Deborah
(around 1125—her song is one of the most ancient
pieces of writing in the Old Testament)is a prophetess at this time and
also a judge. As judge, she sat under a
palm tree situated in the hill country of Ephraim, between the towns of Ramah
and Bethel. She sends for Barak, son of
Abinoam, from Kedesh in the territory of Naphtali to fight against Sisera. He is to go to Mt. Tabor with 10,000 men from
the tribes of Naphtali and Zebulun. She
will draw Sisera to the place and “give him into your hand” (4:7). He insists
that Deborah come with him, and she warns him that to do so will mean that the
victory he will win will not have the kind of glory it would have without her
presence (4:9).
Then another man is introduced—Heber, the
Kenite. The Kenites, it says, were descended from Hobab, the father-in-law of
Moses. Now
Moses’ father-in-law is called Reuel in Ex odus2 and Jethro in other places, so
who is Hobab?
Sisera comes out with his 900 chariots of
iron, but his men panic when Barak attack and Sisera himself flees on foot (4:15)
from Barak. He goes to the tent of Jael, wife of the said Heber - there
was peace between King Jabin and the clan of Heber. Jael greets Sisera and
invites him into her tent. She gives him
something to drink and covers him with a blanket. He sleeps, but instead of watching for him at
the opening of the tent, she runs a
tent-peg through his head (4:21).
When Barak arrives, Jael shows him her work,
and the people attribute the victory over Sisera to God.
Origen (185-254 AD)
De Principiis (First
Principles)
Chapter VI – On the
End or Consummation
3 – Some of the
“beings who fell away from that one beginning” fell to such depths of depravity
that they are “deemed undeserving” of the instruction human beings are assisted
with.
They just do not look back to the time of perfection from which they started. These
beings are called “the devil and his angels, and the other orders of evil,
which the apostle classed among the opposing powers.”
Origen
seems to leave undetermined whether any of these “orders” acting under the
devil and obeying his commands “will in a future world be converted to
righteousness because of their possessing the faculty of freedom of will, or
whether persistent and inveterate wickedness may be changed by the power of
habit into nature.” He seems drawn to the POSSIBILITY of a universal salvation
scenario, but for the present seems to say that the present variety of moral conditions will place all these “beings”
into a setting a lot like Dante’s Inferno and Purgatorio.
“But
in the meantime, both in those temporal worlds which are seen, as well as in
those eternal worlds which are invisible, all those beings are arranged, according to a regular plan,
in the order and degree of their merits; so that some of them in the first,
others in the second, some even in the last times, after having undergone
heavier and severer punishments, endured for a lengthened period, and for many
ages, so to speak, improved by this stern method of training, and restored at
first by the instruction of the angels, and subsequently by the power of a
higher grade, and thus advancing through each stage to a better condition,
reach even to that which is invisible and eternal.”
He lets his
imagination go with the idea that there will be a “new heaven and a new earth.”
No comments:
Post a Comment