theo #7 - July-August 2022

BIBLE TOOLS

THE REVERSE ENGINEER

The fact that a gaggle of intellectuals, many of whom were extremely eccentric, cracked the Nazi Enigma codes and cut an estimated two years off World War II, reveals what academics can achieve when they are constrained by real-world outcomes.

When 18-yearold Gwen Davies was assigned to “Station X” during the Second World War, she was shut into the back of a blacked-out van and taken to Bletchley Park, 50 miles (80 km) northwest of London.

She was dumped with her luggage outside the gates of the park and told by a young guard that she couldn’t come in because she didn’t have a pass. “I was by this time hungry, thirsty and very,

very annoyed. ‘Look,’ I said, ‘I don’t know where I am, and I don’t know what I’m supposed to do.’ ‘Come to the right place then,’ said the guard, ‘most of ’em look as if they didn’t know where they was and God knows what them doing.’ An elderly guard told him to leave me alone, and said that I was to go to the hut at the left of the gates. ‘Somebody will come and see to you,’ he said, ‘and if you want to know where you are, you’re at Bletchley Park.’ ‘And if you want to know what that is,’ added the younger guard, ‘it’s the biggest lunatic asylum in Britain.’”1

MICHAEL BULL

Clearly, the criteria for an assessment of actual lunacy can be quite subjective. Not all academics are as eccentric as Tycho Brahe (1546-1601), the astronomer who discovered the supernova and described the movements of comets. He wore a gold-silver alloy prosthetic in place of the nose he lost in a duel, employed a dwarf (whom he believed to be clairvoyant) as his court jester, and also kept a pet moose whose taste for Danish beer eventually led to its demise after it tumbled, roaring drunk, down the stairs of a nobleman’s castle during a party. Nikola Tesla (who fell in love with a pigeon), insisted that his hotel room numbers be divisible by three, and Albert Einstein (who refused to wear socks) once ran his boat aground because he was deep in thought. There seems to be a connection between a burning desire to understand the abstract workings of the material world and a lack of desire (or crippling inability) to navigate the complex and unspoken “real-world” protocols of respectable society.

The word “eccentric” itself suggests a method behind the apparent madness. From the Greek ekkentros, it denotes a circle or orbit not having the earth precisely at its center. Passengers in a vehicle whose wheels are mounted

“eccentrically” will suffer a bumpy ride, but the cam in an internal combustion engine relies upon exactly the same “error” to transform rotation into a to-andfro motion.

Those intent on discovering the hidden things of the world and harnessing their power have little interest in whatever might be the current center of everyone else’s attention.

Aptly, the mansion on the Bletchley Park estate is a strange

tragic event forced a paradigm change. Once the value of such intelligence was established, it became clear that even those who were ensconced away in the countryside, working on the war rather than in it, were to be considered vital to victory. The burgeoning facility then saw a hurried increase in investment that was to be vindicated again and again.

hybrid of the Victorian Gothic, Tudor, and Dutch Baroque styles, constructed after 1883 for an English financier and politician. While his choices might have been eccentric, the mansion itself is merely tasteless.

The oddballs who directed Station X on the site were not taken seriously by the British military until some crucial intelligence, deciphered by the codebreakers, was ignored, resulting in the British forces sustaining heavy losses. This

The British military could receive and record all of the German military intelligence transmitted by radio, and yet could understand none of it. The Germans were using Enigma machines, a device invented in the 1920s for the purpose of transmitting confidential business information by Morse code. Using a series of three rotors, an Enigma machine substituted each letter of the alphabet for another. To “unscramble” the encoded message required the identification of the particular setting of the rotors used to scramble it. Since all of the operators were given the same rotor setting, deciphering the message was simple. Using the “key,” the scrambling process was reversed, and the text was easily decoded by the recipient.

But the Germans knew that a concerted analysis of the messages—for instance, recording the frequency of

The “key” reversed the coding process and deciphered the text.

certain letters and combinations —could identify the setting of the rotors. So, for added security, they made a synchronized change to the encryption setting on all of their Enigma machines every morning. This meant that if the setting on any given day was discovered, that information was useless for deciphering the transmissions made on the following day, since a fresh setting would be applied.

The Germans also made modifications to the design of the machines, making them more complex. These included an extra rotor and a wired “plugboard,” both of which added further layers of scrambling and thus multiplied the number of possible combinations.

Although the British were familiar with Enigma machines, they were obviously unable to analyze the modifications without capturing a modified machine. This meant that the code breakers had to build corresponding modified machines with nothing to go on but the coded messages created by the German machines. This process of “reverse engineering” was akin to recreating a specific printing press from the analysis of a newspaper.

The history of Station X—much of which remained a closely kept secret for many decades after the

end of the war—is not only fascinating, but the techniques developed through sheer necessity by the codebreakers also serve as a handy analogy for a new development in biblical theology.

There are some helpful correspondences between the method of encryption and decryption used during the war and the study of biblical literary structure as the key to the full meaning of the texts of the Bible.

plain sight. Why be content with looking through a glass darkly when, with a little more effort, we can see “face to face”?

While typology interprets isolated symbols and images, a systematic typology recognizes that the Bible is composed of recapitulated sequences, strings of symbols that are arranged in “sentences.” It compares these sequences with each other, noting both the similarities and the differences. Certain clues in the contents of the text (for example, a particular symbol is always located at the same point in related sequences) enables us to identify the structure, and the structure of the contents then serves as the key to the full meaning of the passage.

Unfortunately, this is a two-edged sword, since the mention of “codes” rightly alarms any serious Bible interpreter. As it is with the careful classification of biblical things in Systematic Theology, the artful use of a “systematic typology” is not about discovering codes hidden in the Bible. Instead, it is about discerning the internal logic common to all the authors of the Bible, the “governing principle” of the Scriptures that explains the full meaning of what we see in

While this might sound complicated, once the biblical pattern is internalized, the practice is a lot like recognizing variations of a familiar melody. And this recognition is precisely what the authors expected of their audience. The original hearers and readers, through careful training in the Scriptures, already had the required “daily setting.”

This process of identification and comparison enables us to “reverse engineer” the texts to see what makes them tick. The “thought system” of the author, once identified, can be

The Bible’s original hearers and readers had the “daily setting.”

diagrammed in a way that makes it a useful tool for interpreting other texts that employ the same pattern. It functions a lot like the “cribs” used by the codebreakers.

A crib was originally a “cheat sheet,” usually a two-language word-by-word translation of a text that students were assigned to translate. In that sense, the same decree written in threelanguages on the Rosetta Stone was a “crib” that led to the “cracking” of the hieroglyphs.

The term was adopted by the cryptanalysts at Bletchley Park to describe a word or phrase which they knew to be contained in the incomprehensible ciphertext.

This strategy, also referred to as a “known-plaintext attack,” relied upon recognizing content that was common to all routine operational messages, such as the daily weather report. Identifying the same word or phrase that was freshly scrambled every morning was a clue to the day’s settings. While the addition of an extra rotor made decryption more difficult, it was still vulnerable to hand methods. It was the German Army’s addition of “plugboards” in 1930 that made the invention of machine computers necessary. (“Computer” previously meant a human being computing.) Based on an earlier Polish machine (a much smaller device known as the bomba kryptologiczna

because it ticked like a bomb), mathematician Alan Turing designed the first British machine in 1939, with important refinements made by his colleague Gordon Welchman in 1940. By the end of the war, there were over 200 machines operating, safely decentralized across various locations.

The work of the bombes was to eliminate the number of possible settings on a given day, reducing it to a more manageable number.

“engineering,” interpreting them is not as straightforward as simply swapping one letter for another.

The Bible’s sequences are comprised of symbols that have significances based on allusions to previous texts. Since these are not explicitly spelled out, the connections within each sequence, and also between related sequences, are not digital or alphanumeric but poetic and musical.

The structure of the texts is only a “house” that provides familiar locations for contents that require an act of literary recognition by a human gifted with wit and an imagination. In that respect, the method is something like solving a cryptic crossword. Tom Chivers writes:

This required a prior manual analysis of the ciphertext for the “cribs” that would make this elimination possible. Once the key words and phrases were located and deciphered, the remainder of the work was down to the sort of deductive logic that can be handled by a machine.

This “vestigial” requirement for human intelligence highlights the artistic nature of systematic typology. While the patterns in the biblical texts are in many ways the product of literary

What people who don’t do them don’t realize about cryptic crosswords is that they’re a battle. They are mental combat between the setter and the solver: there are strict rules of warfare, but within those rules the setter will do anything to mislead and confuse the solver. That’s why a crossword is superior to a sudoku: a computer can set a sudoku, and a computer can solve it, but a crossword is human ingenuity versus human ingenuity, wit versus wit.

