God’s mission to repair us as broken eikons, that is, flawed images of God, begins with Abraham. You know the story, I’m sure. Abraham was hardly the holiest man we can imagine. He treated his wife badly at times. His faith was sometimes weak. And yet God chose him as the man through whom his redemptive work would begin.
God’s work in Abraham is found in a series of covenants God made with him. And so we need to consider how the ancients made covenants. For thousands of years, men have sealed covenants in blood. In the Middle East, they used to say that they “cut a covenant,” meaning the covenanting parties cut their arms and sucked a bit of one another’s blood. The mingling of blood was considered to bring the parties together so tightly they’d have to honor their words. (See here) Continue reading
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Just as was true of proskuneo, there’s an obvious contrast between ritualized, specified, rules-based worship of the Old Testament and a radically different kind of worship in the New Testament. The words used of Old Testament ritual are never applied to the assembly. There’s not a hint in the New Testament vocabulary that the assembly is about obeying rules and following rituals. Rather, the New Testament writers take words that are clearly and repeatedly associated with liturgy and cultic behavior in the Old Testament and use them ironically — demonstrating that the ritualized approach to worship is over and replaced.
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