Episode Transcript
Carey Griffel: [00:00:00] Welcome to Genesis Marks the Spot, where we raid the ivory tower of biblical theology without ransacking our faith. My name is Carey Griffel, and in this episode, it's going to be a little bit chaotic. Of course, my life is always a bit chaotic because I do have children in my house. Whenever I see the theme of chaos in the Bible, which is usually associated with either water or wilderness, I think, why didn't they just use children as the theme of chaos?
Children are the most chaotic thing in my life. They're loud. They're noisy. They're unpredictable, but of course, children are lovable, so, and chaos isn't lovable, so I guess I get why they didn't use children as the theme, but that's still the first thing I [00:01:00] think about when I think about the theme of chaos.
But of course, there is a reason we dig into the Bible instead of personal life experience to try and figure out what the Bible is talking about when it is talking about something specific, when it is giving us themes that we can track through the whole narrative of the Bible. And chaos is one of those themes that is very interesting and also very prevalent and also I think it's not always super understood like it's this underlying thing that oh yeah I understand what chaos is but then you just move on from there. You don't really dwell on what chaos is. What it means and what the Bible is doing with the theme itself. So that's what we are going to try and do a little bit [00:02:00] today to the extent that we can in one episode, at any rate. If you are fairly new to the concept of biblical theology, what it is and how you do it, I actually think that the theme of chaos is one that is super helpful to us simply because this is a theme that humanity has always dealt with, but we have dealt with it in different ways at different times. We have different imagery for it now than the ancient person would have had, because our imagery is very steeped in our current context. It's centered on what we deal with on a day to day basis.
We don't live our lives in the way that an ancient person would have lived their lives. We're not so concerned with the seasons and the cycles of rain and natural phenomena that the [00:03:00] ancient person would have been dealing with on a daily basis. We have different threats than the ancient person had dealing with in their day to day lives.
Now, that being said, it's actually really interesting that we also have an undercurrent of the same types of ideas and themes that are also very interconnected. We just might not realize how interconnected they are, and what that actually means to us, especially as we're reading our Bible.
And I would say this, like, throughout history as well. We all know from school, we remember when we were studying the Age of Exploration, and people from Europe were starting to explore the oceans and see what was on the other side of the ocean, that big stretch of water that was [00:04:00] really hard for them to navigate through and navigate past.
Well, you see all of those ancient maps and on the edge, , it's depicted that there are dragons on the edge, right? Here there be dragons. Well, where did they get that imagery? They weren't going out there and actually finding dragons in the way that we might be thinking about it. But of course, they're encountering whales and other sea creatures that they might have thought of as dragons, but nobody went out there and saw a whale and thought, Hey, that's a dragon.
No, that, imagery is much more primitive. And they went out to sea thinking about it already. And the reason they did that was because of the basis of what we have in the Bible. And what we have in the Bible is in turn based on something that was very culturally prevalent at the time. So understanding all of that is going to [00:05:00] allow us to see this thread and this concern of what does chaos mean, and what does danger in life mean, and how do we deal with that, and how does God relate to that?
That's our main concern when we're studying the Bible, right? How do we read the Bible, and how do we understand our lives in respect to our relationship with God? And there's a reason I bring that up here specifically. Because the usual story of Christianity that most of us here in the West... Or, at least most of us evangelicals in America here, it's full of the story of the fall of Adam in the garden, and this idea that he broke the whole world.
Now, if you've been following my podcast, you know I challenge that a little bit. Oh, not really that I'd even say that it's wrong to say that, though [00:06:00] I'd like us all to question why we think about it that way. Because if nothing else, did you know that that's probably not how the New Testament writers thought about things?
Not quite like that. I mean, think about it yourself. If the Fall, in Genesis 3, is the biggest event that ever happened in human history till Christ came, why don't we hear that much about it in the Old Testament? Well, I've probably asked that exact question before to you, and I'll probably ask it again. I think it's a good question that is needed because it lays the foundation for how We read scripture, and how we think about and live our lives.
Not to mention how we think about and interact with Jesus the Messiah, and think about why he came and what his work was and is. Anyway, I have been exploring [00:07:00] some of this in this series on curses. Sometime in that, we will be talking about the question of death, and whether that is really a curse or not.
