Meredith Kline, 'Images of the Spirit'

Alastair Roberts

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Meredith Kline, 'Images of the Spirit'

October 25, 2018

Alastair Roberts

Today I discuss Meredith Kline's superb little book, 'Images of the Spirit' ( https://amzn.to/2EMKplc ).

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Transcript

Welcome back. Today I'm going to be discussing this book, Images of the Spirit by Meredith Kline. It's a book that I've recommended here before, but I thought I would give a brief discussion of its contents.

Well, maybe not that brief, you know me, but we'll see. The book is a particularly important one. It's a very short book.

It's only about 130 pages long, the actual text, but there is so much packed into that space that you'll find yourself reflecting deeply upon many of the things that he brings up. This is a book that I first read over a decade ago, and it's stayed with me since then. I've often returned to it and found myself mulling over it.

It's a book that was very influential for James Jordan and for many others, and I highly recommend that you read this book. It's a very easy read. It won't take you long to read, but it is a book that will give you a lot to think about.

At the heart of it is the question of the theophanic presence of God in the spirit, the theophany and theophanic, that God's appearance in this glory appearance, and its connection with creation in the image of God, our creation as human beings in the image of God. Now, when we talk about the question of the image of God, we usually think that's the same thing as asking what is it that makes humanity distinct? But yet he argues that the image of God is not simply humanness. The image of God is a more complex notion than that, and to understand what it means, we need to turn back to Genesis and look at it very closely.

And at the very beginning of Genesis, in chapter 1, in verse 2 of chapter 1, he draws our attention to the beginning of creation with the glory spirit hovering over the formless deep. And within that image, you have the start of some deep themes that he draws out throughout the whole of the Bible. We discover themes that draw our attention back to this original creation situation in the story of the Exodus, as the spirit is present in the formlessness of the wilderness, hovering over Israel and giving them light, and then forming them into a people.

It's a new creation event, and the language of creation is alluded to in various places in the book of Isaiah, looking forward to a future event of Exodus. But we can hear the language of creation that is drawn out. So, for instance, he doesn't get into this in much depth, but this is one that has always struck me.

When you read Isaiah 63, you read an account of the Exodus as follows. Now, there are themes that are creation themes within that passage, whether that's the theme of leading through the deep, whether that's bringing out the water, whether that's dividing the waters, whether it's the theme of bringing into rest. All of these are creation themes, and we see these played out in the story of the Exodus.

So, these are patterns that we see already in two different occasions in Scripture. But elsewhere in Scripture, we also see a close association between the glory cloud and the spirit. And this picture becomes elaborated in various ways, as the glory cloud is seen as a cloud and wind form of the spirit's appearance.

It has winged creatures attached. It takes various phenomenal forms of light and cloud. Sometimes it's a sheltering canopy.

Other times it's lightning and thunder. Sometimes it's a storm. And other times it's something that shrouds.

And this is a developing image that you see in the different theophanies, whether that's at Sinai, whether it's the vision that Ezekiel has at the beginning of his prophecy, whether it's something that we see as the Shekinah glory descends upon the tabernacle. All of these are important themes throughout the Scripture. And this close association between the glory cloud and the spirit is also something that needs to be taken alongside the close association between the sun and the spirit.

And this is something that Meredith Klein's work gets into in some detail in this book. And it's perhaps one of the areas where he's most stimulating. He talks about the sun proceeding from the spirit, which isn't the usual way we talk about it, and participating in the majesty of the divine glory.

He is identified with the spirit, but personally distinct from him in the figure in the Old Testament of the angel who is associated with the glory cloud and with the presence. So the angel is a distinct figure from the presence and the glory cloud, but they're very closely associated. The spirit hovers over the creation, not merely as creator, but also as a paradigm for that creation.

So the glory of the spirit is a paradigm in terms of which the creation is formed. God's glory cloud is associated with his throne and with the divine council. And we see this already in Genesis chapter one with the language of let us.

Let us make man in our image. Let us. Who is the us? Some have said it's the trinity.

