Episode Transcript
Carey Griffel: 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 before I get into today's episode, I am going to let you know that I'm going to try something with my episodes. I think I'm going to do a little bit less editing than I normally do because it does take me a lot of time and I'm wondering how much difference it actually makes.
[00:00:38] Is it actually worth all the time I put into it, or am I just kind of spinning my wheels for no reason whatsoever. But I'm gonna try to edit it less, and I would like to see what your reaction to that is. So if you notice a change and you notice a difference in this episode, and if it bothers you, then please do let me know.
[00:01:02] Again, I'm not gonna not edit it at all, but I'm gonna try to make it a little bit more efficient for myself. So if it bothers you, please let me know because I would rather spend the time to edit it if it makes a difference. But if it doesn't really make that much of a difference, then I don't want to put in as many hours as I actually do for the editing process. I would rather spend those hours doing things like reading, researching, talking to all of you, and doing something other than editing. Editing is not something I particularly enjoy. So at any rate, you guys can give me some feedback on that. I would appreciate it.
[00:01:46] But today we're going to continue the theme of water, and I'm going to get into the idea of purification. Now, I know there is a whole lot of other things that I haven't traced yet and that I've kind of touched on, but this is kind of the big deal about water and baptism and ritual.
[00:02:06] So we're gonna get into this in particular today. And aside from the idea of purification, I also wanna talk a good bit about hermeneutics in general. Now, remember, hermeneutics is just our interpretive toolkit that we use when we go and read Scripture. We actually have a toolkit that we bring to that reading. We read it in particular ways using particular methods. And this is the realm of hermeneutics. This is kind of a fancy word, and you may or may not have heard your pastor or somebody else talk about it.
[00:02:44] Unfortunately, I think that the tendency is to talk about it in too simplistic a way. Quite often we act like hermeneutics is only one thing, or it can only be one thing, or it can only look one way and thus be valid hermeneutics. And if you've listened to my other recent episodes, you'll know that that's really not my position. And I've talked a good bit about different ideas and different ways that we approach Scripture.
[00:03:17] Part of the important reason why we need to understand hermeneutics is so that we can understand each other and we're not talking past each other when we're speaking about things in the realm of Scripture or Bible study.
[00:03:33] The fact is we all have different hermeneutics. We all prioritize different things differently, and that is not to say that there aren't good and bad hermeneutics and that we can't put it on some spectrum of judgment as far as that goes. I do think we can, because there are some methods and tools that are simply more valid than others, and they're going to get you more bang for your buck when you're looking in Scripture.
[00:04:05] But we also need to realize and deeply appreciate the fact that all of our interpretive methods are rooted in our own context. That means that our hermeneutics is not like the hermeneutics of the past, and that's something we have to wrestle with. It's a difficult thing.
[00:04:26] This is a biblical theology podcast. And as such, what I'm doing is digging into the context of Scripture, and honestly, through most of history, we haven't had that ability or even just that general way of thinking. Our modern way of exploring Scripture is very much rooted in things like the epistemology of the enlightenment and understanding the way that the world is.
[00:04:57] Some of us have hermeneutics that we would call more fundamentalist than others. And we tend to use those kinds of words as battering rams, don't we? Like, oh, you're liberal, or you're conservative, or you're progressive, or you're fundamentalist, or whatever else. And we use those terms in pejorative ways.
[00:05:23] Now, that's not to say that they can't also be used in descriptive ways. There's reasons that these terms exist. And they can be applied to certain types of interpretations, certain types of traditions and all of that kind of thing. But we do need to be careful that we're not just straw manning other positions and we're not just putting them down because they don't interpret like I do, therefore their interpretation is trash or it's not valid, or it's a misunderstanding of Scripture or perhaps that it is not a biblical worldview.
[00:06:03] Last week I talked about ritual and our understanding of ritual, what it is, what it does, and different ways that various traditions approach the idea of baptism. I did that so that we could see the variety of views and get those in our heads as we're thinking about these things.
[00:06:26] Now another reason that I'm getting into hermeneutics in particular in this episode is because one of my questions that we're going to explore is the question of which came first. Purity or holiness and sacred space.
[00:06:44] Now you often hear those combined and talked about at the same time, and there's really good reasons for that. And I will hear different people from different types of interpretive zones who say that you have to understand God's holiness, but what they mean by understanding God's holiness is not always the same thing, and I think it might be a little bit surprising for people to understand holiness in the way that I'm going to suggest that we understand it.
[00:07:16] There's a reason for that. And the reason is my hermeneutics. The way that I am approaching Scripture is not the way that other people always approach Scripture. Hopefully that's kind of obvious to you at this point, I'm certainly not hiding anything as far as my interpretive methods and my hermeneutics.
