Dennis Tuuri

# Reformation Covenant Church Q&A Session
**Pastor Dennis Tuuri**

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Q1: **Questioner:**
You mentioned something about the garden and the bride and the husband or the man’s responsibility there. Did you have a question or you just want me to expound a little bit?

**Pastor Tuuri:**
You know, I thought about another way to have done the sermon for this text would have been to just talk about the marriage of Christ and the church, as in Ephesians, and talk about husband-wife relationships. And I really, if I had a little more time, I probably would have encouraged wives based on this text in terms of loving and following and submitting to husbands.

But yeah, the basic job that Adam had with the Garden of Eden was to dress and keep it. Those are the King James words. And what that means is: to dress it means to mature it, to make the thing grow nicer, and to keep it meant to guard it. And so man’s basic responsibility in terms of his vocation can be seen that same way.

Those two terms—the exact same Hebrew terms—are used later in the responsibilities of the Levites in terms of temple instruments. And what they do in the temple is a dressing of the temple. They make it more glorious by their work, and they’re to keep—guard the instruments of the temple.

Then we follow that into the New Testament in the Ephesians text, for instance. Those are the very things that Adam—or that man is told—husbands are told, you know, in terms of their wives. You know, no man hates his own flesh but nourishes it and guards it. So what we do for ourselves is to feed ourselves—to stiffen ourselves up by food, that’s what the Greek word means in Ephesians—and we guard our bodies. And that’s explicitly said that’s our job toward our wives. Our wives are little gardens.

So just by analogy with that, we could say we’re supposed to dress and keep them. But then in very explicit terms in Ephesians, the same two concepts are used. We’re to nurture our wives—to mature them in Christ—and we’re to guard them. And the idea there in the Greek in the Ephesians text is a mother covering over her chicks with her wings, protecting them.

So man’s two responsibilities—I tell this to every husband that I do premarital counseling with. You know, your job is to nurture your wife. That means provide for her food, et cetera. But more than that, it’s to try to help her to avoid sin and to mature in Christ. And your second job is to guard her—to guard her from exterior threats, but also to guard her from her own sin, and certainly to guard her from your sin as a husband. Wives are also called to mature husbands. But that’s what I was talking about.

Adam’s responsibilities in the garden that begin in the garden play right through—the very words are used throughout the Old Testament to speak of the husband-and-wife relationship and then in the New Testament as well. So: build up, mature, and guard. That’s our two responsibilities as men. That’s exactly what the new Adam does to his bride.

**Questioner:**
That’s right.

**Pastor Tuuri:**
That’s what Christ does for us. He guards us and he matures us.

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Q2: **Questioner:**
In your studies, I was just wondering if you came across anybody who mentioned or exposited the parallels between Christ’s first birth and his resurrection—the presence of the virgin womb, the virgin tomb, the two Josephs, the myrrh, the presence of angels, the fact that women basically were the first people to see Christ when he was first born and when he was resurrected, and these kinds of types of things.

**Pastor Tuuri:**
No, I haven’t read anything like that, but everything you say sounds great. Have you read something on that?

**Questioner:**
No, the thought just struck me—that there’s a parallel there between the birth and, quote unquote, the second birth of Christ, you know.

**Pastor Tuuri:**
Yeah. Yeah. I’ve seen people comment on the parallelism, but nothing explicitly written to draw those two out in that way. You know, the other thing is—and I mentioned this before with the swaddling clothes. Jesus is bound at his death, and Mary binds him, puts the swaddling clothes around him at his birth. Then he’s placed in the feeding trough, and of course we have, you know, sacramental implications from that as well.

There is a very interesting study I’m just beginning to read now that’s been produced by professors at Knox Theological Seminary that takes the Gospel of John and the book of Revelation as two parallel tracks. And so they look at correlations as it goes through the 22 chapters of Revelation and the 21 or 22 chapters of John’s Gospel. And it shows—going through all these parallel terms that are used—a very interesting correlation.

Now they see a parallelism between the binding of Jesus at his death and the binding of Satan for a thousand years—this kind of reversal binding in Revelation. But no, I’ve not seen an article actually dedicated to that comparison. But I think it’s great.

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Q3: **Questioner:**
Yeah, I had one question. When you were talking about when Christ went into the tomb and he laid his glory aside and put on the linen—I didn’t follow all that exactly. Could you explain that a little more, with the garments and the relationship to his status as God and man?

**Pastor Tuuri:**
Yeah, it seems to me that Philippians talks about the humiliation of Christ—specifically not in terms of his incarnation, but rather in terms of taking upon himself the sin of mankind. Being found in form as a man, he humbled himself to the point of death. So the humiliation is not the incarnation. The humbling of Christ is taking upon himself the sin of mankind.

So in parallel fashion, we can think of the glory of Christ being with him until the point when he’s on the cross, stripped of his exterior garment of glory. And then he’s bound in the linen garment—for what is symbolically a representation of his entering into the Holy of Holies.

In the Old Testament, the high priest had a glorious outer garment. It was like a coat of many colors. It was linen, woven of different threads with some design. So it’s kind of a heavier outer robe. Adam, you know, when Adam is clothed in the garden, it’s a heavy outer robe—a robe of glory and power. And so the high priest would normally have that.

