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 invisibility.
Weekly Readings
For the Sabbath of October 21, 2006
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.
The person conducting the service should read or assign to be read Romans chapter 1.
Commentary: What does it mean that the righteous shall live by faith (v. 17)?
The answer to the above question separates Christians from the world … keeping the commandments, having the true name for the Body of Christ, correctly pronouncing the name of the Messiah, professing the name of Jesus with one’s mouth, saying the sinner’s prayer—none of these produce the faith that will be counted as righteousness. The heart is cleansed by a journey of faith from the land of one’s nativity to the Promised Land. And since Calvary, this journey has been mental, not physical. The distance traveled is from the far land of disobedience to spiritual Judea where the disciple will live by faith as a Judean, keeping the precepts of the law, doing those things that will cause a person to be holy. The person will mentally come out of the world while his or her body remains in the world. Thus, this person will present his or her members [the flesh] to God as instruments of righteousness (Rom 6:12-14), thereby no longer giving to sin dominion through presenting his or her members as obedient servants to lawlessness. By faith, the person will choose to keep the precepts of the law on the person’s day of salvation. And when having made this choice of obedience by faith, Christ Jesus will sculpt the person into a vessel intended for honored usage, effectively removing from the person the option of returning to the world. Jesus takes control of the person and assumes responsibility for the person’s salvation. Therefore, the person does not get credit for anything but choosing life when the promise of entering into God’s rest was open to the person. Everything else is done to the person, a clay vessel made from the same lump that could have been made into a vessel of wrath if the person had chosen death through continuing to live by the social constructs informing the person’s surrounding world.
Most individuals who will read or hear this message live in the Western World, the cultures that have developed from Greco-Roman thought. Most are more highly influenced by the social constructs informing Western cultures than they presently believe. Most are truly products of not the mindset of Christ Jesus, but the mindset of the spiritual king of Greece, the great or first horn of the he-goat that flies out of the west to trample the spiritual king of Persia. Thus, most Christians today are more influenced by demonic princes than by the Father or the Son—and this influence is accepted as “natural,” or the way things ought to be.
What most American Christians believe is “natural,” the unalterable behavior of the human species—of behavior patterns created by God and ordained by God—is actually social constructs originating from the two legs of ancient Hellenism. These constructs are foundational thought paradigms that begin outside of, or beyond conscious thought; they are the girders of the unconscious mind; and the Apostle Paul wrote that disciples prior to conversion followed the course of this world, “following the prince of the power of the air, the spirit that is now at work in the sons of disobedience” (Eph 2:2). Thus, for Paul, social constructs originate with the prince of this world. They are the means through which the prince of this world reigns over a humanity consigned to disobedience (Rom 11:32), and they are in place wherever human beings dwell so it is though having control over these foundational thought paradigms that the prince of this world, the spiritual king of Babylon (Isa 14:4-21), actually rules ‘“the children of men”’ as the prophet Daniel told King Nebuchadnezzar how he ruled over men at the pleasure of God (Dan 2:37-38).
It is always error to teach or assume that the prince of this world reigns or will reign prior to the seven endtime years through human governments. The prince of this world is not looking to come to power through a new world order or through secret societies; he is already in power. He has been in power since Adam and Eve were driven from the garden of God. The Apostle Paul wrote, “Do you not know that if you present yourselves to anyone as obedient slaves, you are slaves of the one whom you obey, either of sin, which leads to death, or of obedience, which leads to righteousness” (Rom 6:16). Adam and Eve presented themselves as servants to disobedience, and were consigned to disobedience through becoming the bondservants to that old serpent, the defeated but still reigning prince of this world. And the children of bondservants are the property of their parents’ master; hence, the child of every descendant of the first Adam has been consigned to disobedience from birth. Only the man Jesus, the only Son of Theos (John 3:16), has been born of woman as a child not consigned from birth to disobedience. Only the man Jesus was unaffected by the foundational paradigms through which the prince of this world rules.
