Part 4: Five Things in the Bible that Once Embarrassed Me but that I Now Think are Freaking Profound

Thing #4 – God Commanding Violence in the Old Testament
This one was beyond embarrassing. This issue calls into question the biblical claim that God is loving and good.

Of course, as a kid I grew up with lovey-dovey Christianity, believing that Jesus was all about loving everybody. But at the secular art college where I studied painting, my seasoned, cynical, liberal arts professors reeeelly pressed this point of the supposed “two different Gods” presented in the Bible – the Old Testament God of vengeance vs the New Testament God of love. And the Old Testament God was not merely passive-aggressive, or theoretically OK with violence. At times He specifically commanded Israel to mercilessly slaughter even the women, children, and animals of Israel’s enemies Furthermore, Israel was initially the aggressor, with “God’s blessing,” wiping out people groups with the aim of occupying their land. On one hand, the OT presents the idea that YHWH is unique, and above all other gods, but His commands to Israel to slaughter her enemies suggests that He is no different from any other war-like, barbaric, us-vs-them god.

Furthermore, I hope we can all agree that “God wants me to kill these people” is horrible foreign policy for our world, yet we still have precisely this kind of reasoning guiding militant Islam today. How can Bible lovers like myself say this thinking was OK for ancient Israel but not for contemporary Islam?

In light of Israel’s role in the world as stated in the Bible, I see three reasons for God commanding violence:

1 – The “J”-word
If God conceived and created all of life, then He has ultimate authority, and we are accountable to Him. The Bible portrays all of humanity as lost and dying. With Abraham, God established the nation of Israel and explicitly stated that Israel’s role in the world was to be a blessing to all the families of the earth (Gen 12:3; 18:18; 22:18; 26:4; 28:14.) He promised a land to Abraham’s descendants at this time. Later, under Moses, God delivered His Torah (Law) to serve as a guide to His “witness people” and a witness to the surrounding nations (Deut 4:7,8.)

So…how does killing off the surrounding nations constitute being a light and a blessing?

Initially, the Torah states that God was using Israel as an instrument of His judgment against the inhabitants of the Promised Land. It says He withheld judgment against those inhabitants for 400 years “until their iniquity was complete” (Gen 15:15,16.) We are told the nature of their iniquity: rampant violence and murder, thievery, rape, prostitution, incest, bestiality, and child abuse including routine child burning in sacrifice to their false gods (Lev ch 18, specifically v 24, 25.) This describes a society, most of the inhabitants of which would be imprisoned or on death row in our legal system. This was a time before there was such a thing as spiritual re-birth, or even 12-step programs. The picture is of a society openly practicing evil (which always entails harming others,) liking it that way, and passing it on to their children. For example the story of Sodom says that the men of the city, “both young and old, to the last man” came out to gang rape Lot’s guests.

Justice is part of goodness and love. It is not good or loving to any party to let a playground bully have his way everyday with the other children on the playground. Good authority must step in to keep evil in check. It must also be remembered that Israel herself was not exempt from judgment. God promised to use the nations to visit the same judgment upon Israel should she turn from God’s covenant, as eventually happened.

If the idea of God using Israel to judge the surrounding nations is objectionable to you, I would sincerely like to hear your ideas as to what you think God should have done instead to keep violence and evil in check. (Call out the UN Peacekeeping Force?) Even today, the world’s peace loving and “enlightened” nations are sometimes forced to revert to warfare in order to keep greater evils in check. Ultimately the spiritually corrupt state of the human condition is the reason God sent a Savior. In part, the Torah was designed as a temporal agent to set a reasonable standard for Israel and the nations until the Messiah’s coming (Gal 3:23-25.) The whole batch of humanity was lost, and pretty much rotting from the inside out.

2 – Extreme intervention
Many Bible critics seem to assume that if God commands something anywhere in the Bible, then He must think it is categorically right and good. But we can easily see that this is not the case, neither in the Bible nor in the rest of life. For example when my children were toddlers, I absolutely did not allow them to cross the street by themselves. Now that they are grown, I expect them to.