That could be why, in the Second World War, so many of British military intelligence’s heroes, the men and women of Bletchley Park who broke the apparently

“The trick is making links between letters and words.”

unbreakable Enigma machine code, were crossword fanatics. It is only a slight exaggeration to say that crosswords—and, specifically, The Daily Telegraph crossword—helped win the war…

In January 1942, a series of letters to The Daily Telegraph had claimed that the paper’s crossword wasn’t hard enough. It could be solved in a matter of minutes, they said; so a man called WAJ Gavin, the chairman of the Eccentric Club, suggested this be put to the test.

He put up a £100 prize, to be donated to charity in the event that anyone could do it, and Arthur Watson, the paper’s then editor, arranged a competition in the newsroom on Fleet Street.

Five people beat the 12-minute deadline, although one, the fastest, had misspelled a word and was disqualified. The puzzle was printed in the next day’s edition, January 13 1942, so that everyone could try their hand. And there the matter might have rested—but, unknown to the Telegraph and the contestants, the War Office was watching.

Stanley Sedgewick, one of those who took part, said: “Several weeks later, I received a letter marked ‘Confidential’ inviting me, as a consequence of taking part in ‘The Daily Telegraph Crossword Time Test,’ to make an appointment to see Col Nichols of the General Staff, who ‘would very much like to see you on a matter of national importance.’”

Mr Sedgewick, and several others who took part that day, ended up

working at Bletchley Park, breaking German military codes.

“Whether it’s a simple cipher, or something as complex as the codes of the Enigma machine which the Bletchley codebreakers were working on, the trick is making links between letters and words,” says Michael Smith, the author of Station X: The Codebreakers of Bletchley Park (and who interviewed Mr Sedgewick for the Telegraph in 1998). “Crosswords are the same sort of lateral-thinking exercise.”

Just as with crosswords, where working out 15 Down gives you a

few letters in the Across clues, you can use the information from cracking part of a code to crack the rest of it; it is, says Smith, a very similar logical procedure.

But more importantly, crosswords are about getting inside the mind of your opponent, and in the same way, codebreaking was about getting inside the mind of your enemy.

The codebreakers came to know the people encoding the messages individually, by their styles, as crossword-solvers come to know setters.

One, Mavis Batey, worked out that two of the Enigma machine operators had girlfriends called Rosa: “She worked it out, trying different options, like in a crossword. Once it worked once, it was an obvious option elsewhere,” says Smith.

Not all of the Bletchley codebreakers were crossword fans, says Smith, but a large number were. James Grime, a

It is about getting inside the mind of your enemy.

mathematician and an expert on Alan Turing, agrees: “It was problem solvers they needed; unconventional thinkers to solve the problem.”

Crossword-solving, like mathematics and code-breaking itself, involves creative, lateral thinking, “not being a robot and following a procedure.” 2

A crossword relies upon its structure to make connections. The horizontal and vertical arrangement of words means that a letter in one of the intersecting boxes is common to two words.

Similarly, the texts in the Word of God are arranged in such a way that the structure bears much more of the burden of transmitting the meaning of the text than modern readers realize.

For the authors of the Bible (inspired by the Spirit of God), literary structure was not merely an ornamental feature. Although structure makes the texts beautiful, it is also a crucial channel of information. Like the extra rotor added to the German Enigma machines, it adds another layer of “decryption” beyond the work of translation from the original languages. But what is even more fascinating is that once the structure is identified by the “cribs” that it contains, the use of the common sequence that serves as a key to this text then

helps us to interpret other texts that use the same pattern.

Fortunately, although this biblical “crib” has a number of variations that serve slightly different purposes, there is a single literary “algorithm” upon which they are all based.

All of this means that identifying the biblical authors’ use of predetermined structures is not an optional pursuit. Instead of accepting the shape and contents of the Scriptures as either totally

Interpretation is less a science than it is an art, but since the realm of the artistic is something that can be difficult to quantify and verify, modern scholarship shies away from it as being subjective and speculative.

However, the beauty of identifying recapitulated sequences in the Bible is that it provides a means of verifying the use of the symbols and types. The comparison of sequences rather than single items is the security protocol built into all Scripture.

This work requires a mind that thinks like an engineer and like an artist. Like the work of the cryptanalysts of Station X, the job of interpreting the Bible needs both technicians and intuitions.

random or a mysterious “given,” we need the mind of the precocious child—the eccentric to whom everything in the world is new. Things that others accept without thinking must be analyzed and questioned.

In other words, we have enough scholars who ask “What?” What we need are theologians who ask “Why?” Why is the text the way that it is? Our academies need more literary lateral thinkers to work alongside the linguistic “robots.”

We are in the middle of a war, and we need access to better methods than those upon which we have relied in the past. But before we engage in systematic typology, many of us must first deal with our distrust of typology itself as a source of crucial “military intelligence.”

Images are from The Imitation Game (2014) The Weinstein Company

1 Michael Smith, The Secrets of Station X: How Bletchley Park Helped Win the War, 47-48.

2 Tom Chivers, “Could you have been a codebreaker at Bletchley Park?” The Telegraph, October 10, 2014.

The job of interpreting needs both technicians and intuitions.

— PETER J. LEITHART

“INTERPRETATION IS NOT JUST ABOUT READING CAREFULLY, BUT READING SUBMISSIVELY. WE ARE NOT THERE TO MASTER THE TEXT, THE TEXT IS THERE TO MASTER US. OBEDIENCE IS PART OF RIGHT INTERPRETATION.”

MISSION EVERY TONGUE TRANSLATING IN TANZANIA

On a rainy day on the shores of Lake Victoria, I park our borrowed Land Cruiser next to the office generator and use the vehicle to jump the office generator … again. The electricity keeps going off, and the generator isn’t working properly and needs to be jumped. Only a vehicle this large has the power to do it.

Tanzania, I remember sharing at churches how determined I was to continue serving with Wycliffe Bible Translators as a software developer and not become primarily an IT support person in Tanzania. Not only had I become responsible for office IT support, but I also occasionally helped start the backup generator during the frequent power outages.

During their time in Tanzania, Eric and Allison Pyle were able to celebrate the publication of the books of Luke and Ruth, the first Scripture in the Jita language!

PYLE

Inside, linguists, literacy specialists, translation advisors, administrators, and Bible translators from nine different languages in the Mara region of northern Tanzania wait for the power to come back on so they can resume their work. Some still have power in their laptop batteries, but they have no connection to the office server until power is restored. This is not what I had planned to do. Adapting to change seems to be my wife’s and my new calling ever since heading to Tanzania in 2011. Before

God, it seems, has a sense of humor—and a higher wisdom— when it comes to our plans versus His. We plan what we think we should do, but God wants to grow us beyond our imaginations into how He sees us for His own glory and the good of others.

I had never imagined being a Wycliffe missionary, dependent on the generosity of others for financial provision. Looking back, I can see how God was preparing me to do things as a software developer that stretched me beyond my imagination and comfort zone.

ERIC

Two women reading the Gospel of Luke for the first time in their Jita language at a 2012 Scripture celebration. This may even be the first time they are reading something other than Swahili, their national language.

All I knew was that I wanted to be a software developer. When I was ten, I taught myself to write Basic computer programs on my Atari 400 and hoped to write my own video games when I grew up.

It was during my studies as a computer engineer at the University of Oklahoma that God opened my heart to understand my need for Jesus as my Lord and Savior. It was then that I began to realize that my life had true purpose and that even mundane work as a software developer, which I enjoyed in itself, carried eternal significance for the glory of His kingdom.

After graduating college, I settled for living a double life: during the day, I worked as a high-end server software developer with Hewlett Packard (HP); during the evening, I took biblical studies classes at Westminster Theological Seminary in Dallas.

Then one day I lost my comfy day job when HP merged with Compaq, and God finally put me in a place where I could consider how to bring both worlds together: my skill as a software developer and my desire to help others better understand God’s Word.

Around that time, a Westminster professor introduced me to his son who served with Wycliffe Bible Translators. He, in turn, introduced me to a Wycliffe center in Dallas and to the language software development team there.

When I saw the software they

God put me in a place where I could bring both worlds together.

IMAGE Michael Nicholls

were developing to help people around the world understand God’s Word in all their different languages, I knew becoming a Wycliffe missionary would be worth it.

It was worth it for an introverted computer geek like me to take over a year to travel around to different churches and share about the mission of Wycliffe Bible Translators and how I could use software development to help get God’s Word into all the languages that still need it.

So I took a big step of faith to accept a missionary role that relied on a team of prayer and financial partners. I never imagined being a Wycliffe software developer would end up

taking me—and a wife—to serve in Tanzania.

In December 2004, I began work with the language software team in Dallas, developing software used by linguists as they study, analyze, and write down languages that have never before been written and begin to build a dictionary.

