Tag Archives: Old Covenant

Bible Study

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Again he entered the synagogue, and a man was there with a withered hand. And they watched Jesus, to see whether he would heal him on the Sabbath, so that they might accuse him. And he said to the man with the withered hand, “Come here.” And he said to them, Is it lawful on the Sabbath to do good or to do harm, to save life or to kill?” But they were silent. And he looked around at them with anger, grieved at their hardness of heart, and said to the man, “Stretch out your hand.” He stretched it out, and his hand was restored. The Pharisees went out and immediately held counsel with the Herodians against him, how to destroy him. (Mark 3:1-6)

Greetings, my beloved Brethren. Today we are going to look at God’s Holy Word as revealed to our dear brother in the Lord, the one who will one day be called ‘Mark’. We’re looking specifically at the passage above, because some of you have expressed difficulty in discerning the full import of the text. I have to say I’m surprised at this. You only have to bear in mind Mark’s rule of thumb that everything in his gospel is a metaphor, which, when looked at with discernment, reveals a previously hidden mystery: 

To you has been given the secret of the kingdom of God, but for those outside everything is in parables, so that “‘they may indeed see but not perceive, and may indeed hear but not understand, lest they should turn and be forgiven’” (Mark 4:11-12, referencing Isaiah 6:9)

Our passage today begins with the Lord healing a man with a withered hand, which should straight away alert us to the fact we are dealing with metaphor. All of the healings in the gospels are. They stand for something more significant than any actual healing.

Some of you might already have made the connection between the use of ‘withered’ here, with its use in another story (Mark 11-12-14), where Jesus withers an unfruitful fig tree. Of course, no actual fig trees were harmed during this miracle. The fig tree and its withering are metaphors.

The tree, you see, is a metaphor for the Jewish system of worship, the old Covenant of the Law. This had reached the end of its life. It was fruitless and God was done with it. He was in the process of replacing it with salvation through Grace. All of this is represented metaphorically by Jesus cursing the fig tree and causing it to wither.

So it is in our passage today, except this time, God offers healing to the Jewish nation. He is nothing if not gracious, reaching out and offering acceptance into the new Covenant, expressed here as the healing of a withered hand. You won’t have missed the fact – again symbolic – that the healing occurs in the synagogue, the Jews’ place of worship. We might also remember Deuteronomy (6:8) where the Lord God instructs the Jews to wear his Law on their foreheads and, more significantly, to tie them to the backs of their hands. But now their hands have, metaphorically speaking, withered away, just as the fig tree will.

God knows of course that few will accept his proffered healing, insisting instead of labouring blindly under the old Covenant. The rest of the story reflects this stubbornness and the incalcitrant attitude as the Pharisees – metaphors for the Jews as a whole – round on Jesus and castigate him for breaking the Sabbath laws in healing the man – in spiritual reality the Jews themselves. That Jesus heals on the Jews’ sacred day is metaphorical too, demonstrating as it does that all the old laws are now surpassed. Jesus, and more importantly his followers – you, my dear brethren – are no longer under the yoke of that law but have new freedom serving Jesus under his new yoke, which is easy to bear. At the end of the story, the Pharisees – the Jewish leaders of our own time, lest we forget – leave to plot against the Lord; in reality against us. With his help we will of course bear this persecution stoically.

So you see my brothers, this story was written for you, to remind you that you are saved. You are the New Covenant. The Old has passed away. You can follow Jesus’ example and do good, yea, even on the Sabbath. You need not fear the Jews or others who might persecute you because the Lord is with us. The Jews, on the other hand, will soon be cast into outer darkness when he comes in person. Even so, Lord Jesus, come quickly.

I hope this has made clear to you the mystery hidden in this part of Mark. I know there will be some of you who are not sufficiently advanced in their understanding of the mysteries, being still babes in Christ, and may yet object to this exposition of the deeper secrets of the Lord. So be it. But don’t say you haven’t been made aware of the Truth.

