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 redeeming the last Adam and Eve.
Weekly Readings
For the Sabbath of January 18, 2014
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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So put away all malice and all deceit and hypocrisy and envy and all slander. Like newborn infants, long for the pure spiritual milk, that by it you may grow up into salvation—if indeed you have tasted that the Lord is good. As you come to Him, a living stone rejected by men but in the sight of God chosen and precious, you yourselves like living stones are being built up as a spiritual house, to be a holy priesthood, to offer spiritual sacrifices acceptable to God through Jesus Christ. For it stands in Scripture: "Behold, I am laying in Zion a stone, a cornerstone chosen and precious, and whoever believes in Him will not be put to shame." So the honor is for you who believe, but for those who do not believe, "The stone that the builders rejected has become the cornerstone," and "A stone of stumbling, and a rock of offense." They stumble because they disobey the word, as they were destined to do. But you are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people for his own possession, that you may proclaim the excellencies of him who called you out of darkness into his marvelous light. Once you were not a people, but now you are God's people; once you had not received mercy, but now you have received mercy. Beloved, I urge you as sojourners and exiles to abstain from the passions of the flesh, which wage war against your soul. Keep your conduct among the Gentiles honorable, so that when they speak against you as evildoers, they may see your good deeds and glorify God on the day of visitation. Be subject for the Lord's sake to every human institution, whether it be to the emperor as supreme, or to governors as sent by him to punish those who do evil and to praise those who do good. For this is the will of God, that by doing good you should put to silence the ignorance of foolish people. Live as people who are free, not using your freedom as a cover-up for evil, but living as servants of God. Honor everyone. Love the brotherhood. Fear God. Honor the emperor. Servants, be subject to your masters with all respect, not only to the good and gentle but also to the unjust. For this is a gracious thing, when, mindful of God, one endures sorrows while suffering unjustly. For what credit is it if, when you sin and are beaten for it, you endure? But if when you do good and suffer for it you endure, this is a gracious thing in the sight of God. For to this you have been called, because Christ also suffered for you, leaving you an example, so that you might follow in his steps. (1 Pet 2:1–21 emphasis and double emphasis added)
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President Obama says that he will dedicate the remainder of his presidency to establishing income equality by phone or by his pen through signing Executive Orders—ruling by decree as if he were the Emperor, and he may well decide that he likes jetting around in Air Force One enough that he will seek to continue in office beyond January 2017. If he does, those presumed free Christian Americans who have been called to suffer as Jesus suffered (1 Pet 2:21) are not to rebel; are not to organize into militias to take back their rights and return the Federal Government to the bag in which America’s founding fathers confined it. They are to become quiet folk, what my Anabaptist ancestors were when they came to 17th-Century Colonial America. And holding one’s peace while keeping powder dry is not an easy task when the Federal Government has been a person’s lifelong enemy, but it is the godly thing to do … ask yourself, when were civil authorities or temple authorities in the 1st-Century not the enemy of Christ Jesus? There is a pragmatic reason for a Christian loving his or her enemies rather than waging war against them; for the Adversary remains the prince of this world and the spiritual entity reigning over all institutionalized authority, inside or outside the Body of Christ, a subject to be more fully addressed.
Christians are, in this world, sojourners and exiles (1 Pet 2:11), made subject to human institutions by having been humanly born as sons of disobedience (Eph 2:2–3) consigned to disobedience (Rom 11:32) … yet Christian liberation has been of the flesh that still sins (misses the mark of righteousness) and still is subject to death; Christian liberation is of the inner self—the soul/psuche—that prior to the person receiving a second breath [pneuma] of life, was itself dead.
A Christian’s citizenship isn’t in this world for the “Christian” himself, as a son of God, isn’t of this world. The fleshly body in which the son of God temporarily dwells is of this world and remains male or female, circumcised or uncircumcised, slave or free even after being baptized, but the Christian is neither male nor female, Jew nor Greek (Gal 3:28). And if the Christian’s citizenship isn’t of this world, then the Christian has no business becoming needlessly involved in the politics of this world. Give the honor deserved to men (and women) who rule in this world, even when those who rule are without honor but are the basest of human beings (Dan 4:17); for until the Second Passover liberation of Israel, the fight the Christian needs to make and to win is against indwelling sin, unrighteousness, and ungodliness that continues to dwell in the fleshly members of the physical outer self, the house in which the Christian temporarily dwells.
