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 stretching your mind.
Weekly Readings
For the Sabbath of July 12, 2014
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 I looked, and behold, a door standing open in heaven! And the first voice, which I had heard speaking to me like a trumpet, said, "Come up here, and I will show you what must take place after this." At once I was in the Spirit, and behold, a throne stood in heaven, with one seated on the throne. And He who sat there had the appearance of jasper and carnelian, and around the throne was a rainbow that had the appearance of an emerald. Around the throne were twenty-four thrones, and seated on the thrones were twenty-four elders, clothed in white garments, with golden crowns on their heads. From the throne came flashes of lightning, and rumblings and peals of thunder, and before the throne were burning seven torches of fire, which are the seven spirits of God, and before the throne there was as it were a sea of glass, like crystal. And around the throne, on each side of the throne, are four living creatures, full of eyes in front and behind: the first living creature like a lion, the second living creature like an ox, the third living creature with the face of a man, and the fourth living creature like an eagle in flight. And the four living creatures, each of them with six wings, are full of eyes all around and within, and day and night they never cease to say, "Holy, holy, holy, is the Lord God Almighty, who was and is and is to come!" And whenever the living creatures give glory and honor and thanks to Him who is seated on the throne, who lives forever and ever, the twenty-four elders fall down before Him who is seated on the throne and worship Him who lives forever and ever. They cast their crowns before the throne, saying, "Worthy are you, our Lord and God, to receive glory and honor and power, for you created all things, and by your will they existed and were created." (Rev 4:1–11)
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22.
Again, the same head citation as last Sabbath: God as spirit in the form of His spirit [pneuma Theou] is to heaven as Elohim [singular in usage] was to Eve, the life-giver … the breath of Elohim was in Adam from Elohim having breathed the breath of life into Adam’s nostrils (Gen 2:7). In turn, Adam was in Eve from having Eve being created from a rib taken from his side, the location of the bone and flesh disclosing that Eve’s breath of life was Adam’s breath of life (Gen 2:21–22). Thus, the life Eve received from Adam was the life Elohim gave to Adam, and from Eve has come all of humanity: the life every human person has since had comes from the breath of life Adam and Eve together—one breath of life in two personages, this breath from Elohim, singular in usage—had when these two, being one, procreated outside the Garden.
The place of procreation is of theological importance.
But it is the reality that two are one through one dividing and becoming two that remain one that causes ideological problems … human logic doesn’t support two being one. And the essence of Judeo thought is monotheism that has God being ONE, not two. Only one problem exists, God is one spirit as Adam and Eve were one flesh (Gen 2:24). The Most High God and the Logos, together, with the Logos being of/with [pros] the God [ton Theon], form one Deity that consists of two deities, now the Father and the Son, but previously these two were described in the Tetragrammaton YHWH, never pronounced but written as a noun as YaHd~nWaiH, with the word Adonai sung in lieu of attempting to utter the always silent linguistic determinative YHWH that identifies category.
Adonai represents the vowels and connector that goes between partially inscribed Tetragrammaton identifying Hebraic deity, with <don> representing the concept of <another such>.
The principle failing of Christendom is its continued eating of the leavening of Sadducees and Pharisees, this leavening thus consuming generation after generation of saints—and this leavening will have numerical singularity assigned to the integer “one” rather than “unity.”
As yeast spreads through a lump of dough, consuming what is sweet, leaving behind tiny gas molecules that cause the dough to be puffed up and without real substance—a lot of hot air—the monotheism of Judaism has leavened Christianity, compelling early Christians to debate the nature of Christ Jesus … these debates produced Arian Christianity as a heresy to Trinitarian Christianity, which isn’t of God even though it became Christian orthodoxy.
