Walls (Part 1)

Welcome to Halting Toward Zion, the podcast where we limp like Jacob to the Promised Land and talk about life, the universe, and everything along the way. I’m Emily Maxson here with Greg Uttinger and Rebekah Leiplein. Who’s that, you ask? Who are you?

Hi. I’m another former student of Mr. Uttinger’s and a friend of the show. I’ve been listening since you started and you were a lifeline to me when I was away at school, so it’s surreal to be here. Thank you. I’ve been a student of Mr. Uttinger’s for my whole life, so I know a few things and have picked a few things up over the years and I love to talk about theology.

I believe it was you in a recent conversation about the theology of sarcasm – am I remembering that right?

Yeah, that was me.

I wish I had a recording of that because I kind of heard it peripherally from another room and I was like, “That sounds very interesting.”

I have the outline that I prepared before I brought it to my elders to discuss, so I can get you that outline.

I would be very interested to read that.

Today we are talking about walls, but first let’s get some foundational ideas out of the way with what the endeavor of biblical theology is, because what we’re doing today is not going to show up in a systematics textbook. You’re not going to find an entry on walls. You’re not going to find an entry on trees or water, except maybe as relating to how baptism should be conducted. So how are we approaching this sort of nebulous topic, Greg?

A little background information for those who may need it or want it. When we study theology in our schools and seminaries and such, we divide it into at least two different perspectives. The one that most people are familiar with is called systematics or systematic theology. It has grown out of the church’s need to defend its life against heretics.

When the heretics came and said, “God didn’t create anything. God doesn’t create stuff because God is spirit,” the church had to think that through, and its response in part was the Apostle’s Creed as well as Irenaeus’s Against Heresies.

Then when the heretics came along and said, “Okay, so there’s a Creator, and among the things he created was Jesus, because Jesus is a created being,” the church said, “No, Jesus is God. He’s not kind of God’s servant, almost God, more God than you could possibly imagine without actually being God.” The church responded in Nicaea with the creed that says, “God of God, Light of Light, very God of very God, begotten not made, of one substance, one essence with the Father.”

Throughout church history when heretics have, as it were, gone for the jugular, the church has of necessity responded with propositional statements that say, “Not that, but this,” and “Not that either, but this,” because there’s usually two sides you can err on.

So in defense of its life the church has given a lot of thought to things that are very crucial to the gospel – the doctrine of creation, the deity of Christ, the dual nature, the hypostatic union of the two natures in Christ, the deity and the person of the Holy Spirit and, as time has unfolded, the sufficiency of scripture, justification by faith, and other cardinal doctrines like the virgin birth and literal second coming.

And that’s a very difficult synthesis, to come up with what does the entire Bible teach about one specific topic. Any topic, that’s going to be quite a project.

It’s going to be quite a project and it takes a lot of minds dedicated to the service of the Lord, disciplined to his Word, spread out over history. God has given the church some great theologians and great teachers who were, after a fashion, geniuses who saw the whole picture and were able to stand up at key moments and be the key figure, but very few of them nailed down everything.

You can think of Athanasius at Nicaea, who did profound work, and yet after Nicaea there was still a backlash saying, “No, mean old Athanasius, he got it wrong,” and it took a new generation to come along and fill in the corners, as it were, and deal with background exposition, redefining terms, so that by the time we get to the Council of Constantinople everybody is now speaking the same language.

And yet again and again throughout the generations, the true deity of Christ keeps coming up as an issue for debate, and every generation needs new systematic theologians who have a grasp of what the Bible says about this particular topic. And because it’s so important, this thing of defending key gospel truths, it is very easy to think that that’s all of or at least the bulk of God’s revelation to us, those key doctrines.

Yes, they’ve increased over time. There was a time when no one questioned the virgin birth. That became more of a thing in the late 1800s to early 1900s when the whole idea of the miraculous was suddenly up for grabs, and we’ve kept adding to it.

In the early 1900s many Bible-believing Christians spoke of the fundamentals. “Here are the things you must believe.” And the problem was not that they were wrong about that. They were absolutely right. These are things that the church has to believe. The problem is when you don’t connect them into the overall system of truth that’s in scripture.

It’s kind of like trying to build a fence when all you have are the fenceposts, and there’s a lot of maneuvering you can do by going through the fenceposts and going between them. So we need to come back sometimes and look at the whole of scripture.

I appreciated your opening, because if you pick up a book on systematic theology and you look up trees in the Index or Table of Contents, you’re not going to find it. If you do an exhaustive search, you might find references to the tree of life, the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, and perhaps to the cross as the tree, but you’re probably not going to find anything that joins them together and explains how they’re connected and says in fact “like trees.”

Right. Here’s why it’s important that the cross was a tree, the way there were trees in the garden.

