Cliff Mak

Oil, Dew & Obedience

— Posted August 31st, 2008 at 2:00 am // Permalink

It’s very nice and heartwarming to hear an exhortation to Christian unity like the one David Fong delivered at last week’s Jesus in Berkeley? event, but — and I don’t mean to be picky — let’s not deceive ourselves into thinking that achieving such unity will be easy.

Behold, how good and how pleasant it is
For brethren to dwell together in unity!
It is like the precious oil upon the head,
Running down on the beard,
The beard of Aaron,
Running down on the edge of his garments.
It is like the dew of Hermon,
Descending upon the mountains of Zion;
For there the LORD commanded the blessing –
Life forevermore. (Ps. 133, NKJV)

While Fong pinned this down as biblical poetry and even attempted to explicate the imagery, I was left a bit, um, perplexed. So unity is as luxuriously precious as oil and as implausible as the dew from distant Hermon descending on Jerusalem? If we left it at this, the first image would be beautiful while explaining nothing, and second would almost seem to undermine Fong’s exhortation — not to mention the entire event! (To his credit, he did only have ten minutes to do justice to the psalm.)

(There Will Be) Blood & Oil

What is it about oil that Scripture wants us to hear? The name Aaron and the mention of his beard and garments places us squarely in the cultic setting of the Israelites. The psalmist is envisioning brotherly unity to be like priestly worship. We are to be none other than the event of consecration, of the anointing of the priests before the ritual slaughters; we are holy because we are in unity.

But we can only be in unity when we truly become the Lord’s priests. The worship in the tabernacle, in the temple, was not a willy-nilly free-for-all, although it certainly got that way some times, leaving no less than Hezekiah (yes, he of the “anointing oil,” no less, in Isaiah 10) to reform his kingdom’s religious practices (2 Kings 18 & 2 Chron. 30). This is the same Hezekiah that defeated the Assyrians with prayer, too. Unity, then, is not just about worship; it is about right worship. And it’s not just about right worship, either; it’s about worship that heralds salvation.

Hezekiah’s reforms find a nice parallel in the New Testament when John warns us against antichrists: they are false teachers and not of us, but we “an anointing from the Holy One” and we “know all things” (1 John 2:20). According to John, to be in the united body of believers is to be an anointed priest, and to be anointed now means being rigorous and faithful in our doctrine as well, “knowing all things.”

Mountain Dew?

These are tough demands, it seems, but Christ himself demands no less. But first, why Mount Hermon? We’ve discussed the oil, but why does the psalmist, why does Scripture, skip from priestly oil to the dew of Hermon? Mr. Fong explains the image as one of refreshment, but why would the psalmist choose such an unlikely source of refreshment as a metaphor for unity? One answer (among many) comes from the New Testament, fulfilling and re-interpreting the Old, when Jesus enters the region of Caesarea Philippi — here we go — at the foot of Mount Hermon. The context reveals the event’s relevance to us: in Matthew 16, Christ has just encountered a group of Pharisees and Sadducees who try their darnedest to test him. After he promptly rebukes them, he warns his disciples to beware their doctrine. This sets the stage for their next conversation.

When they actually enter Caesarea Philippi, Jesus founds the Church upon Peter. Here, truly, is where brothers dwell together in unity. But leave it to Jesus to complicate things. The entire narrative of the New Testament works out of the Old, and every word and deed of Christ fulfills what came before. Psalm 133 is a psalm of David and a psalm of Hezekiah and a psalm, most wonderfully, of Jesus Christ. How good and pleasant is unity? It is like priestly oil, demanding correct worship and doctrine: we must, like Hezekiah, destroy our idols, and like the disciples, we must beware false teachings. Again, how good and pleasant is unity? It is like the dew from Mount Hermon, a mountain to the north, descending on Jerusalem in the south: according to Jesus in his deliberate embodiment of Psalm 133, it is the union of a divided Israel, north and south, old and new, in the body of the Church.

That the World May Know

So when we speak of unity and read from John 17, as David Fong did and many others have, and say rightly that the purpose of our unity is that the world may know that the Father sent His Son to die for our salvation, we shouldn’t forget the lessons of Psalm 133 and the allusion to the anointing of the priests. It is at the end of Exodus 29, after all, that the Lord says this:

So I will consecrate the tabernacle of meeting and the altar. I will also consecrate both Aaron and his sons to minister to Me as priests. I will dwell among the children of Israel and will be their God. And they shall know that I am the LORD their God, who brought them up out of the land of Egypt, that I may dwell among them. I am the LORD their God.

When the God of Israel says “so,” it is a holy, awesome “so.” It is a “so” that means “in this way that I have just described, with all the oil being poured and the bulls being slaughtered and burned” — in this way, I will dwell among you, and you shall know that I am the LORD your God.

When Jesus picks this up in John 17, the entire force of Exodus 29 and Psalm 133 is behind his words. Yes, we are to be in unity that the world may know, but how are we to get that unity? It does not just happen. What means has God provided? The story of Scripture is clear: it is through right worship and the preaching of the Word of the Lord that we — yes, we even at Berkeley — become one.