Sandra Richter, The Servant, the Idol, & the Image of God: Isaiah’s Conversation with the Creati...

well good afternoon I'd like to welcome you to our scripture and ministry lecture my name is Steve Mathewson I'm an area pastor and also serve on the board of the Henry Center for theological understanding and it's my privilege today to introduce dr. Sandra Richter I will do that in just a moment but I'd like to lead us in prayer again now welcome to all of you great to see some faculty and students and area pastors and I know that there are people as well that are watching on the livestream so to all of you welcome would you join me as I lead us in prayer father your name and your renown is a desire of our hearts and I pray that you will help us this afternoon as we think deeply about the image of God about creation in the way that prophet Isaiah draws on those themes lord I pray that what we hear today will be helpful to us in informing us in Christ and also helpful to us as we think about serving you preaching and teaching Scripture lord I thank you so much for a dr. Richter and her willingness to come and to speak to us I pray that she'll feel welcome that your spirit will empower her she speaks to us today father thank you for this privilege that we have in Jesus name Amen well it is a privilege to introduce to you dr. Sandra Sandra Richter she is professor of Old Testament at Wheaton College previously she served as a professor at Asbury Theological Seminary for nine years and Wesley biblical seminary for four years before that she has a Master of Arts degree from Gordon Conwell Theological Seminary and a PhD from Harvard in Near Eastern languages and civilizations and Hebrew Bible my introduction to dr. Richter came from my brother Mark who is on staff at a church in Lincoln Nebraska I believe he's watching a livestream today so hello mark but he told me about he says you've got a you got a read does sander Richter's book the epoch of Eden and and I was so glad for the recommendation Kirstin entry into the Old Testament and and he said you'll find it fascinating and it's been worth the read and then met her as well finally in person at session for the evangelical theological Society and and I've appreciated her work and I was thrilled to find out that she'd be moving into our neighborhood to be nearby at Wheaton College her family let me tell you just a little bit about her family her husband Steven sue Collis he is PhD as well works in comparative religion works with Zondervan and also does some teaching at Emmaus Bible Seminary in Haiti of great interest to you might be that his first career was as a rock star and an Elvis impersonator so who says that Bible scholars and theologians don't have some interesting personal sides to them sander says she has two perfect daughters and if she says that when they are 14 and 11 she's got to be right if they're perfect at that age they are perfect their names are Noel and Elise and so it's privileged to have her here today would you please join me in welcoming dr. Sandra Richter [Applause] I think they are perfect and as I tell my students don't argue with me I still have the gradebook in my hand so it is such an honor to be here it truly is the Carl F Henry Center for theological understanding what a wonderful endowment and a wonderful opportunity for Trinity and I'm looking across this room at people who are my mentors and my friends and my past students and my current students actually as well who've made the trek and I am thrilled to be here thank you Tom McCall for the invitation Jeffery and Heather thank you for making all this happen is are you happy with this Mike yes I don't need to move it all right thank you for having me here as you all know the aim for the creation project has been to broaden the church's understanding of the doctrines of creation to ponder that breathtaking moment when the Creator hurled the cosmos into place from as many perspectives as we can to investigate the stunning perfection of his works with all the intellectual and emotional capacity we can muster and I am thrilled to be a part of that as we consider the heavens the work of his fingers the moon the stars which he has ordained we who are in His image must ask right along with the psalmist in light of who you are what is humanity that you should take thought of them the child of Adam that you should care for him this is the topic of my talk the servant the idol and the image of God and we will ponder this topic via the lens of one of the greatest theologians of all time that theologian of course is the prophet Isaiah so we're going to launch with the book itself I was supposed to get this to Heather but didn't get it to her quite early enough if you want a copy I'm perfectly happy to get it for you as you know this is an enormous normally complex text the book of Isaiah is 66 compelling and overwhelming chapters from a man who in our day would surely carry a THD and a PhD have nearly as many publications as que los and younger and a German habilitat see own to throw into the mix as well but lucky for us the author himself provides us a road map to his magnum opus and as is normative for all of the prophetic books the order of his Oracle's has as much to say to us about his message as do the content of the Oracles themselves so what is the key well lucky for us our author actually offers us a key isaiah chapter 42 verse 9 summarizes Isaiah's thesis behold the former things have come to pass now I declare new things before they spring forth I proclaim them to you in other words this book as has been recognized many many times takes a major shift at chapter 14 and the shift has to do with the former things and the latter things chapters 1 through 39 report the former things I like to speak of this section of the book as Israel as she was chapters 40 through 66 speak to us of the latter things I like to speak of this as Israel as she will be in other words like so many of the prophetic books our rhetorician leads with judgment and brings it home with the hope of redemption thus whereas chapter one of this book details Yahweh's covenant lawsuit against his people introducing the problem of the book in chapter 66 this one whose hand has made all these things announces that he is making a new heavens and a new earth can a land be porn in a single day on the hands of the one who first heard the cosmos in place yes yes it can according to our great profit now in the midst of this book is thus in the second half embedded in the very heart of the latter things is a pivotal conflict between two critical character characters that is too often missed here in this section the protagonist who is our hero is as is often the case in any great epic not obviously the hero and the antagonist is a slick and a smart and alluring as any great villain should be who are they well as the title of my lecture suggests these are the servant and the idle one if he triumphs is the ultimate solution the other if he prevails will in his ascension dispossessed the very people who have offered them him their allegiance this villain of all villains is the idol so how will the people of God defend themselves how will they unmask the Pretender how will they embrace their true hero who is the ability to lead them into a restored identity the new Humanity of God's new heavens and new earth how will they resist the power of darkness that will ultimately destroy them Isaiah's answer is simple the people of God must recognize who their Creator is and therefore and therefore who they are indeed if the people of God will realize what it means to be made in the image of God then there's hope so we turn first - Isaiah's ultimate solution the servant behold my servant whom I uphold my chosen one in whom my soul delights now it's important for us to