Bro. Harry Tennant once said, “When you find a golden thread in a Scripture verse, and you pull it a bit, you never know which other verse will ‘move’. ”
It’s a lovely thought and a constant reminder to us that, wherever we read in the Bible, we ought to be alert for the echoes, the direct quotations, and the marginal references that point us to other parts of God’s Word. The Bible is an inspired masterpiece, and those who understand one part are well on the way to understanding other parts. “What does this remind me of?” is almost always the best question we can ask as we read the Scriptures.
Bro. Harry spoke of golden threads, and we have been talking about scarlet threads, or cords, or garments. The principle is the same, of course.
Even more than that, the two together — golden threads and scarlet ones — remind us of the tabernacle, and then the temples, in Israel. These houses of God, and houses of worship, were equipped with elaborate woven hangings, curtains, and veils. The garments of the priests who ministered there were likewise woven of the finest fabric, and interwoven and embroidered with, among other things, threads of gold, and threads of scarlet!
Exodus 26, 27, 36, and 38 speak of the tabernacle, and Exodus 28 and 39 of the ceremonial garments of the High Priest. In these were to be found finely-twisted linen, and threads of scarlet, and blue, and purple, and even gold itself, drawn out into the finest wire and interwoven with the fabrics.
It is beyond our scope, and our time, to develop this picture in great detail. But we satisfy ourselves here by remarking on the plain Scriptural significance of the fabrics and the gold and the colors:
- Fine linen, being white, signifies holiness, purity, and righteousness, as found in the bride (the sort of garments the young Mary no doubt planned to wear at the celebration of her wedding). In Revelation 19:8, the bride of Christ is “arrayed in fine linen, clean and white: for the fine linen is the righteousness of saints.” (And not so much their own righteousness, but more so the righteousness provided them as a garment, or a covering, by the Bridegroom.)
- The color blue calls one’s attention to the heavens, and to the God who dwells there. The Jews were supposed to wear, always, cords or hems of blue on their garments (Num 15:38), the more easily to remember God and His commandments. (In the gospels, the woman with an issue of blood, who could not be healed, took hold of the hem of Jesus’ garment and was healed. This recalls the passage in Zechariah 8, where ten men of the nations take hold of the hem of the garment of THE Jew, asking him for deliverance and salvation. It was the blue hem of such a garment, perhaps augmented with the scarlet of Judah, that Ruth asked Boaz to spread over her, claiming her as his bride.)
- Scarlet is the color of blood, and sin, and sacrifice God promises Israel: “Though your sins are like scarlet, they shall be as white as snow; though they are red as crimson, they shall be like wool” (Isaiah 1:18). Tamar’s scarlet cord was the cord of inheritance and royalty, and Rahab’s scarlet cord more that of sacrifice, the scarlet blood of the Passover lamb.
- Purple is the combination of equal parts blue (godliness) and scarlet (humanity, sin, and sacrifice). Purple is often associated with kingship.
- And gold is, among other things, a symbol of royalty (the crown of gold), as well as a symbol of faith. In 1 Peter 1:7 Peter compares faith with gold, and a tried faith with purified gold.
All this is fascinating. Without going deeper, it suggests that God’s house, and the coverings for God’s priests, were specially prepared for them according to rigid standards.
In Psalm 139:13-16 (NIV), David sings to God: “For you created my inmost be- ing; you knit me together in my mother’s womb. I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made; your works are wonderful, I know that full well. My frame was not hidden from you when I was made in the secret place. When I was woven together in the depths of the earth, your eyes saw my unformed body. All the days ordained for me were written in your book before one of them came to be.”
Several words in this passage are commonly used elsewhere in the Bible to describe the knitting together, and the weaving, of the fabrics of tabernacle and temple and priestly garments (you’ll have to use a concordance on that later). David applies them to the knitting together of the fetus in the mother’s womb, the mysterious process by which God miraculously creates each human being. David was thus “woven together” in his mother’s womb, as was the Lord Jesus Christ.
Even beyond this point, we recognize that God is working to weave all of us together, in our lives, our experiences, our trials, our “successes” (if there are such) and even our “failures” (as those of David and Bathsheba). It is in our failures that we may learn most readily to turn to the One who doesn’t fail. In our weaknesses we may be drawn to the One who is strong!
God has worked,
- first in the experiences of men like David, of the tribe of Judah, then
- in the experiences of his descendant, our Lord Jesus Christ, and now
- in all our own experiences.
