The following suggested or possible grouping of Scripture passages are offered to aid beginning fellowships. The readings and limited commentary are, hopefully, obviously thematically related. And the concept behind this High Sabbath’s selection is disciples are the temple.
Printable/viewable for Greek characters PDF format
Weekly Readings
For the Sabbath of July 5, 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 1 Timothy chapter 1, verse 1, through chapter 2, verse 7.
Commentary: Modern scholarship has questioned whether Paul wrote 1st & 2nd Timothy and Titus, the Pastoral Epistles, with the majority of scholars holding that because of word selection, these epistles would seem to belong in the 2nd-Century. These epistles are not specifically mentioned earlier than by Irenaeus although Polycarp possibly paraphrases the epistles as early as 130 CE. But within the controversy of whether the Pastoral Epistles were actually by Paul or whether these Pastoral Epistles belong to a Deutero-Paul, an admirer of Paul who wanted to contribute to Paul’s literary legacy, is the larger question of “canon,” that barely touchable word which actually does divide endtime disciples as it divided early disciples.
All questions of canon presupposes the selection of included and excluded texts by an authority figure that is beyond reproach … if the canon is of human origin, with the men who selected canonical texts being those lawless Christians that God had already delivered into the hand of Satan because of the transgressions of His commandments and the profaning of His Sabbaths, then where is an endtime disciple desiring to obey God left, for if the ones selecting canonical texts cannot be trusted to rightly teach the Gospel—and they didn’t rightly divide the words of truth—then what if anything did they get right? And the answer is, Not much!
Working as a self-employed pest exterminator in
The problem inherent in believing any text, as Hermann Melville demonstrated, is that whatever a text gives the same text can take away. A book can be handled as any idol can be handled, but the ideas within the book are not physical things that can be easily proof-tested. So to believe a book requires faith and to believe the Bible takes faith that is not of the person.
One tenet that has been repeatedly argued in the Sabbath readings is that all of Scripture—all of the books collectively—forms the shadow and type of the invisible Book of Life, kept in heaven, a book in which the lives of disciples are epistles written not with ink but by the soft breath of God on human hearts (2 Cor 3:3). As the lives of human beings, inscribed with ink on the skins of animals, formed the content of books of Moses, the Prophets, and the Writings, the lives of glorified human beings form and will continue to form the contents of the Book of Life.
Therefore, if the Bible is the shadow and copy of the Book of Life, a book that cannot be read in this world by human eyes, then it was not men who determined what would be included and what would be excluded from Scripture, but God, Himself … pause and consider the ramifications of the Bible being the shadow and copy of the Look of Life: the commandments of God that James calls the royal law (2:8) are now but the mirror (1:23) of the commandments of God that have been written on hearts and placed in minds (Jer 31:31-34). A disciple will see the new creature born of spirit—this new creature being invisible to human eyes—that dwells in the tent of flesh through the history of Israel’s exodus from Egypt, an example written for disciples so that endtime disciples would not desire evil (1 Cor 10:6, 11). The new creature will be as a Levite in the temple of God: the fleshly bodies of disciples equates to the temple (1 Cor 3:16-17; 2 Cor 6:16), and each person can be likened to a living stone (1 Pet 2:4-5), sculpted and shaped off-site so the sound of an iron tool (a tear or a cry of anguish) will not be heard on the temple mount.
If the received canon is the shadow of the Book of Life, again the premise of The Philadelphia Church, then questions regarding authorship of 1st & 2nd Timothy are mute. Although it cannot be said that it doesn’t matter whether Paul or a Deutero-Paul wrote the Pastoral Epistles, in reality it doesn’t matter: the epistles are part of the canonical text, and with the simplicity of a child receiving a book, Philadelphians can look past the question of who really authored the epistles to the greater concern of what do the epistles say.
In an era when Americans sent men to the moon almost forty years ago; in an era of instantaneous worldwide communication available to almost everyone for a pittance, the burden of proof needed to establish a matter has risen to anything short of DNA absolutism is not proof at all. Cultural expectations are that a matter be proved so far beyond doubt that not even in the rearview mirror can the dust of speculation be seen. Only then will a person believe—but even then the person will have doubts, for can anything really be true?
Because the authorship of 1st Timothy cannot be absolutely assigned to Paul, faith in God enters into whether the epistle should be accepted, especially in light of what is said about woman: Paul would seem to have taken an unenlightened position concerning women teaching or exercising authority over men, especially when he specifically says that the person baptized into Christ is neither male nor female (Gal 3:27-28). That alone is reason enough for most female scholars to reject Paul’s authorship of the epistle. But the doubt of scholarship translates directly as unbelief of the sort seen when Israel believed the ten spies and rebelled against God (Num chap 14) … when translating from physical to spiritual, unbelief that leads to disobedience (Heb 3:19; 4:6) isn’t failure to believe what eyes have seen as in the ten plagues that separated Israel from Egypt, but failure to believe written texts that mentally produce images analogous to what eyes see.
