Christianity Dissected

Romans 13:1-7 and Conservative Politics

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This Pauline passage has recently come into the limelight. It is a tough one deserving of a careful wrestle. I’m not interested in the politics. My concern is about making sense of the passage within Romans and the Pauline corpus as a whole:

Romans 13:1-5 ESV
[1] Let every person be subject to the governing authorities. For there is no authority except from God, and those that exist have been instituted by God. [2] Therefore whoever resists the authorities resists what God has appointed, and those who resist will incur judgment. [3] For rulers are not a terror to good conduct, but to bad. Would you have no fear of the one who is in authority? Then do what is good, and you will receive his approval, [4] for he is God’s servant for your good. But if you do wrong, be afraid, for he does not bear the sword in vain. For he is the servant of God, an avenger who carries out God’s wrath on the wrongdoer. [5] Therefore one must be in subjection, not only to avoid God’s wrath but also for the sake of conscience.

Even before the most recent invocation of this passage in the service of politics, Christians were divided over how best to understand it. On the one hand, it reads quite straightforwardly: governments derive their authority ultimately from God; therefore, the Christian must obey and not resist a government. On the other hand, such a reading is difficult to square with other things we know.

First, Paul himself had gone to the established authorities to seek permission to prosecute Christians – and “prosecute” often meant execute. Paul was there, giving his approval to Stephen’s execution after the latter preached a comprehensive rendition of the gospel. He was heading to Damascus “so that if he found any belonging to the Way, men or women, he might bring them bound to Jerusalem” (Acts 9:2). It was on this famous journey that Paul saw the risen Jesus. What did Paul do? The very opposite of what the established authority commissioned him to do. In other words, Paul “resists the authorities” (Romans 13:2).

Paul was not alone in this defiant act, either. Before he met Jesus, Peter and John performed a miraculous act that caught the attention of the authorities:

Acts 4:5-6, 17 ESV
[5] On the next day their rulers and elders and scribes gathered together in Jerusalem, [6] with Annas the high priest and Caiaphas and John and Alexander, and all who were of the high-priestly family.
[17] But in order that it may spread no further among the people, let us warn them to speak no more to anyone in this name.”

In the end, the authorities explicitly told the Apostles never to speak or teach in Jesus’ name to anyone else (Acts 4:18). In response, the students of Jesus said:

Acts 4:19-20 ESV
[19] But Peter and John answered them, “Whether it is right in the sight of God to listen to you rather than to God, you must judge, [20] for we cannot but speak of what we have seen and heard.”

These students of Jesus told the established authorities that they would not stop teaching and preaching in Jesus’ name, thereby resisting authorities.

A latent idea in these examples seems to be that Jesus’s disciples believed human authorities had no right to invalidate a divine injunction. Of course, people can be wrong about what they take to be a divine instruction. Nevertheless, the disciples did not deny Jesus’ teachings, even in the face of death.

This brings us back to Romans 13. The consensus today is that Paul wrote this letter at the time of Emperor Nero, a ruthless king who would soon launch an intense persecution of the Christians. This was a time when Christians were a minority in the empire. They were generally despised and viewed with suspicion. Christians were non-violently undermining the empire by not worshipping as others did. They were thought of as atheists – if you did not believe in the multiplicity of gods on offer in the first century, you were an atheist; ask Socrates. They were also believed to be practicing incest, perhaps because they called one another brothers and sisters and met in private spaces. Oh, the republic also thought the Christians were cannibals because they gathered for the Eucharist. Indeed, the empire thought that Christians hated the human race! The irony, of course, was that Christians also rejected infant exposure, a significant source of prostitutes in the empire, among other things.

This is the context wherein Paul writes Romans 13. Might this be Paul’s honest attempt at neutralizing public suspicion of Christians – by ensuring that the Roman Christians were law-abiding denizens? Was this a Pauline version of “Give to Caesar what is Caesar’s”? We may never know without more directly relevant data. In any case, Paul assures his audience that the empire ultimately derives its authority from God. He then adds an interesting twist:

Romans 13:3 ESV
For rulers are not a terror to good conduct, but to bad. Would you have no fear of the one who is in authority? Then do what is good, and you will receive his approval,

Surely, Paul is presenting an idealistic argument. He says the Roman Christians need not fear those in authority, so long as they do good by being law-abiding. Law enforcement officials, Paul says, are only after denizens who do bad.

This is, of course, problematic. “Good conduct,” according to whom? The standard “good conduct” in first-century Rome was to worship as many gods as possible, including the emperors. As we have also seen, “good conduct” meant doing as the Jewish authorities said, especially when they prohibited the preaching of the gospel. In any case, Nero used the Great Fire of 64 CE as an excuse to deflect suspicion from himself and to blame the Christians for it. That was the beginning of the persecution. So, it is simply not true that “rulers are not a terror to good conduct,” and Paul certainly would have known that. Some rulers may despise denizens precisely for their morally good conduct. Of course, for the Christian, there is no alternative to good conduct, even if he suffers for it.

How does this passage apply today? It is important to stress that Christians were a minority in a pagan monarchy. Even the leaders of the church had reasons to “resist the authorities.” Many modern states are democratic, with explicit rules governing the conduct of leaders and the people. The leaders continuously earn legitimacy by being law-abiding themselves. Should they cease to be law-abiding, this may be grounds for removing them from office. In fact, a central tenet of a democracy, as opposed to a monarchy, is that the power lies with the people. People can get rid of any leader they do not like.

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Christianity Dissected

Web of Beliefs

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This is one of the introductory ideas I included in the curriculum I designed for a local church. I firmly believe that we ought to pay more attention to it.

I am no arachnologist, but it’s my understanding that the center of a spider web is functionally the most essential part of the structure. It’s critical for directing the structure’s geometry and for sensing vibrations. Every part of the web is important, but not equally so. As you travel radially outwards from the center, functional importance reduces. This is instructive by analogy: If we could empty people’s cherished beliefs into buckets – and every human has them – we would see that people do not exactly believe the same things in the same way.

Let’s take Christian beliefs, for example. Consider the list of Christian doctrines/beliefs in the attached image. If we were to arrange the most important and central beliefs at the center of a web and move outwards as the centrality of the beliefs decreases, different people would arrange them differently. (You can share how you would sort them in the comments and compare with others.)

I wager that almost everyone would agree on how to sort some of the items. For instance, every Christian would place belief in God’s existence at the center. There is at least one other entry on the list that I would place at the center: the resurrection of Jesus. Some of the other entries may not be at the center, but won’t be far removed in my sorting. But there also are some items that will be near the periphery.

In my assessment, too many Christians are raised to put everything at the center. For them, every belief is central and core to the faith. This includes such strange and colonial ideas as the King James Version being the only (or the most) inspired translation, an idea no Christian in the first century would have thought of. This way of doing things makes the faith much more challenging to believe and work out. It also seems like an excellent way to make people abandon the faith.

There are two relevant instructive examples from Paul’s ministry. The Roman church once debated the appropriateness of eating meat. Perhaps this resulted from the ubiquitous fact that meat sold at the market was typically sacrificed to other gods/idols. Whatever the case, Paul settled the debate by recognizing that this was a disputable matter and that there was more than one valid way to go. So, he allowed each one to do according to his conscience, even though he personally believed it was okay to eat meat (Romans 14:1-7). What was most important was to do everything in love – and in this context, love looked like forsaking that juicy steak if doing so would burden another’s mind and conscience.

But when the Corinthians began to malfunction and deny the resurrection, there was no time for compromise. Paul told the Corinthians they could not even be Christians if the resurrection was false. The death of Jesus, per se, does not atone. It is the death of Jesus AND the resurrection (AND the Ascension, according to the book of Hebrews) that afford human salvation.

What we see at play is the importance of sorting beliefs correctly. What one believes about being a vegetarian/carnivore is important, but not as important as whether there was (and will be) a resurrection. One belief goes to the center while the other is radially displaced to the periphery. Similarly, what you believe about anointing for breakthrough and material blessing, tithing, the utility of faith for economic upward mobility, divine direction, sexual purity, miracles and healing, and many more is important. But they are not equally important. Indeed, some of the beliefs may even have resulted from false theological premises. Life often presents opportunities to re-evaluate how we have organized our beliefs.

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On Romans 10:17: Faith Comes By Hearing?

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Romans 10:17 NKJV
So then faith comes by hearing, and hearing by the word of God.

This is a popular text in Charismatic circles, especially the Word of Faith variants. In these settings, this text is generally understood as a divinely revealed secret of receiving and/or maintaining faith. If anyone lacked faith, an antidote would be to listen to the “word of God” continuously. There are two practical ways the “word of God” has been construed. In the days before audio Bibles became prevalent, the word of God was generally understood as a preacher’s sermon or his recorded reading of Bible passages. Nowadays, however, people are just encouraged to listen to audio Bibles and sermons. I do not want to invalidate this Charismatic practice, even though I have seen it abused. After all, motivational speakers have convinced us all that there is value in attending to positive speaking. However, I am convinced that this text is not about what some Charismatics have turned it into – a pretext for telling the people to return to hear a preacher’s sermon continually.

We should begin by pointing out some known problems with this text. First, some manuscripts say “the word of Christ” instead of “the word of God.” This, however, is arguably a trivial matter, since many New Testament texts slot Jesus into God’s place. It may serve as further evidence of how early Christians saw Jesus as God. Second, Romans 9-11 are probably the most hotly contested parts of the letter, with various interpretations on offer. In this piece, I shall argue that it is best to see Romans 10:17 as a conclusion of the idea begun in Romans 10:14 and that Romans 10:14-17 is itself a unit within the argument Paul crafts in 10:14-11:6.

We should inquire what Paul meant by “faith comes by hearing.” What sort of faith did he have in mind, and did he mean to say that faith unfailingly accompanies hearing the gospel message? It is unlikely that he meant to say faith always follows after hearing the gospel for two reasons. First, Paul was present when Stephen gave the longest and most comprehensive gospel sermon. Paul heard the message about Jesus, yet did not obtain faith. On the contrary, he walked away angry and approved of the death of the preacher. In fact, it was a post-resurrection appearance of Jesus on the road to Damascus that led Paul to come to faith. Charismatics are generally reluctant to allow experience to play a corrective role in a believer’s theology, and this is not utterly unreasonable. However, it must be said that a robust and comprehensive sermon did not save Saul of Tarsus; an experience of the divine did. When he finally did, as a trained Pharisee with deep knowledge of Scripture, he did not delay in boldly proclaiming that Jesus is the Lord. This is why Paul says he did not receive the gospel from any human, as we explored elsewhere. Second, Paul also discusses the thorny issue of many Israelites in his day not believing the gospel (10:16). This strongly suggests that the “faith” Paul had in mind is saving faith; the faith that turns unbelievers to believers. Paul says his fellow Israelites heard the message:

Romans 10:18 NKJV
But I say, have they not heard? Yes indeed: “Their sound has gone out to all the earth, And their words to the ends of the world.”

