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 walking as Jesus walked.
Weekly Readings
For the Sabbath of August 13, 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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We who are strong have an obligation to bear with the failings of the weak, and not to please ourselves. Let each of us please his neighbor for his good, to build him up. For Christ did not please himself, but as it is written, “The reproaches of those who reproached you fell on me.” For whatever was written in former days was written for our instruction, that through endurance and through the encouragement of the Scriptures we might have hope. May the God of endurance and encouragement grant you to live in such harmony with one another, in accord with Christ Jesus, that together you may with one voice glorify the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. Therefore welcome one another as Christ has welcomed you, for the glory of God. / For I tell you that Christ became a servant to the circumcised to show God's truthfulness, in order to confirm the promises given to the patriarchs, and in order that the Gentiles might glorify God for his mercy. As it is written,
“Therefore I will praise you among the Gentiles,
and sing to your name.”
And again it is said,
“Rejoice, O Gentiles, with his people.”
And again,
“Praise the Lord, all you Gentiles,
and let all the peoples extol him.”
And again Isaiah says,
“The root of Jesse will come,
even he who arises to rule the Gentiles;
in him will the Gentiles hope.”
May the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace in believing, so that by the power of the Holy Spirit you may abound in hope.
I myself am satisfied about you, my brothers, that you yourselves are full of goodness, filled with all knowledge and able to instruct one another. But on some points I have written to you very boldly by way of reminder, because of the grace given me by God to be a minister of Christ Jesus to the Gentiles in the priestly service of the gospel of God, so that the offering of the Gentiles may be acceptable, sanctified by the Holy Spirit. In Christ Jesus, then, I have reason to be proud of my work for God. For I will not venture to speak of anything except what Christ has accomplished through me to bring the Gentiles to obedience—by word and deed, by the power of signs and wonders, by the power of the Spirit of God—so that from Jerusalem and all the way around to Illyricum I have fulfilled the ministry of the gospel of Christ; and thus I make it my ambition to preach the gospel, not where Christ has already been named, lest I build on someone else's foundation, but as it is written,
“Those who have never been told of him will see,
and those who have never heard will understand.”
This is the reason why I have so often been hindered from coming to you. But now, since I no longer have any room for work in these regions, and since I have longed for many years to come to you, I hope to see you in passing as I go to Spain, and to be helped on my journey there by you, once I have enjoyed your company for a while. At present, however, I am going to Jerusalem bringing aid to the saints. For Macedonia and Achaia have been pleased to make some contribution for the poor among the saints at Jerusalem. For they were pleased to do it, and indeed they owe it to them. For if the Gentiles have come to share in their spiritual blessings, they ought also to be of service to them in material blessings. When therefore I have completed this and have delivered to them what has been collected, I will leave for Spain by way of you. I know that when I come to you I will come in the fullness of the blessing of Christ.
I appeal to you, brothers, by our Lord Jesus Christ and by the love of the Spirit, to strive together with me in your prayers to God on my behalf, that I may be delivered from the unbelievers in Judea, and that my service for Jerusalem may be acceptable to the saints, so that by God's will I may come to you with joy and be refreshed in your company. May the God of peace be with you all. Amen. (Rom 15:1–33 emphasis and double emphasis added)
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We who are strong — today, who is strong in the faith as Paul was? Certainly not any Sabbatarian Christian who doesn’t understand that receipt of the Holy Spirit [pneuma hagion or breath holy] is receipt of a second breath of life, the breath of God the Father [pneuma Theon] that raises the previously dead inner self to life, thereby causing the Christian to be born again, or born from above. The Sabbatarian Christian who teaches that Christians are merely begotten by God is not strong in the faith, but teaches falsely, teaches as one who in the 21st-Century has not been called to teach and hence is a false teacher, a false prophet, a deceitful workman akin to the Circumcision Faction with whom Paul disputed throughout his ministry.
