Achan's Sin

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 Bryan Broome.

Today we’re talking about Achan, who hath stolen the bacon. After the battle of Jericho in the book of Joshua we come to the battle of Ai, which was not successful for the Israelites. Does anybody know why it was not successful for the Israelites?

Oh! Oh! I know, I know.

Oh, let’s not always see the same hands.

Uhhh..

What the text says is this from chapter 7 –

But the children of Israel committed a trespass in the accursed thing: for Achan, the son of Carmi, the son of Zabdi, the son of Zerah, of the tribe of Judah, took of the accursed thing: and the anger of the Lord was kindled against the children of Israel.

And Joshua sent men from Jericho to Ai, which is beside Bethaven, on the east of Bethel, and spake unto them, saying, Go up and view the country. And the men went up and viewed Ai. And they returned to Joshua, and said unto him, Let not all the people go up; but let about two or three thousand men go up and smite Ai and make not all the people to labour thither for they are but few.

So there went up thither of the people about three thousand men, and they fled before the men of Ai. And the men of Ai smote of them about thirty and six men, for they chased them from before the gate even unto Shebarim, and smote them in the going down: wherefore the hearts of the people melted, and became as water.

And Joshua rent his clothes, and fell to the earth upon his face before the ark of the Lord until the eventide, he and the elders of Israel, and put dust upon their heads. And Joshua said, Alas, O Lord God, wherefore hast thou at all brought this people over Jordan, to deliver us into the hand of the Amorites, to destroy us? Would to God we had been content and dwelt on the other side Jordan! O Lord, what shall I say, when Israel turneth their backs before their enemies! For the Canaanites and all the inhabitants of the land shall hear of it and shall environ us round and cut off our name from the earth: and what wilt thou do unto thy great name?

And the Lord said unto Joshua, Get thee up; wherefore liest thou thus upon thy face? Israel hath sinned and they have also transgressed my covenant which I commanded them: for they have even taken of the accursed thing, and have also stolen, and dissembled also, and they have put it even among their own stuff. Therefore the children of Israel could not stand before their enemies, but turned their backs before their enemies, because they were accursed: neither will I be with you any more, except ye destroy the accursed from among you.

Up, sanctify the people, and say, Sanctify yourselves against tomorrow: for thus saith the Lord God of Israel, There is an accursed thing in the midst of thee, O Israel: thou canst not stand before thine enemies until ye take away the accursed thing from among you.

And they go on and they call the tribes and they cast lots, and from the tribe of Judah more lots, until they work their way down by family and come to this man Achan. Joshua rather kindly says –

And Joshua said unto Achan, My son, give, I pray thee, glory to the Lord God of Israel, and make confession unto him and tell me now what thou hast done; hide it not from me. And Achan answered Joshua, and said, Indeed I have sinned against the Lord God of Israel, and thus and thus have I done:

When I saw among the spoils a goodly Babylonish garment and two hundred shekels of silver and a wedge of gold of fifty shekels weight, then I coveted them and took them; and, behold, they are hid in the earth in the midst of my tent, and the silver under it.

So Joshua sent messengers, they find it, they bring it back, and now they have corroborating evidence to go with the testimony.

And Joshua, and all Israel with him, took Achan the son of Zerah, and the silver and the garment and the wedge of gold, and his sons and his daughters, and his oxen, and his asses, and his sheep, and his tent, and all that he had, and they brought them unto the valley of Achor.

And Joshua said, Why hast thou troubled us? The Lord shall trouble thee this day. And all Israel stoned him with stones, and burned them with fire after they had stoned them with stones. And they raised over him a great heap of stones unto this day. So the Lord turned from the fierceness of his anger. Wherefore the name of that place was called, The Valley of Achor, unto this day.

Then God hands Joshua a battle plan, which we won’t spend much time with, at least now, but Israel gets really serious and devotes all their resources to this little thorn in their flesh, and God hands Ai over to them with some trickery, and the conquest of Canaan gets back on track.

So there you go. This is one of the more anti-American stories in the Bible because we look at this and we say, “Well, that’s not fair. Israel didn’t know what this guy had done. Why is God holding the whole nation accountable?” Here are 36 men, fathers, brothers, who will never be going home to their families, and to the American psyche this seems uncalled for. “God could have warned them.” Yes, God could have.

There’s a couple things going on here. One, of course, is the basic doctrine of representation. Americans have a real hard time with this, despite the fact that supposedly we live in a representative republic. We elect these people that we call representatives, and they pass laws and get us involved in all kinds of things, whether it be the Federal Reserve system or World War 1 and 2 or whatever, without actually asking us, without our vote, without our consent, and that in itself is not a problem.