Under no circumstances are Christians to take up arms against an agent of the Adversary such as a human president or dictator. The Christian need not take up arms; for the Christian has available to this son of God more power than agents of the Adversary can muster. By faith, mountains can not just figuratively but literally be moved. By exercising the faith that comes via prolonged righteousness, the natural forces of this world become subject to the Christian. However, the self-identified Christian that doesn’t believe God and continues in his or her [note the return to the physical] former ways may sincerely believe that he or she has faith, and may attempt to exercise the authority that comes with faith, but this Christian always finds that the mountain remains exactly where it was; thus, the Christian begins to make excuses for God, saying that moving mountains is only figurative, that Jesus spoke to His disciples in figures of speech with moving mountains by faith being an example.
Note how Peter, in feeding the “lambs” of God [not yet mature enough to be called “sheep”], addresses converts: Like newborn infants, long for the pure spiritual milk, that by it you may grow up into salvation … pure spiritual milk will have converts keeping the Commandments by faith, their initial exercising of faith as a spiritual force; for natural Israel did not and could not keep the Law. Natural Israel never had the faith needed to free itself from serfdom; from being natural sons of disobedience and thereby stumbling over the words of Moses that were but shadows of the Law being written on hearts and placed in minds.
If a newly born son of God will not even attempt to keep the Commandments by faith, this infant son of God’s faith will not grow … in an analogy that is more understandable, God will not trust this infant to drive the family car, will not trust this infant son of God with use of heavenly power in this world. So mountains remain securely anchored where they presently are despite a President having a phone and a pen, a natural non-sequitur.
In the “natural,” death follows life, the ultimate non-sequitur.
A living organism doesn’t exist until conceived through the union of a spermatozoon and a ovum. There is no dead preexistence. There is no preexistence. There is a male cell and a female cell that come together to produce life, with the union of the two cells being “alive” from the moment when the spermatozoon penetrates the ovum as a maquette of the husband penetrating his wife and becoming one with her … the two cells—a spermatozoon and a ovum—of themselves do not have life, but together, create life that is first nurtured in the woman’s womb, then humanly born to hopefully live a long and prosperous life before death takes the person.
The spiritual is the mirror image of the natural: the human person is born with an inner self that animates the fleshly body of the person, but this inner self is without life of its own. The person and the person’s inner self share one breath of life and together are one entity united in a manner analogous to a woman and undeveloped ovum in her ovaries … the spirit [pneuma] that is in the human person’s inner self [psuche] is dead prior to spiritual birth; it is dead through an absence of its own breath of life. The inner self that would seem alive—and did seem alive to ancient Egyptians and Greeks—is therefore also dead even though this inner self performs the task of exercising dominion over the outer self, the fleshly body of the person. It will be this non-physical inner self that appears before Christ in the great White Throne Judgment.
Again, the inner self is dead because it does not have a breath of life of its own. It is analogous to the software of a dedicated word processor of the 1980s.
When the man Jesus of Nazareth rose from baptism, the man Jesus had one breath of life, His spirit/breath that His Father had installed in the first Adam when Elohim [singular in usage] breathed His breath into the nostrils of the man of mud and this man of mud became a nephesh, a breathing creature. The Most High God was not then His Father. But upon being resurrected from the watery grave by John the Baptist, the breath of the Most High God [pneuma Theou] descended upon the man Jesus and entered into [eis] Him, thereby giving to Jesus a second breath of life, a breath of life that entered into Jesus’ inner self, penetrating Jesus’ inner self as a spermatozoon penetrates an ovum or as a man penetrates his wife. At that moment, Jesus’ inner self came alive through having a breath/spirit of its own. It is Jesus’ now-living inner self that is the second or last Adam, the completion of the man of mud that began outside of the Garden of Eden a long time ago.
So that the preceding doesn’t pass by without being noticed: the first Adam and the last Adam, together, form one “Adam” that is the completion of the creation of Man, begun outside of the Garden of Eden and finished outside of Eden, the Garden of God, where the Adversary was once a guardian cherub.
The man Jesus was conceived in the womb of Mary through the union of the holy spirit of the God of Abraham [the Creator of all things physical] and an ovum indirectly coming from Eve, the life-giver, by way of the first Adam; thus, the man Jesus twice received a breath of life from Elohim [singular in usage] and was therefore the unique son of the God of Abraham. But the man Jesus was not yet the son of the Most High God, the unknown [to Israel] God of dead ones (for the dead know nothing — Eccl 9:5 — and therefore do not know their God). The man Jesus, the Beloved of the God-of-dead-ones, was to this Most High God as a beloved wife when the spirit/breath of the God-of-dead-ones entered into the spirit/breath of Christ Jesus [pneuma Christou]. And thus began the procreation act of the Most High God, with Jesus becoming a life-giving spirit (1 Cor 15:45), an Eve spirit that brings to life the spirit [pneuma] that is in man, with this spirit in man previously knowing the things of man but with spiritual birth now knowing the things of God through having the mind of Christ, first as an infant suckled on spiritual milk (cf. 1 Cor 3:1–2; 1 Pet 2:2), then as a toddler able to walk upright before God, then as a tyke able to discern dual referents, then as an adolescent not only able to dress himself in obedience and feed himself spiritually solid food but now mature enough to begin to do work for God but not drive the family car.