And why did God use trees in the first place?

So we’re coming to talk about Nehemiah building walls. We probably won’t get to much of that today, but it’s appropriate to start talking about walls. Again, you open your book on systematics and you’re probably not going to find any references to walls. With a word search – “He has broken down the middle wall of partition” – and I’m not thinking of anything else right now. There may be something I’m missing.

The thief comes in over the wall instead of through the gate.

Yeah, that’s more of a word search for all of scripture. It might show up in terms of something, but we don’t spend a lot of time there.

The next step is we come back and look say at the garden, and let’s take trees as an example, and I just ask why a tree? There are people who are uncomfortable with that question. First, they’ve never heard it asked. “What do you mean why a tree? It’s a tree. God picked a tree.” Yes, but why did God pick a tree? It’s not like God stepped out of the garden, looked around and said, “Huh, I need something. I won’t use the skunk. Rock? No. Hey, a tree is kind of what I want. I’ll use…”

No, it’s part of his own self-revelation that he even made trees, and when he made them he knew what revelation of himself he was giving in said trees and how that revelation would unfold and flower/bud/bloom/put down roots throughout redemptive history, not only to the cross but beyond to the new Jerusalem.

As we come to scripture, one of the things it behooves us to do is simply look and see what God is actually doing. There are times when we have to jump around from book to book, passage to passage, and find all of the references say about limited atonement or justification by faith or the trinity, and that’s important. Any pastor worth his salt will have been well-trained to do those things, because those are the boundaries that keep you from going off into the darkness, that keep you from going into heresy, but there’s a whole lot more to the Bible.

If systematics is all you know, you come to a lot of passages and you kind of look around and say, “Well, here’s a story about a young woman who needs to get married because she’s poor and has a poor mother-in-law to look after. I guess maybe something about the love of God? Moving on…”

And it leaves you not knowing what to do with art or artists sometimes.

This is so and has implications beyond our immediate understanding of the Bible to our application of the Bible.

Now here’s the thing. As we come and we look at these things – again let’s say trees, and we look at all the times a tree shows up – it’s easy for someone to say, “But you’re just following your imagination.”

“Who do you think gave you that imagination?”

Yes, Rebekah, exactly. You can turn to people and say, “So in systematics you’re following logic?”

“Well, logic is obviously clearer and superior to imagination.”

Arius was great on logic. Arius was a supreme rationalist. It was very simple. The Trinity didn’t make sense, so his whole canon for creating an alternate religion out of Christianity was reason.

Yes, imagination can get out of control. So can reason.

And it’s intellectually dishonest to think you can come to a text without supplying imagination of any kind. When you read, you bring something as the reader. You’re not a blank slate.

No, you’re not, and this in part is where general revelation comes in. We’re born into a world that’s full of stuff. My pastor used to say, “We’re born naked into the world, but we don’t come into a naked world.” I’m looking out my window and I see trees. Those trees were there long before I moved into this house. I think I may be older than that big old tree, but maybe not. It may be older than me. The oak tree that stood behind my parents’ property in Anderson was much older than I was.

I come into a world of trees and I know what a tree looks like. I know what a tree does, and the tree is not there by accident. God made trees and God made these trees. God has purposes for trees, and he has a purpose for the tree I’m looking at. Largely it seems to be to attack the foundation of our house, which gives me a job to do and imposes obligations upon me to protect our house from its encroaching roots.

Someone could say, “You’re muddying the waters. What does that have to do with theology?” Kind of like everything, because when John said, “Behold the Lamb of God” he expected people to know what sheep were and to bring to the table a whole knowledge of shepherding and sheep and what you do with sheep – sheep shearing, eating lamb, sacrifice…

Concrete experience.

Yes, but none of those are things that God found lying around and said, “Huh, I could do something with this.”

Last night my wife was watching a little do-it-yourself video. It took me a while to figure out it was one big advertisement for Dollar Tree, but once I realized they were saying Dollar Tree every other sentence I got it. It was all about going into Dollar Tree and just finding these random things that nobody wants and making cool craft projects out of them.

“You could take this, and one of these, and two of these, and this, and look at this beautiful thing!”

Well, you can. I don’t think most people would have thought of it, and I’m glad you did, I guess. If nothing else, you’re racking up sales for Dollar Tree.

That’s not how we come into God’s world. There’s nothing random here. Everything is predestined, ordained, organized, arranged, and is revelatory of who God is.

So as we read the Bible and we read about light and darkness on Day 1, or we read about trees on Day 3, or the sun, moon, and stars on Day 4, God expects that we know what in the world he’s talking about, that we’ve actually looked up at the sky and seen the sun. Even if we’re blind, we’ve at least felt its warmth on our faces and people have said, “That’s because there’s this thing called the sun up there.”

