By Farther Steps

Reformed and Reforming, semper reformanda to Christ's glory.

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A Study in Cherubim

What is a cherub? If have even heard of the word, the first thing that comes to mind when you hear it is most likely chubby babies with wings. That’s because Raphael painted them that way in his “Sistine Madonna”:

And now they are everywhere looking all cute. You just want to pinch those fat little cheeks, don’t you? Except, that isn’t what a cherub is. So what really is a cherub? Ezekiel saw some and here’s part of how he described them:

[T]hey had a human likeness, but each had four faces, and each of them had four wings. Their legs were straight, and the soles of their feet were like the sole of a calf’s foot. And they sparkled like burnished bronze. Under their wings on their four sides they had human hands. And the four had their faces and their wings thus: their wings touched one another…As for the likeness of their faces, each had a human face. The four had the face of a lion on the right side, the four had the face of an ox on the left side, and the four had the face of an eagle. Such were their faces. And their wings were spread out above. Each creature had two wings, each of which touched the wing of another, while two covered their bodies…As for the likeness of the living creatures, their appearance was like burning coals of fire, like the appearance of torches moving to and fro among the living creatures. And the fire was bright, and out of the fire went forth lightning. And the living creatures darted to and fro, like the appearance of a flash of lightning. (Ezekiel 1:5-14)

The reason you know these are cherubim is because Ezekiel says so in 10:20, “These were the living creatures that I saw underneath the God of Israel by the Chebar canal; and I knew that they were cherubim.”

They’re not supposed to be cute, they are fearsome. God put one at the entrance to the Garden of Eden after Adam and Eve were evicted (Genesis 3:24). There were two cherubim on the top of the mercy seat (Exodus 7:89) and just like in Ezekiel’s vision, the continuing reference to the cherubim is that the Lord is seated above them.

So about all Raphael got right was the wings, just not enough of them. Perhaps. The way Ezekiel saw them, they had six wings, but consider how they’re described in 1 Kings:

In the inner sanctuary he made two cherubim of olivewood, each ten cubits high. Five cubits was the length of one wing of the cherub, and five cubits the length of the other wing of the cherub; it was ten cubits from the tip of one wing to the tip of the other…And the wings of the cherubim were spread out so that a wing of one touched the one wall, and a wing of the other cherub touched the other wall; their other wings touched each other in the middle of the house. (1 Kings 6:23-24, 27)

These cherubim have two wings. Now lest you get the impression that these were uninspired, artistic representations, don’t forget that Bezalel and Oholiab were inspired to construct the tabernacle including the ark (Exodus 31:1-11). They didn’t make up what the cherubim looked like and when Solomon had the temple constructed, they had the ark with the cherubim. No reason they would make the look different if they had a model right there.

So what do we gain from this study of cherubim? I think there are a handful of things.

Ezekiel saw a vision. When prophets see visions, things mean something but not necessarily that cherubim are covered with eyes and have four wings. As we’ve seen elsewhere cherubim only have two wings. What Ezekiel’s vision is trying to communicate is that God is all-seeing and that’s why where his throne touches the earth that structure is covered in eyes. God sees. Cherubim are real creatures but the vision Ezekiel got of them was communicating more than their outward appearance. They’re spiritual beings and so their outward appearance is not something physical like ours.

The temple and tabernacle were earthly images of heavenly reality (Hebrews 8) and the same is true of what Ezekiel saw. He saw something true and real in heaven and tried to explain it in earthly terms. That’s what the temple did too. There is something real in heaven and the earthly things show a picture of what that is really like without duplicating it. It can’t be duplicated on earth.