[00:07:39] So we're gonna talk about the purity frame today. We're gonna talk about the holiness frame as well, and we're gonna talk about why we think and believe what we do. And I'm saying that those things are based on a whole slew of presuppositions and teaching and presumption of how the world works and how God works. And how Scripture is revealing these things.
[00:08:07] In the Evangelical and Protestant world in particular, we're often very concerned about doctrine, dogma, mechanics, and how things work. So therefore, we have the questions like, is baptism salvific? What is the order of salvation? Who is saved? How does atonement work? We need to understand its mechanisms, and oh, by the way, don't worry, it's only symbolic. That's kind of strange to me because you have the same people who are talking about mechanisms and all of these ideas like this versus the idea of, well, it doesn't really do anything because it's just symbolic.
[00:08:54] And then you have people who are in the middle of that who are thinking mechanisms and who are thinking that things are symbolic. But that doesn't necessarily mean that ritual and practice and metaphor even don't have real impact in the world. Right? So we have a range of ideas here, but what I'll bring out here first is this idea of a Christological lens for Scripture. This is the primary thing that I believe as Christians we should be focused on.
[00:09:28] I think that Jesus should be our primary lens for Scripture. Now the problem with that, and I put problem there in quotes. Is that Jesus came in the middle of time, we might say, right? He came after the Old Testament was written, after people were already writing theological ideas and understood in some sense of who God was because God had revealed himself to the people in the past, right?
[00:09:59] But the revelation of Jesus is new. It's different, it's special, it's unique. Jesus is the full and complete revelation of God because he is the second person of the Godhead, right? So there is a real reason why it's very important to focus on Jesus in regards to Scripture. Okay, so first of all, I'm not trying to dismantle any of that, but I will say that there's two ways that you can do this. Well, there's probably more ways than this, but I'm going to talk about two different ways that we can have a Christological lens.
[00:10:40] One of those ways is a Christo centric lens. Now, I don't have any visuals here because this is just an audio podcast, but I want you to imagine the timeline of history. I want you to imagine the Old Testament and the New Testament existing on a spectrum, kind of like a timeline, right? And Jesus comes kind of somewhere in the middle of that.
[00:11:09] So a christocentric lens for reading Scripture is like you see Jesus, and he's radiating out the meaning to all of Scripture. So you can picture Jesus standing there in the middle of the timeline and arrows moving from Jesus to the whole timeline through all of Scripture. Because Jesus is the meaning of it all. So he's the center of it. This is why we call it a christocentric view of Scripture, a christocentric lens.
[00:11:46] Now, I'm having you picture that because what you're looking at here is all of these arrows or things that are radiating out from Jesus as the center, and he's pointing to all of Scripture. Now, the Christocentric lens means that when you read Scripture, you can read it in light of Jesus.
[00:12:08] And it's often like Jesus is being put back into the text. Now, this is less a problem in the New Testament because Jesus is standing right there. And so all of the New Testament is clearly centered and coming from Jesus, right? But the Old Testament, all of these interpretive rays are kind of moving back from the New Testament into the Old Testament, and the tendency is to put meaning from the New Testament into the Old Testament.
[00:12:40] So maybe you can see my bit of difficulty I have with this kind of a lens. Now, I am not saying necessarily that it's always wrong or that we shouldn't do this, but I'm trying to show a light on what exactly is going on here.
[00:13:00] Part of the thing here is that there's a presumption or a possibility at least that nobody could understand the Old Testament before Jesus came along because nobody had a Christological lens, because Jesus hadn't come yet. You see the problem here. The problem is that the Old Testament really doesn't have much meaning, or it can't have much meaning until the time of Jesus.
[00:13:30] And I personally have a big problem with that because like I said, God has been revealing himself through time, and that's what we see in the Old Testament.
[00:13:41] Now, of course, you can still acknowledge a both and kind of a thing going on here, right? You can acknowledge that God is revealing himself in the Old Testament, but usually people will say something like, well, it's not perfect. It's not complete. It's not really the full revelation of God.
[00:14:03] Now again, I just said that Jesus is the full revelation of God. So I will agree with that, but I will still say that this presumption that we can't understand the Old Testament without Jesus is a real problem because the Old Testament is supposed to lead up to Jesus. People were supposed to understand who Jesus was and understand his revelation because of the Old Testament.
[00:14:33] So that leads me to the second way we could have a Christological lens. The second way is often described by people like John Walton. John Walton uses the term Christotelic. The term Christo telic is based on the telos or goal or purpose of Scripture. So it is saying that Jesus is the ultimate aim of Scripture, right?
