The Genius of Jesus
No.74: September 17, 2021
Dear Friends,
First, a follow-up from last week.
Last week I argued that the vaccination war is just a proxy for other preexisting political and cultural battles. To illustrate this, I suggested that if Trump had won reelection then the right-wing media would have instantly become major boosters for vaccines rather than skeptics. The flip-side of that, of course, is that vaccine skepticism would have come from the left.
Behold! MSNBC’s Joy Reid:
Everything is so performative and virtue-signaling, in both directions. So I’ll just suggest again that you get the vaccine and move on with your life. Now, maybe you won’t be allowed to move on with your life, which is probably going to become a real problem. But we can be vaccinated and deal with that problem.
Throwing a mom and two-year-old off a flight because the kid has asthma? If our moral superiors are going to keep ratcheting up this kind of pressure, there is going to be a revolt. This is why I said vaccine mandates are so counter-productive. If you were trying to stoke resistance and even civil unrest, this is what you would do. Box people into a corner and give them an “or else.” “Nice job you have there; it’d be a shame if anything happened to it.” And then, to top it all off, you’d make a big show of being better and more privileged than the great unwashed masses. You’d put on a show reminding everyone of Marie Antoinette. Like, say, attending the Met Gala with all your celebrity pals, unmasked, while “the help” all walks around in masks. That really happened. This is pre-cursor to the French Revolution stuff.
Now, a moment ago I said it is “all” so performative and virtue-signaling. I need to walk that back a bit. In some places none of it is performative. There are people who have genuinely lost their minds about this virus. It is a serious virus, to be sure. I just had a friend die this week from the disease. Yet we also know that COVID does not seem to kill children very often. A grand total of 516 people aged 0-18 have died from COVID over the course of the pandemic. In the year 2019 alone 2,641 kids died from “unintentional injury.” It is a fact that children have a greater chance of getting struck by lightning than they do of being seriously affected by COVID. Now, with that in mind, get a load of this COVID “Safety Plan” for a middle school in Washington State.
Really, read through it. I happen to believe that implementing that document is bona fide child abuse. If you want to teach children to live terrified lives, that’s what you do. Make them utterly terrified of other human beings. It used to be a joke when we talked about wrapping kids in bubble wrap. We’re now actually doing it, only it’s masks and six-foot buffer zones.
Seeing human faces, feeling human touch, understanding personal space and boundaries and levels of intimacy are fundamental to human growth and experience. And those poor kids are being seriously deprived. It is an outrage. If you’ve got a child in an environment like that, I say get him or her out by any means necessary.
The Genius of Jesus
Peter J. Williams is the Warden of Tyndale House, a premier Christian study center in Cambridge, England. I came across an advertisement for a “master class” he’s giving on Saturday the 25th entitled, “The Genius of Jesus’ Teaching.” It looks outstanding, and having had the privilege of hearing him teach I can tell you that it will be profoundly edifying.
What caught my eye was this part of the ad: “In these sessions we consider evidence of Jesus’s profound knowledge of the Old Testament as shown in his parables, his use of memory techniques, and his methods of teaching.” This reminded me of something I’ve been meaning to write about.
I’ve been working through a two-volume commentary on the Book of Revelation, and probably the most outstanding thing about Revelation is its profound—otherworldly—knowledge of the Old Testament. In fact, if you don’t know the Old Testament very well, Revelation will remain a closed book to you.
You know what? It’s easier to just show you rather than describe. Here’s what Peter Leithart describes as a far from exhaustive list of Old Testament allusions in Revelation:
I think you’ll agree that that is an impressive display of Old Testament knowledge. And it isn’t just that John is making random allusions here and there; he is weaving a mind-blowing biblical-theological tapestry. Often when we think about biblical revelation we can get caught up in certain authorship questions that center around what the human author knew or was aware of at the time he wrote. This is especially true of Old Testament prophets—is it still meaningful if the author wasn’t aware of its fully intended meaning? But it holds true with the New Testament, as well, particularly when we notice how its authors understand the meaning of the Old Testament. We locate “meaning” in the self-conscious awareness of the writer—a big mistake, by the way, but that’s a discussion for another time.
I want to float a different idea. When you look at those images and see the encyclopedic knowledge of the entire Old Testament by the author of the Book of Revelation, it can be a little hard to believe. Credulity is stretched. I mean, I don’t doubt that John really knew his Old Testament, but this is really on another level. And I want to suggest that it is on another level for a very specific reason.
John really is simply “writing down on a scroll” a vision given him by the resurrected, glorified Jesus Christ. I mean, he really is. It’s not a literary trope; John saw it, and John wrote it down.
What this means is that it isn’t necessarily John who has encyclopedic knowledge of the Old Testament. Jesus Christ has comprehensive, mind-blowing, encyclopedic knowledge of the Old Testament. And this is not simply by virtue of being the Eternal Word who was in the beginning with God and was God. This is the incarnate Son of God. The God-Man, who “became flesh and dwelt among us.” The Christ who speaks to John is the “son of Man,” the glorified and exalted Second Adam. Jesus has an encyclopedic knowledge of the Old Testament as a human being in his human nature.
Jesus is the “genius” behind the Book of Revelation. The application writes itself: If Jesus thought knowing the Old Testament was worth knowing at that level of detail (I have no doubt he had the whole thing personally memorized), what do we make of the Old Testament? I know that for me the question causes no small amount of embarrassment, and maybe that’s true for you, as well.
Let’s resolve together to know our Bibles better.
Miscellany
Americans and Afghan SIVs are still behind enemy lines. And I bet you haven’t heard a word about it for a long time. I will not let you forget:
This oughta improve your Old Testament knowledge instantly:
Comedian Norm Macdonald passed away, following a nine-year cancer battle no one knew about. I never really “got” his style and brand of humor, but others are more tuned to such things than I am. Dustin Messer wrote a lovely piece here, and Aaron Belz another here. I do recognize that not many people could get away with taking up this kind of air time to tell this kind of meandering joke, but somehow he pulled it off. RIP
I’ll let Tommy and Igor take us out this week. I’ll dedicate this one to Norm Macdonald, and much closer to home and more importantly to me, to my friend Dan who met his Savior this week and was reunited with his daughter. I know there’ll be no more tears in heaven.
Usually we think of the Holy Spirit inspiring the authors. (Blessed is he who has not seen yet believes.)
Incredible to think of an instance where the Son handled the inspiration in person!