realize that there at least two servants in Isaiah's book at least the first is actually Israel herself Israel is spoken of multiple times throughout the book is Yahweh's servant fact if I were to ask a random student like Katharine brightly perhaps to do a books on this book she would come up with dozens and dozens of references to Yahweh as is Israel as Yahweh's servant how does Israel do as Yahweh's servant well we find first that Israel is corrupt one brief quotation our sinful nation a people laden down with iniquity the offspring of evildoers sons who deal corruptly they forsaken Yahweh they have despised the Holy One of Israel they are utterly estranged as you read through chapter 1 of this book you are struck by the fact that Yahweh has pursued every possible method to convince allure court even seduced his people into repentance and yet they have refused how is Israel as Yahweh's servant they are blind and they are deaf hear you death and look you blind that you may see who is as blind as my servant or as deaf as the messenger whom I send who is blind as my dedicated one or blind as the servant of the Lord this is the first servant of Isaiah's book and as is obvious by these quotations this servant has failed miserably to stand as the witness of Yahweh in the court of the nations but then we are introduced to a second servant a second servant who is the most enigmatic individual of the Old Testament as I have ever encountered this second servant is known to us primarily through the corpus of the second portion of Isaiah which we know as the servant songs this servant has stirred centuries millennia of debate we know this individual through the songs but this servant remains within the book itself a mystery how would we characterize this servant in the first song we read that this servant is not blind rather this servant sees clearly God's will and thereby brings about justice a light for the Gentiles this servant is not deaf rather this one hears clearly God's command this one rescues the end the exiles and again becomes a light for the Gentiles we read that this servant is not disobedient or disdainful of the Holy One of Israel rather this one obeys faithfully one who truly knows Yahweh and suffers as a result true light versus false light and then the most mysterious song of all this servant is one whose death will somehow deliver his people from their failures and yet this one will be exalted others will add chapter 61 I Isaiah as a fifth song to the corpus but all stand with the same question who who could this person be and so we asked the same question who is the servant is this an individual or is this a group or is it both and how can it be both as it says on your outline how can a second Israel save a first Israel or how could one man actually embody a nation and so as the centuries have ticked by individuals have proposed that the servant might indeed be Israel but then again how can Israel die for Israel or perhaps this is the remnant of Israel or ideal Israel but if indeed this one perishes for the sake of the nation where does the remnant go or perhaps this is first Isaiah the prophet often theorized is responsible for these first 39 chapters or is it Jeremiah or is it deutero Isaiah the one hypothesized to be responsible for the second half of the or perhaps are we looking at some unknown profit with the exile or zerubabbel or Moses or Hezekiah it would be difficult for us to find one hero of the story of Israel has not been proposed as this potential servant as many have pointed out you could probably limp through the first three of these servant songs with any one of these figures in mind but there is no way to resolve the final servant song with the identity of anyone who stands on the screen and as a result many have hypothesized that the servant of Isaiah is indeed Jesus the Christ and as we look at this fourth and final servant song we read that as a result of the anguish of his soul he will see it and be satisfied by his knowledge the righteous one my servant will justify the many and he will bear their iniquities therefore I will allot him a portion with the great well the prophet who speaks the great theologian who identifies this text does not believe in human sacrifice the great theologian who speaks these words cannot yet know that there is a babe to be born in a manger in Bethlehem and yet he speaks of this one all the same mysterious enigmatic beyond a human figure as my Divinity School students at Harvard University often indicated to me someone not identified by the interplay between the former and the latter things which is our theologians thesis in light of this mystery Bravard child makes this statement this observation implies that in regard to this portion of the message of second Isaiah the canonical process preserved the material in a form the significance of which was not fully understood this is about as close to revelation as you're gonna get here the diversity within the witness could not be resolved in terms of Israel's past experience rather the past would have to receive its meaning from the future hmm now let's turn to the other character in the Book of Isaiah the villain the one to whom the servant is juxtaposed the one literary types would describe as the seducer this antagonist appears to be a good guy in the larger Israelite experience but as the story unfolds is eventually exposed as the villain like the two women in the mask the blonde versus the brunette the firm with Tom Cruise the devil's advocate with Keanu Reeves or like Barty Crouch --is sinister impersonation of the inimitable mad-eye moody in the Goblet of Fire who is the good guy who is the bad guy in Israel's experience this other character the seducer is indeed the idol now I realize that to you and to me it is obvious that the idol is the Pretender the villain but not so for Israel therefore Isaiah speaks I've declared them to you long ago the former things before they took place Aiyaa way proclaim them to you so that you would not say my idol has done them my graven image my molten image has commanded them Yahweh is jealous of this villain jealous for the well-being of his people because he knows that this is ultimately the villain of the tale so let us pause and consider how the ancients spoke of this villain that they do not necessarily recognize as a villain the idol in the language of the ancient Near East would not have been spoken of as an idol rather the terminology applied to this character would be the term Selim or the term Elohim image or God indeed when the diplomats of Assyria approached Hezekiah Jerusalem in order to attempt to negotiate a surrender treaty the route shaka shouted out for all the men on the wall to hear has any one of the gods of the nations delivered this land from the hand of the kings of Assyria he does not call them idols he calls them gods who among well that's the watch so you're in trouble who among all the gods of the land from the hint have delivered from the King hands of the kings of Assyria who among all the gods has delivered from my hand and so Hezekiah prayed to his God indeed o Yahweh the kings of Assyria have cast all the gods of these other nations into the fire so please hear me prove your identity as the only true God and deliver us how can you cast a god into the fire and the answer is you cast an idol into the fire so Israel's neighbors and Israel herself more often than not would refer to what you called the idol as a God in Israel's world what we know as the idol would have been referred to as deity because the Incarnate image of that deity that would be that Selim or what you know is the idol was understood as the animate representation of the God himself and so what we know as an idol they would know as Selim an animate incarnation of their deity but one of the