Way back in the first post of this series (December 2009!) I suggested that the frame question for this series will be:
Toward an answer to the question
Understanding the culture and environment in which the Bible was written can often prove to be helpful for understanding the biblical text. If we take just a very brief look at how temples were perceived in the Ancient Near East (the environment in which the Bible originated) and then go back and look at the biblical text, we gain some insight for understanding the significance of the relationship between temple and creation in Scripture.
On March 6-7 I had the opportunity to preach at First Evangelical Free Church in Rockford, IL for the spring missions conference. The title of the sermon is “In the Mi(d)st of Reality” and is from Isaiah 46 (same as in Davis a few weeks ago). I was able to get an audio file from Rockford and have embedded the sermon presentation with the sermon audio above. You can also right click on this sermon link and select “save link as…” to download just the audio (mp3) file. Continue reading for more on why I think preaching is to teaching as poetry is to prose.
In this post we’ll be taking a look at the creation account in Gen 1:1-2:3 (but also in the rest of chapter 2) in comparison to the views of the surrounding cultures. In the last post I tried to show that the form of the text plays an important role in conveying the author’s claims and in this post I want to show that the cultural background also plays an important role. Between this post and the next,
The last post of this series took a look at Gen 1 from the perspective of Hebrew narrative and we saw that the chapter has a grammatical structure giving strong indication that this is a narrative text. In this post, however, we’re going to look at the poietic shaping of this text and see how it contributes to the meaning the author intends to convey.
This next series of theological musings is going to use a question sent to me on Facebook as a springboard. A college friend and a former discipleship partner of mine asked:
Is—Is NotWe’ve finally gotten down to the real meat of the question with the figural speech or metaphor of Gen 22:12. After Abraham comes through the test that God had prepared for him, demonstrating to God that he will be faithful to him even in the most drastic of circumstances, God says to Abraham, “now I know that you fear God.” We’ve said this is figural. On the one hand it truly represents the fact that God is interacting and responding to Abraham. On the other hand it does not communicate that God did not know how Abraham would respond. This “is” and “is not” is typical of metaphor. But this raises the question: when we apply an image to something, how do we know which characteristics of the image come through and which do not?
Opening A Can of WormsFor a few weeks now I’ve been writing about a couple of issues raised by a pastor friend of mine regarding Genesis 22. In the last post, which you can find here, I was addressing the issue of this statement by God to Abraham in v. 12: “now I know that you fear God, seeing you have not withheld your son, your only son, from me.” This is a bit of a problem if we think God is omniscient. If he knows everything, including what will happen in the future, how did he not know beforehand that Abraham feared God? I responded by saying that this is a figurative way of speaking in which God is described as truly interacting with Abraham’s demonstration of faith even though he knew ahead of time what Abraham would do. He has full knowledge but he is still responding truly to Abraham. The question I raised for this post is: how do we know to take just this part of the statement (now I know) as figurative?
Last week a friend of mine passed on to me an OT question from his son. The question concerned the apparent contradiction between Jeremiah 7:31 and Genesis 22. I responded to that question in a previous post. The father asks…You may remember that my friend threw in his own question.
Today I got this question from a pastor friend in an email and I thought I’d post my response here. Maybe someone has a reaction… Part of the question comes from him, part from his son. Today I’ll give my response to the son’s question and next week (I hope) to the pastor’s. |   |
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