‘Behold, the Lamb
of God’
ide
o amnos tou theou
College Study
84th teaching
9.8.2014
“Theophany”
Review:
Last week, we began a new
section of Christology which we’re calling the Life of Christ. You can see that
we’ve moved through the intro to Christology, where we asked “Who is Jesus
Christ”, and we’ve moved through the second section: “The Nature of Christ”,
and we’re now in this third section. And beginning this new section, we
entitled our study appropriately as: “In the Beginning”. Since it was a new
section, I encourage you guys who missed last week to go back and read over the
notes on the blog.
So last week we began at the beginning, or to
borrow the language of John chapter 1, in the beginning, and we took a close
look at John’s description of this thing he calls the Logos. Our goal was to
discover what the Life of Christ was like before
the incarnation, in what is known as the Pre-Incarnate State. What was the
life of the Son of God like before He was born of a virgin, before even the worlds
were made?
We discovered 5 things about the Logos: His
eternity, His community, His deity, His creativity and His personality, meaning
that He was always in existence, eternal, He was with God, community, He is God, deity, He created all things, creativity,
and He is called a He not an “it”, personality, the Logos is a person not a
force or energy.
And we talked about John’s genius in using both
Hebrew and Greek language and terms, both groups of people could identify with
what he was talking about: the Hebrews would read “in the beginning” and think
back to Genesis, and the Greeks would read “the Logos” and think back to all
the philosophy in their cultural history. But the real kick in the pants, the
real shocker, something that neither the Hebrew or Greek anticipated, was when
John takes this concept of the Logos in the beginning, this transcendent Entity
we call God, and says that he saw the Logos, that in fact the Logos became
flesh and dwelt among men, walked among humankind as a human.
Finally, we found that matter, space and time were
not primary, but that the Logos, meaning, purpose, community was first. And we
asked ourselves most importantly: what is the meaning of our lives? Many of the
stories we tell involve the concept of “destiny”, from Star Wars to Lord of the
Rings, and we can’t be putzing around Tattooine picking up power converters or
yutzing around the pubs of Hobbiton, when there is an empire to be overthrown
and an evil ring to be destroyed! I think that God has given each of us
meaning, a destiny, which we are to seek out and fulfill as Christians. But we
can easily miss that destiny by wasting time, “ticking away the moments that
make up a dull day”. It is time for us to awake, to cast off the weights that
are slowing us down, and realize that there is work to be done. Again, I
encourage you, go back and read the notes. Instead of surfing the internet or
watching tv or playing games or sleeping that extra hour, why don’t you use the
time wisely and read the notes and consider these things? Because in the end,
what is really going to matter, that you got your kicks online or on the tele?
Or that you considered the time and used it wisely, before one day you find
that ten years have got behind you?
End
of Review
Turn
to Psalm 18:1-19.
The writer of this psalm, which the
notations identify as David, has described himself as being in this dangerous
situation. His enemies have surrounded him, he has called out to God for help,
and then he gives this eloquent portrait of the LORD God arising in anger to
avenge him, coming down from heaven with all this terrifying power: smoke,
fire, darkness, brightness, hailstones, thunder. The imagery emphasizes God’s
fierce wrath and ultimate power.
Psalm 18 is a good example of this
kind of visual description of God.
But notice that this description has a kind of vagueness and ambiguousness to
it. Does it talk about what God’s face looks like? His skin? Hair? Eyes?
Stature? This vagueness characterizes the visual descriptions of the LORD God
in Scripture. Every time anybody ever saw God, whether in a dream or a vision
or even physically as a tangible appearance, it’s always recounted in these
very unclear descriptions. One commentator said on this subject: “As may be
seen from the descriptions of the various [appearances], the deep monotheistic
spirit of the Israelites hesitates to describe the Divine Being, and confines
itself generally to describing the influence of the revelation upon the minds
and characters of those beholding it.”
The Law forbade the use of carved
images, statues and idols, even to represent God Himself for use in worship.
Just check out the second commandment in Exodus
20. The essence of God is simply too wonderful and too profound to depict
in purely physical terms. Maybe the Renaissance artists could have thought
about that a little bit more, and that’s why we all think of God automatically
in terms of Him being this old man sitting up in heaven. He’s not. What does God
look like then? Hard to say. He is Light. He is invisible. He is a Spirit. The
language of the appearances of God in the Bible, with all of the vagueness,
suggests this fact: that God’s essence cannot really be depicted, or even
understood by our finite minds. Should we for a moment get a full glimpse of
God’s glory crashing down upon us, we would probably implode, or vaporize.
