The following Scripture passages are offered to aid beginning fellowships. The readings and commentary for this week are more in line with what has become usual; for the following will most likely be familiar observations. The concept behind this Sabbath’s selection is the firstborns of man and beast belong to God.
Weekly Readings
For the Sabbath of January 15, 2011
The person conducting the Sabbath service should open services with two or three hymns, or psalms, followed by an opening prayer acknowledging that two or three (or more) are gathered together in Christ Jesus’ name, and inviting the Lord to be with them.
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After this Jesus went away to the other side of the Sea of Galilee, which is the Sea of Tiberias. And a large crowd was following him, because they saw the signs that he was doing on the sick. Jesus went up on the mountain, and there he sat down with his disciples. Now the Passover, the feast of the Jews, was at hand. Lifting up his eyes, then, and seeing that a large crowd was coming toward him, Jesus said to Philip, “Where are we to buy bread, so that these people may eat?” He said this to test him, for he himself knew what he would do. Philip answered him, “Two hundred denarii would not buy enough bread for each of them to get a little.” One of his disciples, Andrew, Simon Peter's brother, said to him, “There is a boy here who has five barley loaves and two fish, but what are they for so many?” Jesus said, “Have the people sit down.” Now there was much grass in the place. So the men sat down, about five thousand in number. Jesus then took the loaves, and when he had given thanks, he distributed them to those who were seated. So also the fish, as much as they wanted. And when they had eaten their fill, he told his disciples, “Gather up the leftover fragments, that nothing may be lost.” So they gathered them up and filled twelve baskets with fragments from the five barley loaves left by those who had eaten. When the people saw the sign that he had done, they said, “This is indeed the Prophet who is to come into the world!”
Perceiving then that they were about to come and take him by force to make him king, Jesus withdrew again to the mountain by himself. (John 6:1–15)
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If the people had taken Jesus and made Him king, Jesus would have exercised the authority of a king via the will of the people, not because the Most High God had given Jesus that authority; therefore, because the prince of this world retained dominion over the kingdom of this world (John 12:31 et al) the people would have made Jesus an agent of this demonic prince to whom all authority in this world has been given. Jesus needed to nix the intent of the people, and He did so by withdrawing to the mountain by Himself, with this withdrawing forming a shadow and type of Him returning to heaven—withdrawing from the people—until it becomes time for Him to receive the kingdom of this world from the Most High God, thereby ruling the people by divine right. If He had remained on earth longer [that is, for more than the three and a half years of His ministry], He couldn’t have escaped from being made king before it was time: He would have cut short the Adversary’s allotted days.
All authority to rule in this world or in the Abyss comes either from the will of the people [the governed] or from the Most High God. No other basis for authority exists. When a reigning power rules in the name of the people or via the direct will of the people, that reigning power is never of God, who gave to the Adversary all authority over humankind when God consigned all of humanity to disobedience so that He could have mercy on all (Rom 11:32) at a time of His choosing. Democracy—direct rule by the demos, the people—who remain sons of disobedience (Eph 2:1–3) is also direct rule by the Adversary. Only when the kingdom of this world has been given to the Son of Man (see Dan 7:9–14; Rev 11:15–18) and all people have been baptized in spirit (Joel 2:28; Matt 3:11), thereby giving to all people the mind of Christ Jesus, can the people rule themselves as representatives of God, with each person then being a king to him or herself and a lord in the Millennium. Until then, the people serve the Adversary as his slaves, with the Most High God having given to the Adversary authority to reign over living things through being the prince of the power of the air.
Again, the right of human beings to rule themselves either directly [democracy] or indirectly [as in a republic or a constitutional monarchy] does not come from God, but from the Adversary who demanded this right when he said in his heart, I will set my throne on high; I will sit on the mount of assembly; I will make myself like the Most High (Isa 14:13–14). The rebellion of this anointed cherub who was in Eden, the heavenly garden of God (Ezek 28:13), forms the invisible reality seen in type in Korah’s rebellion: Korah, a Levite, his friends and 250 chiefs chosen by the assembly of Israel gathered together against Moses and Aaron, and said to Moses, “‘You have gone too far! For all in the congregation are holy, every one of them, and the Lord is among them. Why then do you exalt yourselves above the assembly of the Lord?’” (Num 16:3).