[00:15:06] So we're gonna go back to our image of the chronological timeline of Scripture, and we're going to put those arrows back in. But instead of Jesus being in the middle and the arrows moving out from Jesus towards all of Scripture, we're going to have all of the arrows from Scripture point towards Jesus.
[00:15:27] So again, Jesus is the center, but here in a Christo Telec view, we don't have to import Jesus back into the Old Testament in order to understand the Old Testament. We can first understand the Old Testament on its own terms and then see how that is pointing towards Christ. That is a different interpretive method than what we have when we import Jesus from the New Testament back into the Old Testament.
[00:16:01] I hope that makes sense. To sum that up, a Christocentric reading reads meaning back into the text. But a Christo telic reading allows for the past meaning of the text to exist to point toward Jesus. And if you've listened to this podcast for long, you'll probably see why I am drawn to a Christo telic reading of the text, because I absolutely think that God has revealed himself through time and that the Bible is revelatory of those actions of God.
[00:16:36] A lot of times we call this salvation history, and so what we have in the Old Testament is just as much a revelation of God. It's not as full and complete as when we get to Jesus, because again, Jesus is the full revelation of God on earth. But just because Jesus is the full revelation of God on Earth does not mean we discount the past revelation.
[00:17:04] Now this brings me to my case in point, which is the idea of purification. I'm going to go a little bit further than this interpretive method of just looking at Scripture, and I'm going to suggest we can do the same kind of interpretive moves through history and through understanding of people at large.
[00:17:26] Because the Bible does not just come onto the scene of the ancient Near East as if nobody understood the ideas that are being presented within it. The Old Testament is very centered in its original context. And so what we have in Scripture is very like what we have in the ancient Near East at large and all of those ideas that they were situated in at the time, all of those came from previous ideas.
[00:17:58] Now, some of our hermeneutics will then go on and say, well, this is because there was an even earlier revelation from God or earlier interactions between God and people that gave the people these things. And I'm not discounting that hermeneutic. I'm not trying to put it to the side or put it down.
[00:18:22] But I am gonna say that that hermeneutic is not an exegetical one. Again, that doesn't mean it's bad. Exegesis is not absolutely everything because exegesis is only about the meaning in the text, and certainly everything that God has done in history is not contained in the text. I would absolutely believe that.
[00:18:49] But the idea that some of the things that we see in the culture of the time were revealed back in the past that we don't really know about, that's a particular hermeneutical move. I think it's a possibly valid one, but we need to be careful in saying that it's exegetical because it's really just not. We have to make some presumptions there.
[00:19:14] So then that's going to bring us to something like the Levitical system. We read Leviticus and we think that it must be about moral purification and it must be about ethics primarily because that's what we are concerned about. And that's kind of what the New Testament is talking about primarily.
[00:19:37] And then we say things like, well, the Old Testament Levitical system couldn't do what Jesus does. And I mean, it couldn't, but was it trying to do the same things that Jesus is doing?
[00:19:54] I think that this kind of idea comes from a Christocentric reading of the text where we are reading what Jesus did and we're inputting that back in the text instead of letting Leviticus move forward to Jesus. I mean, obviously if you look back at Leviticus and you think it's a system to forgive sin, well it doesn't work.
[00:20:18] You have to do all of these things to be purified. We have to ask how and why and why is it about houses and why is it about childbirth and why is it about all of these things that really don't have anything to do with sin or ethics. But because we're reading Jesus back into the Levitical system, we kinda shrug our shoulders and go, I don't know. It just must be about this in some sort of metaphorical way for people to understand something about ethics.
[00:20:51] And maybe that's just not the case. What if the Levitical system is not about moral purification primarily so that God can forgive the people? What if it was never intended to do that to begin with? What if it had a different meaning and purpose entirely?
[00:21:14] What if we read it Christotelicly and Jesus can still be better in that? We just need to understand what is he better at? Why is he better? What is he doing that is better? Because it's entirely possible that what Jesus is doing is something that goes beyond the Levitical system, and that means that the Levitical system can point to Jesus, but it does not have to encompass everything that Jesus is doing.
[00:21:46] Now again, I brought in the course of history into this discussion of hermeneutics. The reason is that what we can see in the ancient Near East at large, they had a purification system and it was there for particular reasons. And those reasons are often very similar to the reasons we have in Scripture. I know that makes some people uncomfortable. Again, this is going back to our hermeneutical principles and the presuppositions and the tools that we're using to read Scripture with.
