| IVa: Macro Role.. of Alpha Precedence | IVb: ..of Body | IVc: ..of Trial Combat | IVd: ..of Your Own Destiny |
For a Text-to-Speech rendition of this webpage, see the audio player below:
As we saw in Part III, it's about Love, not legalism; so God is out to make a Bride for His Son. This Ephesians 1 purpose therefore requires our nature change to become just like His Son: 2Cor5:17+2Cor5:21+1Cor15:43-44+Rom8:18+John 10:34-35+Ps82:6 (which the Lord is quoting, in John 10:34). Thus we have to become 'gods', because it's UNfair that God permit an Inferior Companion for His God-Man, Son. So as the Lord explains in John 10:34, warning us as well as those legalistic Pharisees, we dare not be arrogant with fake humility, for
Notice how the Lord uses the Psalm 82:6 quote. He quotes from the Septuagint, not the Hebrew, but He's using the quote Hebraistically. God can just say a thing, and it is so. (Hebrew text says, "I said: 'gods -- you!'") The context of that verse in the OT is a warning not to mistreat people, since God is the Judge. But the Lord uses another layer of meaning, in John 10:35, very interesting: you are gods, if the Word COMES to you. Then, he seals that statement with the affirmation that Scripture can't ever be 'untied' (not "broken"), tantamount to an oath, see Heb6 last half. So He's flatly saying that the Word GOING to you means that you are gods, because of the previous DECREE (Ps82:6 being a reminder of it) that this be so. Again, God need merely SPEAK and it is so. So He SPEAKS His Word into us. So we really can and do become gods -- just as HE WILLED IT.
That's another way you can know you are to become a god: it would be UNfair for the Holy Spirit to 'work' on you, if you were inferior. For God is Holy. God shouldn't touch what is less than Himself, that's unfair to Him. But He is to be touching you all the time, Eph5:18! Because the Lord Sanctified You for All Time, Heb10:10-14. Therefore the Trinity Indwell you (all "in Him" verses; see also "Indwelling (of body)" in VERindex.htm). Again, God is Infinitely Holy, so you must be and are lifted up to His Level; He won't tolerate lesser-thans, and doesn't have to. Else there couldn't be any relationship with Him, at all; else you couldn't even go to heaven, much less have a relationship with God. [This is how you separate the wheat from the tares among the world's alleged holy books. Infinite God should not be saddled with lesser-thans. All alleged holy books and wanna-be-bible books portray a relationship of God being saddled with lesser-thans -- what an INSULT to His Holiness. Thus they prove themselves satanfodder, fit only for burning.]
Thus you are a child of God, alright, Gal3:26; and you are, due to your being BORN in Him, which birth was juridically produced on the Cross per Isa53:10-11 (both BHS and LXX texts, not in translation), as Isa54:1 exults and Rom6 further explains. So NOW, your soul needs to be filled up with the Son of God's Thinking (theme of Rom8, esp. Rom8:4, see also Rom12:1-3 in Greek).
So the worst sin you can commit, is to refuse to GET this Word. There is no substitute. No work can make you into a god, lol. We saw why, in the "adikia" subsection of the Fourth Reason for Invisibility, in Part III.
Hence Romans 6-8, explain the zigzagging spiritual growth process, post-salvation. You DIVORCED Satan's plan, that first second you believed in Christ, so you "overcame" that hurdle (as 1Jn puts it). But the now-divorced 'spouse', your Energizer Bunny sin nature, keeps on trying to get you to commit adultery with it, mindlessly. Like a really annoying disease which won't go away and won't kill you, either. So Paul walks the reader through the vicissitudes, so the reader can derive comfort and wisdom with respect to the progressive conflict he experiences. For truth is a weapon against falsehood. Now the old spouse is FALSE, so you war with it. Your New Husband is in you, and greater is He, than either Satan&Co. or your yet-powerful, sin nature. You cannot ever fight this battle on your own. You cannot ever fight it with works. Your works are just different expressions of the same sin nature, as Paul explains (with coarse epithets!) in Philippians 3 and Romans 4.
So now you have TWO warring natures, theme of Romans 8. So now you like Paul will constantly quip (Rom7:24-25), "who will deliver me from this body of death?" knowing full well Whose Battle it truly is. And then the 'red sea' parts and you nonetheless live this impossible spiritual life because you really are a god by SPIRITUAL nature, John 4:23-24, Heb4:12, 1Thess5:23 (Greek); thus, under that Same Spirit, you are in training to become a King-Priest, Fit Bride for the King of Kings, Who is God and Man in One Person, forever.
In short, these aren't nice verses to make you feel good about becoming a god; rather, they are real truths to make you SEE God. For you have to be LIKE God, to see God, theme in 1Jn (e.g., 2:28-3:3, and all "born of God" verses).
Omnipotent Infinity doesn't need finity's help. So no impotence, no smallness in finity can hinder Omnipotent Infinity, either. Call it God's Sense of Humor, but it's really His Absolute Love, His Sovereign, Husbanding Attribute: "filling all in all" clause at the end of Eph1. It's hell NOT to be God, so God is out to MAKE everything have the effect of BEING God, even all inanimacy. So how much more you, if even the sparrows are thus cared for, said the Lord in the Gospels.
Notice how Satan's selection of legalism REQUIRES the dichotomy, whereas God's Plenary Purpose, ERASES the dichotomy. People vote with Satan, not with God, because they too want the dichotomy; they want it, to be able to differentiate themselves, to call themselves 'special', 'good', 'better'. But by preserving the dichotomy, you preserve all the frustration which accompanies it: others are lower than you, so you must narrow your relationships. And if happiness only comes from being able to say you are 'special' or 'better' in some way, then as time passes you must widen the scope of those you call 'inferior', lest your 'specialness' be diluted. So either you hunker down and don't associate with anyone 'better' than you, or you broaden your condemnation-range of others. In either event, you become a quivering lump of coal by life's end: all in the name of preserving your ego. Thus has gone the history of the world, which thinks it essential to survival and self-identity, to put down others. Legalism is the justifying key to that dungeon.
Like Paul says in 1Cor13:1-3 in the Greek, life is "outhen" (Attic Drama Greek, "NOTHING!") without Love. Doesn't matter how good you are, how bad you are, what your abilities are, how right or wrong or just or unjust. What's the freakin' POINT, if there's no LOVE? No point. Just a lot of tails full of sound and fury, signifying NOTHING. So God makes a new tale: a tale of Two Natures. So it's the best of times, and the worst of times, and For All Time, you are sanctified. Barkus is willing, you are His Peggity, and He will make you Fit Bride. By THINKING. Because of compatible NATURE, now: those same five infinitives, tell the tale of your life. Lovingly.
Think: to be Compatible with Infinite God requires you to be Equal. It's not as if there was "God" and then something less which could be compatible. Even one 'dot' less than Infinity is utterly INcompatible with it. Co-existence is not the same thing as compatibility. You co-exist with a plant, a dog, a house, but that doesn't mean you are compatible with them. Compatibilities determine the scope and nature of relationships, because SHARED CAPACITIES make for shared compatibilities. Hence the NATURE has to be the same for ANY compatibility with Infinite God. God can create what is not compatible with Him, obviously: the universe He created, Gen1:1 is not compatible; so too with flora and fauna. Sin is not compatible -- He didn't create sin, but He did create the freedom to sin. A soul of itself is not compatible, either. That's the problem. The Infinity-finity dichotomy has to be solved; sin only complicates the dichotomy, because then the being WANTS to sin, and WANTS to reject God, which therefore precludes CONSENT to being made compatible. It's not that God can't solve the problem, but that we don't WANT Him to. Hence you need to change natures, from your own -- into His. Thereafter, the function of that DDNA needs to be deposited progressively, as was mentioned at the beginning of the First Reason for Invisibility link of Part III. See also the "DDNA" link at pagetop. So you "fill up" in that new nature, as Romans 8 (and other passages) explains in detail. Again, that's what the five infinitives of Isa53:10-11 in the LXX, do. Just as they did, to Christ.
So given this unbridgeable gap between Infinity and finity, "performance" can only be God's, never the creature's; hence relationship with GOD, unlike the relationship with people, is NOT about performance: but rather, about your soul and volition gaining the CAPACITY for Divine Love. For Love never coerces, and God wants an Equal Companion for His Son. Now think: God could just bing! you instantly and make the outer 'you' anything from the most spectacular angel, to a lump of coal. So He could just bing! all the obedience and performance into you to make you do whatever He wanted. But you'll notice: He's not doing that.
So God is not legalistic and petty, the way religion and people are. Because God is all about LOVE. Right and wrong are issues to secure CAPACITY and hence COMPETENCY for the enjoyment of TOGETHERNESS. The togetherness is FIRST, hence the First Commandment is First. The Love is First, not second. The "performance", that's what's secondary. Finity has the opposite need: for finity, the performance comes first. That's a BARRIER which got erased at the Cross. Since erased, then any performance is optional, a thing to enjoy as a SUBSET of the already-unconditional, togetherness. So any kind of performance, good or bad, can be enjoyed. So then the relationship, is always fulfilling; not, some forever-frustrating dichotomy.
Which means the delicate enlarging of your soul and volition, only as you consent. For togetherness is all about CONSENT. For again, Love doesn't coerce. God doesn't need your penance, your obedience; but you need -- and would desperately want, if you knew Him -- Rapport with Him. So this entire spiritual life, this entire salvation, even -- is to BE with Him forever. Just to be: to be or not to be with Him, that's the eternal question, the first commandment. Not, your rising up against a sea of troubles and by opposing, you end them. But by Him parting the 'red sea' of the Cross, so you walk dryshod through this drowning, dead, hamlet of a world. So therefore He Performs, due to His Love. Not to put you down, but to put you UP: Isaiah makes that a running theme, with deft uses of ola and other upward-moving words, in the Hebrew of Isa52:13-54:1. So, it's not about being right. Not about being wrong. Not about being proud. Not about being Uriah-Heep 'humble'. So, not to preen. Preening is boring; being complimented is boring and even offensive, Rev19:10's "Don't DO that!" Being king-of-the-hill is boring, when you can instead see Him Who is Invisible: "more than we could ever ask or imagine", Eph3:20.
So while you were a spiritual kid, you learned Bible in terms of right and wrong. But you're supposed to outgrow that tricycle-idea, to realize it's TOGETHERNESS, RAPPORT which makes the question of right and wrong important: for love wants to be COMPETENT. So what's truly right, is to want God. What's truly wrong, is to not want God. Hence no one goes to hell except for rejecting God, John 16:9. So learning God is what's Right. All else is pointless. Unless you enjoy this insane hamlet.
So you're not who you see in the mirror. You're who you see in the Mirror of the Word. [Word "mirror" is a Bible keyword for the Word instructing you how you are. It's not always translated "mirror" or "reflection".] So you're not who your friends, family, co-workers think you are. You're who GOD says you are, and those verses above are but a few of hundreds saying the same thing. For God doesn't want to live with inferior natures forever: would you want to be saddled with the stupid forever? So if not you, why should God be so saddled? So, you are not allowed to BE inferior, once saved. So, those of the OT are not inferior either (everyone gets God's Righteousness at salvation, viz., Gen15:6). So we gotta stop looking horizontally at what WE think is right, but look at what's right from God's View. Which if we weren't now of compatible nature, we could not do: for if we were not of compatible nature the Holy Spirit couldn't justify telling us anything. Now do you see why ONLY believing in Christ 'begets' salvation? We need a complete change of nature, to even be saved!
God is Omniscient. So He knows all the high and all the low. HE is already High. We get to start low, and we learn the High that way, so we can likewise get the 'stretch' of what it's like to be Omniscient; which understanding of 'low' going to High, makes for more rapport with God. Like the Lord says at His Birth (Ps40:5ff, Heb10:5), this having of a finite nature is only a TRAINING mechanism to create the Oneness togetherness. That's why Christ wanted the Cross in the first place: to get that full Togetherness, to ERASE the barrier, the dichotomy between Infinity and finity, which cramps how much rapport one can have with God. And, per the contract of Isa53:10-12, that's what really happened on the Cross, as Romans 6-8 explains.
Hence God flipped all sin into DDNA Oneness on the Cross, in answer to the Lord's John 17 Love prayer, as we saw in Part III. Here in Part IV we'll see the macro-historical effect of Church on history. After all, if we're now gods-being-trained, we ought to have a 'godlike' effect on history. Oh how truly we do, since Our God is Seated, 1Jn4:17! (DDNA link at pagetop explains the DDNA effects in great detail. The DDNA webseries is the inside-you micro explanation, and is the counterpart to this macro Thinking series.)
So NOW, God's out to exploit the Victory of the Cross per Hebrews 1-2, as we saw in Part III. So NOW, God's combing the highways and byways of this little hamlet called Earth, to build an 'Esther' for His Son. You'll see why, in the next section. For now, notice that this is the real drama playing before all the eyes of Heaven; and the criteria for choosing 'Esther', is Heb11:1's "It's about Confidence in Word! Son's Thinking, On Trial! Evidence, Unseen!" You evidenced confidence in Word when you first believed in Christ. You continue to evidence confidence in Word as you eat more of Christ's Thinking. That's why we have a Bible, God's Script, and a System of learning, and a Teacher Who Runs that System, the Holy Spirit.
Meanwhile the rest of the world is LOVELESSLY tail-chasing, and hence signifies NOTHING. So the whole 'play' of life, is HUPOSTATIC; genitive absolutes, like Luke uses in Acts, like John uses in Revelation: split-screen TV, Heb11:1's Greek. What we think we see, is the nothing 'TV program', playing. A tale told by a lot of tail-chasing idiots. So the more and louder they tell it, the more idiotic it becomes. But Heb11:1's Evidence Unseen -- you learning God's Script in God's System -- you are the real tale, and yours is a heroic one. Just like Your Hero, Whose Thinking is deposited in you, thus filling up your spiritual nature. So you are among those in Heb11. Not among the tail-chasers.
That's the Bible's Cinderella story, but it's no story, it's history. His Story, replaying time and again. The Jews couldn't have rebuilt Jerusalem without an Esther then, and they can't do it now. But Esther isn't complete, yet. So Israel is languishing, not really supposed to be back in the Land, since only the Lord can "shub" (=return) them, as you'll see better beginning in the next section. For past is prologue. What happened before, gets repeated in bigger and more epic cycles, until the plan of God completes. For His Son is HoPantoKrator, as we saw in Part III. We saw then what kind of persons we must become, in a dedicated-to-God lifestyle, as Peter puts it in 2Peter3:11: gods. [Greek-geek note: check out huparchein and dei and eusebeia etymology. Like Paul, Peter plays on etymology throughout his letters.] Specifically, the Son of God, Who is Seated. So the world gets to live another day: that fact too, will be extensively covered in this Part IVa. Thus it has ever been, since Adam: "Timeline" link at pagetop provides ooodles of Bible data and math proof of this fact. So what happened then, is upgraded NOW. For the sake of that Same Son Who invented history, Gen1:1, Isa53:10-12.
Of course we can't see all this; so blind we are, we can't even translate Heb11:1 properly. For in our mistranslation, we strip out both Christ and the people in the Trial, rendering the subjects and objects in the verse, as if mere things! After all, it's unseen, lol! [When Satan&Co. mess with a translator, they always but always play on some doctrine in a verse to reverse the meaning. In Gen3:11, they get the translators to keep on mistranslating nagadth as "tell" rather than the correct meaning, "denounce": thus in translation, God gets denounced for hiding/lying (makes God look like He 'hid' knowledge of their being naked, what a farce). So here in Heb11:1, the operative punning Satan&Co. use, is "unseen": thus Christ is unseen (hupostasis, in the verse) and turned into a mere thing, 'substance'; thus those who believe IN Him are unseen (the genitive plural endings in the participles); and all the persons, are turned into some things, to elicit an "awwww" from the reader! Awesome satanic wit. Awesome, how blind we truly are to it. Heb111.htm is a corrected translation (one of many you can make), compared to the popularly-published, insulting-of-God-and-Christ, insipid translations.]
Meanwhile -- split screen -- down here on this hamlet with all its tail-chasing outhen heroism, we humans are utterly clueless about our massive, undeserved importance. We're busy doing Brother-Foot stuff, ignoring the Head. Look how small our souls are, constantly preoccupied with dead things, and imagining that the acquisition of more dead things makes us more alive, more important. Look how small, our motives and identities. For when people ask you what you do, they telegraph that they identify you by your occupation -- rather than, by how you are as a person. Or, worse -- they telegraph that they can't fathom you as a person, unless they can cubbyhole you in some inanimate category, such as your job. So, when people ask us to identify ourselves, and we say our names, ages, birthplaces and ethnicity, we make shallow statements about what personhood means: a collection of polite but meaningless data, which elucidates not at all, the person being identified.
Worse: once you look beneath the nice rhetoric in these books, you find God Himself depicted as but a dog, expected to either roll over.. or bite. For, in all other holy books, God never gets PAID for the wrongs done him. Oh yeah, if we are bad we are reincarnated to a worse life next time, or get some bad karma or get a "painful doom" (Pickthall's translation of Koranic catchphrase), etc. -- but GOD GETS NOTHING. Unless, you want to call Him masochistic and sadistic, exulting in our pain. For all holy books of any stripe but Bible's, inevitably claim He is masochistic and sadistic. For, when you look underneath the paint, you see 'god' (by whatever name) depicted as a capricious, unfathomable person of total power.
Power, and not love. So these other holy books are constantly maligning Him with honeyed words. You have to look at the CONTENT sans the honey, to see the hatred. For if God is only about Power, then He's not really a person, but a monstrous computer. For, if it's about Power and thus NOT love, then it's about hate. Hatred needs Power; love doesn't need power, for it is already the greatest power in the universe. Love is the greatest power, inherent: so it is not emotion. It is the greatest power, because it needs nothing. Needing nothing, doesn't mean it should be unfairly treated. Justice is based on love. So if you love God, you want Him to get paid. If you don't, you fantasize that He doesn't need to be paid, He likes suffering, He's somehow in 'need' of what humans do, etc. So the holy book's portrayal of God, itself tells you whether God really wrote it. For if God is NOT, then He's not love; then He's not Justice; and if Not Justice, then He's not getting paid, and the holy book which portrays Him not getting paid, isn't even worth space in a trash can.
Every fake holy book will also deride God and bluntly, painting Him in satire and pointing at Bible. It's the #1 demonic-origin "autograph" characteristic. Truly weird, how the satire simultaneously praises Bible and mocks those who believe in the fake holy book; all the while, insulting God Himself. Humans aren't smart enough to do all that at once, you know. Bible mistranslations always have this same tripartite characteristic, too -- every time you find one in a verse. Mocking the Trinity, I guess. [Appendix, "Badly Translated" link in RightPT.htm and "About Bible Mistranslation" in DDNA.htm all provide much detail on this topic. In this webpage you can search on "orange light" to quickly get to the section showing examples how fake holy books mock their own believers.]
So how many holy books would be left, after you'd gone through and pitched all those saying God doesn't get paid? How many left, after you toss out those DISMISSING the issue altogether, claiming God doesn't NEED to be paid? Then how many, claiming 'God' is this force or manifestation, not really a Person -- so there is no 'Him' to pay? Of course, if there is no 'Him' to pay, then YOU are the god, see. That personhood can't come from inanimacy or non-personhood due to the first law of math that no set can contain itself, well hey. You can be your own god now, so just overlook that glaring contradiction. Evolutionists overlook it, so why can't you?
Well almost no books are left: only the 66 books of what we call the 'protestant' version of the Bible, remain. Verse by verse, book by book, you can run the litmus test yourself on all the world's holy books. I've done my testing already, which began about 40 years ago, when I was in my teens. If you find a qualifying holy book outside this very narrow list of 66, I'd like to know about it.
1Jn4:19 explains the result: "we love, because He first loved us." God Is Love. So we are not love, since we are not God: this is the essence of the dichotomy between finity and Infinity. Which dichotomy, has been solved BY Infinity, Who is Pure Thought. So that Thought Can Replicate, DDNA! without loss of mass or energy, since that Thought is Life, and Life is IMmaterial. Hence Love is something to be learned, and it requires God's Power, to learn it. So, we needn't be ashamed. But we do need to be aware of the enemy within. Our own sin nature is essentially body-tyrannized. Bigger problem than sin itself, is this puny way of thinking we naturally possess. So we can get out of that status by learning His Thinking, the Bible, because We Get A New Spiritual Nature the sin nature cannot perceive, that first nanosecond we got saved in Christ. John has no end of fun with the "born of God" catchphrase in 1Jn, for this reason. [See DDNA1.htm for more on 1Jn's wordplay and how it's the primer on how we get DDNA-converted. If you're not already familiar with how DNA works -- for DDNA is analogous -- you might have to start by reading DDNA.htm.]
Peter goes happily ballistic in his letters on this topic. For example, Peter can't stop using stonecutting/gemcutting metaphors for this inscribing of Christ's Thinking on each LittleRock (=believer=petros, play on Peter's Aramaic name in Matt16:18). So, characteristically, Peter calls the Bible, His Thinking, when he uses the clever word, "hupogrammos". Written on our hearts and minds, the Bible is the biggest promise IN the Bible -- for if God's Own Thinking is in you, then you CAN and DO Love Him, which is why you have 1Cor13, Rom5:5, and many other "Love" verses portrayed with Head and Water metaphorical functions. Which is why often "Christ in you" verses likewise reference that cycling Bible in your head: Love is in you, see. And you, in Him -- John 15-17, the oneness with God. Happiest state, that cycling Love in you. And that happy state, is our Legacy from Christ (theme of Hebrews 10).
Heb12:2, the Cross is a Joy. That's the big surprise, in this drama. We think love should feel good. No. We think happiness should feel good. No. Our body is DEAD, so what 'feels good' to it is also DEAD. We have no idea, therefore, what life is, what happiness, what love is. For our spiritual nature, cannot be felt by the human nature. Cannot be felt, but can and is designed to, be Built. Isha was "built" for the first Adam, Hebrew word "banah". Not built to be inferior, as the text of Genesis 2 explains. Well, this Esther-Bride is being built, a Living Temple, for the Living Temple Behind the Veil (Heb6:15ff), Who is the Last Adam. And we can't see or feel any of it. But we can know it, via God's Script, in God's System, via our Teacher, teaching us.
And what He teaches us, is a new set of APODOSES. As you'll remember from the First Reason for Invisibility in Part III, the DDNA function of the Cross was to REPLACE the sin-nature apodoses with Divine ones. If x happens, sin resulted; and sin, is a conclusion, a birth -- as James explained back in James 1. So replace the conclusion ON the conclusion, and you have spiritual re-engineering occurring upon the 'soul DNA' of the sin -- IN CHRIST this happened, per those five infinitives (coupled with the Hebrew text) of Isa53:10-12. So now that same DDNA conversion, can happen to us. See why the Cross is a Joy? See why it cannot feel good, and YET be love, happiness, joy? Feeling is a body thing, but love, happiness and joy are SOUL functions. Soul has no feeling, but rather lives on KNOWING, Matt4:4. And knowing is the key to joy, love, happiness. It's all about Who you know. And if you know Him, then you know joy, then you WANT it to feel bad, to EXPRESS that joy.
So we can get God's APODOSES, by asking, WHY. Why are we hapless humans being DDNA-turned into gods as Esther-Bride, for The King of Kings? WHY are we so LOVED? Aren't you curious WHY? So now let's practice learning This Love's apodoses. Of course, God's apodoses are DEEP. So we'd better begin back at the beginning.
Past is prologue, because GEOGRAPHY never changes. Grab a map of the world; note carefully how the continents are connected. It's not hard to see why your geology prof tells you that once upon a distant speck in geologic time, all these continents were basically one: "Pangea." Looks like Someone first drew a big series of craggy circles on a sheet of paper, then curled that paper into a sphere, thus breaking apart the connecting 'lines'. Why, you can see the video of it even on your XP computer: Encarta 2004's, "Continental Drift" video shows you how a world which started UNDERWATER, gradually breaks up and hence floats up, to form the continents as we know them, today. [The video doesn't show clearly the effect of floating that plate tectonics had on Pangea, which was SUBMERGED under the water, due to its combined weight; as each piece broke apart, being lighter, it could go ABOVE the water. Plate tectonics can run IMMEDIATELY, too: that's why we have earthquakes. So we really don't know whether those ANCIENT tectonics were SLOW; we're merely guessing, based on today's generally SLOW plate-tectonic behavior, now that the continents ARE separated. But Pangea's breakup might have been rapid: over a day, a week or a month, a year: who knows. So learn plate tectonics, and you'll understand how the restoration of the world in Gen1, COULD have worked; how the Flood of Genesis 6, COULD have worked. God didn't have to do it miraculously. Maybe He did, and maybe He didn't, but at least you can see ONE way it could have happened. Plate tectonics was one of the great scientific discoveries of the 20th century, well worth your time studying. Explains why most of the Western US was under water (i.e., Grand Canyon).]
So, then: note how, as a RESULT, you can travel along virtually any coastline, and go from anywhere to anywhere.
Can do between 20-40 miles a day, at a normal walking pace; when tired, just get back on the water; and use your arms to row or guide a simple sail, to rest your strong legs, and thus cover maybe another 20+ miles, depending on the winds. For travelling gear you'd need string made of gut and a hook, probably a throwing knife and maybe a slingshot, the clothes on your back and a spare set, a few spices, a wineskin or two; oh, and money or salt for buying what you might need. [Ancient slingshots (like David's) were not pulled back like a bow, but twirled.] Great exercise for the body, great freedom for the mind. For your entertainment you'd review all that information you, like all your tribe, memorized since you were weaned: so to enjoy time with Him Who is Invisible. Then again, there were always other travellers you'd meet on your journey, if you took the normal routes. So, if you wanted to be alone, you found yourself more and more pushing off to water, to think about Him even better.
You could make quite a nice living by moving around all the time. You'd stop in the morning when the fish are biting, haul in maybe 10 of 'em, then sell them to the inhabitants or other travellers you met as you moved on. Easy meal for them, easy salt for you. If you felt like a break, you'd go inland a bit and see what small game you could hit with your throwing knife (or slingshot); then you could skin it, and while the skin was curing you could eat or sell the meat. Quite a nice life, actually. Lots of greens everyone could identify as safe for food; lots of nuts, often wild spelt or other grains would be nearby, so you could chomp on the heads. Dried seaweed was good too, when available. Water was occasionally hard to find, maybe; but everyone had wine or beer, which was safer anyhow.
Now you know why past is prologue. Israel has always been a 'problem' to people, and always will be. By Divine Design. There will never be 'peace' in the Middle East, until Messiah comes back at the 2nd Advent to regather His People. Meanwhile, Israel remains the stumbling or salvation of the world. God couldn't make it plainer, than to LOCATE the Promised Land, smack dab in the middle of the globe, the shortest trade-route distance between all points ON that globe. Surely when Abram left Ur, he'd know how strategically important to commerce, war, politics -- would be the land grant El-Elyon would give him.
Note well: landgrant to ABRAHAM, for "many nations" of sons, need land to live on. Abram was a Gentile when God did that, as Romans 4 explains. "Israel" is a "sons" Promise Made by God to Abram, later Abraham (renaming signifies adoption and contract delivery). Then to Isaac. Then to Jacob. Isaac was born only due to a Promise God Made to Abraham when he was 99 years old: though anyone else could inherit with that son, if they also believed in El-Elyon. The son, however, was the Firstborn of the Promise. Romans 9 explains all that. A promise from God, so a promise to be kept BY God. Not by the son, not by man, not by anyone else. So, then: can GOD keep His Promises?
Well, God's track record had been flawless, so far. In 490-year increments from Adam's fall forward, God promised selected individuals in Genesis 5 He'd continue giving the world TIME, due to their faith. Due to their faith. Not works. And what works could buy time? None. So, 490 years before the Promised son of Abram was born, Shem was born. Shem was a promised son, too: of Noah. God made a unilateral covenant with Noah, and all Noah did was believe it. Believe it while he built his RESCUE CRAFT out of cypress wood. Of course, all those outhen heroes of Noah's day laughed at him. Just as, they had laughed 490 years prior, when Enoch was giving them the same message: for Enoch's son, was named Methusaleh; and that name means the Flood will occur when he dies. So Methusaleh lived almost twice 490 years. For the promise of a son to save mankind was as old as Adam. So Rescue And Warning Not To Miss It, was long known: since Gen3:15, to be precise. So God was orchestrating when to give Abram an heir: 490 years after the prior promised son, Shem. For which, like Noah, Abram had to WAIT. Just wait on the Lord, no works. God always does all the work. Yeah, like He did when Adam finally grew up spiritually, giving him Seth="appointed". Appointed to carry the bloodline of the eventual Savior promised back in Gen3:15. 490 years after that, Jared's son Enoch was born; from whom came, Methu+selah, "when He dies, destruction comes".
In short, all time depended on Israel, and it worked like a balance sheet. Still does: for now the Son is Seated, and through a DIFFERENT Kingship He's Ruling Church, as we saw in the beginning of Part III. So all these "490s" keep on being accounted: and Church believers have to be awarded them. Still, the award is based on how much one matures spiritually, NOT on ritual, religiosity, works. Else, time ends. God makes epic promises, huh.
You can read all about these 490-year increments and test them, by clicking on the "Timeline" link at pagetop. But it's a lot of Bible-verse and number crunching, to vet the data. So lay in a good food supply, beforehand. There are many 490s to track, and they often overlap. Because, the time grants are always Personal Promises. So when more than one person at the same time has been grown in faith to get a 490, the prosperity of the world increases. When only one person remains, the adversity of the world is high. Time only continues because it's 'attached' to someone or some group associated with that someone, still on earth. The believer has and still is the source of time continuing, by God's Own Decree. Again, you can prove all this in Bible, math, and history -- though post-Cross, you can't identify the individuals -- so this doctrine of Bible's is testable.
Now this David was to have A Son on the throne forever, 2Sam7, Gal3:16-19, Isa53:10, 54:1. Forever means post-death, since we don't live on earth forever. So this is the promise of a Messiah, a Savior, a King Who Pays for All Mankind. Which Savior promise, went all the way back to Gen3:15. So now converging in this one line of the sons of Abraham, would be the One Who Would Unite us with God. Of course, when God first gave Abraham all this promise in Genesis 12, Abraham didn't have any sons at all, nor did he know the details, since God waited until David became king, to make that part of the promise.
So past is prologue: until David, No One Knew How Or When God Would Fulfill His Promise. For, God orchestrates time based on Messiah and His physical ancestors. Therefore TIME itself, is a promise from God. Very punctiliar, very prompt, very orchestrated. Yet, without altering even a 'dot' of Freedom. Such as, the Freedom of Consent.
|
of Decedents who Depended, not demanded Volition, is free. God guarantees that freedom. Hence your soul is indestructible, and free will is unimpeachable. You program yourself with each decision you make, and while future decisions become harder to break because of momentum from past ones, you ALWAYS retain the option to go AGAINST that past momentum. So, at heart this question of "Rapture" is about CHOICE, because the doctrine itself, is about God's Choice due to your choice to believe in Him. In short, the basis for the Rapture doctrine, is the same as the basis for the Gospel itself: "what think ye of Christ?"
This is true for everything in life. We humans so easily arrogate to ourselves merit when there is none. For example, if you believe in Christ, that's due to HIS Merit, or you'd not believe. If you read a webpage, it's not the merit in the author which justifies the read, it's the merit of the CONTENT. The content, is an object. That object, 'got into' the author, and now 'gets into' you. But IT is still what has the merit. It might bless you. It might help you. But at all times, IT still retains the it-ness character, of Content. It just happens to be in you now. So all our many arrogances about what we know, who we know, what we have -- sheesh. THEY have the merit, we have the blessing of having them. Gratis. From God. Who is All Merit. The "Paradox of Merit" link at pagetop goes through this issue of Merit vis á vis God in the Trial in more detail. Satan, like mankind, argues that he has merit in himself. Christ, who is Total Merit, threw His Merit away on the Cross. So much for man's (and Satan's) arrogance, huh. So CHOICE, not self-merit, is the issue. It's not about morality, culture, race, creed, or anything else. CHOOSE. And the merit of that choice, will either come back to bite you -- or come back to bless you. ITs merit. So the idea is to choose God, or something or someone else. So, for most of the world's PAST, it was generally NOT known, when Messias would come. So, in the PAST, for eons the SAME promise was that He would arrive at the PROPER "TIME" (i.e., Isa60:22, Heb b'ittah, or Greek kata kairon); not slow as some count slowness; but then would HASTEN the time, ahishennah! to GATHER them (ibid, see LXX). Yes! He would ARRIVE AS PROMISED, to end history's play, and save mankind. So a whole body of wits were sharpened, given that No One Knew Day Or Hour Of His First Arrival, His Birth. After all, what if it was 'today'? Let us not harden our hearts, but ahishennah, grow up in El-Elyon!
