A Digression

A Preface to the Son and the City in Isaiah 6

Our dignity as male and female is rooted in the very existence of God, who dwells on his holy mountain, and the future he has prepared for us in union and communion with himself. God made mankind to magnify himself, as the source and end of all creaturely good. He is the Alpha and Omega of you and me as mankind, male and female, to direct our eyes to who he is and what he has purposed for us. The Holy Spirit wastes no time in telling us this. Our origins are found immediately in Genesis 1-2, revealing a person and a place, as God begins to unveil his divine glory.

First, God, the personal Elohim, forms and fills the earth by his powerful Word, culminating in his making mankind in his own image, two persons, vice-regents of the world he had created. Next comes the revelation of the seventh day in Genesis 2:2-3, Sabbath defined as a place, which is understood to be the eternal home of God with mankind. According to Hebrews 4:11, Jesus’s “Come unto me and I will give you rest,” restates Genesis 2:2-3. God’s enthronement in Sabbath rest is not only declarative but imperative. God calls us to enter the rest he has prepared for us in his presence. In Genesis, Elohim’s rest on the seventh day is a concrete location, a city, always feminized in Scripture, as well as a never-ending age, which Jesus associated with his kingdom in Luke 18. It is both a “where” and “when.” It is the place and time of God’s eternal rest after the six days of creation work.

The fourth chapter of Hebrews implies that Adam and Eve understood that they were to come to him in his Sabbath dwelling. Homecoming for Adam and Eve was to ascend God’s holy hill, to be where he was, with Yahweh, who molded Adam from the dust and built Eve from Adam’s consecrated side. The goal set before them was Zion, the mountain of God. Home was within his holy tent, with their Lord, who had not hidden himself, but revealed himself openly to them in Eden. The heavenly tabernacle-dwelling was not only his house, but their home.

Adam and Eve were pilgrims in paradise, called to a city whose foundations and walls far surpassed the glory of earthly Eden. They were to enter the transcendent realm of the seventh day through Adam’s obedience, strengthened by Eve’s necessary alliance as the herald and beacon of that place. God commissioned Adam as the representative “pilgrim” beckoned home, guarding and keeping what was entrusted to him, living by every Word which proceeded from God, on behalf of Eve and all mankind. And God commissioned Eve as the representative “home,” who beckoned pilgrims.

As a church, I suggest that we have missed Eve as the typico-symbol of Sabbath rest, the audible echo of Yahweh’s “Come,” and the visible sign of the “joy set before” Adam. Eve was not there as a utility, as the means for Adam to increase his legitimate offspring. Nor was she there to provide an honorable outlet for his sexual desire. Nor was she Adam’s “bauble,” as Doug Wilson asserts.¹ She was not a decoration, backdrop, or prop in the garden. She was not part of the stage and scenery of Eden. Just as assuredly as Adam, Eve also had a mission from God. The same mission as Eve’s daughters today. She was the audible and visible sign of Sabbath rest.

Genesis 3 tells us that Adam and Eve rebelled, falling short of their respective missions and failing to enter Sabbath rest. And it also tells us that the combined strength of Satan, sin, misery, and death would not thwart God’s decree to bring his people home. The eternal Son offered himself as a ransom for the fallen race of mankind. We are that race, redeemed by the Son, bound for home, beloved sons in the Son and a bride in the Spirit, destined for the Sabbath city.

This is the pulse of history. It is the heart beat of the Old Covenant, whose essential core is the Seed of the Woman. God’s son Israel and God’s city Zion bottleneck in a divine person who takes to himself a male body and another divine person who comes upon and overshadows a female body, a womb. As Jeremiah writes, “For the Lord creates something new in the land — a female will shelter a man” (Jer 31:22). Perhaps what we have missed as the church is that gender is, above all, pedagogic and evangelical. It is didactic and interpretive of our hope. It proclaims a person and a place. It announces the blessedness of our end as a people destined for the unspeakable glory of the age to come. Our existence as man and woman pertains to faith, the reality of things hoped for.