Now, whether or not they’re doing a good job is something else, and whether or not they’re obeying God is something else, but the fact that they act for us is the way the system works, or the way it’s supposed to work. No, they’re not supposed to have to consult us about everything. This is the genius of republican government – and that’s republican with a small r.

And that’s ‘genius’ as in the central defining idea, right?

Yes, not as the brilliance of it, although there’s something to be said for that, too. The roots in Presbyterian theology and ecclesiology are very deep here, but also in feudalism, the federalism of the Middle Ages.

We’re actually practically used to this. A general on the battlefield yells “Charge!” and suddenly two whole nations are at war. A president makes a phone call on a red phone and suddenly nukes are flying. A pastor commits adultery with the church secretary and the church is divided and even shut down. A father is irresponsible with family finances and the family is out on the street and relatives are having to take them home.

In each case it may be that the people the leader represents had no knowledge, didn’t know what was going on, and maybe it even would have been difficult for them to know what was going on. They’re really not to blame, and yet the consequences follow. This is called life. To say that it’s not fair, in and of itself, is to simply be a hypocrite. This is the way we live.

If the neighbor kid knocks a baseball through our window, and the neighbor kid is 6, we don’t go and ask him to pay for the window. We go to his dad and say, “Your kid broke my window. Please do something about this.” Dad doesn’t say, “Well, when he’s old enough he’ll get a job, but he can start going around collecting cans. I’m sure within a few years he’ll have enough.” No, there is a covenanted responsibility here within the family.

The child represents the family, the family represents the child, the father represents the child. There are connections here where what one of us does affects everybody. This is true of families and it’s true of churches. A church member goes online and says, “I’m a member of such-and-such a church, and I think…”

You’ve just given that church a reputation.

Yeah, you have. The elders can quickly try to get online and delete it and say, “No, no, no, they’re not speaking for us. You’re not affiliated with us,” but it doesn’t always work as well.

“They go to your church, don’t they?”

“Yeah.”

Especially when the elders don’t act quickly – he says, speaking from experience – and we let things simmer too long, it can give us a black eye. “Why didn’t you stop this guy? You heard he was online.”

“We told him to stop. He said he would, and then started again.”

These are normal matters of life, and it’s rooted in the nature of God. I don’t remember exactly what the outline says, but it’s kind of hard not to go there right now.

Because this is what it means to be a person in the presence of other people, right?

Yes, this is humanity. We can look at our common standing in Adam, and as Christians our common standing in Christ. We can see that we each are members of families, of commonwealths, communities, city/states, nations. We are members of churches, and these are things that God has established.

God ordained families. God ordained commonwealths. God ordained church, local congregations and the body of Christ collectively, because God created man in his image. So we look back beyond man, back into eternity and out beyond creation into the essence of God, and we find there that the Father has eternally revealed himself, represented himself, in his Son.

The Son is the image of the Father, the image of the living God. He’s his Logos, the very word of his heart. He is an accurate representation, the exhaustively accurate representation of the Father, and the Father is well-pleased in him.

So when we look at the Son we see the Father, and from both the Holy Spirit proceeds eternally, and from eternity into time, into history, and brings to us the word of the Father and the Son together. So we have a self-revealing God. We have a God who represents himself.

Revelation and representation are different ways of looking at what is fundamentally the same thing. God is not a closed-off God. God is not an isolated God. He’s not a God who has no ties and is a loner and does not want to be touched or bothered or connected. He’s not going to sit over here and read his book and watch his favorite movie. God is tri-personal and there is this eternal fellowship, but the Son being of the same essence of the Father, together them being one God, there’s accurate representation. This is God. This is ultimate reality. So when God creates man in his image, we shouldn’t be at all surprised that this idea of representation is incorporated throughout creation.

We’re talking about the human level, and you can talk about other levels. You can talk about the light that streams from the sun representing the sun. You can talk about the music in the air representing the birds that it came from, and you can go on and on and on, as one sort of phenomenon manifests itself, comes from, flows out of something else. This is just reality. This is just the way the world works, so we should be able to wrap our heads around that.

Have you ever had a friend and then sort of get to know what this person’s family is like, and then you meet their parents and you’re like, “Oh, you make so much more sense now.” Even though you already knew this person and you sort of knew about their family, it all fits together and you understand more, the more you meet. I think that’s always really fun.

Oh yeah.

Any examples come to mind, Bryan?

Weirdly disconnected from myself, yes. My fiancé had the same experience when she met my parents in person. She looked at me after we had finished a conversation with my parents the first day that she was in town and she went, “So many things make sense now.” [laughing]

And she meant that in a good way.

She did, actually.

The funny thing for me, though, is I know both of your parents. I know your dad pretty well because we spent that one year in Bible class, but it started previously. I think it was first the trip to Europe.

