Gospel & Kingdom Chapter 11 and Conclusion

It is time now to see our principles put into practice. In this chapter we shall look at some Old Testament passages and consider the application of Christological interpretation methods. Provided we do not regard these principles as a kind of magic key to every difficulty, and provided we are prepared to work hard at the business of understanding the text, we should be able to avoid the hit and miss of so much handling of the Old Testament and to move in the right direction.

David and Goliath in 1 Samuel chapter 17. In chapter two, we considered some points about this famous story and its context of the life of David. We could not do better than to hear Martin Luther on this text.

When David overcame the great Goliath, there came among the Jewish people the good report and encouraging news that their terrible enemy had been struck down and that they had been rescued and given joy and peace.

And they sang and danced and were glad for it in 1 Samuel chapter 18, verse six. Thus, this gospel of God or New Testament is a good story and report sounded forth into all the world by the apostles telling of a true David who strove with sin, death and the devil and overcame them and thereby rescued all those who were captive in sin, afflicted with death and overpowered by the devil.

The important point to note is that Luther has made the link between the saving acts of God through David and the saving acts of God through Christ. Once we see that connection, it is impossible to use David as a mere model for Christian living since his victory was vicarious and the Israelites could only rejoice in what was won for them.

In terms of our interpretive principles, we see David's victory as a salvation event and that the existence of the people of God in the promised land was at stake. The gospel interprets this event by showing it as prefiguring the true saving event of Christ.

But David's experience also puts the saving event into an historical situation, which helps us to appreciate the New Testament terminology concerning the gospel events. We must be careful not to make too much of incidental details which belong to the immediate life situation described in the text.

David's taking of food to his brothers in the army hardly demands interpretation any more than the dimensions of Goliath's armor. Some areas of the narrative, on the other hand, spell out what is significant in theological terms, for example, verses 45 to 47.

Other details form a pattern within the wider context which again emerges in the gospel events. David is declared king in God's eyes in 1 Samuel 16, but is despised, scorned, and rejected. He wins his victory at the point where he seems to be about to suffer total defeat and his people continue to fight against an already defeated foe.

Rahab, Jericho, and the Salvation of the Gentiles

All Old Testament passages which deal with the Lord's battles against Israel's foes must be evaluated in the light of the saving work of God for us. Rahab's scarlet cord in Joshua 2, verses 15 to 21 and chapter six, verses 22 to 25.

One well-worn line of interpretation focuses on the redness of Rahab's cord as a type of the blood of Christ. This is difficult to maintain. While the emphasis is merely on the redness of each, but in our desire to be hermeneutically pure, we should not overreact.

The conquest of Jericho is part of the salvation and saving acts of God for Israel and his judgment on the godless Canaanites. That Rahab found safety from this judgment and was saved through obeying the instruction to display a sign of identification has many real parallels to the Passover in Egypt.

In that sense, the tying of an easily seen colored cord to the window had saving significance for Rahab. And the fact that she became incorporated into the people of God in Joshua chapter six, verse 25 is a type of salvation.

It may seem a small distinction, but it is not the redness which establishes the typology, but the saving significance of the event. The Rahab passage has another important message because it, along with other passages, demonstrates the purpose of God for the Gentiles as promised to Abraham in Genesis chapter 12, verse three.

As examples of Gentile converts, we have Jethro of Midian and his daughter, whom Moses married, Rahab the Canaanite and Ruth the Moabitess. The polluted spring in 2 Kings chapter two, verses 19 to 22.

The healing of the polluted spring at Jericho, but by the last of the old order prophets may well stimulate thoughts about the need for the human heart to be cleansed. The question of human moral pollution is of course closely related to salvation.

In fact, it is inseparable from it, but let us never lose sight of the fact that God does not save us by eradicating our pollution. We are not saved by our changed lives. The changed life is the result of being saved and not the basis of it.

The basis of salvation is the perfection in the life and death of Christ presented in our place. Now the spring of water in the promised land is closely related to Israel's salvation. Jericho was under a curse from the time Joshua destroyed it.