Historically, the social paradigms of Western civilization are said to have two legs, long identified as Hebrew and Greek, or Judeo-Christian and Greco-Roman. But such identifications of these legs assume that Christ Jesus has somehow or at sometime reigned over the subconscious minds of humankind, and that has simply not been the case: the social constructs that would have originated from Christ Jesus cannot support paradigms of disobedience; thus, they must be excluded from the paradigms undergirding this present world, a convoluted way of saying that Christians are in this world but not of this world (John 17:11, 15-16). Christians cannot partake of the things of this world and not succumb to the lure of this world. Christians cannot participate in the politics of this world without returning to being a part of this world. Jesus told Pilate that His kingdom was not of this world and not from this world (John 18:36), and indeed, it is not—the social constructs of Christ are alien to all that produces disobedience to the laws of God.
Without exception, the constructs of this world produce disobedience to the laws of God. The Christian Church’s appropriation of Sunday as its day of worship is pious disobedience through willful transgression of the Sabbath commandment. As such, the visible Christian Church is based upon readily identifiable constructs of this world, and reveals itself to not be of God but to be of the spiritual king of Greece, a vassal king to the old serpent, Satan the devil.
One leg of Western civilization stands on the image or the surface of things—upon the hard cold line or edge perceived by a piercing gaze. All that is defined by its surface and its form is of this Apollonian leg that seeks to rule nature through the elevation of human thought and imagination. It is from this leg that ancient Greek philosophers assigned to mortal human beings an immortal soul imprisoned in the flesh, awaiting release at death. It is from this leg that loathing of the flesh and its weaknesses came; that repudiation of sexual activity even within marriage entered Christianity. This leg sees an austere black and white world. This leg elevates death and going to heaven, the domain of the sky-gods that fight wars without shedding blood.
The other leg of western civilization, once co-joined with the gaze in Egypt where the surface and the interior of objects were united in honeycombed pyramids that were funeral tombs precisely oriented with celestial bodies, is the dark, wet, undefined underworld of nature as the eternal womb. This is the Dionysian world of wine and milk, blood and bodily fluids, grottos and bedchambers. This is the world of female experience, of female conquest through the recycling of natural processes, of female deification.
Greek converts to Christianity in Hellenist fellowships left the Apostle Paul while he yet lived (2 Tim 1:15), and with leaving Paul, these converts left the foundation that is Christ (1 Cor 3:10-11), laid in the heavenly city of Jerusalem by the Apostle. They left because they could not escape being Greek. They could not rid themselves of Apollonian and Dionysian constructs that informed their perception of truth.
But it is to the practices and writings of the same errant Greek fellowships that left Paul that endtime disciples practicing grammatico-historical exegesis turn when diligently searching for sound doctrine, a situation that would be comical if the stakes were not loss of spiritual life through the second death. Literally, the bet every Christian wages on his or her day of salvation is that God does or doesn’t mean that disciples are to live by every word that proceeds from the mouth of God (Matt 4:4). Those who bet that He doesn’t enter 8th-day fellowships that have been constructed on Hellenistic thought; those who bet that He does mean what He says begin to live as spiritual Judeans, as legalists, that pejorative signifier attached to all Sabbatarian disciples by the lawless Church.
The stakes are entrance into the kingdom of heaven … Jesus said that the person who keeps the commandments and teaches others to do likewise will be called great in the kingdom of heaven (Matt 5:19). Thus, betting that God means what He says about living by every word that has proceeded from His mouth will cause a person to be called great in the kingdom, but betting against God meaning what He says will result in eternal damnation, which isn’t separation from God but being tossed into the lake of fire without the perishable body having put on imperishability; without mortality putting on immortality. Jesus said not to be surprised when some disciples (those who have done good) are resurrected to life and some are resurrected to judgment or to damnation (John 5:28-29); therefore, it should not surprise disciples that some disciples will by faith keep the precepts of the law (cf. Rom 2:26; Matt 5:19) while others will continue to practice the same disobedience or lawlessness they had pursued before receiving the Holy Spirit (Matt 7:21-23). Those disciples who continue in disobedience have teachers that today quote from Paul just as those Greek fellowships that left Paul quoted from his epistles.
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The reader should now read Romans chapter 6.