Everything that is written discloses a divine person and place whom we are receiving. Everything. Everything that God says and does in the Scriptures, everything that is written. All of it feeds our longing for the triune God revealed in that place. His Word forms and shapes our desire as he moves us toward our supernatural end. We have come to Mount Zion, the Spirit-city of the living God, and we have come to the enthroned Son, Jesus, the Mediator of a new covenant. In Hebrews 12, we see the Mountain and the Mediator juxtaposed. We are receiving the City and the Son . . . . the throne room and the One seated upon the throne . . . the kingdom and the King . . . the Spirit tent and the Son encompassed by it. Today he calls us to set our minds on the triune God revealed in that place, and not without help. He places in our path living symbols, our neighbors, the men and women beside us, who, even in their fallen state, herald our supernatural end as sons in the Son and a bride in the Spirit.

Although everything that is written points there, that is not to say that all things are equally clear. And even the things that are perspicuous can be missed by the dull minds, deaf ears, and blind eyes that attend our fallen state, our limited or misguided understanding, and our personal sin. So, for example, Jesus must tell the disciples headed to Emmaus that the Old Covenant reveals him. Paul must explicitly say to the Corinthians that what was written in the past was written for them “upon whom the ends of the ages have come.” The author of Hebrews must clearly connect the Old Covenant to the New — both Melchizedek and the Aaronic priesthood to Christ, and also Mount Sinai to heavenly Zion. Yes, Hebrews, like Isaiah, expounds a son and a city as the substance of our hope.

I have been suggesting that gender is no minor theme of Scripture. The gendered images of sonship and cityhood are pervasive, and not without application to (1) our neighbors, (2) our marriages, and (3) our Lord’s Day worship. First, we love our neighbor not only as “mankind,” but as “male and female.” I love the man who is beside me not only because he images the triune God in Genesis 1, but because he images the Son in Genesis 2. And I love the woman next to me, not only because she images the triune God of Genesis 1, but because she images the Spirit-dwelling of God in Genesis 2.

Secondly, concerning marriage, Paul gives this application. The wife yields to her husband in his prominence, as she leans into her Lord for His protection and care provided through him. Her submission is always in the full realization that her first and final security is her Lord. She submits to her husband’s headship, because he mirrors the covenantal firstness of Adam and Christ, representative of mankind. The mission of the son was to guard and keep the garden and to spearhead the ascent of God’s people to Sabbath rest by obedience to the command “You shall not eat.” In a fallen world, the woman’s submission is unto Christ. In other words, she freely gives way to her husband, as representative of “first” in this age, not under compulsion, but cheerfully, because her eyes are on her Lord. In this she represents the faithful bride whom the Lord is bringing up from the wilderness (Song 8:5). Her covenantal submission to her husband is above all an act of trust in God. Her faith in the Lord is full-hearted, an utter dependence, that does not look to her husband to receive the security which only Christ can give her. She does not battle her husband’s representation of “firstness” in this age, but rather she lives in humility. This patience and quietness of heart can only come by “leaning into” her Beloved, her Lord. Her submission to her own husband does not come from confidence in mere man, who, like herself, is but dust, but in Christ. He is the only son of Adam who can, and did, spearhead her ascent to Sabbath rest by his atoning death and resurrection life.

The mutual submission of the husband is seen in his daily, discernible acts of sacrificial love for his wife. He shares the prominence of the two Adams, representative of mankind in this age, but Paul does not call him to magnify his firstness by ruling over his wife, but rather to apply his firstness to a mission of love. He upholds his wife, promoting her prosperity, with the prominence and strength God has given him in this age. Again, this is not done under compulsion, but unto the Lord, who did this for him. He imitates what he has received, the love of Christ, the only enduring Bridegroom of Scripture, who willingly laid down his life for his bridal people. The wilderness husband chooses to advance his wife’s well-being, considering her needs before his own, in imitation of the humility which the Lord demonstrated on the night he was betrayed — the eternal Son, our Alpha, enfleshed, soon to be exalted to the right hand of the Father, with all things under his feet for the sake of his church, kneels at his disciples’ feet with a humility characteristic of his entire life (Phil 2:1-11). The man’s prominence serves his mission, to love his wife as himself.

Just as man is prominent as the image of this age, I suggest that the woman will be prominent in the next age as representative of the seventh day and Sabbath rest. I see this as part of the divine reordering anticipated in heaven’s society which we find in Matthew 19-20, summarized in the “first will be last and the last first.” What will the woman do with her representation of “firstness” in the age to come? I suggest that she will take her prominence and draw attention to the beauty and strength of her divine Husband. The Spirit-bride in the age to come will magnify the second Adam, the Lord who reigns in Zion. She will point to the one through whom first things have obtained their end. This is what we find in Revelation 5:22-23. I suggest that this is the biblical-theological backdrop of Ephesians 5:18-33. It tells us what the husband does with his prominence, and also what the wife does with her lack of prominence in this age. The husband, representative of first things, upholds his wife in love, magnifying the beauty and strength of his wife as representative of last things. Likewise, the wife yields to her husband’s temporal prominence, magnifying his beauty and strength as representative of first things. In the age to come, it seems to me that the man’s prominence in this age will give way to the new order of the Spirit-bride, even as she takes that prominence and directs attention to the glory of the Son having brought her to Sabbath rest.

