The Philadelphia Church

And He said to them, "Follow Me, and I will make you fishers of men. (Matt 4:19)"

Sabbatarian Anabaptists - The Annals
The Language of Redemption
Teachings of the Hewer of Wood
More on Matthew


Suggested Sabbath Readings
2008



4th Quarter 2008
 December 27, 2008 A celebration of light, Hanukkah represents a differing scenario to Sabbatarian Christians than it does to rabbinical Judaism. It is this differing scenario, embedded in Jesus’ words that He spoke at the time of the Feast of Dedication, that is central to this Sabbath reading.
 December 20, 2008 December 25th is the day upon which humankind celebrates the rebirth of the sun; it is a celebration of the winter solstice. And it is important to humankind that all peoples keep the holiday. It is not, however, a holiday that honors either the Father or the Son … how does Santa Claus with his flying sleigh and reindeer honor Christ Jesus? They do not. Yet there is a connection between a flying sleigh and Apollo, the sun-god who flies across the sky.
 December 13, 2008 So there is no mistake: the person or the fellowship that would require a new convert to do more than to cease living as a son of disobedience hinders the infant son of God from coming to the glorified Jesus. UCG is a fellowship that (by UCG’s policies expressed in its July 2002 United News publication) hinders infant sons of God from coming to Christ.
 December 6, 2008 Baptism after spiritual birth is an outward profession of faith that places the new self or new nature into the household of God, and by extension, puts the new self under judgment. Until baptized, a born-of-spirit son-of-God is neither a part of spiritual Israel, nor under judgment, but is as a Hebrew male infant of less than eight days age was.
 November 29, 2008 Because the work of the Logos was to create the universe within the bottomless pit, the Logos was the one whom Moses and the elders of Israel saw, the one whose feet Abraham washed, the one whom Jacob wrestled, and the one who entered His creation as His only Son, the man Jesus of Nazareth. And “this one — @âJ@H” (from John 1:2) was with the Most High in the conjoined Tetragrammation YHWH. It was the Logos who was the singular Eloah that spoke from atop Mount Sinai.
 November 22, 2008 Christendom’s traditional gospel bars disciples from being one with the Father as Jesus is one with the Father: visible Christendom either holds that God is numerically one in the personhood of the Father [the Arian or Unitarian position], or numerically one in the personhood of the Father, the Son, and their Breath being one entity [the Trinitarian position]. Both of these positions, however, exclude disciples from being numerically one with the Father as Jesus was “one” with the Father; for if disciples are one with the Father as Jesus is one with the Father, the godhead is open and unnumbered, with “one” being a declaration of unity not numerically the number of disciples who are saved.
 November 15, 2008 The energy of the American monomyth that both Obama and Palin tapped will fuel Philadelphia as a single belief paradigm goes after its brother and neighbor to recover as many as possible from the clutches of the king of Babylon. Philadelphia will feel within itself those same conflicting urges to seek Sunday keeping disciples, trying to get as many as possible into fellowship, and to ignore Sunday keeping disciples because of the danger they pose, as are felt by other Sabbatarians. But Philadelphia will not ignore the spiritual plight of its brother; rather the fellowship will try to recover him from the pigpens of this world, knowing ahead of time that the fellowship will not be terribly effective. Nevertheless, out of love Philadelphia will proceed forth as if it will get every single Sunday keeping Christian into covenant with Christ, making Philadelphia a danger to the rule of the present prince of this world.
 November 8, 2008 Knowledge coming via a vision or revelation is the ultimate irrefutable argument. Only the truthfulness of the person who received the revelation can be attacked: the person who cannot be believed in other matters probably cannot be believed about having received a vision or revelation.
 November 1, 2008 If a person votes for one candidate or another, the person participates in the governing process of this world.
 October 25, 2008 So Hanukah becomes a type of Sukkot, with the light (oil) that doesn’t run out until additional oil is ceremonially purified representing the glorified firstfruits, each a son of God and younger brother to Christ Jesus.
 Last Great Day The inter-dimensional realm between the heaven above and this earth is Scripture’s bottomless pit, and Peter’s tartaros: this is the biblical "hell" that Christian theologians have used as a threat against parishioners for nearly two millennia.
