Sabbatarian Anabaptists - The Annals
The Language of Redemption
Teachings of the Hewer of Wood
More on Matthew
Suggested Sabbath Readings
The Language of Redemption
Teachings of the Hewer of Wood
More on Matthew
Suggested Sabbath Readings
2013
4th Quarter 2013
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December 28,
2013 The sheep feed the hungry as Jesus fed the five thousand. The sheep are not focusing on themselves, on their salvation, on their righteousness, on their Bible study, prayer, and mediation. Rather the sheep are out doing, getting about their business of figuratively building their own Arks and thereby condemning the world for its unbelief.
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December 21,
2013 Paul's weakest point, by Paul's own reckoning, is what Sunday-observing Christians believe is his strongest: the coming of grace, with a person justified by faith not by works of the Law. And the reason for this being Paul's weakest point is that faith/belief [pisteos] will have the convert keeping the commandments not out of legal necessity, but out of love for God, Father and Son. Only the reason for keeping the Law—a small thing—changes. The Law is still being kept; for under the New Covenant, the Law is written on hearts and placed in minds where the Law rules the person's inner self, thereby giving to the inner self the opportunity to grow strong as it wars against the lawlessness that remains in the flesh.
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December 14,
2013 Paul, being educated as a Hebrew, most likely would have thought and spoke in sentences that were a long string of short independent clauses held together with coordinating conjunctions, clauses that could have been written as short-line verse if these independent clauses were ideologically subordinated into pairings of thought. The piling on or piling up of independent clauses is, again, characteristic of Hebraic prose; so the author of Ephesians and Colossians is most likely a Hebrew—and who as a Hebrew would be writing to Greek converts. Who might such a Hebrew be other than the Apostle Paul?
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October 12,
2013 The after-the-fact awareness of God's involvement in the course of human affairs, involvement revealed by prophets but not believed until after prophecies come to pass, requires that the history of human affairs, the history of greater Israel, the history of the Christian Church be reworked at periodic intervals. However, the Adversary seems to cause Christianity to rewrite its orthodoxy often, with a rewriting currently underway … for political Conservatives in the United States, America's founding was based on sermons delivered by Christian pastors in the 18th-Century CE. If only that were true. What is true is that the politicos in black robes that railed from Colonial pulpits neither knew God nor the plan of God. They did not believe either the Father or the Son, and they certainly didn't walk in this world as Jesus walked.
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October 5,
2013 Today, with few exceptions, Christians have debased minds, with the prosperity and ease of 21st-Century life in, say, America leading to bi-sexual visibility day in the White House, bringing America officially to where were placed the Romans, again, 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. It is difficult to imagine how America can get farther from God than the nation presently is.
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3rd Quarter 2013
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September 28,
2013 No explication of the writings of Moses will cause a Christian such as the television commentator Glenn Beck to cease worshiping God on Sunday, or cease observing Christmas. A believer such as Beck will not suddenly begin to keep the seventh-day Sabbath and the annual Sabbaths, especially Passover. Thus, a Christian such as Beck will be truly angry at God when the Second Passover liberation of Israel occurs: Beck's adopted son will be an uncovered firstborn that is suddenly killed, a death that did not have to happen if Beck would have had the faith to truly believe God and not what others have said about the Father and the Son ... What a person believes about God does matter, and matters a great deal—not so much so for those who will be resurrected in the great White Throne Judgment, but for those who would be firstfruits, represented in type by the early barley harvest of ancient Judea or by the breba crop of figs that develop on the previous year's shoot growth … in contrast to a fig tree's main crop that develops on that year's growth and ripens in the autumn of the year, the breba crop or _winter figs_ (see Rev 6:13) ripens in the spring.
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September 21,
2013 The juxtaposition Jude makes--a valid comparison—cannot be directly taken from the writings of Moses, but must be hypostasized through the assumption that rebelling angels chose to disbelieve God as ungodly Christians choose not to believe Christ Jesus speaking the words of God the Father ... but the Old Testament is mostly silent about what happened in heaven before iniquity was found in a guardian cherub (Ezek 28:12–16), and about what happened afterwards. Humanity is left to speculate about the rebellion when angels left their first habitation of obedience.
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August 10,
2013 Paul wrote what he did about disfellowshipping the man who was with his father's wife to _test_ the holy ones at Corinth to see if they would place keeping the statutes and rules given to Israel in the days of Moses ahead of personal friendships and loyalties.
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August 3,
2013 The Church is to the glorified Christ as the flesh is to the invisible, non-physical inner self that animates the flesh. Thus, when that older inner self who was a sinner and in whom Jesus entered when the person was still a sinner—when this _old man_ dies in baptism in a death like that which Jesus died and is raised from baptism in a resurrection like that Jesus experienced when the glory of God entered into Jesus in the bodily form of a dove—when the fleshly body of the human person is a widow indeed via the old inner self perishing, the _person_ is free to marry another, but only in the Lord.
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July 27,
2013 All who are genuinely born of God have been, in love, predestined for adoption as sons of God through Christ Jesus—and as sons of God in whom Christ Jesus dwells, all holy ones will walk as Jesus walked in this world, meaning that the inner self of the disciple will live and walk in this world as a Judean.
