About Passing by Nehushtan: A Prophetic Think Tank
Welcome
“Those who are bitten by the serpent find their deliverance in looking to Him who knew evil only by subduing it, and who is therefore mighty to save. Well would it have been for the Church of Christ if it had been content to rest in this truth. Its history shows how easy it was for the old perversion to reproduce itself. The highest of all symbols might share the fate of the lower. It was possible even for the cross of Christ to pass into a Nehushtan.”1
This site is a day-to-day devotional diary, recording my thoughts every morning as I was working as a military contractor based in Camp Lemonier, Djibouti, Africa. This Navy base was and still is the largest U.S. military presence in Africa. Most of my work was in Somalia on Navy Seal bases. Djibouti was a place to wait for C-130 flights to these bases in Somalia. While waiting for flights, I would go every morning to the base Green Beans coffee shop on Camp Lemonier, do my morning devotions, read, and write my thoughts for the day. This blog is a casual recording of my daily thoughts. I called Passing by Nehushtan.
Passing by Nehushtan is about messianic prophecy. The bronze snake that Moses raised on a pole in Numbers 21 was preserved through the centuries and showed up being worshipped in the temple at the time of Hezekiah. Nehushtan literally means bronze thing, a derisive term. Hezekiah smashed the idol, as he did of all idolatry in his kingdom. I ask the Questions: what does Nehushtan really stand for, what did the bronze serpent stand for, and what did the pole Moses use to raise it to view sand for? I believe these questions are fundamental to Christian hermeneutics and an original understanding of the Gospel.
This blog is about messianic prophecy. What is messianic prophecy? Just a proof of Jesus as Messiah, a challenge to the skeptic, a comfort for the hard-hearted believer, a subject in a theology book, or is it something more, much more?
As a prophetic think tank, the aim is to describe the Transcendent phenomenon of the Word of God over against the alternatives that the world has offered it in so many ways after the deaths of the apostles. That is, we repeat, a phenomenon, not a proposition or a concept. This change from artificial constructions to what God intended as an objective, demonstrable, factual re-manifestation of Himself in human consciousness is held here as the starting point for theology and philosophy. Our continued destruction as a Faith comes through the myriads of artful kinds of denials of this description of true revelation in the Bible. It is not by the various and sundry heretical or faulty notions, or ideas, or particular linguistic formulations of biblical or extra-biblical truth. It is by the refusal of the only kind of scriptural appearance of God that he gave the world for his faith. It is the denial of this unique and intrinsic kind of supernatural scriptural appearance that is the rejection of Christ. It is not a rejection of a scriptural proposition since Christ is a Person and a certain revealed knowledge, not a Person and a certain series of words or a set of conclusions.
Nehushtan is the bronze serpent that Moses erected on a pole in Numbers 21 for the healing from an attack of serpents. But it was not Nehusthan back in Numbers 21. The bronze serpent he fashioned and erected was intended as a symbol of an ultimate, spiritual cure by a future person. This bronze serpent was much later turned into an idol. It was preserved all those years by the children of Israel and found by Hezikiah being worshiped in the Temple. He called it “Nehushtan,” or “bronze thing,” which, rather than the expected designation for respect and honor, was one of derision, emphasizing its artificiality and worthlessness with real faith in God. Such a thing has no place in an original, Holy religion.
In John 3 we have the only time Jesus specifically referred to himself as a biblical type. He said to Nicodemus: “as Moses lifted the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up.”
“Son of Man” was Jesus’ favorite biblical name for himself. Not because he was a natural man as well as God, but because it put him as the figure in Daniel chapter 7, the Holy divine Messiah that was given a Kingdom. It was his way to place the crucial object of faith not first in himself or his own testimony, but on the prophetic Word of God himself as the basis for any organized or individual faith in his reality or performance of any action with respect to the salvation of Man.
Aligning himself not with Nehushtan, but with the original Serpent, Jesus is saying that the way in which he is lifted up in view of the people to faith, for salvation, is what is most important for anyone to believe in him and propagate this message to the world. Not just that Jesus was Messiah, but that he was the supernaturally predicted Messiah of the prophets, of the only open display given the world to the reality and nature of God. You have to want such a conception of God in an open display and commence to seek it, find it, think about it, make a life commitment to its truth, and be honored to die for it, just as Jesus did in its fulfillment. Not for a Nehushtan, for Messiah and his Prophetic Word of demonstration.
Is there something that we were intended by God to learn from this example? Above any other, by far, the answer is yes!
Who am I? Does it really matter? Well, maybe.
Usually, these About pages on a blog that deals with some academic subjects are usually for no other purpose than to brag about the author’s credentials. This is not without some benefit to the reader, however. Before people invest in some serious time reading something unpublished in a book or website they at least need some assurance that the person who wrote it knows what they are talking about. I want to assure you that if you read this blog you are not going to get this kind of minimum amount of assurance, and your only motivation for reading it is as someone looking for something different that you might search for and stumble on by influence outside the pedestrian motivations.
