. He can do that. He has no conscience about it. On the other hand, he can flex and live just like a Gentile too, except that there are some restrictions there. He can’t become an absolute antinomian, because he is, after all, bound by the demand of Christ. He’s ennomos Christou.

So in one sense, therefore, he can talk about being lawless, that is, he is free from the Mosaic covenant. He is not under the law. He’s under a new covenant. But that doesn’t mean he’s antinomian. He’s ennomos Christou. What that does, then, is inevitably raise the question.… What, then, is the connection in the demands between the law covenant and what it means to be under Christ’s law? What is the nature of those connections? That’s the issue.

Now if we return for a moment to thinking about the connection between the demands of the law where law is understood to be the Mosaic covenant and the demands of the law where law is understood to mean whatever it means to be ennomos Christou, now we come very close to that debate that was precipitated by the analysis of Aquinas and came down to us through Calvin and others.

Under the tripartite division, moral/civil/ceremonial law, that tripartite division was understood to be the a priori category. That is, it is already there before you begin to do your work. It becomes the category by which you explain the patterns of continuity and discontinuity, and within that framework, then, the moral law is what continues. If you then view the Ten Commandments as the epitome of moral law, then the Ten Commandments are perpetually eternally binding by definition, by virtue of the a priori distinction.

That will generate, then, a certain view of Sabbath, which is the only one of the Ten Commandments that partakes of what most people would think of as, in some sense, taking on less than purely moral terms. Then that is winkled out in different ways. Some say, “Look, the text says, ‘Remember the seventh day to keep it holy,’ ” so they become seventh day believers.

There were some seventh day believers, Sabbatarians in that sense, not only with Seventh Day Adventists, but even in Puritan times there was a minority of Seventh Day Baptists and Seventh Day Puritans, because it says, “The seventh day.” Others become loose enough to it to say, “Well, it’s the seventh day, yes, but that’s not really important. It’s one day in seven.”

Then it just becomes the warrant for thinking that in the New Testament there is some kind of transfer to Sunday. There’s no text that authorizes a transfer to Sunday, per se. We simply look at those texts where Christians were meeting on the first day of the week or something like that. Meanwhile, the apostle Paul can say something like, “One man regards one day above another. Another man regards every day the same. Let each be fully persuaded in his own mind.”

Rather shocking, isn’t it? You couldn’t imagine the apostle Paul saying, “One man regards adultery as wrong. Another man regards adultery as a fine thing. Let each be fully persuaded in his own mind.” You realize there are some limitations here that are going on somewhere. Why can Paul say that sort of thing?

The Sabbatarians, therefore, when they hear Paul saying, “One man regards one day above another,” say, “Well, that’s not really talking about the Sabbath. Maybe that’s talking about Passover. It has to be talking about something else, because Sabbath is moral law. That’s the structure.”

I don’t want to get rid of the category of moral law. Don’t misunderstand me. It is a useful, heuristic category, but I prefer to think of the tripartite distinction as useful a posteriori, not a priori. In other words, if you start to establish how the biblical writers themselves make their connections, then, after the fact, you may observe the nature of the connections and usefully talk descriptively about those things that are essentially ceremonial law.

There are all kinds of elements of law that are primarily bound up with the fact that Israel was a nation. So call them civil law if you like. There are some things there that anticipate the coming of the kingdom and the new community, the new nation with the new people of God. After all, does not the New Testament say, or the Apocalypse says, Peter says, that we are a kingdom and priests unto our God?

So there is a sense in which we are the fulfillment of those kinds of things too, but that doesn’t mean the church then has exactly the same statute about building a little guardrail around the roof of your house so that if somebody falls off you’re not guilty of manslaughter. Most of us come from countries that have enough snow that our roofs are like this and you don’t have to put little balustrades around.

There is a kind of specificity to Old Testament law that doesn’t exactly apply as a first-rate kingdom principle. Yet there is something that is going on there that anticipates the community of the people of God as the nation of God, the kingdom of God, the people of God. Kingdom is a very plastic term and has a lot of different overtones depending on the context. Likewise in the realm of what we call morality.

At the risk of a simplification, there’s a sense in which those demands of God, which change least in form across redemptive history, are usefully labeled moral, a posteriori. Let me repeat that. Those demands of God, which change least in form across redemptive history, are a posteriori, usefully labeled moral. So the Ten Commandments say you’re not to commit adultery. Paul says the same thing. Jesus has some pretty strong words along those lines too. So also does James, and so on. It changes least in form.

But once you’ve done that, you have some room to tweak Sabbath, and that’s why there is such a major division of opinion amongst confessional Christians about exactly what to do with the Sabbath, because when the Sabbath is treated at greatest length theologically, you’re in Hebrews 3 and 4. We’ll look at that passage in a few moments. There the ultimate fulfillment of the rest is, in fact, salvation.

That does not mean to say God doesn’t care for the kind of rest we get here, but there is a sense in which if you think of the Ten Commandments as, first and foremost, the very summary of moral law, a priori, then you’re driven to a certain conclusion. If you see the Ten Commandments as structurally the high point of the Mosaic code …

It is structurally in all kinds of ways, but your moral category, as also your ceremonial and civil categories, are structured a posteriori after you’ve worked out the inner canonical principles for continuity and discontinuity. Then you have a little more flexibility about how you put your Bible together. That’s one of the reasons Heidelberg does not sound exactly like Westminster. You have slightly different principles operating.

Now for want of time, let me press on a little bit before I open it up to questions. I think it’s worth taking a test case on a slightly different issue. It’s a very interesting one, and this one is going to take us 20 or 25 minutes just to even make a dent in it, but it’s worth doing just because it’s a difficult one. I don’t want to talk in such generalities that we don’t look at any hard text. So let’s come to Hebrews, chapter 1, verse 5, in particular.

You’re familiar with the argument here, I’m sure. The writer is saying that Jesus is superior to the angels, all the way from verse 5 to the end of verse 14. Then in the next chapter, in some ways he’s saying he’s not only superior to the angels, but different from the angels, because the Eternal Word becomes a man, not an angel. It is worth observing that a redeemer has arisen for fallen human beings, but not for fallen angels. So in some ways, the argument is continuing in the second chapter, but it’s dealing much more with the humanity of Christ.

Now the first step of the argument, at a superficial level, is pretty straightforward. Verse 5: “For to which of the angels did God ever say, ‘You are my Son; today I have become your Father’? Or again, ‘I will be his Father, and he will be my Son’?” At the superficial level, it’s pretty clear what the text means. That is, the reason Jesus is superior to the angels is because he alone has a son/father relationship to God himself. So far the argument is straightforward.

