The Philadelphia Church

And He said to them, "Follow Me, and I will make you fishers of men. (Matt 4:19)"

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 reading the book of life.

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Weekly Readings

For the Sabbath of March 2, 2013

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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Paul, an apostle—not from men nor through man, but through Jesus Christ and God the Father, who raised him from the dead—and all the brothers who are with me, To the churches of Galatia: Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ, who gave himself for our sins to deliver us from the present evil age, according to the will of our God and Father, to whom be the glory forever and ever. Amen. (Gal 1:1–5)

For freedom Christ has set us free; stand firm therefore, and do not submit again to a yoke of slavery. Look: I, Paul, say to you that if you accept circumcision, Christ will be of no advantage to you. I testify again to every man who accepts circumcision that he is obligated to keep the whole law. You are severed from Christ, you who would be justified by the law; you have fallen away from grace. For through the Spirit, by faith, we ourselves eagerly wait for the hope of righteousness. For in Christ Jesus neither circumcision nor uncircumcision counts for anything, but only faith working through love. You were running well. Who hindered you from obeying the truth? This persuasion is not from him who calls you. (Gal 5:1–8)

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The epistle Paul wrote to the Galatians has been the principle text used by lawless Christians against disciples who know to keep the commandments—this is the text lawless Christians use against Paul and what he taught by his own hand in oversized letters: “See with what large letters I am writing to you with my own hand. It is those who want to make a good showing in the flesh who would force you to be circumcised, and only in order that they may not be persecuted for the cross of Christ” (Gal 6:11–12). The preceding is correct: lawless Christians use Paul’s writings against Paul himself, assigning to Paul’s words [linguistic icons] meanings that Paul didn’t intend … a word, once inscribed, becomes a “thing,” something that exists apart from its meaning that must be assigned to it by a person. Therefore, if a person were to “create” a lifeless shadow of a word, with a shadow of a thing existing in one less dimension than the thing itself, a person would write in a language that is only partially alphabetized: a Semitic language such as Hebrew or Arabic—

The addition of un-inscribed vowel pointing [i.e., the vocalization of vowels] as an invisible physical “thing” must occur before a Semitic-language consonant cluster that is inscribed and visible becomes a word. A Hebrew or Arabic three consonant cluster doesn’t pronounce itself. To the consonant cluster, aspiration must be added. Consonants represent interruptions in the vowel stream; in any vowel stream, regardless of where the stream is formed (restricted) in a person’s mouth—a person’s vocal cords make sound by air/breath being pushed or pulled past them; thus vowel streams can be likened to artesian springs, water flowing from the ground by itself. The anatomy of a person doesn’t require a person to do anything but breathe to stay alive to make vowel streams … the person learns to control these vowel streams when an infant; learns to control these vowel streams before the jaw has lengthened enough that the person can form consonants by interrupting vowels streams at certain points in the mouth and with the teeth and lips. Thus, consonants tend toward silence. If completely formed, a consonant would be silent, as silent as a letter on a page.

A fully inscribed word—a Greek or Latin or English word—lays on a page as a “thing” that can be resurrected to life by adding breath to the word, by uttering the word, but this is not the case with partially inscribed words such as written Hebraic or Arabic words, where only consonant clusters lay on the page and any number of vowels can be inserted between the consonants to produce a variety of words that will represent similar but different things: linguistic icons. Thus, while a written word in a fully alphabetized language [Greek being our example] lies dead on a page and need not ever be pronounced [uttered] and therefore resurrected to life to produce meaning in a person’s mind, meaning that the person assigns to the word, a written consonant cluster in a Semitic language must first be mentally or actually vocalized to become a word to which the reader assigns meaning; hence, one consonant cluster in a Semitic language will represent several words from which the reader, via the context of the word, has already chosen one to assign to the consonant cluster. Said otherwise, if a Semitic language reader doesn’t know what a passage is supposed to say before beginning to read the passage, the consonant clusters forming the passage cannot be read with any certainty or precision: the reader merely guesses at what vowel pointing should be added to the consonant clusters based on what the reader thinks the passage means. Therefore, the Hebraic thought-couplet becomes an important tool in showing the physical (the first presentation of the thought) that reveals the spiritual (the second presentation of the same thought).

