40 Minutes In The Old Testament - 40 Minutes In The Old Testament: Episode 14

Episode Date: April 29, 2015

Ravens, Doves, Rainbows, Law and Gospel

you are listening to a podcast produced and distributed by christholdfast.com please visit christholdfast.com for additional resources this is 40 minutes in the old testament Thank you for joining us for another edition of 40 Minutes in the Old Testament. I think this is episode 14. It feels like it's been a month since we did this, even though it's not. I am joined by Chad Bird. Brandon is unable to join us. let me let me speak to the dedication in which well the amount of dedication that we are putting forward for you it is way earlier than i want to be up right now and it's just the way it had to be to get this out today and i wanted you to have 40 minutes the old testament and so my voice

sounds a little lower it's because i've been awake for like five minutes and uh and so yeah Chad, I know you're a morning guy I'm not, see I'm up at this time sometimes, but it's just because I haven't went to bed yet usually I don't usually go to sleep and then get up and I know you're a morning guy, so I'm counting on you to just really carry this thing

Yeah, I am ready to go I've been up for like three hours to have a couple pots of coffee in me A couple pots? Yeah, I'm ready to go, this is my time of day All right, take us there, then. I will keep you awake.

All right, very good. If you've been listening to us over the last few weeks, we are in the middle of the flood story, actually closer to the end now. And if all goes according to plan, we're actually going to finish up the flood story today. not necessarily finish up the story of Noah, because there is a final chapter, if you will, to the story of Noah, a very revealing chapter, in fact. So we might get into that today, but we definitely are going to finish up the account of the flood itself. If memory serves me, the last time that we talked about the account of the flood, we spent quite a bit of time

discussing just kind of in broad strokes what the account of the flood teaches us in regards to the law and what it teaches us in regards to the gospel, these two words of God. And the message of both is clearly there, the punishment, the wrath, and the destruction that God brings upon the world, but more importantly, the rescue and salvation that God provides for Noah and his family by means of his word of promise and by means of that word incarnate, if you will, in the ark, which Noah builds for the salvation of his household, as the book of Hebrews says. So there's a tremendous amount of good news in this story of the flood. And it's especially important for us as believers to trace the lineage of the flood

and the ark and the salvation that God worked for Noah and his family all the way from Genesis to the font of baptism. Because ultimately, that's where the story of the flood has its It's real grace-filled, gospel-packed meaning is what we see God doing for us in baptism, where he brings us into the ark of his son by means of water, and we are rescued from wrath so that there is therefore now no condemnation for us. And we're not just making up this connection. And the Apostle Peter himself draws that line between the flood and baptism for us. So we've talked about quite a bit of the story of the flood as it relates to God's good news, what he does for us in Christ.

And to wrap things up today, we're going to revisit some of those themes as we look at chapter 8. That's where we'll get started today. chapter 8 as far as the the the story itself is where the flood is is ending it's the story of the the rain stopping and god remembering noah also included in chapter 8 is noah's sending out of both the raven as well as a dove and then toward the end of the chapter is where we have them emerging from the ark, Noah building an altar and offering sacrifices to God. So there's quite a bit in this chapter, and we'll pick up with a few of these verses and talk about their meaning and their significance.

The first thing that I want to point out is in the very opening verse of chapter 8. It says that God remembered Noah. god remembered noah and all the beasts and all the cattle that were with him in the ark you have this this way of of speaking quite commonly in the scriptures where god remembers so here god remembers noah and all the animals at other times he remembers israel in the psalms quite frequently he remembers his people or her remembers the the individual who's crying out to him for for help and for rescue and it's it's important for us not to kind of get our our english minds confused by this this hebrew terminology