As we proceed through the Bible, God takes these things that he has made and he begins to set up literary patterns. The question again becomes, “How do you know that’s a pattern?” The same way mathematicians recognize certain patterns when they see recurring numbers. The idea of a pattern is built into us, again by God. This is not an accident. It’s not something we’re making up. We’ve been taught how to look for patterns.

If nothing else, you can look at the first creation week and you can see these seven things that come in a particular order. And strangely enough, as you make your way through the rest of the Bible, oftentimes we see seven things or seven days or seven panels of information that bear a striking resemblance to the creation week.

You get to the book of Revelation and, among other ways you can lay it out, you can lay it out in patterns of seven. There are the seven seals, the seven trumpets, the seven churches, the seven lampstands, and so on.

What are the checks? The checks I think are two-fold. First, systematics. If our imagination takes us to the place where we start saying Jesus isn’t God, then we’ve gone off a cliff someplace and we need to re-climb and get back where we need to be. We need to get back on the straight road.

Closely related to that or interwoven with systematics is the testimony of the church, and this is why we need the creeds and the confessions. If I find that my study of patterns in the Old Testament is contradicting what the New Testament says clearly and flatly, then I made a mistake. I don’t get to say, “Well, Paul got it wrong, because really what he should have said…” No, we are bound by the totality of scripture and what the believing church has said. We’re not allowed to be Lone Rangers and make stuff up.

The interesting thing is that so often when you’re doing biblical theology properly, you find all these wonderful patterns and you look back and pull the whole picture together and say, “Wow, that’s a great…wait, I know that. That’s what systematics has been saying all this time.” It just comes down with color and sound.

It’s one thing to say that Jesus died for sinners, but to see the bloody lamb with the man laying his hands upon it, it adds texture, dimension, color, thickness.

Something your heart can sink its teeth into – mixed metaphors – but it gets into your heart a little bit better when there’s that texture to it.

Yes, because it appeals to the whole man and not simply to an abstract version of the intellect, which is sometimes what we get when we start talking about reason and rationality. We’re not really talking about the way the human mind actually works. We’re talking about an idealized version that was born in the Enlightenment, and that is a real problem. When theology degenerates to these series of propositions, memorized and said in this order, and there’s really nothing else to say, we miss something and that’s a real danger.

With all of that said, we’re going to do a little exploration of the biblical theology of walls. If at any point we cross a line into systematics, then people should be sending us little emails that say, “Wait, that’s heresy because….”

“That’s heresy, Patrick.” We all answer to Patrick here.

Yes. We can appeal to the Belgic Confession or the Westminster Standards or the Nicene Creed and say, “No, you’ve crossed a line,” at which point we better perk up our ears and say, “Whoa, what?” I don’t think that’s going to be a real problem. What we’re going to see are basic principles that attach the fenceposts, as it were, to one another that bind things together.

God could have said all of this in a very thick book on theology. There’s a reason he gave us stories, histories, biographies, poems, and psalms. There is something in God that needs to communicate, and therefore something in us that needs to be communicated to that way. When we say, “Yeah, the poetry is nice, but I’m not a poetry guy so I’ll just look at the Pauline letters,” you’re going to miss a lot and you’re not doing justice to who God is and what God knows we need to hear.

Can I give an example? There’s a Christian ska band from the 90s. Rebekah will know them – The W’s.

I do not.

Oh, I will have to give you a CD because you’ll love them, if you like ska. Some people just really don’t like ska. They have a song called The Devil is Bad. It was a big hit. It was on Wow 2000 and the first verse is just telling the story of Eve walking in the garden, and the snake coming and tempting her.

The chorus is fun and boppy and it’s not what Eve actually said, unfortunately. It’s “You are the devil and the devil is bad. Go right out of here,” that kind of thing. But then the second verse is Jesus walking in the wilderness and being tempted by the devil, and he does say, “You are the devil and the devil is bad.”

I remember using that song for so many things. I used to DJ for the swing dance club at school and it was a very fun one to dance to, so we’d use that all the time. Then I was dancing to it one time and I was like, “Wait a second, these two concepts are related. They’re telling me the same story twice, but it has two different endings,” things that shouldn’t have been a huge revelation at the moment, but when it’s told in a different way… of course, you know that Jesus was tempted and he succeeded where Adam failed, but to hear it in that way opens your eyes to different parallels and I think it gets into your heart a little bit more.

That reminds me that my first pastor actually made that connection with more depth when I was very young. I remember him talking about it. Strangely enough, I remember years later him asking me what I thought of biblical theology, and I hadn’t had any interaction with it at all. I had, but I didn’t know that’s what it was. All I’d heard was stuff like, “Well, Adam believed this, but Noah was smarter and had it more correct, and Abraham knew even more.”

