Jesus as New David, New Isaac, New Melchizedek and Mary as True Ark of the Covenant

Tomorrow’s first reading contains a number of interesting elements. David is bringing the Ark of the Covenant to Jerusalem, and he acts in some rather strange and unusual ways. Here is a portion of tomorrow’s reading:

“Then David, girt with a linen apron, came dancing before the LORD with abandon, as he and all the house of Israel were bringing up the ark of the LORD with shouts of joy and to the sound of the horn. The ark of the LORD was brought in and set in its place within the tent David had pitched for it. Then David offered burnt offerings and peace offerings before the LORD. When he finished making these offerings, he blessed the people in the name of the LORD of hosts. He then distributed among all the people, to each man and each woman in the entire multitude of Israel, a loaf of bread, a cut of roast meat, and a raisin cake” (2 Samuel 6:14-15, 17-19).

What are the atypical actions: he is wearing a linen apron, he is dancing with abandon before the Lord, he is offering sacrifices, he blesses the people, and he gives food to the people. The linen apron seems to have a connection to what a priest would wear; his joy before the Lord shows a love of God; and he offers sacrifices and blesses as a priest would. The translation of the Hebrew of the food David gave is challenging. The bread is clear, but the rest is not so clear. Instead of a cut of roast and a raisin cake, it could be understood to be wine. If that is true, David gave the people bread and wine.

At first, there seems to be no precedent for David’s behavior here in this story. He, the king of Jerusalem, acts like a priest and gives the people bread and wine. But, alas, there is a precedent: Melchizedek. Melchizedek was priest of God Most High and the king of Salem/Jerusalem who offered bread and wine. He was not a Levitical priest, for Levi had not even been born yet; rather, he was a priest/king of Jerusalem who blessed Abraham after Abraham had gained peace from all his enemies round about Jerusalem (Genesis 14).

David has just or is completing the process of gaining peace from all his enemies round about: “Now when the king dwelt in his house, and the LORD had given him rest from all his enemies round about, the king said to Nathan the prophet, “See now, I dwell in a house of cedar, but the ark of God dwells in a tent’ ” (2 Samuel 7:1-2). After the second generation of the Israelites who were set free from Egypt sinned again at the end of the forty years of wandering, God gave them a new set of laws, a second law called Deuteronomy. Only in this other law is it mandated that there be one place of worship in the Promised Land. Following is the passage:

“You shall not do according to all that we are doing here this day, every man doing whatever is right in his own eyes; for you have not as yet come to the rest and to the inheritance which the LORD your God gives you. But when you go over the Jordan, and live in the land which the LORD your God gives you to inherit, and when he gives you rest from all your enemies round about, so that you live in safety, then to the place which the LORD your God will choose, to make his name dwell there, thither you shall bring all that I command you: your burnt offerings and your sacrifices, your tithes and the offering that you present, and all your votive offerings which you vow to the LORD. And you shall rejoice before the LORD your God, you and your sons and your daughters, your menservants and your maidservants, and the Levite that is within your towns, since he has no portion or inheritance with you. Take heed that you do not offer your burnt offerings at every place that you see; but at the place which the LORD will choose in one of your tribes, there you shall offer your burnt offerings, and there you shall do all that I am commanding you” (Deuteronomy 12:8-14).

God’s plan as set forth in Deuteronomy is that there will be one place to worship Him. David understands that that one place is in Jerusalem, and it will take place when the Israelites have peace from their enemies living round about them. David has just fully taken over the Promised Land and established his base in Jerusalem, so his next step is to fulfill Deuteronomy and establish Jerusalem as the center of Israelite worship. He brings the Ark of the Covenant to town, and rejoices greatly before the Lord.