Either way, it’d be extremely painful.
Now what David has described here in
poetic terms is something which he may not have actually seen. His point is not
that he actually had this vision, but his point is that God arose to defend him
when he cried out. But even though David maybe didn’t see this picture, we know
that several others did.
There are scattered occurrences
throughout both the Old and New Testaments, although these are much rarer in
the New, when God was visibly seen and audibly heard by people. Think for a
moment about just how awesome and frightening such an encounter would be!
People didn’t just see God every day. These special and extremely rare visions
are known as in theological terms as theophanies.
That will serve as our title for tonight’s study: simply the word “Theophany”.
Question: how does this subject of
Theophanies fit into our section in the Life of Christ? Well, consider that
we’re still not at the incarnation yet. So what was the Life of Christ like
before the incarnation, during His Pre-Incarnate State? Consider two things
that describe this portion of the Life of Christ: Appearing and Anticipated. Before
His incarnation, the Son of God was appearing and He was anticipated.
These two words will provide our
structure for tonight and for our study next week, leading up to the Life of
Christ at the point of the incarnation. Appearing is the word that describes
our study tonight, that the Son of God made appearances, cameos of sorts,
through the Old Testament, for specific purposes and with specific messages.
Just why this is the Son of God and not the Father appearing will become clear
later on. But for tonight, the word Appearing represents our subject of
“Theophany”.
Next week, we’ll discuss the
Anticipated aspect of the Pre-Incarnate Life of Christ. In a nutshell,
anticipated describes the fact that the Old Testament saints were looking
forward in time, they were looking for the coming Messiah. Their prophets would
speak of the coming Savior, the Child of the Virgin, the Man of Sorrows, the
Son of David. These Messianic prophecies punctuated the time of the
Pre-Incarnate State when believers anticipated His coming.
Tonight we’re considering His
appearances, the theophanies. Next week, we’ll consider His anticipation, the
Messianic prophecies.
But let’s get the elephant out of the
room first. I think there’s maybe some apprehension in talking about theophanies.
We are after all discussing something supernatural, super-rare and far too
wonderful for us to completely understand. And certainly, the subject of
theophanies bridges upon the supernatural and paranormal, the mystical even.
There are many Christian mystics and authors and heretics, and maybe even some
genuine believers, all throughout history who have claimed to have seen God,
the risen Christ, or some kind of physical manifestation. But all of that
aside, there’s no need for any kind of fear in addressing this subject. We’re
sticking closely to only the biblical accounts of theophanies. I don’t really
care about what some mystic claims to have seen on a dark night in 1802, nor do
I really even tremendously care about the actual saints who claim to have
experienced a vision of the Presence of God which turned their life around.
That’s genuinely great for them, if it really happened, but we’re keeping only
to those encounters that we’re absolutely sure happened: the theophanies
recorded in the Bible.
What’s more, there’s no point in
becoming over-fascinated with the theophanies themselves. It’s like those
people who are more concerned with miraculous healing or with prophecies or
with numerology in the Bible rather than the living Savior who died for them.
The theophanies are tremendously
interesting and mysterious, but turning to them above all else as a source of
understanding God would be like me trying to understand my wife just by looking
at her shadow. The substance is Christ Himself. Hebrews 1 says God has spoken to us in these last days by His Son.
Jesus is the final and ultimate revelation of God. Become fascinated with Him.
Too much fascination with the theophanies can lead into dark mysticism and
obsession with the paranormal, I think.
That said, we’re in the clear. We’ve
got a few points tonight:
1.
What is a Theophany?
2.
What are the Characteristics?
3.
The Biblical Theophanies
1.
What is a Theophany?
Theophany comes from two Greek words: theos meaning “god” and phainein meaning “to show, to appear, to
shine, to bring to light”. Theos is
of course where we get the English word “theology” from: the study of God. Phainein
is a word that we eventually got words like “phantasm”, the appearance of a
ghost or spirit; or “epiphany”, which means a sudden realization of something,
still carrying the idea of suddenly “seeing” something new and strange.
So the word “Theophany” literally
means “showing God” or an appearance of God, from theos and phainein. This
is a word that is not unique to Christianity. Pagan literature and myth
includes stories of gods and goddesses appearing visibly to mankind, such as in
the case of Zeus who apparently appeared on earth just to check out the babes.