We who are strong are extremely few in number, so few as to be statistically insignificant … the Body of Christ that is the greater Christian Church died when the Apostle John died; for the Father quit withdrawing disciples from this world about when the earthly temple in Jerusalem was razed in 70 CE. Thus, as disciples previously withdrawn from the world by the Father giving them a second breath of life (i.e., indwelling eternal life in the form of Christ, or better, the spirit of Christ [pneuma christos] in the spirit of God the Father [pneuma Theon]) died through martyrdom as was most often the case or through old age as in the case of John, there was no recruitment into the Body of Christ until John alone remained. As the Body of Christ began with one man—Jesus the Nazarene receiving the divine breath of the Father (Matt 3:16)—the Body of Christ died with the death of one man, the Apostle John, approximately seventy years later [probably exactly seventy years from the year in which Jesus was resurrected from death and breathed on the ten disciples — John chap 20]. Then nineteen hundred years later (2001/2002), the resurrection of the Body began.
For the centuries between the beginning of the 2nd-Century CE and through the end of the 20th-Century CE, the Body of Christ was dead and was without spiritual understanding. Even today, a decade later, except for a statistically insignificant number of disciples with whom the Father and the Son have been at work, the Body of Christ remains dead, spiritually lifeless (i.e., without the indwelling of the spirit of Christ in the spirit of God). And without life, there are none who are strong; none able to bear the failings of the weak; none who choose not to please themselves. Only within the few with whom the Father and the Son works and has been working are there those able to bear the failings of the weak, the failings of Christians that through ignorance mock Christ Jesus, flaunt obedience to the Law, claim Christians are humanly born with indwelling immortality, and assign personhood to the breath of God.
The failings of Christians weak in faith because they are spiritually dead is really too great for a person to bear; hence, their transgressions are not covered by grace but by death (i.e., by their spiritually lifeless state). For even the glorified Christ Jesus doesn’t bear today the failings of the greater Christian Church, but rather, leaves lawless Christians to their own devices and their own ideology —
The Lord through the prophet Ezekiel told the elders of Israel,
Therefore say to the house of Israel, Thus says the Lord God: Will you defile yourselves after the manner of your fathers and go whoring after their detestable things? When you present your gifts and offer up your children in fire, you defile yourselves with all your idols to this day. And shall I be inquired of by you, O house of Israel? As I live, declares the Lord God, I will not be inquired of by you.
What is in your mind shall never happen—the thought, “Let us be like the nations, like the tribes of the countries, and worship wood and stone.”
As I live, declares the Lord God, surely with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm and with wrath poured out I will be king over you. I will bring you out from the peoples and gather you out of the countries where you are scattered, with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm, and with wrath poured out. And I will bring you into the wilderness of the peoples, and there I will enter into judgment with you face to face. As I entered into judgment with your fathers in the wilderness of the land of Egypt, so I will enter into judgment with you, declares the Lord God. I will make you pass under the rod, and I will bring you into the bond of the covenant. I will purge out the rebels from among you, and those who transgress against me. I will bring them out of the land where they sojourn, but they shall not enter the land of Israel. Then you will know that I am the Lord.
As for you, O house of Israel, thus says the Lord God: Go serve every one of you his idols, now and hereafter, if you will not listen to me; but my holy name you shall no more profane with your gifts and your idols. (20:30–39 emphasis added)
With the giving of a second breath of life to first chosen Israelites, then to selected Gentiles, Israel of Scripture ceased to be the outwardly circumcised nation, and became instead the nation circumcised of heart after hearts have been cleansed by faith—by a mental journey of faith that is equivalent in length to the patriarch Abraham’s physical journey of faith from Ur of the Chaldeans to Haran, then down into the Promised Land of Canaan. For most Christians, this is a mental journey from spiritual Babylon, the kingdom of this world, into Sabbath observance and living as a Judean, a person out of sync with this world, a person who keeps the commandments and eats clean meats and actually loves neighbor and brother, which will require the Christian to bear the failings of the weak in faith.
