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 preparing beforehand.
Weekly Readings
For the Sabbath of July 2, 2011
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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After this Jesus went away to the other side of the Sea of Galilee, which is the Sea of Tiberias. And a large crowd was following him, because they saw the signs that he was doing on the sick. Jesus went up on the mountain, and there he sat down with his disciples. Now the Passover, the feast of the Jews, was at hand. Lifting up his eyes, then, and seeing that a large crowd was coming toward him, Jesus said to Philip, “Where are we to buy bread, so that these people may eat?” He said this to test him, for he himself knew what he would do. Philip answered him, “Two hundred denarii would not buy enough bread for each of them to get a little.” One of his disciples, Andrew, Simon Peter's brother, said to him, “There is a boy here who has five barley loaves and two fish, but what are they for so many?” Jesus said, “Have the people sit down.” Now there was much grass in the place. So the men sat down, about five thousand in number. Jesus then took the loaves, and when he had given thanks, he distributed them to those who were seated. So also the fish, as much as they wanted. And when they had eaten their fill, he told his disciples, “Gather up the leftover fragments, that nothing may be lost.” So they gathered them up and filled twelve baskets with fragments from the five barley loaves left by those who had eaten. When the people saw the sign that he had done, they said, “This is indeed the Prophet who is to come into the world!” (John 6:1–14 emphasis added)
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When Transactions Are Unable to Satisfy Need
A denarii was the usual wage for a day laborer at the time: two hundred denarii would have been two hundred days, or seven months of wages for a working man. Thus, if Philip had worked for half a year, he could not have fed the crowd enough bread to satisfy the crowd’s hunger, but by prayer, Jesus caused the boy’s five barley loaves and two fish to become enough food to feed the crowd and to have food left over … of course, the twelve baskets of fragments [remnants] of the barley loaves have spiritual significance, as does Jesus being the Bread of Life, the reality of the manna that fed Israel and the children of Israel in the wilderness—and again, Israel in the wilderness did not need to buy food for the forty years manna was given, not did the children of Israel need to buy real estate when they entered the Promised Land. No transactions were needed. Nor could one tribe or one person permanently sell its/his land allotment. The year of jubilee prevented sales, for no sale was ever “final” but was merely a rental.
It is Jesus expressing the concept that buying bread from vendors—in one or in many transactions—would not have satisfied the want of the crowd that followed Him, that it was His intent to actually feed the people in a demonstration showing the relationship between manna and Himself, that with Him the staples of life come through belief and prayer … why did the boy have five loaves of barley bread and two fish when apparently no one else in the crowd had any food with the person? The boy had come physically prepared to follow Jesus whereas following Jesus for the crowd was an impromptu action.
Did feeding the crowd require “seed,” the five loaves of bread and two fish? Certainly Jesus could have turned stones into loaves of bread if that had been His desire, but that isn’t what He did. Rather, He caused what one person had—an adequate amount of food for the boy—to become enough for everyone present.
This present world is ruled by the Adversary, with all of humankind having been consigned to disobedience (born as slaves of the Adversary) so that the Father can have mercy on all (Rom 11:32) through raising each person from death by giving the person a living inner self, a second breath of life, either now before the Son of Man rules the kingdom of this world or when the world is baptized in the divine breath of God and all of humankind is given a living inner self that is not consigned to disobedience and death but is truly free to keep the commandments of God.
Christians today generally claim that Calvary set them free from the law of God, thereby claiming that Jesus’ death on the cross means that Christians no longer have to keep the commandments, that keeping the commandments and walking as Jesus walked is legalism and a denial of Christ, a nonsensical claim that well expresses the anti-authoritarian mindset of the Adversary, who has permitted his demonic lieutenants to rule over human beings and to fight among themselves, thereby repeatedly bringing the world to the verge of utter destruction … God allotted the Adversary approximately six thousand years to prove that self-governance in economic systems based upon transactions will not work and will always result in war and utter destruction. If God had not periodically intervened in the Adversary’s administration of this world, the demonstration would have ended long ago in the destruction of all living things, but because God had given to the Adversary a prescribed period of time to prove his [the Adversary’s] claims, God has periodically slowed the course of world affairs, with a slowing noticeably occurring about the first of May this year [i.e., immediately after Osama bin Laden was killed], a slowing that seems like a mini-version of the slowing that occurred following Richard Nixon taking the oath of office as President of the United States in January 1969.