Now just focus on the first of the two quotations. There are two quotations here. The first is from Psalm 2, verse 7. The second, of course, is from 2 Samuel 7:14. We’ll look at them both in a moment, but just focus on the first one. “You are my Son; today I have become your Father.” The interesting thing is that that verse is quoted three times in the New Testament. The second occurrence of it is in chapter 5, verse 5, but begin with verse 4.

Here we are being introduced to Jesus as priest, and we are told, “No one takes this honor [of serving as priest] upon himself. He must be called by God, just as Aaron was.” In other words, Aaron didn’t say, “Oh, I’ll volunteer. That would be great fun.” He was called by God. “So Christ also did not take upon himself the glory of becoming a high priest. But God said to him, ‘You are my Son; today I have become your Father.’ ” Then the Psalm 110 passage is taken as well.

In this passage, the same text is being quoted to prove that Jesus did not take unto himself the right to be high priest but that it was given to him. In chapter 1, verse 5, the text is taken to prove that Jesus is superior to angels. The other passage where it’s quoted is Acts 13, and there it is taken to prove that Jesus really did have to rise from the dead.

Acts, chapter 13, verse 32. This is in the context of Paul’s evangelistic sermon in Pisidian Antioch. “We tell you the good news: What God promised our fathers he has fulfilled for us, their children, by raising up Jesus.” Raising up in this context does not mean bringing into being or introducing him to the stream of redemptive history or anything like that. It means raising him from the dead, as the following lines make clear. “As it is written in the second psalm: ‘You are my son; today I have become your father.’ ”

The fact that God raised him from the dead (so you really are talking about the resurrection of Jesus) never to decay is stated in these terms, and then you get another quotation. So mark well. In the New Testament, these words, “You are my Son; today I have become your Father” are taken to prove, first, that Jesus had to rise from the dead; second, that Jesus is superior to the angels; and third, that he didn’t take the honor of high priest unto himself. On the face of it, Psalm 2 talks about none of those three. Isn’t that interesting? We might as well take a tough one.

So what is going on? Even if we don’t have strong confessional views about the nature of Scripture (and I do), we must at least begin, methodologically, with the assumption that the New Testament writers were not stupid. You have to at least give them the courtesy of trying to find out what is going on in their heads. Why do they quote Scripture this way? Why do they think it proves what they claim it to be proving?

I’m going to suggest, however, that we begin with the second quotation: “I will be his Father, and he will be my Son.” I could say more about that one too, but instead I want to turn immediately to 2 Samuel 7:14. I would love to expound this chapter at length, because the argument becomes stronger when you catch the flow of the text forcefully, but let me summarize two or three of the points so we can put 2 Samuel 7:14 into its context.

When David becomes king, he begins his reign in Hebron, and he’s really only king over the south for a while. After seven years, he becomes king over the entire nation and, in due course, he takes Jerusalem and makes that his capital. Then in chapter 6, the ark of the covenant is brought to Jerusalem. So you have now kingship and the ark with the tabernacle now in Jerusalem.

In this context, David now has stability. According to chapter 7, verse 1, he now has his own palace built there, and he thinks it appropriate also to build a more permanent structure. He may think he is fulfilling the kinds of prophecies already given in Deuteronomy, to the effect that, “Once you enter into the Promised Land, there will be a central place to which the tribes will come.” It may be that he thinks he’s going to build this temple along those lines and he’s fulfilling Scripture.

He utters his plan to Nathan. Nathan approves it, and then God intervenes and says, “Nuh-uh, Nathan. You’ve spoken too soon. That’s not the way it’s going to be.” You have the long oracle then, beginning at verse 5. God now, through Nathan, is saying something rather different. “Go and tell my servant David, ‘This is what the Lord says.’ ” Not what Nathan says. This is what the Lord says.

“Are you the one to build me a house to dwell in? I have not dwelt in a house from the day I brought the Israelites up out of Egypt to this day. I have been moving from place to place with a tent as my dwelling. Wherever I have moved with all the Israelites, did I ever say to any of their rulers whom I commanded to shepherd my people Israel, ‘Why have you not built me a house of cedar?’ ”

The first part of this argument, it seems to me, is simply this. At the great turning points of redemptive history, God and God alone, God exclusively, takes the initiative. Thus Abraham is not presented as volunteering. Moses is not presented as volunteering. In fact, when Moses does volunteer, he gets in a great deal of trouble, doesn’t he? At the great turning points in redemptive history, God and God alone takes the initiative.

Now that’s part of a sweeping assumption in the Old Testament narrative, which finds interesting articulation, for example, in Paul’s Athenian address in Acts 17. It really is an entailment of monotheism. Paul actually has the cheek to say that God does not need you. It is not as if God needs you. That is so different from paganism.

In paganism, the gods and human beings have a kind of reciprocal relationship. The gods have their needs, and we have our needs. You scratch their backs; they scratch your back. You give them the right sacrifice, and they give you the right blessing. They are like souped-up human beings with their fears and loves and lusts and hates. You make them happy, and the gods make you happy. Thus they have their needs.

But God doesn’t need us. It is important to keep saying that in our generation, because we are in danger of so psychologizing God that we think of him as sort of up in heaven and really unhappy unless we get our praise choruses right. “Dear old God is really unhappy unless we live holy lives, miserable.”

Now do not misunderstand. I do not want to make God so withdrawn that he doesn’t care about what happens or that there is no place for his love or his wrath or his response to us. God is a personal God. But it is not as if God is a being larded with a whole lot of psychological needs only we can meet, so that in eternity past “dear old God” was really quite lonely up there and decided to do something about it. It’s just not the way the God of the Bible is presented.

In Puritan times, people used this term. It has just about fallen out of the English language. He is the God of aseity, from the Latin a se, from himself. Now we speak commonly enough of God being self-existent. Self-existence is merely aseity in the matter of origins, but aseity is the larger category. All other beings are not self-existent. We are dependent on the Creator for our existence, directly or indirectly. In fact, we’re dependent upon God for everything, aren’t we?

God himself is not only self-originating; he’s self-existent. He’s the God of aseity. He doesn’t need us. In fact, that’s Paul’s argument in Acts 17, and then he goes further and flips it and says, in fact, we need him for life and food and everything else. We are to think of ourselves, therefore, not only as dependent in our origins, but dependent for everything, for food and drink and health and so on.