Commentary: Quoting from what has just been read isn’t usual in these readings, but this is the exception:
Let not sin therefore reign in your mortal bodies, to make you obey their [mortal bodies] passions. Do not present your members to sin as instruments for unrighteousness, but present yourselves to God as those who have been brought from death to life, and your members to God as instruments for righteousness.… For just as you once presented your members as slaves to impurity and to lawlessness leading to more lawlessness, so now present your members as slaves to righteousness leading to sanctification. (Rom 6:12-13, 19)
The person who presents his or her members [the person’s fleshly body] to sin or lawlessness (1 John 3:4) makes him or herself a slave to sin … again, the state of every person descended from Adam is as a slave to sin, for God consigned all to sin so that He could have mercy upon all (Rom 11:32). But this state changes when the Father draws the person from the world (John 6:44, 65) through spiritual birth. The person is set free from sin (Rom 8:2) if the person [the old self] is crucified with Christ (Rom 6:6-7). The old self dies on the cross, but the person who dies on the cross dies slowly from suffocation. If the old self dies slowly, continuing to live for years in the same tent of flesh as the born of Spirit new self, the infant son of God is “spoiled” by the decay and disbelieve of the old self. This son of God will inevitably continue to present his members [the flesh] to sin as instruments for unrighteousness, thereby voluntarily giving to sin what sin had no dominion over.
The liberated person who chooses to transgress the commandments in even one point breaks the law of God and makes this son of God a servant of sin and subject to the lake of fire. This new son of God, still in the womb of Isaac, makes himself into part of the hated son of promise (cf. Gal 4:21-31; Rom 9:6-13; Mal 1:2-3; Gen 25:21-26) against whom sin is not today reckoned because of Grace and the possibility that this yet unborn hated son will repent, cleansing himself from what is dishonorable (2 Tim 2:20-21). Without repentance, though, this Christian will be resurrected to damnation because he or she voluntarily made him or herself a servant of sin.
The liberated person who lives by every word that has proceeded from the mouth of God will, in trying to keep the precepts of the law, accidentally transgress the law, but these transgressions are also covered by Grace, the righteousness of Christ Jesus. This is the beloved son of promise, deceitful by birth but one who prevails with God through wrestling with the laws of God in a society that supports and actually encourages lawlessness. This is, again, the deceitful son of promise that comes to perfection through much striving against the social constructs that inform society.
Returning to the liberated disciple who chooses to transgress the least of the commandments, the Sabbath commandment, the Grace that is today extended to this disciple by he or she presently being in the womb of the last Eve will be withdrawn when the judgment of this disciple is revealed: the disciple who has not attempted to keep the commandments remains under the law and condemned by it, for this person did not present his or her members to God as instruments for righteousness while the disciple physically lived. Thus, to be under Grace when the judgment of the born of Spirit disciple is revealed, the disciple must present his or her members to God as instruments for righteousness, meaning that the disciple must earnestly attempt to keep the precepts of the law. By faith, this disciple must mentally leave spiritual Babylon and journey to spiritual Jerusalem, a city with theological rather than geographical coordinates. And once in the heavenly city, the disciple must remain there as a spiritual Levite, part of the royal priesthood, holy to God (1 Pet 2:9)—again, the disciple must begin to live as a spiritual Judean.
Spiritual Babylon also does not have geographical coordinates, but is the single kingdom of the world that becomes the Father’s and His Son’s (cf. Rev 11:15; Dan 7:9-14) when Satan is cast from heaven (Rev 12:9-10). So a disciple cannot physically escape from spiritual Babylon, but must mentally leave when liberated by spiritual birth—and as Pharaoh went after Israel to recover his liberated slaves, Satan goes after disciples singularly and collectively to recover his former mental bondservants.
Living by faith as a spiritual Judean means rejecting the Greek social constructs upon which Western culture is built, and here is where the greater Church ran into problems in the middle of the 1st-Century CE: living as a spiritual Judean calls for rejecting what the eye sees. The Apostle John wrote,
Do not love the world or the things in the world. If anyone loves the world, the love of the Father is not in him. For all that is in the world—the desires of the flesh and the desires of the eyes and the pride in possessions—is not of the Father but is from the world. And the world is passing away along with its desires, but whoever does the will of the God abides forever. (1 John 2:15-17)
In so doing, John creates a correspondence between desires of the eyes and desires of the flesh, with the desires of the eyes now corresponding to the surface of things [and people] and to the gaze that transforms people into objects and personifies objects, and the desires of the flesh corresponding to the formless wet interior of nature as womb.
