Fr. Andrew Stephen Damick: Good evening, everyone! Welcome back to The Lord of Spirits podcast. My co-host, Fr. Stephen De Young, is with me from Lafayette, Louisiana, and I’m Fr. Andrew Stephen Damick in Emmaus, Pennsylvania. And if you are listening to us live, you can call in at 855-AF-RADIO; that’s 855-237-2346, and Matushka Trudi will be taking your calls tonight. Be nice to her. We will get to your calls in the second part of today’s show.

So tonight our show is about Pentecost, but in what is now classic Lord of Spirits form, we have some groundwork to lay before we get to our full point, so be patient, and you’ll find that this pays off at the end. As with any of the major feasts of the Church, there are multiple angles from which one can look at them. With Pentecost, we could discuss the feast as the reversal of the tower of babel, what it means for Christians to acquire the Holy Spirit, who the Holy Spirit himself is, the gift of speaking in foreign languages, and so on, but our starting point tonight is, as with so many things on this podcast, way back in Genesis.

In the first chapter of Genesis, God takes the formless, void world and makes the heavens and the earth and all the life that is in them, and then in Genesis 2, the narrative backs up to the beginning again, and retells the story but with a focus on a place called Eden. So, Fr. Stephen, what exactly is Eden?

Fr. Stephen De Young: Well, Eden is the place where God is.

Fr. Andrew: Right, you mean it’s not like some dusty town in an archaeological dig in Iraq or somewhere?

Fr. Stephen: No. Nor is it at the bottom of the Persian Gulf, nor is it… The last History Channel documentary I watched where they were trying to track down where it was said that there was this city in what’s now Turkey built on top of it.

Fr. Andrew: Oh, there are some who say it’s in Missouri. [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Yes, there’s that. Jackson County.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah. I’ve been there. It’s lovely; it’s quite lovely. [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: There are those who say it’s been paved over and put in a parking lot.

Fr. Andrew: Yes, and there’s our first ‘80s reference for the evening! [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: ‘80s? Wow.

Fr. Andrew: I don’t know. I’ll have to look that up.

Fr. Stephen: Sad, just sad. Anyway.

Fr. Andrew: Eden’s where God is.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and this is what we’re going to be tracing for folks today, to tell you what we’re going to tell you. We’re starting at the beginning of the world, and we’re tracing the place where God is: where he is at different points in time. So this is going to be connected to ideas of sacred space and sacred place.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, so this is a good one to have already listened to the entire podcast up to this point in order to get. [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, hit pause and go back and listen to 30 hours of…

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] You’ll be fine! I mean, you’ll still be able to follow it, but it’ll be much richer if you’ve listened to the sacred geography episodes, if you’ve listened to the body episodes. But anyway, so here we are.

Fr. Stephen: The place where God is is, of course, the place where you would go to meet God. So you can meet a Christian in Christiansands; you can meet the devil in Helsinki. But if you want to meet God, you have to go to certain places.

Fr. Andrew: Right, and the point being made by this is not that there’s places where God isn’t, but rather again this is about human experience, where you meet God, as you said.

Fr. Stephen: Right, this is about where the presence of God intrudes into the time and space that only exist as part of human experience. And that’s… Well, yes, we as all Christians have historically affirmed that God is everywhere within creation and always has been; it’s also very clear, just on a surface reading of the Bible, that there are places where he really, really is. [Laughter] So it’s that “really, really” is that we’re going to be focusing on tonight.

So the first of those places is paradise, which—this is a little bit of review, because we’ve talked about before. “Paradise,” the word, it comes from a walled garden; it’s a Persian loan word. So it is this space that is walled-off, sectioned-off, within the cosmos that has been created. And it is not the entire earth at the time of creation, because, even though when it is planted in Genesis 2, God doesn’t tell us east of where, he tells us that he plants a garden in the east.

Fr. Andrew: In the east.

Fr. Stephen: Which means it has a location. It means there is plenty of cosmos that is not Eden at that point yet.

Fr. Andrew: Right. It’s limited.

Fr. Stephen: And when he creates Adam in Genesis 2, he creates him from the dust of the earth, and then places him in Eden, meaning that earth-dirt that he’s made out of came from somewhere outside, and that wall represents this, that there’s a separation. Of course, we talked about how the intent was that Adam and Eve, as they came to maturity—or at that time Adam and Woman, as they came to maturity—would then leave the garden and take Eden, take the presence of God with them, and would participate in, take part in, be given the grace by God to participate in turning the whole cosmos into Eden, to filling the whole cosmos with God’s presence.

Of course, we also know from Genesis 3 that that is not what happened, and so, at that point, humanity was expelled from the presence of God.

Fr. Andrew: Right, and like most icons of this, you see them walking out of Eden kind of looking over their shoulder, and there’s a cherub there with his flaming sword, and some you get Adam sitting down and weeping over what he’s lost. But the main point is, as you said, that they’re expelled from the presence of God, whether that sort of literally means that they walk through a hole in the walls… Like, it’s not necessarily that way. The point is that they’re not with God any more in the way that they were before. We don’t know if that entailed actually leaving a place the way we would think of it now, but that’s the way that iconographically it’s depicted, and the way it’s described in Scripture, so that’s what we’ve got.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and iconography will often depict the wall that’s around it. And so that wall, that barrier, rather than becoming a place that distinguishes the holy place from the rest of creation, it becomes a barrier between humanity and the presence of God. This is often, as so many things are in the West, looked at as sort of a punishment: “This was this nice place, this was this wonderful place, this blissful place, being in the presence of God, and now you’ve got to go out there into the crummy world because you were bad. I’m sending you away, because you have offended me.”

Fr. Andrew: Right, but that’s not what it’s about. Instead, it’s, as we’ve talked about on this podcast before, when mankind is created, he’s created immortal, created to be immortal, and sustained as being immortal by God. But the problem is then if an immortal being sins, he’s crystallized in his rebellion against God, and so what happens is that God gives them mortality so that they would have the opportunity to repent, because you need mortality in order to be changeable in that particular way. So actually being sent out is a mercy.

Fr. Stephen: Right, it’s not, as God said: it’s not good for man to live forever in this state.

Fr. Andrew: In the state of crystallized sin.

Fr. Stephen: Right, because then he would have been just like the devil, who also fell in Genesis 3, and that would also mean that the devil would have succeeded, because that was the devil’s goal. The devil’s goal was to destroy humanity, to make humanity like himself. That’s always been his goal. That’s still his goal, is to make human persons like himself.

So, yes, God prevents that victory by expelling humanity from his presence, and this dynamic that happens here in Genesis 3 we’re going to see stretches all the way through the Scriptures, this idea that while humanity is sinful and while we’re bearing in our bodies and our souls, our lives, the effects of our sin, it is dangerous for us to come into the presence of God.

Fr. Andrew: Right, and this plays itself out in—well, we’re going to talk about a bunch of the ways that it does, but one immediate way it does, for instance, is when St. Paul talks about an unrepentant person in the Corinthian church that has to be cast out until such time as they repent, because it’s dangerous for them to be there. It’s dangerous for that person to be within the presence of the Church, receiving the holy Mysteries, while they’re living an unrepentant life. I mean, this is also the basis for a lot of our Eucharistic discipline. When someone’s not ready to receive the Eucharist because of some grave sin, they need to be purified before they’re ready to, because, again as St. Paul says, those who receive it in that way, some get sick and some die. He says that. It’s dangerous! It’s dangerous to be in the presence of God when you’re not purified.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and so, just as in paradise man had to be prevented from eating of the tree of life, so St. Paul has to prevent unrepentant people from trying to eat of the tree of life.

Fr. Andrew: Because it would be bad for them.

Fr. Stephen: Yes, and suffering that fate. So this is an act of love by God, both to protect them from his holiness and to give them, then, the opportunity to potentially, eventually, come back. And so what then unfolds, as we move on in Genesis, what unfolds in Genesis 4-6 is we see what can happen in the worst-case scenario. [Laughter] Where God is still very present in the earth with humanity, and humanity—starting with Cain—is becoming more and more wicked and more and more corrupt, and is being more and more dominated by sin, by the powers of death, by the powers of darkness, and that’s building up and building up and building up.

Fr. Andrew: Right in his face, yeah.

Fr. Stephen: Literally. [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, exactly, and so this concept—and we’re going to mention this a bunch of times, because this is an important concept—this is called death by holiness, and it’s basically that if you are in the presence of God and not prepared to be, it’s going to be really bad for you—not because he’s, like, mad or anything like that; it’s just this death by holiness. And we see it a bunch of times in Scriptures. And we’re going to talk about a number of those times.

Fr. Stephen: And God’s holiness is over and over again compared to fire, and in your best-case scenario of coming into the presence of God, it’s like putting iron into the fire and all the impurities are burned away, and the iron is purified. That’s your best-case scenario. In the worst-case scenario, the whole thing gets burned and melted away. So Isaiah, when the flaming coal is brought to his lips to purify them, that’s not a pleasant experience. Don’t try this at home! [Laughter] Having a burning coal pressed to your lips—but that purifies him. And this is because of God’s holiness and because of who he is. This is not that he likes going around torching people as an action.

Fr. Andrew: Right, and this explains why, then, there is this cherub put at the gate of the garden with a flaming sword. It’s not to protect the garden from man defiling it; it’s to protect human beings from entering in a place that would destroy them. That’s what it’s doing there.

Fr. Stephen: Right, because it would be better—remember, the cherub is there to keep them from the tree of life—it’s better for them to die physically than to eat from the tree of life and be immortally dead spiritually. So it’s to stop them from something worse.

As we see this evil and wickedness and sin and demonic activity and corruption build up in Genesis 4-6, this sort of culminates, as we’ve said before, most famously in the giants episode. This sort of culminates in Genesis 6:1-4, and of Genesis 6:1-4, verse 3 is sort of the poor ignored Cousin Oliver of the whole situation that nobody ever talks about, because everybody gets excited about the giants.

Fr. Andrew: Yes, well, people do. [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Which are in verses 1, 2, and 4. Giants and nephilim.

Fr. Andrew: Yes, so verse 3 says: “So the Lord said”—so this is right after the description of the giants coming around. “So the Lord said: My Spirit will not”—and then some translations say, “remain in”; others it says, “contend with.” So: “My Spirit will not remain in” or “My Spirit will not contend with humankind indefinitely, since they are mortal. They will remain for 120 more years.” That’s what that verse says. So what’s going on in that verse?

Fr. Stephen: Right, so God’s Spirit, the Holy Spirit, is in the whole cosmos: he’s everywhere present and filling all things. And that means that all of this sin and wickedness that’s happening, building up to and including what the giants are up to, is happening in God’s presence. So there’s this Hebrew verb that’s used that can mean either “abide in” or “remain in” or “contend with.” It can have a positive or negative connotation depending on context, and I would suggest—this happens very often with Hebrew, especially in Hebrew poetry, but in Hebrew in general—and you even get some of the New Testament writers, because they’re thinking with a Hebrew Aramaic brain doing this in the New Testament—where they will deliberately use a word that can be taken in multiple senses and use it to kind of mean both. It’s por que no los dos. [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: It’s pun fully intended.

Fr. Stephen: [Laughter] Right. It’s “remain in,” meaning remain here in humankind in the cosmos: “My Spirit cannot long remain there,” and part of the reason for that is my Spirit being there is having to contend with: it’s a struggle; it’s a battle. Now you notice he doesn’t say here that he is going to depart.