The person who reads Jesus’ words,
“‘Do not think that I have come to abolish the Law or the Prophets;
I have not come to abolish them but to fulfill,’” and
“‘Therefore whoever relaxes one of the least of these commandments
and teaches others to do the same will be called least in the kingdom of
heaven, but whoever does them and teaches them will be called great in the kingdom
of heaven’” (Matt 5:17, 19), but does not believe them and thus
teaches disciples to practice lawlessness will not enter the kingdom of
heaven (Matt 7:21-23) but will be as the nation of Israel was when the nation
believed the ten spies (Num chap 14). And as seen in the wilderness of Paran,
After the tenth plague that saw the death angel
pass over the land of Egypt, slaying firstborns of men and beasts not covered
by the blood of a paschal lamb, Pharaoh expelled Israel, telling Moses,
“‘Up, go out from among my people, both you and the people of
Israel, and go, serve the Lord, as you have said. Take your flocks and your
herds, as you have said, and be gone, and bless me also’” (Ex
12:31-32). The Pharaoh surrendered unconditionally, but he surrendered as a pitbull
terrier does, for as soon as the threat passed, he reneged and went after
A shadow exists in one less dimension than does the
reality that casts the shadow: a three dimensional person casts a two
dimensional shadow. Thus, for physically circumcised
From what little information that is given in Scripture, it seems that a rift opened in the fabric of heaven as the earth opened to swallow Korah and his fellow rebels, and this rift becomes the bottomless pit in which space is created in the form of the universe. Therefore, a human being who receives a second life through receipt of the divine breath of God [pneuma Theon] has life in the bottomless pit, or rather, in that portion of heaven that is in the bottomless pit as the earth’s atmosphere was in the fissure that swallowed Korah.
Those Sabbatarian disciples who hold that human beings, because they cannot pass the pin test, have not yet been born of spirit will not believe that natural Israel forms the shadow and type of the Church; thus, these disciples are unable to see themselves as God sees them, even though Christ Jesus has given His brothers—what He calls His disciples (John 20:17)—a mirror by which disciples can see themselves from God’s perspective. And that mirror includes 1st Timothy … the image cast by 1st Timothy actually pertains to disciples in the first 1260 days of the Tribulation; pertains when disciples have been clothed with power from on high, a further clothing of disciples through these disciples being empowered by the Holy Spirit, or filled with the Holy Spirit as a drinking glass is filled with water until it is overflowing, leaving within the disciple no room for indwelling sin and death. For those to whom Paul writes are, themselves, born of spirit though apparently not clothed with power from on high as Paul was so clothed that if a cloth touched his flesh, the cloth would heal in a manner similar to how Peter’s shadow crossing a person would heal the person.
The concept of righteousness being a garment, or of obedience being a garment dressing the new creature, born of spirit as a son of God, remains an alien concept for too many endtime disciples. The natural mind of a person doesn’t perceive the new creature as anything other than the person; doesn’t perceive the new creature as a second creature or life dwelling in the same flesh and blood body, a life that has come from heaven as the man Jesus of Nazareth came from heaven. The natural mind cannot follow Jesus’ use of the Jonah who as a man was like any other man descended from the first Adam until he was swallowed by the great fish [whale]. He then became “a life” within the whale, with the whale analogous to the fleshy body of the human being: the new creature dwelling within the tent of flesh of the old man is like the resurrected Jonah in the belly of the whale.
Jesus’ selection of the sign of Jonah as the only sign He would give of His divinity is far more complex than has been taught within greater Christendom. Yes, Jesus was in the heart of the earth three days and three nights as Jonah was in the belly of the whale three days and three nights, something that greater Christendom actively denies by teaching a Friday crucifixion and Sunday morning resurrection. Yes, the sign of Jonah is like a red sky (Matt 16:2-4), with the resurrection of the physical body of Christ occurring as Christendom entered a period of darkness and relatively calm sailing, and with the resurrection of the spiritual Body occurring as humankind enters the seven endtime years of tribulation and rough sailing. Yes, the sign of Jonah discloses the movement of “breath” from the front of the face to the back of the head (where a whale breathes) as in aspiration occurring before the nasal consonant /n/ in “John” to in back of the nasal consonant as in “Jonah” (Matt 16:17 … Peter is Simon, son of John — John 1:42; 21:15 — not the son of Jonah), or going from the “os” masculine singular case ending in, where breath is exhaled through the front of the mouth to say the case ending /os/, to the genitive case ending of /a/, where breath is expelled from deep within the mouth to say the case ending (Matt 16:18). But it is the spewing forth of the new creature as a spokesman for God as Jonah was spewed forth as a recognized spokesman for Dagon, the fish god of Assyria, by the inhabitants of Nineveh that is utterly lost in greater Christendom’s rejection of the sign of Jonah; for Nineveh believed a spokesman from its god whereas Israel, physically and spiritually circumcised, will not believe the Spokesman from its God.
