Round Table

Welcome to Have You Not Read, a podcast seeking to answer questions from the text of scripture for the honor of Christ and the edification of the saints. Before we dig into our topic, we humbly ask you to rate, review, and share the podcast.

Thank you.

I'm Dylan Hamilton, and with me are.

Michael Durham, Chris Giesler.

And we had a question that we finally settled on that we were gonna do for this episode starting out, and then we're gonna go kind of around Robin with some other questions, but we'll start with this one.

In Ephesians 5 .14, Paul appears to quote an Old Testament reference. My study Bible says this is a combination of quotes, but I can't really find the last one. Christ will shine on you in the Old Testament.

Is this a misquote, the Septuagint translation issue, or something else? And I'll go ahead and read the text. It's Ephesians 5 .14, and this is coming from the New King James Version. Therefore he says, awake you who sleep, arise from the dead, and Christ will give you light.

Michael.

Yeah, so it's always great to note, try to find where the authors are quoting from previously written works in the Bible. You'll find the prophets quoting Moses, the latter prophets quoting the earlier prophets.

You find Jesus quoting the Old Testament. You find the apostles quoting the Old Testament, and Jesus, and Revelation quotes everything. And so it's a very profitable exercise to go back and say, okay, where was this quoted from?

It's a good thing to do because we have a confidence that the Holy Spirit does not take Scripture out of context. And so by looking at how one biblical author is using other passages in the Bible, we're instructed on how to properly interpret the Scriptures, and by proper interpretation, then we're led along to proper application.

So it's a great question, Ephesians 5 .14. I'm reading from the New King James Version, and it says, therefore he says, awake you who sleep, arise from the dead, and Christ will give you light. Now, it is a combination of quotes.

The question says, well, this last line, and Christ will shine on you is their translation. Mine says, and Christ will give you light. Like, where does that come from? It doesn't appear to be an actual quote from anywhere.

But if you back up to some of the previous verses there in Ephesians 5, we read in verse eight, you were once darkness, but now you are light in the Lord. Okay, and down in verse 14, it says, Christ will give you light.

And in the context, when we're thinking about salvation, Paul describes being saved as being in Christ, being in the Lord. So you are light in the Lord, okay? So walk as children of light. And again, in verse 10, we're told to find out what is acceptable to the Lord.

Well, who is that? We'd say, well, you could say God, and think of the triune God, God in his full godness, and that's great. But we also, I think in the context, are supposed to be thinking about Jesus as our Lord, in particular, the God-man, Jesus Christ, who is King, who is our Lord, and he has some things for us to do, and for us to follow him.

So again, the word Lord, the title Lord, is being, I think, particularly used of Christ. And so when we come down to this quote in verse 14, where it says, and Christ will give you light, it is a quote, I think it's coming from Isaiah.

I think it's coming from Isaiah chapter 60. So in Isaiah 60, we read, verse one, arise, shine, for your light has come, and the glory of the Lord is risen upon you. Now, it doesn't say the glory of the Messiah, or which would be in the Hebrew for the anointed one.

In Greek, it would be Christos, or Christ. It doesn't say the glory of Christ will rise on you. It says the glory of the Lord has risen upon you. But in the context in Ephesians five, Jesus Christ has been identified as Lord.

So I think it is quoting from Isaiah 60. The context there, of course, is speaking about the new Jerusalem, and the new city that God makes, filled with not only Jews, but also Gentiles. As we keep reading in verse two of Isaiah 60, for behold, the darkness shall cover the earth, and deep darkness the people, but the Lord will arise over you.

So again, we hear that. And his glory will be seen upon you. The Gentiles, the nations, will come to your light. The Hebrew, the Goim, the Greek, the Ethnoi, they will all come to your light, and kings to the brightness of your rising.

Okay, and then when you read, if you've been reading Ephesians all the way through, that's a major theme in the letter of Paul to the Ephesians about how Jew and Gentile are brought together into the new temple, the new Jerusalem, in Christ.

So I think that Ephesians 5, 14 is quoting there from Isaiah 60, verse one, using the title Christ to gloss the title Lord, but that's very consistent with what Paul has been writing.

