The Sermon 4

The sermon's over, but I thought I'd just give you the gist as it ended up.

1. Introduction: my usual fare on the Bible as a sacrament of revelation. This sermon was the first of its kind for me. Rather than swim around a topic or the original meaning of a passage, I swam through various spiritual interpretations of a passage. No one would know it, but it was a fair illustration of where I am at currently hermeneutically.

Basically, I see the task of appropriation and proclamation as a word for today and a specific audience. To find and proclaim that word best, we must sit at the table of revelation with the committee of witnesses. As preacher, I am the one appointed to bring the decisions of the council to the congregation/audience.

Sitting at the table are several committee members. The ones who I usually let speak first are the original meanings of the passages of the Bible. They speak to each other, discuss and debate. The words of Jesus have special weight in that discussion, and the New Testament has authority over the Old. Also sitting at that table is orthodox Christian theology, which itself is a subcommittee of the church, which sits there as well. They help me prioritize the biblical discussion. In some respects they have veto power over the appropriation of individual biblical passages, stop signs that keep those voices from leaving the committee.

The church has many voices as well, recognized spiritual thinkers like Augustine, Kierkegaard, Tozer, etc... There are also voices there like Bill Hybels, Rick Warren, Keith Drury, Max Lucado.

My task as the speaker for the committee is a daunting one. I am required to bring Spirit filled, faith filled thinking to bear on their discussion, the discussion of the ages. I must pray and humbly wait on the Spirit to illumine me. I want to be in conversation with as much of the church as I can and in continuity with the faith of the ages. Then with a prayer that God's word will be heard in my words, I dare to speak.

2. I focused on the biblical words, "obedience, not sacrifice."

This first led me to the story of Saul and Samuel, as in my first entry.

3. Then I turned to the Abraham passage, which I was most interested in today.

First Tozer gave witness to a spiritual understanding of the passage, as in my second blog. His part of the phrase was obedience...

4. Then I explored the difficulty of the Abraham passage, how it leads us to wonder whether God requires something immoral here.

I read James 1:13-18, which says God doesn't tempt people with evil. Telling someone to murder seems an aweful lot like telling someone to do evil.

5. I talked a little about 2 Samuel 24, where God tells David to number Israel in a sting operation, then sends a plague on Israel for doing it.

But I went on to show that 1 Chronicles 21 says that it was actually Satan that told David to do this. I did my usual thing on the lights of revelation coming on between Samuel and Chronicles with regard to the Satan. I mentioned Job and how from Job's perspective, he never finds out that in fact he was just a pawn in a wager between God and the Satan.

By the way, this theology in my opinion debunks the all too common idea that Job is the earliest book of the OT written. I think the idea is usually that the story of Job must predate Israel since there's no awareness of Israel in it. In some cases, this is the same kind of premodern thinking that would unthinkingly assume the gospels were written first because Jesus came before Paul. Or there are those who put true on quizzes that say 1 Corinthians was written by Paul from Corinth to us.

This is the pre-modern inability to distinguish between the content of these texts and these texts as events in history. The gospels may be about Jesus but they are some of the later books of the New Testament written and in some cases represent the later theology of the New Testament. Similarly, regardless of when Job might have lived, the book need not be written at that point.

All the evidence points to the idea of the Satan coming into Israelite thought after the Babylonian captivity. Samuel doesn't have him, Chronicles in the Persian period does. My sense is thus that Job in its current form must date to the Persian period.

6. I have suspected for some time that if Genesis had been written in the Persian period, it too would identify Satan rather than God as the one who gave Abraham these instructions. I was thus delighted one day to find that in fact this is exactly how the book of Jubiliees tells the story, a possibly Essene writing that dates to about 150 BC.

While in a sermon I didn't feel comfortable saying it with any strength or assertion, I suspect that what we see in Samuel/Chronicles also applies here. Taking the fullness of the OT into account, we should probably more precisely see the Satan as the instigator of the sacrifice rather than God directly. God is of course the Ultimate Sovereign whose permissive will is involved in everything that happens in the world, both good and evil.

However, the Satan is the instigator of temptation in the later OT, and the NT in James confirms that God does not tempt anyone directly with evil.

7. At this point in the sermon I talked about Kierkegaard and the mystery of God, my third entry above. I read Romans 11:33-36.

8. Finally, I gave what I think is a more accurate original meaning for the passage. Since this entry seems long, I'll post a different entry to tell you what I think it is.