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 a third awakening.
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Weekly Readings
For the Sabbath of August 28, 2010
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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My brothers, show no partiality as you hold the faith in our Lord Jesus Christ, the Lord of glory. For if a man wearing a gold ring and fine clothing comes into your assembly, and a poor man in shabby clothing also comes in, and if you pay attention to the one who wears the fine clothing and say, “You sit here in a good place,” while you say to the poor man, “You stand over there,” or, “Sit down at my feet,” have you not then made distinctions among yourselves and become judges with evil thoughts? Listen, my beloved brothers, has not God chosen those who are poor in the world to be rich in faith and heirs of the kingdom, which he has promised to those who love him? But you have dishonored the poor man. Are not the rich the ones who oppress you, and the ones who drag you into court? Are they not the ones who blaspheme the honorable name by which you were called?
If you really fulfill the royal law according to the Scripture, “You shall love your neighbor as yourself,” you are doing well. But if you show partiality, you are committing sin and are convicted by the law as transgressors. For whoever keeps the whole law but fails in one point has become accountable for all of it. For he who said, “Do not commit adultery,” also said, “Do not murder.” If you do not commit adultery but do murder, you have become a transgressor of the law. So speak and so act as those who are to be judged under the law of liberty. For judgment is without mercy to one who has shown no mercy. Mercy triumphs over judgment. (James 2:1–13 emphasis added
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If you do not commit murder and if you do not commit adultery and if you do not steal, bear false witness, covet your neighbor’s possession, but if you transgress the Sabbath, doing your major grocery shopping on the Sabbath, shop Grizzly Tools’ one-day-a-year tent sale on the Sabbath, visit Home Depot for their Saturday specials, you are convicted as a transgressor and have become accountable for breaking the law. You are a willful sinner. And there is nothing you can say in your defense.
Most Christians will say that condemning a person for not leaving or bucking this world; for not going against what friends and neighbors do is legalistic and not showing mercy, that God is love and God wouldn’t hold doing what is necessary to survive in this world against a person, that God has mercy and will be merciful to all who love Him. Well, can we look at how much mercy God extends and how He extends it: before any discussion, any argument begins there must be shared assumptions, those things that both parties hold as “true.” If assumptions are not shared, then each side talks at the other, not to the other.
Before any discussion of James can begin, all parties need to agree that “Jesus Christ is the same yesterday and today and forever” (Heb 13:8). There should be no dispute about the consistency of Christ. Nor should there be dispute about who Christ Jesus is: “And the Word [o logos] became flesh and dwelt among us, and we [John & the first disciples] have seen his glory, glory as of the only Son from the Father, full of grace and truth” (John 1:14) … the preceding translation is adequate, but not accurate for John wrote something closer to, [glory as] [of an only one] [from Father], [full (of) grace and truth]. This Word that became flesh was in the beginning, and didn’t suddenly come into existence in Mary’s womb; this Word [o logos] was God [theos] and shares the definite article [o] with the Word, thereby linguistically [structurally as well as contextually] establishing that the Word was God and not an aspect of God, such as His breath or His utterance. And this Word was with or of [pros] in the beginning (John 1:1).
Eve was “of” Adam and was “with” Adam in humanity’s beginning: the two were one flesh (Gen 2:24). But no one would say that Eve was the breath of Adam. Nor would anyone say that Eve was Adam in a triune humanity with the breath of these two. Eve was Eve, the woman who was Adam’s helpmate. And the two, Adam and Eve, became one flesh through marriage, the reason a man leaves his father and his mother and holds fast to his wife. (Marriage is never between individuals other than a man and a woman: two men do not become one flesh, but always remain two.)
In the beginning, the Word [the Logos] was God and was with the God and this relationship is represented in the unpronounced Tetragrammaton YHWH, which deconstructs to the radicals YH (Yah) and WH, with “H” or “ah” representing aspiration or breath. The very intelligent but not spiritually wise Greeks that, in the 4th and 5th Centuries CE, gave Christianity a triune deity apparently realized the Tetragrammation YHWH represented both the Logos and the Father and their breath; that since the Logos was God and the Father was God and the Logos entered His creation as His only Son who would be crucified and after the third day raised from the dead, then the Father and the Son had to be one as Jesus claimed. And if the Father and the Son were one in the Tetragrammaton YHWH before the Logos entered His creation (from John 1:3), and if their breath is also represented in the Tetragrammaton, then the Father and the Son are also one with their breath, the Holy Spirit that came upon Mary (Luke 1:35) and overshadowed her and caused her to conceive a child, the Son of God.