What did Korah say that was not true? All of Israel was holy (Ex 19:5–6). Certainly the Lord was leading Israel by day and by night. The assembly of the people represented the congregation in the wilderness—
But in Korah demanding that Moses and Aaron answer to the assembly of the people, thereby creating a republican form of democratic governance, did Korah not do what that Day Star, the anointed cherub in Eden, did when he sought to sit on the mount of assembly and make himself like the Most High? Indeed, in Korah’s rebellion is seen the Adversary’s rebellion, and in what happened to Korah and his friends is seen what happened to the Adversary when a rent in the fabric of heaven opened up—analogous to the wound in the side of Christ Jesus—and spirit flowed from this rent into the Abyss [bottomless pit] along with the Adversary and his angels. As Eve, the mother of all human beings, was made from a rib taken from a wound in the side of the first Adam; and as the Church, the mother of all spiritually living human beings, was made from a wound in the side of the last Adam, the man Jesus of Nazareth, the creation [i.e., all that is physical] was made from a rent (a wound) in the fabric of heaven, with the deep sleep that came over the first Adam and the three days that the last Adam was in the heart of the earth representing in analogy the length of time between the creation and when the world passes away (1 John 2:17). The darkness of deep sleep or of death and burial represents the spiritually lifeless state of the creation, a glorious death chamber in which the Adversary and his rebelling henchmen will be executed after they are cast into time (Rev 12:7–9) from which they cannot escape. For it is not in the mind of man—which the Adversary, the spiritual king of Babylon (Isa 14:4), will be given when he is cast into time as Nebuchadnezzar, the physical king of Babylon, was given the mind of a beast—to devise a means of escaping the confines of time.
The physicality of man prevents him from escaping the creation, but the Adversary is not of this creation. He was the signet of perfection, full of wisdom and perfect in beauty (Ezek 28:12). If left to his own devises, he would escape from his death chamber. But he won’t be left to his own devices: he will be given the mind of a human being even though he will retain the power of an archangel. And with the mind of a man, he will not be able to devise a means to escape. Rather, his intentions to devour the Remnant, the holy ones who keep the commandments and have the testimony of Jesus (from Rev 12:17), and to regain his serfs, the remainder of humankind, will prevent him from escaping until he loses all freedom of movement.
From a wound in the side of heaven—from the spirit that flowed from this wound as blood and water flowed from the wound in the side of the then-dead body of Jesus, all that has mass has been created. And as the Church as the Body of Christ was given life because of Jesus’ death at Calvary, from a wound in the now-dead Body of Christ the endtime harvest of God will come; for the son of the first Adam that was in the likeness of Adam who was in the likeness of God (Gen 5:1–3) wasn’t Eve, flesh of Adam’s flesh, but was Seth. Likewise, the son of God that is in the likeness of Christ Jesus who was the image of God (John 14:9) isn’t the Church, the Body of Christ, but the nation born “of the desolate one” (Isa 53:1), the nation born in a day (Isa 66:7–8), the day of the Lord.
From a wound in the fabric of heaven comes all that has been made, thereby giving to heaven qualities analogous to a human body, with the Most High God in heaven forming the reality of the invisible inner self in a human being and with the dimensional separation between the inner self and a person’s fleshly body representing in analogy the separation between the base of the mountain of God and the height of the summit where the throne of the Most High resides. This separation is seen by the people of Israel being gathered around the base of Mount Sinai, with limits set around the mountain (Ex 19:21–25). Only Moses, with Joshua as his assistant, could ascend the mountain, and then only by invitation (Ex 24:12–18). Only Moses entered the cloud that covered the summit of Sinai.
In heaven, the difference between a son of God being a servant [an angelic son of God] and a son of God being an heir [a glorified human being] is seen in type by the difference between the people of Israel remaining at the base of Sinai and Moses and Joshua ascending Mount Sinai, with Moses being likened to the Joshua and his friends (from Zech 3:8) who can come and go—“‘have the right of access’” (v. 7)—to and from the summit of the mountain of God as they will.
