[S1E8] The cosmological significance of head coverings

Present your bodies a living sacrifice, holy acceptable to God which is your spiritual service and be not conformed to this world but be ye transformed by the renewing of your mind that ye may prove what is the good and acceptable and perfect will of God. Welcome to True Magic, the podcast where we are learning to do spiritual service with our physical bodies by learning about the spiritual meaning encoded into the physical forms of creation. We are finally here at our long awaited episode on head coverings. It has taken an amazingly long time to write and it has also been our most requested episode. And I think the reason for both of those things is that this is a subject that is really perfecting to people and requires teasing out a lot of different theological threads. It really does. I especially didn't want to retread old ground so I'm looking at this issue in a different way to any that I've seen done before and I'm basing a lot of it on thinking that I've done over the past few years that kind of draws together everything from biblical symbolism to the divine council. And our regular true magic listeners should be able to follow along just fine since they're familiar with the ideas that I'll be sharing and drawing on. But if you're just jumping into this and we start using phrases or making assumptions that sound unfamiliar or crazy, you should check the show notes for links to resources that will help to clear things up. So for instance, if you're confused when I talk about the nations being ruled by principalities which are angels, then you'll want to investigate the show notes. One thing we have found about the issue of head covering is that it tends to make people weird. People get very viscerally passionately opposed to it. Or they afford it and they make it their entire personality and think that if only a woman all covered their heads in church then gender roles would fall back into place and the socialism would be destroyed and Christenham 2.0 would rise. It's obvious that this is an issue that touches people deeply, shall we say, and that shouldn't surprise us because all of the creation symbols that God has given us, the ones that stand the test of time, the potent cross-cultural symbols, these illicit strong reactions from people because they're built into us. Think about how strongly people feel about drinking wine or handling dead bodies or celebrating weddings or prostrating during worship. Michael Heizer famously said of protecting passages in the Bible that if it's weird, it's important. I think we can paraphrase that and say if it makes people weird, it's important. Which is ironic because a lot of the people who get really offended and disgusted by the idea of head covering will simultaneously claim that it isn't important. Their argument is that because it was cultural, it's irrelevant to us in modern day that the symbol no longer means anything. But they don't act like it's irrelevant to mean it this. They act like it's insulting and degrading. They want to deny the power of the symbol while demonstrating that it has a great emotional power over them. In the next episode we'll briefly address some of the more common objections to head coverings along with a number of excellent questions that we've received. But today we want to present a positive case and this positive case actually develops directly out of the one question that is not easily answered. The one good argument that I have heard against head coverings in which I haven't really seen anyone deal with least of all successfully because honestly most treatments of this issue are just podcasters caching in on controversial topic by repeating what some other theologians have already said. So the objection that I want to deal with there's one that you will hear from men who are working at a higher level than those guys. Men who really understand the patterns of Scripture well and understand the little humanutics men like Rich Lusk or some of the Theopolis guys who are all against head coverings. And they have one really good question that will stump pretty much anyone who is in favour of head coverings. The question is really quite simple. It is if head coverings are so universal and objective and natural, why did God command the Old Testament male priests to cover their heads of hindrances and turbans during worship and he didn't command women to cover it all? It's honestly a really good point right? It's not just a good point, it's actually the key to understanding head coverings humanutically and covenantally as opposed to merely symbolically and exegetically. This question was a light bulb moment for me. I didn't know the answer when I heard it, but I had the very first inclings of what it might be and how to find it. And it really provided the humanutical key that I needed to put things together and to be able to say that's why this weird passage is here in the New Testament in First Corinthians 11. Right, so we're not going to hand wave this question away, I mean quite the opposite. If you follow Nonslogic through as we got, I hope you'll see that why Old Testament priests wore head coverings is not a contradiction or an embarrassment to the pro head covering point of view. It's actually a really cool and significant theological point with some pretty far reaching implications. The key to understanding First Corinthians 11 lies in going much further back. This passage does not exist in a vacuum. It is part of a whole body of Scripture, the whole body of the law that already exists at the time that Paul is writing and what he's doing in this passage, if you're attentive to the Old Covenant ordinances, which let's be honest, we pretty much never are because we think the Old Testament is hard and confusing and most people really just think it's relevant. But what he's doing is he is overturning the mosaic order and establishing a new one. And that is why this passage is in the Scripture in the First Place. It's necessary for it to be there because God's people need instruction about properly symbolizing a covenantal and cosmological change, a really tremendous seismic shift that has taken place with respect to the priesthood and worship. You are going to need to explain this. Let's start with the Old Covenant order. The reason most people find First Corinthians 11 so perplexing is that it seems so utterly out of their field. It's as if Paul just drops the web, direct from heaven, about this new practice that is simultaneously so strange that his own explanation barely makes sense to us, and yet so important and ubiquitous that he knows no other custom nor all the churches of God, it's verse 16 of First Corinthians 11. But how did all the other churches know to practice it before he wrote First Corinthians? Where did this custom come from such that absolutely