Fr. Andrew: Right, that’s not this part. [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: He says that the humans are going to depart!

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, they’re going to remain for 120 more years.

Fr. Stephen: And then—[Fffft]. Bad things are going to happen. So this is what produces the flood. The flood happens because God’s presence remains in the world, and their wickedness doesn’t stop.

Fr. Andrew: Death by holiness.

Fr. Stephen: And so life on earth, minus Noah and his family and the life in the ark of salvation, is wiped out, because it is in God’s presence and is wicked.

Fr. Andrew: I feel like, in the back of my head, there is an Avengers: Infinity War joke just percolating up somehow about destroying all life and it being inevitable and so forth, but it’s just not—

Fr. Stephen: This is more than just 50%, though.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Yes, a little bit more than 50%! 99.999… Well, that’s because Thanos isn’t God. He just can’t do that, yeah.

Fr. Stephen: And the reason it’s water, we’ve talked before about the sea, Yam: this is chaos.

Fr. Andrew: Chaos, yeah, the forces of chaos.

Fr. Stephen: So what God essentially does, the way the flood actually happens and the way it’s described, it talks about the water coming up out of the ground and the water coming down out of the sky, which is reversing the second and third days of creation. So God just stops restraining, he stops protecting humanity from the chaos and evil that he’s unleashing in the world. This is how punishment works in the Bible, all the way through.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, there’s patience. God has patience for a while, and then it’s like: “Okay, time’s up.”

Fr. Stephen: When God punishes people, he’s not actively torturing them or inflicting pain and suffering on them. The way punishment works in the Scriptures is God just stops protecting people from their actions and from what they’re doing and lets them suffer the consequences. So this is what happens here. He lets chaos come back and consume the cosmos, and then he re-creates again, takes it back to tohu wa-bohu and then…

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, that’s the “formless and void.”

Fr. Stephen: From Genesis 1:2. And so, then, after, afterwards, we have this symbol of the rainbow, which is not, as some folk might think, “God tied this beautiful shiny bow around the earth. Isn’t it pretty?”

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] No, yeah, it’s “bow” like the weapon, like with arrows.

Fr. Stephen: Right, “bow” like bow and arrows. And God sets it down. It says he places it in the clouds. He sets it down which is, in the Ancient Near East, when someone’s going to war, they’re depicted iconographically as holding a bow—pharaoh is holding a bow, the king of Assyria is holding a bow. So God setting his bow down says, “Okay, I’m not going to go to war with humanity any more, and you will know that this promise is true because you’ll be able to look up in the sky and see my bow still sitting there, that I haven’t picked it up again.”

So he’s saying, when he says he’s not going to destroy the world again, he’s saying, “I’m not going to allow humanity to get to the point where they destroy themselves by being in my presence.” And so that’s why we see… In Genesis 10-11, we see something, at the same time very similar and very different unfold.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, and it doesn’t take long for things to start to go bad again. Noah sets down and they start rebuilding, but there’s wickedness within—I mean, we don’t need to get into it, but there’s wickedness in the house of Noah not too long after all of this. And then eventually you get the 70 nations that are all descended from Noah, and they start doing bad things again, especially one particular construction project. [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Right, and there’s some build-up to that in the genealogies in Genesis 10, which, again, for some reason, not people’s favorite part of Genesis, the genealogies. But there’s this fellow who shows up in the genealogies… There’s a couple of important things in the genealogies, actually. I think we already referenced in a previous episode, the prophecy that Noah’s father, Lamech, makes about Noah, which is really important framing of the flood—or, no, actually, that’s before the flood. In this, at the table of nations in Genesis 10, that’s laying out the 70 nations and how they’re all descended, we run into this fellow, Nimrod.

Fr. Andrew: Right, which is not just a way of referring to— which is not just an insulting thing to call somebody; it’s an actual person. [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Or a super-popular pendant in the ‘70s, to have hanging amidst your chest hair.

Fr. Andrew: Oh wow. That’s a call-back.

Fr. Stephen: You can look that up if you weren’t alive back then.

Fr. Andrew: Yes, so who is Nimrod? This actually came up in The Lord of Spirits Facebook group the other day, asking, “Is Nimrod a giant?” because he’s described as being this mighty hunter before the Lord.

Fr. Stephen: Yes.

Fr. Andrew: Dun-dun-dunn! [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: So Nimrod is indeed… Nimrod is serving the purpose in the narrative of being the founder of Babylon. Now there was actually another Assyrian city named after him, Nimrud, which was the military center of the Assyrian Empire much later, centuries later, but this is all part of Achad; this is all part of the northern part there. But the reason they’re named after him is not that: “Oh, hey, you remember that hunter guy in the Bible, in the genealogy?” [Laughter] The reason for that is that Nimrod, or Nimrud, is the—lexically, it’s the same name as the god Ninurta.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, so who’s that? I think a lot of us have probably never heard of Ninurta.

Fr. Stephen: [Laughter] Well, haven’t you been reading your tablets from the library of Ashurbanipal II? I mean, seriously.

Fr. Andrew: Well, there’s still 90% of them that have not been translated yet, so I haven’t gotten to those. [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Well, that’s what I’m saying! People need to get to it. Come on. They’re sleeping on these tablets! [Laughter] So Ninurta is one of the primary gods of the pantheon and was one of the main gods of the original Babylonian Empire.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, associated with farming, hunting, healing, laws, scribes, and war. So it’s kind of a nice portfolio there.

Fr. Stephen: Right, because he was essentially for a period of time serving the function of most-high god. So if you’re someone who has that role, even for a little while, you tend to take on a big package of stuff. [Laughter]

Now this is the original Babylonian Empire. We have a bad gauge in our heads a lot of the time of how old things are in the Ancient Near East. So when we think of Babylon, because of the Old Testament, we may think of, like Nebuchadnezzar.

Fr. Andrew: Right, that’s a lot later.

Fr. Stephen: Or maybe his dad, Nabopolassar. That’s the Neo-Babylonian Empire. That’s the new one, in the sixth and seventh centuries BC.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, this is, what, a couple thousand years before that?

Fr. Stephen: The original one, yeah. We’re talking about, like, 2500 BC and a few centuries before and after. So we’re talking about Hammurabi; we’re talking about the Martu, who were the biblical Amorites, whom we already talked about in the giants episode a little bit. So this is one of the gods of Babylon at that time. So what the text is doing in Genesis 10 is it’s tying this to this particular nephilim fellow who is the city founder figure, who becomes the god Ninurta. He ends up, his spirit ends up being worshiped by the Babylonians. That’s what’s going on here, and it’s part of Genesis showing us that the whole nephilim thing is even starting to happen again. Just like in the genealogy of Cain that we had before the flood, now we’ve got this genealogy of the nations, and—oh looky, the whole nephilim thing is happening again.

Then this culminates with the Tower of Babel. We talked before about how the Babylonian bavili means the gate of God, the gate of the gods and how this temple, this ziggurat that’s being built was looked at, and how they were trying to draw Yahweh the Most High God down and sort of make him serve their purposes in their ziggurat.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, it’s… Being a gate, it’s essentially rather like trying to break into Eden. “We’ll make our own paradisaical garden on our own paradisaical mountain, and we’re going to make God come down here and be with us and do what we want,” which is… [Laughter] That’s not the way that God set things up in Eden. It’s a violent sort of aggressive technological kind of approach to relationship with God.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and it’s based on this in Genesis that every future empire that’s talked about in the Scriptures, all the way up through and including Rome, is described in terms of Babylon.

Fr. Andrew: It’s the prototypical bad civilization.

Fr. Stephen: Right, starting with the city that Cain founded, this is continuing that streak, and that’s going to continue all the way up into Rome. But so if the same thing is unfolding again, God has promised that he’s not going to wipe everybody out again. So all the people in the world are all gathered around the ziggurat; [they are] trying to call [God] down. He said he’s not going to destroy them all again, so then what is the other option? The other option is for God to remove himself.

Fr. Andrew: To leave.

Fr. Stephen: For God to leave. And so this is why—again, it is out of mercy—this is why God steps back at Babel and, as we read about more in Deuteronomy 32, why, when he steps back, he assigns the 70 nations of Genesis 10 to the sons of God, to angelic beings. So there’s this buffer between him and them, so that they won’t perish.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, and it’s fascinating how much of the action of what goes on in Scripture—and we’re going to see this more and more as we talk—but it’s fascinating to me how much the action of what goes on in Scripture is really about this very basic dynamic of dealing with the problem of death by holiness, of people not being ready to be in the presence of God, so then the things that happen as a result of that. It’s fascinating how this is kind of a unifying principle for so much of what’s going on in Scripture.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, and part of the reason we miss it so often is that, in our contemporary world, we’ve almost completely lost the idea of sacred space.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, right. Even among Christians, they’re like, “Well, isn’t every place sacred?” which what that does is… So that’s correct—although, spoiler alert, we’ll talk about that later—but what that effectively does is it makes it so that nothing is; no place is sacred. Or, for instance, those who object to having holy days in the Church calendar. “Well, every day should be like it’s Christmas!” Well, when every day is like Christmas, then no day is Christmas. You tell someone, “Every day should be like your birthday,” so then no day is your birthday. That’s what tends to happen, is our sense of egalitarianism flattens everything out. Like, that’s in the intro to our show, is that secularism, materialism makes everything flat! This is part of what’s going on.

Fr. Stephen: Right, it doesn’t take what’s lowly and broken and lift it up.

Fr. Andrew: No! [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: It takes what is high and lifted up and pulls it down. And that’s why iconoclasm is such a perfect instance of it, is that it’s pulling down and destroying something that is otherwise beautiful and uplifting.

Fr. Andrew: So now we’ve got: God has withdrawn himself from the nations and assigned angels to them to govern them by proxy, and what happens with them later is—well, we’ve talked about that before, but there’s still this problem, then, of God’s sort of active presence in the world being withdrawn. He’s not going to just leave it that way, just let us be distant. Something’s got to change.

Fr. Stephen: Right, because the goal was… Remember, the goal of the expulsion from paradise was so that there could be repentance, so that they wouldn’t end up eternally condemned. And so the goal of withdrawing here, again, is so that the people won’t perish because God doesn’t want them to perish. So what we get then in Genesis 12, beginning with Abraham—and there’s a monster time-lapse here [Laughter]—but what we get with Abraham in Genesis 12 is the beginning of salvation.

Fr. Andrew: Right, and Abraham is living in the midst of Ur, probably around the time that they’re building a big ziggurat, that they would have looked up and seen this thing and lived in its shadow.

Fr. Stephen: Yes, and that’s where the memory of that, that he was there in the Ur III period, when the great ziggurat of Ur was being built—the memory of that is why you sometimes find, especially in Targumic traditions from later Israel, there are these things connecting Abraham to the building of the Tower of Babel, even though the text clearly doesn’t do that, but that there was this preserved oral memory of the building of a ziggurat in Abraham’s lifetime, and those two things kind of got blended together due to their proximity in the Genesis story.

But so Abraham is the beginning, then, of salvation. This is what distinguishes—lots of theories out there about what distinguishes Genesis 1-11 from the rest of the book of Genesis; sometimes genre, sometimes all kinds of things are suggested, but what really distinguishes it is that Genesis 1-11 is outlining the problem—how we got here—and then Genesis 12 is the beginning of the solution—it’s the beginning of salvation. And this is why, when we get to the New Testament, any time St. Paul or someone else is talking about salvation, they start with Abraham. That’s where they go to, because this is the beginning, now, of the recovery.