In the very next verse to 10:17, Paul says that the descendants of Israel of his time did hear the gospel message, which had gone out to all the world by then. Yet, many of them did “not obey the gospel” (10:16). Hence, whatever Paul meant in 10:17 cannot be that faith always follows when someone hears the gospel message, even if it is robust and Spirit-breathed.

So, what is Romans 10:17 about then? As I mentioned earlier, Romans 10 is tightly connected to the issues Paul started addressing in chapter 9. In 9:30, Paul turns to the problem of Israel’s unbelief. This is a particularly knotty problem for the Apostle to the Gentiles. He has had much success witnessing to non-Jews while the majority of his people vehemently stood against his message. This was a heartache, resulting in Paul’s “heart’s desire and prayer to God for” his kinsmen to be saved (Romans 10:1). But why have they not believed? Well, it was not that they did not know about the Christian proclamation that “Christ is the end of the law for righteousness to everyone who believes” (Romans 10:4 ESV). On the contrary, they have elected not to “submit to God’s righteousness” (Romans 10:3), as Paul and the other apostles are preaching. They seemed to believe that Jesus and the Apostles were fundamentally wrong, a belief Paul felt the need to address.

Paul argues that Moses, on whom his Jewish kinsmen stood, foresaw the message about Jesus. The same Moses who validated the righteousness of the Torah (10:5) also writes about the righteousness that comes by faith in Jesus. Beginning in verse 6, Paul dips into Deuteronomy 30, one of a few farewell chapters in which Moses told the Israelites of his day what would happen after Moses was dead:

Romans 10:8-10 ESV
[8] But what does it say? “The word is near you, in your mouth and in your heart” (that is, the word of faith that we proclaim); [9] because, if you confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved. [10] For with the heart one believes and is justified, and with the mouth one confesses and is saved.

The quotation in verse 8 is from Deuteronomy 30:14. Paul applies these words from Moses to Jesus. That is, Paul believed that Jesus fulfilled the words of Moses. Furthermore, Paul added that everyone, Jews or non-Jews, who believed on Jesus would be saved, “For there is no distinction between Jew and Greek; for the same Lord is Lord of all, bestowing his riches on all who call on him” (Romans 10:12). He does not here go into details about the universality of salvation, but he tells the Galatians that the Gospel of Jesus was first preached to Abraham that all the nations of the world – that is, nations who are not genealogical descendants of Abraham – would be saved through Abraham (Galatians 3:8). Furthermore, Paul tells the Roman church that Israel’s unbelief is temporary and that Gentile believers have a role to play in Israel’s destiny:

Romans 11:11 ESV
So I ask, did they stumble in order that they might fall? By no means! Rather, through their trespass salvation has come to the Gentiles, so as to make Israel jealous.

He says the fact that Gentiles are coming to Christ is itself supposed to be a means by which the Jews will come to Christ. Where is Paul getting such an idea? He gets it from the foremost Apostle of Judaism. In another part of Moses’ farewell address to Israel, Moses says concerning the future:

Deuteronomy 32:21 ESV
They have made me jealous with what is no god; they have provoked me to anger with their idols. So I will make them jealous with those who are no people; I will provoke them to anger with a foolish nation.

Moses says that because the Israelites of his days provoked God to jealousy by running after illegitimate gods, God would also provoke his people to jealousy by a foreign people. Hence, according to Paul, all of these elements of the gospel message he preached are spelled out in the Hebrew Bible. Jesus was the fulfillment of it all, and Paul was not making things up.

So, why were the Israelites of Paul’s time not saved again? They refused to confess with their mouths that Jesus is Lord and believe in their hearts that God raised him from the dead. This suggests that they denied the resurrection. They probably believed the theory that Jesus’s disciples stole his dead body and lied about his resurrection (cf. Matthew 28:11 – 14). If they genuinely believed that Jesus was not raised, it would be understandable that they also rejected him as the Messiah – ironically, Paul once was himself in that state of unbelief concerning the resurrection. But all they needed to do was ask the eyewitnesses alive at the time. They needed to be told the truth about what happened, rather than merely going by what their Rabbis, who, according to the Gospel accounts, knew better and had chosen to lie, said. This sort of thinking may be why Paul further writes:

Romans 10:13-17 ESV
[13] For “everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved.” [14] How then will they call on him in whom they have not believed? And how are they to believe in him of whom they have never heard? And how are they to hear without someone preaching? [15] And how are they to preach unless they are sent? As it is written, “How beautiful are the feet of those who preach the good news!” [16] But they have not all obeyed the gospel. For Isaiah says, “Lord, who has believed what he has heard from us?” [17] So faith comes from hearing, and hearing through the word of Christ.

This pericope seems to serve at least two functions in Paul’s thought. While it continues the subject of Israel’s unbelief begun in chapter 9, it also seems to convey a standalone idea. As we already said, the Israelites heard the gospel and yet did not believe. Paul’s use of Isaiah 53:1 ought to make this point clear: who has believed what he heard from Paul? The answer: “Not all obeyed the gospel.” Again, Paul’s fellow Jews heard the word of God (or Christ), but saving faith did not result from it. Paul maintains that this state of unbelief on the part of his kinsmen is temporary (11:11-12). The Jews could do something about it, namely believe in the gospel message.

The standalone idea communicated in this passage seems to be the necessity of missional work. While it is true that faith does not necessarily accompany preaching, God has so designed it that preaching usually precedes saving faith. God sends out his equipped saints to go preach because that is the best chance the world has of hearing about Jesus and believing in him. This idea is borne out by the Great Commission as reported by Matthew and Luke:

Matthew 28:18-20 ESV
[18] And Jesus came and said to them, “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. [19] Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them inthe name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, [20] teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you. And behold, I am with you always, to the end of the age.”

These are the final words in the Gospel of Matthew. This is Matthew’s way of saying that everything he had written prior leads to this conclusion: making disciples of the nation by preaching.

Similarly, Luke, the man whose writings constitute the most by volume in the New Testament, writes:

Acts 1:7-8 ESV
[7] He said to them, “It is not for you to know times or seasons that the Father has fixed by his own authority. [8] But you will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you, and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the end of the earth.”

Luke says Jesus here told his followers that they would soon be supernaturally empowered to witness about Jesus. Considering how witnessing plays out in the rest of Acts, we know for sure that preaching is a key element of what it meant. Actually, Acts 1:8 serves as the organizing thesis for the book of Acts. The church began in Jerusalem; when persecution broke out, the disciples were scattered everywhere in Judea, but some left Judea for Samaria. Philip was one of those who headed for Samaria. He preached Jesus, and won many Samaritans for Jesus. It was in the middle of doing this that the Spirit told him to go after the traveling Eunuch (Acts 8). This is noteworthy for a racially conscious world we now live in: a Black man from an ancient African kingdom was the first to believe in Jesus after the Jews and their siblings, the Samaritans. By Acts 13, Black people were teachers and/or prophets in the church of Jesus. It was in Acts 10 that a Roman and his household first believed in Jesus. So, we see that the witnessing on behalf of Jesus followed the path outlined in Acts 1:8: Jerusalem to Judea, then Samaria, and then to the non-Jews. The only thing missing is witnessing “to the end of the earth.” This, of course, was precisely what Paul was conscious of as he sought to take the gospel to the end of the then-known world, Spain (Romans 15:24), and Luke was with him to document it. So, again, Romans 10:14-17 may be Paul’s way of saying what Matthew and Luke said in their own contexts: preaching the gospel is a major component of God’s program of saving the world.

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Christianity Decolonized, Christianity Dissected

The Gospel without Torah is a Half-Truth: An Example from Matthew 12

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I recently learnt that the church did not pay attention to the Gospel of Mark for centuries because it assumed that Mark was merely an abbreviated version of Matthew. This caused my mind to entertain several thoughts. Could it be, for instance, that after over 2000 years, we still may be deficient in our understanding of the faith? Consider the following passage:

Matthew 12:1-8 ESV
[1] At that time Jesus went through the grainfields on the Sabbath. His disciples were hungry, and they began to pluck heads of grain and to eat. [2] But when the Pharisees saw it, they said to him, “Look, your disciples are doing what is not lawful to do on the Sabbath.” [3] He said to them, “Have you not read what David did when he was hungry, and those who were with him: [4] how he entered the house of God and ate the bread of the Presence, which it was not lawful for him to eat nor for those who were with him, but only for the priests? [5] Or have you not read in the Law how on the Sabbath the priests in the temple profane the Sabbath and are guiltless? [6] I tell you, something greater than the temple is here. [7] And if you had known what this means, ‘I desire mercy, and not sacrifice,’ you would not have condemned the guiltless. [8] For the Son of Man is lord of the Sabbath.”

This is one of those passages that remind us that we will make a mess of the Gospel of Jesus if we do not take care to seriously study the Hebrew Bible. If your church experience is similar to mine, you have probably heard preachers explain this passage in the following way: Jesus was not for slavish observance of the laws (i.e., the Torah). He prioritizes people and their needs over laws and regulations. Indeed, Jesus appeared to fulfill (or, more accurately, to do away with) the laws, so we can now live by grace.

But such a reading is simply off-target. It does not do justice to the different moving parts of the passage above. For instance, the point Jesus makes about priests working in the temple on the Sabbath does not contribute to the argument of prioritizing people over laws. Indeed, it undermines it since priests, unlike everyone else, do not get a day off from their job. Moreover, the Matthean Jesus also says:

Matthew 5:18 ESV
For truly, I say to you, until heaven and earth pass away, not an iota, not a dot, will pass from the Law until all is accomplished.

So, no, Jesus is not antinomial. He is not defying the law. Indeed, if he was trying to pit himself against the law, he went about it in the most perfect wrong way because he appealed to the law to make his point! So, what is going on here?