everyone was doing it right from the start of the New Testament era? Well, when the apostles are establishing the church, what is the basis for any matter of doctrine and practice? What is the basis for every custom that they would have taught the churches to follow? Is it not the Hebrew scriptures interpreted through the lens of Christ's teachings? Paul tells Timothy, "Every scripture is breathed out by God and profitable for teaching, for conviction, for setting a right for instruction that is in righteousness, that the man of God may be complete for every good work having been finished. A prayer and prophecy good works, and is how you do them part of that good work. Is wearing the appropriate headgear while doing them good work? And does Scripture say something about these kinds of good work, something that the apostles were aware of, something that they understood through the teaching of Christ, to have changed because of Christ?" This is what I'm arguing. This is the only way to make sense of Paul recording and otherwise perplexing and incomprehensible instruction about covering the head, and really this should be obvious it should be our default method of interpretation. In hindsight, thinking about this passage now, after having done all this work, it's really weird even perverse that no one interprets it in this way, that no one tries to understand first Corinthians 11 through the lens of all testaments instructions about head coverings. Why not? If we know that the Old Testament is the body of instruction about the Old Covenant, and the New Testament is the body of instruction about the New Covenant, and if we know that the New Covenant overturns the Old Covenant, so comprehensively that Scripture describes us as now living in a new world and being new creations, then surely we ought to be consciously setting New Testament laws next to Old Testament ones to examine how things have changed. So this is the approach that we need. To make sense of head coverings in the New Testament Church, rather than viewing the passages by priestly turbans as problem passages to explain away, we should start with those passages and work forward to see what has changed, such that those head coverings are no longer required and new instructions about head coverings are not necessary. As in you have heard it said of Old, but I say to you. Exactly. He have made first Old and what become obsolete in his Old is near to disappearing Hebrews 8:13. The Old Covenant was passing away as Hebrews was written, which is why it was written. And this is how we should read all of the New Testament, which should read it in this light, seeking to understand how it changes our relationship with God, both individually and corporately. The New Covenant is a better covenant, because it establishes a new and better cosmic order under Christ. I think most Christians intuitively grasp this at some level, but they don't understand how radical the break was it occurred at the cross. And they don't let it sink in to the level of their hominidics, their rules and methods for interpreting Scripture. They don't have a covenant or hominidic. So let's go back to the Old Covenant for a bit and try to get a hint of just how different worship laws for believers back in the day. I think this is really, really hard for us to wrap our heads around, because we are so used to the blessings of the New Covenant that we kind of interpolate them backwards into the era before Christ, but things were very, very different. The most striking difference, especially for understanding head coverings, was access to God. In the Garden, of course, God walked and talked with Adam and Eve face to face, but as soon as mankind fell, there was a barrier between men and God, a spiritual barrier, which of course was symbolized in a physical barrier because spiritual truths must be embodied. Their access to God was cut off. There was only one way into the Garden, apparently, just like the temple. And a chair with a flaming sword was stationed there to cut you into pieces and burn you to a crisp if you tried to get in. Incidentally, this is exactly what happens to the sacrifices later, but that's somewhat of a tangent to my main point, which is that encounters with God after the fall were rare, and there were nearly always initiated by God himself. There are very few examples of people just praying to God out of the blue. If we look at some examples in the early Old Testament, a majority of the time when God speaks to someone it's an instruction, and their response isn't recorded, maybe when God told Noah to build the ark, he said, "Okay, and ask some follow-up questions about the construction, but it's not recorded. We don't get a magnificat like we get with Mary." At other times, we see people interacting with God during a vision, so God started it and they respond, but the point is it's still a God initiating. and occasionally we'll see someone praying after that initial encounter as a kind of follow-up. So when the angel comes to Manoa's wife, did I know she was going to be a sampson, Manoa then prays and asks him to come back and give them further intel. Then we get things like the case of the Bimilek, he's the guy who accidentally took Sarah as his wife because he thought she was Abram's sister, and in that instance God specifically tells him not to pray himself. He says, "Now send back the man's wife, for he is a prophet and he shall pray for thee, and now shall live." The Bimilek actually tries to plead his case to God, saying, "How he didn't know and hadn't touched Sarah, and God basically says, 'Yeah, I know, but talk to the hand,' and Bimilek needed someone to intercede for him, who had God's ear already. And we see even even more explicit version of this in Job, which probably took place around the same general time period. In Job 42 we read, after Yabe had spoken these words on the Job, Yabe said, "Elephaz, the Timonite, my wrath has kindled against thee, and against thy two friends, for ye have not spoken of me the thing that is right, has my servant Job hath, now therefore take unto you seven bullocks and seven rams, and go to my servant Job, and offer up for yourselves an ascension offering, and my servant Job shall pray for you, for him will I accept, that I deal not with you after your folly." When we do see people praying off their own bat, they're often either a leader like Joshua, or a prophet like Samson, or representing a prophet like Abraham's servant, who prayed that he would find a wife for Isaac. Now we don't want to make too much of this, because obviously not all prayers are recorded in Scripture, but since God is in charge of what is recorded, we are presumably meant to notice the pattern that access to God is not assumed, and this pattern is congruent with the clear and quite extreme boundaries that God establishes when he institutes the priestly