Month: June 2016

Dear Brothers and Sisters,

Some Christians are in the habit of using strange-sounding phrases like, “The Lord spoke to me,” “my prayer language,” “God gave me a word of knowledge,” “the Lord put a burden on my heart,” and “God gave me the anointing.” I’m not saying such phrases are wrong, nor is it my intent to mock them, but I do want to point out that the use of such Christian “in-speak” tends to detract from biblically accurate communication. In this letter I want to focus on the use (and misuse) of the phrase, the anointing.

In Scripture, the word anoint typically is used to refer to a way of confirming a special work that God is doing in or through a particular person. People are anointed for healing, in preparation for burial, and when being consecrated (commissioned) as a king, priest or prophet. When a priest or prophet would anoint someone to commission them for leadership, a transfer of authority (and thus power) to the one being anointed is sometimes noted. But it’s important to note that the one performing the anointing was not in control of that power—the anointing was not the equivalent of a dying king passing their rule on to a successor. Rather, the person who was anointing the king, priest or prophet was setting them aside in a public way to confirm that God truly had called that person into a particular leadership responsibility. For example, when the prophet Samuel anointed David, he was commissioning him as king, not transferring the Holy Spirit to David.

In Psalm 139:7-12, David shows that God is present everywhere (he is omnipresent). This means that the Spirit is not some sort of force under our control that we can transfer from one person to another through anointing. Moreover, Scripture shows that the Holy Spirit is not a “force” but a “person”—he speaks (Acts 13:2), is grieved (Ephesians 4:30), and has a will (1 Corinthians 12:11). By remembering that the Spirit is an omnipresent, divine person, we guard against false teaching, including the misuse of the word anointing.

Sadly, the word anointing is frequently misused. On the one hand it’s misused in referring to subjective experiences like “pins and needles” feelings. On the other hand, it’s misused to refer to a transfer of power (“receiving the Spirit”) akin to being given another helping of mashed potatoes! This wrong-headed thinking concludes that the Spirit is not present until hands are laid on a person, or that a person cannot have the Holy Spirit abiding in them until some action is completed apart from believing in the Son. These conclusions are badly mistaken—God does not fragment himself! Moreover, God’s being and doing is not conditioned (dependent on), nor determined by, for example, the use of our hands in a prayer. We can’t claim to be “alive in Christ,” and that he resides in us, then turn around and claim he is somehow not in us. The apostle John put it this way: “He whom God has sent speaks the words of God; for he gives the Spirit without measure” (John 3:34 NASB).

It may surprise some folks to learn that anointing does not involve a tangible transfer of power as if anointing is like plugging a television into an electrical wall outlet. The Spirit’s power is not a commodity to be purchased, traded, exchanged or accessed like a physical form of power. Moreover, there is no such thing as the receiving of a single, double, or triple portion of the Spirit as though receiving him is like scooping extra servings of food onto a dinner plate. The Bible never has Jesus or any of his apostles teaching that we can receive such an “extra portion.” What we do find in Scripture is a sorcerer named Simon being rebuked by the apostle Peter for trying to buy a portion of the Spirit’s power (Acts 8:9-24).

At this point, some might be wondering about the story of Elisha in 2 Kings 2, and the account of Pentecost in Acts 2. Let’s take Elisha’s story first. You’ll recall that the Jordan River was parted for Elijah and Elisha’s benefit:

When they had crossed, Elijah said to Elisha, “Tell me, what can I do for you before I am taken from you?” “Let me inherit a double portion of your spirit,” Elisha replied. “You have asked a difficult thing,” Elijah said, “yet if you see me when I am taken from you, it will be yours—otherwise, it will not.” (2 Kings 2:9-10)

Elisha’s request was made in accordance with the legal terminology of Deuteronomy 21:17, which specifies that the firstborn was to receive pî šnayim (“a double share”) of his patrimony. So Elisha was not asking for a double portion of Elijah’s anointing, but for a double portion of his spirit, meaning to be heir to Elijah’s office and gifts. Here is a case of misreading what is actually said in Scripture through an overly literal interpretation. If someone says “you’re pulling my leg,” you know what it means—you haven’t literally grabbed his leg.