God continues to work today to construct and organize a tabernacle, or temple, in which He will dwell. This is what we mean when we talk about the “scarlet thread, or cord” in the story of the women of Matthew 1 (and, I venture to suggest, what Bro. Harry Tennant meant when he talked of finding, studying, and learning from the golden threads of the Bible).
More than this, the scarlet cord plays an important part in the development of our story. As we recall:
- A scarlet thread or cord was used by Tamar to mark out her firstborn as a prince in Judah.
- And another scarlet cord (or the same one?) was used (probably) by Salmon prince of Judah as a Passover emblem to denote the house of Rahab, and to save her and her family when God destroyed the city of Jericho.
- A garment (whether with a scarlet cord, we cannot say for sure) figured prominently in Ruth’s claiming her redeemer Boaz: “Spread your garment over me… give me protection.” And another prince of Judah resulted from their union, another link in the genealogy that led from Abraham to Jesus Christ.
- And then, there are the lips of the Shullamite, as “a scarlet thread” (Song 4:3). This signifies that she is distinguished by talking about, and thinking of, these stories.
- The scarlet cord seems to recede in the story of David and Bathsheba, but it is replaced by a sword: “The sword shall not depart from your house.” Because of sin, there is suffering, and death, and loss, but in all of this, and despite it, God still works to produce His seed, to continue the royal line, that leads at last to His only-begotten Son.
When Jesus was born, he was taken shortly thereafter to the Temple to be presented to God, and redeemed by a special sacrifice. There the old man Simeon took the baby in his arms, and then said to Mary: “And a sword will pierce your own soul also” (Luke 2:35). In this he implied, as plainly as he could, that there would be a “sword” (suffering, and death) in the life of this little baby.
There is more. We go to the garden of Gethsemane, and there we watch. We see, in the shadows, the Son of God sweating as it were great drops of blood falling to the ground (Luke 22:44). Shortly thereafter, there arrive at the garden soldiers, carrying swords and clubs, to arrest him. Peter pulls out a hidden sword, and wields it. Jesus warns: “Put your sword away. Must I not drink of the cup prepared for me?”
Finally, a few hours later, we see his captors “put a scarlet robe on him” (Matt 27:28) and mockingly saluted him as “the king of the Jews [literally, the king of Judah]”.
The sword could not depart from David’s house; it cannot depart from our house either. We are all condemned to die because of our sins. The sword will not depart… until the work of Jesus Christ has run its full course. He must experience the sword, he must wear the scarlet robe, and we must be bound to him in those experiences. We must share in his death, and his sacrifice: we must be touched by his blood. We must crucify ourselves, and our pride and our sins and our self-reliance, along with him at Golgotha.
We must bow down at the foot of the cross, and say, ‘Lord, be merciful to me, a sinner! I grasp the scarlet cord of your garment. I need to be sprinkled with your shed blood. I need healing that only you can provide. I need covering that only you can provide. Redeem me, O Lord.’
*****
We have traced the theme of the scarlet thread through the stories of the women of Matthew 1. As we went along, we noticed that the picture of the scarlet thread (or cord, or garment) seemed to give way to the picture of the sword (and blood and sacrifice and death). Alternately, it might perhaps be said that the scarlet cord has become the cord of blood! For several reasons, this makes quite a good deal of sense:
- As the scarlet “thread” is traced through our story lines, and we get closer and closer to the culmination, with Jesus Christ, the theme of blood and sacrifice begins to supersede the other. That is, it becomes more obvious that the inheritance of the royal line of Judah depends upon a sacrificial death of the One in whom the line concludes! Jesus IS the King because he is first the perfect sacrifice. He will wear the crown of gold because he first wore the crown of thorns. He will conquer the nations because he first conquered his own “spirit”, his own “will”, by making that will the same as his Father’s will.
- When the scarlet cord appears in the story of Rahab, it is plain that it is the nearest approximation to the blood of the Passover Lamb. When Rahab hung the scarlet cord in the window of her house, it would, to Jewish soldiers and angels alike, resemble the blood sprinkled, or smeared, around the doors of the Israelite homes in Egypt. The inhabitants of those houses were the only ones who escaped the final plague, the death of the firstborn of each family. This points plainly to Jesus Christ himself, whom John the Baptist calls “the [Passover] Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world” (John 1:29).
- Then there is another scarlet thread in the Bible, already mentioned. It is the scarlet thread found in the garments of the High Priest, and in curtains and veils and garments associated with the tabernacle and temple. It is the scarlet thread of sacrifice.