system. Now there were a special group of representatives, and it wasn't optional, you couldn't choose to DIY a sacrifice to God if a priest wasn't available as Saul found out, he lost the kingdom because he tried to take sacrifice upon himself, kidding himself that he was seeking God's favor by doing so. This was even a big point of contention during the establishment of the priesthood, as the sons of Korah basically said, "Hey, where Levi's to, how do you exclude us?" But we know how that ended. The system was very deliberately designed to draw attention to the distance between man and God by putting barriers between them, and picking out an extremely exclusive and narrow number of people, the priests, who'd be able to navigate those barriers. And there were barriers even to the priests themselves. They had a certain kind of access to God, but it was limited based on a lot of factors, some of which were out of your control. There was your lineage, obviously you couldn't get in as a non-leviate, no matter your spiritual merit. You couldn't get in if you had physical deforeties, even descendants of Aaron couldn't serve as priests, if they were not like their sacrifices, whole and unblinished, and you couldn't get in if you had contact with a dead body recently, someone has a heart attack, dies, fall at your feet, and even if it was your turn to serve at the Tabernacle, and it was a feast day, and you'd been excited about it for months, and it was going to be supering-immediate. Too bad, that access was gone. And interestingly, we don't know that the priests actually prayed all that much. They did make their offerings to God, which was symbolic of prayers. They were to burn sweet incense on the altar in the holy place morning and evening, and we see the spiritual reality this points to in Revelation 5.8, which speaks of the golden bowls full of incense, which are the prayers of the saints. But we don't actually know whether they prayed with words at the same time, it wasn't commandant. I was really surprised when I went looking for this, because I thought, well, you know, the priests prayed to God on behalf of the people, that's what priests do. But I kept looking through the viticus, and, you know, the word prayer just kept not showing up. They did a lot of actions, they waived, they sprinkled, they inspected, they roasted and baked, and kept fires burning and ate and washed, and these things did intercede for the people, but those are deeds not words. Even on the day of atonement, the making atonement or making a covering over in the holy place, seems to have been much more like actions and words, sprinkling the blood on the cover of the ark, the mercy seed. Just as the Israelites in Egypt weren't told to pray when they sprinkled the blood on their doorposts, they were just told to do it. And in fact, when the priestess duties are summarized in Deuteronomy 3310, they don't include prayer. They shall teach Jacob your judgments in Israel or law, they shall put incense before you and a whole bird sacrifice on your altar. I've made the point before that it wasn't until David, these symbols, became internalized in the people themselves, and they were able to offer prayers and praise themselves rather than symbols of them, until that time worship was essentially silent. Now we do see one instruction for the priests to pray on behalf of Israel, and that's in number 62227, and that's the blessing, you know, my Yahweh bless you and keep you, your my maker's face, shine upon you, etc. And that too is ritualized, it's obligatory. They aren't encouraged to pray however they want. Right, and we'll see how God's face shining upon us as significant later on, but right now we need to make sure that we understand the barriers that God put between himself and the people. It was the institution of a priesthood itself limiting who had access to God, and they were the purification rituals the priests had to perform before entering the tabernacle, but then there was a tabernacle itself, which was also nothing but barriers. I don't think it can be overstated how significant the architecture of the tabernacle was. It's covered in multiple layers, it's the bale and veil. There's the first layer of linen, the ten kutans that are hooked together, then there's the goats here covering, then the ram's skin covering, and the final mysterious covering of manatee or du-gong or equivalent to some dutu translation, badger skins. These are covering to get tougher and more robust as they work out once. This is not a flimsy tent where you could peek in or see silhouettes moving inside if someone had a torch. This was like multiple levels of radiation shielding to contain the deadly glory of God. To be clear, we're not saying the Hebrews knew about radiation, or that God was actually radioactive, as you might perhaps infer from Indiana Jones. But the coverings did form a significant barrier. And while what they each represented is up for debate, I think one of the chief points is to emphasize that going into the tabernacle was really to pass through the waters of the sea, which is the du-gong skins, through the earth, the red ram skins, through the clouds, the black goat skins, and so through the physical cosmos into heaven itself, behind the fine linen embroidered with the angels, you weren't just walking through a curtain, you were travelling through every layer of the world, and into God's own heavenly house. Which explains why there was a human barrier as well. If you tried to rush the door and get in, they would be guards there ready to go. Yes, the priests were specifically set as guards to put anyone to death who draws too near in numbers three. They were the human equivalent of the chariot with the flaming sword outside Eden, chariot was a palace guy ends, and the tabernacle was God's palace. The word translated temple later in scripture just means palace. But supposing you could enter, you still would not feel like you had arrived. The main room of the tabernacle, the holy place, was not a nice comfortable square type room for hanging out in it. It was relatively narrow, like a passageway, especially once you put the show bread table on one side and the lamp stand on the other, so you'd be walking down between them in the middle. If you want to get a sense of it, you can look there various CGI kind of 3D images on YouTube. They're kind of cheesy, but they do get the dimensions right. And any architect will tell you that long narrow spaces don't encourage you to dwell, but to move forward and get somewhere. They draw the eye to a place. And the tabernacle corridor, conspicuously, leads to an NZ, a heavy solid curtain, another veil. If you were in there, you'd be constantly aware that you were only as it were halfway there. There was a beyond. Right there at your elbows as you worked with the altar, but infinitely removed. It must have