In Acts 2, Luke tells us what happened on the day of Pentecost following Jesus’ ascension. There is no reference in that account to people receiving a “portion” of the Holy Spirit. Nor does Luke tell us that there was a transfer of power from one person to another. Rather, he notes that God audibly and visibly set apart those who were there through the outpouring of the Spirit. The word anoint is not even used in that account, though we may legitimately view it that way since the anointing came directly from God. As Luke notes, everyone heard Peter’s sermon in their own language. The skeptics accused the participants of being drunk (in our day, a few attempt to interpret this as being “drunk in the spirit,” but the text does not support any such idea). Peter set them straight:

These people are not drunk, as you suppose. It’s only nine in the morning! No, this is what was spoken by the prophet Joel: “In the last days, God says, I will pour out my Spirit on all people. Your sons and daughters will prophesy, your young men will see visions, your old men will dream dreams. Even on my servants, both men and women, I will pour out my Spirit in those days, and they will prophesy.” (Acts 2:15-18)

As Peter noted, this event was a fulfillment of prophecy. Jesus had instructed his disciples to wait in Jerusalem and they were blessed in doing so. It was the birth of the New Testament church.

Ultimately, the one who is supremely the anointed one is Jesus himself. His title, Messiah, is derived from the Hebrew word for anointed, and means “the anointed one.” “Christ” is the same title in Greek, derived from the word for anointee. In Scripture, Jesus Christ is portrayed as fulfilling in a full and final way the three anointed offices of prophet, priest and king. While in the Old Testament only special persons were anointed for God’s service, in the New Testament all believers receive the anointing by the Holy One (1 John. 2:20). God fulfills his plan for us by adopting us as his children by the work of Jesus in the Holy Spirit. That’s a true anointing—our sharing in Jesus’ own anointing, by the Spirit, who he sends to us in the name of the Father.

In the name of the Father, Son and Spirit,
Joseph Tkach

Dear Brothers and Sisters,

Genesis is perhaps the most debated book in the Bible, largely because its purpose and nature are often misunderstood. Fundamentalists and evolutionists alike claim that Genesis conflicts with science. But Genesis makes no attempt to address many of the questions that are the concern of modern, evolutionary science. The purpose of the creation narratives in Genesis (there are two, as I explain below) is not scientific but theological (with philosophical and religious implications). The creation narratives reveal who the creator God is, what kind of relationship he has with his creation, and his ultimate purpose for his creation. Science has other concerns.

Evolutionary creation?

The creation narratives of Genesis do not give detailed descriptions of the mechanisms involved that explain exactly how creation came about or unfolded. The descriptions are not “scientific” (as we would say today) in that way. But that does not mean they are inaccurate about what they do explain. Unfortunately, many of the scientists in the ongoing debate make claims that are largely philosophical rather than strictly scientific. Scientist Richard Dawkins (one of the so-called new atheists), a vocal contributor to the debate, is a prime example. His arguments, rather than being about material aspects of creation ascertained by the scientific method, are philosophical claims involving speculative logical inferences about God, religion and evil made from selected scientific information. That being said, a right understanding of Genesis does not rule out the possibility that God has (at least in part) used evolutionary processes to advance his creative purposes.

The creation narratives in Genesis leave room for theistic evolution (others prefer the term evolutionary creation), by which God oversees evolutionary processes in bringing about his purposes for creation. God’s oversight of and intervention in his creation comes, ultimately, in and through Jesus Christ. Since Genesis and the rest of Scripture do not specify the means God used (and continues to use) in creating, we are free to adopt the best scientific theories available that do not contradict the theological claims of biblical revelation.

Why the Genesis creation narratives?

