Leviticus 26 – There can be no idols
or sacred pillars and the Sabbath must be honored.
Then
comes the setting forth of blessings and curses—this was common in contracts in
the ancient Near East according to Schocken (632]. The reward for obedience will be God’s care—rain, harvests, food in
abundance, security in the land, peace (26:5-6).
“I will set my
Dwelling among you, and will not disdain you. Ever present in your midst, I
will be your God, and you will be my people; for it is I, the Lord, your God,
who brought you out of the land of the Egyptians and freed you from their
slavery, breaking the yoke they had laid upon you and letting you walk erect” (26:11-13).
But if you reject me,
“then I, in turn, will give you your deserts” (26: 16)—no crops, devastation,
war, pestilence. Five stages of disobedience and punishment
are described, the last of which will be that the Lord will scatter them among
the nations (26:33).
But then, “when their uncircumcised hearts are humbled and they make amends
for their guilt, I will remember my
covenant with Jacob, my covenant with Isaac, and my covenant with Abraham;
and of the land, too, I will be mindful.
But the land must first be rid of them, that in its desolation it may
make up its lost Sabbaths, and that they, too, may make good the debt of their
guilt for having spurned my precepts and abhorred my statutes. Yet even so, even while they are in their
enemies’ land, I will not reject or spurn them, lest, by wiping them out, I
make void my covenant with them; for I, the Lord, am their God” (26:41-45).
[The
Book of Leviticus ended here once. The
next chapter is an appendix, meant to go over how the sanctuary was to be
supported monetarily]
Leviticus 27 – Covers the price of
“redeeming” people or offerings of other kinds (houses, fields, made or “dedicated” (given in a “vow of offering”) to
the Lord. These are offerings other than
“first-born,” which are necessarily dedicated to the Lord. It refers to human
beings that are “doomed” (27:28). They
cannot be redeemed.
Irenaeus of Lyons
(c.180 AD)
Valentinus, Secundus,
Cerdon and Marcion
11 – Irenaeus notes that
there are a number of different gnostic thinkers – “two or three of them
anyway” and they don’t necessarily agree on the ideas they have. Valentinus
seems to be his greatest concern. He goes on to outline the key concepts of
Valentinus’ approach. There are many names associated with the different parts
of the system: the “unnamable Dyad” [Ineffable and Silence], “a second Dyad”
[Father and Truth]; a “Tetrad” from which come “Logos and Zoe [Wisdom],
Anthropos [Man] and Ecclesia [Church].” There are powers that come from these. This is just to give you all a flavor of what he is trying
to explain. He obviously does understand their entire system of thinking. I
think the key things are the following: Gnostics like Valentinus thought that
the God of the Old Testament was only what he called a “Demiurge.”
The
other gnostic thinkers see things somewhat differently but use the same big
concepts – Ogdoad, Tetrad, Aeons, Proarche, Monad – Look them up - they are interesting but way beyond what I can analyze here. He makes fun of the
complexity of their thinking. They all believed that only those who immersed
themselves in the mystical and deeply complex “truths” they saw could ever
“come to salvation.” The body “cannot be saved.”
The
gnostics denigrated the Jewish scriptures. Marcion “dared publicly to mutilate
the Scriptures, and more than any others to malign God shamelessly” but
Irenaeus seeks in his treatises to refute them, “convicting him from his own
writings, and from the words of the Lord and the apostles, which he preserves
and uses, I will overthrow him, with the help of the Lord.”
He
says that “all those who corrupt the truth and injure the teaching of the
Church are the disciples and successors of Simon Magus the Samaritan. Although,
in order to deceive others, they do not confess the name of their teacher, yet
they teach his views. Setting up the name of Christ Jesus as a kind of decoy,
but in one way or another introducing the impiety of Simon, they bring many to
destruction, spreading their evil teachings under a good name . . .”
No comments:
Post a Comment