It was sort of the idea of an evolving knowledge of God, where things in the past may not have been all that accurate, so we stand at the end of that and we’re really accurate, but the older testament may not be. What little I’d heard was that. That’s not biblical theology. That’s liberal garbage.

It’s also incredibly depressing.

Yeah, and given biblical theology and given that it’s all true revelation from God, we are not ashamed at the least to jump from Genesis to the book of Revelation and expect to find the same message and the same God. Although things become clearer and fleshed out, the message doesn’t change. God doesn’t evolve and the Word doesn’t evolve. We just get a little clearer explanation the closer we come to Christ.

Thank you, good illustration, and that’s the kind of thing that if you are simply a good reader you will pick up on. Read T.S. Eliot. Read Nathaniel Hawthorne. Read Melville or Shakespeare or Spenser. If you can’t read to see imagery and patterns, you’re going to miss a lot. You’re going to wonder what all the big fuss is about anyway. “What’s this thing about this black veil over your eyes, or this woman with this red letter? And why does the knight keep falling into temptation and someone has to save him?” and you keep going through this. One of the reasons we teach literature is so that you can read the Bible, not simply as a book of random statements here and there that we have to find.

Here's something else about systematics. Most systematic theologies have a list of scripture references in the back, as well as a topical index. It would be interesting – I’ve actually done this, but if no one else has – go back and find that scriptural index and see which books of the Bible it quotes from. Most of the Old Testament histories are exempted – a little bit from Genesis around the time of Abraham and from the creation week, a little bit from Exodus, Numbers not so much, and Deuteronomy not so much.

Leviticus is about worship and you’re not going to see many references. Joshua, no. Judges, no. Ruth, no. Samuel/Kings/Chronicles, probably not. Ezra/Nehemiah/Esther, no.

You come to Psalms, and because the psalms celebrate the attributes of God so much, we’ll get a lot there and some in Job. In Proverbs, not very much after the first few chapters at least, and then so on. Because of the nature of systematics, which is not bad, it’s just incomplete, they’re looking for propositional statements about key doctrines, and those books generally simply don’t have them.

That does not mean for a moment that those doctrines – the reality of who God is and how God saves – is at all absent from those books, but you have to read, and you have to read with a little bit of imagination, and you have to read in context, and you have to follow a pattern and image.

Anyway, we keep saying we’re going to talk about walls, so let’s talk about walls. Even here we have to supply something. I’m not in Nehemiah, I’m in Genesis chapter 3 and we’re told this in verse 22:

And the LORD God said, Behold, the man is become as one of us, to know good and evil. And now, lest he put forth his hand and take also of the tree of life, and eat, and live forever… Therefore the LORD God sent him forth from the garden of Eden, to till the ground from whence he was taken. So he drove out the man; and he placed at the east of the garden of Eden Cherubims, and a flaming sword which turned every way, to keep the way of the tree of life.

The word wall does not appear. It is possible there was not a wall. It’s possible it’s a sheer drop down a cliff, but the point is the garden was enclosed. How do we know? Because the cherubim were put on one side of it, and because a single sword was able to guard all approaches to it.

There’s an in and out.

And interestingly enough there appears to be only one way into the presence of God. Now, once I say that and say it that way, that resonates all the way through scripture. The Bible doesn’t highlight it and attach sparklers and things.

I mean, there’s a flaming sword.

Yeah, and cherubim. Once we find out what cherubim look like later on in Ezekiel, that’s kind of a big deal. Whether or not the rest of the garden was walled – I get asked, “How do you know?” We know it was a mountain or plateau. How do you know? Water runs downhill.

I once knew a pastor who wasn’t from my denomination, but he was a stickler for, “If the Bible doesn’t say it, you can’t believe it. The Bible has to absolutely say it, so how do you know that it was on a mountain?” and I just looked at him and said, “The water runs downhill.” That caught him for a second. And I said, “And in Ezekiel, Eden is called the mountain of God, so if you want something very specific, there it is.”

Now, whether or not there were walls around it, don’t know, but it was enclosed either by walls or by sheer ravines and cliffs, so that there was one way in, one way out, and no other way.

In terms of authority of information, this one is way down the list, but historically the shape of a garden in literature has this very specific shape where it has a wall around it, then there’s a circle in the middle with water. The fountain is in the center and it’s surrounded by sort of a square that goes with the walls.

There is a verse in the Song of Solomon, another book that generally gets not referenced in systematic theologies. This is chapter 4, verse 12, and here it compares the garden to the bride:

A garden enclosed is my sister, my spouse; a spring shut up, a fountain sealed.