The social, literary, art critic Camille Paglia wrote in Sexual Personae, “There is nothing less erotic than a nudist colony. Desire is intensified by ritual limitations. Hence the mask, harness, and chains of sadomasochism … decadence is a disease of the eye, a sexual intensification of artistic voyeurism” (SP 36) that occurs in the late phase of a culture. She also said, “Judeo-Christianity has failed to control the pagan western eye. Our thought processes were formed in Greece and inherited by Rome, whose language remains the official voice of the Catholic church. Intellectual inquiry and logic are pagan. Every inquiry is preceded by a roving eye; and once the eye begins to rove, it cannot be morally controlled” (SP 33). By this criteria, amoral scientific inquiry is high paganism, with scientists the priests of the objectifying gaze. Paglia further writes [same paragraph], “Judaism, due to its fear of the eye, put a taboo on visual representation.… Christianity followed suit, until it drifted into pictorialism to appeal to the pagan masses.” Thus, eye-intense paganism, “based on cultic exhibitionism, in which sex and sadomasochism are joined” extends directly from Roman statuary to Hollywood cinema, a “sexual showing, a pagan flaunting,” the restoration of “pagan antiquity’s cultic exhibitionism. Spectacle is a pagan cult of the eye” (SP 33).
But returning to the Apostle Paul epistle to the Romans, Paul anticipates Paglia’s argument:
For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men, who by their unrighteousness suppress the truth.… And since they [those who suppress the truth by their unrighteousness] did not see fit to acknowledge God, God gave them up to a debased mind to do what ought not to be done. They were filled will all manner of unrighteousness, evil, covetousness, malice. They are full of envy, murder, strife, deceit, maliciousness. They are gossips, slanders, haters of God, insolent, haughty, boastful, inventors of evil, disobedient to parents, foolish, faithless, heartless, ruthless. Though they know God’s decree that those who practice such things deserve to die, they not only do them but give approval to those who practice them. (Rom 1:18, 28-32)
Who suppresses the truth by their unrighteousness? Not now the world! But teachers of lawlessness who claim to be wise though they are fools who have exchanged the glory of God for idols of all sorts, dishonoring their bodies in secret affairs and in shameless acts of perversion that commonly make newspaper headlines. It isn’t just the Roman Church with its altar-boy scandals or Evangelical televangelists with prostitutes, but it is the affair that the visible Church has with demons which most dishonors the Body of Christ. Outwardly mild-mannered pastors are inwardly full of envy, murder, strife, deceit as they divvy up disciples within a city as if tithe-paying members were gold-bearing ore waiting to be mined and smelted. They know God’s decrees, but they don’t believe God. They believe, instead, the traditions of men as they approve divorces and now abhorrent sexual behavior, even to sanctifying gay pastors.
What Paul lists are the crimes from which Western society provides a slim degree of protection by social contract, relegating these crimes to spectacle on large and small screens. They are the diseased desires of the flesh and of the eye that give birth to beauty as power and power as beauty, the apt description of female and male relationships in modern America. The juxtaposition of a feminized nature using her beauty as power against capitalist masculine aggression that sees power as beauty forms the backdrop for Christian political intervention that attempts to contain the chthonian womb of sexual experience through the erect church spire, a conceptual phallic symbol that has not yet been “softened” and made impudent by the silver screen. Both the spectacle and the spire become pagan extensions of edges and the erect line separated by unbridgeable distance. Thus, when the spire turns to spectacle as in the Left Behind series of books and movies, the crimes from which society provided a degree of protection are incorporated into the mores of the prevailing power, turning the power ugly but also unbelievable.