Because the purpose of the Genesis creation narratives is fundamentally theological, they rule out the claims of atheism, polytheism, deism and dualism. In fact, the Genesis creation narratives likely were written to address those who had heard of and possibly believed in the creation myths taught by the polytheistic religions of Babylonia, Akkadia and Egypt. Evidence for this is seen in the many similarities between the Genesis creation accounts and the Babylonian creation myth known as Enûma Eliš. One of those similarities is that both begin with a watery chaos.

Unfortunately, some skeptics go too far in what they make of these similarities, claiming that the author of Genesis merely changed the Babylonian creation myth to make it about the God of Israel. But in making that claim they fail to account for the crucial differences between the biblical and the polytheistic creation narratives. Genesis gives us a theological explanation of who God is quite different than that of the pagan myths. Whereas Genesis tells the story of the creation of humanity by the one God of Israel, Enûma Eliš tells the story of creation through many gods, who in turn give birth to several other gods who grow up to be quite a rowdy bunch (much like humans!).

Concerning the differences between the Genesis creation narratives and the Babylonian creation myth, Victor Hurowitz (in Is the Creation Story Babylonian?), wrote that it is “patently untenable” to speculate that the biblical authors simply took Enûma Eliš and “applied it to YHWH.” [1] As Hurowitz and others have noted, the character and purpose of the one creator God presented in Genesis is entirely different from the gods of the polytheistic creation myths. Consequently the depiction in Genesis of God’s relationship with humans is entirely different than the relationship between the gods and humans depicted in the pagan myths.

Reading Genesis rightly

Adding to the complexity of understanding Genesis is that it contains two creation narratives in its first few chapters. Current debates about Genesis often overlook this, along with three other facts: 1) the creation narratives are small parts of the larger whole of Genesis, 2) the focus of Genesis is not creation but the nation of Israel, 3) Genesis is part of the Pentateuch and the entire Bible, giving it a much larger context than is typically acknowledged.

It’s also important to note that Genesis must be read through ancient eyes rather than modern ones. These different “lenses” assume different things and ask different questions. Reading with ancient eyes requires that we become aware of our modern perspectives that mainly want to know how things work and how to use things for our purposes. Modern “scientific” explanations insist that we don’t need to know anything about any agent involved in creation, but only the mechanisms of the natural world. It also insists that there is no need to know the ultimate purposes of those things that exist—only how to use them for our own ends. In our modern era, these philosophical assumptions determine what constitutes scientific explanation, thus reducing the search for knowledge by asking essentially technological questions.

Reading Genesis rightly also requires that we understand what the original audience expected from stories such as the creation narratives. Ancient readers would not have looked to Genesis to learn how creation works at the natural, material and causal levels. Instead, they would have wanted to know about the agent(s) responsible for creation and its ultimate purpose or destiny.

Rather than trying to make Genesis answer modern, very constricted scientific questions it was not designed to address, we should ask, What questions was Genesis actually designed to answer? Genesis reveals theological truths about the agency behind creation and its purpose. It does this in fairly straightforward ways that do not require logical inferences and speculations about what is written.

For example, no passage of Scripture directly states the age of the universe. Trying to determine the date of creation from the Bible requires interpolating from what the biblical authors say about other things. But such interpolations (logical inferences) do not lead to truth. That is why the church, when it began to debate the improper question of the age of the universe, was unable to come to agreement. Those who contributed to the debate offered only unprovable theories based on unprovable assumptions, generated by logical inferences using biblical information provided for very different purposes! An example is the work of Bishop James Ussher who claimed to have calculated the exact date of creation based on inferences from biblical genealogies.

Another key issue in reading Genesis rightly is being able to identify the literary genre of the text. Tremper Longman III, professor of biblical studies at Westmont College, makes that point in his book, How to Read Genesis: “No reading of the book [of Genesis] can proceed without making a genre identification. Most people do it without reflection, a dangerous procedure since an error in this area results in fundamental misunderstanding of the book’s message” (p. 23).