Are you one with your breath? Do you have physical life apart from breathing? Can you live physically without breathing? The question is foolishness. Yet your breath isn’t you, and isn’t a person apart from yourself although in Greek, the linguistic icon [psuche] is used to represent both the shallow breath that sustains physical life as well as those aspects of the dead inner self that give to the fleshly person his or her identity. Thus, the Greek icons for shallow breath and for deep breath [pneuma] represent the living outer and inner person. Prior to when a person receives a second breath of life, the breath of God [pneuma Theon], the person consists of the fleshly body [soma] and its physical breath [psuche] as seen in what Jesus tells His disciples before the breath/spirit of God is given (Matt 10:28). It is God who can destroy both the flesh and the inner self even before this inner self is made alive through receipt of a second breath of life.
When hardness of hearts caused Christian converts to not marry and to not think of a man and a women being one flesh; when Greek aestheticism was fertilized by grace, saints wrote letters such as the one Paul received from the Corinthians in which these saints apparently said that it is good for a man not to have sexual relations with a woman (1 Cor 7:1) … Greek ideology was divided between worship of an Apollonian sky god (which the Christian God represented in Greek mythology) and a dank, dark, wet, female underworld—a world of fluids, from breast milk to vaginal discharges—a world that was not beautiful but was seductively powerful. Thus, abstaining from sexual relations with a woman was, for too many Greek men, part of pure worship of the sky god; so men lay with men, committing abominations that are today celebrated in gay-rights parades. Not much has changed in two millennia.
For Greek converts to Christianity, the concept of God being like men was not to be entertained: God couldn’t be like human beings, but had to be pure and free from all femaleness. To these Greek converts, the flesh was sin; for the flesh of a man desired the wetness of women whereas the mind of man sought the higher and more-noble virtues of logic and knowledge and those things that pertained to heaven. Hence, the concept of the Word [o logos] functioning as the Helpmate of the God [ton Theon] was too alien to be considered; so four centuries after Christ Jesus lived, Christian theologians bundled the Word [Yah] and the God [WH] with their breaths [H] into an unexplainable triune deity that seemed to them consistent with the Hebrew deity represented by the Tetragrammaton YHWH.
It would have made much more sense to believe what John records:
So Jesus said to them, “Truly, truly, I say to you, the Son can do nothing of his own accord, but only what he sees the Father doing. For whatever the Father does, that the Son does likewise. For the Father loves the Son and shows him all that he himself is doing. And greater works than these will he show him, so that you may marvel. For as the Father raises the dead and gives them life, so also the Son gives life to whom he will. The Father judges no one, but has given all judgment to the Son, that all may honor the Son, just as they honor the Father. Whoever does not honor the Son does not honor the Father who sent him. Truly, truly, I say to you, whoever hears my word and believes him who sent me has eternal life. He does not come into judgment, but has passed from death to life. / Truly, truly, I say to you, an hour is coming, and is now here, when the dead will hear the voice of the Son of God, and those who hear will live. For as the Father has life in himself, so he has granted the Son also to have life in himself. And he has given him authority to execute judgment, because he is the Son of Man. Do not marvel at this, for an hour is coming when all who are in the tombs will hear his voice and come out, those who have done good to the resurrection of life, and those who have done evil to the resurrection of judgment. / I can do nothing on my own. As I hear, I judge, and my judgment is just, because I seek not my own will but the will of him who sent me. (John 5:19–30 emphasis added)
If the Father has life in Himself, the Father has “breath” [H] in Himself as seen in the radical WH from the Hebrew Tetragrammaton YHWH. Likewise, the Son has life in Himself as seen when the breath of the Father [pneuma Theon] descended-upon and remained with Jesus (Matt 3:16), and this life is the glory seen by the prophet Ezekiel, who wrote,
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 … 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. (1:22, 26–28 emphasis added)