 October 18, 2008 This fractal nature of every spiritually circumcised Israelite being a type and copy of the Church that has not been well understood or well explained. If ancient Israel as a chiral shadow of the saints is also a fractal of the Christian Church, what is missing is the middle; i.e., life. Sin and death are present in the form of a spiritual Egypt, Assyria, and Babylon, but the dark or missing portion of a Sierpinski Triangle now represents life, or the Tree of Life in the Promised Land.
 Tabernacles Those Christians who say they have circumcised hearts but who do not keep the law are liars. Those Christians who claim to have circumcised hearts claim by extension to be Jews, but unless they also keep the law they lie and thus they form the synagogue of Satan. Simple? The Christian who looks like Jesus, who walks as Jesus walked, who follows Paul as he followed Jesus forms the Body of Christ—this Christian has made a journey of faith that has cleansed the heart and allowed this Christian’s heart to be circumcised (Deut 30:6).
 October 11, 2008 The great nation of God will be built from those who believe Moses’ writings, for if an Israelite will not believe Moses’ writings the Israelite will not believe the words of Jesus (John 5:46–47), and if the person will not believe Jesus the person will not believe the Father (v. 24) and will not be glorified.
 Yom Kipporim, Atonement 2008 There is one path to salvation, with Moses setting before Israel life and death, and with every Gentile convert who would choose life necessarily choosing to keep the commandments and all that is written in Deuteronomy by faith. The natural Jew who by tradition keeps the commandments must by faith profess that Jesus is Lord, and the Gentile convert who believes that Jesus is Lord must by faith keep the precepts of the law. One path leads from the plains of Moab into the Promised Land and God’s rest—and this one path will be followed by every person who would be “one” with Christ Jesus.
 October 4, 2008 When the good news that the one who endures to the end shall be saved (Matt 10:22; 24:13) is proclaimed throughout the world, the end will come. This good news or gospel has been, admittedly somewhat weakly, delivered to all the world since 2002/2003.
 October 1, 2008 Feast of Trumpets A prophet’s or watchman’s responsibility ends when the warning has been delivered. Trumpets or Yom Teru'ah is about warning Israel that a sword will come upon the nation for its rebellion against God. Trumpets is about the prophet delivering his or her message of repentance


3rd Quarter 2008
 September 27, 2008 Abraham chose to live in tents as he looked forward to the coming of the city of God. He chose not to become invested in a city of the Hittites, or of the Amorites, or of any peoples then occupying the land of Canaan, “invested” used in the sense of being a citizen of a city, or of a city-state [a polis] and thereby living in a so-called permanent structure, with neighbors, and the responsibilities of citizenship. By his simple statement of remaining in tents as a sojourner in the land of Canaan, Abraham claimed citizenship in the city of God.
 September 20, 2008 Paul tells endtime disciples that the invisible things of God are revealed through the things that have been made. And as Paul had to unlearn what he had been taught and assign a new set of signifieds to the signifiers inscribed by the former prophets, those who come after Paul and build on the foundation Paul laid also have to unlearn what they have been taught and assign new meanings to the same words that were previously read and reread.
 September 13, 2008 Deconstruction describes forced separation of signifier from signified ... for a literal reading of a text to possess validity, signifier and signified must necessarily be tightly bound together, a condition God ended at Babel. Hence, no literal reading of Scripture has ever been valid or really even possible since Babel. In blunt language, God has already negated and declared invalid every literal reading of Scripture; so the person who advocates literal readings opposes God. Deconstruction breaks the hard link Daniel establishes when he tells Nebuchadnezzar that he is the head of gold, for what Daniel tells the king cannot be literally true but must be figurative language.
 September 6, 2008 Unless a person is of Nahum’s reading community, the meanings Nahum assigned to his words are not fully recoverable, a lengthy way of saying that words mean not what the author intended but what the reader intends; so unless a reader also hears the voice of Yah before or Christ Jesus now, the reader will not assign the same meanings to Nahum’s words as Nahum assigned.
  August 30, 2008 Unless a person is of Nahum’s reading community, the meanings Nahum assigned to his words are not fully recoverable, a lengthy way of saying that words mean not what the author intended but what the reader intends; so unless a reader also hears the voice of Yah before or Christ Jesus now, the reader will not assign the same meanings to Nahum’s words as Nahum assigned.