Similarly, one can’t isolate a biblical command of God and claim that it represents God’s perfect ideal when the whole of the Bible claims that it does not. The Bible’s linear, progressive, unfolding revelation is consistent both with itself and with the world we know. If a skeptic’s argument ignores the whole, he forfeits his right to argue against the legitimacy of the Bible. His argument is simply reduced to “I really don’t like that part of the Bible.” To which I might reply, “I’m with you bro. I don’t like that part either. And apparently God didn’t like it either, seeing as He sent a Messiah.”

A benevolent doctor may prescribe chemotherapy for a cancer patient, even though chemo would be a terrible prescription for a healthy, cancer-free person. The benevolent doctor may even need to amputate a limb in order to save the larger body, though this would appear unspeakably cruel to an uninformed onlooker. However, it would be wrong to call the character of the doctor into question unless he goes around sadistically cutting limbs off of healthily functioning people.

Perhaps God viewed the cutting off of the depraved nations inhabiting the promised land as an amputation; an intervention necessary to spare the larger body of the human race, until such time as something better – true healing and guidance – could be brought into play. The cancer of sin threatened to bring judgment down upon all of humanity again, as with Noah’s flood. Eventually, God’s Messiah would come to deal with the sin issue once and for all. God would judge sin in the Messiah, and introduce the possibility of spiritual rebirth to humanity.

The Bible states that God is not categorically happy with slaughtering evil people. Several times He states that this is not His first choice: “As I live, says the Lord God, I have no pleasure in the death of the wicked, but that the wicked should turn from his way and live…” (Ezek 33:11, see also 18:23 & 32.)

3 – Prefiguring better realities
Now comes a surprise. In a previous post I wrote of God’s vision for Jewish-gentile unity, and how the coming of the Messiah has made this possible. The apostle Paul writes of this unity in an often-overlooked passage in his letter to the Romans, chapter 15:8-12. Here he quotes prophetic passages from Moses, King David, and the prophets to make his case:

“For I tell you that Christ became a servant to the circumcised [the Jews] to show God’s truthfulness, in order to confirm the promises given to the patriarchs, and in order that the gentiles might glorify God for His mercy. As it is written,
‘Therefore I will praise thee among the gentiles, and sing to thy name’; [David – Ps 18:49]
And again it is said, ‘Rejoice, O gentiles, with his people’; [Moses – Deut 32:43]
And again, ‘Praise the Lord all gentiles, and let all the people praise Him’; [David – Ps 117:1]
And further Isaiah says, ‘The root of Jesse shall come, He who rises to rule the gentiles; in Him shall the gentiles hope.’” [Isaiah – 11:10]

Don’t these Old Testament quotations sound nice? They’re not. In what appears to be a feat of dishonest interpretive gymnastics, Paul cites one of the bloodiest Psalms of David as a prophetic statement on Jewish-gentile unity! Psalm 18:49 is, in fact, David thanking God for giving him victory over his gentile enemies. In other words, he killed them. This Psalm contains statements such as,

“I pursued my enemies and overtook them; and did not turn back till they were consumed. I thrust them through so that they were not able to rise; they fell under my feet…” and, “…I beat them fine as dust before the wind; I cast them out like the mire of the streets.” (v 37, 38, & 42)

Wow. What possible justification could Paul have for using the warrior-king’s exultations to speak of unity and friendship with the nations?

Well…exactly the same justification that he had to interpret every other aspect of the Mosaic Covenant as a foreshadowing of the new and better spiritual realities that arrived with the Messiah’s New Covenant. From top to bottom, every aspect of the Torah and the prophets has been (or will be) fulfilled in the Messiah, and is now translated into spiritual terms, according to the teaching of Jesus and His apostles. This is not some interpretive sleight of hand. This IS what all the Torah and the prophets pointed to and looked forward to. This is what all of creation and its Creator have been waiting for. It’s the historic coming of salvation and the kingdom of God, entering into our present, corrupt age. It comes with an invitation, with the aim of eventually unifying all things (Eph 1:9,10.)

Specifically, New Covenant teaching acknowledges a warfare, but says we no longer fight against flesh and blood. Neither are our armor and weaponry material (Eph 6:11-17.) We still invade nations on behalf of a kingdom, but we bring a message of love and salvation, never a sword. We do hope to see the inhabitants of all nations individually surrender to Israel’s God, but not as prisoners. We surrender to the Lordship of Jesus, becoming spiritual sons and daughters of our Creator, and co-heirs with believing Israel.