Human life is sustained by the dark fire of cellular oxidation, with the person’s breath supplying the oxygen molecules that are picked up in the lungs and carried to every cell in the body. Eternal life is sustained by the bright fire seen by the prophet as fire inside glowing metal. This bright fire comes from heaven (i.e., is not of this world) and would utterly consume a person if it were not contained in a vessel that has also come from heaven, that vessel being the indwelling of Christ Jesus in the form of His breath [pneuma Christos from Rom 8:9]. Therefore, when the Son asked to have the glory He had before returned to Him (John 17:5), the Son asked to again appear as He appeared to the prophet Ezekiel, and this is how He appeared to John:
Then I turned to see the voice that was speaking to me, and on turning I saw seven golden lampstands, and in the midst of the lampstands one like a son of man, clothed with a long robe and with a golden sash around his chest. The hairs of his head were white, like white wool, like snow. His eyes were like a flame of fire, his feet were like burnished bronze, refined in a furnace, and his voice was like the roar of many waters. In his right hand he held seven stars, from his mouth came a sharp two-edged sword, and his face was like the sun shining in full strength. (Rev 1:12–16)
Possessing eternal life is possession of a glory that cannot be seen by human eyes although Moses saw the burning bush, fire that was not an oxidizing agent, and saw the backside of the Lord. Others see this glory in vision, and even in vision are unable to stand before it.
For our present purpose, it is enough to say that the breath of the Son [pneuma Christos] is the bright fire seen by Ezekiel, with this bright fire represented by the H in the radical YH, the front part or visible aspect of the Hebrew Tetragrammaton YHWH … the fire within the one sitting on the throne that the prophet sees isn’t a personage any more than your breath is a person. It would be utter foolishness to assign personhood to your breath because you can send dust bunnies fleeing with your breath or because you can command work to be done by others who are in another room or because you can calm a crowd by the words you speak through modulations of your breath. It would also be foolishness to assign personhood to the breath of God, unless, of course, in doing so you could keep all aspects of femaleness out of the godhead—if that were your desire.
Christians need to drop their fear of gender-identity and accept that in the beginning, the Logos and the God were two entities conjoined as if married in the Tetragrammaton YHWH so that the were one deity; for in heaven there is neither male nor female. Gender and gender politics are aspects of this world, where men have abused women and woman have openly rebelled against men, with women now holding to other women in a Dionysian quagmire of relationships that have gone awry … a person cannot help who he or she falls in love with, or so claims will be made by those individuals bent upon rebelling against God in any way they can. And there is some truth in these claims; for the damage done to the psyches of men and women is sometimes so great and occurs so early in childhood that the person is repulsed by the opposite gender, or repulsed by his or her own gender and thereby involuntarily chooses to identity with the opposite gender.
The dead inner selves of damaged human beings may be able to control outward behavior, but these dead inner selves do not heal themselves. Only when damaged inner selves are made alive through being born of God can healing occur—and even then, healing is often slow.
If the emergence of a triune deity within Christendom is understandable; if the emergence of deity-singularity as in Arian theology is also understandable; and if neither Greek Trinitarians nor Greek Arians were philosophically able to accept the reality that the Logos functioned as the Helpmate of the Most High God, then a person can begin to grasp why all of Christendom is today far from God, and getting farther away by the day even though a Third Great Awakening is underway …
If the Christian transgresses the commandments in just one point, with the Sabbath commandment being the one Christians habitually break, the Christian commits sin — for Christians to zealously return to churches on Sunday mornings, Christians will seal their rebellion against God that had begun to soften from spiritual neglect. And if allowed to soften and spoil, the rebellion might have been thrown out as rancid butter is, and true Christianity substituted for the tainted version that has been long accepted by this world as genuine.
· The Second Passover liberation of Israel occurs when humankind can get no farther from God than it is—when the midnight hour of the one long spiritual night that began at Calvary is upon humankind.