Next time, if there are those who need to know more of the mysteries hidden in God’s new revelation, we can look at the next part of Mark, though I trust that you are, by now, developing sufficient spiritual insight to discern for yourselves the hidden mysteries embodied by the gospel’s metaphors.

Ken Ham’s ‘Five Evidences that the Bible is True’

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Yes, that’s what he says: ‘evidences.’ Good use of English there, Kenny. Actually, the article is anonymous, but as it’s on Kenny’s site, and as it features inside his Noah’s Ark vanity-project, we can safely assume he authorised and approved it. That being the case, he can take responsibility for it.

Anyway, here are those ‘evidences’. Be prepared to be underwhelmed:

1. The Bible Is God’s Word

The ‘reasoning’ here is that God inspired the writers so, ipso facto, the Bible must be God’s words.

How do we know God inspired the Bible? Because the Bible appears to say so. But how do we know we can trust what the Bible claims about this and everything else? Duh… because God inspired it. Circular reasoning that gets us nowhere.

But wait, more ‘evidence’ from Kenny: ‘the Bible is authoritative in every subject it addresses’. I guess that’s so long as you exclude all the areas where it isn’t, like those that are scientifically, historically and geographically inaccurate, including the early chapters of Genesis that Kenny loves so much. Then there are those parts that are evidently myth, legend or fantasy.

Yes, apart from all those bits, the Bible is accurate and authoritative.

Isn’t it?

2. The Bible is Unique and Unified

Two claims in one. The Bible is far from unique; there are many religious texts in the world – the Qur’an, the Vedas, the Pali Canon, the Book of Mormon… many with evidence of several authors at work in them. Neither is the Bible unique because it is ‘unified.’ It is not unified. It is contradictory and inconsistent: the so-called ‘new covenant’ cuts across the ‘everlasting’ agreement God allegedly made with the Jews and YHWH himself evolves, even having a personality transplant somewhere between the Old and New Testaments. Most significantly, for what is supposedly its central message, the Bible offers several, frequently mutually exclusive, ways to salvation.

3. The Bible Has Been Faithfully Passed Down.

This is empirically, demonstrably false. Many books of the Bible were written decades, even centuries, after the events they purportedly describe; the oral tradition is an unreliable means of transmission; texts were altered both by accident and on purpose; some books are patent forgeries; ninety percent of surviving manuscripts were created 800 years or more after the originals, and none of these ‘autographs’ survive for anyone to determine how ‘faithful’ later copies might be.

4. The Bible Contains Fulfilled Prophecy

It does? Where? Is it in the gospels where Jesus prophesies that the Son of Man will, in the lifetime of his listeners, return through the clouds to judge the tribes of the Earth and establish God’s Kingdom? Is it in the contrived symbolic events imposed on Jesus’ life to make it look like he fulfilled prophecy, even when the earlier ‘prophecies’ were not prophecies at all? Is it in Paul’s letters where he promises the rapture will be coming while those in his churches still live? Is it in the many prophecies that were written after the events they were supposedly predicting? Is it in the innumerable prophecies that didn’t come to pass?

That’s right; not one of these bits of malarkey constitutes ‘fulfilled prophecy’.

5. The Bible Holds the Key To Eternal Life

No, it doesn’t because there’s no such thing. This is the great swindle at the heart of Christianity; a fantasy dreamed up by fanatics, fantasists and psychotics, and preserved in the Bible. Christians are singularly unable to provide any evidence that anyone has ever gone on to have a life after death, nor that they ever will. We know now, as we may always have suspected, that when the body dies ‘we’ die with it. End of.

So, every one of Ham’s ‘evidences’ is false; a sham like his beliefs and the book from which they spring. You’ll struggle to tell him so, however, because like so many Christian web-sites, there’s no posting of comments; Kenny broaches no dissent. That’s how confident he is of his case. Best not to entertain any views other than your own weak, unfounded assertions.