But when the high priest, on the day of atonement once a year, would go into the Holy of Holies to apply the blood of the Passover lamb, he would take that outer robe of glory off and he would wear a fairly simple linen inner garment into the Holy of Holies for his work. And then the text says he was supposed to take that linen garment and leave it in the Holy of Holies. After he has done his work, he comes out and puts the outer garment of glory back on.

Now, so the idea is that the emphasis on the grave clothes of Christ seems to draw our attention to his putting aside robes of glory, doing his work for us as the great High Priest, entering into the Holy of Holies that the tomb represents, and then in his resurrection, he gets robes of glory back.

You know, some men may disagree as to what is the removing of the robe of glory. Some would say it is his setting aside the glory he has of his Father in his incarnation. And there’s an aspect in which that’s true. But I think in terms of the text in John’s narrative, it’s the removal of that outer tunic of Christ that represents the removal of his glory. He has divinity with him in his humanity. He is not emptied himself of all divinity in coming to earth.

But I don’t have a problem if people say that the real association with the taking off of the robe of glory is his incarnation, because there is a sense in which he does not have the full glory on earth that he has with the Father in eternity. And he makes that clear in John 17 when he prays that way: “Give me the glory with which I had with you, you know, in all eternity.”

Does that help at all?

**Questioner:**
Yeah. And I guess I was just thinking about, you know, when the soldiers wanted his garment, right? And it was a special garment without seam, right? So when was that—at the point when he was getting scourged?

**Pastor Tuuri:**
Well, they’re actually gambling for it while he’s on the cross. So they’ve taken him as he goes to the cross—he goes naked. So they take it off him before then. And I think I mentioned at the time that it’s woven without seam, one piece, and the high priest garment seems to be that same way. At least we know explicitly historically that at the time of Christ, the high priest’s garments were woven that way with no seam. The Old Testament’s a little less clear, but the fact is it is emphasized—its unity of composition by the woven-ness of it for the high priest.

So he’s taken off the high priest’s outer garment of glory. He goes to the cross to do his work. And the cross opens the way into the Holy of Holies. He’s wrapped in the linen garment now to go to the Holy of Holies to do his work. Then when he resurrects, the robe of glory is returned. That’s the imagery that I think John wants us to think about as he writes.

You know, one other thing, by the way, in terms of this study going on at Knox Theological Seminary—one of the main guys who’s doing this is a professor named Warren Gage. There’s going to be a conference in January which I would like to go to. I don’t know if I will or not. But Gage, quite independent from work that James B. Jordan has done in the same area, has come up with his own correlation, saying that John’s Gospel is definitely a movement through—as is the book of Revelation—a movement through the temple in this way. So in terms of that imagery, that’s what I was trying to get at in that part of the sermon.

Does that make sense, Howard L.?

**Howard L.:**
Yeah.

**Pastor Tuuri:**
And you know the practical implication for us—you know, anybody that’s been married or had kids knows what that is. Howard and Valerie are going to have to take off the robes of glory and change stinky diapers again in a few months, you know. That’s what you do, right? You’re the glorious head of the household, and wives should look to you as their Lord. You know, the Book of Common Prayer, the wedding vows—a woman is to reverence her husband. That’s correct language in the Bible. But the husband puts aside the robes of glory to serve, you know, as a priest to his family.

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Q4: **John S.:**
In Deuteronomy 21, it’s the passage about the one who hangs on a tree is cursed, and the context for that is: don’t let the body hang on the tree overnight, right? What relationship does that have to this passage where they’re taking down Jesus’s body?

**Pastor Tuuri:**
Yeah, it says explicitly in John that the priests didn’t want him hanging on the tree because it was a Sabbath day—a high Sabbath. And I’m wondering if—what that passage, how that passage relates. I mentioned that last week. I mention too many things, I know I do that frequently. But yeah, I tried to refer to that last week. The Pharisees were trying to keep that provision.

And there’s a parallel passage as well in Numbers. That’s why they go to Pilate and want the body taken down. It’s why they crush the legs of the two men, because the law—Deuteronomy or Numbers—says the land will be defiled if that body hangs there as a curse overnight on the tree. So that’s what motivates the Jews to seek his removal because of the approach of the high Sabbath—Passover, you know.

There’s another whole direction to take in this text. You know, what’s going on with this great Sabbath referred to in the text. That’s the way it’s referred to as a great Sabbath, right? This is the last Sabbath of the old creation. You know, because Jesus is now going to rise up on the third day on the new Sabbath and move time ahead. So you know, there’s that whole thing that’s going on.

But yeah, that is definitely the law regarding Sabbath observance that the Jews were trying to keep in requesting for the death to be assured, come quickly, and get him off the cross.

One other thing: the Jews at this time would not allow the kind of burial that Jesus got. The burial fit for a king is in marked contrast to what they would do. They had two places of common burial plots outside of the city in a bad place—one for people that had been crucified, the other for people that had been, I think, stoned or burned or something. I mean, if you were executed for a crime, you were not accorded a normal Jewish burial. It was in this common grave.

Which was better than the Romans would do. The Romans would just leave the bodies there till the birds plucked them all away. But the Jews would—so Jesus, we expect him to go to this common burial plot. But no, see, we’re already told that, you know, long before the resurrection, that Jesus’s exaltation as King and High Priest are being portrayed for us. And so in the providence of God, you know, Joseph gets this request granted to put him in this plot fit for a king.

Wonderful text. Any other comments or questions? Okay, let’s go have our meal then.