Yeah, it was a joke anytime any called Zeus a “holy” god. He was more horn-dog
than holy god.
Other very early stories such as the
Iliad and the Epic of Gilgamesh include accounts, fictional ones, of divine
appearances. In fact, in Ancient Greece, the Theophaneia was the name of a
festival at Delphi that was celebrated by displaying, showing, the public the
statues of Apollo and other gods so everyone could see them. These statues
would be taken out of the sanctuary where they were hidden and made visible to
the public, that’s the sense again of the word theophany. So the word isn’t
unique to Christianity.
However, the Bible is simply the only
case in which it is true. There is only one God and He has appeared to men multiple times, not to check out the babes like
Zeusie-boy, but for specific and good purposes.
Note that theophany is different from
anthropomorphisms. A theophany is really seeing something, really having of
vision of something that’s actually there. An anthropomorphism is just
descriptive language that describes God in terms we can understand. The opening
psalm we read would be better understood as anthropomorphic rather than a
theophany. David didn’t really see all that he described, perhaps, but his
language is descriptive in terms that convey meaning to the reader.
Now to continue our lesson in the
Greek language, let me bring up a trio of terms: Hierophany, Theophany and
Christophany. What do they mean?
Hierophany means an appearance of the
sacred. Notice hierophany is the lowest of these three terms. It isn’t
associated with the divine. You cannot call an appearance of God a hierophany.
Hierophany merely describes the appearance of the sacred: such as angels, or
the holy articles of the temple, such as the ark of the covenant, or maybe
visions of heaven would count under this term. This is more of a mystical term
and has little to do with Christianity. Its only application would most
concretely be the appearances of angels, if we’re to use it at all.
Theophany, we already know means an
appearance or manifestation of God. This is the broadest of the three terms and
most appropriate for Christian theology.
Now Christophany is the most specific
of the three and what it means is pretty easy to guess: a specifically
non-physical, non-incarnate appearance of Christ. Christophany is a term that
distinguishes itself from seeing Christ incarnate, in the flesh. Christophany
describes seeing the Son of God, say, during the Pre-Incarnate State of His
existence, as we’ve been discussing. One example, which we’ll read late on, is
one which Martin Luther and the church fathers believed was an example of a
Christophany: the Man who appeared to Joshua, identifying Himself as the
commander of the army of the LORD (Joshua
5:13-15). In fact, so many church fathers and medieval commentators
believed that appearances of God were Christophanies
specifically, that in art up until about 1400AD, God was always depicted with
the features of Jesus, according to author James Hall.
Of these three terms, Christophany
bears the most closely upon our subject tonight. Theophany is still a very
useful term, since there are definite appearances of God which are not
appearances of Christ, such as at Jesus’ baptism, when the Holy Spirit appeared
like a dove. That was a Theophany, not a Christophany.
But here’s why Christophany is such an
important distinction to make when talking about these appearances throughout
the Scriptures. In John 1:18 we
read: “No one has seen God at any time.
The only begotten of Son, who is in the bosom of the Father, He has declared
Him.” In John 6:46 we read: “Not that anyone has seen the Father, except
He who is from God; He has seen the Father” Jesus said speaking of Himself.
God, if you remember, has attributes.
And of those attributes, one of them is invisibility. No one has seen God, at
any time, John writes. God is hidden and unseen. Another attribute of God is
metaphysical light. I Timothy 6:16,
God “alone is immortal and… lives in
unapproachable light, whom no one has seen or can see.”
Well, then, what about Theophanies?
How can we reconcile this? How can you say that God appeared to people and at
the same time say that no one has ever seen God at all.
One of the great strengths of
Christianity is that it is internally consistent. It is not a
self-contradictory religion. God never says He is three Persons and one Person
a the same time, that’d be nonsense. God never says that Jesus is only God and
only man at the same time, nonsense again. So too God is not saying no one sees
Him and at the same time some have seen Him. But the answer is complex.
To briefly answer it, we can say two
things:
a. There is a difference between
seeing God’s actual essence and seeing a manifestation, a kind of façade that
He can put on and take off at will, hence the temporariness of the theophanies
that appear and disappear.
b. Christophany is a good word.