So you have Abraham whom Yahweh draws near to personally—and literally he draws near to him personally. He appears to him repeatedly. He stands in front of him and talks to him. But Abraham and his immediate descendants are living as nomads. They leave Ur, and Ur in the Abraham story, notice, is identified as Ur of the Chaldees.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, what’s that about?

Fr. Stephen: It actually isn’t—Ur of the Chaldees. Ur was in Sumeria, not Achad. [Laughter] And the Babylonian Empire didn’t really exist at that time and didn’t control Ur, but, more than that, the term “Chaldean” refers to the Neo-Babylonian Empire. But it’s called Ur of the Chaldees in the Genesis text precisely to make the connection to what just happened with Nimrod and the Tower of Babel.

Fr. Andrew: Ohh! Interesting.

Fr. Stephen: Chaldeans are Babylonians.

Fr. Andrew: Sort of like: Ur, like the Chaldees.

Fr. Stephen: Right, right. So it’s making the point that when God does come and appear to Abraham—Abram at that point—and calls him out, he’s calling him now out of Babylon; he’s calling him out of the city. God had already withdrawn himself from that, and now he’s calling Abram out, to come out with God, away from that civilization.

And so the place where God is, since Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, and Jacob’s sons are living nomadically, the place where God is is with them, wherever they are. So this is why, all the way through up to Moses—and we’ll be talking about Moses more in the second half—when God identifies himself, he doesn’t identify himself as the God of a place.

Fr. Andrew: Right! Which is what most spirits of that time were associated with. The local god, basically, territorially local.

Fr. Stephen: In Genesis 1-11, he’s God Most High; he’s just God, the God of gods. From Genesis 12, on for a good long while, he’s the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.

Fr. Andrew: So it becomes local, but it’s not local to a place; it’s local to these people. He’s with them.

Fr. Stephen: Local to those people, yes. He is with them, wherever they are.

Fr. Andrew: Traveling with them, yeah.

Fr. Stephen: And he appears to all of them bodily. So what we see in terms of sacred space is not a temple or temples—it’s not that kind of thing—but at these places where Abraham, like at Mamre, or Jacob, like at Bethel—

Fr. Andrew: Right, where he wrestles God there.

Fr. Stephen: —where they encounter Yahweh personally, where he appears to them, where they interact with him, they build an altar there. And then that is the place, when they come back ritually and offer sacrifice on that altar, they’re making the time when they were there in the presence of God to be that time again.

Fr. Andrew: So they basically go on pilgrimage back to those places, and by means of offering sacrifice there, they’re there again. They’re then again, I should put it. [Laughter] I have to think fourth dimensionally!

Fr. Stephen: Ritual time-travel, yes.

Fr. Andrew: Yes, exactly!

Fr. Stephen: They don’t travel back in time, but that time becomes this time.

Fr. Andrew: And you don’t have to go 88.8 miles per hour.

Fr. Stephen: Right. You need zero gigawatts of… [Laughter] And, as a note, if you actually look at those altars in the patriarchal narratives, in the stories of the patriarchs in Genesis 12-50, there are twelve of them, and there’s one in each of the territories that God later assigned to the twelve tribes of Israel. So if they had done what they were supposed to do and taken the land they were supposed to take, each one of them would have had one of those shrines within their territory—but of course they didn’t. [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: Disappointing. [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Right. So, I don’t know if that was giggling or not… Before we move to Act II and get to our friend, Moses… Before Moses, there’s this big time gap between the patriarchs and the beginning of Exodus where—

Fr. Andrew: Right, it’s like 500-700 years of space between them. Basically Jacob and sons are in Egypt—and then, 500-700 years later, you get the Exodus. What’s going on? [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Right, you go from 70—not coincidentally—people who go down into Egypt to what’s going to become the nation of Israel. So during that time, during these centuries, where is the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob? Where is Yahweh during this time?

Fr. Andrew: Right, because they’re—as far as anyone on earth is concerned, they’re dead. So God isn’t hanging around in the cemetery. Where’d he go?

Fr. Stephen: So the question is: Did God just withdraw again for a few hundred years and then come back to Moses?

Fr. Andrew: Or follow them into Egypt? I mean, what would happen if he had followed them into Egypt? That would probably have been bad for the Egyptians. [Laughter] As it later is…

Fr. Stephen: So what’s actually in the Bible and some archaeology tell us where he is during those centuries.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, and I’m just going to preface this, everybody, by saying: I had no idea. I had no idea! [Laughter] Yeah, yeah. Put your hats on so that your skulls don’t explode too much here.

Fr. Stephen: So the earliest mention of the name “Yahweh” as a God that we have, outside the Bible is on a wall at a temple at the city of Soleb in Nubia—so this is northern Sudan today.

Fr. Andrew: This would have been an Egyptian settlement, right?

Fr. Stephen: Right. It’s an Egyptian temple built by Pharaoh Amenhotep III, as a temple to Amon-Re. So on the walls of this temple, there are these cartouches, and a cartouche is sort of a way of marking off an inscription. So you have, like, usually an oval shape and then the hieroglyphics are within that.

Fr. Andrew: I remember seeing that for the first time when I was reading Asterix and Obelix comics when I was a kid, because we had the Asterix and Cleopatra comic. Thanks to my dad who bought it in Australia, if you can believe it. True story! That’s how I learned about cartouches! I think I still have it, actually.

Fr. Stephen: It might be worth money.

Fr. Andrew: Oh, it’s probably… yeah, I don’t know.

Fr. Stephen: I don’t judge, but that’s my first thought.

Fr. Andrew: Right? I think, if I still have it, I would have had it since 1982, ‘81? I mean, it’s a long time ago. But that’s how I learned what a cartouche is.

Fr. Stephen: [Laughter] So these cartouches are basically Amenhotep III bragging about all the people whom he’d beat up on in war, and where they were from and sometimes who their gods were and all that stuff: a lot of trash-talk. So in the midst of this— This was built in the early 14th century BC. Early 14th century would be sometime between the year 1400 and 1350 BC, is when this cartouche was carved, and it refers to one of the people whom he had beaten in battle and taken as slaves, were the Shasu of the land belonging to Yahu.

Fr. Andrew: Okay, so who are these people?

Fr. Stephen: Yahu was the common way of abbreviating Yahweh, and still is. Benjamin Netanyahu has the name Yahweh in his last name. So every time Jewish people say his name, they’re saying Yahweh.

Fr. Andrew: How about that, everybody? [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: In response to some questions we occasionally get from listeners.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, I mean, there’s a lot of Jewish names that include “Yahweh” in them in one way or another, like Elijah. Isn’t it Eliyahu?

Fr. Stephen: Yes, that’s the “Yah” in—

Fr. Andrew: There’s the “Yah,” yeah.

Fr. Stephen: —allelu-yah. The “-yah” at the end.

Fr. Andrew: Obadiah, isn’t that? Yah! Yes, exactly. So the Shasu of Yahweh’s land. Who are these Shasu?

Fr. Stephen: It’s not the land of Yahu, like the name of the land was Yahu; it’s the Shasu who come from the land that belongs to the God Yahweh.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, it’s a possessive genitive.

Fr. Stephen: And there’s a similar inscription in Amarah-West, from the 13th century BC, so from about a hundred years later, that also talks about the Shasu who are from the land belonging to Yahu. And you don’t have to look far to find out, in Egyptian records, that the Shasu are what they called the Edomites.

Fr. Andrew: Right, so these are descendants of Esau, the brother of Jacob.

Fr. Stephen: Right, the Edomites, the descendants of Esau. The settled members of that group were called the Edomites. They were settled in the land of Edom around Mt. Seir (S-e-i-r), and then there were also the Midianites whom you read about in the Old Testament, [who] were basically a mixed group of Edomites and Ishmaelites. So that’s who the Midianites are. So all these people are descended from Abraham.

Fr. Andrew: Right, because they’re sons, descendants of Esau.

Fr. Stephen: According to Genesis.

Fr. Andrew: Right, and it’s this bunch—so we actually meet one—I don’t know if we meet any before him, but we meet one in Exodus when Moses goes out into the wilderness and spends—what is it?—40 years out there?

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, Moses goes on the lam…

Fr. Andrew: Run awaaay!

Fr. Stephen: ...for killing somebody. Geez, it’s the law! [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: So he’s out there, and he meets a local girl and marries her, Zipporah, and her father is Jethro, and he’s a priest, and he’s a Midianite, and he’s a priest of Yahweh.

Fr. Stephen: He’s a priest of, right, the Most High God.

Fr. Andrew: Of the Most High God.

Fr. Stephen: So he’s the one who then imparts the knowledge of who Yahweh is to Moses, shows him where the mountain of God is, and when God introduces himself to Moses, he says, “Your forebears knew him as El Shaddai, as the God of the mountain, but you will know me as Yahweh.”

So what this shows us, both from, again, reading Exodus and from this archaeological find in terms of what the ancient Egyptians at that time knew about those people, is that the worship of Yahweh had been continued by the rest of Abraham’s descendants, at least to this point, who didn’t go into Egypt. And it’s not just this: “Well, hey, look, there’s Jethro.” There’s a bunch more about this in the Old Testament if you look closely.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, there’s multiple references, and I’m just going to rattle off the references so people can look these up: Deuteronomy 2:1-5, 12; Joshua 24:4; Judges 5:4; and then Ezekiel 35:1-15. And they all reference Mt. Seir, if I’m correct—S-e-i-r, once again. You could actually just do a word search on the biblegateway.com for the word “Seir,” and you’ll see all these references to it. For instance, the one in Judges 5:4, “Lord, when you went out from Seir, when you marched from the region of Edom, the earth trembled and the heavens dropped; yes, the clouds dropped water.” So you get God: he’s in this place called Seir, and it identifies it as Edom.

Fr. Stephen: Right, in Judges 5, they’re describing Yahweh coming to lead the people of Israel into Canaan, into the promised land, and he comes to do that from Mt. Seir. So that’s where he—he was there, being worshiped by the Edomites, and then he comes from there to lead the people of Israel.

In the Deuteronomy 2 verses that you mentioned, first it’s that when the Israelites came to Edom, they were just kind of hanging around there for a while, and God had to tell them, “Hey, Moses, come on. Get it moving. We’ve go to go into the promised land.” [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: Right. “Yes, I’m here, but…”

Fr. Stephen: “I know these are your cousins…”

Fr. Andrew: “I’m here, but this is not the place.” [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: But he says there—he says, “You are not to take” literally one foot; it says, “the length of one foot, one human foot.” “You are not to take one foot of their land,” because, Yahweh says, he brought the Edomites there, and gave them that land, and he’s giving Canaan to the descendants of Jacob.

Fr. Andrew: And as another reference, is this the one in Deuteronomy 2:12 the Horites? Now, are those giant people?

Fr. Stephen: Yes.

Fr. Andrew: So God clears out giants and brings Edom into live in Seir.

Fr. Stephen: Right, he used the Edomites to clear the giants out of the land and give it to them, directly parallel to what he’s about to do in the book of Joshua. So there’s this direct parallel: God did the same thing with Edom that he’s going to do with Israel. He did it there first. Joshua 24:4 that you mentioned, that’s at the end of the book of Joshua where Joshua’s laying out how God had fulfilled all the promises about the land that he made to Abraham. Attention, our Dispensationalist friends: the book of Joshua says that God, in the conquest, fulfilled all the promises about the land that he made to Abraham. It literally says that.

