Saved Through Water

 “(I)n which a few - that is, eight souls - were saved through water: this same baptism, thus pictured before, now saves you as well - not as a removal of dirt from your flesh, but as the appeal of a good conscience unto God, through the resurrection of Jesus Christ”. 1 Peter 3

1 Peter 3:8-4:6 has to be taken together as a single thought. Here Peter is making a legal and covenantal argument. The Christian is to live in obedience to God so that when accusations are brought against him by others God the Righteous Judge will be able to declare on the man’s behalf in His court and come to his defense, acting sometimes both as judge and executioner. This presupposes a number of things. Maybe the most prominent and often neglected is the fact of God’s actively being involved in history as a regular and constant reality. Not only does He do this in keeping the planets in orbit, or in making food grow up from the ground, or any other aspect of nature, but He is also actively, constantly, judging and responding in the affairs of men. He raises up some rulers and puts others down. And he acts on behalf of His children when they cry out to Him to do so - and even occasionally when they don’t. He acts for His own glory but also as He is bound in covenant with those He has set apart for Himself. Sometimes He acts by delivering His children immediately when they are suffering unjustly. But as Peter talks about, sometimes He allows the persecution to persist for a long time. Just as Jesus suffered unjustly in His sojourn here, so must we, as we walk the path of salvation He has laid out for us. Either way, the time will come when eventually we will be delivered, either in our death or when Christ returns to rid the world of evil for good and to make all things new.

The point of Peter’s thought with regard to Noah is that justice had to be carried out because the world had grown wicked enough for God to do so. It was through water that God saved Noah’s family. And God also saves us through the water of Baptism. There is no hint here that this water is somehow not water, that this is merely symbolic language for an action carried out by the Holy Spirit apart from real physical water. Just as the Spirit used real water in saving Noah, so He uses real water in saving us. It’s worth saying as well that in neither case is the word “saving” meant in some metaphorical way, in Noah’s or our case either one. Deliverance from the persecution of evil people during our earthly sojourn is not merely symbolic of God’s salvation of our souls when we die. It is the manifestation in this present life of the salvation procured by Jesus’s death and resurrection. God rescued Noah from a wicked world when He brought him through and destroyed evil mankind by the flood. And the point of the passage here is that God will do that for all His children when they look to Him to make a righteous judgment on their behalf. God’s heavenly court is always in session.

This is why I have rendered the phrase “the appeal of a good conscience toward God” the way I have. Some major translations, like the ESV, seem not only not to know how to handle the Greek phrase all by itself, but also don’t understand the larger context in which the verse sits. Peter is echoing an earlier statement from vs. 16, a part of the same flow of thought. The ESV also flubs the translation of the word “sarx”. Somehow they chose to translate the same word as “flesh” in vs. 18 while translating it as “body” here. But that obscures Peter’s deliberate parallel. The idea of Jesus “being put to death in the flesh but made alive in the spirit” is meant to parallel “not as a removal of dirt from your flesh, but as the appeal of a good conscience unto God”. Baptism is the application of Christ’s resurrection to the believer, thus resulting in a good conscience. This is why Peter quickly follows the latter phrase with “through the resurrection of Jesus Christ”. The importance of baptism isn’t that it washes physical dirt off of a person - it isn’t that kind of bath. Rather, it is a legal, covenantally binding ceremony between God and that individual. The person who has been baptized can then go into God’s law court at any time and say to Him, “I am your covenant child. We are legally bound to each other. Please act in space and time on my behalf.” The person who has been baptized has partaken of the work of Christ, and therefore has been, and will be, saved - that is, delivered not only from his own sin, but from the sins of those around him. Peter ends vs. 22 the way He does for that reason. None of the forces of the spiritual realm are above His control. He has authority over all. And when His children call on Him, He acts (Ps. 18).

“My Truth”

 There is no such thing as “your truth” or “my truth”. There is only THE truth. This language of “my truth” is a cutesy way of attempting an end run around absolute reality, making truth a sentimentalistic, individualistic thing. It is the idolatry of one’s self. It tries to reject God as the one who defines truth, instead putting one’s self in the place of God and creating its own reality. This way the person can reject the absolute moral standards that exist outside of him and which are binding upon him. But then the person with this approach invariably turns back to other people and hypocritically tries to bind them to his own self-invented moral standards, as if they aren’t allowed to do what that person just did by creating their own reality.

Individualism is death. No man can take the place of the Creator and Sustainer of all things.

No Doctrine At Odds With Another

 No one doctrine of Scripture is separate from any other doctrine of Scripture, any more than one attribute of God is disconnected from another. As God is unified, so are His works in the created order. And so if we find ourselves holding to an eschatology that is at odds with our soteriology, then the disconnection comes from a fault in our understanding of one or both. Eschatology is the working out of God’s soteriology in the cosmos, no more and no less.

The Real “Parenthesis”

 Dispensationalism has always taught that the Church is a “parenthesis“ in God’s plan. But Romans and Galatians make it clear that if anything can be regarded as a parenthesis, it’s OT Israel. The Law, as in Israel’s Law, and the nation of Israel, were a temporary arrangement designed to prepare the way for Jesus. This is evident in Paul going back before Israel to Abraham to illustrate justification by faith (Rom. 4). The Law was a guardian to keep mankind until the work of Christ was accomplished and justification by faith was brought to bear upon Jew and Gentile alike (Gal. 3:23-29). God does not have, and has never had, two parallel systems working, but rather one overarching plan. Israel was always meant to be temporary, while the salvation of all mankind apart from Israel was God’s end goal. Dispensationalism somehow manages to get Scripture exactly backwards in this.