Jesus clarified John’s statement: no one has seen God means no one has seen the
Father specifically. The Father, in a sense, represents the perfectly
transcendent, incomprehensible essence of God. No one has seen the Father. But
we have seen Jesus. In fact, the physical manifestations or theophanies of the
Old Testament must really all be Christophanies more specifically. If no one
has seen the Father, then the appearances of God must be appearances of God the
Son.
Justin Martyr, was a 2nd
century Christian apologist, a defender of the faith, who went to be with the
Lord in the year 165AD. It will be incredible to meet some of these early
Christians in heaven, those like Justin who stood and defended the faith against
the creeping heresies of the early centuries.
Among Justin’s accomplishments was his
interpretation of the Logos as being the Angel of the Lord in the Old
Testament. If you read about the Angel of the Lord, you’ll find Him accepting
worship as God and being addressed as the Lord. What Justin Martyr did was
equate the appearances of the enigmatic figure, the Angel of the Lord, which is
clearly an appearance not of a regular angel but of God Himself if you read the
accounts, as appearances of Christ prior to His incarnation. Thus he rendered
many Old Testament theophanies as Christophanies, such as the Angel of the Lord
wrestling with Jacob, appearing in the burning bush and so on.
You know, you’ve got a lot to be
thankful for. Be thankful that a lot of really smart people paved the way for
much of Christian theology. So give ol’ Justin a high-five when you meet him in
heaven.
What have we learned so far? Theophany
means an appearance of God. It is not a word that is unique to Christianity,
although the Bible is the only case in which it actually happened. Of the three
words Hierophany, Theophany and Christophany, the first is hardly ever useful,
the second is the broadest term, and the third is a very specific term. Nearly
every appearance of God is probably a Christophany since no one has seen the
Father. The Angel of the Lord is a figure in the Old Testament who is addressed
as the Lord, and is a Christophany.
2.
What are the Characteristics?
What characterizes a theophany, an
appearance of God? Now there are certainly many different kinds of appearances.
Some of the theophanies are humanoid, human-like in appearance, such as the Man
that Joshua saw or the Man that came with two angels and ate lunch with
Abraham. But there are other theophanies that are notably non-human in
appearance: the fire on Mount Sinai, the dove at Jesus’ baptism, the glory of
God filling Solomon’s temple.
A Rabbi once said to his student, upon
looking at his reflection in different mirrors: “Behold, your own figure
appears differently because the mirrors reflect it differently; how much more
must the glory of God be mirrored differently by different human minds?”
Though there are tremendous
differences between the theophanies and the different appearances vary from
ordinary to extremely unusual, there are some common characteristics shared
between nearly all, if not all of them. Let me give you five, five
characteristics of a biblical theophany:
a. Evanescence
Theophanies are marked by being
fleeting and temporary. God appears, delivers His message, and often disappears
just as suddenly as He came. Theophanies are appropriate for the moment and
then the appearance is gone. It’s not like God appeared to Moses in the burning
bush and then stayed like that, just burning and burning for years, and you can
go see it still burning today. No, when the vision was done, it was done, and
so far as we know God never appeared in that same likeness again
b. Vagueness
Now we touched on this already. There
is a kind of dreamlike quality to the theophanies in that they are not very
descriptive. Sometimes all that is seen are lights and fire and cloud. John’s
writings in Revelation are a perfect example. He hardly describes the form
seated on the heavenly throne, but he describes the light radiating from Him
and surrounding Him. This distinguishes theophanies from the incarnation. Can
we call the incarnated Christ walking around in a real human body an actual
Christophany? I don’t think you can. There’s a difference between a vision or
appearance of Christ and then the actual, physical flesh and blood incarnation
of Christ that could bleed and feel pain and grow and become weary and so on.
If you were confused about that, don’t be. Let’s just not equate Christophanies
with the incarnation. We’re talking before His incarnation and after His
ascension into heaven, strictly
c. Danger
God told Moses in Exodus 33:20, “You cannot see
My face; for no man shall see Me and live.” There’s an inherent danger in
experiencing a theophany. God, we know, is perfectly holy and being perfectly
holy, he is perfectly angry about sin. He should be. He could not be perfectly
good if He did not care about evil at all, if He was just indifferent to it. So
then, there’s a danger in bringing into close proximity a Supreme Being that
reacts strongly to sin and a human being who is simply crawling with sin. It’s
like mixing two volatile and reaction solutions together and the outcome can be
extremely dangerous. God’s words to Moses underscore the fact that seeing God
can actually be fatal to humans.
