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 Adam died when he ate.
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Weekly Readings
For the Sabbath of September 18, 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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Then the Lord my God will come, and all the holy ones with Him. / On that day there shall be no light, cold, or frost. And there shall be [one] day, which is known to the Lord, neither day nor night, but at evening time there shall be light. On that day living waters shall flow out from Jerusalem, half of them to the eastern sea and half of them to the western sea. It shall continue in summer as in winter. And the Lord will be king over all the earth. On that day the Lord will be one and His name one. (Zech 14:5–9 emphasis added)
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When His disciples asked why He spoke in parables, Jesus said that to them it had been given to know the secrets of the kingdom of the heavens, that blessed were their eyes for they see and their ears for they ear: “‘Truly, I say to you [His first disciples], many prophets and righteous people longed to see what you see, and did not see it, and to hear what you hear, and did not hear it’” (Matt 13:17).
A parable is a type of metaphor (figurative language) where one thing or person stands for another thing or person, with the latter usually indescribable in “common” words. Speech in parables requires that the speech not be taken literally, but that the speech’s intended meaning be taken from the speech through the use of dual referents, where a named thing represents an unnamed thing that is like the named thing but is not the named thing. Thus, the naïve Christian that takes the Bible for what it literally says is prevented from ever “hearing” the words of Jesus; for this Christian is as Israel was when described by Isaiah and quoted by Jesus, “‘“You will indeed hear but never understand”’” (Matt 13:14 — citation is from Isa 6:9).
The Apostle Paul says that the invisible things of God [those things for which no human words exist] are made known through the things that have been created (Rom 1:20), and that the physical precedes the spiritual (1 Cor 15:46). Therefore, parables serve as literary devices through which Jesus used non-specific referents that were recognizable to describe the invisible things of God, things for which no human words exist because these things are not of this world or this dimension.
The wrong way to read Scripture is line upon line, here a little, there a little; for this is how the drunken priests of Ephraim caused the house of Israel to “fall backwards [away from God], / and be broken, and snared, and taken” (Isa 28:13) — and this is how the pastors and teachers of the Sabbatarian churches of God cause a modern house of Israel to turn their backs to God and be snared by the lies of the Adversary, who will have this house of Israel (with very few exceptions) appear, this year [2010], before the Lord a month early as greater Christendom weekly appears before the Lord a full week early.
The prophet Isaiah records,
Ah, the proud crown of
the drunkards of Ephraim,
and the fading flower
of its glorious beauty,
which is on the head of
the rich valley of those overcome with wine!
Behold, the Lord has
one who is mighty and strong;
like a storm of hail, a
destroying tempest,
like a storm of mighty,
overflowing waters,
He casts down to the
earth with his hand.
The proud crown of the
drunkards of Ephraim
will be trodden
underfoot;
and the fading flower
of its glorious beauty,
which is on the head of
the rich valley,
will be like a
first-ripe fig before the summer:
when someone sees it,
he swallows it
as soon as it is in his
hand.
In that day the Lord of
hosts will be a crown of glory,
and a diadem of beauty,
to the remnant of his people,
and a spirit of justice
to him who sits in judgment,
and strength to those
who turn back the battle at the gate.
These also reel with
wine
and stagger with strong
drink;
the priest and the
prophet reel with strong drink,
they are swallowed by
wine,
they stagger with
strong drink,
they reel in
vision,
they stumble in giving
judgment.
For all tables are full
of filthy vomit,
with no space left.
(Isa 28:1–8)
Surely modern Sabbatarian pastors and teachers are not drunken sots, reeling about in Scripture, picking up a line here, a precept there, weaving the words of the Lord into a tangled hank of half-truths that has no discernable shape … unfortunately, they are. They are drunk on the heady brew of their own self-importance; they may or may not be physically drunk but they are all drunk on the nectar of the Adversary, mimicking the words of the one they deem God’s essential endtime man, who used the following translated passage from Isaiah to deceive a people:
To whom will He teach
knowledge,
and to whom will He
explain the message?
Those who are weaned
from the milk,
those taken from the
breast?