In keeping with this radical New Covenant way of thinking, Jesus says things like, “You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ But I say to you, Love your enemies…” (Mt 5:43,44.) And we have apostolic teaching agreeing, “For though we walk in the flesh, we are not waging war according to the flesh. For the weapons of our warfare are not of the flesh but have divine power to destroy strongholds. We destroy arguments and every lofty opinion raised against the knowledge of God…” (2 Cor 10:3-5.)

Summary
I don’t believe that King David had the slightest inkling that what He was writing had anything to do with an eventual New Covenant wherein God’s people would love their enemies. Nor did Moses have a clue that the feasts of Israel in Leviticus had anything to do with prefiguring the work of a Messiah who would come two millennia later. These prophets were immersed in the dispensation of the Old Covenant under which they lived, and what they wrote was in complete fidelity with that context. The fact that there is a precise, uncanny correspondence between the Old and New Covenants over a period of several millennia is due only to the genius of God.

Clearly, Mohammad also had no inkling of these things when he founded Islam, 600 years after Jesus established His New Covenant. Despite the Koran’s repeated claims that it supports the Gospels, it clearly does not. In fact the Koran contradicts all that Jesus accomplished, reverting back to physical terms and conditions similar to those of the old Mosaic Covenant, including the recognition and slaughter of Islam’s human enemies. Islam’s prophet was a warrior. There is no new covenant in the Koran.

In the teaching of Jesus and His apostles we see a revolutionary, seismic change that far transcends the time in which it was written. Specifically, in the New Covenant of Jesus we see the elimination of ethnic differences (no Jew or Greek,) status and economic differences (no slave or free,) and gender differences (no male or female.) Freaking revolutionary.

“For in Christ Jesus you are all sons of God through faith. For as many of you as were baptized into Christ have put on Christ. There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is no male and female; for you are all one in Christ Jesus…” (Gal 3:27-28; also Col 3:9-11.)

(Thanks to Pastor Jonathan Williams for first pointing out the Romans 15 passage to me.)

Part 3: Five Things in the Bible that Once Embarrassed Me but that I Now Think are Freaking Profound

Thing #3 – Noah’s Ark
The above illustration is a typical depiction of what many think of as a children’s story. But actually, “Noah’s Ark” is a story of terror that is probably not appropriate for children. For me, that Christian parents would decorate nurseries with images of rainbows and a jolly Noah on a pleasure boat brimming with smiling animals is one of the bizarre aspects of Christian subculture. According to the Torah, the Genesis flood was YHWH intentionally destroying all of life on a global scale because it had become so corrupt and violent. It’s a nasty story of judgment.

Cheery or nasty, making this story sound ridiculous is like shooting fish in a barrel. Believe me, I’ve been in a lot of lively discussions on the topic. My atheist/skeptic friends LOVE critiquing the Noah story:
How’d he keep the penguins and polar bears cold enough?…What about venomous snakes?…How’d he fit the dinosaurs on the ark?…How’d he fit millions of animal species on the ark?…What did they do with all the excrement?… How did they keep the lions from eating the zebras?…Wouldn’t it be risky bringing skunks along?…How could it rain non-stop for a month when there isn’t enough moisture in the atmosphere for this to happen?…There isn’t enough water to on the planet to cover earth’s highest mountains…etc. I get it!

Rather than spend this post answering the same old million assumed objections, I recommend interested readers visit >here<. The CMI site’s search bar can take you to articles written by qualified PhD scientists who actually believe the Noah story could’ve happened.

Instead, for the remainder of this post, I think the best service I can offer is to draw a clear line between two different ways of looking at the world. The story of Noah, which I once found embarrassing, I now find to be endlessly fascinating with profound implications.

First, as is often the case with “well known” Bible stories, there are quite a few misconceptions that must be corrected. Whether or not you believe the story of Noah’s Ark, let’s at least be clear as to what the Torah says about it.

The pre-flood world was significantly different from ours:

• The earth’s population spoke one language (Gen 11:1)
• Dry land may have consisted of a single continent (Gen 10:25)
• Animals did not fear humans until after the flood (Gen 9:2)
• YHWH did not allow humans to eat meat until after the flood (cf Gen 1:29-32; 9:3)
• It had not rained until the time of the flood. (Gen 2:5-6 implies the earth was watered by a mist, but we can only speculate about what this means.)
• This all sounds pretty paradisiacal so far, except that sin and death had entered the world, and human beings had corrupted themselves. The Torah states, “YHWH saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every imagination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually…Now the earth was corrupt in God’s sight, and the earth was filled with violence…(Gen 6:5,11.)