d. Fear
The saints understood their sinfulness
in the Presence of God. Isaiah said “Woe
to me! For I am undone; because I am a man of unclean lips, and I dwell in the
midst of a people of unclean lips: for my eyes have seen the King, the LORD of
hosts.” Moses hid his face and was afraid to look at God. This kind of
theophobia struck anyone who chanced to encounter an appearance of the Living
God. Human fear marks a genuine understanding of God’s presence. I’ve said it
before, and I’ll say it again, since it might be one of my favorite theological
statements: God is not a teddy-bear. God is a very real, very powerful and very
holy Being, and our sins that we so tolerate and flirt with have no toleration
in God, so much so that He went to the lengths of dying to wash them away so He
could call us His own.
e. Natural consequences
A lot of the theophanies, though not
all of them, are marked by natural occurrences as supernatural meets natural.
Job saw a whirlwind. Mount Sinai was enflamed with fire and smoke. Thunder and
lightning often characterizes the appearances of God. It’s as if His very
Presence has a profound effect upon the natural environment. Not all the time,
sometimes the theophanies were very subtle.
So some characteristics of a theophany:
temporary, ambiguous, dangerous, fearsome and often disruptive to the natural
environment.
3.
The Biblical Theophanies
Here’s how it’s going to work. We’re
each going to draw from this pool of references and see which theophany you
get, and then you’ll read that passage. I’ve got a pool of about 20 references.
These aren’t all of them, mind you. We’ll see how far we get, making minimal
comments on each one. What we’re doing is just getting an idea of the biblical
appearances, seeing what the saints saw, and not necessarily making
interpretations on them.
i. The Eden Theophany — Genesis 3:6-9, God walking in bodily
form through the garden in the cool of the day, a beautiful picture of the
leisure and innocence that Adam once enjoyed in Eden before sin.
ii. The Abraham Theophany — there are two
here: Genesis 17:1 without any
description of the vision at all, and a more detailed appearance in Genesis 18:1-15.
iii. The Isaac Theophany — Genesis 22:1-14.
iv. The Jacob Theophany — Jacob had at least
two visions of God, but the one we’ll focus on is in Genesis 32:24-30.
v. The Burning Bush — Exodus 3:1-6.
vi. The Pillar of Cloud and Fire — Exodus 13:20-22.
vii. The Sinai Theophany — Exodus 19:14-21.
viii. The Moses Theophany — Exodus 33:17-23 and Numbers
12:6-8
ix. The Joshua Theophany — Joshua 5:13-15.
x. The Temple Theophany — I Kings 8:6-13, later the prophet
Ezekiel would envision the same glory of the Lord departing from that same
temple built by Solomon when the nation had so turned against God.
xi. The Elijah Theophany — I Kings 19:4-13.
xii. The Job Theophany — Job 38:1-3, short one.
xiii. The Isaiah Theophany — Isaiah 6:1-5.
xiv. The Ezekiel Theophany — Ezekiel 1, this is the longest one on this list, since nearly the
entire chapter of twenty-eight verses is describing the vision, but just read 1:26-28, everything else describes the
attending angelic beings and their wheels.
xv. The Fiery Furnace Theophany — Daniel 3:19-25.
xvi. The Baptism of Jesus — Matthew 3:13-17, I find the words “like a dove” the most mysterious. Did it look like an actual dove
or kind of like a dove, was it a shining bird-like shape or did it merely
invoke the imagery of a dove? I bet you never thought that the Calvary Chapel
logo, this dove at Jesus’ Baptism representing the Holy Spirit, is actually a
theophany. So you can say for certainly that Calvary’s logo is actually a
theophany.
xvii. The Mount of Transfiguration — Matthew 17:1-8, the cloud is no doubt a
reference to the Old Testament cloud of the glory of God that had filled the
temple.
.
The Pentecost Theophany — Acts 2:1-4, an appearance of the Holy
Spirit.
xviii. The Stephen Theophany — Acts 7:54-60, Stephen was the first Christian martyr and this
vision may be the earliest one of the risen and ascended Christ.
xix. The Road to Damascus — Acts 9:1-9, the only visible appearance is the light.
xx. The Revelation — There are so many
theophanies and crazy things happening in Revelation, but we can look at Revelation 4:1-6, the vision of God’s
throne room.
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