Fr. Andrew: It’s been fulfilled.

Fr. Stephen: But part of that fulfillment, according to Joshua 24:4, is that God gave the land of Edom to the descendants of Esau, and brought them in there and gave it to them.

And then the last one of those references you read, in Ezekiel, it’s at the end, after Judah has gone into exile. And at the time Judah went into exile, the Edomites sort of used that opportunity to do some pillaging and some expanding of their territory and to sort of turn on their brothers and gloat. So Ezekiel is promising the Edomites that, because of their wickedness, they’re going to suffer the same fate Judah did. So there’s this direct parallel between what happens to Israel and what happens to Edom in the Old Testament. They’re treated fundamentally the same way.

Fr. Andrew: Cool. Well, everybody, now you know where exactly God was during those 500-700 years, and—

Fr. Stephen: And knowing is half the battle.

Fr. Andrew: It— G.I.— Yes, it is! [Laughter] We’ll be back in just a moment, as we continue this discussion, as we head towards Pentecost, but right now we’ll take a break.

Fr. Andrew: Thank you, Voice of Steve. Always great to hear from you. I actually had lunch with the Voice of Steve last week.

Fr. Stephen: Just his voice!?

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, well, you know, actually his body was present in all of its… in every way. His whole nexus of potentialities!

Fr. Stephen: So this isn’t like a Metatron situation that we have going on here, okay.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Yes, he’s not the Metatron, or Megatron. Yeah, so, all right, we do have a caller waiting. She’s been patiently waiting. Yvonne has a question about the tree of life. So, Yvonne, are you there?

Yvonne: Yes, I am. Thank you for taking my call. Can you hear me?

Fr. Andrew: You’re welcome. Yes, yes, welcome to The Lord of Spirits podcast.

Yvonne: Great. It’s actually about the tree of knowledge, and it’s a quick, quick question, and if it’s okay I have another quick question after that. But everybody calls it the tree of knowledge, but you know how it’s the tree of knowledge of good and evil? Is that—? Are they saying it’s the tree of judgment, like the old…? You know, the old-fashioned definition of judgment, which was like discernment? I don’t mean like condemnation; I mean like discerning, knowing good and evil, knowing right and wrong. Is that what that means?

Fr. Andrew: Yes. I’m just going to go out on a limb and say yes. [Laughter] Am I correct in my yes, Father? I just want to make sure.

Fr. Stephen: You’re stealing my bit.

Fr. Andrew: Well, what can I say?

Fr. Stephen: If you go…

Yvonne: So when people say like… Oh, I’m sorry, go ahead.

Fr. Stephen: I was going to say, as you go forward in the Old Testament, that phrase, “knowledge of good and evil,” what it’s used for in the rest of the Old Testament is sort of coming of age or maturity, like a child becomes an adult when they’re able to know good and evil. So the idea is it’s not an evil tree; the idea is there would have been some point when Adam and Eve had reached a point of maturity where God would allow them, then, to come to that knowledge. They would have been mature enough and prepared for it. But they try to seize it for themselves, or the devil gets them to seize it for themselves, by telling them, “You’ll be like God if you do this. You’ll sort of leap-frog the process.”

Fr. Andrew: Okay, so what was your follow-up question, then, Yvonne?

Yvonne: You were talking about Abraham, Abram, how he was by the Tower of Babel, when it fell apart. Was he…? Does it even matter, but is it true that he had the original language? You know, like how before the languages were divided, whatever, would he have had the…? Because Paul said, when he said, “What benefit is there in being a Jew?” and then he goes, “Oh, much in every way, because they’re the keepers of the oracles of God.” Does that mean that they had the pre-diluvian language, and would it even matter? And did Abram have that, if he was by Babylon?

Fr. Andrew: So, well, I would love to say that the original language was Lithuanian, of course, or Old English, one of the two, but—

Fr. Stephen: Not likely.

Fr. Andrew: Not likely, yeah. [Laughter] No, so Abraham, as we just said, Abraham was associated with the Tower of Babel in Scripture, but he’s not actually there. He’s a lot later. So by the time we meet Abraham, the nations of the world have already been divided up into many, many languages.

Yvonne: So could he have had the first language? Like, could he have held onto it, you know what I mean? Because I know that you said that genealogy is really boring, but there’s a guy, he’s an author and his name is Vaughn Heppner, V-a-u-g-h-n Heppner, and he writes these fictional books. I actually have, because his books are so good and they’re very, very easy to read… He goes into the genealogy—that’s what he does—of Genesis. But anyway, I think he suggested it in his books, that maybe when Babel was spread out, that one of the groups kept the original language. But I guess nobody did? Like, could anybody have had the pre-diluvian…? Is there anybody who had it, or was it just wiped out? Because when they talk about the books of Enoch and stuff like that being from pre-diluvian, I mean, somebody would have had to speak the language, right?

Fr. Stephen: Well, but we obviously don’t have any copies from back then.

Yvonne: Oh, right.

Fr. Stephen: But I think most likely it’s gone. You could try to do that with Sumerian, I guess, because Sumerian is a really weird language; it’s not related to any other language in earth history. It’s weird in that regard. But at the time Abram lived in the Ur III period… I mean, there were Sumerian words that got incorporated into other languages, but he would have been speaking a version of Akkadian at that point.

Fr. Andrew: Right, which is a Semitic language.

Fr. Stephen: Right, a Semitic language.

Yvonne: Because they do this… If you follow the genealogy, if you do the math… Wait, who is Shem, Ham… What if the sons of Noah had been alive when Abram was still alive? They suggested in this book that they could have talked to each other or met. I guess it doesn’t matter; it’s all fictional.

Fr. Stephen: The problem with that approach—and this’ll get people grumpy with me—the problem with taking that approach to the genealogies is that if you try to take any one of them literally in the Old Testament, you run into trouble with some of the other ones, first off; they don’t match. And the way that ancient genealogies were written, they didn’t list every single generation; they just listed important figures. So especially the genealogy of Abram, there’s probably a lot being skipped, and here’s why: because if you take those numbers and you say there’s no skipped generations at all, then there are only 300 years between the flood and Abram—or not the flood and Abram; between the Tower of Babel and Abram. And it seems unlikely to me that you would go from all the people in the world being in one place to Abram being able to meet the pharaoh of Egypt and they have a whole civilization over there in Egypt and then they have a whole other civilization in Sumeria and another one in Syria, and there are kings and there developed different languages, and all of that could have happened in 300 years.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, it’s just not a thing. It’s just not. Plus the other thing is that, just speaking from a linguistic point of view, language changes a lot. There’s no… Even if someone is, say, living for hundreds of years, there’s actually no reason to believe that they wouldn’t change the way that they speak along with everybody else. I mean, I’ve lived in different parts of the United States, and I even lived on the island of Guam for a while, and the way that I talk has altered. I do not sound like the Southerner I was born to be; I sound more like the Yankees among whom I live. And that’s just within my few decades of life. Languages change over time. They simply do, especially when you don’t have mass culture like television and radio and so forth, and mass literacy. Everything just goes a lot more quickly in terms of the way that it changes. It’s just not plausible on any measure.

Yvonne: Right, right.

Fr. Andrew: Well, does that answer your questions, Yvonne?

Yvonne: It does! It does, thank you so very much.

Fr. Andrew: All right, well, thank you for calling. Okay, well, now that we’ve watched God come out of Seir and come to rescue his people in Egypt—although I should say we see that in progress. [Laughter] Let’s go to another mountain, another significant mountain, another mountain that is being the mountain of God, and that’s Sinai.

Fr. Stephen: Right, so we’ve already seen one transition—or a couple, actually, but we’ve seen the transition of God being the God of these particular human persons and being where they are, and then we saw him being at this mountain. Now at Sinai, of course, we see… Well, at first with Moses we see the same pattern we saw with the patriarchs in the sense that Yahweh, the God of Israel, is with Moses. He’s with Moses and Aaron when they go back to Egypt. He’s now with them as people, but once we get to Sinai, we then get the instructions given to build the tabernacle. So this, then is going to be a transition where there’s going to be this place where God is going to be, where his presence is going to be: in this particular tent, which is going to be set up at the center of the Israelite camp while they’re wandering through the desert and making their way. They’re going to pitch their tents and camp.

And another thing that people love reading, their favorite part of the Torah, is the detailed instructions in the book of Numbers about the order in which the tribes marched and where they set up camp in relation to each other and to the tabernacle. I know. That’s like the big… Everybody’s super excited about that.

Fr. Andrew: We should do a big cosplay reenactment or something. [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: I know, right? But the tribes camped around, in a circle around the tabernacle, and that, just that way of camping, you have God dwelling in the midst of his people and you also have this idea starting to develop that we’re going to go into more detail here in a minute, of these sort of concentric circles leading out from where the presence of God is. You’ve got the presence of God in the tabernacle, then the next circle out you’ve got the camp, then you’ve got outside the camp. So this is, in a certain way, a return to the way things were in Eden or paradise, because you had the walled garden, and then you had the world outside of it. And now you have the world outside the camp, and then the camp with the tabernacle at its center, and that’s why you get the Edenic imagery in the tabernacle.

But for our purposes tonight—where we’re eventually going to talk about Pentecost [Laughter]—the most important part of this… I mean, we talked before, in the sacred geography and stuff, we talked a little bit about the tabernacle there from that other perspective, but we want to talk about what unfolds in Leviticus 8-10 as the tabernacle is put into service and consecrated.

Fr. Andrew: Okay, so before we get to that, we actually do have a caller. Christopher is calling, and, Christopher, are you there?

Christopher: I am.

Fr. Andrew: All right, well, Christopher, welcome to The Lord of Spirits podcast. What is your question or comment or insinuation for us this evening? [Laughter]

Christopher: Well, I am reading, or actually just finished Fr. Stephen’s book…

Fr. Andrew: Oh, you have a book, Fr. Stephen?

Christopher: He does!

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, I don’t know if Ancient Faith still has it, but, yes, I do have a book.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Buy them now, everyone! Sorry. Sorry, go ahead, Christopher. I’m sorry.

Christopher: Well, I have a question about the angels that got assigned to govern the nations and cities. I wonder how all of them became corrupt and demons, because I know they’re talked about in Tolkien and Lewis’ Till We Have Faces, and they have a mixed influence there, good and bad. So how did all of them become corrupt? Did God just choose the wrong ones or…?

Fr. Stephen: Well, it depends on what you mean by “how did.” It’s not all of them, because there’s St. Michael, number one. [Laughter] So there was one, at least. But also, I think one reason why people misunderstand this point is that I haven’t effectively communicated what I am hopefully about to effectively communicate; you’ll have to tell me. So it’s not just a question of “Well, okay, there are these 70 individual angelic beings, plus St. Michael, and those particular beings are assigned to these nations, and each of those beings individually goes bad.” In some cases, that’s what happens, that that individual being goes bad, but you also have cases like Ninurta, that we were just talking about, where the people of a given city begin worshiping a demonic entity, and by doing that, that demonic entity, by them becoming demonized in their worship of them, that demonic entity becomes the power that’s controlling that city.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, they’re a sort of dark patron. Say that again, Christopher?

Fr. Stephen: I’m sorry?

Christopher: It’s the people that are causing it, by making it an idol?