The flood as described in the Torah: 

• The flood was designed by God to wipe out every air-breathing creature, except for Noah and the inhabitants of the ark (Gen 7:22-24.)
• The Torah does not say that it merely rained for 40 days and nights. It also says the “fountains of the great deep burst forth” as well. It is likely that the flood was a violent cataclysm involving volcanic activity and crustal plate movement (Gen 7:11-12, 17-20.)

For me as an artist, one of the fascinating things about life is how two different people can look at the same thing and see a completely different picture. Hand in hand with this goes the human tendency to see what one wants to see. In the interest of clarifying two very different ways of looking at the world, I’d like to show you two pictures that may widen your perspective.

Here’s the first:

You’ve seen the geologic column before. Each era represents a span of millions of years. The strata show the accumulation of millions of years of sediment built up through the ages, telling the story of the evolution of life. Older rocks on bottom, newer rocks on top. This is the hard evidence for evolution. While it’s true that 77% of earth’s surface has 7 or more of the strata systems missing, still, generally the marine creatures are at the bottom, with land-dwelling life forms appearing as one moves upward through evolutionary time.

Is there another reasonable way to interpret the geologic column? You decide.

Here’s the same picture with one small addition – a water line:

Think about the ecological zones where animals live. Marine invertebrates live on the ocean floor, swimming fish live above them, amphibious animals living near the water line live above the fish, and land-dwelling and flying animals live above them. If there were a catastrophic, global flood that buried everything under huge layers of sediment, wouldn’t we expect to see life forms buried roughly in the ecological zones in which they lived?

95% of the fossil record consists of marine organisms such as corals and shellfish. The remaining 5% are generally found above them. Is it so unreasonable to entertain the possibility that when we look at the vast sedimentary layers covering the planet, we are not looking at billions of years of evolution, but the grim result of the great global catastrophe described in the Judeo-Christian scriptures?

If it really happened, the flood described in the Torah would’ve been the most destructive and unforgettable ecological disaster in recorded history. It would’ve permanently altered the face and climate of the entire planet, as well as the course of human history. It would’ve left lasting evidence worldwide, burying everything under layers of sediment. According to the Torah, every human being living today is descended from the 8 people who survived on the ark. Coincidentally, there seems to be a collective memory of a great flood worldwide. We know of at least 500 flood stories from various, unrelated world cultures, many of which share elements of the Genesis story.

Furthermore, the best alternative – evolutionary theory, says that modern humans have been here for some 200,000 years, yet it appears that humans acquired the ability to write language only 5000 years ago. It appears that humans didn’t develop agricultural practices until only about 10,000 years ago. Why? Nor does the current population of the earth fit if we have been here for 200,000 years. And if humans have been burying their billions of dead for 200,000 years, there’s scant evidence of it. Apparently there are hard questions for scientists and anthropologists on both sides of the debate.

I want to conclude by spelling out the implications of these two views regarding the nature of life and death. The biblical view and the materialist view are pointedly divergent and irreconcilable:

The biblical view:
A loving, relational Creator created a good and unified world, including humans with free will. Man chose to break relational unity with his Creator, introducing sin, death, and corruption to creation. This spiritual separation from God (death) also resulted in relational separation between man and man, and man and nature. For human beings, life is defined as relational unity with our Creator, while death is defined as an “enemy” that our incarnate Creator defeated for us at His resurrection. In Him the consequences of separation/death will eventually be done away with – suffering, disease, fear, hatred, oppression, imperfection and physical death.

The evolutionist view
There is nothing beyond material reality. Free will is an illusion. There is no eternal soul. Biological life exists with the sole aim of passing its genetic information to its offspring. That’s it. Life forms unable to do so die out. All of life, humans included, exists as a result of blind, mindless, impersonal processes. Biological life exists by a process of natural selection involving mutation, disease, carnivorous predation, suffering, violence and death. Nothing that exists has any transcendent or objective worth since what exists is only here by accident. Of course, we do value people and things subjectively, but others may value them differently, or not value them at all. We are worthless and ultimately alone in the universe.

