od’s Spirit is at work within God’s people to advance God's king- Phat is the work of sanctification. But he is also at work through God's to advance God’s kingdom. That is the manifold work of the Spirit sh the church in evangelization, healing, and prophetic manifestation V's truth and love. And that work, like all of God’s kingdom advance, atter of warfare. I assume here but argue elsewhere that from the Fall d, God’s Spirit has worked through prophet figures to wage war in (0 establish and advance God's kingdom in the world. r understanding of God’s mode of kingdom establishment/advance nables us to produce a more nuanced version of our major paradigm. w the paradigm as a parallel to the structure of Egyptian theology, ich Amon-Ra worked through his incarnate son to do the work that ced his kingdom and aimed at restoration. In the biblical parallel, 1¢ Spirit who works through the incarnate Son to do the same. But me dynamic was at work through the prophets of old, and is at work in and through the church, The final form of the paradigm thus il- (es God’s way of kingdom advance in any age. ‘The Major Paradigm (Final Form) God works by his Spirit through the Word/a prophet figure to war against and defeat his foe God establishes a covenant with a peopl God’s covenant establishes that people as God's people. God establishes a temple among his people, because he 1 reside among them. d conducts warfare through a prophet figure on the analogy of the Why? Because all prophets through whom the Father worked before carnation were modeled on the Son. Although they came before him, ith he was before them (cf. John 1:30). And all who have the Spirit of after Pentecost are modeled also on the Son, for God's Spirit works n us to remake us into the Lord’ mess (cf. 2 Cor. 3:18) and through do the works that our Father is doing, Conclusion A Symphony of Parallels + the outset of this work, we noted three possible sources of paral between the Old Testament (and Bible as a whole) and the ancient Near Bast: the mutual recollection of major events that actually did oc- cur (eg., Creation, the Flood), the use by biblical writers of literary and legal forms already current in the ancient Near East (e.g., poetic parallel- ism with its stock word pairs, the second millennium B.C, international treaty/covenant form), and, finally, the activity of deceiving, demonic spir- its (producing parallels between supposed acts of pagan gods and the acts of God as they appear in the Bible). Primarily we have explored the third of, these grounds of parallelism. Our exploration not only has shown that the pagan cultures of the ancient Near East had certain fundamentally impor- tant concepts in common with the biblical authors, but it also has shown that those pagan cultures shared a theological structure of thought with that of the biblical writers. We have endeavored to summarize and outline that structure, It may be a modern irony that theology often is practiced more as an academic discipline than as a spiritual one. But the spiritual dimension of theology is paramount, whether or not it receives paramount attention at the hands of many theologians. In the cases of parallelism that we have considered in this book, there are almost always two ways of looking at the data. The first way is to consider them to be part of an ancient Neat East- ern worldview. In that case, the biblical authors are just couching things in terms familiar to them from their contemporary thought world. The "7Mesopotamia Canaan ‘An (supreme god) Bl (supreme god) Enlil (storm god) Baal (storm god) Divine assembly Divine assembly Humans Humans Greece Rome Chronos (supreme god) Saturn (supreme god) storm god) Jupiter (storm god) Divine assembly Divine assembly Humans Humans Biblical View ‘The Father (supreme God) ‘The Son (also God, of course, appearing in storm theophany) Angelic assembly (e.g., Job 1-2) Humans ical view of reality presented above is paralleled by the pagan worldviews, which both predate and postdate the Bible. The ancient world anderstood that there was a supreme God, with whom all things originated and who held all authority and yet was relatively inactive in human affairs. But they also understood that there was another god, the storm god, who was indeed active among both monarchy may present an analogy, in which the monarch theoretic: holds authority and instructs the prime minister to form a government, but it is the prime minister who is truly active, who “gets things done.” So it was in the ancient world with Enlil, Baal, Zeus, and Jupiter. To carry the analogy further, it may be that the Son is the one who is the more “active” person of the Trinity, the one who “gets things done” by the power of the Spirit working through him and who is associated with storm theophanies (e.g Matt. 26:64)? In any case, the parallel that concerns us now is that which obtains between the pagan divine assemblies and the biblical assem- bly of angels, or “sons of God” (Job 1-2 Rsv). Holy angels refuse human 2, CE Niehaus, God at Sinai, 333-84, To the extent that analogy is true, of course, the Father does not hold a merely theoretical authority! ‘worship (cf. Rev. 19:10), but fallen angels clearly do not, as Moses and Paul have indicated. It seems reasonable to agree with these biblical writers, and such agreement leads us to understand that the common pagan theological structure presented above is a theological counterfeit not only endorsed by ancient pagan thought, but imposed upon the ancients by the mislead- g inspiration of fallen angels ( trines of demons,” 1 Tim. 4:1 Rs ‘The Bible devotes the lion’s share of its attention not to Satan and his works but to God and his works, and that is where our attention belongs as well. He is the one who, lowed such theological parallels as we have explored to become manifest over many