But for sure, the ground was cursed in the incident in the garden. We know that. And we take that to mean, without much other evidence, honestly, that this made all of creation fall with us. We assume all death came as a result of this, even though, note that the Bible never says that, not even in Romans chapter 5, it doesn't say that.
In Romans 8, creation is said to be groaning, waiting for the revealing of the sons of God. I think we take these groans to be ones of pain because of brokenness. The creation is in pain because of what we did. We broke the world in the fall. But what it really says is that creation is groaning in childbirth. [00:08:00] So it's as if the creation is part of our new creation.
That's a bit of a different narrative than us breaking the world and that's why it's in pain, right? If, rather, it is in pain because it is giving birth to a new creation along with God, that's a different story altogether.
Remember that the earth was involved in the making of Adam. God took the dirt and made Adam. And here we have creation once again seemingly involved in the new creation. Now, hang on, you'll say, look at verses 20 through 21 in Romans 8, where it says that creation was subjected to futility, that it's in bondage to corruption. Fair point. This is because of someone, because of him.
And who is that him? Who is being referenced there? [00:09:00] Is it Adam? did Adam subject creation to futility? Of course, many do think this person in Romans 8 is Adam. It is a possibility and possibly a strong one. Adam's not mentioned anywhere, but we could assume he should or would be assumed to be the one in this passage.
But did Adam have that power? Was it Adam who was able to do that? Or is the person being referred to, actually God. Another possibility is that it was Satan who did that, but most commentators would steer away from that idea. Satan probably didn't have the power to subject creation to futility.
Paul probably had a very specific idea in mind when he wrote this, of course. I mean, he's writing to specific people who would have specific things in mind, [00:10:00] as far as what they were thinking when they were thinking about creation and the state of creation. At the time of Paul's writing, there were several ways that people could have been thinking about things.
Now, by the time of the New Testament, there was in mind this idea of the fall. As opposed to the Old Testament, there are some intertestamental writings that do seem to focus on this idea that Adam brought down humanity in a fall narrative, right? Like we think of it today. So I'm not saying that this idea was foreign entirely to the New Testament writers or the readers or the hearers of the New Testament writings.
But there were various ways they might have been thinking it. It wasn't such a monolithic thought that we have really firmly established now here today. I'm going to read a quote from IVP, Bible Background [00:11:00] Commentary of the New Testament, which is talking about Romans 8:20. It says, quote, Greek tradition declared that the world had been declining from its past golden age to the present. Jewish tradition debated whether it was good that humanity had been created and suggested that Adam's sin had brought harm and the domination of evil powers to all creation. Stoic philosophers believed that the elements would come unraveled and nothing but the primeval fire was really eternal. Cosmic pessimism was rampant in the first century. Most people believed that decay and fate reigned supreme. Paul's point that God had subjected creation to this worthless temporal state is bearable only in the light of the future hope that he attaches to it in verse 21. Like most Old Testament prophets, he includes the assurance of God's [00:12:00] faithfulness. End quote.
Alright, so there's just all of these different ideas floating around, and we think that so much of this is just rooted in Scripture, and really it's actually rooted in the way that we have interpreted things throughout the centuries.
And if this verse is the best we can offer up regarding all of creation falling alongside us? Not that this is the only place that we can necessarily look, but listen, this is a massive doctrine that we've put into place here. And I'm just suggesting that there are other ways we can look at this and think about it.
We think of creation and then the fall, right? Well, more than one theologian has suggested that the opposite of creation in the Bible isn't non existence, but rather it's chaos. [00:13:00] When the Bible opens in Genesis 1, it doesn't actually open with nothing. It opens with a state of chaos. Now, the point of that isn't that God didn't create everything in existence, and I don't think he created chaos either, but we'll get to that in a little bit.
It's just that creation from nothing simply wasn't in the author's head. Creation out of disorder. That's what they had in mind. Order from chaos. That's how they were thinking. And so, you know, we think of creation as perfect. The word describing Eden is the word we get paradise out of. So, it's no wonder that we think of it as a perfect state.
So, we have perfect creation, we fall from grace, so to speak,[00:14:00] and sin enters the world in that process. That's how we tend to think of it. So, I mean, Genesis 3 is describing sin entering the world. And we did fall from grace, but what we also did was introduce disorder. We took what was nice and put together neatly, and we introduced chaos.