If a Philadelphian walks as Jesus walked, the Philadelphian will build up his or her neighbors and brothers for their good.
As Paul begins to wrap up his treatise to the saints at Rome, Paul reminds them that whatever was written in former days was written for Christian instruction (Rom 15:4) … what Paul couldn’t grasp at the beginning of the Christian era was the death of the Body of Christ, was the course of events that would see those things that happened to the man Jesus the Nazarene occurring to the inner selves of Christians, including Jesus’ crucifixion and bodily death on the cross. For the cross—the crucifix—is the shadow and copy of Death, the fourth horseman of the Apocalypse. The cross represents death, not life. And the infamous mark of the beast [chi xi stigma from Rev 13:18] is the tattoo [stigma] of Christ’s [chi] cross [xi].
The Body of Christ [i.e., the greater Christian Church] was slain by the cross-shaped demon that is called Death in Revelation 6:8, and that appears as the fourth king/beast in Daniel chapter 7 following the Second Passover liberation of Israel. Hence, it was essential that the man Jesus the Nazarene be crucified as a shadow and copy of the demonic fourth king of Daniel 7 slaying the Christian Church in the 1st-Century and again slaying the majority of the resurrected Christian Church in the 21st-Century—resurrected through the Father giving to all Christians a second breath of life, His divine breath, the Holy Spirit [again, pneuma hagion].
Only through incredible ignorance or through deliberate deceit would any Christian assign personhood to the bright fire representing indwelling eternal life within a living entity … as the dark fire of cellular oxidation of simple carbohydrates sustains physical life in physically living creatures, the bright fire that is the glory of God sustains life in living entities that are not of this physical creation.
Ezekiel records,
In the thirtieth year, in the fourth month, on the fifth day of the month, as I was among the exiles by the Chebar canal, the heavens were opened, and I saw visions of God. On the fifth day of the month (it was the fifth year of the exile of King Jehoiachin), the word of the Lord came to Ezekiel the priest, the son of Buzi, in the land of the Chaldeans by the Chebar canal, and the hand of the Lord was upon him there.
As I [Ezekiel] looked, behold, a stormy wind came out of the north, and a great cloud, with brightness around it, and fire flashing forth continually, and in the midst of the fire, as it were gleaming metal. And from the midst of it came the likeness of four living creatures. And this was their appearance: they had a human likeness, but each had four faces, and each of them had four wings. Their legs were straight, and the soles of their feet were like the sole of a calf's foot. And they sparkled like burnished bronze. Under their wings on their four sides they had human hands. And the four had their faces and their wings thus: their wings touched one another. Each one of them went straight forward, without turning as they went. As for the likeness of their faces, each had a human face. The four had the face of a lion on the right side, the four had the face of an ox on the left side, and the four had the face of an eagle. Such were their faces. And their wings were spread out above. Each creature had two wings, each of which touched the wing of another, while two covered their bodies. And each went straight forward. Wherever the spirit would go, they went, without turning as they went. As for the likeness of the living creatures, their appearance was like burning coals of fire, like the appearance of torches moving to and fro among the living creatures. And the fire was bright, and out of the fire went forth lightning. And the living creatures darted to and fro, like the appearance of a flash of lightning.
Now as I looked at the living creatures, I saw a wheel on the earth beside the living creatures, one for each of the four of them. As for the appearance of the wheels and their construction: their appearance was like the gleaming of beryl. And the four had the same likeness, their appearance and construction being as it were a wheel within a wheel. When they went, they went in any of their four directions without turning as they went. And their rims were tall and awesome, and the rims of all four were full of eyes all around. And when the living creatures went, the wheels went beside them; and when the living creatures rose from the earth, the wheels rose. Wherever the spirit wanted to go, they went, and the wheels rose along with them, for the spirit of the living creatures was in the wheels. When those went, these went; and when those stood, these stood; and when those rose from the earth, the wheels rose along with them, for the spirit of the living creatures was in the wheels.