Then it goes on and describes the garden, a fountain of gardens, a well of living waters and streams from Lebanon. So what you’re describing is actually in the Bible, but you have to get halfway through before you run into it.

That’s also why I like Turkish rugs. The traditional Turkish rug design has a blue spot in the middle, and the floral design goes throughout, and there’s a border, because it’s meant to be a garden.

I did not know this. Cool.

So from the beginning, God planted a garden and it became man’s first home and became God’s first sanctuary. It’s where God met with man. As you say, it’s enclosed. Water flows through it. The water actually rises higher and then flows through the garden, the text says, and then parts in four heads and goes out and waters the world, this river that is the source of life for everything, and Adam and Eve are to start here. They’re not to end here, because on the first day of their lives they’re told to take dominion over the planet. Fill the whole planet up, and it begins here.

Adam had already been put on probation. He’d been given a job to do, an apprenticeship if you will, and that involved this little small area with two people in it, and it’s a picture and a starting point for all that’s going to come.

If they had been faithful, if they had trusted God and relied on his grace and walked in faith, they would have told the devil where to go, appropriately enough, and in time they would have taken the plants from the garden and carried them down the trail that led out of Eden and follow the rivers down along the banks, and they would plant more gardens, more oases out in what was now a howling wilderness, because although it wasn’t a fallen or cursed world, it wasn’t a garden. Only Eden was a garden. So this idea of the garden as a source from which things ought to go out is here from the beginning.

But then as soon as they fall, something changes in the imagery. God puts guards at the garden gate. He puts these cherubim and he puts a flaming sword. Whether it operated independently or whether they swung it we’re not exactly told, but whatever it was, it was scary and dangerous and deadly and you didn’t want to cross it. It was flame.

In the future, God’s people could come this close to the garden. They might have been able to see the tree of life or not. They might have been able to see the glory of God or not, but they could sure enough look at these huge cherubim things that would look monstrous to them. If you don’t know what a cherubim looks like, consult Ezekiel 1 for starters.

There were monsters on the mountains. There were gods, and that image has echoed down through the sculptures of the Mideast, but the presence of God is now walled off. It’s sealed off. The gate is a living gate. It’s these cherubim and you can’t get past them. There’s no way through. You can’t get to God. God has walled himself off. He’s shut the door, as it were. We can come to the door, but we can’t come any closer.

If that’s all there were to human history, then human history would be abysmal and depressing and not worth telling, but from the beginning God said “seed of the woman.” As Adam and Eve walked out of the garden and walked down the path and looked back – again, if you haven’t read Ezekiel 1 lately, it would be a good thing to do – they would see the four alternating faces on the cherubim – the lion, the bull, the eagle, but then they would see a human face and they would think, “That should be us. We were the ones who were supposed to protect the garden.”

Adam can think, “I was supposed to protect the garden. In comes this serpent thing and I should have grabbed it, tied it in a knot, and banged it on the head with a rock or something, but I didn’t. I did not fulfill my role as a guardian of the garden, so now the cherubim are here,” but notice the human face. It would be interesting to know whose face it was.

The garden was still there. God didn’t blast the garden to pieces. He didn’t set it on fire. He didn’t collapse it into the ocean or rapture it up into heaven. It’s still there and one of the faces guarding it is still human. So that, put together with the promise and with the sacrament of sacrifice, would lead them to understand that there’s going to be a way back into God’s presence. “What we have done is horrible and vile and destructive, and yet God is going to find a way to bring us back. There’s going to be a door, a way into the presence of God.”

Now we’re 4,000 years away from Jesus when he says, “I am the way, I am the door,” but the precedents are all set here.

So God’s people could come and they could worship at the garden gate, and we’re told that God recognized Abel’s sacrifice and not Cain’s. My own belief is that the flaming sword swooped down on it and lit it on fire, because that’s usually how God accepts sacrifices. He ignites them.

But that’s it, and for the next 1,600 years that’s as far as we go. We keep waiting, we keep looking, we keep hoping, but not everybody. Cain brought the wrong sacrifice and then he murdered his brother, and he went off and he built a city.

A city is enclosed. We come to the pagan word and the city of Enoch, Cain’s city, to Babel/Babylon, when mankind erected a tower to reach into heaven, and to all the cities of the ancient world. Mankind understood the need for a community that was set apart from the rest of the world, that was indeed enclosed and walled, that had fruit trees and vegetables and gardens and things that made it look beautiful and, temperature-wise, cool – oases, gardens enclosed – and they built cities.

Here I reference The Ancient City by Fustel de Coulanges, the classic text, which is wonderful. As far as I know, the author is not a Christian but he has profound insight into how the ancient city viewed itself.