  August 23, 2008 In Zephaniah 1:3, “man” is the physical correspondent to spiritual “birds of heaven.” “Beast” is the physical correspondent to spiritual “fish of the sea.” Nowhere in Scripture is it said that beasts enter heaven. Man will or will not, when judgments are revealed, enter heaven, but beasts are sacrificed, not glorified.
  August 16, 2008 The hermeneutics of the angel Gabriel always moves from the physical [the visible] to focus on the spiritual [the invisible], using the visible only to “set up” or reveal the invisible—and it is this movement that forms the central metaphor of typological exegesis. Those scholars and disciples who only permit the use of “typological exegesis” to reference New Testament intertextual use of types badly miss the hypertextuality of the angel Gabriel.
  August 9, 2008 Paul genuinely received knowledge of the mystery of Christ by revelation as evidenced by his insight of this mystery. To say otherwise causes the person to commit blasphemy against the Holy Spirit. But—and here is the caveat that divides the sons of God from the sons of the devil—to use the epistles of Paul to teach a disciple to transgress the commandments is also blasphemy against the Holy Spirit.
  August 2, 2008 The good news that Jesus said would be proclaimed is about the world being baptized in spirit into life as the world was baptized by water into death in the days of Noah. The message will not be believed or accepted prior to death angels passing over all the land, slaying firstborns not covered by the blood of Christ-and once this slaying occurs, disciples of Christ Jesus will be truly hated by all the world.
  July 26, 2008 The Philadelphia Church has been employing enantiomorphs and using chirality for some period before formal realization occurred that within typology what was being seen were non-symmetrical mirror images that were as left and right hands, with the /S/ or left hand images being the physical things of this world that reveal the invisible things of God, the /R/ reality that which has life in the heavenly realm.
  July 19, 2008 The teachings of both Trinitarian and of Arian Christians are false—when the spirits are tested, what is found is the presently dead Body of Christ [dead through separation from Christ] that has many, many disciples looking at the physical things of this world (i.e., those things that pertain to the flesh) as if they were spiritual things, not realizing that what they are seeing are shadows and mirror images of living realities in the supra-dimensional heavenly realm.
  July 12, 2008 What Jesus pointed to when He called Peter the son of Jonah was the prophet Jonah and all that Jonah represented, including being the spokesman from God--the sign of Jonah takes on added significance.
  July 5, 2008 The new creature will be as a Levite in the temple of God: the fleshly bodies of disciples equates to the temple (1 Cor 3:16-17; 2 Cor 6:16), and each person can be likened to a living stone (1 Pet 2:4-5), sculpted and shaped off-site so the sound of an iron tool (a tear or a cry of anguish) will not be heard on the temple mount.


2nd Quarter 2008
  June 28, 2008 As Paul while he still lived saw all in Asia leave him and rejection by those in Achaia and Judah, John while he still lived saw the death of the Body of Christ, for disciples such as Diotrephes (3 John v. 9) had gained control of congregations. These false disciples were John’s little antichrists, disciples that went out from them, for they were not of them even though at one time they had fellowshipped with John.
  June 21, 2008 If the issue under discussion at the Jerusalem conference were either circumcision or keeping the commandments, then there would have been no reason for Paul to have Timothy circumcised unless the Circumcision Faction had prevailed at this conference—and this is definitely not the case. The issue was not causing offense or setting stumbling blocks in front of those whom God was obviously calling to be part of the Body of Christ.
  Pentecost 2008 Therefore, the reality of what is foreshadowed by the two symbolic baptisms (of spirit and of fire) on Pentecost is fulfilled during the seven endtime years of tribulation, with the reality of baptism of Israel by spirit beginning these seven years and the baptism by fire [i.e., the resurrection of firstfruits] ending these seven years. The harvest of firstfruits begins with the resurrection of Christ Jesus and continues until He returns to take to Him those who are His at the end of the Tribulation. Hence, the reality of both Pentecost and the Feast of Weeks moves into the reality represented by Unleavened Bread. … Christ Jesus is, ultimately, the substance or reality of every festival, new moon, and Sabbath (Col 2:16-17), which does not give a disciple excuse to neglect observing these festivals, new moons, and Sabbaths; for without observing these Sabbaths when disciples consciously enter into the presence of God, disciples will have no understanding of the plan of God and will say silly things about God.
