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 between the resurrections.
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Weekly Readings
For the Sabbath of February 14, 2009
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.
Some confusion exists concerning the timeline that is known from prophecy and from using typology as prophecy; thus, working backwards from when this present universe as we know it will end with the coming of the new heavens and new earth (Rev 21:1), disciples see Death and Hades being thrown into the lake of fire following the last of the great White Judgment, in which every person not judged as one of the firstfruits will be resurrected from death and judged:
· The great White Throne Judgment is represented typologically by the main crop wheat harvest of ancient Judea, and linguistically wherever a distinction is made between wheat and barley when Israel is metaphorically said to be grain or the grain harvest of Judean hillsides.
· Disciples who have been born of spirit and who have taken judgment upon themselves through the sacrament of baptism prior to Christ Jesus’ return are not identified in Scripture as wheat but as barley when a distinction between wheat and barley is made as in the Wave Sheaf Offering.
Paul said that “all who have sinned without the law will also perish without the law,” but “when Gentiles, who do not have the law, by nature do what the law requires, they are a law to themselves, even though they do not have the law. They show that the work of the law is written on their hearts, while their conscience also bears witness, and their conflicting thoughts accuse or even excuse them on that day when … God judges the secrets of men by Christ Jesus” (Rom 2:12, 14–16). What Paul writes about those who do not have the law being judged by whether the work of the law is written on their hearts occurs in the great White Throne Judgment. Every person who has every drawn breath will be judged.
Individuals who never knew the Father and the Son (and who were not under the law as Israel was under the law) will be judged without the law and will perish without the law if the work of the law is not written on their heart … the work of the law is to cause a person to love his (or her) neighbor as the person loves him or herself. The work of the law is not to cause a person to enter into Sabbath observance, for to enter into Sabbath observance is to enter into God’s rest and into His presence: those individuals who were without the law and without knowledge of God were not given the opportunity by the Father and the Son to enter into their presence, but the opportunity was afforded to every person to love his or her neighbor so the work of the law could be written on anyone’s heart. However, the narrative of history records that it is truly the rare person who has outwardly loved his or her neighbor; thus the majority of human beings who are resurrected to life in the great White Throne Judgment will perish without the law. But as the Adversary drew a third part of the stars of heaven [angels] down into the bottomless pit, the Son of Man will probably draw a third part of humankind upward into heaven as the chiral image of Satan’s rebellion.
No human being is presently in an ever-burning hell, being tortured in fire not quite hot enough to consume the person. Those who have died without the law now rest in the dust of the earth, their lives recorded in the books to be opened in the great White Throne Judgment. They will be returned to life as Israel in the valley of dry bones is returned to life (Ezek chap 37), and they will appear before the Lord as the two thieves were raised on crosses, one to either side of the man Jesus (Luke 23:39–43). The making of judgments in the great White Throne Judgment will take no one than it took for Jesus to tell the second thief that he would be in paradise. The work of the law will or will not be evident on hearts of those who were without the law, and of those who were under the law, the doer of the law will be known.
Israel received the law in the days of Moses and has been under the law ever since, but no one in Israel was born of spirit prior to the man Jesus of Nazareth. Although a few ancient Israelites received the promise of inheriting eternal life, they did not have eternal life while they lived, the difference between before the giving of the Holy Spirit and after the spirit was given. Since the giving of the Holy Spirit, Israel has been a nation born of spirit and circumcised of heart. Natural Israel, still under the law, was loved for the sake of its ancestors, but has not been the “Israel” of Scripture. Therefore, natural Israelites since Calvary who were/are or were/are not doers of the law but who were not born of spirit prior to their natural deaths will appear before God in the great White Throne Judgment, whereas natural Israelites that lived prior to Calvary and who were doers of the law have the promise of inheriting eternal life as firstfruits; i.e., as part of the early barley harvest.
Therefore, the event that immediately precedes the coming of the new heavens and earth is the great White Throne Judgment and the throwing of Death and Hades into the lake of fire. Every person will appear before the Lord in judgment one time, not many times. Today, judgment is on the firstfruits who appear daily in a one-time judgment, a statement that is not linguistic gibberish. For the firstfruits, judgment will be revealed, not made, when Christ Jesus returns (1 Cor 4:5); judgment is being made daily while disciples live, with this daily judgment constituting one day of judgment, the long spiritual night that began at Calvary. So the daily failings of a disciple are forgotten or remembered no more if the lawless person turns to righteousness. But if a righteous person turns from his or her righteousness and does injustice, the person shall perish in the lake of fire when judgments are revealed.