And what is kind of cool is where these two things come together. In Genesis 3 God places a cherubim at the entrance to the garden of Eden to guard the way to the tree of life. But if the cherubim are associated with God’s presence, then God didn’t post a guard and take off. Everywhere else in the scriptures, God’s glory shone above the cherubim. In Genesis 3, the cherubim guarded the way to the Tree of Life but also into God’s presence. In Revelation 21 and 22 the Tree of Life is back and, as you’d expect, it is associated with God’s presence. In Revelation 21:22, John notices that the city that he was shown has no temple, “for its temple is the Lord God the Almighty and the Lamb.” The point is that God dwells with man in this city. In chapter 22 he says that there is a river that flows out of the throne of God through the middle of the street of the city and on either side of it is the Tree of Life. There is no cherubim this time. Everything that is evil has been thrown into the lake of fire and in this city “nothing unclean will ever enter it, nor anyone who does what is detestable or false” (Revelation 21:27). There is no need of a guard now.

Endnote: This is not license to spiritualize everything in scripture which is usually the accusation as soon as you say anything like this. No, you have to pay attention to what the author is doing. Visions are not like watching TV where you get live coverage of the event. However, history is history and so when Moses says that Noah built an ark, an ark was built. Ezekiel tells you that he’s seeing a vision, Moses clues you in that he’s recalling historic events. Best to keep them straight. Notice that Moses never described the cherubim in Genesis, he only said that they were there; probably indescribable.

Time and Again

The Lord comes a second time to all who are his true children. Have we never, like Abraham, stopped at our Harans? Of course we have. We are sent on errands, but some sin or preoccupation detains us. Have we never, like Moses, taken matters into our own hands and formulated our own plans? Of course, we have. Like Peter, we have even denied our Lord on occasions when we should have spoken for him. We have disobeyed him. We have run away from him. Some of us, like Jonah, have run very far indeed. Does God cast us off? Does he disown us? No! He disciplines us, it is true. But, having done that and having brought us to the place of repentance, he returns the second time to recommission us to service. Moreover, he comes a third, a fourth, a hundredth, a thousandth time, if necessary, as it often is. None of us would be where we are now in our Christian lives if God had not dealt thus with us. Oh, the greatness of the unmerited grace of God! We deserve nothing. Yet we receive everything, even when we foolishly turn from it. – James Montgomery Boice, The Minor Prophets, volume 1, 294

Hitting the Nail Upon the Top

I’ve been updating my blog more lately and that means one thing for sure: comment spam. Fortunately, the spam filter catches about 99% of it but there are some that wind up in the zone between spam and comments and I have to review them. They’ve been getting interesting. Here are two samples:

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So why do spammers do this? Because they always include links to something stupid. The idea is to get their crap website selling crap bumped up in the Google search results for when people search for crap. Google ranks sites based on how many other sites link to it. Having bots post comments on blogs like the above is supposed to be a way of getting better Google ratings for free. The other, more honest way of doing it is to pay Google. Well, that isn’t exactly honest but it doesn’t pollute the internet. Well, at least it doesn’t pollute my blog. What would really be an honest way? Have actual content on your site that people would link to instead of crap. But where’s the fun in that?

Update: Spambots approve of this post. It attracted a spam comment itself:

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God is More Than You Think


Not being able to fully understand God is frustrating, but it is ridiculous for us to think we have the right to limit God to something we are capable of comprehending. What a stunted, insignificant god that would be! If my mind is the size of a soda can and God is the size of all the oceans, it would be stupid for me to say He is only the small amount of water I can scoop into my little can. God is so much bigger, so far beyond our time-encased, air/food/sleep-dependant lives. – Francis Chan, Crazy Love

God’s Purposes and the Nations

For the chastisement of the daughter of my people has been greater
than the punishment of Sodom,
which was overthrown in a moment,
and no hands were wrung for her. (Lamentations 4:6)

Sodom, for all her wickedness, got wiped out in a flash but Israel, for her unfaithfulness, suffered long under siege and exile and foreign rule. God directly eliminated Sodom but used the instrument of Babylon to punish Israel. God didn’t have the covenant relationship with Sodom that he had with Israel; he had not given his oracles to Sodom, he had not promised to raise up Eve’s seed from Sodom, his promise would flow through Abraham’s seed, not through Sodom’s gates. When Sodom’s wickedness was full their time was over. When Israel’s wickedness was full it was time for their exile till the land had its rest. As far as the nation goes, what purpose does God have to bring Israel back? What promise is he yet to deliver if Jesus has come and they rejected and killed him?