So would you say there's some sort of equivocation between light and glory that you're seeing from Isaiah into Ephesians?

Yes, so the use of the term glory as it's developed throughout the Old Testament and the New Testament, kibbutz in the Hebrew and doxos in the Greek in the New Testament, light is a huge component of that word.

And light and weight, weight, heaviness, preciousness, somewhere in between the both of them. So glory and light are operating together. I would say that light is a property of what glory is all about.

Biblical Covenants and Their Fulfillment in Christ

Well, we wanna move on to our next question then. I'm confused about what a biblical covenant is and how many of them are in the Bible. How does this apply to us as New Testament believers? I'm stuck between dispensationalism and reformed worlds and don't know what to think.

You're not alone.

Yeah, it's a good question. So when we read about covenants, if somebody is systematically trained with systematic theology first, and sometimes it's easier, it feels a little bit easier to get into knowledge of the Bible through systematic theology because somebody has done a lot of hard work for you.

And it's good to have teachers. It's good to have folks to disciple you. So if you're reading a dispensational theology or you're reading a covenantal theology, one of the joys of that is that you're constantly coming into connections.

You're seeing connections in the scriptures, seeing how the Bible fits together. It's very encouraging. It's faith-building to see the way in which God's word is coherent and even beautiful. And so a lot of folks gravitate towards that.

But the challenge is, of course, when we're reading through the scriptures or even teaching through the scriptures and having to come to firm conclusions in the scriptures, the systematics sometimes lead us into dead ends, blind alleys, and what do I do with this now?

And that's the signal that all those systematic theologies are helpful and they can be part of our discipleship, that they have to be submitted to God's word and they are there to be corrected by the scriptures.

So a biblical covenant. When we talk about biblical covenants, we're not talking about what the covenantalist would talk about, covenant of works or covenant of grace or covenant of redemption. We're not talking about those.

Biblical covenants show up with Noah. God tells Noah in Genesis 6, I'm gonna make my covenant with you. I will make my covenant with you. He doesn't make that covenant until the latter part of chapter eight, moving into chapter nine.

All of a sudden, now God is making his covenant with Noah. And there's a sacrifice, there's promises, there's warnings, there's direction, and God cuts a covenant with Noah. And then he does so as well with Abraham in Genesis chapter 15.

Even though he's made his promises to Abram in chapter 12 and reiterates those promises in chapter 13, showcases his faithfulness to Abram in chapter 14, the covenant's not cut until chapter 15. And then the covenant is upheld by contrast in chapter 16 and by sign of circumcision in chapter 17.

And not really even confirmed again until chapter 22 when Abraham takes Isaac up the mountain, Mount Moriah, and is prepared to sacrifice him. And in all these different chapters, we find God reasserting his promises to Abraham and reaffirming his covenant with him.

So we have a covenant with Noah. We have a really big emphasis on God's covenant with Abraham. And then we have God forging a covenant with Israel at Mount Sinai in the wilderness about almost halfway into Exodus.

Really, the covenant is not really cut until really properly chapter 20 when God gives the 10 commandments. Chapter 19, chapter 20 is when it all comes down. Everything prior to that, we're seeing God working out his promises to Abraham without respect to that covenant at Sinai.

And then truly, that covenant that God makes with Israel at Sinai bears a lot of weight, a lot of glory, and it is, in some sense, condensed, streamlined into God's covenant that he makes with David, concerning David, the son of David, the heir of David, the person who, the king of Israel, who would stand in for the sake of all the people.

Now, when we think about these biblical covenants, and sometimes they're called the covenants, but they're all in the same bag. And then sometimes they're just called the old covenant in the New Testament.

But they all have something similar about them. One flows into the other. All of them are shaped. They all have creation's shape, okay? And they are all Christ's shadow. And it's the bulk of the Bible that we read about these covenants.

Prior to the covenant that God makes with Noah, that's just a few chapters in Genesis. And then the covenant that God makes with Noah on all the way through the whole Old Testament until we get into the New Testament, all the new covenant promises that we have in the Old Testament.

And then the New Testament itself, all dealing with the new covenant in Christ, which has been spoken about so long and in so many ways by the Old Testament that we're constantly being referred back to all these shadows and types and promises so that we can understand who Jesus is.