So far only the glorified Jesus, the former Logos, has been spewed forth from the grave in the role of spokesman for God: His younger brothers await resurrection and glorification until He returns. Then His younger brothers, married to Him as His Bride, will be one with Him and will serve Him as He serves as spokesman for God.
If a disciple is able to see obedience as a garment clothing the new creature, then the disciple should realize that the new creature has no substance and is not of this world, but exists as a thought exists within the mind although the thought is ephemeral, lacking permanence, whereas the new creature possesses permanence. Obedience would “clothe” a thought, transforming the thought into a desire to be obedient. Likewise, obedience will clothe the new creature, causing the new creature to desire to be obedient … flesh and blood “cannot inherit the kingdom of God” (1 Cor 15:50); cannot enter the kingdom of God, for the kingdom is not of such things. The kingdom of God is a realm outside of space-time even though living entities in that supra-dimension interact with living entities within space-time, and these living entities that come from heaven are well able to inspire even lawless bishops into including texts that form the shadow of themselves and of their lawlessness as well as the shadow of future empowered disciples slipping away from what is good and true. Therefore, those who are Philadelphians will, by faith, accept the Pastoral Epistles as reliable articles of instruction in righteousness without letting questions of authorship—possibly legitimate questions—undermine this instruction.
Now, beginning what Paul claims to have written: in 1:1, Paul makes the claim that he is an apostle by command of two entities, “God our Savior—,” and “Christ Jesus—,” with both God and Christ being direct objects of who issued the command. So in the initial statement opening this 1st epistle to Timothy, Paul asserts that he is an apostle, a claim now being denied by doubters who would relegate Paul to the role of usurper … if Paul, who claims to have laid the foundation of the house of God (1 Cor 3:10-11) can be erased from Christendom, then many problems go away: Christianity can retain its conciliar reorganization, and messianic Judaism can bridge the gap between the need to construct a third temple and the kingdom of God presently being here on earth in the form of the Church. No one will henceforth have to struggle with, “For no one is a Jew who is merely one outwardly, nor is circumcision outward and physical. But a Jew is one inwardly, and circumcision is a matter of the heart, by the Spirit, not by the letter” (Rom 2:28-29).
If circumcision is a matter of the heart, then that new creature dwells within the heart and mind of the person drawn by God from this world. The problem that Paul’s gospel causes both lawless Christendom and messianic Judaism is his explication of what Jesus meant about being born of water and of spirit (John 3:5). For those who hold human beings receive eternal life through a man having his way with a maid, being born of water can only mean baptism, not birth from the womb—and being born of spirit can only mean regeneration of an immortal soul condemned to hell from birth, thereby making the parallelism of Jesus saying, “‘That which is born of flesh is flesh, and that which is born of Spirit is spirit’” (v. 6), a nonsensical expounding of being born of water and of spirit.
Being born of water is being born of flesh. Again,
a person is only flesh until born of spirit; so the person born of flesh has no
eternal life dwelling within the flesh. Human beings are not born with immortal
souls, a claim inherent in what Paul teaches about “the free gift of God
is eternal life in Christ Jesus” (Rom 6:23). Hence, Paul is the enemy of
conciliar Christendom, Islam, and both Buddhist and Hindi traditions. Now add
to this what Paul teaches about circumcision being of the heart and not of the
flesh, and Paul becomes the enemy of Judaism and messianic Judaism as well as
the double enemy of Islam. It is no wonder that all in Asia left Paul while he
still lived (2 Tim 1:15), that those in Achaia doubted whether Paul was of God,
and that those in
Timothy is instructed to charge “certain persons” to teach no other doctrine than the one received from Paul, who writes elsewhere that in Christ there “is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is neither male nor female” (Gal 3:28), for outward circumcision or uncircumcision pertains to the flesh as does whether the person can or cannot be outwardly circumcised. The person born of water has or doesn’t have a penis to be circumcised. Likewise, the person born of water is a free person or a slave. But the disciple is not a person of flesh, but dwells in living flesh as the prophet Jonah was imprisoned in the belly of the great fish [whale], a living person inside a living beast. The inner new creature is a living son of God residing inside a living person. Therefore, those things that pertain to the flesh are the things upon which the mind set on the flesh dwells; whereas those things that pertain to heaven and to the spirit of God are those things upon which the mind set on the things of the spirit dwells. And as Paul assures disciples, the mind set on the flesh cannot please God, for the mind set on the flesh is hostile to God and does not submit to God’s law, and indeed, cannot submit to observing the law (Rom 8:7-8), for the person remains in subjection to disobedience.
