“[A] ministry based on pragmatism is built on sand regardless of whether it is more traditional or contemporary” (Michael Horton, A Better Way: Rediscovering the Drama of God-Centered Worship, 13).

“The scripture describes prayer to be our drawing near to God, lifting up our souls to him, pouring out our hearts before him….A golden thread of heart prayer must run through the web of the whole Christian life; we must be frequently addressing ourselves to God in short and sudden ejaculations, by which we must keep up our communion with him in providences and common actions, as well as in ordinances and religious services” (Matthew Henry, A Method for Prayer, iv).

Before Julie and I had children we started a family tradition: we would bury shoes in the yard of our rental before we relocated to the next rental. (We moved during the winter once, the ground was too hard to dig with a spade so we threw shoes up in to a tree to hang.)

We have been in our current rental for over three years, so today was our first chance to bury shoes with our children. They loved it. As they say in Fiddler on the Roof, “Tradition!!!”

Four important qualities of Hermeneutics (Biblical interpretation).

1) Hermeneutics requires humility — Biblical interpretation requires humility. God is the one telling the story. Sacred Scripture is God’s story-telling of history via a divine-historical text. We don’t own the story. It is a gift. This means we should handle the divine-story-text with humility and gratitude.

2) Hermeneutics is quasi-scientific  — Scripture is not an accident. God decided that men under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit would write down in the format of a divine-historical-text the history which is the “external medium of God’s redemptive plan” (William DiPuccio, The Interior Sense of Scripture: The Sacred Hermeneutic of John W. Nevin, p. 91). This included semantics and syntax and grammar and words and people and narratives and historical settings and types and figures: the men inspired by the Holy Spirit that wrote down the divine-historical-text used those things as the raw materials for the divine revelation of Sacred Scripture, and Biblical interpretation aims to understand those raw materials. Understanding is not accidental, it takes effort, skill, and serious study, but that is not all that it takes — it takes much more. Since interpretation is also an art (see next point), Hermeneutics is quasi-scientific.

3) Hermeneutics is an art — Scripture was written by the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit is the Third Person of the Trinity, the Father and the Son’s breath-voice-spirit-singer. Accordingly, Scripture is a “musical” book that is rich in symbols and imagery, rhythm and repetition. Therefore, interpreting the Bible is also an art. Why? Because it isn’t enough to know all the words to the song, you also have to know the tune. And Scripture has a tune.

4) Hermeneutics is Spirit-led — Sacred Scripture is a Spirit-book. Scripture was written by the Holy Spirit. And only those who have been regenerated by the Holy Spirit, those that have been given eyes to see and ears to hear the written God-song of God’s divine-story-text know the “tune” of Scripture. (They know the “tune” because they’ve been regenerated, they have a new Father who teaches them songs of their ancestors — the “tune” sang by Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, etc.) The Bride of Christ is the Church: together her members sing the “tune” of Sacred Scripture, which was taught to her by the beautiful Holy Spirit.

Somewhere during my undergraduate studies I read something Michael Glodo said about modernity and postmodernity: he observed that both modernity and postmodernity have the same point of origin — they both begin with the autonomous man — but (and this is an important qualifier) they each reach radically different conclusions. It is a good observation.

Modernity starts with the autonomous man and concludes with hubrisic optimism (e.g., “Progress! Future! Truth!”). Presumptive brag, that. However: Postmodernity, starts with the autonomous man and concludes with fainthearted nihilism (e.g., “Progress?! Future?! What is Truth?!”).  Whinny ninny, that.

So, there is this tension between the former and the latter. There is the old guard (modernity) and the new guard (postmodernity), but really they are comrades of the same guard. Even though they don’t like the fact that they are walking together, albeit to a syncopated rhythm, in the end they are one in the same — an idolater vainly raging against God.

Excerpts from Ray R. Sutton’s That You May Prosper: Dominion by Covenant.

How do we discover the covenant? We have to be convinced that it is the central organizing principle of the Bible. The only way to come to this conclusion is to understand the covenant itself. If we do not know what a covenant consists of, we will never be able to see it in all the segments of the Bible. Then, after we know the meaning of a covenant, we can consider how it works.

So, That You May Prosper has two parts: covenant and dominion. My primary purpose in the “covenant” section is to define the covenant. The Book of Deuteronomy is a model, a place where all of its parts can clearly be seen. Deuteronomy is to the covenant what Romans is to systematic theology. But how do we know Deuteronomy is a covenant? Moses says, “He declared to you His covenant which He commanded you to perform, that is, the Ten Commandments [Words]” (Deut. 4:13). Deuteronomy is the second giving of the Ten Commandments, a “new” covenant so to speak. Moses says of the book as a whole, “Keep the words of this covenant to do them, that you may prosper in all that you do” (Deut. 29:9). Deuteronomy is definitely a covenant document (pp. 14-15).

…

The Biblical covenant in Deuteronomy has five parts….Therefore, let us briefly overview the five points of covenantalism (p. 16).

Sutton’s list, summarized:

1) True Transcendence — God is distinct (Deut. 1:1-5).

2) Hierarchy — God is sovereign in relation to his people and utilizes representatives, e.g., Levites, Priesthood (Deut. 1:6-4:49).

3) Ethics — stipulations for the law at the heart of God’s covenant (Deut. 5-26).

4) Sanctions — lists of blessings and curses/rewards and punishments attached to covenant (Deut. 27-30).

5) Continuity — answers the questions “Who is in the covenant and has the Spirit (who empowers them to obey) and takes dominion?” (Deut. 31-34).

Here we see Sutton is echoing and unpackaging Westminster Confession of Faith, “Of God’s Covenant with Man” (VII.I.), which teaches that the Triune Lord relates to creation and has chosen to self-disclose knowledge of God to man by mode of covenant.