During a conference, a colleague

of mine who was serving in Thailand said I should consider working overseas someday, as it would help me better understand how to develop software for users in overseas contexts. I was pretty content just remaining in Dallas, but I never forgot his advice.

Not long into my time in Dallas, I met my smart and smiley future-wife, Allison, who was pursuing a Masters in Applied Linguistics. Little did I know that we would be married about three years later.

Fast forward… After we were married in late 2008, we tried to imagine what our life together with Wycliffe would look like.

Unlike me, Allison was excited about the prospect of serving in an overseas assignment. I tried my best to convince her and others we should serve in Thailand with my other colleagues there.

However, a colleague suggested I consider Tanzania instead. Our software team had recently formed a “focus group” relationship with an office hosting a cluster of several related languages in the Mara region. It was then that Allison informed me that she had “always wanted to go to Africa.”

Allison has loved learning languages since she was a teenager. Speaking other languages enables her to talk

Unwritten languages are like a secret code waiting to be broken.

Eric and Allison visiting their colleague Mago's family in a Tanzanian village

with and serve more people.

In the 8th grade, she remembers helping a new Spanish speaker feel more welcome when she tried communicating with what she had been learning from her Spanish classes. She would later major in Spanish and then pursue a Master’s degree in linguistics and Bible translation.

Language learning helped her explore other cultures and ways of looking at the world. She was ready to serve overseas somewhere in missions, having already been involved in various overseas mission trips and international study during high school and college.

She also loved the idea of doing linguistics, of figuring out the grammar and sound systems of a language that has never been written down before. To her, it’s like a secret code, waiting to be broken. Thus, we found ourselves called to serve in Tanzania for two years. In 2011 and 2012, we studied Swahili (the national language of Tanzania) and served a project in the Mara region.

Allison put her linguistic and translation skills to use working with the Jita language team. During our time in Tanzania, we were able to celebrate the publication of the books of Luke and Ruth, the first Scriptures in the Jita language! She enjoyed going through many steps to

prepare the book of Luke for publication, things like overseeing spelling and key term consistency, and preparing and formatting a glossary, captions, footnotes, and maps.

I had understood that I’d primarily be developing software called Paratext, which was being used for Bible translation collaboration in the office.

Not long into our time there, however, the operations manager and IT support person left to spend a year in the U.S. on furlough. Before I knew it, I was the one on the phone with the internet company and the electric company, the one who jump-started the generator, and the one troubleshooting server and computer problems.

While this is not my preferred line of work, it was good to be able to fill this role because it helped our Tanzanian colleagues see me with a tangible role, and I had more opportunities to build relationships with people. The impact of this role was much more evident to people there, compared with my more abstract

Being a missionary is a lot like having a family business.

Jita men enjoying Luke and Ruth, probably their first books in Jita.

IMAGE

Michael Nicholls

work as a software developer.

When our visas expired in 2012, we decided to return to the U.S. Allison was 5 months pregnant with our first child, and she had been very sick during the pregnancy while also battling giardia, an intestinal parasite. Based in the U.S. again, Allison had two more rough pregnancies and is still recovering her health and energy as we raise three kids.

When people ask my wife about her current role with Wycliffe, she says being a missionary is a lot like having a family business. Everyone is involved. While she doesn’t have an official work role at this phase of life, she helps to write newsletters and thank-you notes, and to plan and give presentations at churches.

She also teaches ballet and hopes to serve part-time at the International Linguistics Center as the kids get a little older. She has filled a couple of part-time roles there before, at Dallas International University, which prepares students to serve internationally in linguistics, literacy, world arts, and more.

Since 2013, I’ve been working on the Digital Bible Library (DBL) Project, the world’s largest digital archive for Bible translations. Here, Bible translation organizations make Scripture available to digital Bible publishers in text, audio, sign

language video, braille, and print. Digital Bible publishers, in turn, make Scripture available to people around the world.

One of the biggest digital Bible publishers is YouVersion, a Bible app that many people have on their smartphones. The last time

I checked, there were more than 2,600 translations available in over 1,760 languages in YouVersion, including audio versions in over 700 languages. No one could have imagined

My colleague from Thailand was right. Tanzania is still with me. I learned to never take electricity or the internet for granted, especially when it comes to Bible translation software and its users around the world. I also learned never to take my mother tongue for granted. In Tanzania, very few spoke English well enough to communicate.

Being forced to speak to others and attend church all in Swahili certainly helped me appreciate Pentecost’s gift of the Holy Spirit: tongues of fire upon the heads of the apostles, who preached the gospel of Jesus in many languages.

Did you know that over 7,000 languages are spoken or signed around the world? At least 1,800 of those languages still need translation work started, and over 2,200 translation projects are currently in progress.

Bible translations being so easily accessible today—not John Wycliffe, not even the early reformers who had the power of the printing press.

Often, in the past, it could be hard to find copies of Scripture that had been translated, especially if they were no longer in print. Now, anyone with a smartphone or an internet connection can access a digital Bible in thousands of languages, sometimes even before it has been printed!

All are welcome to help make God’s Word accessible to people around the world! Let us see ourselves as God sees us, joining the harvest of worshippers from every nation, tribe, people, and tongue (Revelation 7:9). n

Check out www.wycliffe.org to explore how you can serve or partner to help everyone have God’s Word in a language they can clearly understand. You can also find missionaries like Eric and Allison Pyle there at www.wycliffe.org/partner

At least 1,800 languages still need translation work.

Guy Ritchie’s superherocomic-style reinvention of the King Arthur legend might just have a better grip on the hilt of the Bible than all of Christian academia combined.

FILM THE STREETWISE GOD

MAKING SENSE OF THE DEVIL

MICHAEL BULL

Late last century, on a drunken dare, a young man broke into a famous residence which Prince Charles was due to visit on the following day.

When he was questioned, police were more interested in locating the blind spot in their security measures than they were in prosecuting the harmless trespasser. Unfortunately for them, although his animal instincts had remained keen, he had been so intoxicated that he could not remember how he had managed to evade detection. Likewise, if you are building a fortress you must think the thoughts of an attacking general long before he will ever think them. And the designer of any sort of secure facility must take on the mind of one who is trying to break in or break out.

The jailbird is focussed only on the objective, and must quite literally think outside the box, devising improvisations and workarounds, taking advantage of the oversights, weaknesses, and even employing the strengths of a system, in order to evade it, and perhaps even to destroy it.

When it comes to digital security, companies pay people to hack into their computer systems. Not only are the breaches discovered, but the measures required to block them are taken into

account in future builds. Of course, the actual hackers also continue to learn, and this process of breach, discovery, judgment, and development becomes a cycle of fortification.

This pattern of evasion and escalation helps us to understand one facet of what is going on throughout the Bible. History itself began with a heist—the devil’s attempt to steal the inheritance of Man. The strategy was a devious one: entice Man to steal the kingdom which God had planned to give him as a gift when he was mature enough to receive it (Matthew 4:8-9; John 16:12; 1 Corinthians 2:14). By this means, God would be forced to execute the man and woman as He Himself had warned.

While the tactic was clever, the motivation of the angelic servant was as tawdry as that of the jealous, scheming butler in Walt Disney’s The Aristocats. “How can you give all of this to them?!”

If we are to understand the actual plot of the Bible, whose text maintains a poker face, we must get a grip on the desires of the eternal and infernal players seated invisibly at the table. This is because all subsequent events work through precisely the same sequence as Genesis 2-3, but in manifold different ways.

As history progressed, God foiled each of Satan’s strategies

with a superhuman cunning. As we read the Bible, these iterations grow not only in size and complexity but also in subtlety and literary beauty. A series of plot twists comprised of dramatic thrusts and parries between heaven and hell, history’s mortal coil is itself a mesmerizing, crooked serpent.

In that day the Lord with his hard and great and strong sword will punish Leviathan the fleeing serpent, Leviathan the twisting serpent, and he will slay the dragon that is in the sea. (Isaiah 27:1)

If lying tongues are not stopped with truth, bad ideas take on flesh, and serpents grow into dragons. As any gamer knows, every battle won in the war means that both the stakes and the risks are raised. Each time, beginning with the atoning sacrifice in Genesis 3, God pulled victory from the jaws of defeat. What is overlooked is that, through disobedience (like Adam) or obedience (like Noah), Man was growing in wisdom— sometimes learning the easy way, and sometimes the hard way. Noah was entrusted with the sword of justice for which Adam had failed to qualify. The judged was now a judge. Men had sought godhood the wrong way, but now there was a man who was indeed like God—faithful,

merciful, and just, and able to discern between light and darkness in the ethical realm. In God’s eyes, this transfer of the legal authority of heaven to a faithful heir on earth was worth the whole world.

Noah’s wife: “Is it the wind which waileth?”