Some have said that it's referring to the angels. And I think that Meredith Klein falls more on the latter half, the latter option, which is that it's the divine council. That's a deliberation of God with his divine council, the angels, the cherubim and seraphim and these other figures.

And this divine council is the sight of the gods, the sight of the angels and the divine figures. And it's a temple as well. It's a throne, divine council, and it's a temple.

And the one enthroned at the heart of the glory cloud is seen in anthropomorphic categories. It's a human like figure at the heart of this glory cloud. So when you read the story of Ezekiel, you have this very elliptical description of this glorified figure, this wonderful figure at the heart of this chariot vision.

And this wonderful figure is described as like a man, like a human figure, but described very elliptically, like as unto and this language that doesn't talk directly, but has these similes and these metaphors that talk around the figure, that the figure is shrouded in a very indirect language. We never see the figure directly. Or Moses seeing the back of the Lord at Mount Sinai or Isaiah seeing the train of the road filling the temple.

The glory cloud is associated with God's presence and with his power. The glory spirit is also a covenant witness. The glory spirit is there at the heart of the covenant people, bearing witness.

The glory spirit is the archetype for the cosmos. So we see the lights of the firmament above, the heavens above, are associated with the glory spirit. The light of the glory spirit is the light of the first day.

And the lights of the fourth day that are placed in the firmament correspond to it in certain respects. As we look in chapters one and three of Genesis, for instance, in the association of the image with the glory spirit and divine counsel, we see, let us make man in our image. The image of God there is not just about God as a figure.

It's about God as a person. It's about God as a person. And the image of God is not just about God as a person.

It's about God as a person. And the image of God is not distinct from his counsel. It's the counsel is involved in that as well.

That the image is something that includes the wider counsel in some sense. That's an interesting thing that he brings to the forefront. The angels accompany the angel of the Lord.

There is an association of image with glory spirit and with divine counsel. And Genesis 1.26 is not simply Trinitarian, but that argument isn't entirely off the mark either. And so the spirit, father is the archetype, and there's a human ectotype, a correspondence to that archetype.

Father-son is a paradigm for thinking about the image of God. It's not just about representative status, but it's also about representational likeness. And this is associated with the idea of each being created according to its kind.

The language of in his likeness is associated with that kind language. That as Adam bears a child in his image and likeness, it's according to his kind. And so being created in the image is a creation in the archetypal image of the divine son according to the divine spirit.

And we see this fleshed out in passages such as Revelation. So pages 24 to 25, he writes, the opening vision of the book of Revelation reveals Christ as the archetypal glory image. And the book closes with a prophetic view of the church as the ectypal image.

In the spirit, John saw Christ in the form of a theophanic blend of the glory spirit and the angel of the presence with the anthropomorphic lineaments of the latter dominant and the glory cloud features adjectival. The theophanic figure was further a blend of the ancient of days as well as the son of man of Daniel 7, 9 following and thus fully Trinitarian. Earlier at the transfiguration, John had been witness to a proleptic apocalypse of Christ in his majestic glory.

The resurrection marked Christ's definitive assumption of his spirit identity. And in the vision of Revelation 1, John saw this risen glorified Christ as the spirit Lord present to recreate all things and particularly to impart his glory to the church. The new man recreated in his image.

And these are themes that he explores throughout the book. Reading that quote alone might be confusing for many of you. But as you read the book, it makes a lot of sense of this.

And the categories that Klein provides are very illuminating and helpful. The new Jerusalem is the ultimate likeness of the spirit glory. New Jerusalem as portrayed in Revelation 21 and 22 is the ultimate likeness of the spirit glory.

For it is a city transfigured in light and its light is the glory of God. It is the tabernacle of God, the cuboid holy of holies where the Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the end, who sits above the cherubim of the glory cloud is seen enthroned. In this new Jerusalem, all the promises of the letters of the seven churches find their amen in Christ.

Here all is fulfilled. Christ, the archetypal glory image of the opening vision, has created the new mankind in his glory likeness. Christ, the archetypal temple, has constructed the church into a temple for God's presence.