usually though not always but usually when we remember something it's because we have forgotten it. So we forgot something, and then for whatever reason, we remember it. But the biblical terminology of remembering is not like that. It's not when God remembers something or when he remembers someone, it's not as if he has forgotten it. Rather, for God to remember is for him to focus upon the object of memory in such a way that it results in a saving action. So when God remembers Noah, he focuses upon Noah and he focuses upon Noah's family and everyone in the ark in such a way that it results in a saving action. So to remember in in biblical idiom to remember is to act and the analogy that that that actually works in

english is as well is if um say it's it's uh the anniversary of uh my wife and i and uh i get up in the morning and i don't i don't say anything to to her about the anniversary and leave for work and i still haven't said anything and we go through the day i don't call her i don't text her say anything about her anniversary i don't take her out to the dinner that night i make no mention of the anniversary and it's obvious that to me that she's she's upset about something so as we're getting ready for bed that night i i say uh is there is there something wrong and she says to me well you forgot our anniversary now if i say to her at that moment no sweetheart i i remembered our anniversary my remembering is not going to

fix the problem that i've just created because to remember an anniversary or to remember a birthday or to remember any significant event, even in English, means to celebrate it. So that's one way in English in which we use remember in a very Hebrew sort of way. So when I remember an anniversary, that means that I'm acting. I'm celebrating it. When I remember a birthday, that means I'm acting. I'm celebrating that birthday. And it's like that in the Scriptures.

When God remembers something, it's not that he's not forgetting it. He's acting. So when it says that God remembered Noah and all the beasts and all the cattle were with him, he acted in such a way as to make sure that they realized that they were at the forefront of his mind. And the way that he did that is in the second part of the verse. It says that God caused a wind to pass over the earth and the waters subsided. it. Now, this is a great example of how God remembers, because He remembers by acting in such a way that He sends a wind to dry up the waters of the earth. Now, this wind is the same wind that we see in Genesis chapter 1. It's the same wind, in fact, that you see in

the book of exodus when the israelites are standing at the shores of the red sea and they're trapped between the water on the one hand and the pursuing egyptian armies on the other hand god causes a wind to blow that parts the waters so that israel can pass through the red sea on dry ground and that dry ground and that wind sent from god becomes the means of salvation and rescue for israel and similarly here when god remembers noah he sends this wind in order that there might be dry ground once more in order that noah and his family might emerge saved and rescued by the hand of by the hand of god there's this intimate connection that we see between creation and the flood, because as we've talked about before, the flood

and the new world that comes after the flood is like a new creation. God is redeeming and saving his people and bringing about a new creation for them. I think it's just to say one more thing about this first verse, and this is drawing from luther's commentary on this particular section in genesis it's a tremendous struggle that noah and his family go through because as luther as luther points out when it says that god remembered noah implicit in that is that noah and his family during all of this time had really no message from god to assure them that everything was going to be okay they'd been trapped in the ark for months on end they knew that the whole world around them had

perished and even though they had god's word of promise to begin with to build the ark they had to pass through months of darkness and waiting and no doubt struggle while they waited for god's redemption. And Luther compares this to many of the Psalms. Many of the Psalms convey this same sense of waiting in darkness, waiting in doubt, waiting as the believers struggle for God to finally hear them, to remember them, and to act on their behalf. You could really think of these months that Noah and his family are in the ark as a picture of so much of the Christian life. We're going through whatever it is we're going through, whatever darkness that we're in, and we wait. And certainly we have God's word of promise that he's with us, that he loves us,

that he's going to care for us. And yet we're crying out to him to remember us, to save us, to bring us out of the darkness and back into the light again. And it's hard. It's a cross. I've been there, and no doubt everybody listening to this has been there as well. But that's the way that it is in this life. That's the way that it is as we bear the cross as Christians. There is plenty of darkness, and yet even in that darkness, we have God's word of promise that he's with us. We have his word of promise that he is going to sustain us through the midst of the darkness.