Well, there is still hope. God didn’t punish Israel after Jesus’ death and resurrection they way he’d punished Sodom; that is, fire didn’t fall from heaven and consume Jerusalem. Instead God, as he had done in the first exile, used the instrumentality of a nation, this time Rome, to scatter the Jews and level Jerusalem. So if the pattern noticed above holds, then there is still a future for Israel and Egypt and Assyria and Rome and the rest of the nations since he didn’t wipe them out after Jesus’ death and resurrection.

While it is true that God doesn’t change, it is also true that his purposes for different nations and people are not uniform. At the same time, he doesn’t pretend he didn’t see sin. Jesus died for his people and their sins are atoned for, but when entire nations act wickedly he deals with them as well. Just like in Israel, those who trust him are saved but the nation may be doomed to fall even if it doesn’t involve fireballs from the sky. The promise of Revelation 5:9-10 shows this to be so. There were people “from every tribe and language and people and nation” but there weren’t nations standing there.

The Place of Politics

Keep politics in its place as the affairs of man which God rules over, not as the affairs of God which man rules over. Lewis has some wise words:

“Whichever he adopts, your main task will be the same. Let him begin by treating the Patriotism or the Pacifism as a part of his religion. The let him, under the influence of partisan spirit, come to regard it as the most important part. Then quietly and gradually nurse him onto the stage at which the religion becomes merely a part of the ’cause’, in which Christianity is valued chiefly because of the excellent arguments it can produce in favour of the British war-effort or of Pacifism. The attitude which you want to guard against is that in which temporal affairs are treated primarily as material for obedience. Once you have made the World an end, and faith a means, you have almost won your man, and it makes very little difference what kind of worldly end he is pursuing. Provided that meetings, pamphlets, policies, movements, causes, and crusades, matter more to him than prayers and sacraments and charity, he is ours — and the more ‘religious’ (on those terms) the more securely ours. I could show you a pretty cageful down here.” — C.S. Lewis, from The Screwtape Letters

(From Sad Hill News)

Invisible Links

Nothing in the modern mind encourages us to see the invisible links binding together all of life. We have no sense that we live in the presence of a loving Father and are accountable for all we do… This is my Father’s world… Everything you do is connected to who you are as a person and, in turn, creates the person you are becoming. Everything you do affects those you love. All of life is covenant. – Paul Miller, A Praying Life

When People do ‘ologies’

Science is a bit of a political football and a wax nose these days. The New Atheists are claiming that science has all the answers and no other discipline, especially not theology, can or should dare speak to science. But here’s the problem with that idea: science doesn’t happen in a vacuum. People do science. Just like people do theology and sociology and psychology. And when people do “ology” their biases and preconceived notions come in to play. The scientific method should manage that but, like science, the scientific method doesn’t happen in a vacuum either. People do the scientific method. And so what you wind up with is science and the scientific method operating pretty well as long as research and theories occur within the boundaries of what scientists are willing to accept as truth. Once you stretch that boundary, you’re in trouble, adequate research not withstanding. I’ve posted on this before.

And so today I came across two news articles that once again demonstrate this principle. I’ll offer the first without much comment since the findings are new and are still being evaluated. Dr. Mark Regnerus did some research on homosexuality and that seems to have gotten him in a lot of trouble. This is one of the areas that is so highly politically charged that only specific types of research are tolerated. Regnerus went beyond the bounds and he is now under intense scrutiny. The first round of reviews found nothing suspicious in his methods but “according to a report released on Wednesday by the [University of Texas at Austin], that does not mean the study isn’t ‘seriously flawed,’ only that there was no evidence of falsification or other unethical practices.” Obviously, it must be flawed because it seems to prove what we don’t believe.