That’s why Jesus can say likewise in the Sermon on the Mount not a sparrow falls from the heavens without God sanctioning it. Not a hair falls from your head without God having full charge and keeping the count. (In my case, that means he has to do rapid subtraction.) The God of the Bible is in charge. I am dependent upon him for everything. He’s not dependent upon me. That’s not the way it works.

That’s the kind of God who’s presenting himself in the first part of his response, verses 5–7. “Did I ever give the command to any of my shepherds of Israel to build this house? So what do you think you’re doing?” It’s as blunt as that. Then the second part says, “David, don’t forget that I took you from being a shepherd boy and made you king. And you know what? I will make your name great like the names of the greatest men of the earth. Do not think that by building me a temple you will make me great. I will make you great.”

It’s a way of saying that, yes, although in the Bible we ought to give praise to God and, yes, in the Bible we owe him our allegiance and our corporate worship and all the rest, do not think that by doing this you are enhancing God. That was the danger, because in the ancient Near East, the surrounding petty kingdoms vied for building bigger temples to enhance their respective gods.

Is David now to get in the business of vying with Moab and Ammon in order to build a bigger temple to prove that his God is a little bit bigger than somebody else? “Nuh-uh. You don’t make me great; I make you great.” Indeed, ultimately, verse 11b. Far from David building a house for God, God will build a house for David.

Now in part, the argument here turns on a pun. House can mean temple or household and household can mean dynasty. “The Lord declares to you that the Lord himself will establish a house for you.” The whole question of dependency is running the other way now. “When your days are over and you rest with your fathers …” Interestingly enough, there’s a whole theme of rest here that’s picked up in verse 1, verse 11, verse 12, and so on, that is tied to a whole rest theme that runs right through Scripture.

A throwaway remark here. This remark is free. You can track out various trajectories in Scripture, about 20 or 25 of them, that are major themes that run through the Scripture that serve as kind of tendons or ligaments that hold the whole storyline together. Rest is one of those. There are a lot of little ones as well, but there are about 20 major ones, and you can track out how these themes run through Scripture. This is just one of them, and I just mentioned it on the fly.

“When your days are over and you rest with your fathers, I will raise up your offspring to succeed you who will come from your own body, and I will establish his kingdom. He is the one who will build a house for my name.” God does know the future. God is going to fulfill his promise in Deuteronomy. God will build it, but he will do it by God’s decree at God’s time and God’s appointment of God’s man for God’s job.

That’s the way it’s going to work at this great turning point in redemptive history. “I will establish the throne of his kingdom forever.” Of whom is this speaking? Don’t say “Jesus” or you’re going to have a lot of difficulty with the next verse. “I will be his father, and he will be my son. When he does wrong, I will punish him with the rod of men.”

You’ve probably heard of the old Sunday school joke. This pastor is trying to communicate with a group of 7-year-old boys, and he normally doesn’t speak to the 7-year-old boys, but he’s trying to communicate. He thinks of a clever illustration. He starts saying, “Now I’m thinking of an animal. It’s gray and has a bushy tail. It jumps from tree to tree. It loves to gather nuts. It’s very fast. What am I thinking of? Johnny, what am I thinking of?” He replies, “Please, sir, I know the answer is Jesus, but it sounds like a squirrel to me.”

You see, there’s a danger that we come to this text and say, “Please, sir, we know the answer is Jesus, but it sounds an awful lot like somebody else,” because “When he does wrong, I will punish him with the rod of men.” It has to be referring here to Solomon. The reason it’s referring to Solomon, of course, is that David has seen what has happened to Saul. Saul didn’t even get a dynasty going. He started so well, and he didn’t even go to the next generation.

So now David is king. Fine and good. How long is this going to go on for? If the child or the grandchild or the great-grandchild turns out to be unfaithful, what happens to the dynasty? But now God says, “I will create a house for you, and I will establish the throne of his kingdom forever. I will be his father, and he will be my son. When he does wrong, oh yeah, I’ll punish him all right.”

Verse 15: “But my love will never be taken away from him, as I took it away from Saul.” That’s the point. This is going to be different from the Saul case. So as the nation then divides after Solomon under Rehoboam, in the north you have successive dynasties, but in the south you still have the same dynasty. Then verse 16: “Your house and your kingdom will endure forever before me; your throne will be established forever.”

Now it’s with a promise like that in mind that you can understand why so many people, both in Jeremiah’s day in Jerusalem and in Ezekiel’s day, the same day really, but now in Babylon, 700 miles away in captivity, could not really believe that the house of David would fall, because after all, God had said he would punish his people with the rod of man, but he would never take away his favor.

If the temple comes down, Jerusalem comes down, and the Davidic king is kicked off the throne, doesn’t that mean God has broken his promise? You can understand why Ezekiel and Jeremiah had such a tough time being believed. In fact, it would be the most devout people who were saying, “This is the Word of the Lord; this is the promise of God,” who would be most convinced that God couldn’t let Jerusalem go.

Moreover, when you come to the end of verse 16, “Your throne will be established forever,” from a logical perspective, either that means the dynasty goes on and on, that one replaces another and one replaces another and one replaces another, on and on, world without end, amen, or you have to have a very special king coming along.

As the prophetic witness about David becomes clearer with time, you start getting glimpses of a special David. So already with Isaiah, chapter 9: “Unto us a child is born, unto us a son …” There it is, the son language again. Son is one of those tracks that run through Scripture. “Unto us a son is given. He will sit on the throne of his father David.” So he’s a Davidic king.

“Of the increase of his kingdom there will be no end, but he’ll also be called the Wonderful Counselor, the Mighty God, the Everlasting Father, the Prince of Peace.” Boy, that’s a bit extravagant, isn’t it? If you ask, “Does the text really say, ‘Mighty God’?” because there are some translations that try to make it different, yes, it does. There was a superb essay in the Tyndale Bulletin about 15 years ago by Murray Harris, which is the best exegetical treatment of that text I have seen.

Now it is important at this juncture to take one further small text. This son language, “I will be his father; he will be my son …” That is traditional ancient Near Eastern language for a king coming to the throne, because the king was often viewed as, in fact, the reflection of God. The king was the son of the god. The king was supposed to exercise the justice of the god. The king was the extension of the god’s authority.

It’s fairly common language. Thus, becoming the son of God is more or less equivalent to enthronement. When you become king, you become the son of God. You are thus engendered by God. He becomes your father. You become his son. That sort of language is being picked up here. You can understand why it is picked up. Precisely because the son is supposed to reflect the god.

