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 spiritual circumcision.

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Possible songs include the following hymns:
Come Thou Fount of Every Blessing
Crown Him With Many Crowns
God Himself Is With Us
Holy, Might Majesty!
We Praise Thee, Oh God, Our Redeemer

Weekly Readings

For the Sabbath of January 26, 2008

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.

The person conducting the services should read or assign to be read Romans chapter 3.

Commentary: In chapter two, the Apostle Paul says that the circumcision that matters is of the heart by Spirit, not of the flesh by hands (2:28-29). This was central to the message he taught everywhere, for the prophet Jeremiah writes, “Behold the days are coming, declares the Lord [YHWH], when I will punish all those who are circumcised merely in the flesh—Egypt, Judah, Edom, the sons of Ammon, Moab, and all who dwell in the desert who cut the corners of their hair, for all these nations are uncircumcised, and all the house of Israel is uncircumcised in heart” (9:25-26).

Judah and Edom (the sons of Esau)—and perhaps Ammon and Moab (the sons of Lot) and those who dwelt in the desert (the sons of Ishmael)—should have been physically circumcised if these nations had continued in the practices of Abraham. But apparently, even the house of Judah had abandoned the practice of circumcision, leaving only the house of Israel to continue physical circumcision as received from the patriarch Abraham until God sent what remained of Israel into captivity at Babylon. And, yes, God identifies the remains of the southern kingdom as the house of Israel at the time He sends this nation to Babylon (see Ezek 12:9, 21-25). From God’s perspective, once He sent the northern tribes into Assyrian captivity, these tribes were dead (Assryia represents death as Egypt represents sin typologically). Israel still remained, for the name Israel stayed not with certain tribes, specifically the descendants of Ephraim and Manasseh as was taught by the former Worldwide Church of God and now taught by some of its splinters, but with the polis of Jerusalem. So Israel doesn’t go into captivity until Nebuchadnezzar razes Jerusalem and takes the last inhabitants of the city to Babylon.

When a scriptural matter is unfamiliar, such as Judah having abandoned circumcision, and when scant evidence exists to prove or disprove the matter, understanding that natural Israel forms the lifeless shadow and copy of spiritual Israel allows the juxtaposition of the physical and spiritual to establish whether the scriptural matter has merit: if Jeremiah is correct, Judah was apparently uncircumcised when this nation went to Babylon. Judah was also all that was left in Judea of Israel when this nation was taken captive by Nebuchadnezzar. The reality of Judah being taken captive (the captivity of natural Israel forming the shadow of the Church, because of its lawlessness, being delivered “to Satan for the destruction of the flesh so that [its] spirit may be saved in the day of the Lord” — 1 Co 5:5) is the Church being delivered to the prince of this world when Emperor Constantine determined what sound doctrine would be for the Church at the Council of Nicea (ca. 325 CE). So the question that must be asked, was the Church spiritually circumcised when about a sixth of its bishops journeyed to the Black Sea city of Nicea, their expenses paid by the emperor? Certainly none of those bishops was going to tell the emperor that he was an agent of the prince of this world, and as such, an agent of Satan. After all, Paul had written. “For there is no authority except from God, and those that exist have been instituted by God” (Rom 13:1). What Paul writes also means that Satan, ruling as the prince of this world, rules by authority that has come from God.

Pause for a moment and consider whether the above statement is true: Paul writes, “For God has consigned all to disobedience, that he may have mercy on all” (Rom 11:32). Thus, God delivered humankind to disobedience—to sin—when Elohim drove Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden before they could eat of the Tree of Life (Gen 3:22-24). Dominion over humankind was given to the prince of this world, but this prince was the Adversary of God, and this prince still had to report to God (Job 1:6-12; 2:1-6). He was not free to do whatever he liked. However, because humankind had been delivered into the hand of the Adversary, humankind’s lawlessness [i.e., its sins] was covered by every person being the bondservant of the Adversary. Every person was a son of disobedience (Eph 2:2-3), a slave to sin (Rom 6:16) by having sinned (1 John 1:8-9), for no one descended from the first Adam [whose forefather was the first Adam] was righteous (Rom 4:10-12). Only Jesus of Nazareth, whose father was Theos, the Logos, who was with Theon from the beginning (John 1:1-3), was born of woman without being descended from the first Adam. Thus, Jesus was the first to be born as a free man, free to keep the commandments of God, and not born as a son of disobedience.