So the Bible is just full of covenant language and covenant artifacts and specimens of covenant. And so it's an important way, it's an important thing to recognize when we're reading the Bible, the theme of covenant.

But essentially, the way that biblical covenants work is that they address what was lost in creation and anticipates what will be won in Christ. I've been reflecting a lot about the relationship between creation and the covenants in Christ.

And I would have to say this, that whatever is creational and covenantal is ultimately Christological. He's the one who brings about creation and he's the one who makes creation new again. He's the one who forges the covenant.

He's the one who reveals God to mankind. He's there in the covenants and he's the one who fulfills the covenants. So whatever is creational and covenantal ultimately is Christological. Everything there is to point forward to him.

And so I think that's how they function. They recognize that, hey, we're made in God's image and we're to love God supremely, love others rightly, steward creation righteously. And every covenant that God makes in the Bible addresses what it means to be made in God's image.

Thus, all those covenants are pointing forward to the image of the invisible God, Jesus Christ himself.

So the second part of the question was how does it apply to us as New Testament believers? And so the way that, yeah, and I think you're actually getting a lot of the meat on the bones there for that because you're talking about how it is Christological and applying to us from the Old Testament how we're supposed to be reading those things.

Application is not a one-to-one, let's take Sinai and let's bring it forward into a new covenant context, but more of let's look at it through the lens of Christ and then that's where we're gonna find our application at.

Yeah, well, I think in the Abrahamic covenant, it's to you and your seed. The New Testament then tells us what is meant by that. As you go through these covenants, David is a king, but there will be a king that'll be a king forever.

The New Testament fleshes that out. You pointed out whenever we first started coming here to this church, you pointed me to this verse and you're like, oh, covenant, okay, I think agreement between two parties, but in Isaiah 42 in verse six, it says, I, the Lord, have called you in righteousness and will hold your hand, I will keep you and give you as a covenant to the people.

And he's talking about a person here. He's going to give a person as a covenant to the people and then we see that in Christ.

It's repeated again in Isaiah 49 as well.

Yeah.

You mentioned earlier about systematics being helpful, but leading to dead ends. Is this something where we're taking a theme out of the narrative or a device out of the narrative, say covenant, or I don't know what you would put on the dispensational side, but you're taking it and you're hoisting it up and you're saying this is the main point of the text or this is the main thing that we should read.

We should read through this lens, through the whole text, but you're giving us a third way, or I say third way. You're giving us a different way to look through the covenants.

Well, to be fair, folks like Stephen Wellam, who is a progressive covenantalist, used to call himself a new covenant theologian. They have used that term third way before, not in its Hegelian dialectic leftist idea, which they quickly had to stop using that word because it triggered so many people, for good reason, for good reasons.

I want people to be triggered by that, that's good. But yeah, so the dispensationalism ultimately is an acknowledgment of the absolute sovereignty of God in which there is full confidence that everything in the Bible is true and God is absolutely free to change up how he deals with people, and he's righteous in everything he does.

And so dispensationalism is like there's this word in the King James Version, dispensation, and so they took this biblical word and tried to use it to talk about the differences that happen when God's dealing with people in different times and they see these separations and that they see God righteously separating things out and dealing with people.

But ultimately, it's an affirmation of the sovereignty of God. And oh, hey, who can be against that, right? And then covenantalism, covenant is a far more common word and I think a far more fundamental word to the Bible's story than dispensation is.

But covenantalists will also try to be affirming the sovereignty of God, the faithfulness of God to always keep his promises as well. So they're trying to affirm the very same things the dispensationalist is.

They're talking about it in terms of covenant, which is a very biblical word. But the dispensations that are drawn out, the framework of dispensationalism is not native to the Bible itself. It's not native, you don't find it out of the Bible, though the claim is that it's there.

The framework of covenantalism, the covenant of works, covenant of grace, the covenant of redemption, all of that, those systems are not native to the scriptures itself. They say, well, no, we can observe it here, here, and here.

It's like, well, what's happening here is that you've constructed some spectacles through which to read. These spectacles are done in good faith, wanting to honor God, but they lead us into some dead ends.