The difference between a servant and an heir; the difference angels and glorified saints [the holy ones]; the difference between those saints who will be called least and those saints who will be called great (from Matt 5:19) in the resurrection of firstfruits; the difference between saints resurrected in the great White Throne Judgment and those resurrected as firstfruits—the difference between one living entity and another in heaven is represented in type by Israel at Sinai, with Aaron remaining with the people at the base of the mountain and with Joshua and Moses ascending, but with Joshua only going halfway up while Moses entered the cloud where the Lord was.
As the first Eve was deceived by the serpent, the last Eve [the Church] has been deceived by that old serpent, Satan the devil. And because both the first Eve and the last Eve were deceived [devoured] by the serpent, it is reasonable to conclude that all of the creation—all that has mass—will be likewise devoured by death, what the ancient Mayans anticipated but did not understand.
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Jesus had to use elevation and distance to escape from the people who wanted to make Him king: the people were willing to follow—as in following a king—whomever healed and fed them. Does that sound politically familiar? Do politicians not retain their elected offices by promising healthcare reform and welfare assistance?
The sacred cows of politics in the United States of America are Social Security and Medicare, with elderly voters more likely to turn out to vote than any other demographic, and turn out to protect “their issues.” Similarity exists throughout Europe: safety-net social programs, once implemented, have the same permanency as the country that implemented them; for these programs will bankrupt the country.
Any people or nation state that is congressionally organized [that is, where the people have the power to select their leaders] will inevitably fail, what the Most High God knew when iniquity was found in an anointed cherub (Ezek 28:14–15) … mountains are not ruled from their base, but from their summits—
Geography is a thing of this world that reveals the invisible things of God (Rom 1:20), with Jesus escaping the people after feeding them by going as high up on the mountain as Joshua went with Moses up Mount Sinai, disclosing that Jesus was not then, when He fed the five thousand, in type the Moses who had led the people out from Egypt [the geographical representation of sin] and had led Israel and the children of Israel, the firstborn son of God (from Ex 4:22), to the plains of Moab where the children of Israel would have to choose life or death (Deut 30:15–20) … analogies do not represent hard one-to-one correspondences with the things being represented; for one “reality” can be represented by several analogies and one analogy can reveal two or more realities. Rather, analogies as metaphors disclose what cannot be mimetically represented by human words or by comprehendible words. Analogies are a form of figurative speech that is akin to parables.
In analogy, the man Moses represents the man Jesus the Nazarene during His earthly ministry and represents the glorified Jesus when He leads the 144,000 (see Rev 14:1–5) in the Endurance, but Moses and Aaron together, in analogy, represent the two witnesses during the Affliction. And in a logical extension of Moses as analogy, the Remnant in the Endurance is a reality of Aaron in the wilderness, and a reality of the first disciples in the 1st-Century.
The Moses who entered the cloud on the 10th day of the third month to receive instructions pertaining to building the temple; this Moses who in anger hurled the commandments to the ground, breaking the two stone tablets (Ex 32:19); this Moses who made the people “drink” their idolatry (v. 20) and who stood in the gate of the camp and asked, “‘Who is on the Lord’s side? Come to me’” (v. 26); this Moses who went again to the summit of the mountain to plead for the life of the people and who came down with a second Sinai covenant, a spiritual covenant that was not ratified by the shedding of blood but by the better promise of entering into God’s presence—this first Moses is the representation of the glorified Christ Jesus between the 1st and 21st Centuries, with Moses after he ascends the mountain to plead for the people forming the shadow and type of Christ Jesus as high priest in heaven. And what the Lord told Moses about blotting out of His book whoever has sinned against Him (v. 33) pertains to Christians who willfully transgress the commandments (see Rom 6:16), for willful transgression comes from unbelief.
Glory did not initially shine from Moses’ face when he spoke with the Lord at the burning bush or when he first met with the Lord atop Mount Sinai—this glory by its absence discloses that the prophet to come who would be like Moses (Deut 18:15–19) would be a man as Moses was a man. But after the rebellion of the people and after the Lord rejected them, ordaining the sons of Levi instead of all the people to be a kingdom of priests (cf. Ex 19:6; 32:29), the Lord sent a plague upon the people (Ex 32:35) as the Most High God sent a death plague upon the Christian Church which rebelled against the Lord because the men who spoke for the glorified Jesus [i.e., His disciples, who were in type spiritual Aaron] allowed the people to break loose and sin through idolatry against the Most High. And as the man Moses descended from the mountain to address this idolatry, Christ Jesus will send His two witnesses, the two sons of new oil who stand by the Lord (Zech 4:14) to deal with the people as the man Moses dealt with the people at Sinai.