In 1968, the United States of America was about to slip into a civil war that would pit the youth of the nation against the authoritarianism of the governing establishment: freedom in this world is always an anti-authoritarian expression of rebellion, with the rebels of one generation rebelling against the rebels of previous generations, and with each generation taking humankind a little farther away from God, with gay marriage being perhaps the ultimate expression of rebellion against God who created humankind male and female in His image and after His likeness, with there being in a union of male and female one head, circumcised or uncircumcised. Marriage as a union between two biological males will have there being two heads in this union, an unwitting denial of Christ Jesus through making the Logos [o logos] who was God [theos] the equal in authority to the God [ton Theon], with Jesus telling the Jews of His day, “‘If God were your Father, you would love me, for I came from God and I am here. I came not of my own accord, but He sent me’” (John 8:42).
Entering His creation (John 1:3) as His only Son (John 3:16) was not an idea that originated with the Logos, but the Logos who was God and who functioned as the Helpmate of the God in a relationship mimicked by human marriage in which two [a man and a woman] become one flesh, one entity, with the husband occupying the position of the God and the wife occupying the position of the Logos, with these two being one coming together to produce offspring that neither the husband nor his wife marry, but that marry other offspring. As the children of Adam and Eve married each other, the only Son of the Logos who was God (i.e., the man Jesus the Nazarene) will marry the glorified offspring of the Father, to whom both the Father and the Son have given life (see John 5:21) —
The Father gave spiritual life to the man Jesus, whose biological father was the Logos (John 1:14) and whose biological mother was of Eve, the first Woman, but whose spiritual Father was the God who became His Father when the breath of God [pneuma Theon] descended and lit upon Him in the form of a dove (Matt 3:16), with the God twice raising the man Jesus from death, once when the Father gave to the man Jesus His breath thereby giving to Jesus’ inner self indwelling eternal life (see John 5:26) and a second time when the Father raised Jesus from the grave after His body lay dead for three days and three nights in the heart of the earth.
Gay marriage blurs the distinction between the God and the Logos, a distinction blurred long ago by Christians who sought to retain the monotheism of Judaism while acknowledging that Jesus was God—gay marriage is a logical outgrowth of social contracts in a nation crafted from Trinitarian Christianity’s ideology. As Job failed to comprehend the difference between man and God before the Lord spoke directly to this righteous man, Christianity has failed to comprehend the difference between the Father and the Son, who as two are one but one as a human son is to be one with his father, with the father in the son through both nurture and nature.
At the Wedding Supper, the glorified Church is to become one with the Son as the Logos was one with the God in the Tetragrammaton YHWH. However, until then—until the Second Passover liberation of Israel—Christians are one with the Son through being the Body of the Son, not the Bride [a man doesn’t marry his body, but is already one with his body]. In order for the Body to become the Bride, greater Christendom must be separated from Christ Jesus through a process analogous to Eve giving birth to Cain and later righteous Abel. The Second Passover liberation of Israel is such a process, and the means by which the greater Christian Church, resurrected from physical death, will be separated from Christ Jesus so that it can develop into a righteous Bride, a chaste virgin, well prepared to endure the Bridegroom’s delay represented by the Endurance, the last 1260 days between the glorified Jesus returns as the Messiah.