So there you have it. One view says life is companionship with the loving Creator who conceived us (see previous post), the other says life is merely one accident in a pointless and impersonal universe. One view says death is a corruption and an enemy (1 Cor 15:26), the other sees death as part of the natural selecting process that defines nature’s winners.

What is an ark?
A Fort Collins, Colorado pastor, John Meyer, recently made a side comment that struck me. He said, “An ark is not a boat. An ark is a vessel that holds something of value to protect and preserve it.” I thought of other arks. I could only think of two: 1) Israel’s ark of the covenant that carried the stone tablets of the Law, Aaron’s rod, and a jar of manna. 2) Jewish synagogues have something called a “Torah Ark” which contains the congregation’s Torah scrolls.

Out of curiosity I did a search to see if there were other arks in the Bible. I found one, hidden by the English translation, but the Hebrew word is the same. This ark was made of wicker, covered in pitch, and placed in the water. It carried an infant who was under a death sentence. This baby was preserved, and grew to deliver the children of Israel from slavery. His name was Moses. He prefigured the Messiah.

Noah’s Ark tells the story of a loving God who must also judge His creation. In judging a corrupt and violent human race He also preserved, protected, and saved something of value in the ark. Whether or not you believe this crazy story, my hope is that you can believe that you are valuable and loved by God, and that He invites you into spiritual rebirth, life, and relationship with Himself.

Part 2: Five Things in the Bible that Once Embarrassed Me but that I Now Think are Freaking Profound

Thing #2: Adam & Eve
The creation story in Genesis is full of embarrassing things that a modern, educated, intelligent person is expected to run away from: Adam and Eve, Adam’s rib, the talking serpent, the magical tree…You simply can’t say you believe these stories are true and remain in good standing in a modern academic environment. Because academia has something much more modern and intelligent to believe. (Namely, the magical world of evolution, where life spontaneously springs from non-life, and the statistically impossible has accidentally occurred millions of times over to bring us to where we are today.)

To be an academic, one must be intelligent, literate, and capable of rigorous thought. Academia is an elite and exclusive enterprise, to which one must earn entry. By contrast, the stories in the Torah read like children’s stories: God caused Adam to sleep, and while he slept took one of his ribs and made it into a woman. Really? A rib? How insulting to intelligent people. What could be more ridiculous? (I mean, other than the idea that the first woman accidentally evolved from dead matter as a result of non-directed, mindless processes.) But why must the creation account read like a children’s story?

Well, one reason might be that our relational Creator has universal truth that He wants to communicate to “every tribe, tongue, and nation” of the world. God is not elitist. The stories in the Torah deliver content very effectively.  There are some 1 billion illiterate adults in the world – about a quarter of the earth’s adult population. I know missionaries who are sharing God’s truth through Bible stories right now, with illiterate people groups.

But does the fact that the Bible can be understood by uneducated people mean that the Bible is anti-intellectual? Not at all. One of the amazing things about the Bible is that it makes sense at a literal, story level, but at the same time there is spectacular depth for those who bother to search it out. Centuries of Rabbinic Jewish scholarship recorded in the vast literature of the Talmud attests to this, for example.

The Genesis creation account contains way too much profundity for a single blog post, so I want to share one, big idea from the creation story that ties into my previous post on the triune, relational nature of God. After you read this, you may never view life the same way because this is one of the most profound ideas in the universe!

Here it is: According to the Bible, our relational Creator defines life and death in relational terms.

Please bear in mind that, regardless of whether or not you consider this to be true, I’m simply presenting an internally consistent idea that runs throughout the whole of scripture.

What is death?
In the creation account we are first presented with our relational Creator’s understanding of death:

• God places Adam in the garden, giving him responsibility over it, but instructs Adam not to eat the fruit of a particular tree, saying, “…for in the day that you eat of it you shall die” (Gen 2:17)
• A very cunning creature tells Adam’s wife that, actually, God is essentially being selfish and arrogant, and is lying to them. He says, “You will not die. For God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil” (Gen 3:4,5.)
• So the first couple decides to eat the forbidden fruit. Then it later says that Adam lives to be 930 years old!