In a Semitic language, it takes two presentations—the first physical (visible), the second spiritual (Invisible)—to reveal a completed concept that is represented by a single word in a fully alphabetized language; for when a word is complete but dead from lack of aspiration, meaning can be assigned to the word without the word being resurrected to life. And this assigned meaning can be added to other assigned meanings so that knowledge is acquired without a single word ever being uttered aloud or silently. The dead words give life to meaning in a manner analogous to how the spiritually dead fleshly bodies of human persons will give life to sons of God in the great White Throne Judgment: the life isn’t in the words, but in the meaning assigned to them so that the person who while physically alive manifested love for neighbor and brother will receive meaning for his or her love for others in receiving eternal life from God. This person’s manifested love for neighbor and brother functions for the person raised from death in the White Throne Judgment as God foreknowing the Elect in the Resurrection of Firstfruits; thus, the person who truly loved others need not have professed that Jesus was Lord to be saved. Like circumcision of the heart, that barrier of profession that Jesus is Lord (Rom 10:9) pertains to the Resurrection of Firstfruits, not to the general resurrection of humankind that occurs after the Thousand Years of the Millennium.

A reader of Semitic inscription needs to know what a word means, what a text says before the text can be read; for this reader is required (because of the partial alphabetization of Semitic languages) to know what the word should be before the word can be read through vowel pointing being added to the consonant cluster[s]. Meaning now precedes utterance and doesn’t follow utterance. The Elect understand spiritual things through being foreknown, predestined, called, justified, and glorified while the now-living inner self still dwells in a house of flesh as in Semitic languages, the meaning of the word is known before the word can be uttered.

But in the great White Throne Judgment, none of these dead human persons will have been predestined for glory. Rather, each person will lay complete as an inscribed word in a fully alphabetized language is complete but lifeless. These lifeless words can be read without having breath [vocalization] given to them, and the meaning produced in God’s mind when these dead human persons are “read” in the great White Throne Judgment determines whether God will bring to spiritual life the person by giving to the person His voicing, His breath, His aspiration. … If God utters a person’s name in the great White Throne Judgment, the person will live forever as a son of God, but if God chooses to read the person’s name without uttering it, a reality that came into existence when Scripture went from being written in Hebrew or Aramaic to being written in Greek, then the person will perish in the lake of fire.

When God calls the resurrected two witnesses up into heaven (Rev 11:12), these two have assured eternal life.

Again, a word in a fully alphabetized language such as English can be read silently without the word ever being pronounced. The word can lay dead on a page and not be resurrected to life by a person vocalizing the word and still produce meaning in the reader’s mind, but this is not the case with Hebrew or with any other partially alphabetized language: the word must be heard either with the ear or in the mind so that the consonant cluster becomes a word; for the consonant cluster is not one word to which many meanings can be assigned, but the root of many words to which many-squared (many2) meanings can be assigned, so many that the reader must know in advance what the word means [in analogy, must know in advance what it means to walk in this world as Jesus walked].

If a Christian doesn’t know to keep the Sabbath, the Christian will only keep the Sabbath because the Christian desires to walk in this world as Jesus walked. The person assigns meaning to his or her life … if the Christian is truly born of spirit as a son of God, the Christian “knows” to keep the commandments as the outward manifestation of having love for God, neighbor and brother: the Christian is without a choice when it comes to keeping the commandments. But if the Christian has not been born of spirit—the plight of most Christians, the cross most bear—the Christian who assigns godly meaning to his or her life through how the person lives will still consciously walk in this world as Jesus walked, keeping the commandments as the person knows to keep them. However, the person who knows nothing of God but who nevertheless manifests outward and sincere love for neighbor and brother also assigns meaning to his or her life, meaning that can be and will be “read” by God in the great White Throne Judgment as will be the meaning the Christian not born of spirit assigned to his or her life. Both those who professed Christ who though not born of God but who strived to walk in this world as Jesus walked as well as the non-Christian who without knowledge of God lived a godly life will have their names read by God in the White Throne Judgment and will have meaning assigned to their names, meaning that gives to them eternal life.

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The issue under discussion in Paul’s epistle to the Galatians is circumcision of the flesh: does a person have to become a Jew in the flesh before the person can become a Christian, a disciple of Christ Jesus? The issue isn’t whether disciples are to keep the commandments, with the Sabbath being the objectionable commandment for most Christians, despite Sabbath observance remaining the outward sign that an Israelite, now a person inwardly circumcised (i.e., circumcised of heart), is sanctified by God, the God that raised Jesus from death not the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. These two formerly conjoined deities in the Tetragrammaton YHWH are one spirit as a man and his wife are one flesh. And the problem confronting outwardly circumcised Israel is, simply, the reality that the God of the man Jesus is not the God of Abraham.