Curious Angels

 “It was revealed to them that they were serving not themselves but you, in the things that have now been announced to you through those who preached the good news to you by the Holy Spirit sent from heaven, things into which angels long to look” (1 Peter 1:12). The last line, “things into which angels long to look”, isn’t a mysterious aside by Peter. He’s making an allusion to the work of angels as “ministers of salvation” in the Old Covenant (Heb. 1-2). He repeats variations on the word “angel” three times in this verse, something which doesn’t carry over into English. And like with other major doctrines in this chapter, he makes use of these words at one point here and then revisits them later in the chapter (vs. 25, “εὐαγγελισθὲν”). So there is some word play going on in his mentioning of angels. But it isn’t just word play. The whole point is that God gave revelation of the work of Christ yet to come in the Old Testament, but gave no clarity on who this savior would be or when he would arrive. These revelations of the salvation yet to come were themselves acts of salvation by God, as He worked out His redemption of the world. And so this chapter is filled with words of knowing, searching, inquiring, seeking, and looking. Those things that were hidden, which men and angels longed and do long to see, were revealed beginning in the first century and have continued to be revealed in the New Covenant up to this day, with the pulling back of the veil (apokalupsis, apocalypse) so that men and angels might gaze into the Most Holy Place upon the glory of Christ in His person and work. What was once hard to see is now set up before all men to behold, in the proclamation of the Gospel and the good works of believing men. And this is why here and throughout the book Peter exhorts them to lives of holiness, that the fullness of Christ’s work might take hold in their lives, and that others may be saved. Rather than the end of vs. 12 being a confusing aside, or vs. 10-12 as it might seem at first blush, this section is at the core of Peter’s exhortation to them, as its teaching is throughout the New Testament in its message - though it seems to be something we have often failed to make clear in the Church.

More on WandaVision

 I think ”Westview” and “Eastview” are references to The Wizard of Oz, as well as The Witches of Eastwick. That’s one Easter egg I haven’t heard anybody pick up on. I believe that we’ll find that Wanda went to Westview, where Agatha Harkness lives, to receive training on how to harness her powers. And things got out of control, in such a way that involved Wanda cutting a deal with Mephisto. I believe Pietro is actually Mephisto. I also think there were intentional allusions to some nineties movies in the last episode, namely Twister, The Sixth Sense, Godzilla, and Hocus Pocus. 

There’s a narrowness in this show, a narcissism, of the sort you get from artists - tv shows about making a tv show, poems about poetry, music videos and songs about life on the road. The hardest thing for some artists, it seems, is to make art about real life. Tom King, who wrote the ”Vision” comic series on which this show is partially based, once said that the suburbs were to him what Hell looks like. And there’s something of that in this show. Disdain for one’s subject matter cannot accurately reflect that subject. All art has to be born out of love, or it will end up being a misrepresentation of its subject. But narcissism is the breeding ground for hate, after all, and hate always deforms both the artist and his subject in its presentation. The makers of this show love TV. But not so much suburbanites in their everyday lives. That is clinging to the myths of yesteryear, a time that deserves to be dead and gone.

Prayer

 Visits to my blog have been up over the past few months, something for which I am grateful. I hope it means I have been posting things that are true, and helpful, and that bring glory to God.

I have been going through a rough patch for awhile now though, and would appreciate any prayer any of you might give. I won’t go into details right now, but simply ask for prayer. 

Irresistibly Drawn

 “No one can come to me unless the Father who sent me draws him. And I will raise him up on the last day” (John 6:44). Raise who up? The one who is drawn. The “drawing” of the Father invariably leads to resurrection. In other words, those who are drawn do not and can not resist. All those who are drawn are saved. When God wants to save a man, no one can stop Him, not even the man himself.

Complete Repentance

 “The Lord is not slow to fulfill his promise as some count slowness, but is patient toward you, not wishing that any should perish, but that all should reach repentance” (2 Peter 3:9). Is Peter here saying that God wants every last person saved? To try to make the verse say that is to ignore its context in the rest of the letter. Peter is talking to believers, not unbelievers, and is wanting them to come to a change of mind, “metanoia”. This is a continuation of what he says in 1:5, and the rest of the book flowing after it. In short, Peter doesn’t mean here initial repentance, as we mean in our systematic theologies, but rather the complete renovation of mind that occurs over the course of a person’s life and only ends when his life is over. And he is saying God desires this for those already on the path of salvation, that is, Christians.

The Plague

 I had the chance to speak with an ICU doctor the other day about the virus, in a non-medical setting. In the midst of the rest of the conversation, here’s what he said.

Everybody he’s dealing with is a COVID patient. If you’re either elderly, or wait too late to get checked out rather than going in when you first get it, you’re done. Everybody else can get over it. 

Masks, in his opinion, do no good. You walk around at all times with a cloud of moisture around your head. All the mask does is slow it down as it leaves your mouth. It’s still there.

It’s an inflammatory disease. They’re using Remdesivir, but what is really working is steroids. Once the inflammation destroys enough lung tissue and scars it up to where you can’t breathe anymore, it’s too late. The steroids knock down the inflammation. 

From me - Americans on the whole eat a terrible, inflammation-causing diet. The preventative, then, is to eat an anti-inflammatory diet. Knock off the Little Debbies and eat some greens, if you want to live.