So all along, the goal of this seemingly-unfair 'test' of mankind, what with Abel sacrificing those lambs (depicting Messiah-to-Sacrifice-Himself, for who knew when Messiah would come?), of Abram waiting for an heir, of Israel waiting to go into the Land -- all these 'tests' were to build FAITH, so that LOVE could flourish: built one day at a time, living on His Promise. For God is love, and it's all about love, Which Is A Thinking Thing, A Believing Thing, An Understanding Thing. Love is not emotional (emotion exists only in the body). So not at ALL tit-for-tat-doo-doo, religious. For love never coerces, manipulates, influences, cajoles, seduces: but religion needs to make its living by all those verbs! Joseph, the first one enslaved and the savior of Egypt as a result (1916-1836BC), depended on that promise, too; at the end of his life counselled his sons to take his sarcophagus from Egypt, when the appointed time came; for by then they knew they'd be in Egypt for another 400 years. Oh, and finally, the appointed time did come, what a surprise! For they had forgotten about it. But into Ha Erets, the Promised Land, led by Him! Ooooh, didn't He come suddenly? Suddenly, without warning, all those plagues. After all, no one by then expected Him. But GOD didn't forget. Love remembers. Lovingly.
But if the son died heirless, then his daughter Hatshepsut -- aka God's Wife -- would have to marry some royal outside Egypt! That just wasn't politically acceptable. They had only just gotten some freedom from outsiders, via her dad and grandfather; the Hyksos were still a real threat, too. So as she's bathing, bobbing in the reeds is one of those Hebrew babes. Poor thing was followed by its sister, who confessed all when Hatshepsut queried her. So here was the salvation of Egypt, "a gift from the Nile" (="Moses", claim of his divine origin from Isis, a moniker ONLY used by the 18th Dynasty) -- floating in an arklike covered basket! Hu-hah! Political conundrum resolved! Moses: known also to history, as Thutmosis III, but only during Hatshepsut's regency period. If you can read hieroglyphics, you can read about him in Central Park, NYC, on an obelisk misnamed "Cleopatra's Needle". (The "Thutmosis III" of the post-Hatshepsut period was the son of Thutmosis II and a concubine.)
or whether you know in advance: what do you think of God's Promise? For with God, it's always about voting. Free will, see. Love Never Coerces. Never wants to. God is Love, so Loves Free Will.
Meanwhile back on the other side of the Reed Sea, Israel was in high spirits for about three days; then got bitter again, while Amenhotep and his dead comrades were floating in a different kind of bitter water. [If the Pharaoh somehow didn't die in the Red Sea, someone would have murdered him. It was politic to ride at the head of your army, so if he managed to get out alive, he'd have killed himself, would have ordered someone else to kill him, or someone else would just have done it. I don't remember how my pastor knows he died IN the Red Sea, so I have to hedge on its proof, for now. Closest verse I can find corroborating Pharaoh died in the Reed/Red Sea is Psalm 136:15. The verb there is to shake off, like you shake off dust from your clothes, but it has the connotation of shaking them out of their chariots and horses INTO the sea, with the waters closing over them. So since Pharaoh is severally distinguished in this Psalm verse, the "popular" interpretation that he died in it, might be right after all.] Oh, but within a generation of Joshua's death 40+ years after entering the Land, well lessee, where did we last leave the Ark of the Covenant? Wasn't there some Book or something we were supposed to wear 24/7, and teach to our kids? So Israel spent another wandering period under the judges, but within her own lands. Very harrowing account. This time, it lasted about 300 years. How human: to have a disaster, be rescued, be grateful and train so to never again lapse into disbelief. But then well, it's back to the same ol', same ol'. We learn from history -- that we learn nothing. Sigh. 390 years after the Exodus vote by about six million souls, Israel had grown weary of God as King; weary of waiting for Him to become the promised Man as fast as they had wanted. So, He gave them a human king, Saul, in 1050BC. That kingship didn't work out so good. In fact, about halfway into Saul's kingship God took Israel's first prophet, a guy who as a kid slept in the same room as the Ark itself, and He had him appoint a human progenitor for the Human He Himself would hawah, become: the Savior Incarnate, Immanuel, God-with-us. Just to make sure no one would miss the point about how stupid it is to reject God: God caused that human progenitor, known to us as King David, to be born exactly 400 years after the Exodus. Yeah, the same number of years as Israel was in slavery, mirrored back to them in freedom, which they (like all of us!) abused. Despite this gift, which was the final phase of establishing Messiah! well ho hum. The people grew ever wearier of even their Divinely-protected kings; and the Davidic line nearly died out several times. [Mary, in fact, would end up being the last of the line (Joseph's being cut off due to the Coniah curse).] At this point, Israel's days become numbered, and the Exact Year of Messiah's Birth and Death, are DEADLINED. 1000 years after David's consolidated Kingship began, He would be born. 1000 years after David's death, He would die, paying for all the sins of mankind. Just as the Flood people got 1000 years' advance warning via Methu+Selah, so also mankind got 1000 years' advance warning of the end of the world. For when Messiah came, He would live for the same period as David ruled, 40 years -- assuming Israel did not reject Him when He came -- and He would die at the end of that period. That was necessary, because David's 1000-year Time Grant would RUN OUT. So if No Messiah, then Time ends. But if Messiah and Israel accepts Him, then Time also ends. But in a different way.
The long wait to know When Messiah Would Come, was over.
Just go to any news item on the web about Israel, or watch those newscasts. Notice how the newscasts are always slanted against Israel, whether conservative or liberal, no matter what country airs the broadcast. Sometimes the slant is vague, an undertone; sometimes scorn or even vehement browbeating is reflected in the report. But it's always negative. Like 1960's MIT scientist-turned-singer Tom Lehrer sang, in his "National Brotherhood Week": "and the white folks hate the black folks, and the black folks hate the white folks; all my folks hate all of your folks, and everybody hates the Jews." Finally, when Nebuchadnezzar was on the verge of defeating Judah, Jeremiah found the Book in the Temple (Jer15:16), yet again; then God told him to add to it. Two kings were thus informed. One of them, burnt the Book Jeremiah wrote; the second of them, pretending to concede to his advisors, threw Jeremiah in his son's sewer for awhile (underneath the king's barracks), hoping he'd die. But "Ebed-melech" an Ethiopian eunuch, rescued Jeremiah (Jer38:6), so the king (Zedekiah) had to look good, and had Jeremiah released. [Seems to be a title, not a name. Ebed=slave. And "melech" means King. So: "slave of the king" is his title.] For 40+ years, Jeremiah's job had been about this Temple's future destruction; for 40 years, he warned everyone that time was up now, Nebuchy baby was gonna raze the temple. And then, despite his enormous respect FOR Jeremiah, Nebuchadnezzar reluctantly did raze it, in 586BC. So Israel's volitional choice had been rejection; so, God's Choice in Response: the appointed Temple isn't gonna get any appointees (kings), anymore. Israel didn't keep any of the appointed sabbatical years, and during all those 364 years, rarely celebrated Passover on the national scale God had commanded Moses. So, finally, the APPOINTMENT (Heb: l'moed, look it up) was cancelled, the Temple destroyed, the people led into captivity in Babylon. Too many times Israel didn't want to learn Adonai at the appointed times, so Love never coercing them to keep the appointments, the appointments, were cancelled. Appointment with God, l'moed, always meant a UNITY of time and place and space: time, every moment, and the Sabbath time to focus solely on learning Him. Place, HaEretz, the Land: Israel, gifted to the people, the land of milk and honey. Space: the Temple, symbol of the appointment, the MEETING PLACE, the "Place of Testimony". School. For God is infinite, we are not, and it takes Infinite Power FROM God, to learn Him. So to have a relationship with Him. For that one perpetually goes to "schul" (modern Yiddish). So if you don't go to schul and cut classes enough, sooner or later you never go back. So the schul, the Land, the Ark (meaning covenant) goes away, too. God doesn't stay where He's not wanted.
OT likes to first summarize the Decree/Order of a thing, then later on elaborate on its execution (viz., Gen1:26-27 compared to Genesis 2:7ff). So the KJV version of the initial commission order and its result, reads as follows (pasted in from BibleWorks): 1 Kings 6:12-14 12 Concerning this house which thou art in building, if thou wilt walk in my statutes, and execute my judgments, and keep all my commandments to walk in them; then will I perform my word with thee, which I spake unto David thy father: 13 And I will dwell among the children of Israel, and will not forsake my people Israel. 14 So Solomon built the house, and finished it. Now, the elaboration: what God replied to Solomon's prayer of dedication (1Kings8:22-53), on the very day the First Temple was dedicated, 1 or 2 Ethanim 950BC. ["Ethanim" roughly corresponds to our Sept-Oct, and the first day of it is Rosh HaShana, the New Year. Law forbids work on the first day (Trumpets), so the Temple was maybe dedicated the 2nd day. Then again, you met in holy convocation, so maybe it was 1 Ethanim, not 2. You can read the chronology also in 2Chron. The month and day will be fine-tuned, later.] Note the repeat warning: 1 Kings 9:6-9 6 But if ye shall at all turn from following me, ye or your children, and will not keep my commandments and my statutes which I have set before you, but go and serve other gods, and worship them: 7 Then will I cut off Israel out of the land which I have given them; and this house, which I have hallowed for my name, will I cast out of my sight; and Israel shall be a proverb and a byword among all people: 8 And at this house, which is high, every one that passeth by it shall be astonished, and shall hiss; and they shall say, Why hath the LORD done thus unto this land, and to this house? 9 And they shall answer, Because they forsook the LORD their God, who brought forth their fathers out of the land of Egypt, and have taken hold upon other gods, and have worshipped them, and served them: therefore hath the LORD brought upon them all this evil. ["taken hold" is a euphemism; Hebrew verb is hazaq, hiphil stem. Greek verb is antelambanomai. You'll have a real hard time getting an honest answer from the lexicons, so trace how these verbs are used in Scripture.] No more human kings for her, but Him. But He had also promised He and He alone! Would Return them, SHUB! But when? Oh LORD, When? Daniel prayed in Daniel 9, acknowledging for the whole nation, the "riv", the Divorce, was solely Israel's fault. So, one day soon after, Daniel got the Word that Israel's time of punishment, was ending! Hallelujah! For here's what God said to Daniel via Gabriel:
26 "After this period of sixty-two sets of seven, the Anointed One will be killed, appearing to have accomplished nothing ["killed" is "cut off", as in foreskin; so, Cut a Covenant, cut off without descendants, are all additional meaning layers]; and a ruler will arise whose armies will destroy the city and the Temple. The end will come with a flood [of troops], and war and its miseries are decreed from that time to the very end."
See, the "seventy sevens" granted to Daniel in Daniel 9, was all the time the world had left: under the Time Accounting System God invented, that time would be UP in 37AD. The world, not merely the Jews, had only that much time remaining. For if no Savior, then no world can be saved. And if no Jews, then no Savior can arrive. Because, Remember The Past Promise God Made To Abram? On whom, all the world depended. Abram had pressures you and I can't even imagine -- but God kept him going. God kept the family going. God kept the nation going. A few in each generation, believed Him. Daniel believed Him. So, the world got 490+126 more years to breathe and shake-the-fist at God, because of Daniel. Just as it always has gotten time because of Abram. Who got THAT time, because of Noah. Who got that time, because of Enoch. Who got that time, because of Jared. Who got that time, because of Adam (Seth and Jared's son Enoch are 490 years apart, and God signifies grants by sons). Mirroring.htm ("Timeline" link at pagetop) traces that promise of time from Adam forward, if you are willing to crunch a lot of Bible verses and math. These seventy sevens, you'll notice, are broken up into smaller accounting pieces. Each piece has a character, so if the character fits, the piece 'plays'. So the pieces can, but need not, play consecutively. Here, they did. Because, each piece of Real Time Depends on that Character, being Fulfilled. Again, Mirroring.htm goes into a lot of detail about the character of each piece, and traces from Adam forward, how the pieces fit and play. But Israel was taught that system, so that's why God spoke to Daniel in the 490 accounting vocabulary. So: GOD Decreed the Rebuilding back in 586BC when the Temple was razed, Jer25. Daniel was reading it in 538BC, Dan9:2. So Daniel prays, because he knows the 70 years are a DEADLINE. So God Replies: world was scheduled to end in 37AD, the deadline due to 1000th anniversary of David's Death. So one "seven" had to be reserved for Dan9:27. This, because the Davidic deadline came BEFORE the 490 would end, and in God's Accounting System, you can't have a 1000 continuing without an underlying 490, NOR a continuing 490 without an underlying 1000. So Messiah would have to come FIRST in order to BUY another 1050 unit of time (1000+50 year voting period=490+70+490). Then and only then, could the 50-year reserved-for-Gentiles-voting period between Daniel 9:26 and :27, 'play'. The reserved 'seven' would play last. (The 50 years is not part of the 490, so is not listed in Daniel 9. It is also beyond the Davidic deadline; but that reserved 7, was part of the 490.) So then those years would play in reverse order, just as Moses long instituted, mirroring the joint holiday of Passover+Pentecost. That would bring history to its proper ending, 94AD, at which point the purchased Millennium (1000+50 year voting period following it), could close. So the last 1050 from Adam, was to be the fifth one. Five: number of Profit, Restitution, All Goals Accomplished. Preview of Coming Attractions: the whole 'math' went like this: 586BC-70-70-49-364-70=37AD. Scholars mistake the "decree" in Dan9:24 as some mere human's decree. But the one decreeing in that sentence, is GOD. So it dates from when God decreed He'd send the people back after the sabbatical years, which was back in 586BC, Jer25. That accounts for the first 70. The second "70" was the historical voting window, which could be justified if the Temple were rebuilt during the first 70; Jerusalem would have to be built by the end of that second 70, which equated to a deadline of 446BC in our system. Followed by, the 49 year allotment to finish Canon, which allotment ended the historical voting window 'attached' to the 7th 490 since Adam. Then, the 364 years the 1st Temple was standing, could be 'reimbursed', followed by yet another 70 sabbatical years required within the 490 (which purchase the 70 years 'sandwiching' after it ends). Messiah would die by the end of that 70 years. His 1st Advent Rule, was to be of the same length, as His progenitor David. First David, 7 years + 33 years. Last David, 33 years + 7 years. That Was The Initial Design. Due to Israel's rejection however, we see His Life cut short by 7 years, which are 'reimbursed' to Israel from 64AD-70AD when Jerusalem was under siege. Dan9:26 playing live but prematurely, due to rejection of Messiah. GeneYrs.xls plots all this out for you. When you load it, select Excel's "Views" then "Custom Views", and you'll get a dialogue box of spreadsheet snapshots. Scroll to the end and select "Temple, 1st", then double-click. That section of the worksheet next appears, and you can trace the gold 'stripes' to see when the 490-year allotments and their voting periods, end. The green 'stripes' are the 1000-year time grants. Cell A2 of the worksheet has a link to a Word doc which summarizes all these concepts for speedier comprehension. It seems more complicated than it is. All ancient calendars were run based on years FROM. So God's Calendar is based on years from Adam's FALL (Gen5 accounting begins with the FALL, it's not from the initial creation of the world). So it isn't really hard to measure. It's just new to us, that's all. It was ABCs for the Bible writers, both in OT and New. You see this pattern, if you ONLY go by the BIBLE's dates, forget what other people say. That's what GeneYrs.xls does: it only goes by Bible. The 490-year pattern is thus visible and testable. From Bible. But now we're ahead of the story, so let's go back to the Jews in the Land, having built the 2nd Temple, awaiting the clock to run out.
God was real specific about its construction, even as He'd later be specific about how to make the travelling Tabernacle, with that other person He'd deliver in an ark: Moses. Yeah, 'drawn out from the water'! So the first 'moses', the 'one who gives us rest', aka "Noah" to you, spent YEARS growing and chopping up cypress wood (wood-of-choice for ships used in ancient times, aka "gopher wood"). Heh: cypress wood, from the cypress tree. Light, buoyant, tough, bendable: great for coffins and ships. (Apparently St. Peter's in Rome has some of its doors built out of that wood, and they've not decayed in hundreds of years.) Then, Noah had to coat that light wood on both sides with the readily-available, bitumen. Took lots of time. And he was building it miles away from any sea access. The length was about 1.5 American football fields (450 feet); 75 feet wide, but only 45 feet high; perfect seaworthy proportions, kinda like a barge, a bit shorter in length than a WWII Liberty Ship. Three floors. One Door (Christ, known then as El-Elyon); one window (up to God). No wonder it took so long to build. [Dimensions from Gen75 L.85, near end of tape.] Noah just kept building, ignored the growing ridicule. And, he kept on warning his jeerers: 120 years, to warn folks their disinterest and rejection of God would lead to a deluge. Over 500 years before Noah was born, God went so far as to name Noah's grandfather, "Methusaleh", which means aprés lui, le deluge! "When he dies, the Flood happens." So, believe in El now! Get into the Promise which that Ark represents, because Muth+shalach!! Methusaleh! The death of him, that's the sign it begins! So it's not like the message of the last 120 years' building, was a surprise. Ark, whoa: A Box, really. Stablest form, for a vessel on water. God will have to steer it, though, since it's a box, not a boat -- God delivers. God delivers a Box holding all of the life to be preserved, and all of us, come from those eight people. That's what's important about the Ark. That's The Only Valid Question To Ask: WHY? Well, think: preserving life, saving life, rescuing life which is incompatible with God, so to RESCUE it from incompatibility, is way more important than just having it breathe. Everyone else, Voted Against Compatibility With God. But Noah&Co., didn't. [The Ark is not sitting on Mt. Arrarat. Someone is hoaxing or hallucinating. Its wood was way too valuable to leave on a mountaintop, especially since so many beasts of burden were readily available. No sane person would have let 120 years of lumbering, go to waste.] So this Box was depicted by Israel's smaller one in the Holy of Holies, the third of its kind. It was bigger than the boat baby Moses floated in. Oh, MUCH bigger in meaning, too (see Heb3). For THIS Ark of the Covenant for Israel travelled with them. Back about 950 BC, this third Ark finally came to rest atop Petra, the rock on which Isaac was almost-sacrificed; smack dab in the center of Solomon's Temple (aka "First Temple").
Of course by 586 BC, Israel had rejected that third Ark for so long, God had Nebuchadnezzar's troops raze the Temple to the ground. The Ark itself, was melted down to extract all its gold. Playing a Noahic role, Jeremiah had forewarned them of this bad future, in Jer3 (i.e., v.16): but (past is prologue!) no one listened. So when the Temple WAS later rebuilt by 516 BC, and Israel WAS finally keeping her appointments again; when Israel finally knew how to tell time of Messiah and the rest of history, well the ROCK on which the Ark used to sit.. was bare. Waiting for its Living Counterpart, to be born. So on Yom Kippur, the head priest would sprinkle the blood over the Rock. A very thick curtain, maybe 2 feet thick and 90 feet high, separated that Rock from the antechamber. So if you were on the outside, as all but the High Priest were -- then you could forget that the Rock was naked, now. More a stumbling block, really, rather than the Cornerstone-to-Come, Depicted.
Ahhh, the Grand Designer, noticing stuff we humans don't. Hmmm. Like, how intimidated we'd be, if He just showed Himself as He really is. Okay, then, the Temple Veil which represents the Holy of Holies being Sacred, is also the veil which separates God and man, due to that Holiness. So the One Born to Tear that Veil from Top (as God) to Bottom (as Man) will come together, l'moedth, in time and place and space. And an angel acting like a star in order to be a travel guide for some really positive guys (Matt2:9, Greek), plus some old forgotten prophecies will guide them to Him. Lest, they turn and be healed. Lest, they turn and be frightened of a Lamb. By the time He did come, the world had been given 1000 years' advance notice on His Birth Year. They had been given thousand years' advance notice on the Flood, but didn't listen. The one who makes a nest ("Kenan") sires Praise ("Mahalal"); who sires Descent-of-civilization ("Jared"); who sires Dedicated-to-God ("Enoch"); who sires When-he-dies-destruction-comes ("Methusaleh"): the guy whose death date is the Flood's date. Yeah, this long line of oddly-named guys; their names were their MISSIONS. But no one listened. So the doomsday guy sires Power-Man ("Lamech", wry play on how angelic or human power count for nothing, compared to God); who sires he-who-will-give-us-rest: "Noah". Who built a boxy boat while everyone else laughed. Until they drowned. It wasn't as if God didn't establish a PATTERN, huh. But so have we humans. So, past is prologue: we won't hear Him when He actually Arrives As Promised, yet again. So notice: the precedence for the Rapture, is Voting. They didn't know for the longest time, WHEN it would be time to vote. But when God finally gave them 1000 years' notice, updated in 538BC and 521BC (to Zerubbabel, Haggai 2) -- no one cared. So even if we knew when the Rapture would occur -- and we can't, because our contract is a Body Promise, not a time promise, as Part IVb will show -- even if we knew when, we'd still screw it up. Mankind never changes. Thank God He won't change, Heb13:8! |
"Jesus of Nazareth", a 1970's mini-series by Franco Zeferelli, covers the politico-religious struggle resulting from the Lord's First Advent in Israel. But even that movie portrayal, light-years superior to the typical syrup pandered as His Life, soft-peddled the real message: This Promise is of a World Ruler Who Is Also The Only God. Who Comes To Pay For The Sins Of All Mankind. Who Then Comes Back, to End The World, Killing Millions All By Himself. So: Believe In Him For That 'Rescue', And You Live With Him Forever. Don't, and You'll Burn Forever. [Nerd note: "save" and "salvation" words in English Bibles really first mean "rescue", "deliverance", in the Bible's original languages.]
Almost no movie producer can afford to portray the DESTRUCTION PROMISE of this prophecy, without sugaring it somehow (i.e., with senseless power-miracles and maudlin script). Zeferelli did better than most others. For This Story is not some warm-fuzzy tale, goo-goo over the Baby in the Manger, say-awwww-here. Oh no. This story is shocking. God is shocking. Believe or burn is shocking. So Messiah is Most Shocking.
So long as God is 'distant' in our minds, we are comfortable with the idea of him. The atheist has to make God NOT exist, for there is no amount of distance which he will find comfortable. The ooohhhmmming crowd who wants god to be a collection of impersonal attributes they can tap to make themselves the next Thetans or LightSpheres (gnosticism, again) must divorce the idea of Personhood from God. But even the believer in the God of the Bible will 'distance' his belief to find comfort. Because we are innately shocked at the idea of this Holy Person Who can just zap us into oblivion with nothing more than a nanosecond's will. For we don't understand Absoluteness. We only recognize POWER, and we all want as much as we can get. To get comfort. For we are none of us comfortable, really. So when we write our movies about the supernatural, or about Christ, we sugar them with gooey love statements, syrup them with spectacular circus tricks. And thereby, gain that precious distance. Trouble is, the truth is intimate, never distant. And we can't take it.
Not shown by star, since astrologers must be executed, Deut 18:20. So rather, Announced by living angels to living shepards, a living angel to some living Persian priests; then by those living Persian "magi" to comatose Jerusalem; then by many massacres of living babies, ordered by a dying Herod the Great, to the rest of living Israel, due to those "magi". |
So the news of His Birth, though few humans witnessed it, nonetheless spread like wildfire by means of those innocent Magi; then, through that ol' dependable gossip network of humanity. So much, that Herod ordered his troops slaughter all males below age two who were unfortunate enough to be born in towns where the Child was taken. For Herod feared civil war, if this 'messiah' remained alive. Which of course served to spread the news even further, faster, and deeper. Think about that fact for a minute. How great must have been the interest, that such news could travel throughout the world in just a couple of years? And it did traverse the world: for no leader sets about to massacre babies unless he has a worry over foreign domination. Domestically, it's political suicide to do such a thing -- oriental despot, or no. So the only way he can justify it is by saying some foreign intrigue over this Messiah rumor warranted it. But notice also, that by making this claim, by ordering his troops to kill babies from Bethlehem up to Nazareth -- he himself contributes to the fast spread of the news, worldwide! For now, a KING is involved, seeking to kill another -- and prophesied! -- King! For this kind of event shocks people wherever they are; wherever they go, they will tell this story. We all salivate over disaster stories.
Look at the difficulty: the Jews are caught in the middle. They have always been caught in the middle. As a middleman nation much like Switzerland, they have survived on diplomacy and playing the rivals off each other. It's the only way for a small nation to survive, at any time. So here are these Persian officials, who however naive, are still highly-ranked. What are they doing inquiring about what they have to know, is the Messiah prophecy? At a time when Herod himself was king? The Jews didn't like Herod, everyone knew that. Sure, these Persians demonstrated themselves to be really naive -- but not so naive, are their superiors back home. See the dilemma: now if the Jews show too much interest in a Messiah, Rome will see that as an attempt to ally with Persia, since this official delegation has just arrived -- well, what's to stop Rome from running over Judea, just squashing it? By contrast, what's to stop Persia from running over Judea? Either way, it's a slaughter of Israel. Better to slaughter babies, than to have the whole nation be slaughtered by one of the two sides. Israel is in a political vise grip. It's a real problem, that these Persian officials are expressing positive attitude toward Israel's PROPHESIED King. If Herod doesn't repudiate them, if he doesn't repudiate Messiah, Rome will surely intervene.
Much has been made of the fact Herod ("the Great") was bloodthirsty even within his own family, as if to explain this baby atrocity as a personal motivation of his; and in fact, on both sides of the family there was a long train of killing off rivals which dated back almost 200 years prior, to the origin of the once-noble Maccabees (Herod's wife was the daughter of the last great Maccabean king, who maybe was also his cousin). For, the whole reason why Rome got control over Judea at the time (well, finally after the Battle of Actium), was due to this very tangled relationship between the Herods and the Maccabees (aka Asmoneans or Hasmoneans). Rome was dragged into what had been a simmering struggle between Egypt and Syria, charmed by Herod's father (and no doubt, the promise of much travel-tax revenue); when Rome finally succeeded in winning against the other (backed by eastern potentates) factions, Octavian (later called Augustus, Caesar) had appointed Herod king of Judea; and the latter spent a bloodthirsty four years quelling intense Jewish opposition to him, finally settling himself down in 37BC. So, you can understand why this Herod would be fairly nervous about rivals a scant 33 years later: some of the worst of whom, were in his own family. He nearly killed off all of them, including his own wife. He knew quite well Augustus only wanted him there as a buffer between Persia and Rome: kinda like the Eastern bloc countries were, between Russia and Germany, from the time of Catherine the Great, onward.
But brutal people are often quite pragmatic -- and no king sets about to murder potential taxpayers, without a very strong reason. For in those days (and probably still today, somewhere), Rulers commonly must kill (or at least sequester) rival royal children: for people who are NOT children, can USE them to cause trouble -- witness the history of (the later) Europe, and especially France. Even in our day 2000 years later we can surely understand, since the same phenomenon kicked off our Y2K (which really began 2001): "9/11". The terrorists are still active in the US, around the world, and now especially in Iraq and Palestine: trying to blow up rivals (i.e., those brave Iraqis running for office in the January 2005 elections). When a significant power threat is perceived, violence is often used. It's a calculated move, usually a counterproductive move (it backfires), but humankind just hankers after what seems like a "quick fix". See, the trouble in the Middle East today has always been going on. Geography, politics and tribal rivalry are the real story behind that trouble, not the issues voiced in the evening's news. Deeper still, The Trouble Over Messiah Is The Foundational Reason: remember, Satan&Co. have a vested stake in preventing Messiah, and in persecuting all who believe in Him.
So sometime just after Chanukah 4BC, Herod the Great was thinking, Ouai! those Magi didn't go to Bethlehem Ephrata! So the Child must be there! But idou! They then turn north, and just go back to Persia, snubbing my courteous request! So many towns they visited on their way home! All the way up to Nazareth! What if they somehow snatched the Child in Bethlehem -- no, had it DELIVERED to them -- and then left with it? What if they moved the Child north, secretly in someone's care? Ouai! They cannot be the innocents they seemed! Ouai! the East could never be conquered by Rome -- maybe they sought alliances with the Promised Royal Family (where oh where WAS the Davidic line these days?) -- Ouai! there's nothing more powerful than Religious Motivation! -- so they'll build forces, overrun Judea, monopolize, get rich and attack Rome's economy! What then could Caesar do, since Rome's army has never been able to defeat Persia? Judea is prime territory, linking all trade routes! That's it! They plan to conquer SPQR via this Messiah! And I'm the buffer territory? Maybe I should send emissaries. No, it's too late, I've already allied with Rome; I'll be beheaded if they conquer Judea, the Jews HATE me! Ouai! To defend the Land.. Kill all the newborns.. no, all those up to 2 years of age, when they stop suckling, since you can't tell baby age earlier, and it will take TIME to find them all! Now Now Now Now Now! In the mini-series "Jesus of Nazereth", producer Franco Zeferelli had Peter Ustinov play Herod the Great in that scene: fabulous way to help us see the real cause for that order to slaughter babies. Which from Bible's deft "ramah" labelling, tells us happened at least partly from Bethlehem in the south, going 120 miles north in a relay -- to Nazareth.
For, back circa 4BC, grappling with a huge worldwide influx of people seeking this Messiah, never sure who were spies or insurgents among them, Herod needed to show brutality, 'strength'; he was not particularly beloved, amiable and attractive though he was, since he was not Jewish. So, he thought he'd bought some time, not knowing his own time on this earth was just ending. Maybe he feared Rome's reaction, since "Messiah" was the heart of Judaic hopes, the Promised One, the Sevened One. Whatever his reason, and of course Satan&Co. had a lot to do with the motivation, Herod felt he had to do this brutal thing. It didn't work, of course. The Baby got to Egypt. Never trust in man's ideas, but in God's. By the way, it was THIS Herod, who rebuilt that second (Zerubbabel's) Temple, and at great expense. Trying to ingratiate himself. His sons would continue that project, finally finishing the rebuilding in 64AD. Right in time for the seige of Jerusalem to begin, and by 70AD all that hard work would be burnt to cinders.
For this reason, Herod's second son by a third woman, a Samaritan -- also named Herod, this one "Antipas" -- married his half-sister Herodias; who, through his father's Hasmonean wife, was herself a Jewish Royal Princess (though not from the tribe of Judah); Herod did this in order to legitimize his Roman-appointed rule, tainted further as it was by his father's brutality -- but as well, to secure greater claim for himself against his own brothers. Problem was, he himself divorced his first wife, and then had married Herodias via her divorcing her previous husband -- his own half-brother Philip! No soap opera on TV today, can rival this convoluted story of the Hasmoneans and the Herods! Both tumultuous bloodlines, married again! [BibleWorks Dictionary (Easton's?) says Herodias was Herod the Great's daughter by Mariamne (sp?), but Encarta says she was Herod's grandaughter, and sister of Herod Agrippa I. You decide.]
John was a herald foretold, end of Malachi, so he talks like Malachi predicted, to make clear who he was. His birth was also prophesied in Malachi (toward the end): THAT was how people were to know of Messiah's presence, as well. John's heraldic role was to PREPARE the people for Messiah's Announcement of Kingship: by Voting for Him. "Voting" meant believing in Messiah for one's salvation, just as Moses and even Abram had done (i.e., Gen15:6, Deut 6:4). For, the Kingdom was of heaven, not earth. Everyone knew those prophecies. Everyone was ABUZZ with those prophecies.
When you read Luke 1, you realize that since John's father was miraculously able to speak only by choosing a first name which was politically-incorrect, you know much. From that day forward, everyone knew John's role, prophecy or no prophecy. So for the first 20-some years he lived, people came from miles around to hear him. What made John particularly egregious, was the fact he was a legitimate Levitical priest at a time when many serving in Temple were not legitimate. Yet he snubs Temple service? Under the Law, that's a bad thing. So if he's popular, well that's a big advertisement that the priesthood is sooo corrupt, that even God is snubbing Temple service. If you were in the Sanhedrin, house of all the bloodline records, you would find this snubbing by John most troubling. For under the Law, a Levitical priest does have the right to teach and minister. John was just such a priest, but garbed in Elijah-style roughness. Powerful weapon for massing support. That wasn't John's motive -- but the Sanhedrin would think it was.
John, cousin to the Christ, was six months older than His Savior, was the "Elijah" everyone waited for; he lived an ascetic life, in the style of a prophet being ostracised. Which he was, because what he taught, few wanted, the Sanhedrin hated, and Herod -- though intrigued by this man's teachings -- couldn't politically tolerate a man who told the world their tetrarch married against the Law. John wasn't advertising Herod's sin to get him in trouble, but to save him: some of the details John had broadcast, no one but God could know. God gives the Gospel in myriads of ways, and all of them don't feel good, lest you believe for the feel-good. What, should feeling become god? How fair is that?