And in this new reality of the union of the new man, the church with the new man Christ, more is involved in the church's likeness to the divine glory, the mere reflection of that glory. There is a mysterious kind of identification with the glory in the spirit. The city temple that shines with the glory of God is the glory theophany with the church body of Christ engrafted into it.

For while the church is the temple where God dwells, God is the spirit temple where the church dwells. Later on, he observes about the association between the image likeness of God in the broader work of the divine council. So angels, in some sense, share in the image of God.

Let us make man in our image. Angels are identified as sharing in the image likeness to God. The lines of likeness connect not only God and man, but God and angels, and man and angels.

Arguably, in the reflection of Genesis 1, 26, following in Psalm 8, 5, following man's likeness to God is expounded in a comparison of man and angels. The man in his likeness to God is like members of the divine council, suggests that to bear the image of God is to participate in the judicial function of the divine glory. And it is this judicial function that is prominent when the image idea next appears in Genesis 3, 22.

There man's likeness to God is expressed in terms of his knowing good and evil, which has to do with the royal function of judicial discernment and decision rendering. The latter is elsewhere noted as a mark of likeness to both God and angels. Now this gets into very deep stuff within the story of scripture that helps you to understand what's taking place at the fall, what's taking place in the maturation of humankind, what it means to be prophet, priest, and king.

These sorts of themes are deeply explored within this book. He talks about the themes of recreation in God's image that focus very much upon themes of glory. And our focus upon non-corporeal aspects of the image leads us to miss some of the significance of theophanic and glory themes.

So the transfiguration of Moses's face, for instance, as he sees God's glory is a physical form of the image and likeness. It's something that shows that there is a glorification of man's physical appearance as he experiences the Lord. And that relationship and distinction between image and glory is something that is very important within his argument.

And he expresses this in quite a powerful way. In pages 30 to 31, image and glory appear as twin models in the Bible for expressing man's likeness to the divine original. If they are to be distinguished, the distinction might be that image likeness is reproduction of the original and glory likeness is reflection of the original.

Well, the image is stative and expresses the fact of imageness, i.e. that man is secondary, not the original, but different from it because of his createdness. While glory is active and expresses the content of the image, i.e. that man is similar to God in those features comprised by the concept of glory. To the extent that such distinctions are valid, the aspect of discontinuity connoted by image and the aspect of continuity suggested by glory are mutually conditioning correlative aspects of man's likeness to God.

Both image and glory mean likeness. Moreover, such is their equivalency that where all that constitutes the glory is gone, no vestige of the image remains. After the fall, while we're supposed to grow from glory to glory, we fell into shame.

And so man being originally covered with glory, and that may have been a physical thing as well, reflecting God's glory, man is now characterized by the nakedness of shame. And Klein challenges the popular readings of the image of God in various ways. So, for instance, he challenges Barthes' idea of the image of God associated with relationship or the ways that the image of God is very much associated with those things that make us peculiarly human.

The image of God is a more precise term than that, terminology than that, with more theological weight and specificity than that. And so he, for instance, challenges the idea that male and femaleness are at the heart of the image. Indeed, where male and femaleness is related to the image concept, as we see in 1 Corinthians 11, it's actually with the man as the image and glory of God, and with the woman as the glory of the man.

And so there's a distinction between the two that suggests that it's not a straightforward concept that's applied to each in the same way. And that's difficult for us because we're used to applying this as a concept of just generic individual humanity and maintaining human rights and dignity. And that's not how the concept functions in Scripture.

It's a far more precise and complex concept, one that is far richer in its connotations and its usage than we'd expect. And recreation in the image is associated with themes of investiture, of clothing. And this is one of the best parts of the book, the way he explores this theme of clothing.

A primary example of this is the tabernacle. This is received according to a divine pattern. And in the construction of it, the spirit inspires the craftsman.

It's also a place that is a replica of the glory spirit, the archetypal temple. It's a replica of the glory cloud that was upon Mount Sinai. And the Holy Spirit, by entering the tabernacle in the glory cloud, identifies with it, the cherubim at the heart.