Over the heads of the living creatures there was the likeness of an expanse, shining like awe-inspiring crystal, spread out above their heads. And under the expanse their wings were stretched out straight, one toward another. And each creature had two wings covering its body. And when they went, I heard the sound of their wings like the sound of many waters, like the sound of the Almighty, a sound of tumult like the sound of an army. When they stood still, they let down their wings. And there came a voice from above the expanse over their heads. When they stood still, they let down their wings.
And above the expanse over their heads there was the likeness of a throne, in appearance like sapphire; and seated above the likeness of a throne was a likeness with a human appearance. And upward from what had the appearance of his waist I saw as it were gleaming metal, like the appearance of fire enclosed all around. And downward from what had the appearance of his waist I saw as it were the appearance of fire, and there was brightness around him. Like the appearance of the bow that is in the cloud on the day of rain, so was the appearance of the brightness all around. / Such was the appearance of the likeness of the glory of the Lord. And when I saw it, I fell on my face, and I heard the voice of one speaking. (1:1–28 emphasis added)
The glory of the Lord is indwelling life outside of space-time, or simply, eternal life. Again, no Christian is humanly born with indwelling eternal life; human flesh is unable to contain the optically-invisible bright fire that represents indwelling eternal life. Hence, a primary failing/weakness of Christians is the widespread belief that every human being possesses an immortal soul—and this is not the case. Every human being is born spiritually dead (i.e., without life), a truism that Jesus acknowledged when He addressed would-be disciples:
Now when Jesus saw a crowd around Him, He gave orders to go over to the other side. And a scribe came up and said to Him, “Teacher, I will follow you wherever you go.” And Jesus said to him, “Foxes have holes, and birds of the air have nests, but the Son of Man has nowhere to lay His head.” Another of the disciples said to Him, “Lord, let me first go and bury my father.” And Jesus said to him, “Follow me, and leave the dead to bury their own dead.” (Matt 8:18–22 emphasis added)
Permit the dead to bury the dead of themselves, perhaps the better translation—the “dead” are all of humankind that has not received a second breath of life, the breath of the Father. The dead are all of Christendom that has not received a second breath of life, and evidence of receiving a second breath of life is understanding of spiritual matters …
Recently, a person who occasionally supports the ministry of Philadelphia said that he could not live as a Jew, that he could not walk as Jesus walked; for Jews were mostly responsible for the evils of this world, which is not true, the individual’s statement revealing his anti-Semitic bias inherited from his Germanic heritage (he is a first-generation American). The individual said he had always tried to live as a good person, which is true as far as is known, but he simply could not keep the Sabbath for to do so would cause him to publicly appear as a Jew … how many other Christians will not walk as Jesus walked because of latent prejudice against the earthly nation of Israel, a nation whose history forms the shadow and copy of the history of the Christian Church in the 1st-Century, then again in the 21st-Century following the Second Passover liberation of Israel, the nation circumcised of heart?