The church spire of the silver screen includes and excludes through cultic ritual controlled by human beings, thereby imbuing personal decisions [making a decision for Christ through praying the sinners’ prayer] with the life and death powers of God, making human utterance the pinnacle of evolutionary nature and transforming Christianity into white witchcraft. Instead of the spire prevailing over nature, the silver screen transformed the castrated spire into the visual image of the invisible God, thus transforming a theology of lawlessness into lawless spectacle. In Evangelical Christianity’s attempt to appeal to [and convert] the pagan masses, it reveals to observers its pagan roots that were somewhat concealed through having made the Books its primary idol in the 16th-Century … Evangelical Christianity is a modern derivative of the ancient Apollonian sky cult that feared the chthonian underworld of fluids, grottos, bowers, and wombs, a fear inherent in the invisible fluidity of Pneuma ’Agion [the Holy Spirit] that Christianity thought to contain through the 5th-Century CE assignment of personhood and humanlike characteristics to what is like wind. But Apollonian sky cults can never contain fluids and merriment even though many Evangelical fellowships forbid any consumption of alcoholic beverages and dancing. These stern fellowships, however, have declined in cultural significance as spectacle turned to sporting events and “tailgating parties,” with the annually-played Super Bowl becoming the spectacle successor to feeding Christians to lions in pagan Rome’s Coliseum.
Believing that praying the sinners’ prayer directs the otherwise hell-bound immortal soul skyward to heaven gives to the person imagined control over the person’s fate, and transfers to the person the power to bestow everlasting life onto him or herself, thereby determining ahead of time (before when judgments are revealed [1 Cor 4:5]) what, according to Scripture, cannot be known until Christ Jesus returns as the Messiah. In this pagan belief paradigm, the chthonian underworld is the terrifying default state of every person; it is the woman’s world of pain and fire, the inner hearth upon which every soul that hasn’t uttered the exclusionary prayer of white witchery roasts forever in flames not quite hot enough to consume and destroy. And God in this belief paradigm is made in man’s image, with His ability to judge constrained by human utterance of the sinners’ prayer; God is no more than Apollo was. In a very real sense, this belief paradigm elevates humankind over God through using Scripture to support God being the servant of men.
But in white witchery, God is also the socially comfortable ruling class, blonde with fair-complexion, that allegedly exists to serve the darker featured downtrodden by keeping them from being overcome by the flames of hell. So God becomes the servant that reigns over humanity consigned to disobedience—in this pagan belief paradigm, the prince of the power of the air [the prince of this world] is the deity to whom sinners’ prayers are uttered.
Greek gods were not beasts as were Egyptian and Mesopotamian gods, but intelligent men and women who lived forever in undiminished beauty. They were like Renaissance paintings of the man Jesus, an androgynous image that probably better represents the Adversary than any Jew so ordinary in features that he could disappear into a crowd. The prophet Isaiah wrote concerning the One who would be wounded for Israel’s transgressions, “[H]e had no form or majesty that we should look at him, and no beauty that we should desire him” (53:2). Renaissance artists painted their version of Apollo and called their sky deity Jesus so that the pagans whom they were attempting to convert would adopt the civilizing constructs underpinning a culture based on Greek thought.
When the Apollonian leg of Western civilization asserts itself, androgyny prevails. The form of young boys becomes the pinnacle of beauty. But when the Dionysian leg prevails, transsexual behavior comes out of the closet and begins to appear as spectacle: life becomes performance art, with what had been hidden from, or suppressed by the Apollonian leg gaining not only public acceptable but advocacy with sexual transformation becoming the theatrical merging of nature with what has been man-made.
The cultural dominancy of these separated but once co-joined Greek legs produces a simultaneous repudiation of, and surrender to nature, which bestows upon humankind biological attributes of sex that are physically embraced [Dionysus] and mentally rejected [Apollo]. Homosexuality is the triumph of the mind [the imagination] over nature, with the mind producing sterile offspring that only satisfy with lifelessness experience. And such, male with male homosexuality is of Apollo; is of sky cults and surfaces. But transvestism that results in the sexual personae of male lesbianism [male as female with female], an apparent oxymoronic expression, is nature triumphing over the imagination, thereby imprisoning the male psyche in female experience, and is of Dionysus.
Although the male homosexual as well as the male lesbian will reject all insistence that anything but nature gave to them the sexual persona he enacts as biologically contrary performance (both will be correct in their assertions that they were psychologically created as they are), each fails to grasp what humanistic psychology has failed to explain: the mental topograpyy of human beings is the territory over which the asexual prince of this world and his angels reign. Thus, both sexual personae are as natural as is war, which isn’t of God but of the old serpent.
