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 spiritual prostitution.
Weekly Readings
For the Sabbath of August 6, 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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The word of the Lord came to me: “Son of man, there were two women, the daughters of one mother. They played the whore in Egypt; they played the whore in their youth; there their breasts were pressed and their virgin bosoms handled. Oholah was the name of the elder and Oholibah the name of her sister. They became mine, and they bore sons and daughters. As for their names, Oholah is Samaria, and Oholibah is Jerusalem. / Oholah played the whore while she was mine, and she lusted after her lovers the Assyrians, warriors clothed in purple, governors and commanders, all of them desirable young men, horsemen riding on horses. She bestowed her whoring upon them, the choicest men of Assyria all of them, and she defiled herself with all the idols of everyone after whom she lusted. She did not give up her whoring that she had begun in Egypt; for in her youth men had lain with her and handled her virgin bosom and poured out their whoring lust upon her. Therefore I delivered her into the hands of her lovers, into the hands of the Assyrians, after whom she lusted. These uncovered her nakedness; they seized her sons and her daughters; and as for her, they killed her with the sword; and she became a byword among women, when judgment had been executed on her. / Her sister Oholibah saw this, and she became more corrupt than her sister in her lust and in her whoring, which was worse than that of her sister. She lusted after the Assyrians, governors and commanders, warriors clothed in full armor, horsemen riding on horses, all of them desirable young men. And I saw that she was defiled; they both took the same way. But she carried her whoring further. She saw men portrayed on the wall, the images of the Chaldeans portrayed in vermilion, wearing belts on their waists, with flowing turbans on their heads, all of them having the appearance of officers, a likeness of Babylonians whose native land was Chaldea. When she saw them, she lusted after them and sent messengers to them in Chaldea. And the Babylonians came to her into the bed of love, and they defiled her with their whoring lust. And after she was defiled by them, she turned from them in disgust. When she carried on her whoring so openly and flaunted her nakedness, I turned in disgust from her, as I had turned in disgust from her sister. Yet she increased her whoring, remembering the days of her youth, when she played the whore in the land of Egypt and lusted after her paramours there, whose members were like those of donkeys, and whose issue was like that of horses. Thus you longed for the lewdness of your youth, when the Egyptians handled your bosom and pressed your young breasts.”
Therefore, O Oholibah, thus says the Lord God: “Behold, I will stir up against you your lovers from whom you turned in disgust, and I will bring them against you from every side: the Babylonians and all the Chaldeans, Pekod and Shoa and Koa, and all the Assyrians with them, desirable young men, governors and commanders all of them, officers and men of renown, all of them riding on horses. And they shall come against you from the north with chariots and wagons and a host of peoples. They shall set themselves against you on every side with buckler, shield, and helmet; and I will commit the judgment to them, and they shall judge you according to their judgments. And I will direct my jealousy against you, that they may deal with you in fury. They shall cut off your nose and your ears, and your survivors shall fall by the sword. They shall seize your sons and your daughters, and your survivors shall be devoured by fire. They shall also strip you of your clothes and take away your beautiful jewels. Thus I will put an end to your lewdness and your whoring begun in the land of Egypt, so that you shall not lift up your eyes to them or remember Egypt anymore. (Ezek 23:1–27 emphasis added)
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The visions of Ezekiel consistently hold that Israel, the House of Israel and the House of Judah are faithless, not giving up the idols and idolatrous practices of Egypt, but adding the idolatrous practices of the Canaanite peoples to the faith that Israel’s fathers practiced in Egypt, with this faith not being of the Lord … the Law was given to Israel not because of the people’s faithfulness, but as an instrument of death. The Law was given to give life to sin so that sin might kill this idolatrous nation; for Paul writes,
For while we were living in the flesh, our sinful passions, aroused by the law, were at work in our members to bear fruit for death. But now we are released from the law, having died to that which held us captive, so that we serve in the new way of the Spirit and not in the old way of the written code. / 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. (Rom 7:5–14 emphasis added)
The Law kills through making sin alive and permitting sin to do its work of showing that the person is a slave of the Adversary, sold under sin and consigned to disobedience (Rom 11:32). Where there is no knowledge of the Law, the person is free to worship God however and whenever the person desires and will therefore practice idolatry with a clear conscience as Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism does—and as Israel did in Egypt until the Lord made Himself known to Israel while the nation was still enslaved by Pharaoh (Ezek 20:5).
Once the Law was given in the days of Moses, death was no longer able to stealthily reign over all of humankind through the idolatrous practices of paganism: a way to escape death had been given to Israel, thereby ending death’s reign (Rom 5:14). But that way was not an easy path, but required that by belief, by faith the person live by the words of the Lord, putting away all unfaithfulness and serving only the Lord.