- Even though Levi (and not Judah) was the priestly family in Israel, Jesus is plainly a different order of priest. He is a priest, not of Levi, but after the order of Melchizedek (Heb 7): a king-priest combination. So there is reason to see two scarlet threads in the Bible: one kingly and one priestly; and also to find them coming together in the person of our Lord.
Certain passages in the Book of Revelation bring these threads together:
- Revelation 5:1-13: The Lion of the Tribe of Judah is proclaimed (in heaven? or in the temple of God?) as having triumphed. To him is given the privilege of opening the Book of Life and the book of the future. In the scene pictured in Revelation 5, all the hosts around the throne of God wait eagerly for the “Lion” of Judah to appear so that the wonderful book might be opened. However, when he does appear, in v 6, he appears, amazingly, not as a “Lion” at all, but instead as a “Lamb, looking as if he had been slain”! It is one of the great dramatic reversals, and great surprises, in the Bible, if we can imagine the theatrical effect of this scene. [‘We all waited, breathlessly, for the Great Lion to appear! And behold, when he came, he was a lowly lamb, covered with blood and the marks of having been slain!’] However, in one sense it is no surprise at all: the “Lion” of Judah who receives the scepter of the Kingdom of God could prove his right to the throne only by laying down his life. He had to be a lamb, the Lamb of God, before he could ever think of being the “Lion of Judah”!
- In Revelation 7:9-17, the redeemed “out of every tribe, nation, people, and language” wash their garments and make them white in the blood of the “Lamb”, the Lamb who rests in the center of God’s throne.
- And in Revelation 13:8, the Lamb is said to have been slain “from the foundation of the world”. In other words, his death was ordained from the beginning. So there is every reason to suppose that, from the “foundation of the world” to the end of the world, the “scarlet threads” (the threads of bloodshed and death and sacrifice) would, if pulled a bit, lead inevitably to him. Signs and markers and emblems left ahead of time, little scarlet threads interwoven into the fabric of God’s wonderful Book, all point to the Coming One. He is a Man who became a Lamb, and then became a Lion (though he still may appear, to believers, at least, in his most precious role, as the Lamb who had been slain.).
*****
We have talked earlier, also, about the “scarlet cord” as a cord of hope, binding together one generation to the next, in shared expectations of the One to come.
It is no surprise, then, that the umbilical cord binding the expectant mother to the child in her womb, and carrying nourishment from the one to the other is actually a “scarlet cord” and a cord of blood.
The spiritual “umbilical cord” is the means by which the mother conveys spiritual nourishment to the child, giving him or her the first lessons about God. Such lessons inculcate an awareness of the One who is beyond, intangible, unseen, yet all-knowing and all-powerful, and on Him we all depend utterly. The old rabbis said the one who is best taught is the one who is taught by his mother.
*****
Matthew 1 — with its special women — speaks to us of the hopes, the yearnings, the “treasured-up-in-the-heart” desires of righteous mothers for their children. It may seem, sometimes, as though men rule the world, but there is great truth in the old saying. The saying is a cliché, but it is still true: “The hand that rocks the cradle rules the world.”
We all should have our own memories of the “scarlet cord” of family — for many of us a natural family, father and mother, grandparents. For all of us, surely, there are memories of a spiritual family, of “fathers” and “mothers” in the faith, who gave us visions of coming glory. Those are the memories we should cherish and pass along to others, to our own natural children, and to our “spiritual” children as well.
I still have copies of books that belonged first to my grandmother, and then were passed along to my mother, and now they are mine. On the front pages are written notes like this: “My darling Ruth, please read this, and read it again. It is your life! The Truth is the most precious thing I can give you.”
I have my own memories, of a mother who dragged us boys out of bed on Sunday mornings so that we could drive an hour each way, no matter the weather, to attend Sunday school and meeting, practically every Sunday. I can still hear myself saying, ‘No, Mom, I want to sleep in. I’m tired. I don’t feel well.’ And I still hear her reply: ‘Get up anyway; you can sleep in the car; you’ll feel better when you get there. It’s the right thing to do!’ So off we would go! They are “scarlet cords!”
*****
In a documentary about the Statue of Liberty, and the meaning of freedom and America, Mario Cuomo, the son of Italian immigrants and at that time the governor of New York, talked about his family history.
He remembered his father, who had first come to the shores of the New World, and then worked as a ditch-digger to earn enough money to bring over his wife and one son. Finally she and the boy (Mario’s older brother) were able to make the trip from the Old Country.