centuries in the ancient world so that truth would appear, even in darkened and polytheistic forms. ‘Truth in such forms could have no sav- ing power. But it did prepare a matrix of thought, a background of theologi- cal understanding, so that when God truly appeared and did such things as the pagans had claimed for their gods—instituting covenant, giving laws, commanding conquest and extending his kingdom, even by signs and wonders—his revelation would come to a people who had some theologi- cal preparation for it. In this way God was glorified even by the distortions of pagan religion, for even in their darkness the pagans had retained or obtained common grace reflections of his truth. It is the fuller revelation of that truth that now makes true life possible, and also makes possible all works of Christian theology. And the fuller revelation of that truth also encourages us to wait patiently until the God of truth does finally, on a day and hour that he knows, come back once and for things. 3. CF. the misleading guidance provided by a “lying sprit,” or “spirit of deception,” ‘through the mouths of false prophets in 1 Kings 228 Ancient Near Eastern Themes in Biblical Theology second way is to consider the parallels as rooted in truth: revealed truth in the Old Testament and the Bible, and distorted truth in the ancient Near East. We prefer the second approach because it is consistent with the claims made by the biblical writers and speakers themselves. For example, we are told that David gave Solomon “the plans ofall that the Spirit had put in his mind for the courts of the temple of the LoRD and all the surrounding rooms, for the treasuries of the temple of God and for the treasuries for the dedicated things” (1 Chron, 28:12). Those plans included the weight of gold and silver for the lamp stands and their lamps and for the tables and the weight of gold for the forks, sprinkling bowls, :nd dishes, as well as for the altar of incense (1 Chron. 28:14~18) David said, ‘I have in writing from the hand of the LORD upon ‘me, and he gave me understanding in all the details of the plan” (1 Chron. 28:19). ‘Thutmose II (1490-1436 B.C.) erected a holy of holies for Amon and received divine guidance, not only for the temple construction, but also for fashioning the temple's liturgical equipment: «+a great vase of electrum... [...] silver, gold, bronze, and copper .. the Two Lands were flooded with their brightness, like the stars in the body of Nut [ie. the sky goddess], while my statue followed. Offerin bles of electrum .... I made it for him out of the conceptions of my heart, by the guidance ofthe god him: When a pagan king makes the same claim that a and when that claim is a spiritual one and involves divine guidance, an evaluation that says the biblical king is just understanding these things the way any ancient Near Easte arch would understand them does not do justice to the data, David either got guidance from God by “the hand of the LORD” upon him, or he did not. If he did not, then his state- ment to the contrary makes him either a liar or a deceived, and perhaps a self-deceived man. ’Since nothing elsewhere in the Bible gives us any reason to think that David's statement was in error, we can only conclude that it was true. If it was true, then David’s experience of inspiration, cr divine guidance, was a genuine experience that produced the results m 1. Breasted, Ancient Records of Egypt 2:68 (§ 164) A Symphony of Parallels 179 that God wanted. But how are we then to understand the similar claims of divine guidance made by Thutmose III? It would be most bizarre if by centuries made an almost identical claim to divine guidance for making temple furnishings for his god and made that claim by coincidence. Or, to put it another way, the true God just happened to do to David what Thutmose claimed his god did for him earlier. llels we have explored in this book are of this sort. We have concluded that they cannot be explained as cases of biblical dependence on ancient Near Eastern theology. We also conclude that they cannot be explained as coincidences, if only because the accumulation of such coin- cidences sooner ot later strains credibility. Our belief need not be strained, however, because the Bible itself gives us the reason for such parallels. Pas- sages such as Deuteronomy 32:16-19; 1 Corinthians 10:20; and 1 Timothy 4:1 tell us clearly enough that demonic powers and intelligences are behind false religion, and even behind false theology in the church. The activities of Satan and demons are not given much press between the covers of Scrip- ture and deservedly so, since the Bible is primarily about God and his acts. and his kingdom and not about the other side. On the other hand, Paul can write that he and the early church were not ignorant of the Devil’s schemes (2. Cor. 2:11). God in his wisdom has not left his people ignorant of those matters. At least, he has given his church the wherewi by his Spirit, to understand certain fundamental and his ways. Demonic inspiration of false religion (which produces the sort of parallels we have considered, including the major paradigm in its Pagan articulations) is one of the things that the Bible teaches quite clearly in the passages noted, Of course the church can, unfortunately and in spite of what Paul wrote, be ignorant of such matters, just as believers can be ignorant of any biblical truths that they may choose to ignore or happen not to know. ‘We said earlier in this work that the topic of the ancient Near Eastern di- vine assembly would not form a major topic of discussion for us, and it will not. It needs to be noted at this point, however, that in light of what Moses and Paul wrote about false religions, a proper understanding of the pagan pantheons is in order. A broad understanding is presented in the following schema,