[00:22:22] So I understand if this is uncomfortable. If you don't like it, I understand. If it doesn't fit with the way you're reading Scripture, and I'm not trying to argue with you there, I'm just saying that there is a difference here in hermeneutics. And there are multiple valid ways that you can be doing this, and if we argue too much about that, we're not really getting anywhere else in the conversation.
[00:22:49] Now, I said I wanna talk about purification versus holiness because I think one of those ideas may have come first in the course of human thought. Again, we're bringing a little bit of actual historical information here because we have at least some information about ancient cultic systems.
[00:23:14] And when I use the word cultic here, I'm just talking about like the official religious system that people are using in order to interact with God or the gods, in a religious fashion. I'm not using the word cult there in a modern sense, where we might talk about Christianity versus Christian cults or something. I'm just using it in a very technical way and it doesn't mean anything bad. I'm just talking about the religious practices that include things like ritual, sacred space, a distinction between humans and deity, and all of these ideas here.
[00:23:56] The relationship of purification and holiness is going to depend greatly on how you understand holiness. And again, I'm going to draw upon this Christocentric versus Christo telic way of reading Scripture. Because a lot of us with the Christocentric view and we see what Jesus is doing, we see what he's talking about, and there is simply less impact and less discussion about a ritual purity system than there is about ethical considerations.
[00:24:34] Now, I'm not saying that ethics are not part of the Old Testament or the Levitical system. But I'm going to be bringing out a few points here that are going to show that the Old Testament Levitical system, the purity rituals of the ancient Near East at large, they are not all centered on moral ethics. They're just not. There is a purpose and a logic behind them though, and that purpose and logic is holiness.
[00:25:06] What is holiness? That is one of our questions here. If we presume that the Levitical system is about holiness, and then we further presume that the Levitical system is about moral ethics, then usually we're going to equate holiness with moral ethics. If something is holy, then it is sinless or it's perfect. And we'll bring in the word righteous here, and we kind of put all of these ideas into one box.
[00:25:40] So a modern conceptual frame of holiness often has to do with sin and morality. In fact, that's usually the core of it. God being holy means that he is sinless and perfect and righteous in a way that is ethical, that encompasses our idea of holiness.
[00:26:02] And again, there is a reason for that because when we go into the New Testament in particular, and we look at the ideas of holiness and we look at the ideas of purity, and we look at this conceptual matrix, it is absolutely attached to behavior, sin and all of these ideas.
[00:26:24] So when we're coming at these scriptural ideas and we're starting in the New Testament, basically, then this is what we're pulling away from it. To us, holiness means that you are behaving well, that you are not sinning.
[00:26:40] And I am going to suggest to you that actually we should understand holiness from an ancient mindset where it is all about God's divine godly otherness. Right? Many of you probably have heard the definition of holiness or holy as something that is set apart. Now, we usually are still looping in the sinless aspect here, right?
[00:27:07] We will acknowledge that it is set apart for God, but then that obviously means it's just morally perfect or sinless, or at least it's supposed to be. That's the core nature of holiness.
[00:27:22] I think that part of our understanding of God is also colored with the classical attributes of God, right? He is omnipresent, omniscient, omnipotent. You know, all of these omni aspects of God along with some other things. Those are the biggest qualities that we have of God in our heads, and rightly so.
[00:27:45] I'm not dismantling any of that, but we do have to acknowledge that these omni attributes did show up in human thinking at a particular time. Again, this is why I'm looking into historical hermeneutics. When you have ideas that show up in particular time, and they do they, they just do, people get really irritated when I try and talk about things like this sometimes.
[00:28:14] I get a lot of pushback and that's actually fine, by the way. I love pushback and I love these conversations, but part of my point seems to often get lost. When I say that some ideas and concepts and even theology shows up in time and it was not there in the past, I'm not trying to dismantle the fact that the Bible and revelation are based on God who knows everything. And surely, even if people didn't know these things, God did. Therefore, there are parts of these ideas in Scripture.
[00:28:52] I mean, maybe. That's a way to see it. But I think again, that's Christocentric and not Christo telic. I believe that there's a way to understand history and Scripture and revelation that gives credence to the fact that we should not be imposing later ideas on the people in the past and acting like if they didn't have these later ideas, then surely they didn't understand God or they didn't have a good conception of God, or they didn't have an understanding of the afterlife or who God is or whatever else.
[00:29:31] It just feels to me like we are putting ourselves or later people on a pedestal compared to earlier people, and we're not able to really understand the earlier interpretations, the earlier ideas, the earlier revelation, and I believe we have to. I believe that's important because I believe those people in the past are just as much a part of the people of God as we are today together.