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The person conducting the services should read or assign to be read Ezekiel chapter 18, noting especially verses 21 through 32.
Commentary: The concept of an ever-burning hell in which human souls are cracklings is anti-love and anti-God; the concept is from the Adversary. Human beings are not born with immortal souls, another lie of the Adversary’s, for eternal life is the gift of the Father in Christ Jesus (Rom 6:23). And every teacher of Israel who argues that human beings are born with immortal souls is of the Adversary, who has disguised himself as an angel of light so as Paul wrote, “it is no surprise if his servants, also, disguise themselves as servants of righteousness” (2 Cor 11:15).
It is relatively easy to identify false ministers, false teachers, and false prophets; for every minister, teacher, and prophet who teaches that human beings have immortal souls is of Satan—yes, every one of them! Every minister, teacher, and prophet who teaches Israel to transgress the law (especially the Sabbath commandment) is false! And every minister, teacher, and prophet who finds Rome, the Roman Empire, or the Roman Church in biblical prophecy is false! Likewise, every minister, teacher, and prophet who asks for money is a deceitful workman who has not been called by the Father and the Son to teach or preach or explicate prophecy.
When the number of ministers, teachers, and prophets that teach that human beings have immortal souls, that the law has been abolished, and that Rome is the fourth beast of Daniel chapter 7, and who ask for tithes or donations is subtracted from all of the Christian ministers, teachers, and explicators of prophecy, the remainder is a very small number: when Jesus said that many are called but few are chosen (Matt 22:14), He was referring to Israel, not the teachers of Israel. Of the teachers of Israel, even fewer will be chosen when judgments are revealed. Most ministers, teachers, and prophets have not been called by the Father but seek after honor or an income. They run after the whispers of demons, and they chase shadows as if the shadows possessed real substance, and they repeat the errors they have been taught as if the traditions of demons might somehow save men. Thus, even after a third of humankind is slain a second time in the sixth Trumpet Plague near the mid point of the seven endtime years of Tribulation, humankind will continue to worship demons and the works of their hands as they do today (Rev 9:20).
The traditions of demons will save no one, regardless of how silvery these traditions appear.
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The event that precedes the great White throne Judgment is the loosing of Satan from the bottomless pit where he has been bound for a thousand years (Rev 20:7) … the thousand years are the millennial reign of the Messiah, the Anointed One, who is not a single individual but the harvest of firstfruits.
Satan or the Adversary is the spiritual king of Babylon (Isa 14:4) against whom Israel during the Millennium is to take up a taunt. From when the glorified Jesus returns as King of kings and Lord of lords to begin a thousand year long reign to the end of that reign, the Adversary will be bound in the bottomless pit in which the universe is created.
Nebuchadnezzar, a human king of Babylon and the king to whom Daniel said was the head of gold of the humanoid image the king saw in vision, formed the shadow and type of the invisible spiritual king of Babylon. And as Nebuchadnezzar had his human nature taken from him for seven years and was given instead the nature of a beast, Satan, when he and his angels are cast from heaven (Rev 12:7–10), will be given the mind of a man. For seven years—three and a half before the millennial reign of Christ and three and a half years after these thousand years (the millennial reign of Christ does not cast a shadow)—Satan will be given the mind of a man before fire comes from his belly to utterly consume him (Ezek 28:18–19).
Whether God returns to Satan the mind of an angel before fire comes from his belly is speculative, but in the case of Nebuchadnezzar, the Lord returned to him the mind of a man. Shadows of spiritual events are chiral earthly images of the spiritual events; thus, it is reasonable to project that since the Lord returned reason to Nebuchadnezzar followed by Nebuchadnezzar praising God, the Lord will return to Satan his mind before fire comes out from his belly to utterly destroy him — as Nebuchadnezzar lived to again be king of Babylon, Satan will perish and never again be a king or a prince but will be ashes under the feet of the saints.
A chiral image is the non-symmetrical mirror image of a thing as the left hand is the mirror image of the right hand. Therefore, as the hard labor pains of childbirth precede childbirth in this world, the hard labor pains of childbirth will follow, not precede (Isa 66:7–8) spiritual childbirth, in the inter-dimensional heavenly realm known as the bottomless pit. Similarly, as death follows life in this earthly realm, death precedes life for those who are born of spirit. The earthly shadow of a heavenly event looks upward towards God as the spiritual reality casting the shadow looks downward towards humankind; so man and God look at each other as the visible things of this world reveal the invisible things of God (Rom 1:20), with the physical preceding the spiritual (1 Cor 15:46).
