Lecture 3: The Fall
Where was humanity after the Fall, Genesis 3.1-24?
The rest of the Bible is the story of From Creation to Redemption. However, redemption has its own end in Paradise Restored. We have noted that history has a purpose as does the human race created in God’s image.
Teaching the Old Testament is not an easy task. Often, people think the Bible is the New Testament in place of the Old Testament. This is functional Marcionism. However, the Bible consists of 39 canonical, inspired, profitable, doctrinal, and moral instructions for the New Testament church also.
Some think the Old Testament is mean, archaic, passe, out-of-date and irrelevant. Nothing could be further from the truth. We need not a quarry from moralisms, but to assay the Law-Gospel structure that informs the development of redemptive history. Often, in modern evangelical churches, one is exposed to snippets here and there. It is worse for the charisphilic and yappaphilic outposts.
If there was one thing Archbishop Cranmer sought during the English Reformation it was this. The re-establishment of biblical literacy for the English nation. The Book of Common Prayer was designed to lead individuals and the congregations through the Old Testament once per year, the New Testament twice per year, and the Psalter once per month.
Here are some modern reports.
A British study turned up these results for England and Wales.[1] It reports the following.
“Translated into terms of the population of England and Wales as a whole, this means that only 3 out of every 100 adults are in the habit or reading the Bible privately each day, and that nearly two-thirds of the adult population (64% = 26.4 million) have not personally read anything from the Scriptures for a year or more.”
The Catholic News service reports this.[2]
“ VATICAN CITY (CNS) -- The Bible: Most people in Europe and North America have one and some of them actually read it, but more than half of them say it is difficult to understand.”
Ergo, many people do not read it.
This report suggests illiteracy as well.[3] Bill Keller says, “Having preached to several hundred thousand people in evangelistic meetings in churches of all denominations throughout the country, having ministered to millions via television and radio through the years, and having prayed for and intimately counseled thousands and thousands of people over my 18 years of ministry…I would have to say the biggest problem I have encountered with Believers is the vast majority have never read the instruction manual!!!”
Having taught New and Old Testament to college students, one of my preliminary questions early in the class work was to ask them who could recite the ten commandments. In about four years of work—retired now—I never had a student that could them. The knew of a handful of individual commandments, but not all of them and not in order either. My anecdotal inquiry was not positive.
We read recently in a blog post by the Dean of Covenant Theological Seminary, to wit, that over his twenty years of service, it was noticed that 2/3’s of entering seminary student twenty-years in the past passed the English Bible exam. Twenty year later, today, 2/3’s of those entering Covenant failed the English Bible exam. He called attention to the fact that these students were from some of the best “covenant families” of conservative Presbyterian Christendom.
In a recent post we drew forth a few comments about biblical illiteracy and indifference[4] during Bishop James Pilkington’s days of the early English Reformation.[5]
It is a commentary on the ancient prophet of Haggai and leadership failures with respect to God’s Word.
We quote the notes from Pilkington’s bold commentary and equally bold application to the national situation of his day.
“Hag.1.2—Prophet speaks only in God’s name and with faithfulness to God’s Word. Similar call to Englishmen. He recites Gal.1.6 re: the Gospel and Dt. 4, the exhortation to neither add nor subtract to God’s Word. The Jews had failed for almost 40 years in building the Temple. “Papists” pull God’s Word from people; they claim the people can’t chew meat. Kings, princes, priests, and family-heads are to regularly teach the Scriptures, not the “John Mumble-Matins” of the Church of England. God takes away His Word as a form of judgment, Amos 8, and the false clerks are an instrument of the divine scourge. Pilkington lists several OT scourges and judgments. Yet, despite manifold mercies, the people claim, “It is not time to build God’s house.” Ingrates and self-service predominates. Whether rich or poor, all called to serve God—including fathers in their homes. PV—education and literacy grew with the Reformation and the exhortation to family-devotions with prayers and Bible reading, something unknown in the Church of Darkness. Zerubbabel, the Governer and Joshua, the High Priest, are rebuked as leaders of the many, with the call to pull down idols, restore the worship, and lead by example. The rulers are to be blamed, principally, although the rank and file do not escape censure. “Lay hand quickly on no man” means qualified ministers. Pilkington observes that England has failed here and that God and Cranmer sought biblical reforms. As God took Haman in his plot and pogrom in Esther’s day, so has God delivered many “Gospellers” from the persecutions of Romanists. He notes how God has prospered Germans, but England is still beset by problems.”