[00:29:59] And just like we can talk together and help each other have better ideas as we talk together, we can also converse with the people in the past because they also had good ideas and their ideas and their theology and their understanding of God should help us understand God better today as well. Instead of just understanding things from a modern hermeneutical perspective, we can loop in the past and we can loop in those ideas and we can see how those are also faithful understandings of who God is and what God's purposes are in reality.
[00:30:41] And what we see in the ancient context is that holiness as an attribute only belongs to God. It is who he is. The reason it's kind of hard to define holiness is because it just kind of encompasses who God is. So while that absolutely encompasses things like morality and ethics, God is not only God because he's moral, he is God because He's God.
[00:31:12] He is God, and he is fully other than us. And so that's why we have this idea of "set apartness" that is involved with the idea of holiness. If holy was a communicable quality that God gave to things or people, then when God gave that holiness to someone, then they would have some sort of quality.
[00:31:36] And that's kind of this idea of moral sinlessness or perfection or righteousness. When something is made holy, then there's this idea that, oh, that means it's perfect. Well, what if that's not what it means? What if it mainly just means that it belongs to God? And that's about as good as you can say.
[00:31:59] The reason why I need to talk about holiness here is because the cultic system of purity was designed for a holy deity to dwell with them. This was across the board in the ancient Near East. Yahweh God was not the only one who was said to be holy. The other deities also were holy. They needed a set apart place to be worshiped as well, which is why you have ancient Near Eastern temples and sacred spaces and altars.
[00:32:34] So again, the Levitical system or any other ancient cultic purity system was designed for the divine to dwell with the people in some way. This is not strictly or solely because the people were sinful, that they needed a system to allow this. But the cultic system was designed for purification of space because holiness, being other than everything else around you, being sacred means that you can't have a set apart other in your midst without first some house cleaning.
[00:33:15] It's not really that a holy God can't be in the presence of sin, like that's somehow impossible, it's that there is no other holy space without actively setting it apart from the common space.
[00:33:31] So now let's talk a little bit about holy versus common and clean versus unclean. This is why I'm talking about purity and holiness together because I think you have to, but they're not the same thing. They're definitely related, but they're not the same.
[00:33:51] So you can think of it as two spectrums. You have holy versus common and clean versus unclean. Here's another reason why we shouldn't presume that holy just means not sinful, because if we presume that holy means not sinful, then we are bringing in the idea of sinfulness to commonness, and it's simply not the same thing. There wasn't anything sinful about being common. There wasn't even anything sinful about being unclean necessarily.
[00:34:28] Okay, so I want you to think of these two spectrums, ho ly and common, and clean and unclean. So you can have something that is holy and clean. That's good. But if you unite something that is holy and unclean, then you're gonna have some destruction going on there because the holiness will obliterate the uncleanliness. It's kind of like a powder keg there.
[00:34:56] Now you can also have common and clean. So something that is common, but clean is not necessarily holy. So then you can have something that is common and unclean and you're not getting any explosive powder kegs there, because the unclean is not touching the holy.
[00:35:17] Then you have the combination of holy and common, and this is also destroyed, or perhaps it's just outright impossible to do this.
[00:35:26] And it gets complicated because again, there's intersection, but there's not complete overlap. And that can be hard for us to wrap our minds around.
[00:35:37] And incidentally, I kind of think this is one reason why Jesus is the better version of things, because he has actually united the holy and the common in himself as he became incarnate. When God became incarnate man, then he united the holy and the common to himself.
[00:36:01] But anyway, getting back to our point here, purification has to come before the idea of holiness. Now of course, our record and understanding of ancient ritual is a little bit patchy because we don't have everything written down. We don't have all of the records of the past to understand what they're doing. And we certainly don't always understand why they're doing what they're doing. But we do have some texts and we do have some explanation as well.
[00:36:33] Now, I also want to point out here what we have going on here in Leviticus is a system that is going to allow the holy God to live with the people. This means that the system is going to have to deal with impurity. The system is not obliterating commonness or anything like that because the whole goal is for a holy God to dwell with a common humanity and the combination there, again, it's not about a holy, sinless God living with a sinful humanity, even though those are parts of the equation.
[00:37:11] But this is why we have to look at Leviticus as a whole and for what it is actually doing and how it presents itself. It is not, entirely, fully, completely, and utterly a sin management system. Yes, it dealt with impurity and it dealt with some sin, but that's because sin did make people impure, and it was something that had to be dealt with inside the system to create sacred space.