Oh yeah, because the Bible class he sat in on was my senior year. That’s right.

So I got to know him as an adventurer in Europe as a chaperone. That year we went to Paris and there were pickpockets all over, and he was very bold to help defend not only the young ladies in our group, but the rather dense oblivious young ladies in the other group, who didn’t understand pickpockets or how you avoid them or how you don’t get stolen from. Then he sat a year in our Bible class and, although our theology at some points differ, we had a great time. He was an asset, to be sure.

So I know him, and yet I see some of him in you, but not a lot. I probably see more of your mom in you.

That’s true.

Your zeal, most certainly, is in your dad.

Sometimes we see it, sometimes we don’t. Sometimes we have to know people and we have to look for subtleties. I think if people knew my parents they would see my mom in me first, but I can see some very stark things that I get from my dad, both good and bad. If you say “conspiracy theory,” that’s my dad and I don’t completely apologize for it.

Again, this is normal life. We say “Like father, like son” and we assume that the one represents himself to some degree for good reasons, which are about a covenant. The problem, of course, is – and this is what you wanted to bring up, Emily, so go ahead and shoot.

This is not only an American principle, but a principle of the book of Deuteronomy, when Moses says, “You shall not put the children to death for the sins of the father,” and vice versa, so there’s some kind of individualism there, if we want to see it in the text. So how does that fit?

When you first brought this up with me I had one answer, and in the 25 minutes that followed I have a different answer, which is more accurate.

I’m very curious to see if either of your answers are similar to mine.

My first thoughts have to do with – it’s the right direction and I just wasn’t going far enough. When you’re dealing face-to-face with God, and God has set parameters, and God’s the one calling the shots, that’s a little different from civil government.

That’s exactly where I was going to go. This is talking about man dealing with man.

Yeah, and what I just said is true, it’s just not true enough, and I’ll develop that in a second.

There’s this obvious thing of let’s not have blood feuds. “Your son took our pig. We must kill all your children now.” Let’s not do that. Let’s have no Hatfield and McCoys, because where does it end?

“Them’s fightin’ words!”

Yeah, we don’t need to have entire clans over successive generations at each other’s throats because something happened in the past and we don’t even know for sure who did what to whom. The law avoids that.

That’s one reason the Bible does establish civil government, so we don’t reduce down to clan law and perpetual blood feuds over generations. God tells civil government to execute the person who committed the capital crime. It doesn’t bleed over or spill over to anyone else. Our own Constitution reflects this – no punishment, no blood of attainder and other fancy Latin words. The Constitution says, “Don’t punish the kids or take away their stuff, taint their blood or taint them with treason because their father did something,” because that was something the old world did a lot.

“Your father did something to me before I became king. Now that I’m king, obviously that’s retroactively treason and therefore all of his lands are forfeited, which means all your lands are forfeited, which means you need to pay all the bills your father accrued. Oh, you have no money? You are now in debtor’s prison,” and it just kept going and going.

Our Constitution says, “No, that’s not right,” and it has good biblical basis for saying that’s not right.

It sort of brings to mind every action movie where the villain says, “All right, you interfered with my plan for XYZ” – this drug deal, this world domination plan, whatever it is, depending on the genre – “so I’m going to kill your kids now.” It’s a very inherently wicked thing when you’re dealing man to man.

Yes, it’s “I want to hurt you as badly as you hurt me, or more so, and the thing that will hurt you most is taking your kids,” whereas the thing that hurt me most was taking away my plot for world domination or getting a few hundred thousand dollars, or whatever.

That goes back to Hammurabi, too, doesn’t it, where the children are treated as an extension of the father, rather than as persons in their own right.

Yeah, that was common enough among Roman law, Greek law, and just about everybody else. Again, Israel was refreshingly unique and dedicated to individual freedom in this respect, with regard to normal civil practices. And yet we look here and the children were executed, and we can deal with that in a minute. By the way, there’s no wife on this scene. He seems to either be a widower or the wife was away or just doesn’t have one for some reason, but the children are executed.

I think we’re drawn more to, “But how about these other guys who died in battle?” Their connection is distant. They weren’t consenting to the act. They did not know about the act, nor were they particularly the ones responsible to find out about the act. That would have been up to their elders.

There’s nothing that says that these individuals who died failed in their responsibility to make sure that everything was hunky-dory. They were just sent into battle, and the punishment upon all Israel – and it would affect all Israel to some extent, but obviously their own families most of all – Israel had collectively disobeyed God because their leaders had not done what they needed to do, which was to check with God before you go into battle.

Now, the hint to all of this is mentioned in the previous chapter. The hint is at the beginning of verse 7. The children of Israel committed a trespass in the accursed thing. They took of the accursed thing, we’re told.

