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Extreme Walking. Tom de Bruin
Читать онлайн.Название Extreme Walking
Год выпуска 0
isbn 9781532615764
Автор произведения Tom de Bruin
Жанр Религия: прочее
Издательство Ingram
Progressive Understanding
As I wrote above, the Bible is full of progressive understanding. This is specially the case with Satan. As you read backwards from the New Testament, everything falls into place. But without the New Testament, you would have a completely different view of Satan. He is not portrayed as rebellious. At most he is the devil’s advocate, testing the righteousness of individuals on God’s behalf. He does not tempt people to sin, but does keep a close eye on everyone to see if they are sinning. Maybe from his point of view it would be a victory if someone were to sin, but his divine task is proving that people are righteous. He shows that a person will be faithful no matter what, just as he did with Job. The word “satan” itself is not even a bad word in some contexts. Even an angel can be a satan when doing God’s bidding.
Now, I’m itching to step off the path. I see so many interesting things just out of reach. So many things that we can discover. Don’t get me wrong—the Old Testament has already shown us many intriguing perspectives but, trust me, where we are going is even more intriguing. If you were paying attention, and if you have a good knowledge of the Old Testament, you know that I have skipped a passage. The final place that Satan appears is in Chronicles.
First and Second Chronicles are the newest books in the Old Testament. If what I have been saying about progressive understanding is correct, we should see some of that in this book. It should show us a glimpse of the further revelation of God in the Bible. And, don’t worry, it does.
New and Improved Version
Chronicles is basically a retelling of the books of Samuel and Kings. You could call it Samuel & Kings: The New and Improved Version. Maybe we could compare it to a new Bible translation. When you read it, it feels a bit strange. The wording is different and unfamiliar, but often it is a lot easier to understand. Chronicles is the same: different and unfamiliar to Samuel and Kings, but often easier to understand. Read what 2 Samuel says and how Chronicles relates it:
Again the anger of the Lord was kindled against Israel, and he incited David against them, saying, “Go, count the people of Israel and Judah.” (2 Samuel 24:1)
Satan stood up against Israel, and incited David to count the people of Israel. (1 Chronicles 21:1)
David is going to hold a census. It is not entirely clear to me why counting the Israelites is so bad. Maybe David was planning to use this information to boast about how many subjects he had, or maybe David didn’t stick to the rules from the Torah for holding censuses. Whatever the reason, it is clearly very bad. Joab advises David not to count, and when David is done he is very sorry that he did.
In Samuel, David counts his people because God is angry. I can understand that God gets angry sometimes, but that God then makes David do something that both he and God regret is harder to understand. Especially if you read the rest of the chapter and see the terrible consequences of this census. This is even more mystifying if we consider that God is portrayed so lovingly in the New Testament. I find it hard to imagine that God does this. Apparently, so did the editor and author of Chronicles. They must have read this narrative and known that there was something else going on. Of course, it wasn’t God who put David on this track of destruction, it had to be Satan. In their version, they fixed the theology.
Let us leave the Old Testament behind us now. In fact, let’s step off that path and go exploring. As we walk, the undergrowth is getting thicker, the going is getting tougher. What do we see?
Jubilees
In the third week of that jubilee the polluted demons began to lead astray the children of Noah’s sons and to lead them to folly and to destroy them. And the sons of Noah came to Noah, their father, and they told him about the demons who were leading astray and blinding and killing his grandchildren. And he prayed before the LORD his God and he said, “God of the spirits which are in all flesh, who has acted mercifully with me and saved me and my sons from the water of the Flood and did not let me perish as you did the children of perdition, because ‘Great was your grace upon me, and great was your mercy upon my soul. Let your grace be lifted up upon my sons, and do not let the evil spirits rule over them, lest they destroy them from the earth. But bless me and my sons. And let us grow and increase and fill the earth.’”4 (Jubilees 10:1–3)
This passage is about demons that lead people astray, that blind and kill. They lead people to sin, they blind them from the truth, and they kill them. They don’t personally kill people, but lead them to sin and its wages: death. They are evil demons that have nothing good in store for Noah and his family. Here is an image of the forces of darkness that is much closer to home. This is more like what we are used to, and very different to what we saw in the Old Testament.
The passage above is a part of Jubilees. This book was written about 200 BCE, probably by a priest or another theologically trained person. Jubilees fantasizes about what Moses saw when he was on Sinai for forty days (Exodus 24:18). In fifty chapters Moses writes down everything that the angel told him. Every single detail of history, from the very beginning at creation, all the way up to Moses’s time. In Jubilees thousands of years of history are written down by Moses on mount Sinai. This is obviously not how Jubilees came to be, but it is a nice piece of fiction that fits into biblical history.
Noah
After a while the angel starts to tell Moses about Noah. Noah has survived the flood and wants to get on with his new life on a clean earth. But all is not going according to plan. Demons are being irritating. They are messing things up for Noah and his family. They can’t go a day without some demon or other coming along and pestering them. Finally it’s the last straw, and the children come to complain to Noah.
Noah, the patriarch, is the person who has to pray to God. So he gets down on his knees. He reminisces about the time of the flood, and about how God’s mercy saved him and his children from death. Then he asks for more mercy. He does not want the evil spirits to master his children. These spirits are clearly very dangerous, for if they lead his children astray, the children will be lost. Noah’s prayer does not stop there. He continues:
And you know that which your Watchers, the fathers of these spirits, did in my days and also these spirits who are alive. Shut them up and take them to the place of judgment. And do not let them cause corruption among the sons of your servant, O my God, because they are cruel and were created to destroy. And let them not rule over the spirits of the living because you alone know their judgment, and do not let them have power over the children of the righteous henceforth and forever. (Jubilees 10:4–6)
Apparently Noah knows a lot about these spirits. He knows where they came from and he knows what their power is. The demons are children of something Noah calls “your Watchers.” These Watchers were, if we can judge by Noah’s tone, not the nicest people around. They must be very important: why else would Noah bring them up? So who, or what, are these Watchers?
The Watchers
The Watchers are often discussed in extrabiblical books. The birthplace of all these discussions is an obscure passage in Genesis. Out of nowhere, the book talks about sons of God who see that the daughters of humanity are beautiful and marry them (Genesis 6:2). These sons of God have children with human women, and “the Nephilim were on the earth in those days” (Genesis 6:4). And the children of the sons of God and humanity are “the heroes that were of old, warriors of renown” (Genesis 6:4). In the very next verse, Genesis starts to discuss how incredibly evil humanity was, and then comes the flood. These Nephilim are only found in one other Bible verse, which calls the people in the promised land “Nephilim,” or, as most translations read, “giants” (Numbers 13:33).
It should be quite apparent that this is not the easiest passage from the Bible to interpret. For centuries people have been interpreting it in different ways. Who are these sons of God? Are the Nephilim the fruit of the marriage between the sons of God and humankind? What does the word Nephilim even mean? Are they giants? What is the link between these four verses and the flood? All of these questions led to a huge, fantastical discussion outside of the