Spiritual unfaithfulness equates to physical fornication/adultery … as anger spiritually equates to physical murder (Matt 5:21–22), and as lust spiritually equates to physical adultery (vv. 27–28), all forms of spiritual unfaithfulness by Israel equates to physical adultery; for spiritual unfaithfulness comes via lusting for what the eyes can see and what the hands can touch and what the heart can feel. There is no better example of this than the gospel song about Give Me that Ol’ Tyme Religion, because the religion of Christendom in previous decades and centuries wasn’t the faith of Jesus Christ, but is/was a bastardized perversion of the Adversary—a form of Christianity that borrows the name “Jesus” and scabs this name onto Israel’s idolatrous practices and beliefs dating back to ancient Egypt.
Christendom’s belief that a person is humanly born with an immortal soul doesn’t come from Scripture, doesn’t come from Moses or from Jesus or from Paul, Peter, John, or James, but comes from ancient Egypt through the idolatry of Israel, reentering Christianity when Greeks began to believe that Jesus was Lord. The belief comes from the Adversary and from the serpent who told Eve that she would not die (Gen 3:4). And the greater Christian Church as the last Eve believed that old serpent Satan the devil; for if a person is humanly born with an immortal soul, a second breath of life—the divine breath of the Father [pneuma Theon]—need not be received from God. A good person will live forever simply because the person is good, the apparent belief of Islam and a belief that produces societies in which no one takes responsibility for anything for to admit that the person has erred might be enough to keep the person out of heaven.
In societies constructed on acceptance that human beings are born with immortal souls, the Law that made sin alive is neglected, thereby causing all in that society to again come under the reign of Death, the fourth horseman of the Apocalypse. The society becomes a nation of spiritual prostitutes.
The words of the prophet Amos concerning Israel and her neighbors were time-specific but also apply to spiritual Israel, the nation circumcised of heart and her uncircumcised neighbors—
But the words of Amos were not welcomed by the king of the House of Israel, nor by the priests of this northern kingdom. In fact, Amaziah, the priest of Bethel, tried to turn Jeroboam, son of Joash king of Israel, against Amos before going to Amos and saying, “‘O seer, go, flee away to the land of Judah, and eat bread there, and prophesy there, but never again prophesy at Bethel, for it is the king's sanctuary, and it is a temple of the kingdom’” (Amos 7:12–13).
Amos responded in an underappreciated manner:
Then Amos answered and said to Amaziah, “I was no prophet, nor a prophet's son, but I was a herdsman and a dresser of sycamore figs. But the Lord took me from following the flock, and the Lord said to me, ‘Go, prophesy to my people Israel.’ Now therefore hear the word of the Lord.
“You say, ‘Do not prophesy against Israel,
and do not preach against the house of Isaac.’
Therefore thus says the Lord:
“‘Your wife shall be a prostitute in the city,
and your sons and your daughters shall fall by the sword,
and your land shall be divided up with a measuring line;
you yourself shall die in an unclean land,
and Israel shall surely go into exile away from its land.’” (Amos 7:14–17 emphasis added)
The concept of sex as a transaction is a reoccurring one in Scripture. The context is always the same: when a people are unfaithful to the Lord, the people are likened to a prostitute, a woman/wife who sells her body, with her body commanding less and less of a price as she ages—the woman that is unfaithful engages in transactional sex. The nation that is unfaithful engages in transactions with the Adversary and his minions, with these transactions being compared to sexual intercourse.
Why? Why compare idolatrous worship with prostitution? What is the connection?
Before the spirit was given, every person was inwardly dead. This includes all of Israel. Thus, the relationship represented by the Tetragrammaton YHWH [YH + WH] was represented through human marriage, with Yah [YH] representing the Logos [o logos] who was God [theos] and who was with the God [ton Theon] in the beginning (John 1:1) and who created all things physical (v. 3) before entering His creation as His only Son (John 3:16). In English and in Greek, the Logos is assigned masculine gender, but not so in French; for the Logos occupies the position of the Helpmate of the God [ton Theon] as Eve was the helpmate of Adam (Gen 2:18–25). The Logos, in relationship to the God [ton Theon], is in the feminine position of a spiritual marriage relationship, with the Logos having created both Adam and Eve as well as everything else created.
The wife shall be saved through childbirth (1 Tim 2:15), but she shall bear children in pain (Gen 3:16)—
When the people of Israel are liberated from physical bondage [slavery] to a physical king [Pharaoh] in a physical land [Egypt], the people of Israel—following this Passover liberation—are “free” to marry their liberator, the Lord … the first Sinai covenant represents a marriage covenant between the Lord and the people of Israel, with the blood ratifying this covenant (Ex 24:5–8) representing the broken hymen of a bride on her wedding bed. The people of Israel, if a faithful bride, would have no intercourse with the gods and idols of this world. The people of Israel, if faithful, would remain loyal to the Lord. But this is not what happened.