Cities were laid out magically because they were religious institutions. Now, 200 years after the Enlightenment, we sit back and think, “Religion and city? How does that even mix?” The ancient world could not imagine how they couldn’t mix, and it wasn’t until the Enlightenment that anybody ever thought that a city couldn’t be religious. It was just a question of which religion. “Which god are you serving? What holds this thing together? What provides your standards and your values? Whom do you serve and whom do you trust?”

Here we reference all of our discussions at the beginning of this series on continuity of being – the closeness, the interwovenness of God/the gods/man/deity/humanity/magic, as below, so above. The sorcerers, the magicians, the sages, the patriarchs, the priests would use their magic to divine the location that the gods had chosen, and the gods were very often your dead ancestors. Think of the Disney movie Coco here. There would be magic means to divine exactly where the site should be, and they would with divine geometry trace out the orders, and then they would plow the furrow that would represent the walls.

We have a reference to this in the legend of Romulus and Remus, where Romulus plows the furrow. The furrow itself is the moat, and the dirt that’s thrown up is the proto wall. Remus looks at this and despises it and jumps over and says, “That’s what I think of your wall!” and Romulus kills him on the spot saying, “Thus be it ever to those who despise my walls.”

Rome was built on human sacrifice. It’s a question of who calls the shots. Who is in touch with the powers that be? Who’s in touch with ultimate reality? Is it Romulus or Remus? Is it this people or that people? Is it this priest or those priests over there? You have to make a decision and you have to make a commitment. Once you do, and once you build the walls, they are divine protection and divine identification.

People who live in the city worship the god that led them there, and usually at the center of the city there is a temple dedicated to that god. Again, often that god was simply your ancestor or a clan ancestor or something like that, sometimes some god or goddess representing the powers of nature. Baal comes to mind, but even Baal is an echo of one or two particular ancient kings.

Once you are in that city, you are bound together in that community by your common worship, and those walls keep out foreigners. I say foreigner. If I use the Latin word, alien, we get a lot closer. We hear alien today and we think men from outer space, little green men or tentacled monsters, and as far as the ancient world was concerned that wasn’t too far off.

“We in this city are men. Those people/things out there look like men, but we’re men. They’re something else. Mildly put, they’re strangers, but they are aliens and they may be monsters. They can come in and trade because we get something off of them that way, but they’re not going to be part of this city until they conform to its religion, if that’s possible,” and it wasn’t always in every system.

Rome was unique in that it spread its walls to the ends of the earth. For instance, Tarsus became an extension of Rome, and Paul being born in Tarsus was born Roman, was born free. Rome had a chip on its shoulder. It felt it could do that. Most cities didn’t. They raised their walls and they shut their gates and they were heaven on earth.

It might not be a great heaven. Not all utopias are that great, and our generation is fascinated with dystopias. If you go back and read Plato’s Republic it was not a great community by any stretch of the imagination, but this was the thing. It was dedicated to the worship of gods or a god, and if you wanted to be part of the city you had to join their religion.

The idea of free immigration was right out, unless somehow there was a possible way of being inaugurated into their religion, which in many cases was possible, but it was rarely easy and it wasn’t something you did just by signing on the dotted line or some such thing.

In that book by Fustel de Coulanges, The Ancient City, he describes the marriage ceremony in ancient Greece. It just is a very succinct picture I think of the identity not only of the city, but of the family, the family being a microcosm of the city, where the household has its gods, and in order to change from one household to another as part of a marriage, you had to forswear all the gods of your house and switch your loyalty over to the new house, which again with the city was not a viable option. It was not an easy thing.

No, and the reason for instance in Greece that some states eventually began to recognize each other is they looked beyond their more immediate ancestors to some tribal ancestor further back that they could all appeal to – eventually in the case of Greece, to Hellas, the historical or mythological, depending on what you think, ancestor of the Greek people. There had to be somebody back there, because if there wasn’t, what did you have in common? How could you trust each other?

Another thing about the marriage thing, the practical and economic implications were that daughters were not thought much of because they’re going to leave and go to the household of other gods. What’s important is that you have a son, because he will pick up the rituals and honor the family traditions and keep the gods happy with your family. Therefore, adultery in the case of the wife was treason and horribly dangerous to the family, so a woman who committed adultery would be executed.

Daughters didn’t matter much. You could adopt a son and teach him the mysteries. Better an adopted son who was faithful than a son born of the flesh who would not keep the secrets and the mysteries.

This begins to define their ethic of what’s important. Your land is important because your ancestors are buried here. Your marriage is important because your wife had better give you a legitimate son. Your daughters? Not so much. And your own faithfulness to your wife? Pfft. It doesn’t matter who you “visit” because they’re not going to be part of the system anyway.

I have three thoughts that are related. Going back to the Romulus and Remus thing, they were brothers who had basically everything in common that they could have, and yet they broke apart and they were the two cities.

