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 preexistence before filling heavens and earth.
Weekly Readings
For the Sabbath of November 1, 2014
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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But false prophets also arose among the people, just as there will be false teachers among you, who will secretly bring in destructive heresies, even denying the Master who bought them, bringing upon themselves swift destruction. And many will follow their sensuality, and because of them the way of truth will be blasphemed. And in their greed they will exploit you with false words. Their condemnation from long ago is not idle, and their destruction is not asleep. For if God did not spare angels when they sinned, but cast them into hell and committed them to chains of gloomy darkness to be kept until the judgment; if He did not spare the ancient world, but preserved Noah, a herald of righteousness, with seven others, when He brought a flood upon the world of the ungodly; if by turning the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah to ashes He condemned them to extinction, making them an example of what is going to happen to the ungodly; and if He rescued righteous Lot, greatly distressed by the sensual conduct of the wicked (for as that righteous man lived among them day after day, he was tormenting his righteous soul over their lawless deeds that he saw and heard); then the Lord knows how to rescue the godly from trials, and to keep the unrighteous under punishment until the day of judgment, and especially those who indulge in the lust of defiling passion and despise authority. Bold and willful, they do not tremble as they blaspheme the glorious ones, whereas angels, though greater in might and power, do not pronounce a blasphemous judgment against them before the Lord. But these, like irrational animals, creatures of instinct, born to be caught and destroyed, blaspheming about matters of which they are ignorant, will also be destroyed in their destruction, suffering wrong as the wage for their wrongdoing. They count it pleasure to revel in the daytime. They are blots and blemishes, reveling in their deceptions, while they feast with you. They have eyes full of adultery, insatiable for sin. They entice unsteady souls. They have hearts trained in greed. Accursed children! Forsaking the right way, they have gone astray. They have followed the way of Balaam, the son of Beor, who loved gain from wrongdoing, but was rebuked for his own transgression; a speechless donkey spoke with human voice and restrained the prophet's madness. (2 Pet 2:1–16 emphasis added)
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1.
The essence of Christianity was manifested by the patriarch Abraham, who believed God about whom his offspring would be, and had his belief of God counted to him as righteousness (Gen 15:6). The essence of Christianity has NOT evolved beyond belief of God; the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob; the God of living ones, not dead ones (Matt 22:32). And all who believe God will live in this world like the person truly believes God, meaning that the person will keep the Commandments while dwelling as a sojourner in this world, taking no ownership position in this world beyond the field in which the person—the living inner self of the outer person—will bury the dead body of the person, analogous to Sarah, wife of Abraham.
In the movement from physical—Abraham and Sarah—to spiritual, the living inner self of the person is analogous to Abraham through the indwelling of Christ Jesus in the form of the spirit of Christ [pneuma Christou] in the spirit of the person [to pneuma tou ’anthropou] in the soul [psuche] of the person that is, in turn, in the fleshly body of the person. The spirit of the person is to the soul as Abraham was to Sarah. In turn, the soul of the person is to the fleshly body as Abraham was to Sarah, with this marriage relationship of male in female (as in human intercourse) backing up to form the model of the spirit of Christ penetrating and entering into the formerly dead spirit of the person as the spirit of God [pneuma Theou] in the bodily form of a dove entered into [eis — from Mark 1:10] the man Jesus the Nazareth when raised from death; i.e., from the watery grave of baptism.
The man Jesus was twice raised from death, the first time when raised from the watery grave of baptism to fulfill all righteousness (Matt 3:15), with the spirit of God the Father immediately entering into Jesus thereby giving life to His inner self, His spirit, the spirit of Christ, with Christ Jesus being the unique son of the Creator of all things physical [the Logos: ’o Logos] who was the Beloved of the God [ton Theon] and who had equality with the God [again, ton Theon] (see John 1:1 in Greek, noting that <arche> without an article should be translated as “primacy,” and see Phil 2:5–7) before He divested Himself of His deity and entered this world that He created not to condemn it but to save it, thereby finishing the creation …
Is the preceding too difficult to understand? Is the significance of human gender, sexuality, and marriage as a model of divine relationships too difficult to understand? What is it about a human male being the “head” of his wife as Christ is the head of the Church (1 Cor 11:3), the Body of Christ (1 Cor 12:27), that a Christian cannot understand? Is not a man humanly born with two heads, one atop his shoulders and one at the end of his penis? Is not a woman born with one head only, the head atop her shoulders?
Neither the man with his two heads nor the woman with her one head will naturally produce seed, offspring, unless the little head of the man penetrates and enters into the woman so that he temporarily becomes her <head> in marriage … temporarily because marriage between two human persons is for only the duration of the life of the flesh, consigned to die when the world was baptized into death in the days of Noah—
Death entered the world when Adam ate forbidden fruit. Whether the story is literal or symbolic doesn’t matter; for Adam’s unbelief of God when he saw Eve eat forbidden fruit and not die forms the antithesis of Abraham’s belief of God. Unrighteousness entered into Eden, the Garden of God, through the unbelief of the Adversary, an anointed guardian cherub (Ezek 28:12–15); unrighteousness entered into this world through the unbelief of Adam, about whom Paul wrote,
Therefore, just as sin came into the world through one man, and death through sin, and so death spread to all men because all sinned—for sin indeed was in the world before the law was given, but sin is not counted where there is no law. Yet death reigned from Adam to Moses, even over those whose sinning was not like the transgression of Adam, who was a type of the one who was to come. (Rom 5:12–14)
Death didn’t reign over humanity from Adam to Christ Jesus, the last Adam, but from Adam to Moses who prematurely entered into the presence of God and into God’s rest at Mount Sinai, with Moses forming a type or model for both Christ Jesus and the Elect. And if this model is taken backwards, aligning the first Adam with the second or last Adam (1 Cor 15:45) as if these two were witness marks, what would be seen is an unrecorded prehistory of this world that is to the first Adam as the descendants of this first Adam through Eve were to Christ Jesus …
The preceding needs to soak in for a moment before preceding: it is commonly assumed by greater Christendom that Genesis chapter one, the “P” creation account, represents a six day creation account, with a day being likened to a thousand years. But the “P” creation account comes to humanity in the form of unique Hebraic poetry, with the focus of any poetry not being on what inspired the poetry—the seeming subject of the poetry—but on the artifice itself, the construction and craftsmanship of the words from those presented in ordinary speech to those presented in the poem. And words are vocalized utterances that have been inscribed [made permanent through transcription], thereby ascribing to the ephemeral the permanence of stone or bronze or ink on vellum.