· Initially, all of Israel was to be a kingdom of priests—
· Initially, all of Christendom was to be a kingdom of priests (1 Pet 2:9)—
· After idolatry broke out within Israel, the sons of Levi were ordained to be that kingdom of priests—
· After idolatry broke out in the Christian Church, Sabbatarian Anabaptists at the cost of great persecution were chosen as the seven named churches to be the kingdom of priests—
As not all of the tribe of Levi served in the temple but took turns serving, not all Sabbatarian Anabaptists will serve in the temple of God as living stones from which the temple is constructed. Today, most Sabbatarian Anabaptists have tasted of the goodness of God, have liked the “taste” of receiving the spirit of God, but have not continued to grow in grace and knowledge but have become fossilized invertebrates in the hardened mud of lifeless ideologies.
The glorified Jesus deals with Christian idolatry through the two witnesses (Rev 11:3–13), who will bring plagues upon all peoples of the world; for when the Holy Spirit is poured out on all flesh, all people wherever they dwell will become the people of God. Hence, Jesus does through the two witnesses what He did in His own body, even to the Father calling the two witnesses forth from the dead after three and a half days.
In analogy, the giving of the Law represents the giving of the spirit on the afternoon of the Wave Sheaf Offering (see John 20:22–23), with the seven days of the Feast of Unleavened Bread representing the seven endtime years of tribulation (i.e., the Affliction and the Endurance). Thus, the giving of the spirit midweek [on the fourth day of Unleavened Bread] represents in type when the world will be baptized in spirit and the third part of humankind will rebel against the Antichrist … the people breaking loose and running to riot in orgy while Moses was still in the cloud serves as a type of greater Christendom’s idolatry between the 1st and 21st Centuries, and as a type of greater Christendom’s idolatry during the Affliction, the first 1260 days of the seven endtime years. When Moses descends the mountain and in anger casts down the stone tablets, the spirit is in type taken from the Church. Again, the spirit is taken at the end of the 1st-Century CE, and though the spirit is not taken from rebelling Christians on day 220 of the Affliction, these rebels are condemned to the lake of fire, a condemnation that uses the second death as the reality of the spirit having been taken from the Church in the 1st-Century.
Moses ascending the mountain a second time and entering into the cloud a second time represents in analogy when the glorified Jesus ascended to heaven a second time (Acts 1:9). Thus, the people running to riot and being slain by sin while Moses was initially in the cloud, in type, serves to represent what happened to the natural descendants of the patriarchs, who by the prohibition of kindling a fire on the Sabbath were prevented from having spiritual life. In addition, the people running to riot and being slain by sin while Moses was initially in the cloud serves as a type of the Christian Church adopting the principles tenets of Greek paganism and Mathraic sun worship. Hence, it is the rebellion of Israel when the twelve spies returned from the Promise Land (Num chap 14) that directly pertains to the Christian Church in the Apostasy (2 Thess 2:3); for ten of these spies represent ten prominent Christian theologians who tell Christians that they are still under grace after they have been filled-with and empowered by spirit, thereby liberating them from indwelling sin and death. These ten tell the spiritually naked Son of Man that it is not possible to slay the giant named, Obedience [to God]. But Joshua and Caleb, the two spies that serve as the shadow and copy of the two witnesses as Moses and Aaron serve as types of the two witnesses, did not go along with the ten other spies … it is Caleb, however, who was most vocal in insisting that the people could overcome the land, that the people of the land were bread for Israel (Num 13:30; Num 14:6–9). Caleb served as Joshua’s spokesman as Aaron served as Moses’ spokesman.
Analogies are sometimes hard to follow, difficult to grasp, and mentally unwieldy, but they are all Christians have for “sight” when it comes to seeing into the supra-dimensional heavenly realm … Jesus used analogies, metaphors, metonymical speech, and parables, a special kind of metaphorical speech, to make the words of this world represent the things of heaven. But in the visible things of this world representing the invisible things of God (again Rom 1:20), the audible words of this world also serve as visible things. It is not simply the linguistic objects that are assigned to words [linguistic icons] that reveal the invisible things of God; it is not simply in the linguistic objects of mimetic speech that God has made known so that every person can perceive the attributes of God; but in a more complex schema involving linguistic objects in translation and phonetic, cross-language naming icons, the mind of God and of Christ Jesus becomes darkly seen, with “play” being an important element of the mind of God.