Now, again, chaos isn't a thing. Like, you don't create chaos. It's not a material thing that you make. It's the lack of a thing. Just like darkness isn't a thing, it's the lack of a thing. It's the lack of light. So no, when we say that God created everything, He didn't create chaos because chaos isn't a thing to have been created.
God didn't manifest a perfect creation. [00:15:00] He made something that could have a spectrum of existence. It could continue moving towards Him being perfected, or it could move away from Him becoming dark and chaotic. Those are the two choices. Move up towards God, toward perfection and light, or away from God, towards darkness and chaos.
Now, remember what we are trying to do is get in the head of the biblical author. To think like he thought. It wasn't existence, non existence. It was order and chaos. Now, what do we do with the idea that the Bible does talk about destruction for the wicked? It talks about that a lot, in fact. It talks about that much more than it talks about torment and torture, by the way.
So what do we do with that imagery? Does it mean that when the wicked are destroyed, they go into a state of non [00:16:00] existence? Well, maybe, but again, does it actually talk about destruction to the point of non existence? And it's, hard to say, but it does talk about an unquenchable fire and worms that don't die. Images of ultimate chaos, perhaps. Chaos which doesn't go away, and just keeps being chaos. Systematizing these ideas kind of sanitizes these concepts to a point where we often obscure what we should be seeing, at least as far as the imagery and metaphor go. Metaphors, which are less than metaphors, actually end up with, I believe, a truncated meaning.
A changed meaning, often, as well. All right, I'm actually not really trying to get into the topic of Annihilation versus Eternal Conscious Torment, and Hell, and all of [00:17:00] that. I'm just saying that we have systematized all of these things into those categories, and when we do that, it's a lot harder for us to look at the metaphors as the figurative language that they are.
And I think that's important because figurative language usually has layered meaning in ways that a straightforward doctrine doesn't have. In the end, you might actually come out with the same answer. Either way, but if you really get into the metaphor and dig into it and really live with it as figurative language, then that becomes easier to my mind to really look at how, how does that apply to my current life and the figurative language that I would use to describe my current life. How do those overlap and what does that mean? I [00:18:00] mean, talk about application purposes here.
Now, what do I actually mean by that? Well, let's go back to Romans 8 and think about this for a second. In fact, let's go ahead and read this section of Romans 8. I'm gonna start in verse 18, and I'm reading from the ESV.
It says, quote, For I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory that is to be revealed to us. For the creation waits with eager longing for the revealing of the sons of God. For the creation was subjected to futility, not willingly, but because of him who subjected it. In hope that the creation itself will be set free from its bondage to corruption and obtain the freedom of the glory of the children of God. For we know that the whole creation has been groaning together in the pains [00:19:00] of childbirth until now. And not only the creation, but we ourselves who have the first fruits of the Spirit grown inwardly, as we wait eagerly for adoption as sons, the redemption of our bodies. For in this hope we were saved. Now the hope that is seen is not hope. For who hopes for what he sees? But if we hope for what we do not see, we wait for it with patience. End quote.
Now, if we take this passage to be talking about the fall of creation alongside mankind, when we sinned, all of creation fell with us. And now creation is groaning for salvation, just like we are groaning for salvation. When we take that way of thinking, what is the end of that? Now, I'm sure there are many ways that you [00:20:00] could go from that thinking into further thinking, right? There's many different paths, so I'm not suggesting that this is the only direction for this thought, or that it's the necessary direction, but honestly, I see it as a common one.
When people come to the text and think that, then they're thinking, well, there's something wrong with this creation, and there's something wrong with humanity. And we need a new creation and a new humanity to the point that there is now no longer any point to this creation at all. Like there's, this creation is going to be tossed and there's nothing to it anymore.
Right? So basically that's the idea of we just need to get through this life till we get to heaven and then we'll be good. Salvation is getting to heaven after this life.[00:21:00] It doesn't really connect a whole lot into what we're doing here. In other words, our new creation isn't starting right here, we have to wait for it. Just like the new creation of the earth, we have to wait for that as well.