most interesting details about Isaiah's rhetoric regarding the idol in really much of the Bible's treatment on the topic is that Isaiah does not choose to use this vocabulary rather Isaiah violates his neighbor's vocabulary will not use the standard terminology when he refers to these deities or their animate images whereas the nation's referred to them as gods Isaiah calls them hustle or Pesa lean as you can see on the slide as a verb this word is actually very common in the ancient Near East it simply means as a verb to craft to sculpt or to hew as a noun it means to be something crafted hewn or sculpted in other words our biblical writers are making use of vocabulary which is familiar to their audience to craft to hue but they are creating a noun by which to speak of these four deities although you will find the verb frequently among Israel's neighbors you will never find the noun what does Isaiah's word mean that which is heyou that which is sculpted that which is made what does it communicate these gods that you are worshipping our things made they are things hewn things you sculpted with your own hands , stupid period these are not gods they are not intimate these are things made the first occurrence of this word is found in the Ten Commandments specifically that critical expansion of the first commandment you shall have no Elohim no gods before me indeed you shall not make for yourself a pestle or any likeness of what is in heaven above or on the earth beneath the other place where you will find this noun pestle something that you made with your hands , stupid all over the biblical text is with our theologian Isaiah who picks up this word and uses it over and over and over again to describe the great villain the idol most specifically he utilizes this word in his famous idol parody poems we'll pick up the most famous of his idol parody poems here in Isaiah chapter 44 Isiah starts by reminding Israel of who made them in the first place but now listen o Jacob my servant even Israel whom I have chosen thus says Yahweh who made you who formed you from the wound who made who I made you he goes on to speak to Israel regarding their calling to serve as witnesses of the Almighty and yet the fact then rather than standing as witnesses they have instead turned their allegiance to things they've made with their own hands he moves on to begin to speak about the absurdity of humans making God's the complete and utter insanity of the thing created making the thing that cannot be created and as the passage continued he speaks with pointed sarcasm reaaargh regarding the limits of the craftsman who is actually fashioning yet SAR if you know your creation vocabulary a god and he concludes by speaking of how Israel's resultant condition is as blind and as deaf and has inanimate as the gods they claim to make and so we turn to Isaiah chapter 44 12 and we see the parallelism of the Prophet the man shapes iron into a cutting tool and the man works it with the coals he hammers it and fashions it he works it with his strong arm even the human becomes hungry because of his limited so that he has no strength and he must pause and drink water lest he faint this most famous of these poems in Isaiah 44 describes the crafting of an idol and Isaiah mocks his audience how could a limited human attempt to make a god he goes on and he speaks of the human who Hughes a tree stretching forth a plumb line outlining went with red chalk he fashions it was scraping tools and with a compass the human designs it he makes it like the form of a man according to the beauty of a dumb in order to be enthroned in a house a temple so with great sarcasm and pointed what wit the Prophet goes on to say you plant the tree but it's the ring that makes it grow you burned the tree to keep yourself warm and bake your bread and with the other half you make a god and you fall down in front of it and pray deliver me for thou art my god the Prophet roars how stupid are you can't you see you can't even make the tree grow without me your strength fails while you work yet you think your own creation can save you when I'm right here your Creator awaiting your worship the problem is it made explicit by this image coming out of ancient Mesopotamia here we see they have no knowledge who carry about their wooden Idol and pray to a God who cannot save we as humans need a deity who is both eminent right here with us and transcendent able to deal with the vagaries of the universe how do our ancient polytheists deal with this problem well they create local incarnations of their gods incarnations that are here with us we can serve but who are also ritually empowered to be transcendent because you see even the pagans knew that humans should not be making gods but once we have made them we need to make them dots and the solution that they have arrived at is a ritual solution what is that ritual solution well in the ancient world it is known as the Babylonian Miss pea ritual the mission of the Miss P ritual which literally means the opening of the mouth the mission is to make an Elohim a human making an Elohim now we have literary evidence for this particular ritual from the days of Judea that takes us back to before Abraham's era all the way to nebuchadnezzar ii that's the fellow who takes down jerusalem in 586 BC in other words this ritual is broadly known and broadly practiced in Isaiah's world how does it work well we have the mission so far so good we're going to make use of our ability to interact with the divine so the first step will be divination where the priests of a particular temple actually ask the gods do you approve do you approve that we might actually create an incarnation of you oh great god a syllable and of course the deity will respond and if he gives us permission then the selim the image is actually crafted the crafting will be done by the finest of sculptors and the finest of materials will be used the statue will be coated in gold or in silver the eyes set with jewels the clothing beyond cost for the average citizen and that image will be crafted in a very specific sacred space within the temple itself so far so good now we have ourselves one beautiful statue but the statue of course is just a statue so what will the ancients do to be a god this statue this incarnation must live and so the ancients will need to animate their statue how will we animate it well the first step is that the image will be transferred to a sacred garden notice the words that I'm highlighting they will become more important as we move forward the statue will be transferred to a sacred garden somewhere in the temple precinct and in this garden it will be placed with its face pointed toward the sunrise and our priests and our craftsmen will depart the sacred precinct at dawn they will return and when they return our priests and our craftsmen will now look at this beautiful perfect statue as the light of the dawn catches both the glinting medals on its service and the sacred waters moving through the tamarisk canal placed upon the birthing bricks of the goddess facing the east and they will declare look what the gods have birthed and they will declare in ritual fashion that this statue has been born born in heaven made on earth transferred into our realm and so just as the process would be with a human baby the next step will be the mouth washing the Miss P ritual as we in applied health care today would take a suction tube and suction out the mouth of a newborn baby and wipe the various fluids of birth from its eyes and ears so - these would wash out the mouth in the eyes and the ears of their new-born deity then the craftsmen themselves then they would wash the image with water as we would a newborn child the craftsmen themselves would ritually disassociate themselves from the birth of the statue in other