The son is supposed to reflect the father with the father’s justice, the father’s authority, the father’s right, the father’s views. That’s why the king in Israel was not only to exercise God’s justice. The king was also supposed to institute God’s laws and teach the people of Israel God’s ways. That was all part of the function of the king. “I will be his father, and he will be my son.”

Now turn to Psalm 2. Psalm 2 is an enthronement psalm. “Why do the nations conspire and the peoples plot in vain? The kings of the earth take their stand, and the rulers gather together against the Lord [Yahweh] and against his anointed one, his mashiach, his messiah.” Now in the Old Testament, the mashiach, the anointed one, could be a priest, could be a king, could be a prophet, and occasionally a few other people as well. The term itself does not necessarily have messianic overtones. That depends on the context. We remain open until we see what the context is.

“ ‘Let us break their chains and throw off their fetters,’ they say. The One enthroned in heaven laughs; the Lord …” Not Yahweh, but the sovereign. “… scoffs at them. Then he rebukes them in his anger and terrifies them in his wrath, saying, ‘I have installed my king on Zion, my holy hill.’ ” So on the face of it so far, what it sounds like is the Davidic dynasty is being threatened by petty kings around who are rebelling.

At this point, there’s a kind of sovereign thrust, whether it’s David or Solomon or one of the other stronger kings who are ruling all around, and they’re rebelling and saying, “Oh, we’re going to overthrow the rein of David and that Yahweh God,” but Yahweh holds them in derision. “I have installed my king on Zion.” So far it makes entire sense that way, does it not?

Then the king speaks. The voice changes. It’s the king who speaks. “I will proclaim the decree of the Lord. He said to me, ‘You are my son; today I have become your father.’ ” In other words, verse 7 is the same as verse 6 from the king’s point of view. Verse 6 has God saying, “I have installed my king.” Verse 7 says, the king now speaking, “God said to me, ‘You are my son; today I have become your father.’ ” The day God becomes his father is the day he’s installed as king. In other words, you are back to the same sort of language as 2 Samuel, chapter 7.

What God says to him at this installation is, “Ask of me, and I will make the nations your inheritance.” That’s precisely why these surrounding nations are not going to be able to overturn things. God himself has promised this. Except the language begins to get a bit extravagant. “I will make the nations your inheritance, the ends of the earth your possession.” Well, that’s a bit extravagant for David, but nevertheless it’s in the same sort of thought line. It’s just becoming a little larger here, isn’t it?

“You will rule them with an iron scepter; you will dash them to pieces like pottery. Therefore, you kings, be wise. Be warned, you rulers of the earth. Serve the Lord with fear and rejoice with trembling. Kiss the son …” Yes, I know there’s an Aramaic variant. We won’t even worry about that here. “… lest he be angry and you be destroyed in your way, for his wrath can flare up in a moment,” and so forth.

So in general terms at least, despite the kind of anticipation of a pretty big David here who is actually extending his reign all the way to the ends of the earth.… It’s hard to interpret this one as merely to the ends of the land, because it’s all the nations to the very ends of the earth. It seems pretty extravagant. It is nevertheless a Davidide sort of enthronement psalm. That’s really what it is.

So there is a kind of anticipation of a mashiach who is installed as king, who has a lot more authority than David or Solomon has, but, nevertheless, the general language and installation is pretty clear. Now when you come to the New Testament, to find a passage in which something said of David or a Davidide is applied to Christ is not unusual. That’s part of the larger recognition that David’s greater son stands in the trajectory of what happens to David.

That’s part of this larger Davidic typology. I’ve alluded to that already. The pattern of a Davidic typology is not unusual. So to apply chapter 2, verse 7, to Jesus is not exceptional. That’s merely commonality in the New Testament. You could argue rightly that within the framework of a Davidic enthronement psalm there are indexes in the psalm itself that picture this as messianic, that the mashiach here has a pretty extensive reign. It’s going to the ends of the earth.

You could argue that there are some indexes in here that are already moving into a pretty great mode. You could say, I suppose, that the language is merely hyperbolic and so on, but it’s heading in a certain kind of direction, and there are quite a number of Davidic psalms that do that sort of thing.

So the application to Jesus is not the problem. The challenge is.… How, then, does this by itself warrant any of the three conclusions that are drawn when the passage is quoted? First, that Jesus is risen from the dead; second, that he’s superior to angels; and third, that he does not take on the honor of high priest by himself.

Now the next stage. In the New Testament, at the risk of another terrible generalization, there are two kinds of Christology. This is terribly reductionistic, but you’ll see what I mean in a moment. There is one Christology that looks a little bit like that. You find it, for example, in Philippians 2. “Though he was with God, he did not think equality with God was something to be exploited, but emptied himself and made himself a nobody. He took on the form of flesh, and then descended all the way to the ignominious shame of the cross.”

Verse 9: “Wherefore God has highly exalted him and given him the name that is above every name, that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow.” You get this kind of Christology likewise in John 1. “So the Word was with God, and the Word was God. The Word became flesh and lived for a while among us.”

Then ultimately, of course, he goes to the cross. Then he is confessed, “My Lord and my God,” and he returns to the Father, to the glory he had with the Father before the world began. John 17. So that kind of Christology is very common. It is not only here. It is in many, many places in the New Testament.

The other kind of Christology in the New Testament begins here. It’s not that this part is denied. It just isn’t looked at. You begin with a description of Jesus in his flesh, and he’s going about doing good and so on, and then he dies and is resurrected and is ascended to the right hand of the majesty on high, and so forth. It’s not that all of this is denied. It’s just it’s not interesting to the author at that point. It’s nowhere near the fore of things.

The reason I mention this is because in a great deal of twentieth-century New Testament scholarship, Christology has been done on quite a different basis. What has characterized a great deal of New Testament Christology in the twentieth century has been two things. First, a study of christological titles. So we speak of “Son of God Christology” and “Son of Man Christology” and “King of the Jews Christology.” We speak of “kingdom Christology,” and then we speak of “priestly Christology.” They’re all separate, and it turns on the titles.

The second thing we have done in New Testament Christology is to make them conceptually distinct. It’s almost as if we are saying that if Christians adopt a Son of God Christology, they don’t also have a Son of Man Christology. If they have a Son of Man Christology, they don’t also have a priestly Christology. If they have a priestly Christology, then they don’t have a kingly Christology. They’re not only analyzable differently, but they are held separate.