Not only is David fulfilling Deuteronomy, but he is also fulfilling Genesis 14-22. David is a new Melchizedek: he is the priest/king of Jerusalem who offers bread and wine and gives a blessing after peace has been obtained from the enemies round about. In some respect, David could be said to be a new Isaac: he offers up his whole self as he dances before the Lord with abandon, and he offered sacrifices as Isaac offered himself at first and instead sacrificed a ram in his place. In response to Isaac’s self-offering, God blessed Abraham and Isaac and all the nations of the earth; likewise, David blesses the people. Jesus, then, comes to fulfill the Old Testament, and He is a new Melchizedek, a new Isaac, and a new David; he is the priest/king of Jerusalem who makes a sacrifice by offering up Himself, and He blesses the people with His offering of bread and wine.

The gospel passage fits in with the first reading; it ends with, “For whoever does the will of God is my brother and sister and mother” (Mark 3:35). Obedience to God makes us God’s children and family; Melchizedek, Abraham, Isaac, and David were all obedient to God and thus were His chosen people. Mary is the one who is obedient more than anyone else in the entire human race; that is why she is Mother of God, because of her obedience to Him.

The Ark of the Covenant, the item which makes the temple holy, the sacred home that David is rejoicing before as he brings it into Jerusalem, is a type or symbol of Mary. It held the Ten Commandments, the Manna, and Aaron’s rod; the first is the word of God, the second is the bread of heaven, and the third is the priest’s sign of authority and leadership. Mary was home to the Word of God, the Bread of Heaven, and the High Priest and God Himself. Mary is the True Ark of the Covenant. Another parallel is that before David brings the ark into Jerusalem and leaps before it, it spends three months in the hill country; Mary spends three months in the hill country with her cousin Elizabeth, and John the Baptist leaps for joy in his mother's womb upon hearing the voice of Mary.

The holy items of God are what made the Ark holy, and the Ark is what made the temple holy; likewise, Jesus is who makes Mary holy, and Mary is who makes God’s home, earth, holy because of who she carries within her. In a similar manner, each of us is to be a mother to Christ, bringing Him within ourselves and making the world holy. Also, each of us is to be spouse and bride of Christ, becoming one mind and heart with Him, becoming one flesh with Him, becoming another Christ. Christ within us makes us holy and we become partakers of the divine nature, which is to say that we become self-sacrificing lovers as He is. As self-sacrificing lovers, we bring His presence to the world, which brings peace from our enemies round about. World peace is only found here.

Thanks for reading and your prayers.
Copyright 2007.
All rights reserved.

The Quest for the Son Begins Again

Last night we discussed how Abraham was called back to his ancestral home to reclaim the family’s rightful inheritance; once he established a peace from his enemies round about, the undisputed head of the family, Shem/Melchizedek, comes out to bless Abraham. Shem is also the King of Salem and priest of God Most High who celebrates using bread and wine. It is possible that Salem, which means peace, later becomes Jerusalem when the Hebrew word for “it will be provided” is added as a prefix. It was added later in Abraham’s story when he offers up his only son in chapter twenty-two and says that God Himself will provide the lamb.

Shem was one of a handful of righteous first-born sons, and he is the king of peace in (Jeru)salem who offers bread and wine. Later, in this same location, Abraham/Isaac offer up Isaac, and God provides the lamb. This provision is all fulfilled when the true King of Kings and King of Peace, the true King of Jerusalem comes offering bread and wine; Jesus is the Lamb that God provided on Calvary in the same general location as Mount Moriah where Isaac offered himself up. Isaac was passed over, becoming the reason God provides the Passover to the Israelites in Egypt, and Jesus fulfills all of these prefigurements when He remakes the Passover at the Last Supper which ends with His own self-offering as the Lamb of God upon the cross.

Abraham is blessed by Shem when Abraham retakes the Promised Land, which solidifies the constant quest for the Promised Land by his descendants. The other primary quest now comes to fruition: the quest for a son. The very first thing that is mentioned after the blessing sequence is completed, is that God speaks to Abraham who immediately asks for a son. Blessings/the inheritance are meant to be passed on to one’s son. This is no ordinary blessing but a powerful, life-changing reality, and it is meant for one’s son. Abraham was quite wealthy before, but now that Abraham has been endowed with such a blessing from the patriarch, Shem, he knows he needs a son and so asks for one the first chance he gets. Thus begins anew the quest for the son.