Fr. Andrew: Well, so, what he’s saying that, in some cases, you’ve got essentially a good patron who goes bad by virtue of accepting worship that’s being offered to him by the human beings that are under his care. But in the case, for instance, of Babylon, it’s being depicted as: You’ve got probably a giant spirit—so we’re talking about a demonized human soul—who interacts with the locals, and they begin worshiping him and taking him as their patron, so he was already bad before they started doing idolatry with him.

Christopher: Okay.

Fr. Andrew: So that’s how you get bad patrons in one way or the other.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and so obviously there are now more than 70 nations, in different places in the world, and so a lot… But what the Scriptures do tell us that all the gods of the nations are demons, and what the pagans offer in sacrifice, they offer to demons.

Fr. Andrew: Right, there’s no indication that any of them are still worshiping Yahweh.

Fr. Stephen: Right. That’s the key: they’re not worshiping Yahweh. So if their angel— I’m sorry, go ahead.

Christopher: So by St. Paul’s time, when he writes in 1 Corinthians, when he says all the gods of all the city-states, those are all demons, they had fallen by that time.

Fr. Stephen: Well, or they’re worshiping another spirit. None of the nations of the world go on to worship unfallen angels. They stop worshiping Yahweh the true God and they start worshiping other things. So in some cases that was the angel who was assigned to them, who has now fallen and is participating in that worship; in other cases, it’s some other demonic spirit that they started worshiping.

Christopher: Okay, that distinction helps, yeah.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. But the point is it’s now the demon who’s in control, through sin, through the power of sin, and through death, who has now enslaved those people.

Fr. Andrew: Does that make sense?

Christopher: Okay. It does make sense, yes.

Fr. Andrew: All right.

Christopher: I got to the end of the book, and then— [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: There’s always going to be more. Always going to be more questions.

Christopher: That’s true. Thank you, Fathers!

Fr. Andrew: Thank you very much for calling, Christopher. Good to talk to you.

Christopher: Thank you.

Fr. Andrew: Okay, so we were talking about the tabernacle, and we were just about to discuss how it gets consecrated. So how do you consecrate a tabernacle?

Fr. Stephen: [Laughter] Not that I recommend going and doing this, for the record…

Fr. Andrew: Yes, don’t try this at home!

Fr. Stephen: This is not “how-to” as in, like: “Hey, guys! Hey, kids! Have fun!”

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, especially once you’re about to hear how it’s done.

Fr. Stephen: Yes. So there are sort of two principal things that are done and then something happens. All of the elements… So when we talk about elements here, I’m talking about the physical objects that make up the tabernacle. So physical objects like the altar of incense, the altar of burnt-offering, the tent-posts, the tent-pegs, the goat-hair curtains—all the things that are going to be put together, physically put together to make the tabernacle, and the tabernacle that is going to designate the place where it is as sacred. All of those things are first purified with sacrificial blood—purified from what? Well, they’re taken out of the world—we’ve talked about this before in previous episodes—they’re taken out of the world where they have the taint and stain of the sin and wickedness of the world on them. And it’s not just a question of them being pure enough to come into the camp; this is going to be God’s presence, so it has to be completely pure. So the sacrificial blood, like in the Day of Atonement, cleanses these physical objects. Then they’re anointed with oil, and then after that has been completed, then the theophanic glory-cloud—a certain group of people just got excited—

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, that’s going to be the name of my next band: Theophanic Glory-Cloud.

Fr. Stephen: You’re inclined to do that, are you? [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: I caught that reference!

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, so the fiery cloud which is the presence of God, which is the Holy Spirit, really—the presence of God in the world, the one who couldn’t bear with man before the flood and had to leave—now comes to fill the tabernacle, comes and fills the tabernacle.

Fr. Andrew: So now the question of “Where is God?” is answerable because he’s in the tabernacle now.

Fr. Stephen: Right, this is where he’s going to be located, as the Israelites for 40 years are on their way to the land of Canaan. So then, in Leviticus 10 where this happens, the story of Nadab and Abihu unfolds.

Fr. Andrew: Right, which I feel like should be a scriptural passage that is covered in the first day of liturgics in seminary. I just think it would be a Good Idea…

Fr. Stephen: Just to scare everyone. [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, or to print it… Right now, the Liturgikon has the commandments of St. Basil to priests, which are excellent. There should also just be a page where you just simply include this passage.

Fr. Stephen: Right, yeah. So Nadab and Abihu are two of the sons of Aaron, the high priest, and…

Fr. Andrew: So they’re Levites; they’re part of the priestly bunch.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and… Well, the Levites… Well, anyway, we won’t get into that.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, yeah, yeah, sorry. [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: They’re in the high priestly family.

Fr. Andrew: Exactly.

Fr. Stephen: People argue about what exactly the problem was, and you get different hints in different parts of the text. I go for an all-in approach of: They did everything wrong. [Laughter] So we know from the text that they were drunk. We know from the text that they went into offer incense at the wrong time, maybe because they were drunk. And we also know, because it’s called “strange fire,” that they offered the wrong kind of incense, because there was the whole incense recipe and how they were supposed to offer it. So they’re drunk and they do everything wrong in terms of what they were supposed to do in their duties to go into the tabernacle as priests.

And they fall over dead. Fire comes out from the presence of the Lord and consumes them.

Fr. Andrew: Right. Death by holiness.

Fr. Stephen: Right. And so this is not only—we see this theme again, but this is an object lesson now, to all the people in the camp.

Fr. Andrew: Right, see, this is what I’m saying: We need to put it in our liturgical books! [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: That the fact that God is now dwelling in their midst is not just: “Oh, lovely! Isn’t that nice?”

Fr. Andrew: “I really feel like God is here tonight.” [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: That should scare you.

Fr. Andrew: Yes! Right? When someone says that… I know.

Fr. Stephen: This is a serious thing, a serious thing, and so they need to conduct themselves accordingly. So when the Day of Atonement ritual, that we’ve already gone through in detail in a previous episode, is given in Leviticus 16, when it’s given, it’s given expressly, right at the beginning of the chapter, it’s given because of what happened to Nadab and Abihu.

Fr. Andrew: Right, that’s verse 1 of chapter 16: “The Lord spoke with Moses after the death of the two sons of Aaron, when they drew near before the Lord and died, and the Lord said to Moses…” etc.

Fr. Stephen: And this was a good five chapters previous, so it’s brought up again here to remind: This is why. And so this process is put in place for the cleansing with blood and reconsecration, once a year, of the tabernacle, the purification and reconsecration every year of the tabernacle so that the priests will be able to go in safely, come in safely to the presence of God, the purification that’s necessary for them.

And expanding out from that, this is what the vast majority of the Torah is: the Law. “Torah” not like the first five books; “Torah” like the Law, the way we think about it. This is what the commandments are aimed at. The commandments are aimed at—and this includes both what we call “moral commandments” and we call “purity laws” and all of it—that distinction, by the way, was first made by a second-century Gnostic; I had to throw that in. Anyway, what the whole thing is aimed at is: God is now living in our midst. We’re now in the presence of God. This is how we need to conduct ourselves to be safe, because if we don’t, one of two things that we’ve already seen in Scripture, in Genesis, one of two things is going to have to happen. Either God is going to have to—the language that’s used in the Torah is God is going to break out in the camp and people are going to die, if he stays and we are impure and wicked; or, out of his love for us, he’s going to have to leave, and then he’s not going to be with us any more. We don’t want either of those things to happen. So the Torah was laying out what had to happen for that to be possible.

And then you get, because of that—and I know we’ve talked about this before, at least briefly—you have those concentric circles, and those concentric circles: the closer you go in, the more purity is required of you. So the Torah sets this standard for purity for the Israelites who are living in the camp, who are living near to the presence of God. They have to have a higher standard of holiness than the rest of the world. This is why God never tells them, “You need to go and make the Syrians stop eating pork.”

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, no, it’s… yeah.

Fr. Stephen: Because it’s not law; it’s not actually law. [Laughter] It’s not some kind of eternal legal moral standard. It’s not that; it never functioned as that.

Fr. Andrew: It’s liturgical preparation, basically.

Fr. Stephen: And so they didn’t have to force that on anyone else, because they’re not living anywhere near God. They’re not drawing near to the presence of God, so they don’t need that holiness. Now, if they want to, if they want to come and eat the Passover, well, then they have to be circumcised, and then they have to start following the commandments so that they can safely draw close to God.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, which, I mean, has an obvious pastoral application in our time, which is, frankly, that the only people… However you want to slice it, the only people who are actually going to be effective in terms of convincing them to follow the commandments of God are those who are trying to draw near to him. The people who are not have no reason to do that. I mean, you could try to convince them of its benefits or whatever, but really they don’t have any good reason to do that, and if you look at the command that Christ gives to the apostles, he doesn’t tell them, “Go into all the world and tell them to do my commandments”; it’s: “Go into all the world, baptize them, make them disciples, and teach them to do all that I have commanded.” The whole point is that it’s entry into the Church that involves all of that.

Fr. Stephen: Right, it’s the other way.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah. It’s not, you know… Yeah, exactly. I mean, the call to repent is a call to draw near to God, because the kingdom of heaven is at hand. That’s what’s going on. It’s precisely this exact same dynamic.

Fr. Stephen: Right, but so, yes, on one hand we live in a society, so I’d rather not have to worry about my heathen neighbors murdering me, right? [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: Right, there’s a certain amount of restraining that needs to go on.

Fr. Stephen: But, on the other hand, [my] trying to go and get people who don’t know Christ to live a moral life has no value. It has no more value to them to have lived a moral life, rejecting Christ, than it would for a worshiper of Ninurta to not eat pork. Like, it means nothing; it does nothing.

So this is all about drawing closer. The Israelites have this higher standard than the surrounding world. The priests within Israel who are living and working in and around the Temple have a yet higher standard. The regular people in Israel did not have to maintain the level of purity that the Levites and the priests did. And then the high priest, most of all, because the high priest had to do all the preparation for the Day of Atonement, for that one day when he went into the holy of holies.

So when we get to Solomon’s Temple, the first Temple, all of this that we see in the tabernacle, which is mobile, gets concretized in terms of a fixed building in a fixed place.

Fr. Andrew: Stationary. And it’s important to note that this was not God’s idea. He didn’t… Because how many times does it say in Scripture, “God does not dwell in temples made by hands”? It’s not God’s idea for them to build a temple, but he agrees to it; just as it wasn’t his idea for them to have a human king. He agrees to it. Yeah.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and there’s this great disparity that you notice very quickly when you actually read the text. You go to Exodus—the whole last half of Exodus is all of the minutia of the instructions for every element of the tabernacle being given in detail twice.

Fr. Andrew: It’s God’s blueprints, literally.

Fr. Stephen: Yes, and they’re all laid out, and then it describes them doing it in the same level of detail, so you get it all twice. You don’t get that with the Temple.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, it’s literally man-designed, man-made.

Fr. Stephen: And the way that the Temple is described is actually almost identical to a Syro-Phoenician temple built at the same time, meaning a pagan temple built at the same time. Now, when I’ve said that publicly before, I’ve had people come to me and say, “Well, hey, there’s this one verse in 1 Chronicles that if you read kind of sideways and squint at it kind of sounds like God gave David the plans for the Temple.” And my response to that is: “Let’s say that’s what that verse really means. Do you still think that one verse with a passing mention in 1 Chronicles is comparable to the whole second half of the book of Exodus in the Torah? You don’t see any difference there?”

Fr. Andrew: I just kind of love the fact that someone is reading the Bible so closely that they come to you with that, though, so that’s great!

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, assuming they weren’t Google searching to try and, you know.