In his treatise to the saints at Rome, Paul wrote that whatever was written in former days was written for our instruction, that through endurance and through the encouragement of the Scriptures we might have hope (15:4). Elsewhere Paul wrote,
For I want you to know, brothers, that our fathers [whose fathers? Not the biological fathers of the saints at Corinth] were all under the cloud, and all passed through the sea, and all were baptized into Moses in the cloud and in the sea, and all ate the same spiritual food, and all drank the same spiritual drink. For they drank from the spiritual Rock that followed them, and the Rock was Christ. Nevertheless, with most of them God was not pleased, for they were overthrown in the wilderness. / Now these things took place as examples for us, that we might not desire evil as they did. Do not be idolaters as some of them were; as it is written, “The people sat down to eat and drink and rose up to play.” We must not indulge in sexual immorality as some of them did, and twenty-three thousand fell in a single day. We must not put Christ to the test, as some of them did and were destroyed by serpents, nor grumble, as some of them did and were destroyed by the Destroyer. Now these things happened to them as an example, but they were written down for our instruction, on whom the end of the ages has come. Therefore let anyone who thinks that he stands take heed lest he fall. No temptation has overtaken you that is not common to man. God is faithful, and he will not let you be tempted beyond your ability, but with the temptation he will also provide the way of escape, that you may be able to endure it. (1 Cor 10:1–13)
The fathers of Israel followed Moses out from Egypt, not the fathers of the mixed peoples Rome had imported into Corinth after destroying that Greek city two centuries earlier. So when Paul writes that our fathers drank from the spiritual Rock that … was Christ, Paul identifies the Christian saints at Corinth as Israel, the extension and continuation of the people of Israel that left Egypt and physical bondage to a physical Pharaoh in a physical land.
Paul goes one to say,
Therefore, my beloved, flee from idolatry. I speak as to sensible people; judge for yourselves what I say. The cup of blessing that we bless, is it not a participation in the blood of Christ? The bread that we break, is it not a participation in the body of Christ? Because there is one bread, we who are many are one body, for we all partake of the one bread. Consider the people of Israel: are not those who eat the sacrifices participants in the altar? What do I imply then? That food offered to idols is anything, or that an idol is anything? No, I imply that what pagans sacrifice they offer to demons and not to God. I do not want you to be participants with demons. You cannot drink the cup of the Lord and the cup of demons. You cannot partake of the table of the Lord and the table of demons. Shall we provoke the Lord to jealousy? Are we stronger than he? (1 Cor 10:14–22)
Today, Philadelphia speaks to all Christians as if they were sensible people: can you take the Passover sacraments of Bread and Wine that represent the Body and Blood of the chosen Lamb of God daily, or weekly, or quarterly, or on some other night of the year except the dark portion of the 14th day of the first month and not deny Christ? You cannot! And if you deny Christ, will He not deny you before the Father? He will! Therefore, why do you expect to be saved when you, who have a tiny bit of knowledge, mock Christ Jesus? Should you not, rather, expect to be cast into the lake of fire when your judgment is revealed? Luckily, because you are not born of spirit, judgment has not come upon you. However, because you claim to be born of spirit, your sins will be remembered and your fate is sealed by your disobedience.
You who profess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord and believe that the Father raised Jesus from the grave are “judged” unworthy without ever entering into judgment. But the person who is among you and who has been a good person, manifesting love for neighbor and brother, shall be as the righteous men [and women] of old were when the person’s judgment is revealed, with the person not being numbered among the great of the firstfruits. Otherwise, the Christian who professes that Jesus is Lord and who does not walk as Jesus walked will perish in the lake of fire.
Death reigned over all of humankind between Adam and Moses (Rom 5:14); yet the spirit in the form of indwelling eternal life wasn’t given to Moses or to David or to any of the righteous men of Israel prior to when it was given to Jesus as the last Adam. Death as the demonic fourth horseman of the Apocalypse reigns over Christendom between the last Adam and the two witnesses, who will be to circumcised of heart Israel as Moses and Aaron were to physically circumcised Israel.
The Lord told Moses that He would create a great nation from Moses: He is about doing just this for if a Christian will not believe the writings of Moses, the Christian cannot hear or believe the words of the man Jesus the Nazarene (John 5:46–47).
The Christian who is a good person but who doesn’t walk as Jesus walked is not covered by grace, and has no other sacrifice for his or her sins but the person’s life. Thus, expect to see the martyrdom of virtually all faithful Christians following the Second Passover liberation of Israel. It will be, with a statistically insignificant Remnant excluded, the only means by which Christians can hold-on to the indwelling eternal life they will receive at the Second Passover liberation of Israel.
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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."