  June 14, 2008 To resolve Christological questions, the most reliable writings endtime disciples have are of John and in particular the first and third chapters of his Gospel.
  June 7, 2008 The temple in physical Jerusalem was a shadow and type of the heavenly temple of God in heavenly Jerusalem—but John the Revelator saw in vision no temple in the heavenly city when it came down to new earth (Rev 21:22), for the temple of the heavenly city is the “Lord God the Almighty—the naming expression that is seen in Revelation 4:8. To dwell in the house of God, disciples are to imitate Paul as He imitated Christ. Only by walking as Jesus walked will a disciple cross the threshold and enter into the house of God as a younger son of God.
  May 31, 2008 In order for a physically uncircumcised Gentile to make a natural Israelite jealous, the Gentile must live as the natural Israelite lives without being physically circumcised. Simply put, a Gentile must live as Jesus, an Observant Jew, lived. If the Gentile persists in living as a Gentile, the person is an unprofitable servant, worthy of death. … Being saved by grace, now, is analogous to not be killed for idolatry (as in Elijah's day), which will have all those Israelites saved by grace not practicing idolatry—Paul identifies his people, natural Israel, as an idolatrous nation.
  May 24, 2008 For “obedience” is an idea that has substance in this world as if the word were a cloak that is put on daily when rising from sleep.
  May 17, 2008 Jesus told Pilate that His kingdom was not of this world; that if it were of this world His servants would fight. So the kingdom of God over which Christ Jesus will reign as King of kings and Lord of lords is not a kingdom of this world as Alexander’s Greece was, as even as Nebuchadnezzar’s Babylon was. Christ Jesus will not reign from the spiritual realm over vassal kings and lords that in turn will reign over humanity in the manner that Nebuchadnezzar and Alexander did. Rather, He will reign by replacing Satan, who, today, reigns over all sons of disobedience as the prince of the power of the air.
  May 10, 2008 To answer what is usually the first question asked of a Sabbatarian disciple, “Why not worship on Sunday,” the disciple needs to remove the focus that the question places on Sunday and place the focus on Jesus being the Lord of the Sabbath, and the disciple’s personal Lord … if Jesus is truly the disciple’s personal Lord, then the disciple will desire to walk as Jesus walked, and the world was no friend of Jesus. Nor will the world be a friend of the disciple.
  May 3, 2008 The person who employs Paul’s epistle as justification for disobedience has not been sent by God, but is a disguised servant of Satan, regardless of how pious the person appears or how large an organization the person represents.
  April 26, 2008 Under the second and eternal Sinai covenant, the Sabbath commandments includes the weekly Sabbath and the three times a year when all of Israel is appear before God—and this is what is seen in Leviticus chapter 23. The “Christian” who does not observe the weekly as well as the annual Sabbaths breaks the Sabbath commandment, and is a transgressor.
  First High Day Unleavened Bread Keeping the Sabbath of God sets a person apart from this world and is a sign that identifies the person as being of the household of God. But the “Sabbath” is not just the seventh day of the week: it is every day listed in Leviticus chapter 23. It is the weekly Sabbath, plus the three seasons a year when Israelites are to appear before the Most High. And the Sabbatarian Christian who will not come before God on these three seasons breaks the Sabbath just as surely as does the Pope.
  April 19, 2008 Keeping the Sabbath by faith (and organizing the disciple’s life around keeping the Sabbath) becomes a representation of the daily sacrifice just as the paschal lamb physically circumcised Israel sacrificed during “unleavened” is a type of Jesus being sacrificed as the Passover Lamb of God at the hour when temple officials were then (31 CE) deeming that paschal lambs should be sacrificed.
  April 12, 2008 Within Sabbatarian Christendom, dispute still exists over when the Passover sacraments should be taken. There should never be any dispute that the so-called Last Supper was the Passover meal referred to by all of the gospel writers.
  April 5, 2008 Every Sabbatarian disciple needs to avoid those men who would have them either adopt Judaism’s calculated calendar or would have them look to present day Jerusalem when setting a calendar. Every congregation needs to look for itself for the new crescent moon.