I am not a pew theologian and I am not someone with academic credentials either. I loathe what both of them produce. So much so that I call their obsessions and output nothing more than spiritual pornography. I can’t talk to the average pew-sitters about theology and I can’t read the scholar either. I have done a lot of it, and way beyond my limits, but no more.
I have been for the entirety of my adult life what most of the world would call a tradesman, a blue-collar guy, but at the same time given to love and pursuit of all things spiritual and all things Christian.
I consider myself a fundamentalist, but far too fundamental for a fundamentalist, and a liberal, but far too liberal for a liberal at many points. I have no degree. I have not even taught a Sunday School class. Anyone who is looking for the truth on a web page on the basis of the author’s church membership, certification, writing prowess, pithiness, creativity, how few times he writes in the passive voice, fame, his enthusiasm for intra-mundane theological concepts and conclusions, or any of the other gateways to revelation that the world touts, you won’t find it here.
What you will find, however, is the truth. If you find yourself disturbed by the conservative and liberal theological narratives of the world, and suspect that we have missed something vital that the church is suffering for, as well as yourself, you will find it here, and I say that emphatically, especially if you came to faith through the miracle of the God speaking across millennia by the Hebrew prophets, fulfilled in Jesus of Nazareth, Messiah.
I am not a professional writer and I don’t even consider myself a good writer. You may get bored and you may get confused because of my clumsiness, but if you have the determination to dig for it and get through all the rubble you’ll find the gold if you know what gold is and know it when you see it. But please be prepared, because although none of this is contradictory to all of our historical doctrines, what is contradictory is our common underlying presuppositions for our faith which, if not confronted, has the potential to overthrow what is left of it, or, God willing, be the basis for repentance and the remaking it anew, and a real reformation, along 1st-century grounds.
Maybe then it won’t be so strange being enlightened to the solution of what seems very difficult theological problems and converted to repentance by the preaching of a non-academe, as all were after Christ left the earth. Maybe its something that we should have been looking for all along. Maybe it’s something that is even mandatory, if mainstream scholarship represents more an ink-blot in a Rorschach Test, self-absorbed in its own paradigms of understanding than offering something real and original. After all, the truth, if it comes from a real God, is unexpected and unwelcome by the world, and its two invariable reactions are always going to be either an open attempt to kill it off or a more stealthy attempt to assimilate only its self-serving parts into the same old hapless and insular religious industry.
Thousands of books on Christian theological themes have been written over the past 1700 years, from Origen to Augustine to Aquinas to Billy Graham and everything in between. It seems like everything that could be written has already been written, being now only up to us to choose which will guide us through to a richer understanding of God. But do we really believe that they have done anything more in explaining the nature and power of the Christian revelation than Time or Newsweek does? Don’t take this as gratuitous sensationalism to get attention. Think about it for a minute. What if we have been wrong all through these long ages…our whole suppositional view of what is most important in scripture and about Christ. I am not speaking about getting some of it wrong, but essentially all of it: the whole hermeneutical paradigm that we have used.
If we are believers, we have at some point in our lives read the Bible or heard something from it that ripped us from our former worldview and into another. Although such a change is expected of real experiential faith, it also goes without saying that we should not believe that simply a change in worldview, with all the lifestyle changes that come along with it, are the most important revelatory symbols of our new moral, spiritual natures, but our faith around certain information from that scriptural source which precipitated it. If faith, not works, is crucial, are our motivations for belief equal, as motivations that could be said to be the most spiritually virtuous, to the central facts of the scriptural revelation which would inarguably be considered most demonstrably transcendent? Is our new moral and essentially spiritual nature as a result be said really honorable and compatible with that of Christ? I ask these questions of ourselves as much as I ask about the content of Augustine in his Confessions, Aquinas in his Summa, and I ask it of almost the entire two millennia of Christian theology as a whole, which are also presumably examples of the greatest expressions of faith.
If we are asked by God to explain to the world how and why this transformation happened to us, it makes sense that the reasons we give would not be less revelatory, or in fact any different, than those of ultimate import that God gave to cause such change. But this assumption is, strangely, not operational in our usual idea and practice of evangelism.
Christ, in our evangelism and in our moral instruction, is taught properly transferred to, and accepted by people for any reason they so choose, certainly not because of anyone crucial kind of biblical fact or facts. Neither is the volumes by Chafer, Barth, Pannenberg, Schleiermacher, Hodge, or any of the systematizers offer anything independently and transformationally revelational, or deal mainly or directly with the implications of that crucial phenomenon of the prophetic, messianic revelation. I contend they deal only in tacit admissions that the power of ultimate Truth is to be found somewhere at the end of a blind fumbling within the choices offered in the doctrines of “the Bible” as a whole and then essentially throwing the source of our motivations at the mercy of the Münchhausen Trilemma : regression, circularity, or blind faith. Do their systems, the manner in which they explain the gospel, really help affect our transcendence of the world by and with Christ?