And most importantly, we know that God will bring us out of that. He'll raise us up out of the pit, just like he did countless believers, countless believers of old. this uh this past weekend i was i was in california speaking at a at a church in san mateos south of san francisco and we looked at one of the psalms that describes the the kind of thing that i'm that i'm talking about uh the psalmist is is describing his his condition of a feeling like he's been forgotten by God, and he says something like, you know, has God forgotten to be gracious, or has he in anger withdrawn his compassion? Then he goes on to say, in my grief, I said that the right hand of the Most High is changed. So he's wondering if God is no longer

gracious toward him. He's wondering if, in fact, God is angry with him. These are honest questions of a struggling soul, and there's nothing wrong with asking them. In fact, that's one of the reasons that God puts these words in the Psalms, so that we can actually give voice to the grief and the heartache that we feel. But the Psalm goes on, and this is the most instructive part, the Psalm goes on in the very next section, which is the last section of the Psalm, where the psalmist says, I will remember the days of old, I will remember the deeds of the Lord from long ago, and he recounts God's saving work in the Exodus, how God remembered his people in Israel when they were in the midst of slavery and oppression, and he sends Moses and Aaron

to lead them out into liberation, into the freedom that they experienced in the promised land. So the psalmist, as he's expressing these questions of whether God has forsaken him, whether god is still with him he finds comfort in god's saving history of being with his people and rescuing his people and and the psalmist could have gone on to talk about the flood uh that's the reason i bring this up he could have gone on to say i will remember the days of old when god was with noah and his family in the ark and when god remembered noah and all the beasts and all the cattle and finally brought them out of the ark and into into a dry and into a new creation once more so there's lots of lots of good things in that opening verse of chapter eight about god

remembering noah and the reality of of struggle of bearing the cross in in the christian life and then ultimately of God remembering by acting to save his people. I think it's interesting that the Bible uses language opposite of that for when somebody isn't saved. They're not remembered. And so you have Joseph when he's in the prison, and he interprets the dream for the baker and the cupbearer. And when the cupbearer is restored, it says, I think it's in Genesis 40,

but it says that the cupbearer did not remember Joseph. In other words, he was left there. To remember him would have been to give him a path to freedom, which is interesting because in the story of Joseph before that, with his mother Rachel, it says, and then god remembered rachel and opened her womb and gave her joseph and so with god he remembers and and something good happens he helps you he delivers you he saves you and then you have contrasting with man is and we don't remember and uh and we leave people in

darkness and we leave people in imprisonment uh but that's that's the that's pretty consistent language throughout the scripture, instead of just saying, and then God did this thing, or this guy didn't do this thing, it's God remembered, and this happened, or this guy did not remember, and this didn't happen. Yeah, those are great examples, and they remind me too that one of the greatest messages about God remembering or not remembering is that that belongs to us that he doesn't remember. He doesn't remember our sins. I will remember their sins no more. So for God to not remember our sins and for him to forget our sins is not simply for him to put them out of his mind, but it is for him not to act toward us as sinners, not to act toward us

in regard to the evil that we have done. Instead, he acts toward us in mercy and in grace and forgiveness. So for him to remember our sins no more is for him not to act toward us as we deserve as sinners, but instead to act toward us in grace because he remembers us in Christ, because he remembers us as those who have been redeemed, as those whose sins have been atoned for. and therefore when he sees us when he remembers us he remembers us as his children as those who have been baptized into into christ yeah there's uh there's two verses that i like to put next to

each other which are love keeps no record of wrongs god is love yeah yeah that's that's how he does it because god is love he keeps no record of wrongs and he keeps no record of wrongs because he is love that's the way that love works love doesn't go around tallying up our sins and punishing us accordingly instead love remembers us as those who are forgiven let's talk about birds for a minute i've always liked to talk about birds first of all it's it's a it is my last name so i have this special affinity for birds we have this uh this rather odd occurrence at uh at the time of the waters drying up and uh of course the the ark is on the top of the the mountains of ararat the water's going down but everybody's still stuck inside

the ark so noah opens a window in the ark that he that he makes and he he sends out two birds first of all he sends out a raven which flies here and there until the waters are dried up from the earth and then he sends out a dove and of course he sends out a dove or or more than one dove three different times so uh it's i find it i find it very uh very intriguing because of the way that the symbolism works here, at least as it's unpacked by some of the commentators throughout the history of the church. And I draw in particular, as I often do, upon Luther here.