An infant knows the things of an infant: an infant son of God knows the things of an infant son of God, knows those things about which the Apostle Paul wrote.
An adolescent knows the things of an adolescent: an adolescent son of God knows the things of an adolescent son of God, knows the things about which I now write …
When the breath/spirit of the Most High God directly entered into the man Jesus, this human person received a second breath of life, not a second giving of the same breath of life in a manner akin to how the book of Deuteronomy is traditionally perceived to be the second giving of the Law, not a second covenant made with the children of Israel that is in addition to the covenant made at Sinai (Deut 29:1) … in Moses there is the Passover Covenant made with Israel on the night when the Lord led the fathers of Israel out from Egypt (that is, made in the first month of the first year). Then there is the first Sinai Covenant made in the third month of the first year. Then there is the second and eternal Sinai Covenant made in the fifth month of the first year. Then there is the Second Covenant made in the eleventh month of the fortieth year. What’s missing is the second “Second Covenant” that has the mediator of this covenant go from Moses to Christ Jesus as well as the second Passover Covenant that will have the Law written on hearts and placed in minds so that all Israel will know the Lord.
In Hebrew style narration, what is spiritual has a lifeless physical mirror image. The first Adam is the spiritually lifeless mirror image of the last or second Adam. Together, they form one Adam.
Eve is made from the flesh and bone of the first Adam. The Christian Church is “made” from the indwelling of the spirit of Christ [pneuma Christou]. But there is a half-step between the creation of the second Adam and the creation of the Church as the second Eve, the Body of Christ [as a wife functions as the body of her head], with this half-step having the spirit of the Father [pneuma Theou] enter into the man Jesus to begin the divine procreation process so that Jesus is both the First of the firstborn sons of God as well as the life-giving [Eve] spirit that gives birth to many sons of God, His younger siblings (see Rom 8:29).
The glorified Jesus functions as the man Adam functioned with Eve in that He is the Head of every disciple, but He also has a Head, God the Father, the God of dead ones. Therefore, the glorified Jesus gives spiritual life to disciples through His indwelling in the disciple, being crucified for the disciple while the disciple was still a sinner—
Heaven is a timeless supra-dimensional realm, with time, its measurement, and its passage being part of the creation itself and therefore outside of heaven. Hence, the inside-of-time crucifixion of Jesus almost two millennia ago occurs outside of time when the non-physical (also outside of time) inner self of the disciple is still a sinner, with all activity in the heavenly realm simultaneously occurring in the same heavenly moment, the present. Procreation between the Most High God and His Beloved began when the man Jesus fulfilled all righteousness through the symbolic death of His old self/nature via a watery grave analogous to the Flood of Noah’s day. So when raised from this watery death, the man Jesus received a second breath of life, the breath of God [pneuma Theou], that was in addition to the breaths of life He had received from Elohim [singular in usage], breaths that in type ceased to exist when He was submerged in baptism. Thus, when He was raised from baptism as a new man, He both received a second breath of life to become the second or last Adam, and His still present spirit/breath was penetrated by the spirit/breath of God as a spermatozoon penetrates an ovum. The man Jesus was, after baptism and receipt of a second breath of life, both the last Adam and the last Eve, a life-giving spirit. He was in Himself the completion of the Hebrew style narration of the creation of man, what the Apostle Paul understood but what the Circumcision Faction did not—what greater Christendom does not understand today.