This is, in part, owing to the kind of reconstruction of early church history that has tried to talk about separate communities with separate belief structures. So there’s a Pauline community and a Johnian community and a Markan community and a Matthean community and so on. It has been part of that sort of development.

This is not entirely wrong, but it has some elements to it, in my view, that are deeply wrong historically as well as theologically. The part that’s not wrong is it is worth finding out how those titles work. It’s worth examining them closely in their literary context and historical context. It’s worth finding out what is meant by these things, and the different authors may use these terms slightly differently. That’s all worth doing.

Moreover, in some sense, there are communitarian church connections. Otherwise, you can’t make sense of the fact, for example, that when John, who writes 1 John, is addressing certain problems bound up with proto-Gnosticism, in my view, he’s not pretending that proto-Gnosticism is a problem throughout the entire Roman Empire in all of the churches. It’s a problem in the churches to which he is addressing himself.

So in some sense, there is some sort of connection to some churches at some time, but the work of Richard Bauckham and others has begun to debunk the views, rightly in my judgment, that the canonical gospels were written first and foremost for narrow sectarian communities, that there’s a Matthean church and a Markan church. So he edited the book The Gospels for All Christians, and there is very good evidence for that.

If you haven’t read that book, you should read it. You don’t have to agree with every argument in there. I don’t. But he does a very good job of expanding categories that have been closed too much. Even when you have some gospels written with particular groups of Christians primarily in mind, the question is.… Even when they’re primarily in mind, are they meant to be primarily in mind to a certain narrow sectarian community that is hermetically sealed off from all the rest of the Christians or are they already thinking still of the broader church?

Now if you accept those criticisms, then we must be careful in our assessment of christological titles about making absolute distinctions from one christological title to the next. In terms of my characterization of New Testament Christologies as being either this kind or this kind, let’s begin with the second one.

In the second Christology, which dominates in Luke/Acts but is found elsewhere, you have Jesus being God’s mashiach, who’s going about healing the sick and pronouncing the gospel of the kingdom and pronouncing forgiveness of sins and predicting that he will go to the cross, and then he does go to the cross and dies as the suffering servant and rises and is thus vindicated and is seated at the right hand of the majesty on high. He’s entirely vindicated and thus has entered into his kingly rule. That’s an elementary summary.

Thus in the New Testament, when does Jesus come to his kingdom? Well, that’s slippery. In one sense, in Matthew he’s born a king. “Where is he who is born King of the Jews?” In one sense, he enters into his kingly ministry at his baptism. In one sense, a spectacular sense, he enters into his kingly rule at his death/resurrection/exaltation. He’s seated on the right hand of the majesty on high. “The day will come when you will see me on the right hand of the majesty on high, and all nations will fear because …” That too is part of it.

So at the end of Matthew’s gospel, you have Jesus saying, in effect, “All authority is given to me in heaven and on earth.” He has entered into his kingly rule. You get that kind of language likewise in 1 Corinthians 15, that all of God’s sovereignty is conferred upon Christ who is now the mediatorial King, and he must reign until he has put all of his enemies under his feet.

Where is the sign of Jesus’ transition to this state? It’s his death/resurrection/exaltation. At his death/resurrection/exaltation, he enters into his king dominion. His resurrection is his establishment as king. In that sense, that’s when he becomes God’s son. If the sonship language is tied up with the installation of the king, then there is a sense in which the resurrection/exaltation is precisely his entrance into his sonship in that sense.

But when does he enter into his priestly ministry? He enters into his priestly ministry precisely by dying, rising again, and being vindicated by God. It is precisely the resurrection and exaltation that establishes Jesus as king, as mediatorial priest. That argument is worked out in great detail, for example, in Hebrews, but elsewhere as well.

This kind of authority is given to him in a way that marks him out as entirely different from the angels. Thus it is precisely in the installation of Jesus as King that he is shown to be superior to the angels, that he enters into his priestly ministry, and all this takes place at his resurrection. All of this is configured as a whole, it seems to me, by the first Christians.

That is why they can quote Psalm 2:7 in this way. It is not only the fulfillment of the ultimate Davidic pattern in Jesus as the ultimate antitype of the Davidic typology, but the Christologies merge in their mind, such that that great event of the cross/resurrection/exaltation is precisely what launches Jesus into his authority as the mediatorial King, the mediatorial Priest, and so forth.

I think that’s the kind of thing that is going on in their heads. That’s the kind of integration that is presupposed as they read the Old Testament. Then suddenly the texts don’t seem quite so strange. They seem a little more strange to us only if we have been so indoctrinated into twentieth-century “bitty-ism” that we cannot integrate themes; we have to view them all as distinctive. Now let me pause there for comments and questions.

Male: [Inaudible]

Don: Although he is ruling now, there are enemies to overcome. It is the mediatorial kingdom. That’s why the last enemy is, in fact, death. He reigns now, but his reign is still being contested, exactly as in Psalm 2. Interestingly enough, Psalm 2 as a whole is also quoted in Acts 4 in connection with the first outbreak of persecution against Christians.

In other words, it is precisely his king dominion that is being contested. All authority is his now, but it’s being contested. There are enemies everywhere. That does not come to the end until the last enemy is beaten. That’s the argument of 1 Corinthians 15.

Male: So he’s a king, but he’s not completely a king?

Don: Oh, he’s completely the King, but his king dominion is being contested. All of God’s sovereignty is mediated through him now as the mediatorial King. This is no more difficult than the notion of God’s providence generally. Under God’s sovereign reign, evil is still being promulgated, but on the other hand, the notion of Jesus as mediatorial King is no more difficult than that. It’s part of the same thing. Ultimately, the kingdom will emerge into the open plain where there is no more contesting. That’s the dawning of the new heaven and the new earth.

Male: [Inaudible]

Don: They integrate them. You bet. That’s right. As soon as you say that, don’t you start thinking, “Oh yeah, that makes sense”? It’s just that we have been so charged with Western bittiness in approach to critical studies of Christology, especially in the twentieth century, but that’s not how the patristics thought. It’s not how Aquinas thought. It’s not how the Reformers thought. It’s not how the eighteenth century thought.

This is a very modern bitty approach that really begins by assuming sooner or later that there’s not one mind behind the whole thing. It isn’t capable of integration. As soon as you start trying to look at things from the way the earliest Christians thought of Jesus, can you really seriously imagine any Christian going around in the first century saying, “Oh yes, personally I believe in Jesus the Son of God, but I don’t believe in Jesus as the mediatorial Priest”? Good grief.