Two things can be said about this present world: no person can escape sin or transactions, with sin being simple unbelief of God and with transactions forming the underpinning constructs of this world. To escape sin, the Christian must be freed from indwelling unbelief, which will not happen until the Second Passover liberation of Israel, something that the Apostle Paul did not understand when he wrote,
What then shall we say? That the law is sin? By no means! Yet if it had not been for the law, I would not have known sin. For I would not have known what it is to covet if the law had not said, “You shall not covet.” But sin, seizing an opportunity through the commandment, produced in me all kinds of covetousness. For apart from the law, sin lies dead. I was once alive apart from the law, but when the commandment came, sin came alive and I died. The very commandment that promised life proved to be death to me. For sin, seizing an opportunity through the commandment, deceived me and through it killed me. So the law is holy, and the commandment is holy and righteous and good. / Did that which is good, then, bring death to me? By no means! It was sin, producing death in me through what is good, in order that sin might be shown to be sin, and through the commandment might become sinful beyond measure. For we know that the law is spiritual, but I am of the flesh, sold under sin. For I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate. Now if I do what I do not want, I agree with the law, that it is good. So now it is no longer I who do it, but sin that dwells within me. For I know that nothing good dwells in me, that is, in my flesh. For I have the desire to do what is right, but not the ability to carry it out. For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I keep on doing. Now if I do what I do not want, it is no longer I who do it, but sin that dwells within me. / So I find it to be a law that when I want to do right, evil lies close at hand. For I delight in the law of God, in my inner being, but I see in my members another law waging war against the law of my mind and making me captive to the law of sin that dwells in my members. Wretched man that I am! Who will deliver me from this body of death? Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord! So then, I myself serve the law of God with my mind, but with my flesh I serve the law of sin. (Rom 7:7–25 emphasis added)
Paul was an apostle, sent to the Gentiles as Peter was sent to the Circumcised. He had the spirit of God; he had been born anew (i.e., he had received a second breath of life). Yet, sin continued to dwell in his fleshly members (his body), thereby causing him to do the very things he hated and not to do what he knew was right and good. And so it is with every Christian—and will be with every Christian—until the Second Passover liberation of Israel, when every person who identifies him or herself as being of Christ Jesus will be filled with and empowered by the divine breath of God so that sin [unbelief] no longer dwells in the disciple, and the Christian’s body will do whatever the inner person, a son of God, desires, hence making visible for man and angels to see the inner love for God, or lack of love.
In this present era, no person—regardless of how badly the person wants to obey God—can truly keep the commandments although by endeavoring to keep them, a Christian comes ever closer to doing so as this son of God grows in grace and knowledge. But because unbelief continues to dwell in the fleshly members of the Christian, thereby causing the Christian to do those things that the Christian despises at least on occasions, every Christian truly born of God is under grace, the mantle or garment of Christ Jesus’ righteousness. However, this basic tenet of Christendom will come to an end when the Son of Man is revealed (Luke 17:30) or disrobed, with the garment of grace being stripped away from the Body of the Son of Man when it is no longer needed because of every Christian having been filled with and empowered by the divine breath of God.
Until the Second Passover liberation of Israel, grace (again, the garment of Christ Jesus’ righteousness) is needed to cover the unbelief that continues to lurk in the fleshly members of disciples, with this unbelief manifesting itself in feelings of needing to protect oneself physically, whether from mobs or burglars or famine—
It is here, with the realization that unbelief [sin] will not leave the person until the Second Passover liberation of Israel, where this Sabbath Reading follows the path of previous Readings: every Christian will have unbelief [sin] dwelling in the Christian’s fleshly members regardless of how much the Christian wishes/prays that were not the case. This unbelief is covered by grace; so it is covered by the body and blood of Christ Jesus. But this unbelief will cause the Christian not to walk as Jesus walked—and here is where the problem lies, for the Christian is to walk as Jesus walked (1 John 2:6) … if the Christian outwardly keeps the commandments of God, having and exercising love for God and for brother and neighbor, then the Christian’s indwelling unbelief will not be easily seen, nor should it be seen at all. But the Adversary’s organization of society is based upon transactions, which by their very structure is manifested unbelief of God; i.e., a failure to believe that God will truly provide the Christian’s needs without the Christian buying or selling the goods and services of this world.
Let the Philadelphian’s only sin be engaging the world in honorable transactions because just as it is not possible to live without unbelief dwelling in the fleshly members of the Christian—the situation Paul observed in himself—it is not possible to live in this world without engaging in transactions (buying and selling). It is not possible to secure the means of survival in this present world without conducting business of some sort. It is not possible to prepare for those things that Christ Jesus will do following the Second Passover liberation of Israel unless the person engages in a transaction; for how had the boy with the five barley loaves and two fishes obtained them? He certainly could have caught the fish although he probably did not; for there is no indication that the fish were fresh. The two fish were probably salt-preserved; they could have been dried or smoked. Regardless, they were ready to eat in a preserved state when the boy turned them over to Jesus.