And it's more of a deductive reading of the scriptures rather than an inductive reading of the scriptures saying, all right, Lord, build me my spectacles as I go. Now, in doing so, we should not be throwing off the labors of our brothers and our spiritual forefathers who have done a lot of really solid work.

But nonetheless, when we read in the text and we see that there's so many elements in the creation story in Genesis that have similar symptoms and signs and parts to it that we would find later on in a covenant that God made.

It's the covenantalist who reads covenant back into the creation story. It says, oh, look, there's a covenant there. Well, but if you don't have that system already in place, then if you're reading through the Bible, you say, well, here's all creation.

And look, after there's the fall and sin, now in these covenants that God makes because of all the sin that happened, these elements of creation are reaffirmed. And at the same time, they're pointing forward to the one who comes, who saves, and makes all things new.

New creation.

Right, so to me, I'm not saying that there's not a orderliness to scripture.

There is.

And everybody who is a dispensationalist and a covenantalist or somebody in between, like a new covenant person like myself, or if you're a little bit more educated than your progressive covenantalist, but if you're someone like that, everyone's trying to affirm the Bible is harmonious, it is orderly, it is true, it's supposed to interpret itself and go together, and we certainly will disagree about the proper lens to read it through.

I'm just, when I think about the biblical covenants, I see them being very much filled with the language of creation, the meaning of what it means to be made in the image of God, and they're all pointing forward to Christ and fulfilled in Christ.

I think one of the key texts is Jeremiah 33. In Jeremiah 33, as God is saying, in that day when I do this good thing for Israel, he's talking about the new covenant that he's already established and talked about in chapter 31, but in chapter 33 of Jeremiah, he walks through and uses all the distinctive language of his covenant with Noah, his covenant with Abraham, his covenant with Israel, and his covenant with David, and all four of those biblical covenants are sewn together into one mantle, into one cloak, if you will, and it was all laid upon Messiah.

And to me, that's just an affirmation. All of God's promises in Christ are yes, and this new covenant that Christ brings is one that fulfills, doesn't tear away and do away with and wad up and throw into a corner all that God has done, but Christ satisfyingly fulfills all of it.

And so that's why I see the biblical covenants coming in. They're all pointing forward to Christ.

I was gonna say, you've mentioned the shadows, and if you follow that shadow back, you get to the shadow being distorted and it looks weird, but if you follow it to its source, it's Christ there.

Yes.

One way is, we're talking about lenses that we see through things, but we get help in the New Testament by seeing how the apostles pick up those themes. How do they describe the covenants? How do they interpret the covenants?

And they pick up that creation language and they pick up Christ. For example, I was thinking of firstborn of creation. Firstborn of creation. They're talking about Jesus being the firstborn of creation, and you get charismatic circles saying, well, he's the first Christian and he's the first, and all these different things, but it's that creation language.

You have creation in Adam, and then the fall, and you get these covenants all pointing to a new creation, and then when you get Jesus being given as that covenant, you have this new creation and he's the firstborn of that creation in the new covenant.

And think about all the most important terms that deal with what's creation, what are the central focal points in creation and in all the covenants. What about these terms? And we could think of the terms like seed, son, we could think about terms like servant, and all these key terms that we think about that would describe Adam or describe Israel, all of them are used of Christ in a heightened way that is unlike what came before.

That's like what came before, but it's unlike what came before because he fulfills these structures, these titles, these promises in a satisfying way. You're not gonna find fulfillment in a dissatisfying way, but a very satisfying way.

Yeah, and that's what I was gonna say before you were mentioning that, Chris. It gives so much more thrust to the one greater than phrases, one greater than Adam, one greater than Moses. That gives so much more thrust to that that I didn't see before we started kind of talking about this, I don't know, over the last couple of years.

But having those types be he is greater than the types and having it wrapped up and summed together in Jeremiah 33, and you're saying it's laid upon him, like, yeah, it just gives it so much more weight.

Someone pointed out, is the marriage greater than the symbol of marriage, the wedding ring? The wedding ring is a symbol of marriage, but marriage is so much greater, it's so much more than that. It's meant to point to something, it's meant to signify something.