words they would take every tool that they had utilized in the birthing process they would sacrifice a ritual animal typically a sheep they would wrap their tools in a cloth place those tools within the carcass of the ritual animal they would ceremonially detach their own hands not literally place that into the body of the sheep as well and cast the evidence that this creature had been made not born into the sea actually into the river divine gestation has occurred in the words of Michael dick the womb like tamarisk trough has been filled with the rivers fructifying semen the tamara's trough is placed on the bricks of the birth goddess the invocation of the gods has birthed a deity this is how the animate imminent incarnation of a deity occurred in the ancient world from the earliest days of writing in Mesopotamia until the fall of Israel's monarchy this is how a god was made when the God was complete it was then installed in the temple and from this point forward this animate deity must be fed must be clothed must even be taken out to visit its relatives and go hunting this is the Selim of the deity incarnate and installed in the temple so let us at last circle back to the creation narrative what is the conversation that our great theologian is having with Genesis 1 and 2 then Yahweh Elohim crafted yet saw the human from the dust of the ground and he breathed into his nostrils the breath of life and a human who was not animate became animate and Yahweh Elohim planted a garden toward the east a garden that has been recognized by hundreds of theologians as a paradigm for a temple and he installed the human whom he had fashioned do you hear it in what some have called a children's tale we have a sophisticated critique of one of the most elevated practices of the ancient world what does it communicate Yahweh has fashioned his own sillim his own local animate reflection of himself because gods can make selim humans can't this is why the religion of Israel is an iconic this is why Israel was forbidden to make images of their God because God has already made his own image and that image is you what are the biblical implications of Isaiah's conversation with the creation narrative we read that humanity was created in the sillim the image of God this is repeated in both Genesis 1 with the technical terminology of Selim and in Genesis 2 in the narrative of the creation animation and installation of our creature we read that God animates and installs this image in his sacred garden but we all know the tale that humanity rebels refusing their divinely ordained role and chooses instead as Isaiah details the blindness and the deafness of their own idols these statues are not animate gods Selim is animate and God Selim has enact the ultimate act of betrayal by refusing their role and seeing placing that role on the inanimate idols of their own making in other words the first servant failed so God redeems he chooses a new covenant people he rescues redeems and restores and he restores these people to his land and his purposes and he places his presence in their midst this is Israel called as was the first servant to do what to demonstrate his character to the nation's to be a light to the world to stand as a witness of the one in whose image they have been made but as isaiah chronicles for 39 chapters this servant fails as well so what will we do and we return - Isaiah's ultimate solution the hero of this text the most unlikely of heroes the servant and we read again Isaiah chapter 53 who has believed our message what an impossible tale and to whom has the arm of Yahweh been revealed for he grew up before him like a tender shoot like a root out of parched ground he had no form or majesty that we should look upon him nor appearance that we should be attracted to him he was despised and forsaken of men a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief and like one from whom men hide their face he was despised and we did not esteem him surely our griefs he himself bore and our sorrows he carried yet we ourselves esteemed him stricken smitten of God and afflicted but he was pierced through for our transgressions sorry I can't ever get through this passage he was crushed by our iniquities the chastening of our well-being fell upon him and by his scourging we are healed all of us live sheep have gone astray each one has turned to his own way but Yahweh has caused the iniquity of us all to on him this mysterious figure the one whom Brevard Child's tells us that even Isiah himself could not identify the one whose identity quote could not be resolved in terms of Israel's past experience rather the past would have to receive its meaning from the future the one whom our New Testament writers identify as both the type man of Israel the one who could embody a nation a second Israel who could indeed save the first the second Adam who is indeed the recreation of the selim that was the first Adam intended in the garden this is the answer to the puzzle and so our New Testament writers latch on to this reality in Matthew 8 14 through 17 we read the Gospel writers saying yes yes this is the one he himself took our infirmities in John 12 we read the gospel writer even after he had performed so many miracles in their presence they still would not believe in him who has believed our message and to whom is the arm of the Lord been revealed he has blinded their eyes and perhaps my favorite illusion is Matthew chapter 11 when John the Baptist is dying in prison and he knows that his days are numbered and he sends his disciples to his cousin the Christ and says are you the one or am i rotting in this prison in vain and Jesus turns to the disciples and he quotes Isaiah 60:1 he says tell him that the blind see tell him that the lame walk tell him that good news is being announced to the poor code language tell him I'm the one so how does this impact our theology and here we are sitting in the Carl f henry center for theological inquiry affects our theology because as this great prophet is want to do he connects Eden to the New Jerusalem he pulls the great story together he teaches us that Jesus the Christ has come as the image but selim of the invisible God Jesus the Christ is termed by our New Testament writers as the firstborn over all creation does Paul choose this language randomly certainly not indeed the son is the radiance of God's glory the exact representation of his being he is not just any Selim he is the Selim and this one who is designed to be the ultimate light for the nations has come to this new Israel so that those whom he foreknew he also predestined to be what Ari conformed I would throw in to the cell of his son in order that he might be the firstborn among many brethren looking at Isaiah's message again what do we read that the first servant and the second servant Israel were commissioned to be Yahweh's witnesses you are my witnesses declares Yahweh and my servant whom I have chosen in order that you may know and believe me and understand that I am he because if we know who he is we know who we are before me there was no God form and there will be none after me it is I who have declared and saved and proclaimed there is no strange God there is no Idol among you so you are my witnesses declares Yahweh and I am God and so in Acts chapter 1 verse 8 we hear the Commission reapplied but you shall receive power when the holy has come upon you and you shall be what my witnesses both in Jerusalem and in all Judea and Samaria and even to the remotest part of the earth indeed we have been tasked as the new Israel with the same role as the first Adam the same role as Israel and it has been made possible by the one who has made exactly in His image Isaiah speaks is it too small a thing that you should be my servant to raise up the tribes of Jacob and to restore the