Again, God isn't dog; He doesn't perform to expectations. Instead of seeing Messiah (Who by the way needed much solitude, as King-in-Training), the people saw.. John. Scrawny, maybe muscular, who knows -- wearing camel's hair tunics and eating grasshoppers with honey (tweaking the Law, ok?) our herald isn't exactly what fits in with the religious crowd. Neither were those Luke 2 shepards, who weren't even allowed to go into the Temple -- never mind, that their sole job was to pasture the only kind of lambs the Temple could use for sacrifice! But the angels went to them; but the Holy Spirit endued (=pimplemi, a Greek word which is not plerow, so less than the Filling of the Spirit, look it up) John. Worse, God advertised His Son via some distant priests who He just had to know would rile up political concern since they were Persian, for crying out loud. Who then turned and were healed by an angel acting like a star. As a result of their visit to Honor that Son's Birth, maybe hundreds of babies, died. God foreknew all that, and did nothing to stop it. Wouldn't let those priests even go back the same way they came; thus making their visit look like it had power-grabbing motives to an already suspicious and apoplectic, Herod the Great: what, did they secretly arrange a marriage between this just-born King of Israel, and one of their princesses? Herod would surely suspect these priests of such motives. It was, after all, the normal practice: even, his own.
What God does, is cause trouble. He caused political trouble and many childrens' deaths, in order to birth Israel at the Exodus; so here He does it again, only this time Jewish babies die. Antiochus IV Epiphanes had done the same thing about 164 years prior, when the Jews refused to give him pigs to sacrifice in the Temple. So, God does it Himself: sacrificing babies, just because He births Messiah. Nor does He stop there. He keeps on causing trouble for those who believe in Him, by sending them a scruffy prophet who talked about Messiah being alive, rather than by sending them Messiah. Time and again, God does what we consider wrong, late, slow, bad, ineffectual. Like Satan in Matt4, we are flummoxed at God's Choices. So, then, what do we choose? Do we look beneath the surface of our puny expectations and ask WHY God does a thing? Do we ever stop to think about what all those Gospel verses are telling us about these uproarious times, and the Person Who lived then? Oh, we can practically repeat the facts by heart! Yet think about their meanings, not at all. For what movie yet made, brings out How Much Immediate Worldwide Trouble This Birth Caused, and on purpose, too! For that is always the issue, in the life: "what think ye of Christ?" (Matt22:42.)
There's a whole lot of Bible-bashing which is rationalized based on the fact Bible is silent about the first 30 years of Christ. No homework! For you don't announce yourself as king, until age 30. You couldn't serve in Temple until that age, and Christ has Two Kingships, one of which is King-PRIEST kata Melchizedek, antedating Israel. A king must train, before claiming rule. So the years are 'silent', because it's illegal for Him to announce Himself, prior. David was crowned when he was 30, not before. Samuel had anointed the lad when he was a teenager. But then nothing happened. Maybe 15 or more years passed between David's anointing and his kingship. You don't hear anything much about his years then, either. Because, he's too young. It's a ponderable question how many knew who He was, during those years. Did John meet and talk with Him? John's reaction to Him when He comes to the River to be baptised that first time looks like John knew who He was, but didn't actually believe He was God -- so maybe not the Messiah -- until John heard God testify of Him. So maybe that reaction typifies what people at large knew. For the shepherds were charged with saying Messiah was born when He was born, and they knew Him directly, being present within a day or two of His Birth. They would know His Name. So maybe people did know, furtively going to Nazareth during the ensuing years, to be nearby -- but laid low. Because, it really was up to Him whether He Himself would Vote to Be Messiah. God would not coerce.
Of course God didn't let those babies get destroyed for no purpose: He Saved Them For Heaven That Way. For, no one who is incapable of understanding and refusing the Gospel, can die and escape Heaven. You have to be blotted out of the Book of Life via Lifelong Unbelief. So, if your life wasn't long enough, guess what? You went to Heaven. Unlimited Atonement on the Cross, baby. For every baby. And every adult. Still, who are we, compared to God? Does He not OWN everything? Wouldn't it be wrong if He didn't have the right to exercise His Choices over all of what He owns? How would our own ownerships have any juridical basis, if this First Rule of Ownership, wasn't GOD's Rights? The one who is positive to God, thinks that way. The one negative, doesn't. Positive or negative, we all are unworthy, so those positive have nothing over those negative. So God uses His Unexpected Nature in a way which strips out all the barnacles, so it's a pure question: do you want Him, or not? Love, is like that: unsauced.
Being unsauced, the Truth is a starkly confrontational choice: to choose Messiah, is not merely to choose versus the nice alternatives; but rather, since God always causes trouble for His creation -- to choose to GET trouble, if you choose Him. Messiah was born for trouble: troubled times, end of the world, destruction of the people, and especially, His Own Death on a Cross. He knew that from the moment He was born, Heb10:5 (spoken supernaturally from the feeding trough, aka "manger", French verb for "to eat"). So we GET TROUBLE as a result of believing in Him: he who would follow Me must take up his own cross, see. So all these people didn't take up politics, they took up crosses, when they believed in Him. It was ever thus: read Hebrews 11. So the unsauced truth is, a rough-hewn cross with plenty of splinters awaits the one who believes in Him. So it can never be said, á la Job1:9-11, that you love God for His Goodies. Even as, He doesn't love you, for yours. Even as, He Makes You Into A Diamond from your own doo-doo nature, if you learn His Son's Thinking. Then, you are full of goodies, anyway. Suneisis and stauros, comprehension and cross, together eaten, Isa52:13 and :14, not just one or the other. Unsauced.
The worst persecution is not overt, but covert. The drip drip drip drip of doubts, of wanting to be comfortable, wanting to fit in with one's fellows -- that's the devastating kind of persecution. The 'cross' is also, learning Him Whose Very Beauty makes the self feel even smaller, still. Even uglier, still. And, since per 2Cor5:21 we get the very Righteousness of GOD that first nanosecond we believe in Christ -- for the Cross is an Exchange of sins FOR that Righteousness -- we are, the moment born-again, totally at odds with ourselves. What was once acceptable, is now, well somehow unsatisfying. That drip drip drip drip over the years wears one OUT. So the flashy persecutions which make mouths cheer in the movies -- aren't the worst ones, by far. The sheer differential between Godness and our puniness. THAT's the torture. That's what He saves us from. And that's what we go through, that's our cross: a lifetime of tortured waiting to BE as good as our Divine Standards from Doctrine, for HIM! (Rom8:11ff, last half of 1Cor15.)
This torture plays quietly. That is why it's sooo intolerable. There's a growing, quiet separation-of-thinking between the worldly thinking you have, and the growing Truth you're getting in God's System. This growing, silent, deadly separation quietly grates. Like sand developing into a pearl, you'll find yourself progressively and yet quietly irritated all the time. For, you are growing OUT of your attachments to things human, and growing quietly INTO new attachments toward things spiritual. Paul deftly explains this quiet transmutation and its devastating internal separation, in Romans 6-8. That's the true cross. Not the flashy one. Christ would have to suffer way more BEFORE the Cross, to be able to ENDURE the Cross. Your training must always be harder than the combat, in order for you to do well IN combat. So it is, for us. Playing drip drip drip drip relentlessly. And 99.9% of us, won't endure it. We choose the dry world, instead of the drip drip drip drip of Doctrine in our spiritual veins.
Oh, these many confluences of history, prophecies melding together, messages all discomfiting! All the elites could do, was pray this 'Messiah' never actually showed up! For this time wasn't like the others. This time, there was no one going up to John and saying, "I am he". So this time, unlike all the others, it was believable. No one promoting himself. The herald, not promoting himself nor accepting approbation, gifts, etc., the way charlatans do. So this time it was um.. maybe real?
What makes it sooo ruddy difficult, is the TIMING. Years from Adam, everyone knew. Years from Adam in 1050-year increments told you exactly when the world would end. And here's this Messiah thingy? At the very time it should be? Waving it off would be easier if the CONFLUENCE OF TIME were out-of-sync. But it wasn't. And it was too easy to count from Adam. Year 1, when he fell. Year 4103, when Messiah comes. At this point, it's something like Year 4104-32, and everything's right on track. Scary.
In the OT, you have so many multi-layered metaphors, it's easy to gloss over them when reading Bible. Pictorial depiction enables man to learn more quickly, since he can hear and see and touch. Babies learn better with fingerpainting; if you just TELL them what fingerpainting does, they'll never learn it. Same, here. But once an adult, the richness of the pictorial explodes into a bizillion 'spokes' of understanding and reasoning. So for the adult, Passover itself depicted the saving of the world, in miniature: for upwards of four million NON-JEWS accompanied the Jews out of Egypt. And, being now Jewish by FAITH (like Abraham, a true fathering, see Romans 4,9, Gen15:6), they quickly intermarried and became Jewish by blood, too. So deft an analogy, to how Messiah would spread His Wings (for He is God, Deut32-33) over all the world, and we could nest in His pinions.
So the Coming of Messiah in the early AD's represented the coming DELIVERANCE of the world. But first He would have to pay; then, because He's Jewish, everyone would hate His People, even as others mostly had. So Tribulation preceded Triumph. Every Jew knew that, ever since the first Passover promise to Abram, way back in Genesis 15:13 first your sons will be enslaved for 400 years, and then I will bring them out to the Land I have promised you. So it would also be for the world -- and now, the time for deliverance for the entire world was at hand?!
See: you can't be neutral, no matter where you are in the world. This story is too POLITICAL, too epic, too apocalyptic, to ignore. Laugh at it or loathe it or love it, you'll have to do 'something'. And, everyone did.
Think of a network of relay posts dotted along every coastline in the world, and it shouldn't be too hard to see how quickly news can spread. So Israel was the Center of Commerce: it took almost no time for news of this Messias, to spread around the globe. People came from all over the world to hear Him (viz., Acts 2). It's the whole world, not just the Med area, which learned of Him. (Look up the Clovis and pre-Clovis anthropological theories, plus Thor Hyderal's work, if you are skeptical about ancient travel.)
Trade and talk go together. People like people, and people like to compete with people. Everyone loves a good story. So imagine how popular it was to tell this story, which is why John was so popular: the Promised 'Elijah' to herald His Arrival was at the Jordan, proclaiming His imminent arrival; and by the way, The World Is Ending as a result, so you can quit this dusty life and go to heaven soon. Who wouldn't listen to such a story? How could such a story not become popular, among the hopeless, the hurting? So how could such a story not become political?
So any 'messiah', real or fake can be used by the clever to foment outside alliances, to cause trouble. In the miniseries "Jesus of Nazareth", Antipas (Christopher Plummer) explains this problem to John the Baptist (Michael York). The larger reality that short jail scene depicted, cannot be overdone. Again, the strategic geographic position of Israel forever makes it the most fought-over piece of territory in history, so the threat of invasion or outside-sponsored civil war (much like in Iraq today), was quite a threat, even in normal times. But these weren't normal times; and oddly, no one was coming forward to claim David's Crown. The real Messiah wouldn't be seeking political power, everyone knew that. He must finish as Lamb first. So, since no one is claiming David's crown, is the Real Messiah, really on earth now? even the elites, wondered.
"Sanhedrin" was the name of the juridical body in charge of running Israel. Back when Moses was first made leader of Israel, the job proved too much for him, so Jethro (his father-in-law) recommended he appoint 70 "elders" to assist in juridicating the law. For the Law was divided civilly, too: it was a combination of spiritual and secular provisions (Greek names for the divisions are entole, dikaiomata (the spiritual rules), and krimata). So these 70 men came to be known as the Sanhedrin. They were the most-trained-in-law among Israel. So: among them were those thirsty for power, and those thirsty for the Kingdom of God. The former obviously didn't like the latter. So when John the Baptist came, it galvanized the divisions within the Sanhedrin, so the power-thirsty were looking for a way to arrest him. But couldn't get one, since they couldn't control those thirsty for the Kingdom. Movies don't bring out the split, but should. We are all human. It's just the Jewish flavor of wanting power, which shows up in this history. But it could be any flavor. Negative or positive, any human is some of both. But God loves us all.
In those times, people loved to talk about their faith just as much as any other popular topic. God wasn't a pariah of common society, then. Understand that Scripture was very well-known, even among the smallest brains in the Land, and in a good bit of the world -- again, owing to the commonness of travel -- and this Scripture about Messiah was so well known, crowds were everywhere looking, straining for news of Him. Especially, since "1000" is also the promised 1000-Year reign of Messiah! Will it begin now? people wondered -- kinda like people drool over the idea of the Rapture, today. Wow: God sure keeps a tight watch on His l'moedths! [See "Timeline" link at pagetop for how that 1000 year timing compared to David's reigning ages and dates, was determined.]
David's dates were too well known. One can 'construe' prophecy and claim it's merely an 'interpretation'. But math isn't an interpretation. 1+1=2, never 3. Since everyone counted from David, they'd know 1000 years from his kingship, was Messiah's Birth. If they didn't know when He was born, they sure knew it not long afterwards, for between the shepherds and those chatty magi, the news was everywhere. That would get everyone counting. That would get everyone looking at Daniel 9:26. Many inaccurate ideas, but all can count to 1000. So many could know He'd die by 37AD. TIME MUST END if He doesn't arrive at this point. Time Must End if He doesn't die by that deadline. These are deadlines, and only the Real Messiah, can arrive to extend them.
Real Dates tied to Real Politics can only come from Real God Who Really Advertises His Coming to Rule. A false messiah can't manipulate time. He can manipulate verses. He can seem holy. He can seem a lot of things, but he cannot be born, announce, AND be from the line of David you can prove from Temple records -- child must be dedicated at the Temple when born, it's the Law. So who else could this Jesus of Nazareth, be?
What they couldn't then know, of course: that He would die for our sins in the 1000th anniversary year of that First David's retirement in 970 BC, seven years EARLY. At that time having been, like David, (uncrowned by people, but crowned by God) King of all Israel -- for 33 years, exact same number of years as David had been King over all Israel. But they sure could add up the dates when He's on the Cross!
What they could then know, but didn't analyze until after-the-fact: God sent His Son to His Deaths on the Cross on exactly the same Passover DELAY timing; first set aside on the real 10 Nisan; then, Sacrificed on the real 14 Nisan. Of course, to know all that, you'd have to be savvy about the Jewish calendar running four days late that year. Of course, to know all that, you'd have to be savvy about the timing of the Passover. For the Jew, that's basic kindergarten stuff, so everyone should have known, as Passion Week unfolded.
So all these l'moedths, the keeping of Time and Date and Place exactly as Previously Commanded and Assiduously Explained -- all these, who could orchestrate, except Adonai Himself?
God has always been of extreme emotional value to the Jews, as indeed to many people of that part of the world. We in the West tend to be 'cold', deeming stoicism the more respectful. But in the Middle East and most of South Asia, extreme emotion is deemed the more respectful. Plus, the temperments of people in those geographical areas (also the Southern Med) are more joie d'vivre (no less intellectual). So you'd have rejoicing in the streets, here. Tears. Wailing over all the waiting, is now over. Whether you even believed in Messiah as God or not, the political meaning was a kind of vindication. You can't understand Palm Sunday and the problem with Herod, Pilate, and the Zealots, if you don't understand what "Messiah" means politically. It's as big a powder-keg issue as there can be, for a people who've considered themselves punished by God for lo, these six centuries. God is Now Smiling Upon Them! It's POLITICAL. We don't make enough of an issue over His Kingship and Kingdom, though the Bible stresses that fact incessantly. It's not religion: religion is against Christ, was Satan's invention. So, the religious elites were in an uproar. For, it's Political, so their power will be LOST.
Again, the (by then) 565 years' advance notice meant that everyone understood Isaiah 61:1. Jubilee meant RETURN. It was the Return to Former Status; Israel lost its Temple and its kings in 586 BC, and now The Promised One Is Here To Take Away, Israel's Long Reproach! So to hear it was PARDONED now, well the wordplay on Salvation and Pardon, Redemption in the term "Jubilee" meant jubilation in the streets!
Hence it's a very emotional, tumultuous time everywhere, not just in Israel. All along every trade route the news spread faster than germs: remember the Messiah prophecies? Well, He's Finally Announced Himself! Just like King David did! To claim His Kingdom! To save the world! So the end of the world, ahishennah! Just as the prophets foretold (i.e., Isa60:22)! After all, Israel hadn't had a king, since 586BC. Remarkable thing, that. 613 years pass after that, yet no Jewish King. The bloodline remains. The members of that most-sacred bloodline, were thus long under threat by Herodian and Maccabean descendents. For the Maccabees were originally priests, so had non-royal Judah but Aaronic-priestly blood, themselves. Cashing in on that status during a period of foreign domination (Antiochus Epiphanes), the Maccabees had long ago become usurpers as kings, too. So the real Royal Family Members stayed silent, living on Nehemiah 8:10 and Lamentations 3. Imagine, then, how they felt when they hear the Heir Apparent announce He's Messias: oh, he's causing trouble, exposing the Family! (Read John 5ff for several chapters, to see how upsetting it was.)
So the real Royal Family had gone underground to avoid pressure-to-marry, persecution, greed. For then as now, if you are "royal", everyone wants a piece of you. Especially, if you were of the line of David. (Just think about the Grail myths!) So back since Antiochus Epiphanes in the 160's BC, they remained low-key. It was a blessing when finally Rome took over and installed Herod, because by legitimizing one who was NOT Jewish, the Royal Family wouldn't be so much a threat. But they didn't advertise themselves. That's why the genealogies in Matthew 1 and Luke 3 are needed. They didn't advertise themselves, so lots of people didn't know.
So if you were Jewish, you'd be so shocked at how the prophecies are being fulfilled, you'd faint. Or, jump about wildly. If you weren't Jewish, you'd either become Jewish right then and there, if you believed -- or, you'd become virulently anti- this Messiah person and His People. So the world POLARIZED during this time. The polarization began about a generation earlier, what with His Birth Year known, people began to talk a lot about the prophecies; the Essenes themselves, started going into the wilderness to prepare -- they knew Isaiah, so skip the fanfare, let's just hide out and wait for the 2nd Advent, hearing about the First, from afar. In short, this Birth, this Kingship was the focus of the world's attention, as illustrated by the Magi running around Jerusalem asking where He WAS, based on what they thought was this oddly-moving 'star'; as illustrated by, the city-wide adverse reaction to them; and only the long silence between Birth and Kingship Announcement, kept it from boiling over. But now, well He's here! Whether you believed in Him or not, now He's in everyone's 'face'.
Adverse reaction occurs when you are worried about something being true. For Israel, Messiah's Coming meant first Tribulation Before Triumph: precedent was set with Abram, Gen15:13. Isaiah spent four whole chapters explaining how that future would occur, in Isa52-55; and now, staring everyone in the face, was the very Messiah he'd talked about, with all the events being on their doorstep; no longer in some dusty book. So they faced the prospect of everyone assembling against them, as a consequence of His Arrival.
It's really no different from our current reaction to Iran or Osama bin Laden. Both of them claim a world ascendancy, that the West will be crushed. Well, the prophecy of Messiah means that the WORLD will be crushed. That theme is repeated so often in the OT you can't open one of the prophetical books on any page, and not find it.
No one could afford to stay neutral, either: here's this claim of One World Ruler Who Is God Himself! Coupled with, an announcement that the whole world is about to end (can't divorce the prophecy of Messiah's Advent from the ending of the world). No one in power can afford to truly yawn at such news. So were you a satrap in Persia, a shaman in the Americas, a Caesar at Rome -- you'd perk up your ears, even if you didn't believe. Civil wars come from years of unrest simmering below the surface in the common man. And here, was the common man's salvation! So think: when people get enthusiastic, they move. They do something. At least, they begin to murmur a lot. So that's going on all over the world, not just in Israel. For, this Messiah is a Worldwide Event, one that just happens to start in Israel. Brew for civil war, indeed!
For one characteristic the Jews have in spades, is a fierce independence -- it's the flip side of their (understandably) slavish devotion to things Jewish. So there had been many messiahs, many uprisings, and one reason the Romans even installed the Sanhedrin to govern; one reason the Romans wanted a Herod as the interceding tetrarch, was to Keep These People Quiet. So the Sanhedrin, like Herod, were vitally interested in squelching all this 'messiah' talk; so in the very name of protecting the people, as well as their own power, they came to plot how to discredit, capture, and then kill Him, using Him as a scapegoat for Israel's well-known rebelliousness -- to propitiate the Romans. [They go completely wacko in Passion Week, acting suicidal, totally out of character. That sudden meshugge behavior betrays a different 'hand' uppermost: Satan's. See PassPlot.htm's Divisions #2 and #4, for a sketch of the wackiness.]
The Jews have always been a vigorous people. Smart, talented, attractive, often more healthy than the average person: all these, are part of the Genesis 12 and 15 blessings bestowed on behalf of Abraham. (So the Arabs share in some of those traits via Ishmael and the sons of Keturah.) By now, probably most of the population of the world has at least one drop of Jewish blood, which honors Abraham, the more. But those we call "the Jews" have historically been the smartest, fiercest, most competent of people in virtually every field of endeavor. So, way back in the Lord's Day, Israel already was well known for its trading acumen, military prowess, and a wide range of other talents. Unfortunately, they were also famous for their fanatical bravery and stubbornness; accordingly the Sanhedrin were very nervous about this Messias. It seemed very politic to propitiate the Romans with but one Jewish life, if they could 'catch' Him doing something wrong. Thus saving this important people, see. After all, He did come to die, anyway. So if He really was Messias, they could rationalize themselves helping Him achieve his goal; if not, well then Israel was rid of another false claimant.
Moreover, world trade was threatened by any upheaval: didn't The LORD grant the Land to this people? And if this 'messiah' were not dealt with, wouldn't the whole world be adversely impacted? Compounding this concern was the fact that travelling activity was at an all-time-high during the Lord's time on earth, and a lot of it was due to Jews In Diaspora who wanted to see this Messias. If there was massive movement to Israel, well: that would upset other countries, too. No one likes losing a taxpayer.
A similar population influx began back when Joseph was promoted to vizier of Egypt in 1916BC. Since ancient peoples were constantly moving, they all knew much about 'foreign' lands and cultures. Trade was extremely well-developed. So back then, when famine hit other parts of the globe, "mostly Asiatic" people (per Encyclopedia Britannica) went where they knew the FOOD was: Egypt. They poured into both Upper and Lower Egypt, looking for work so they could get food. Jacob and his family were among that number, and they are the highlighted folks in the Genesis account of that time, arriving in 1870BC, when Jacob was 130 years old (see Exodate.htm and Mirroring.htm for details on them). But extra-Biblically, Egypt's history was demonstrably (and later severely) impacted by the demographic changes. Her language changed, her culture became cosmopolitan: she truly became an empire, with a wide sphere of influence. For people remember if you kindly feed them. She also became a target for those jealous of her popularity. For as a result of her feeding so many, other nations LOST many taxpayers. Where the food, wasn't.
Of course, this economic-becoming-political phenomenon has recurred many times in history, making and breaking nations. The United States is the product of just such a movement: so we can tell the past from the present, which was once, merely prologue. WitnUS.htm is an essay about worldwide jealousy over the US from WWII onward, and our extreme naiveté about our role.
So when spiritual famine is perceived, people move with hunger. And go where the spiritual food is. So other nations who LOSE enough of those people, become jealous. So the nation receiving such people, becomes a target. Here, a particularly lucrative target, given Israel's geography. Of course, that was how Egypt got destroyed, too: the Exodus. She didn't recover from that depopulation for well over 100 years. The spiritual hunger for a desert god of these Hebrews meant a lot of taxpayers wanted Pharaoh to let them go. And you can understand better now why he was rather reluctant to agree. So reluctant, in fact, that the "Red Sea" actually GOT that name by those retelling the story of how all Pharaoh's army, perished in it. [Check out the etymology in Greek. Now you know why the OT calls it the Sea of Reeds -- because the Jews didn't call it the Red Sea -- but by the time the LXX was being written, the same sea was known as "Red", owing to that much death. Aww, another fake 'contradiction' in the Bible dies.]
Now the Sanhedrin, ever the lovers of men's traditions, were all too aware of the past parallels to their current situation. These events were well-known in the world, as Israel had already long been a nation others periodically hated. Their abilities, their history, their vigor -- and now their Messias? Well, that's a problem. Had no one much known of Israel's "God" and His Story, all this concern would be overblown. But He was Well Known. That in fact was the Purpose of Israel, to Teach The Goyim About Him. Which was fine, so long as this Messias never came, so never upset the usually-cordial relationships the Jews were famous for cultivating. So sheesh: what are we gonna do, now?
The Jews had long understood their superiority. They were quite proud of it, as any review of the Gospels will show. They became rather diplomatic over the centuries, and in fact were prone to ally with other nations. For superiority invites jealousy. That's the dark side of wealth. Any kind of wealth: looks, health, money, connections, talent, you name it, if you are perceived as superior, you will be hated. Obviously true now, and always true prior. So if you are superior you learn to play it down; you learn to be diplomatic.
In a word, you learn to Compromise And Cover Up. The Royal Line of David had long laid low. The prophecy of Messiah had long been told, but the higher up you were, the more you pooh-poohed it -- out of self-preservation. After all, the idea alone would threaten Rome, who well knew its content. So what Rome needed to see, as nations prior, was that you would be LOYAL to them. That you DISBELIEVED the prophecy, wouldn't make anything of it, would quell the masses if they got riled up. Else, the power in question would indeed have to 'do' something if you rulers of Israel do not. See, it's a real and valid concern, the Sanhedrin had.
God always puts us in a situation where we have to choose between Compromise and Alliance: who is more important, God.. or the competition? Especially, when it seems God's creating the problem in the first place (His favored ploy, ever since the Garden), well the competition looks better. True then, true now.
So all religion was threatened. Not just the local ones, but all of them worldwide: for Religion Depends On Politics And Most Of All, Money. All of a sudden, a claim about God which actually makes sense gets widespread attention. People think. People talk. This time, it's not about the ho-hum sacrifices 'I' must make, but one God Freely Makes for me? Whoa. Who wouldn't sit up and take notice? What, I don't do anything but BELIEVE, and get saved? Tell that to anyone now, and you'll get a shocked look. And, deservedly so. Think, then: what must have been the widespread reaction of this news of a Savior who would pay for all sins, with the result that all you do is BELIEVE in Him, and you are forever saved (John 3, esp. v.16, but Isa53-55 tells the whole story)? All along every coast in the world, spreading like wildfire inland.
So next think of the political ramifications. If you're a witchdoctor or shaman or other teacher whose long tenure was marked by a browbeating form of religion, which all religions are -- well, how do you compete, with THIS message? You have to persecute those who believe in it, or.. you convert. And, that's what happened. It wasn't pretty. So migrations of populations increase at this point; not that you can find them anthropologically (which require large masses of hidden material, to constitute a 'find'). [If you saw the tsunami destruction pictures on television, you can easily understand how after thousands of years, evidence of population migrations along coastlines would be scant or none.] But you can find traces of the story being told, in language and literature. Stories morph, but like handwriting, there are telltale characteristics of origin. Kinda like how the Flood is also in the epic of Gilgamesh, so you find bits and pieces of His Messiah story playing all over the world (usually, snippets in their myths, where there is no written language). Or, you can just deduce the fact, logically. Not that difficult, given human nature now: FREE SALVATION, folks! Who turns down, Free? So it was still human nature, back then, to want this message. To gossip about it, whether smirking or smiling.
Bible debunkers are keen on asking the wrong questions, so they can get the answers they want, allegedly proving Bible wrong. Smart lawyers do the same thing, in courtrooms. If you ask the wrong question, you get the jury to buy the wrong question as valid, so the 'evidence' you bring in makes your wrong question, suit your argument. So the debunkers don't look at the massive shift in religion which took place in the 1st century AD, and instead attribute bass-ackwards, the religions they see as causing 'Christianity' or 'Judaism'. The truth is the other way around; and the way you can tell, is by the TIMING. More about this will be said later in this page, but here the point is, there's plenty in writing you can trace FROM the Cross, to prove it was the Cross, not something else, which made the other religions, change. To compete. That was also true back in 1440BC and 586BC, and will prove true again, in 1st century AD.
John, endued (not filled) with the Spirit from birth (OUTside the womb, in Greek: Luke 1:15 is mistranslated) -- John was awestruck that His Savior would come down to be baptised as well. It was so UNlike what a King should do, especially back then. For Kingship then meant, haughtiness. You weren't kingly if you were nice. You weren't kingly, if you humbled yourself. That was the absolute antithesis of royalty, even the subjects would turn away in horror if some king humbled himself (Isa53:2c, again). So This One behaves in Exactly The Wrong Manner, If He Wants His Subjects To Vote For Him.
Note how what the Lord emphasizes, is His OWN Obedience to Father. Not, that He is Messiah, a King worthy of all the footlicking man can do. People talk a lot about humility, but they don't get what it really means: one is so Awestruck by the Beauty of the Love Object, one Wants to Prostrate the self Forever. That's what's going on, here. David prostrated himself on Mt. Moriah, maybe even ON the very Rock which would become the Holy of Holies Ark Stand, back in Psalm 138:2. He was so overcome with awe, so desirous of serving Such Gorgeous God! he just had to prostrate himself (maximum sign of respect, in oriental culture).
Yet here is the LORD Himself, having the Same Attitude? ACCEPTING the Baptism of the Cross (see Romans 6)? That's disturbing. Who would want to see the Queen of England ever grovel? Perish the thought! Yet here is the King of the Universe, and THIS is what He does? See, it's not that John didn't know Who He was: they were close enough cousins, that Mary visited Elizabeth, when the latter was pregnant with John, and Mary stayed until he was born. Mary may have even been like a godmother to him. But what John didn't know was how his Cousin would really choose: it was still possible, He'd say no. So to see This One bow in the water? Too much shock. Even when you know a thing, until it gets up real close, you don't know it at all, John1:29-34. What a comfort: here he is, the Herald, and for all that even John doesn't really believe enough, until he gets the Spirit's confirmation; he knew yet didn't really know his own Cousin was Son of God, until then. It's human to doubt, no matter what spiritual gifts you have. Shock breeds denial, no matter how great you are. [Greek word oida has a number of meanings, which include to understand, perceive, recognize, to acknowledge. How many times have you known someone, even intimately -- but some later defining moment gives you so much insight into their character, it's as if you never knew them, prior. That's what I bet this passage means. There are a lot of meaning layers, here, one of which is that John really didn't see Him as GOD Himself, until that witness from the Spirit. John is now talking of His Messiahship, rather than just a cousin; he's sorta admitting his own prior, lower belief. He's admitting what the Spirit said, was a defining moment for him. I mean, haven't you yourself had a recognition about God so deep, that you count as zero, all your prior 'knowledge' of Him? Oh well. I suppose someone could make the argument that John actually didn't recognize Him physically until after the Baptising, but I doubt it; John wouldn't have to repeat it twice in verses 31 and 33, esp. using dia touto in v.31 -- a phrase usually reserved for climactic conclusions, "For this very reason!" -- if it was merely a first-time facial recognition, dove flying down like a mouse pointer, this is the Guy! Of course, most translations of v.31 leave out the climactic dia touto, aarrrrggghhh. By the way, this John 1:29ff verse is spoken as a testimony of that past baptising. So: note how the rest of John 1 after verse 29, is about belief due to seeing, versus not-seeing. Yeah, I'd bet money verses 29-34 are John's confession of lesser belief, before the Spirit testified at the Baptism's completion. This rhetorical style depends on your knowing the previous Gospels, or you'll miss the lesson, not being able to flash back-and-forth to see the parallels. Each Gospel writer refers to what's prior Holy Writ, so don't regard the Gospels as mere re-tellings. Look for the way they are written, and read them in chrono order: Matt, the Luke, then Mark, then John.]
So for John to hear the Holy Spirit speaking for Father afterwards, "This is My Son.." was vital. Not because John didn't know, but because he did. Shock needs all the authority it can get, for stability. And there's no greater shock, than knowledge. Like, Knowledge that Your Own Savior, is bowing down for you to baptise Him. Love would never want that. Hatred always wants that. So the Holy Spirit, gives John the comfort of validation, AFTERwards. Not before. [In Luke 7:19ff, John is suffering so much, he's having doubts. John already knew the answer to the question, which explains the indicative mood in the participle. Going by the Lord's answer, it appears that John was having a doubt-attack. Poor guy was in prison a long time, before his beheading. Who wouldn't have doubts? Here we see another characteristic: John lived his entire life as the herald for Messiah. So now that the reality strikes, well he's human. Parents go through much the same thing when their kids really do grow up: part of the parental psyche, can't accept it. Any long anticipation over years which gives way to the event actually happening, whether a marriage long-awaited, a job, a death.. the brain just has to rut out in stunned disbelief. So how much more, realizing your Task in Life, came to Eternal Fruition? Especially, when you are likely to die soon? See, Bible heroes are just as human as anyone else, which means anyone can become just as great. Lord makes that very point, in Matt11:11, Luke 7:28.]
So God won't tyrannize John, by telling John in advance, His Ruling on this Son. So the Lord won't do it either, but instead reasons with him, why this Baptism is necessary. Because, that's how love thinks. Then afterwards, when volition has voted, God speaks His Affirmation/Confirmation, provides the 'evidence'. Because, you survived the first shock, based on something you KNEW. So now you can absorb the higher shock: seeing God AGREE.