been both terrifying and tantalizing for the average priest to know he would spend his life in service and never really get there. You can overthink the symbolism of the dimensions and not notice the obvious human implications people will talk about or the numerology of the dimensions, but the very clear intuitive sense that you would get if you actually just built the place is that it's an enter chamber. Everything about the tabernacle's architecture was calculated to demonstrate the distance of God from the priesthood. You're entering this corridor where you can't go further. Actually, it's an enter chamber that is bigger than the chamber, which is not usually how enter chambers are. Usually you get to a place that will hold more people, you pass through and you open up into a space. There was not room in the holy of holies for a whole bunch of people, even if they were allowed in. But there was another way that the barriers were symbolised as well. The portable tabernacle veils as it were that the priests wore on their own heads, given all that we've said so far in this season, and especially about modesty as place keeping and covering as a way of preserving a place in the hierarchy, and of course uncovering as a kind of revealing or grasping for glory. Hopefully it's obvious by now that the priests had to cover their heads in God's house. There was something not worthy to come in bare-headed. Their hair, which as I showed in the last episode, is a glory cloud, was anointed with liquid light. But then that hair could not be loose while he served in the holy place. It could never be uncovered. Its glory was bound up in a turban or a hidress. Priests were required to bind it up so that the glory was hidden away because of the sin that separated them from God. Christ had not yet come to redeem human nature, so no man could be in Christ, and so no man could shine forth God's glory. His fallen corrupt nature veiled and obscured God's image in him. Remember that man was made a little lower than the angels. Hebrews tells us this specifically quoting Psalm 8.5, but even the angels covered their heads in God's presence. And we see this in Isaiah. In the year of the death of King Uzia, I saw the Lord sitting on a throne high and lifted up. And its train filled the temple, serif, was standing above it. Six wings had each one, with two covering its face, and with two covering its feet in a two flying. There is an interesting tension here though, because even though covering the head is an expression of humility, and without human nature being redeemed they couldn't image God's glory anyway, the priestly headdresses and the turban for the hyper east, it's a different word for a different garment. They're not just humbling, they're also glorious. The priestly garments as a whole are described as being full glory and for beauty. The craft'smanship has repeated the emphasise throughout Exodus 28 when the instructions are given, that don't just have to be made, but they have to be made well, I have to be made beautifully. And the turban for Aaron, the hyper east literally has an expensive beautifully crafted gold pluck on it that's as holy to Yahweh. So the hyper east was anointed as a living creature. length in the temple of God as we saw in the last episode. This oil is liquid light, it is a glory that separates him for service to God, and it is specifically in connection with serving in the Tebben-Akul, that the priestic armaments had to be wore, including headdresses. These headbeats were not to come off while the priests were serving as they die, and this language of not buying this is in Exodus 28 and Leviticus 10. This language is specifically because they are in the holy place near to God, that is a dangerous place for a sinner to be. They had to be set apart correctly, which means they had to be dressed correctly. So you can see here that even if the garment designed to remind you of your lowly place in the cosmos, a garment that is in some sense symbolising the distance from God, they were the kind of dignity and beauty in it, thinking that it is like wearing the livery of a great house. A footman can be proud to wear his livery, and it can be splinted, and it grants him access into the house. But at the same time it shows that he is a servant and all of a sudden. "I would rather stand at the threshold in the house of my God than live in the tents of wickedness." "Yes, better to be the doerkeeper than not be able to come near at all, but the priests are not relaxing in God's house. They are slaves, not sons." This is the point that we need to especially emphasise because it's key to understanding what changes in the New Covenant, which explains Paul's new instructions about head coverings. Priesthood isn't ultimately about being a person who does certain things. It's about being someone who goes certain places. We think of priests as those who do certain rituals, but that isn't really what priesthood fundamentally is. They do the rituals because of where they are. They're serving in God's house. A priest just is someone who is allowed into the house of God to serve there. The high priest just is someone who is allowed into the throne room of God itself to serve there. That's what makes him the high priest, the chief priest. "You might want to explain how the most holy place is God's throne room." Well, in light of everything that we've already said, it's probably fairly intuitive if the tabernacle is God's house, the temple is his palace. Then the place where he is will be the throne room God tells Moses about the holy, holy place, saying, "There I will meet with thee, and I will speak with thee from above the cover or the mercy seat, from between the two cherubs which are upon the ark of the testimony of all things which I give thee in commandment unto the sons of Israel, it's just twenty-five." And this is why one of the Appalachians for God in Scripture is Yahweh in thrown between the cherubs or above the cherubs. If we read carefully in the incident of Nadab and Nabihu who brought strange five before God and were consumed by him, we learn that it wasn't merely that they brought it into the holy place, but into the holy, holy place, the most holy place. Yahweh spoke unto Moses after the death of the two sons of Aaron when they drew near before Yahweh and died, and Yahweh said unto Moses, "Speak unto Aaron my brother, that he come not at all times into the holy place within the veil before the cover which is upon the ark, that he die not, for I will appear in the cloud upon the cover," so the verdict is sixteen. "So they were really asking to get smoked?" Yes, and in your mind just file away that phrase, they drew near before Yahweh as meaning into the holy, holy place because that will become important in a minute. So we have a system, the old covenant system under which people normatively do not have