The means by which Paul argued against circumcision of the flesh having importance begins as a classic Aristotelian argument, with Paul presenting his strongest point first: he had a revelation from God, with what was revealed being irrefutable for the thing was from God. All that can be challenged was whether such a revelation truly occurred. If it didn’t, then Paul is not trustworthy in anything he writes. If it did, then Paul must be believed. For Paul lacks any authority to command the saints in Galatia to cease outwardly circumcising themselves—his only authority comes from his words, his understanding of spiritual matters. And in this case, Paul’s opponents, the Circumcision Faction, have Scripture on their side. According to Moses, Paul is wrong. However, according to Christ, Paul is correct. But what exactly is known about Christ, especially when Paul wrote his epistle to the Galatians? Even today, what is truly known about Christ? The author of Luke’s Gospel is uninspired and has no spiritual understanding. Acts is a Sophist novel. Matthew’s Gospel cannot be factually true if either Mark’s Gospel or John’s Gospel is true: Matthew’s Gospel, however, is true when applied to the indwelling Christ Jesus, thereby making the inner self of the person born of God a disciple of the indwelling King.

The dilemma Paul faced was that he could not easily refute Moses [the son] while retaining the core of what Moses taught; for Moses’ words form the inscribed shadow and copy of Jesus’ words. Moses wrote what Jesus uttered, a juxtaposition that takes a moment to grasp for truly, a millennium and a half before Jesus lived, Moses inscribed words that were the lifeless shadow and copy of Jesus’ living words—and as a person’s shadow is two-dimensional but the person is both three-dimensional and physically living, the words Moses inscribed in a codex pertain to the surface of things (the outer self) and not to the core of the matter … if a person keeps the Law, the person will keep the commandments, but the person keeping the commandments doesn’t necessarily keep the Law; for the Law of God pertains to the inner self of a person, with this inner self being neither male nor female, Jew nor Greek. Thus, outward circumcision that pertains to the flesh of the person is not an indicator of whether the heart of the person has been circumcised, and we have arrived where the prophet Jeremiah was:

Behold, the days are coming, declares [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 are uncircumcised in heart. (Jer 9:25–26)

Paul doesn’t say how he received revelation—he doesn’t need to say for endtime disciples receive revelation in the same manner, through the indwelling of the spirit of truth, the parakletos.

·   Revelation from God is through the parakletos;

·   Revelation from Christ Jesus is through visions.

Because the God [ton Theon] the man Jesus worshipped (i.e., the God of dead ones as the God of Abraham was the God of living ones — Matt 22:32) was not and could not be the God of Abraham, a realization of those persons truly born of God as sons and a realization that separates circumcised-of-heart Israel from outwardly-circumcised-only Israel, the man Jesus could not be the Messiah for outwardly circumcised Israel. Jesus could only be the Messiah for circumcised-of-heart Israel.

Jesus was, for the natural sons of Abraham, a pretender, a false Messiah, a false rabbi; for there is one God [YHWH] and no other (Isa 45:5). And this one God [YHWH] formed light and created darkness (v. 7), made the earth and created adam (v. 12). And this one God said, Let us make adam in our image …male and female He created them.

Outwardly circumcised Israel doesn’t recognized the reality imbedded in Hebrew being a partially alphabetized Semitic language that initially used never-vocalized linguistic determinatives to give to inscription the “fullness” of oral utterance, with these linguistic determinatives identifying speakers and locations, as well as the circumstance of the utterance. These determinatives were not proper names. It is always a mistake to vocalize them as a proper name would have been vocalized.

Linguistic determinatives function as stage directions do for a play—

However, over time as linguistic changes occur in a language, stage directions become part of the drama: never vocalized linguistic determinatives become words. And to partially alphabetized Semitic determinatives, vowel sounds were assigned, except to the Tetragrammaton YHWH that came back from Babylon too sacred to utter, thus retaining its never-vocalized status. Only an extremely ignorant person would attempt to assign vowels to the Tetragrammaton … post-Exile Israel retained what was believed to be the appropriate vowel pointing in the substitute utterance of Adonai, which when added to the Tetragrammaton would disclose that the one God represented by the Tetragrammaton YHWH is actually two deities as a man and his wife are two individuals that together are one flesh.

·   The Tetragrammaton YHWH deconstructs to (YH) + (WH), with <H> being the universal symbol for aspiration or “breath”;

·   When Adonai is inserted between the consonants as is done with vowels in Semitic languages, we find the word YaHd~nWaiH, with the letters “d” followed by an indistinct vowel and the nasal consonant “n” representing the meaning of <another such>, thereby validating the deconstruction of the Tetragrammaton.