Governor Cuomo, a great storyteller, imagines the scene that might have occurred when Mrs. Cuomo and her small son were interviewed by an Ellis Island official. As he had imagined it, they had just come off the ship, in the shadow of the Statue of Liberty.
‘So… Mrs. Cuomo, do you have any money?’
‘Almost nothing at all.’
‘Any other family in America?’
‘No, sir.’
‘Do you have any education?’
‘Very little.’
‘What prospects do you have in America?’
‘Well, my husband is working — when he can find work — at making trenches.’
‘Making trenches? Oh, he’s a ditch-digger?’
‘Yes.’
‘That’s all?’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘So. Let me get this straight. You have no money, no friends, no education, no job, nowhere to live, and one child so far to support. Your husband is a ditch-digger. Why did you come here?’
‘Sir, we came because over there, on the mainland, there is work, and we believe there is hope, hope for something better.’
‘So, Mrs. Cuomo, why should we let you in, since you have brought next to nothing with you? What can you give to us?’
‘Sir, it is true: I have nothing else to offer, except for one other thing: You see, I have a dream, just a hope, really, that before I die, a son of mine will be governor of this great state of New York.’
*****
Let us then imagine another interview. Let us imagine that, when Naomi and Ruth made their way from Moab toward Naomi’s homeland of Israel, they were met by an Israeli border guard:
‘So, ma’am, you are Naomi widow of Elimelech, and you have land and property in Bethlehem. Is that right?’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘We are pleased to have you return to us. Shalom! But who is this with you?’ ‘Sir, this is my daughter-in-law, Ruth of Moab, the widow of my son Mahlon.’
‘And you, then, Ruth of Moab, let us see about you. What is your allegiance? Whom do you worship?’
‘Sir, I worship the God of Israel. I have learned of Him from my husband and my mother-in-law.’
‘Oh yes, and so they all say, when they try to sneak into Israel. How do I know this is true?’
‘Sir, you have only my word for it.’
‘Well, we shall see. Let me think: what else? Do you have any money?’
‘Almost nothing at all. We are poor widows.’
‘Do you have any education?’
‘Only the little I received in… uh, that other land.’
‘What skills do you have? Your mother-in-law is too old to be of much use working? How will you support yourself and her?’
‘I had thought that I would glean in the fields during harvest time.’ ‘Hah! One more of those… And how will you ever manage?’ ‘We have faith, sir. And I am a hard worker.’
‘No great prospects in that, I must say. So, let me summarize: you have no money, no skills, no expectations, and a questionable past. We know you were an idolater, and who knows what else, over there in that dark, ugly land. So why should I open the gate and allow you to enter our special Land of Promise? You seem to have brought absolutely nothing of value.’
‘Well, sir, there is one other thing: I do bring with me the hope that, if God give me the right husband, one day a descendant of mine will be the King of Israel, and another will be the Messiah.’
*****
So, in the last analysis, what can you and I offer to the LORD of heaven and earth? Nothing, really. Except our firm grasp of the scarlet cord of memory and belief and love and hope, the cord of faith that binds us together with His Son, and with one another. The hope that one day we, and our sons and daughters, will rule as kings and priests in God’s glorious eternal Kingdom. This will be so not for any merit we have, nor for any works we have done that lift us above anyone else, but because with unfailing resolve we continued to cling to the hem of the garment of the One who died for us. We held on and we never let go.
“Then those who feared the LORD talked with each other, and the LORD listened and heard. A scroll of remembrance was written in his presence concerning those who feared the LORD and honored his name. ‘They will be mine,’ says the LORD Almighty, ‘in the day when I make up my treasured possession. I will spare them, just as in compassion a man spares his son who serves him’ ” (Mal 3:16,17).
*****
In Jesus, then, the “scarlet cord” of family line and inheritance and royalty, and also of sacrifice and redemption, reaches its end. Each of us, belongs to Christ, and is through him Abraham’s seed and an heir of the promises. For us the “scarlet cord” has, in every generation, a wonderful new beginning. “Behold, I make all things new!”
- Like Tamar, we say to our Lord (the prince of Judah): “Give me your special cord and insignia, as a pledge!”
- Like Rahab, we say: “Remember me when you enter the promised land!”
- Like Ruth, we say, “Spread your cloak of protection over me!”
- Like Bathsheba, “Lord, remember the oath, the promise you made to me!”
- And, like Mary, “Lord, I am your servant. May your will be done with me!”
The Origin of the Organic World – Part One