Here is a helpful and straightforward idea that everyone familiar with the workings of a legal system can appreciate. Often, laws can conflict with each other, and it may not be immediately apparent how to resolve the conflict. In a recent US case, for example, a judge had to adjudicate between an alleged offense by a former FBI director and the legal process by which the US Attorney came to office. The judge, in this case, ruled that whatever case the State had against the FBI director is moot because the US Attorney’s appointment is invalid. Similar issues arise in the Torah. The Torah stipulates that a baby Israelite boy be circumcised on the eighth day (Leviticus 12:3). The Torah also forbids Israelites from working on a Sabbath (Exodus 20:8-11). So, what happens if the eighth day falls on a Sabbath? Similarly, the Torah famously tells the Israelites to be fruitful and multiply. But the very acts of ejaculation and/or female discharge render a couple ritually unclean (Leviticus 15:16-18). Even worse, the very act of birthing a child renders a mother and possibly the baby unclean (Leviticus 12). Furthermore, as implied in the Matthean passage above, the Torah also stipulates that priests must continually serve in the temple, even on the Sabbath. In other words, priests were required to work on the Sabbath, thereby violating a Sabbath rule.

How do we make sense of these things? The same way the ancients did. First, it is crucial to stress that ritual impurity was not a sin. In fact, one often must become ritually impure as one carries out God’s will, as the reproduction example shows. Also, and this ought to be obvious, contracting ritual impurity from another source was not a sin either. In fact, except for one, who was a priest perpetually locked away in a temple, ritual impurity was the norm. It was basically guaranteed to happen regularly. Hence, the ancients quite reasonably discerned that all the laws are essential, but not equally so. The law concerning the priesthood is more important than the Sabbath rules. On the evidence of the Mishnah, it appears that the Rabbis judged that the eighth-day circumcision rules are more important than the Sabbath observance rules. So, if the eighth day fell on a Sabbath, the Rabbis would circumcise the child. Of course, if an infant was fighting for its life on the eighth day, the Rabbis also judged that it was better to wait for the child to be well first. Now, what is vital for our passage is that Matthew, the disciples, Jesus, and the Pharisees are all familiar with this aspect of the Torah. This knowledge is taken for granted by all parties in this story. So, how might we parse the passage from Matthew? Carefully.

First, what the disciples did, working on the Sabbath by plucking grains, was ordinarily unlawful, and Jesus admits this point. When Jesus references the occasion when David ate bread that was ordinarily appropriate for priests to eat, he is not denying the legal point the Pharisees raised. On the contrary, he grants their point but now makes a legal defense from the Torah: what the disciples did would be permissible if there was a greater, more important reason or mission warranting it. This was the same principle of law that made it permissible for David and his men to eat the holy bread.

That story is in 1 Samuel 21. David was on the run for his life from Saul, the king. He was hungry. When he arrived at Ahimelech, the priest, he asked if there was anything to eat. The following conversation ensued:

1 Samuel 21:1-5, 6 ESV
[1]  Then David came to Nob, to Ahimelech the priest. And Ahimelech came to meet David, trembling, and said to him, “Why are you alone, and no one with you?” [2] And David said to Ahimelech the priest, “The king has charged me with a matter and said to me, ‘Let no one know anything of the matter about which I send you, and with which I have charged you.’ I have made an appointment with the young men for such and such a place. [3] Now then, what do you have on hand? Give me five loaves of bread, or whatever is here.” [4] And the priest answered David, “I have no common bread on hand, but there is holy bread—if the young men have kept themselves from women.” [6] So the priest gave him the holy bread, for there was no bread there but the bread of the Presence, which is removed from before the Lord, to be replaced by hot bread on the day it is taken away.

Ahimelech did not know that David was on the run for his life. So, David lied to the priest to account for the unusual way he had appeared to the priest unaccompanied. The relevant legal point for us is that once David said the king had sent him on an urgent mission, that communicated to the priest that it was okay to suspend the usual laws that would apply to eating the holy bread. But it was still important that the men be ritually pure from women, or it would not have been permissible for them to eat the bread. (No, this purity point is not a moral judgement. Several other things could have rendered David and the men ceremonially impure, but the priest seemed to have gunned for the most obvious candidate. This is not a dig at women, but this issue will have to wait for another time.)

Thus, we observe a legal principle at work in the David story. Ordinarily, only the ceremonially clean priests could eat the holy bread. However, under certain circumstances, including when the king commissions someone on an urgent matter, a non-priest person may eat the holy bread, provided they are ceremonially clean. This was the exact point of Jesus’ argument to the Pharisees. Ordinarily, the disciples would be guilty of breaking the law for plucking and eating grains. But the King of kings had commissioned Jesus and the disciples on a critical mission, and this fact makes it permissible for the disciples to profane the Sabbath and yet be guiltless.

Jesus does not condemn the Pharisees here for being after the Torah as though that was a terrible thing to do. No, he acknowledges the Pharisees’ point but then challenges them to be thorough in their application of the Torah. The temple (where God resided) was the thing that made the bread holy and inappropriate for a ritually impure person to eat. Jesus says something greater than that temple is here, implying that the ministry God had tasked him with is greater and legally trumps Sabbath rules. In case the Pharisees misunderstood that point, Jesus further adds that he is the Lord of the Sabbath. The effect of these pronouncements is that Jesus’s exposition of the Torah is trustworthy; they also invite the Pharisees to closely investigate Jesus’s claims and identity. The Pharisees did not know it then, but one of the most promising guys in their ranks would later write, decades before Matthew wrote his gospel account:

Colossians 1:15-17 ESV
[15]  He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation. [16] For by him all things were created, in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or authorities—all things were created through him and for him. [17] And he is before all things, and in him all things hold together.

So, at least one Pharisee understood the point Jesus made in Matthew 12. His ministry is greater than the temple’s, and he is also the Lord of the Sabbath precisely because he created all things. Jesus does not condemn the Torah in this passage.

Additional Resources

Sloan, Paul T. Jesus and the Law of Moses: The Gospels and the Restoration of Israel within First-Century Judaism. Baker Academic, 2025.

Williams, Logan, and Paul Sloan. “Did Jesus Ignore the Sabbath? The Controversy over Plucking Grains.” Jesus and Jewish Law, Castbox, 9 July 2025, https://castbox.fm/vb/826255186. 

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An Exegetical Proposal for Understanding Ephesians 2:20 and 3:5

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Ephesians 2:19-20 ESV
[19] So then you are no longer strangers and aliens, but you are fellow citizens with the saints and members of the household of God, [20] built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets, Christ Jesus himself being the cornerstone,

Earlier, I wrote on some matters arising from the way we have often described the fivefold ministry gifts. A central argument of that piece is that the Bible’s uses of these terms – apostle, prophet, evangelist, pastor, and teacher – are not as rigid as many modern church sermons suggest. On the contrary, these gifts seemed to be mutable roles God empowered believers to perform. In this piece, my focus is slightly different, although it remains on the ministry gifts.

As I have written in a few blog entries, Paul, our chief source on the ministry gifts, connects Jesus’ giving of the gifts to the conquest of Bashan and Hades, long-term foes of Yahweh, through his death, resurrection, and ascension. It was in that context that Paul says ministry gifts were given:

Ephesians 4:11-14 NRSV
[11] The gifts he gave were that some would be apostles, some prophets, some evangelists, some pastors and teachers, [12] to equip the saints for the work of ministry, for building up the body of Christ, [13] until all of us come to the unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the Son of God, to maturity, to the measure of the full stature of Christ. [14] We must no longer be children, tossed to and fro and blown about by every wind of doctrine, by people’s trickery, by their craftiness in deceitful scheming.

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On the Gender of God: Is God Male?

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Presumably, some people, including irreligious ones, would answer the question in the negative: God is not male. In that case, that form of the question may not be the most helpful. What if we modify the question slightly and ask instead: Are men more like God than women are? I suspect that this formulation might yield more fruitful results. The matter before us subtly influences other beliefs; some are harmful and dangerous.

I first became aware of this matter in an undergraduate Hebrew Bible Writings class. The ethnically Jewish, non-religious professor made a comment that set off the rabbit hole: “The name ‘Yahweh’ in Hebrew is as grammatically masculine as “Richard” is in America.” I had not listened closely enough to realize that grammatical and biological genders are separate. My mind immediately went down a long rabbit hole. It seemed to me that whatever it meant to say God was masculine could not exactly mean how we ordinarily use the term for humans. The reason seemed simple: God is a spirit. To be a spirit is to be unembodied. I had to admit, on the other hand, that God is consistently called a Father and Jesus was a male human for 33 years. I managed to get out of the hole by pushing the issue aside so I could focus on the lecture. Now is the time to carefully unpack this crucial matter.

Language Matters: What Does it Mean to be Male?

Many of us today use the terms “male/man” and “female/woman” synonymously – and this is more or less the practice I’ll uphold in this entry. However, it is beneficial to be aware of and learn from advancements in Psychology and Gender Studies. In the ancient world and many parts of our world today, biology is assumed to determine one’s gender. In the Greco-Roman world, for instance, women were thought to be irrational, unsuitable for ruling, needing male guidance, and emotional. Amy Peeler notes that because women were generally smaller in body, they were also thought to be smaller in mind and spirit (90). In other words, to be female meant manifesting the attributes above. The problem begins when we observe that not all women fit into that box, and some men check some of the boxes. This observation motivated some scholars to separate biology from sociology and sex from gender. Biology determines sex, but social factors determine gender. This move raises an obvious question: what does being male (or female) mean?

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Christianity Dissected, Featured Works, Islam Matters

Surprising Quran-Bible Agreement: God as Father

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Much of the Quran is devoted to a single idea: Islamic monotheism. While Christianity and Judaism also affirm the doctrine of monotheism, Islam is different. The Quran spells out this idea in clear terms in Surah 6. There are no deities besides Allah alone that govern the entire cosmic order. Hence, Allah sovereignly determines who he guides on the right path and who he leads into error (6:39, 125). Also, if Allah afflicts a person, no one else can remedy it (6:17). For every prophet Allah appointed, he also appointed human and spirit enemies for the prophet (6:112). These ideas convey that Allah alone governs the universe as He sees fit. Indeed, verse 102 explicitly puts it like this:


Surah Al-Anaam, Verse 102:
ذَٰلِكُمُ اللَّهُ رَبُّكُمْ لَا إِلَٰهَ إِلَّا هُوَ خَالِقُ كُلِّ شَيْءٍ فَاعْبُدُوهُ وَهُوَ عَلَىٰ كُلِّ شَيْءٍ وَكِيلٌ

That is Allah, your Lord, there is no god but He; the Creator of all things, therefore serve Him, and He has charge of all things.

