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The Purity
Principle
Thesis abstract: my observation and speculation that the reason the Fall happened before Adam and Eve had children, and that the Flood destroyed all of mankind except Noah’s family, is that God chose those times to avoid the far more complicated consequences of what would happen if only a part of mankind fell at once, or how to keep the Messianic Line undiluted from Adam to Christ. They appear to be decisions made mainly on the basis of demographics, with respect to their relation to sinfulness and its effects on the righteous who are living, keeping in mind God’s respect for the deterministic autonomy of man.
How
can I say that with simple words? = Specific points in history have seen God’s
intervention, I speculate, because of an implied, but (to my knowledge)
inexplicit, goal of maintaining the spiritual purity of believers: first the
patriarchs, then Israel, and then the Church.
Here’s
my big idea: have you noticed, for instance, that every single person in Jesus’
lineage as given in Matthew and Luke (as far as can be told from Biblical
background information on them) were saved? What are the chances of that? Now,
there must certainly be unbelievers in His ancestry
somewhere, BUT nevertheless the fact that there is at least one lineage containing an unbroken chain of
belief in God, from father to son, from Adam to Christ, is a very conspicuous
observation. And it begs analysis of why this might be the case.
I
should clarify how I am using the word purity.
You may have gotten the idea from the last paragraph, but let me dispel any
possible misunderstanding. My notion of purity in this article concerns itself
with spiritual genealogy. The physical lineage doesn’t matter; this isn’t
promoting nationalism or ethnic divisions between people. In the context of
Israel and the Church, Biblically, purity means you have believers inside and
unbelievers outside. Let unrepentant ones in, and the passage “a little leaven
leavens the whole lump” comes true. The idea is that unbelief is, from a
demographic viewpoint, infectious. Leave it alone without a purge of some sort
(does not need to be violent), and over time it has the tendency to totally
corrupt everything. We see this in the example of Noah, whose culture had
become so far removed from God (from the impurity of the God-believing Sethites
intermarrying with pagan Cainites, which tainted the succeeding generations
with the Cainite godlessness) that he was the ONLY man alive on earth who
walked with God!—out of the millions or possibly billions of people alive at
that point. As a student trained in biology, this makes me think of serial
dilutions.
Right-click on any of the following images to see them in a full size view.
Faithlessness, if tolerated by the faithful, and absent God’s intervention, has the effect of diluting faithfulness over time so that there is less and less faith on earth, by proportion of the total population, by every succeeding generation.
This
is obviously a bad thing, and if God does not desire (as I believe the Bible
gives us strong support to believe) for faithfulness to ever disappear
completely from the earth, at any one time, then He would have to do something
to protect the diminishing remaining faithful from the corrupting godlessness
around them.
And
this is, I believe, a supporting reason for God’s decisions in history to a)
send the Flood, b) call Abraham out of Ur, c) the Israelite Exodus, d) the
Zionistic theocratic laws for Israel that forbade intermarriage with
foreigners, and ultimately why Jesus came at just the time that He did.
Naturally,
the main reasons from a theological point of view, and a historical point of
view, are different, more obvious, and more important. But every good thing
done has more than one good reason for doing it, and I’m going to use the space
after the jump to describe how God’s desire for the spiritual purity of the
various people God has dealt with has, I believe, been a supporting reason for His
decision making and His perfect timing.