access to God without the mediation or covering of the priests, and the priests require the protection of various fails themselves, the protection of the literal coverings of the tabernacle, and later the physical building and curtain of the temple, and the fails over their own heads. But the old covenant system is not just one monolithic time period where everything stayed the same until Christ came. I think a lot of Christians actually do think this. They think there was really no progression in the religion. It was set in place by Moses, and it was exactly the same until the coming of Christ. That is not how it was. God was working throughout this time, preparing the wave of Christ, and one turning point that we see is right at the beginning of 1 Samuel, the transition from the priestly era to the kingly era. Here we see a woman, Hannah, a nobody. No one's representative, not a great figure in history, as far as we know, never approached by God before, and she comes to the temple to pray. She's not at her own house. She still has to come to God's house to speak to him, but she does come, and she comes alone, and she prays alone. She doesn't ask a priest to intercede for her. She talks to God so intimately in fact that she doesn't even make a sound, which makes Eli the priest think that she is drunk. Let's expect the fact that he thinks this shows that people really aren't rocking up to the temple and praying a whole lot. This is an unusual situation. But when he hears her story, he blesses her. He doesn't take over and pray for her, rather he validates her own prayer. There is in the text itself a kind of approval, a signing off by the priest on this prayer that she makes. It's somewhat like the image that we have in Numbers 30, where if a man hears his wife make a vow, he can revoke it. Here Eli hears her prayer, but he doesn't revoke it. He upholds it. It's as if in the history of Israel, God is saying, "Okay, now you're allowed to pray to me directly without needing a priest to come in between." And from this time on, you see a shift as if God is allowing people to speak to him more directly now. Prophets are depicted praying more often, and soon afterward, David the Prophet King begins writing his own prayers to God in the form of Psalms as an example for his people to follow. And then his son Solomon writes his own allegorical love poems. There was a freedom of expression and creativity that flowered at this point, which had been very rare before. This was a taste of sonship of growing up. And you've talked a lot about King Lee wisdom, about how Christians are not meant to just absorb God's truth in a kind of passive, root-like way, but how we are meant to spot patterns and tease out implications and look for wisdom by observation. Like Solomon did, we are meant to move from milk to meat. And in fact, that's what we're trying to do here in True Magic. A lot of things that we've learned about clothing and modesty and glory aren't a simple matter of finding a verse for that. They require us to look deeply at the patterns of scripture and of creation. And it's a dangerous thing to do because it's very easy to make up our own patterns. You can get a spiritual parodolia. It's harder to be a king than to be a priestess. Why there's a progression. And that's why Solomon prayed for wisdom. He knew he didn't just have to follow the law, but create case laws of his own. But going back to the Bible, we're not there yet, are we? Hell, it was the beginning of a shift towards kingship, but Israel was still slaves, not sons. There were still under the veil of the Torah, and the nations, the Gentiles, were still under the veil of their own gods, had a parade. And we don't know if she was wearing a veil at the time, like probably because women did sort of tend to do that regardless at the time, but in a sense it didn't matter either way because there were still so many metaphorical and symbolic vales between her and God anyway. And when the temple replaced the tabernacle, it still had a holy place that only priests could enter, and that led for absolutely everybody except one man once a year to a forbidden place. But wonderfully that place was still hidden by a veil. Think about that. The coverings of the tabernacle had been replaced by strong solid walls and roofs of wood and golden stone. The doors entering the temple were huge solid doors. The entrance to the most holy place could have been a solid door too. It would be safer and more secure, more permanent. But God, the author of symbols knew what he was doing and he kept it a veil. And we all know when that veil was destroyed. Jesus having again cried a loud voice yielded his spirit and behold the veil of the temple was rent in two from top to bottom and the earth did quake. The earth quaking hints at how much more of a cosmic cataclysmic event this truly was than necessarily meets the eye. When Jesus died and rose again, he overturned the entire cosmic hierarchy. The gods apportioned to the Gentile nations, had their authority stripped from them. So Jesus could begin reclaiming every nation in the world to be his people as promised in some a too. And not just to be his people but to be his priests. The priesthood was no longer limited just to Levites or just to Israelites or just to men. It was for all believers. And the most holy place, the throne room of God, instead of being a place one man could enter into with fear and trembling once a year became the place that all believers freely enter every time they gather together in his name. And this isn't just inferred from scripture, it's both clearly patent and explicitly confirmed. Remember how I mentioned that Nudub and Abihub are consumed with fire for drawing near to God that specific phrase? Well, Hebrews uses the same language, saying having therefore brothers baldness for the entrance into the holy places in the blood of Jesus, which way he did initiate for us, new and living through the veil that is his flesh. And having a high priest over the house of God, may we draw near with a true heart in full assurance of faith, having the heart sprinkled and so forth. And he goes on and exalts us not forsaking the assembling of ourselves together as a customer of some is but exalting in so much more as you see the day coming near. Now when we assemble ourselves together according to Hebrews, we are drawing near to the throne of God himself. Remember what Jesus tells his disciples in Matthew 18, for where there are two or three gathered together unto my name, there am I in the midst of them. This is divine council language. It is set in the context of binding and losing of exercising heavenly authority. And Psalm 82 tells us that God stands in the council of God in the midst of the gods, he renders judgment. This takes place in the heavenly throne room. I saw Yahweh sitting on his throne and all the host of