For it is precept
[rule] upon precept [rule], precept [rule] upon precept
[rule],
line upon line, line
upon line,
here a little, there a little.” (28:9–10)
Will God teach infants able only to ingest milk the precepts or rules embedded in Scripture? Are infants—Christians like the saints at Corinth to whom Paul wrote (1 Cor 3:1–3), or like the Hebrews (Heb 5:12–14) who should have been teachers but were in need of being taught the fundamental concepts of God—the ones to whom the Lord will explain His message? Are infants even able to understand the meat of the word of God? Are infants able to understand dual referents or metaphorical language? … No, they are not; therefore with stammering of lip and with a people of another tongue (translated as, “For by people of strange lips / and with a foreign tongue / the Lord will speak to this people” [Israel] — Isa 28:11), the Lord will deliver to Israel His message about giving rest to the weary.
The Lord will speak so that Israel, the nation now circumcised of heart (i.e., the Christian Church, and specifically, the Sabbatarian Church), will notbe able to understand His words.
Yes, the above is correct: understanding has not been given to spiritual infants, Sabbatarian Christians who refuse to grow or who are unable to grow because of damage done to them by the so-called essential endtime man, who taught them to take meaning from Scripture by reading here a little, there a little.
the Lord will speak to
this people
to whom He has
said,
“This is
rest;
give rest to the
weary;
and this is
repose”;
yet they would not
hear.
And the word of the
Lord will be to them
precept upon precept,
precept upon precept,
line upon line, line
upon line,
here a little, there a
little,
that they may go, and
fall backward,
and be broken, and
snared, and taken. (Isa 28:11–13)
In this age of universal translators, how would it be possible for the Lord to speak to Christians by stammering lips and through another language? What language is not understood by Christians? Metaphorical speech, perhaps—
There is no worse way to study Scripture than rule or precept upon rule or precept, line upon line, here a little, there a little; for studying Scripture by following topics or words from passage to passage will inevitably cause the Christian to fall away from God, be broken, snared, and captured by the Adversary … is Sabbatarian Christendom one with God? Are Sabbatarians one with each other? Or are Sabbatarians one with lawless Christendom? Is not studying Scripture here a little, there a little the principle means through which the Adversary has caused schisms and divisions within the Sabbatarian churches of God? So why would any Christian continue to advocate following the footsteps of the drunken priest of Ephraim? Why would any Christian choose death over life—and that is exactly what the Christian, and especially the Sabbatarian who takes meaning from Scripture through precept upon precept, line upon line, does. The Christian would rather be “right” in his or her own eyes than hear the words of God.
In the scope of history, two millennia is not an excessively long time, but the amount of physical knowledge available to endtime disciples far exceeds what was available to disciples in the 1st-Century CE. The amount of knowledge in common circulation in the 21st-Century exceeds what was available in the 20th-Century. And studying Scripture here a little, there a little prevents grasping the realities of a dimension without time, a dimension where there shall be [one] day, which is known to the Lord, neither day nor night, but at evening time there shall be light (Zech 14:7).
The stumbling block that tripped natural Israel; the stumbling block that is Christ Jesus, the stone laid as a foundation in Zion (cf. Isa 28:16–17; 1 Pet 2:1–8)—this stumbling block caused outwardly circumcised Israel to fall away from God. This same stumbling stone now causes circumcised-of-heart Israel to turn its back on the Lord as these Sabbatarian Christians stop their ears with their thumbs so that they cannot hear the words of God.
Whereas Christ should cause the circumcised-of-heart Israelite to make justice the horizontal line and righteousness the plumb line (the “x” and “y” axes) upon which the house of God is constructed, one living stone upon another living stone, with the Apostle Paul having laid the foundation for this house in the 1st-Century when he wrote spiritual milk to disciples not able to handle solid spiritual food—this stumbling stone that is Christ trips Sabbatarian Christians in this endtime era; for this stumbling stone discloses knowledge that the glorified Jesus is the vessel within every born-of-God Christian that holds indwelling eternal life: as a “jar” held manna, the physical bread that came from heaven, in the wood Ark of the Covenant that Moses constructed in the wilderness, the “breath of Christ” [pneuma Christos] (Rom 8:9) [the indwelling of Christ Jesus in the form of His “breath”] resides in every born-again disciple where it functions as the vessel able to “hold” the bright fire that is the glory of the Father, the bright fire that gives eternal life to the formerly dead inner self of the disciple. And Sabbatarian Christendom’s refusal to accept that Christians are truly born of God through receipt of a second breath of life, the breath of God [pneuma Theon], has caused Sabbatarian Christians to fall backwards, away from God. For when born of God as actual sons of God as angels are sons of God (see Job 1:6; 2:1; 38:7 for example texts), circumcised-of-heart Israelites are to appear before the Lord three times a year; they are to appear at “fixed” seasons that were established by Christ Jesus death at Calvary. Hence, Christ has become the living stumbling stone over which Sabbatarian Christians stumble.