Jesus in His prayer to God just before He was taken said,
And this is eternal life, that they know you the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom you have sent. … And now, Father, glorify me in your own presence with the glory that I had with you before the world existed. (John 17:3, 5)
The person who has indwelling eternal or heavenly life knows the Father, the Most High God, and knows Christ Jesus, the Beloved of the Father whom the Father sent into this world to finish the creation of human persons so that divine procreation could become a reality. Nothing more physically needed to be done in the creation of humankind, but a bridge needed to be constructed so that human persons could received life from the Father; for the glory of God would utterly consume what is physical if this glory—bright fire—were not held in a vessel that has also come from heaven.
The person who has indwelling eternal life, according to Jesus in John’s Gospel, knows that God is One consisting of two deities, with the Father in Christ Jesus as the Head of Christ (1 Cor 11:3) causing these two to be one deity as Adam and Eve were one flesh in procreation. And the leavening of Judaism has prevented Christians from understanding that the God of Abraham, the God of the living, was the Logos, Yah, the Creator of all things physical.
The worst aspect of the leavening of Judaism is its taste: puff pastries taste good. Doughnuts taste good even though they are without food value and widen waists. And monotheism of Judaism is a rejection of God that goes back to Mount Sinai.
Judaism doesn’t think of its monotheism as idolatry, but it is—and idolatry of the worst type, for the person who truly believes in an ideology will die for it, and will kill for it … the monotheism of Judaism has contaminated all of Islam as well as greater Christendom, leaving the world posed for World War Three.
If God doesn’t intervene first (at this time, that is an unknown) monotheists will attack monotheists, leading to Trinitarians stepping in to save one form of monotheism so as to avoid regional nuclear war, with the act of stepping being like pouring gasoline on a fire. So while the leavening of Judaism—of Sadducees and Pharisees—is sweet in the mouth, it is bitter in bellies.
It is so comforting to declare with all confidence that God is One:
Thus says [YHWH] to His anointed, to Cyrus,
whose right hand I have grasped,
to subdue nations before him
and to loose the belts of kings,
to open doors before him
that gates may not be closed:
"I will go before you
and level the exalted places,
I will break in pieces the doors of bronze
and cut through the bars of iron,
I will give you the treasures of darkness
and the hoards in secret places,
that you may know that it is I, [YHWH],
the God of Israel, who call you by your name.
For the sake of my servant Jacob,
and Israel my chosen,
I call you by your name,
I name you, though you do not know me.
I am [YHWH], and there is no other,
besides me there is no God;
I equip you, though you do not know me,
that people may know, from the rising of the sun
and from the west, that there is none besides me;
I am [YHWH],
and there is no other.
(Isa 45:1–6 indented lines are spiritual portion of thought couplets; doubled emphasis added)
The above passage from Isaiah is usually cited to prove that YHWH is one deity, but consider the thought couplet, I am YHWH, / and there is no other … what is actually said? That there is no other deity than the Most High God and His Beloved, Yah, the Logos. That is what the Lord conveys through Isaiah; for look at the double emphasized spiritual portion of the couplet, For the sake of my servant Jacob [the natural name of the loved but deceitful son of promise born to Isaac—men are humanly born in the likeness of servants, see Phil 2:7], and Israel my chosen, the name given to Jacob after he wrestled with God and prevailed by enduring until the coming of light.