The sequence was this: first He's baptised by John, then the 40 days, which take place BEFORE His 30th birthday; then the wedding at Cana, then teaching at Capernaum, then He goes back to Nazareth again and THERE He announces He's Messiah publically, via reading Isaiah 61, then saying it's FULFILLED. So He had had His 30th birthday for certain, by the time He announces in Nazareth, as David was crowned when he was 30, also -- and then ensued the civil war over his crowning. Thus Christ begins His Ministry, in an uproar. [I bet He was 30 years old just after the 3 temptations, so the temptations ended not long before Chanukah. A rite of passage, eligibility to declare Himself King. Can't prove this dating yet, but by John's Gospel you know you're looking at four months of official ministry in Galilee before that first tumultus trip to Jerusalem for Passover, in John 2:13.]
By then, He had assistants, those who saw Him baptised, and during the 40 days, went around looking for Him, telling others they had found The Christ. Andrew, who had been advised by John to follow Him, went to his brother Simon, and said, "We found Messiah!" (John 1:41, Greek.) Simon joined, too. So that's why you get John 1:35, Jesus had deliberately RETURNED to John the Baptist's area after the 3 Temptations, twice (so He was obviously waiting for them to arrive and find Him). So John identifies Him again, as the One to Follow.
John's Gospel fills in the aftermath of the baptism of Jesus by John. John 1:29 and following occurs over 40 days AFTER that baptising -- which the previous Gospels covered, so John omits it. During the interim, the Pharisees had come to John. When Jesus had finished passing the Three Temptations, He RETURNS to where John is baptising, awaiting the disciples Father would choose. So that's why you have the account in John 1:29 et seq., it's the epilogue, how the disciples came to find Jesus.
When they do -- because He returned to where John was -- He and the disciples went around on a circuit, with Him teaching the gathering crowds. For His Mission was to go to the Cross, and folks needed to be educated about that, and vote. After the Cross, would come the Kingdom. So the King was engaged in due-diligence disclosure.
His group of followers suddenly became smaller, John 7. The Pharisees thus seek to persecute Him for doing those miracles, so He does MORE of them over the ensuing year, John 8-10. Odd that two pieces of good news would so alienate people. Here you can tell how sick man really was (and still is). The entire meaning of Sabbath (lit., 7th, promised, appointed-meeting-day), is REST. Not, arrest. Rest, to Study Word. God gives them a vacation day once a week during which they can spend the entire day on only the Word. Greatest Rest there is, to know this Word. So, for spiritual children, the rules were laid down: Do No Work On That Day. So what do these spiritual retards do? Oh, they make a big stink out of doing nothing! Making a pain, a work out of doing even nothing, on the Sabbath! Like so many modern 'Christians' do, priding themselves, Oh, I Keep The Sabbath! Yikes. See how good I am to not even use an olive's bulk. Is there an arrogance worse than this? So of course, they make a work of the Word, too; hence don't actually learn it; memorize it, yes; chant it, yes; make word-games with it, yes; but Learn Why God Sent Messiah -- no. Never mind, that the sabbath was made for man to study The MAN, not the other way around. So He was not accepted, wa lo hashabnuhu, Isa53:2-3.
Notice how He can't win for losing. If He is genuinely humble (John baptising Him), well no king should grovel like that. Ok, so then He announces in a Kingly manner, invoking Isa61:1 as He is supposed to do. Oh, then He's being arrogant, and must be stoned! Ok, so He just goes into Perea, making a circuit between there -- a politically-unacceptable area -- and the many towns around Galilee and Samaria, all of them despised by the pious Jew. Oh, see, He consorts with the unclean and uncouth. Ok, so finally He does the most humble thing, yet what you'd WANT of a King: announcing that He's the Bread of Life. And oh, He heals on the Sabbath, it's a King-Sized Miracle -- and what happens? Oh, You worked on the Sabbath! and You Blaspheme in calling Yourself Bread! If it's true, He's not blaspheming, is He? See: there's no way to please this stiff-necked people, who are any generation of people anywhere in the world. Ok: time out. Vashti has voted NO.
John has an interesting way of putting this. John 2 groups three miracles which made a lot of people believe in Him: the wine at Cana, driving out the money changers in His first year, because HE is the Temple, proved when He resurrected -- very poignant, since John writes a generation AFTER Temple Razed. And a third category, all the miracles He did after that. Then John concludes the chapter by saying He didn't believe in their faith in His Miracles. Same Greek verb pisteuw, in the chapter: parallelism of their believings versus His View of them. Faith is fickle. We are fickle. So He didn't take it too seriously, all our praise. [John's Gospel is laid out in chrono order, but some of the timing words are mistranslated so it becomes confusing. So, for example, you see 'the next day' repeated three times in English (1:29, 35, 43), followed by 'the third day' (2:1), which to the English reader should be the fourth day. But TWICE ON THE SAME DAY -- the day Jesus returns from being tempted, when John next sees Him -- John talks about Him (1:23, 35). Then another day passes, with details on how the disciples met Jesus. So that's why John 2:1 says 'on the third day' (using Greek two definite articles) so you realize that the third day AFTER the disciples found Jesus AFTER He'd returned from being tempted -- the wedding miracle at Cana happened. Thereafter, John accounts time by feasts in sacred-calendar order, but the hours using Roman time (e.g., in John 4:52), since the hourly accounting is an accounting of what Romans do (i.e., the legate whose kid was healed, Pilate announcing crucifixion, etc).
Back then, it should have been a Mistrial Verdict, since it's a Mistrial if the Prosecution tampers with evidence. It's evidence tampering, if a Promise is Entered In Evidence But Not Kept. The first promise of salvation is a unilateral thing, conditional only in the sense the Christ had the right to say no or fail. But the other promises required consent which by now, wasn't happening. But all those past generations of believers BELIEVED in those promises -- shall they now not be delivered? How then is the Most High any better than me? Satan reasoned. But oh drat -- David comes along and accepts first the kingship, then the abdication in order to get the 2Sam7 contract delivery. Thus God grafts in Israel through David, even as He had grafted Levi in through Moses (Aaron, technically, Moses having refused, see "Jochebed" link in MisTrans.htm). So the Trial, continued! So human history, continued!
Here in 29AD, it's far harder. 'Desperate situation for the Last David: Time had to end WITH the Cross, If Israel Said No. We saw the time accounting, back near the beginning of "Because Israel became 'Vashti'" section (link at pagetop). 1000 years from David's death, Time would end -- and here, it's ending early. Too early. Even if HE completes His Mission, Israel's Voting No means the Promise CANNOT be delivered. What to do?
So He invokes His First Kingship, and Unilaterally Agrees to Pay for a yet-unborn group of Humanity which in Matt16:18, He dubs 'Church' -- building them upon HIMSELF. That's a completely different covenant and spiritual life, His -- far harder than the Law, since He had to INVENT a higher spiritual life in order to pay for sins, as we saw back in Part III's Third Reason. A dual-sided INTERNAL Spiritual Life of Thought -- ALL of you is the sacrifice, your own self (Third Reason for Invisibility); so it's Priestly, and you spend yourself Constantly Thinking Toward Father (Third Reason for Royalty). Um, the Mosaic Law couldn't fulfill that, didn't demand that. And the Jews couldn't obey the Law. So now Christ raises the bar to the far higher Life HE HIMSELF invented? And this 'Church' was to be built upon His Life? Worse, this is a FUTURE group of people? What if they don't come to exist? What if they too, reject this life? We saw Satan's reasoning at the end of Part II about all this, and in Part III, it was shown just how unbelievably difficult, this higher spiritual life is. The Royal Spiritual Life is about having PERFECT THOUGHTS: for Father forever hears each one, and you are Thinking Toward Him to Please Him. It's a killer life. Light-years beyond moral behavior. It's exhausting, a kind of spiritual racquetball, and you never get off the court!
Back here in 29AD therefore, Christ Vastly INCREASES The Cost Of The Cross When He Says Matt16:18, telling Peter he's a 'chip' in this yet-to-begin, entity. It would be a testamentary construction, conditioned on Father, the vote for which is recorded in John 17:20-21. In Trial terms, this Saves History, Allows Time Itself to Continue. Satan's not compromised. If anything, Christ played into his hands. Oh, now the cost is FAR HIGHER, so how can He make it? Far bigger win, if I stop Time by getting believers to be negative! And how will they not be more negative than Israel ever was, with this Impossible Royal Spiritual Life? Again, we saw that reasoning back at the end of Part II. Thus Time continues! Trial, continues! Human history, continues! What a shout must have gone up from the angels in heaven, that day.
With respect to Israel, such a 'Church' Announcement is just about the biggest insult He could devise. For simultaneously, He's saying that the Gentiles will become the Bride, Israel having rejected Him. Not that any Jew who believed in Him would be left out, but Isa52:15 would be the mechanism of fulfillment now. Unless, Israel repents within the next year. For again, a deadline was looming: by the end of the following year, the 1000th anniversary of David's Retirement from Kingship, would occur. The Lord basically announces His Retirement, since He is being rejected, a year in advance. You can trace this theme in Matthew beginning from Chapter 16 forward: look at all the parables about the king or master being rejected beginning in Matt20, through His Arrest (Matt26). Then locate the parallel periods in the other, later Gospels (chrono order is Matthew, then Luke, then Mark a generation later, then John a generation after Mark).
Shocking thing, that. "Church" is Greek word ekklesia, the Greek equivalent of Jewish synagogue -- So He Was Replacing The Law, too! For they didn't believe Him when He said, He had come to fulfill it (i.e., Matt5:17-18) -- in His Own Body, since He IS the Petra, Recipient of all those Yom Kippur 'sprinklings', since Solomon built the Temple depicting His Body. So they won't believe Him about 40 years later, so they can flee Jerusalem before the Temple is destroyed as warned throughout the Book of Hebrews. [See Heb13:23ff; Paul was dead.]
In sum, He's not making the right kind of Kingly Announcement, to get votes. Rather, it's the kind of announcement one makes if Declaring War. And He was warning them of just that: for if they persisted in wanting only a Political Messias, they'd be playing Vashti. Matt16:18's import is reviewed further in the "Dan9:26c" link (at pagetop), further on down the page. For the moment, notice how He's insulting them: they are the Vashti, this time. If you know how much Jews LOVE being able to say they are superior to all goyim, you'll understand what a deep insult this was to their egoes. It was easy to imagine He was rejecting them, the chosen People of God! in favor of the dirty Gentiles. [Every group has its prejudices based on what it perceives are its own cultural or racial superiorities, versus another group. "China", for example, means "Middle Kingdom" in the Chinese (character "Jung"). Center of the universe, is what that means. The Japanese have their own sense; the Russians, their own. Each of us has a cultural prejudice, so the Jews are no exception. Problem is, the Jews do have demonstrably superior Bible; and that is why they are always hated. They have a Real Promise From A Real God, and there's a real Satan out to persecute them. But being human, they of course abuse their status. Who of us, has not? All prejudices are defense mechanisms to soothe a hurting ego. Here, though, the Jews have so long been the brunt of prejudice against them, they cling to the prejudice with practiced rigor. For in order to keep the Law, they have to Keep Telling Themselves They Are Doing Something Better. You see the same kind of defense buildup in Christians who are legalistic. A rigidness due to a long-perceived threat morphs into prejudice, too; even, where none initially existed.]
So His announcement of Church played right into the hands of the Sanhedrin, and they rapidly picked up adherents. Those who didn't really like the Law, stayed with Him -- it wasn't really Him they wanted, but to overthrow authority. Those who DID believe in Him were few and timid, confused: why would He do this? Aren't we the chosen people? In short, what support He had rapidly dwindled down, and those believing in Him started to keep quiet. Even His family went along grudgingly (read John 6ff).
As a believer in Christ, you will face the same opposition. People don't want God, they want goodies. When those goodies are refused, they get angry. That's when you know all the previous protestations of love or admiration were bupkis, John 2:24-25. We are all hypocrites: it's only a matter of PRICE. So now you know why religion and fake spirituality are always popular. Those are goodies. People feel they are more 'worthy' if they can do something to get goodies DUE them. So "love" is just a way to get goodies, no more. We don't mean to be so grasping. But we are. Past is prologue.
By the end of that three years, He was betrayed by His own, everyone left Him. He was tried in seven(!) kangaroo-court trials that would make a later Stalin's or Hitler's, look positively virtuous. Then, He finally Hung, Cursed On Wood. For extensive details on the corrected timing of Passover week, CLICK HERE for the "Passover Plot" webpage chronology. It's a long story, because it's never properly told, except by a few pastors out there (mine being but one). Yet you can conclusively prove the timing from Bible. Takes a few days chasing and pondering verses in OT and New (because Passover week is strictly regulated, day by day). The link has the salient verses, to speed your vetting time.
His final Week was 'celebrated' in a manner the Sanhedrin could find downright threatening. Palm Sunday, He comes waltzing in on a donkey, traditional entry into the city reserved for the King. Of course, this was preceded by the miraculous resuscitation of Lazarus, so everyone was abuzz with His Entry. Then, quite kingly and insultingly, He enters the Temple and teaches openly, but stays outside Jerusalem UNTIL the Passover. And AGAIN drives out the folks making money off the Temple, Matt21:12, Mark 11:15, Luke 19:45. He uses the KING title, this time. Son of David. Rights of a human king.
So note well: the accounts in Matthew 21, Mark 11, Luke 19 are summary, are the FINAL time, NOT the first time, which John 2:13ff recounts. Read all three accounts carefully: notice how no one is surprised in the other three Gospels, you don't get the long conversations you see in John, and Christ is not censured for driving out the moneychangers and merchants. But rather, the Sanhedrin are afraid, plotting to kill Him, and instead rebuke Him for allowing people to call Him Messiah, due to that Triumphal Last Entry. Yeah, because the LAST time He enters Jerusalem, that will be His Human Death to pay for sins, the promised Son of David!
It's really important to 'get' the meaning here. They didn't listen to Him the first time. That's analogous to not listening to His First Coming, which of course this is. In prophecy, His Second Coming is as King Triumphant. So He's making a strong point to the Sanhedrin, even while still in His First-Coming State, that He will return AS the King, which His Triumphal Entry depicted. It's like a rehearsal.
So the Sanhedrin are afraid. If He is installed as King, they are of course in deep trouble. The people want to make Him king, obviously. So this REPEAT of the throwing out of the merchants, which after all is not illegal since what the merchants were doing was the violation -- this REPEAT, couldn't be prosecuted under either Jewish law nor under Roman. But the kingship claim could be, if He put a foot wrong. So they had to find a way to make Him appear as a usurper against Rome. The public acclamation played right into their plotting hands, and the violence of throwing out the merchants suddenly had a new, more sinister meaning they could INSERT into the event: rebellion, disruption of Rome's rule.
Zeferelli's 'Jesus of Nazareth' production did a great job of presenting the issue of Christ's Authority over the Temple, Ian Holm playing a Temple scribe named "Zera", seed, coming up afterwards pretending to be calm: asking why Jesus did this thing -- but Zeferelli's presentation confuses the TWO times the Lord overturned the money changers as if they were one. With a mortified Ian McShane playing Judas, trying to pacify "Zera". Yeah, that's the way to win votes, alienate the very people who can fund you, Master. Notice they didn't arrest Him for what He did, so whatever seeming violence in it, He broke no law (i.e., no damage to property, no one hurt, no money lost). They would have gladly arrested Him if they had a valid charge, you know that. And as Son of David -- David, who INVENTED Temple service, priestly courses and rules, see the end of 1Chronicles -- Christ does have the right, to do this. But oh! He's crazy! would be the charge. Never mind those guys were profiteering. Oh, ok. So if He's properly Regal and Severe -- driving out the cheaters in front of the Temple, for example -- well, He's cruel and unholy, a madman!
The Gospels are meant to be interlocking. When you see what to uninformed eyes looks like a contradiction, instead you get more details of the same event, or you are being told of a SIMILAR event, or a REPEATED event. At the Last Supper and Resurrection, for example, there are many similar events, i.e., more than one disciple asked Jesus who was the betrayer; more than one woman visits the tomb. After several readings of what seems like the same person in the same event, you realize there are subtle differences. Here in the driving-out-moneychangers account, the subtle difference is the reaction of the Pharisees. First time, first Passover of His Ministry when He does this, they post a challenge, and their plotting begins. Last time He does it, they don't challenge Him directly -- but they plot all the more.
Matthew's is the first Gospel, coming out about 35-45 AD, tops. Paul quotes from it, and so does James. Then comes Luke, written just after Paul was imprisoned, and Luke plays to Matthew, extensively adding parenthetical material, as he did with the angels and shepherds, to parallel what Matthew wrote about the angel mistaken as a star until the magi believed in Messiah (Matthew 2:1-2:11; notice how in 2:12 they are warned by the angel, just as Joseph was in verse 13). Then comes Mark, written just before the Temple is to go down; Mark plays on both Matthew and Luke, adding his own witness. Then comes John, a generation after the Temple is destroyed.
Bear that chronology in mind when reading, and forget all the controversy over the dating of the Gospels, many 'scholars' aren't honest or competent, what a pity. If you ignore the controversy, the 'fit' of the Gospels will become clear to you, especially if you use 1John1:9 as you read. Always ask God: 'is this the same event being told with added detail or from another angle? Or is this another but similar event?' For example, the Last Supper had multiple people in it, so you have multiple times people went up to Christ asking who would betray Him. So too, at the Resurrection when His Body is suddenly missing, multiple people went multiple times to the tomb, and you got at least three Marys to work with, Mary of Bethany, Mary of Magdala (who wasn't a prostitute), and Mary the mother of Christ. It was a common name, just like James=Jude=Judah=Judas. :)
God is not the author of confusion. Each Gospel comes out to refresh the memory of the audience, which is changing. Reading Bible is always a test of how much you want to know God, so you gotta ASK God for the meaning. If you don't ask, you'll be like those hapless scholars.
So now you know why John omits the LAST time Christ drove out the money changers, from John 12; and instead puts his account on the FIRST time He did it, in connection with the theme that Christ is God. Full circle, the end which was the beginning by the One Who Has No Beginning. For by then, the Temple was long gone, and Daniel 9:26c was the current 'bubble' of applicable prophecy. That mattered a whole lot in the 90's AD, because the original schedule for the Millennium was 94AD -- and it wasn't gonna happen, due to Jewish Rejection. So what would happen now? Remember this timing when your read John's Gospel, and his deliberate irony will jump out at you (i.e., he omits or inserts well-known Gospel events to stress irony).
I can't honestly say to you I'd never betray Him, either. Clearly I have, for He had to pay for me, just as He paid for every other human, else I'd not be breathing. Moreover, every time I sin, I AM betraying Him. Look at all this doctrine God has given me through my right pastor: so how is it, that I still sin? Sin is thinking, a type of traitorous thinking. Body is just a bucket of biology, mindlessly obeying whatever stimulus hits it. And that 's the problem. Our biology is more powerful than the soul, due to Adam's sin. So it takes Superhuman Power to be loyal to Him. Spirit runs that power, man can't even know how such Power works. Christ didn't depend on His Human Power, and of course didn't cheat by using His Godness. So yes, the Jews all betrayed Him. Even John depicts himself as just skulking around after Christ Rose, staying sorta at a distance (last chapter of John's Gospel). They, we.. are human, after all. Just like James Farentino gets to tell the camera: All Of Us. [More on why biology is more powerful than the soul is in Fixes.htm's first five bullets. Gist: Adam's sin is a negative derivative which bounced off Infinite Holiness, thus shattering the soul. Think of fission, and you'll understand that while man can't lose his free will, he certainly can -- and did! -- lose his mind. Part II's coverage of the Fall goes into some discussion on how psychological defense mechanisms thus were generated.]
We also each betray Him every second we breathe some thought in self-defense. If we have even one thought about injustice, we betray Him. For the greatest betrayal, is to think that self has anything whatsoever that is "good", to claim. What a slap in His Face, what derision of the Work of the Cross, that we ever think our puny righteousnesses, could count! Is there greater arrogance than this? Yet we, quintessentially defective, rightfully condemned to think in terms of petty tit-for-tats, can only be arrogant. Yet, cancelled (not merely forgiven, the verb is a financial verb, aphiemi) are our sins. [Nerd note: check out Eph1:7, Col1:14, 1Jn1:9. The latter is an operational need for fellowship, based on the Finished Work of the Cross.]
The hardest thing for anyone to understand and believe, is Grace. Grace isn't a freebie, but a hard-won Brideprice (see Eph5) -- but, not paid by us. So, we feel bad about it. Feel like we owe -- so can't enjoy, The Freedom Purchased At The Cross. Due to the Cross, Grace: so, no need for goodies one can claim to feel good about self. No need for breastbeating because one feels bad about self. God is Omniscient. If it mattered to Him at all how bad or good we are, there'd have been no Cross. So neither our goods, nor our bads, matter. HE DIDN'T WANT THEM TO MATTER. Else, there'd have been, no Cross. So Forever FINISHED! are all questions of injustice or inferiority. Only blind arrogance clings to those "i" shibboleths! The tomb is empty, and so is any condemnation: Romans 8:1!
Repeating: the TOMB IS EMPTY, and so is any condemnation, Romans 8:1! You have conclusive proof of this, right now: You are breathing. God is Omnipotent, and if He wanted obediences outta you, He'd just bing them, djut! and you'd be a happy little Stepford drone (wife or husband, take your pick). So He Must Have Been Paid. And Christ's Resurrection is the Testimony Of The Success Of That Repayment. Bible differentiates between His Spiritual Death On The Cross (Romans 6) and His Physical Death of Victory, usu. via Greek keyphrase "ek nekrwn", "out from the dead ones", a play on Birth. So, in Romans 6, Paul makes much of that Victory, the death turned to birth turned to our death with Him ON the Cross turned to our spiritual birth, so now we are divorced from death, and alive to Him Who is Life. (Paul adores wordplay, and it never translates properly.) So that's The Hupostasis, The Reality, The Substance, The Christ: no condemnation in Christ Jesus, get it? Total Grace, totally abounding (see last half of Romans 5). All things are new, now: the old things have passed away. See 2Cor5, Eph1. [Nerd Note: if you know someone who thinks Christ's physical death paid for sins, you might want to read the "Grail" link in DDNA.htm. It has more info on how you parse out the two Deaths of Christ on the Cross and what-death-belongs-to-what-doctrine. You can prove it yourself if you have original-language Bible texts on software. Takes maybe a month (or less) to go through all the searches and see for yourself. Christendom has been goofy for centuries, always reading body meanings out of God/spiritual verses, which is why so much of the Bible is mistranslated. But we have good access to the original-language texts, now. So we can be disabused of our quaint notions about what happened on the Cross. I did Isaiah 53:9 and Genesis videos on this topic, you can search for them in Google.]
We humans are always comparing ourselves to each other. So if someone is richer, smarter, prettier we think they are better persons than ourselves. Yeah? Well a cold or calamity strikes anyone down, pretty or ugly, rich or poor. So it's just a difference of circumstance which makes one of us seem better than another. So if one person knows Bible better -- well, he hit his flash-point need to know, earlier than 'you' did. Same for any kind of lesser wealth. The guy who's wealthier than you, needed it then. So, he got it then. So, if you need it now, you'll get it now. And we all need Bible all the time. So: we are all together, one, in this thing. None of us really better or worse than the other. For only God is good. And only God, has the right to condemn us, right? But God is not condemning, but rescuing us instead, Rom5:8+Rom8:1 due to John 3:16!
So of course God didn't let up on anyone. He just kept on rolling out that overwhelming evidence of His Son, in spades. At the very moment of His Death on the Cross, His Last Word being about the WORD (Ps31:5, only partly recorded in Gospels, since everyone knew that verse so well), a sort of mini-display of future Tribulational stuff, occurs (Matt27:45ff). Actually, all of that stuff was orchestrated to demonstrate yet more OT prophecies about the effect of Messiah's death, especially the splitting of the Temple Veil. They weren't comforting miracles, they were SHOCKING ones. God doesn't use "sign" miracles to comfort, but to WARN; for His typical Miraculous Style is Quiet, not loud, 1Kings 19:10-12, Eph5:18. (That's how you can immediately tell the difference between demonic supernatural, and Divine supernatural.) Man can't take too much evidence of God, as was explained in the "Third Reason for Invisibility", in Part III. That's why the OT Scriptures, are so anthro-metaphorical, as teaching aids and buffers for a shocked mind. That's why the Holy of Holies in the Temple was veiled -- but now, that Extremely Thick Veil, was torn from its (maybe 90-foot) Top, to the Bottom?
Worse -- again, to fulfill an old set of prophecies -- dead believers are resuscitated at the very moment He dies, so all these formerly-dead people are wandering about in Jerusalem (Matt27:52-53). Hoo-boy: how ya gonna explain THAT? All these dead people now alive again, demonstrating en masse what He'd done with Lazarus (which after all, only a small crowd saw)? Who can breathe, seeing all this shocking evidence?
Then, the worst: He Himself, is alive again? Popping up suddenly in the midst of one group or another, behind closed doors, out in the field, showing up to the women but not the men -- but then, to the men but not the women. Who can live with such experience? IT WAS UPSETTING, not comforting. Brain overrun by too much supernaturality, too close to the Divine, can't cope. God never lives up to our expectations, but always exceeds them. So when you read of people in the Gospels running around talking about these three days and His Resurrection -- they can't help themselves. Brain needs to exhale the shock it had. And, considering that one got into a lot of trouble if one talked about Him back then -- in Luke 24, watch how believers hedge when talking to the Stranger-Who-is-really-Risen-Christ -- you'd have to be uncontrollably upset, to do so.
Worse still, how these things happened. Dead people coming back to life aren't so many one couldn't doubt the encounter. Appearances by the Lord are of a mundane nature, and He doesn't advertise that it's Him (He doesn't lie, either). So, all these occurrences are.. you know, weird. Unexpected way for God to behave. He's not making some gorgeous display all the world can see in the sky: you know, the long white-bearded muscular guy with the outstretched finger, on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. But instead, lots of little occurrences that make a person feel foolish to recount, stuff which sounds like chismes, lalew, gossip, fairy tales. He shows up, only to a few, and only for a little while, then disappears again. Now who is gonna believe what just happened? Makes you wanna be quiet. Unless you are so upset, you just gotta tell someone.
The entire point of interrogation or torture is to get information. To do that, you've got to shock or otherwise upset the victim so much, he loses his sense of restraint. You can do this deftly, like Satan does in Matt4 (baiting), or you can do it with brutality; or, you can do it by disinformation which upsets the hearer. However you do it, once the restraints are down, the person blubbers out information. And afterwards regrets his loss of self-control. That's what you see happening here. People don't readily admit when they are wrong; people don't readily admit to a supernatural experience; people certainly don't admit beliefs which can land them in jail or in the hospital. Yet, that's what happened here. It's not like the wacko who wants his 15 minutes of fame so says or does something outrageous. Normal people restrain themselves, calculating how the hearer will react. That is, unless they are in too much shock, as were the believers, here. It really shows up in the text. Again, God doesn't feel good. We are incompatible with Him, and when He is too 'close' to the reality we know, well it's a shock!
When a human being is in a state of shock, he always reacts with some kind of denial. It's a biological reaction, born of Adam's sin actually, which in psychology is called a "defense mechanism". To buffer the soul against shock. This denial takes many forms, and since (like all defense mechanisms) it is dysfunctional, its failure to protect, shows just like the coverup does. One MORPHS the truth, instead of being able to fully excise it. All psychological illness is rooted in denial and its many morphings. So too, with respect to denying the truth known about God. Simple denial is more shallow: the person can't quite manage to replace the truth with a morphed story, so he keeps on shaking his head. At some point, he will either slowly come to grips with the shock (i.e., shocked grief eventually gives way to acceptance that a loved one really HAS died), or he will begin to morph. So all morphings of the truth display a greater and prolonged negativity. But here, three days into the post-Crucifixion life of the world, people were too shocked to morph much. So, they don't believe the women who went to the empty tomb and were informed by angels that He had risen. But that's all they can do, is deny it. Just like, everyone around Judea then. Shock. All groups, believer and unbeliever, alike.
The soldiers guarding His Tomb probably got severe punishment. So all the barracks personnel would know about it, too. The Pharisees, who believed in an afterlife, and the Saducees, who did not, were immediately set against each other: even though neither side believed in Messiah. Some among their number, like Joseph of Arimethea and Nicodemus, committed political suicide (see how the fake gospels all insult those two). So, what can one say? God is upsetting, that's what. He upsets everyone, and on purpose, too. God is like that: always upsetting the applecart. Like, showing Himself, saving us...
Childish piety says one must be low to be holy. The opposite is true. God is HIGH. So we must become high. The higher, the more holy. Obviously only God can accomplish this. Obviously, it's a THINKING standard, the body couldn't possibly obey on such a high level. So much for the Brother-Foot people. God wants gods, and He can make them, John 10:34. And no lesser-than is Fit Bride for His Son.
Theme of Ephesians? God's Superior Begetting! Christian! It's Your Duty To Be Close, Near, Intimate With Very God! Cry all the way to the Bible Bank, baby!
[Paul uses "far" and "near" OT language. Ionic dative of purpose in Eph2:10 will be covered in LvS4b.htm's "Father's Criteria.. :Fit Bride" table. Ionic dative is a discovery of my pastor's back in the mid-1980's while exegeting Ephesians verse-by-verse; that led me to the play "Ion" in 2003.]
If you don't have time to read "Ion" by Euripedes, here's a synopsis. "Ion" is about a Greek god, Phoebus Apollo who raped (remember that!) a human woman, Creusa. As a result, she became pregnant, and bore a son, whom she was too ashamed to keep. So she put it by a tree with snake charms (to protect the child -- "Ion" means "venom", euphemism for semen). Phoebus saw the child, took it to his Temple, and raised the boy (his son) as a Temple slave ("doulos" in Greek means both "son" and "slave"). Creusa, meantime, keeps the birth a secret, and marries well. Then, the god causes Creusa to be barren, so that eventually she'll come to the Oracle of Delphi (his temple) seeking the ability to bear kids. Where she meets Ion, the now-grown son. Discovering who he really is takes up the rest of the play, and is extremely funny.
At the end, of course, all is revealed, and Athena comes down to announce Phoebus' repentance, which results in Ion being awarded as the Progenitor Of All Greek Peoples. "Phoebus Apollo" is the Greek myth version of Satan's pre-Fall title, "Son of Dawn" or "Morning Star", in the OT, Haylel-ben-Shachar, in Isa14:12. (See also Job 38:7.) Look up the role of Phoebus Apollo in an encyclopedia. [Why Isaiah 14 and Eze28's references to Satan are pooh-poohed by scholars, when the keywords for Satan are there and elsewhere, completely baffles me. Can God make it more obvious who "Son of the Dawn" was, by crowning His Son's Humanity, "Bright Morning Star"? Even the Koran uses the same keywords (At-Tariq sura, among others). God draws analogy between the pride of the human king and his demonic backer, using the analogy to show how the king will share his backer's fate. Description weaves in characteristics which must reference Satan, since obviously no human was in the throne room of God.]
So Ephesians is thus chock full of sexual innuendo, depicting the Victorious Fathering Of Bride, beating Satan in the Trial. God gave this to the only perpetual-virgin apostle, Paul! Paul deliberately and carefully parallels both Isa53 and the play in his circular letter which we know as Ephesians. It spread to all the churches of Greece and Asia Minor, who were largely populated by these 'sons' of Ion. For, the play was as popular to them, as Johnny Appleseed or the story of George Washington would be to Americans. So the audience for 'Ephesians' knew immediately that Paul was parallelling the play. Remember, what we call "Rapture" derives from 1Thess4:17's Suddenly Snatch Up (Gk: harpazw)="rape". For that was the cultural norm, not the exception: when men invaded or attacked, they would just grab women. It's a trend of ancient history. So too, in the play "Ion". So too, when the Lord comes for His Own, the Church.
So "Ion" is used to wittily convey God's Superior Begetting Plan in Ephesians, when combined with Isa53, a chapter all about Him being raped with sterile sins and thus bearing all children. Here's a sampling of just a few witty analogies which quickly come to mind:
Writer of Hebrews picks up "Ion" + Isa53 witticisms in his own Chapter 2; in the lengthy, threaded Temple analogy from Chapter 7-10; his "Archegos" (=progenitor, founder) usage in Heb12:2; and his "Church of the Firstborn" comment (Heb12:23).
This same theme runs throughout 1Jn, who tracks his letter horizontally to Ephesians, using "in the beginning" and "born of God" (really, being-sired-by-God) to tie to the "Ion" theme, and then spends most of the letter tracking to Eph3:15-19 via 4:11-16, how that gets done (i.e., 1Jn4:12-17 reverses the order of building in Eph3:15-19, covered at length in DDNA1.htm). For God Makes Sons through the "me amal" (labor pains, pregnancy-of-sin-imputation) of THE Son, Who is "plundered" so we can "share" (merizw, LXX, a term much used by Paul) in His Thinking (suneisis, a God-Produced Knowledge, as all sun-prefixed words denote). [Most of the verses in NT which seem to talk about human works use Greek words that make it clear only Divine Works are in view.] The One Who Had No Descendents will Get Plunder by being Himself Plundered (Isa 53:8,10-12, 54:1, BHS and LXX texts, LXX for the keywords). And we are to share in that Plunder, as Bride (Eph4:11-16, very pointed allusions to LXX verses in Isa53:10-12). And what's the Plunder? His Thinking (suneisis), taught to us by our pastors (again Eph4:11-16, very graphic, can't translate it in public, sumbibazw and sunarmologew plus haphe, in Greek -- see RightPT.htm's exegesis but you need detailled lexicons which will explain etymology).