There's a division into outer court, holy place, and holy of holies. And this corresponds, he argues, with earth, heaven, and the heavens of heaven. And there's also the lava, which is associated with the heavenly sea.

There's themes of Eden, with the cherubim, with the different fruit trees, and the other things that are associated with that. The tabernacle is closely associated with the vestments of the high priest, Aaron. The tabernacle is a replica of the glory spirit.

And Aaron's vestments are a replica of the tabernacle, designed for glory and beauty. And there's a sort of, the seamless robe, for instance, is a scaled down tent. And this language associating tent with clothing is something that we find in 2 Corinthians, for instance, where Paul talks about this earthly tent and being clothed with a new body, as it were.

And this language is something that draws back to this image that associates clothing and tents. The tent is a sort of clothing for a community. It's a building as a form of clothing.

The coverings of the priest and the tabernacle are multi-layered, but they're reversed in a sort of outward-inward order for the high priest's garments. The tabernacle ordering is inverted in the case of the priest's garments. And the association of the breastplate is with the Holy of Holies.

There's a similar squareness, and it's the central reality. And the pouring of oil upon the priest is similar to the descent of the spirit upon the tabernacle. So all these things relate to each other and help us to understand the figure of the priest, the figure of the tabernacle, how these things interrelate, how the spirit is impressed, the archetypal order of the spirit is impressed upon the reality of the tabernacle, and then how the priest fits into that.

When the spirit comes upon a person, he is said to clothe that person. And this is all a recreation of the original Cosmos Temple. The armour of God is a reflection of God's own clothing.

We see God putting on his armour to fight in Isaiah 59, verse 17. And then later chapters, we have the bridegroom who acts as a priest as he adorns himself, and then the bride corresponding to that. And so the priest and the bridegroom are associated figures.

Christ at the beginning of Revelation is seen as a priestly figure, but also as the divine bridegroom. The end of Revelation combines clothing, building, and marital themes with the new Jerusalem descending out of heaven, adorned as a bride for her husband. It is also cuboid like the Holy of Holies.

The dress corresponds with the bridegroom's dress in Revelation 1. And so these themes really help us to understand what's going on, that there is a reflection of the glory image of the spirit, and that is being reflected in the clothing of the people of God, both as individual persons, as the high priest, and then also as the tabernacle, and new Jerusalem, whatever it is. And so this is a broader pattern in scripture that we can see played out in various contexts that helps us to understand what is going on, particularly in concepts like the tabernacle and the high priest. In Ezekiel 16, we see other themes associated with this coming forward.

Israel, presented as a woman, is clothed in the garments of the tabernacle. So God describes the way that he clothed Israel when it was naked and alone, that he clothed them with these garments, and the garments are the garments of the tabernacle. There's nuptial imagery here as well.

God spreads the corner of his robe over Israel, but that corner of God's robe is associated with the glory cloud, with God's covering over his people. That's language that we find elsewhere in Deuteronomy, for instance. The washing and anointing of the bride is associated with the preparation of the priests.

Also, bearing God's name is an important theme in association with bearing God's image. The righteous in Revelation 22 verse 4 have God's name on their forehead, and that's like the priest we see in his garments. He has holy to the Lord on his forehead, and this is a pattern for marriage, he argues.

Here, in the record of the covenant creation, is the ultimate source of the combination of elements found in the allegory of Ezekiel 16. The divine covenantal covering, the tabernacle investiture of man as image of God, and the marriage covenant. In Genesis 2, marriage covenant is present explicitly in the form of a societal analogue to mankind's covenantal image relationship to God.

Through the parable of the marriage relationship of the woman and the man, established by creation ordinance, instructive insight was afforded into the nature of the covenant between God and men. The woman wife, derived from the man as bone of his bone and flesh of his flesh, was the image likeness of the man. The name pun brings this out.

She was called Isha, woman, because she was taken out of Ish, man. And the man husband received the wife, his image, in a covenant of marriage, under his lordship, to bear his name and to be his glory, not least by bearing him image sons to fill the earth with his name. The parable of human marriage covenant was fully exploited in the revelation of redemptive recreation and covenant.