What’s the deal? The serpent is supposed to be evil, but it looks like he was the one speaking the truth! Not only did the man and woman come to know good and evil, they did not die that day. Furthermore, after this, God drives them out of the garden so that they can’t eat from a second tree, the tree of life, which apparently wasn’t even forbidden originally:

‘Then YHWH God said, “Behold, the man has become like one of us, knowing good and evil; and now, lest he put forth his hand and take also of the tree of life, and eat, and live forever” – therefore YHWH God sent him forth from the garden of Eden, to till the ground from which he was taken. He drove out the man…’ (Gen 3:22-24.)

It appears as though God is afraid of human beings becoming wise and eternal, like Himself.

The key to the story has to do with relational unity from start to finish. The biblical concept of death has to do with separation. Conversely, life has to do with unity, both on a spiritual and a physical level. On a physical/biological level we may think of death as the cessation of biological function. But every known culture also understands that this entails a separation of the physical body from some non-material part of us.  Certainly the Bible teaches the existence of a non-material soul/spirit that is separated from the body at physical death.

So death is separation. But for human beings, physical death is merely the inevitable result of a more fundamental, spiritual separation. In all of creation, human beings are unique in that we are both physical and spiritual beings. We were designed to live in relational unity with the fountainhead of life – our Creator. When the first couple chose to disregard God’s will regarding the tree, relational unity was broken. This is the death of which God spoke when He said, “…for in the day you eat of it you shall die.” In separating themselves from the source of life, the first couple did in fact die a spiritual death. The physical death that later followed was an eventual consequence.

Contrary to the serpent’s words, eating the fruit did not make Adam and Eve more like God at all. It made them more like the serpent – relationally cut-off from their Creator, and facing evil they were unequipped and unable to successfully deal with.

Is this view of death simply one possible interpretation? Does the Bible speak explicitly of humans being physically alive while spiritually dead? Yes – this is exactly how our state is described:

• “And you He made alive, when you were dead through your trespasses and sins…” (Eph 2:1; also 2:5.)
• “And when you were dead in your transgressions and the uncircumcision of your flesh, God made you alive together with Him, having forgiven us all out transgressions…” (Col 2:13.)
• “She who is self-indulgent is dead even while she lives” (1 Tim 5:6.)

What is life?
If the Bible describes death in terms of relational separation from God, then we might reasonably expect the Bible to define life in terms of relational unity with God. This is exactly what we do see:

• “This is eternal life, that they may know Thee, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom Thou has sent” (Jn 17:3.) This is a key statement by Jesus, often overlooked. Here He defines eternal life – not as “living forever,” and not as “going to heaven.” He defines it in purely relational terms, while referencing His own relational unity with the Father (v 1,4,5.)
• “For as the Father has life in Himself, so He has granted the Son also to have life in Himself” (Jn 5:26.)
• “And because you are sons, God has sent the Spirit of His Son into our hearts, crying , ‘Abba! Father!’” (Gal 4:6.)
• “Truly, truly, I say to you, unless one is born anew, he cannot see the kingdom of God” (Jn 3:3.) It is this spiritual rebirth that reconnects us with our Creator, who is Spirit.

The problem of relational disunity is universally recognized. Every religion and ism that I can think of either seeks to bring about relational unity, or seeks to convince us that we are already one, and to live accordingly. But I contend that other religions and isms seek to accomplish unity by means of human effort, often by coercion. One can call to mind the efforts of Communism. Or Islam, which sees peace and unity as arriving only when the entire world is Muslim, and seeks to accomplish this through human effort.

Only the Judeo-Christian scriptures present relational restoration with God as impossible through human effort. Instead, Salvation is something God Himself has accomplished for us, which He then offers to us freely as a gift (Eph 2:8,9.) Once relational/spiritual unity is restored, we then do good out of love and gratitude, not to earn points. This is the opposite of religions which require good deeds and sacrifices in hopes of earning God’s favor.

A word about resurrection.
In keeping with the above teaching of Jesus and His apostles, resurrection, then, is not some random, fairy tale hope about people coming back to life. Resurrection is part of what salvation means for the whole person, as humans are meant to be spirit, soul, and body, in unity. Resurrection follows logically from restored relational unity with God as God reverses events that occurred at the fall in Genesis:

• Adam immediately died spiritually when right relationship with God was broken. Physical deterioration, death, and decay eventually followed as a result.
• Today, when right relationship with God is restored through spiritual rebirth in His Messiah, we are made eternally alive immediately. Physical resurrection with imperishable bodies will eventually follow as a result.

