Passion Week XXXIII

It was now about the sixth hour, and darkness fell over the whole land until the ninth hour, because the sun was obscured; and the veil of the temple was torn in two.  And Jesus, crying out with a loud voice, said, “Father, INTO YOUR HANDS I COMMIT MY SPIRIT.” Having said this, He breathed His last. (Luke 23:44-46 NASB)

One of places all of the accounts of Jesus’ crucifixion seem to agree is the timing.  Except for John, who leaves the timing out completely, all the Gospel accounts seem to agree on the timing based on the darkness that covered the earth.  From the sixth hour until the ninth, darkness fell over the earth.  Only Luke, of the three, attributes this darkness to an eclipse.  He actually uses the technical term for it of his day.

A solar eclipse occurred as Jesus hung bleeding on the cross.  There have been many things written on the significance of this.  The position I have taken has been that Jesus had to suffer death in the form of separation from God as the penalty for sin for all mankind.  But I have also believed that this happened when He breathed His last, and lasted for the three days He was in the tomb.  Now, I’m not so sure about that timing.

What does the darkness mean?  Considering that the Creator of the universe set that date and time in place as He created the universe, as it was marked by an eclipse, the timing must be important.  Jesus lives through it, and breathes His last on the other side.  Or does He?  Luke says that the veil of the temple was torn, then Jesus cries out, committing His Spirit to the Father, then dies.  The other Gospels include only one other detail, Jesus asking why He has been forsaken.  Other than that, they agree, which presents an interesting option for timing.

It’s possible that Jesus breathes His last, and then the eclipse concludes, revealing the sun once more.  Consider the dramatic conclusion to this life, that, as He breathes out, the sun slides from behind the moon to illuminate his Creator’s body suspended in death upon a cross.  Why the sun now of all times?  Why not the darkness from that point?  But the  image translates what was considered a defeat into the illumination of a victory.  Jesus says Himself, “It is finished.”  And so the sun can, once more, reappear to reveal the body of his Creator.  Only now, that body is all that’s left…for now.

So, while Jesus hung for those three hours of darkness, what was happening?  At the end of them, Jesus cries out asking why He has been forsaken, and the temple veil is torn from top to bottom.  He commits His Spirit into the hands of the Father, and dies.  Although, I believe that, even though He breathed His last at the ninth hour, Jesus dies at the sixth.

What is the penalty of sin?  According to Romans 6:23, sin earns death.  According to Isaiah 59:2, our iniquities have caused a separation between us and God, and He hides His face from us, and does not hear.  In the Garden, God tells Adam that the very day he eats from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil he will certainly die.  Yet, the day they ate of the tree, Adam and Eve are banished from the Garden, and have children.  Did the “wages” change?  It could be important that the banishment from the Garden is the last recorded communication between Adam and God.

The impression left from this cursory examination of sin may redefine death.  Jesus, in order to pay this penalty for sin, would need to suffer that separation from God.  God would have to hide His face and not hear Jesus.  And this would be in keeping with God’s definition of death.  The problem of Jesus’ deity aside, the payment remains the same.  Just as the Trinity, the triune nature of God, is inexplicable, so too would be how Jesus could pay this debt.  Regardless of how, He did.  And so, I believe He did so, and as He does so, the sun is hidden behind the moon.

I believe Jesus dies in the sixth hour, is separated from the Father for three hours, and then breathes His last.  And is then joined by the criminal in paradise?  So it would seem.  Wouldn’t it be supremely ironic if, as Jesus breathes His last, He lives again?  The sun reappears.  For those at the cross who witness Jesus’ last breath, it’s over, and He dies.  But for the Father, that isn’t necessarily so.  The reunion of Spirit and body hasn’t happened yet, but does Jesus’ connection with the Father resume when He breathes His last and the sun reappears?  Or is the sun’s reemergence a promise of the hope to be revealed in three days?  Does the Father foreshadow Sunday on Friday?  I’m not sure.  But that day Jesus stands with a redeemed criminal in paradise.

What’s your view of Jesus through your knothole?

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Shift Your Paradigm For the Kingdom Is Near!

“I call heaven and earth to witness against you today, that I have set before you life and death, the blessing and the curse. So choose life in order that you may live, you and your descendants, by loving the LORD your God, by obeying His voice, and by holding fast to Him; for this is your life and the length of your days, that you may live in the land which the LORD swore to your fathers, to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, to give them.” (Deuteronomy 30:19-20 NASB)

I’m ecstatic that I recently purchased a set of books, a 10 volume theological dictionary just of the New Testament.  And of course I want to pursue a current study trend of mine, repentance.  The dictionary begins with the difference between repentance and remorse.  But then spends page after page on repentance, both in the Old Testament and in the New.  I’m loving this.  But I’m also challenged by what I find.

Back in school I began the pursuit of a theory that all of Scripture was God helping His human creatures understand the definition of death.  I believed that He was doing this so we could choose between life and death.  Therefore, all of the Hebrew Scriptures would have this theme, and all of the Christian Scriptures would have this theme.  See, we do dumb stuff when we’re young, we all do.

My attempt at simplification of Scripture has fallen on deaf ears and hard times.  Much of Scripture simply refuses to conform to this theory.  Undeterred, I press on in my study of Scripture with this theory in the back of my mind.  I have found that life and death mean something different for God than they do for His human creatures.  We think of it in biological terms (brain activity, respiration, growth, etc.).  I believe God thinks of life and death in purely relational terms.  So for us it’s only accidentally biological.  The cessation of those biological functions signals the end of a set of relationships.