The bride derived from Christ, the second Adam, as glory of his glory and spirit of his spirit, is a recreation in his image as a likeness of derivation, like that of the woman in relationship to the man and the son in relationship to his father. The glory image of the church bride is possessed under the authority of her husband lord. Christ takes his church, his image wife, in covenant of marriage to bear his glory in his name, to be the fullness of him who fills all in all.

The initiation of the prophet also typically involved a transformative encounter with the glory spirit. The prophet is seen as a man of the spirit. The prophet belongs to the divine council.

He enters into this realm of divine deliberation with the angels and the other members of the council, the deliberative council of angels, through spirit rapture into heaven in vision. So we see this, for instance, in Isaiah 6, whom shall I send and who will go for us? This is a deliberation within the divine council with the seraphim there and Isaiah is present within this in vision and members of the divine council perform an administrative and judicial role and it's a renewal and an extension of mankind's original dominion. The whole being of the prophet is caught up within their calling and they have a deep emotional and ethical association with the holiness of God.

This brings into play the ethical dimensions of the image of God concept and it brings them to the fore. Prophets like Moses also physically reflected God's glory and prophets like Elijah and Ezekiel were transported from place to place. So this isn't just a spiritual and ethical thing, it can have physical dimensions as well.

This is all part of the history of God restoring and fulfilling the image of God in man. So when we read about the prophets, we're not just reading about messengers that God sent to do errands for him, we're having an anticipation of what it means for men to be formed by the spirit, humanity to be reformed by the spirit and constituted in a renewed and a more glorious form of the image of God. And this is a fulfilling and an extension of the image of God that helps us to understand something about the destiny of humanity more generally.

Human flesh and life taken up by the spirit and participating more fully in God's image and his glory. Moses for instance is a paradigmatic prophet and image of God and he imparts a prophetic likeness to others whether that's Joshua who acts as firstborn son to Moses or to the 70 elders that we see in Numbers 11. And transmission of his prophetic spirit is like an act of fathering.

He's like a father to Joshua. He gives Joshua his name among other things. And behind Moses however there stands the archetypal prophet.

This is one of the areas where I particularly find Klein very illuminating. He talks about the angel of the presence, the messenger of the covenant as the archetypal prophet. He's the one who carries God's name in him and he speaks as the covenant witness and as the messenger of the covenant.

And so this figure is encountered particularly at the beginning of the book of Judges on a number of occasions. Before there are prophets sent we have this figure of the angel of the covenant, the angel of the presence. And this character, this angel of the presence is very closely associated with God but yet also distinguished in some sense.

He's distinguished also from the glory presence theophany. The relationship however between the angel and the glory presence is very strong and is a complicated figure to understand because the angel of the presence is associated on a number of occasions so closely with God that it's very clear that this figure is God but yet in other senses it's distinguished and that makes things complicated. How exactly are we to understand this figure? And so for instance we have this playing out in Exodus 32 and 33 where God promises to send his angel before Israel and initially says that he will not go up in their midst although he will send his angel before them until eventually he relents to Moses' request.

He writes, in response to the intercession of Moses on this occasion of his second 40 days on the mount the Lord promised to send the angel, my angel, before Israel to drive out the occupants of the promised land with a view to Israel's possessing it. In contrast to the promise of the availability of the angel was the Lord's declaration I will not go up in your midst. Relenting however at Moses' further plea that God's royal splendor or majesty should go with them the Lord promised my presence will go.

This prompted Moses to express the desire to proceed no further unless the Lord's presence did indeed accompany him and the people for it was in God's going with them that the election of Israel would be known. Moreover as a seal of God's assurance that he would do this Moses requested a revelation of God's glory associated with the presence faced in distinction from the angel in this narrative are the glory and God's own going in the midst of Israel. And then this leads to some very interesting reflections upon the significance of God's appearance in the glory in the angel of the presence.