According to Paul’s gospel, the person who has been born of spirit is free to keep the commandments of God by faith as the reasonable expectation of the household of God, for sin no longer has dominion over the person (Rom 6:14) … this is the gospel Paul charged Timothy to teach, and charged Timothy not to permit any other gospel to be taught.
To be under the law is to be under the penalty of the law—and the penalty of the law is death—so to be under the law is to be under a death sentence. Until liberated from indwelling sin and death, the fleshy body of every person (the fleshy body being a son of Adam) is sentenced to die, and either has died or will die if not liberated at the second Passover.
· Every son of the first Adam will die physically, for the world has been baptized into death with the flood of Noah’s day. Hence, no longer will a person live a thousand years or most of a millennium as did the ante-Deluvian patriarchs.
· When disciples are truly filled with the Holy Spirit they will be liberated from indwelling sin and death, and they will not die from natural causes unless they return to sin, thereby committing blasphemy against the Holy Spirit.
· Liberated disciples will still be mortal and will remain subject to death.
· But death will only come to liberated disciples via martyrdom as occurred in the 1st-Century to those filled with the Holy Spirit (Rev 6:9-11) … neither Peter nor Paul died of natural causes.
· Once filled with the Holy Spirit, disciples who do not take sin back inside themselves will either be physically killed or will be changed in the twinkling of an eye at the Second Advent.
· The 144,000 natural Israelites who follow Jesus wherever He leads (Rev 14:1-5), and the remnant that keep the commandments and hold the testimony of Jesus, which is the spirit of prophecy, are all of ante-liberation Israel, physically and spiritually circumcised, that will physically enter the second half of the seven endtime years of tribulation.
The above are confident assertions that Christian orthodoxy will slip under the rug of 1 Timothy 1:7, so that the lawless teachers of Israel can continue in their lawlessness … Paul writes that the law is good if used lawfully (v. 8); for the law is not for the just, the righteous, the obedient, but for the lawless and disobedient—and especially for those who profess to be disciples of Christ Jesus, walking as He walked (1 John 2:6), but attempting to enter into God’s presence [i.e., His rest] on the following day.
What sort of foolishness is it for someone to read, “Now we know that the law is good, if one uses it lawfully, understanding this, that the law is not laid down for the just but for the lawless and disobedient, for the ungodly and sinners, for the unholy and profane … and whatever else is contrary to sound doctrine, in accordance with the glorious gospel of the blessed God with which I have been entrusted” (1 Tim 1:8-11), and then to teach disciples that the law has been abolished, that disciples are not under the law when these same disciples willingly transgress the commandments, that grace covers the disciples who have shown no interest in truly walking as Jesus walked. The person who teaches disciples to assemble on the 1st day instead of on the Sabbath will also condone all manner of transgressions of the law, including tolerating sexual immorality within fellowships, an issue that should have been settled at the Jerusalem Conference (Acts chap 15).
What sexual immorality? How many young adult “Christians” live together before entering into wedlock? Too many?! And how many pastors will tell these couples that they need to cease transgressing the commandments before they attend with the fellowship? Any pastor … almost no pastor will say anything about young people attending church services while living together, for the Church is for sinners. And the pastor who tolerates such flagrant violations of the commandments will himself transgress the commandments by holding services on Sunday morning. The pastor has mishandled the gospel entrusted to him or her—
And the pastor’s only hope for redemption is Paul’s hope: “I received mercy because I had acted ignorantly in unbelief” (1 Tim 1:13).
What Paul writes about himself should be said by every “Christian” pastor who today teaches disciples to transgress the commandments of God about him or herself. Hopefully this will be the case. Prophetically, it will not be the case … the two witnesses wear mourning garb because they know how few will acknowledge that they have acted ignorantly in unbelief. They know how few will receive the mercy that is available to all.
The first 1260 days of the tribulation (woes one & two) are about God delivering Christendom into the hand of Satan so that this lawless nation may learn not to blaspheme—and today, before the seven endtime years of tribulation begin, those who are blasphemers label genuine disciples as Judaizers.
Whom is one to believe? Jesus, who said to Pharisees, “‘If you believed Moses, you would believe me; for he wrote of me. But if you do not believe his writings, how will you believe my words’” (John 5:46-47), or Christian orthodoxy? The unbelievers—those who act ignorantly in unbelief—do not keep the commandments of God.
*
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."