Our considerations have noted the relationship between the word of God and water, as we contemplate how the features of creation project divine truths and principles. We observed how water can appear in a number of forms: rain, clouds, snow, rivers, seas, ice, steam, underground rivers, etc. We recognized the continuing Scriptural relationships between the clouds of heaven and the presence, power, glory and nature of our Creator. Falling from those clouds are the early and latter rains of our Creator’s spoken word: the word made flesh and the word exercised in power. The next logical extension of this progressive theme would be to consider the bodies of water these rains and snows replenish.
These bodies of water present a consistent Scriptural relationship with the word of God in judgment, maintaining the seamless spiritual/recreational theme of the water from the clouds through the rain and to the oceans, flood, seas and rivers. This judgment aspect, witnessed in these bodies of water, is focused in the diametrically opposed final judgment of life or death.
The saving and destroying flood waters of judgment
The flood waters of divine judgment, racing down from the collapsed upper firmament waters (Gen 1:6-8), submerged the continents (temporarily) deeper into the Earth’s magma, delivering both death and life. The death aspect is quite obvious, eliminating perhaps two billion people. Peter references the life saving feature of the flood waters in his baptism parallel “…when once the long suffering of God waited in the days of Noah, while the ark was a preparing, wherein few, that is, eight souls were saved by water. The like figure whereunto even baptism doth also now save us (not the putting away of the filth of the flesh, but the answer of a good conscience toward God,) by the resurrection of Jesus Christ:” (1 Pet 3:20-21). The same creational features of the water that drowned the many, buoyed up the ark of salvation above the destruction, saving the eight. Here, Peter confirms Paul’s inspired statements that it is the resurrection of Christ that will save us, while the death of Christ has reconciled us (Rom 5:10). The flood waters brought death to the many rejecting our Creator’s righteousness, and brought life to the few confirming our Creator’s righteousness.
The dramatic events in the Red Sea confirm this pattern. The children of Israel walked between two massive walls of water, standing to attention, as they traveled across the dried sea bed (Exod 14:21-22). When the children of God exited from between the water walls, the sea collapsed upon the arrogantly foolish Egyptian cavalry, bringing death to these sons of men. This body of water meant death to the flesh and life to the spirit, just like the flood waters.
Life to death in Egypt but death to life in the wilderness
The first of the ten plagues in Egypt converted the life sustaining Nile waters into blood, presenting a progression from life to death. However, after travelling an appropriate three days into the wilderness without water, the wilderness ecclesia witnesses the reverse progression. The poisonous waters of Marah were converted to life sustaining water by the tree cut down and thrown into the death waters to make them living waters, a symbol of the coming Messiah. The environment of Egypt projects the body of water image of life being transformed to death. The isolated wilderness ecclesial environment projects the reverse image of water being transformed from death to life.
Sea of life and sea of death
Our Creator painted this lesson geographically in the Promised Land for the enlightened, those with seeing eyes. There are two seas. The Sea of Galilee is a sea of life. Crops grow along the shores. Birds fly overhead. Herds drink its water. Children play in the water. Fishermen harvest Galilee’s bounty. The Dead Sea is appropriately the lowest point on the surface of our planet. These waters cannot sustain animal life or vegetation. No fish live in these waters. Cold, grey rocks line the water’s edge. The few venturing into the waters will spend days desperately trying to remove the salt residue (personal experience). There is a sea of life and there is a sea of death in the Promised Land, that was so carefully crafted by our Creator to educate those bearing His name.
The life to death river reversal
The Jordan River appropriately progresses from the Sea of Life to the Sea of Death. This Creator’s portrait of the progression of life under the curse of sin and death was reversed when the feet of the priests bearing the golden Christ-ark stepped into the river’s flow. This happened across from Jericho, before the gaping mouth of the Dead Sea, voraciously swallowing the waters of life into its waters of death. The Jordan river waters unnaturally receded all the way back to the city of Adam (by Zaretan, meaning “distress”), depicting how the curse of mortality can be reversed through our Messiah for the faithful all the way back to the distress by Adam. Appropriately those bearing the divine name were commanded to wait about 2,000 cubits back from this scene, before following this ark. This projects how all those bearing the Creator’s family name, into which we are baptized, will wait about 2,000 years from when our Messiah would first experience this reversal of the curse of mortality (Josh 3:4). The pattern is consistent. Bodies of water relate the theme of the word of God in the judgment of death to the flesh and life to the spirit.
The baptismal waters of death and life
This pattern is perfectly projected in the ritual of baptism. The two baptismal stages of death and resurrection project what Jesus explained to John the Baptist was the fulfillment of all righteousness (Matt 3:15). Since Jesus was only concerned about his Father’s righteousness, we can easily understand that baptism projects all the right-ness of our Creator. Christ’s baptism certainly had nothing to do with the forgiveness of his sins. He had no sins to be forgiven. It had nothing to do with erasing any imagined inherited guilt from Adam’s sin, as that would declare our Creator to be unrighteous and a liar. Christ’s baptism was all about his Father’s righteousness, just like his death and his resurrection. Christ’s voluntary burial in water is a declaration that our Creator’s initial demand to Adam and Eve, that sin must mean death, is a perfectly right and just understanding. All of paganism and apostate Christianity refuses that declaration of divine righteousness, blasphemously maintaining that sin can be just as eternal as righteousness. Rising from the water burial of baptism declares the rest of our Creator’s righteousness. Despite the rightness of our Creator’s judgment that sin requires death, He is also right in gracefully extending life even though we correctly deserve death due to sin. Our creator’s grace is not a contradiction of his judgment. He is right in both the baptismal burial shadow and the baptismal resurrection shadow of His rightness. The baptismal bodies of water, the rivers and lakes and oceans and ponds and pools and tubs, all display this same theme of the word of God exercised in the judgment and the grace of death and life.
Our next commentary will further extend this progressive theme, to the water’s spiritual/recreational relationship to fruit bearing plant life, confirming even greater evidence of the breadth, height and depth of this relationship between the spoken word of God (creation) and the written word of God (Bible).
The Origin of the Organic World – Part One