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July 20,
2013 If disciples are both individually and collectively the Body of Christ, what Paul states (again 1 Cor 12:27), then it is reasonable to hold that Jesus was crucified for the collective in 31 CE when all of humanity remained sinners, but is individually crucified for every disciple while the disciple is yet a sinner, meaning that while I was yet a sinner (anytime prior to baptism in 1973) Jesus was crucified for me so that I should experience a resurrection like His resurrection so that I could walk in newness of life, having been set free from sin and disobedience so that I could believe God, believe Christ Jesus, and walk in this world as Jesus walked. I was set free from unbelief and disobedience so that I could keep the commandments of God.
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July 13,
2013 You were dead in the trespasses and sins in which you once walked, following 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—among whom we all once lived in the passions of our flesh, carrying out the desires of the body and the mind, and were by nature children of wrath, like the rest of mankind.
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1st Quarter 2013
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March 30,
2013 Regardless of how much it hurts, how much it seems like the wrong thing to do, love requires that you let your neighbor make his or her own mistakes, even when those mistakes will cost your neighbor his or her life. Without your neighbor having the option to keep the commandments, your neighbor will keep the commandments (if he or she does) for a wrong reason; for it isn't keeping the commandments that truly matters. It is having love for your neighbor and/or brother, with the commandments forming a codification of love.
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March 23,
2013 According to Scripture, the fate of rebelling Israelites is not positive: those individuals who know the will of God but who steadfast refuse to do those things that are pleasing to God will be punished by God through other men as the House of Israel was taken captive by Assyria and the House of Judah was taken captive by Nebuchadnezzar and the Chaldeans; therefore Christians in the Western world can expect to be punished by God bringing unbelievers against them, and this might already be happening … how can a "Christian" nation support gay marriage or abortions on demand? No Christian nation can—and America's President Obama assured the world that the United States of America was not a Christian nation, a reality he has set about confirming day-by-day.
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March 16,
2013 As American teenagers of two decades ago used the word
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March 9,
2013 This concept has significance when it comes to the "Book of Life" for fully alphabetized names, and for those names written in a Semitic "Book of Remembrance." … And if John records his vision with the type of linguistic precision endtime disciples have come to expect in modern documents, then there is a Lamb's book of life (Rev 13:8; 21:27), and an additional Book of Life that has been kept from the foundation of the world (Rev 17:8), with this latter Book of Life probably being Malachi's Book of Remembrance.
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March 2,
2013 Both those who professed Christ who though not born of God but who strived to walk in this world as Jesus walked as well as the non-Christian who without knowledge of God lived a godly life will have their names read by God in the White Throne Judgment and will have meaning assigned to their names, meaning that gives to them eternal life.
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February 23,
2013 If a person wants to actually remember how post-Resurrection Matthew differs from Mark and how both differ from John, the person will write out the endings, realize that they differ, don't initially be put off by their differences, and deconstruct the post-Resurrection differences to see what is will be revealed. Intentional difference serves to subtly reveal what isn't to be known to everyone. Endtime disciples need to understand the difference between intentionality and the simple recording of an event because the event happened in such & such way.
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February 16,
2013 Paul couldn't imagine a Second Passover liberation of Israel that would have "Israel" filled with spirit so that Sin and Death would be "pushed" out of the fleshly members of disciples. The concept was beyond him, and beyond anyone who was born-into and educated in the traditions of Judaism. In all probability, comprehending that a Second Passover liberation of Israel was promised by the prophets was only available to a person who wasn't reared as a circumcised Jew.
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February 9,
2013 Earthly Jerusalem has importance for outwardly circumcised Israelites that live outwardly by the Law, but it is heavenly Jerusalem that has importance for the "Israel" that is circumcised-of-heart. And in the distinction between earthly Jerusalem and heavenly Jerusalem is the difference between the Passover sacraments being the annual slaughter of a bleating lamb and the sacrifice of the Lamb of God at Calvary. Seder services are inherently unscriptural and mock both Moses and the Lord.
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February 2,
2013 The nation of Israel that left Egypt and that did not enter the Promised Land because of its unbelief was the intended lamb of God through being the firstborn son of the Lord (Ex 4:22). Do not defile yourselves with the idols of Egypt; I am the Lord your God. But they rebelled against me and were not willing to listen to me. None of them cast away the detestable things their eyes feasted on, nor did they forsake the idols of Egypt.
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January 26,
2013 To begin with, the Jews were entrusted with the oracles of God. What if some were unfaithful? Does their faithlessness nullify the faithfulness of God?
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January 19,
2013 Christ is the Head of the Church as the husband is the head of his wife; so the biologically male disciple whose inner self is a son of God will "marry" Christ as His Bride when glorified, thereby turning gender roles upside-down. And it is in this gender confusion that angels first appear to the women to tell them that Jesus has risen from the dead.
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January 12,
2013 It is the glorified Christ that gives heavenly life (received from God) to the disciple. Thus, spiritually, Christ Jesus serves as the Woman, represented physically by women, not by men who function in marriage as God the Father functions in heaven.
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January 5,
2013 The concept of heart knowledge will permit a person, a Christian, to fellowship with others, to share meals, but not to believe the same things that others of the assembly believe; for the person with heart knowledge has superior knowledge (greater understanding) than even the person speaking from the pulpit has, or so this person believes.
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Past Sabbath Readings
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