preserved ones of Israel I will also make you a light to the nation's so that my salvation may reach to the end of the earth and so the gospel writer says to this new servant I am the light of the world he who follows me will not walk in darkness but will have the light of Life and then the great servant takes that task and turns to his newly formed people and Commission's us you are now the light of the world if you will allow yourselves to be reconfirmed to the image you will fulfill the first and ultimate task indeed Jesus the Christ is the image of the invisible God the firstborn of all creation for in him all the fullness of deity dwells in bodily form and in him you have been made complete and so we come full circle what was the ultimate problem a humanity who refused their role as that selim of the Almighty and chose instead to make a God in their own image and as a result became as dead and blind and deaf as the idols they worshipped what is the ultimate solution a new servant one who can embody the original intent of the Creator who can both be represent and redeem the very ones who have failed in their calling and so he comes the exact image of the almighty in the form of atom and if we will agree to be conformed to his image then at last we can be that selim of the almighty a light to the nation's a witness to the people's Isaiah saw it on horizon he did not fully understand it it awaited Israel's future to fulfill it but he understood that a second atom must come and he believed so that we might believe as well thank you very much Thank You dr. Richter for a wonderful lecture very removing and very stimulating we're going to have a time for Q&A it's about 152 we can go till 2:30 if you still have questions so I will open it up in just a moment we will ask you to come to one of the mics on either side here of the area in the front and please don't trip all over each other and then fight for those but you know what it's like it always takes one person to be bold and to get started so please do that but maybe I will start with a question actually you already answered this but it might be worth revisiting I thought this was such a great point you made but in in Exodus 20 verse 4 that the second of the 10 words you know we read you shall not make for yourself Petzl mm-hmm and it's interesting that you know a biblical writer doesn't seem to make the connection or or you know as the 10 words are being given the connection isn't made but that's that's the very the very reason that why Israel wouldn't do that is because they were selling they were image of God and I I guess I've always thought about that but thought well scripture doesn't yeah it doesn't make the connection as explicitly as we'd like but I think what you're saying is the connections there it's there from Genesis 2 it just has to be you know understood and in light of a whole you know body of what scripture says so I mean if somebody said to you well the connection isn't there I think I know what your answer would be but what would you say to them well again our focus on the original authors vocabulary important this is not random this is not intended this is not a word you're going to find in any other ritual liturgical material so when the writer of the Ten Commandments and Isaiah pick up this term it is it is a slur it is intended as a slap across the face in fact the the urban legend regarding George HW Bush and his pronunciation of Saddam Hussein's name have you heard this urban legend yet I can't confirm it but for those of you who live through that era or remember that era whenever the first President Bush would speak Saddam's name he would not say Saddam he would say saddle do you remember this and a lot of people attributed it to his Texas accent but of course Bush was not stupid and he had advisors and so the urgent urban legend is that he was intentionally speaking the word Sodom every time because Sodom in Arabic is a slur it is an insult and so every time a news broadcast was sent over the airways Bush was intentionally insulting the man this is the urban legend this is exactly what Isaiah is doing he is intentionally insulting and he is intentionally dividing and Exodus is doing the same thing there is plenty of vocabulary for God an image and any any sort of deity and instead he chooses a verb that everyone in his audience would recognize as you made it with your own hands this is why the study of original languages is absolutely critical to your theological education right Richard yes thank you questions please make your way to one of the mics on the side well and I would love to hear aha moments as well in some ways this lecture is very self-contained there's not a lot of outside data but I'm hoping that dots got connected for many of you that have never been connected before yeah this was a fantastic lecture thank you very much for setting this out before us this me speak connection and so on is very helpful in terms of the context in which Israel would be reading a lot of this material one question that I've had that that you didn't talk about this but you can't talk about everything we talked about Isaiah's servant all at once but I've wondered how much the suffering of the servant hmm is connected with the whole the prophets as servants hmm and how much that leads into how he develops the servant terminology in in the songs and this is an issue that I think may help us to understand how he gets there is what I'm trying to say in terms of the suffering of the servant and the significance of that in Isaiah 53 because then we have a whole kind of another set of things that were internal to Israel that would push us into our understanding of and Jesus talked about himself as being that prophet right mm-hmm and so on and so there's a lot that can be done with that but and you know they have Hebrews 1 and and so on and the connections there so I just wondered if you thought through that if you have any particular thoughts about the linkage there between the prophet and the suffering of the prophets in the Old Testament and how that leads into this ultimate suffering the end the ultimate identity of Jesus as prophet and those the connections with various ultimate he's ultimately so many different things right right and the writer of Hebrews of course can't leave that alone right so don't go yet because well I told the QA people before we started that I'm gonna have more resources in this room to answer QA than ever happens in in my experience so you're thinking in terms that the profits role as being this in some ways on having this unfortunate calling of being a rhetorician in a context in which rather than operating in the standard rules of rhetoric which is find out what your audience wants to hear and kind of lure them forward instead is regularly called to slap him upside the head and therefore is generally a figure who suffers and that this identity of the profit informs the servants role because Jesus himself will ultimately profit as well are there more talk to me well Joe what would you add in there well I could add for example in a sermon of the mount in the last of the Beatitudes there's a shift of you from the from the third person to the you and and in it it talks about blessed are you when you suffer because and that it ends because that way you're like the prophets of the Old Testament and so it continues on into the ethos of the kingdom mm-hmm okay from there and I've wondered about how much that links us as the ones who are in Christ to being servants as well mm-hmm as the very earth Ahsan of being the the Serpent's to whatever comes we we we witness through it okay including suffering and all that comes with being light in the midst of art of darkness and that being made in His image involves the fact that in this exiled world we will be