God tells Joshua, “They’ve transgressed my covenant, for they have even taken of the accursed thing.” Then he tells Israel, “Sanctify yourself. There is an accursed thing in the middle of you. It shall be that he that is taken with the accursed thing shall be burnt with fire, he and all that he hath, because he hath transgressed the covenant of the Lord because he hath brought folly in Israel.”

When we go back and look at the previous chapter we see in Joshua 6:17, speaking of Jericho –

And the city shall be accursed, even it, and all that are therein, to the Lord. Only Rahab the harlot shall live, she and all that are with her in the house, because she hid the messengers that we sent. And ye, in any wise keep yourselves from the accursed thing, lest ye make yourselves accursed when ye take of the accursed thing, and make the camp of Israel a curse and trouble it.

That sounds like one thing, but then something happens here that we may not be ready for.

But all the silver and gold and vessels of brass and iron are consecrated unto the Lord. They shall come into the treasury of the Lord.

So we’re told –

And they utterly destroyed all that was in the city, both man and woman, young and old, and ox, and sheep, and ass, with the edge of the sword. And they burnt the city with fire, and all that was therein. Only the silver and the gold and the vessels of brass and of iron they put into the treasury of the house of the Lord.

But the children of Israel committed a trespass in the accursed thing, so what’s going on here? This word ‘accursed’ has only one meaning to us. It means it’s really bad, and bad things are going to happen to it, but that’s not quite what’s going on here. The word is more subtle and broad in its meaning. It has the idea of that which has been devoted wholly to God. God has a claim on it in his wrath. That which survives his wrath then becomes his.

So the silver, the gold, the brass, the metal things that can survive fire become his personal property. Nobody gets any of it. When they loot the town and spoil the town, nobody gets to take any of the gold, silver, treasures, gems, anything like that home to themselves.

So when Paul talks about those things that are saved but as through fire…hmm.

Exactly. Some things can survive a fire. Some things are burned up.

So when we come to this and we’re talking about the accursed thing, we have to understand that Jericho was unique. It was the first fruits of the conquest of Canaan, and God did something very special with it. He said, “It is mine. Once you get past this and you conquer other cities, you can take stuff. You can get rich off of this. But we’re starting – whether you think first fruits or tithe or the Lord’s Day – and the first part is mine. This is part of my ongoing holy war.” We’ve talked about holy war already.

“You must keep your hands off of this, and anything that survives the fire comes to me and I destroy everything else. Or I give you the fire and you destroy everything else.”

So that’s the context. Israel is here fighting a holy war, which is to say they are acting as priest warriors. This is what I meant earlier when I said you’re dealing directly with God. It’s more than just that in a vague-ish sense, in that you’re not just talking to another human being. You actually are talking to God. But God has put you in his army, put a sword in your hand, given you a battle program, given you specific details, and said specifically, “But don’t touch that!”

Specific instructions to the contrary, Achan.

Yeah, very specific. So when Achan does that, he violates the whole meaning of the conquest of Jericho. Israel as a whole, as a united army, as men standing before God as his personal emissaries – and remember, this was kind of a new thing. God was not in the habit of commissioning his people to carry swords and go kill people. He had done it a few times now, starting with Amalek at the beginning of the 40 years, and then the Amorite tribes on the other side just a year or so back from where they’re standing right now, and then Jericho. So this is something they’re still getting used to, being warriors in God’s holy army, and God is very tight here, very clear. There’s no room for confusion.

So when they’ve done this, you would think the leaders would stop before they go into the next battle and say to God, who knows everything, “Did we do all right? Did we miss something?”

Performance feedback.

Yes. Exit/entrance please. What went on? And unfortunately they didn’t, and as they get ready for the next battle they also do not ask God. Here’s this little city. It’s a town, not even a city. It’s more like a village, and the feedback he gets from the spies is, “We just need a few thousand people,” so the town probably only had a couple hundred inhabitants. “A few thousand, we’ve got this no problem,” and at no point do they consult with God.

They’re dropping sort of down from Rank 1 down to Rank 2. We’re going from a personally dedicated directed strike force for God down to a general army still working for God. We haven’t cleared things with the top command, and on our own initiative we’re going to say, “We don’t need to take this very seriously because anybody can do this.”

There’s a problem with that, and there are some spiritual lessons there. Sometimes we look at particular sins, struggles, and problems in our lives and we say, “This is hard, this is really hard. I need help. I need counseling. I need a friend. I need prayer,” and we find our way through it and we come out with a sigh and think, “Whew, boy, that was hard but God was faithful.” Then some little thing comes up – the cat trips us and we kick him across the room, or our little girl spills something and we explode – because we’re not ready for that next little thing. It’s a little thing! Is it not little?