But those Sabbatarians that cling to the teachings of the essential endtime man will argue that Christians are not yet like angels, but is that really true, considering that rebelling [fallen] angels are confined in outer darkness [the creation] as the inner selves of Christians are presented housed in tents of flesh that have no life in the heavenly realm and can never have life in the heavens …
Although time and its passage still challenges theoretical physics, a dimension without time functions as an intellectual stumbling block for everyone who is physically-minded, to the Jew first, then to the Gentile convert to Christianity; for in such a dimension there would be no mass, no flesh, no dissenting churches of God, no separateness. In a dimension without time, the Higgs field, if it exists, would not serve as molasses to attach mass to force vectors.
In a dimension without time (time and its passage can be written as mathematical functions of gravity; hence time is mass-dependent), activity would erase the record of previous activity: there would only be the present. There would be no historical trace recorded in dusty texts. There would be neither yesterday nor tomorrow. There would only be the existing moment, with no decay of the moment. Thus, the present would be as a room in which a dance of oneness occurs, with the dance moves erasing previous dance moves. All of those things that are physical and that require the passage of one moment into the next moment for relocation from one set of coordinates to another set of coordinates would be frozen in place as if they were unmovable stones … if a person could be bodily raptured into heaven, the person would be as lifeless and as unmovable as a boulder in Idaho’s City of Rocks. In whatever position the person bodily entered heaven, the person would remain, forever.
· Reality dictates that without the passage of time, nothing physical [nothing that possesses mass] can exist; for mass itself creates time, with the passage of time coming through decay of matter possessing mass.
· The inner self—the person who died when the first Adam ate the mingled fruit of the Tree of Knowledge—is not physical, does not possess mass, and cannot be seen with human eyes or measured by micrometers.
It is about the dead inner self of Israelites, the firstborn son of Yah (Ex 4:22), that Jesus said, Follow Me and permit the dead to bury the, of themselves, dead (Matt 8:22) … in order for the dead to bury the dead of themselves, “the dead” must be physically living. And in order for the dead to be physically living, it isn’t the physical body that represents the person but an inner self that even when dead still animates the fleshly body so that the enlivened fleshly body is able to bury no-longer-enlivened fleshly bodies.
What Jesus’ first disciples did not well understand is that the fleshly body is not the person. Greek philosophers sensed but also didn’t understand the nuances of the fleshly body not being the person; for the Greeks borrowed from the Egyptians the concept of human beings having indwelling immortal souls, a concept that for centuries was rejected by Hebrew theologians but sadly was beginning to be accepted by the 1st-Century because of Greek occupation of the Promised Land throughout the 2nd and 3rd Centuries BCE and Roman occupation in the 1st-Centuries BCE and CE.
By the end of the 1st-Century CE, Christendom had borrowed the pagan concept of human beings having indwelling immortal souls from birth. The dead that were to bury the dead of themselves were no longer really dead: their immortal souls merely needed regenerated for they were only separated from God until they accepted Jesus of Nazareth as their Savior; so prayers were made to Mary, mother of God, for the souls of sinners caught betwixt and between heaven and earth. Candles were lit. Rosaries were prayed. And Greek paganism passed itself off as Christianity to a dead world in which the dead made war against themselves in the name of Christ, making for themselves ever more dead to bury as if the goal of Christianity were to kill the dead of this world in such a manner that the dead would never live when drawn by the Father from this world.