· God is Light: the Word [o logos] that entered His creation (John 1:3) as His only Son (John 3:16) was the light of this world (John 12:46).
Jesus said, “‘The light is among you for a little while longer. Walk while you have the light, lest darkness overtake you. The one who walks in the darkness does not know where he is going. While you have the light, believe in the light, that you may become sons of light’” (John 12:35–36 emphasis added).
The Christian theologians of the 4th and 5th Centuries who assigned personhood to the breath of God walked in darkness and didn’t see the hole into which they stumbled, a hole like that into which Alice fell … the red queen masquerades as a Christian leader.
Before any discussion can begin about what James meant when he wrote, Listen, my beloved brothers, has not God chosen those who are poor in the world to be rich in faith and heirs of the kingdom, there must be shared assumptions about the nature of the godhead … God is not a trinity. The Holy Spirit [pneuma hagion] is the breath of the Father [pneuma Theon]. Likewise, the breath of Christ [pneuma Christos] is also a holy spirit: the English word “spirit” comes from the Latin word spiritus, the direct translation of the Greek word [pneuma], with the Greek word pneuma usually assigned a meaning of moving air as in wind or deep breath. The Latin word spiritus is usually assigned the meaning of breath or the breath of a god as in the breath of Jupiter. But the English word spirit is usually reserved for invisible personhood, as in a triune Holy Spirit. Somehow, the meaning that Jesus intended when He said to Nicodemus, “‘Truly, truly, I say to you, unless one is born of water and pneumatos [the spirit], he cannot enter the kingdom of God. That which is born of the flesh is flesh, and that which is born of tou pneumatos [the spirit] is pneuma [spirit]. Do not marvel that I said to you, “You must be born again.” The pneuma [wind] blows where it wishes, and you hear its sound, but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes. So it is with everyone who is born of pneumatos [the spirit]’” (John 3:5–8).
Until there is the shared assumption that the Father and the Son are two who represent one deity as the Word [o logos] who was God [theos] and who was with the God [ton Theon] in the beginning were two who represented one deity, there can be no discussion between Binitarians and Trinitarians, or between Binitarians and Unitarians, which is really a shame; for the firstborns of Trinitarians and Unitarians will suddenly perish and they will not know why when they will return to their churches on the Sunday that is the 18th of Iyyar in the year of the Second Passover liberation of Israel. They will not know that they are being waved as firstfruits as they strive to get right with God. And they will not understand that when they keep Christmas on the Sunday of the year of the Second Passover, they will complete their rebellion against God that condemns them to death in this world and to spiritual death in the lake of fire.
How far can Christians get from God? A Third Great Awakening will show to man and angels just how far away they can get—and that Third Great Awakening is showing its teeth in Washington D.C. today in Glenn Beck’s Restoring Honor rally.
A Third Great Awakening is indeed happening, but Christians don’t return to God by continuing to transgress the commandments. And that—open transgression of the commandments—is what Christians everywhere are now doing, and what another Great Awakening will compel them to do in the name of Christ so that those who “refused to love the truth and so be saved” will come under “a strong delusion, so that they may believe what is false, in order that all may be condemned who did not believe the truth but had pleasure in unrighteousness” (2 Thess 2:10–12).
Those who refuse to love the truth refuse to keep the commandments. They are both Trinitarians and Arians, the two Christian ideologies representing the kings of the South and of the North respectively, the two silvery colored iron legs of Nebuchadnezzar’s humanoid image that cast as shadows in this world the Ptolemaic and Seleucid empires. And the Arians will eventually prevail against the Trinitarians as the Seleucids wrest control of Jerusalem away from the Ptolemies before the Seleucids were defeated by the Maccabean sons of light. Only this time, it will be Christ Jesus as the Son of Man that defeats the fourth beast, Death, the demonic king of the North.
Assumptions about God are not shared by Trinitarians, Unitarians [Arians], Binitarians; so no Binitarian warning message will be heeded by Trinitarians and Unitarians. No communication will occur until the dead of Trinitarians and Unitarians clutter their doorways. And even then they will listen to their own messengers rather than to those who keep the commandments and hold the testimony of Jesus.
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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."