So, Allah is the creator of all things, and that implies that everything else is an ontologically inferior creature.

Because much of the Quran’s content interacts with historical Christianity, Islamic monotheism is likely a reaction against what Muhammad understood Christianity to be. Hence, Quran 6 continues:

Surah Al-Anaam, Verse 101:
بَدِيعُ السَّمَاوَاتِ وَالْأَرْضِ أَنَّىٰ يَكُونُ لَهُ وَلَدٌ وَلَمْ تَكُن لَّهُ صَاحِبَةٌ وَخَلَقَ كُلَّ شَيْءٍ وَهُوَ بِكُلِّ شَيْءٍ عَلِيمٌ
Wonderful Originator of the heavens and the earth! How could He have a son when He has no consort, and He (Himself) created everything, and He is the Knower of all things.

Here, then, is our first avenue for exploring Islamic monotheism. This verse assumes that for Allah to have a son, he must have a consort, a wife. In other words, the Quran’s understanding of the Christian sonship language is sexual – and that is understandably repulsive. But, of course, this is not what Christians mean when they say Jesus is God’s Son. The Quran also shows awareness of why God having a son is problematic for the Islamic doctrine of monotheism. First, Quran 4 says:

Surah An-Nisa, Verse 171:
يَا أَهْلَ الْكِتَابِ لَا تَغْلُوا فِي دِينِكُمْ وَلَا تَقُولُوا عَلَى اللَّهِ إِلَّا الْحَقَّ إِنَّمَا الْمَسِيحُ عِيسَى ابْنُ مَرْيَمَ رَسُولُ اللَّهِ وَكَلِمَتُهُ أَلْقَاهَا إِلَىٰ مَرْيَمَ وَرُوحٌ مِّنْهُ فَآمِنُوا بِاللَّهِ وَرُسُلِهِ وَلَا تَقُولُوا ثَلَاثَةٌ انتَهُوا خَيْرًا لَّكُمْ إِنَّمَا اللَّهُ إِلَٰهٌ وَاحِدٌ سُبْحَانَهُ أَن يَكُونَ لَهُ وَلَدٌ لَّهُ مَا فِي السَّمَاوَاتِ وَمَا فِي الْأَرْضِ وَكَفَىٰ بِاللَّهِ وَكِيلًا

O People of the Scripture, do not commit excess in your religion or say about Allah except the truth. The Messiah, Jesus, the son of Mary, was but a messenger of Allah and His word which He directed to Mary and a soul [created at a command] from Him. So believe in Allah and His messengers. And do not say, “Three”; desist – it is better for you. Indeed, Allah is but one God. Exalted is He above having a son. To Him belongs whatever is in the heavens and whatever is on the earth. And sufficient is Allah as Disposer of affairs.

The people referred to here are Christians. This verse implies that Christians known to Muhammad thought of Jesus as God. However, the verse counters this by saying that Jesus was merely a human born of a human mother. Besides, it is unthinkable for Allah to have a son, apparently because Allah does not have a wife. Quran 72 repeats the same idea:

Surah Al-Jinn, Verse 3:
وَأَنَّهُ تَعَالَىٰ جَدُّ رَبِّنَا مَا اتَّخَذَ صَاحِبَةً وَلَا وَلَدًا
And [it teaches] that exalted is the nobleness of our Lord; He has not taken a wife or a son

The idea in Quran 4:171 above that Allah owns everything communicates that Allah has no need, much like Quran 10:68 asserts, and having a son would be a need. However, since Allah wants worshippers (often understood as Allah’s slaves) devoted to him alone, and nobody thinks this qualifies as a divine need, Allah having a son is no worse than having devoted slaves.

Second, Quran 23 provides another idea why a son would undermine Islamic monotheism:

Surah Al-Mumenoon, Verse 91:
مَا اتَّخَذَ اللَّهُ مِن وَلَدٍ وَمَا كَانَ مَعَهُ مِنْ إِلَٰهٍ إِذًا لَّذَهَبَ كُلُّ إِلَٰهٍ بِمَا خَلَقَ وَلَعَلَا بَعْضُهُمْ عَلَىٰ بَعْضٍ سُبْحَانَ اللَّهِ عَمَّا يَصِفُونَ
Allah has not taken any son, nor has there ever been with Him any deity. [If there had been], then each deity would have taken what it created, and some of them would have sought to overcome others. Exalted is Allah above what they describe [concerning Him].

This verse demonstrates an understanding of the fundamental concept that if Allah were to have a son, that son would be a deity. It further adds, perhaps influenced by surrounding ideas in Muhammad’s time, that a plurality of deities would result in infighting. The idea, it seems, is that Muhammad’s audience would somehow be able to tell that no such divine fights were happening, and therefore, Islamic monotheism was true. There’s no God but Allah.

In this entry, I shall argue that the Quran indeed agrees with the Bible that God is the father of Jesus, despite the numerous verses that deny the sonship of Jesus. I shall first explain precisely what the Bible means by saying God is a Father – a point often not sufficiently explained by Christian apologists. Then, I will demonstrate that the Quran affirms the biblical claim that God became a Father. I understand that Muslims may continue to hold on to the explicit texts that deny the sonship of Jesus. Still, such a Muslim must do so uneasily, wrestling with whether the Quran accurately critiques the Bible on this matter. The view that the Quran critiques was never an orthodox doctrine in the entire history of Christianity.

The Biblical Jesus and the Father

It first dawned on me about 10 years ago that something was weird about the labels of the Triune God. I recall speaking at a church and wondering aloud why Christians give the Holy Spirit a non-familial name, alongside the Father and the Son. “Holy Spirit” is an unusual label – “Mother” or some other familial term would be more fitting if we consider human reality. Even earlier still, while in college, I realized that whatever Christians mean by calling God the “Father” cannot be equivalent to a human father. This point should be rather obvious and non-controversial. God is a spirit (John 4:24) and, therefore, carries no phallus. To be a spirit is to be unembodied. Spirits are not gendered because they cannot be.

There are other ways God is not like a human father, too. Amy Peeler writes that God is a Father, but he is not male (2). Contrary to centuries of Christian traditions that have assumed the maleness of God, God is quite unlike a male human. God does not create as humans, male or female, procreate. God can create ex nihilo without needing preexisting material to do His creative works. Humans always need a partner to procreate. Procreation in humans is a bodily exercise, an observation that does not apply to spirits.

Besides, there is an old but inaccurate analogical idea that God is male because the male human provides the seed or energizing force leading to a pregnancy. Both ancient and modern science refute this idea. The ancients knew that both male and female humans contributed materials for procreation. Ironically, modern biology has shown that women contribute more essential materials to the proper development of children. So, that construal of maleness does not work.

Indeed, the Hebrew Bible often employs a masculine language for God. Below are a few examples:

Deuteronomy 32:6 NIV
Is this the way you repay the Lord, you foolish and unwise people? Is he not your Father, your Creator, who made you and formed you?

Isaiah 63:16 NIV
[16] But you are our Father, though Abraham does not know us or Israel acknowledge us; you, Lord, are our Father, our Redeemer from of old is your name.

Psalms 68:5 NIV
[5] A father to the fatherless, a defender of widows, is God in his holy dwelling.

Psalms 89:26 NIV
[26] He will call out to me, ‘You are my Father, my God, the Rock my Savior.’

Malachi 1:6 NIV
[6] “A son honors his father, and a slave his master. If I am a father, where is the honor due me? If I am a master, where is the respect due me?” says the Lord Almighty. “It is you priests who show contempt for my name. “But you ask, ‘How have we shown contempt for your name?’

These uses of the Father language are generally focused on Israel’s national identity, creation, and God’s guidance of the people. As we shall soon see, this is remarkably not how the New Testament uses the language.

A notable detail is that the Hebrew Bible also employs female language quite graphically for God. Here are a few examples:

Deuteronomy 32:18 ESV
[18] You were unmindful of the Rock that bore you, and you forgot the God who gave you birth.

Hosea 11:3-4 ESV
[3] Yet it was I who taught Ephraim to walk; I took them up by their arms, but they did not know that I healed them. [4] I led them with cords of kindness, with the bands of love, and I became to them as one who eases the yoke on their jaws, and I bent down to them and fed them.

Isaiah 42:14 ESV
[14] For a long time I have held my peace; I have kept still and restrained myself; now I will cry out like a woman in labor; I will gasp and pant.

Isaiah 49:15 ESV
[15] “Can a woman forget her nursing child, that she should have no compassion on the son of her womb? Even these may forget, yet I will not forget you.

Isaiah 66:13 ESV
[13] As one whom his mother comforts, so I will comfort you; you shall be comforted in Jerusalem.

The Hebrew Bible is not shy about using exclusive motherly language to describe Yahweh. It appears that the Hebrew Bible’s use of gendered language for God is balanced. In other words, one cannot construct a doctrine of God’s exclusive maleness from the Hebrew Bible.

How God Became a Father

So, why do Christians call God a father, then? It may be shocking, but it is true: God became a father because of Mary. Unlike the Old Testament’s use of the Father language, the New Testament consistently emphasizes that God is the Father of Jesus Christ. He is not merely the father of Israel (which is still true) or the father of creation. God in the New Testament is the father of Jesus Christ of Nazareth (e.g Matthew 3:17, 17:5, John 20:17).

This point is worth stressing. Christians refer to God as Father because this was Jesus’s preferred label for God in the Gospels. This fact is why we call God “Abba, Father” – a phrase that doubly names God as Father. Jesus introduced believers to a God who was a Father, and his followers used that language thereafter to refer to God (1 Corinthians 8:6, Romans 1:3-4, 2 Corinthians 1:3, Hebrews 1:5, 1 John 4:9, Ephesians 1:3).

The question yet remains: How exactly did God become Jesus’s Father? Theologians have spilled much ink on the eternality of God as the Father and of the sonship of Jesus. That’s not my worry here. The simple historical answer is that God became a Father through the incarnation. The gospels clearly state that Joseph did not father Jesus. They are also consistently clear that Mary was Jesus’s mother. Well, does that make Jesus a fatherless child? No. The New Testament consistently claims that God played the role of a father in the conception of Jesus. That’s what the incarnation is about.