Because in Himself the man Jesus represented the completion of the creation of man, when this man Jesus took on the sins of all Israel and by extension, all of humanity, and paid the death penalty for these sins at Calvary through His physical death—the indwelling life He had through receipt of the breath of God was not physical and could not die when the outer self died; could not die when the fleshly body died. Thus, Peter wrote,
For it is better to suffer for doing good, if that should be God's will, than for doing evil. For Christ also suffered once for sins, the righteous for the unrighteous, that He might bring us to God, being put to death in the flesh but made alive in the spirit, in which He went and proclaimed to the spirits in prison, because they formerly did not obey, when God's patience waited in the days of Noah, while the ark was being prepared, in which a few, that is, eight persons, were brought safely through water. Baptism, which corresponds to this, now saves you, not as a removal of dirt from the body but as an appeal to God for a good conscience, through the resurrection of Jesus Christ, who has gone into heaven and is at the right hand of God, with angels, authorities, and powers having been subjected to him. (1 Pet 3:17–22)
During those three physical days when the earthly body of Jesus lay in the heart of the earth as the man Jonah was in the belly of the whale [great fish], the still-living spirit of Christ [pneuma Christou] that was brought to life through penetration of the spirit of God [pneuma Theou] in the single divine act of procreation that was analogous to Elohim [again, singular in usage] breathing life into the man of mud (Gen 2:7)—this still-living spirit of Christ went, according to Peter, to imprisoned angels that had rebelled when iniquity was found in an anointed cherub. All that the spirit of Christ did while His earthly body lay in the Garden Tomb was outside of time and space and therefore not constrained by earthly moments and the decay of one moment into the next moment.
Human utterance is not constrained by grammar rules or even by the pronunciation of words (e.g., no English speaker pronounces the “n” in the word <can’t> yet hearers will “hear” the unpronounced “n” through having nasalization on the “a”). Inscription is not constrained by spelling errors if the inscribed word starts with the correct letter/sound. And the spirit of God is not constrained by the laws of physics that pertain to the creation. The indwelling spirit of Christ that gives life to the spirit in man—to the inner self of a human person—is not constrained by human sexuality as expressed in mammalian biology. Its constraints are heavenly, where angels as sons of God have life in a differing moment from God the Father and the glorified Christ Jesus who received heavenly life from the Father; where angels as sons of God have life in a differing moment than human sons of God who have all received life from Christ Jesus who performs in the disciple the role of both Adam and Eve, with the inner self of the disciple to be as righteous Abel was, or to be a murderer as Cain was, or beginning halfway through the seven endtime years, to be accepted by God through enduring in faith as Seth did.
In the 1st-Century, the glorified Jesus as the last Adam created from Himself a last Eve through breathing on ten of His first disciples (John 20:22), but this Eve in her offspring (in childbirth) “died” because of unbelief of the sort that caused the first Eve to believe the serpent rather than the first Adam, her husband. [She lived for as long as her womb was barren.] Thus, the Body of Christ that lived for a while as the earthly body of Christ lived for thirty-three years, died seventy years after Calvary. This Body of Christ that died represented not the last Adam, but the last Eve … a life-giving spirit, however, cannot die.
Jewish mysticism holds that Adam had a first wife named Lilith, with this story of Lilith coming from rabbis not understanding the two creation accounts in Genesis chapters 1 and 2. The traditional explanation for the Lilith story is hokum, but the basis for the story runs deeper than traditional explanations; for again, in Hebrew style narration, possession of either half of the chiral narrative requires the production of the other half to complete the half in hand. … Eve is not the second wife of Adam, nor was Lilith the first wife. The veracity of the creation account of Adam and Eve is not at issue. What’s at issue is the spiritual reality that cast as its shadow, as its mirror image, the first Adam and the first Eve. This spiritual reality will have Christ Jesus being both the last Adam and a life-giving spirit, thereby fulfilling both the role of the male [the one who penetrates the inner self of a disciple] and the female [the one who gives birth from penetration].
As the spiritual reality of Elohim [singular] breathing His breath into the nostrils of the man of mud, the breath of God [pneuma Theou] entered into the newly baptized man Jesus about where the blowhole of a whale is located, symbolizing that the fleshly body of the man Jesus was analogous to the whale [great fish] that swallowed Jonah whereas the inner self of the man Jesus was analogous to Jonah in the whale, with this inner self being resurrected from death through receipt of the breath of God as Jonah was returned to life inside the whale:
Then Jonah prayed to [YHWH] his God from the belly of the fish, saying, "I called out to [YHWH], out of my distress, and He answered me; out of the belly of Sheol I cried, and you heard my voice. For you cast me into the deep, into the heart of the seas, and the flood surrounded me; all your waves and your billows passed over me. Then I said, 'I am driven away from your sight; yet I shall again look upon your holy temple.' The waters closed in over me to take my life; the deep surrounded me; weeds were wrapped about my head at the roots of the mountains. I went down to the land whose bars closed upon me forever; yet you brought up my life from the pit, O [YHWH] my God. (Jonah 2:1–6 emphasis added)
The receipt of the spirit/breath of God [pneuma Theou] didn’t give life to Jesus’ already physically living fleshly body (outer self) as the breath of Elohim [singular in usage] gave physical life to the man of mud so that this clay corpse became a nephesh (a breathing creature). It wasn’t Jesus’ physical flesh that needed to then be resurrected from death; for John the Baptist had already raised Jesus from the watery grave that surrounded Him. Yes, John raised Jesus from the waters of the Jordan that symbolically represented the heavy seas into which Jonah was cast as well as the foundations of the deep that erupted in Noah’s day … baptism is into death; unto the death of the old self. True repentance is the killing of the old self with its lawless ways; is turning from transgressing the Law to obeying the Law, living by the Law, not out of social or legal compulsion, but out of love for God and love for neighbor and brother. And even though He was without sin, Jesus had to be baptized to fulfill all righteousness, thereby establishing the model for repentance by His younger siblings. Jesus was baptized out of love for His disciples.