Noah: “No, wife. It is the chaff which the wind driveth away.” (John Huston’s The Bible, 1966)

Each cycle of covenant history raised the level of discernment required in Man in order to thwart the serpent.

The Great Flood slew and resurrected the world given to Adam, but it also took history to the next level of “gameplay.”

After the sin of Ham, the devil’s strategem was not the abolition of worship (as it had been before the Flood) but its replacement with a Babelic counterfeit.

Israel’s amalgamation of true and false worship was a more subtle twist on the same lie, and the devil succeeded in causing Israel’s kingdom to be divided and destroyed. But once again, God “raised the dead” and brought a people out of Babylon. Yet, even that gambit was nothing compared to Satan’s tour de force—the ultimate deepfake. The first century Babylon of the Herods, with its workers busy on a glorious temple as a tower to heaven, bore all the promise of

the “new Jerusalem” of Ezra and Nehemiah. But in Jesus’ eyes, it was spiritually Egypt and Sodom, the city where He would be crucified (Revelation 11:8).

Thus, the first saints were called to “see” the unseen—to discern between the corrupt city that was pleasing to the eyes (Genesis 3:6; 6:2; Mark 13:1-2) and the incorruptible one above that could only be perceived with the eyes of faith in obedience to the Word (Galatians 4:25-26).

This 4D chess level of “gaming”

on Satan’s part is why scholars still struggle with the language of the Book of Revelation, since it describes the spiritual warfare of the apostles in the symbols of physical Old Testament battles.

As usual, the devil was three steps ahead of men, but Jesus was way ahead of the devil. The saints were not deceived (Matthew 24:24), and, in the same way that God used the tyranny of King Saul to humble and prepare David for his throne, Jesus used the Herods and Rome to prepare men for the first Christendom.

The man is the message

As David, the future king, learned when he was on the run, life on the streets is a dance with death that makes you lean, mean, and keeps your senses keen. Your default setting is “fight or flight.”

In contrast, the abundant repose

The first saints were called to “see” the unseen.

enjoyed by the lords of leisure makes them flabby, gullible, and arrogant—apparatchik chumps who are wise in their own conceits. When it comes to gravitas, the court prophets in soft clothing are no match for the rugged voice crying in the desert.

I run the race then with determination. I am no shadowboxer, I really fight! I am my body’s sternest master, for fear that when I have preached to others I should myself be disqualified. (1 Corinthians 9:26-27, J. B. Phillips)

This might explain why a recent superhero-comic-style reinvention of the King Arthur legend has a better grip on the hilt of the Bible than all of Christian academia combined.

While there are many subtle nods to lesser-known aspects of Arthurian lore, Guy Ritchie’s gonzo epic King Arthur: Legend of the Sword owes more to East End Jack-the-lads, The Lion King, Robin Hood, the Bible, and The Elder Scrolls role-playing video game than it does to all of the solemn student canon that has gone before. Even Monty Python and the Holy Grail is more faithful to the original mythos. For many, Ritchie’s liberties were too much to swallow, and his movie, which was designed to be a foundation for a series, saw only limited success. But its

critics failed to see the unseen. Legend of the Sword is an ancient city with a new heart, and the film—in word and image— operates on the broad bandwidth of the biblical prophets. The medieval trappings serve as a low-built vehicle for a highoctane ride to the question of theodicy—“If God is good, how can He allow the bad?

The answer turns out to be the same as that given by an old farmer when asked why he worked his sons so hard. “I’m not just raising corn and wheat; I’m also raising men.”

Just like those who ridicule the Bible’s eccentricities and bizarre visions, critics panned the movie as an epic fail, not realizing that every aspect of its apparently prodigal excess and fastidious “graphic novel” attention to detail is an instrument finelytuned in service of the core of the narrative—that there is no true government without selfgovernment.

In biblical terms, submission to heaven (priesthood) leads to dominion on earth (kingdom). Consciously channeling Navy Seal Jocko Willink, Ritchie says,

If you don’t own something, you’re not the boss. You have to take full responsibility for everything that you do. Why be subservient? You must be the master of your own kingdom. You can’t just walk into

things with your eyes half open. You have to take possession of your life. Every man in himself is aristocratic. He is his own king…

Religion has done for the spiritual significance of narrative what the businessman did to the suit. He’s literalized it. He didn’t realize that putting on a suit is putting on a suit of armor. He’s putting on something that’s rather spectacular, but he’s just doing it for convention. When we see only the exterior aspect of the narrative, we see the world upside down. We’re not really interested in its soul. We’re interested in its body.1

Thus, in the unblinking blue eye of Ritchie’s cyclone of weaponsgrade megafauna, Wiccan mages, smart-mouthed brigands, and a manic uncle whose blackguards hunt men in the streets like beasts, Arthur’s primary battle is an internal one. MMA boxer Conor McGregor was an inspiration for this reimagining of the “born king” when he said that his challenge was not the opponent in the ring—his real fight was against himself.

God not only calls, but also trains, His heirs. Even Jesus was perfected (that is, brought to maturity) through suffering. Jesus’ personal mastery over the devil’s temptations in the wilderness gave Him power over the devils in others. Then, His willingness to lay down His actual life gave Him authority over the entire cosmos.

Likewise, Adam was expected to master self-government before he could bear actual government upon his shoulders. Only once he was qualified by submission to God could he be given the keys to the kingdom and the flaming sword of heaven, things which Jesus not only possesses, but also uses, in Revelation.

In other words, our first task under the command to love God and men, as Jordan Peterson says, is to “clean your room.”

The young Arthur does exactly that, and the boy’s entire life becomes an unwitting, even unwilling, rollercoaster quest for a trophy more glorious than any golden cup—the devil himself.

Spivs of Londinium

Foreseeing his own death, Uther Pendragon sets his infant son in a basket on a serpentine river— a royal seed like Moses who will gestate in the very womb of the Egypt that sought to slay him. He is drawn from the river by the whores of Londinium, a virtual ville that is a droll pastiche of iconic ancient and medieval landmarks. Raised in the brothel, the boy’s inherited drive leads him to become the archetypal “wide boy,” wide-awake, streetsmart, and sharp-witted.

In a dazzling montage of ad hocery, this school of literal hard knocks teaches him to fight, to

protect the “mothers” who delivered him, and to hustle some readies for his own coffers along the way. But his heart of gold sets him a cut above the other lads, and, like David, he attracts a ragtag but loyal band of friends among those who use the system in order to defy it.

He is ignorant of his identity, but a recurring childhood dream— a memory of his father and mother mixed with a vision of an approaching serpent—still haunts him.

Once physically mature, he is the wisecracking flip side of his uncle Vortigern, the world-weary usurper whose careful disciplines serve his unbridled lust for a “ten-digit” grasp of the throne. He is utterly humorless (except for a grim talking-into-asevered-ear joke nicked from Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs), rarely leaves the comfort and safety of Camelot, charms power over the realm by sacrificing women to the squid-sirens in his watery cellar, and buys command of the seas through slave trading with a wheeler-dealer gang of Vikings. And he just happens to be building a “tower to heaven” as a means of maintaining his magical hold over the kingdom. He also enjoys the gift of eternal youth, in the style of Dorian Gray, from his slithering gestalt of surrogate mother and sisters (more women-and-womb-water

The throne is only ever a step away from the execution block.

symbolism, like the Bible) in return for the sacrifices of his beautiful “caged-bird” daughters.

The sword can only truly be Vortigern’s once Arthur is dead, so these polar opposites are faces forged on the same royal coin. Arthur wants nothing to do with the sword while Vortigern would gladly sacrifice the world for it.

And there’s the rub. As in Eden, and in Gethsemane, the throne is only ever one step away from the executioner’s block. In the carnal world, it matters who your spiritual father is (John 8:38-39).

In Ritchie’s retelling, where the burden of imagery seems to flow from David’s song of deliverance (2 Samuel 22), the rough stone is as important as the smooth sword. Arthur himself is the stubborn rock and Vortigern is the burning blade Arthur must receive, whether either of them likes it or not.

Arthur is Adam, surrounded with images of the land, dotted with greenery and dappled with sunlight, garbed in sheepskin and smeared with mud, while the calculating Vortigern broods in lavish but sombre designs suited to his fire-and-ice persona.

As symbols of nature and culture, wilderness and palace, Esau-rough and Jacob-smooth, animal skins and seamless robes, cultivation (earth) and representation (heaven),

childhood and maturity, virgin womb and whitewashed tomb, these paired opposites, as day and night, are irrevocably linked but distinct. And there is only one way this bloodline discord can find resolution.

Like the two trees in Eden, priesthood and kingdom must become one prophetic tree—a priest-kingdom like that of Noah, the “better” Adam. For that to occur, both men must be cut down.

