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 the Spirit of God.
Weekly Readings
For the Sabbath of December 30, 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 Revelation chapter 6, verses 9 though 11; followed by Matthew chapter 10, verses 34 through 39.
Commentary: If Jesus did not come to bring peace but a sword,
and if more Christians are to die as the martyrs of the past died, the question
of what is a Christian’s civic duty and responsibility cannot be escaped,
and must be addressed by the disciple. Should disciples vote, run for public
office, serve in a nation’s armed forces, seek to improve the governance
of a nation? What about public protests of obvious social wrongs? What about
armies of the Cross? More bluntly put, should a disciple resist regimes such as
Hitler’s Nazi Germany? Is it every Christian’s duty to figuratively
take up the sword against Hitler, or Pol Pot, or Joseph Stalin? As an active Evangelical
Christian, is President George W. Bush correct to have waged war against the
assorted evils of
Was it right that six million Jews pacifically went
to their deaths rather than take or attempt to take a German soldier with each
one of them? Jews in the modern nation of
Of equal theological importance is the question of
female suffrage: is extending full enfranchisement to woman a step forward toward
quality before God? The Apostle Paul wrote that the born of Spirit disciple is
neither male nor female, neither slave nor free, neither Jew nor Greek (Gal 3:28);
so full enfranchisement would seem to be of God and wholly “Christian.”
Or is enfranchisement disguised rebellion against God that requires
women’s involuntarily return to spiritual
Why can’t the mind set on the flesh submit to God’s law … the Apostle Paul answered the question in his same epistle to the Romans: “For God has consigned all to disobedience, that he may have mercy on all” (Rom 11:32). The flesh has been consigned to disobedience; i.e., to sin or lawlessness (1 John 3:4). Because of Adam’s disobedience—the flesh was consigned to disobedience when Elohim drove Adam and Eve from His garden in Eden—sin entered the world (Rom 5:12) and the flesh of every human being born of the first Adam has been condemned to death because of Adam’s consignment to servitude to the prince of disobedience (Eph 2:2-3), the prince of this world. All have died, and all will die until the flesh is liberated from indwelling sin and death. Only then can a human being truly escape death by being changed in the twinkling of an eye from mortal flesh to imperishable spirit.
Birth from above (being born of Spirit) liberates the mind from bondage to sin (Rom 6:14; 8:2), but the flesh remains consigned to disobedience. Thus, being born of Spirit initiates a war between the mind and the flesh (Rom 7:21-25); for until liberation, no human being can keep the law of God. This means that until the liberation of the mind through of the birth of a new creature, an infant son of God, the person is a son of disobedience, a child of wrath, a mental offspring of the Adversary.
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The reader should now read John chapter 8, verses 31 through 47.
Commentary: Some spiritual novices, too immature to rightly divide the word of God, have assumed that by Jesus telling the Jews confronting Him that their father was the devil (v. 44) that some of the human race was created by Satan. These novices contend that Caucasian Christians descend physically from the first Adam, that today’s Jews and Coloreds are mud people who have descended from a different, or from many different progenitors. These novices are Christian racists, and many have congealed in a foul sediment called the Christian Identity Movement (CIM), an accursed blotch in the cup of Christendom.
Prior to being born of Spirit, every person was condemned to disobedience, to sin. No person could keep the commandments of God. This is correct: no one was liberated from indwelling sin in both the flesh and in the mind. Ancient King David is a prime example. David was a man after God’s own heart; yet David committed adultery with Bathsheba. Then to cover his adultery, David ordered that Bathsheba’s husband, Uriah, one of David’s mighty men, be murdered, a murder concealed by Uriah being placed in the front of a battle and the army withdrawing from Uriah, leaving him to face the enemy alone. Yet, again, David was a man after God’s heart, but David was not born of Spirit even through he had the Spirit of God with him (Ps 51:11), as did Abraham [the addition of the /ah/ radical to his and Sarah’s name indicating when he received use of the Breath of God] and the prophets of old. Even John the Baptist, the greatest man born to woman, was not born from above, an honor that goes to the last Adam, Christ Jesus, whose father was not the first Adam but Theos or Yah.
