The following Scripture passages are offered
to aid beginning fellowships. The readings and commentary are offered as
openings into dialogue about the subject or concept. And the concept behind the
readings for this Sabbath is typology basics.
Clickable hymns on this page require RealPlayer to be installed on your computer. The download is free.
Possible songs include the following hymns:
Blessed Assurance
Hail the Day That Sees Him Rise
Breathe On Me Breath of God
I Will Sing Of My Redeemer
Holy, Holy, Holy
Sabbath Readings
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 Psalms 40.
Commentary: The basics of typology that
are visible in the creation accounts, albeit difficult to initially grasp, are
also visible in the structural repetition of Hebraic poetry: the Psalms were
written as poetry, which, again, foregrounds “words.” Thus, the mimetic reading
[the reading that uses words to mimic or imitate a thing or event in the
natural world] of a poetic passage isn’t the ultimate focus of the passage, but
the poem itself is its foremost focus. Poetry is self-aware text; i.e., poetry
looks at itself, not at the thing or event it describes, as being most
important. Therefore, movement within a poem exceeds in importance movement
described by the poem. And King David was a master poet, who understood God
much better than his translators have.
In the “P”
creation account that begins in Genesis 1:1, light comes from darkness, and
darkness followed by light creates one day. The Apostle Paul wrote that the
natural precedes the spiritual, as the first Adam preceded the last Adam (1 Cor
15:44-47). So within the completeness of a unit is the natural or physical
component followed by its spiritual equivalent. Likewise, within a Hebraic
poetic conceit is a natural component followed by its spiritual counterpart.
But within the conceit are paired thought couplets which also move from natural
to spiritual.
So from the
level of basic Hebrew linguistics through the division of the Bible, the
natural precedes the spiritual. One example within a collection of examples is
verse 8 of Psalm 40: “I [David] desire to do your will, O my God” — this is
David voicing his conscious thoughts. And David’s conscious thought is followed
by, “[Y]our law is within my heart” — the heart and mind as fleshy tablets upon
which God has written His law constitutes a euphemistic expression for the
conscience, part of the subconscious mind. So the movement of the conceit,
which begins with “sacrifice and offerings” (v. 6) is from the works of the hand to written Scripture (v. 7) to conscious thought to the
conscience. This movement is from darkness [sacrifice and offerings] to light
[the covenant of God in the conscience]. And in the darkness/light metaphor
that forms each day, and governs the daily routine of human beings is the
confirmation of typology, and typological exegesis.
The reader should now read 1
Corinthians chapter 10, verses 1 through 22.
Commentary: The greater Christian Church
has forgotten [or badly misread] what the apostle wrote to the saints at
Corinth: Paul definitively says that the events that happened to the
circumcised nation during their exodus from Egypt are examples for the saints
upon “whom the end of the ages has come” (v.
11). Paul thought he would be one of those saints, that he would be alive when
Jesus returned. Even Paul’s vision of the work to be done was too small, for
Israel’s example was for a worldwide church, not a body of Believers in and
around the Mediterranean Sea.
Paul didn’t live
to see the end of the age. Even today, this end remains ahead of the Church,
but no longer in the distant future. So, since it is to the endtime Church that
Israel’s exodus from Egypt serves as an example—in the same way that the
lifeless moon reflects the glory of the sun, or that darkness precedes
light—the juxtaposition of the Passover lamb slain in Egypt with the Passover
Lamb of God slain at Calvary aligns the example with prophecies about endtime
Israel.
The many false
prophets that have come and that are prophesied to come inevitably identify
endtime Israel as a physical nation, usually as the modern nation of Israel
long descended from the physical remnant of the house of Judah that left
Babylonian captivity by Cyrus’ decree. Some few false prophets identify endtime
Israel as the English-speaking descendants of, allegedly [and probably], the
ancient house of Israel that was the northern kingdom of Samaria. But endtime
Israel has the same relationship to the natural nation of Israel as the sun has
to the moon. Thus, endtime Israel is the greater Christian Church, not any one
division or schism within the Church. And endtime Israel is composed of the
many sons of God that have been born of Spirit, and that are presently
domiciled in tents of flesh of varying colors. These tents and especially, the
ancestry of these tents have no spiritual significance. Hence, any teacher of
Israel who excludes or includes on the basis of the flesh is false, and should
be utterly rejected. This is particularly true for the Christian Identity
Movement in all of its many manifestations—and among Sabbath-observing
disciples are many who hold tenets of “Christian Identity.” These
Sabbath-observing disciples do more harm to spiritual infants than they can possibly
imagine; they are inevitably tares, mistaken for wheat but yielding worthless
fruit.
As the moon
reflects the light of the sun, and makes the sun visible in the darkness of the
night, so too does the natural nation of Israel reflect the light of the woman
cloaked in the brilliance of the Son (Rev 12:1) as it serves as a copy and
shadow of the greater Christian Church. And if the natural nation is a shadow
of the spiritual nation, then the historical record of the natural nation in
Judea becomes the visible shadow of the invisible nation in the heavenly
realm…although the Christian Church is a visible entity, who within and without
this assemblage actually has been born of Spirit cannot be determined by mere
observation, and might not be determinable by human beings. Therefore, while
the visible history of the Church as been recorded by various human
historians—this account tainted by having been written in darkness by blind
scribes—the actual historical record of the greater Church is today readable through
the writings of Moses, Joshua, and other ancient Israelites scribes, who left
the Church a record of itself in the heavenly realm.
The Apostle Paul
warns 1st-Century disciples not to repeat the conduct of the natural
nation. He aligns crossing the Red Sea with baptism, and eating manna and
drinking from the waters of the rock with eating and drinking the sacraments.
