Beware the Sea Monsters

I’ve long thought that Kline’s books are entertaining reads. Moreover, I’ve thought reading them outloud often makes them difficult to distinguish from science fiction and fantasy. Kline will throw in the occasional oddball sentence. Nonetheless, in my experience I have found Kline most often right than off in wacko land. Indeed, Kline’s mind worked on another level. His ability to connect biblical themes and relate them organically into the sweeping progress of redemptive history was truly a blessing to the Church. The following is one of my favorite excerpts in Kline. The first sentence is one of those that leaves you scratching your head – perhaps even laughing out loud. But the remaining treatment, I trust, will demonstrate the tremendous insight he can load into such offbeat sentences.

Synonymous with the motif of the ordeal by water is that of ordeal by combat with sea-monsters. Thus, the Red Sea water ordeal becomes in certain Old Testament passages a conflict of Yahweh against Leviathan (Isa. 51:9, 10; cf. Pss. 74:12-15; 89:10, 11 [9, 10]). We are thereby reminded that the Lord was present with his people in the passage through the sea, that he underwent their ordeal, and that their salvation depended on their identification with him. Then in the New Testament there is a typological application of this imagery to Jesus’ conflict with Satan in the course of his humiliation unto death.20 Hence, on our understanding of John’s baptism in general and of his baptism of Jesus in particular, Jesus’ experience in the Jordan would have been a symbolic anticipation of his ensuing victorious combat with the Satan-Dragon. We cannot, therefore, but view with new appreciation the liturgies of the ancient church when they speak of Jesus crushing the head of the dragon in his descent into the river for baptism.

It was with valid insight that early baptismal prayers recited the Lord’s supernatural way in the waters in events like creation, the deluge, and the Red Sea and Jordan crossings. Singularly apposite is the anchoring of God’s redemptive acts of subduing and dividing the ordeal waves in his creation acts of dividing and bounding the chaos waters in order that the dry land, inheritance of man, might appear. (It may be recalled here that in ancient mythology the slaying of the chaos dragon is the necessary preliminary to the establishment of the world order.) There is indeed an allegorical strain in these ancient prayers, but they did achieve a live sense of identification with the eschatological current of redemptive history, something our denatured modern baptismal liturgies would do well to recapture.

-Meredith Kline, By Oath Consigned, pp. 60-61