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When godly play is unrecognized by readers of Scripture, the reader is intellectually impoverished … as a segment of humanity, the poor represent those individuals who lack an adequate distribution of the things of this world such as food, shelter, clothing, tools, possessions of any sort. When the things of this world reveal the things of God, the poor represent those Christians who lack understanding, knowledge, the fruit of the spirit. Therefore, the economic realities of this world inevitably forms a mirror image—as the left hand is the non-symmetrical mirror image of the right hand—of understanding and knowledge of the things of God, foremost of which is love. Those who are rich in this world will usually be poor in theological understanding; whereas the poor in this world usually love their fellow human beings as the rich are unable to do.
Economics shouldn’t be a part of theological discussions, but the subject cannot be avoided:
Six days before the Passover, Jesus therefore came to Bethany, where Lazarus was, whom Jesus had raised from the dead. So they gave a dinner for him there. Martha served, and Lazarus was one of those reclining with him at table. Mary therefore took a pound of expensive ointment made from pure nard, and anointed the feet of Jesus and wiped his feet with her hair. The house was filled with the fragrance of the perfume. But Judas Iscariot, one of his disciples (he who was about to betray him), said, “Why was this ointment not sold for three hundred denarii and given to the poor?” He said this, not because he cared about the poor, but because he was a thief, and having charge of the moneybag he used to help himself to what was put into it. Jesus said, “Leave her alone, so that she may keep it for the day of my burial. For the poor you always have with you, but you do not always have me.” (John 12:1–8 emphasis added)
The nard would have, if valuations are compared, fed the Passover crowd that would have made Jesus their king one and a half meals … was Judas Iscariot correct in saying that the wealth of this world should be given to food banks and soup kitchens and homeless shelters rather than “wasted” on Christ Jesus when He remains spiritually present with His disciples before the Second Passover liberation of Israel and the revealing [disrobing] of the Son of Man? This is a question every disciple must answer for him or herself, but John said that Judas Iscariot’s motives were impure, that Judas was a thief, not a champion of the poor.
The poor will always be with a nation: they are derivatives of social systems based on buying and selling. And in congressionally governed nation-states, when the poor realize that they no longer have to live “poor” if they place this person or that person in power, the nation state, in trying to eliminate poverty, will destroy itself from within. It needs no outside enemies. Its own good intentions are enough to collapse the nation.
Two hundred denarii, what Philip said it would cost to feed the crowd that followed Jesus just one meal, was the equivalent of two hundred days’ wages for a laborer, or eight to nine months of employment. The disciples, if engaged as laborers, could have fed the crowd that followed Jesus during the Passover [the time when Israel would have been in Jerusalem to observe the spring feast, from the 10th to 22nd day of Aviv], but that is all they could have done in the year. There would have been no means to feed the crowd at the Feast of Weeks, and at the Fall Feast, the other two times a year when all Israelite males were to appear before the Lord.
The few cannot support the many. Whereas the many can barely provide for the few, it is not possible for half of a society to support the other half. Thus the most reliable and safest means to overthrow a government is to increase the number of poor and then convince the poor that they are victims entitled to support from their oppressors, the rich. This is the job of “community organizers” who “empower the poor” by rhetoric and agitation. This lies at the heart of Marxism’s recipe for overturning societies based on buying and selling; for in a Marxist utopia, workers “work” not to produce goods and services but for the sake of the inner empowerment that comes from working. Workers work because they are workers, thereby taking their happiness not from the accumulation of things but from the work they do. Workers support the party drones that are periodically purged as are honey bee drones when seasonal change occurs. Yes, Marxism exploits and makes visible the animalistic nature of human beings, a nature received from the Adversary through his broadcast as prince of the power of the air, but a nature that will change (see Isa 11:6–9) when the world is baptized in the divine breath of God (Joel 2:28).