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Why Satan can deceive the nations at the four corners of the earth after the 1,000 years (Rev 20:8) lies in the reality concealed in Canticles:
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The person reading should read or assign to be read the Song of Solomon, all eight chapters.
Commentary: Although Canticles makes for a lengthy reading, a few things should be apparent, especially if a modern English translation is read: the entirety of the book is poetry … the focus of poetry is never what the words mimetically represent, but the words themselves. Thus, the focus of the word “tree” in a poem is not the leafy tree being described, but the word tree. The focus is the artifice of words, not the article[s] the words seek to describe, a distinction realized by poets but not by many biblical critics. Therefore, because Canticles is written as a series of interrelated poems, the subject of the poems is not outside Canticles but inside the book itself.
Second, Canticles is a three-part drama similar to early three-part Greek dramas: Canticles is a play, written to be performed on a stage to an audience twice separated from the action described by the lines. On the stage are the protagonist, the Bride; the antagonist, Solomon; and the chorus, separated into two parts when they danced onto the stage, going to the left and to the right of the stairs leading to the stage. The chorus is the “daughters of Jerusalem,” with the chorus director or leader having a speaking part and with the chorus answering either the leader, or one half of the chorus answering the other half.
The stage presents an alternative reality to the reality of the audience: the existence of the stage separates the audience from the actors in a manner analogous to how a clear pane of glass in a window separates those inside a building from those outside the building, permitting those inside to see what is happening outside but preventing those inside from being a part of what is happening outside.
If the Lord wanted to convey to Israel that Canticles is not set in this present evil world, but is set in the future—specifically, set after the Holy Spirit has been poured out on all flesh and the natures of both men and beasts have been changed—there is no better way to convey this information than to use a poetic drama … the poetry tells the audience that the focus of the written text is not things in this world, but the poem[s]. And if the focus of Canticles is itself, and if Canticles is a drama which it is, then the twice-removed focus is the acts occurring on stage in a reality that differs from the present reality.
Typology discloses that the rebellion of Israel under Samuel is the shadow and type of spiritual Israel’s rebellion against God when the great falling away (2 Thess 2:3) occurs after the seven years of tribulation begin; the revealing of the lawless one is the reality foreshadowed by the crowning of Saul as king of Israel. Therefore, the following correspondences exist and are true:
1. King Saul, who had an evil spirit, forms the shadow and type of the man of perdition, who will seem to be a man of righteousness, but in reality is a human being possessed by the Adversary.
2. This lawless one or man of perdition will be broken or taken halfway through the seven years of tribulation, for three and a half years before the glorified Jesus returns as the King of kings and lord of lords.
3. This man of perdition will be broken when Jesus fights on earth on a day of battle (Zech 14:3–4) on the same day that Michael and his angels fight against the old dragon and cast Satan and his angels out from heaven.
4. The man of perdition will be broken on the doubled day 1260, but on this same doubled day, Satan will come claiming to be the returned Christ and will deceive many. Satan will come as the true Antichrist. The man of perdition came as the true Antichrist’s time-linked shadow.
5. On the same day that Satan is cast from heaven, the single kingdom of this world is given to the Son of Man—and the glorified Jesus is the Lamb that stood on Mount Zion, whom the 144,000 followed (Rev 14:1–5).
6. The glorified Jesus does not come so that the whole world sees Him, but comes to the 144,000 as the reality of David being king over Israel. The glorified David will receive this throne in 1260 days when he is resurrected.
7. King Solomon’s reign over Israel is, therefore, the earthly shadow and type of Christ’s reign over Israel once the Millennium begins.
Solomon’s heart drifted away from the Lord because of his foreign wives, with “wives” being analogous to ideas or philosophies.
Light casts no shadow; Christ is light and thus casts no shadow. And glorified disciples are divided between the greatest and the least, with those disciples who are great to rule the day and those who are least to rule the night, the turning or twisting away from the light … that there are disciples who relaxed the least of the commandments and are therefore glorified as the least of Christ (Matt 5:19) poses interesting juxtapositions when a disciple realizes that when Satan is loosed after the 1,000 years he will deceive the nations at the four corners of the earth. A deceived nation is one that turns or twists away from the light that is Christ. These deceived nations will, in some way, be ruled by glorified disciples who relaxed the least of the commandments while they lived physically. The implication is, now, two-fold: these glorified disciples will see or will learn that not only cannot the commandments be broken if one is to live, they cannot even be relaxed.