a target over and over and over again amen it would be my response I I think it's a it's an important it's a very important illusion in thesis to our character and his character yeah well it helps man and I just thanks again for this wonderful culture absolutely thank I'm gonna use this to stir it more conversation ready go ahead hi thank you very much my name is Clinton molars I'm one of the research fellows here and I just found your talk so so interesting and illuminating at very new to me of this material it kind of reminds me a little bit of like the first time I went to a Passover ceder done by Jewish believers and you see this whole line of so the Passover lamb wearing right from the beginning all the way through revelation and so well I'd be interested to know is that I assume that there is a history to these insights with in the history of interpretation and I'm wondering could you talk a little bit about where this understanding of the image in the Garden in Isaiah in Colossians what the history of that interpretation has been mm-hmm well there there were a lot of first of all the serving himself is probably the most debated figure in the Old Testament is that safe to say and the interpretations are legion I actually invited in fact it was the year that Katherine took Isaiah with me we invited a local Jewish rabbi in to speak to their traditional views on the servant and that was even further enlightening and he confirmed to us that his tradition prior to the strong emergence of Christianity so one two hundred ad would have affirmed that the servant figure was indeed a messianic figure and then Jewish interpretation backed away from that particular interpretive scheme when the church championed it but this was an early interpretation of the servant himself always enigmatic so much so that the deven actually made the argument that the servant songs were an alien corpus to the book of Isaiah that they don't belong in Isaiah this is introducing a whole new idea that cannot be reconciled with to the book and I love the fact that Brevard child's was willing to stake currency on that one and say absolutely not you know this this is core material here so the servant himself hotly debated what I find so intriguing about the history of interpretation actually is actually what the New Testament writers do you know that in the midst of their struggle to figure out who is this Christ this is not who we expected they latch on to this identity and fulfilling as regards the image there were a lot of whispers out there of people making these connections certainly the first Adam of the last Adam the connections between Genesis 1:26 and Colossians were out there but it really wasn't until the Assyria logical translations and I've got two books with me that both of which I will recommend to you very highly until this material actually and everyone at this table is going oh yes the the miss P ritual was fully translated and we came to understand what it meant and then of course it takes about 20 years for biblical scholars to get a hold of what the serial adjusts are doing sometimes 30 sometimes more and then pull it into biblical studies studies Michael dick was probably the first one who really popularized it's not exactly in the newspaper but popularize the material and then my friend and colleague Kathy McDowell at gordon-conwell has really written this into biblical theology and almost everything I've learned about this material I've learned from her so I would say in the last lesson help me out with this where would you say this material actually got into biblical studies would you say okay so it's fresh and for us it's fresh and for me has transformed my take I am I am so overwhelmed that Isaiah actually saw this on the horizon that Isaiah could actually stand in the middle of our Canon and tag the image in the garden and look ahead to someone he didn't know so if you're looking to do more research those are the books I'll affect would you like to look at them I will hand them to you all right I didn't get much laughter which means you're a very stuffy conservative crowd so just kidding can can I show you another image while you think of your next question I am on top of being a scholar yes I'm also a mom and as a mom I of course got last sued into teaching toddler church at my Anglican Church back when I worked at Asbury Theological toddler church is very challenging to people who are you know abstract learners and in the midst of this my little 3 4 year olds I asked them to draw a picture of God and we had just finished the creation narratives with them and my own budding theologian drew this instead of God and got a big yellow crayon colored all over it and I came over and I said to her Alise what what is that and she said and this is my kid she said you asked me to draw a picture of God I can't draw a picture of God so I drew Adam instead I almost started sobbing in the middle of toddler church I'm like yes so that's correct other questions so be a little bit on farmer that's I'm thinking the breasts go out but we to observations and then raise a question mm-hmm this lectures come in the context of the creation project of course you don't what are the things that strikes me as interesting about the Book of Isaiah is the cosmic scope that it has mm-hmm we were talking yesterday about how who a calf the occurrence of two who are the Book of Isaiah mm-hmm first observations second and this one I think you did a wonderful job of showing the ancient mind and and how the logic of idols or gods works mm-hmm and as I think I was thinking about your presentation there's a we've this contrast between the materialism and the mythology or the mythical mind mm-hm and so it struck me the way that you representing idols you already see Isaiah questioning that mythical thought mm-hmm and sort of sacramental or however you want to talk about this idea that the material world has some kind of divine being to it such that this thing can be God and I say saying no it's just it's just a tree mm-hmm so putting those two observations together in the context that we're in does Isaiah have any insights for us on how we think of creation between on the one hand imbued with the divine and on the other hand merely batter hmm Thank You Jeffrey for a great question one of the topics on the outline that I realized I probably would not have time for and so if you were paying very close attention to I ditched it is the differences between polytheistic and monotheistic thought which is the worldview issue and to this day my great hero on this topic is Ezequiel Kelvin and he is a Jewish theologian he was one of the responders to vel Heusen actually and people of course you know what is the oedipal complex we are destined to try to kill our fathers and has come under much criticism but he's in here I think is profound his response and don't let me go too far afield the question he was answering was could monotheism have evolved out of polytheism this is the standard University line that we've gone from the many of polytheism to the single allegiance of henotheism to the ultimate monotheism and in that evolution which of course is three stages because all evolutionary paradigm should be three stages right solely as it ought to be that we've gone from the simple to the complex we've gone from the concrete to the abstract we've gone from the eminent to the transcendent and Calvin responded and said that is a wholly inadequate way of dealing with the differences of this profound distinction of world view between polytheism and monotheism and what Jeffrey is tagging as you look on the left of a very distilled version of Calvin's argument is that because there are multiple deities in the heavens we must first affirm that every deity is therefore limited because if BHEL is