“For this perishable nature must put on the imperishable, and this mortal nature must put on immortality. When the perishable puts on immortality, then shall come to pass the saying that is written,
‘Death is swallowed up in victory.
O death where is your victory?
O death where is your sting?’” (1 Cor 15:53-55)

By His great mercy we have been born anew to a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead…(1 Pet 1:3)

Beggars’ Gate Painting #2

A couple of weeks ago I posted a painting that I recently completed for a Loveland, Colorado church that goes by the name of Beggars’ Gate. I titled the painting Water to the Thirsty. Pictured below is the second painting, titled Clothing to the Naked. I alluded to the theme of “nakedness” in the first Beggar’s Gate post, but this second painting provides an excuse to elaborate a bit on the theme.

“Clothing to the Naked” – painted by the author
4×5 ft, recycled housepaint on birch panel – photography by Alanna Brake

The first and most obvious meaning of the painting has to do with helping those who are in need of literal, physical clothing. This is a part of what the church of Jesus does. But more importantly, there is another, more profound clothing spoken of throughout the Judeo-Christian scriptures. It is this clothing that really interests me, and this is what the painting is really about.

In the Bible, virtually every common aspect of our physical existence has a more primary, spiritual counterpart: birth, food, water, nakedness & clothing, home & shelter, marriage, family & inheritance, warfare & peace, slavery & freedom, seedtime & harvest, and even life & death, all are spoken of in spiritual terms with the coming of Jesus and His new covenant. These physical realities are real, but the spiritual realities are just as real. In fact they are eternal. The apostle Paul states, “…for the things that are seen are temporal, but the things that are unseen are eternal” (2 Cor 4:18).

Consider the puzzling subject of clothing. Clothing is a fascinating aspect of our common experience that is unique to humans. Even if you’re sitting all alone in your house right now with your computer, there is an extremely high probability that you’re wearing clothes. By contrast, if your lovable household pet is nearby, there is an equally high probability that it is blissfully buck-naked. Only humans bother with clothing. You may respond that this is all merely a result of social conditioning, and I would agree to some extent. But maybe there is something deeper going on with this business of nakedness and clothing.

Let’s look in the Torah where the subject of nakedness first comes up. It says YHWH produced a creation that He pronounced “very good” (Gen 1:31). He placed the first couple in charge of tending the garden, and commanded them to “be fruitful and multiply” (1:28). This sounds like a very nice gig. Then, of all the things that could’ve been pointed out about the situation, the text somewhat weirdly says “the man and his wife were both naked and were not ashamed” (2:25). The situation described is that of perfect community – communion and unity between the couple and YHWH, as well as communion and unity between the man and the woman.

It is interesting that when communion/trust is broken between YHWH and the couple, the first thing it says is “the eyes of both were opened, and they realized that they were naked” (3:7), so they hid themselves among the trees from the presence of YHWH (3:8). Also interesting is that they make coverings out of leaves to cover themselves. Why? Strange.

What happens later is more interesting still: YHWH makes coverings for them out of animal skins, implying that their leaf coverings were insufficient (3:21). So the first blood shed in YHWH’s creation was shed by YHWH Himself, in order to provide sufficient covering for the man and the woman. I don’t think it’s a stretch to say this can be seen as a prefiguring of the sacrificial death of the Messiah.

Some thousands of years later, when the Messiah does arrive, he teaches His followers to look beyond the physical to the spiritual. Not that the physical is negated or unimportant, but that the spiritual is foremost in importance: “Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothing?…but seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things will be added to you” (Jesus – Matt 6:25-33)

After the bodily resurrection of the Messiah, the apostle Paul writes, “…For in this tent (physical body) we groan, longing to put on our heavenly dwelling, if indeed by putting it on we may not be found naked. For while we are still in this tent, we groan, being burdened – not that we would be unclothed, but that we would be further clothed, so that what is mortal may be swallowed up by life. He who prepared us for this very thing is God, who has given us the Spirit as a guarantee” (2 Cor 5:2-5).