Being born again means, literally, a second birth,
a birth by receiving heavenly life through the indwelling of the Breath of God
[Pneuma ’Agion]. Being born
again is receiving spiritual life when drawn by the Father from this world
(John 6:44, 65), this life coming in the form of a new creature or new creation
that is an actual son of God dwelling in the tent of flesh of the old creature,
crucified in Christ Jesus. And here is where disciples encounter theological
problems: the flesh and the old self are inexorably linked through being
consigned to disobedience, and in forms of Western philosophy, the self is
defined by the actions of the flesh. But in Christianity—as opposed to
Judaism—a new creature, born of Spirit, dwells in the same tent of flesh
that defined the old creature or old man, and this new creature is born
liberated from bondage to disobedience. Thus, this new creature is free to keep
the laws of God, but to do so this new creature must war against the indwelling
disobedience that continues to reside in the flesh, the problem the Apostle
Paul observed in himself. The mind of the person born of Spirit [i.e., of the
last Adam] has been fully liberated from disobedience, but the flesh awaits
liberation, which will come through empowerment by the Holy Spirit at the
Second Passover liberation of
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The reader should now read Romans chapter 7.
Commentary: When ancient
When the chief priests and the nation of
In the Kabalist concept of Tzimtzum, this physical world or creation conceals the spiritual
things of God from physically circumcised
The relationship between Theos and Theon changed from that represented by a man and his wife to that represented by a Father and His Son when the divine Breath of the Father descended as a dove, lit and remained on the man Jesus (Matt 3:16-17). Thus, when the man Jesus was resurrected and had the glory He once had as Theos or Yah returned to Him (John 17:5), this glorified Jesus was no longer “married” in the heavenly realm, or in the physical realm. He was, according to the Apostle Paul’s gospel, free to marry again in both the heavenly and the physical realm. And He does: in the heavenly realm, He will marry His Bride following when judgments are revealed at His return [the Second Advent], and His Bride will be glorified saints. In the physical realm, as the last Adam (cf. 1 Cor 15:45; Rom 5:14) He creates and “marries” the last Eve when He breathes on ten of His disciples and says, “Receive the Holy Spirit [Pneuma ’Agion]” (John 20:22). And this last Eve will bring forth three sons as the first Eve brought forth three sons.
Disciples are today the last Eve. They are “married” to Christ if they have the Spirit [Pneuma] of Christ (Rom 8:9) dwelling in them; they are one with Christ as the Body of Christ … disciples are made alive spiritually when they receive the Spirit [Pneuma] of the Father, the one who raised Jesus from the dead (Rom 8:11). Both the uncovered Head [Christ Jesus] and the covered Body [disciples collectively] have been made alive by the Breath of the Father—disciples are covered by the righteousness of Christ Jesus, which is grace. But as the Father gives life, so shall the Son give life (John 5:21). And the Son, to whom all judgment has been given, gives life when judgments are revealed. Then, and not before then, the perishable tent of flesh shall put on imperishability. What is mortal shall become immortal for those whom the Son knows when judgments are revealed.
The Father brings forth spiritual life in a tent of flesh; the Son gives to those tents of flesh deemed worthy immortality. Thus, both the Father and the Son must give life to a disciple in the first resurrection if the disciple is to enter the heavenly realm as the Bride of Christ. It is not enough to be born of Spirit. All of humanity will eventually be born of Spirit although differently than those who are today born of Spirit through being drawn by the Father—when the Holy Spirit is poured out upon all flesh, every person not already born of Spirit will receive spiritual life as Cain, Abel, and Seth received physical life from the first Adam and the first Eve, and they will receive life in an empowered or fully liberated state. They will not receive life in a tent of flesh in which sin and death dwell, but will receive life in a fleshly tabernacle that has no need for the covering or garment or mantle of Christ’s righteousness. Thus, grace ends when the Son of Man (Head and Body) is revealed (Luke 17:30). And the liberation or empowerment of disciples by the Holy Spirit marks the transition from Body to Bride, for no man marries his body even though the first Eve was of the body of the first Adam. A separation must occur, the one foreshadowed by the first Adam saying, ‘“[S]he shall be called Woman, because she was taken out of Man”’ (Gen 2:23). What was one must become two, which will return to being one even though two form this latter “one.”