In the Annunciation, when Gabriel came to Mary with the news of motherhood, Matthew and Luke, the two authors who include the birth narrative in their stories, make an extra effort to tell a story of a non-sexualized pregnancy. This is remarkable because both authors almost certainly were aware of stories of gods impregnating women. The Greeks had plenty of such, and Luke was a Gentile. In the improbable event that they did not know about gods messing around with women, Matthew and Luke surely have read Genesis 6. Yet they told stories of a non-sexual pregnancy.

When Gabriel arrives with the good but terrifying news, Luke depicts Mary as interrogating the angel about his news. Mary was not passive. She considered the news and ultimately decided to invest. It is vitally important that there were no threats to Mary should she reject the message of Gabriel. Indeed, she raised similar questions as John the Baptist’s father, but she received no punishment, unlike Zechariah. Mary had to be under no threats or coercion, or we would have a case of divine rape – a theme not uncommon in Greek mythology. Luke writes:

Luke 1:35 ESV
[35] And the angel answered her, “The Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you; therefore the child to be born will be called holy—the Son of God.

The Holy Spirit, an unembodied entity, will come upon, not into, Mary. Surely, Luke deliberately told the story of the most sexual of human realities, pregnancy, in a non-sexual way. The Most High played the role of a father, though not as male humans do. For that reason, the child would be called the Son of God. In other words, God became a father, first to Jesus and then to all believers. I cannot stress the point enough: God is a Father, but he is not male. He became a father because Mary was the mother of the child. No child can be born without both a father and a mother. The texts say Mary was the mother and God was the father of Jesus.

Here is a noteworthy point worth mentioning. The first woman in the Bible to name God, long before God would self-identify as Yahweh to the descendants of Abraham, was an Egyptian slave woman named Hagar, the young girl Abraham and Sarah sexually maltreated, and who would be claimed as Muhammad’s ancestor:

Genesis 16:13 ESV
[13] So she called the name of the Lord who spoke to her, “You are a God of seeing,” for she said, “Truly here I have seen him who looks after me.”

So, there is a biblical precedent for women naming God. What’s interesting is that Luke introduces Mary as a slave girl, too:

Luke 1:38 ESV
[38] And Mary said, “Behold, I am the servant of the Lord; let it be to me according to your word.” And the angel departed from her.

The word rendered as “servant” here refers to a female slave. True, Mary was not an enslaved person in the same social sense as Hagar was, but she, quite like Hagar, would forever determine God’s name. God became a father because of Mary.  God has always accorded more worth to women than religious men have ever dared to replicate.

The Quran Agrees

As we have already seen, the Quran emphatically denies that God has a son. It gives various reasons. If Allah had a son, the son would be a deity like his father; in any case, Isa is merely a human, just as his mother was. Interestingly, the Quran affirms the virginal conception. Yes, it misrepresents the details, but the gist survives in a recognizable form. Describing how Mary became pregnant, the Quran says:

Surah Al-Anbiya, Verse 91:
وَالَّتِي أَحْصَنَتْ فَرْجَهَا فَنَفَخْنَا فِيهَا مِن رُّوحِنَا وَجَعَلْنَاهَا وَابْنَهَا آيَةً لِّلْعَالَمِينَ

And [mention] the one who guarded her chastity, so We blew into her [garment] through Our angel [Gabriel], and We made her and her son a sign for the worlds.

The Arabic word rendered as “garment” here is the word for “vagina.” So, the Quran says Allah, through his angel, was responsible for Mary’s pregnancy.

The same idea is affirmed in another Surah:

Surah At-Tahrim, Verse 12:
وَمَرْيَمَ ابْنَتَ عِمْرَانَ الَّتِي أَحْصَنَتْ فَرْجَهَا فَنَفَخْنَا فِيهِ مِن رُّوحِنَا وَصَدَّقَتْ بِكَلِمَاتِ رَبِّهَا وَكُتُبِهِ وَكَانَتْ مِنَ الْقَانِتِينَ

And [the example of] Mary, the daughter of ‘Imran, who guarded her chastity, so We blew into [her garment] through Our angel, and she believed in the words of her Lord and His scriptures and was of the devoutly obedient.

So, with relatively minor alterations, the Quran affirms what the Bible teaches concerning Jesus’s sonship. Mary did not become pregnant naturally. Allah sent his angel to fulfill His will in the conception and birth of Jesus in a unique way that has never been repeated. This means that Allah played the role of a father in the conception of Jesus, just as the Gospels say. We may quibble about words, but Allah is the father of Isa, according to the Quran.

Work Cited

Peeler, Amy. Women and the Gender of God. Eerdmans, 2022.

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Christianity Decolonized, Christianity Dissected, Featured Works

The Gospel and the “Sons of God” of Genesis 6

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The Easter Story Retold: How It All Started

According to the Christian calendar, the Holy Week commemorates the most important week ever in the cosmos’ billion years of existence. It is the week of Easter or, to be more inclusive, the week leading to Resurrection Sunday. The idea that one week can identifiably be more significant than all others may offend a thinking mind at first. After all, we have repeatedly heard the argument that our earth is only a speck in the big picture of things. It is an argument asserting that size matters. Ordinarily, I would agree with the argument, but there are exceptions. People do not usually conclude, for instance, that the butt is more important than the brain due to size. Similarly, a speck of uranium may be considered more important than the mountain of trash standing over it.

For generations, churchgoers have been taught to believe that a Messiah became necessary because of Adam and Eve’s sin, but that is an incomplete story that accounts for only one-third of the data. To be sure, the story arc resulting in the Messiah’s coming began with Adam and Eve, but there is more. Let us begin from the beginning.

So, how did we get here? As far as we can tell, an uncreated creative mind wanted to get to work. Evidently, it was not his first attempt at creating. He had already created a myriad of essentially immaterial beings “eons” prior to the “moment” he decided on another project. Undoubtedly, there were innumerably infinite ways the project could have taken shape. But just as he had to narrow down the options with his other creative projects, he must do the same here. God decided to make a class of beings constructed of molecules for unrevealed reasons – a terrifyingly complicated undertaking.

How do you build a being from molecules? Easy — you start with, well, molecules! The problem is that molecules did not exist yet. So, the ultimate project must wait as God began by creating the Carbon, Hydrogen, Oxygen, Phosphorus, Sulphur, and other isotopes needed to make the molecules from which his end product would be constructed. But how long would the construction project have to wait? It is not very long – only about 30 million years, which apparently equals about a few days in God’s reference scale. Once the material universe was in place with its arrays of stars coming into and out of existence and all the requisite atoms were available, God could initiate the building of functional molecules.

It soon became clear that God did not want wild humans. Hence, though he had caused vegetation to spring up everywhere on the blue globe, he yet proceeded to carve out a garden for the creature he was about to construct. The human was going to be cultured. After arrangements for human flourishing were in place, God finally built his project after waiting a few million years, a dating that excludes moments “before” the cosmos came to be. The human God created was neither male nor female. It was a genderless composite. In time, it became apparent that the human would not optimally flourish in its composite state. It must be split equally into two complementary forms. Hence, God formed the woman from a rib of the human he had made. It is interesting to note that the Hebrew term for “rib” is a construction term often used to describe a side of a temple. Here, then, is how we finally got the gendered male and female humans. She was in no way inferior to the man. Yes, she was a suitable “help” for the man, but “help” often describes how God is a “help” to humans. If “help” suggests any asymmetry, it is probably in the other direction.

I wish they lived happily ever after, but there would not be a worthwhile story if they did. Some of God’s earlier creations were not down with God’s new hairy creatures. It is not immediately clear if it is the hair or something else, but those older immaterial beings were ticked. Soon enough, they figured out how to mess up God’s project. They would corrupt the young creatures before they have exercised their spiritual muscles unto maturity. Obviously, this implies that the hairy creatures were not incorruptible. If they became corrupted, it was because they could be corrupted. They were not perfect, only good. Very good, actually. Sinister forces succeeded and corrupted the humans.

What was God to do? Another 30 million years is nothing to an eternal being, but starting afresh would communicate lasting victory to the sinister forces. He must find a way to undo the damage. However, we soon learn that God is not in a hurry. Just as he took his time to execute the creation project, he seemed just as relaxed in his redemption plans. It will take a few thousand years to sort things out. In the meantime, however, things became terrible very quickly.

Bashan and Genesis 6’s Sons of God

By the second generation, while there were only four named humans in the story, a man would remorselessly murder his own brother. But that was only the beginning of moral decay. The corruption would soon become supernaturally charged. In Genesis 6, we read the following:

Genesis 6:1-4 ESV
[1] When man began to multiply on the face of the land and daughters were born to them, [2] the sons of God saw that the daughters of man were attractive. And they took as their wives any they chose. [3] Then the Lord said, “My Spirit shall not abide in man forever, for he is flesh: his days shall be 120 years.” [4] The Nephilim were on the earth in those days, and also afterward, when the sons of God came in to the daughters of man and they bore children to them. These were the mighty men who were of old, the men of renown.

This is a hotly debated pericope; we shall not attempt to settle it here. It is fair to say that the standard view in our churches today is that the “sons of God” are humans – whether human kings, descendants of Seth, or something similar. I shall only point out to readers that this reading is a more recent (4th century AD) position. A much older Second-Temple Era tradition takes the “sons of God” as supernatural beings/angels, and the evidence for this reading, in my view, is much stronger. Besides, as we shall see, the angelic interpretation has immense explanatory power. The Genesis 6 passage builds on the earlier chapter. Genesis 5 is a genealogy featuring extraordinarily long life spans. Adam, for instance, lived for 930 years, and Methuselah famously lived for 969 years. Scholarly debates continue as to whether these are literary or literal ages. However, our pericope in Genesis 6 suggests that the human life span was cut shorter to 120 years. Exactitude does not seem to be the point because people lived longer than 120 years afterward but significantly less than the ages reported in Genesis 5.

If we suppose the “sons of God” are supernatural beings, then Genesis 6:4 would suggest that the Nephilim were the offspring of the sexual union of angels and women. These Nephilim are often identified as giants who descended from Anak (Numbers 13:33). They are, hence, also called Anakim (or Anakites) and lived in the land Israel was to inherit, Canaan (Joshua 11:21, 22). Though it remains an offensive and troubling issue in popular discourse, one of the literary reasons God would have the Israelites wipe off everyone in Canaan was because they were descendants of the Nephilim. The famous Goliath was also of the Nephilim. In other words, God was somehow using the Israelites to solve an ancient problem of angelic corruption in his project.