The second is kind of similar except instead of a young professor, it is about a retired professor who really doesn’t give a rip if people don’t like what his data are saying or how he interprets them. That, my friends, is kind of refreshing! James Lovelock, the father of the Gaia theory which says that the Earth operates as a single, living organism, acknowledged that he had been unduly “alarmist” about climate change. How did he arrive at this? Was his researched tainted by money of special interest groups? Nope, just the opposite.

[Dr. Lovelock] responds to attacks on his revised views by noting that, unlike many climate scientists who fear a loss of government funding if they admit error, as a freelance scientist, he’s never been afraid to revise his theories in the face of new evidence. Indeed, that’s how science advances.

Isn’t that great? Here is a leading scientist, and I do mean ‘leading’, and I do mean ‘scientist’ who is not afraid to update his position because he can’t lose funding if he does. What caused his update?

Having observed that global temperatures since the turn of the millennium have not gone up in the way computer-based climate models predicted, Lovelock acknowledged, “the problem is we don’t know what the climate is doing. We thought we knew 20 years ago.”

Right, his change of heart is data driven. Personally, my attitude toward climate change has been that something is going on but we can’t be sure what just yet. I’m relieved to hear that I’m pretty much in line with the grandfather of climate change theory. I didn’t have facts, I was just going with my gut and looking at how the facts were being handled and presented. Here’s a guy who has the facts.

The lesson we all need to hear from this is that no matter what side of the debate you’re on, you’re on that side of the debate and you have luggage packed and sitting there with you. You believe what you believe and you’re biased to keep believing it unless something sure can change your mind. Therefore, when something you don’t believe seems to contradict, the first response is doubt. That’s fine, be skeptical, but also be prepared to listen and to be wrong.

Context Context Context

Often new Christians are introduced to certain “narrow” types of Bible study (memorization, Bible study guides, etc) without having any idea of what the Bible as a whole is all about. This causes several problems. First, someone could “study” the Bible for years in this fashion without ever really learning. Secondly, this ignorance is seldom dealt with because it is hidden behind an impressive array of Bible quotes. When a Christian quotes a passage out of Hosea from memory, it rarely occurs to others to wonder if he has ever read Hosea. If he hasn’t (as is frequently the case), he cannot know the context of the passage he quotes. This is because he learned it off a little white card and the card has no context. – Doug Wilson, As Somebody Somewhere Said…, Blog and Mablog

I remember when a friend first recommended that I memorize scripture, this was my very response. What about the context? I don’t recall the answer but I think the impression was that I was over reacting. Later I bought the white, pre-printed Navigator Bible verse memory cards and gave it a shot. I don’t think I did well. I do better at memorizing when there is context; I remember stories better than standalone sentences.

Here’s an example of the issue. Psalm 46:10 says “Be still and know that I am God.” Well, the first part of that verse does anyway. Who wrote that Psalm? Who is being address in that command? The context could make that a wonderful blessing or a large threat depending on who it is said to. The note from the Geneva Bible says “He warns them who persecute the Church to cease their cruelty: for also they will feel that God is too strong for them against whom they fight.” If that’s right, and I think it is, then is this really the promise you mean to claim? Isn’t more of a warning about how God will defend his people? That may be comforting for his people but it is at a cost to the nations.

To be sure, there is a place for the imprecatory psalms to be prayed by the saints, but I don’t think that is how most saints think of this one when they put the stickers on their cars or the vinyl on their walls. That isn’t to say that the intention isn’t true, we are called to rest in God in other places in scripture. Wouldn’t it be better to remember those instead?