heaven standing by him on his right hand and on his left second king's 22. When we assemble together every Sunday, we are entering into the holy holy place and not just a physical representation of the holy holy place, but the actual thing itself, the true throne room of God in heaven. This is excess that not even the high priest of Israel had, they'd alone anyone else. We are a royal priesthood entering and serving continually weak after weak in the heavenly temple. Freely but still reverence. And this is why he'd cover it or any aspect of worship is so important. This is why we take litigy and reverence in worship seriously. If we are coming into the presence of God, the heavenly court itself, then obviously it matters how we dress, how we move our bodies, how we eat and direct the Lord's supper, how we sing. And this moves us toward answering the question that should naturally arise when we are approaching 1 Corinthians 11 with a covenantal humaniac. When we're coming to the text asking how things have changed, how these new instructions reflect a new cosmic order under a new covenantal system. It is extremely clear that the context of 1 Corinthians 11 is worship. This chapter begins a new section of the book in which Paul turns specifically to addressing issues of public worship, first head coverings, then the Lord's Supper, then the use of spiritual gifts. The first half of 1 Corinthians 11 on head coverings also corresponds chastically to 1 Corinthians 1535-49, where Paul speaks of the natural body and then the supernatural, which makes sense given that with head coverings he's taking for granted a shift from the natural religion of the old covenant, that's physical tabernacle, to the supernatural religion of the new with its spiritual tabernacle. But to say that 1 Corinthians 11 is about worship, is really to say that it is about how to conduct oneself when entering into the most holy place. This is why new instructions are required, because new people have access into God's prisons. All supplicants are now able to draw near to God, not just the high priest once a year. Everyone is a priest now. So when Richluss says to me, "Nah, I do not think women were required to wear head coverings by Torah. Would it not be strange if male priests wore head coverings in the old covenant?" Whereas, now they do not. Well, women did not wear head coverings in the old covenant, but now they must do so. In fact, I can say, "No Rich, the answer is quite the opposite." It is easy to see that in fact there might be an excellent reason for women to now have to wear head coverings. They are entering somewhere they could never go before. Women didn't need to wear head coverings in the old covenant, because they were already multiple veils between them and God maintaining their place. But now as Paul says, that veil has been removed, the veil of Torah that kept them out, the veil of unbelief that prevented access, and the veils of the temple that created a physical barrier. So women walk right into the throne room alongside men. This is why 1 Corinthians 11 is all about Hitchip, hierarchy, glory and modesty. These are the key concepts throughout the passage. Paul introduces it by telling us that a change of Hitchip is taken place. There is a new cosmically hierarchy. Man is no longer under angels, but under Christ. And this is also why because of the angels is right at the center of the passage. Non-Sid and his last episode, this passage is structured as a chias and it works in towards the center and then back out again. Its conceptual shape is that of an X or a V placed against a mirror. And the center of the symmetrical structure is in verse 10. On account of this, ought the woman to have authority on her head on account of the angels. This is not some extra argument Paul throws in the last minute. It is central to his case. So the question is, what do angels have to do with glory and hierarchy in the new covenant cosmos and how does it differ to the old? Well, Hebrews answers this question directly, quoting Psalm 8, it says, "But we behold him who have been made a little lower than the angels, even Jesus, because of the suffering of death, crowned glory and honor. That by the grace of God he should taste death for every man, for it became him for whom are all things and through whom are all things, in bringing many sons unto glory to make the author of their salvation perfect through sufferings." So Jesus was made a little lower than the angels by being made man. He was born under the law under Torah, but we know that he is now far above all the angels and has died to the law. He is above the law as Ephesians and Galatians say about him. And we are now his body, which means that we too are now far above all the angels. Ephesians 2.6 has explicit about this. It says, "God did raise us up together and did see us together in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus. We are where he is, above the angels. And if we have died in him, we have also died to the law and we are no longer under that either. We are now part of a new hierarchy." This is the whole point of Christ coming to sum up all things in himself, literally, to gather up into one head, all things in Christ Ephesians 1.10. God raised him from the dead and made him to sit at his right hand in the heavenly places far above all rule and authority and power and dominion, which is to say the angelic powers. And he put all things in subjection under his feet and gave him to be "head" over all things to the church, which is his body, the fullness of him that filleth all in all. The body of Christ is itself a new cosmos, into which all things in the old cosmos are being integrated, not every individual thing, but the creation hierarchy itself, is being summed up in Christ. So the church is the center of a new cosmological hierarchy that God is establishing in the world. A cosmological hierarchy was out of the veils, little barriers between us and God, but. This is why men should no longer cover the heads for priestly service in the Holy Holy Place, which is to say for worship. The veil is gone. We are no longer unworthy to boldly approach the throne of grace. Jesus, God's son, who wears no surveyor-livery, has transferred his worthiness and his access to us. We are no longer separated from God under a veil, under law, under angels. The veil is removed because we are in Christ. Paul actually speaks directly of the veil being removed in 2 Corinthians. You may recall in explaining the greater glory of the new covenant. He says that we are not as Moses who put a veil upon his face, that the sons of Israel should not look steadfastly on the end, the tillos, of that which was being brought to nothing, which is the old covenant. But their minds were hardened, for as far as this very day upon the reading of the old covenant, the same veil abideth. It not being uncovered to them, that it has been brought to nothing in Christ. But until today, whenever Moses is read, a veil lie at the bottom of their heart. But whenever they may turn to the Lord, the veil is taken off. Now the Lord is the Spirit, and with the Spirit of the Lord is there is liberty, but we all with uncovered face, holding as an amerah the glory of the Lord, to the same image being transformed, from glory to glory, even as from the Lord the Spirit. 