The second implication is that God is not a respecter of persons, that every person must overcome Satan by faith.
If Satan can deceive the nations at the far corners of the earth, twisting these nations away from God even when these nations consist of individuals humanly born filled with the spirit of God, then knowing God and having the law of God written on hearts and minds is not enough to ensure obedience to God: something more is required, with this “more” being the desire to keep the law by faith, a desire manifested in keeping the commandments by those human beings who are resurrected to be great in the kingdom of heaven.
It is not enough to keep the commandments when there is no opposition to keeping them, or when the social expectation of the society is that the person keeps them. Keeping the commandments does nothing for the person. However, the faith to keep the commandments in a world devoted to disobedience develops within the person a commitment to obedience that is unchanging and unchangeable.
Now, we are ready to go back to Canticles: how to read the Bride or woman is a little bit difficult. The land of Israel seems to be personified in the Bride, with the leadership or administration of the government personified in Solomon. And what Solomon says to the woman sounds good but is disingenuous. Solomon really doesn’t care for the woman; she is just there, someone to be complimented and forgotten. And so will it be during the Millennium: the human leaders of the temple will be more interested in looking skyward than in what the people are doing, or how the land fares.
Much more can be said about Canticles, some of which appeared in 2005 Sabbath readings. It is enough here to say that there will be a 1,000 year long reign by Christ Jesus that never ends, again not linguistic gibberish but the reality of a kingdom not of this world or from this world but a kingdom that reigns from the heavenly realm over the mental topography of living creatures. This kingdom will reign for a thousand years over a physical earth and heavens before the new heavens and new earth come, with Christ’s reign over this new earth to never end.
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Disciples have now worked their way towards the end of this present age: the age in which disciples presently dwell began with the Flood of Noah’s day and continues forward until the coming of the Anointed One, the Messiah (in Greek, the Christos). Between where disciples presently are located in the continuum of time and the end of this age lay seven endtime years of tribulation that begin with the second Passover liberation of Israel, now a nation circumcised of heart (Rom 2:28–29), and end with the Second Advent, the visible return of Christ Jesus. These seven years were broken down somewhat in last Sabbath’s reading so only an overall reveal will be here given: on the second Passover of a year soon to occur, the death angels will pass over all the earth, slaying firstborns not covered by the blood of the Lamb of God. Approximately a third of humankind will die between the 15th day and the 17th day of the second sacred month of that particular year. Then 220 days later, near Christmas, the vast majority of Christians will rebel against God in the great falling away, with this rebellion representing the birth of a spiritual Cain, the rejected son of the last Adam.
The seven endtime years are 2520 days long. By beginning on the second Passover, and by ending on the 10th day of the fist month, the day when Jesus entered Jerusalem as both the Passover Lamb of God, a looking backwards towards Israel’s exodus from Egypt, and as the future high priest of Israel [the meaning of riding the colt], 2520 days pass … seven solar years are 365x7 days, or 2555 days (plus at least one day for a leap year). Seven sacred years of 360 days are 35 fewer days, or the difference between the second Passover and the 10th day of the 1st month seven years later.
Halfway through the 2520 days, or on day 1260, a doubled day when counting from both directions, the man of perdition will be taken when the split Mount of Olives swallows the armies pursing the 144,000. Satan will be cast from heaven and will come claiming to be the Messiah. The kingdom of this world will become the kingdom of the Father and His Christ (Rev 11:15–18; Dan 7:9–14). And the Holy Spirit will be poured out on all flesh, quite a bit for one day.
Returning now to 220 days after the second Passover, the count begins for the 1290 days. The 1290 days end in the latter part of July, approximately 10 months after Satan is cast to earth. And 45 days later—approximately fall feast of the fifth year of the Tribulation—or 1335 days after the great falling away, when Israel’s covering of obedience ends, the third part of humankind can no longer be deceived by Satan. Thus, all who come to this day without having taken the mark of death will be blessed (Dan 12:12).
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The subject of this Sabbath’s reading was supposed to be the iron legs of Babylon, and will be next Sabbath. But the separation between the resurrection of firstfruits [the barley harvest] and the main crop harvest of this earth [the wheat harvest] by a thousand years can sometimes be lost in the expression “seven endtime years of tribulation.” The coming of Christ does not mark the end of the world, but the end of this present evil age. The coming of Christ brings light so that the fruit of the spirit can ripen in its due season. Today, the fruit of the spirit must ripen in darkness.
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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."