Some have used metaphors for this mutuality. Christopher West, Richard Eyer, and Tim Keller have all used dance as a picture of the man and the woman in covenantal marriage. In ballroom dancing, there is a first to move and a second, a lead and a follow; and yet the will of the “lead” and the will of the “follow” are both fully engaged. Dominance and passivity are equally the enemy. The “follow” must actively communicate with the “lead,” maintaining her personal balance, proper distance, exercising her agency as she interprets his movements and gauges her own response. If the “lead” dominates, it disrupts the dynamism which is necessary for partner dancing. Communication breaks down, and the joy inherent in their synergy is lost. The same happens with passivity. If the second partner is passive, failing to maintain her balance, agency, proper distance, communication similarly fails, and the flow of the dance is interrupted. The dance metaphor has difficulty capturing that the synergy of the husband and wife in Scripture goes places. It carries them both beyond the dance floor. It takes them onward and upward in the direction of their supernatural end. These are the things magnified in the Song of Songs.

The bride and groom of the Song do not extol their own glory, but the beauty and strength of the other. So, for example, when the King’s glory is expounded at the end of chapter 3, he directs all eyes to his bride. When the narrator asks in 3:6, “Who is this coming up from the wilderness like columns of smoke, scented with myrrh and frankincense from every fragrant powder of the merchant? Look! Solomon’s litter surrounded by sixty warriors from the mighty men of Israel.” The narrator then calls the women of Zion to go out and gaze at the crown given to him which his mother placed on him on the day of his wedding, the day of his hearts rejoicing. That gaze would have caused an eruption of praise, and yet the man immediately diverts the gaze of the women of Zion to his beloved, saying, “How beautiful you are, my darling, how very beautiful! Behind your veil, your eyes are doves.” As he moves down her body, he likens her to the “mountain of myrrh” and the “hill of frankincense,” evoking Zion, the Spirit-city, beautiful in elevation, the joy of the whole earth. The language and imagery used to describe the beauty of the bride and groom suggest the transcendence of sacred space — tabernacle, temple, and city — the Spirit-habitation made after the heavenly pattern.

Returning to Ephesians, the larger context of Paul’s epistle magnifies God as the source of our union. The mutual submission in Ephesians 5:21, worked out in this age in 5:22-32, magnifies the “indwelling” of our tri-personal God. Ephesians 5 more specifically highlights the union between Christ, the enfleshed Son, and his Spirit-formed, Spirit-filled pilgrim church. This emphasis on union also echoes the Song of Songs. The husband and the wife can never stand in antithesis to one another. They are one and the same in essence as they magnify two persons equal in power and glory. Mutual desire for union and communion hold submission and love together. Submission without love is dead works, and love without submission is empty sentiment, which Paul makes clear elsewhere (1 Cor 13; 16:14; cf. 1 John 3:17). We have more to go on than first century Near Eastern culture when trying to understand the Pauline commands to husbands and wives in Ephesians 5. We have Genesis to Revelation unfolding, and its compendium, the Song. There we find a man and a woman in their representation. The woman says to the man, “Take me with you,” and the man answers his Beloved with these words, “Arise, my darling. Come away, my beautiful one.”

Some might call my understanding of the Pauline command for wives to submit as watered-down. I can imagine that it would seem that way to those who have a difficult time distinguishing the wife’s submission to her own husband and the obedience of a child to his parents. By definition, patriarchy flattens all relationships into authority and obedience. But the fact remains that the Bible never says that a husband has authority over his wife apart from 1 Corinthians 7:4, the same verse that gives the wife the authority over her husband. Authoritative rule by the husband distorts the representation of two divine persons, equal in power and glory. What the husband and wife offer the other is offered freely.