5 Corinthians 3 12-18. The way that Paul speaks of the veil here is multivalent, on the one hand the old covenant itself for law, Torah is the veil. When Jews turn to the Lord, the veil is taken off, and no longer under Torah. On the other hand, the hardness of the Israelites' hearts, the sin that made the Lord necessary in the first place is the veil. Exodus 34 tells us, "Aren saw all the sons of Israel also, Moses, and low the skin of his face, Sean, and they were afraid of coming near to him. Why were they afraid? For the same reason that they were afraid to have God speak to him at Sinai, for the same reason that everyone is always afraid to be anywhere near God when he appears to them. Sin. In both cases, the veil is a barrier between the people in God. Now Paul's emphasis here is on the face, not the head, the word is veil, not the word covering that is used in 1 Corinthians 11, but there's similar in Greek coming from the same root. And when the face is covered, the head is obviously covered by implication, covering the face is covering the head to the uttermost. In a new covenant era, according to 1 Corinthians 11, we no longer do that, because now the head of every man is Christ. That's how he sets up a whole passage. Now I want you to know the head of every man is anointed. Your Bible will say Christ, but Christ means anointed, so let's try to read this like Paul wrote it. And notice how differently it hits. The head of every man is anointed. Now the head of the woman, the man, now the head of anointed God, and then he goes straight to every man praying and prophesying, having anything at his head, dishonoreth his head. By starting with, I want you to know, he is telling us this is something new. Something his readers won't learn in the scriptures they already have. Or indeed something that if they were to rely on their existing scriptures, they would get wrong, because of how that old covenant is passing away. The whole, the new has come. The head of man is now Christ, something that was not the case in the old world under the old covenant system. There is no longer a barrier between the people and God. We shine forth his glory directly now. We are no longer slaves, but sons. It would be downright inappropriate for a son to act like a servant in his father's prisons. And so it would, indeed, be a shame to a man to dishonor his head by having it covered during worship. We are no longer priests, but priest kings. We don't get to put a barrier back up once Christ has taken it away. There is no longer anything between us and God. And this is why men ought not to cover the heads any longer when entering the heavenly court. They have the glory of Christ, the crown of Christ. It is in us that Christ himself shines forth. So to cover this glory would be perverse. It would dishonor Christ to have his own crown hidden in the heavenly court, because he's the king. We saw in the last episode that scripture depicts the likeness of the glory of Yahweh as a man. In Christ, this is how all Christian men appear, as metal men as firemen with brightness all around us. The crown of glory around our heads, which is our hair ought to be seen by all. And they're anointing on our heads, not of liquid light, but the true light of the Holy Spirit, the tongue of fire, by which we burn as torches in the world. That ought not to be put under a bush or quenched. Now I can see an obvious objection here. As you said before, the priesthood is for all believers male and female. So if men can have their glory, their heads, their crowns uncovered before God, and in fact should do, why shouldn't women is our hair less glorious than men's, or do we still need mediation to come for God? There are those in the patriarchal movement who believe salvation is literally mediated between a woman and God by her father or husband. Tell us this, don't worry. To your first point, the Bible is clear that women's hair is actually more glorious than men's hair. And we've looked at this from a couple of angles already. Women were created as the glory of men. So she is glory multiplied, the glory of the glory. To your second point, no, it is absurd. Really, I really don't understand how anyone can think this. That woman can't be saved without the mediation of her husband or father. First generation Christian women exist. The woman at the well is definitely not granted salvation through any of her five husbands, or the man she was living with, who was not her husband. Women as well as men have direct access to God. They are united to Christ directly just as men are. Okay, so then why the head coverings? If we go back to first Corinthians 11, the hair of a man, the short hair specifically as per the first floor is a glory to him, and you say that glory should be on display, but the long hair of a woman is a glory to her. So since her glory is even more glorious, it would make sense to think that it should be even more conspicuously on display. But as we saw last time, the woman's crown is not Christ's directly. It is the crown of man. Waves are the representatives of their husbands, and men are the representatives of Christ. This is critical. This is Paul's whole explanation of the hierarchy. Men represent Christ directly. They shine forth Christ to the world. And women represent him indirectly. They shine forth their husbands to the world. It's a different glory that ought not to be put in competition with gods in the heavenly court. I think church history has shown quite definitively that it is easy for church to become a place for men to show off their glorious women and for women to delight in displaying their glory. We see this in the tradition of getting fancy new Easter Bonds. Even though they are literally a form of head covering, they can be used as a status symbol and a coquitter shore elegant fashion statement. We see historically in the practice of brides appearing for the first time after their honeymoon and everyone craning their next to see what a fancy purpose-made outfit would be. There are numerous references in literature going back a long time to young men going to church to gawk at the pretty girls. And of course if a woman does want to get dolled up, one of the major things she'll do aside from the clothes and make up, you know, maybe heels, maybe nails, but she'll get her head on. Try hiring a last minute hairdress around from time it just can't be done. But there's more to