The Good Kind of Inconsistent

How’s this for an odd chain of thoughts. Carl Trueman asked why The Gospel Coalition takes a stance on complementarianism. I commented on that. Doug Wilson commented not so much on Carl’s question but on an illustration Carl used to make his point. Now I’m about to comment on a throwaway statement Doug made in his post. Confused? Don’t worry about it, here’s what Doug said,

I preached from a psalm of David this morning (68), called it the word of God, but freely acknowledge that it was penned by a man who couldn’t be an elder in our church, adultery and murder being the initial reasons that might be given. How’s that for weird? Life is funny that way.

Doug said that King David, the man after God’s own heart “couldn’t be an elder in our church” primarily because he slept with Bathsheba and killed Uriah to cover that up. He did do that and Doug hints that there might be other reasons.

So why is this worth commenting on? To get to the reason and then on to my point, I need to do some Venn VU meters, if such a thing existed. Here goes.

Doug and Carl and I are all of the Protestant, Reformed tradition. That does not mean we agree on every point of doctrine. I’m baptistic whereas Doug and Carl are Presbyterian. Where we agree is on some principles of the unity of scripture and redemptive history. Where I differ from them is that I don’t believe that circumcision is replaced by baptism and so I don’t think that the children of believers should be baptized. Carl and Doug differ in how far they go with that. Doug believes that since baptized babies are part of the New Covenant they should be given communion. And there are people who are even farther and say that “covenant children” are regenerate and saved but may grow to reject those gifts of the covenant and become apostate.

The reason all this can be represented by Venn VU meters instead of a 0 to 10 scale is because there are boundaries between these different clumps of theology but within each there are varying degrees. If we were to put them on a 0 to 10 scale, the scale would be the degree of continuity between the old covenant and the new covenant. None of us would be zero but you get the idea. If I’m a 5 and the last group I mentioned are 10, then Carl would be a 7 and Doug would be an 8.

Before I proceed, I hope I’m being fair here. I don’t want to misrepresent anyone and I don’t mean to be insulting to Carl or Doug, I’m simply trying to paint a picture of where the various folks are. If anyone is offended by this illustration or thinks it is unfair, I totally apologize.

All of that to say that Doug believes in a good degree of continuity between the old and new covenants. And that’s where I have a problem with him saying that David could not be an elder in his church, especially for the reasons he cited. What I’m going to try to do now is explain my problem with his statement from within his perspective. Wish me luck.

Israel’s kings and priests are referred to as Israel’s shepherds, see Jeremiah 2:8 and Ezekiel 34:23 for example. David was a shepherd when he was called to be the king and as a king he was to be a shepherd of Israel. Same thing with Moses. Of course the fulfillment of David and Moses was Jesus and elders are not kings and prophets the way they were. However, they are charged to shepherd the flock of God under the authority of the Great Shepherd Jesus (1 Pet 5:1-4) so in that way, elders are shepherds.

So in the old covenant, David was qualified to be an elder/shepherd and God didn’t remove him from that office even after the Bathsheba/Uriah failure. If in the old economy David was fit to lead, why is he not in the new? David did commit adultery and murder but he also showed the fruits of repentance in 2 Samuel 12 and Psalm 51. Apparently God forgave him for it too. His child died but that is the last mention of it. As a matter of fact, when David sinned and counted a census in 2 Samuel 24 the punishment was worse.

So if God did not remove David from the office of elder/shepherd in the church/state of Israel, why should we deny him that role? Well, Doug did indicate that there might be other issues that would bar David from being an elder. The one that comes to mind is that an elder must be “the husband of one wife” and David had many (1 Chron 3:1-9). In my book that would disqualify him right away but there is more to be considered. Since we’re seeking to make David an elder in Doug’s church and David is dead, we might assume that David is resurrected. If that’s the case, he is no longer married (Matt 22:30) so perhaps he’s still eligible.

Alright, I’ve picked enough nits here. My point is that Doug sees a strong connection between old and new and so excluding David from church leadership in the new when he was the head of the church in the old seems inconsistent. It is a good kind of inconsistent since we’re letting the New Testament have the final word on church leadership.