A problem occurs within forty days or so: Aaron, at the behest of the people of Israel, cast for Israel a gold calf (or two gold calves) that Aaron identifies as the elohim of Israel (Ex 32:4) … the marriage covenant that the Lord made with the people of Israel lasts for forty days before it is broken through unfaithfulness and ended in the shedding of blood:
And when Moses saw that the people had broken loose (for Aaron had let them break loose, to the derision of their enemies), then Moses stood in the gate of the camp and said, “Who is on the Lord's side? Come to me.” And all the sons of Levi gathered around him. And he said to them, “Thus says the Lord God of Israel, ‘Put your sword on your side each of you, and go to and fro from gate to gate throughout the camp, and each of you kill his brother and his companion and his neighbor.’” And the sons of Levi did according to the word of Moses. And that day about three thousand men of the people fell. And Moses said, “Today you have been ordained for the service of the Lord, each one at the cost of his son and of his brother, so that he might bestow a blessing upon you this day.”
The next day Moses said to the people, “You have sinned a great sin. And now I will go up to the Lord; perhaps I can make atonement for your sin.” So Moses returned to the Lord and said, “Alas, this people has sinned a great sin. They have made for themselves gods of gold. But now, if you will forgive their sin—but if not, please blot me out of your book that you have written.” But the Lord said to Moses, “Whoever has sinned against me, I will blot out of my book. But now go, lead the people to the place about which I have spoken to you; behold, my angel shall go before you. Nevertheless, in the day when I visit, I will visit their sin upon them.”
Then the Lord sent a plague on the people, because they made the calf, the one that Aaron made. (Ex 32:25–35)
The marriage covenant that the Lord made with Israel is refined to being only with the sons of Levi under the second Sinai covenant (Ex chap 34); for the prohibition against kindling a fire on the Sabbath (Ex 35:3) prevents the sons of Israel from receiving the spirit of God, or said even more simply, from having indwelling eternal life in the presence of God.
Judaism in the days of Moses and through the time of Herod’s temple and even rabbinical Judaism today deny that the Lord ended the Sinai covenant through the shedding of blood when Moses came down from the mountain. But Judaism didn’t and doesn’t understand the nature of a heavenly covenant:
But when Christ appeared as a high priest of the good things that have come, then through the greater and more perfect tent (not made with hands, that is, not of this creation) He entered once for all into the holy places, not by means of the blood of goats and calves but by means of His own blood, thus securing an eternal redemption. For if the blood of goats and bulls, and the sprinkling of defiled persons with the ashes of a heifer, sanctify for the purification of the flesh, how much more will the blood of Christ, who through the eternal Spirit offered Himself without blemish to God, purify our conscience from dead works to serve the living God. / Therefore He is the mediator of a new covenant, so that those who are called may receive the promised eternal inheritance, since a death has occurred that redeems them from the transgressions committed under the first covenant. For where a will is involved, the death of the one who made it must be established. For a will takes effect only at death, since it is not in force as long as the one who made it is alive. Therefore not even the first covenant was inaugurated without blood. For when every commandment of the law had been declared by Moses to all the people, he took the blood of calves and goats, with water and scarlet wool and hyssop, and sprinkled both the book itself and all the people, saying, “This is the blood of the covenant that God commanded for you.” And in the same way he sprinkled with the blood both the tent and all the vessels used in worship. Indeed, under the law almost everything is purified with blood, and without the shedding of blood there is no forgiveness of sins. / Thus it was necessary for the copies of the heavenly things to be purified with these rites, but the heavenly things themselves with better sacrifices than these. For Christ has entered, not into holy places made with hands, which are copies of the true things, but into heaven itself, now to appear in the presence of God on our behalf. Nor was it to offer Himself repeatedly, as the high priest enters the holy places every year with blood not his own, for then He would have had to suffer repeatedly since the foundation of the world. But as it is, He has appeared once for all at the end of the ages to put away sin by the sacrifice of Himself. And just as it is appointed for man to die once, and after that comes judgment, so Christ, having been offered once to bear the sins of many, will appear a second time, not to deal with sin but to save those who are eagerly waiting for Him. (Heb 9:11–28 emphasis added)
The covenants ratified by blood—even the covenant made with Abraham that is ratified through circumcision of foreskins (Gen 17:1–14)—are merely shadows and copies of heavenly covenants that do not ended with the destruction/death of a person’s fleshly body. Therefore, a marriage covenant that is ratified by the blood of a broken hymen ends with the death of the person or of the person’s spouse, whichever comes first, and is merely the shadow and copy of a heavenly marriage covenant made between the Body of Christ and Christ Jesus …
But a step has been overlooked!