“I shouldn’t need prayer for this.”

“Yeah, I shouldn’t need prayer for this. I don’t need God’s grace. I can handle this.” Well, no. You can’t.

Not only is this ‘holy’ war, it’s holy ‘war.’ You’re going out onto a battlefield. It’s unconscionable for commanders not to make sure that their men are coming back alive.

We’ve had our share of generals, both in American history and European history, where their reputation is they won all their battles. They didn’t care how many men it cost them, but boy, they won. One who became a US president comes to mind. But that’s not a Christian approach to battle, nor is it a Christian approach to ministry, which is what this is. These are acts of worship.

If I haven’t said that yet, I need to make that real clear. This warfare, being holy warfare, is an act of worship. They are priests worshiping God with swords. What you do in the presence of God is a whole lot different from what you do on a tennis court or a soccer field or even in protecting your home from an intruder.

We have not only this and like things. Just at Bible study last night we were talking about Uzzah who puts forth his hand to steady the ark, and God smites him. He meant well. He wasn’t the one who came up with the plan of moving the whole thing by a cart, and he was put in a horrible predicament. “If I let the ark fall, there goes the covenant. If I touch it, I break God’s law. I’m sure God will understand.” No.

That’s a funny thing about Uzzah, too. Throughout the old covenant we see these external acts of judgment that God delivers, and we don’t know what that says about Uzzah’s soul. We don’t know ultimately how God looks on his sin. We know how God dealt externally with this action.

With this particular covenant action, because he’s a Levite and he’s in the presence of God and he ought to know. When the ark came back from the Philistines, it was a priestly city and a bunch of people got up and opened the ark and all of that. Eventually they stepped over a line and God judged them, but the law says you weren’t even supposed to look at the ark. It was supposed to be covered.

God cut them a lot of slack, but there comes a point where he says, “No, you’re over the top now. You’ve lost all reverence here. You’re just treating it like a freak show.”

You can think of Nadab and Abihu, who offered strange fire before the Lord. They got everything right. I mean the right God, they weren’t worshiping a false god, it was the right place, it was the tabernacle, it was the right incense, they were the right people, it was their job to offer incense. All they did was offer the wrong fire and God smote them dead and burned them up.

You come to the New Testament and there’s Ananias and Sapphira. They brought money that they said represented the whole price of their land, and Peter is very clear. “You didn’t have to sell your land. You didn’t have to give it to the church. You didn’t have to give all of it to the church. You could have just given part if you wanted to. But you brought a gift into the presence of God and you lied to make a name for yourself. You lied to the Holy Ghost and you’re dead now,” and one by one they dropped dead.

We can think too of the Lord’s Supper. Paul warns the Corinthians that some among them have become ill and some have fallen asleep or died because of their abuse of the supper. We’re not told specifically what they did. We’re not told that they were great sinners, the ones who died. Maybe they were. Maybe they were the ones who were visiting prostitutes and suing each other in court, but maybe they weren’t. What Paul in that chapter talks about is eating the supper before other people get there, or getting drunk at the supper.

Here again what we’re seeing is these are things that happen in the presence of God. The closer you come to the presence of God, the more serious things get and the more the representation ties you to instantaneous and serious judgment.

So as we continue considering this, that I think is key. It’s not just that it was a God thing. It’s not just that they were in covenant together, although they were. These are all true things, but specifically it’s this issue that these things were accursed.

Notice we’ve got a garment from Shinar, a Babylonian garment, so that’s kind of like, “Oh, you mean this comes from the place called Babel, where man rebelled against God?” That’s wonderful.

I was going to ask about that because Babylon wasn’t a world empire, so it’s talking about the city or the region where Babel was built?

Babylon came and went a number of times, but they would know of it, and I believe the Hebrew was “a garment of Shinar,” so it’s from that region. But the other stuff – the gold and silver – should have gone through the fire and gone into the tabernacle. He stole from God’s treasure chest. It’s like sneaking into heaven and trying to rob the golden throne. I mean really! How stupid do you have to be? How simple and naïve do you have to be to think that this is in any way a good idea? So we’ve got that.

And then we probably should address the whole thing of the family, because we find out at the end that the sons and daughters are included. Now, were they just part of this because of covenant responsibility? That’s possible. I think in this case it’s more likely – tents were not like huge houses. Tents were maybe a little larger than Boy Scout tents, but not a whole lot, and to hide something under the floor might be a little bit difficult without collusion from your family.

In light of what you have already read, that children should not be put to death for the sins of the fathers, I think we can probably say that taking it as far as the death penalty probably means that they were directly involved, or they were at least accessories after the fact. If not, it again just goes to show you that in this particular circumstance God’s holiness is not something to mess around with.