Yet Jesus, as the only Son of Theos (John 3:16) and as the “‘shepherd … the man who stands next to’” the Lord of hosts (Zech 13:7 — cf. Matt 26:31), was delivered, or better, allowed Himself to be delivered into the hand of the prince of this world to take on the sins of Israel. Jesus’ fleshly body was made sin, was made into sinful flesh, so that He might condemn sin in the flesh, in order that the righteous requirement of the law might be fulfilled in disciples (Rom 8:3-4), who no longer walk according to the flesh [meaning in sin] but according to the Spirit, for sin no longer has dominion over the person who has been born of Spirit (Rom 6:14) even though the law of sin and death continue to dwell in the flesh (Rom 7:21-25). However, if the person who has been freed from the domination of sin returns to disobedience, the person made him or herself into a voluntary slave of sin. For this person, there is now no escape from sin except in a fiery second death. So until the second Passover liberation of Israel, the flesh of every disciple remains consigned to sin despite the fact that the law of God in the mind and heart of the disciple has liberated the person from disobedience.

Therefore, what is seen is that the Adversary continues to reign over the flesh of humankind because of the sin of the first Adam—and his reign is by the consent or permission of the Most High God who will take Satan’s authority to rule from him when Michael and his angels fight against the old dragon and his angels (Rev 12:7), and cast Satan into time; into the creation (vv. 9-10) when the kingdom of this world becomes the kingdom of the Most High and His Christ (Rev 11:15-18; Dan 7:9-14). The dominion that had been given to spiritual Babylon to reign over the earth will, then, be given to the Son of Man.

So, yes, no authority exists except that given by God, but God has for a time given human beings to the Adversary for him to reign over the earth. Thus, the kingdoms and principalities of this world are now ruled by Satan, not by God, who has retained to Himself the right to intervene as He sees fit, and the right to draw a person from this world whenever He desires by placing a hedge around the person. When the second Passover liberation of Israel occurs, God will remove all of those hedges He has erected and will deliver the saints into the hand of the Adversary (Dan 7:25) as He delivered Jesus into the hand of the prince of this world, and as He delivered Job into the hand of Satan. But He will not leave the saints as orphans, for they will be fully empowered by the Holy Spirit so that neither sin nor death will any longer dwell in their flesh.

Now back to whether the Church was spiritually circumcised when Emperor Constantine invited it to Nicea for a working holiday: every person is born as a son of disobedience, no exceptions (except for Jesus of Nazareth). Each of the bishops who went to Nicea was born as a son of disobedience. Assuming that each had been born of Spirit [this is an assumption that might well not be true], and knowing that merely being born of spirit does not cause the laws of God to be written on hearts and minds, but that a mental journey of faith equivalent to the patriarch Abraham’s physical journey of faith from Ur of the Chaldeans to Canaan is necessary to cleanse hearts before they can be spiritually circumcised, did any of the bishops at Nicea make such a journey?

The Apostle Peter said, at the Jerusalem Conference, “‘And God, who knows the heart, bore witness to them [Gentiles], by giving them the Holy Spirit just as he did us, and he made no distinction between us and them, having cleansed their hearts by faith’” (Acts 15:8-9). The consensus of the conference was that those of the Gentiles were to abstain “‘from things polluted by idols, and from sexual immorality, and from what has been strangled, and from blood’” (v. 20), that everything else they needed to know could be learned from hearing Moses read every Sabbath (v. 21).