The Devil and the Huntsman

With a shameless wink at Cinderella, every eligible male in the kingdom is forced to try to extract the sword. In a cocky, Cockney cameo, David Beckham tells Arthur, “Both hands, ten digits round the blunt bit, give it a tug, left foot, right foot, collect your brand, back on the barge.”

And with that, Arthur discovers his pedigree. He is the one. But taking possession of his destiny will not be that simple. The extraction of the sword, although his by right, “knocks him dead” because he is not ready to bear it.

It is Excalibur that seeks him, not the other way around, and that inversion of the practice of men is the path to true glory. The man worthy to represent God is the one for whom wielding power is

but a duty to God and others. Even better, Arthur’s successful drawing of the sword is far deeper than a mere symbolic rite of succession. In a brilliant twist, the son actually receives the sword from the father.

As infant Arthur drifted into the mist, Uther cast the sword into the air, bowing to take it in the back of his own neck. This act of self-sacrifice transmogrified him into the stone to prevent the mage-made weapon from falling into the hands of his demonic attacker. So Uther had been with Arthur all along, guarding his inheritance both in his dreams, and as his rock.

In the same way, the heart of the Father who called the Son to selfsacrifice is no less self-giving. In His sacrifice, the Son represented the Father. God never calls us to do anything that He is not willing to do. He says He is with us because He is as present in the mean streets of Egypt or the bordellos of Jericho as He is in the heavenly courts of crystal. However, the climactic “God with us,” the incarnation, was an act of atoning intervention and also a battle strategy. God promised to be with Joshua in his conquest of the Land, and Jesus promised to be with the apostles in their conquest of the World. Enabled by that cunning infiltration of humanity with

holy seed, the Spirit now dwells in the saints. The eternal God who gave us His ten digits on tablets of stone is now also a wide boy wheeler-dealer with friends in every house, fingers in every pie, and two eyes, two spies, that run to-and-fro throughout the Garden, Land, and World. The king of heaven Himself became a king of the streets to show Himself straight to the pure and crooked to the shrewd (2 Samuel 22:27).

Arthur’s self-sacrifice is no less real for the fact that it also serves as a serpentine ruse. Like Jesus, the true king is bait in a trap.

Between two “naked” trees, in an inversion of the sin of Eden, Arthur voluntarily takes a bite to the neck by a serpent from the sleeve of his beautiful young mage (who is as persistent with stubborn Arthur as Ritchie’s Lady of the Lake). This is so that he, too, might see the unseen. His battles with his uncle will be mostly spiritual in nature.

Arthur: “I don’t like snakes.”

The Mage: “No one likes snakes.”

As a willing pole for a serpent in the wilderness, he perceives that the fruit of the Tree of Kingdom is a taste of death for all men. Vortigern, feared and despised by his people, sheds rivers of blood for the throne, while Arthur, like David “the beloved,” offers his blood to gain the throne, and the

hearts of the people, freely. Only a lamb is worthy to open the scroll and inherit the nations.

“The true soldier fights not because he hates what is in front of him, but because he loves what is behind him.” — G. K. Chesterton

In this two-edged context, his disoriented ride to Camelot to offer himself on behalf of his friends is an unsettling thrill. The poison has opened his eyes to the spiritual world. He sees the dark fire in the eyes of Vortigern’s blackguards. Even the nymphs of

the forest turn their leafy heads to reveal themselves, while a psalm of spiritual war rings out.

Young man came from hunting, faint, tired and weary; What does ail my Lord, my dearie?

Oh, brother dear, let my bed be made

For I feel the gripe of the woody nightshade.

Men need a man would die as soon Out of the light of a mage’s moon; But it’s not by bone, but yet by blade Can break the magic that the devil made.

As night approaches, in the midst of a mighty, rushing wind (Acts 2:2), the mage summons and sends forth an enormous eagle carrying a king-sized serpent. Where the critic sees only gratuitous spectacle, the symbolism is on point, perhaps beyond Ritchie’s intentions.

Egyptian rulers wore a crown with the heads of an eagle and a

The lamb becomes a lion, and berserker hell breaks loose.

serpent, signifying predatory rule over heaven and earth. These two creatures correspond to the constellation of Scorpio— eyes below and eyes above— which matches the position of the Lampstand in the Tabernacle, with its “seven eyes” of fire.

Like the confrontation between Moses and Pharaoh, this is a battle of serpentine wits. Thanks to the protective poison, the giant serpent recognizes Arthur as its master. However, even this beast is just a provocation that enables a bait-and-switch.

Vortigern slays it with the stolen Excalibur, lodging the sword in a stone pillar. Only one man can retrieve it—the born king.

In that instant, the lamb becomes a lion, and berserker hell breaks loose in slick, stylized violence reminiscent of video games. Under the spell of the sword, Arthur is a force of nature. He moves at lightning speed, sees in the dark, and causes earthquakes. Virtual reality is a man-made spirit-realm, so the nod to gaming “power fantasy” portrays the path to maturity as a quest through a series of ordeals. The spell over the land is broken but the last enemy remains— Vortigern’s towering, highmaintenance alter ego. The final battle entails a liturgical ascension to heaven. It takes place in the false king’s “tower of

power,” yet in the spiritual realm, where its firmament-fight-night boxing ring is battered by the waves of a stormy crystal sea. Heaven itself is at war. Or is this really the abyss? Once again, the throne and the dungeon are quantum-entangled like the waters above and below.

The fiery demon growls “Play with me,” and the jealous blade even gives Arthur a “hit points” reset when he is knocked down. But the sharp end of the story arc cuts to the joints and the marrow when Arthur wounds the pretender: the born king realizes that his tough upbringing, not his heredity, was what prepared him to bear the royal mantle. And for that, he actually thanks his uncle. The sirens had warned Vortigern, “As your power increases, so, too, do the forces that will oppose you.” Like Joseph’s perception of God’s purpose in his sufferings, the money quote from the victor to his dying nemesis is, “You created me… You make sense of the devil.” And with that quip, a rollicking, red-blooded popcorn flick outstrips the anemic Christian Babel academy in the discernment of God’s mind. Stripped of his blood-bought spiritual armor, Vortigern is a fragile lightweight. And having been faithful in the day of small things, the urchin is now a rock, an Adam with the gravitas—and

the smarts—to rule a kingdom.

This also explains the absence of a dragon, the king of the beasts, in the movie. Having been tested by man-sized rats, bats, wolves, and serpents, Arthur Pendragon (“head dragon”) is the true rex of the nocturnal Darklands.

The born king succeeded where Adam failed, not only entering into God’s rest but also providing us with a more robust analogy for the Christian sacraments than theology has yet supplied. As it was for Jesus, baptism is an investiture, a knighthood for spiritual service as a guardian of the realm. And as it was for His disciples, communion is a round table for the friends of the King of Kings as the true sons of Abraham, for those who examine their hearts, offer their bodies as living sacrifices, and sit upon thrones as righteous judges and protectors of the world. Arthur, a talented carpenter, is building a table, and also invites the Vikings to his new order, where nobles, peasants, and even slave traders are welcome to tread on the serpent together as they share a common cup. As Abraham, the wheeler-dealerwith-God, the new king makes them an offer they can’t refuse: “Why have enemies when you can have friends?” (2 Chronicles 20:7; Isaiah 41:8; Amos 3:3; James 2:23; John 15:14-15)

A thief to catch a thief

Usurpers still seek to dispossess the Sons of God, and Jesus still comes against them like a thief.

Since the Herods’ attempted “grand theft” of the kingdom in the first century, the planned heists have been even more slippery and ingenious. A selfstyled “city of God” puffed itself up like a toad in Rome, only to be goaded by those prickly, but wily, Reformers. In our day, a tattooed, whoring, scolding dragreverend Jezebel, self-invested with embroidered kitsch, is brazenly teaching immorality to the saints (Revelation 2:20-21).

When Satan ups his game, the saints need to apply old wisdom from the Word in new ways. And those who represent Jesus are called to be Jacobs—as harmless as doves but as wise as serpents (Matthew 10:16).

Sadly, ignorance of Scripture breeds a spiritual naivety that sees Christians duped and swindled. Too many saints are as harmless as doves and as dumb as doorposts, unable to see through the schemes of the power-grabbers both inside and outside of the Church.

“…the sons of this world are more shrewd in dealing with their own generation than the sons of light.” (Luke 16:6)

But the God who hides Himself in clouds can easily discern beastly hearts. In His eyes, moral purity and clarity of vision are inseparable (Genesis 27:1; Acts 9:18). And by His Spirit, our own eyes are opened to see His horses and chariots (2 Kings 6:17).

Not only are the plots of the devil exposed (Ephesians 5:11), but the mind of Christ is also revealed (Philippians 2:5-11).

Jesus advanced the battle from defense to assault, from the visible to the invisible,

intensifying the war from a wrestling against flesh and blood to direct conflict with the spiritual realm (Hebrews 4:12).