The outer person (i.e., the fleshly body of the person) reveals through its actions the invisible inner person that is not of this world. It is this inner person that died when Adam ate forbidden fruit, not the fleshly body of Adam that lived for 930 years (Gen 5:5), with almost all of these years coming after eating forbidden fruit. Likewise, when Nebuchadnezzar had his mind changed from that of a man to that of a beast; when Nebuchadnezzar had the spirit of man taken from him and was given the spirit of a beast for seven years, Nebuchadnezzar didn’t outwardly become a beast [an ox] but remained in the fleshly body of a man (Dan chap 4). So it isn’t the fleshly body of a person that represents the person, but the inner self that is dead until it is resurrected from death through receipt of a second breath of life, the breath of the Father [pneuma Theon]. And when this inner self is made alive, passing from death to life without coming under judgment (John 5:24), is not this inner self that is a son of God (Gal 3:26–4:7) dwelling in a spiritually lifeless tent of flesh like an angel confined in time [the creation] that is passing away (1 John 2:17)? Indeed, this inner self—this son of God—is like an angel in outer darkness in that when judgments are revealed, if the mortal flesh does not put on immortality through the Son to whom all judgment has been given (John 5:22) giving to the person “life” as the Father gave life to the person when He raised the inner self from death in a resurrection like Jesus’, the revealing type and shadow of the resurrection of the inner self by the Father and of the fleshly body by the Son.
Both the Father and His Christ must give life to a human being before this person can enter heaven as a son of God. Likewise, both the Father and the Body of Christ must condemn a fallen angel before this angel as a son of God perishes in the lake of fire. The Father is consistent: a thing is not established by the testimony of one, but by the testimony of two or three, even in granting immortality to human sons of God or in stripping immortality from angelic sons of God.
But no human son of God will judge an angelic son of God until this human son of God rightly judges himself, for the physical precedes the spiritual: rightly judging the physical [the fleshly body of Christ, individually and collectively] must necessarily precede judging the spiritual [angelic sons of God].
In the age before super colliders, the world knew little about bosons, subatomic particles that when having the same energy can occupy the same place in space, obeying Bose-Einstein statistics, thereby reserving paradoxes for fermions, particles that obey Fermi-Dirac statistics (two or more fermions cannot occupy the same time and space). There are four elementary “observed” bosons, the gauge bosons—y, g, W, Z—plus the postulated Higgs boson.
What’s to be made of particles with integer spin (as opposed to fermions with half-integer spins) that are able to occupy the same space at the same time? How does such knowledge affect Christianity? Seventeenth Century Puritans were not particularly troubled by paradoxes, but Christians since Kant have soundly rejected the theology of their predecessors: Christianity became less magical and more logical as Western cultures rejected shape-shifters, lamia, and the dead burying the dead of themselves. Logic had to be applied to even the Bible, which failed to hold up to the new criticism. The intellectual elite rejected simple faith and began to speak about social justice and collective salvation and the commandments being principles for Christian living: the Ten Commandments became the ten suggestions, with Suggestion Four appearing as Suggestion Three in Catholic Bibles so that the plaster statuary of Catholicism need not be smashed, thereby returning dust to dust.
Dead Christianity continued its death slumber, not to be awakened for another three-plus centuries; dead Christianity will not awaken until the soon-to-occur Second Passover liberation of Israel.
The logical limitations Kant and other German philosophers placed upon Christianity in the 18th-Century came from their ignorance. Unfortunately, their limitations continue to hamper Christian understanding of the mysteries of God; for the greater Christian Church is of this world, with its ability to grasp the mysteries of God limited by its physical-mindedness. Faith allegedly plasters over its unbelief, but not really for Christian unbelief is publicly manifested every Sabbath which the greater Christian Church celebrates by making it the busiest shopping day of the week … is there any reason why God should not, after resurrecting the Church from death, deliver spiritually living Christians into the hand of the Adversary for the destruction of the flesh? Today, these same Christians mock the Father and the Son through their lawlessness: they thumb their noses at God; they demand that God accept them just as they are. And God will resurrect them to life just as they are today: God will fill them with spirit, His breath, so that they can keep the commandments. But because it isn’t their habit to keep the commandments, they won’t when they have the power to do so; thus, they will perish in the lake of fire.
In Revelation chapter 21, the coming of the new heaven and new earth that is not physical but of heaven is seen … those things that are physical possess mass whereas those things that are of heaven do not. Again, time and the passage of time can be written as mathematical functions of gravity, the expression of mass’ attraction upon mass. Thus, heaven [a metaphorical naming expression for a supra-dimension] and those things within “heaven” are without time: the present moment is unchanging and doesn’t decay into the next moment. What was must necessarily coexist with what is and what will be, with this unchanging moment seen in there being one day, a unique day, that is neither day nor night, winter nor summer, a day without need of sun or moon, “for the glory of God gives it light” (Rev 21:23).