Some well-known non-canonical Second-Temple era Jewish literature unequivocally understood the “sons of God” as defiant angelic beings (1 Enoch 6 and Jubilees 5, for example). We may also have a New Testament witness to this tradition of reading Genesis 6. Consider the following:

2 Peter 2:4-6
[4] For if God did not spare angels when they sinned, but cast them into hell and committed them to chains of gloomy darkness to be kept until the judgment; [5] if he did not spare the ancient world, but preserved Noah, a herald of righteousness, with seven others, when he brought a flood upon the world of the ungodly; [6] if by turning the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah to ashes he condemned them to extinction, making them an example of what is going to happen to the ungodly;

This passage speaks of “angels when they sinned” (verse 4). When was that? It does not explicitly say but moves on to the time of Noah. The careful reader would immediately notice that the story of Noah and the flood is in the same chapter that discusses how the “sons of God” copulated with women. It is, therefore, very plausible that Peter here says God consigned those sinning “sons of God” to hell and that he “did not spare the ancient world” precisely because he wanted to wipe off the Nephilim from the earth, a project that continued even through the ancient Israelites, as earlier mentioned en passant. Besides, the 2 Peter passage also referenced Sodom and Gomorrah, ancient cities known, among other things, for their terrorizing and inappropriate sexual practices. Peter could have cited the sexual practices of these cities as a contrast with the order-defying sexual practice of the “sons of God” of Genesis 6. Indeed, the passage talks about “those who indulge in the lust of defiling passion and despise authority” (2 Peter 2:10 ESV). Of course, the acts of angels copulating with women are an exercise in “defiling passion,” which also despises the authority of God and his established order of reproduction according to kinds (Genesis 1:11).

In the non-canonical Second-Temple era work called 1 Enoch, the “sons of God” entry point onto the earth is believed to be Mount Hermon (1 Enoch 6:1-6), also called Mount Sirion and Senir (Deuteronomy 3:9). It was the tallest mountain in ancient Israel serving as the northern border of Bashan, east of the Sea of Galilee. In the days of Joshua, after the Israelites had conquered the land, Bashan was allotted to the half-tribe of Manasseh:

Joshua 13:30 ESV
Their region extended from Mahanaim, through all Bashan, the whole kingdom of Og king of Bashan, and all the towns of Jair, which are in Bashan, sixty cities,

This Og king of Bashan came at the Israelites while they were coming out of the wilderness to battle with them:

Deuteronomy 3:1-2 ESV
[1] “Then we turned and went up the way to Bashan. And Og the king of Bashan came out against us, he and all his people, to battle at Edrei. [2] But the Lord said to me, ‘Do not fear him, for I have given him and all his people and his land into your hand. And you shall do to him as you did to Sihon the king of the Amorites, who lived at Heshbon.’

The implication is that Og and his people are descendants of the Nephilim.

Furthermore, Psalm 68 also has a lot to say about Bashan. Consider the following selected verses:

Psalm 68:1, 15-16, 18, 20 ESV
[1]  God shall arise, his enemies shall be scattered; and those who hate him shall flee before him!
[15] O mountain of God, mountain of Bashan; O many-peaked mountain, mountain of Bashan! [16] Why do you look with hatred, O many-peaked mountain, at the mount that God desired for his abode, yes, where the Lord will dwell forever? [18]  You ascended on high, leading a host of captives in your train and receiving gifts among men, even among the rebellious, that the Lord God may dwell there.
[20] Our God is a God of salvation, and to God, the Lord, belong deliverances from death.

The Psalm unequivocally begins with an expectation that Yahweh will arise to battle with his enemies. These enemies are identified as relating to Bashan. Indeed, the Psalm says Bashan is envious of Zion, the mountain God desires as his forever residence. (Note that the ancients believed that gods lived in mountains, regions of the earth that were removed from ordinary human incursions.) Next, we get the familiar verse that Paul applies to Jesus in his letter to the Ephesians: “You ascended on high, leading a host of captives in your train and receiving gifts among men, even among the rebellious, that the Lord God may dwell there.” Finally and critically, the Psalm links this divine battle with Bashan to human salvation from death. As pointed out later, this is directly connected with “the gates of Hades” of Matthew 16.

Interestingly, by applying the Psalm to Jesus, Paul affirms that Jesus fulfills the expectations of this Psalm. The Psalm promises a deliverance from death, a central component of the Gospel that Paul preached. Two additional points are worth making here. First, this is yet another example of the subtle ways New Testament authors affirm that Jesus is Yahweh. Undoubtedly, the God that Psalm 68 expects to battle with Bashan is the Yahweh of Israel. Yet, the monotheistic Jew, Paul, has no problems placing Jesus in that spot of Yahweh. Also, Paul’s use of the Psalm implies that the functioning of the ministry gifts Jesus gave the church somehow contributes to deliverance from death, even as they equip saints for ministry work. We shall have more to say shortly.

The Role of Noah

We began the story from the beginning of humanity’s slide into decay. With only four named persons, there was a murder. We also saw supernatural beings’ role in increasing corruption in the land when angelic beings took on flesh and birthed the Nephilim of old. By the middle of Genesis 6, here is the report of that world:

Genesis 6:12-13 ESV
[12] And God saw the earth, and behold, it was corrupt, for all flesh had corrupted their way on the earth. [13] And God said to Noah, “I have determined to make an end of all flesh, for the earth is filled with violence through them. Behold, I will destroy them with the earth.

So, the corruption and violence only increased, and God concluded that the generation had to be wiped out. But Noah and his family were rescued. It is vital to remember that the people rescued were part of a corrupt generation. The text does not tell us how Noah found divine favor, but we read that Noah obeyed and performed the tasks given to him (Genesis 6:8, 22). And everyone who believed Noah was also rescued. After the flood wiped out life on the earth, we read:

Genesis 9:1-3 ESV
[1] And God blessed Noah and his sons and said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth. [2] The fear of you and the dread of you shall be upon every beast of the earth and upon every bird of the heavens, upon everything that creeps on the ground and all the fish of the sea. Into your hand they are delivered. [3] Every moving thing that lives shall be food for you. And as I gave you the green plants, I give you everything.

The careful reader ought to catch the allusions embedded in this passage. Earlier, God said, “Be fruitful and multiply” to the humans in the Garden of Eden. The language of dominion over the animals is also reminiscent of the task given to Adam. Even Genesis 9:20, “Noah began to be a man of the soil, and he planted a vineyard,” is a clear allusion to Genesis 2:15, “The Lord God took the man and put him in the garden of Eden to work it and keep it.” There are thus two literary functions performed by the Genesis 9:1-3 verses above. First, the world must be repopulated with Noah and his people just as Adam and Eve had to do, being the first humans (Genesis 9:19). But there is more. The verses above also remind the reader that God had not given up on addressing the problems caused by Adam and Eve. Indeed, the flood became necessary because what Adam initiated had degenerated into worse acts of violence and evil.

However, the flood was no real solution; it only slowed the decay but did not reach the root. Indeed, one of Noah’s sons would soon remind us that the problem remains. After Noah had resettled post-flood, he drank from the wine of the vineyard he had planted. He became drunk and fell asleep naked. Next, we read:

Genesis 9:22-25 ESV
[22] And Ham, the father of Canaan, saw the nakedness of his father and told his two brothers outside. [23] Then Shem and Japheth took a garment, laid it on both their shoulders, and walked backward and covered the nakedness of their father. Their faces were turned backward, and they did not see their father’s nakedness. [24] When Noah awoke from his wine and knew what his youngest son had done to him, [25] he said, “Cursed be Canaan; a servant of servants shall he be to his brothers.”

This is a problematic passage for a few reasons. Though the passage’s text merely says Ham saw his daddy’s nakedness, verse 24 says Ham did something to his daddy while he was asleep. Merely seeing someone’s nakedness does not equal “doing” something to them. Besides, it likely was not Ham’s first time seeing his dad naked, especially when he was a little boy. The other problem is that Noah cursed not Ham, the perpetrator, but Ham’s son, Canaan. These observations have generated many interesting conversations concerning the nature of Ham’s offense, including voyeurism, paternal rape, or incestuous sex with Noah’s wife (and Ham’s mother). Now is not the time to flesh out the arguments. Regardless of how we read the story, it is a reminder that this son of Noah was no different from the others killed in the flood. In other words, again, the flood did not solve the problem of evil inclinations in human hearts. It merely scaled it down.

Shortly afterward, we are introduced to the Tower of Babel (Genesis 11) following a Table of Nations (Genesis 10). The world was being repopulated again through the three sons of Noah after everyone else died in the flood. As if to remind us that the flood did not solve a problem, the new generation of humans yet decided against God’s directive by choosing to congregate in a chosen spot rather than spread far and wide:

Genesis 11:4 ESV
Then they said, “Come, let us build ourselves a city and a tower with its top in the heavens, and let us make a name for ourselves, lest we be dispersed over the face of the whole earth.”

So, they explicitly intended not to be “dispersed over the face of the whole earth” – the very result God wanted all along from the days of Adam. With a measure of irony, though they were going to build a tall tower reaching to the sphere of the gods, the Most High God came down instead to inspect the defiant project (Genesis 11:5). Twice, in consecutive verses, the passage says God ensured that the people were eventually dispersed over the face of earth as God always wanted (11:8,9). God achieved this desire by confusing the people’s language.

Abraham is a Major Character

Ten generations and 465 literary years later, God made a pivotal move toward solving the problems we have been discussing. Perhaps God waited until the genetic contributions of the “sons of God” and Nephilim in the gene pool were washed out. Whatever his reasons, God decided to call a 75-year-old childless Abram to derive an ultimate son from his lineage. Nine generations after Noah, God made a move:

Genesis 11:31 ESV
Terah took Abram his son and Lot the son of Haran, his grandson, and Sarai his daughter-in-law, his son Abram’s wife, and they went forth together from Ur of the Chaldeans to go into the land of Canaan, but when they came to Haran, they settled there.

So, Abram’s father intended to journey with some family members to a land Yahweh was very interested in, Canaan. Indeed, when God eventually called Abram, he told him to complete the journey his father had started. Understandably, Abram took everyone who began the journey with Terah with him to Canaan (Genesis 12:5). No reason is given for why God wanted Abram to complete the journey, but we are told the following:

Genesis 12:2-3 ESV
[2] And I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you and make your name great, so that you will be a blessing. [3] I will bless those who bless you, and him who dishonors you I will curse, and in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed.”