The Gentiles who lived in Antioch and Syria and Cilicia partook in a Hellenistic culture. For any of these Gentiles to quit frequenting temple prostitutes (the pagan temples being popular meeting places where business and the affairs of the city were conducted), the person would have made a journey of faith of considerable distance. Couple to this abstaining from blood, abstaining from meats strangled (so as to retain the blood) and from things offered to idols—and the person will have journeyed mentally as far as Abraham journeyed physically. Thus, for this Gentile to believe God that Jesus is Lord and that the Father raised Jesus from the dead, this person will be as Abraham was when he believed God that his offspring would be as stars. The person’s belief would be counted to the person as righteousness.

Now, move forward one generation: the son of the convert who grows up in a Christian household makes no journey of faith if this son believes what was taught in the household. Yes, the son is sanctified or holy (1 Co 7:14) as natural Israel was made the holy nation of God (Ex 19:5-6), sanctified before God (cf. Lev 11:44-45; 1 Pet 1:15-16). But being sanctified or having been made holy does not imply that hearts have been circumcised. As natural Israel was the holy nation of God but as every natural Israelite was born uncircumcised, so too is the Church the holy nation of God (1 Pet 2:9) but a nation in which every son of God is born spiritually uncircumcised. It is only after being born of Spirit, and after undertaking a journey of faith equivalent in distance to Abraham’s physical journey of faith that the heart of the son of God is cleansed so that it can be circumcised after this son of God enters into God’s rest (cf. Deut 30:6; Heb 3:16-4:11; Ps 95:10-11; Num chap 14). Spiritual circumcision does not occur outside of God’s rest. And for disciples, God’s rest in this era is Sabbath observance.

The son of a convert must, if possessing all knowledge, make actual physical journeys as Timothy did as evangelists. But once the spiritual Body of Christ died, as the physical body died, there has been ample opportunity to make theological journeys of faith from the errors taught by the synagogue of Satan to Sabbath observance, with Andreas Fischer (dod 1540 CE) being one of the first to make this long journey.

No disciple is spiritually circumcised—as the children born in the wilderness to the nation that left Egypt were not physically circumcised—until entering into God’s rest, with this “rest” being typologically represented by Judea, by Sabbath observance, and by Christ’s Millennium reign.

The Millennium is not yet here: disciples will not enter the Millennium as physical human beings but as glorified spirit beings or not at all. Disciples need not journey to Judea, for circumcision is not now a matter of the flesh but of the heart and mind, and flint knives (Josh 5:2-7) are inappropriate instruments for circumcising the heart. Therefore, disciples in this era enter God’s rest when they keep the Sabbath, the sign between Israel and God that Israel knows that God sanctifies the nation (Ex 31:13).

How many of the bishops at Nicea in June 325 CE kept the Sabbath? None! None of them had circumcised hearts. None of them had made a journey of faith equivalent to Abraham’s physical journey. So Judah was all of Israel that remained in the Promised Land when Nebuchadnezzar surrounded Jerusalem—the spiritually lifeless shadow of the Christian Church—was, indeed, an uncircumcised nation as the prophet Jeremiah declares.

The interesting aspect of this, now, is that the school at Ephesus typologically was represented by the house of Israel (the northern kingdom of Samaria) throughout the 2^nd and 3^rd Centuries. The house of Israel was physically, but not spiritually circumcised, indicating that there were still some within Ephesus’ theological influence who kept the Sabbath and who had circumcised hearts into, at least, the 2^nd-Century. But because Samaria was delivered into the hand of death before Judah went to Babylon, those who had continued to observe the Sabbath had passed from the scene before 325 CE. There were no more Sabbath observing “Christian” fellowships in the 4^th-Century although some individuals probably did keep the Sabbath in a manner analogous to how Daniel and his friends obeyed God in Babylon. But Nebuchadnezzar made eunuchs from the captives that served him, so as Daniel and his friends were, most likely, unable to produce offspring, those who obeyed God were unable to produce spiritual offspring throughout the 1200 years (325 CE to 1525 CE) that the Christian Church was formally captive in spiritual Babylon.