Because of the naming of Israel in the spiritual portion of a thought couplet (as occurs in Isaiah 43:1), there are two levels of narration functioning as one narrative: two are one. So the singular self-identification of deity conceals the dual nature of deity present; for Cyrus as a servant of the Lord, anointed by the Lord, doesn’t know the Lord even though the Lord knows Cyrus. And this is the physical compliment to Jacob not knowing the Father even though the Father knows Jacob, with this reality evident in Jesus saying,
I have manifested your name to the people whom you gave me out of the world. Yours they were, and you gave them to me, and they have kept your word. Now they know that everything that you have given me is from you. …
For I have given them the words that you gave me, and they have received them and have come to know in truth that I came from you; and they have believed that you sent me. … The glory that you have given me I have given to them, that they may be one even as we are one, I in them and you in me, that they may become perfectly one, so that the world may know that you sent me and loved them even as you loved me. Father, I desire that they also, whom you have given me, may be with me where I am, to see my glory that you have given me because you loved me before the foundation of the world. O righteous Father, even though the world does not know you, I know you, and these know that you have sent me. I made known to them your name, and I will continue to make it known, that the love with which you have loved me may be in them, and I in them. (John 17:6–8, 22–26)
The Christological debates of the 4th and 5th Centuries CE were a matter of the dead speculating about life, with some of the dead holding that “life” differed in substance but not in type, with some holding the position that created life was inferior to life that preexisted creation, with some holding (especially late in the 5th-Century) that the breath that gave life to the dead was also living and thus worthy of worship. But a dead squirrel is a dead squirrel. A spiritually dead Christian is spiritually dead. Unfortunately, unlike a dead squirrel that knows nothing, having lost awareness of the little it knew before, a spiritually dead Christian thinks that he or she understands the mysteries of God.
A dead squirrel, squashed by a speeding car, turns putrid and stinks enough that even passing motorists are aware of it, but a spiritually dead Christian disguises his or her stench before God by church attendance either on Sunday or on the Sabbath.
Question: How is a Christian to praise God when the Christian doesn’t know God? When the Christian sincerely believes that God the Father is the God of the Old Testament? When the Christian believes that the God of Abraham—the God Islam worships, the God Judaism worships, the God Arian Christians worship—is the God that raised Jesus from death? And not only believe, but willing to kill brother and neighbor in defense of the Christian’s errant belief.
The leavening of Judaism is spiritual poison. … Jerusalem was razed because of its idolatry, not because of its righteousness. And Jerusalem wasn’t razed just in 586 BCE: it was destroyed when the temple was razed in 70 CE, and nearly a 100,000 Jews were taken into slavery by Rome—
Why would God allow the destruction of earthly Jerusalem if the people of Israel were righteous? The scriptural record records that in the 6th-Century BCE, Jerusalem was sacked because of the people’s, and the kings’ idolatry. Is this not the same reason for the sacking of Jerusalem in 70 CE? However, modern rabbinical Judaism holds that Second Temple Pharisees were excellent readers of Scripture. They were not. They were very poor readers. They could never read the second narrative that accompanied the first—the spiritual narrative that paralleled the physical narrative. And because they never learned to read spiritually, they were always spiritually blind, a veil separating them from Moses, their minds partially hardened.
When that veil is lifted, their eyes and their minds will be opened—and they will finally realize that they have been, as that trite saying goes, as blind men describing an elephant. They will then understand that earthly Jerusalem is not the Jerusalem of endtime prophecies. Endtime Jerusalem is New Jerusalem.
New Jerusalem as a living entity is composed of living stones that have spiritual life that came from Christ breathing on ten of His disciples and saying, Receive breath holy (John 20:22) …
Endtime Jerusalem is personified in the Elect, not by a physical city constructed of anger and hatred. Again, endtime prophecies about Jerusalem are about living stones, not dead concrete and rebar.
John the Elder is most likely John the Revelator, and as such, John the Elder, having received spiritual life when the glorified Jesus directly breathed on him, says of himself that he is the brother and partner (Rev 1:9) of endtime disciples, this relationship spanning the passage of time and his physical death. If, therefore, John is the brother and partner of Philadelphians, time has been bridged in a way analogous to the three days and three nights the man Jesus was in the heart of the earth. There will be no loss of knowledge between John and his brothers and partners, not that John recorded everything his endtime brothers needed to know and will know.
When John writes the Apocalypse, John knows what no other disciple in the 1st-Century knew … were the first disciples saved without any of them (except for John) knowing anything about the letters to the seven churches? Did Peter need to know anything about these letters to be saved? No! The letters were/are for endtime fellowships. They are a form of Christ communicating with His brothers through keeping alive John as the partner and brother of endtime disciples; hence what John’s Gospel discloses needs to be read differently than it has been read in the past.