And Paul warns these disciples, “You cannot drink the cup of the Lord and the
cup of demons. You cannot partake of the table of the Lord and the table of
demons” (1 Cor 10:21). Yet, within three centuries, partaking of the cup and
table of demons was prescribed behavior for “Christians.”
The reader should now read 1
Corinthians chapter 11, verses 17 through 34.
Commentary: The early Church so sought to
disavow its Jewish heritage that it systematically proceeded to profane the
blood and body of Christ Jesus. It didn’t continue to accidentally eat and
drink in an unworthy manner, as the saints at Corinth were doing when Paul
rebuked them. Rather, the early Church accepted the Hellenistic concept of
human beings having immortal souls, which is a doctrine of the old serpent
himself, and this now corrupted Church took to itself the determination of good
and evil. So by the 4th-Century, God formally sent the Church into
Babylonian captivity at the Council of Nicea (ca. 325 CE), where eating the
body and blood of the Lamb of God on the night that He was betrayed, as Paul
received from the Lord and delivered to the saints at Corinth, was officially condemned.
From that summer forward (and earlier for many fellowships), the Church partook
of the cup and the table of demons.
The Apostle Paul
didn’t realize that two millennia would pass before Jesus would return. He
didn’t know that later disciples would ape the examples of Israel in the
Wilderness of Sin; he didn’t know that the liberated natural nation of Israel
served both as (1) the shadow of individual conversion, and as (2) the shadow
of the future Church when it, too, is liberated from bondage to the law of sin
and death that presently dwells in the flesh of every disciple (Rom 7:25). Paul
didn’t know that his instruction to the saints at Corinth would be used to
justify taking the sacraments whenever and however disciples desired. He would
have vigorously condemned taking the sacraments at any time but on the night
that Jesus was betrayed, that night being the dark portion of the 14th
day of the first month. That night isn’t any particular weeknight; it isn’t on
Thursday evening, the weeknight on which extremely poor readers of Scripture
believe Jesus was taken. Rather, it is the dark portion of the day when the
Passover lamb was slain—and its date is fixed on the sacred calendar.
On one night a
year, [unleavened] bread and wine are the body and blood of the Lamb of God,
sacrificed for the household of God. On every other night of the year, bread
and wine are an offering of the fruit of the ground (Gen 4:3). So through the
eating and drinking of the sacrament, the central division affecting the greater
Church is made manifest. Most disciples partake of the cup and table of demons,
and believe they serve God when they do so. They have placed their faith in
some man, or in the decisions of the Council of Nicea. They do not believe God,
and their unbelief is directly akin to the unbelief of the natural nation that
left Egypt (Heb 3:19).
If a disciple
will not believe the Apostle Paul and will not believe the example the man
Jesus left, then is this disciple not like a natural Israelite who rebelled
against God and would not listen to Him (Ezek 20:8)? Certainly, the disciple
is. And are not most disciples like natural Israelites who would not cast away
the detestable things their eyes feasted on, nor forsake the idols of Egypt
[sin] (same verse)? Don’t most disciples do the majority of their buying and
selling on the Sabbath, thereby greatly profaning it? Certainly they do. And
the greater Church has profaned God’s Sabbaths for 17, 18, 19 centuries—for
long enough that the greater Church has acquired a taste for sin, has actually
become addicted to sin, which, like sugar, leaves such a sweet taste in the
mouth but kills the body. [Research indicates that sugar is more addictive than
cocaine.]
The Apostle Paul
probably never imagined how unheeded his admonishment of the saints at Corinth
would be. He wouldn’t have wanted to believe that the Church would rebel
against God as it did in those early centuries. He wouldn’t have wanted to
believe that the natural nation was the actual shadow of the spiritual nation. He
lived long enough to see corruption enter the fellowship at Galatia—and that
corruption never ended, but only shifted from accepting the teaching of the
Circumcision Faction (which placed emphasis on the flesh) to rejecting all
things Jewish.
The reader should now read
Jeremiah chapter 16.
Commentary: In the darkness/light
juxtaposition between natural Israel and spiritual Israel, the Jerusalem of
Jeremiah’s day compares first to the Jerusalem-above in the 3rd and
4th Centuries CE. The martyrdom of the decade between 303 and 313 CE
didn’t come upon the Church because of its righteousness (this isn’t to say
that the righteous were not martyred, for most likely the righteous died during
this period because of their righteousness). Rather, the Church appeared before
God as the natural nation of Israel appeared before God just prior to when God
drove the natural nation from the Jerusalem-below.
Jeremiah makes
the connection between the emptying of Jerusalem and the exodus from Egypt,
saying that God would again set His hand to recover Israel (vv. 14-15). So the penalties attached to
the examples of natural Israel in the Wilderness of Sin about which the Apostle
Paul warns the saints at Corinth appear spiritually in, ‘“But first I will doubly repay their iniquity and their
sin, because they have polluted my land with the carcasses of their detestable
idols, and have filled my inheritance with their abominations” (v. 18).
The reader should now read
Ezekiel chapter 20.
Commentary: This is how God sees the
greater Church, and this is what He promises to do. He will recover those He
can, and He will do so in a manner that makes everyone forget the exodus of the
natural nation from Egypt.
The prophets
link the recovery of endtime Israel to the exodus of the natural nation from
Egypt…the former exodus forms the lifeless shadow of the endtime reality. This
includes the liberation of the spiritual nation from bondage to the spiritual
king of Babylon, a Pharaoh who will successfully cause the vast majority of
Christians to rebel against God once they are liberated from sin and death.
This rebellion will be the great falling away, and for the disciple who
habitually transgresses the laws of God and profanes His Sabbaths, this
rebellion will be business as usual.
The person conducting
the Sabbath service should close services with two hymns, or psalms, followed
by a prayer asking God’s dismissal.
* * * * *
"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."
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