Fr. Andrew: Well, there’s that as well, yes. The Google School of Theology. [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: You see this very clearly when you see the dedication. We talked about the dedication of the tabernacle. When you look at the dedication of the Temple, you see this very clearly in terms of Solomon’s prayer and then God’s response, because Solomon’s prayer is very much… I mean, it’s virtually Tower of Babel kind of stuff; it’s moving in that direction. It’s: “Lord, whenever anybody prays toward this temple, give it to them.” [Laughter] “God, do all this stuff related to this temple as object.” It’s very close to: “We want you to come live in this object, and then we’re going to use that fact to get what we want from you.”

Fr. Andrew: Good stuff.

Fr. Stephen: And so then then the flip of that, God responds and goes into great detail about how he did not ask for a temple and he does not live in buildings made with human hands, and he’s not going to automatically do that, and if they keep the commandments he will bless them, and if not they’re in trouble. He lays all that out and at the end basically says, “But, because I know you are human and weak and hard-hearted, I will condescend and I will come to dwell in this building.”

Fr. Andrew: Right, so then again they do the purification with blood, the anointing with oil, and then you get, once again, the name of my next band, the theophanic glory-cloud.

Fr. Stephen: Right, comes and fills the Temple. So then this is the place where God is. Israel is destroyed by the Assyrians, the northern kingdom. Judah—God departs from the Temple and they go into exile, and you see the two fates there: you see death with the northern kingdom; you see exile: God having to remove himself with Judah, with the southern kingdom. And he does that, again, so they won’t be destroyed, like the northern kingdom.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, because they found evil.

Fr. Stephen: They go into exile just like Adam and Eve were exiled from the garden, so that they can repent and eventually return.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, so then after—I don’t know, how long is it in the Babylonian exile?

Fr. Stephen: Seventy years.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, they come back, and they rebuild the Temple under Ezra. So you’ve got the Second Temple. Thus—this is our term—Second Temple Judaism.

Fr. Stephen: Right.

Fr. Andrew: And they do the consecration service: the blood, the oil. But there’s no theophanic glory-cloud! That’s a big difference. Does that mean it doesn’t work, that they’re not actually worshiping there?

Fr. Stephen: No, they’re offering the sacrifices there.

Fr. Andrew: But it’s sort of from a distance, like a Bette Midler song.

Fr. Stephen: But there is no direct experience of God happening there. And then Antiochus IV Epiphanes, the Seleucid monarch, comes and desecrates that Temple and it falls into ruins, and the Maccabee brothers get torqued off and go and stage their successful war to reclaim the Temple and to regain their independence, and they go and they rededicate the Temple and start the celebration of Hanukkah…

Fr. Andrew: But! No theophanic glory-cloud, even after that rededication.

Fr. Stephen: Right, even after all that. So this is something that, in the Second Temple period, they were keenly aware of.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, they were like: “God did not come back.” And even then—I can’t remember; the timeline is not clear in my head, but when the Roman general Pompey—when was that in relation to the Maccabees?

Fr. Stephen: That was 110 years later. The Maccabees were under the Greeks.

Fr. Andrew: That’s right. So when the Romans come in, and the Roman general Pompey decides to walk into the Temple and go all the way into the holy of holies, in which, if this had been 500 years before or whatever, would have meant he would have been struck dead before he even got in, but he goes back there and he just doesn’t see anything, and he’s like: “Oh, they must worship their god with their minds!” Like he’s so impressed by that! [Laughter] But literally, God’s not back there.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, the ark of the covenant isn’t even back there. All that’s back there is literally an empty cherubic throne, an empty throne. So they were aware of this. And this is part of why they understood themselves to still be in exile. It wasn’t just that they were still being dominated by the Persians and then the Greeks and then the Romans, because there was that brief period with the Maccabees with the Hasmoneans when they were independent, very brief. They made a treaty with Rome, and it was a bad idea, and so they got annexed. They were aware of this fact. “God hasn’t come back; we’re still under foreign domination. This isn’t it.” So we see this language in the New Testament, of restoring the kingdom to Israel; we see this language.

And these various groups, various Judaisms, of this period relate themselves to the Temple in Jerusalem in different ways. We tend to think that they all accepted it, but they didn’t. So the Qumran community that produced the Dead Sea Scrolls, their whole basis was of going out in the desert and doing sort of reconstructed Temple rituals out there, because they rejected the validity of that temple. They’re like: “God’s not there. This temple’s bogus.” There were the Jewish community in Elephantine in Egypt, who built their own temple there.

Fr. Andrew: I did not know that! Is there anything left to that? Is that around at all?

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, you can see where the well of souls was and stuff. You can see basically, like, the floor plan of the foundation.

Fr. Andrew: Wow. Suddenly I’m having Indiana Jones flashbacks here. [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Right, so they were aware of this, that this hadn’t happened, and that they’re looking toward deliverance, especially associated with the Messiah, and this is part of what that deliverance is going to bring. It’s not just… We’re so used to history being written in the 19th century German mode that we think, oh, they were all looking for a political messiah, like politics was separated from everything else at that time.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, no, they wanted God back in their worship center.

Fr. Stephen: They wanted the Romans out, and they also wanted God back. And those two things were related.

So as we end this half, I wanted to break down for a minute—because I don’t think we have this in our heads, fully—when we talk about the tabernacle or the Temple being in the midst of the people of Israel and this kind of thing, I think somewhere in our heads that most of us have this idea that “Well, that’s where they went to church,” because we’re kind of reading our own experience back into their experience.

Fr. Andrew: Right, and often Orthodox Christians will, not entirely incorrectly, say, “Well, you know, our worship is like Temple worship,” which is not totally wrong, but it’s wrong in certain key ways. So let’s imagine what it would be like if a modern Orthodox church actually functioned like the Temple or the tabernacle. What would that actually look like?

Fr. Stephen: So we’re going to say your local Orthodox parish is the tabernacle or the Temple. You’re an ancient Israelite pilgrim going there for one of the feasts, because we talked about before, obviously without fast travel, people weren’t going there every week. So this is a lot more like Eden, which was still closed, and the cherub with the sword is still there. You’re near. You’re able to draw near to God, but not go into his presence. So if you’re the average person, you would come to the narthex of your local Orthodox parish. You would lead your animals to the narthex, or you would bring money, because there would be people in the narthex and in parts of the parking lot selling sacrificial animals for people who couldn’t—who came from a long way away and couldn’t bring animals with them. And you would get your animals; you would then give those animals to the priest.

The priest would go take off with the animal, take it to the place called the prothesis. He’d kill the animal; he’d butcher the animal. He’d skin the animal, separate the meat the way he was supposed to under the Law. He would take the portions that were going to God, he’d take them out into the parking lot and burn them on a big barbecue pit out in the parking lot. He would then hand you your wrapped-up pieces of meat to take with you to eat with your family. And that would be it for you. That would be your visit.

Fr. Andrew: Right, you wouldn’t go into the equivalent of the nave, and only the priests would go there. The holy of holies, which in modern Orthodox churches, the sanctuary, the area where the altar is, no one would go there except, what, once a year the high priest would go there.

Fr. Stephen: And the women and children would stay in the parking lot.

Fr. Andrew: Right, they wouldn’t even go into the narthex.

Fr. Stephen: The male head of the family would go in the narthex and deal with the priest and actually make the exchange. The priests would go… For matins and vespers, they would go into the nave and only the nave, and offer incense and prayers, twice a day. And then, one day a year, the high priest, equivalent to the bishop, would go back behind the iconostas, only on that day, with a big cloud of incense, and purify the place, and then come out. That was worship. This is our pre-Christian worship, if we put it into those terms.

So I think we need to realize just how shut out from the presence of God people still were in order to understand the reality of what we have now going in church.

Fr. Andrew: And with that, we’re going to go ahead and take our second break. We’ll be right back!

Fr. Andrew: All right, welcome back and thank you for that, Voice of Steve. We would love to hear from you, so do give us a ring.

Okay, so we just talked about how the actual experience of a worshiper in ancient Israel was and compared it against our experience now as Christians, actually coming to church, coming into the nave—men, women, and children—and actually having and seeing the veil opened to the holy of holies. Very different from ancient Israel. So there has to be some kind of transition between these states, so let’s talk now about what happens in the New Testament. There is a transition, and it starts with a young, young girl. What was she about? What, they say she was two or three years old, I think?

Fr. Stephen: Yes, when she was old enough to be brought to to the Temple, the Theotokos. So this is a little bit pre-New Testament.

Fr. Andrew: Okay, yes, yes, well.

Fr. Stephen: Slightly pre-New Testament. So we have—for folks who are listening who aren’t Orthodox, we have a feast of the Entrance of the Theotokos into the Temple, because, as has been handed down to us by Christians since this happened, who I don’t think are liars, the Theotokos, when she was born to her parents, they were at an advanced age, and so, to give thanks to God for giving them their child, St. Mary, they brought her to the Temple to serve as one of the virgins there. This was an institution that already existed. It goes actually back to the tabernacle. One of the rarely discussed offices of the old covenant was that there were women who lived at the entryway to the tabernacle. So they couldn’t go into the courts of the tabernacle, but they lived just outside the gates, and they were dedicated to assisting the priests and the Levites in terms of sewing cloth, preparing things, repairing things, feeding people, taking care of all these sort of duties.

So when the Temple came about—and we know for sure, because this is recorded; people talk about it with the Second Temple—but when the Temple came about, obviously now you have it in one fixed place, you had these women who were dedicated to—and they’re referred to as virgins because they didn’t get married. So rather than having children, having responsibilities to a husband and children, they dedicated their lives to taking care of these things. And because of that, they had to maintain a higher level of purity, because they’re closer than the rest of the people. So the Theotokos was brought to be one of these women when she was a young girl.

Fr. Andrew: Right, which, just as a sidebar, what a contrast that is to what the nations were doing. They also had women that hung around their temples—

Fr. Stephen: And shrines, yeah.

Fr. Andrew: —and shrines, and they were the opposite of virginal, pure. It was… Yeah, exactly.

Fr. Stephen: Now, we can be fair and throw the Romans the Vestal Virgins, but that’s a whole other discussion. [Laughter] And this is also important, and I won’t delve into this right now, but sometimes we get questions from our Protestant friends about the importance of the Theotokos as ever-virgin, that she was always a virgin through her entire life. This is a big part of that.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, because she’s been set aside for this.

Fr. Stephen: This is a dedication of her whole life and self to God. That’s the focus of that, not anatomy: that’s not primarily what it’s about.

So this happened, and then what our forefathers in the faith have handed down to us is that then, when she came of age, because of those same purity laws, she could no longer remain in those Temple precincts, so that’s when she was betrothed to St. Joseph.

Fr. Andrew: As her protector.

Fr. Stephen: As her protector, who was an older, widowed man, who was to care for her. And then presumably, at some point in the future, she would have—if she hadn’t, you know, given birth to our Lord—she would have come back; in the normal process, she would have come back to the Temple to continue serving in that capacity. This is also the role that the Prophetess Anna has, when Christ is brought to the Temple to be dedicated, and there’s this widowed woman there who’s been living there for years since her husband died; she is also one of these women.

But so, in the feast, we celebrate her being brought to the Temple, and the story that’s been brought down to us is that she, in sort of a contrasting parallel to the General Pompey, went back into the Temple itself and went back even into the holy of holies. And this event we have in iconography, we have it in the feast, the festal celebration every year, and in the hymns related to it. But the key element of this that’s being brought across to us and that is relevant for what we’re talking about tonight is that this is the beginning of that transition.