See Joshua chapter six, verse 17 and 26. The city site ceased to have the same significance as the inheritance of Israel, which was a fruitful land flowing with milk and honey. This is not an easy passage, but it would appear that sanction is given for a re-inhabiting of Jericho by the prophets act.

The physical sustenance of the people in the promised land is part of the whole salvation process. The ritual use of salt lies in some obscurity, but apparently indicates cleansing or a break with the past.

We may allow that Elisha's act involved redemption of the potentially life-giving spring from under the curse of the ban. Once again, we see this as a saving act of God for his people rather than a purifying act within the believer.

To drink of the purified spring was in itself to partake of the life that God provided for his people. To take of the water of life is to have life itself. The orientation of the pure spring is Christ himself, not the heart of the believer.

God graciously provides the pure water of life in the place of the cursed. We should interpret this passage in light of Christ as the fulfiller of the place where God keeps his people in eternal life.

Canaan and all its fruitfulness is in Christ. Blessing the child killers in Psalm 137. This Psalm contains one of those difficult imprecatory passages which call down terrible curses from heaven upon the enemy in what appears to be a wholly immoral fashion.

Psalm 109 verses six to 20 is a more extended imprecation which some have sought to excuse by understanding it as the words of the wicked in verse two against the Psalmist himself. But there are other clear cases which still leave the problem.

Psalm 137 has an easily discernible context. It springs from the agony of the Babylonian exile when the pious Jew was torn from the promised land and transported to a foreign country to be tormented with memories of the destruction of Jerusalem and the temple.

The whole covenant relationship with God and the salvation of the people were called into question. The theological context of the controversial verses seven to nine is the hope of redress against the enemies of God's people.

Whatever the actual form and content of the expressions, the imprecations are cries for God's kingdom to come. However much we may allow the culture and the times to have conditioned the prayer, it is essentially a longing for the day of vindication when the coming kingdom will introduce terrible judgment on all who oppose it.

The Psalmist was not conditioned by unrealistic notions about the innocence of children, but by a sense of solidarity of all age groups in a sinful mankind. However cruel the destruction of the next generation of Babylonian soldiers may appear to us, it was seen to be integral to the final overthrow of the enemies of God at the coming of his kingdom.

As we move to the New Testament, it is true that a clearer perspective is to be had. The real enemy is not flesh and blood, but principalities and powers. On the other hand, the New Testament is quite clear that the human enemy whom we must love will also come under judgment on the great and terrible day of the Lord.

To pray, thy kingdom come, is a solemn thing indeed. We have not said all that can be said about the moral problems of child killing. However, we may be disposed to interpret the biblical references in the light of the so-called primitive state of Israel civilization, a dubious concept.

The theological perspective must take precedence. It is distasteful to us that Israel slaughtered whole civilian populations during the conquest, but these historical facts, as well as the psalmist curses, cannot be interpreted apart from certain salient aspects of biblical revelation.

Firstly, that Israel's own moral failure did not disqualify her from being the agent of God's justice in the same way that godless nations became God's agents against Israel. Secondly, such slaughter and retribution visited by Israel on another at God's command was truly deserved.

See Deuteronomy 9, verses four to five. Thirdly, while the judgment in the Old Testament takes the form of death, which man naturally sees as the ultimate punishment, the New Testament depicts a far more horrendous fate for the godless.

Death by the sword in the Old Testament is only a pale shadow of the eternal judgment on the godless in the New Testament. Nehemiah rebuilds Jerusalem in Nehemiah chapter two, verses 17 to chapter four, verse 23.

Nehemiah, Allegory, and the Proper Use of Old Testament Details

Some years ago, a popular radio Bible session broadcast a sermon on this section of Nehemiah in which the speaker used a well-worn but quite inexcusable method. In order to make this piece of post-exilic history applicable to the Christian, key words were taken.

In this case, the names of the repaired gates of Jerusalem and a kind of association of ideas used to lead us to some useful but largely unrelated New Testament truth. So, for example, the horse gate led us from horses to soldiers and thence to armor, and finally to the putting on of the whole armor of God in Ephesians six.