On a more pedestrian level, we ask if the demands primarily for a personal reformation of a morality of bodily works, and continued progress in its improvement, the most important evidence to an original faith or are they rather be placed only after an acceptance of what Christ taught was to be singularly motivational, messianic prophecy, which can be the only rational and scriptural signification of Christ Himself.
Was the anti-prophetic and unbiblical assumptions about faith in the Church, where every possible creative permutation was advanced for an alternative justifying reason for faith except that of messianic prophecy alone, inconsequential for the Church over these long centuries? If, as designed by God and as I suggest, this Prophetic Word acts as Christ to Christian consciousness, it is not an inconsequential question!
I do not speak only of apologetic reasons for faith from messianic prophecy. I mean that the biblical filter that we use through which all scripture, all “articles of faith” and dogma, all our Christology and systematic theology, presuppositions, creeds, and all philosophical addenda is approached is through what Pannenberg called the “prophetic Word of demonstration” as the main signifying reality of Christ Himself as he is presented to the Christian mind and heart. That this stream of scripture is far more than apologia, a curious appendix to a religion, a voluntary consideration; it is the visible, daily, ubiquitous manifestation of Christ present in the world for all to see, and, without which, “no one comes to the Father” but through that which is informationally Christ himself.
Most of us agree that if Christianity is to be worthy of special consideration as an original message from God, thereby distinguishing it from other claims to truth by other religions, it also must require of its believers a faith-based and prepared to speak principally about its most powerful examples – which distinguish it as True and the others false. But, again, this means far more than mere apologia. If Christianity depends upon such a unique revelation, then the accurate transmission of that original message and reasons why it is important is also necessary for it to be and function as something more than only a novel philosophy or common religion. For us to be anything more than naive philosophers and religionists who can satisfy God’s demands of our spirits, as in any other religion, by anything we so wish.
For now, it is not important why God would make such a demand on humanity. Only that, if true, it is not helpful for us to blame shift the reasons for the continual decline of Christianity to anything else but our continual expectation of the Christian faith being relatively prosaic, puerile, and motivationally familiar to other world religions. It is time, once and for all, to re-dig the original first-century foundations of faith, about which Paul warned: According to the grace of God which is given unto me, as a wise masterbuilder, I have laid the foundation, and another buildeth thereon. But let every man take heed how he buildeth thereupon.
That foundation is Christ, we must all agree. But our question is, what does, or what biblically, is Christ to signify to the world, that He expects to be expressed in the content of our faith and the method of our teaching? I believe that this missing signification represents the true sin of the Church, why we can’t seem to produce any explanatory work about it that is not lacking, and why the Church continues to fall into the common emotional and intellectual La Brea Tar Pit of the world, where settles all the failed Quixotic crusades for truth and failed theories.
This is not your father’s theology. Although my message is ridiculously simple, requires little effort to apply, and which readily can bring us to unanimous agreement, it is also an idea that has never been seriously treated before, about something biblical that has never been written before, and will at once elicit deafening howls of protest for that reason alone. It’s not traditional, which means that our interpreters of the faith have not written about it, or its too conservative, meaning that there is no built-in buffer for our consciences to soften the impact of the rather cruel spiritual realities of which it speaks.
Those protests will be louder and more emphatic as it is learned of the credential poor man who here speaks of it. But regardless of the messenger, our failure to deal with it all these centuries reveals the nature of real stumblingblocks: those things that are right in front of us and clearly seen, not those that are invisible, that we stumble over and over as if they were. They are things that have only the appearance of piety which demand our exclusive attention and reverence, but in fact, have no more substance than that of the constituent elements of the world, and are worthless for a righteous kind of faith that God ordained for us. Those stumblingblocks will be identified and removed here once and for all if you can at least stand a false stumblingblock speaking about the real ones.
The aim is to smash, like Nehushtan was, the world’s
liberal and conservative theological paradigm once and for all.
For starters, please see the links below or on the carousel:
When I Survey the Wondrous Nace, part 1: Passing by Nehushtan
Islam: When Ishmael Comes Marching Home: Passing by Nehusthan
Christ and the Noun Norming of Transcendence: Passing by Nehushtan
What is the Word of God?: A Prophetic Think Tank
The Meaning of the Cross, part 3: Persecution
Romans 1: Apostasy of the Gospel General Revelation
When I Survey the Wondrous Nace, part 1: Passing by Nehushtan
Luke 15: Parable of the Lost Coin, the Lost Motivation