I don't know how anyone can read Bible in translation. All the wordplay is blanded out. Bible is the most enjoyable book on earth. But not, in translation. No human pleasure can compare with learning it, sorry!
Bible keywords for the change in spiritual life and covenant wrought by His Successful Completion of the Cross are many, but three of the more significant ones are "Resurrection", [Gk: anastasis] which describes the Power Nature of the change (the Justification to Transform us into His Nature, not merely the "miracle" idea of raising from the dead); "fullness" or "fulfill", [Gk: pleroma, a pregnancy term] and like verbs, to describe the process of this change; and "perfect" [Gk: teleiow] (legal sense of perfecting, completing all contract terms). If you track these keywords throughout your NT you'll find that they are constantly linked with His Thinking (which is usually metaphorically depicted as "riches", "Christ", "Love", etc). These words all mean to convey something Totally New, and planned from eternity past (i.e., in Eph and Colossians). It would take a long time for the writers of the NT, to know how to explain this change in writing. For, they themselves had to learn it first. Like Paul repeats often in his letters, this new change was a "mystery" to the OT, though based on the same principles.
Then, drastic isolation ensues, as the Holy Spirit teaches him the new spiritual life. This second Saul-renamed-Small (="Paul") spends about 14 years hidden away in Arabia somewhere to restudy the Law and thus regroup, but he "gets it" at last! and comes back like gangbusters. In fact, when he gets to Jerusalem in Acts 15, he's too far ahead of everyone else, and they're all muttering "ti oun estin" (=what the heck do we do about this guy)? For those "pillars" are still playing with their OT doctrinal dolls, drooling. So they clash with Paul. Acts 15 is a compromise to get rid of him, basically. But then when he starts his missionary journeys, he pitches their rules. This gets him all kinds of persecution from the Jerusalem Church and the Judaizers. Everyone's trying to wiggle the Law back into the life, but Paul by contrast, realizes that Christ UPGRADED the Law. It's a messy situation. For Paul is a better scholar in the Law than all of his comrade believers.
Like everyone else, even this Paulus wants to compromise 'somehow'. He realized that everything in the Law was being pitched -- only the morality ideas ("entole", i.e., the Ten Commandments, plus principles underlying "krimata") ported over. Yet even this Paulus gets roped into not just one, but two Nazirite vows -- catching himself as he stands at the port in Kegchreia, waiting for a boat to take him to Jerusalem (which he knows he's supposed to avoid, Acts 18); second vow, he gives into James' compromise with the Jewish believers who catch him by using that vow to kill him, Acts 21-23 (look for the genitive absolutes). Sound familiar?
Does God have an ironic sense of parallel timing, or what? This second Saul is appointed after the Second (and forever-ruling) David! Heh: remember how, 40 years previous to the First David, was that first Saul made the king the people wanted instead of God? So now the Omega David, who the people rejected as King Yet Again, sends them another Saul! Funny no one among Israel caught onto that deliberate, timed irony, yet one more obvious clue that Messiah had Risen and was COMING BACK! The first Saul was voted for by the people, but not by God; the second one, who IS voted for by God but not by the people, will nearly get killed on the Temple steps due to a claim he's changing the Law (yep, he is) by the sons of those same people who'd voted for his namesake!
Of course, God wanted Paul to stay away from Jerusalem, instead go to Rome and just live there, teaching. My pastor spent about a year teaching how Paul kept hemming and hawing, not wanting to give in ("Paul's Fall" taught in April+ 1999 portion of 92 Spiritual Dynamics lessons). For Paul's need to 'get along' with Jerusalem, motivated him to rationalize accompanying a monetary gift back to Jerusalem -- hence he nearly got killed. Nonetheless, this second Saul ends up writing most of the New Testament! By 57AD he had written the basic roadmap of God's Bridal plan, explaining from OT verses how Bride was to be built. When circa 58AD he got tricked into that second Nazirite vow, the near-death experience landed him in Roman prison, where a greedy Felix waited for a bribe (Paul was wealthy). When it wasn't forthcoming, Paul languished for two years. So, blatantly imitating in reverse the path of Jonah, God used Paul's negative volition to transport him to Rome: chained. And from Rome, from 62AD until his death, He had Paul write the Rest Of The Story. So by 68AD, when Nero decapitated Paul, everyone had plenty of time to digest (what we call) Ephesians, Colossians, Philippians -- and to tie them to the earlier material in Romans, Corinthians, Galatians and Thessalonians -- as well as to the OT. So they had time to learn God's Bridal Dowry Plan; and, as a result, His Divine Benefit Plan for mankind and get in on it. But, most didn't.
Thus begins the wacky, schisming, history of "Church." It had a kind of bi-polar disorder from the start, which continues to characterize it today. The legalists in the Jerusalem church morphed into what you would call ecumenical religion, today. Those hearing what God had Paul write -- which was 100% consistent with everything else in Bible, would anyone study the material -- they would become breakaway Back-to-the-Bible movements and independent churches of history. The legalists were hanging onto the Law. They were wrong. Book of Acts casts this bi-polarization using genitive absolutes, in the Greek: split-screen story of the bad guys -- the legalists, which in the beginning included all the apostles -- and the good guy, Paul. Two tracks, two stories, very bitter schism between them. God resolves the whole argument by employing Paul to write most of what becomes the New Testament. By the end, James realized Paul was right, so gets murdered by the legalists for it; Peter leaves Jerusalem for Antioch and then Babylon, never setting foot in Rome, since Paul is there (apostles don't step on other apostles' territories); John, the last apostle left alive, gets to write a Gospel which updates the post-Temple situation, and he patterns what he writes in 1Jn after Ephesians. So John completed the job God had Paul start; when Paul died, Peter and the others reinforced what Paul wrote, so you had 100% agreement among the NT writers about what was Canon (see 2nd half of 2Peter). Which leads back in a big circle, to John 15: abide in Me by abiding in My Word. For now, Jeremiah 31:31-34 is being implemented (main theme of the book of Hebrews). At least in the Word, there is 100% agreement. But the legalists still go on dressing up in outdated party clothes, and largely argue Canon is not closed, inventing their own 'divine writ' -- yeah, they have to, for the real Bible contradicts them on nearly every doctrine they tout. Oh well.
So notice how this saga starts out a lot like the Exodus did. Back then, it was Moses who was the outcast; now, it's Paul. Back then, it was Moses who got to write the first books; now, it's Paul. Back then, the people went out to Israel; now, they are going out from Israel. Back then, Moses' authority was always questionned, rebelled against; now, it's Paul who gets grumbled against. People tried to stone Moses; they will try to stone Paul. Paul, who began as witness to the stoning of Stephen, becomes more persecuted than Stephen ever was. So just like that first Exodus, where then-new Israel split into factions, now-new Church will, too. "Legalists vs. Paul" would be a good title for the period -- which is another reason why the NT Canon, took so long to write. Can't get trained by God if you're not looking AT Him, but instead at someone He appointed -- with envy. Do you notice a pattern here? Same tacked-on 40 years, same wilderness, but new cast, new covenant: 1470 years (3 sets of 490 years!) after that first one of 1440BC. 1000th anniversary year of First Temple's dedication, the first NT books are written. Hmmm: someone is sure paying attention to some very old dates, huh. Do you notice Orchestration here?
|
Notice how Matthew, James, and Paul's letters are written right away. Luke is the 2nd Gospel. Then, silence until Paul dies, 68AD. Then a flurry of more books, Peter, Jude, Book of Hebrews, Mark's Gospel -- all with an undertone of expecting the Rapture due to the Temple's imminent destruction: it was the year of the Four Emperors, and Vespasian had adopted Titus who was then besieging Jerusalem. Then another silence for another generation. Notice the rollout of the New Testament was accomplished with only 9-10 people, all of the same century, versus the OT.
The axiomatic writing style of Bible tells you the readers got that discernment, and were extremely familiar with the contents, long before it was put in writing. Israel was a cosmopolitan nation based on commerce, so even her poorest people were multi-lingual, as you can see from the Gospels or even any barrio in Los Angeles. It's a quaint myth among Bible debunkers that Christ was unilingual. Dream on! (Lots of poor people overseas are multi-lingual; just watch PBS videos sometime.) See, during Christ's time, you learned a whole language as a special vocabulary for certain purposes: you spoke Aramaic at home, spoke or wrote Latin when dealing with Rome on official business; spoke or wrote Greek in analytical or dramatic discourse (Greek was the language of refinement); Hebrew, was reserved for Torah discussion, though Greek was often preferred. So being multi-lingual was the norm -- especially for any country which made its living on foreign trade.
People liked Bible back then. It was a cultural icon to them. So they repeated and played with it all day long, especially when doing the many menial tasks which made up the average day. Bible was part of their cultural life, warp and woof, their way of learning to speak, read, write and have fun. Didn't mean everyone believed in it, obviously -- but believe in it or not, it was the center of life for people. Much like, the Koran is for Saudis and Afghanis, even today. And that was the problem: Bible was too well-known. As a result, its usage denigrated to the level of mere culture. Satan's not stupid. Make a faith so widespread, everyone is 'in' it. Therefore, all of life's vocabulary, is in its terms. Then it STOPS being about God, and instead, is about people. Point is, the Bible is not and was not abstruse. If anything, it was too familiar. Just like today. When a thing becomes too familiar, it becomes despised.
So as the New Testament was gradually reduced to writing, it also became too familiar. Thus people stopped being interested in it for what it said about God. Thus they stopped teaching their children properly. By the 2nd century AD, they stopped teaching it in university. And by 180AD, no one could even read the Greek well, anymore. An ecclesiastical vocabulary replaced what was once known. Again, Satan's not stupid.
"Roiling" describes the world in the wake of His 30AD Crucifixion. Everything turned upside down religiously and politically. But why? Surely, the death of a power threat ends the threat. But oh, the world roils even more, instead! Because That One --"ekeinos", in Greek -- That One Is Coming BACK! cried His believers. Everywhere. The potency of that same can't-be-neutral message was this: He's GOD, and when He comes back, the world ends. So you believed in Him to be saved and picked up by Him when He returned, or you didn't believe and got burned at that Return. Stark message still: just like it was, at the First Advent. Difference here? You didn't know WHEN it would happen, whereas the First Advent was predictable 1000 years in advance.
People hide when they are persecuted, and since Christ wasn't exactly popular politically with anybody, it wouldn't be expedient to drop His Name to get some favor. Rather, one would pretend to not know Him (like Peter did, like we all have at times) -- to keep a little bit of safety. So to claim He'd Risen From The Dead, was political suicide. Yes, it was the biggest promise in the OT, second only to the Cross itself -- but still not um.. wise. For, who had really seen Him, and couldn't just anyone claim to have seen Him? Surely if anyone ran around today saying they'd seen Christ, at least one hearer would place a call to the local lunatic asylum for a pickup wagon. So to also say He is Coming Back! is certain to garner rock-throwing. To one's DISadvantage. Stephen sure found that out.
For the rivals couldn't shut up, either -- just like today, if one could get something by blaming someone, hey -- let's do it! Oh, yeah right, coming back. What a lame thing to say, to cover up that your 'god' died in crucifixion's ignominy, as all 'gods' do: heck, punctilious Romans like even Tacitus, were forever afterwards confused about his name! So, lamebrain Christian(!): just admit your 'god' is your emotional fantasy. Thus, the world ever thinks. Sure looks like the world is right, huh. After all, they expect God to have a flashy finish, with hundreds of angels lofting His Body up to heaven where everyone can see -- kinda like Satan was expecting, in the 2nd Temptation. Or, they all expect God to come down in some nice costume and take over the sceptre from a grateful world -- kinda like Satan was expecting, in the 3rd Temptation. What the world does not expect, is a God who allows everyone to starve -- and Who Starves Himself, too! -- like Satan didn't expect, in the First Temptation. But God is never tempted to perform to expectations. He only likes EXCEEDING them all: "filling all in all", it says at the end of Eph1! Yeah, Isa53:10-12, again, filling us up with His Son fills us up with the spoils, makes us great, and He is the Cause, Romans 8 (main theme), Eph3:15-21!
People hide when they are negative to God: just like Adam did, in Gen3. They hide beneath altruism. They hide beneath superficial 'respect', nodding to God on Sunday. They hide in crusades in the Name of God, but not really Him, since the only 'god' they love, is their egoes. You can prove this all too quickly. So with everyone hiding due to persecution or negativity, due to making-self-fit-in with the "in" crowd, the notion that He's Coming Back! well who could resist taking sides? No one could be neutral to Him while He was here; let alone, if He Became Ruler of the Universe and is Returning! For even if you didn't believe that claim, you could sure use it to gain power, yourself.
As my pastor likes to explain it, "next in sequence of events, without prior warning". For, tachú is also a military term, the Next Move On The Battlefield. Element of surprise; suddenness of HASTE. So it's Haste which is the heart of "tachú", in all 12 uses in Bible. Not how long one waits. So He says to the believer, Make Haste! Get Ready! For I will come upon you like a thief, Hastily, tachú, since Rapture is the Upgrade and Means of Implementing the ahishennah of Isa60:22! Mark's Gospel uses a synonym, "euthus", usu. mistranslated "immediately". Same idea as tachú, next-in-sequence, can't predict it, and it's Swift when it happens. Because, Mark was writing his Gospel as a result of Paul's (and probably Peter's) death, knowing that the Temple's destruction, was soon to occur. For the traditional warning period for Israel was 40 years, and Mark was probably writing circa 68AD, when Paul was executed by Nero.
Of course, back in 30AD many people around Rome's 'lake', laughed at all this talk of Sudden Return Of The Christ, A Preparing Bride, And The Sudden-Death Nature Of Time Now that He's Seated. After all, that's exactly how their own dramatic plays ended: yeah, we know the god always comes down at the end of the play, deus ex machina, to deliver his clients. Many around Greece's 'lake', smiled too: yeah, that's how we were founded, by a half-god, half-human spawn of that snakegod, Phoebus Apollo: Ion, our venom, our founder!
So everyone laughed at "harpazw" as Bible's "Rapture" term (1Thess 4:17, Greek): it signifies "Rape"! "Thief!" The coming snatch-up. Not at all a nice verb, but not at all unusual. Didn't gods always rape women? Didn't the conquering tribe or nation always get to pillage? In Latin Vulgate of 1Thess4:13(?) the term translates as rapto; hence our English "Rapture". So we moderns think it's something nice, not knowing etymology, as usual. It wasn't nice: it was Violent and Sudden. It was ho-hum though, to the inhabitants of both Med and Aegean. Yawn. Been there, done that: Phoebus raped Creusa, that's how we Greeks got birthed. Zzzzzzzz. Someone's had a little too much wine in the morning.
Uh-oh, God's disappointing His Audience, yet again. But hope never disappoints (Rom5:5). For, Hope (elpis, a central Socratic term denoting absolute Confident Expectation about someone or something Divine, and in the Future: a moniker for Christ in Bible) delivers the Groom into our hearts -- long before the Wedding Day. Specifically, His Thinking kits us out to BE Bride, which is why we don't see Him now (Heb2,4-10, Rom5-8, 1Cor, central theme). So the rest of the audience, laughs at us much like their ancestors laughed at Noah who was so long in building that stupid box-boat. So the audience of the world, booes Him. Oh well. Someone needs a little whine for their mourning.
As a result, others had recalled: oh, wait! The Lord said the Temple would be destroyed before He returned, right? Pump pump pump the heart holds belief a little longer, a little faster. But tachú! Paul is suddenly arrested a second time, and executed by Nero! So then, Book of Hebrews had gone out: Okay, this might be "it", tachú, Grow UP! But then, Nero, gone as well! Hail Caesar, full of gracelessness. So nice to lose a bad poet. Little did anyone know how quickly things would happen, then. For, each of Nero's three successors didn't last but a few months; when only Vespasian remained, everyone breathed a sigh of relief (whew, his troops won't overrun us), and they crowned him.
So you also knew when Time was supposed to end if Messiah succeeded, so you knew how to estimate the Rapture, if God kept to the same timeline as initially planned. For if Messiah had been accepted by Israel, He'd have died 37AD, which was the 4143rd year from Adam's Fall, when God started to number Adam's days; the historical 1050 year ending would have been 4200, which was exactly 57 years later, the 4th 1050 from Adam's Fall. The 57 years represented the sum of Passover plus Pentecost, Firstfruits beginning on the night of the last day of Passover -- so, that represented 7 years 'reimbursement' for Passion week, and 50 more years for the Gentiles to vote (true since Adam, not just with respect to Gentile unbelievers), which took you to the end of time. That would be 94AD in our terms, and that's when the Millennium was supposed to begin. So it was easy to guess the Rapture would rollout seven years prior, in 87AD. Or, more likely, in 70AD, for obviously the cut-short 7 would play from 64-70AD, since a seven in God's accounting is always housed inside a 40-year judgement period. So from 30AD when He did die -- David's 1000th anniversary of retirement from Kingship -- plus another 40, was 70AD. So then you'd expect the Rapture to occur when the Temple was razed, since Daniel 9:26 would not be fulfilled UNTIL the Temple was razed.
So despite the warning the Lord gave the apostles in Acts 1, people anticipated the Rapture based on the old Davidic schedule. It made sense, given that God always likes to be on time. And it could have happened. Paul anticipated it in 1Thess4 and Philippians 3. But it didn't happen, and instead Paul was executed. So Jude, Peter, Book of Hebrews and Mark's Gospel went out because Jerusalem's siege got stepped up. Then the Temple was gone. No Rapture. No one grew enough. Now maybe you see better why, and why our penchant today for dating the Rapture, has a long history originating in the first two generations, post-Cross: we want prophecy to titillate us, not Word to grow us.
The purpose of prophecy is to tell you what time it is. And time, was up. So no more prophecy. Instead, Learn Word. We didn't. So Now, God has to resort to a Stronger Warning Method, same Policy as Leviticus 26. And that method, will continue to 'play' the theme in Daniel 9:26c, with wars and desolations dominating the Land Which Lost its Temple, Until Messiah Returns at the Second Advent. Now updated, with a Rapture occurring seven years prior, which no one can date. We didn't listen to Him when He told us when He would come. We didn't listen to Him when He told us He would come again. So now, we need Daniel 9:26c to be advertised, daily. That's what 'time' it is, the Times of the Gentiles, Rapture is tachú!
Greek word "archegos" means founder, originator, author, even prototype. The first and ruling one, thing, idea from which all the rest, comes. This term is used of the Lord in Hebrews 12:2, and that verse uses a marathon footrace metaphor (you can't see it in English), paralleling His life with our own marathon footrace (in Heb12:1, also not visible in English). Idea is, we get the race, because He first ran it. As my pastor likes to explain, He tested and proved successful the spiritual life He invented while down here, analogous to a successful submarine hull's staying intact at 100000 fathoms; so we can certainly be submerged by life's problems, at a mere 2000 fathoms. So too, with "tribulation": the Lord's Tribulation on the Cross, was by far the worst, and had to be, since He basically paid the present value of the cost of all souled creation, either directly or indirectly, lest Father be cheated. So, too, He leaves behind a copybook (Petrine term, hupogrammos), so we Living Stones can be inscribed like Him. Prototype. Progenitor. So to reject Him now, carries a much higher penalty. Before, He hadn't paid. But now, He has. Before, He didn't leave behind a Royal Legacy. But now, He has. By 70AD (and ever since), the world had rejected Him, yet again -- despite all that added proof, written Canon. So how can God 'talk' to a world which still rejected Him, yet point Him out at the same time, to save or spiritually grow, whoever will respond? Takes more drastic measures, now. So, just as in Matt22's parable -- you talk parables to negative people and to children -- Send out the servants (us) to all the highways and byways, calling everyone to the Imminent Wedding. Which, being but servants, We Are Sent As God Makes Happen (Our Prototype didn't promote Himself, but let Father and Spirit run that). But of course, like the parable about the vineyard, since they don't accept the Owner's Son, but instead killed Him -- they won't accept His servants, either. How deaf. So next deafen them with what they WILL hear: cataclysms. Drastic measures because drastic surgery is needed to remove so much scar tissue (prolonged negative volition, Bible term for it). Hardening of the arteries, actually: "hardness of heart", in English Bibles. Arteriosclerosis of reason.
For Europeans didn't write this Book. GOD wrote this Book. Using, descendents of Noah. Of whom, we all are. "Noah" means rest, relaxation, repose, and that's the whole Purpose of Learning This Book: to Rest in Him. Him, The Second Noah, Christ, the Author of our Salvation: and we all died in Him (Romans 6). ALL, Greek word "pas" (pronounced pahss), used in the plural as a substantive (=noun), which means: "all items/people without exception." So, then: All Mankind Can Be Saved. So God isn't the God of the Jews only, as Paul repeatedly explained. God is the God of everyone. Without exception. So anyone without exception can believe in Him and become Body of Christ. No longer separated by stupid and meaningless barriers such as race, culture, religion or gender; but One In Him. The One who Paid for it all. Real God, Really Got Paid. Real God, really saves you, that first nanosecond you first believed Christ paid for all your sins. In that first nanosecond, you married Him. Whether you know it, or not. So, for all those who still scoff at Him and invent truly stupid excuses based on their tribal, racial, or cultural backgrounds, like, oh, we have a god who is as good as your god -- just like the inane excuses people make in the Matt22 parable to refuse the wedding invitation -- well, they need pretty drastic surgery, since obviously they think God is just a dog, to be owned by a particular people! But the believers who reject Him -- usually pretending to love Him no less -- shall they be less punished? Oh no -- but more punished! Because the cost had been, our sins. But Now, the Cost is the Son Himself. God raised the bar on cost of salvation, didn't lower it: The Payment Is Continually Living, Now -- That's What His Resurrection Power Signifies. Thinking paid for sins, main point of Isaiah 53 (runs from 52:13-53:12 in Hebrew samex markings). So the Payor must live forever, since hell lasts forever too. Sinning goes on forever. So Counter-Thinking must go on forever. That way, those who are still sinning, are countered by those thinking Divine Thoughts, and thus those who go on sinning can still be SAVED. Christ paid so this counter-thinking can continue, not merely to pay the present value of all sin: Father should be given pleasing thought; what else can a finite person, give God Who Needs Nothing? So, hell does not ever compensate God, it's an ongoing COST. Hence, nothing in the Bible says demons and unbelievers are forced to stay in hell (Lake of Fire, eventually). Luke 16:20ff shows you the guy in Hades, loves staying in hell. Loves priding himself on what a victim he is. 2Pet3:9 tells you that God is never willing that any should perish. Never, is never. Not maybe, not sometimes, not eventually, but NEVER. Meanwhile, how else can we become sinless forever ourselves, if His Thinking Which Made Him Sinless, doesn't get into us? There's a reason why God never wants to sin: due to what He Knows. So, if we Learn the Book, we will gradually sin less, and then when we die, we will know what we need to know, to retain free will but yet never sin again. It's not magic, it's Justice. God's. In Christ. For us. For ever. See why God doesn't just bing us and make us little obedient doglike Stepford-spouses? Sure, He's got All Power. It's HOW HE CHOOSES TO USE IT, that's at issue. Justice is How He Chooses, and it's Only Just, if it is FREE. No matter what the Cost. But still, Just that God get Paid, and Payment has to BE Thinking, since what else can pay Holy God? Only His Own Thoughts, are good enough. So, that's what happens when we die: the Bible you learned and lived on down here, goes with you. It's True Capital, from which God can justify BURGEONING your understanding to fit your new eternal status. If you learned no Bible down here, you'll only get a de minimis amount to enable you not to sin again. But what you can do with that, won't be much. Heaven is not an equality, it's a hierarchy of spiritual understanding. And that, leads to a hierarchy of material wealth, to express it. Rich in understanding, rich in material wealth: King of a kingdom, under the King of kings. Else, a happy Royal Peasant forever, take your pick. There's no middle ground. Since in Him, then we merely believe in Him. Finished, is the payment ("with results that go on forever", is the meaning of "tetelestai" in the Greek). Finished, is salvation. Ended, is the enmity. Begun, is The Life Learning How to Live in Him, Since We Died in Him (theme in Romans 6-8, 2Cor5, Col1-3, all of Hebrews). Which means not less but more surgery, Heb4:12. Lifelong surgery, every day. Delicate surgery. Delicate or drastic, surgery means 'tribulation' will occur. For Better and for Worse. For with God, there is no such thing as "divorce". So the Official Tribulation, belongs to its own class; it is briefly defined as the timeline of Daniel 9:27. Therefore, a type of 'syncopated' tribulation begins, because our slowness never makes God slow about keeping His Promised l'moedths, appointments. So He plays it out, syncopated: not exactly the official Tribulation long forewarned and explained in the Old Testament; but rather its underlying trends rhythmically play out -- enough to alert unbelieving Jews and believers everywhere that they, not God, were slow to take up the Promise. Book of Hebrews was the last warning. God stamps history after 70AD with Daniel 9:26c's characteristics; so a) we can better spot where we are in time despite our deafness, and b) we won't confuse the official Tribulation 'owed' the Jews, with the syncopated version assigned between Temple Destruction and Rapture. "Syncopation" is a kind of musical or percussion rhythm which repeats in a discernible patter -- but is never stressed on the exact same beat. It's not always ONE two three, but ONE TWO three, or one TWO three, etc. The stress varies somewhat unpredictably; the number of beats often change, as well (or are variantly chained together). This way, you know a tune is being played, but it's wacky, weird. Unexpected, see. Kinda like California rain, which isn't quite rain, and isn't quite mist, it's a noticeable aberration. Catches your attention. Like those tsunamis did, mimicking what God describes of the Flood, in Gen6. But, for the world of January 2005. What a way to start the year. We should take deep notice. God never plays to our expectations, because then the relationship isn't with Him, but with the expectations. Expectations ruin a relationship, as many a drunken divorced person, will gladly explain. So God has to get our attention if we aren't listening to Him, and He uses both time and weather, to do it. The aberration from our expectation of time, of weather, can only be superhumanly explained. We well know man can't manipulate either time or weather; so naturally we are motivated to look UP when either one, seems out of kilter. Weather, since it is not manmade, attracts our attention, and every culture ever on this planet attributes weather (correctly) to God's Direct Action. (God runs the weather via angels and via direct control, in order to communicate His pleasure/displeasure to mankind -- hundreds of verses on that. No auto-pilot inanimate forces run the universe, k? See Gen1 for a refresher course on how directly God handles the universe -- Gen1:2, mother hen, the Holy Spirit (in Hebrew).) So we "get it" about God when some huge thing happens which we know man couldn't control. So, "tribulation" involves huge things, since the 'small voice' of the Spirit (1Kings19:12), is going unheeded. So He plays Lev26, Deut28, Gen6, Exodus -- via Huge Things. It's all in writing, so we can see play what the Writings warn. And know there is a connection. It's not rocket science. And the message is always the same: Wake Up Wake Up Wake Up and smell the sweet savor of your Savior's Thinking. As the Lord puts it in the Greek of Revelation (a refrain), if you reject the machaira (Heb4:12, "knife", short Roman sword), you'll get the Romphaia (big Gentile-style broadsword which hacks you to pieces). Word or war. Your choice.
| ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
So let's look into how Christians Stopped Wanting The Spiritual Life Christ Wrought, Once the Temple was Destroyed: for, every generation of Christians since 70AD has the selfsame disease. To understand today, you have to look at yesterday, since human nature is the same in 2007, as it was, back in 70AD. Notice that: Christians are to blame, not the unbelievers. If you finish all of Part IV's a-d, you'll have a clear idea, why. Indeed, to whom much is given -- us Church! -- all is expected. Without exception.
So how do we know these folks just waited for the Rapture, and didn't learn anything about God, and were disappointed in Him from 70AD onward? Well, the Biblical science of "textual criticism" uses language and isagogical quirks in the writing, to date authorship times. So from those quirks, you can tell there's a hiatus in the "Writings" (Bible's name for Bible in Bible). Peter, Jude, and John's epistles are very different in tone and content, largely Pointing Backwards (with the exception of Revelation), rather than forwards. Depicted below is a table with more-probable dates of the New Testament Books. PopeMyth.htm has the same table; in it I listed Scofield Reference Bible's dates, but here they are somewhat corrected, and will be refined further when I find my notes. Left-aligned dates are for the Pauline books. Red denotes post-Paul.
So here's what we know:
| ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
But we Christians began falling away, right away. Even in the OT (and in Judaism today), everyone knew that having the DABAR (the Word) in your heart was The Highest Spirituality; hence the tfellin, to remind you to wrap the Word around your thinking. So how is it, that a decade or two after the Crucifixion, people lapsed into works? Book of James (Judah, his real name, the Lord's oldest half-brother) was written to redress this lapse; it is one of the earliest NT books. James was murdered by Christians and Jews(!) soon after Paul was shipped in chains to Rome, partly due to his longtime support of Paul, but the Book of James looks like it was written maybe 10 years earlier.
Video demonstrating live exegesis of James 1 and 2, with a color-coded Word doc, here: So when large numbers of folks are age 50 chronologically but age 5 spiritually, there's no excuse: people don't care about What God Actually Says, or they'd not ARrest in spiritual childhood. Children care only about what makes ego feel good, because they feel small. That's the "natural" man's thinking (1Cor2): it's foolish to the natural man, to say he can't do anything which "counts" toward God. It counts as far as he's concerned, so dadgummit, God admires it also! So, people pretend to obey God, but the 'god' is their emotions, Phili3:18-19. That was the problem among believers when Paul was weeping over it, while under house arrest in Rome (when he wrote Philippians). Again, we should take deep notice. And we notice that we don't take deep notice or even teeny-weeny notice, lol. For Every Generation Is Just Like the Generation of 70AD: puerile. So God's percussion of disaster, the thlipses on personal/national/regional levels, must keep on playing the Lev26 and Rev6 'tunes'. Trying desperately to beat into our dull skulls (Heb5:11,6:11-12, blazing nothros sarcasm), so we might turn and be healed. That's why hell exists. That's why life is hellish down here, too. For "God is not willing that anyone should perish", 2Pet3:9. We're the ones slow-on-the-uptake. So He'll keep beating the eardrums. [Part V deals with soul cancer and the official Tribulation in more detail, first half of webpage.] |
So [sigh, here] by the 90's AD, one generation into the syncopated, prototype tribulation, Christians were soooo tired. Read Revelation 1-3, which chapters were composed circa 96AD. Note also that during the 90's AD, the "Church Fathers" arose and via their prolific writings, morphed Christianity out of all resemblance to the real Bible. Read their stuff carefully, note how Pharisaical and goofy most of it is, straining at gnats but swallowing camels. Instead of studying Scripture, they were trying to 'reconcile' it with pagan culture (!), apologizing, for crying out loud, defending the faith! (Yeah, God is weak, see, so needs human defense, lol.) Pure garbage, high on their own holy-sounding tones, learning nothing from Bible. It's pathetic. Or, they're out chasing who THEY consider heretics -- sure sign of apostacy -- writing tracts and all manner of humanistic claptrap, as if it were 'wisdom'; getting involved in politics, telling everyone else how to live their lives; or, contemplating their navels and calling themselves 'holy' due to their isolation. Their writings prove they didn't know God101, even though many of them were allegedly fluent in Greek and Hebrew, and had the original-language texts. I mean, the 'esteemed' Origen concluded that the Son is subordinate in power to Father? Did he never read 2Cor13:14 or any part of the OT, nor any of Hebrews 1-2,11:1 nor any of Romans or that quintessential passage on the Son's Equality, Phili2:5-10? Maybe he had a different Bible than mine. To think that Western Civilization was built on these dolts. Gibbon's indictment of the early Church is scathing, but once you read these guys in their own words? Gibbon is too tame! So if these guys so messed up, how much more, will I? So it's scary, what negative volition can do to a once-sane, person! See for yourself: Click here to access a site which offers some of their writings online. To see what kind of nonsense the Early Church saw fit to circulate, Click here and peruse Eusebius and Hegesippus' story on James' martyrdom! Yeah, we learn from history that we don't learn a dang thing.
With each passing century they became weirder and weirder. By 300AD, they didn't even know what God-man meant, nor Trinity: so had to convene bleeping councils, to figure it out! So blind were they to the Word, that "councils" was a good idea! Do you see God ever convene a council to authorize explanation of His Nature? No! And yet in history books these folks are honored? Sheesh. What historians call the "golden age" of the Church Fathers used to be known more accurately as The Dark Ages. Yeah, Scripture was midnight to them, 1Jn1:6, so the world had no light, either. Come on! "Good Friday" was invented by these idiots. Um, Friday to Sunday isn't three days and three nights, k? They couldn't read Bible if it BIT them! So, it did!