Discernment is the power to pass through closed doors (Matthew 18:20; John 20:19)—from the squalid streets of common men into the boardrooms, and the bedrooms, of the kings of the earth (Matthew 14:3-5; 27:19).

Tougher than David on the run, and wiser than Solomon on the throne, our streetwise God trains us to be the same. He plants the seed of the Gospel not only to raise men—from sin, death, and the miry pit—but also to reign with Him as humble Sons of God (Ephesians 2:1-10). n

Images are from King Arthur: Legend of the Sword (2017) Warner Bros

1 Joe Rogan Experience #956 –Guy Ritchie. Edited for clarity.

We must be as wise as serpents, not as dumb as doorposts.

When we got off of our bus, one of our crew asked him how he had been so successful at turning the “Alcatraz of the South” into a fairly safe environment. Warden Cain replied, “Three things make for a peaceful prison: good work, good prayin’, and good playin’.”

EVANGELISM THE FARM

LIFE ON THE INSIDE

The first time I saw the inside of a prison was in 1999; I was 16. I hadn’t knocked over a fruit stand or been caught stealing hubcaps, I was just an unsuspecting teenager playing piano for a Louisiana gospel group.

One Wednesday evening in October, my pastor and leader of the band gathered us up after prayer meeting and told us we had been invited to come sing at Angola, the Louisiana State Penitentiary. We were all

wide-eyed and slack-jawed.

“The Farm,” as it was known to most, had a long reputation of being not only the largest, but also the bloodiest prison in America. And for those of us who had grown up hearing the stories, this was like hearing that we had been invited to sing in the main arena at the Roman Colosseum with ribeyes tied around our necks.

expanse of fields on which the inmates grow crops.

MEEKS

Angola Prison is named for the slave plantation that once occupied its 18,000 acres near St. Francisville, in West Feliciana Parish, Louisiana. It is hemmed in on three sides by swamps and the Mississippi River. The other side is a vast

But when folks in Louisiana think of Angola, they aren’t thinking about Bradley Tomatoes and collard greens. There were nearly 2,350 assaults committed on the grounds of the penitentiary in 1996 alone. Many of these resulted in death, as inmates fashioned crude weapons using everything from sharpened mop handles and toothbrushes, to strangling ropes made from corn silk and shoe strings.

“It’s not like it once was,” the pastor said.

“Well, I should hope not!” the

mothers and grandmothers of the boys in the band said in a hot mix of fear and aggravation.

“There was a time when they just handed out weapons to the inmates and let them keep the peace as it suited them best,” said the mother of the drummer. “Didn’t really even have guards.” And there was truth to that. “They’ve not had an incident involving members of the public in several years,” our pastor said, trying to reassure everybody. “I think it will be good for these boys.”

And with little further protests, we decided to book the date to perform for two days at the supermax prison where 85% of all inmates who ever leave do so feet first.

Twice a year, Angola puts on a rodeo. A couple days in April and every Sunday in October. We had been slated to put on a concert on the last rodeo Sunday of the year. Bucking bulls, wild broncs, and a horde of murderous men with nothing left but time. “What could go wrong,” we thought.

But by the time our old 1959 Silver Eagle made its way to the razor-wire gates at the end of Old Highway 66, most of us young folks were practically giddy. To tell the truth, I don’t think we had enough sense to be scared.

There were hundreds of freemen already there by the time we arrived. Thousands come annually to watch the convicts test their mettle against steers and horses and each other. And at eight dollars a head, it’s pretty cheap entertainment.

We were led through the prison compound into the rodeo arena by the warden, Big Burl Cain. Cain believes in redemption. He believes that the worst of men can become good men with

welding and carpentry and masonry. Those who prefer the fields can learn to grow their own food,” he said.

“You will also notice the steeples before you notice the guard towers around here these days. We build em’ churches and encourage attendance. We’ve also even partnered with seminaries to train our converts and make preachers out of em’. Some of them are even sent to other prisons as missionaries.” said Cain.

“But the rodeo is purely for fun. It gives these men something to look forward to. A chance to let their hair down and feel the wind in their faces. For most of em’, it’s the closest thing to freedom they will ever experience again.”

enough patience, discipline, and proper instruction.

When we got off of our bus, one of our crew asked him how he had been so successful at turning the “Alcatraz of the South” into a fairly safe environment. Warden Cain replied, “Three things make for a peaceful prison: good work, good prayin’, and good playin’.”

“You passed the fields when you came up the road. We teach these men how to work. Some have never had a job. So we give em’ a trade. We teach plumbing and

The first inmate I met confirmed as much. As we began unloading our equipment to set up for the afternoon concert, two men came over to help us. A young white man named Nick Nicholson, and an old black man named Eugene Tanniehill, Jr. whom everyone called, “Bishop.”

Nick was a former all-around champion of the Angola rodeo. “I always dreamed of being a cowboy,” he said. “But I didn’t know that it would take killing a man to finally get me into the saddle. These days I beg for a mean bull.” There was no humor in his words. Nor was this a cold

There was a time when they just handed out weapons to inmates.

remark of a callous and unfeeling man. He said it with an air of confession. As though perpetual repentance to every person he met would make his life sentence a little easier to bear. He was 36, and he would end his natural life between unending rows of field corn and the concrete walls of Cell Block C.

Nicholson would eventually end up buried beneath a plain white cross in a coffin he had built himself. As one of the apprentice carpenters who had no living friends or family in the free world, he had already built a box of birch and pine that would one day follow a horse-drawn carriage in Angola’s own Potter’s Field. This was “good work” according to Nick, “honorable work.” “Me and my boys have even been asked to build coffins for the Graham family,” he said. “Me and Billy Graham will be buried in boxes I have made, out of the same tree.” Then his eyes fell again and he stood there shaking his head.

The Bishop, on the other hand, was lively and upbeat. “God has been better to me than I ever was to myself,” he said, smiling. “Two people have died at my hands,” he said, staring hard into my young eyes. “One was a young man I kilt for seventeen dollars and half a bottle of whiskey, the other was Old Tanniehill hisself.” He said, thumbing his chest.

“That boy didn’t deserve killin’,” continued Tanniehill, “and I have been paying for it on this farm for better than forty years now. But Old Tanniehill did deserve killin’, and I kilt him when I hung him on the cross beside Jesus.” He smiled again.

“Some say I will never leave this place. But I am already free. A body in jail is better off than a soul in prison. Old Tanniehill is dead and Bishop Tanniehill is a brand new man.”

few hours one Sunday in October of ’99, I remember experiencing freedom in a new way; sitting beside convicts who lived only for bad bulls and bible studies.

Some years later I was somewhere in the hills of North Carolina preaching under a tent. After services were over, I went back to my hotel room and ordered a pizza. I was flipping through the channels to find something to watch as I stuffed down slices of pepperoni with jalapenos and extra cheese when I landed on a face that stopped me in mid-chew.

Then the Bishop pulled a few of us boys over to one side, “But the Lord has told me that I won’t die in this here prison. He’s gonna turn me loose, give me a pretty wife, and give me a nationwide ministry. You just watch and see.”

The rodeo and the concert went off without a hitch. No one was severely wounded in the arena, and not a single band member took a shiv to the gut. We considered this a victory. I suppose everyone remembers things in their own way, but for a

The TV landed on TBN (Trinity Broadcasting Network). Sitting there beside Jan Crouch and her enormous purple hair was Eugene “Bishop” Tanniehill and his lovely new wife. After 52 years, he was released from Angola. He was now an ordained bishop and was serving along Jim Cymbala at The Brooklyn Tabernacle in New York. He spent the rest of his life trying to get back into prisons, telling hopeless men how to find hope in Jesus.

To this day I would put my hand on the Bible and swear that he turned into the camera and stared hard into my young eyes once again and winked, saying, “I told you so.”

Bishop Tanniehill died at home in 2020.

…convicts who lived only for bad bulls and bible studies.

THEOLOGY ACCELERATOR

TEMPLES OF THE SPIRIT

BULL

The shape, furniture, and “renovations” of the house of God through the Bible can be baffling, but each variation rests upon the same basic foundation—the human body.

MICHAEL

The God of the Bible isn’t limited to any domain. He isn’t a household god—He is a household. Wherever the Great King chooses to dwell is crafted to fit Him perfectly, whether it be His Word, His Worship, or His World.

Orientation day

All the world really is a stage. In Creation, God calls things from nothing. By Covenant, He gives them differing roles and suitable authority. In His Court, He prepares for them a place to perform.

The events of the Bible all take place within a “cosmic theater,” one based upon the structure of heaven. The reason we don’t recognize this is because that “theater” moves around a lot, like the Tabernacle in the desert. It is mounted and demounted as required, appearing and disappearing again with the swiftness of God’s own cloud of glory.