Luther's kind of interesting because if you read his commentary, very often he will speak pretty negatively against allegory, for instance, about finding a spiritual meaning in some of these narratives. But on the other hand, he'll turn right around a few pages later and he'll spend quite a bit of time developing an allegory on the very same narrative. And he does that here. His argument is basically that, first of all,

we need to have the history correct. And then if we want to draw some sort of application from this in an allegorical way, then that's fine. but focus first of all upon what the literal meaning of the text is. And I like what he does here with the raven and with the dove, because, not surprising for Luther, he actually relates these birds to the law and the gospel. So he sees the raven as the emblem of the law.

uh and i don't want to don't want to spend a whole lot of time on this but i think it's it's interesting to see how he how he does this so he says that the raven is like the law because it it is sent out just like god sends out the law and it goes forth it it it flies here it flies there just like the law goes goes everywhere but it doesn't bring back a message of peace and reconciliation. All it does is fly about in its accusatory way. So Luther sees the raven as this emblem of the proclamation of ongoing punishment. As the raven flies here and there, but doesn't return with an olive branch in its beak, doesn't return with any kind of message that there's peace and reconciliation. So that's what the law does.

Yeah, the law is flying around and just reminding you that you're screwed. That's all it does. Yeah, it's like that black bird that's flying around in the air. And the only message that it sings is accusation. The law always accuses. So is it sent from God? Yeah, it is. The law is the law of God, and he proclaims it to us.

He does send out that raven of death, but it doesn't sing a song of redemption. It doesn't sing a song of peace. It doesn't sing a song of reconciliation. All it sings is thou shalt and thou shalt not. And in the end, all that we're left with is that, yeah, we're screwed because we can't live up to it. It's not that it's telling you an untrue thing. it's just saying flying around it's a it evaluates and uh and says that's a lot of water

it's not telling you anything i mean it's telling you the truth it's just not exactly good news it's it's the bird's not bad it's just coming back with an evaluation that says that's a lot of that's a lot of water noah yeah not all not all truth is good news uh sometimes truth is is the exact opposite and that's what the law does the law is true and like the raven it uh it sings truth but that truth is that there's water everywhere there's there is sin everywhere and you can't swim there's nothing you can do to change it so that's the the the uh the raven as the preacher of the law. But then we have the dove, which could not be more opposite. The dove is sent out by God, but it's the messenger of the spirit of peace. Luther says it announces that the era of wrath

has come to an end, and it brings the news of a new creation. So it proclaims the grace and mercy and the goodness of God. Like when the dove returned to Noah with this freshly picked olive leaf, Noah knew that the waters were abated from the earth. So when the gospel comes to us, it comes to us with the opposite message of the raven. It comes back telling us that all is well

because there is now no wrath, No condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus. It's for that reason that it's especially appropriate that when the Spirit came to Christ at his baptism, he came in the form of a dove. That's why the Holy Spirit took that particular form. Because when Jesus steps into the water, when he steps into the water of the Jordan River to be baptized, he is stepping into our place. You could really think of his baptism in the Jordan River as he is the embodiment of the world at the time of the flood, sinking under the waters of condemnation. because in his baptism, what he's doing is he is standing in our stead. He is taking on the punishment that we have deserved.