Fr. Andrew: Right, and she’s welcomed back there by Zachariah, the priest, who of course… He knows. Well, it happens later, but he’s the father of the Forerunner. He’s got this prophetic place. And I think a lot of the hymns talk about him. The Holy Spirit comes upon him, and he welcomes her to do that. I mean, that’s the appropriate thing for a priest to do. A priest is there to serve as the one who connects people to God. But in this case, she’s coming to be… She’s essentially, in some ways, not quite to take his place, but she’s there to fulfill that role; she’s there to be the Temple, because she’s… That’s where God is going to dwell.

Fr. Stephen: Right. Even though this is the Second Temple, so technically that’s not… That’s only kind of the place where God is. That’s only symbolically the place where God is.

Fr. Andrew: It’s not really a temple.

Fr. Stephen: Her womb is going to become the place where God will be—is, for nine months, while Christ is within it. So this sort of hand-off sort of takes place at this feast and at this point. So she is being set apart to be God’s dwelling-place, so in our Tradition that we’ve received, the understanding is that the Theotokos, like the tabernacle and like the Temple, was purified by the Holy Spirit for this role.

Fr. Andrew: Right, and there’s a couple different views amongst the Church Fathers as to exactly when that happened. Some of them, like St. John Chrysostom and some others, say that it happens at the Annunciation, so she’s purified when the Archangel Gabriel comes to her, and then the Lord is conceived within her womb; but then others say that she gets purified in her mother’s womb, but, notably, after her conception, so after she’s conceived in the usual way by her parents, God purifies her in the womb of St. Anna so that she is then prepared throughout her life. So there’s variation on this point between some of the Church Fathers. That’s okay. It’s okay; it’s all right. It’s okay, everybody!

Fr. Stephen: They all agree that she was purified to be the place where God was going to dwell.

Fr. Andrew: Yes, and that it happened… They all agree that it happens before the conception of the Lord. It’s just a question of exactly when before that.

Fr. Stephen: And someone might ask: Why would she need to be purified in the womb? Obviously she hadn’t committed any sins in the womb. But the response to that, of course, is that, yeah, the goat-hair flap of the tabernacle that Moses purified with blood and anointed with oil hadn’t committed any sins either. That’s not what it’s about; it’s not moral guilt.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, go back and listen to our atonement episode for a full treatment of that. It’s about dealing with the residue of sin in the world.

Fr. Stephen: Right, existing in the world, and her being set apart for this special purpose and being purified for this purpose. And this isn’t just this crazy Mary thing that [we] Orthodox folks came up with. [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, there are other saints that experienced this, too.

Fr. Stephen: Right, so in our traditional understanding, St. John the Forerunner was purified and received the Holy Spirit in his mother’s womb. That’s why he was able in the womb to give testimony to who Christ was when the Theotokos came to visit St. Elizabeth. The Prophet Jeremiah says God set him apart from his mother’s womb to be the prophet. So this is something we see repeatedly in Scripture and in the history of the Church that there are particular individuals whom God sets aside and calls to a particular purpose, and when he does that, he comes and he purifies them. And sometimes it’s later in their life, like St. Paul on the road to Damascus, and sometimes it’s all the way back in their mother’s womb.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, and sometimes you see something like that and you might think to yourself, “Well, how come I wasn’t purified in my mother’s womb and I have to struggle against sin and whatever and whatever?” But, number one, that is simply not the way that the world works; but, number two, anyone who had this, they usually went through a whole lot of suffering as they fulfilled God’s purpose for them, almost all of them. It’s not necessarily… It’s not something you should ask for. If it’s something that God gives, then you’re responsible to that, but it’s not something that God gives to very many. There are certain people that he has a particular purpose for them, and so this is what happens.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and you don’t necessarily want to drink of the cup that they drink.

Fr. Andrew: Right, and aren’t there certain cases even where, if I remember correctly—we were just reading the readings last night for the feast of the Nativity of the Forerunner, and one of the readings is about Samson. Doesn’t it say that he is from his mother’s womb, and yet that didn’t turn out well, ultimately?

Fr. Stephen: What!? Samson didn’t turn out well? I’ve never heard this before.

Fr. Andrew: Yes, big sinner. Big-time sinner. Big-time breaker of promises to God.

Fr. Stephen: Okay. If you say so. If you say so, Fr. Andrew Damick. [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: Murder/suicide at the end, yeah.

Fr. Stephen: So this is, like we said, the beginning of the change. Of course, with the Theotokos, the Theotokos, the great gift she was given by God is that she got to participate in the salvation that comes through her Son, most fully and completely and directly and personally. And so when Christ comes, we have all of this language, particularly concentrated in St. John’s gospel, regarding Christ being the new Temple—not the new Temple to replace the Second Temple; the new Temple like the one that Prophet Ezekiel prophesied about during the exile, that it wasn’t that Second Temple, that it’s actually Christ when he’s born. So we see that at holy Theophany, at Christ’s baptism, in John 1:32-34. The Holy Spirit comes and descends upon him and then rests within him, comes to abide in him; the presence of God comes and stays.

Fr. Andrew: Almost like a theophanic glory-cloud…

Fr. Stephen: Yeah… [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: I love that.

Fr. Stephen: And then John 1:14 is part of St. John’s Prologue. He says literally in the Greek: “The Word became flesh and tabernacled among us, and we saw his glory,” and that he was full of grace and truth. So that’s the imagery of Christ’s flesh being like the curtains of the tabernacle, and God’s presence: God is dwelling among us in the flesh of Christ, and he is full of glory, like the glory… theophanic glory-cloud that filled the tabernacle and the Temple.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, and, to double-down on his identification as the dwelling-place of God, as being the Temple, in John 2:19-21, this very famous passage where Jesus says:

Jesus answered them, “Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up.” And the Jews then said, “It has taken 46 years to build this temple, and will you raise it up in three days?”

And then this amazing editorial comment from St. John:

But he was speaking about the temple of his body.

That his body is the temple of God in their midst. It’s not that building; it’s him now.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and Christ isn’t just the new Temple, but he’s the final and eternal Temple, that one that Ezekiel talked about. So that’s why, also written by St. John in the book of Revelation 21, in the new heavens and the new earth, there’s no temple, because the Lamb is there in their midst.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, and if you wanted to read that Ezekiel reference, by the way, it is literally the last nine chapters of Ezekiel, chapters 40-48, and it’s stunning stuff, really, really beautiful.

Fr. Stephen: Yes, and it’s talking about Christ, Dispensationalist friends. I don’t want to pick on our Dispensationalist friends too much tonight, but…

Fr. Andrew: Well, we’re talking about temples and stuff.

Fr. Stephen: It has to happen.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah. [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Bound to happen. So now… Oh, and the other place where this language of the temple is used related to the Holy Spirit is St. Paul. And he talks about this in a couple points in 1 Corinthians. In 1 Corinthians 3:16-17, 6:19, where he says that our body is the temple of the Holy Spirit.

Fr. Andrew: Wait, wait. So that’s not just about you eat right and drink right and don’t drink: your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit?

Fr. Stephen: No.

Fr. Andrew: Uh-oh. Okay.

Fr. Stephen: Okay, I’m more on the side of the meme: My body is a temple, it’s broken-down, abandoned, and decrepit. [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: “Not one stone shall remain upon another!” [Laughter] Y’all’s body is a temple of the Holy Spirit.

Fr. Stephen: And this isn’t this sort of separate, independent thing where there’s now a whole bunch of temples, not just Christ.

Fr. Andrew: It is just Christ.

Fr. Stephen: Right, as Paul says in Galatians 3:27, if we’ve been baptized into Christ, we’ve put on Christ. That’s why St. Paul says in Christ after just about everything; he just adds it on to almost every sentence. Our body is a temple to the Holy Spirit in Christ. So Christ shares his templeness or templitude with us.

Fr. Andrew: Temple-osity? [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, with us. If we are in Christ, then we are functioning as part of—as a member of his body, which is the temple.

Fr. Andrew: Right, because we’re his nexus of potentialities.

Fr. Stephen: And so now—

Fr. Andrew: Dun-dun-dunn!

Fr. Stephen: —in our Pentecost episode, we’re going to talk about Pentecost!

Fr. Andrew: Yes!

Fr. Stephen: But there’s even a little bit of build-up to that. [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: Right. Yes, we prepare to prepare to prepare. See? Our podcast really works like the Orthodox liturgical year. It’s just, it’s a year every episode, or a major liturgical season.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, there’s a reason for this, and only a few people out there will know what I’m talking about, but I had too much Yale School preaching in my background, so that’s how you end up structuring things like this.

So, yeah, [my] saying now we’re going to talk about Pentecost was actually sort of like “Let us complete our prayer unto the Lord,” like, we’ve still got a little ways to go.

Fr. Andrew: Exactly. Okay, Luke 24, one of my favorite chapters, because it’s about eastern Pennsylvania—no. [Laughter] This passage, Luke 24, towards the end, Christ meets with two disciples as they’re walking along the road, Ss. Luke and Cleopas. We talked about this a couple of weeks ago—a few weeks ago—with the post-resurrectional appearances of Christ. This is Christ on the road to Emmaus. And why is this important?

Fr. Stephen: Because it’s on the road to Emmaus.

Fr. Andrew: Emmaus in particular, right, exactly. So we talked earlier about the Maccabean revolt, so that is successful at a battle that took place at Emmaus. Emmaus is like a famous battlefield in this time and place, so, like the example from our time, again, to bring it back to Pennsylvania, if someone would say, “They were on the road to Gettysburg,” you’d be like: “Ohh! Gettysburg, yes, yes; I remember what happened there.” And that’s exactly the same thing: Emmaus is like this famous place because of the battle that happened there, and so everyone would see… When you would read that in Luke’s gospel, what you’re getting then is this reference to this battle that was fought and won there that led to, then, the Temple being rededicated after it had been desecrated. So that’s all part and parcel of “on the road to Emmaus.”

Fr. Stephen: And so people miss this a lot, because they say… They think this is the only place Emmaus is mentioned in the Bible, but if you go and get your 1611 King James and turn to 1 Maccabees, which is in the 1611 King James…

Fr. Andrew: Yes, I have a replica of it here in my studio!

Fr. Stephen: Right, the battle of Emmaus, this is the climactic battle where the Seleucids are defeated and driven out. So, yes, this is what’s being conjured up here: not just the battle, but the aftermath of the battle and the idea of the rededication of the Temple. And the proof that St. Luke has the rededication of the Temple in mind is how he ends his gospel. The last two verses of St. Luke’s gospel, Luke 24:52-53.

Fr. Andrew: Right. “And they worshiped him, and they returned to Jerusalem with great joy, and were continually in the temple, blessing God.”

Fr. Stephen: And so you may notice that this is Volume 1. When you go to Volume 2 in the Acts of the Apostles, they’re not hanging out in the Temple. When St. Luke narrates the Ascension again, he doesn’t describe them going back to the Temple. So it’s not that he’s making things up one time or the other; it’s just what he’s choosing to focus on. So why is he choosing to focus on the Temple here at the end of the gospel of Luke? It’s to bring out this dynamic. Christ has just won this victory. That’s what the Gospel is; it’s the report of a victory—book from Fr. Andrew coming soon—

Fr. Andrew: Yes! Thank you! Thank you! [Laughter] Look, I have been selling your book a lot, so I expect a little bit in return here!