Note that: councils, rather than GOD's Command to use 1Jn1:9 and studying Bible to find the answer, 2Pet3:18 (in context). God didn't matter, lol, but humans and their overinflated egoes! Just after the Pentecost, the church began in people's homes; there was always a teacher, and no one needed a pontiff: our King was Seated in Heaven. But oh! All that changed, and man's assuming power In God's Name over man, became preferred! How do we know? Because, by the 200's AD, no one could read the Bible in Greek anymore. Because, No One Kept Up The Teaching Of Its Greek. A lapse which began, back in the 90's AD. We preferred "Church Fathers" to The Father Of The Son Whose Thinking Is Written In That Book. Which was designed for anyone to learn, under no ecumenical Rev17 harlot, but under a local teacher. Hand-picked by none other than the Holy Spirit, Himself. But by the 90's AD, we were like Israel, wanting human replacements for God's Grand and Royal Training. So, we became peasants, unable to even read the Book. We replaced the gorgeous husbanding of Eph4:11-16 with trailer trash. [Eph4:11-16 is always horribly translated in any Bible language I can read (Spanish, French, Italian, English, Portuguese, sometimes German). See either the Greek exegesis of Eph41216.htm or RightPT.htm's "short" or "working" translation links if you prefer.] Who dressed themselves up in the exact same colors as the Rev17 harlot. But we didn't get that obvious hint. We didn't get anything. Dumb beasts we, ridden now by politicized religion. By Satan&Co. Fancying ourselves holy, of course.
God is Grace, though: He used these incredibly-inane councils To Gather Scripture. That way, maybe the folks would wake up to the fact that It's the Bible, stupid. [God didn't need man's help to preserve Scripture; God doesn't need man's help in identifying which of the many books out there, are God's, or counterfeit. Man shows his extreme and horrifying arrogance when he claims that he himself preserved the Word or he himself decided what's God's and what's not, or he himself tells us what's right or wrong interpretation. God does all that; so God appoints teachers Himself, just as He had appointed Paul on the Damascus Road. No pontiffs, no more apostles, no middlemen. Eph4:11-16 couldn't be clearer, in the Greek.]
AVOID THE TRAP KEY → Faith in Christ has within it an implicit desire for, and recognition of, authority. Authority is a wonderful thing, like morality is a wonderful thing. To learn proper rule -- whether you exercise it, or exercise obedience under it -- is the greatest prosperity of being human. So much Freedom is gained once one has and is under, proper rule, because all the pieces of life thus FIT, so you are free to have them all with minimal compromise. People instinctively know this, so they seek to be under authority, as much as they seek to exercise it. So Satan can and does use both authority and morality, to trap us: they are his most potent weapons. Oh, how well he succeeded here in the first century, where the most INSANE ideas prevalent today, were all born.
FAST-FORWARD: Just like today, every other faith got warm respect and welcome, all the nice politenesses. But the Christian, gets only accusations. TV programs revile Christianity constantly and in every fashion. Granted, we Christians are mostly still in our spiritual diapers, and there is much ridicule due. But you'd never see the respect given to Moslems who get upset over the exercise of free speech, given to the Christians. Never has been, never will be. Like the Jew, the Christian must be reviled: because his God is the Real God, principle of Isa52:14, writ large, and over history. Ken mishhat me-ish -- battered beyond human semblance. Wa toaro me bene adam -- Incarnation, yet Beyond Human, Born from man to Save man. And so, the Redeemer and all who belong to Him are always Reviled, 1Jn3:13,4:8, 17. For Grace is forever ugly, to the ugly.
The proof of the story, was the very Book of This God, which is why Christianity spread like wildfire after the Crucifixion. People could read why what happened DID happen, and that it was long explained beforehand. Miracles can be claimed by anyone, but this God had this Book which made SENSE. So even if you didn't see the miracles claimed, the Book Itself Was Provably But Sensibly Miraculous. No other holy book was like that (even until today). You could Take the Material IN the Book, compare it with whatever you were told, and VALIDATE. What holy book, ever did such a thing? For the Bible Mandates You Validate Using It, And Mandates That You Test It. Idea is, it tests you, and you test with it, and you test IT. [See Paul's witty Greek wordplay in Romans 12:1-3, esp.v. 2. Rom121-3.htm translates the passage, since all translations I can read are mangled.] Because, you are to Learn To Think with it. Because, miracles of themselves aren't important, but rather the Lesson From Them. Because, you are to learn to THINK.
Here's a Heads-Up:
So you are meant to test Bible and prove it all, even commanded to do so; because, Bible IS so specific. Because, you are supposed to learn it. Because, learning it teaches you how to Think Like God Does, So You Can Know God And His Will. So that's why you have to test IT, to Make Sure You Are Interpreting It Properly. That's why you have it. Of course, if you don't learn it, you won't see a thing. And if you can't see, then Bible looks any other holy book.
Most of all, the Character Of God revealed in Scripture is unlike any other holy book. Try this experiment with any other holy book: strip out the flowery-i-love-you's, mystical vocabulary, and Delphic vagueness. What's left? A 'picture' of 'god' which is cruel and capricious, deriding all who believe in the holy book portraying him. For there is no surety about your afterlife: it's vague. Sounds like you have to do things your whole life, and maybe in your next life you'll be better off. MAYBE. Screw up, and you definitely will be hurt, though that's vague, too. The more cruel among these fake-god books tell you that you must keep coming back to this dirtball in one living format or another, and you MAYBE can break free of that after thousands upon thousands of years. Or, you break free if you do something spectacularly noble (but silly) and sacrificial: say, if you starve or torch yourself in public (popular ideas, even back before Alexander's time). In all events, you have to really work at it, and well, maybe it will work. How cruel.
And derisive, for the afterlife these books sell is kinda hot, going by the usual descriptions. Here the most clever wordplay is employed. True genius. Like,
But in Scripture, God Gets Paid. And you're Told Why. And you're told what He wants to do, is spend it on you, just as He spent your sins on Christ; because He didn't need to be paid, but it was only Just to be paid; that because He's Infinite and you're not, well that's a Medical Problem and a Legal Problem. Which He can fix, but He won't coerce. Medical Problem: you don't have His Nature, and the one you have, is all trashed up by sin. Legal Problem: you must CONSENT to Him fixing you. That fixing, is called salvation; and it's instantaneous, happening the very second you first 'do' John 3:16, Believe Christ paid for your sins. That's it. No baptism, no rituals, not i'm-sorry junk. Ok, then what next? Well, your soul still has free will, so maybe you want a say in how much more than salvation, God should do to you. That's why you have This Here Book. To choose to learn it, means God the Holy Spirit will change your soul to match the Son's, line by line, precept upon precept, decision upon yes-vote-decision-to-learn-and-live-on-The-Book's-principles, that you make. Notice it's a personal relationship, just between God and you. You get a teacher, but it's a personal crafting in your soul, what you choose to learn and live on. Not, some religion. Now you know why you didn't immediately go to Heaven that first nanosecond you believed in Christ.
Pretty powerful message, and not too hard to understand, either. Ok: God is too big, but He can make me compatible. That's a medical problem. I am a person with the indestructible power of consent, so He being the God of Authority, Honors Consent. Will not violate it. Ok, and if I consent, I am 'saved'. Then, made more like Him, since He's Omnipotent and He can do that. Via learning His Thinking. Ok, makes sense.
Similarly, Hinduism was initially animism, so 'godness' was this abstract thing; unlike Buddhism, Hinduism's 'All' played out as gods MANIFESTED, most often in animal form. Post-Cross, this "avatar" idea got upgraded, too: principally, by adding "one to COME", who'd usher in a permanent prosperity, and He was Human. Moreover, the entire concept of godness became a oneness of PERSON; amorous, no longer amorphous. Just as had happened to Buddhism.
To be sure, the idea of Absolute God had already been around a long time; after all, Elohim created the angels, adopted them and gave them His Last Name, such that they were bene ha-elohim, the stars of God. So to be sure, as that story was told around the world throughout man's existence, some of the story morphed; some groups just truncated the bene-ha-elohim, and those were the gods; the promise of their being Grown Up To Be Like the Most High made for an eventual transformation, too. Aha.
To be sure, these syncretic faiths easily incorporated into their beliefs whatever was in the periphery. So within the century of the Crucifixion they emphasized: 1) a savior-helper, and 2) an underlying Oneness to godness, thus chucking centuries of polytheism. What used to be a loosey-goosey confederation of deities/supercreatures, with 'oneness' always lurking around somewhere, tightened up to eliminate the idea that there were ever multiple gods, in the first place. Sheesh. Everyone had to have a monotheistic, Second Coming tenet in their faiths, now! What a pain.
Historically, you can find many examples of such opportunistic changes since time immemorial, so this morphing was nothing new. Most notable, was the 'vision' (and god-change) promoted by Thutmosis IV, younger son and heir of Amenhotep II after the latter died (either in or as a consequence of, the Exodus). This change simultaneously repudiated Amenhotep's patron deities, and adopted the Hatshepsut patrons, to keep peace (in the name of placating the gods, but it was the society who was being appeased). Each Pharaoh after him likewise had to follow that precedence, and with devastating ramifications. Building on the 'vision' that Hatshepsut claimed when she claimed Moses her own, each Pharaoh had to mix the Hebrew-God ideas with local deities; or, like the Tutankamens, abandon the former altogether, 'returning' to the old gods under whom Egypt became great. It didn't work. The 18th dynasty died just like the 12th one had. Past is prologue.
The closest parallel we moderns have, is our shivering or angry awareness of terrorism. No one can stay neutral to it. It's now the policy of the United States to not befriend anyone who favors terrorism (replacing the Monroe Doctrine, in a way). Well, then no nation or its people, however they truly feel about the terrorists, will BE neutral. Gauntlet is thrown down. Same now, as then. Today, of course, we can easily leave traces behind of our history. Back in the Lord's day, given the explosive potential of civil wars, you'd have a whole bunch of folks seeking to cover up the impact His Coming had, try to play it down; hence, a massive and skilled coverup which makes the other coverups like massive deletions in Talmud during the Middle Ages, Hitler's concentration camps, Stalin's persecution of kulaks, Saddam's sold-to-the-highest-bidder WMDs, Watergate, Enron or Worldcom seem amateurish.
It's A Matter Of Political Survival: if they don't morph their religions, cultures; if they don't cover up His Advent smartly, Then People Will Know! So civil war remains a threat. Elites must cover up whatever threatens their power. It's not always a greed thing. Some rival and popular idea, ruler, religion invites voting feet. Voting feet means chaos. Voting feet means loss of revenue. Voting feet means the very survival of the group, can be lost. Same problem as the Sanhedrin had while Christ was still alive and visible; but now, the whole world inherits the same problem, due to His Crucifixion. So the very problem the Sanhedrin meant to solve by means of His Crucifixion, instead expanded geographically. The world's elites therefore had to offer something of like attractiveness. Pogroms and other oppressions, wouldn't suffice.
Of course, the lie that Peter was ever a Pope, ever even in Rome, much less buried there, is covered up blithely by the Catholic Church. You can prove that claim a lie so easily, it's embarrassing: see PopeMyth.htm.
So past is prologue, and present is what happens when the past comes to pass, yet again. We learn from history that we learn nothing from history. Shenayim!
Those who win in history get to rewrite history in their favor; and in the case of Messiah, the anti-God forces will win. So they burn, cover, hide, what doesn't make them look good. And it makes no one look good, to reject all this fulfilled prophecy about Messiah. Moreover, there are plenty of altruistic reasons to justify the coverup, and every country had a doozie: to Keep The Peace. Antiochus Epiphanes wanted to destroy Israel for that reason; the Arabs sweet-talk the same idea today to everyone (yet talk quite differently, in Arabic). Peace in the Middle East will be here when Israel's gone.
So the Book has been assiduously sought, in order to destroy it; so to destroy any Basis for Faith in this Messiah. That's why only three known copies of the Masoretic text survive even today. Antiochus baby had a lot to do with that, confiscating every OT he could lay his hands on about 160-some years before Christ came here. It's been going on ceaselessly, ever since. Only the tactics, have changed (now Bible is hidden via bad translation). Understand, this isn't a human conspiracy. But humans do have their reasons for participating in parts of the conspiracy, and they don't see the fit of the overall historical conspiracy over the centuries. But Satan&Co., who manage this conspiracy, sure do. And -- I guess to make it fun -- they leave all kinds of Very Large Hints that they, not mankind, are behind all this (see Appendix). So much has been done to wipe out evidence of this Messiah in the interests of keeping the peace, history sometimes has to be torn in pieces.
Trouble is, they didn't manage to wipe out the evidence. Instead, they corroborated it, by proving they covered up. For, when anyone tries to cover up a vast occurrence, no one can succeed at covering up its language; so since all that's left are traces in the language and literature, you know there has been a massive coverup. Which, you trace like you do DNA: looking for markers in literature, belief, histories regarded as myths, etc. (Use the same process, when tracing out mistranslations of Bible.) So too, the usage of words Biblically, leaves its markers in every culture. Which usage, is at variance with other cultural norms. [A real good example is how Christ is portrayed in the Koran as the Faultless One -- versus Mohammed, who is portrayed as a sinner -- yet Christ only plays John the Baptist, to Mohammed? And yet Christ magically doesn't die AT ALL.. and has a Second Coming in His Same Body? This is Islamic teaching about Him. Harunyahya.com, a Moslem site which is apparently respected, has CDs you can buy on it, and books you can download. See also the Mary sura, and the At-Tariq sura.]
The modern Navajo have their own creation stories: man is made by the Great Spirit from the red earth, Who Breathed His Spirit into him. Very much like the old Anasazi stories, about how man comes up from the ground, some versions (where the spirits come up from below the ground).
So there are three common morphings which characterize worldwide religions from the first century AD forward:
So to keep their own adherents, they had to redefine Bible's essentially Tri-Theistic presentation of Identical, Co-Equal Infinite Essence in Three Unique Gods (e.g., via use of "He" and articles in 2Cor13:14) -- into monotheism: just ONE Person being God and labelling all other ideas, heresy. In addition, they face the impossible task of recasting witty Bible terms like "echad" and "monos", which each mean "unique", and "united": signifying that They plural! Each Unique, Voluntarily Unite As A Corporation -- signified by "Elohim", last name, plural, collective noun, viz Gen1:26-27, 3:22 (not "like", but "out from") -- due to Love. For it was JEWS who wrote the Greek OT, and mostly Jews who wrote the NT, showing how those witty meanings IN the OT, were all Fulfilled As Promised. Validating the proper definition of the Jewish God for all Time. So here the non-believing Jews are, faced with Total Vindication of Their Holy Writ -- in need of debunking it. Not a happy position to be in!
The Jews would face the ultimately-impossible task of morphing "God" into Only One Person -- so to eliminate That Christ, being God. Sure, the Pharisees finally succeeded in killing Him; but oy, now what a problem! He Resurrected! Promises of the Brass Serpent, and The One Who Will See No Decay, all over the OT! [Ps16:10, Ps49:9, Acts 2:27-31, 13:37] Worse, the rabbinical schools could find endless other problems with such a stupid 'oneness' morphing of Bible's doctrine, even logically and juridically. So the internal arguments raged among Judaism's more-established sects (Pharisees, Saducees, etc). The hundred-or-so Judaic sects in the world today sprang from arguments like those dramatized in the bullets below, which splintered them. [The typical Christian barely knows of the top three, which are Conservative, Reform, Orthodox. But there are the Hassidim, Sephardim, Kabbalah crowd (with many subsects that argue against each other), Tzadokites, Ebionites, etc. You can find many of them on the web; you'll find many Jewish sects believe Jesus Christ is Messiah (they call Him Yeshua, His Name in Hebrew (translated "Iesous" in Greek and hence "Jesus" in English); but they vary over how much of the New Testament they also consider Divine Writ. Much of the dramatized bullets below are sketched from their sectarian differences. Judaism, like Christianity, has never been monolithic. The minute Moses was appointed by God -- Who DISinherited all the Levites, in favor of him and Aaron, and then gifted the entire tribe TO Aaron -- the rifts and sectarianism began. God really likes being politically incorrect. See "Jochebed" link in MisTrans.htm, if you want more info on that appointment.]
Yikes! Everyone knows that verse is a typical min preposition wordplay on Messiah-to-Come, being Born "out from" the Holy Spirit, v.11 (qereb at ruach), even as His Humanity would be borne out from Israel who the Spirit led out from the 'womb' of the Exodus! Not to mention, the nine verses connected with v.16, using the same Fathering concept! Not to mention, all of Isa53-55, which use that same Fathering concept to describe our salvation! Boy zhamoy. Feh Feh Feh. Can we just hide the Writings and hope no one will notice?
It wasn't that they wanted to cover up "God", but rather they wanted to buy time, get the people back together and then figure out a way to educate them. So, it took time to work out what to do. Some years later, they finally did. Hence the Talmud. Hence the retooling of time, after the Temple was destroyed. They decided to call the period the goyim would come to call AD, "the Common Era", for in their morphing to unify after the Temple's Destruction, they came up with a new doctrine that God had transcended the Law to a new 'common' phase, so that the Temple and the sacrifices were no longer needed. "Common", of course, means "times of the Gentiles".
Which, of course, was true: Book of Hebrews was written to Jews and Gentiles in Israel, shortly before the Temple's Destruction, about the time of Paul's execution by Nero -- to warn everyone to grow up or get out -- and it explained why and what about the Law, was now made obsolete.
How right James was when in his Book he counselled that not many should seek to be teachers. What a responsibility. What "double discipline" (my pastor's term) accrues to the teachers who distort His Word! What fear anyone should have, when representing that Book!
The devastation among Jews was total, in 70AD; the seige on the outside, the horrors Josephus recounted, were but dinky compared to the inner upset. For every Jew knew the Book. It was part of his very breathing, just as Moses ordered. The first time the Temple was destroyed, it was largely due to Israel's pursuit of phallic-style religions. But the second time, whoa -- Israel had gone way overboard in punctiliar observance. So think: here you are, a devout Jew, being very careful to obey the Law and then, poof! The Temple is gone? After all my careful obedience? For seeing the Law, they held it too closely, became rotelike, comprehending nothing. So God had to give them some distance. To think. To wake up and see Daniel 9:26 right before their eyes. Since they didn't, couldn't accept the Messiah when He came. And the Dome of the Rock keeps on witnessing to Daniel 9:26c. Mutely testifying to the devastation that began on the inside, as a result of the Crucifixion.
Judaism has never recovered from it. And won't. Not until He returns, to properly regather His Own, just as He has always promised (see Rom9,11). [Meanwhile, bet your life that there flourishes in many little pockets a remnant of different sects of Jews who, like their forebears, do believe in Yeshua HaMaschiach. They aren't loud, they aren't flashy, they are part of Church because they believed in Him, and They Are Still Jews, yet in the Higher Church Covenant; and they will be shouting with joy at the Bema along with us bleeping goyim, Gal3 (no racial distinctions in Christ, so no racial barriers, either). God keeps His Promises!]
Yes! Three Becomes One! First, the Problem: what we Christians would later come to call the doctrine of the Trinity was so well-known by the Jews,
Satan really feels for these guys. So he puts on his thinking cap. So, lessee. How about, we just restrict the thought about the meaning of "one" to one person, as if Infinity were limited and spatial, 'wholeness' can't exist unless one entity. But the Pharisees, who keep mulling over this suggestion, not knowing Satan's behind it, are understandably despondent, and their ruminations begin again. Oy, such a headache! Hmmm. despite all the other Bible uses of echad for unitedness (or heis, its Greek), not to mention how the Each of Them is separately designated God, like in Isa 63:9-18. Or, failing that -- oomph -- since after all it's Painfully Obvious "God" Is A Collective Noun, Denoting Three Independent Persons -- oomph -- we can't fix this. We'll just have to be pious and deny it, hoping no one will notice how incompetent, is our coverup. Satan tries again. Aha! Wait! Suppose ya truncate "God" into a hydra-headed Scylla, no one 'head' being really alive on its own -- yeah, like the beast of Daniel, hooray! Oh, yeah, and have the Christians call it, "Three in One! and make it a mystery, the name for Church, how God can really be a whole Person, Alone! Oh: and make it heretical to disbelieve they are separate whole Persons! Heh. So he can confuse both Christians and Jews so much, they'll kill each other! Yeah, Satan's not stupid. He got to work on both Jews and Christians, right away. "God" is this EGG, see... Whew. Satan saved the day. And so they all lived happily ever after, the Jews with their One-Person-Revision despite that even today "Echad" means "United" as in "United Nations". Oh: and the Christians are happy too, with their Mystery Egg, which is somehow Three Persons, Yet no One of Them whole as God on His Own? Yeah, God is just a good ol' Egg..
The Jews of his day who kept peppering Mohammed with questions -- so that 'Gabriel' had to dedicate several Suras to them -- the Jews alongside Mohammed were very contented with his replies. Guess they didn't notice that the Cow sura turned the red heifer into a golden calf, that the Koran STILL claimed Abraham sacrificed Isaac, never Ishmael (Sura As-Saafat, 37:83-113). But then, the Koran never says that Ishmael was the rightful heir, either -- the Jews still have their inheritance, Allah has something different for those who Surrender to him -- so maybe the Jews were mollified. Precisely what the Surrenderers were to get as their inheritance, the Koran wouldn't say. Allah knows. Allah merely promises shade in "Paradise" beneath the earth after one dies IF you obey the Koran; which is where all shades go, as everyone knows from 5th-century BC Greek lit: Hades, aka "Hell". But by Mohammed's time, the OT prophecies of the Ascension, Messiah taking everyone out of Paradise (see Eph4:8-9), had been fulfilled for six centuries. So Paradise was EMPTY, in Mohammed's day. No shade in it, but rather IT WAS DARK -- well, that's a kind of 'shade', huh. So "in Paradise there is shade", is quite true! But notice: lots of shades roasting OUTSIDE it in 'Torments', though (see Luke 16:20ff). That's why they can SEE but not be in, that Paradise where there is shade... "Allah", as any good Muslim will tell you, doesn't mean "God". That's true: it's a Hebrew term for the rising of smoke from an offering. So comes to mean ascending. As in Isa14:14. But no one seemed inclined to make that Most Obvious Connection, though "ala" is one of the most important Hebrew words IN the Bible, a preposition of ASCENT. So if "Allah" really means ascending, well then "Allah" isn't yet on high..right? Ooops. For sure that blooper wasn't Mohammed's fault. The guy was just an honest young man who had no familiarity with Scripture. But his Jewish hearers should have known better. Guess people got sleepy, when hearing Mohammed explain his visions, or when reading that name in the Koran. For centuries. So of course who raised an eyebrow, when the Koran said how this Allah would be diminished if He had partners? Who asked, So, um -- wouldn't Allah be MORE diminished, if He created other beings? More Diminished, if sharing this message with a Mohammed, rather than simply announcing the Message with .. skywriting? Oh well. Yeah, so "God" must be diminished to.. an Egg. Something you eat. Something which never becomes alive. Coming from a chicken brain which can't understand John 17, 2Cor13:14. So what was the proper Trinitarian Jewish view, could nicely become but mere Hindu 'manifestations' of One God. No one manifestation was the whole of Him. For eggheads. So back in that first century AD, the "Way" also having splintered mostly due to Paul, finally decided that amidst all the persecution, they better find a way to stick together. So, by the end of that first century, what had been the Jerusalem faction of believers, gained dominance; and from their loins would be fashioned, political religion. And the world would never be the same again: Rev17 began right on time, just as God had John warn them. |
Naturally, during that first tumultous century AD, people around the world largely found all these changes in their long-cherished beliefs, extremely upsetting. Gimme that good ol' time religion! Out of that upheaval, many others saw opportunity for yet more variations -- and profit. Profit means trade, and trade means travel, so that first century saw a huge upswing in travel. The normally ever-mobile populations (great way to keep safe), now enboldened by the peace of Rome, travelled like never before. (It's no coincidence that the Mohawk, certain Hawaiian headgear, and the Roman helmets, have so much in common. It's no coincidence that Mayan and other Latin American temples remind one of ziggurats.)
So, new faiths sprang up like weeds, especially based on some kind of Redeemer claim, and a lot of money was easily um, obtained thereby. Oh, so popular the tale! Just as foretold by Christ, and in Paul's letters to the Thessalonians, messiahs started popping up everywhere. Anyone who had a grudge against entrenched authority, claimed himself a messiah returned, to make his bid for power. Polities would soon be at risk, so governmental persecution soon became the usual reaction. It was as if the First Advent, hadn't completed.
By Domitian's day, Christians were so UNpopular, there were mime plays mocking their beliefs and rituals. Tableaus of their ridiculous meglomania of god sacrificing himself for them! Oh how sacreligious! How against the Roman mindset of inclusiveness! All The Gods Share Power. How DARE any of them not reciprocate honor to another! How dare one of them claim to be the only true god! Why, such effrontery goes against every tenet of Roman culture! And it's Rome who is headed by a god, not some dusty little backwater country every soldier yearned to avoid, and every politician, considered a penal tour!
Coupled with the rampant upheaval among those having diplomatic connections with Rome, the pressure on the Emperor to do something about this "Way", these Christians (an epithet!), became intense. You, oh Caesar, are the Imperator of the very realm which spawned these people. Surely it will be a significant statement if you teach them a little discipline.
What was most obnoxious about these bleeping Christians, even as their Jewish 'parents', was their utter Faith. Granted, they were goofy, and goofiness in the name of a god was accepted on the grounds that you thus demeaned yourself -- say, by torching yourself in the street to atone or show the god love, a common practice Romans and Greeks alike even admired -- but these people! had the colossal gall to denigrate any faith but their own! So who could say what they might do? Of course they had to be taught a lesson. But -- careful now, don't want to so alienate them that, well Claudius had been promoted by the praetorian guard, and Nero would have been murdered by them if he didn't beat them to the punch. And of course the Guard really liked that Paulus, and were very upset with Nero for executing him. Hmmm, show a little of that Roman inclusiveness, just banish this guy whom the Christians say saw their Chrestus or whoever he was. So what was a good Emperor to do? Round Them Up! Tachú!
There on Patmos, a rock really, some shrubs -- there on Patmos, hardly big enough to sustain its paltry wildlife, let alone a people -- there The PetraRock told one of His Living Stones, the rest of history: aka hey Apokalupsis, the UnVeiling, the Revelation of Jesus the Christ. In mime. With a narrator/ chorus, sometimes played by the one on Patmos, not in the play, relating the mime. A Burlesqued Mime, this time against those who burlesqued His lambs. The Lamb reviewed His troops on the earth where John actually was, warning them to Get Ready! but Next In Sequence told how "after these things, a Door opened" -- Revelation 4:1 -- and they would be snatched up into the green pastures, to dwell with the Lord forever. Not mere Eleusian fields.
Of course, there is an anti-reflection. As with Malachi, God gives His Church Final Word, because believers on earth are too negative to listen. So the next time they get revelation will be for Judgement, and the Book's contents, will play. Meanwhile the Christians on the earth were already fast succumbing to what John would pen in Rev17: politicized religion of allegedly 'Christian' flavor (denoted by "mystery", a moniker for Church, but this one is fake); equals, the harlot clothed in purple and scarlet, dominating (not merely sitting on) the 'beast', political powers. [The 'beast' is traditionally interpreted to have a head location of Rome, since the seven hills was a famous moniker for Rome and what Rome then represented -- empire -- but at a future time, and in a different configuration versus what it was at the time. Problem is, the angel says, "was and is not" in Rev 17:8; so I wonder if Rome was meant. Rome reached its largest extent under Trajan, later than the "was". I remember my pastor hedging on the location, too. So for webpage purposes I go along with the traditional interp of the location of the beast, but am none too sure. The idea of a "Revived Roman Empire", a 10-nation European confederacy comes from the ASSumption that Rome is meant, in Rev17. But again, Rome WAS an empire at the time John got Revelation, so if the angel says "is not", how can it be Rome? If you interpret "is not" to mean the at the RAPTURE's time, rather than historical time on Patmos, then Rome would have been long dead. Not sure you can read "is not" that way, since it's contemporaneous in Daniel, which uses a parallel idiom. Someday all these issues will be re-examined and my webpages fixed accordingly.]
So Christianity was morphing into a political power, its faith having declined to the level of mere human culture, God long forgotten, but like the Romans did, "God" is piously mouthed to make one receive human approbation. The actual future harlot probably isn't around in Church history, but is only aped or in prototype form, given the angel's comment that this harlot comes from the Abyss: where demons are now locked up, released in Rev9, during the first half of Trib, so that future religion is of demon invention. But since Satan doesn't know when the Rapture will occur, he uses the Rev17 setup now, to trap and prepare. So we are to understand Rev17 as a pattern, a trend which will operate during the time of Church, not a particular denomination. For again, the actual 'denomination' will be the invention of the demon nation which is let out of the Abyss by Satan, in Rev9.
Here's the tragedy which John is about to pen, which had been one of his main themes, five years or so prior: when you stop wanting God, you stop knowing God or you never come to know Him. So of course you'll trash His Word. Doesn't matter how moral you are. Doesn't matter how religious you are. Doesn't matter how right you think your doctrines are. The soul which stops or never starts wanting to know God and thus His Word, blackens. Slowly. So his reading of that Word blackens immediately (Greek words matiotes, skotizw, sklerunw). Thus, history comes to an end with a lot of blackened, hating-God souls, many of them quite moral and religious, shaking their fists at His Coming. Thrice: 1st, Church, Raptured in Rev4:1; then, the Trib people, separated by the Baptism of Fire, Rev 19 (see also Matt24:37-41,Luke17:30-37); then those at the Great White Throne, cast into the Lake of Fire, Rev20:11-15. Scary thing, to not want God. Insane, too. See, it's not a warm fuzzy, Revelation. It's a true future we're warned about. [There's a double-entendre in the Matt24 and Luke 17 passages. We Church don't know when He will come, and the people at the end of Trib don't know when the 2nd Advent actually arrives -- that very day, is in focus. My pastor teaches the Baptism of Fire meaning, but it's also clear the lesson is to warn us about our own 'day' when He arrives to pick us up, given the allusion to Noah. Normal life will go on that day -- and suddenly, cease. Parallelism. Be prepared.]
MORAL: So Play #3 demonstrates that ya either want God, or don't, and all the goodies won't make a bit of difference. So, end with an anti-deus ex machina, the release of Satan&Co., hence that final big war during the last 50-year voting period in history, Rev20:7.
Then, The Judgement, and what a future German would call "Valhalla", last part of Rev20.
Therefore Daniel 9:26's timeline didn't stop at 70AD, since Church is not Israel; Dan9:26 however did specify the Character Of Our Time, which is left 'open' as to length. Because Matt16:18+John17:20+21, Revelation must play paradigmally as trends during Church, syncopated to dovetail with Daniel 9:26, alerting everyone what comes next Without Warning, Tachú. Again, Rapture is based on Church believer bodies completing, not a set period of time. Time thus stopped for Israel but shifted, rerouted to Church: for Christ the King of Kings, is the Nexus of History, Joining both Israel and Church, Eph2. Theology overlooks the dual-entendre of prophecy here, though it recognizes that Scripture typically plays prophecy in what it calls a "near" and "far" "fulfillment". That's true here, too. For Revelation, penned 95 or 96AD, laid out the rest of history in neat Greek-Drama format, as summarized above. No excuse, that we don't understand it. RevPlay.htm has a fuller outline; but for this webpage, watch how embarrassing it is that we don't understand Revelation, in what follows:
Meanwhile, above the thickening, teeming fray of human confrontation, high above the clouds, looking down on all this writhing humanity, the one who for eons ached! to replace the Most High! was most pleased with his progress in all these fractious proceedings; quite pleased, in fact, that the very Revelation 17 harlot of political religion, which the Most High even told everyone was soon occurring -- well, she was sitting like a princess, nicely flexing her beauty within that horrid "Way". Might as well adopt the same colors as those in Rev17, so no one has excuse to say he was fooled into my Pretty Ruse. After all, to avoid the persecutions, many among her number opted for the harlot's security of political clout that sympathy over the persecutions, granted. Meanwhile, the Jewish problem was nicely solved by none other than the Rejected Bridegroom back in 70AD, so persecution BY these "Way" people of the former bride was also proceeding to develop, nicely on course: all that had to happen, was for the harlot to be called, "Christian". Dress up in the "Way" terminology, but suck out the meaning. Falsify the Gospel by adding verbs, replacing the only verb that saves, "believe"; and any number of Lord, Lord people who are mine will be thought "Christians". Thus the real Christians can be persecuted, too. Thus the Real Bible can be confiscated, hidden, 'protected' -- well, kidnapped, let's not be coy -- as well. Ahhh, the final solution to all these vexing problems.
So, here we are in this Year of Our Lord, 2007, and it's still, Tachú! Unlike that first century's folk, we are soooo wise now; all religions born since His Crucifixion are sooo wise, now. All nicely retooled to look just like him, so they say. So many holy books out there, now. All claiming to be Divine Writ, all clamoring at the fair to be purchased, all being nicely respectful, "tolerant" of all faiths -- well, when expedient. Um, but one teeny problem: How Did Sins Get Paid For? Ooops! None of the holy books answer that question, even now -- except the Bible.