He is putting himself under the wrath of God so that we might not be those who are condemned, so that we might stand forgiven and free. And so when the dove comes, when the Holy Spirit comes in the form of a dove and he lights upon Christ, that message in and of itself is the message of peace and reconciliation. You can really, you can almost see the whole gospel story of Christ compressed in his baptism. Because here you have the Father proclaiming, this is my beloved Son in whom I am well pleased. You have the heavens open, you have Christ stepping into the water, stepping out of the water,

of the Holy Spirit coming. So the whole message of salvation is compacted within that one account of the baptism of our Lord. And it links up so beautifully with the flood account, because you have the dove landing upon this one who is the proclamation of good news, the one who proclaims peace that we have with our Father because of the wrath that He's taken on in our stead. With Christ as baptism, you have the sort of first moment since the fall where a man is standing before God, and God is well-pleased with him in His own merit, that He's well-pleased with him uh for for what he is for for being righteous for being without sin for being perfectly obedient and this is a baptism where he just went down into the water where all these

sinners had went before him and he goes into the water and he has no need to be baptized for repentance he has nothing to repent for but he goes and accumulates to himself all the sins washed washed in that river before him and comes out and then god proclaims him his son with whom he's well pleased and it's interesting as all this water is everywhere no flood in the flood and you have the dove there and then you have jesus in the water and the dove there and then you have us in the water in our baptism which paul says unites us to christ and so we know then that through baptism that this is my beloved son with whom I am well pleased is now ours because we're in Christ. And so we receive a well done, good and faithful servant because this is my son with

whom I am well pleased was first true of Christ. And those before Christ receive, I am pleased with you because of faith in Christ and the promise of him. So it all comes back to this this one moment where uh where jesus stands in his own merit and god says yes and then all everyone else is is brought into him and and receives that same um affirming word yeah it's the i don't know what you want to call it the uh perhaps the pivotal moment or the the center point of all of god's salvation history because everything leads up to that moment and everything flows from that moment. Everything that was promised in the Old Testament, every redemptive act of God from the flood to the promise in the Garden of Eden to him saving Israel to all the

sacrifices in the Old Testament, all these many and various ways of God's promises to save his people and his actions of saving his people come to their fruition in christ and then everything after that flows flows from him so john talks about him being the the lamb of god slain from the foundation of the world because every lamb every ox that was slain in the old testament was in a manner partaking of that sacrifice of christ because they pointed forward to that and the Israelites, by faith, in that coming sacrifice of Christ, already received back then the benefits of those Old Testament sacrifices. And then we, who stand on the opposite side of history, of Christ's redemptive act,

all of his benefits flow to us from what he's already accomplished. So the whole history of salvation is brought to its fulfillment and its fullness in the act of Christ. And everything in the Old Testament leads forward to it, and everything afterward flows directly from it. So, lots of good stuff there on the two birds, the raven and the dove. I think that because the baptism of Christ happens so suddenly in most of the gospel accounts, at least it's sort of the first thing we see of Jesus after his birth, or maybe a temple, getting lost, parents not being able to find him in the temple and things like that. But it gets to the baptism of Christ pretty quick.

It's easy to forget that before God says this of Christ, that he has 30 years of perfect law-keeping on his record, this sort of active righteousness of Christ, the active obedience of Christ. There's 30 years of being in perfect obedience to the Father that he's got going on at that point. And so before he goes and heads into ministry after that, and before that baptism happens, you have this life lived. I mean, that's the life lived that we couldn't live.

And it's not a life, you know, we look at the life of Christ, and I think sometimes we think, well it's these three years where he did all this stuff and that's the life of Christ that's not, that's part of it that's the ministry of Christ but before that he had 30 years of doing regular stuff that we do working jobs and serving neighbors

and just regular stuff that we hear nothing about that apparently didn't draw him much attention that didn't make him known but you just have 30 years of living a life in a fallen world in perfect obedience to God in some vocation

carpenter maybe don't know for sure but something doing something something regular something that gets you no reputation he's a man of no reputation so it's not something that gets you a lot of accolades

or that doesn't give you a position with powerful people, but he lives the life that we live, but we live so poorly. But I think it's interesting that we do that, and we don't think about that active obedience of Christ up to that point of just regular vocational active obedience. That's part of the gospel that I think we need to hear more about because Christ passes through every stage of our lives. He is an infant in the womb.