And it’s not just between you and God. It’s between you and God and the church around you.

Yes, the church around you. When Nadab and Abihu died because of the fire, Moses had to tell Aaron, “Don’t you dare weep. Let Israel weep. You follow through and continue ordination, lest God be angry with the whole congregation.”

There’s one other story. I don’t remember if in our projected course of study we come to it or not, but at the end of Joshua when the battles are over and the children of Israel are going back to their various tribal locations, 2-1/2 of the tribes – Reuben and Gad and half the tribe of Manasseh – are going back across the Jordan. And no sooner had they gone, but word comes to Joshua and Phinehas and some of the others that they built an altar. Immediately, to their credit, Israel says, “We’ve got to go to war!”

We can’t have another altar to the Lord.

No, there’s only one altar. They actually eventually tell these tribes, “Today you rebel. Tomorrow God is going to be angry with the whole congregation.” See, they’d learned their lesson. But again it’s a matter of worship. It isn’t that they broke a speeding law. It isn’t that they stole somebody’s property. It isn’t even that they killed somebody.

In God’s mind, those are bad things but this is in a class all by itself. This has to do with the centrality of the gospel, the salvation of the world, and that’s a far more important thing than whether somebody did 75 in a 60 mph zone, or even whether or not somebody killed his neighbor in a fit of rage. This is something that goes very deep and very far.

But Israel is wise enough that before they jump into battle they send good representatives. They send the best people they’ve got to try to talk them down off a ledge and say, “Look, you can’t be doing this. Now, if your land is unclean we’ll give you some of ours, but don’t do this. Don’t rebel, or God’s going to be angry with all of us.”

They said, “Oh no, no, wait. You completely misunderstand. It’s just a monument. We’re not doing any sacrifice here. It’s just to remind your children in the future and ours that we all belong together and that we all have interest in that same altar and tabernacle. We’re not doing any sacrifices here.”

It’s a memorial in the shape of an altar. It’s not an altar.

It is not an altar. It just kind of looks like one. So everybody is happy with that. But there again, today you sin with regard to the worship of the Lord, of what you do before the face of God, and tomorrow God will be angry with the whole congregation.

This is something that hurts. When pastors or elders are unfaithful, they don’t defend the church from false doctrine, they offer, as it were, strange fire before the Lord, false doctrine, false worship, God may remove those congregations. Little innocent grandmas and grandpas who were faithful for many years may get caught up in it and they may not know what in the world is going on or why people are preaching some kind of strange things and why everybody is shoving and shouting and why our church building is being shut down and no one comes anymore.

God will remove candlesticks that are unfaithful. We could do an entire lesson on chapters 2 and 3 of Revelation at this point, the danger of losing your candlestick if you do not guard the purity of the church when Jesus comes to see it. Again, it’s what you do in the presence of God and what you do in the worship of God.

Speaking of Jesus, this idea of representation is absolutely critical. I can imagine hearing Christians hearing this and thinking, “No, this is just reprehensible to me. I think God treats us all as individuals,” but if we fall back on that, what do we lose?

What we lose is a Savior who can represent us covenantally, at which point Jesus becomes nothing more than a great example. “He showed us how God loves, because he died. You know, it’s not really clear how that works, but somehow…”

“Let me demonstrate my love for you by perishing.”

By dying. “I came to tell you about God’s love…”

And for no reason.

“…for no reason. I died senselessly because people didn’t like the moral message I was giving, but by dying I showed you that God apparently wanted you to be good people, and I came to tell you about that and show you. I’m not clear exactly how he was going to show his love, but he did because in the end he’s rejected and killed, and that’s it.” So we look to Jesus as this great example of God’s love in what he said and ultimately what he did, dying a martyr, and that’s it. That’s all Jesus did for us.

That’s not the gospel. Without the covenant union with Christ, that is not the gospel.

No, so that brings us back again to what we were talking about, the American Gospel, the second one, where the people who are being checked out and interviewed by the movie makers keep coming back with this, “Well, God is love. He doesn’t need to punish his son. I mean that’s reprehensible. You don’t punish one person for someone else, and you don’t sacrifice your child. The world agrees that child sacrifice is a wicked thing, so God couldn’t possibly do any of that.”

So we’re left with, “God gave us Jesus as some kind of example of love, and we’re supposed to live up to it, and that apparently is the gospel.”

I remember a couple of young punk naysayers kind of making a joke out of, “Well, we don’t really know what the gospel is. I mean at which point of the Bible, because they all say it differently or get it different, so I can’t say what the gospel is.”

That’s because you’re willfully blind.

Yeah, after slapping them a couple times, which is not the Christian way of doing things but you feel like doing it anyhow…

Indwelling sin.