this than just stealing glory, so to speak. Verse 5 says, "Now everyone praying or prophesying with uncouired head dishonoreth her head, for it is one and the same with having been shaven. Obviously, a woman whose head is shaved is not going to be stealing glory from God with her luscious hair. If it's shaved, the glory is gone." Right, and this gets back to what we've talked about in our episode on modesty, then modesty is placekeeping. It is wrong to flaunt something that should not be flauntland, just as it is wrong to destroy something that should be prudent. A woman who shaves off her hair is marring her glory. A woman who shows off her hair in the wrong context is also misusing her glory in a dishonorable way. Again, you think of another body part, brists. I think this is sort of more intuitive to us today. It is shameful for a woman to cut off her breasts. Now, as we said, then, shame is not sin. You know, if a brist is cancerous it needs to be cut off so be it. But it is right and proper for a woman to see that as a real loss and be sad about it. And a bit of a side note, but I absolutely disagree with anyone who thinks that going for breast reconstruction after a mistake to me is somehow being shallow, vain, or less of a spiritually minded Christian woman. It is absolutely appropriate for a woman to want to have the shape god made women to have. But it is also shameful for a woman to go around showing off her breasts to all of them's undri. The misuse of glory is shame. Failing to keep her place is shame. High rocky and glory go together. We've used the phrase "too much information" to illustrate how modesty works because revealing or uncovering is a kind of revelation. When a woman uncovered herself, you come from knows something about her that in many cases you shouldn't. It's something that in the right context should be glorious, but in the wrong context, grasps the glory elicitly. There is a direct intimate connection between uncovering and glory and hierarchy. Indeed, in the astute listener will notice that it is precisely this logic that Paul appeals to in explaining his instructions about head coverings. And while the place of woman under new government is, as sons and priests, the gender-shopping there is an analogy. Women don't literally become male sons, any more than men literally become a collective woman because of the bride of Christ's analogy. You don't want to end up like those people who claim that neither male nor female, June or Greek, slave and or free means that we're all suddenly transgender, we're all just kind of munged together into this sort of homogenous nothingness. Grace restores nature, it doesn't destroy it. A woman in Christ has her place in the cosmic hierarchy. And in terms of authority, not ontology, that place is under men, versus age 10, make that clear. This is in the context of covenant, we're talking about covenantal authority in the new creation, the church. A single woman is an under the authority of all men in general, but a Christian woman, even if she doesn't have a father or a husband, will still be under the elders of the church and also have a natural, creational place underneath men. It is her natural place to be underneath a man, even if she hasn't received a man, so to speak. And a head covering is a symbol of being in that place. Women are given free access like men to come before God's throne. They are able to participate in the priestly service of prayer and prophecy, speaking and singing within the congregation, but they are not the natural head of prayer and prophecy. On the contrary, they are to be silent in terms of individuals, speaking as individuals, because prayer and prophecy are not given them to exercise hardship in. Your women and the congregations let them be silent, for it had not been permitted to them to speak, but to be subject as also the law the Torah sayeth. And if they wish to learn anything, let them question their own men at home for it is a shame to women to speak in a congregation, first Corinthians 14. Hence, the anointing and glory of a woman ought to be covered in recognition of their place. Modesty is placekeeping. We are no longer a little lower than the angels, we are raised above them in Christ, but it is therefore Christ's crown which must shine forth in worship, not man's. So just as he elders before the throne in Revelation 3 removed their crowns, so we men cover hours. And that is why women must cover the heads in church. And I would all things considered be pretty brady of us to object to strongly to that. You know, if unfulen angels can cover their faces before the throne of God and do it without wanting that other beings don't have to, I think we can cover our heads while we behold the glory of Christ with unveiled face. Quite so, Smoky, quite so. So, Narn, can you sum up? I can try. In the new cosmological order inaugurated by Christ, we are all believers now serve inside the veil of the most holy place. Men should no longer cover their heads, but women should, and both for the same reason that the priests of the old covenant did cover their heads. In the case of men, there is no longer anything between God and them in the hierarchy, the cosmological hierarchy. Rather, man is a glory of God, and therefore should shine forth in the heavenly court. In the case of women, they signify their place underman in that cosmological hierarchy by covering themselves, since they as the glory of man should not compete with God's glory in the heavenly court. We imagine that you will have questions about what we have said, or insights that you would like to share with us, and that is what our signal group is for. We have some very sharp brothers and sisters who critique us and talk over these ideas of us, they're helping us to prune the trees to bemmel fruit by asking questions and challenging us and bringing in insights that we definitely would not have seen for ourselves. So, if you want to be part of that, head on over to www.trumagic.nz and follow your nose to become a paid subscriber. Or if you simply want to contribute financially to true magic because you find I work helpful and believe in the project of reformed re-enchantment, you can do the same thing. You just don't have to join the signal group if you don't want to, or you can join and look and say nothing, we do not mind. Hopefully our next episode will be considerably quicker to produce, because we'll be following up on this one with some practical applications. We're going to answer questions about things like when you should cover how much, what kind of covering to use, whether only married or mentioned cover, and even falling issues like how to answer people who are very offended, you might think they're sitting by not covering. Until then, continue to present in geodies as living sacrifices, which is your spiritual service. This has been True Magic.