Did you catch that: <d~n> functions in the Tetragrammaton YHWH as a vowel, something that is seen in Greeks borrowing the Phoenician script, with Greeks assigning vowel sounds to some Phoenician consonants that Greeks did not utilize. In this case, the Hebraic sound image represented by the English letters <Adonai> functions as three vowels [/A/ + /don/+ /ai/] that fit between the four consonants of the cluster that includes a twice-repeated consonant representing the interruption of the vowel stream at the glottal stop, the palatine uvula, the conic projection from the posterior edge of the middle of the soft palate (the little hanging down thing in the back of your throat). Thus, the linguistically ignorant person will, without considering why Jews do not pronounce the Tetragrammaton, assign some vowel combination to the sacred consonant cluster and come up with a sound image that reveals the person’s lack of spiritual understanding.

Rabbis that returned from Babylon knew or should have known that the one God Israel worshiped consisted of two entities as one day consists of a dark portion and a light portion, with the darkness not being the light. Any intelligent scholar, having read King David’s latter psalms, would have known that Yah was not a contraction for YHWH, but was the deity that interacted with human persons, that interacted with David; that YHWH included Yah but was bigger than Yah, the Spokesman for the conjoined YHWH.

Possessing the Key of David amounts to the ability to read Hebraic poetics composed in thought-couplets in which the physical precedes the spiritual—and to not have this Key of David means that his psalms were vocalized but never understood, an extremely grievous indictment of Israelite scholarship.

But backing up to the concept that to read Semitic inscription, the person must know in advance what the words say whereas with fully alphabetized inscription can be read without knowing in advance what the words are: meaning can be assigned to these words after they have been read, not before they can be read …

Perhaps the preceding is the best way to say what has been presented in more difficult language: the writings of Moses were inscribed in proto-Hebrew so the reader of Moses’ writings had to know in advance what Moses wrote before being able to read what Moses wrote, but the writings of the New Testament are in fully alphabetized Greek so these writings can be read without knowing in advance what they say. Meaning is assigned to them after they are read, not before they can be read. Therefore, these Greek texts can transcend time, with God through the Parakletos giving to the endtime disciple the meaning that should be assigned to these texts after these texts have been read and reread.

Too often the Sabbatarian Christian, sincere in belief but without spiritual discernment, will attempt to pronounce in bastardized Hebrew what was never pronounced by natural Israelites, either before the Deportation or after the Remnant returned to the Land Beyond the River to build for King Cyrus a temple for the God of kings David and Solomon. The hubris of these Sabbatarian Christians exceeds that of Hollywood stars and starlets that regularly parade on red carpets while not understanding how or why conquering Agamemnon was slain by a servant and an offended wife … these Sabbatarian Christians babble on about spiritual matters of which they know nothing. Endtime Gnosticism has a public and a private face—and they form its public face; thus, they “feel” special as they utter the name of God in their bastardized Hebrew, not at all realizing they strive to pronounce a structurally plural Semitic glyph [YHWH] representing a linguistic determinative, the “us” of Let us make adam in our image … male and female he created them.

Through man (adam) being created male and female, a “man” is not complete by himself. Nor is a man complete when the man lays with another man or with other men or with beasts, regardless of what governing entities declare. These governing entities did not create humankind; did not create marriage; and have no authority to do more than bind or loose civil unions under community property law. Therefore, although secular governing authorities can apply the word “marriage” to the civil unions these authorities sanction, these governing authorities cannot make two into one, or a second from the first. Rather, all these governing authorities can do is bring further damnation upon themselves.

Human persons create their governing entities regardless of whether these authorities were created centuries earlier through the conquests of a war lord, or via the ballot box. Thus, civil authorities are of men and exist to serve men. They are servants that occasionally take to themselves the ways of an oppressive bully. When this happens, human persons are left with the option of submitting to continued bulling, or overturning the authority either by passive resistance or by the force of arms …

Every Sabbatarian Christian—through the act of keeping the Sabbath—passively resists the present prince of this world, the Adversary, and has thereby chosen sides (has chosen the side of the Lord) and has set forth on a voyage of resistance that precludes the Sabbatarian from returning to port and still living spiritually.

Servants can own slaves, but servants do not dictate policy to free men … as an angelic being, the Adversary was created to be a servant. He has become arrogant because of his beauty, his wisdom, but he remains a servant and as such, he is not to have authority over those who have been set free from the law of sin and death by Christ Jesus. He has to deceive, to “trick” Christians into returning to the lawless ways of this world. And as a prostitute turns “tricks,” deceiving her “John” with a false show of affection and her readily available public body, the Adversary tricks through false affection and his readily available public body, the religions of this world—every religion that doesn’t observe the Sabbath.