Marxism pretends to be an ideology of the people, but when the people are allowed to vote with their feet, they inevitably “vote” themselves out from the Marxist nation. The safety net that Marxism provides to the workers always needs to be propped up by rifle barrels and anchored by tank tracks—
The impossibility of truly providing a safety net for the poor is never logically addressed when “the people” directly or indirectly control the purse strings of a nation state. Compassion overwhelms logic. No one wants a mass human die-off from starvation as is seen among animals:
In the 1980s, the Sitka Blacktail deer population on Kodiak Island reached and exceeded 100,000 animals. The State of Alaska in 1982 gave seven deer tags to every hunter, up from five tags the year before, but hunters did not seriously diminish the population, and a series of hard winters with heavy snowpack drove deer down onto the beaches, where for want of browse, many starved. The population dipped to about 20,000 animals, and has since somewhat stabilized at about 25,000 … during a series of hard winters in the 1960s, it was not unusual to find as many as 1,200 deer carcasses along a single beach, suggesting a 20-year cycle was at work before brown bears realized that another source of protein [besides salmon] was present on the island, where bears now den a few weeks later than they did a half century ago.
The boom and bust cycles seen in wildlife populations, notably in rabbits, is replicated in human populations, with war traditionally limiting overpopulation if plagues and famines are absent … but using war, plagues, famines is no way to rule over humankind. It is, however, the way of the Adversary, the present prince of this world. Only one problem exists: since the invention of the hydrogen bomb, wars have ceased being a reliable means to slow human overpopulation and have become, instead, the means by which human life can be utterly destroyed.
Humanity seems determined to destroy itself, or at least that is what secular prophets of doom claim. If human beings do not die from starvation, specifically because of genetic modifications of seed grains, then humans will exhaust the world’s supply of fresh water—or will place super computers in robots that deem humans expendable—or will begin a hydrogen bomb cascade that leaves the globe uninhabitable—or will through climate change make the earth uninhabitable—or will run out of fossil fuel before an alternative energy source materializes … how many ways can humankind destroy itself? In more ways than the one way that is necessary to wipe the species from existence.
It will be our good intentions that ultimately destroys us—
Human good intentions aside, until dominion over the single kingdom of this world is taken from the Adversary and given to the Son of Man halfway through seven endtime years of tribulation, with the fall of spiritual Babylon [the kingdom of the Adversary] forming the mirror image of the ascendency of the kingdom of the holy ones and with the fall of Babylon, if grafted, appearing as a logarithmic curve, public charity will bankrupt the nation state, any nation state, with the nation coming to its end in public anarchy, from which a dictator or a series of dictators arise.
There needs to here be a pause: the earthly poor that have been addressed forms the left hand enantiomer of the spiritually impoverished, those Christians who for want of understanding cannot comprehend the metaphoric language of Scripture. Most if not all things that can be said about the earthly poor pertains to the spiritually impoverished.
Various schemes have been humanly devised to address overpopulation and by extension, social inequality, but none have been successful or will be successful as long as the scheme has an economic core … capitalism is no more the answer than is Marxism or national or international socialism. All of them revolve around the formulation of wealth or the redistribution of wealth, when it is the concept of “wealth”—not wealth itself—that is the problem … in a similar way to Paul saying that “by the works of the law no one will be justified” (Gal 2:16) and that it will “the doers of the law who will be justified” (Rom 2:13), it is the concept of wealth and all that the concept entails, not the wealth itself, that ensures the failure of a society. The concept places importance on “things”; i.e., on what has been made from the spirit that flowed from the wound in heaven’s side. The concept places importance on the wound, on Eve, on the last Eve, the Christian Church. The concept doesn’t place importance on Moses and Aaron, or on the Father and His Son, or on the two witnesses, but rather on the assembly of Israel in the wilderness, on choosing Jesus as one’s personal Savior, on those Christian leaders in the Affliction that would have the holy ones mingle the sacred and the profane.
The most spiritually impoverishing act a Christian can undertake is to mingle the sacred with the profane as in Christ [the sacred] with the day of the invincible sun, and by extension, Christ with the birth day of the invincible sun [December 25th]. The rebellion against God that is seen in Scripture as the great falling away [the Apostasy] (2 Thess 2:3) when the lawless one is revealed comes on Christmas, and comes as a result of Christians wanting to keep Christmas for their children after 220 days of tribulation and social turmoil.