He grows up as an infant, and then a toddler, and then a child, and then a teenager, and then finally an adult. The Church Father, St. Irenaeus, talked about this quite a bit, about how God, in taking on our humanity, passes through every aspect of our human growth in order that we might be assured that we have redemption through every stage that we go through in human life. That's one of the ways in which we see the full impact of the incarnation. In other words, Jesus didn't just come down from heaven as a 30-year-old man. He passes through the same things that we pass through, everything from conception to birth and onward. And as you point

out, in each of these stages, he was doing that which people do. He was the unborn. He was the baby. He was the toddler. He was the teenager and the adult. He wasn't going about just, you know, working miracles to make his life easy. He was a common person. He had parents to whom he was obedient. He had work to do. He had studies to do. So that act of obedience on his part is good news for us, because in every single stage of our lives, we're messing up. We're rebelling already from the youngest age, and we're messing up what's given to us. We're disobedient. We're unfaithful. And yet, through every stage of life that we pass through, Christ passed through it first in order to perfect it and then to give to us who are imperfect

his perfection so that we might rest assured that in him everything's okay because he's kept the law for us. And as Augustine says, all the commandments of God are kept when what is not kept is forgiven and we are forgiven in christ and his active righteousness is then imputed to us yeah yeah jesus doesn't just become flesh and say i've got some miracles to perform but he comes becomes flesh and says i've got some cabinets to build common everyday aspects of our our vocations that's that's where christ was active as as a human being and that's where he's still active in and through us in the vocations that we that we lead i think we just got uh about a minute left uh i'm gonna wrap things up with just a few words about about uh the rainbow

uh real real quick here but i think it'll be a good way to to end this when when the flood is over when noah and his family emerge from the ark then god makes a covenant with them and he says the sign of the covenant is going to be the bow that he places in the clouds. So what is it about this bow or this rainbow? Well, I think it's a lot simpler than we sometimes make it out to be. And I love this because it's sort of the crowning moment of the whole flood story. In Hebrew, there is no special word for rainbow. The word for rainbow is simply the same word that you'd use for bow, as in a bow and arrows.

So when God puts the rainbow in the clouds, he's putting a bow in the clouds. That is a weapon. But what's important is that what he does, what God does in the rainbow, is that he hangs up in the heavens the weapon of war. it's not in his hand it's not drawn back with a uh an arrow ready to fire at humanity rather he's taken the weapon of war and he's hung it up just like a warrior might as a clear message to the world that he has set aside the wrath he has set aside the weapon that symbolizes his wrath he has declared peace between himself and humanity

and the symbol of that is the cloud that he that he hangs there in the heavens and the promise is it never will he again flood the earth as he did here and for us there's an even greater significance here because we see here in the story of the flood a foreshadowing of the ultimate redemption that we have, the ultimate salvation that God has worked for us in the flood that Christ has taken upon himself, and the redemption that we have, and the peace that we have as a result of him, so that we can say that God has finally, once for all, hung up his weapon in the skies, so that there is no more wrath to be abated. There is no more flood, because Christ has taken that all into himself. So the weapon has been hung up in the heavens. It will no longer be drawn

against us because of the work of Christ. You even see that in the direction that a rainbow is pointed. It's not even pointed at us. If it were a bow that you were going to use in that position, and that arrow goes upward instead of downward. And God does that and tells you that he will absorb the death or the wrath of God will be absorbed by God. So that goes upward, which is pretty cool. So even he hangs it there, and it's not even in a threatening direction, but instead it's pointed towards himself.

Yeah, He's taken the wrath that we deserved upon Himself and His Son. So the whole message of the rainbow is packed with good news about our reconciliation with God and His activity of bringing that about on our behalf. That's a good way to end. Yeah, very good, very good. Lots of good stuff in this flood story. Glad everybody could join us. Yeah, well, thanks for joining us. go over to

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