As soon as you start putting the things together, you realize they would have to find ways of holding them together. Then it seems to me this exegesis, which strikes you first of all as being a bit strange, is merely obvious.

Male: And thus it goes so far that they can even take temporal language and son language and rest language and everything comes together in Christ.

Don: Yes. Now why? What’s the warrant for that? Let me go a little farther on this one. Let me take a couple more questions. We’ll come to that one in a minute.

Male: In Romans 1:3 it talks about how Christ was declared Son by the resurrection. Now at what point do you, in this reconstruction …

Don: See, the declaring of Christ as Son by the resurrection is the second Christology.

Male: What was Christ’s consciousness of his sonship before …? What was Jesus’ awareness of his sonship?

Don: But don’t forget there are two Christologies here. If you ask, “Does Jesus have any awareness of all of this before the cross or before the resurrection?” what do you do with Jesus when he’s 12 years old? What do you do with Jesus at his baptism? “This is my Son whom I love.” What do you do with the repeated predictions of the cross and resurrection? Five of them in Matthew. I would want to say that Jesus understands this. Yes, of course. It’s part of his messianic consciousness.

Male: Just to clarify that point, you wouldn’t say that Jesus became Son at the resurrection but that he was declared Son [inaudible]. Perhaps at his baptism he suddenly had his own confirmation of [inaudible].

Don: Correct. There have been various people who have tried to argue that son language is christological language applicable only after the resurrection, so it becomes a kind of post-resurrection category. That means it is inappropriate, therefore, to use it “Trinitarianly” of the very being of God in eternity past. They may speak of the Father, the Word, and the Spirit, but they can only think of the Father, the Son, and the Spirit in a post-resurrection sense.

I’m not saying that, precisely because the son language is flexible. You have this double Christology going here, and that’s why even John’s gospel, for whom Son of God Christology is a really big thing.… John 3:17 speaks of the Father sending the Son. Unless you think of that as an anachronistic usage, then he is sending the one who is already the Son. That’s why I said even the kingdom language is a bit flexible in the New Testament. He’s born a king in Matthew. He’s born the Son. He’s declared the Son at his baptism.

The thing that launches him into his kingly mediatorial reign in the dawning of the kingdom in the most spectacular sense is precisely bound up with his death, resurrection, and exaltation. That’s why, again, it is John’s gospel, of the four canonical ones, which thinks most unitarily of the death/resurrection/exaltation as one event. Historically they’re clearly sequential, but in a theological sense they’re the one event that establishes Jesus as the Son, the King, and so on, who returns to glory.

So simultaneously, when Jesus is glorified he’s glorified on the cross, but in John’s gospel, as he’s glorified on the cross, he’s returning to the glory he had with the Father before the world began and is thus glorified by returning to that glory. It’s all one unified event in John’s gospel. So John, yes, preserves the historical sequence, but he who has the strongest son language is also the gospel which has the strongest unified theology at this point.

That is the great turning point in which Jesus is launched into his kingly rule, and now he is the mediatorial King, and he must reign in this mediatorial capacity with all of God’s sovereignty mediated through him now, to use Paul’s categories in particular. But they’re not just Pauline. In Matthew he says, “All authority is given to me in heaven and on earth.” Or Hebrews 1: “He upholds all things by the word of his power.” That’s referring to Jesus.

Now in 1 Corinthians 15, likewise, all authority is given to him, and he reigns as the mediatorial King until he has put the last enemy under his feet, and then everything is united under God. It’s a common New Testament theme, and it is a profoundly integrating theme, which it seems to me has often been hidden to our eyes, precisely because we have thought in such bitty terms.

Male: What seems to be generating a lot of these distinct categories is the integration of theology with modern personality theories, so we’re having a lot of trouble looking back and saying, well, they didn’t understand what personality is all about, and now since the nineteenth century we understand personality, so we have to reread all of these documents from the original community to try to understand how, in their limited understanding of personality, how they can be talking about Jesus in these terms.

Don: That’s only one small factor. There is also classic liberalism. There is a classic reconstruction of Christianity so that the Bible is not a unified document in any real sense. By 1798 you have your first Old Testament; and in 1802, New Testament theology, and then by the time you get to 1850 there are no more biblical theologies to speak of except the odd one. They’re Old Testament/New Testament theologies.

By the time you come to the twentieth century, New Testament theology has Synoptic Gospel theology, Pauline theology, Petrine theology, Johnian theology. Then you hit the redaction critics, and it’s not Synoptic Gospels. Then it’s Matthew versus.… And then it’s the sources.… It gets bittier and bittier and bittier with time. There are a lot of different factors that are going into this drive toward bittiness, and at some point you have to say, “Wait a minute. Slam on the brakes here. Is there one mind behind this or not?”

As soon as you start acknowledging that there is, even without a sophisticated doctrine of Scripture, which I want to support, you start asking a whole lot of integrative questions about how these things come together instead of being bitty all the time. So personality theory is one part, but it’s only one small, small part of a much bigger movement toward radical bittiness.

Male: [Inaudible]

Don: Well, that’s why I said the second Christology is not denying what comes before, but in terms of presentation it starts from here. I’m not denying that there are two competing and mutually contradictory Christologies. I’m merely saying that in terms of how Christology is presented in general terms in the New Testament, most of the descriptions can either fit into this pattern or fit into this pattern, but that’s not to say the two patterns themselves don’t belong to a bigger one whole. Is that fair?

Now if you don’t mind, I’m going to slam on the brakes again or else we’re not going to cover this next little bit. This next little bit has its own importance as well. Let’s start with Hebrews again. This really has to do with the matter of sequencing and the like. Let’s start with Hebrews 3–4. I wish we had about an hour for this, but let’s just pick up three places in Hebrews where this matter of reading the Old Testament sequentially is absolutely critical. Start in chapter 3, verse 7.

“So, as the Holy Spirit says …” Now there’s a quotation from Psalm 95. “Today, if you hear his voice, do not harden your hearts as you did in the rebellion during the time of testing in the desert when your fathers tested and tried me and for forty years saw what I did. That is why I was angry with this generation, and I said, ‘Their hearts are always going astray, and they have not known my ways.’ So I declared on oath in my anger, ‘They shall never enter my rest.’ ” Notice the rest language. Notice the today language at the beginning of the chapter.