The distance between God and the creature is so great, that although reasonable creatures do owe obedience unto Him as their Creator, yet they could never have any fruition of Him as their blessedness and reward, but by some voluntary condescension on God’s part, which He has been pleased to express by way of covenant.

Have begun packing to relocate to Billings, Montana. The moving process feels odd: you take a house and remove all of its glory. Now everything is packaged in ugly brown boxes, and soon those packages will be shoved into an uglier moving box-van.

In effect, the glory of a home is buried; dying, the glory is buried in boxes.

All of the personal items that give the initially empty house a humanizing element are buried. So too the decorative things and furniture; everything which made the house “feel” like a glorious home is packaged and buried.

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Making a home is merely an element of Christian obedience. It is like a bullet on a page, or a chapter in a book,  or a theological loci — making a home — it is an item in a list, an element of an enumerated–obedient-response to God’s dominion mandate/cultural mandate for man (see Genesis 1:28).

God said, “Subdue and cultivate the world,” and that is why a Christian makes a corner here on earth their home. This is one of the true tests against the heresy of Gnosticism: Are you willing to obey God enough to tend to something as seemingly unspiritual as four walls and a roof? Are you willing to be thoroughly incarnational, that is, thoroughly earthly, and tend to a house and yard. To wit, to tend to a temporary home? which can and ought to represents your true heavenly home (the Christian home is to be an outpost of the Heavenly Kingdom).

A Christian makes a home here and now. Not in spite of, but because they are on a pilgrimage to their true home in the Celestial Garden-City, the New Jerusalem.

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We are moving. My family is moving to Montana. And the glory of our home is buried in boxes.

I know we’ll decorate and humanize and make the next empty house into a glorious home, but knowing that doesn’t make the moving process easier, and it certainly doesn’t alleviate the “odd” feelings created by a relocation of residency.

However, I am thankful for these feelings. But it is not in order to be sentimental. It isn’t that at all. There is much more to the story than merely living in this rental the past 3+ years and making it our home. Specifically, in January of 2010, it was God who answered our prayers and provided a beautiful rental and a Christian landlord when we moved to Warsaw, Indiana, and it is God, again, who has answered our prayers and provided a beautiful rental and a Christian landlord for us in Billings, Montana. It is an odd feeling because on the one hand, God answered our prayers in 2010 and brought us to this rental in Warsaw,  but on the other hand, again God has answered our prayers and is taking us from this home (which was an answer to prior prayer) to our new home (which is an answer to new prayer). The oddness, however, is commonplace for the Christian, who is in accordance with God’s will and by the work of the Spirit and through prayer, is continually transitioning from one type of glory to the next type of glory.

All of this is gift. Gratitude is the only proper response to each new bend in the road of the journey, to each new page turned in the story we are a part of. And even though it is a gift, and even though gratitude is the obedient response, I still feel an oddness.

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Providentially these feelings and thoughts have converged during Easter. This is the day in our Church Calendar that we remember the Resurrection.

The incarnate Christ was smitten and stricken, He was killed by sinners. However, God raised him from the dead. The Father raised Christ and changed him from one type of incarnate glory to another kind of incarnate (resurrected) glory.

As the Gospel of John says, Christ was “lifted up” on the Cross — a word play is at work, Christ was “lifted up”, that is, he was “glorified” by the Father in the foolishness of the Cross and subsequent Resurrection. The Father “glorified” Christ through Cross and Resurrection; the Father has made Christ both Lord and Savior and the world has become his footstool, and now Christ’s kingdom is extending into the corners and shadows. Because Christ was lifted up and glorified the curse has been rolled back, and both redeemed man and the world are being (and eventually will completely be) changed from one type of glory in to another (resurrected) glory.

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The glorious Christ was lifted up on the cross; He died and was buried, and then the Father lifted him up from the grave. God lifted up the glorious Christ from out of the package of death and in so doing he glorified the world because we (the Saints, the Elect, the Bride) rose to new life with Christ. And now Christ has made all things new; Christ has risen, therefore, this world is a temporary home for the Bride, the Church.

Christ ascended to prepare a permanent-heavenly home for his Bride.

Someday I will die. I will be placed in a box and stuck in the ground and when Christ returns I will be resurrected and I will be changed from glory to glory and I will go home.

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All of these boxes laying around my house…it feels odd because the glory of this house has been buried in said boxes. However, these boxes remind me of resurrected life, they are signs pointing towards a new life, new glory, and a the new home in Montana that is coming on the other side of this figurative death.

All of this is a gift. I receive it with gratitude, and hope.

An excellent summary of the overarching structure — highview architecture — of The Psalms.

The Torah is holy history that becomes Law only in the context of Todah, “Praise and Thanksgiving.

… 

The Canticles that were preserved in the Book of Praise [The Psalms] open with the dynamism of obedience (Psalm 1) and the expectation of the ideal King (Psalm 2). They terminate with the Hallelujah of the final apotheosis (Psalm 150) (Samuel Terrien, The Psalms: Strophic Structure and Theological Commentary, 60).

I had to look up the word “apotheosis” — from the Greek word “to deify” — elevation to divine status, deification, the perfect example.

Also, what a phrase! — “dynamism of obedience” — I love that.

“Doxology is the key to theology” (Samuel Terrien, The Psalms: Strophic Structure and Theological Commentary, 60).

Verbatim conversation at dinner table the other day. I kid you not. (Moses is three-and-a-half years old.)

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CCS: Moses, what are you going to do when you grow up?

MLS: Die.

CCS: Right, someday you will die, but before that…what kind of work do you want to do?

MLS: Use hammers, a lot.

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