This is a familiar passage that deserves careful parsing. Narratively, Genesis 10 describes the many nations that emerged from the three sons of Noah. Strangely, God calls Abram and promises to make a hitherto non-existing great nation out of him, even though several great nations already exist on earth. In fact, Abraham did not even have a child because his wife was barren. It is as though God abandoned the other nations to start afresh with Abram. He, however, is not permanently abandoning the other nations because “all the families of the earth” somehow will be blessed by the nation God would make of Abram. From that moment forward, God specifically guarded the blessing within Abram’s lineage.

This was a serious project because God clarified that he needed no help. Abram was 75 when God called him and told him he would become a great nation, but he remained childless 10 years later. (This is a recurrent theme we have seen in Genesis so far – God never seems to be in a hurry.) So Abram (and Sarai) understandably thought they could help God initiate the “great nation” project through a second wife. But God was firm and clear:

Genesis 17:19-21 ESV
[19] God said, “No, but Sarah your wife shall bear you a son, and you shall call his name Isaac. I will establish my covenant with him as an everlasting covenant for his offspring after him. [20] As for Ishmael, I have heard you; behold, I have blessed him and will make him fruitful and multiply him greatly. He shall father twelve princes, and I will make him into a great nation. [21] But I will establish my covenant with Isaac, whom Sarah shall bear to you at this time next year.”

Ishmael was not it – hence, the later Islamic claim of a prophet from Ishmael’s lineage has no basis whatsoever in Scripture. Ishmael will also become a great nation like the ones in Genesis 10. But he is not to become the “great nation” that will be a blessing to the world.

Eventually, 25 years after the initial promise, the promised son Isaac was born. And when he became a father, he gave birth to twins, creating a little problem. The “great nation” lineage can not come from both children. God must make his election clear again. It would be Jacob, despite his devious ways. Jacob would become a father of 12 sons, but the promise must be carried forward through Judah, one of Jacob’s worst and most unintegral sons. Matthew states that God closely supervised the blessing for 42 literary generations until Jesus was born.

The Gospel Effectuated

This, then, is the long-lived redemption plan of God. Jesus was the long-awaited son and deliverer. This Messiah will decisively address all the problems we have discussed. Paul clearly understands this when he writes:

Galatians 3:8 ESV
And the Scripture, foreseeing that God would justify the Gentiles by faith, preached the gospel beforehand to Abraham, saying, “In you shall all the nations be blessed.”

The good news, or gospel, of God finally redeeming the cosmos did not start with Jesus. On the contrary, Jesus came to initiate the end of it. The Gospel that Jesus effectuated began with Abraham. Abraham was the genealogical head of a project that produced the promised Rescuer of the cosmos. But the problems predated even Abraham. The Jesus Event finally effectively dealt with the problems we have chronicled: the glory lost in Eden, language confusion at Babel, and the corruption of the angelic sons of God.

Jesus as Adam 2.0+

Romans 5:12-21 is an extensive contrast of Adam and Jesus, which shows that Jesus’s appearance had something to do with the ancient problem in the garden:

Romans 5:12-15 ESV
[12] Therefore, just as sin came into the world through one man, and death through sin, and so death spread to all men because all sinned— [13] for sin indeed was in the world before the law was given, but sin is not counted where there is no law. [14] Yet death reigned from Adam to Moses, even over those whose sinning was not like the transgression of Adam, who was a type of the one who was to come. [15] But the free gift is not like the trespass. For if many died through one man’s trespass, much more have the grace of God and the free gift by the grace of that one man Jesus Christ abounded for many.

The argument is straightforward: Jesus reverses the error and the attending consequences of Adam’s trespass in the Garden. Whereas death, through sin, spread to all men as a result of Adam’s acts, Jesus’s obedience provides life to all who appropriate the offer:

Romans 5:18-19 ESV
[18] Therefore, as one trespass led to condemnation for all men, so one act of righteousness leads to justification and life for all men. [19] For as by the one man’s disobedience the many were made sinners, so by the one man’s obedience the many will be made righteous.

Hence, Jesus solves the Adam Problem. Christ is the second and last Adam (1 Corinthians 15:45, 47).

Tongues in Acts: Babel Reversed

Luke, the author of Acts, seems intentional about connecting the ministry of Jesus – specifically the ministry of the Holy Spirit – to the Babel event of Genesis 11, thereby implying that Jesus addresses another ancient problem. Below is how the Babel story begins:

Genesis 11:1-4 ESV
[1] Now the whole earth had one language and the same words. [2] And as people migrated from the east, they found a plain in the land of Shinar and settled there. [3] And they said to one another, “Come, let us make bricks, and burn them thoroughly.” And they had brick for stone, and bitumen for mortar. [4] Then they said, “Come, let us build ourselves a city and a tower with its top in the heavens, and let us make a name for ourselves, lest we be dispersed over the face of the whole earth.”

The chapter begins by saying the whole world had one language. Since the previous chapter gives a table of nations, each with its own language (Genesis 10:5), we need not conclude that this verse asserts the existence of a single language from which all languages are derived – a claim against current scientific evidence. On the contrary, the verse can be taken to say the world had a lingua franca, a common language for business. The relevant point here is the flow of this narrative: the people had a common language and understanding to permanently station at a chosen spot rather than spread all over the earth as God wanted. To achieve his goal, God determined that confusing their language so they no longer understand one another was an effective way to get the people to abandon the project (Genesis 11:7, 9).

In Acts 2, the believers were gathered in one spot as Jesus instructed them. Suddenly, the Spirit descended and filled eachperson so that they “began to speak in other tongues as the Spirit gave them utterance” (Acts 2:4). Meanwhile, something else was happening outside:

Acts 2:5-12 NIVUK
[5] Now there were staying in Jerusalem God-fearing Jews from every nation under heaven. [6] When they heard this sound, a crowd came together in bewilderment, because each one heard their own language being spoken. [7] Utterly amazed, they asked: ‘Aren’t all these who are speaking Galileans? [8] Then how is it that each of us hears them in our native language? [9] Parthians, Medes and Elamites; residents of Mesopotamia, Judea and Cappadocia, Pontus and Asia, [10] Phrygia and Pamphylia, Egypt and the parts of Libya near Cyrene; visitors from Rome [11] (both Jews and converts to Judaism); Cretans and Arabs – we hear them declaring the wonders of God in our own tongues!’ [12] Amazed and perplexed, they asked one another, ‘What does this mean?’

Religious Jews from “every nation under heaven” heard the Galileans speak in these traveling Jews’ languages. Both the “every nation under heaven” phrase and the list of nations provided allude to Genesis 10, the table of nations, and Genesis 11. And, of course, the central action is a reversal. Unlike in Genesis 11, God has supernaturally enabled all the people “from every nation under heaven” to once get his message through “common” languages.

Acts expands the pattern. Every time a distinct category of people received the gospel message, they spoke in tongues. This happens again in Acts 10 at Cornelius’ house – the first Gentile group to be accepted by God without first converting to Judaism. In Ephesus, a region far removed from the regions of the Spirit’s operations thus far in Acts, some individuals also received the Spirit and spoke in tongues. This suggests that the divine program is not geographically restricted.

The Death of Jesus and the Powers

We have been trained over the years to associate Jesus’s death with the atonement – and, for sure, it has much to do with that. But the death of Jesus addresses other critical issues. Consider the following:

Colossians 2:13-15 ESV
[13] And you, who were dead in your trespasses and the uncircumcision of your flesh, God made alive together with him, having forgiven us all our trespasses,
[14] having cancelled the charge of our legal indebtedness, which stood against us and condemned us; he has taken it away, nailing it to the cross. [15] And having disarmed the powers and authorities, he made a public spectacle of them, triumphing over them by the cross.

This common passage deserves careful parsing. The central issue the letter to the Colossians addresses is the sufficiency and supremacy of Christ for salvation. The Colossian church was being harassed by some Jewish teachers teaching that the Gentile church had to do more to become complete children of God. The “more” required seemed to be about Jewish mysticism and Torah-observing. Paul would have none of that as he revealed the clearest and boldest claims about Jesus (Colossians 1:15-21; 2:9-11). In Colossians 2:8, Paul writes:

Colossians 2:8 ESV
See to it that no one takes you captive by philosophy and empty deceit, according to human tradition, according to the elemental spirits of the world, and not according to Christ.

In this difficult verse, Paul contrasts Christ with some “elemental spirits of the world.” According the the Faithlife Study Bible, there are three possibilities for the “elemental spirits”:

The Greek phrase used here could refer to several concepts: the basic religious teachings of Jews and Gentiles; the material parts of the universe (such as water, earth, and fire); or spiritual powers (such as evil spirits or demonic entities). In this context, the first and third options are most likely. Paul makes clear that these teachings or forces are negative influences.

In other words, Paul says the mystical Jewish doctrines are being influenced by demonic forces in opposition to Christ. This is the context for understanding 2:13 – 15. Verse 15 says Jesus disarmed the “powers and authorities” and “made a public spectacle of them, triumphing over them by the cross.” In other words, Jesus’s death on the cross, while initiating the atonement process, was a direct victorious battle over the powers and authorities, the elemental spirits of the world who influenced the lives of the Gentiles (See Colossians 2:20). How is that so?

A Return to Bashan

As argued at length in another entry, Jesus’ statement in Matthew 16 is directly connected to this idea:

Matthew 16:18-19 ESV
[18] And I tell you, you are Peter, and on this rock I will build my church, and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it. [19] I will give you the keys of the kingdom of heaven, and whatever you bind on earth shall be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven.”

The Gospels record Jesus once making a 25-mile-and-15-hour trip from Galilee to Caesarea Philippi, where Jesus uttered the words above (See Matthew 16:13). But “Caesarea Philippi” was a new name for an ancient rocky region we have already encountered, Bashan. (See our “Gates of Hell” article for how Bashan became Caesarea Philippi.) Besides, at the time of this trip in the first century, this region had a temple devoted to Pan, the god of the underworld. It also had a grotto locals described as the “gates of Hades.” Matthew employs much wordplay in verse 18. “Peter” means “rock,” and Jesus uttered the words while he stood on a rocky surface. In other words, Jesus here declared that he would build his church right atop the gates of Hades, thereby employing another double entendre. He referred to the spiritual reality of Hades while affirming that Peter would play a critical role in the project.