This belongs to one of the so-called historical psalms. There are quite a number of historical psalms where the mode of discourse summarizes some part of Israelite history and then draws some moral lessons. It describes in poetical terms some part of Israelite history and then offers moral insight of some sort or another, encouragement, rebuke, or whatever. Psalm 78 is a very good example of that sort of thing, but there are a lot of psalms that do this, the so-called historical psalms.

Initially, what the writer does from this quotation in verse 12 and following is merely draw a moralizing inference. Initially, it is a pastoral application. “See to it, brothers, that none of you has a sinful, unbelieving heart that turns away from the living God, but encourage one another as long as it is called ‘Today.’ ” That’s the first time he’s picked up a specific word. He’s going to explain that “today” in a moment.

“As long as there is a today, in which God is speaking to us in these terms of warning against falling away, make sure you’re not amongst those who fall away.” So far it’s not much more than what a preacher would do today to get a moralizing conclusion out of a text with some warnings. The Hebrews view of perseverance is articulated very strongly in verse 14: “We have come to share in Christ, if we hold firmly till the end the confidence we had at first.”

That is to say, for the writer of the Hebrews, genuineness is authenticated by perseverance. “We have come to share in Christ, if we hold to the end the confidence we had at first.” That sort of thing is said again and again many times in the New Testament. Jesus, in John 8:31 says, “If you hold to my word, you are my disciples.” Paul says the same thing in Colossians 1:21–23. It’s a pretty common theme.

Then he begins to ask historical questions himself. “Who were they who heard and rebelled?” That is, in the actual historical situation. Who was it that fell away? “Were they not all those that Moses led out of Egypt? And with whom was he angry for forty years? Was it not with those who sinned, whose bodies fell in the desert? And to whom did God swear that they would never enter his rest if not to those who disobeyed?”

His whole argument here is that the people who fell in the desert, fell under God’s curse and never entered into the rest, which was at the time the language of entering into the Promised Land, were those, in fact, who had been saved from something. They had been saved from something, but they had not yet been saved to something. They did not persevere. There was a transition step, and they fell away because they did not persevere. That’s what he is saying. “So don’t you get into the place where, in fact, you don’t persevere to the end.” Are we agreed so far as to what the text says?

Now he takes a new step. Hebrews 4:1: “Therefore, since the promise of entering his rest still stands, let us be careful that none of you be found to have fallen short of it.” A lot of the argument down to verse 13 is an exposition of that point. I don’t have time to unpack it line by line, but the argument in brief is this. Yes, those people in the desert did fall away, but some did enter the Promised Land eventually. They entered the Promised Land under Joshua. Hence, Joshua is explicitly named down in verse 8.

Some of them did enter the Promised Land, but now, centuries later (that’s the point), after people did enter into the rest of the Promised Land, God is saying in Psalm 95, “Today, if you do not harden your heart, you will enter into my rest.” That presupposes that entry into the Promised Land was not entry into the ultimate rest. Is that clear? It’s a salvation historical argument. It’s an argument that depends on sequence, and it is explicit.

Verse 8: “If Joshua had given them rest, God would not have spoken later about another day.” Then the argument goes even further. The text says, “You will never enter my rest.” Well, whose rest is that? It’s God’s rest. The author says, “Yeah, but where does the text ever start talking about God’s rest?” Now he goes back to Genesis 2. God finished, and he rested.

That becomes paradigmatic for Sabbath. It’s picked up in the Ten Commandments. “Remember the seventh day to keep it holy, for in six days the Lord made heaven and earth, and he rested the seventh day.” Thus the Sabbath rest is a picture of God’s creation rest. Now he says, “Today, if you do not harden your heart, you will enter into my rest.” God’s rest, the rest that is pictured by God as ceasing from his work. So we must cease from our works to enter into God’s rest.

Thus, the ultimate fulfillment of the pattern that is fulfilled in entering into God’s rest means that we fulfill creation, Sabbath, the significance of entry into the Promised Land, into now the full salvation that is ours in Christ as we cease from our works and enter into God’s rest, because, after all, Psalm 95 is still saying to us loud and clear, “Today, if you do not harden your heart, you may enter into my rest.” It’s a sequential salvation historical argument.

Hebrews 7. There are only two passages in the Old Testament that speak of Melchizedek. One, of course, is Genesis 14. The other is Psalm 110. I would describe Psalm 110 as an oracular psalm. I don’t have time to go into that here. Just take the logical argument. The argument in chapter 7 roughly is this. On the one hand, Abraham pays tithes to historical Melchizedek, which suggests Melchizedek is more important than Abraham.

Melchizedek is an odd duck in the Old Testament. He really is a strange case. When you read the book of Genesis, anybody who is anybody, anybody who is important, anybody who is significant, has a genealogy. You know where he or she is in the stream of things. But here, suddenly, Melchizedek pops up. There’s no father. There’s no mother. There’s no record of when he dies.

You could take those three verses out, and you’d never miss him in the storyline. What on earth is he contributing to anything? Yet he’s important, because even Abraham, the ultimate ancestor, is the one who pays tithes to him, and so forth. Then within this framework, in Hebrew there is actual language in the text that ties chapter 14 to chapter 15 of the covenantal renewal too. There are all kinds of linguistic ties in the Hebrew in this regard.

So here you have a priest who is also a king. He’s the king of Salem, and he’s the priest of El Elyon, priest of God Most High. He’s a king/priest. Now at this point, Levi is not born, but in a culture in which the son is always less than the father, who is less than the grandfather, who is less than the great-grandfather, there’s a sense in which you have to see Levi as less than Abraham and Abraham as less than Melchizedek, because he is the one who gives him the tithes and Melchizedek blesses him.

So along comes Levi, and then the Mosaic covenant comes along, and within the Mosaic covenant, years later after all, the Mosaic covenant establishes Levi as the priestly tribe, and the whole structure of the priestly system turns on Levi within the Mosaic covenant. Then, centuries after that, God now says to a kingly figure in Psalm 110, “You are a priest forever after the order of Melchizedek.”

Now what do you do with that? He says if you start announcing another priesthood from another tribe, you overthrow the priestly structure of the Mosaic covenant. You are announcing the principial obsolescence of the Mosaic covenant. You are publicly stating that that Levitical priesthood cannot go on forever. That’s the argument that works out from chapter 7, verse 11, on.

In fact, the language of verse 11 is astonishing. Skip the statement in parentheses for a moment, although what is within the parentheses is, in some ways, the most interesting part. “If perfection could have been attained through the Levitical priesthood, why was there still need for another priest to come, one in the order of Melchizedek, not in the order of Aaron?” Then it goes on and on to explain.