All of the above is a long way around to saying that no reading of Romans chapter 3 that comes from spiritual descendants of the bishops that attended the Council of Nicea is of God.

Paul writes that God will judge the world (Rom 3:6); however, Jesus said that the Father judges no one but has given all judgment to Him (John 5:22). Paul does not contradict Jesus, but writes this theological treatise with less linguistic precision than those who have quibbled over his words would like from him. So to properly read Romans, an endtime disciple needs to lean back [not forward to see the fly specks on the letters] and comprehend the gist of what Paul writes.

Being a natural Jew, such as Paul, is an advantage to a person, a disciple, because the oracles of God were entrusted to natural Israel; thus, natural Israelites grew to physical maturity hearing Scripture read and expounded upon. Even today, when a natural Israelite, the son or daughter of Observant parents, hears that Christ Jesus was the reality of the Wave Sheaf Offering, the person has in mind the image of Jesus being likened to the first handful of barley waved before God so that the barley harvest could begin. When our natural Israelite hears the second Passover mentioned, he or she understands that the person who was spiritually defiled could not take the first Passover and had to eat of the lamb a month later. When our natural Israelite hears that Caleb was the son of Jephunneh, he or she knows that Caleb was not born into the tribe of Judah but had been adopted in by an early form of being baptized, circumcised (Caleb was probably already circumcised), and giving a gift to God. So in many ways (Paul’s “much in every way”), there was no real substitute in the 1^st-Century for the knowledge of God that a natural Israelite would have possessed by merely having heard Moses read every Sabbath since birth.

Paul goes on to say that “if our unrighteousness serves to show the righteousness of God” (Rom 3:5), disciples cannot continue in unrighteousness, in sin, to further magnify God as he has been accused of teaching, but must leave sin—and the only way out of sin is by keeping the law by faith, with grace covering those times when disciples don’t measure up. For faith establishes the law (v. 31). What could not be done by the flesh when consigned to disobedience—none were righteous—can be done by faith, for “the righteousness of God has been manifest apart from the law” (v. 21). The garment of grace (Gal 3:27 — Christ is put on as a garment) is the mantle of Christ’s righteousness with which Jesus covers every disciple, making no distinction between Jew or Greek, male or female, free or slave, for every disciple has sinned and has the legal and just demands of the law claiming the disciple’s life. But Jesus’ blood, shed at Calvary, covers these legal demands of the law for all who believe.

Therefore, no person has grounds for boasting before God, for every person is justified by faith. However, being justified by faith does not grant permission to willfully sin, or transgress the law.

God is the God of everyone.

Is that too difficult of a message to understand? Every person is born a son of disobedience, and continues in disobedience as long as he or she is the bondservant of the Adversary. The person has no choice about being a sinner; thus, although the person will die the lawlessness of the person is not reckoned against the person (Rom 5:12-14) for he or she is covered by being the servant of Satan. But the new creature or self, born of Spirit in a tent of flesh that continues to have sin and death dwelling in its fleshly members, is born free to keep the laws of God. And this new self is born into a fight with the old self, a war that must be won, with the old self being slain with baptism. This new self now, still struggling to overcome the law of sin and death that remains in his or her members, will lose some battles to disobedience. Grace covers these losses. And by faith, this new self will journey on until this new self crosses the figurative Jordan River and enters into Sabbath observance. There this new self will be spiritually circumcised … the new self is not circumcised on the Moab side of the Jordan when battles are fought that are typologically represented by Israel prevailing over kings Sihon and Og. The new self is circumcised after entering into God’s rest and before the walls of Jericho come tumbling down.

This is perhaps enough for one Sabbath, but this is a subject that will be revisited often.

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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