God does not take long to respond: “And behold, the word of the LORD came to him, ‘This man shall not be your heir; your own son shall be your heir.’ And he brought him outside and said, ‘Look toward heaven, and number the stars, if you are able to number them.’ Then he said to him, ‘So shall your descendants be.’ And he believed the LORD; and he reckoned it to him as righteousness” (Genesis 15:4-6). God wants to give Abraham a son; that was His plan from the beginning and why He called Him to come to his homeland. Abraham trusts God and believes that God will provide him a son, even though he is at the age of 75 and his wife is 65 and has been barren her whole life.

Ten years later, Abraham and Sarah still have not been given a son. There are key parallels to this story and the Adam and Eve story. Here Abraham and Sarah, with the God-given promise of a son, have been given something like the command to be fruitful and multiply. They have not been given the command to not eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, but they are tempted to have a child outside of the ordinary way children come to couples. In both stories, the husband listens to the voice of his wife and sins. Both tried to fulfill God’s will by their own strength instead of allowing God to provide the son. Eve conceived Cain, and Hagar conceived Ishmael. Neither was the son God promised.


Thanks for reading and your prayers.
Copyright 2007.
All rights reserved.

Canaan Stole Shem's Promised Land

Continuing the discussion from two days ago, Ham attempted a takeover of the family by sleeping with his mother, and Canaan was the fruit of his action. Noah curses Canaan, and then he blesses Shem in the very next verse: “Blessed by the LORD my God be Shem;
and let Canaan be his slave” (Genesis 9:26).

The blessing is a big deal; later, we see Esau and Jacob doing whatever they can to get the blessing from their father, Isaac. Shem gets the blessing, and then we no longer hear of the blessing until 290 years, ten generations, later when Abraham gets blessed by Melchizedek saying, “Blessed be Abram by God Most High, maker of heaven and earth” (Genesis 14:19).

Melchizedek is probably not a person’s given birth-name but a title-name. The letter to the Hebrews says of him that, “He is first, by translation of his name, king of righteousness, and then he is also king of Salem, that is, king of peace” (Hebrews 7:2). So if Melchizedek isn’t his birth-name, who is he? Hebrews is not arguing that Melchizedek had no genealogy but that he did not have the correct Levitical genealogy required to be a Levitical Priest. The argument is about which is the enduring priesthood, and the answer is the bread-and-wine priesthood of Melchizedek.

Since Melchizedek is someone other than Melchizedek, and he is someone who possesses the blessing, could he be Shem, the last one we heard about who was blessed? Shem lived 210 years after the birth of Abraham, so he was around.

I’ll tell you what I think. Shem was blessed and given the inheritance, but the Canaanites and the Hamites continued to try to take over his inheritance. Shem’s descendants moved away to avoid the conflict, leaving Shem mostly on his own but still the king of Salem. Shem’s inheritance, the land promised to him, is taken by the Canaanites and becomes known as the land of Canaan. The land of Canaan is really Shem’s rightful inheritance stolen by Canaan and his family.

Abraham is called back to this land by God to retrieve it for God’s chosen people. As soon as Abraham defeats the four kings who had defeated the five kings in that region, becoming a sort of king of kings in what later will be called Israel, Melchizedek comes out to bless him. When Abraham reasserts authority over his family’s rightful inheritance over against the Canaanites, it is then that the ultimate family father, Shem, comes out to pass on the family blessing and inheritance. Abraham comes to set his people free and to regain the lost inheritance, and so he is blessed and made the new head of the family of God by the former head, Shem.

The Promised Land was controlled by the Canaanites because they had usurped it from Shem’s family. Abraham reasserted his familial claim, and so was made the family’s new head. This is all symbolic and a representation of the battle between humans and demons. The demons are jealous of us and seek to keep us from our God-given inheritance, heaven. The Promised Land is one of the strongest symbols of heaven, and through the disobedience of our first parents and the deceit of the devil, we lost our inheritance.