1st Quarter 2008
  March 29, 2008 We don't today see people immediately dying because of some transgression of the law. Nor was this seen in the 1st-Century before Calvary. So what's going on? And the "what" amounts to realization that death is separation from God, not necessarily absence of physical breath.… His death did not end the Law, or the promise of life. Rather, the Law moves from being written on two tablets of stone to being written-when the new covenant is implemented-on two tablets of flesh, the heart and mind of the disciple.
  March 22, 2008 In this era, the person who will live as Jesus lived does so only because of the person's faith that Jesus is the Son of the Most High and the person's elder sibling. There is no other reason why a person believes Moses' writings while professing that Jesus is Lord (add John 5:46-47 to Rom 10:6-9). There is no other reason why the person will return to Genesis without skepticism and with understanding that does not come from human intellect to read again two creation accounts, one about the first Adam, a man of mud, and one about the last Adam, a life-giving spirit, with the first being last and the second being first.
  March 15, 2008 The churches of God have, for the most part, ignored “one origin,” because of the awkwardness that the clause produces. They should not have; for if Jesus is not ashamed to call disciples “brothers” why should disciples be ashamed of being called “brothers”?
  March 8, 2008 What Jesus told those seeking His life can be said to every leading Christian theologian: “‘You search the Scriptures because you think that in them you have eternal life; and it is they that bear witness about me, yet you refuse to come to me that you may have life’” (John 5:39-40).
  March 1, 2008 The parakletos is no more a living entity than the Holy Spirit is—and they cannot be the same, for the world can receive and will receive the Holy Spirit whereas the testimony of Jesus is that the world cannot receive the parakletos.
  February 23, 2008 A man—a person—is a soul that can die, but is a soul who shall not suffer condemnation because of the sin and sinfulness of his father (or she, her mother), nor enter into God’s rest because of the righteousness of father or mother. And this was the state of all human beings until the man Jesus came to John the Baptist to fulfill all righteousness by being baptized (Matt 3:15).
  February 16, 2008 As long as Christ dwells in disciples, these disciples are with the Bridegroom. The Comforter] has not been sent from the Father, has not come to disciples. But the time will come at the beginning of the seven endtime years of tribulation when the Bridegroom is taken from disciples by the Father.
  February 9, 2008 The foundation that Armstrong laid is now charred rubble, his work having gone up in flames when tried by fire. Only work constructed on the foundation Paul laid will stand—and this work of Philadelphia is built on Paul and Christ Jesus.
  February 2, 2008 The rest of God is heaven. Entering the rest of God is entering heaven. The natural type of this rest is entering Judea [Canaan, the Promised Land]. The spiritual type in this era of entering into God’s rest is Sabbath observance. Christ’s Millennium reign over the earth will be from the heavenly realm and the last shadow of entering heaven.
  January 26, 2008 The Millennium is not yet here: disciples will not enter the Millennium as physical human beings but as glorified spirit beings or not at all. Disciples need not journey to Judea, for circumcision is not now a matter of the flesh but of the heart and mind, and flint knives (Josh 5:2-7) are inappropriate instruments for circumcising the heart. Therefore, disciples in this era enter God’s rest when they keep the Sabbath, the sign between Israel and God that Israel knows that God sanctifies the nation (Ex 31:13).
  January 19, 2008 Today, former Believers have become skeptics, dismissing Paul as a fraud and Jesus as a false prophet. This is especially true of former disciples of Herbert Armstrong: the small amount of knowledge they had acquired from Armstrong has been taken from them—and they celebrate the loss of this knowledge as liberation from error and a personality cult. They write with bitterness about their liberation from Herbie’s cult on Internet blogs, little realizing that not only has the knowledge they once had been taken away, but so has been their promise of salvation. They serve as examples of what will be seen on a far larger scale once the seven endtime years of tribulation begin.
  January 12, 2008 The person who does not believe that Paul was an apostle and specifically the apostle who laid the foundation for the endtime house of God will lack spiritual understanding and will be like the person (usually of high intelligence) who does not believe that any God exists, that all such belief is carried-forward superstition from an earlier era. No argument will convince the person that God exists. The base for such a belief is not present in the person. Rather, the same amount of faith (or perhaps much more) is employed in disbelief and denial.
  January 5, 2008 Understanding holiness, righteousness, and the new covenant begins with eagerly seeking to live by every word uttered by God, with these words forming even the material tent of flesh in which the born of Spirit son of God now temporarily dwells.


Past Sabbath Readings