So if even Christians don't understand their own Book, lol -- you just try to find any OTHER book which explains How Sins Got Substitutionally Paid. For surely the one who did the wrong, is now Damaged Goods -- so couldn't afterwards pay, anything at all to Infinite Infinite Infinite God. If our post-sin righteousnesses are menstrual rags (literal Hebrew of Isa64:6), um what can you do with such gross stuff? So the Real God, 'whoever he is' has to be paid. Ok: then the only valid holy book, is the one which admits that, and answers How He Got Paid. Simple as that.
So of course all the holy books skirt this question, even until today; or, they make lame statements like God doesn't need to be paid (so, God doesn't deserve justice, lol); or, just throw up their hands and make Him a mystery (cute word, that -- mocking the "mystery" moniker that is Church). Clever lawyerly ploys, all. Oh: and make sure you link political/ethnic loyalty to the holy book, so those in that group will feel traitors if they don't adhere.
Sooo wise, to recast reincarnation, a spoof on salvation invented eons ago, into a "science of evolution", hah! Then, just for fun, mix its goofiness with religion, so now religions can be "scientific": whether a rehashed metempsychotic gnosticism with Kabbala highlights, like the one invented by a used-car salesman (L. Ron Hubbard); or, by a woman with four surnames who felt refusing medical attention was spiritual, yet scientific (Mary Baker Patterson Glover Eddy)! Or well, there are too many, to list! All how we float up to the Light, all magical transformations WE make, whether through the nicely-martyr-sounding eons of time, or instant! In this lifetime! Just observe this taboo, chant this mantra, pay this money, commune, baby. Yes! Man-becomes-god. Old story. Been there, done that, so if God makes Himself man, it's kinda anticlimactic.
All the while, God getting paid is never addressed. We are too mesmerized with each other. Fitting in. Being alike. Being nice to each other. Making gods out of ourselves. So the last thing we want to do, is admit Someone Infinite Made Us and He Should Be Compensated for That. Satan's not stupid. Just mimic Bible in the right places, and you mask the real issue, Believe or Burn because Sin requires Payment to Infinite God Which You Can't Make. Thus Bible remains unique, even as it always was. And uniquely reviled, too.
As we saw earlier, Israel's time ended at the Cross, except for two 'sevens': the first seven was reserved back in Daniel 9, because the 1000th anniversary of David's death occurred beforehand (explained in more detail in "David" and "To Be or Not to Be" links of Mirroring.htm), so Messiah would have to redeem Time, before that 'seven' could play. The second seven was within the Daniel 9 grant, but Israel rejected Christ. So He died at the next-closest Davidic deadline, 30AD: that was the 1000th anniversary of David's retirement from Kingship. So that cut-short other 'seven', played between 64-70AD: siege of Jerusalem and Temple razed, thus fulfilling Daniel 9:26a and b. But the prophecy of Israel's land being dominated by the Gentiles until 2nd Advent -- Daniel 9:26c -- remained. So Israel's time is used up. A year before He died, Christ knew all this, hence He made a testamentary contract for Church to BUY TIME and complete Bride. So our deadline being now of a body-completion nature, literally Buys Time for every day that Body-building, continues: ergo God has Paul exhort us to grow up and finish, Col4:5 and Eph5:16. Meanwhile our 'spot' in history is characterized by Daniel 9:26c, to keep advertising to the world that Messiah has Come and Left, Rapture is Real and the Bible is Really from Real God. So anyone can look into the Book, look around in life, and prove that fact conclusively. Later on in this page you'll see how embarrassingly bald, is that proof.
Our "witness" role is to GOD, since we are Royal Priests to God. The witness is about whether the crown laid up for us, is justifiably awardable (i.e., the do not lose your crown verse in Revelation). That is, everything you do and think is being Witnessed From Heaven. You are tested for whether you should inherit a kingdom, every second. You are being Trained for that Role. For, we were ALL slated to be kings since eternity past, theme of Eph1 (i.e., the "every spiritual blessing clause", a kind of escrow, as my pastor likes to explain it). But we can abdicate, as explained back in Part III. So forget about witnessing to people. God will throw that role in your lap unexpectedly, you don't need to seek it. The First Person to Whom you live.. is GOD. Just as it was, for Christ Himself.
So the Level of History itself, is solely determined by: 1) Church Voting plus 2) Christ's Own Spiritual Maturity Standard and hence Spiritual Life, Eph4:13. Um, now you know why history has been so Low for so Long. So We are Liable. WE are to blame for sickness, disease, bad weather, war, calamity: just read Lev26, see for yourself. We believers are Liable. Not, the politicians or unbelievers or name-whomever-the-world-deems-liable.
Are you frightened yet? You should be. I'm scared to death of not growing up spiritually. "Spiritual Atlases", my pastor likes to say of Church winners. True: and the flipside, is to know forever if one failed. No thanks!
So if the Twin Promise of Church Mature Witness and Number of Believers is Not Fulfilled, it's a Mistrial, Evidence Not Being Produced -- and Satan would win. Satan can win, because God Grants Time only due to believers who suffficiently mature. That's a precedence from Adam, as noted earlier (and explained fully, in Mirroring.htm, "Timeline" link at pagetop). So that criterion remains: so if no one matures enough, then TIME ENDS. Satan hopes to exploit that rule. There's a tandem rule about mass voting, which occurs in 70-year units and 50-year units, 'intercalated' since Adam. So if enough believers are negative, Time stops when the voting period ends: the problem in Daniel 9 (they were in the last four generations of a 490-year historical time grant, Temple had the Time promise, but it was razed 126 years before the expiry of that grant). If enough unbelievers are negative, Time stops for them, Gen 6 (120=70+50, standard worldwide judicial voting period). So if enough Church believers vote negatively, the Rapture will have to occur at the WRONG Time. Hence God didn't complete Church -- never mind it's our fault, not His -- and Satan wins. Or, if the number of slated Mature Witnesses don't fully complete (i.e., they get discredited under cross-examination, same idea as Job) -- then again, Satan wins. Because, God made a NUMBERS promise. And it's like tampering with evidence, if claimed evidence is never produced. Mistrial Verdict would then be due.
The true doctrine of the Rapture is uniquely abrasive, a Severe Warning about not growing up in time, about this Mistrial potential -- just as, for the First Advent. As you'll see in Part IVc's "Rap the Rapture" section, Satan masks or distorts the Rapture to arrest us spiritually. He's been wildly successful, too. Not one Christian who believes in the Rapture remembers its frequent Bible usage as a warning to grow up. And of course the rest of the world, Christian or no, laughs at "Rapture", not knowing the term's violent origin (Latin translation of Greek rape/snatch up verb "harpazw" in 1Thess4:17). Yeah, Satan knows how to take advantage of our disinterest in the Word. So we Church ape the first post-Cross generation, since EVERY GENERATION is potentially the Rapture Generation -- here we are, all hyped up about this Rapture thingy, viewing it as nice fiction or Disneyland, an escape from drycleaning. But it's a Sword Hanging Over us: the machaira, Heb4:12 -- do we BELIEVE it? Delivered from destruction down here, if "yes"; destroyed by a Bigger Romphaia sword, if "no" (Heb10:36-39, Rev2:16, 19:15). For we're still in Revelation's Play #1, Chapters 1-3, with Chaps6-19 rolling out in a prototypical, syncopated, even appetizer format. Play#1's title: "Will Church Complete?" Will this Superior Temple whose Foundation is Christ Himself, the Petra Incarnate (Matt16:18, 1Cor10:4, Heb6:18ff), be Built (Eph2-4)? So that the rest of History can occur (Heb11:40)? But hey: we are Church Not Reading Our Bible, aping the puerile goofiness of past generations. Either we go hog wild over Rapture as a Halloween-like event, now making the silliest movies, sermons and TV programs imaginable; or, we pride ourselves on how stupid an idea it is, and parade our sloven scholarship by calling Rapture an invention of the 19th century. BIG MISTAKE, to do either one! |
Hence We Church are ON TRIAL for the Progress of Our Spiritual Maturation, Heb11:1, Eph4:13. Our Trial Testimony thus far? We Church are utterly childish, immature despite the fact 'Esther' is soooo OLD, Now. In a word, RETARDED! Nous sommes en retard! So the Rapture hasn't happened till yet. Spiritual growth stops if certain key Bible doctrines are misperceived or not believed. Rapture is one of those doctrines. So long as we misperceive or disbelieve Rapture, we will not mature spiritually, because it ties to every other Bible doctrine like a 'major trade route'. So though saved, we will be among the Royal Peasant class of believers.. forever.
As we saw in Part III's 'Corollaries' section, as in every other Royal family, not all Royalty, rules. You have to be trained to rule. Else, you're a beneficiary, and you get little jobs, something to do.. but not much. For, you're little-trained. Peasants are able to move their bodies, but their minds have the wrong values, are childish in thinking. So they must train, to advance out of peasantry. Down here, we are in training to become Kings, and if we fail at that, we will be happy, but.. in lower capacities. Not ruling. The more you have, the more you have to honor Christ. Obviously a poor person can't do much with what he has. So aim to be rich. Satan aims to keep us all thinking it's only holy to be poor, to be Brother-Foots. Be rich in Doctrine, and then you are truly rich. Whatever material wealth you have or lack down here, is meant to TRAIN YOU. You will get both high and low. For that's what happened to Our Precedence, Christ.
So we know for sure, that Heaven at present is populated with people who, 99.9% of them, were spiritual babies, down here. And died that way. Doesn't take too many people to rule kingdoms. One king per kingdom, and obviously there won't be too many kingdoms. Not a large number needed, to be sure. Yet 2000 years have passed, and still not enough kings were developed, proved true in the Witness Box? Unbelievable. That's how little we know our Bible.
The most critical Doctrines to keep asking God if you perceive correctly, are as follows. There is at least a Baker's Dozen of Our Daily Bread, which are most important. Going by the many false doctrines on the internet and their source beliefs (which generate the errors), going by the tragic history of believers not learning these doctrines from the first century onward -- if you don't 'get' the following doctrines right in your OWN soul, so long as the errors are retained, you will infect your spiritual life and eventually shrink it. (SpirTips.htm has a longer list of spiritual aids and pitfalls which either speed growth or retrogression.) God allows enough time to learn these doctrines. But, like a child who grows up physically but not mentally, there comes a point when retardation sets in. It is always possible to grow out of error. But there comes a point, where you don't want to. That's what happened to believers from the first century onward, and keeps on happening, today. Here's the Baker's Dozen list:
Morality (i.e., the Ten Commandments) was never spirituality, even in the OT. Morality is a gift to the human race so you can have a happy life down here. Morality has its own laws; Mosaic Law was divided into three components, two of which were secular. So of course you still should be moral. But even the unbeliever can be and often is, moral. SPIRITUAL IMMATURITY IS EVIDENCED IN ANYONE WHO TEACHES OR THINKS THAT MORALITY IS THE SPIRITUAL LIFE. That's what felled Israel, and that's what fells Church. Satan uses morality to BEAT God, that's how much morality is not spirituality. It's his fake substitute, morality, as the "MEGA" link in Part IVc explains. All the Matt4 temptations are temptations to do good deeds! Satan is moral. His arguments against God are Moral Arguments. So of course he uses morality to substitute for the spiritual life!
The Royal Spiritual Life is about having perfect THOUGHTS: for Father forever hears each one, and the believer in Christ is a Royal Priest to Father, 24/7. It's impossible to have perfect thoughts, which is why you need #1, so to keep on being Filled with the Spirit. So it's a killer life, constantly monitoring your thoughts, constantly learning and living on Bible you know so far, gauging every thought and action and decision in Bible terms. Nothing is more satisfying, either. Light-years beyond moral behavior.
Moreover, that Thinking Evidence you can't see of your learning and living on Bible 24/7, is playing live before Heaven (more on this follows below). Satan uses your thinking to accuse you -- your thinking and attitude toward Word, not your sins, since your sins were all judged on the Cross -- but God uses your thinking to justify giving the world one more day. All the good deeds and moral behavior on the planet, cannot buy TIME. So the Christian who doesn't understand the sudden-death nature of the Rapture based on the voluminous Bible Doctrine from Genesis through Revelation that God orchestrates Time based on the Trial, will not grow up, because he won't recognize the importance of how he's thinking RIGHT NOW. Rapture has a basis: the Trial. As we saw earlier, it's due to Israel's TIME ENDING that Church was inaugurated, in the first place. That's why the Rapture has no fixed time, and ends God's Rebuttal. That means the believer must first understand the underlying doctrine of God's Orchestration of Time due to the Trial, to understand the role of Church and its own timing constraints. The believer who doesn't, won't mature. It's akin to always being late, because you don't know what time it is: those Matt25 virgins without oil [Holy Spirit] in their lamps [souls] had no conception of the timing of the Bridegroom.
It's amazing how incorrect perception of these (and some other) Bible doctrines stunts spiritual growth and sends you into Satan's camp, moral and blissfully thinking you're being spiritual. But instead, 1Jn1:6,8,10 characterize the life. It's unbelievably tragic, how we all get so trapped. For centuries. The proof of that tragedy is all over the internet and in 'Christian' chat rooms, churches. The more incorrect someone is about these doctrines, the more anthropocentric, legalistic; the more that person fancies him/herself holy. [That's why I keep auditing my beliefs by writing websites, myself. The tragedy of Christendom is so vast, I don't trust 'my' interpretations AT ALL, and need to see them 'on paper', to correct them. Constantly. I'm lazy. If I don't write out, I don't internalize the doctrines. If I don't write out publically, I'll be sloven in my research. It's not teaching, it's auditing, that you see in these pages: I'm writing a report to God, who cares if someone else reads it. That's between God and the reader.]
So Christendom has been Stone Deaf for centuries, and that's why the Rapture hasn't happened until yet. Not using 1Jn1:9 is the primary reason. All the hallowed tones and theological degrees on the planet are no substitute for the Holy Spirit's Brains, Eph4:23 in Greek (correct translation is "by Agency of the Spirit"). We are all brainouts, apart from 1Jn1:9. Then, progressively learning and auditing your understanding of at least the critical doctrines enumerated above, of which the Rapture is one -- must be ongoing. Else, you'll show up at the Bema with only your charred-and-healed small soul, ever grateful to even BE there. But, with no gold, silver, precious stones -- except for the high moments in your spiritual life, before you tanked. You will always be rewarded for the spiritual highs Spirit made in you. But you could have more: Kingship. More to honor Christ with. Go for it. It's far harder to be rich than to be poor. It's parenting.
So Heb 11:1 should read, "It's about Confidence in Word! Christ's Thinking On Trial! Evidence, Unseen!" to match the Greek dramatic intent and meter. In sum, Thinking BIBLE properly is Successful Trial Witness, avoids a Mistrial Verdict: that's the Substance of the Trial, Heb11:1's Greek. Thinking properly is far harder than acting properly. It's easy not to murder; but impossible, to avoid a nasty thought toward a Windows glitch or misplaced chair. Again, the Royal Spiritual Life is about having perfect THOUGHTS: for Father forever hears each one. It's a killer life. Light-years beyond moral behavior. It's exhausting, a kind of spiritual racquetball, and you never get off the court!
Here we are Church On Trial, inserted into Daniel 9:26 to be the Time Bridge to the Tribulation, so that a Mistrial Verdict won't be declared; yet our Thinking Witness thus far is abysmal. So what happens if Satan wins? God will indeed submit if Satan wins. God is Love, and Love subordinates, and Love never gerrymanders Truth; so if the truth is we don't want God, then Time must End. If it ends too early, then we are Raptured, Satan wins, and we'll still be together with God. But they would rule us. Love doesn't need to be in charge. Love has already informed us they won't win, because their schemes just flat don't work. But, they CAN win. So if we don't keep growing in Word to have that Heb11:1 result, then Time Will End. Because God is Perfect, and even Submission doesn't compromise Him, Ps138:2b, Ps89:14-15, Isa52:14, 53:7-12.
This news of God Loving us unconditionally is very hard to live with. Dunno about you, but when I hear "I love you", my first instinct is to run away as fast as possible. The phrase is employed to USE the object of it, to take something, even if sincerely meant. Human relationships are proof enough of that. Yet what can God take from us? Nothing. So He isn't using us. We only add a COST to Him, saved or not. So it MUST BE TRUE LOVE, and no other reason, for His creating and upholding us. Either that, or He's nutty as a fruitcake, just as Satan contends.
Satan well knows God's Love is unconditional. In the Appendix, the first "God's Paradox" section goes through how God's nature totally bollixes Satan, who is seriously in love with God, really. But love like anything else, needs Maturation in Thinking. The plan for us after all, is the same as the initial plan for the angels, as we saw in Part II. Satan just couldn't stand it, that his merit -- above all the other angels -- didn't contribute in some way to God's Love. Satan is extremely moral. So are most of the fallen angels; to get us to do gross sin is a way to deride us as animals. It's the morality question that's the object of the Trial. Merit is at heart, a morality question. Satan contends merit should be the basis for relationships, and up to a point it's easy to understand his contention. But Love is beyond merit. That's what God's been explaining from the beginning. The "Paradox of Merit" link at pagetop, in addition to the above-cited "God's Paradox" section in the Appendix, go through these issues. But for our purposes here in Part IV, just know that Satan's strategy and tactics are all based on morality, theme of Part IVc; God's Strategy and tactics are all based on Love, a Body-Building-Sons purpose, covered more here in Part IVa, and Part IVb and d. The two sides couldn't be more different. Satan's got an unreconciled love; God, of course, is Reconciliation Inherent. To the extent we, like Satan, can't reconcile to God's Unconditional Love -- and we never will, if that Word doesn't get in and cycle in us, Rom5:5 -- we too will be unhappy with God. Precisely because, His Love is Unconditional.
So what do we conclude? Well we know Satan won't win; but they win over us the meanwhile, if we don't keep doing the Hebrews 11:1 learning-and-living on Word. Our Trial Witness is primarily to Heaven, unseen; not, to people down here. No human being can hear you think Bible. That's what's on Trial. Not your sins, your good deeds, your rituals, what others think of you, how you look, what job you have. You have One Job, Learning And Living On Bible: that is supposed to seed into all else you have and are in this life. Having done all, to stand, Eph6:12-13. Fail in that Testimony, and you'll be ashamed at the Bema. For Satan won't win, he's been warned, as have we. But if we get slovenly about it, those who did not -- they will be the kings awarded at the Bema, they will be the ones buying Time For the World, and we will be mightily glad to be saved, but.. we won't have anything atop that salvation, 1Cor3. It's a big deal. So of course Satan&Co. would mask bald Trial verses like Heb11:1, so we don't know about all this. This is a POLITICAL thing going on in Heaven, in the format of a Legal Trial. The winner takes all. Forget entirely about earthly politics: the Heavenly politics demand all of your thinking and time!
Yet, all that has to happen, is for my harlot "Christian", to muscle out the real Christian, even among the independent churches. That is proceeding very nicely indeed. Dress up in crusader's clothes, but lay off really learning Bible. Falsify the Gospel by adding verbs to "believe", and be sure to crusade on anything which even the dumbest person with Bible software can prove anti-Christ. Thus the real Christians who don't follow along can be persecuted, too. Thus the Real Bible can be hidden, 'protected' -- well, kidnapped, let's not be coy -- even though in plain sight, easily available to anyone in the Original Languages, Like Never Before In History. Ahhh, the final solution to all these vexing problems is en pleine, sigh.
How nice of the average believer to not notice the Fake Church which the Most High warned them would take hold, way back in their puny 96AD. Why, that's the very year and the very reason I began it! I even used the same colors as Rev17, didn't they get that? Nope. Wasn't too hard, either. Starting with Acts 15 nutcases who wanted to keep the Law, folding in the alluring idea that if you adopt pagan rituals and other senseless paraphernalia you'd at least maybe save some; barnacled religion, by 180AD. Aha, and all Scripture -- well, not all, drat, but most -- captured under this wonderful Fake Church. Universal. Yes. Of course, with their incessant politicking, I had to throw them a bone or two -- ok, my boys lost control, let's not lie -- you know, the Reformation and the dozens of breakouts before it -- then that dang Tregelles and Tischendorf and all their ilk, what with their collecting manuscripts -- still, now the independents have had Scripture for over a century, and in the original languages at that -- still, I have them. I own them. They play to my piping tune, nicely over the political cliff.
So, let's play the same tune as in the 90's AD, this time with the independents, who after all are so proud of themselves that they aren't 'catholic'. Take them down the same ol' road, see if they notice the parallels. They don't, aha. The creeping in of crusaderism, of the need to 'defend' God from 'heretics', of tabooism and relics and little rituals with food and days -- never mind Paul wrote extensively against all that -- they don't discern. Give them maybe 20 years -- 10, if I'm really careful -- and they'll morph faster into a pontificating group than that first group ever did. Even with all those original-language texts. That will show the Most High how His Own Sheep are truly disinterested in His Word.
So it never dawns on us that no Temple from God is ever man-made. From Tabernacle to Eternal State, God and God Alone, Instructs And Empowers Its Building, each time. Even for the Tabernacle, God the Holy Spirit pimplemi'd the workers -- and that was just a very fancy, Tent! Oh, but Paul sure noticed that Only Divine Temple Builder, in Ephesians. Built the letter around Him building Us Who Will Be Made Fitted Bride. So Paul also weaves into Ephesians the most-famous play of the Greeks' origin: "Ion", by Euripedes. So no one would miss the meaning of God begetting This Temple Made Without Human Hands. Oh well.
Tragically, we therefore miss this most blatant message in the Bible, using the most blatant Symbol of that Message: God is building a 'Temple' of Sons! From His Son's Thinking! Line on line, precept on precept, because Truth is God's Attribute which Can Be Deposited In Us! Isa53:10-11's LXX contract clauses, Living! So yet another metaphor: the woman was built for the man, Hebrew verb "banah" in Genesis (rib verse). So Paul uses that one, too: we are being built BY God, Eph2:10, Ionic dative of epi, Matt16:18 thus referenced, Upon The Man. Also, NT enjoys many a witty play on ek, birthing, referencing me amal in Isa53:11 Hebrew -- BEYOND, BORN -- root meaning of Hebrew preposition min, always meaning AFTER, separated from, never "in" or "from" the womb as English Bibles blasphemously make it. Upon, Out From, Due To, Made-Up-Of The Man, Who is the King of Kings. So we are to be built as Kings. Yeah, since the Temple always has represented the King-to-Come, Messiah! Hence a Temple analogy is always used for the wife, too -- Israel was to be that woman, but she played Vashti. Hence the "banah" now proceeds upon Christ: building up Church, theme of Eph4:11-16. So doncha know, Eph4:11-16 is egregiously mistranslated, so #7 of our Baker's Dozen doctrines above, is never learned! Thus your spiritual life tanks, since you don't learn Bible under your right pastor! Oh well.
Wow, what a dramatic and fitting metaphor for God to use throughout Bible, that of Temple Building. Stone upon stone, precept upon precept, person upon person, all fitted together into a Kingdom. By means of His Thinking ON TRIAL. Buildup of Evidence leads to a Built Church and Built Time-and-Justice Bridge to Trial climax, the Trib and resulting Millennium. Finishing for all time, the Body for the Eternal State. How clever. The one thing we can ALL see, the one thing we relic-hungry humans can all admire, the one topic on which The Most Bible Text Is Spent, the Temple: and we don't notice its Divine Builder, even cutting off the Lord's Head in favor of Peter's, in Matt16:18!
Remember the "Legatee" table in this page, at the beginning of the "Our History" section? How, way back when Daniel was praying and fasting because he was worried about his people, God sent an angel to inform him of the rest of Temple history. Since Temple=National Covenant, such that if no Temple, no relationship with God, Temple history meant Messiah's history and thus Israel's history. So Daniel was anxious to hear the angel explain what would happen. While explaining, the angel made what then seemed a cryptic comment about the regular (lamb) sacrifices stopping in order to set UP the abomination of desolation, a statue of an anti-Christ, a Fake Anointed One. But, um isn't that strange, that Dan9:27? Didn't the angel just finish saying (Dan9:26) that the temple would not be rebuilt until after The Very End of the 70 weeks; meaning, Not Until Messias Returned, just like Isa61 and Ezekiel 39ff have also said? So, then: who had caused the temple to be rebuilt and sacrifices resumed, so they could stop again? Couldn't be God Who authorized it.
Aha. So this "abomination" is going into an "abomination" of a temple; an "abomination", in that it pretends to be of God, but is not. So someone not God, rebuilds the Temple over the Holy of Holies, and claims to be Messiah! Oy! So stopping the sacrifices would rile up people believing in this Fake Temple, to protect this Fake Temple from stopping the sacrifices. Oh, no! It's A Trap To Herd And Kill The Jews! Or, if the sacrifices are stopped before the Temple is destroyed, as a Warning the Temple is about to be destroyed, oh no! It's just a different kind of trap to herd and kill the Jews, because they will try to defend it! One of these two outcomes, but either one, still a trap!
After all, the Temple had already been plundered and desecrated many times during its 364-year history, mostly by the Jewish Kings, themselves -- to buy peace from foreign domination -- as well as, by those conquering them. So "desolation" was very familiar to Daniel. Of course, back in 586 BC there was no temple at all. Zerubbabel would be rebuilding it, not too long after Daniel got this prophecy. Then, to prepare for the Lord's Arrival, an "abomination" named Herod, would essentially rebuild Zerbubby's temple to gain political popularity (actual rebuilding begun 17BC, ended 64AD, just in time for Masada and the protracted siege of Jerusalem). Hint, hint of things to come. For Israel remained Under Foreign Domination from Zerubbabel, forward. Just as promised, in Dan9:25.
Between 516BC and the time Messiah came, there were many other hints: most notably, Antiochus Epiphanes, in the 160's BC. Which gave rise to the Maccabees who were total Scriptural dolts, even though God gave them the Grace to Protect the Temple. Hence, the secular custom of Chanukah. So by celebrating Chanukah every year since circa 164BC, Jews are REMINDED of "abomination" for eight days. The Lord's prophecy in Matt24 even uses that holiday's significance, to teach them how to read Daniel 9:25-27. But, no one hears Him.
So, when (28-29 Aug 70AD) Titus reluctantly fulfilled the "near" part of the Lord's (Matt24) double-entendre prophecy/explanation of Daniel 9:26, no one still heard Him. [28-29 Aug date is from the Atlas of the Bible and Christianity by Tim Dowley, though other sources could be used.] Oh well. Guess it's necessary to raze the Temple, wait a generation or two; and then a whole Roman city was built around its former site; culminating in, a Roman temple built smack dab atop the old Temple site (Hadrian, sometime after 135AD, since Jerusalem was wholly destroyed in the Bar Kochkba rebellion)! And still, no one heard Him? First, 70AD, Temple Gone! And then, a repeat lesson about "abomination": another 70 years later, an Abomination stares them in the face; meanwhile, with Jews worldwide commemorating Chanukah every year for a week, and They Don't Get It By Now?
God wasn't exactly coy when He had the 2nd Temple destroyed. 57 days from Passover to Pentecost, and 57 days from Pentecost to 9th Ab, when Titus razed the Temple. (The final siege began on Passover, 70AD.) Um, 57 was the number of years in the Mosaic Law depicted by the number of days from Passover to Pentecost (you began the count of the Omer on the LAST day of Passover, modern Judaism doesn't read Bible rightly). Those 57 years were the number of years between Messiah's deadline for completion (37AD, in our terms) and the beginning of His Millennial Reign (94AD in our terms), known since David died, and reaffirmed in the Daniel 9 timeline (it ends in 37AD, because Messiah has to purchase time for the remaining 7 and the 50 to play, in God's Accounting).
Moreover, 9th Ab 586BC, the First Temple was destroyed. 140 years passed, just as prophesied to Daniel: Jerusalem was rebuilt by 446BC, right on time. So Notice The same Number of Years, not just in number of years, but in Meaning Per Segment (true indication of Divine Mirroring)! First 70, analogous to 586-516BC; the 2nd Temple was completed by that deadline. Next 70 years was a mirroring back of the first 70, so Jerusalem got rebuilt by that deadline, 446. Now note the reverse, in AD: to 70AD, Temple destruction; to 140AD, Jerusalem destruction -- and complete rebuilding, By Abominators. Can't miss it.
Daniel 9:26 is very specific, as is Daniel 9:25. It's about the destruction, not the mere desecration, of the Temple. 40 years after the Lord died on the Cross is significant, for "40" is always the Judgement warning period. Can't miss this. Can't miss the play on Daniel 9:2 -- the next 70 years, subsuming both the elapse from Messiah's Birth and the 40 years -- replaying again, shenayim, twice! But of course, according to some reports, the entire reason for the destruction in 135+ AD by Hadrian, is that the Jews were continually trying to rebuild the Temple themselves. So by then they couldn't read any of their Ta'anach. Sandy soil (ta'anach=sandy soil), nothing grows in it. Like, understanding, since the Temple is Not Standing Under the Contract. Just as Daniel 9:26, explains.
And lest you say all this is too arcane, Jews Are Raised On Biblical Numerology; just check out their obsession with numbers on the web (e.g., the wacky Bible Codes people). Biblical numerology is abused by many in Judaism, but that doesn't mean Bible doesn't use numerology. And your big hint it's valid is that real time is 'matched' (mirrored) to the numerological concepts. So look: "70" means all the missed sabbatical years. Jews didn't miss them from the 2nd Temple forward. But they missed the Sabbath, Adonai Sabbaoth becoming Immanuel -- so they missed all the sabbath rest, theme of Hebrews 4. So that Chapter's purpose was to announce a higher abrogation of Promised Rest, and hence the Temple would be destroyed. And it was, right on time. And it was, on the Same Timeline As The First Temple. And then Jerusalem was destroyed, right on time. And an Abomination of a Temple rose on the very Holy of Holies. Could you miss such a blatant Message? Done in real time, we can all verify these facts about the time -- sheesh. How blind we are!
Look: what is called "Jerusalem" today is really still the Roman layout of that city! Layout Abomination, get it? [Construction dates for Aelia Capitolina and the Roman Temple, per Encyclopedia Britannica, "Jerusalem, History of", vol. 10, 1985; and Encarta 2004 "Jerusalem" article, in Windows XP. Fausset's Bible dictionary in BibleWorks 5 dates this city from 130AD. Hadrian died in 138AD.] The Kabbalists are so hung up on Biblical numerology, and they miss this? Sheesh: what does it take to get through to this stiff-necked people, Christians included! So, oh well might as well keep on Playing In Real Time, What Daniel 9:26 says.
So wars and rumors of wars were decreed, and they keep on playing. So the Land changes hands many times, over the ensuing centuries. Then the Christians decided to try their hand at being abominations -- Emperors Julian and Justinian each tried to rebuild the Temple toward the end of his reign, so clearly they knew no Scripture at ALL -- but fortunately God stopped them. [I can't prove it about Justinian, but I could swear I saw something in the 550's about him trying to rebuild the Temple. Julian's attempt is clearly provable: you can search his 363 AD attempt on the internet; whether an earthquake or fire stopped it, who knows; point is he tried, 40 years after his uncle Constantine; the latter, by the way, took power 490 years after Antiochus desecrated the Temple. Constantine presided over the desecration of Christianity, over the senseless murder and ostracism of millions, as well as helped preserve Scripture. We are all used by both sides, in this Trial.]
Notice how whether it's a Roman or Persian conqueror, the focus is on rebuilding the Temple with a timeline strangely 'tied' to significant Jewish-Temple-related dates and the Daniel 9, 490-year time accounting unit. Isn't that strange? Isn't it stranger still, no one listens? Especially, since Matt24 and Daniel 9:26 and Rev11:1 so clearly say God Does Not Want That Temple Rebuilt? So who does? Guess.
Worse, nowhere in the Koran is there a command to build on that site. Do you see the prank? It's soooo cruel against Moslems, who thus prove they don't even know their Koran, however much they chant it in school. But also cruel against Jews and Christians, who demonstrably can't see the Dome Proving Bible Right. Satan&Co. love to burlesque us all: here, with a Real Building we all can see, in Real Time. It's not a hallucination or ancient story. One of my Word docs on this is IshmaelnotIsaac.doc. Just type it in, over this page's name in your browser (the "LvS4a.htm" portion), to retrieve it. That Word doc merely pasted from the Koran the relevant verses and Islamic commentaries, pasted from Alim 4-in-1 software (which I got as a gift from a Moslem). I love the Moslems, just as much as the Jews. Kills me, that they -- and we Christians -- are so burlesqued by Satan. But we don't want to learn God, so it's fair he be allowed to do this. We only have ourselves, to blame.
There's a whole lot of verifiable Temple History available on the internet, in encyclopedias, etc. going all the way back to Solomon's Temple. They can prove what it was, where it was (the recent Temple location disputes are farcical and fanciful, since obviously the Dome is supposed to cover the Rock on which Abraham almost-sacrificed his son). So this orchestration isn't hard to notice, prove, etc. When you turn on your TV at night and see Jerusalem always in the news -- you have no doubt whatsoever about Satan being behind Islam. Look: that's why Islam got started, so to capture the Temple Mount, thus fostering attention (and yearning) on not-waiting-for-God-to-rebuild! Again, the "Rev6-17" link in the red table at pagetop offers a more comprehensive sketch of his plan from 70AD onward, tied to God's 490-year Time Accounting System.