I don't get rid of my wedding ring whenever I get married, but that isn't the same as the marriage.

So when we're thinking about what's the use of the Old Testament, it's profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness to equip the man of God for whatever work we have to do.

Well, our good works are following the Lamb wherever he goes. We can take up the Old Testament, and if we're reading it with unveiled face, as Paul would say to the Corinthians, if we're reading it with unveiled face, then we're looking for Christ and seeing Christ, and then we're supposed to be having, we're supposed to be interacting with the text along his light.

So if I'm reading Leviticus, okay, I don't say, well, this has all been fulfilled in Christ, so I don't need Leviticus anymore. That's not what we're saying. We're saying that the way in which this text becomes rich and meaningful and life-transforming is to see what it actually says, what are the words being used, what's the context, see the holiness of God on display, but don't stop there.

See how that's fulfilled in Jesus Christ. And then, after seeing that, follow the Lamb wherever he goes. He's not going to lead you to get rid of all of the yeast out of your house, right? Because then he's saying that he's not satisfyingly fulfilled that.

He's not saying, for the ceremonial and the holy, so in what way has he fulfilled it? And we're told how he's fulfilled these things, and we're given those signals and those directions from the apostles in their writings and so on, but we are going to be led into holiness.

We are going to be led to getting sin out of our lives. We are going to be led to doing the thing. What is the meaning of this? We don't know the meaning of it unless we look to Christ. Once we know the meaning of it, then we know what the application is.

Anointing Oil, Prayer, and Healing in James 5

All right, well, I think we've sufficiently covered that question. We'll move on to the next one. The question reads, I've seen some churches call people down to the front of a service to offer prayer.

In two different churches, I've seen pastors use small bottles of oil in which they put a drop on their finger and either touch the forehead or the spot that people are requesting for healing. What is the purpose of anointing oil?

Is this merely a practice of a specific denomination? Is prayer any less effective without it? Is this part of an old covenant or Eastern cultural practice that has simply been passed on?

Thanks, Michael.

So in James chapter five, it says, is anyone among you suffering? Let him pray. Is anyone cheerful? Let him sing psalms. Is anyone among you sick? Let him call for the elders of the church and let them pray over him, anointing him with oil in the name of the Lord.

And the prayer of faith will save the sick and the Lord will raise him up. And if he has committed sins, he will be forgiven. Confess your trespasses to one another and pray for one another that you may be healed.

The effective fervent prayer of a righteous man avails much. Elijah was a man with a nature like ours and he prayed earnestly that it would not rain and it did not rain on the land for three years and six months.

And he prayed again and the heaven gave rain and the earth produced its fruit. So in this list of instructions that James is giving to the church, we see this pattern. Here's a situation or a need. Here's the approach that you should take.

So one to one, one to one. And so in the very first thing he says, is anyone among you suffering, let him pray. Now this is something that we need to remember. Jesus, when he was teaching us how to pray in the Sermon on the Mount in Matthew chapter six, tells us to pray like little, trusting, and to pray like little children to a heavenly father.

What else are you gonna do?

If my kid is suffering, he's gonna come to me and tell me why, because he's expecting me to do something to help him. That's the approach that we're supposed to have as the Lord's children, trusting that he is good.

Are you suffering?

Pray.

Are you cheerful? Let him sing psalms. All right, here's a great way to express your confidence, your zeal, your boldness. Sing psalms, give praise to God. Is anyone among you sick? Let him call for the elders of the church.

So what's the difference between suffering and sick, right? Now we're seeing that there's a, is James saying the only way to express your cheerfulness is by singing psalms?

No.

No, no, and so James is not trying to restrict everything the Bible says about cheerfulness and joy to only one allowed expression.

Sometimes I smile.

Yeah, yeah.

Don't get too out of hand.

Yes, exactly. So this is kind of saying there's an appropriate response to certain things, and they need to be responses of faith, right? This is James' point in his letter, right? The responses, our responses need to be that of faith, and faith is expressed in practical actions, because we are actually believing these things.