Now, it does seem to me that Revelation's pretty clear that there's going to be a new heavens and a new earth, and that this earth will be passing away, just like our physical bodies are going to be passing away, and we will be clothed in glorified bodies.
So, that's the eschatological hope, but does that mean that nothing in between now and then matters? Does that mean that all of this is just the fallen state? What this kind of leads into is a form of Gnostic thought. Now, you might not be familiar with Gnosticism and what that is, but the [00:22:00] basis of Gnosticism is that there's spiritual reality that's good, and physical reality is bad. So when you have this idea that we need to escape to heaven, then it's a really easy step to say, that physicality is evil, like there's something better about spiritual reality and evil with physical reality.
But even if you don't go that far, what you're reading into this text in Romans 8 is that the creation is groaning for its destruction. Like it's, waiting to be destroyed because it was subject to futility. So, now it just wants to be destroyed, but that's not what the text says. It says it wants to be set free from its bondage to corruption and attain the freedom of the glory of the children of God. [00:23:00] So, what does that mean? The very next verse, in verse 22, it says that creation is groaning in childbirth, and we ourselves are groaning as we wait for adoption as sons. What that seems to suggest to me is that creation is part of our hope, that as we attain the glory that God gives us, this also fixes the problem of the futility of creation. We were created to have dominion over the earth, were we not? In Genesis 1, that's what it says. We were created to have dominion over the earth.
So, when creation is groaning, waiting for the glory of the children of God, it is so that we can take up our mantle of that dominion and do it properly. And creation wants [00:24:00] us to do that.
I would also like to point out that glory features so highly in this passage in Romans. And, of course, glory is something that I have been talking about quite a bit in my imaging series, particularly in the episodes with Joshua Sherman. And I think it's very enlightening that the idea of glory is closely associated with the imagery of light, because, of course, chaos could also be associated with the imagery of darkness.
And I just want to bring that up because a lot of times when we think of the theme of chaos in the Bible, we're primarily thinking of chaotic waters, right? But that is not the only imagery that the Bible uses for chaos. And so if we're restricting it to that, we're [00:25:00] going to miss out on a lot of things, and I think we're going to miss out on the underlying structure of the entire idea, really, which is the idea of disorder, the idea of moving away from God, which is moving away from God's glory.
So that's my suggestion to you. When you're thinking about this theme, and you're thinking about the purposes of creation, and what We're supposed to be doing here on Earth, it's a broader picture that we could be looping all of these things into all of that. Rather than simply being saved because we are sinful humans, we are saved because we are getting into a relationship with God where we are now manifesting His order in creation, which creates glory for Him and glory also for us because we [00:26:00] are God's imagers. The glory that we have as his imagers is not detracting from his glory. It is adding to it. Because the whole idea of being God's imagers is that we are his representatives. And as such, when we do things in creation that are amplifying God, we are doing that as his representatives. Like, that's part of the whole picture of what's going on here.
And I really think that's important to keep in mind because we do tend to really zone in into these more romantic ideas of the sea dragon and the chaos monster. And I'm not going to lie, I love those ideas. I love the pictures that they bring to mind and the things that that kind of imagery have. It really helps us [00:27:00] to see this theme throughout history, like I mentioned before, and also in our own lives, like when we watch Godzilla, that's what we're seeing is the chaos monster.
And we like that imagery. It's very primal. It's very deeply embedded within humanity. And we like seeing this idea of good versus evil, right? And we want the evil to kind of be a real threat. Otherwise, what's the point of it? But I'm going to admit here, like, chaos is not actually a threat to God.
And so, we see that and we might get a little bit disappointed sometimes, like, oh, really? God didn't actually have to battle a sea monster for reals?
And we think that's kind of [00:28:00] disappointing, it's a bit of a letdown if God's not actually doing that. But, listen, he... He kind of is because we are his representatives. So as we are combating the chaos, then we are actually performing this fight against evil in a very real way. Like it, it might be not as dramatic as we want. We might not have a big sword and hacking away at the dragon scales, but what we're doing is just as impactful as that kind of an action.
All right, so as far as that chaos beast and the imagery that it has in the Bible, let's actually get right into that part of the discussion about chaos, because there's a lot there. And in particular, I want to do this because I can loop into the [00:29:00] discussion in my previous episode, in episode, 31, where Michael Norton and I were reading Genesis 3, and we were talking about the serpent in the garden, and I was talking about Satan, and the Satan figure that gets developed throughout time. The theme of chaos is very much a part of that whole thing, and that whole picture.