fighting it out with ash roth who's biting fighting it out with mardukas fighting out with shamash who's fighting out with a greek pantheon every one of them has limited power this place is the worshipper in a profoundly insecure state because of course if you make any one of them angry they can do damage and so the pious individual in the ancient world added on to their pantheon constantly and tried desperately to keep all the gods happy so this is one issue another issue is that the deities therefore have limited territory which is why bail is indigenous to Canaan and Jeroboam the first brilliant exercise and contextualization is to actually synchronize yahweh and bill because he keeps everybody happy except for yahweh in that process the deities because they are themselves multiple and let me add to this point pantheon czar constantly expand the gods are either birthing new gods or new deities are being assimilated every time a country is contacted either through military acquisition or trade or anything else because of that with these Pantheon is constantly expanding the ancients who were polytheists had to understand that the gods could reproduce and they could be reproduced which is very important which necessarily forces us to ask where do the gods come from and the answer is that they come from the primordial realm this is critical because it means that gods are being created we can create more and if the gods come from primordial stuff you know you think of T mots being split in half her primordial stuff the chaos then if you can control the primordial stuff you can control the gods and that is the essence of magic and this is where your question connects if the gods are embedded in the creation if they share their personhood their ontology with creation itself then we can get to the gods through creation we can cast spells we can manipulate magic we can do divination we can manipulate them like now pitch tune does when it gets off the ark they're hungry if I put together a big enough barbecue they will come to me and I can ask them for my life and they will give it to me so this business about the gods deriving from the primordial realm I think is Calvin's stroke of brilliance you cannot get from there to monotheism you can't you cannot cross that Great Divide and of course the end result is that deities need humans and this plays into the misty ritual of course whereas the god of monotheism is omnipotent omnipresent ex neo this is a God who has no need so as we speak into our current context which is quickly reverting to a very comfortable socially acceptable version of paganism we still hold the God who is unique in this identity one who is still uniquely offensive in this identity and one who demands Allegiance and the only possible response is submission absolutely I I think that the average person's theology tends very much toward polytheism that there is let me see how am I going to put this together humanity always has been and I think always will be very uncomfortable with a sovereign deity a single God who stands outside of our realm and has the authority to make us in His image and remake us in His image who whose identity is not something that can be abstracted into for example a philosophical discussion of polytheism versus monotheism for example a very hot debate on my campus is the Muslim Christian question and the one of the responses will be well there is only one God so of course Muslims and Christians worship the same God and what of my responses to that is who are you talking about not what are you talking about but who are you talking about monotheism is not simply a category of unique allegiance to a single god it is unique allegiance to a person who is God and has therefore boundaries on his personhood how can I add to that you might need to to encourage me further we we are very comfortable with the idea of God somehow being embedded in his creation in modern thoughts the New Age movement is is basically a resurrection of Hinduism with better clothes am I am I being radical it's hard to tell up here you're very quiet oh okay well isaiah sees the created order as one of the ultimate reflections of the character in the personhood of god he sees this as the work of his hands the work of his fingers he entrusts creation to the one made in his image as a result i would say that Isaiah's theology of creation isn't that it is highly esteemed it is precious and it belongs to the Almighty not to humanity this is a major thesis in my work on environmentalism that the the question that should be posed when you ask the environmental question is who does it belong to that's the ultimate question and if it does not belong to humanity than an aspect of humanity's submission to the Almighty is there care for his material I don't know if that helps I might be missing it Jeffrey hello this is Heather Paulette who graduated from Asbury Theological Seminary she also spent three weeks at Tara home being covered in dirt uncovering the iron age with me okay so I just wanted to say it really appreciated a lot of the things that you've brought up in your presentation from the beginning to where we just land it now and I think you're dead on when you talk about even a lot of Christians that we know having a polytheistic view even if they don't acknowledge it or even know it so my question kind of goes back or he does go back to the the miss pea ceremony and especially going back to Genesis for you you pulled out one into you about God forming and breathing Humanity or breathing into humanity and kind of activating you know his sell them there yes there we go mm-hmm and then if you go further into Genesis 3 then we get into the Serpent's deception and and the fall and all of that and then the beginning of that kind of opens up with you know their eyes were opened and they saw that they were naked and so they clothed themselves and all of those things and I just was kind of thinking through throughout your presentation so many little dots were connecting back and forth but I just think it's so interesting and having you detail well the the opening of the mouth ceremony and and honestly I never connected that to what we do with babies so there's that too but then how the Genesis narrator continues to kind of use some of those same I know phrases even to kind of show like the fall and then I was thinking to you about Psalm 51 and and this isn't so much a question there's like a common comment I guess so you feel free to agree or disagree or whatever but going back to Psalm 51 where David is you know kind of pouring out his heart and crying out to God to make him clean make him whole to restore him and he just pulls in a lot of language about you know ritual washing and opening like his lips to so that they can bring forth praise to the proper you know I don't know just is there a connection there or sounds like a really interesting seminar paper oh great I did I immediately go to Psalm 8 when I think of this material but what I what I love about the parallels that you're finding is that David is recognizing that his role is to live purely to embody a proper witness to the character of his God he realized that he's failed he knows that his lips are supposed to be utilized to speak praises so much of that Psalm is rehearsing David's role as a servant of the Almighty and he's recognizing that aspects of his performance have been compromised by a sin I do like that very much yeah well I think that you freeze things better I appreciate that and I think it ties back into what you're just saying a couple of minutes ago about remembering who remembering what and who everything belongs to you ultimately mm-hmm because they think a lot of times people can get stuck reading through Genesis and thinking like hey where were the airs where their crowning