Ultimately, the only way to rightly read Genesis is to read it through the “lens” of Jesus Christ—carefully accounting for his life, death, resurrection and ascension. In his Gospel, Luke tells us that, “beginning with Moses and all the Prophets, [Jesus] explained to [his followers] what was said in all the Scriptures concerning himself” (Luke 24:27). Jesus then said to them, “‘This is what I told you while I was still with you: Everything must be fulfilled that is written about me in the Law of Moses, the Prophets and the Psalms” (Luke 24:44). Luke then tells us that Jesus “opened their minds so they could understand the Scriptures” (Luke 24:45). It is Jesus—who he is and what he has done—that informs our understanding of Genesis as well as the rest of the Old Testament (and, indeed, the whole of Scripture).

The importance of seeing the whole picture

In Genesis: the Movie, Episcopal priest and scholar Robert Farrar Capon explains the book’s title and purpose:

[My purpose is to] help people stop reading the Bible as if it were a manual of instruction in religion or spirituality or morality or anything else and to start watching it as a film, presented to you by the Holy Spirit, who is the movie director. When you watch a movie, you don’t stop 10 minutes into the film and try to decide what it means. You cannot fairly say anything about the movie until you have seen the whole movie and hold it in your mind as an entirety—as a whole piece. And that is what needs to be done with the Bible. It has to be seen as one thing. So I’d like people to see biblical inspiration, not as a matter of word-by-word inspiration, but as scenes in the movie the way the director wants to show it to you, that is, scene-by-scene.

I think Capon is on to something here. If we don’t see the whole picture of the Bible, it’s easy to derive inaccurate meanings from passages that we are pulling out of the context of that one “movie.” It’s when we see what the Holy Spirit as the movie director is doing that we pick up the clues woven into the text. Capon’s book helps us understand not only the purpose of the book of Genesis, but how the whole of Scripture is integrated around the core of God’s ultimate plan of redemption in Jesus Christ.

Reading Genesis in the light of Jesus

I’m glad to say that my dear friend John McKenna (pictured at right) is writing a book that will offer important incarnational, Trinitarian perspective on Genesis. It will explain that Moses, the author of Genesis, was the great prophet who lived at the beginning of Israel’s history. It will note parallels between Moses and Jesus, referencing, for example, Deuteronomy 18:15 (KJV): “The LORD thy God will raise up unto thee a Prophet from the midst of thee, of thy brethren, like unto me; unto him ye shall hearken.” Recognizing Moses as a prophet significantly impacts how we read Genesis.

John will also explain that the first eleven chapters of Genesis are “primordial prophecy” with the first chapter relating to the cosmos as first created or developed, and the second through the eleventh chapters relating to the earliest ages of history. John will explain that the remainder of Genesis is “ancestral prophecy”—telling the story of inheritance.

Please join me in encouraging Dr. McKenna to finish this important book, and also join me in reading Genesis from the perspective of who Jesus is and what his plan is for all humanity. After all, as Paul says in Colossians 1:15-20, everything was created through the Son, for the Son, and to be inherited by the Son of God. In the Old Testament, we see God’s faithfulness displayed in what he was doing to prepare the world for the Incarnation of the Son of God, leading to the redemption of all humanity in and through Jesus. It is in this light that Genesis is rightly read.

Rejoicing in the goodness of our Creator who is our Redeemer,
Joseph Tkach

PS: To read more on this topic, we recommend Three Views on Creation and Evolution, and Four Views on the Historical Adam. The latter book has a helpful chapter by Denis Lamaroux on evolutionary creation. Also click here for a related Surprising God post by Gary Deddo.

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[1] Quoted from Exploring Genesis: The Bible’s Ancient Traditions in Context, a free e-book from the Biblical Archaeology Society. Here is an extended quote from Hurowitz’s chapter in that book:

As recent scholarship is making clear, simplistic comparison between Enûma Eliš and the biblical tradition—as if the Bible were directly dependent on Enûma Eliš and it alone—is patently untenable.… In light of all this and more, it is impossible to accept today in a simplistic manner the claims… that the biblical authors took the Babylonian Story of Creation, that is Enûma Eliš, and simply applied it to YHWH, God of Israel. The specific parallels are fewer than originally thought and even the best ones are not entirely certain. (pp. 11-12)