Anyway, regardless of whether I’m right or wrong, I find that this theory encroaches on my other studies, like repentance.  In a sense, I’m beginning to see repentance as that process in our lives that reverses the decisions and repercussions made in the Garden of Eden.  Repentance is becoming for me the choosing of the other tree.

In Deuteronomy 30, Moses is setting before the people a ceremony they are to conduct once they enter the land.  The people are to stand on two mountains, write the blessings and curses of Deuteronomy on stones, and shout across the valley to each other reciting them.  As Moses wraps up his instructions, he finishes with the words, “I call heaven and earth to witness against you today, that I have set before you life and death, blessing and the curse.”

In the typical Hebrew “parallel” literary construction, blessing = life and curse = death.  Not hard to understand at all.  But then we read further.  Life is further defined as 1) loving God, 2) obeying God, and 3) holding fast to God.  In other words, life is relational.  And specifically, life is relationship with God.  To be in relationship with God is being alive, and not being in relationship with God is being dead.  Which means many people are biologically alive, but actually dead.  I don’t know about you, but that sounds vaguely Christian to me (Ephesians 2:1-10).

So, the idea of repentance, this change of mind to agree with God, now becomes a reversal of that condition lost in the Garden.  In the process of “being transformed by the renewing of our minds” (Romans 12:2), we live.  The process is the choice of life, to love God, to obey Him, to holding fast to Him (faithfulness).  How do we choose?  In the choice of relationships, we choose our Master over everyone else.  In the choice of time we choose to spend it with Him.  In the choice of words, we choose to speak His words.

Our world view will become the world view of its Creator.  Our “paradigm” will shift to align with His “paradigm”.  It’s not adaptation, it’s realignment.  It’s a return to the directions and definitions of where we started.  Repentance is a return, but not a 180 turn in behavior.  Repentance is a return to the life we were intended to live, and that results in a change in behavior.  But it begins in the processes of the mind and the intent of the heart.  As Jesus set His face toward Jerusalem, and therefore the cross, we are to set our faces toward His throne, and therefore His face.

That was a meandering romp through theological thought.  What’s your view through your knothole?  Life and death, your thoughts?

On a Side Note: Knowledge of Good and Evil

The LORD God planted a garden toward the east, in Eden; and there He placed the man whom He had formed. Out of the ground the LORD God caused to grow every tree that is pleasing to the sight and good for food; the tree of life also in the midst of the garden, and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. (Gen. 2:8-9 NAU)

Then the LORD God took the man and put him into the garden of Eden to cultivate it and keep it. The LORD God commanded the man, saying, “From any tree of the garden you may eat freely; but from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat from it you will surely die.” (Gen. 2:15-17 NAU)

Of all the things that make up the “fall of humanity” it’s the knowledge of good and evil as a definition of “death” that seems to set the most definitive boundary.  What I mean is that the choice to be made was between life and its opposite (the two trees).  But rather than simply use the word death, God defines that choice as the knowledge of good and evil.  Therefore the opposite of life is the knowledge of good and evil.

For most of us, the word “evil” has become associated with a moral quality.  Something evil is morally so, as an element in the philosophical category of ethics.  There’s a cultural language issue that I believe obscures the point here.  While it seems clear that God is interested in defining death for Adam and eventually Eve, this definition as “knowledge of good and evil” is linguistically tied to our philosophical category of ethics.  I don’t believe it really belongs there, at least not as the term “evil” is traditionally used in the category.

The words for this tree in Scripture are “tov” (good) and “ra” (evil).  The problem of rendering these words into English are cultural.  A better rendering of ra in almost every instance is “bad”.  In Hebrew, ra is as flexible, if not more so, than our use of bad. Even in idiom or slang, they approximate each other.  The reason is that the meaning of these words is not only arbitrary, but very contextual. Something bad for one person can be good for another.  It depends on context of both affected parties.  This can also be said of ra.

In Amos, the prophet asks, “Can ra befall a city, and God has not done it?”  Well, obviously, if this refers to moral evil, we have a problem in our understanding of God.  Clearly the reference is to a calamity of some sort, either human or natural which harms the inhabitants.  But the point I’m making is that this word is used as a quality of something which God does, and therefore, even though causing suffering, can’t be seen as morally wrong (it’s God, He’s not morally wrong).  Therefore ra cannot be seen as a moral ethical element of the ancient Hebrews or as a moral quality in their understanding of God (a Hebrew theology).

The word ra belongs to a qualitative description based on the perception or point of view of the observer.  So, when I call something ra, that same thing might be described by another person (with another point of view) as tov.

Now, back to the tree.   The tree of death was called the knowledge of good and evil or tov and ra.  So what was the choice?  Life on the one hand or the knowledge of these arbitrary categories on the other?  How is the knowledge of these arbitrary categories death?

The answer is in the alternative.  The alternative to the personal knowledge of good and evil is the acceptance of God’s definitions of good and evil.  In other words, the choice in the Garden was between life (relationship with God) or death as “defining for ourselves what is good and evil”.  So the more we understand good and evil as God does, the more we begin to reverse the choice.  This is not to minimize the other elements in the deception or temptation, like becoming like God, and so on.  But death was brought about in that day in the choice between defining good and bad for themselves or continuing to accept God’s definitions of those things.   One is life, the other death.

So, as Moses said to the people, “Choose life!”  Study Scripture to understand God’s definitions, and live those out.  Inherent in this charge is the lordship of Jesus in our lives, the belief in His resurrection, and the rejection of our personal definitions of good and bad.  All these things are part of God’s definition of good and bad.  As is our submission to His definition of these in our lives.  Let Him “spin-doctor” the events of our lives rather than do it ourselves or let the world do it for us.  That’s the process we follow to reverse the choice our ancestors made in the Garden.

So what do you see and learn among the trees in the Garden?