The above is not a riddle although it will seem so to those who are carnally minded. From one man a rib was taken and, by God, fashioned into a helpmate for the man. And the two—the man and his helpmate—became one through marriage. Likewise, from a wound in the side of one man, the last Adam, God fashioned a helpmate for the man, the Church, consisting of those whom the Father has drawn from this world. And the two—Christ Jesus and the Church—become one through marriage first here on this earth, then later in the heavenly realm. But as the first Eve was deceived by the serpent [dragon — the same Hebrew word is translated into English as either serpent or dragon], the last Eve was deceived by that old dragon, Satan the devil. As the first Eve believed the serpent when it said that she would not die (Gen 3:4), the last Eve believed Satan when he said that human beings would not die but have immortal souls. As the first Eve’s lawlessness was covered by her husband’s obedience [sin did not enter the world when Eve ate forbidden fruit, but through Adam when he ate], the last Eve’s lawlessness is covered by the last Adam’s obedience. Thus, disciples are today covered by grace, Christ Jesus’ righteousness. But in the womb of the Church two sons struggle, one hated, one loved even though no sin is today imputed to either. They struggle as Esau and Jacob struggled in the womb of Rebecca, Isaac’s womb through two being one.
Prior to being born of Spirit, no person has life in the heavenly realm, but was as a beast (Eccl 3:18-21)—what being born of Spirit confers on the disciple is life coming from the last Adam as physical “life” came from the first Adam through Eve being of his flesh. Until the first Eve gave birth to a man child [Cain], no human life existed except that which came directly through an act of God from the flesh of the first Adam. Likewise, no spiritual life now exists except that which comes directly through an act of God from the Spirit of God. But this changes in the same way that Cain, the third human being, and Abel, the fourth, were of Adam and Eve, though coming through the sexual activity of Adam and Eve rather than from the direct creation of God. When the last Eve, spiritual Zion, brings forth children in a day (Isa 66:7-8), these children will be those who were first born of the Spirit and then empowered by or filled with the Holy Spirit so that sin and death no longer dwells in these tents of flesh.
The great falling away (2 Thess 2:3) cannot occur until spiritual Isaac gives birth to the twins that struggle in his womb [again, there is neither male nor female in the kingdom of heaven]. The great falling away cannot occur as long as Esau and Jacob remain in the womb, which equates to grace. Only when empowered or liberated by the Holy Spirit at the second Passover will the Son of Man be revealed, or exposed as the naked first Adam and first Eve realized they were after they disobeyed God. And the disciple who takes sin or lawlessness (1 John 3:4) back into him or herself after being empowered by the Holy Spirit will have committed blasphemy against the Holy Spirit, and this blasphemy will not be forgiven. This is the unpardonable sin, for the empowered disciple is no longer covered by grace.
Before being made alive spiritually, the disciple is a son of disobedience; the disciple was numbered among the dead that Jesus said shall bury the dead.
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This subject shall be continued in
next Sabbath’s reading, for the subject is of utmost importance. The
disciple appears physically identical to the person who has not yet been made
alive through being born of Spirit. Spiritual birth doesn’t change the
shape of the hand or the color of the eye; it doesn’t add inches or
pounds [kilograms] to a person. It doesn’t change the length of a
person’s stride, but it does change the way the person walks in this
world. It cleanses or changes the inside of the cup; it changes the values of
the person, the way the person thinks. It changes what seems important to the
person. As a result, it changes the person if the disciple is to walk as Jesus
walked (1 John 2:6), for the person has been liberated from disobedience and is
now free to keep the commandments of God. And the disciple who by faith chooses
life on his or her day of salvation will keep the commandments. The disciple
who does not keep the commandments makes him or herself part of the hated son,
spiritual Esau. And the glorified Christ Jesus is the Theos of the
spiritually living Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. He is not the Theos of spiritual Esau who will perish outside
of God’s rest even though Isaac loved him most.
Christendom today, represented by spiritual Isaac, loves the hated son most. It loves those fellowships, sects, and denominations that are men of the fields. It doesn’t highly value Sabbatarian Christianity, but sees Sabbatarians as deceitful mamma’s boys. It sees the faults of Sabbatarian disciples without seeing that they form the loved second son, the son who will become righteous Abel after wrestling with God during the first half of the seven endtime years.
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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."