First of all, I want to paint kind of a broad picture of what this looks like. And scholars look at all of this very closely, and they try and figure out where did this idea come from, and how did that idea develop, and there's a lot of good stuff to those kinds of studies.
But it's also the case that this topic, in particular, is such a wide ranging one. [00:30:00] That there's an entire matrix of ideas that fit within it. And the idea that we can just trace the exact development, I personally think that's a bit mistaken and too simplistic. Because these ideas stem from an extremely early and primal source.
And, you know, there might be very valid reasons for that as far as how we are looking at the Bible and seeing it as the Word of God and as truth and how these ideas do stem back into the dawnings of time or humanity or culture or religion or however you want to look at that kind of thing. In other words, they just hold a lot of truth.
One of the ways that we can really [00:31:00] see something as true, I think, is that you can bring it from different places and talk about it in different ways and layer these ideas all together into the same concept. Very rarely is truth something that you can just state in a very small summary statement.
In any case, In the 1800s, a lot of scholars thought that the idea of chaos stemmed primarily from the culture of Babylon, because what they were looking at were the texts from Babylon.
And if you remember or have listened to my episode about the Babylonian creation text Enuma Elish, you can really kind of see this direct connection. Just a quick recap, [00:32:00] in that story, you have a battle between Marduk and Tiamat, who is the Chaos Dragon. So, if you're a scholar and that's the kind of material you have to work with, well, it's pretty easy to say, hey look! The idea for the story came from Babylon, because we have this earlier text where the God is battling the Chaos Dragon, and we see all of these different parallels to what we see in the Bible.
Now, that's fair enough, because that's what they had to work with. But in 1928, there was a discovery in the city of Ugarit. Now, Ugarit is a Canaanite city, not a Mesopotamian or Babylonian city. And here, they found temples to Baal. This is where we get the texts [00:33:00] about the god El and Dagon. So these are all exceptionally embedded in the biblical narrative.
Not that Babylon is not, because we have quite a few connections to Babylon in the Bible, but of course we also want to be seeing these connections within the area of Canaan as well, and that is what we found when we had this discovery in Ugarit. In addition, there were piles of texts that were found at Ugarit.
And in these texts, we also see this direct parallel of creation narratives with the defeat of the sea and the sea monster. And all of these texts from Ugarit are actually earlier than what we have from Babylon.
Alright, we are not going to get into all [00:34:00] of these text critical issues as to where it came from, and what influence it had on this text over here, and what influence it had on that text over there.
What we can absolutely see, crystal clearly, is that this whole theme is very broad, very wide, and it stretches through time to an incredible degree. And, you know, we even have the question of why are there Western dragons and Eastern dragons, you know, from China, from the Chinese dragon to the feathered serpent of South America, to the chaos serpent of Egypt, all of these things are so very similar.
It's just a super interesting thing to see, and I don't think that this is anything that we can really pin down definitively in the way that scholars [00:35:00] want to, but their discussions are quite interesting.
I think one of the cautions we need to have when we are looking throughout history and time, however, is that the theme and the imagery does not always mean the exact same thing in every case. I mean, we can even see that within the Bible.
When Moses raises the serpent staff, we aren't supposed to think that it is chaos, which is healing the people of Israel, right? And seraphs and cherubim and throne guardians, that kind of imagery, those are also not chaos beasts, right? So, so we do have to take care and not just apply something overall, because when we overreach our interpretation, then suddenly, it might be the case where something means everything, [00:36:00] and then it means nothing because you have over applied it.
One way to prevent that is to make sure that when you are trying to hyperlink things in the text, then you need to find more than one correspondence within the theme.
For instance, we apply the concept of the seraph to the serpent figure in Genesis, not simply because of the serpent imagery, but also because the serpent is found within sacred space, and the word used for the serpent can also have a potential meaning of shining or bronze, as well as being that clever and crafty creature.
So then our question is, Is the serpent in Genesis the Chaos Dragon? Is that the [00:37:00] same thing? I actually find this to be an exceptionally interesting question. It seems very obvious. We want to jump to, Yes, he is, because he is described as the dragon in Revelation 12, right?