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Marxist China tried to address that nation’s overpopulation through limiting the number of live births permitted: the State’s birth control program resulted in a disproportionate number of male to female births to such a degree that China’s involvement in a major war is inevitable (that is, inevitable unless God intervenes by taking the lives of uncovered firstborns)—
There is no economic reason to consecrate to the Lord all firstborns: “‘Whatever is the first to open the womb among the people of Israel, both of man and beast, is mine. … Every firstborn of a donkey you shall redeem with a lamb, or if you will not redeem it you shall break its neck. Every firstborn of man among your sons you shall redeem’” (Ex 13:2, 13). The reason given to redeem is the Passover exodus of Israel from slavery: “‘“Therefore I [the Israelite] sacrifice to the Lord all the males that first open the womb, but all the firstborn of my sons I redeem”’” (v. 15). But redeeming makes no sense unless there is an ownership issue in play—
Sacrificing firstborns makes no economic sense, especially when the reason is remembrance of a past event unless of course that past event forms the shadow and type of a future event … when actions are economically motivated or explained [justified] by economic activity as theoretic Marxism attempts to do, even to declaring that the Medieval Crusades occurred for economic reasons, sacrificing firstborns of livestock and redeeming firstborn of men with the sacrifice of livestock have no explanation unless—and this a huge caveat—a second Passover liberation of Israel remains to occur, a liberation of the circumcised-of-heart nation that will see the deliberate collapse of all economic activity. For the redemption and consecration of firstborns is anti-Capitalist, anti-Marxist, anti-Imperialist, even anti-theological.
To 21st-Century Americans, to deliberately kill innocent life so that another life can live is morally problematic: it is not all right to kill a Chinese prisoner so that his organs can be used to save another person’s life. It is not all right to kill a fetus so that its stem cells can be used to save a life. But for the Christian to eat a hamburger, a cow had to die. To eat meat, an animal has to die. Yes, the animal was raised to be slaughtered … have people also been reared for the express purpose of being slaughtered? Returning to what Joshua and Caleb told Israel, “‘Only do not rebel against the Lord. And do not fear the people of the land, for they are bread for us. Their protection is removed from them’” (Num 14:9)
The Apostle Paul wrote to the saints at Rome,
For the Scripture says to Pharaoh, “For this very purpose I have raised you up, that I might show my power in you, and that my name might be proclaimed in all the earth.” So then He has mercy on whomever He wills, and He hardens whomever He wills. / You will say to me then, “Why does He still find fault? For who can resist His will?” But who are you, O man, to answer back to God? Will what is molded say to its molder, “Why have you made me like this?” Has the potter no right over the clay, to make out of the same lump one vessel for honorable use and another for dishonorable use? What if God, desiring to show His wrath and to make known His power, has endured with much patience vessels of wrath prepared for destruction, in order to make known the riches of His glory for vessels of mercy, which He has prepared beforehand for glory—even us whom He has called, not from the Jews only but also from the Gentiles? (Rom 9:17–24)
If God hardened the heart of Pharaoh so that He could destroy Pharaoh and by extension, Egypt, then God acted capriciously. But if God hardened the heart of Pharaoh so that Pharaoh could serve as the shadow and type of the Adversary, the spiritual king of Babylon who will not let his slaves go without the Lord purchasing lives with lives, then in hardening Pharaoh’s heart the Lord showed how utterly impossible it was/is for a people to escape from disobedience without being redeemed by the death of others.
It was not possible for a Christian in the 1st-Century to receiving indwelling eternal life without Christ Jesus losing His life at Calvary. Now, since the spiritual death of the Body of Christ [from loss of the Holy Spirit] at the end of the 1st-Century, it is impossible for the greater Church to “breathe” on its own and thereby have life as the second generation son of promise (as Esau and Jacob, the sons of promise born to Isaac, the first generation born of promise) without an additional ransom being paid, the life of every firstborn in the Abyss and here on earth.
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This Sabbath reading continues on for another 10,000 words, far too much for a reading. Therefore, mid-thought, this reading will be continued for next Sabbath.
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The person conducting the Sabbath service should close services with two hymns, or psalms, followed by a prayer asking God’s dismissal.
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"Scripture quotations are from The Holy Bible, English Standard Version, copyright ©2001 by Crossway Bibles, a division of Good News Publishers. Used by permission. All rights reserved."