In Pilkington’s view, this illiteracy is a matter of failed leadership and divine judgment.[6]
Following Haggai, as well as Pilkington’s bold commentary and application, what else can we deduce about illiteracy, leadership, mainline denominations, evangelicalism, Romanism, Orthodoxy and other factors? Pilkington had guts.
When we read the Old Testament, we read of Creation, a chosen people, history, human conflict, wars, slavery, lists of kings, sin, complicated rituals and laws, migrations and more.
Yet, we err if we think this is only or merely a history book. It is that, but it is a dramatic history book in which God’s authors His own Self-disclosure. It is God’s Autobiography. God is the Chief character. Page after page after page we hear of God revealing Himself, establishing his Law and promising His redemption and Gospel. Over and over, we read of God searching, finding, rescuing and saving His people.
Every event, every institution, every law, every story, every covenant, every king and every national event in the Old Testament serves to say something about God.
How could anyone claim that the Old Testament is irrelevant? Passe? Archaic?
To say the Old Testament is irrelevant is, by deduction, to say that God is irrelevant.
We’ve said enough for today, but we will be spending a fair amount of time on The Fall in lecture three.
We close with the old hymn, “How Firm a Foundation.” We listen again to Diane Bish from Coral Ridge Presbyterian Church, Fort Lauderdale, Florida.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GJzMHjziKfo&feature=related
How firm a foundation, ye saints of the Lord,
Is laid for your faith in His excellent word!
What more can He say than to you He hath said
To you who for refuge to Jesus have fled?
Fear not, I am with thee, oh, be not dismayed,
For I am thy God, and will still give thee aid;
I’ll strengthen thee, help thee, and cause thee to stand,
Upheld by My gracious, omnipotent hand.
When through the deep waters I call thee to go,
The rivers of sorrow shall not overflow;
For I will be with thee thy trouble to bless,
And sanctify to thee thy deepest distress.
When through fiery trials thy pathway shall lie,
My grace, all-sufficient, shall be thy supply;
The flame shall not harm thee;
I only design Thy dross to consume and thy gold to refine.
The soul that on Jesus doth lean for repose,
I will not, I will not, desert to his foes;
That soul, though all hell should endeavor to shake,
I’ll never, no never, no never forsake.
Footnotes:
[1] http://www.citw.org.uk/research.htm accessed 7 August 2009.
[2] http://www.catholicnews.com/data/stories/cns/0802435.htm accessed 7 August 2009.
[3] http://healtheland.wordpress.com/2008/01/23/less-than-10-of-professed-christians-have-read-the-entire-bible/ accessed 7 August 2009.
[4] What else is the emergent/emerging church movement but the withdrawal of the Word of God from the auditor? The problem appears to be more serious than we know.
[5] http://reformationanglicanism.blogspot.com/2009/06/works-of-english-reformer-james.html.%20 Rome, during Pilkington’s day, was one of the most vicious enemies of biblical literacy. That prevailed until there was some relaxation of the rules in the post Vatican Two period. This scribbler has interviewed pre-Vatican Two Romanists and their testimony is that, as children and adults also, reading the Bible was strongly discouraged and prohibited.
[6] In the future, we propose to study R.C. Sproul’s four-part video entitled War on the Word. Sloth, unbelief, indifference, various idolatries, and sophisticated internal attacks are integral to the problem. This is an issue of strategic importance on the frontlines for the Church Militant.
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