Just as the plays of Shakespeare were written for the Globe Theatre, so the visions and prophecies of the Bible take place within this predetermined architectural space. The writers assume that we are familiar not only with the layout of this arena and the significance of the elements contained within it, but

also with the relationships between those elements. Once you know the shape, you can identify how the same rooms and roles are fulfilled in different ways in each part of the text.

The fact that all of the Bible takes place within a “virtual reality,” like the Globe Theatre, does not abstract the Bible from reality. Rather, this architecture gives us the key to understanding the cosmic, social, and anatomical “houses” based upon the same plan, the houses in which we live and move and have our being.

Once we know the pattern, we begin to realize that all human activity, whether done out in the open or behind closed doors, takes place in the court of God.

As with all the best architects, the design of God’s houses is an expression of His nature. The physical Creation and the human life that crowns it are also expressions of that nature. Thus, every aspect of human life is founded upon the same blueprint. The physical houses of

God are replicas of the cosmos; they show us that God Himself is not just a house but a household. And not just a household, but every room in every sphere of existence.

The house that I am to build will be great, for our God is greater than all gods. But who is able to build him a house, since heaven, even highest heaven, cannot contain him? Who am I to build a house for him, except as a place to make offerings before him? (2 Chronicles 2:5-6)

Above, beside, below

The Lord created the world and prepared the Garden for Adam and Eve, but Cain, as the kingly firstborn of Adam, was the first human “world builder.” He built a city of refuge to protect himself from vengeance. However, the first domain that was built by Man with instructions from God was the ark of Noah. That was also a protective domain, but this vengeance was from God.

The design of the ark is significant because it helps us to understand the strange details and events of that first “house building project” undertaken by God in Genesis 1, 2, and 3. This is because the ark was a symbolic miniature of the whole world that served as a bridge—or a portal—from the primeval era to the age of the patriarchs.

All human activity takes place in the court of God.

The construction and arrangement of Noah’s ark helps us to interpret the construction and arrangement of the physical order. And a good interpretation of the physical order, with its waters above and waters below, helps us to understand the shape and imagery of biblical texts.

The ark was comprised of three levels, with a door that could open to the earth, and a roof with a window that could open to heaven. The window relates to the mention of the “windows” of heaven above, and the pitchcovered door relates to the closure and covering of the bloody history of the old world via the opening of the fountains of the deep.

In this way, the ark mediated between the past and the future. God temporarily relocated the faithful during the renovations. They were safe in this microworld while the actual world underwent a “death-andresurrection.”

It is important to notice that God Himself closed the door at the beginning of the Flood, yet it was a man, as God’s legal representative, who opened the window at its end. This house, like Adam, was thus a gobetween, mediating between heaven and earth—and transferring God’s legal authority to a human being. The shape of

this architectural world model, thus, relates to the legal pattern of the biblical covenants.

Since the three levels of the ark of Noah represented the three domains of the world that had been corrupted by Man, Noah’s temporary model of the world helps us to understand the shape of that primeval world.

NOAH’S ARK HEAVEN (WINDOW)

the Trinity that is faithful to what it claims to represent, the first place we ought to look is Genesis 1. God Himself gave it to us—as architecture. He does not tell us. He shows us.

The Noahic model also helps us to understand the shape of the “temple” that mankind defiled.

ADAM’S WORLD WATERS ABOVE

A BOVE THE GARDEN Adam: theft from the Father

B ESIDE THE LAND Cain: murder of the Son

B ELOW THE WORLD Intermarriage of the lines of Seth and Cain: blasphemy against the Spirit

WATERS BELOW

(DOOR)

These three domains are linked but distinct. They are a symbolic representation of their Creator who is an indivisible three in one. If we want a “diagram” of

The sins in the Garden, Land, and World were specific to their domains, yet they were all the same at heart—a theft from God. When the entire “temple” was corrupted, the waters above and below that were divided on Day 2 were reunited. Not only were the World and the Land washed clean of their bloodshed, but the Sanctuary itself was destroyed. Humanity would not have a “throne” for God on earth until the Tabernacle was constructed.

If we want a diagram of the Trinity we can look at Genesis 1.

Tree and Tabernacle

Creation is cruciform, or in other words, cross-shaped. This is not apparent to the naked eye, nor to the eye of unbelief. It is an aspect of reality that has come to us as a revelation. But once one’s eyes are opened to it, one is able to see it in every place, and at every level.

The Bible’s matrix is a process of construction, from word to image. We have observed it in its fivefold legal form (Covenant), and in its sevenfold historical form (Creation). We also observed that the sevenfold pattern is inherent in the fivefold pattern, but if the three Ethics steps are arranged as a horizontal “beam,” the result is cross-shaped.

TRANSCENDENCE ABOVE

HIERARCHY

ETHICS BESIDE

OATH/SANCTIONS

SUCCESSION BELOW

This configuration gives us the basic pattern of the Garden of Eden, and, by extension, of the Tabernacle of Moses.

The three domains are present as God’s throne in heaven (the Most Holy Place), the offices of Priest, King, and Prophet who mediate between heaven and earth (the Holy Place), and the earth itself (the Court of Sacrifice).

The Veil that mediates between

the upper domains, and the Tent itself that mediates between the lower domains, provide the two extra steps of the Covenant pattern.

Then the offices in the Holy Place provide the two extra steps of the Creation/Conquest pattern.

The domain of the Priest is the Garden; the domain of the King is the Land; and the domain of the Prophet is the World. What this means is that the Ethical offices in the horizontal “beam” relate to the movement from heaven to earth (or earth to heaven) in the vertical “beam.”

The priestly Table is oriented up towards the throne, and the kingly Lampstand is oriented down towards the earth. Priestly submission to heaven brings kingly dominion on earth—and then prophetic authority.

If we align these elements with their counterparts in the Creation pattern, it helps us to understand their purpose.

Ark

DAY 1: Darkness and light Veil

DAY 2: Waters divided Altar & Table

DAY 3: Dry land and fruit bearers Lampstand

DAY 4: Governing lights Incense Altar

DAY 5: Hosts (swarms) in sky and sea Laver & Priesthood

DAY 6: Spring, land animals, and Man Shekinah

DAY 7: Rest and rule

Notice that the Bronze Altar corresponds to the dry land, with the four horns as four compass points. In Genesis 1 it rises on Day 3, but in the Tabernacle pattern it appears as number 7. That is because the Land that is promised at Ascension is not actually inherited until the final step—Glorification.

Also, Days 1-6 form the house and fill it with “furniture,” but as in Exodus 40:34-35, God does not move in until it is complete and He has judged it to be good.

A stairway to heaven

Since Adam’s body was intended to be God’s first temple, the description of his creation from the dust in Genesis 2:7 follows this exact pattern. When the day came for the “wind” of God to “move in” (like on the Day of Pentecost), the house was not prepared. It had been defiled.

But the human body is still “covenant-shaped,” so the Bible refers to aspects of it to describe acts of obedience and conquest.

The human brain is like the mind of God, hidden behind a veil of flesh. We “see His face” when we obey the light of His Word.

The brain has two hemispheres, perhaps priestly and kingly, and together they speak as a prophet. Likewise, the brain has three levels like the ark of Noah—the cortex (abstract thought), the

mammalian (relationships), and the reptilian (instinct).

The angels are “eyes,” like the two witnesses who guarded Eden. Incense is the heart that pleases God with its fragrant works.

In Revelation, Jesus’ right hand bears the Lampstand churches as seven stars. His left hand brings priest-kingdom, the bread and wine of the new Melchizedek.

The tablets in the Ark were written with God’s finger, so our ten fingers are to take hold of the world in submission to God. This leads to the dominion of the world under our ten toes. Adam took the forbidden fruit and failed to crush the serpent.

The promise of dominion included offspring as well as the Land, so the groin area of the body corresponds to Conquest and the Day of Coverings.

The Tabernacle pictured an ascent to heaven, but it was laid out horizontally upon the ground. Adam was likewise created lying down before God breathed into him and made him “upright,” an image of holiness.

Jesus was nailed to the cross on the ground and lifted up to mediate between heaven and earth, tearing the Veil (Hebrews 10:20) and revealing God’s mind.

Next time we will consider how this Temple architecture functions as God’s War Room. n

REDEEMING THE CULTURE CULTURE

KINGS OF COOL

THE REAL ANTI-HEROES

Jesus rightly identified embarrassment as one of the devil’s weapons (Luke 9:26). Since pride is the core of all sins, many will even sell their souls just to avoid being considered “uncool.”

But it wasn’t always so. In fact, it used to be the other way around. And it will be so again.

In the spiritual ruins of what was previously known as Christendom, the devil rarely gets to use actual violence against the saints.

Thanks to Jesus, our tyrants have to pretend to be anti-heroes— rebels against the establishment. Like Judas, they cover their delusional power-grabs in a veneer of advocacy, altruism, and “Christian” compassion.