[00:37:42] You can think of it as an umbrella or like a Venn diagram. The idea of sin and ethics fits inside the idea of holiness and cleanliness and purity, but it does not encompass it. There is a broader picture there. And that is hard for us today, because we are on this side of things and we are much more focused on ethics and behavior and morality than we are about ritual purity.
[00:38:15] And there's a reason for that because Jesus did do away with the ritual purification system. That is absolutely something that we see in Jesus. We no longer have to do certain things in order to approach God. We don't have to do the things to draw near to God that people in the ancient Near East saw themselves as having to do.
[00:38:40] And in addition to that, remember I've mentioned this several times already. The reason I decided not to get into baptism yet, but talk about covenant first is because that's also related to all of these things. You don't get Leviticus without the incident at Sinai, without the people being in covenant relationship with God.
[00:39:04] Now, this is actually very different from the ancient Near East because the gods were not seen to be in covenant with their people. Their people were reaching out to the deities in order to try and have some benefit and blessing from them in their cultic context. But the gods did not come down and say, I am going to have a covenant relationship with you.
[00:39:31] I am choosing you as my people. That is not what we see in other ancient literature. This is what we have in the Bible. We have the revelation of God giving us this situation where he is coming down, choosing his people to be in covenant with, saying, I want to be in covenant with you. He sets up the covenant, and then once that covenant is set up, then the people are like, well, okay, now we need a system in order for God to be here with us.
[00:40:03] And that system is very similar to the larger ancient Near Eastern system in general. In order for the god to dwell with the people, he needs some sort of space to dwell in. And in order to have the space for the god to dwell in, that has to be a ritually, pure and set apart space. So then we have to have a cultic ritual system that purifies that space so that we can maintain the presence of the deity in our midst.
[00:40:37] For the Bible, this is not bribing. This is not forcing God. In fact, Yahweh God is the one who chooses this. The people don't choose it. They call out to him and ask him to be their God, as they do in Egypt, we see them crying out to God for deliverance. God comes and he delivers the people. He delivers them first and then he sets up the covenant and then he sets up a situation where he can dwell in their midst in the Levitical system.
[00:41:12] Of course, having God himself dwell within your midst means that you're gonna be having some standards there, right? You're going to need to behave well. God is going to expect a lot of his people, but that is not first and foremost what the purification system was about. The purification system was centered on a holy God dwelling with his people who were not holy. But God could make them holy by dwelling with them and accepting them and all of this other stuff, right?
[00:41:47] Because holy being the attribute of God, it's not a communicable attribute. It's not a behavioral attribute. It is an attribute that you can have because God chooses to have you. God chooses to be in relationship and make you holy. And being in relationship to God will necessarily also change your behavior to be more sinless, to be righteous.
[00:42:16] But again, we need to be not conflating the ideas overly much as we tend to do. That is why having the proper frame is really essential. And the proper frame is set in the ancient context. That's why we have to look at the Old Testament. We have to look at Leviticus first. We don't look at the New Testament and then read that back into the Old Testament because the New Testament has its context because of the Old Testament.
[00:42:48] Yes, there's new things in the New Testament. Yes. Jesus brings about change and renewal and all of these things that are more in line with the fullness of the revelation of God. That does not mean that we just discard everything in the past as if it means nothing.
[00:43:08] We can't understand Jesus. We can't understand holiness. We can't understand purification at large until we understand the ancient context. And it's just really hard, but it's also not really all that hard, like it's a bit of a contradictory thing here. What's really interesting about things like baptism and rituals at large, usually they're often really, at least on a surface level, obvious.
[00:43:41] It is so interesting to me that purification is such a big deal because inherently we understand some importance of purification. There are few people in the world who don't have any understanding of the fact that it's better to be clean than dirty. That doesn't mean that we all understand that the same way or that we've always understood that. But there's something inherent about us that understands that we should make things orderly around us, that we should wash off some dirt sometimes. And that inherent meaning is embedded into things like baptism and purity.
[00:44:23] So on that level, purification and these ideas are really quite easy to understand. They're not hard. What's hard for us today is to understand the relationship of purity to the relationship of holiness. Like I said before, about God's omni attributes. Those came about in a particular time. Whereas people before that, I mean maybe they were thinking in terms of God being all powerful, God being all knowing, God being all present, but maybe they weren't thinking of it in the same way.
[00:45:02] What they were certainly thinking about was God's holiness his set apartness, his complete otherness to us. And in the Bible we see Yahweh God as being way more holy than other deities of the time. And we see that because Yahweh God does not behave in the same way that the other pagan deities do.