It is arguing, in fact, that with the salvation historical sequence in place, it follows that Psalm 110 is already a principial announcement of the obsolescence of the Levitical priesthood. Now go back to the parentheses in verse 11. “If perfection could have been attained through the Levitical priesthood (for on the basis of it the law was given), why was there still need for another priesthood to come?”

Then verse 12: “For when there is a change of the priesthood, there must also be a change of the law.” That argument depends on what’s within the parentheses. Because of the tripartite distinction we have inherited from Aquinas through Calvin, we tend to think of the moral/civil/ceremonial law as putting the moral law at the top of the heap. That’s the important bit. Then, of course, you do have the civil and ceremonial law, but they sort of drop off. They have their place to play, but the moral law is the real law of God.

This text is looking at things rather differently. It’s suggesting that the law covenant was, in fact, given on the basis of the priesthood. That’s what the text is saying. So verse 12.… When you change the priesthood, you have to change the whole flipping law. As soon as you start reading the Old Testament that way, it makes sense, it seems to me.

You have the Ten Commandments. That’s important. I’m not trying to put them down, obviously. You have chapter after chapter after chapter in Exodus telling you how to build a tabernacle, what the third silver socket from the left looks like. Then you have all of Leviticus, with all the priestly system and how to purify this and how that …

You have some moral stuff thrown in here and there in chapter 19, but where does the heart of the Mosaic covenant lie? Doesn’t it rely on the entire priestly tabernacle system? Such that, if you now, in effect, say that the priestly system no longer operates, it’s not as if you’ve lost a little bit off from the corner and you can keep the rest of it. The whole law covenant is announced as “principially” obsolete. Isn’t that clear?

Chapter 8 of this book. Now he looks at the prophecy of Jeremiah. I wish I had time to unpack that one at great length in its Old Testament context. I just don’t have time. Here God, through Jeremiah in chapter 31, announces that there’s going to be a new covenant. What is the explicit argument Hebrews draws from this announcement in chapter 8, verse 13? “By calling this covenant ‘new,’ he has made the first one obsolete.”

Do you see what’s going on? In every case, the logic is from the Old Testament itself. This is not appealing to some sort of deep mystery in Jesus or anything like that. It’s from the Old Testament. It is saying if you read the Old Testament texts in their chronological and historical sequence, you discover there are later texts that are themselves part of Tanakh, already announcing the principial obsolescence of the old covenant structure, the law covenant.

For you now, he says to his readers, to make the law covenant the very center of things, as if that is the way you primarily please God, as if that’s the culmination of things instead of a transitional step along the line, means you don’t understand your Bibles. Paul does the same thing in Romans 4, when he observes the sequence between Abraham’s faith and circumcision. Which comes first?

He does the same thing in Galatians 3, where he says, “The promise is given to Abraham and in his seed, that all the nations of the earth will be blessed. It’s four centuries later before the law is given, and the law does not annul the promise.” That’s a salvation historical argument. Those kinds of arguments go back to Jesus himself in passages like Matthew 22.

There is a hermeneutic of reading the Old Testament that is traceable to Jesus that turns on a salvation historical reading of the Old Testament. It is blisteringly important. Indeed, that way of looking at the texts, Paul says, Hebrews says, in effect, cannot be ignored. The more conservative rabbinic Jewish way of the first century is not an alternative, equally acceptable reading. Not for them. For them, it is a false reading.

I would be prepared to argue that once you see this, it gives you some of the pieces for thinking about how typology works, because you now have the pieces for showing how there is development across time and inner Old Testament evidence about how certain pieces are themselves principially obsolescent. They are not ends in themselves. They point forward to other things.

So you get the beginnings of what later becomes typological argumentation anchored in the text itself. That in turn is bound up with several New Testament streams that argue that the New Testament gospel is simultaneously the fulfillment of Old Testament predictions and mystery, something that’s hidden in time past but now fully disclosed. I’m just nibbling on the edge here of something really large, but it seems to me that lies at the heart of the New Testament reading of the Old Testament.

Now so that I’m fair to people, I’m going to close in prayer, and then if you want to talk privately, fine, but it is time to go, and I don’t want to be unfair to people since it’s time to leave. I know I’ve left you with more questions than answers. I had a friend in a former seminary I taught at who put a sign on his door. I wish I’d copied it down exactly.

It said something like, “You may think that I now have all the answers, but, in fact, my learning has now taught me that I have more questions than answers. It is simply that I would like to think my questions are at a higher level of understanding and misunderstanding than my previous questions.” That’s not quite fair, but there’s some truth to it.

The more you probe in the Word of God, the more you see that it is like a pool in which a child may wade and an elephant may swim, but you get these sorts of things firmly in place, and all kinds of little pictures open up in the Word of God. There is a coherence, an internal order, an internal structuring, an internal oneness about the whole thing that reflects the very mind of God himself. Let us bow in prayer.

We are ashamed, Lord God, of how little we understand when we have access to Scripture and when we read it again and again and think about it. Help us, Lord God, to lean self-consciously on the countless generation of Christians who have come before, to study their understanding, to think things through, to learn from them, and then to go back to Scripture again and again and test these things to see whether they are so, to understand our own times but not to be snookered by them, to understand our own culture but to see also how, in the light of your Word, culture itself is so easily contaminated by sin and must be reformed by your Word.

O Lord God, we confess our inability to do all these things by ourselves. Our minds are so small, and we are so committed to tradition, to arrogance, to our own heritage, to our own loves, our own predilections. Reform us by your Word. Empower us by your Spirit. Open our eyes to see wonderful things in your law, and make us, we pray, to be good and faithful ministers of the Word of God, rightly unpacking the Word of truth as we hold it forth to a new generation of believers and a new generation of unbelievers. This great mercy we ask.

We ask not only for ourselves, but for the churches we represent. We ask for the continent in which we find ourselves. O Lord God, we hear of genuine blessing in parts of Asia. We see the gospel multiplying in parts of Africa. We see its growth in Latin America, and we beg of you, Lord God, while blessing others, do not pass us by.

We ask not because we deserve it, not because we have been faithful or strong, not because we are better or wiser than others, but precisely because we have been corrupt and perverse and lost. We have sacrificed the heritage so many of us have received. But to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life. Have mercy upon us, we beg of you, and display yourself to us and in us and through us to the great glory of your Son and the good of the people for whom he shed his life’s blood. We ask this mercy in Jesus’ name, amen.

To quote Billy Graham, may the Lord bless you all real good.