We see the angel of the Lord appear in a number of occasions in scripture before we have this glorious appearance of the angel. When we read the story of the exodus the angel of the Lord appears in very glorious forms associated with the glory presence the cloud and the pillar the pillar of cloud and fire and the theophanic splendor that occurs the storms and the lightning and the thunder and the voids and everything else on mount Sinai but yet in chapter 18 and 19 for instance of Genesis the angel of the Lord appears to Abraham and goes to Sodom in a manner that's very incognito in many respects. We see a similar thing when we read the story of an angel the angel wrestling with with Jacob.

This is not a glorious appearing of the angel of the Lord it's appearing almost incognito and he writes the issue concerned two modes of divine manifestation one that had been characteristic of the patriarchal age and one that signalized the new mosaic age of the fulfillment of the promises during the earlier period where the kingdom offered in the Abrahamic promises was still abeyant. God appeared as the angel apart from the glory phenomena but the advent of the age that was our final judgment and kingdom consummation witnessed a form of theophany that was appropriate to an age of eschatological fulfillment. God's self-revelation to Israel in this age of exodus triumph and kingdom founding was still a revelation through the angel but now the angel appeared in union with the spirit presence in the more public and continuous and awesome epiphany of the glory cloud.

This old testament pattern of theophany has its antitypical parallel in the successive states of the humiliation and exaltation in the history of the incarnate son whose triumphant exodus entrance into the heavenly kingdom is marked by his investiture in the clouds of glory as the glorified spirit lord. The angel then as it appears first more incognito and then in the glory of the exodus is paralleled with Christ with Christ who is the angel as we discover that Christ appears first of all in a shrouded way he comes incognito he comes in the form of the servant and then he appears in glory. The angel has a covenantal mission and it was integral to the glory from the beginning he is the messenger of the covenant as mentioned in Judges he's seen as the archetypal prophet he sets out the pattern for all the prophets that follow Christ is the prophet like to Moses and the one who fulfills the prophetic identity he's the messenger of the covenant himself as we see in Malachi 3 and the way that that's used in the in the gospels.

At Sinai the angel of the presence was revealed in his glory form in the theophany to Moses and this informs Paul's treatment of the transformation of believers with the believer corresponding with Moses and with Moses and the angel of the lord with Christ himself so just as Moses was transformed transfigured as he looked at the angel the lord just seen the back and the glory of God's presence so as we see the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ we are transfigured and transformed into the same glory even by the spirit and this is Paul's argument as he draws parallels between us and Moses. In Revelation we see the glorified Christ as the glory image of the imagery of lampstands also draws upon imagery from Zachariah this imagery is something that is quite pronounced in scripture and it fits in with the more general examples of analogy so you have the lampstands that correspond to stars and then the stars that correspond to the seven spirits of God and these things express on different layers what God's glory being impressed upon reality the archetypal presence and reality of God being impressed upon a reality beyond it. There are close parallels between the prophet and the priest in many sense the priest the prophet exceeds the priest in a number of respects he's a figure that stands behind and appoints the priest at many points and associated also with the anointing of kings the spirit presence the angel of the lord and the Moses Moses and the prophets associated with Moses correspond in the new testament to the spirit and the paraclete the helper the counsellor with Christ and then with the apostles that threefold correspondence and the final chapter of the book by Klein focuses upon the spirit presence and its association with God's eschatological appearing and so he sees this in the reference in the garden of Eden to the sound of God's coming and judgment in as the spirit of the day now that's often translated in the cool of the day God coming in the cool of the day but the sound of God coming in the as the spirit of the day is the way that he argues it should be read God coming as the spirit of the day and the wind of the day the cool of the day that's the way it's been translated but it's the same word for spirits it's God comes as the spirit of the day in this glorious theophanic appearance and he comes in and he sees the same thing in what he argues is a mistranslation in the reference to Elijah hearing the still small voice rather what it means is a silencing crushing voice a roaring crushing voice rather than a still small voice it depends upon how we translate it I'm not completely convinced by that translation but I think the more general point is on track that God's coming in the theophanic vision is usually seen as a powerful rushing wind.