Peter turned and saw the disciple whom Jesus loved following them, the one who had been reclining at table close to Him and had said, "Lord, who is it that is going to betray you?" When Peter saw him, he said to Jesus, "Lord, what about this man?" Jesus said to him, "If it is my will that he remain until I come, what is that to you? You follow me!" So the saying spread abroad among the brothers that this disciple was not to die; yet Jesus did not say to him that he was not to die, but, "If it is my will that he remain until I come, what is that to you?" This is the disciple who is bearing witness about these things, and who has written these things, and we know that his testimony is true. (John 21:20–24 emphasis added)
What Jesus told Peter about John—If it is my will that he remain until I come—becomes a reality in John being the brother and partner of endtime disciples who will remain when Jesus comes again; for in his endtime brothers, John figuratively lives.
The Father gives knowledge to the glorified Jesus (Rev 1:1) to give to John in vision, who in turn gives this knowledge to his endtime brothers and partners in an inscribed text [the Book of Revelation], each giving at a lower level than the previous giving. Thus, knowledge revealed through inscription [through the Bible] will be at a lower or more primitive level than knowledge delivered in a vision, and knowledge delivered via a vision will be at a lower level than knowledge coming directly from the Father either by the hearing of His utterance, or by the Parakletos, the spirit of truth.
Knowledge obtained via a vision of Christ is spiritually inferior [though not necessarily any less accurate] to knowledge received by the Parakletos, which will have the disciple genuinely born of spirit coming to know a thing without realizing why the disciple knows whatever it is. And here is where minds are stretched: John lives in his endtime brothers in a similar way to how the 1st-Century Jesus lives in endtime disciples. Not in exactly the same way. John and his endtime brothers are joined together by the position of Thirdness being filled by the Beloved of God, the last Adam, a life-giving [Eve] spirit.
Slowing the preceding down so it can be understood: the last Adam is Christ Jesus, who received spiritual life after the model established by the first Adam. Human persons are as the clay from which Elohim, singular in usage, sculpted the man of mud, who was not a breathing creature until Elohim breathed the breath of life into the nostrils of the man of mud. Then—not before then—Adam came to life and became a nephesh …
The breath of the Father (the breath of God, pneuma Theou) descended upon the human man, Jesus the Nazarene, in the bodily form of a dove and entered into [eis] Jesus (Mark 1:10) as the reality foreshadowed in narrative by Elohim breathing the breath of life into the nostrils of Adam. Now the second Adam’s earthly ministry began in a manner analogous to the first Adam being placed in the Garden of Eden to keep and dress it. The second Adam called Sadducees and Pharisees vipers, hypocrites, as the first Adam named the animals created in the Garden—because the analogy will withstand close reading, it can be said that the Garden of Eden is the physical type of the earthly temple (where Sadducees and Pharisees were created), with the earthly temple being the physical type of the spiritual temple, and which will now have Eden, the garden of God (from Ezek 28:13), being the forerunner to New Jerusalem.
The creation of angels by God in heaven did not fundamentally differ from the creation of Adam by Elohim [singular in usage] here on earth. Thus the position filled in heaven by the twenty-four elders [their origin/ancestry unknown and not knowable] would seem to be analogous to the position held by Elect here on earth.
Where all of this goes is to God, in the form of His spirit, entering into His Beloved to create the plethora of angels that exist, both those that continue to believe God and those that no longer believe through having been deceived by the Adversary, an anointed guardian cherub in whom iniquity was discovered. This will have heaven being a living house as in a house like Moses (Heb 3:1–6), a house constructed from planks of law and precepts for life; a house fabricated from lives well lived.
The Elect especially should be praising the Father as the twenty-four elders praise the Most High God. How the Elect are to praise the Father may not be as easily discerned as the need to praise. Certainly a life well lived here on earth; a life during which the disciple kept the Commandments would be praise. But can the disciple do better in extending praise? That is an area still to be explored.
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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.