My brain keeps going to Abraham. In his whole story he was going from city to city seeing these cultures and seeing what his differences were, what they differed on. I can’t remember the verse, but Abraham searched for a city which had foundations, whose builder and maker is God. What goes on top of foundations? Walls.

Even with Romulus and Remus, they had everything in common they could possibly have, and they found differences. Every city, if you look hard enough, you can find differences and they can break apart within themselves and make more cities. You’re never going to find a perfect unity, no matter where you look, unless your city, whose builder and maker is God, and all the people who live in the city are those under God’s rule. That is one large city, because everything is under God’s rule.

Excellent points, and we are headed in our discussion toward that city. That’s where this is going to end up. Yes, while the pagans were building their cities, God didn’t give his people a city right away. We’ll talk more about that next time, and why not and what he gave them instead and how it all points forward.

You said that there’s no way to make people get along and not break apart. As Christians we say yes. As pagans we say, “No, wait, there’s a way.”

“It’s called everybody listens to me and does what I tell them.”

“As long as everyone looks out for my self-interest as much as I do, we’ll be fine.”

“And all we need for that to happen is I need to have all the power and complete information on everybody. That requires extensive technology so I know what people are saying and thinking behind my back.”

“There’s no reason for them to ever rise up against me.”

“And somebody to make it work. I’ll find a way to make them happy.”

Again, you look at the dystopias, 1984, Brave New World, Fahrenheit 451, and others. The brighter humanists have seen that this is where this goes. You want peace? Then you have to hand somebody complete control, and that’s been implicit from the beginning.

“But we don’t trust anybody. Well, I trust me.”

“Does anyone else?” The only way giving one person complete control doesn’t backfire is if that one person with complete control has everyone’s best interests at heart, and surprisingly there’s only one being who’s there.

We were talking about walls, but now you’re talking about foundations. It all goes together. What we’re doing here is talking biblical theology. We’re looking at things that we know from the world around us, and as we talk about them we begin to see, “Oh, the Bible mentions that. Oh, and it mentions that. Oh, and it talks about this. Oh, and we’re heading toward that.”

As we talk about God’s world – surprise, surprise – we keep running into God’s Word. These are not two separate things. That’s a gnostic kind of view of scripture where theology is one thing and daily life is something else. The Bible never presents it that way.

When Jesus, when he wanted to represent himself, said, “I am the door. I am the good shepherd. I am the way. I am the bread. Come to me and drink,” he used the language of common ordinary things. Yes, he did speak of the sheepfold and he spoke of climbing up over the walls and how you shouldn’t do that. You should go through the door, and he said, “I am the door.”

There’s a lot more to talk about, but this may be a good place to wind up and do recommendations, and then we’ll see how long it takes us to get through the rest of this discussion, because eventually we’ll get to Nehemiah.

I hope so. He’s my favorite.

I haven’t decided what to recommend yet, so anybody else want to go first?

Rebekah, have you got a recommendation?

I do. This is a recommendation specifically for young people, because that’s where I am. It doesn’t really apply to you all, sorry.

What are you saying?

I’m saying you’re married and you have a house, which disqualifies you from what I’m about to say. This is to unmarried young people, my demographic. I am currently house-sitting and this is the third summer in a row I’ve done some form of house-sitting, and it’s really cool. Honestly, I would recommend it to people who are trustworthy. I keep getting recommended to people who I only kind of know, and then they recommend me to more.

I’m basically recommending living alone, but on a trial period, because living alone for me is a very interesting experience. I’ve always lived with my parents or, when I was away at school, with someone else’s parents. But living alone shows me what my bad habits are and, “Oh, wow, I should get on that, but I don’t have other people to keep me accountable for it,” and also what good habits I could have that I don’t, because I’m easily distracted in my home environment. “Okay, let me set myself up for success.” I’ve done a lot of really good creative work while I’ve been alone, which is great. Then are other things where it’s like, “Oh, I do need people to keep me accountable for this.”

So generally I recommend living alone for a very short period of time, because it’s a really nice way to refresh. This is specifically for young people, because if you have a house and a spouse you shouldn’t leave them and live in someone else’s house.

That would be bad.

On a related note I guess, I’m going to recommend budget meetings with your family. David and I like these. Now and then we open a bottle of wine for them, and we did this week, getting ready for this upcoming month, and it was just a good time. You get to talk about your values, things that you value but not as much as other things, because that’s the thing about dollar values. You have to assign them. You can’t just say, “Ah yes, this is the best thing ever.” You have to say, “How much of the best thing is this right now in this situation with the limited dollars that we have.”

It really brings clarity. It’s an opportunity for great communication and dreaming together about what you would like those good habits to be as a family and that sort of thing. It’s great. We like budget meetings.