Furthermore, this battle with Hades will somehow result in Jesus giving the keys of the kingdom of heaven to Peter (and the rest of the disciples). The Apostles had a gatekeeping role in the kingdom. It is, hence, not an accident that when the church’s construction properly began with the giving of the Holy Spirit in Acts 2, Peter gave the first public sermon. Notice how Matthew immediately connects the “gates of Hell” pericope with the death of Jesus:

Matthew 16:21 ESV
From that time Jesus began to show his disciples that he must go to Jerusalem and suffer many things from the elders and chief priests and scribes, and be killed, and on the third day be raised.

Matthew here tells us that everything Jesus said hinged on his death.

As earlier shown, Paul also connects Jesus’s death and Bashan. When Jesus took the disciples to Caesarea Philippi, Paul was not yet a believer. But after Jesus appeared to him, Paul validates the “gates of Hades” story through Psalm 68. Paul repurposes Psalm 68 in Ephesians 4:8 – 14. Paul’s use of Psalm 68 implies that giving ministry gifts – Apostles, Prophets, Pastors, Evangelists, and Teachers – to the church is a continuation of the church-building process Jesus said he would perform atop Bashan. Paul specifically says these gifts are “for building up the body of Christ” (Ephesians 4:12). The “body of Christ” is, of course, the church. In other words, Jesus’s one-time mission to Caesarea Philippi continues to bear fruit through ministry gifts. God continues to settle an old score, as Psalm 68 prophecies. Jesus is the Yahweh who settles the score.

John the Revelator also alludes to this reality. The resurrected Jesus introduces himself to John in this way:

Revelation 1:17-18 ESV
[17]  When I saw him, I fell at his feet as though dead. But he laid his right hand on me, saying, “Fear not, I am the first and the last, [18] and the living one. I died, and behold I am alive forevermore, and I have the keys of Death and Hades.

When and where did Jesus get “the keys of Death and Hades”? Obviously, when he died and went to the Underworld. The imagery here is of a complete routing of his enemies. He beat them so badly that he took the keys from them. They no longer can keep people in, but Jesus can keep people out of the reach of Death and Hades. As John records, Jesus’s encounter with Hades was a victory useful for encouraging believers:

Revelation 3:21 ESV
The one who conquers, I will grant him to sit with me on my throne, as I also conquered and sat down with my Father on his throne.

But, of course, believers are not expected to do battle in life by themselves or in their own strength. Indeed, there is another related reason Jesus died and rose:

Hebrews 7:24-25 NIVUK
[24] but because Jesus lives for ever, he has a permanent priesthood. [25] Therefore he is able to save completely those who come to God through him, because he always lives to intercede for them.

Right now, Jesus is praying for his own. His love for humanity is deep. When it is all said and done, God will dwell with humans in a new Eden, just he wanted always wanted:

Revelation 21:3-7 ESV
[3] And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, “Behold, the dwelling place of God is with man. He will dwell with them, and they will be his people, and God himself will be with them as their God. [4] He will wipe away every tear from their eyes, and death shall be no more, neither shall there be mourning, nor crying, nor pain anymore, for the former things have passed away.” [5] And he who was seated on the throne said, “Behold, I am making all things new.” Also he said, “Write this down, for these words are trustworthy and true.” [6] And he said to me, “It is done! I am the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the end. To the thirsty I will give from the spring of the water of life without payment. [7] The one who conquers will have this heritage, and I will be his God and he will be my son.

And this, all of this, is the gospel. This the good news that turned the ancient world upside down and brought a great empire to its knee.

Work Cited

Barry, John D., Douglas Mangum, Derek R. Brown, Michael S. Heiser, Miles Custis, Elliot Ritzema, Matthew M. Whitehead, Michael R. Grigoni, and David Bomar. 2012, 2016. Faithlife Study Bible. Bellingham, WA: Lexham Press.

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Atonement Requires More than the Death of Jesus

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I understand that this can become a charged issue for many Christians and that various Christian traditions over the ages have taught that Jesus’s death by itself was sufficient for atonement. Indeed, I believed similarly until I came across a scholarly work by David Moffitt. When we interact with various biblical data points, we will see that the Bible says something different about our topic. The belief that Jesus’ death was all needed for atonement has much biblical data for it. Here are a few:

John 1:29 ESV
The next day he saw Jesus coming toward him, and said, “Behold, the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world!

The idea here is that of the sacrificial lamb in Jewish temple rituals. Of course, John would further clarify that this lamb was slain in Revelation 5:6. Together, the verses imply that the slaying of the Lamb equals the taking away of sins.

Colossians 2:13-15 ESV
[13] And you, who were dead in your trespasses and the uncircumcision of your flesh, God made alive together with him, having forgiven us all our trespasses, [14] by canceling the record of debt that stood against us with its legal demands. This he set aside, nailing it to the cross. [15] He disarmed the rulers and authorities and put them to open shame, by triumphing over them in him.

Paul says the “record of debt” opposing the Colossians before God was canceled by nailing it to the cross. The idea is substitutionary. God took care of sins by the cross.

Romans 5:6, 8 ESV
[6] For while we were still weak, at the right time Christ died for the ungodly.
[8] but God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us.

Again, Paul reiterates the same message that Jesus’ death has much to do with addressing humanity’s status as “sinners.”

There are other examples one could point to in defence of the traditional understanding that the death of Jesus by itself takes care of the human sin problem. However, a few other passages provide more details that must be accounted for along with the verses above. Consider the following:

1 Corinthians 15:16-17 ESV
[16] For if the dead are not raised, not even Christ has been raised. [17] And if Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile and you are still in your sins.

This is a fantastic passage that is often overlooked. 1 Corinthians 15 is believed to be the earliest piece of Christian writing – before Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. Paul here defends the resurrection of Jesus and tells his audience, if they were in doubt, to investigate the over 500 people still alive then and who saw the risen Jesus. In the quoted verses above, Paul says the Corinthians (and all of us) are still in our sins and retain the “sinners” status if Jesus did not resurrect. Contrasted with the traditional understanding of atonement, this is a staggering claim. If Jesus did not rise from the dead, then he remains forever dead. But if the death of Jesus per se was sufficient for atonement, then the resurrection should not matter. In other words, the Corinthians should not have remained in their sins if Jesus had not arisen! Yet, the same Paul who makes the statements to the Colossians and the Romans now tells the Corinthians that there is more to the story.

Furthermore, Paul is not alone on this point. Indeed, one of the central themes of the book of Hebrews has to do with this subject. Consider the following:

Hebrews 7:25 ESV
Consequently, he is able to save to the uttermost those who draw near to God through him, since he always lives to make intercession for them.

This text says the resurrected Jesus lives to intercede for believers to save them “to the uttermost” or completely. Again, if his death took care of sin, why did he rise only to continuously make intercession for the people who already believed? The implication is that, contrary to a popular claim, the death of Jesus does not cover all sins – past, present, and future. Jesus is still daily atoning for sins.

The penetrating insight Moffitt, a specialist in the book of Hebrews, offers is that we should understand Jesus’s sacrifice in light of the Old Testament’s sacrificial system. When we do, we realize that atonement sacrifices in ancient Judaism were not an event but a process. When a sinner approached the temple for propitiation, he came with an animal (a bull is required for the sin offering, a ram for a burnt offering, and two additional goats for Yom Kippur. See Leviticus 4 and 16). The sinner seeking to be cleansed then lays his hands on the head of the animal in a substitutionary move; his sins are transferred to the animal. Then, the animal is killed in the courtyard/entrance to the tent of the meeting. Here is an important point: the sinner is NOT yet cleansed because the animal was killed. There are yet more critical steps in the process.

The instructions differ a bit depending on whether the sinner is a priest, an ordinary Israelite, or an elder. But they invariably involve bringing some of the blood of the slain animal inside the Tent of Meeting. The priest would sprinkle some of the blood on the altar and pour the rest at the base of the burnt offering altar. The animal’s fat will be removed and burnt on the altar of the burnt offering. Then, the remaining parts of the slain animal – the head, legs, entrails, and dung – will be carried outside the camp to be burnt on a fire of wood. Only after the process is complete is a sinner assured of forgiveness.

Remarkably, the author of Hebrews sees the sacrifice of Jesus in the same way and declares the sacrificial system of Judaism as “copies of the true things” (9:24). Here is a relevant quote:

Hebrews 9:11-12 ESV
[11] But when Christ appeared as a high priest of the good things that have come, then through the greater and more perfect tent (not made with hands, that is, not of this creation) [12] he entered once for all into the holy places, not by means of the blood of goats and calves but by means of his own blood, thus securing an eternal redemption.

Jesus entered the holy places not in his death but through the ascension that followed his resurrection. This is why the resurrection is essential. If Jesus remained dead, he would have failed to complete the atonement process. This is not to trivialize his death – after all, there can be no resurrection without his death. So, all the New Testament passages suggesting that Jesus’s death achieved atonement took the resurrection (and ascension) for granted. The authors were aware of the process but focused on portions of the process as they saw fit. But when a church like the Corinthians started twisting truths, Paul had to set them straight by emphasizing the criticality of the resurrection in the atonement process.

Here is the key takeaway: Whereas the death of Jesus is by itself insufficient for atonement, Jesus is! The cross is vital, but it is not all there is. We don’t fix our gaze on the cross. We fix our gaze on the one who was on the cross and rose again!

Referenced Work

Moffitt, David M. Rethinking Atonement: New Perspectives on Jesus’s Death, Resurrection, and Ascension. Baker Academic, 2022.

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The Death, Burial, and Resurrection of Jesus is NOT the Gospel Per Se

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What’s the Gospel?

The Gospel of Jesus is like the proverbial elephant in the room. Àjànàkú sì kọjáa mo rí ǹkan fìrí. Generations of severing the gospel from Jesus’s Jewish roots have generated much misunderstanding among believers today. We need to reappraise the elephant for what it is. So, what exactly is the euangelion, the Gospel?

Part of the challenge for us is that we are often completely removed from the first-century world that had a profound influence on the New Testament. New Testament authors did not invent the term “gospel.” Indeed, every adult in the Roman Empire was familiar with a gospel long before Jesus was born. The term “Gospel” was often associated with Roman rule and the ascension of a new emperor. It was a gospel maintained with brutal force that crushed opposition triumphantly. In fact, ironically, it was for reasons of upholding the imperial gospel, the Pax Romana, that Jesus was crucified. The crucifixion of Jesus was not a unique event. Rome impaled thousands more before and after.

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