The marriage covenant, ratified by the blood of a broken hymen, forms a shadow and copy of the covenant made between the living inner self—the inner self raised from death through receipt of a second breath of life, the breath of God [pneuma Theon]—and the still mortal fleshly body of the person, with the spiritually living inner self representing Christ Jesus and the person’s fleshly body representing the greater Christian Church that is today spiritually dead but physically living. And this is the difference between Christendom and Islam or Judaism.
What happens if a woman’s hymen has been broken prior to marriage, whether from horseback riding or from fornication? Is the marriage covenant made between her and her husband valid when consummated in the wedding bed even though no blood is shed? Or is the woman to be considered as already married to another, a woman unfaithful to her body and therefore unfaithful to the Lord?
The born-of-God Christian woman whose hymen has been broken prior to her wedding night knows whether her body has been unfaithful to her living inner self, with her body functioning as a wife to her living inner self that is a son of God.
If a Christian woman’s body has been unfaithful to her living inner self, will she as a wife be faithful to her husband? This is a question even she cannot really answer until tested by a trial … Israel failed such testing at Sinai. Most of Christendom will, following the Second Passover liberation of Israel, fail such testing: the Apostasy (2 Thess 2:3) occurs because Christians today are spiritually as high school tarts are physically. Even though Christians today have, almost without exception, no living inner self and are as an unmarried woman is, Christians have committed spiritually fornication with demons and with idols that cannot see or hear or walk (note Rev 9:20–21). Christians are not chaste virgins awaiting receipt of the Holy Spirit [pneuma hagion or breath holy]. Christians today, with very few exceptions, profess that Jesus is Lord while claiming to believe in their hearts that the Father raised Jesus from death, but these Christians (men and women) commit fornication with the Adversary and his minions through their ongoing lawlessness. Therefore, when these Christians finally receive indwelling eternal life in the form of the breath of God [pneuma Theon], these Christians will have been unfaithful so many times that they will—because it has been their habit—play the prostitute with the Adversary and his ministers, while feeling only the mild tinges of guilt as they sell their faithfulness for a wine-soaked sop. They will be spiritual Judases.
Prostitution occurs whenever a Christian enters into an ideological transaction with the Adversary; for what sort of a relationship can a Christian have with the Adversary other than an extremely hostile one without the Christian committing adultery with the Adversary?
A Christian cannot engage in the politics of this world without committing fornication with the present prince of this world.
A Christian cannot acquire the wealth of this world without prostituting him or herself.
A Christian cannot seek the glory or honor in this world without selling him or herself to the devil.
A Christian cannot walk as Jesus walked when following the highway and bylaws of this present world. Only by separating him or herself from the ways and practices of this world can a Christian truly walk as Abraham walked, as Jesus walked, as Paul, Peter, John, or James walked. And even then, walking as Jesus walked is not easy but is difficult.
Jesus’ yoke may indeed be an easy burden to bear, but to walk past the stalls where the flesh of this world is offered for sale at bargain prices requires a spiritual discipline that transforms a Christian into a disciple of Christ Jesus. For any transaction made in the shambles of this world causes the Christian to be spiritually butchered as if he or she were a stalled ox.
Prostitution is transactional sex: faked affection is exchanged for money in a motel/hotel room. The woman’s [in some cases, the man’s] body is purchased for an amount of money usually greater than can be lawfully made. But this transaction defiles the woman’s body, something she comes to understand and often accepts, for she knows she is not her body which becomes the means she employs to obtain the good things of this world. And so it is for every Christian politician and most Christian pastors: unfaithfulness to Christ Jesus defiles the Christian politician, something he or she will come to understand and usually accept as the politician sees laws being made. Unfaithfulness to Christ Jesus defiles the Christian pastor who preaches any other gospel but that which the Apostle Paul preached—and Paul taught Christians to “Be imitators of me, as I am of Christ” (1 Cor 11:1), saying of himself, “‘Neither against the Law of the Jews, nor against the temple, nor against Caesar have I committed any offense’” (Acts 25:8). Thus, the Christian pastor who teaches parishioners not to keep the Law of the Jews [i.e., the commandments of God] is a spiritual prostitute, a person who has sold his or her salvation for the tithes and offering collected on a Sunday morning.
And prayers made by or for Christian political prostitutes, or by or for Christian pastors who prostitute the gospel will not be heard by God. These individuals are spiritually defiled when they should be chaste virgins.
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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."