Human beings, because their fleshly bodies possess mass, cannot bodily enter heaven, the readily apparent error of all Christians who believe in a bodily Rapture to heaven. Whereas those living entities of heaven can possess solidity when present in time, an enigma suggesting the Higgs field, seldom is a heavenly entity seen with human eyes or touched with fingers as in the case of Thomas (John 20:27–28) touching the glorified Jesus’ wounds. Rather, most often heavenly entities are seen in visions which themselves have no mass, no solidity.
The inner person or self or creature—the Apostle Paul’s old man or new man—is not physical, but is “revealed” or made visible by the fleshly body of the person … the Lord God [YHWH Elohim] took the first Adam, the man made from red mud, and put him in the garden of Eden to work it and keep it (Gen 2:15), and the Lord God told Adam, “‘You may surely eat of every tree of the garden, but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat [or in the day when you eat] of it you shall surely die’” (vv. 16–17).
But what happened when the day came when Adam ate forbidden fruit?
Now the serpent was more crafty than any other beast of the field that the Lord God had made. / He said to the woman, “Did God actually say, ‘You shall not eat of any tree in the garden’?” And the woman said to the serpent, “We may eat of the fruit of the trees in the garden, but God said, ‘You shall not eat of the fruit of the tree that is in the midst of the garden, neither shall you touch it, lest you die.’” But the serpent said to the woman, “You will not surely die. For God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.” So when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was a delight to the eyes, and that the tree was to be desired to make one wise, she took of its fruit and ate, and she also gave some to her husband who was with her, and he ate. Then the eyes of both were opened, and they knew that they were naked. And they sewed fig leaves together and made themselves loincloths. / And they heard the sound of the Lord God walking in the garden in the cool of the day, and the man and his wife hid themselves from the presence of the Lord God among the trees of the garden. But the Lord God called to the man and said to him, “Where are you?” And he said, “I heard the sound of you in the garden, and I was afraid, because I was naked, and I hid myself.” He said, “Who told you that you were naked? Have you eaten of the tree of which I commanded you not to eat?” The man said, “The woman whom you gave to be with me, she gave me fruit of the tree, and I ate.” Then the Lord God said to the woman, “What is this that you have done?” The woman said, “The serpent deceived me, and I ate.” …
And to Adam [the Lord God] said,
“Because you have listened to the voice of your wife / and have eaten of the tree / of which I commanded you, / ‘You shall not eat of it,’ / cursed is the ground because of you; / in pain you shall eat of it all the days of your life; / thorns and thistles it shall bring forth for you; / and you shall eat the plants of the field. / By the sweat of your face / you shall eat bread, / till you return to the ground, / for out of it you were taken; / for you are dust, / and to dust you shall return.”
The man called his wife's name Eve, because she was the mother of all living. And the Lord God made for Adam and for his wife garments of skins and clothed them.
Then the Lord God said, “Behold, the man has become like one of us in knowing good and evil. Now, lest he reach out his hand and take also of the tree of life and eat, and live forever—” therefore the Lord God sent him out from the garden of Eden to work the ground from which he was taken. He drove out the man, and at the east of the Garden of Eden he placed the cherubim and a flaming sword that turned every way to guard the way to the tree of life. (Gen 3:1–13, 17–24 emphasis added)
Adam died when he ate, for with eating came knowledge that he was naked: he was no longer covered by obedience. His inner self died though his body lived in a land of thorns and thistles.
Why is it so difficult for Sabbatarian Christians to believe God? Either the Lord meant what He said when he told Adam that in the day when he would eat forbidden fruit he would surely die, or He didn’t. If the word of the Lord is to be taken literally, Adam died when he ate; Adam died when he realized that he was naked. But Adam didn’t physically die, and wouldn’t physically die for centuries. Hence, either the inner self of Adam died as the Lord God said would happen, with this inner self representing the man Adam, or “death” is not death, the absence of life, but separation from God as Evangelical Christendom teaches. Either way, Scripture cannot be read literally. So the Christian who ignorantly says that Scripture is his or her only guide is as dull of hearing as ancient Israel was.
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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."