We have been trying to regain it ever since; this is represented in the Old Testament by the continual quest for the Promised Land. Abraham was the first one to reclaim it; David is the next one to get peace from his enemies round about, and then God makes a covenant with him promising that one of David’s descendants will reign on his throne forever. Jesus is the fulfillment of these prefigurements, for He definitively retakes heaven and opens its doors for all who are united to Him.

Thanks for reading and your prayers.
Copyright 2007.
All rights reserved.

Abraham, Our Father in Faith

I want to spend more time with our father in faith, Abraham, over the next couple of days or weeks for there are rich treasures to be discovered in his life. Although he was a descendant of Shem, Noah’s righteous first-born son, Abraham’s family had moved away from the Promised Land some time before Abraham was born. God called Abraham back to the home of his ancestors. Abraham obeyed, and made his way to a place unfamiliar to him. Throughout the rest of the Old Testament, the people of God are trying to return to the Promised Land, beginning with Abraham. At the end of chapter 11 in Genesis, Abraham’s father, Terah, started the journey back to this land; he stopped short, but Abraham completed the move in Genesis 12.

This is the beginning of the constant theme of the quest for the Promised Land. What makes this land so special? God is a big God and the earth is a big planet, especially in relation to only thousands of people living on it at the time. Aren’t there many other equally or better suited locations to settle down? Why does God call Abraham back to this location, known as the land of Canaan? Another nation occupies the land, and God wants Abraham to take possession of that land away from the Canaanites. That does not seem fair or even right. Shouldn’t God send him to some unoccupied place to make him the father of a multitude of nations? Why displace another people?

In Genesis 12:7 it states: “Then the LORD appeared to Abram, and said, ‘To your descendants I will give this land.’ So he built there an altar to the LORD, who had appeared to him.” God promises him the land of Canaan. Then there is a famine in the land of Canaan, and Abraham finds help by going down to Egypt. His half-sister and wife, Sarah, is very beautiful, and Abraham is worried that the Egyptians will kill him and steal his wife. His solution: say to them that she is his sister and leave out the part about being married. The pharaoh, naturally, takes Sarah as a wife.

“But the LORD afflicted Pharaoh and his house with great plagues because of Sarai, Abram’s wife. So Pharaoh called Abram, and said, ‘What is this you have done to me? Why did you not tell me that she was your wife? Why did you say, ‘She is my sister,’ so that I took her for my wife? Now then, here is your wife, take her, and be gone.’ And Pharaoh gave men orders concerning him; and they set him on the way, with his wife and all that he had.”

Why does Abraham act so poorly regarding his wife, allowing her to be taken by the pharaoh? This is the first time that there is a mention of the people of God making their way to Egypt, and this is repeated several times by Abraham’s descendants, and there are many parallels among the different journeys.

After returning to the Promised Land, “The LORD said to Abram, after Lot had separated from him, ‘Lift up your eyes, and look from the place where you are, northward and southward and eastward and westward; for all the land which you see I will give to you and to your descendants for ever. I will make your descendants as the dust of the earth; so that if one can count the dust of the earth, your descendants also can be counted. Arise, walk through the length and the breadth of the land, for I will give it to you’.” Genesis 13:14-17.

The reason this land is called the Promised Land is that God promised it to Abraham, but that still does not explain why God chose this land and why He is willing to remove the Canaanites from it. There is a battle between kings of this land in chapter 14, and Lot, Abraham’s nephew is taken prisoner. Abraham saves him by defeating the kings who defeated the kings, making Abraham a sort of king of kings. Then he is blessed by the mysterious Melchizedek. Only after receiving the blessing, and at the very next encounter with God, Abraham, who is 75 and married to an elderly barren woman, asks God for a son. There is a connection between getting the blessing and passing it on to one’s son. He has the blessing, so now he needs and asks for a son. Again, we return to the quest for a son that we saw in the Fall.

Tonight, I just want to pose some questions and set the stage. Tomorrow, I may give some of the answers and continue to set the stage. Ultimately, I want to explain why God asks Abraham to kill his own son and how that connects to the sin of our first parents.

Thanks for reading and your prayers.
Copyright 2007