Greek culture overwhelmed early Christians: the reviled Circumcision Faction consciously resisted Apollonian image-making and objectification of the invisible God, but in doing so, these converted Jews succumbed to the darkness of Dionysian nature that concealed the spiritual things of God from disciples. The Circumcision Faction required disciples to bloody what was most hidden from public view in the ritual mangling of the flesh that fit with the violence of Dionysian sparagmos. The Apostle Paul truly wished that those who caused Hellenistic converts in Galatia to begin to circumcise themselves would mangle their own penises [would castrate themselves] (Gal 5:12).
Today, Apollonian image-making and Dionysian mother cults continue to exert control over the Christianity of the Orthodox and Catholic churches—and somewhat surprisingly, in a moderated form, over the Arian Mormon church, with its temple rituals that only initiates can observe. Secret rituals and secret societies begin in darkness and flourish in darkness: they exist without definition as individuals shrink into faceless groups with influence undefined by boundaries. They are Dionysian; they are socially transvestite organizations, female bodies with male muscles and aggression clad in gray flannel that is transparent in the light of day, leaving nothing to see and nothing that cannot be imagined. And the greater Christian Church is the most secret of all secret societies, for even God cannot be certain who is genuine and who isn’t until He disrobes this woman through empowerment by the Holy Spirit at the beginning of the seven endtime years. Then what each Christian is within the person will be revealed by the actions of the liberated disciple. The empowered mind will rule over nature, thus producing a tripart Christological schism represented by the geography of ancient Eden, with Assyria being the domain of Unitarians, Judea the home of Binitarians, and Egypt the land of Trinitarians. The kings of the North [Assyria] and of the South [Egypt] shall battle each other for control of the Promised Land—the king of the North shall prevail until broken by Christ Jesus fighting on a day of battle.
The two legs of Western culture stand on shifting sand: one leg is Apollonian science coupled to the Christianity of icons, images, image-making, and divisions into denominations. The other leg is Dionysian spectacle coupled to secret societies, especially the one that foregrounds reverence for the mother and child cult. The Christianity of the Apostle Paul ceased having a cultural effect before the 1st-Century ended: again, with Rome sacking Jerusalem, burning the temple, and taking Jews into slavery, the so-called Hebraic leg of Western culture was swallowed by asexual and transsexual Greeks. Within a second generation of Christian converts, no Christianity remained: prayers to an invisible God were focused through visible statuary and the fire of lighted candles. In the bowels of early persecution a new religion emerged, one that appropriated the name of Christ and the trappings of paganism. This new religion took Christ to the world, and made sure that the gates of hell would not prevail against a fragile book, seldom read and even more seldom believed. But this new religion was destined for destruction … Christ Jesus is the alpha and omega of the Greek language. His ministry is to the first and to the last of the age.
Christianity started well, with the Apostle Paul laying the foundation for the house of God in the heavenly city of Jerusalem, but as Paul writes to Timothy, all in Asia left him while he was a prisoner in Rome. And Christianity will finish well, with the remnant of today’s Church that keep the commandments and have the spirit of prophecy leading the third part of humankind into the kingdom of God. But in the centuries between Paul in the 1st-Century and Philadelphia in the 21st-Century, the Christian Church has been ruled by the sun-cult’s Apollonian imagery and by the formlessness of Dionysian darkness that sports well-suckled paps from which comes milky sola scriptura.
What apparently cannot be helped is that most Christians—by far the vast majority—have never worshiped either the Father or the Son in truth, but have worshiped instead the trace of Christianity that has been tracked as mud onto the pure paganism of Apollonian and Dionysian cults. These Christians will be accepted by God if they do well, what Elohim told Cain (Gen 4:7); they will be accepted if they keep the precepts of the law by faith. Their hope remains viable, but only so until they are liberated from indwelling sin and death. Then, their present lawlessness will send them into the lake of fire, for they are today the hated son of promise, spiritual Esau, the son who does not value his birthright enough to strive for it against seemingly impossible odds. These odds, however, only pertain to what can be seen by the eye and felt with the hand.
Striving against the social constructs of the world begins with keeping the 7th-day Sabbath.
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Works Cited
Sexual Personae, Paglia, Camille. New York: Vantage, 1990.
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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."