Now the Passover was at hand when the boy delivered to Jesus five barley loaves of bread—the Wave Sheaf offering for the year would not yet have occurred, meaning that the loaves were not baked from new barley but from the previous year’s harvest, further meaning that the barley had been stored for a year, ground into flour, and baked into bread by, most likely, someone other than the boy. The boy would have possessed the two fish and five loaves either by having been given them by his parents (the most likely explanation) or through entering into transactions that allowed the boy or his guardian to purchase them.
If the boy had been given the two fish and five loaves by his parents, then disciples can expect the Father and the Son as parents of the Christian to provide those things that the Christian needs for survival …
But the boy had the two fish and five loaves with him when the vast majority of the crowd—mostly adults—were without food.
In this era when a Christian cannot escape unbelief dwelling in the son of God’s fleshly members, let that unbelief manifest itself in physical preparations for the forthcoming period when the genuine Christian cannot buy and sell in this world, but must live by faith with whatever the Christian has on hand or is given by God. Let the Christian be as the boy was; for it will be the Father and the Son that supply to the Christian in this era those things that are needed for life (that supply to the Christian, a son of God, the reality that casts as its shadow the two fish and five barley loaves the boy had).
As unbelief cannot be fully avoided until the Second Passover liberation of Israel, the Christian in this era cannot avoid entering into transactions. These transactions are also covered by grace, for they stem from imbedded unbelief, the Christian’s inability to believe that a son of God can live a full life in this world without engaging in frequent transactions.
Corporate jets and expansive homes and luxury automobiles—the finer things of life—are of no value to the inner son of God, born of God when the physically living person received a second breath of life, the breath of God [pneuma Theon]. The things of this world cannot be taken out of this world; thus, possession of these things dies when the person dies physically. Hence, to pursue these things is vanity, the vain exercise of energy, imagination, and talent. The Christian needs to leave the things of this world to those individuals who truly are of this world and who are without indwelling hope or life.
If a Christian in this era cannot escape unbelief in some manifestation, the Christian cannot escape engaging in transactions as the Christian purchases those things that God is able to directly supply to the Christian … Moses told the children of Israel,
And Moses summoned all Israel and said to them: “You have seen all that the Lord did before your eyes in the land of Egypt, to Pharaoh and to all his servants and to all his land, the great trials that your eyes saw, the signs, and those great wonders. But to this day the Lord has not given you a heart to understand or eyes to see or ears to hear. I have led you forty years in the wilderness. Your clothes have not worn out on you, and your sandals have not worn off your feet. You have not eaten bread, and you have not drunk wine or strong drink, that you may know that I am the Lord your God. And when you came to this place, Sihon the king of Heshbon and Og the king of Bashan came out against us to battle, but we defeated them. We took their land and gave it for an inheritance to the Reubenites, the Gadites, and the half-tribe of the Manassites. Therefore keep the words of this covenant and do them, that you may prosper in all that you do. (Deut 29:2–9 emphasis added)
The Second Passover liberation of Israel begins the 1260-day fall of spiritual Babylon, the single kingdom of this world: no war for territory will have to be fought by the saints, whose citizenship is in heaven—and when clothes and sandals do not wear out, then additional clothes and sandals do not have to be purchased. When no “bread” made from wheat or barley is eaten, nor grain alcohol is drunk, then no transactions are necessary to obtain those things necessary to sustain life. When Christ Jesus can cause two fish and five loaves to become enough food to feed five thousand, then transactions are really anti-God and by extension, the production of indwelling unbelief.
Again, until the Second Passover liberation of Israel, let the Philadelphian’s only manifestation of unbelief come through engaging in transactions that causes the Philadelphian to be as the boy was among the five thousand followers of Christ Jesus, a person prepared to stay awhile, to endure in place [in situ] for an extended period (up to seven years). Let the Philadelphian’s unbelief not manifest itself in a transgression of the commandments, but as a transaction through which the Philadelphian can supply to those who haven’t prepared those things that doubters will need to live physically for a while longer.
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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."