In the “P” creation account, a transition occurs between verses one and three, with this transition turning the darkness of Day One into the light of Day One. The first Adam is created in the darkness of Day One, a day that is linguistically separated from the second day or third, fourth, fifth, sixth, and seventh days; for the last Adam, Christ Jesus, is the light of Day One (see 2 Cor 4:6), thus making this “P” creation account about the spiritual creation of God the Father, not about the physical creation of this world.
The creation of the first Adam (Gen 2:7) will be preceded by an unrecorded prehistory (<pre> because it is unrecorded by human transcription) that will be typified by the history of humanity from Adam to Moses, with the history from Moses to Christ Jesus typifying the transitional forms of humanoid creatures found by archeologists scouring the fossil record … neither Lucy (the common name for AL 288-1, 40% of a female Australopithecus afarensis skeleton found in 1974 in Ethiopia’s Awash Valley) nor any of her relatives were descendants of Adam, but were to Adam as Ethiopians in the days of Rameses were to Christ Jesus, the last Adam.
Descendants of Christ Jesus are Christians truly born of spirit through the indwelling of Christ in the form of His spirit penetrating and entering into the spirit of the person, with the spirit of God the Father being in the spirit of Christ. All other human persons are to Christ Jesus and to the Elect as an undisturbed clay bank was to the first Adam: all of humanity forms the potential pool from which God can form sons as the Beloved formed Adam, the man of clay, from the base elements of this earth; from red mud or red clay. But as not all clay was formed into Adam, or into Eve, or into their descendants, not all of humanity will become sons of the living God. And as the earth collectively (all of the earth’s clay deposits) groans as it awaits the adoption of the sons of God, all of humanity groans as it awaits the glorification of the saints, the holy ones.
Is the preceding difficult to understand? Have anthropologists found humanoid bones that they have dated to older than six thousand years? And according to Scripture, how much time has passed since the creation of Adam? A little over six thousand years? Have not unbelievers used this perceived discrepancy between the age of fossils and the years assigned to the patriarchs to promote unbelief, stifling the belief of Christian youths who are compelled to choose between a young creation or the Bible being Hebraic myth, an either/or fallacy?
Again, the essence of Christianity is belief of God—belief based upon spiritual understanding, not stupidity or intellectual dishonesty.
In the course of human affairs, with the Adversary being the prince of this world, we find humanity being like clay through which water percolates very slowly … spiritual knowledge enters into humanity even more slowly than water passes through blue clay. It is nearly impossible for a humanly intelligent person to understand the most basic principles of spiritual birth until the person has been born of God and thereby receives the mind of Christ through the indwelling of Christ.
A woman laying with another woman as she would with a man will never become pregnant. Likewise, a man laying with another man as he would with a woman will never become pregnant. If the Adversary wasn’t restricted by demonic kings within his own hierarchy, notably by his ideological firstborn, the great king of the federated King of Greece, the asexual Adversary would prevent human procreation through promotion of orgasmic sex, woman with woman and man with man, the orgasm satisfying the needs of the flesh without producing seed that in turn will grow to produce another generation as if the seed of a person were wheat or barley. For already in institutions of higher learning, students are labeled as breeders or non-breeders, with the non-breeders feeling superior about themselves since that are not contributing to human over-population and additional global warming.
These non-breeders are modern Lucies, their skeletons to bear an HS xxx-y designation when, near the end of the Thousand Years, they dig from the rumble of today’s urban civilization. Their skeletons will produce questions not easily answered: why are the pelvises of females as narrow as the pelvises of males? Did they not have children? Are they an alien species? Why do we find two females buried together, two males? And their bones will be collected and catalogued according to newly emerging protocols as humanity emerges from its latest dark age when there was no buying or selling, no transactional economy. But this will be a very short return to the glory of the past. Three and a half years. That’s all. That will be all there will be before the coming of new heavens and a new earth, one that is not physical.
This Reading is short, but the subject isn’t … what happened in the dark of Day One? What happened before God filled [bara] the heavens and the earth (Gen 1:1)? To fill implies preexistence of what is to be “filled.” So what about a preexistence of the heavens and the earth before they were filled? The model for this preexistence is in aligning the First Adam with the Last Adam, with Israel coming from Abraham through Sarah, not through Hagar or Keturah, and with the last Adam coming as a root shoot of Jesse, not as a son of David (Isa 11:1) but as a another branch of Israel that has no descent from an Israelite king in His ancestry, no king separating Him from God.
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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."