We're making that connection from Genesis 3 , and as readers of the entire Bible, that can be fair to us on this side of interpretation. But there might also be more to think about there. If we think of chaos being the opposite of creation, if we think of chaos being the opposite of God's glory, then, the serpent certainly introduced those elements into the creation in a way that they hadn't been there before.
And this is actually a really massive [00:38:00] deal when you think about the serpent being a throne guardian. The throne guardian being the creature who is closest to God, and this is the creature who is introducing Chaos, and taking us away from God's glory.
This isn't at all the same as what we see in the Babylonian accounts or in the Ugarit accounts where we have the God battling the sea monster. We don't have God battling the sea monster in Genesis. There are echoes of that theme in other places, such as in Job, but we don't have any hint of that really in Genesis. Chaos in Genesis 1, it's just, it's a passive thing, where the Spirit of God is hovering over it. And the sea monsters are just another creation of God in day 4 of [00:39:00] creation.
So we don't see this cosmic battle. And yet we do see this potential chaos serpent entering the story. And who is he doing battle with? He's not going head to head with God. He is going head to head with humanity.
So is that fundamentally the same idea, but really put on its head? Because if we are God's representatives on earth, and we are the ones doing the battle with the chaos monster, that's a massive difference from what we see in the pagan literature.
And we, it might not look as dramatic because it doesn't have the big fight scene, right? Eve doesn't have any weapons.
But what do we see in the book of Ephesians? We are to put on the armor of God, and our [00:40:00] sword is the Word of God. And who or what is the Word of God? We often think of that as the scriptures, right, the Bible, what we're reading. And that might be the case of what it's referring to here: actual words or the things that we're speaking or possibly the things we're reading. The Greek term here that is translated as word, is not Logos, which is what we have in John 1 and elsewhere, which directly refers to Christ. So this possibly is Scripture, but a little bit of further reading, Paul talks about the Gospel and proclaiming the Gospel. So, quite possibly, what he's saying is that our proclamation of the gospel is our offensive weapon.
Anyway, even though we might not see this [00:41:00] as some really dramatic fight scene, we are on the front lines, and we are battling chaos.
In any case, if the serpent is... Effectively, the Chaos Dragon, then what we have in Genesis is a fascinating twist on the story of Chaos Kampf, as the Germans like to say. The struggle of chaos, or the war against chaos, that the god of a religion is fighting this chaos beast. So, Adam and Eve, they fail at defeating the chaos monster, and because they fail, more chaos is then unleashed upon the world.
So now we have a world of incredible disorder, and it's not just a problem with humanity. Because we see [00:42:00] that even those closest to God, the throne guardians, they introduce chaos into the world. So, if even the, the beings who are closest to God, who, who are enveloped in God's glory continuously, if even they can fall and fail and introduce this element of chaos, drawing us away from God, then what hope do we have as poor mortal humanity?
And going back to Romans 8, which has humanity and creation tied together so closely, it seems that what we can say is that our revelation as adopted sons of God, our salvation through the work of Jesus, not only is impacting us, but all of creation. So it's not just that we are waiting [00:43:00] for this world to pass away so we can get to heaven when we die.
It is that our ultimate purpose in creation can actually reach its fulfillment. We can actually do that. We can actually be what God created us to be. We can order the world and we can fight against the chaos through fulfilling this role.
I don't know. If you've listened to me for a while, you know I get a bit excited about this kind of thing. Because our lives are so important. What we do, it's so important. And it's not that we have this checklist of things to do so that we can be perfect little people because God demands that of us. No.
It's that we were made to be participants with God in the [00:44:00] ruling of this world in the right way. I don't know what can be more exciting than that. I don't know what can be more dramatic than that. Even the slaying of a dragon somewhere. That's, like, like if you were being terrorized by that dragon in a village, you know, that would be pretty important for someone to come along and do.
But we're talking about all of creation here and the entire purposes of everything. I don't know. I don't see how you don't get excited about that.