The sheep gate under repair served as a springboard from which the speaker jumped without apology to the good shepherd of John chapter 10. Now Ephesians six and John 10 have important lessons for us and these lessons may well overlap the meaning of the original Old Testament passage in question.

What is at issue here is the method used. Sermons on the Old Testament should demonstrate and even spell out in explicit terms the legitimate relationships of the text to the New Testament. What are the points to watch in this passage from Nehemiah?

First, it belongs to the post-exilic reconstruction age, which is not one of our principal strata in the structure of biblical revelation. The return from Babylon did not herald the expected fulfillment of prophecy, but it did bring about a shadow fulfillment in which all the ingredients of the kingdom existed, although very imperfectly.

Thus, we may treat this period as a kind of interim and interim fulfillment in which the nature of the kingdom of God is clearly discernible, but during which the problems of imperfection and non-fulfillment of the prophetic hope had to be dealt with.

Secondly, the rebuilding of Jerusalem must point to the prophetic hope for the future glorification of the city of Zion, the focal point of God's kingdom. At the same time, its imperfection says something of the not yet as a dimension in the existence of the people of God.

Thirdly, it is the whole event which interprets the details and not the other way around. We should be prepared to forego the Christianizing of details unless the theological significance of these details can be established with some certainty.

If there is a way to Ephesians 6 from this passage, it is not by way of the horse gate. Rather, the resistance to Nehemiah's work, which is offered by his enemies, highlights the ongoing conflict with godlessness referred to by Paul in Ephesians 6, verses 10 to 20.

The Loss of Historical Perspective in Evangelicalism

This discussion has been at risk throughout simply because of the aim of keeping it to modest proportions. The reader will inevitably and rightly feel that many problems have been left untouched. The aim has been only to establish basic principles of interpretation.

Underlying the survey has been the conviction that 20th century evangelical Christians have experienced a radical loss of direction in handling the Old Testament. One of the contributing causes is this severing of evangelicalism from the historical perspectives of the faith.

This introduces a vicious cycle because devotion to study of the Old Testament is an important means of preserving the historicity of the gospel. Evangelicals have lost sight not only of biblical history, but of their own historical heritage in the Reformation.

By reverting to either allegorical interpretation, on the one hand, or to prophetic literalism on the other, some evangelicals have thrown away the hermeneutic gains of the reformers in favor of a medieval approach to the Bible.

The other great contributing factor to modern misuse of the Old Testament is a generation of bad habits in Bible reading. Evangelicals have had a reputation for taking the Bible seriously, but even they have traditionally propagated the idea of the short devotional reading from which a, quote, blessing from the Lord must be rested.

Failure to gain this undefined blessing is usually seen to be a function of the spiritual state of the reader rather than of the nature of the text itself. This mentality is almost paralyzed by such phenomena as the genealogies of the Bible.

Consequently, one is unlikely to find genealogy text included in daily devotional selections. The difficulties of dealing adequately with the Old Testament when this mentality prevails have been amply discussed in the previous pages.

The Crisis of Inner-Directed Christianity

The pivotal point of turning in evangelical thinking which demands close attention is the change that has taken place from the Protestant emphasis upon the objective facts of the gospel in history to the medieval emphasis on the inner life.

The evangelical who sees the inward transforming work of the spirit as the key element of Christianity will soon lose contact with the historic faith and the historic gospel. At the same time, he will come to neglect the historical acts of God in the Old Testament.

The Christ enthroned in the human heart loses his own incarnate humanity and the humanity of the Old Testament history will soon be discarded so that the, quote, inner spiritual meaning may be applied to the inner spiritual life of the Christian.

The crisis of the Old Testament today is only another form of the crisis of the Protestant faith. Inner directed Christianity, which reduces the gospel to the level of every other religion of the inner man might well use a text from the Apocrypha to serve as its own epitaph for the reformers.

Quote, there are others who are unremembered, they are dead and it is though they had never existed in Ben Sirach chapter 44, verse nine. By contrast, we should think of these fathers of the faith in the way indicated by the writer to the Hebrews in chapter 11, verse four.

They being dead yet speak.