In joining a church, a Christian enters into the public body of the Adversary to become one with this public body as a man becomes one with a prostitute when he enters into her public body … underlying American culture is the concept of the righteous whore, the fallen woman with a heart of gold who’s not to be judged by what she does in the darkness of night but by what she does in the light of day. American Christians do not want to be judged by the darkness that still lingers in hearts, but by the good they do in the public square. Thus, inevitably, American Christians do not ask hard questions of themselves, such as why they do not keep the Sabbath, but easy questions such as do they support troops overseas, or disaster relief efforts, or anti-abortion candidates? Are these Americas for fiscal responsibility, balanced budgets, the Second Amendment? Have they been taxed enough already? Do they have an emergency supply of freeze-dried food, three or more days of water on hand, more ammo than they can carry? If so, they understand what is happening to America—

No they don’t! They remain spiritually blind, deaf and dumb. They utter drivel. Their minds are set on the “things” of this world. And perhaps worst of all, they have come to believe the worn-out tart they enter every Sunday is the last Eve, the mother of all that lives spiritually … give her a break; get off her; pull up pants, fasten belts, and permit her to repent of her evil ways. If her heart is as golden as her reputation would have it, she will repent, mend her ways, and live free from the law of sin and death.

The advertising slogan claims, What happens in Las Vegas stays in Las Vegas … I spent the summers of 1963 and 1964 in Reno, running a chain stitch machine for my aunt, and I came to realize that the glamour of club life came with a concealed hook that made club life like a fishing fly: if a person bit into club life, the person was in a fight for his or her life, a fight that was usually lost so that the person was netted, suffocated, butchered, and devoured by the Adversary. What happened in Reno did, indeed, stay in Reno, the whitened bones of the person who ingested a little too much glamour still lying in the Nevada desert somewhere.

I came to Reno as a naïve kid who once walked into a streetlamp post while gawking at bouncy breasts (the braless craze hadn’t yet reached the Oregon Coast). At first I couldn’t believe what I saw, but after a while I wondered how anyone could believe what I saw … my aunt and her gay friend would flirt for the same fellow’s attention—and I would shoot jackrabbits with a .22 rifle on Mount Rose. The rabbits never saw the bullet coming. Even if they saw me, they froze instead of running. And that mistake proved fatal.

Why doesn’t the Christian who opens his or her Bible and reads, “‘Observe the Sabbath day to keep it holy, as YHWH our Elohim commanded you,’” do just that?

When the servant assumes the authority of God, the servant will, without conscience, pose as God, accepting the worship that is rightfully God’s without feeling guilt. Sobeit. The servant is already condemned to death.

Man is complete in marriage when a man and a woman become one flesh, with a child becoming the visible production of a man and his wife being one flesh—and this is but the spiritually lifeless shadow and copy of the son of God being one flesh, with this union of spiritually living inner self and spiritually dead outer self bringing forth a new creature (analogous to a child) that shall be either great in the kingdom of the heavens, or least in the kingdom.

Backing up, God the Father entered the Son in the form of His breath [pneuma Theou] appearing in the bodily form of a dove when the man Jesus rose from baptism (Mark 1:10 — to pneuma os peristwran katabainon eis [into] auton). And in this way, the Father and the Son became one spirit as a man and his wife are one flesh, with the glorified Son [Messiah] being the fruit [child] of this union. The “spirit” is not a separate entity from either the Father or the Son but “is” the breath of the Father [again, pneuma Theou] and the breath of the Son [pneuma Christou], two separate breaths as your breath is not my breath even though both your breath and my breath originated with Elohim (singular in usage) breathing the breath of life into the man Adam, then taking this breath that was in Adam and placing it in Eve so that Adam and Eve could be one flesh in the production of new life.

When meaning must exist before vowel points can be assigned to Hebrew consonant clusters, thereby forming these clusters into vocalized words, a living inner self must exist before the fleshly body of the person can walk in this world as Jesus walked … is that simple enough? For the Elect, the receipt of spiritual life in the form of the indwelling of Christ precedes and doesn’t follow the person walking in this world as Jesus walked. However, for the Greek, the spiritual Gentile, the person must assign meaning to his or her own life, own “name,” with God only vocalizing those names that reveal the person having lived a godly life after the fact. But more about this 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."