Alright, anyway, I want to tie up this episode by connecting back to my previous episode where I was talking about the Satan figure. And, particularly about what I said about him in Job, and, , this stems partially from a discussion [00:45:00] in my Facebook group, , from some comments by somebody I don't know. And I don't know if he wants me to name him, so I'll just use his first name. , this was Joseph, and he made some really good comments that I would like to kind of loop into this discussion.
For those who haven't listened to my previous episode, or maybe need a little bit of a reminder, what I was talking about referring to the Satan figure in Job, is that the writer of Job wouldn't necessarily have been making a connection with the adversary, the Satan, in the early part of Job, with the serpent figure of Genesis 3.
And Joseph took a little bit of disagreement with that, which... is fair, he brought up some really great points. If you're not a part of my Facebook discussion group, you should probably go there because we do occasionally have some really good [00:46:00] conversation and we would have even more if you were there to help us talk about things.
So, so part of what he brought out were some verses that kind of showed this connection of God versus a cosmic adversary. And part of this is because you do not just jump from Genesis 3 to Revelation 12 without anything at all in between, and that's fair enough. I mean, I would agree with that.
The question in my mind, however, is, is this an aspect of progressive revelation where we have earlier writers who might not have really been connecting all of the dots and then, then we have later writers who are connecting all of those dots.
So the question as far as the book of Job [00:47:00] is, would the author of Job be making those connections, or would it be that the author of Job doesn't quite make those connections but somebody later does?
Job of course has the longest description of the being Leviathan that we have in the entire Bible. And I certainly don't want to say that Leviathan isn't a chaos beast here, because he most certainly is.
And any chaos beast is going to be an enemy to God, right? That's just something that comes along with the territory. And there is some language of God subduing this beast, right? in Job 41, it talks about drawing Leviathan out with a fish hook, putting a rope in him like he's being [00:48:00] tamed. It talks about a battle. It suggests that if Job tried to battle him, he wouldn't do it again. So there's a suggestion of a battle there. So definitely, this is one of those places, those actually really quite rare places in the Bible where we have suggestions of God battling a chaos monster.
This isn't something I'm going to disagree with at all. Like, this is very common imagery. It's, it's tamer than the pagan literature, but we have very much the suggestion of God versus chaos, and chaos tends to be personified in, Leviathan, or the character of Rahab elsewhere, and we have just general descriptions of sea dragons or sea monsters, and God versus just chaotic water in general.
So we have all of these [00:49:00] ideas that are definitely floating around. I mean, the question for the Satan figure is, he actually looped into all of that? Or is he separate from all of that? it's also the case that Rahab in particular is connected with the nation of Egypt. And so we have, we can also loop in all of the Exodus imagery of the people going through the sea and all of that. So this is a very complex and detailed picture that we have moving throughout all of Scripture.
And the reason I think we can also connect this to the work of Jesus is because it is both creation imagery and it is also eschatological imagery. That, that's just a fancy word for the end times. We have the chaos at the beginning being [00:50:00] introduced, the chaos being dealt with in the work of Christ and the chaos being dealt with in full consummation at the end of time. And this imagery of the serpent goes through all of that and, and we see that from Genesis with the serpent throughout other texts in the Old Testament, we see Jesus interacting with Satan in the temptation narrative in the wilderness. Remember, wilderness is an image of chaos. We have death being defeated and Satan being connected with death, being the ruler of this world. And if this world is a chaotic world, then Satan is the chaotic quote unquote god of this world. And the ultimate defeat of the dragon. And so all of this just goes throughout the whole [00:51:00] narrative of everything.
And that's why I really think that this is a much broader theme than just our personal sin being the entire problem, right? Not that it's not a problem. I will always admit that it is a problem and that that's, that's part of the work of Christ, but let's look broader at that.
Okay, but here's a couple of points that Joseph brings up with the connection of the Satan in Job and the nachash of Genesis 3. He says that both try to, quote, cast doubt into others minds about someone's character, end quote from Joseph. This is a really interesting point, and I think this is why we read the narrative and we're like, well, look, the, that adversary, whoever he is, he doesn't seem [00:52:00] to be rightly portraying anybody. Right. And so I really like this point. This, this is a really fascinating point to me. Joseph is making the point that the Satan is acting like a slanderer. And that's what the devil is, that that's. It's kind of the devil's modus operandi, that's just what he does. So it's, it's very easy for us to see what the adversary in Job is doing is the same thing that the serpent did in Genesis 3, seems to be kind of the same thing that Satan is doing in the temptation wilderness with Jesus.