Yeah, exactly. You want to say to them, “So you do not know what the gospel is. Do you then believe that one can have fellowship with God, go to heaven, live eternally, without believing a gospel that you can’t define? So are you telling us either a) the gospel is totally irrelevant to anything and you’ll do just fine without it, or b) are you telling us that you’re damned eternally and we shouldn’t be listening to you? Which of these? Because either way we shouldn’t be listening to you.”

Of course, they would say, “That’s dualistic thinking. We don’t believe in either/or’s.”

Well, God does.

Also just as a rebuttal to that idea, it’s the common phrase “cosmic child abuse.” I think that’s what David Bentley Hart calls it, and a few others. It’s really not, because of the obvious reasons that scripture very clearly describes it not being that way, but also Jesus went to it willingly and it wasn’t because of Stockholm Syndrome.

Honestly, I feel like this is where a really robust Trinitarian doctrine that is informed by the history of the Church regarding that doctrine really helps hedge against frankly stupid statements like this. If you look at divine simplicity it’s like the actions of the Godhead are they belong to all the members of the Godhead. God the Father is not opposed in action or will or desire to the actions of God the Son. In fact, they’re so united that the term that’s been used to describe this is ‘inseparable operations.’

There’s another term that I meant to use tonight, and I didn’t see how in the world I was going to get there, but you just opened the door. It’s perichoresis. It’s the idea that the Father is in the Son, and the Son in the Father.

We can think of the Upper Room discourse or farewell discourse. He’s trying to drive home his unity with the Father and he does not merely say – although to merely say this would be incredible – “I’m God and the Father is God. We’re one essence.” But having established that they are the same God and one essence, it kicks even further as regards to being distinct persons. Nonetheless, there’s a mutual indwelling. Whenever we meet the Father, we meet the Son. Whenever we meet the Son, we meet the Father.

It’s not like a 3-sided crystal, where you can look into one side of the crystal and see all of the crystal, but you’re only confronted with the one face. Then you turn the crystal and you see a different face. You see the whole crystal, but the other face….

“That’s modalism, Patrick.”

It is a form of that, to be sure. The doctrine of perichoresis helps dispel that even more. Not only are they all the one God with a common consciousness and will, but the person of each is with and in the person of the other all the time, so they’re always doing everything together.

So when you talk about the sacrifice of the Son, 1) it’s the same God, and 2) it’s not the Son as held at arms’ length being told, “Go do something mean and nasty, or let something violent happen to you.” It’s the persons wrapped up in one another, agreeing that this is the loving thing that they want to do, that he wants to do, and it’s not, for example, Abraham offering up Isaac, although even Abraham did that by faith. This is something that takes it to levels we can’t even begin to understand. The deep unity is the Godhead, and then we can go back even further, the unity of God’s love and justice.

These progressive Christians – and this comes out in the movie – keep saying, “Why does God need to be just? He’s God. He can just arbitrarily forget about the whole justice thing and just love people. Just forget about their sins. Why should he have to punish anybody?”

Because he’s God and he doesn’t ‘have’ justice, he doesn’t ‘have’ love, he isn’t mostly love and a little justice, mostly grace and a little wrath. He is God. He is righteousness and truth and justice and love. It just matters how we see him from our historical perspective.

With that which happened on the cross we see the greatest love and grace of God, and the greatest wrath and justice of God, all wrapped up in the same thing at the same time. God can’t be other than himself.

What this whole progressive thing does is it tries to bring – and I appreciated the way you said that earlier – it brings God down to what I am comfortable with, what meets my sensibilities.

Not to mention what meets your logical understanding of a being. “We can’t have three persons in one substance. Clearly these are three miniatures that are talking amongst each other.”

“We have a club called God that has three members, and one of them is mean and brutal, and the other is loving and kind.”

“That’s modalism, Patrick,” or tri-theism. Partialism.

It’s definitely tri-theism as well. It’s a whole lot at once.

There’s a lot of different heresies you can commit at the same time.

Some of these people wonder, “Why do you get into all this stuff about the Trinity and unity and simplicity and this thing called perichoresis? Why does this matter?”

We’re talking about what God does!

“Isn’t it just our relationship with Jesus that counts? Isn’t that the important thing?”

We can be blamed for talking about things that are too deep or too high, or people can check out. “Oh, that’s too deep for me.” No, it isn’t, and you need to discipline your mind to hear what God is telling you. “The secret things are the Lord’s, but the things which he’s revealed belong to us and our children, that we may be do all the words of this law.”

If God tells us these things, there is application. There is need in us. There ought to be a hunger in us to learn these things and to get them right and to keep reminding ourselves, because it’s so easy to forget.

It’s like looking at a stream or a river and seeing still water and thinking, “That’s not that complex.” But then you realize how deep it goes.