Fr. Stephen: [Laughter] I haven’t said anything negative about it…

Fr. Andrew: No, no, it’s good! I feel like I’ve been doing a pretty good job, actually, so…

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, I think my name’s in the front, so I think it’s my narcissism that’s causing me to push it a bit.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] That’s right. Right, a report of a victory, yes, exactly.

Fr. Stephen: So this victory has happened, and this victory is being compared to the victory in Emmaus, and then what happens? The Temple is rededicated. So what we should be expecting as we conclude, as we close the back cover on Volume 1 and open the front cover on Volume 2 is: “Oh, now I’m going to read about the rededication of the Temple.” And that frames, then, what we have at the beginning of the book of Acts. If you remember the Atonement episode, we talked about how Christ’s atonement purifies not just an itty-bitty physical space but the whole world.

Fr. Andrew: The whole world, right, which is illustrated then, for instance, by the fact that you’ve got Cornelius, this Gentile centurion, who receives the Holy Spirit even before he is baptized; and then also the incident where Peter is told to eat these animals that previously had been unclean, and what God says to him is, “Don’t call anything unclean that God has made clean.” God has made it clean, and how did it become clean? By the atonement that Christ accomplished in his passion, death, and resurrection.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and so Christ’s blood has now purified the whole cosmos, and so now, when individual humans receive the laying-on of hands and/or anointing, the Holy Spirit—the theophanic glory-cloud, the presence of God—comes and fills them, as a temple of God. And this starts with the apostles on the day of Pentecost, when you notice how the wind and the fire come into the room in which they’re sitting. So St. Luke even brings in that spatial idea to where the apostles are. But the Spirit comes and fills not that room, making that room the new temple, but fills them.

Fr. Andrew: Right, and yeah… I think this might be peak Lord of Spirits episode structure here, because literally now we’re getting to what Pentecost is. This may be the worse offense of all that pattern. But I think it’s… To get there, we had to look at all of that. The Holy Spirit descends into them, but there’s like aftermath now! So, just as with the presence of God in the tabernacle and the Temple, you had to do the purification, you had to do everything the right way in order to prepare to be in the presence of God or else you could die—again, death by holiness—now there are things that happen connected to the fact that the apostles and the Church are now effectively the holy of holies. So the classic example—and this was one that always kind of puzzled me as a kid; I was never sure quite what to make of it—and they’re still in Jerusalem and all the disciples, all the Christians, are pooling their stuff so that no one has to be in want.

Fr. Stephen: Commies.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Yes, yes—but it’s voluntary.

Fr. Stephen: Okay.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] But they… People are selling property, and they’re pooling their money so that everyone could be—no one has to go hungry. And you’ve got this one couple, Ananias and Sapphira, who decide to sell their property and, instead of giving all of it over to the apostles for the help of the poor, they give only part of it, but then they lie about giving only part. So first Ananias lies directly to St. Peter, and then he dies. And then he’s taken away, and then his wife comes in, not knowing that he’s dead, and St. Peter asks her the same question: “Did you give it all?” And she says, “Oh yeah, this is all of it.” And as a sidebar, it’s an interesting note that she is, as a Christian, as a Christian woman, she is answering for herself; she is not being lumped in with whatever her husband happens to say, like she’s actually responsible for herself, which is a very different role for women in the ancient world. And she lies also, and then also dies.

When I was a kid, I read that, and I’m like: That seems a little extreme, Lord. I mean, not that I have any business second-guessing God’s judgments, but understanding it in terms of this question of death by holiness—they are literally bringing an offering to God, but they are doing it in a bad way, and lying. That’s why they die.

Fr. Stephen: And St. Peter says, “You have not lied to men, but to the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit cannot long contend with human wickedness.” So Ananias and Sapphira are the Nadab and Abihu of the new covenant. St. Luke follows the same pattern here at the beginning of Acts, as the dedication of the tabernacle. And, so then, what comes in terms of the Christian life—they serve as this kind of warning. So if we are members of Christ’s body and therefore our body is the temple of the Holy Spirit, and the Holy Spirit is in our midst and Christ is in our midst when we gather in worship, then, rather than the commandments and the way that the Torah works in our life being like the old covenant, where it was about purifying this physical space, this external physical space, and maintaining its purity in these concentric circles, now it’s gone interior. So that’s why the Christian life becomes about repentance, becomes about cleansing and purifying and rededicating ourselves, not a space.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, it’s… I mean, it’s… I don’t know the right word to use, but it’s really powerful to look at what’s going on in the Old Testament there with the tabernacle and the Temple there and realize it applies to us as persons, because we are… we fulfill that role now, inasmuch as we are in Christ. Yeah.

All right, well, let’s give some final comments. There’s… The first place I want to start is with that final point, that when we undertake the fasting, the prayer, the repentance, the asceticism—all of these things that are part of Orthodox Christian life—when we undertake these things, I think often we can receive that stuff… Like, there’s one way, which is people are like: “Oh, it’s this burden I have to have because I’m Orthodox.” Or sometimes people take it as being sort of like a hyper-macho thing, like: “Oh, look at us! We’re like the Marines of Christianity! We fast! We pray! We do long services!” Those ways of looking at it.

But fundamentally, those are kind of almost materialist ways of understanding these spiritual practices. They are disciplines, but a discipline has a purpose. It’s not merely just to be disciplined. The discipline has a purpose, and the purpose is to prepare us to be in the presence of God. And when we don’t do that, we degrade, because it’s not good for us to be in the presence of God, and sometimes that degradation can get so extreme and our sin become so extreme that we have to be removed from communion until such time as we are prepared to return again. So it’s purification so that we can worship God, so that we can be in his presence, so that we can be within, within the Temple.

Earlier we talked about what would Orthodox church life look like if it actually functioned like the tabernacle and Temple and how separated we would be from God. Now we have the opportunity to be right there in the place where the sacrifice is offered; we have to prepare ourselves to do that. That’s what this life is for. It’s not just sort of like self-discipline or self-help or becoming a better person. It can do those things, but that’s not what it’s for.

And the other side I wanted to mention in my final remarks is that, with the descent of the Holy Spirit into the Church and we being in Christ and being his body, being now the temple of the living God, then what that means is the task that Adam and Eve were given, way back in paradise where we started, has now been restored to us, and we’ve now been given the ability to take it further than they could have when they were first created because of their immaturity. And that means that our task as Christians is not simply to become better, but rather to take paradise into the world, to expand the temple, to bring… Because when someone becomes a Christian, when they are baptized into Christ, then they are also then part of the temple of the living God. They become pillars of the temple of the living God.

So our task is to Churchify the world, and we do that not only by the act of evangelism, although that is absolutely critical—evangelism is a message; it’s the announcement of Christ’s victory—but it’s also to take on this role of “Be fruitful, multiply, cultivate the earth,” and that doesn’t just mean make sure you have a well-mowed backyard; it means bringing God’s love and justice and compassion to the people around you. This is what the task is. This is how we bring the presence of God and his making things right and putting them in order—that’s how we participate in that.

This is God’s act. God is the one who expands Eden, but it’s our task to be the instruments by which that happens. So there is both an internal side to it in terms of our own attention to our purification—to meet God, to worship God, to commune with God—and then there is also this external, outward initiative-taking, outgoing side to it as well, where we are to serve those around us, to sacrifice ourselves to those around us, so that they, too, can participate in this same life. That’s its purpose.

All right, what you got for the end, Fr. Stephen?

Fr. Stephen: So humans are like Tardises.

Fr. Andrew: Yes!

Fr. Stephen: They’re bigger on the inside. [Laughter] And I want to focus a little on… We already brushed on this a little bit, but… The Holy Spirit comes and writes the Law, writes the Torah in our hearts. This is how the New Testament expresses, and the Old Testament prophesying that it would happen. It talks about that internalization of the Law that we were talking about right at the end. And despite the fact that we’ve probably all heard or read that a thousand times, I don’t know how much it has sunk in for us, because we still have this focus on the outside and on the external and on our interactions out there with the world when we think about commandments, whether we’re thinking about the Ten Commandments in the Old Testament, we’re thinking about the commandments of Christ: we’re thinking outside.

But what this internalization means—and you see it reflected everywhere in Christ’s teaching in the gospels—yes, if you have yeast in your house and you don’t contain it and treat it properly, it will infect things and infest things and can poison your kids and bad things will happen. But if you allow a little leaven into your heart and your soul and your mind, it will spread and it will infect everything and it will destroy you. The internalizing of that commandment is far more important than the externalizing of it. And what Christ communicates to us in the gospels—we read a gospel on Sunday for Pentecost where Christ says, talking about the coming of the Holy Spirit, that “rivers of water will flow from your belly,” which is a weird promise to receive—most of us try to keep that from happening—but what he’s talking about are the rivers in paradise, the rivers in Eden, that flowed out of Eden to water the whole earth.

All that external stuff—what we do in the world in terms of the commandments, how we relate to people, how we relate to the world around us, how we see the world and interact with it—all of that flows out of what’s going on inside. And so if we don’t keep what’s inside of us clean and pure and dedicated to Christ and to his service, then everything that flows out of us is going to be tainted by whatever’s wrong inside. You can’t get good fruit from a bad tree, a rotten tree.

So I think what we need to be reminded of maybe is that keeping the commandments of Christ, living the Christian life, always begins by going back into the paradise that’s inside of us, that the Holy Spirit has put there when we received him within ourselves, and maintaining that space with all the zeal that all the Levites and all the priests of the old covenant had, purifying ourselves of sin, rooting it out, finding it, driving it out, repenting of it, repairing what’s wrong, confessing, receiving forgiveness and cleansing and purification. And once we maintain that, all of these other things will flow out naturally: the love, the joy, the peace, the patience, the kindness, the goodness, the faithfulness, the gentleness, the self-control. All the fruits of the Spirit will blossom forth when we’ve done the hard work of getting into the mess and the brokenness and the dirt and the grime and the ugliness that’s still lingering around in different places inside of us.

We talk a lot, and Fr. Andrew just talked about, and rightfully so, our need to go out into the world, but we also need to not forget to go inside of ourselves and take care of the temple, care for the temple, purify and rededicate the temple that lies within us.

So now I have a question for Fr. Andrew.

Fr. Andrew: Oh boy.

Fr. Stephen: If I sing, “Spring Up, O Well,” will you yell the “splish-splash” in the background?

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Wow. That is a very dim, dim memory in a very shriveled part of my brain!

Fr. Stephen: Glad to bring it back.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Thank you. Well, on that note, that is our show for tonight. Thank you very much, everyone, for listening. If you didn’t get a chance to call in during the live broadcast, we would love to hear from you either via email at lordofspirits@ancientfaith.com, or you can message us at our Lord of Spirits podcast Facebook page. We do read everything, but we can’t respond to everything, but we do save what you send for possible use in future episodes.

Fr. Stephen: And join us for our live broadcasts on the second and fourth Thursdays of the month at 7:00 p.m. Eastern, 4:00 p.m. Pacific.

Fr. Andrew: And if you are on Facebook, like our Facebook page and join our Facebook discussion group.Leave reviews and ratings, but, most importantly, share this show with a friend whom you know is going to love it.

Fr. Stephen: Or even if you just think they’ll love it, go ahead and share it. And finally, be sure to go to ancientfaith.com/support and help make sure we and a lot of other AFR podcasters stay on the air.

Fr. Andrew: Thank you very much, and may God bless you always.