jewel of everything so everything goes back to us and we forget that everything doesn't it does all go back to God and remembering kind of not only proper place and knowing that role but I think remembering like I don't know I just there have been some pieces in here that you've connected for me in ways that I can't quite articulate yet but just remembering who who actually belongs to and how that's to be paid back and significant I think especially the environmental stuff that you're working in so anyway thank you thank you my Sandra John Kilner on the faculty here yes and what a marvelous presentation that was about how the whole scripture hangs together hmm you know from the beginning to the end and how that that ties together and then in light of that that stimulated the question in my mind because you were you were lifting up Jesus Christ is the image of God which is very clear New Testament teaching mm-hmm and then the various passages the New Testament that talk about people being renewed according to that image so you have that kind of language and then it brought to mind James kind of summarizing the Genesis account by talking about people being created according to the image of God and then the Genesis passages also always having some sort of preposition there people being created according to the image in people being renewed according to the image like you see any significance between any difference between Christ being the image or saying that something is the image and and people being created or renewed according to the image hmm I do I do and I thank you for for making that explicit that of course God the son comes to us in Jesus the Christ and so he is the he's the original and yet in his humanity he is the image and I'm going to leave this to the system Atisha n--'s to figure out how both those things can be true but this for me as an Old Testament person is probably the greatest miracle of the Incarnation that I have the nation of Israel being restored by the type Man of Israel who is God himself and yet is Adam and how Matthews trying to do that in his genealogy and perhaps it's easier to accomplish in a genealogy than in a systematics book you know it takes me 400 pages to take that to say that I took him a few verses but yes Jesus is being presented as the servant as the original cast in the image we are copies we are not the original and that's a very obviously important part of New Testament theology and that that language is in there as well we have time for one more question John did you you were making your way up Thank You dr. Vicktor that was fantastic not a prof on a doctoral student just a practitioner in the local church I'm wondering if you could help me with the idea Isaiah is mocking basically saying my God is better than your God yes they shared the assumption then of a two-story universe a material world in the spiritual life as a pastor most of the people I encounter not in the church that I'm trying to reach they live in a world group fact Cormac McCarthy Kim Kardashian's celebrity without substance they so much believe only in brute fact of the here and now we don't believe in it - Tori - the story universe or a spiritual world other than sort of I'm a spiritual because I use an iPhone and you have an Android how do we unmask the false idols when they don't see it as Idol making because you would have to assume a two story universe they just see it as the brute fact of existence hmm I give you two examples I had a young woman who came to my church 24 heroin in started prostituting herself in 17 and I've got a guy who comes right now every Sunday 82 years old as a ten year old he was a Russian concentration camp in World War two because of the horrors of what she saw even though he comes every Sunday because we have a friendship he can't even conceive of a good god yes so how do I take Isaiah's unmasking vitals and the image of God and Christ which are precious doctrines to us and make those matter and come alive to those who live well let me tag three things and thank you first of all for being a practitioner and living on the front lines the first thing I would say is I think that the concept of idol worship gets tossed around in the popular pastoral literature to casually than it should and I don't think we do our practitioners any favors by doing that the the core crime of idolatry hear me on this the core crime what idolatry is is making God in my image that's the core crime Jesus has lots of things to say about being wealthy he has lots of things to say about frittering your life away with recreation he has lots of things to say about sex and idolatry but idolatry is making God in my own image so when I'm sharing the gospel to someone who's had a really rough time and they've decided to create an alternate deity and they say my God would not do that in my head I say ah an idol worshiper they have made God in their own image their God is comfortable their God is familiar and they worship that deity actually this is probably more of an epidemic in the church than any sort of blatant polytheism or paganism we recreate God in our image we put our own character on him we decide what he will and will not do based on our cultural norms as opposed to his revelation of himself so this that would be my first tag a second one is if I were talking to your heroin addict I would assume that her self-esteem is crushed beyond therapeutic repair I would assume that she despises herself and has a great deal of trouble sleeping at night or looking too long in America so I would love to tell her that there is of God who can recreate her a God who can take what is broken and what in her mind is shameful and can rebirth it and her brute facts cannot be addressed by education therapy or wealth she needs a new she needs a new soul this girl so that would be what I would say to her and of course it would take years right to the Ashwin's victim is this it was at Auschwitz is that we soon our my my Dean at Wheaton is a poet and she wrote a poem about the Holocaust that still haunts me and there was a line in it about how the numbers on our arms were phone numbers to heaven that no one ever answered some such line very powerful that man has been a betrayed and the one he trusted in his mind has thrown him under the bus I would talk about a fallen world I would talk about the necessity of a recreation that it's not that bad things happen to good people it's that this is a fallen broken poisoned marred world and the only hope is the day of Yahweh when both justice and judgment come hand in hand he needs and I know I'm waxing eloquent here but that man needs Yahweh to show up and split the clouds and deal with his abusers and we don't like to talk about that in Western contemporary culture you know we're not supposed to have anyone that we hate but I'm gonna guess he has people who he hates and I think I I firmly believe Isaiah dresses that in the need that must mercy and justice must go hand in hand but I think that guy's going to have you're gonna have to do a miracle there yeah last word you conform to the image of God will eventually speak to his broken heart yeah well thank you dr. Richter that is so wealthy illogically rich and soap astrally sensitive but would you join me and just just thank you dr. Rick how would you please stand for a benediction and then we'll send you on your way as you go may that the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ the one who is the image of God and may the love of God and may the Fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with you all amen go in peace thank you very much you

Channel: Henry Center

Views: 14,534

Rating: 4.8526316 out of 5

Keywords: idolatry, imago dei, creation

Id: WU2dj_S9iM0

Length: 86min 33sec (5193 seconds)

Published: Wed Aug 08 2018