So if you're suffering, pray, why? Because you believe that you have a good heavenly father. Is anyone cheerful? Then sing, why? Because you believe God is the one who gave you this happy moment in your life.

Is anyone among you sick? Let him call for the elders of the church. I have the sense that this sickness is something like, this is too much for me to bear, right? There are burdens that are too much for people to bear.

That's why God gave us to one another in the local church, to encourage one another. Let him call for the elders of the church. Let them pray over him, anointing him with oil in the name of the Lord. Now, the anointing with oil, okay, we read about that in the Old Testament.

We read about that in the Old Testament, and we find parallels in the New Testament with the gift of the Holy Spirit, right? But the Holy Spirit has already been given, so this is not about putting some special oil that activates the Holy Spirit, okay?

It's been properly paid for and prayed for by some TBN person somewhere. This is something that is practical, right? Like singing a psalm, like praying, like gathering people together. This is something that is practical.

I would say this, anointing him with oil, there's nothing sacred about this anything different than hit him with something else, right? For example, we just said, let him sing psalms. Can he not sing spiritual songs?

What about hymns? Is it okay to sing hymns? We don't read that part restrictively, sacredly, correct? Because we have other scriptures that show us that we can sing. Okay, anointing him with oil in the name of the Lord.

You know what Paul told Timothy when Timothy was feeling bad? He didn't say, call for the elders and have them anoint you. He said, drink a little wine for your stomach's sake, right? So this just could have been as easily written as anyone among you sick, let him call for the elder of the church, let him pray over him and give him some wine to settle his stomach.

Okay, this is not some sort of sacred, what would you call it? Some sort of sacred rite or action that has a special endowed grace from God. This is something practical. James is saying, you believe? Okay, great.

Live that faith out. Well, you know what you believe that God heals? Live that faith out by giving some medicine to somebody.

Hello.

Okay, so this is something that's supposed to help them. Okay, anointing him with oil in the name of the Lord. Notice that whatever we're doing to try to help the situation is in the name of the Lord singing.

Psalms, what?

We sing Psalms in the name of the Lord, right? It's to the praise of God. Praying, we pray in the name of Jesus Christ, right? Elders of the church. What church, the church is named by who? In the name of Jesus Christ.

Okay, I'm gonna give someone medicine, something to help him.

How?

In the name of the Lord. Do we see the, we're acting in faith. There are practical actions that we take, but always in faith in the Lord.

Yeah.

Okay, so I'm not against the folks wanting to be really obedient to the Bible and they love Jesus and so they say, okay, you're sick, James says use oil, let's get the special oil out. I don't begrudge them that, but it's not a special move, right, that has something extra to it.

I had a question about this passage specifically coming out of charismatic circles. I hear this one claimed a lot and there's another one and I'm wondering if the context is different. So here it says, if anyone among you is sick, let him call for the elders of the church and let them pray over him, anointing him with oil in the name of the Lord.

And the prayer of faith will save the sick and the Lord will raise him up and if he has committed sins, he will be forgiven. Confess your trespasses one to another. So there's that. There seems to be some context about sin, forgiveness, being cleansed of sin.

Another one that we hear quoted a lot is in Isaiah 53, by his stripes we are healed and people will claim that by his stripes I've been healed and they typically mean physically healing. But when I read the verse in the context, it says he was wounded for our transgressions, he was bruised for our iniquities, the chastisement for our peace was upon him and by his stripes we are healed.

They read the healing as physical, but all the other things, the wounding and the bruising, that seems to be dealing with sin sickness, like a soul.

Yeah, I would say that there is a greater appreciation in the Bible for the connection between the inner and the outer man than we generally live with. And so for our peace, that's Shalom and Shalom in the Old Testament is everything.

It's what's going on in the inside and on the outside. So this thing in James too, there's a thought almost immediately, like maybe one of the reasons why this guy is sick is because he's committed sins, right?

Paul talked about those who were sinning in the Lord's Supper getting sick because of it and some dying. So maybe James is pointing to, hey, when we trespass against the Lord, there is chastisement. Hebrews talks about chastisement.

The Lord chastises those he loves like his own children and this can manifest in physical ailments.

David in several places talks about, my bones are wasting away or aching because of the sin.