Politics is all bait-and-switch for the in-crowd—at least until reality bites and these self-styled elites and experts lose their cred. Mark Bauerlein writes:

We are surrounded by professionals who aren’t that professional, experts who aren’t very competent, leaders who can’t lead but won’t step down. It’s one reason for the populist fervor and the election of Mr. Trump. People highlight the condescension of the elites as a reason for the revolt of the unwashed, but in truth the lower orders are willing to take a little superior attitude from the whitecollar, advanced-degree crowd if they believe that crowd is competent. It’s when elite condescension is paired with elite ineptitude that people without any college degrees gain the confidence to rise up in protest. Anti-intellectualism is spreading because of an old American strain of mistrusting the eggheads. It’s spreading for the simple reason that the intellectuals are unimpressive and negligent and self-involved.1

The real issue is the fact that this world cannot be governed without wisdom from God; He designed it that way. Those who would steal His world have enormous shoes to fill. Their shoulders were not created to bear more weight than the worries of a single day, and, without God’s light, their eyes can only see so far. Even though they are benevolent, completely well-meaning secular rulers can be dangerous simply because they lack God’s wisdom and are

famous comment about responsible governance.

“I’d rather entrust the government of the United States to the first 400 people listed in the Boston telephone directory than to the faculty of Harvard University.” Some might say he was speaking hyperbolically. I don’t think so, but even if he was, if I said it, I wouldn’t be… The ruling elites have a deep set of pathologies going, and many of them have by now manifested themselves as severely dysfunctional. But one of their pathologies that still works on a lot of people is their ability to act convincingly like they are still the arbiters of cool…

prone to deception—including self-deception.

Once the wheels fall off, and without violence as an option (for now), the only tactic left for the protection of the elites’ credibility, and thus their power, is a schoolyard-level ridicule. Douglas Wilson writes:

Most of the really big problems in the world are caused by the smartest guys in the room. Having a high intellectual rpm is not necessarily a good thing. This grim reality reminds me of William F. Buckley’s

We don’t need sophisticated economics. We need people who understand the difference between bigger numbers and smaller numbers. We don’t need nuance in race relations. We need to judge people by the content of their character rather than the color of their skin. We don’t need wise men who manage an endless series of nation-building wars. We need our wars to be purposive, rare, and short. We don’t need a candidate who wins the grudging respect of the professional left. We need a candidate who has an uncanny ability to set them all off as barking mad. In sum, this means we need a candidate who is embarrassing to the conservative establishment.2

So much for the political arena. But the devil is as much, or more, concerned with shaming the religious as he is with shaming the commoners, which are often

By design, this world cannot be governed without wisdom from God.

the same thing anyway. This is because the actual steering wheel of the Land and the World is not in the halls of secular power but in the Garden. Since the serpent has been cast out of heaven’s Sanctuary forever, the worst he can do—apart from making Christianity illegal, which he is achieving little by little—is bring it into disrepute. Wilson again:

Archimedes famously once said “Give me a place to stand and with a lever I will move the whole world.”

If the devil were to go in for such practical mechanics, where would he stand, what lever would he use, if he wanted to move a Christian?

We are talking about what it means to not pay close attention to what we have learned, and what it therefore means to move slowly away from Christ. With many believers today that place to stand is the world and its ways, and the lever is the bar of coolshaming. The world offers us sweets, sure enough—the lust of the flesh and the lust of the eyes—but it also establishes and maintains a value system. That value system is called the pride of life.

“Love not the world, neither the things that are in the world. If any man love the world, the love of the Father is not in him. For all that is in the world, the lust of the flesh, and the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life, is not of the Father, but is of the world” (1 John 2:15-16, KJV).

This is the snare that captured our first parents. They saw that the fruit

was good for food (lust of the flesh), they saw it was pleasant to the eyes (lust of the eyes), and they saw that it was able to make them wise (pride of life). Let us focus for a moment on this last one.

How many times do Christians find themselves avoiding something, or adopting something else, because of how they think their action will be evaluated on a pride of life scale?

Worldliness has a police force, and they do write tickets. That dress is dorky, or that movie is lame, or that book is uncool.

divine wisdom is disguised as foolishness. And this ruse sorts the men from the boys. Douglas Jones writes:

The final and eternal divide between the City of God and the City of Man will be determined by simple, personal embarrassment. On one side of the chasm will be those who were too embarrassed to cling to Christ; on the other will be those who by grace were not embarrassed to be Christ’s fools.

“Let no man deceive himself. If any man among you seemeth to be wise in this world, let him become a fool, that he may be wise. For the wisdom of this world is foolishness with God” (1 Corinthians 3:18-19, KJV).

But in medieval times, when the culture, however imperfectly, was Christian, the coolshaming worked in the opposite direction.

Jones continues:

When such a ticket is “written,” and you feel shame, that is what we call coolshame. And what it means, since you obviously care about the world’s opinion, is that you are in the process of being moved. You are drifting away.3

Of course, the tactic goes to the very heart of what it means to be a Christian, and this is by God’s design. Our Master is much craftier than any serpent, so while the educated elites of the world pass off their myopic bungling as cleverness, His

The medieval attitude toward the truth of Christianity was a delight to behold. They lived it and breathed it. It was taken for granted by commoners and intellectual elites alike. Christianity was such comfortable, common furniture that its opponents looked clearly artificial. Even the unfaithful recognized that they lived in a world under the Lordship of Christ. These are all, of course, generalizations, but the obviousness of Christian truth permeates medieval thinking in the same way that sheepishness regarding

In medieval times, the coolshaming worked in the opposite direction.

Christian truth permeates modern thinking. Medievals weren’t frightened by ideological opponents. After all, they had raced their ideological opponents and triumphed. The pagans longed to imitate Christian culture.

Coolshaming Christianity is not the worst problem. Without the Bible, there would be no Christianity, so the sharpest knife is the one inserted between Christians who take the Bible seriously, and those who attempt to compromise with the wisdom of the age. Jones again:

The final divide between the embarrassed and unembarrassed horrifies those moderns who take the Enlightenment seriously. But it should also horrify modern professing Christians, because so many of us are instinctively embarrassed by the claims of the Christian view of reality. Think for a moment about how many squabbles in the Church stem from not wanting to have moderns thinking we are unenlightened throwbacks … dare we say, medieval?

Consider how agitated we get in our rush to assure our Enlightenment lords that scriptural faith endorses nothing so obviously embarrassing and unmodern and wicked as excommunication, the death penalty, patriarchalism, slavery, a young earth, and monarchy, or that Scripture condemns sodomy, public schools, or whatever else

might make moderns shake their fingers at us.

But the important test question here isn’t whether Christianity teaches an old earth, but what if it clearly didn’t? Would we be embarrassed then? What if the Bible really taught those horrible things mocked so loudly by moderns—would we be ashamed?

This is a wonderful personal test. Think of the most horrible moral or scientific accusation made against the Christian faith and then ask, what if it’s true? Would we be embarrassed to stand by Christ? Or would we thumb our noses at modern scowls?

We are promised that idolatrous wisdom is less than false; it is foolishness. The very first commandment calls us to disdain all other loyalties and fear God alone. “Let God be true, and every man a liar” (Romans 3:4)…

Part of the medieval ability to appreciate the obviousness of Christianity was their maturing understanding of that ancient war between the seed of Eve and the seed of the Serpent, that deep divide between the friends and enemies of God. If we aren’t in the midst of a war, then any talk of enemies and subversion sounds rather silly and paranoid. That is the modern Christian predicament. We agree with our contemporaries that we’re all at

peace, working toward the same pleasant neighborhood goals, when in fact we stand stupidly in the middle of a total war assuming we are at a banquet.4

Ignoring the world’s opinions is, likewise, a really big lever. And nobody is as cool as a vindicated prophet, especially a dead one.

When Babel falls, Christians will again be the cool kids—but only if we stay faithful to God’s Word. n

1 Mark Bauerlein, “Leaders who can’t lead,” First Things, December 2019.

2 Douglas Wilson, Rules for Reformers, 163-165.

3 Douglas Wilson, “Coolshame,” dougwils.com

4 Adapted from Douglas Jones, “The Emerging Divide,” Angels in the Architecture: a Protestant Vision for Middle Earth, 47-49.

contributors this issue

Michael Bull is a graphic designer and author who lives in the Blue Mountains west of Sydney, Australia. His passion is understanding and teaching the Bible.

Eric Pyle is a software developer for Wycliffe Bible Translators. He and his wife Allison are based in the Dallas area with their three kids.

J. Brandon Meeks (PhD, University of Aberdeen) is a writer, studio musician, and sometime poet. He serves as Theologian-in-Residence at his Anglican parish in Arkansas.

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