[00:45:29] The other pagan deities were very human-like. And that's not to say that there is no human-like attributes to God in the Old Testament because there certainly are all over the place. But you do see a difference between the character of God in the Old Testament and the character of the deities in other ancient Near Eastern literature. It's a pretty pronounced difference and when your holy God chooses to be with you and you are not forcing him to be there, but it's His choice, that is a big difference as well.
[00:46:04] And I don't know about you, but once you see this understanding of holiness as being, that's just kind of who God is, it actually, it does simplify it. Not that we fully understand it, because we could never fully understand something that we aren't. But to me at least, it's really helpful.
[00:46:25] It's really helpful to see that God's otherness and his separateness is so very core to all of these ideas, and then you bring that into the fact that God wants to dwell with us. You bring that into the incarnation of Jesus. You bring that into our unity in Christ, in baptism, and that's an incredible thing.
[00:46:49] That's something that is very unprecedented.
[00:46:54] But again, if we understand the Levitical system for what it is, then we can actually better understand the incarnation. We can better understand the church. We can better understand our union with Christ in baptism. And all of these other things. It is so absolutely fascinating to me.
[00:47:17] Okay, so I wanted to get into a lot more Scripture than I seem to have time for today, but I will likely bring out a lot more of this later in other episodes, but I want to pass the torch to you, and I want to tell you to go look for yourself. There's different words in the Old Testament and the New Testament that you'll find that are going to apply to what we're talking about in purification.
[00:47:42] I won't go through all of those here today, but you can do some word studies yourself and find those words. What's really interesting is how often the words are used for things like gold, pure gold or pure oil, or pure incense. Of course, all of those things are used in the Levitical system, in the tabernacle and in the temple.
[00:48:08] And again, I'm not saying that there is no connection with innocence from sin and freedom from guilt and general ritual cultic cleanliness, but it seems like the aspects of sin and guilt and repentance that are applied here, they come after the fact, right? You first have the ritual cleansing. And these ritual ideas that happen earlier in time, in history, and you even have this in Scripture. You have a difference in some of these ideas between the Torah and the prophets .
[00:48:46] What we see in the prophets is so similar to what we see in the New Testament, and it's also similar to what we see in the Torah, but there seems to be this progression of idea and perhaps I wanna say progression of priority. And this makes sense.
[00:49:04] Again, it just makes sense historically and the way that people learn and are taught through time in general. You learn first principles first. Once you learn first principles and basics of ideas, then you can learn layered meanings. You can learn deeper things. You can expand your understanding beyond what you learn first.
[00:49:29] And I think this is also part of the benefit and beauty of ritual. When you enter into a ritual, you might not understand it fully and I think that's fascinating. There are people who have no idea why they got baptized or maybe some vague notion of why they get baptized or they don't really understand the whole purpose of communion, but they do it anyway because, well, we see that this is what we do.
[00:49:56] And I may not understand it all, and I may not even be interested in thinking about it all that much, but I'll do it anyway. I don't think that's necessarily bad. We all come at things with a lesser understanding than we might have otherwise. That's just life, and that's just the way things are. And I think that's an okay thing.
[00:50:21] So going back to our understanding and how we can study this ourselves in Scripture. Again, there's different ways we can see this concept of pure, purification, even the idea of purging. As I said, one of the most common ways you'll see it is with gold. It's compositional flawlessness or uniformity of something.
[00:50:45] Then you have ceremonial or ritual purity. This is not always about sin, although it can have something to do with that. Right? There is not a clean disconnect between the two at times. Sometimes it's not clear what it's talking about, whether it's talking about simple ritual purity or whether it's looping in moral purity.
[00:51:11] We do have ethical purity that is associated with all of that. The idea that a people chosen by God should be pure and should perform moral, ethical actions seems to be pretty obvious, at least as far as the Scriptures go.
[00:51:30] Along with the concept of purity, we have the idea of purging. Especially some of the older translations of Scripture you'll see more of the usage of the word purge.
[00:51:41] You even have the concept of burning. The concept of burning can be a type of purifying, and we'll get into some really interesting things there regarding water versus fire later. Seriously, some very interesting things once you trace this both through Scripture as well as history.
[00:52:03] The idea of cleanliness is not unique to Israel, and even its particular expressions of it are not necessarily unique. What is unique about Scripture and the Bible and Israel's idea as a whole is because it's built on who Yahweh is, and Yahweh is unique. He is the God of all gods.
[00:52:28] I think I will leave some of the tracing of this for another episode because there's a lot here. We're gonna get into Divine Council themes. We'll talk about things like food and death and sacred places, and all of these other ideas. There is just so much here. But what I want to leave you with here today is this concept of holiness as being who God is, and that has to encompass something more than just morality and behavior and sin.