Adam was created outside the Garden of Eden, then placed inside the Garden with one commandment: do not eat of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, with evil being nothing more than unbelief. And once inside the Garden, Adam named the created animals as part of the physical portion of the chiral narrative that has Jesus naming the animals found inside the temple [the temple symbolically equating to the Garden of Eden]:
Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you travel across sea and land to make a single proselyte, and when he becomes a proselyte, you make him twice as much a child of hell as yourselves. Woe to you, blind guides, who say, “If anyone swears by the temple, it is nothing, but if anyone swears by the gold of the temple, he is bound by his oath.” You blind fools! For which is greater, the gold or the temple that has made the gold sacred? …
Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you tithe mint and dill and cumin, and have neglected the weightier matters of the law: justice and mercy and faithfulness. These you ought to have done, without neglecting the others. You blind guides, straining out a gnat and swallowing a camel! Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you clean the outside of the cup and the plate, but inside they are full of greed and self-indulgence. You blind Pharisee! First clean the inside of the cup and the plate, that the outside also may be clean. Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you are like whitewashed tombs, which outwardly appear beautiful, but within are full of dead people's bones and all uncleanness. (Matt 23:15–17, 23–27)
In the temple, no helpmate for Jesus could be found among hypocrites and blind guides as no helper could be found for Adam among the livestock of the field and the fowl of heaven (Gen 2:20) inside of the Garden of Eden. Thus, inside the temple of God, a helpmate—a last Eve—was created from the spirit of Christ [pneuma Christou], this helpmate being the 1st-Century Christian Church that was not able to give spiritual birth to offspring, with spiritual birth coming via receipt of the breath of God in the breath of Christ, and no person could in the 1st-Century nor presently in the 21st-Century come to Christ Jesus unless drawn by God the Father (John 6:44); thus, the womb of the 1st-Century Eve was barren as Sarah’s womb was barren, as Rebecca’s womb was barren [as Lilith’s womb was barren, with Lilith again coming from the necessity to complete the narrative shadow of spiritual events that were not known to those creating the shadow].
Today’s greater Christian Church doesn’t come from the 1st-Century Church bringing forth seed of God, but from the Adversary—there can be no union between sons of God, born of spirit through the indwelling of Christ Jesus, and Christians within greater Christendom. There can be no intercourse between sons of God and lawless Christendom. There is no intercourse between sons of God, descended from the last Adam, a life-giving spirit, and night birds that find their resting place in a destroyed Edom.
You who have been called—you have been given a second breath of life, the breath of God in the breath of Christ, with Christ being a life-giving spirit; with Christ being both the Head of the disciple as a husband is the head of his wife (1 Cor 11:3), and with Christ being the Mother of the disciple through bring to life the inner self of the disciple … it is not now and it never has been within the prerogative of the Christian Church to give spiritual life to disciples. Therefore, of necessity the womb of the Church (if the Church is the last Eve) is barren—and bishops and cardinals of Christian orthodoxy wear female garb to deceive.
In this endtime era, open worship of Gaia, mother earth, has returned … according to Al Gore, Gaia has a fever—and indeed she does, with her fever indicating that she is sick and about to die, or at least worship of Gaia is about to die. In this endtime era, the dark bower (the grotto representing female sexuality) is worshiped even in the form of Lady Liberty, with Liberty again becoming the rallying cry of patriots eager to take the pen from President Obama. Permit night birds to sing the sweet refrains of liberty. Born-of-spirit Christians need to redeem the time they have before the Second Passover liberation of Israel and not help the Adversary make his governance of this world work better than it does; for the essence of Christian prophecy is that Babylon will fall, only to be replaced by the Son of Man reigning over the single kingdom of this world.
Infant sons of God need to quickly drink the spiritual milk Paul left them for already this milk has curdled.
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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."