When you use the mail slot to the right of the play triangle to access the 2nd-5th videos below, you'll see this weird trend of history, Satan deploying Islam every 430 years -- mimicking Exodus 12:40-41! -- but ONLY after the West failed to 'deliver' for him. (Quickest way to download the very-readable originals, is to search on 'How Satan Deploys Islam' in Youtube; each video description has a download-original link.) Use the highest 'p' resolution and view in fullscreen (the four-arrows button at far right on the ribbon), to well read the history worksheet (GeneYrs.xls) alongside the commentary.
All this in-your-face interpretational proof, yet we don't ask the right questions about the Temple, nor about the Two Witnesses? And what's the right question? WHY are there Two Witnesses? WHY do they WARN everyone AWAY??? For surely if they were standing in front of a valid Temple God authorized, they'd NOT be clothed in sackcloth; they'd surely NOT be issuing fire out from their mouths at people who came near.
Answer: God allowed these present Two Stone Witnesses to represent the upcoming human warners; so we don't need to chase around Scripture to learn the right answers. The Two Witnesses tell us where to look in Scripture, by Their Physical Placement: Dan9:26, Matt24, Luke 21, Rev11. A blimp flying in the sky with huge chartreuse arrows pointing down to these Bible verses painted on some tarmac, wouldn't be plainer. See, there's no limit to the "Love of God in Christ Jesus"!
Our ignorance of God's Accounting System For Time, considering our obsession with Bible's numbers, is all the more evidence of Satan's Orchestrating Obfuscation. Look here, the fact that God orchestrates Time itself, is not so well hidden. Only the timeline in Bible seems to be 'magically' hidden from our sight -- hiding IN plain sight no less -- for somehow everyone gets it wrong! How is that possible? Genesis 5 is very plain, everyone uses it, yet everyone comes up with different dates? How is that possible? Oh, because We Don't Believe Bible! We don't believe it, because we don't read it properly, so we get frustrated and don't understand what it says. We are also vulnerable to unbeliever taunts that "objectivity" must be defined extra-Biblically (cuz the Bible must be lying, you see). So what do we do? We go elsewhere for validation, to non-Bible sources (i.e., astronomy or pagan sources). We also ASSume Bible's listing of multiple years is lunar (big mistake!) so of course we can't balance to history. Worse, we ASSume that Genesis 5 begins with the creation of the world (unbelievable!) so of course we ASSume a young earth, and the numbers don't balance to history! (Timeline's commencement should be at Adam's Fall, so the Judaic calendar is totally messed up, 346 years too low.) There are more stupid things we do which account for our ignorance of how God orchestrates time: TenWaysThisTimelineDiffers.doc walks you through the differences. GeneYrs.xls shows the timeline from Adam forward. Incredible, how the pattern of God's orchestration of Time becomes clear, if you just use BIBLE, and ignore all its critics. Satan used BIBLE to date his launching of the Crusades, as we just saw above. Hint hint!
However, the doctrine that believers buy time is a central teaching of my pastor's and I'm sure many others: that's what the Genesis 5+11, Matt1, Luke 3 and Hebrews 11 rosters, tell you: when you crunch their math, you see God designed time in 490-year increments keyed to these people; Matt and Luke even use 490-year 'synonyms' to stress that fact. Since 2004 when by accident (yeah right) I was caused to learn of this 490-year Divine Structure of Time since Adam, I've not found anyone else who recognizes it. However, since 2005 stuff has been surfacing on the internet and in print, with many variations -- all thinking about the question. But for decades, my pastor and many others have recognized that 'somehow' believers have been used to buy time since Adam. We also have many bald Bible verses on that fact you can see even in translation, like Col4:5 and Eph5:16. So although vague, the doctrine is 'out there'.
It's not at all vague, in the Bible. The Bible math you find in all those many verses with the dull begats and dates, is utterly precise, showing how God orchestrates time. (Bible Greek verb epichoregew means "to orchestrate" the financing and putting-on, of a play. Timing is everything, in a play.) That you can prove this doctrine from Bible and mathematically, is the subject of Mirroring.htm, the "Timeline" link at pagetop.
Again, all this is empirically testable from Bible and from history. If you want proof of God, this is it, baby. Scary proof, though. You won't be the same person after you understand it, as you were before. That's why it must be covered up. If you see how God orchestrates time, you have more proof and understanding of both Him and what He regards as the spiritual life, than you could dream of. Relics and Bible interpretations can be disputed. Math cannot. Well, anything can be disputed, but with math you just laugh at those who still claim, like the Good Friday crowd, that 1+1=3. So Satan covers it up as always, by recourse to our own laziness and negativity: our eyes glaze over when Bible goes into dates and cubits and begats. Amazing, how much VITAL information is in those verses. Yeah, and we don't care to read them properly, so a lot of satanic coverup is just a nudge to encourage our native negativity, a tad more. That's why we don't get it about Daniel 9 only being a sample ACCOUNTING of how God orchestrates Time. And I was once just like all the other lazy people. God spanked me for that. Hence this Part IV. Ouch and Thank You, Dad.
But in 1071, oh! Seljuks grabbed Byzantium, and the Crusades were thus needed in revenge! Never mind, that the same crusading idea was promulgated 490 years prior between that same Byzantium and Persia, resulting in Islam when both those abominators were exhausted by their fighting over the Holy Land (a phenomenon even Sir John Glubb noted in his Short History of the Arab Peoples, which you can buy at Amazon). We learn from Bible that we learn nothing from Bible, even as we learn from history that we learn nothing from history. And especially, we learn nothing of the MATCHING in God's 490-year Accounting System for Time, since we don't use the BIBLE, to date Bible events! See why the Rapture hasn't occurred till yet! And we fancy ourselves FAITHFUL? What a farce! We're always clamoring for "proof of God" -- though it stares us in the face from Bible and from history, century after century! What liars we are, whether Jew, Moslem, or Christian!
So oh, the one who ached! to replace the Most High! Ached! to get His Chosen People to Return to the Land, for -- how can I destroy them neatly and dramatically, unless they are herded? And by the way, deflect their attention away from Codex Amiatinus, which was finding its surreptitious way into Cluny and other believer hearts...
And thus it remained, until just before WWI. Either the Christians or the Moslems are the rulers, up front or in the background, holding the political strings and territory. Mostly, the Moslems: for it's Satan's goal to keep attention focused there, so he can turn on or off the desired religious zeal. But then, Satan succeeded! The Final Solution finally comes: the Balfour Declaration, nicely and ignorantly promulgated by true friends of the Jews, who also didn't know their Bible; then, the two World Wars and their pogroms, the Jews meanwhile having bought the Land progressively from the Sultan, and then moving back there before and after WWI -- just in time, too, for Hitler's pogroms and the West's rejection of refugee Jews, to forcibly swell the Land's population. By 1948 so many of them are there, that for the first time in 2000 years, there can be a nation. A nation which celebrates Chanukah every year, so now sees The Abomination Of The Dome, live from their Jerusalem windows; a nation thus Being Blatantly Reminded That God Did NOT "shub" (regather, return) them. But Satan did -- using their friends! Sheep to the slaughterpens, ka seh latevah yuval. Finally.
See how deaf? See how Dead Stones speak volumes to deaf stones, the Bible in every hotel room, Daniel 9:26 and Matt24 being even well translated? Who hears, mi he'emin lishmuateinu? Not the Jews. Not the Arabs. Not the Christians. Makes you wanna put on sackcloth and ashes, as will the Two human Witnesses of Rev11:1. The God of Israel is VINDICATED! but we don't notice. So now you can notice why the bridle-high bloodbath in Revelation 19 (+Zech 12-14), occurs in erstwhile-Bridal Israel: because so many Jews are LIVING THERE, despite God's Warning. If Satan can destroy enough Jews at any time before the 2nd Advent, then there won't be enough of a POPULATION left to vote for Messiah when He comes the 2nd time. Then he would call for a Mistrial.
Observe: the longer Satan can delay the completion of the Body of Christ by diverting us into all these fake spiritualities (like rituals and works and prophecy-slobbering, rather than Word-Eating) -- the greater his chance of preventing its completion, altogether. A human being needs time to learn to think as His Lord does. And as time passes, the number of those failing become more numerous, so the pressure of the masses against Learning Word will eventually overwhelm the desire to learn. Which goal is ardently desired, since after all, the sooner the Body Is Completed, the sooner Satan&Co.'s sentence in the Lake Of Fire, begins.
So, it's a funding calculation with respect to how the remaining time is used (Parts IVb and c will go over this topic in much detail). See, to fund a whole kingdom, requires infrastructure. Which, requires money (Thinking Doctrine is Money, in God's Kingdom). So, requires upfront time in Building Sufficient Capital, so the necessary Thinking Money will flow in enough vigor to Nourish the Kingdom (analogous to blood). You invest in what works. God wants Thinking. You don't invest in what doesn't work. So God is investing in His Son's Thinking, not in puny, sin-nature doo-doos.
In finance, you have to keep close watch on Timing and Yield. So: when you don't get the yield on your investments you should by the time deadline you should, the remaining time period during which you must make it up, is shorter. So, your future yield must be higher. If not, the loss is greater. So look at all the Loss By Christians, since 1070AD. Christians, who shouldn't even be alive. How much investment loss in His Thinking, do you calculate? Unimaginable amounts. So how much more is expected of us who have the original languages of long-hidden Scripture? What potential yield must Father be planning, via us in this generation?
Fertilize the fig tree, one more time. In agriculture, there comes a time when you can no longer fertilize the ground. It will begin to burn the soil, rather than nourish it. So too, with investments which don't produce. The longer you wait, the more they must yield, to make up for the lost time. At some point, they cannot produce a sufficient yield to make up for the losses. That's what Satan's banking on. The longer he can delay the Rapture, the more 'yield' must come from the remaining believers to be produced, to make up for the many spiritual babies who have died and will be living. So Church technically, will not complete. It's more than possible. At the same time, given world population it is always possible for enough new believers to exist and mature such that the Rapture can complete as God desires. Both possibilities remain. Billions of people are on this planet. Only a handful of them, maybe a family's worth -- would be needed as kings. Leverage. It's truly a race for time when there is no time. Couldn't be more political or dramatic. Forget earthly politics, then. Concentrate on the heavenly one of getting your own kingship!
So Daniel 9:26 remains the character of our 'time'. So history can end any minute. That was the fact most stressed in Matt24, so Tachú is how we should live. In haste. As if in exodus, exile, on the run: because we are way past the 1070-1144AD dates, in overtime, the sudden-death round of history. All this, Dan9:26 advertises. We are in its time bubble -- No Prophecy. Just as were those post-Crucifixion, in the first century AD. We just saw their history, their foibles when the Lord didn't return as quickly as they themselves expected. We just saw how They Failed The Spiritual Life when they lost that sense of haste. And they lost that sense of haste by looking for prophecy, when the only remaining prophecy for them was "tachú." So they waited and watched, instead of growing. Since every generation is the Rapture generation, every generation ever since has aped the same follies. We've just seen how we have failed in the spiritual life. Past is indeed prologue. Past is indeed precedence. We are precedented on Christ. Our foibles are precedented on past generations' retardation, which with age are given an undeserved patina of respectability. So in the name of their preceding us, we instead call "tradition" holy. Yeah, it's the traditional APOSTACY. And God's Word? Well, it sits nicely on our coffee tables, big and heavy, a place where we record births and deaths.. where people can see it and call us, pious.
| CLICK HERE to continue reading Part IVa. |
Matthew's Gospel is written first. You get no details of the Birth other than the King-proving, Prophecy-proving fact that He was born in Bethlehem in Judea, Matt2:1. Matthew then goes on to tell the report of the high-ranking Persian priests ("magi", in Greek) and how Jerusalem, not Bethlehem, reacted. You can even read it in translation. Luke 2, written about 10 years later, in typical Bible fashion fills in the details about Bethelehem; but also, about the fact the couple then went to Jerusalem to obey the Temple Law (maybe circumcision, definitely the purification and Dedication-of-Firstborn sacrifices); immediately upon which, they returned to their hometown of Nazareth (Luke 2:4, 22, 39). So you know that after first 50+ days, they were back home. Going back to Matthew 2:11-14, you know that then they were visited by the Magi, and because of that, Joseph and Mary suddenly have to leave with the Child in a hurry, at night. From there they go to Egypt. You can see all this, even in translation.
So, this much is true: He is born in Bethlehem, in a stable amidst farm animals, plopped into one of their feeding troughs on hay. It stinks in there. We know this, because in Luke 2:7 and 16, Greek word phatne means "stable" and/or "feeding trough". Not a cave, not a nice place. The world had no room for Him; so of course Bethlehem's inns didn't, either. He was wrapped in death bandages, not "swaddling clothes": these long strips were like the ones He'd be wrapped in 33 years later, when He was taken down from the Cross and buried by Joseph of Arimethea and Nicodemus (John 19:39). Message: nothing is apart from God, no matter how ugly. At the high end, myriads of myriads of angels parade in military formation, Luke2. Isaiah 53 is born, here. Psalm 40 is fulfilled, here; Hebrews 10:5 begins, here. And, He's not as we expect Him to be, Isa52:14!
The shepards come afterwards, that night, by themselves. There are no "wise men" there at ALL. Just the parents, their Child, the shepards, and (earlier) a bizillion angels overhead, saluting, all explained in Luke 2. So note the Loving Grace of God: although His Birth Year was exactly known, Christ (=Messiah, in Hebrew) was unexpectedly born without fanfare. In secret. Biggest event in the universe, upon which the entire history of mankind depended, and yet the format of His Birth, depicted His Upcoming, Ignominous, Death. This isn't the harped-upon humility people laud every Christmas, either. But rather, the most powerful way to say Nothing Is Apart From God. For, we expect God to be grand, majestic, spurning the small. We don't expect Him to prefer what we would shun, the ignominy of grime, anonymity. But God is Infinite, so to Him, Everything is Grand, Majestic: and He Spurns, Nothing. Not even the sparrow, not even us. Else, you'd not exist. Nor would the dust and grime. God sees everything. So He must want to see it all, since He IS Omnipotent. And so He knows how frightened we are of Him. And so Messiah is not born with only angelic glory, pomp and ceremony, but with the lowing cow. For Infinity means just that: intimate with everything, excluding nothing. Just like, the Truth. Which is first, God's Own Attribute.
Principle: the stage we're on has a far larger Unseen audience, God: therefore NOTHING about our lives, is small. However small or big we imagine ourselves. Because GOD, is BIG.
God doesn't violate His Own Law. If you get the death penalty under the Mosaic Law for practicing astrology, then God won't tempt you to violate His Own Law by using astrology to advertise His Son. So no 'wise men', and absolutely NO Star of Bethlehem attended His Birth. In fact there was no star anywhere, but rather an angel was reported to BE a star in Jerusalem, not Bethlehem, by some Persian sorcerer-priests who were positive to the King of the Jews. For "the Magi" of Matt 2:1 were Persian priests: a "magus" is a priest, and "magi" is the plural. So Bible doesn't say how many there were. But these guys were at least of high enough rank to make a public appearance everyone noticed in Jerusalem, never Bethlehem. So, they get King Herod the Great's personal attention and concern.
Next, it's important to distinguish whether Bible is quoting someone, or saying something of itself. Quoting requires that what the person says, be accurately represented, whether quoted in gist, or quoted verbatim, or quoted interpretatively. All three types of quoting are used, but that does not mean Bible agrees with the quote: you have to read the surrounding context to know God's opinion or communication, regarding the quote. Scholars all know this. We didn't pay attention to the fact that in Matt2, the references to "star" are all in the mouths of other people. What they think they see, what they think they know: God isn't ever saying it is a star, but what it was perceived to be by those on the ground. Moreover, there is jarring Greek text in Matt2 which tells you it is NOT a star, and why. If you knew the Mosaic Law against astrology, you would immediately know God isn't sending a star, anyway: so you'd be alerted. But you'd also know He sends angels, who could look like stars. So you'd immediately understand that's what Matthew is talking about. But of course if you don't know your Bible, you won't know what Matthew means.
What follows below are 33 additional points to ponder and investigate in Bible. Text is written hastily. Nothing like this on the internet which I can find, so be sure to ask God about it, breathing 1Jn1:9 as needed so you don't waste your time.
Look up in the night sky. Real stars are very far up in the heavens, and you can't say any ONE of them stands over a specific location. The earth turns, hence the stars seem to 'rotate' through the night. So for some 'star' to be standing over Israel, means it was a) LOW in the sky, daytime or night time; and b) if it RISES, heck -- how can it even BE a star? Stars don't actually rise, they just become visible due to light and the position of the earth relative to where you are. Stars seem stationary, not moving. So it's abundantly clear it's not a star. When we see the same phenomenon today we immediately know we're looking at an asteroid, or comet, etc. Because we know where the real stars are, we know anything not fitting that pattern is not a star. Couldn't be plainer, especially to those trained in that very night sky's appearance.
These are trained astrologers, which means they are trained astronomers, knowing the constellations, as did even the average layman -- you needed to know the stars, to travel. They should have known immediately that it wasn't a star. It's possible that "seen.. star" means an astrological prediction rather than a real sighting, but given the fact that they later see and FOLLOW a star, that interpretation probably isn't correct. So these astrologers should have known, from their many years of actually charting stars, that what they saw rising, was no star. But you know, when one wants to believe a thing, no matter what the contradicting evidence, it takes awhile to admit one is mistaken. That's what seems to happen, here.
Notice how Luke's later account 'answers' this not-so-nice depiction of Israel's no-desire for Messiah. Someone reading Matthew in 50AD would naturally wonder if anyone positive to Messiah got to know when He was born at the same time. Answer? Yes, the shepards did, and here's the story in Luke. Again, later Bible books always elaborate on prior material, for the then-current audience. It's not a question of whether the Gospels 'agree': of course they agree, but you can't know how they agree until you know how they are designed to teach.
Everything in the Bible is paradigmal. Whether God is telling you a real story that transpired or principles, you are to understand that the example or structure you see, stands for many others you do not see. So it's categorical: categorical negative volition in Jerusalem, representing a large slice of the world's population; categorical but messed-up positive volition, represented by the Magi. Categorical and straight-on-Scripture positive volition, represented by the shepards. Real people, real stories, but paradigmal of the larger whole. So anyone who was into astrology but wanted the King of the Jews, saw a 'star' or similar phenomenon to 'guide' them to move to Israel, if they weren't already there. As you'll see after this table, they would have plenty of time to get to Israel. So many did see, many did come, and like us, they all had mixtures of goofiness and God-interest, driving them.
Later in this section, we'll cover why we know it's an angel, not a star or even a prophecy you 'see' (calculate, which even Israel could easily do from Daniel 9). Meanwhile, the point is this: Israel was unpleasantly surprised (which it shouldn't have been), and the magi weren't seeing any star either, else they'd not need to ask anyone in Jerusalem about it.
Preview of coming attractions: stars or prophecies don't act like the bouncing ball dancing atop the lyrics in the old Mitch Miller or other variety show. Stars don't hover over houses, or 'lead' you, anywhere. They are too far away, and they can't be stars if they're galavanting around. Only people can do that. Well, persons: conscious beings, who control their own movement by volition. Prophecies don't have volition; neither do stars. But angels do. Angels were sent to shepards.
Takes time for news to travel throughout a city, and Jerusalem wasn't small. Most likely, they were led there to (unknowingly) wait until the completion of the 40-days' Lev12 Law for Mary; to wait for the 30-days-minimum age Law on a first born child's Dedication at the Jerusalem Temple. More on waiting follows below. At the moment, notice that these Magi must have some reason to be in Jerusalem for awhile, else their news can't permeate all of Jerusalem. If they are an official delegation, they would stay a minimum of two weeks, or even a month. If as (my pastor maintains) the Feast of Dedication is going on at this time -- or any other Feast, for that matter -- it would explain also why they'd stay at least that long. Certainly this was not a short visit: you don't travel as an entourage for such an express purpose, to briefly stay at your destination.
Takes time to ask the right questions. How many Bible documentaries have you seen, books you've read, timelines you've seen on the internet, all of them obsessed over planetary conjunctions, or other attempts to date based on illegal lights in the freaking sky? We hear someone 'expert' tell us there was this star in Bethelehem (yeah, you just try to find it in Bible) -- and we just ASSume it's true. So not only does it take time for news to travel in a city; it takes centuries for anyone to search beneath a common story. We don't catch on fast, either. Even now.
So when does that season end? In Chislev. You'd just finished planting your Next Year's Crops, before the rain began in Bul (Oct-Nov, "Bul" means "rain"). Chislev in the Hebrew calendar runs basically mid November to mid-December on our calendars. First Chanukah commenced 25 Chislev 164BC, which was also the date Antiochus IV Epiphanes, died (according to ISBE Encyclopedia and other sources). There's a way using God's calendar, to prove the Lord was born on 25 Chislev, which works out to 25 December of OUR calendar that year. PassPlot.htm has the details, but the principle behind the Birthdate is to fill a deadspot in the Hebrew calendar (calendar is all a roadmap of history) -- so see the "Modest Proposal" link there to orient to WHY that date would be picked. God has this 'thing' about orchestrating Time to Communicate, viz. in Dan9:25. This isn't about oooh-aaah stuff, but about How God Thinks and What He says About His Son.
Um, there are no feasts after Ethanim and before winter, except Chanukah. So that's the reason why Jerusalem would be so crowded, Mary and Joseph could find no room at the inn -- Bethelehem was only five miles southwest, so would have received a lot of overflow. Why the magi would come and stay so long. It was a famous civil holiday, much like our July 4th in America, and you didn't just celebrate it for a day.
After all, beginning 25 Chislev 164BC, the weather must have been good enough for thousands of Jews to spontaneously walk from their homes carrying candles, to converge upon the Temple in honor of its Rededication. For "Chanukah" means "Dedication", aka the "Feast of Lights" (named after that spontaneous parade). And the weather must have been good enough for the Lord to be there, John 10:22. He's outside, talking (see 10:31 on how they picked up stones to throw at Him). Solomon's Portico is along the eastern wall of the Temple; given the map on p.65 of Tim Dowley's Atlas of Bible and Christianity (1997 Baker Books edition), looks like it was near a gate facing the Mount of Olives (on the map as the "Golden Gate"), so they could have easily walked out there. Stones to throw would not be inside the Temple grounds, lol: it's against Mosaic Law to kill anyone inside the Temple. So the weather had to be nice enough for the throngs, and for Pharisees to amble around, having leisure to pick up stones to throw.
For in Leviticus 26 and Deut 28, God makes no bones about the fact He uses weather to communicate blessing or cursing. Since here the Savior is being born, it makes a great deal of sense to say that whatever the season is, it's nice: unexpected. For the Blessing of Salvation, is born. The 2nd Advent is specifically designed to be a comfortable day, Zech14:6. So it makes sense that the First one would be also. What's more, since this Birth is predicted via both David's 1000 years promise and the Daniel 9 timeline, you can estimate when it will occur, and plan, even go to Israel; so it makes sense to argue that the nice weather preceded His Birth by some months, maybe even a year -- to give everyone time, to comfortably get there.
See, Christianity isn't paying attention to its Bible. But some do: it was really heartening to read how Tim Dowley reports this passage on p.60 of his 1997 Baker Books edition of the Atlas of Bible and Christianity: the short paragraph stresses it was the report of the Magi of a "portentous star" -- not saying the Bible agreed with that report. Exactly true. My pastor made the same point in his 1965 exegesis of this Matthew passage.
Then why do the magi see this 'star' in Matt2? Why is it there? Why does it disappear and reappear, so to speak, by Matt2:9, then by Matt2:11, 'lead' them to Joseph and Mary? And where are Joseph and Mary, at that point? Answers to those questions are pretty big ones, and will be covered below.
So assuming the much more likely scenario that there is no time elapse between Matt2:1a and 1b given the Greek text, the following bullets seem the most likely interpretation. God will tell you if I've screwed up somewhere, so the wording below is forthright, as usual. No sense in hedging.
So for the people to commonly call Him that, was predicted in the OT Hebrew soundplay Root/Branch-related verses like Isa11:1; and there are many of them, since "Root" (aka "Branch") is one of His Titles. "Nezer" also means the holy crown worn by the high priest: main theme of Book of Hebrews is His New High Priest status. "Nezer" also means a ruler's crown (2Kings 11:12 and transliterated nezer, in the LXX). Furthermore, the very town of Nazareth was located on the slopes, a kind of crown/root of its own -- you couldn't build your house on the plain, and even on the slopes you had to dig deep and build from the limestone; or the rains would sweep the house away -- hence the firm foundation analogy the Lord makes in Matthew 7:24-25, yet another play by Matthew on Nazarene.
The Nazirite vow in OT Law signified dedication (Numbers 6). It was represented by not cutting your hair, because pruning meant God cutting you OFF. You prune unproductive branches and shoots, so that new ones will grow whereas the old ones did not. The pruned branches (etc.) were burned. You also pruned to use what was on the vine for eating, etc.: common-life stuff. So to not be cut off for common use, hence sanctified-to-God, hence the long hair. See Lev25:5, 11 for the analogy. But He did not have long hair; which we know, since God never breaks His Own law: Paul devoted an entire chapter on how men should have short hair (hence no yarmulkes, either) -- but women long, 1Cor11. Paul, who took the Nazirite vow twice (Acts 18 and 21), ought to know something about hair. Further, you grew your short hair for the vow. But if you yourself were the vow, then all of you grows, and your hair is meaningless. Qorban, in Hebrew: set-apart-to-God. New Priesthood, new rules, theme of Book of Hebrews.
See: there are hundreds of related verses, here. Kinda apt, to be coming from Nazareth, huh. Too bad the Pharisees missed it all, thinking that no prophet can come from Galilee (John 7:52), and especially, not Nazareth. The name alone, should have alerted them. Good to know that the mistake we make about the Star of Bethlehem, is kinda like the mistake they made about no prophet coming from Galilee. They only searched Scripture superficially; we did, too. Human nature, then: no need for embarrassment.
Luke also concatenates all that Nazarene meaning, in Luke 2. First, he sets up His Arrival with it. Starting with, how the shepards are phulassw'ing their flocks in Luke 2. That's a play on Isa60:21, which in Hebrew uses "natser" for phulassw, a prophecy which belongs to Messiah; which He'll actually use to begin His Ministry: Isa61:1, quoted in Luke 4:19. Shepard. Guarding. Good Shepard. The Nazarene. See how rich is the wordplay, in a tri-lingual society (Greek, Hebrew, Latin -- not to mention Aramaic, which is a hybrid)? See how no English translation can even begin to convey all this meaning? So until about the 1850's or so, all those Nativity pageants can be excused (maybe) for positing a Star of Bethlehem. But we got the original languages collated and disseminated between 1830-1890, mostly done in Europe then ported to the US -- so there's no excuse now, here in 2007. For more Greek-geek stuff to proof this interp, click here.
So the scholarly consensus that a lot of time elapsed between end of Matt1 and beginning of Matt2, is remiss -- you know, even scholars are human. :) After all, the Greek text DOESN'T put in any of the normal words to indicate a huge time elapse like two years. That's your biggest tipoff the events are immediately after His Birth. Well, that and the magi, who surely wouldn't have delayed fully two years, before arriving. Again, it doesn't take long to get to Jerusalem from Persia: see Ezra 7:8-9. Ezra had a whole train of priestly stuff to take with him from Babylon, since he was permanently moving there -- yet it only took him four months. Took Nehemiah even less time (asked for permission in Nisan, finished the wall by 25 Elul, 52 days, Neh2:1ff compared to 6:15, so his trip took less than four months, probably much less, as he had a cavalry escort).
Herod thinks Bethelehem is where the child would be -- proving he forgot the Mosaic law about presenting the child at Temple. We forgot it all these centuries, too. Despite Luke 2. And despite Luke 2, we still argue over whether the Lord's parents lived in Bethelehem or Nazareth, before He was born. Can we be dumber? What's not to understand in Luke 2:4 and :22 and :39? You don't need to be a Greek student to read those verses. Stuff on the internet about this, claiming the Bible contradicts itself, is astonishingly puerile. We don't read, so we don't see, so that means the Bible is wrong, lol. Again -- the point is to show how desperate Satan&Co. are, to blind us: Bible answers hiding in plain sight, we don't see. For centuries.
Notice the Grace of God in all this: they are so positive to His Birth that they come; so positive, that they remain. Just like the shepards in Luke 2, they don't panic, but instead wait. So they are thinking over, reassessing the information they have. And expect a Divine Answer. They are shifting out of relying on inanimate stars, and into waiting for direct contact from a Living God. Of course, we know that by Matt2:12, this shifting has worked: for now they are TALKED TO in a dream, just like any strong believer then would be. No more stargazing, for them! For when you have the Word, you don't need magic anymore.
Read the later Luke 2 with the above paragraph in mind, and you'll see that Luke 2 'answers' Matt 2. Tale of two positive sets of volition. Matthew's, of the foreign magi, very wryly told. Luke's, of the Jewish shepards, who of course also get angels ANNOUNCING, but with no magic 'star' ideas clouding, since of course the Jews know that's not how God does things. But the magi, didn't. But the magi, came to LEARN it was an angel. See the parallels in Luke? And you know Luke's Greek writing style specializes in finesse. He likes to make indirect statements so that when the import dawns on you, the enjoyment is more intense. (Book of Acts specializes in wry finessing, too.)
| Here we see the biggest mistake in the translations: Greek word "anatole" should be translated "rising" after Matt2:1, but instead keeps on being mistranslated "east". The term is in the plural in 2:1, so properly means "east"; but is not used in the plural again, anywhere in Matt2; the singular form meaning "rising", is only used in 2:2 and 2:9. Had the translation been corrected, then we'd have gotten Matthew's wordplay. We all know that airplanes and helicopters rise; we all know that to be directly over a "house" is not something a star does; there were no airplanes, helicopters, or even hot air balloons, back then: so it could not be a star. Therefore, it had to be an angel. Whew! No more stupid documentaries on planetary conjunctions, no more attempts to prove some bleeping AGAINST THE LAW, Star; no more lying-against-Bible Christmas scenes with the three wise men by a manger! |
Oddly, mainstream Christianity doesn't reconcile Matt2:13-14 with Luke 2:39, so another map below on the same Atlas page ASSumes they went directly to Egypt from Bethlehem, based on Matt2:13-14. But Bible doesn't say that; Luke inserts that data about them going directly back to Nazareth after His Dedication.
What seem like Bible contradictions are always HEY LOOK AT ME flags from God. He's stressing something. Since we are so prone to call the Word a liar, He 'plays' the liar but plays the lyre of deft confluence for us. Take the Jochebed controversy, for example (see "Jochebed" link in MisTrans.htm). Many think the Bible errant with respect to the 400 years in Egypt, because they misdefine Moses' lineage. It's jarring: God cut out Levi and then Joined him (cute: "Levi" means Joined, in Hebrew), thereby completely removing the sons of Kohath; then, via Jochebed, a higher-ranking Levite through the MOTHER, God grafts in Amram, her husband. Moses and Aaron were the kids. Why did God do this? Levi had cut off all the males in Shechem after ordering them to cut their foreskins; all that treachery, in the name of avenging Dinah's rape. See: Moses' authority was always contested by the other sons of Kohath, because they had male primogeniture, but God cut them all off. But on the surface -- if you don't investigate -- it looks like a mistake, for Amram to be listed first -- and of course, you can't find an earlier Amram, to justify the lineage order God gives. So scholars think the Bible wrong. Nope. Jarring, yes: Pay attention! is what that means. Now you'll know more about why the rebellion, how the slavery yes lasted 400 years, and many other things you'd not know, had God not flagged us with Amram.
So too, here with Luke 2:39. God is flagging us down to stop and pay close attention. For if they returned to Nazareth, then they did not go to Egypt from Bethlehem, which can ONLY mean that the Magi visited them in NAZARETH; so Herod could learn where the baby was; so they had to leave. You immediately know that all Israel would then be target for his baby-murdering scheme, since the road Joseph and Mary travelled on, was the main road north. You are too horrified to speak as you realize this. So is Luke: he stops writing, himself horrified. Aposiopesis: can't speak anyway, and the reader under the Spirit will need that pause as well.
So now you know just how brave Joseph was, in Matt2:23. Going back to the same place. Joseph was afraid to go anywhere in Israel because Archelaus was ruling in Judea; but God wanted him to go right back where he was. Takes a lot of faith, to return to the place your family was known to be, by your enemies.
By this you know that it was almost the last minute before the Magi realized it was no star. That they had to be warned in a dream not to return to Herod (Matt2:12), shows they were still naive about his motive: because it wasn't their motive. But they have real wisdom, now. It will take time to grow up in it. Since they come from the northeast, this northerly route to Nazareth is right on their way home. So the spies tracking them, are tracking them north. Herod had a great spy system. So to suddenly lose these magi means they had some 'help' from God.
