19 June 2008 | 1 comment

Hair-pulling: a new pastoral method? Sandy Grant

Justin Moffatt20/06/2008 05:25 AM

Sandy—what would it look like to read this verse christologically? Could Jesus be a ‘better Nehemiah’, overturning the cleansing the temple etc?

It struck me that we have the same problem in many texts—it’s just that we are not used to hair pulling!

Texts like this one are Josiah in 2 Kings 23, and the weird one in Numbers 25:

<i>7 When Phinehas the son of Eleazar, son of Aaron the priest, saw it, he rose and left the congregation and took a spear in his hand 8 and went after the man of Israel into the chamber and pierced both of them, the man of Israel and the woman through her belly. </i>

What do you think?

And if you want to hear the Non-Lionel Windsor approach to the Hair-pulling texts, then enjoy the last few minutes of Mark Driscoll’s Dwell sermon here. Mark preached that Nehemiah is a kind of urban church planting manual.

The part that raised my eye-brows and got me thinking about that verse happens at around 47 minutes into Mark’s sermon. It got some laughs, but I was thinking that we need to read Nehemiah through the lens of the Gospel of Jesus, rather than as an ancient code for discipline, church planting or anything else.

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