And all the little eddies and all the little sub-currents.

And all the things that are alive there that are invisible to the naked eye, but the river wouldn’t be the river if all that weren’t there. Any why is it moving, anyway? I don’t see anything pulling or pushing it.

Why are all these sharp rocks here?

And why are these rocks so dull? It’s like it has a history or something.

Anyway, there we go. I think that is our discussion, at least of the high points of this little thing.

How it ends is the children of Israel get serious and they go back to God, and God gives them a plan. It’s a plan that we see again later on in the book of Judges. “You’re going to put some people behind the city. They’re going to hide. Then you’re going to send a strike force up and they’re going to run away until all the men are out of the city, then your lurkers are going to come and take the city.”

There are things in the Christian life that deserve all of our energy and interest and focus, especially when the whole life of the church is concerned. And there are some things that we can get along without fussing with each other about. But in every generation there are some things where we can’t, and those are the things that concern the gospel.

In every generation the gospel is attacked a little differently, and it’s easy to say, “This is a big thing. That thing over there – that’s just dumb. We’re not going to worry about that. Someone can handle them.” We need to be careful. We need to be serious. We need to not be those who surrender a congregation, a class, a presbytery, a denomination to some little heresy that’s going to turn around and eat us all up in the next generation.

Those of us who are called to office, those of us who have been given an understanding of theology need to be very responsible here. I think as people listen to us, I hope they see that the thing we come back to again and again is the gospel of Jesus Christ. There’s a lot of things we love to talk about, a lot of fun things, but that I think has been a line we’ve drawn in the sand, or I hope in concrete. This is salvation. This is your God. This is the way he’s ordained. There are no other options. And however little this deviation may seem, if it’s not the gospel of Jesus Christ then let it be anathema.

That’s a good place to stop for the evening and make some recommendations.

Yes. I would love to recommend things. In fact, I would like to re-commend to you all something I’ve already recommended once, so is that a re-recommend? I don’t know. In any case, since I talked about it a little bit towards the end there, I figured it is as good a time as any to recommend once again James Dolezal’s excellent book All That Is in God.

If you want a quick – I can’t say easy, but at least a very succinct primer on divine simplicity and the doctrine of classical Christian theism as it has been expressed in the Church for the past roughly 2,000 years, I highly recommend it. He’s a very intelligent Reformed Baptist – I believe he’s a minister now – and it is excellent.

I’m actually overdue for a re-read to refresh myself on the concepts because some of these deeper topics have a habit of getting into your head and you go, “Wow, that’s great!” and then you forget about it three months later because it’s complicated. So that’s James Dolezal’s All That Is in God. The full version of that phrase is “All that is in God is God.” I recommend it.

Great. Greg, do you want to go next?

I’m going to recommend Cornelius Van Til’s Introduction to Systematic Theology. It’s best probably for people who already understand systematics. Introduction to Systematic Theology is actually about the doctrine of God more than anything else. It doesn’t deal with everything that falls under systematics by any means, but it talks particularly about the doctrine of God. It’s what he has picked up largely from Herman Bavinck.

Van Til is not the greatest or smoothest or clearest of authors. That’s why I say if you don’t know anything about this topic, probably start with Bryan’s recommendation and work up to this. But if you have a pretty good grip on simplicity, the unity of God, and the doctrine of the Trinity, this will begin to pull some things together for you philosophically, and begin to point in interesting directions.

It will challenge your thinking. It will challenge your ability to understand English. But it’s at the same time simple and profound. It’s simple in that he doesn’t really use big words too much – he does occasionally – but sometimes you’re not sure what in the world he just meant. But if you think it through, there’s meat to chew on that goes beyond just what theologians tend to think about.

It begins to break out into the realms of philosophy, history, sociology, and things like that – begins. Other people have taken it from there, but if you haven’t read this then you might not know what they’re talking about. So that’s Cornelius Van Til’s Introduction to Systematic Theology.

I’m going to take a left turn or possibly a wormhole from there to Bob Dylan’s gospel album, “Slow Train Coming,” just because I enjoy Cornelius Van Til’s writing for many of the same reasons that I enjoy songs by Bob Dylan. I want to, at some point, put together a quiz of “Who said it? Bob Dylan or Cornelius Van Til?” because I think that would just be a blast.

I get that Bob Dylan is not everybody’s cup of tea vocal style-wise, but the songs are really excellent. And if you want to just expand your musical horizons a little bit, I highly recommend this album.

Thank you, guys, so much. This has been a great time. Thanks also to David, our producer and my lawfully-wedded husband.

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I think that’s all of the extra information that I can cram into my brain at this late hour, so thank you so much for listening. We hope to see you next week.