So I really think that these are good points to bring up. if you've heard of Dr. Heiser talking about this subject and saying, Well, the adversary might just be a [00:53:00] job description, and this might just be what he is supposed to be doing, challenging things for God so that the righteousness of God can prevail and we can see the truth of people's characters and things like that.
And I think part of the reason he says that is because we do see God testing people. And this is, part of my conversation that I want to have within, or at least connected to, my curse series. Because we do see trials and temptations and tests in the Bible, and they're not always the same thing. Like a temptation from an evil being is not the same as somebody being tested by God himself. So to me, it's a really open ended question here. Is [00:54:00] the adversary working in God's employ, being part of the mechanism that God uses to test people so that people can know where they stand with God, so that people can grow in their relationship and faith in God and all of that.
Or is the adversary genuinely acting like a tempter who would be the opposite of what God is doing when he's testing people. I hope that kind of makes sense to you. This is something I will be getting into more later, actually, coincidentally, I've been working through a lot of these thoughts in trying to understand what the difference is between temptation and trial, or tests, and how we can really even use those different words in our vocabulary to get across the point that [00:55:00] we want to be making because God is not a tempter in the way that the serpent was tempting Eve.
That's not what God does, but God did place the tree in the garden and that could be seen as a test. So to me, it's still a bit open ended whether the adversary in Job is a genuine tempter or whether he is in God's employ . It does kind of seem more like he's being the tempter there.
The question a lot of people have is why would Satan be in God's throne room? Wasn't he already cast out after Genesis 3? Well, yeah, but, you know, chronology is a funny thing, and I think that sometimes we're not really supposed to read these stories like, this happened before this, and this happened before that. We should be [00:56:00] reading the story as a whole in and of itself. So trying to fit them together like a really long puzzle... I don't really think that's what we're meant to do because, remember, when they, these books were written, people were reading individual books. They weren't bound together in one single book. So, even though they were part of the conceptual framework of the minds, It wasn't necessarily thought that this came first, then this came .
In fact, a lot of times, they probably didn't even have the other text available to them to read, so they weren't thinking any of that to begin with.
So, yeah, it's a really interesting question, and I really appreciate Joseph for bringing that up, and I think that I will be talking more about that on Facebook, so come join us there. And I will also [00:57:00] be looping this into some further episodes in a few weeks, I think.
But all that being said, I didn't talk nearly as much about Leviathan and Rahab and dragons as I thought that I maybe would in this episode, but that's okay because there are future episodes that could be had, and if you're interested, it's actually the case that this, the weekend that this is coming out, I should be on a live stream with a YouTube channel that I work with called Myths, Mystery, and Majesty.
And I will be putting that link in the show notes and I will be trying to link my live stream in the show notes as well once that happens. For those who are interested in the topic of chaos, we are going to be getting into that as far as the Old Testament and the Ancient Near Eastern perspective of it.
[00:58:00] We will be talking a lot more about chaos, dragons, and all of that there. So if you are interested in more of that, you can actually get it really soon. Or it might already be out if you're listening to this a few days after it's posted.
So, I guess it's about time to wrap up this episode, and thank you once again for listening.
I am so excited that you guys listen. This amazes me. It really does, and I really appreciate it. I appreciate all of you who listen. I appreciate those of you who email me or who leave me reviews, and I really thank you so much for sharing my episodes wherever you can because that's one of the best ways to get the word out about my podcast to those others who might like to listen and who would enjoy the content. So I really [00:59:00] appreciate you all I'm still working on that newsletter.
So you can go to my website at genesismarksthespot.com and you can put your email there to receive my newsletter when I've got that worked up and also you can leave reviews there, you can leave comments on my individual episode pages, there's just so much to do on, on my website there. I'm so excited about it.
And if you just want to email me, I can be reached at genesismarksthespot@gmail. com. So I guess that is all for now. And I hope that whatever chaos that you personally are dealing with this week, I hope that you can get through it okay, , I hope that you're bringing that to God and finding some solace in prayer and scripture. And overall, I just wish you all a blessed week. And we will see you later.[01:00:00]