It's associated with thunder and with lightning. It's associated with a voice that shakes the heavens and rends the heavens and shakes the earth. We see these themes taking place in the book of Ezekiel and see it with the heavens open, seeing visions of God.

We see it in the story of Christ's baptism. We see it in Pentecost as well with the rushing mighty wind that goes through that the house. And the day of the Lord is associated with judgment and the connection of the spirit of the day with the day can be explored from Genesis 1. He writes, spirit and day are brought into clear and close conjunction right at the beginning of Genesis 1 in the record of the first day of creation.

Though not lying so obviously on the surface, a more most significant relationship also obtains between the spirit and the seventh day. It will in fact appear that the seven day pattern of the creation record as a whole was so constructed that while it was figuratively indicating the temporal dimension and especially the sabbatical structuring of the creation history, it should also serve as a seven panelled portrait paradigm, a prototypal model of the day of the Lord which was to be of such great importance in the unfolding biblical revelation of cosmic redemptive history. And so again this helps you to understand what's taking place in the coming of the spirit.

The day is associated with the light, it's associated with the spirit and the light of the first day is the light of the glory cloud, the light of the spirit. It's associated with action and assessment as God does things and pronounces his works to be good. He does something, he creates something and then he assesses it and the weekly Sabbath is associated with the great day of the Lord, this judicial consummation of history, consummation of a period of time as God pronounces over his and our works.

So every time we celebrate the Lord's Day we are celebrating in anticipation of the great day of the Lord as God comes in judgment and we see this in the way that we talk about the Lord's Supper for instance. In 1st Corinthians 11 this is a sense of the celebration of the Lord's Supper as being a proleptic final judgment, that it's an anticipation of that final judgment what will happen that will happen in the future and we are tested and we're judged in order that we might not be condemned for the world and this testing in the moment of the supper is something that I think shows the connections that the day of the Lord involves that there is this light of the Lord coming on the scene, the spirit comes and as the spirit and the day come and those two things are very closely associated so light comes and things are brought to light, there's judgment and there's assessment and there's pronouncement and the coming Lord and the coming day become interchangeable. God's coming is like the dawning of a day bringing dark things to light and bringing life and blessing and wholeness and renewal is intensified in Sabbath celebrations such as Pentecost and Jubilee where there's liberation and restoration for the meek and judgment upon the wicked and in the New Testament Christ is associated with the face of God from which the divine glory shines and these are deep themes that we find particularly in association with the eschatological and passages of scripture whether that's in Revelation, whether it's in the epistles, whether it's in the Gospels, these are deep themes that if you've not focused upon this enough you'll miss a lot of this.

This book then is one that I highly and heartily recommend. There's so much packed into it, it's a very dense book in the material that it has but it packs a punch. There's a lot within it that will make you think in new ways about what the image of God means, about how the Spirit and the Son relate to each other, how to see God's presence in the Old Testament, how to think about what it means to be a priest or a prophet and how these figures actually show something about what it means to be the image of God more generally and as this theme develops I think it really sheds a great deal of light upon passages of scripture that might otherwise be confusing and I found it when I first read it a deeply exciting book and when I reread it this past week in the past few days in preparation for a book club that I have with a friend where we chat every week over Skype over something we've been reading I found it a tremendously fulfilling book and it reminded me of so much that it has influenced me in.

So I heartily recommend this book. There's a great deal that I haven't said about it that I could say but I won't say any more right now. I just recommend that you buy this book, read it, you'll enjoy it and it will give you a great deal to think about.

It may challenge you and unsettle your views in certain respects but it will generally be quite for the best. There's so much here to enjoy and if you're into for instance biblical horizons, theopolitan style biblical theology you will love this. This is a book that has had a great influence upon people like James Jordan and it's not surprising when you read it you'll see some of the impact that it has had.

So I recommend you read this book Images of the Spirit by Meredith Klein. I'll leave the link for that below. If you have any further questions please leave them in my Curious Cat account.

If you'd like to support this and future videos please do so using my Patreon account and Lord willing I'll be back again tomorrow perhaps with another video giving a book review. Thank you very much for listening and for your time. God bless.