Sermon Tone Analysis

The fourfold pattern of Biblical eschatology

A decline in the human condition

2. Proclamation of judgment from God, both negative and positive

3. God carries out the judgment

4. A rebuilding, a new creation.

The very earliest complete eschatology in the OTis in the flood story, and the flood story conforms to the fourfold pattern.

This pattern is that, first, there is mention of a decline in a human condition.

Then God makes a proclamation of what He will do in relation to that, usually both a threat of destruction and also a promise of redemption.

Then, third of all, God acts.

And then finally, there’s a restoration, a new creation that comes.

Paulien, J. (2015).

BI290 A Biblical Theology of End Times.

Bellingham, WA: Lexham Press.

, AND - here, the promise may not be so clear, but a remnant surviving is hope

The Destruction: A Reversal of Creation

Now, in the flood story itself, the interesting thing is how it is described.

The flood story is not simply a disaster—a natural disaster—but, rather, the flood story describes the flood in the language of creation.

In other words, God uses the language of the past to describe what would happen in the flood story itself.

For example, in the creation story, God creates through a process of separation and distinction.

For example, He separates the waters that are below from the waters that are above.

He separates the light from the darkness and creates day and night.

He separates the dry land from the sea and creates places where animals and human beings can live.

So the process of creation is a process of separation and then distinction.

In the flood story, all of those processes are reversed.

For example, the rains came down, and the floods came up.

So the waters below and the waters above meet once again, and they overflow the dry land, so the separation between dry land and sea is taken away.

And the end result is the entire world is covered with water.

And that simply means that the world returns to the condition it was in before creation.

In other words, God takes apart His creation piece by piece until evidence of it is completely gone.

4. The language of the wind here is the same word as the Spirit moving on the face of the waters before God separates the waters from the dry land.

having brought a clean, complete end to the old world, a new world comes into play, and the language of that new world is again the language of creation.

For example, in Gen 8, it talks about the reappearance of dry land.

And in the Hebrew language, there’s a lot of different words you can use for “dry land.”

But the specific words chosen here are the word that you find in chapter 1 regarding dry land.

So you have a mention of dry land once again.

You have, in 8:22, a renewal of the seasons which had been originated in chapter 1.

You have, in chapter 9, a renewal of the covenant between God and the human race, and that echoes the language of the original covenant back in chapter 1.

In chapter 9, God guarantees these distinctions.

In other words, “I will never again destroy this world by a flood, but now things will continue in a new way.”

The human race, in chapter 10, multiplies and spreads throughout the earth just as occurred in the first chapters of the book of Genesis.

From Noah’s point of view, eschatology meant that the world as he knew it had come to an end or would come to an end.

That world ends, and then a new world comes into place, and that new world is created along the lines of the old.

And God would use a remnant, which turns out to be Noah and his family.

That remnant will be the basis for rebuilding the human race, rebuilding God’s relationship with that human race, and, ultimately, restoring the garden of Eden that was lost.

So, when God comes to Noah, He meets him where he is.

He describes the future in terms of his time and place.

And Noah lived to see the fulfillment of all that.

From Noah’s point of view, eschatology meant that the world as he knew it had come to an end or would come to an end.

That world ends, and then a new world comes into place, and that new world is created along the lines of the old.

And God would use a remnant, which turns out to be Noah and his family.

That remnant will be the basis for rebuilding the human race, rebuilding God’s relationship with that human race, and, ultimately, restoring the garden of Eden that was lost.

So, when God comes to Noah, He meets him where he is.

He describes the future in terms of his time and place.

And Noah lived to see the fulfillment of all that.

Paulien, J. (2015).

BI290 A Biblical Theology of End Times.

Bellingham, WA: Lexham Press.

The Abrahamic Eschatology

decline

The coming together of the 70 nations that arise in the aftermath of the flood band together to build a tower in opposition to the command to multiply and replenish the earth.

They are centralising instead of spreading out as God commanded men to do.

Here is a spiritual decline

The coming together of the 70 nations that arise in the aftermath of the flood band together to build a tower in opposition to the command to multiply and replenish the earth.

They are centralising instead of spreading out as God commanded men to do.

Here is a spiritual decline

2. the warning/promise

First of all, there’s a proclamation of destruction.

God will destroy the tower; He will scatter the people; He will confuse their languages.

But then comes the promise of a remnant.

The promise of the remnant which provides hope is found in the genealogy which ends up with Abraham in the narrative immediately following the story of the tower of Babel

3. , God carries out the judgments

4. The rebuilding

What is sometimes missed in this text is in that promise to Abraham [and] is a blessing for all the nations of the world.

The previous reference to all the nations of the world is in chapters 10 and 11—the 70 nations, the Tower of Babel story.

In other words, Abraham is called to be the blessing to the very nations that were under judgment in chapters 10 and 11.

So the Abraham story is really the climax of the Tower of Babel story, so the promise to Abraham sets the foundation for a new eschatology.

God blesses the nations through the seed of Abraham.

Through Abraham’s children, God was going to bless the world, so the world is seen as under the curse in the Tower of Babel story, but it is under the blessing in the children of Abraham.

You see, that’s a very different kind of eschatology from the one we saw in the flood story.

It is more of a developmental eschatology, where God doesn’t simply reverse the curse of chapters 10 and 11 completely, but He sets the stage for a gradual blessing on the nations—that through Abraham and through his children, the nations would become blessed, and the end result would be a restoration of the garden of Eden.

The Relationships of Creation

You might say, “How on earth could that take place?”

Well, let me quickly review something with you that we’re not going to cover in the course in detail, but you can go back and study them.

If you go back to Gen 1, you will realize that in the original incident there, there’s three relationships that Adam and Eve have.

They have a relationship to God—an upward relationship—a downward relationship to the earth—in other words, they mentor the earth the way God has mentored them—and then, third of all, they have a relationship with each other.

The Destruction of Relationships

And when sin comes in, in Gen 3, it undoes those three relationships.

It breaks the relationship between Adam and God.

It ruins the relationship between Adam and the earth.

The earth produces thorns and so forth, and it attacks the relationship between Adam and Eve.

There would be pain and childbirth and bickering and anger between them.

So, in the fall of Gen 3, there’s an undoing of the three relationships that occurred in Gen 1 that God brought into being.

The Restoration of Relationships

When we come to the Abraham story in chapter 12, we see God giving Abraham three promises.

And the interesting thing about it is those three promises correspond to the three curses of Gen 3.

He promises him that he will be a blessing, that Abraham will have a special relationship with God.

In other words, God restores the relationship with Himself that Adam and Eve originally had through Abraham and his children.

Second of all, God promises a land to Abraham.

And in the Hebrew, “land” and “earth” can often be the same word.

So the barrier between human beings and the earth will be undone when God provides a land to Abraham’s seed.