[00:53:01] Now, a lot of this will also help us to clarify what we see in Scripture when we see this little word called righteousness. This is a bit difficult for a lot of people because in the New Testament we see it straight out that no one is righteous. And yet in the Old Testament we see a whole lot of people who are described as righteous.
[00:53:26] Why would that be? What do we have going on here in these two ideas? What do we have going on between the Old Testament and the New Testament? If we presume that righteous means sinless and we have a more of a focus on things like morality and ethics, then no, nobody is righteous because nobody is sinless. Nobody is perfect. Nobody is holy like God. That does not then mean that God cannot bring us in, that we cannot dedicate things to God and things like that.
[00:54:03] So when we have this term righteous in the Old Testament, what I want you to ask when you come across it is, is it talking about morality and behavior?
[00:54:14] Because sometimes it is. Is it also, or mostly talking about things that have to do with making things right, like justice. It seems like God is not presuming that we will be perfect on your own or that we can be, nor do we have perfect things that we're going to do in order to create a perfect society apart from God.
[00:54:38] So we have all of that, but we do have a system in place and I kind of hate to use the word system because then we're thinking mechanics and all of this idea, right? But, and that's not really what I'm trying to get at. The system is there for teaching, for relationship, for understanding who God is so that people can relate to him.
[00:55:02] It's very similar to our concept in general of ritual. Whatever we think of that. There's a reason we do rituals. Whether we think it does something or not, we still do them and there's reasons we do them.
[00:55:19] Alright, I'm gonna go ahead and start wrapping up here in this conversation. If you guys have any questions or any pushback for me, please let me know. I love having the conversations, but just be aware that when you do, I'm probably going to also challenge your ideas. That's part of what we should be doing together. It's what I love to do and I don't mind it. I know it kind of is harder for some other people and I get that. And I'm sorry if sometimes I am sometimes a little bit abrasive. I get it. I know I am. Sometimes it's not because I'm trying to be really. It's not like I'm trying to, you know, tear somebody down.
[00:56:02] I just like the challenging conversation. Sometimes I like it a bit too much, but the only reason I talk to people like that is because I care about you and I want to hear about your ideas, and I want you to strengthen my ideas and I want to be able to strengthen your ideas, and that is part of why I have a biblical theology community.
[00:56:25] I will leave the link to that in the show notes for you guys to check out if you're not a part of it. I just think that the body of Christ together, working together and conversing together in real time is a good thing. And also not just talking together in real time, but through history. That's why we need to understand the ancient context because it has so much to teach us. There is so much we can learn from it.
[00:56:55] Alright, you can look forward to more conversations about purification and things like that. I also have a conversation to drop, I hope, about the frame of atonement in Genesis. I actually recorded a live stream in my community and I will share that as an episode with you and some other fun things coming down the pike as well.
[00:57:19] At any rate, I appreciate all of your listening, all of your support in the various ways that you do. And I encourage you all to go out there and study deeply, get to know who God is, get to know who God's people are, both in the past and around you today.
[00:57:38] Okay. I'm going to add something here. A little bit of a bonus at the end of my episode. I just got my copy of The Unseen Realm Expanded Edition, and I was so excited to see the first part of what the additional content was that is in this book of the expanded edition of The Unseen Realm. Because first of all, the first thing that Dr. Heiser talks about is basically frame semantics. He's talking about frame of reference and how everybody is interpreting things with a frame of reference, and we should ask what is that? And his work is based on trying to get into the frame of reference of the ancient person and understand the Bible that way.
[00:58:27] So I was really quite excited to see that in this new edition. Also, what made me laugh was he talks about a Christocentric lens of Scripture and a Christocentric reading. And he doesn't use the term Christotelic but a lot of what he is saying in this sidebar is so in line with what I was just talking about in this episode. It just tickled me enough that I really wanted to say something about that and share that with you.
[00:58:58] If you're in my community at On This Rock, we are actually focused this month, this is October, 2025, we're focused on The Unseen Realm as our monthly theme, so I encourage you all to come over and join us there. Join us for the conversation, even if it is no longer October, 2025, we're more than happy to talk about past monthly themes and things like that, so it's not like we only have these few weeks to talk about it.
[00:59:28] Part of the monthly theme idea is to have a shared attention that we're all thinking about certain things, which makes it easier for us to all talk about.
[00:59:39] At any rate, just thought I would toss all of this in here at the end of the episode. Get yourself a copy of the Unseen Realm Expanded Edition. Get a physical copy if you can, because it's a beautiful book. But anyway, thanks for listening. I appreciate you all. I hope you all have a blessed week, and we will see you later.