As signs of the Son and his Spirit, there can be no competition or striving between husband and wife, other than this: “to outdo one another in showing honor.” There is no vertical power hierarchy in Ephesians, but rather a horizontal movement in time and space magnifying the triune God of the Scriptures who exists outside time and space. The husband and wife mirror the Son and Spirit in their mutual mission. Both are at work to bring a wilderness bride to Sabbath rest through the obedience of a covenantal and representative head. The man and woman, distinguished in their representation as the means and end of the covenant, are found to be co-heirs of both Christ and the glory of the Sabbath city. We are fellow pilgrims, co-laborers, and signs to one another of our eternal hope.

Our unity as husband and wife magnifies not only the unity of divine persons, but the cosmic indwelling of Ephesians 1:10. God is bringing everything together in Christ, things in heaven, represented by the woman built from Adam’s sacred side, and things on earth, represented by the man molded from the earth’s dust. At every level of representation and revelation, we find the same core. God is glorified and worshipped as three consubstantial persons in procession and embrace.

If I might apply this also to our Lord’s Day worship. The church is an equally ultimate unity and diversity. That unity is expressed in terms of the church as a temple, body, bride, flock, vine, or vineyard. Her diversity is expressed as living stones, body parts, tree branches, plantings, and members, with various gifts, callings, and missions, fitted together and serving the whole. We can add to that spiritual diversity, our natural differences as man and woman, as well as tribes, tongues, and nations, having a common end, the mountain of the Lord (Is 2:2; Mic 4:1-2). We could come up with other metaphors for our unity and diversity, such as a symphony or mosaic, which would highlight the glory of being one and many. Our diversity serves our unity, as we press ahead, interdependent, joined by the Spirit, pulling together, one in mind and purpose. Our unity also serves our diversity. Anchored by our union in Christ, belonging to one another as brothers and sisters in one family, we spur each other to exercise our gifts and fulfill our personal missions. Both are on display as we glorify God as triune, the alpha and omega of both our unity and diversity.

Perhaps, it is worth considering again whether our worship magnifies the God who has revealed himself as one and many, or whether we are clinging to truncated conceptions of ourselves from pagan thought. Movements in broader human history or in the church that despise diversity are out of sync with God’s revelation of himself as one and many. Our unity and diversity are from God. Adam and Eve, joined as one flesh, located in one place, Eden, are to spread out and fill the earth with diversity. As we have come to understand through science, every cell in our bodies is coded for that diversity. And yet what is the end? We are told that the tribes and tongues and nations found in them, even to the ends of the earth and distant coastlands, will make their way home to the Son and the City (cf. John 10:16). This is mankind’s “unfolding” and “enfolding,” and it is a mirror of the divine movements which the church has come to call “processions” and “perichoresis.”

This brings me to Isaiah 6, our differences traced to the Son and Spirit as revealed in the heavenly realm. On earth, sonship and cityhood — Israel and Zion in the Old Covenant, and Christ and the Spirit-church in the New Covenant — are manifest in two gendered images that can be traced back to the revelation of the Son and Spirit in heaven. Isaiah sets up this gender paradigm in Isaiah 1-5 as he expounds two images of God’s people, the images of God’s disobedient son, Israel, and God’s disobedient daughter, Jerusalem, culminating in a song about love gone awry. In Isaiah 5, God’s people are his beloved vineyard, tenderly cultivated, protected, and cherished, but which has not borne fruit. The vineyard is masculinized as “the house of Israel” and “the men of Judah” in 5:7-10, and they are feminized as Zion, with “her dignitaries” and “her masses,” in 5:13-14. The end of both is the same — darkness and distress, portrayed as utter ruin for the sons and the city. This is the backdrop of the throne room scene of Isaiah 6.

To be clearer, in Isaiah 5:14, God’s disobedient son, Israel, and his disobedient daughter, Zion, are swallowed whole by the enlarged throat of Sheol. The prophet evokes a gaping mouth and a bulging, undulating throat, perhaps of a serpent, vulture, or the Egyptian mythical beasts of death and chaos, Ammit or Apep, who prey upon and devour human souls. Over and against this ghastly scene of the sons and the city, carried in waves ever deeper down the throat of Sheol, stands the Lord of Armies exalted by his justice and righteousness (5:16), while “resident aliens” survive to become his grazing lambs feeding among the ruins of the rich.