So, to clarify, according to the Bible, this business of nakedness, clothing, and shame does not seem to be about sex. We know this because sex was a gift from YHWH, and part of His “very good”, unified creation. Furthermore, at the fall it says the couple hid from the presence of God, not from each other. Rather, nakedness seems to be about vulnerability. In Genesis 2 the root of the Hebrew word “naked” means “exposed”, and I believe this is the heart of the matter. Before the fall, humanity was vulnerable, but protected by virtue of being in loving relationship with God. When that communion was broken, humanity was left exposed (naked) to the consequences of disobedience – to all of the imperfection and suffering that we now live with, ultimately ending in physical death. In willfully “unplugging” from the Source of life, humanity was left in a state of mortality.

If that is true, then one might ask why God didn’t do something about it. The short answer is, He did – in sending a Savior. It is the role of His church to let people know about that. The question of why He took so long is the subject of another post.

“For you are all sons of God through faith in Christ Jesus. For all of you who were baptized into Christ have clothed yourselves with Christ” (Gal 3:27,28).

Beggars’ Gate Painting #1

I recently received a request that was extremely unusual coming from a theologically orthodox, evangelical church: create three large paintings for their newly renovated building. More remarkable still was that the commissioning pastor turned down my routine offer to submit a few rough ideas for him to approve. He wanted to see how God might inspire me, and he didn’t want to interfere. This rarely happens, regardless of who, or what organization is doing the commissioning. I had to pinch myself. Evangelicalism hasn’t had a rich tradition of supporting the arts, although I now see this changing. I don’t even attend this guy’s church. It’s a new, non-denominational church called Beggars’ Gate. They meet at the corner of 29th and Garfield in Loveland, Colorado in a creatively renovated building that formerly housed a bar and restaurant.

I cocked my head when I first heard the name Beggars’ Gate. It didn’t strike me as a very alluring name for a church. But then I realized that was probably the point. If someone would stay away because they felt the name was beneath them, then it’s a thought-provoking name indeed. Humility is a prerequisite to coming to God for salvation. If one thinks one has something to bring; something to add to God’s gift of salvation, then he or she doesn’t understand the spiritual poverty of his or her situation. Rightly or wrongly, the most common criticism I hear against church people is self-righteousness and hypocrisy. A church with a name like Beggar’s Gate would have to really work at being either of those.

In thinking about the beggar idea, I recalled the things that God offers to us according to the Bible; things that we have no hope of acquiring by our own effort. I’ve tended to shy away from “religious painting”, but I know from past experience that these things are very difficult to depict in paint without lapsing into the cheesiness and sentimentality that has often typified evangelical subculture. Following are some thoughts I had around the main Beggar’s Gate painting, pictured below.

I resisted the idea of depicting a literal beggar at first because it seemed too obvious. But then I became captivated by the idea of visually quoting Michelangelo’s “Creation” from the Sistine Chapel. Michelangelo’s archetypal image depicts Adam as a perfect, godlike being, and in fact, you could argue that the Bible implies that’s what Adam was. In the painting he’s reclining, in a position of reliance on his Creator, but he’s clearly an impressive figure, naked and unashamed. However shortly after the creation account, the scriptures describe the fall of man from Life – he is separated from God and begins his slide into darkness, depravity, and death. Everything else that follows in the Bible is the story of our relational Creator restoring his creation to life and communion with Himself.

Which brings us to our present situation. I’ve repainted Adam as a beggar; emaciated and needy. He’s clothed in dirty rags – his own attempt at covering his disgrace. He represents our fallen human condition. The child clothed in white, who brings him a cup, represents the spiritual rebirth made possible through God’s Messiah. She is doing the work of the church. But what she offers doesn’t come from an earthly source:
“…whoever drinks of the water that I shall give him will never thirst; the water that I shall give him will become in him a spring of water welling up to eternal life.” (Jesus – Jn 4:14)

“…If any one thirst, let him come to Me and drink. He who believes in Me, as the scripture has said, ‘From his innermost being shall flow rivers of living water.'” Now this He said about the Spirit, which those who believed in Him were to receive; for as yet the Spirit had not been given.” (Jesus – John 7:37-39)

Here Jesus claims to fulfill centuries-old Hebrew prophecy.

Water to the Thirsty
Scott Freeman, 4 x 6 feet, latex paint on panel