Following sort of in the train of that, of what’s important and what’s not important, my parents grew up in the Great Depression and had a Depression mindset of, “We can get by. We can save everything that comes into our house, because we might need it sometime.” The things that my parents saved were silly at times – pie tins and bread clips and all kinds of things, because you never know when you might need that.

On the one hand it did keep them from getting into debt. Aside from the mortgage on their house, I don’t know that my parents were ever in debt to anything, and their mortgage, having been acquired in the late 50’s, was mind-blowingly cheap, but because they didn’t make a lot of money it took them a while to pay it off.

Their attitude of, “This isn’t working so well, but we can put off fixing it” is something I acquired, and I probably amplified it. Dad was good at doing “spit and polish” on all kinds of things and making them look a little awkward but a little better than they had. He had more handyman skills than I have. I have virtually none, so I guess a side recommendation is to learn how to do things and learn how to use YouTube.

The main point here is that it is better to tighten your budget now and then and fix things as you go, than to wait till your ship comes in. If things are so bad that you have to spend thousands and thousands of dollars just to make your home operable and livable, you’re probably already in over your heads. You probably have spent too much money already and you probably need to cut back on your lifestyle if you’re spending a lot. But if not, then my advice is to look for places where you can spend a little less.

For instance in our case, it was to buy a new dishwasher. The last time we bought a new dishwasher it was kind of a heart-searching, soul-searching thing like, “Can we afford it? Do we need it?” This time it was, “Oh look, the plastic is broken. There’s something black growing inside. ‘Home Depot? We want a dishwasher.’”

My wife presented it to me as something she’d already done, and I completely agreed without a thought, and it’s great. We’re no longer poisoning ourselves. We knew the dishwasher was bad, but we didn’t know how bad. So now I’m looking at our kitchen and saying, “Alright, what’s next?”

Our oven, for instance, the door can fall off. It has at least twice. If you don’t keep screwing in a certain screw it will happen, and it can happen when everything is very hot. Two of the burners don’t light unless you use a little flame-starter fire. You just get click-click-click and nothing happens, and so on.

There’s a planned obsolescence in today’s appliances that didn’t exist 40 years ago. My parents would buy something and it would last 20-30 years. Now 10 years is about it, and we expect our appliances to crash and burn.

So my advice is that while you’re doing your budget, realize that as a factor and do your maintenance as you go along. Keep things up to date. It’s healthier. It presents a better mental and spiritual environment when you’re maintaining your house and not letting it run down just because you’re afraid to spend the money.

It may mean some sacrifice. It may mean you may not get to spend the money on what you like. That’s not sacrifice. That’s being smart. So there’s my recommendation.

It’s kind of like weeding your garden.

Yeah, like weeding your garden, for us too. The last couple years I have not had a great deal of time out there so, so far, although school was out two weeks ago, every day except today when it was too hot I have been out in the garden and I’m doing catch-up from two years ago, because the weeds keep coming back, and flower beds have to be reinvigorated, and trees that are about to break fences and things need to be cut back.

This is an ongoing process in life, and it’s an ongoing process spiritually too. To put yourself on spiritual hold for two years because you have more pressing things than reading that book on theology or that book on worship or the book on marriage and family…

Or the Bible.

Or the Bible, or you don’t have time for prayer – “I’ll get to it. I’ll make time in a few months” – it’s not a good thing. The whole dominion mentality is one of at least maintaining what you’ve got as best you can, while pushing the boundaries.

The danger, particularly for young people, is to want to jump to the end, and it generally doesn’t work that way. You have to build a little at a time.

Rebekah was our producer for our spring play, and although she did a lot of work along those lines, a lot of what she did was go back to all the stuff we’ve accumulated over the last 10 years or more, and throw stuff out and catalogue other stuff. I knew it needed to be done, but I didn’t know how badly it needed to be done, and it’s not done. She did a fantastic job, but she had a finite amount of time. So at least start. Really, a lot that was there we could never use because we didn’t even know it was there or how to get to it.

Life is like that a lot, either being afraid to face the junk and the clean-up, or thinking, “Eh, we’ll do it another day,” but rushing to this really exciting ending is not a sign of maturity. They’re signs of something else. So there’s my recommendation.

That ties in so well with what we’ve been talking about, God planting a garden and saying, “Here, maintain it,” and then go beyond.

This has been a wonderful conversation. Thank you both so much. Thank you, Rebekah, for joining us at very short notice. Thanks also to David, our producer and my lawfully-wedded husband. Thanks to you, our listeners. We appreciate you tuning in.

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Thank you again so much for listening. Hope to see you again next time for a continuation of the biblical theology on walls. Good night.