This is the setting of Isaiah’s call as a prophet. He is taken up into the throne room of God and sees the divine antithesis of the sons and city consumed in death. The sight of the Lord of Armies undoes him. Yahweh is seated on a high and lofty throne in his Sabbath rest, as his train proceeding from the throne, envelops him in glory. The contrast could not be greater between two sons and two cities: (1) the throne of the Son as Yahweh Sabaoth stands over and against the disobedient sons of Israel in 5:7; (2) his Spirit-city, his holy tent, filled by the Lord’s robe wrapping the throne in blazing glory, exists in stark opposition to Zion with her masses in 5:14, swallowed by Sheol.

Isaiah’s response is remarkable. It resembles nothing of Paul’s “far better,” or Peter’s “joy inexpressible,” or how the author of Hebrews describes the victory celebration in chapter 12. Rather, the prophet is undone. The six-fold woe, which he pronounced against the vineyard of chapter 5, he now directs against himself in chapter 6 as he beholds the Lord and his Sabbath-city. He is unclean and lives among an unclean people, and yet he has seen the King, Yahweh Sabaoth. What Isaiah then experiences presages Pentecost. The altar and coal reveal the Son, slain before the foundation of the world for Isaiah’s sin, according to Revelation 13:8. They also reveal the Spirit, whose fiery presence does not consume, but enfolds and equips his sons and daughters to prophesy.

I continue to suggest that there is a connection to be made between our triune Lord and mankind as male and female. Again, we see it in Isaiah 1-6, as it echoes the ontological male and female of Genesis 1 and their trinitarian and covenantal identity in Genesis 2. (1) The Lord, (2) his manifestation above as throne, tabernacle-train, and smoke, and (3) his manifestation below as mankind, male and female, are a unity and a plurality, in procession and embrace. That representation of God comes with a mission made explicit in Isaiah 6: “Who will go for us?” Who will declare the Son and the City? It is worth noting that there is a linguistic parallel between “Who will go for us?” in Isaiah 6 and “Let us make . . .” in Genesis 1:26.

Isaiah 6 also reminds us that the purposes of God will not be thwarted even by sin. We are unclean, and yet God purifies us with coals taken from his own holy fire, so that we may draw near to him. God ensures our destiny as receiving him as triune, an eternal king and a never-ending kingdom. Despite sin, Satan, suffering, and death (and, in the final analysis, through them) we will come to the Son and his Spirit-City. We have been brought to the Son within his citadel. All earthly thrones and kings, and all earthly capitals and kingdoms, evoke this in our thoughts: our eternal God reigns in Zion. And yet more specifically, Israel, God’s first born son, always masculinized — and Jerusalem, God’s city, always feminized — were raised up to direct our eyes to the living God enthroned in the city of life.

As a personal side note, I have found no joy in seeing the ways in which women have been misconceived and disparaged in the Reformed and Presbyterian tradition. Many men have taken their prominence in this age and used it to diminish their sisters. No doubt some, perhaps most, have done this in ignorance, with sincere hearts, thinking that this serves God. But I suggest that rather than serving God by magnifying who he is and what he has purposed for his people, this denigration has obscured God.

Secondly, I make an observation. Christian nationalism and patriarchy advance together for a reason. They share a common preoccupation with things below. Many in those camps perhaps grasp Adam’s prominence as the covenantal head of mankind in Genesis 2, and his representation of this age, but they give far too little consideration to the goal of Adam’s advancement. They diminish the supernatural end toward which Adam presses, a city which is feminized in Scripture. The goal of sons is the city whose builder and maker is God. It was true for Abraham, and it is no less true today. We press toward nothing short of the manifestation of the Father, Son, and Spirit in a supernatural realm, God’s rest. Revelation makes clear that only the Lord, the Son enthroned in his Sabbath dwelling, can bring the natural realm to its supernatural end.

I suggest that myopia is the bane of both Christian nationalists and patriarchalists. Their eyes are not fixed on the Lord enthroned in Zion and so they continue magnifying the glory and strength of mere men on this earth. I continue to think that the prevailing gender paradigms of the Reformed tradition stand on sand, and our current understanding of ourselves cannot withstand the cultural shifts that have introduced so much confusion. Can we consider whether the essence of gender is the unshakeable foundation of God and his plan for his people?

1. See here Doug Wilson’s understanding of “certain creational realities” labeled “concave” desires: “Men want to possess and women want to be possessed. Men want to want and women want to be wanted. Men want baubles and women want to be baubles.” Notice also that Wilson states that when a woman denies or rejects her concave desire to be a man’s possession and bauble, she is rejecting God, not man.