Reading the bible in the dumbest possible ways.
I was reading in Revelation 3, and John makes this statement about ‘the seven spirits of God.’ Seven spirits? I thought there was just one Holy Spirit, right? Yesterday, I wrote something that I stand by, but, that ruffles some feathers: The bible isn’t written for you. That shouldn’t shock you; even in evangelical circles, that’s rule number one of hermeneutics, of bible-reading and interpreting.
Consider the context. It’s rule one. Context, context, context. What’s rule number two? Rule two of hermeneutics, I was always told, is that we let the more clear passages of scripture interpret the less clear for us. You’re not doing much interpretation on your own: Let the bible speak on the bible. I take it to the extreme, erring on the side of caution. The bible is not one book, but sixty-six, and I let each book first interpret itself, before looking to another book to try and understand what I’m reading.
I’ll give you an example of this. John writes in Revelation that he saw Jesus walking ‘among the seven lamp-stands.’ After making this statement, he gives us an interpretive method that we can carry through the remainder of the book: “The mystery of the seven stars you saw in my right hand and of the seven golden lamp-stands is this: The seven stars are the angels of the seven churches, and the seven lamp-stands are the seven churches” (Revelation 1:20 CSB).
Did you catch that? John doesn’t give us this symbolic imagery in order to confuse us, or mystify us, or send us out to look at our own world and try to connect dots that don’t connect. I see it so often among the evangelical crowd. They read of a great dragon and they imagine military helicopters. They read of a great bear in the north and they see Vlad Putin, in Russia. They interpret numbers in strange ways, saying things like, that the Hebrew number symbolic of lightning matches the Hebrew number of Barack Obama’s name. Such pursuits are idiotic.
John says, “Understand the mystery here: The mystery is, the seven lamps represent the seven churches in Asia Minor,” and from then out, we know that when he makes mention of a lamp, he’s speaking of a church in his own day. John was a student of Jesus Christ. “You are the light of the world,” as Jesus said. John makes use of that imagery because, in his day, it is meaningful imagery.
So what of the seven spirits? That’s a weird one, right? Who has ever known a trinitarian God--who appears as Father, Son, and one Holy Spirit--to be seven-fold in any way? Wouldn’t such a congress of gods be woefully conflicted?
Understand that the bible wasn’t written to us, or for us. It was written in Hebrew and in Greek, to Hebrew and Greek-speaking people--primarily Judeans--living, in the case of Revelation, in second-century Palestine and abroad, in the mediterranean. To the young, Greek-speaking, Hebrew reader, who would have attended school under a rabbi, the phrase ‘seven spirits’ would be instantly recognizable.
The phrase, ‘seven spirits’ would have called to mind a messianic passage from the prophecies which all little Hebrew boys were made to memorize, Isaiah 11:1-3.
“Then a shoot will grow from the stump of Jesse, and a branch from his roots will bear fruit. The spirit of the LORD will rest on him: a spirit of wisdom and understanding, a spirit of counsel and strength, a spirit of knowledge and of the fear of the LORD. His delight will be in the fear of the LORD. He will not judge by what he sees with his eyes, he will not execute justice by what he hears with his ears” (Isaiah 11:1-3 CSB).
We speak of seven deadly sins, vices, and seven heavenly virtues--none of which are actually found in the bible. But what is found are these seven godly spirits:
the spirit of the LORD
the spirit of wisdom
the spirit of understanding
the spirit of counsel
the spirit of strength
the spirit of knowledge
the spirit of fear of the LORD
These spirits rest on one man, who came from the lineage of Jesse. The messiah. Jesus Christ. John writes that the sevenfold spirit of God, the Christ himself, has a message for the seven churches of Asia Minor. It’s no secret that, in Hebrew, numbers have meanings. They aren’t hidden meanings, but they also aren’t revealed in scripture, because Hebrew numerology was an extra-biblical, largely inter-testamental Hebrew pursuit.
You’ve likely heard of the number 666, and how, somehow that means devil-worship. Well, there’s the tiniest shred of truth to that, as, in Hebrew, the number means something like, “the perfection of incompleteness.” Six is their number for mankind, and for God’s work on the sixth day, which was incomplete until God rested. Whenever a number is repeated, it means the most of that thing.
So 666 is the most incomplete work, the worst of all mankind. But the number itself is absolutely meaningless to us, in our day, apart from being the former area code of Reeves, Louisiana, until enough fundie Christians raised a stink. There’s even disagreement on whether or not the number 666 is listed in the bible.
John is calling upon extra-biblical, historical, patently Hebrew mythological imagery in order to teach a particular truth. Namely, that in Jesus Christ dwells all the fullness of God bodily, just as Paul also famously wrote. He had the spirit of the Most High God, he had wisdom and understanding, counsel and strength, knowledge and respect for the things of God. We would all do well to cultivate each of those qualities.
All of the bible’s authors draw upon contemporary and mythological, literary imagery in order to connect with their audiences. Jesus quoted non-biblical poetry. Paul quoted three or four different philosophers, including a secular philosopher and poet of his day, Aratus. John quotes Heraclitus, the philosopher. And there are many more, direct quotes in scripture, whose origins--and the documentation of them--have been lost to time. Further proof that while the bible has been faithfully and dutifully preserved for us, it is not a book written to us.
Instead of keeping interpretive methods like these in mind as we read the bible, we engage in our own apocalyptic fantasies, because studying the actual words of the bible is just too hard.