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Essays for A Commentary — From the Margins A _____________________________ When
I began to reread prophecy and write what I was reading in 2002, I completed
the initial draft of A Philadelphia Apologetic
(APA) in two and a half months. By the fall of 2004, I knew that APA needed to be updated, and I began to
rewrite chapters, but I did not get far before I realized that enough
information was coming from typological exegesis that I needed to add to what I
had just written. However, the demands of writing for numerous websites
prevented me from returning to APA.
Those demands remain. Thus, to satisfy both the demands for new pieces on my
home website, and to finally return to APA,
I have opted to use the Commentaries
to produce the essays that will become chapters; so the serialized edition will
remain as it presently is until enough Commentaries
have been written for a new published edition. At that time, the serialized
chapters will be replaced by the published edition. * * * * * Chapter One Drafted _______________________ EVOLUTION— what
happens if, the
child asked, when
you're baptized they
hold you under too
long? Will
you become a fish? (asked
by my then seven year old daughter, Kristel – HK) ______________________ 1. Bruce Bawer, author of A Place at the Table and Stealing Jesus, was asked by a stranger
on the subway, ‘“Are you a Christian?”’ (1.1). He uses
the occasion to begin his focus on Protestant Christianity’s theft of
“Jesus,” the linguistic icon representing the only way to
salvation. But the Jesus stolen by
Protestants, legalistic and non-legalistic, bears small resemblance to the Son
of Man, who promised to love and to manifest Himself to the disciple who has
His commandments and who keeps them (John 14:21), two attributes that form the
realistic description of someone who is “a Christian,” as well as a
definition of Judaeo-Christian legalism. “To
have His commandments”—what does this mean? Under
the second covenant—a covenant not like the one made “on the day
when [the Lord] took [Israel] by the hand to bring them out of the land of
Egypt” (Heb 8:9), but one that has the laws of God put into the single
house of Israel’s minds and written on their hearts (v. 10)—the law is not far from Israel, but in the
disciple’s mouth and heart (Rom 10:8; cf.
Deu 30:11-14; Jer. 31:31-33). So to have His commandments would be to have the
law of God written on one’s heart and placed in one’s mind. This is
the description of spiritual circumcision (Deu 30:6), first promised under the
second covenant initially mediated by Moses (Deu 29:1), the covenant that was
not ratified by blood but by a song (Deu chap 32) and the covenant to which
better promises were added when its mediator became the glorified Christ Jesus.
Better promises cannot be added to that which has been abolished, and it was
the dividing wall of hostility that Jesus abolished on the cross, the law of
commandments and ordinances made with the flesh and that would have the flesh
circumcised (Eph 2:13-16). The flesh is not a heavenly thing, and covenants
made with the flesh [a “covenant” linguistically represents the
distance between “cuttings”] are necessarily ratified by blood as
shadows and copies of heavenly things (Heb 9:22-23). Thus, the second covenant
made on the plains of “To
have His commandments” is to have all that is written in the book of
Deuteronomy (Deu 30:9-10); for Jesus said to the Pharisees who did not keep the
law Moses gave them (John 7:19) that, ‘“If you believed Moses, you
would believe me; for he wrote of me. But if you do not believe his writings,
how will you believe my words”’ (John 5:46-47). Moses wrote of
Jesus in Deuteronomy (18:15-19). And it is in Deuteronomy where Moses wrote,
‘“And now, Israel, what does the Lord your God require of you, but
to fear the Lord your God, to walk in his ways, to love him, to serve the Lord
your God with all your heart and all your [mind], and to keep the commandments
and statutes of the Lord, which I am commanding you today for your
good’” (Deu 10:12-13). What
was the second attribute of the disciple to whom Jesus promised to love and to
manifest Himself? Keeping His commandments, correct? The Apostle John wrote,
“And by this we know that we have come to know [Jesus], if we keep his
commandments. Whoever says ‘I know him’ but does not keep his
commandments is a liar, and the truth is not in him, but whoever keeps his
word, in him truly the love of God is perfected” (1 John 23-5). John then
added one more thing: “By this we may be sure that we are in [Jesus]:
whoever says he abides in him ought to walk in the same way in which he
walked” (vv. 5-6). The man Jesus of Nazareth was an
Observant Jew, a prophet, and the first human being born of woman whose Father
was not descended from the first Adam; thus, He was the first male child born to
the human cultivar It is
not walking as Jesus walked that divides visible Christianity—the
“Christianity of the flesh”—from the faith of Jesus’
first disciples, all outwardly Observant Jews who had been inwardly circumcised
by Spirit. The Apostle Paul wrote, “For no one is a Jew who is merely one
outwardly, nor is circumcision outward and physical. But a Jew is one inwardly,
and circumcision is a matter of the heart, by the Spirit, not by the
letter” (Rom 2:28-29). So it is not just Jesus who has been stolen, but The
theft of both Jesus and Israel occurred so long ago that a third
theft has been likewise overlooked: the claim of Islam is that the angel
Gabriel came to Mohammad because both Christianity and Judaism had strayed from
the truth of God, but Mohammad’s visions were not written down until
after the prophet’s death. The prince of this world, the dragon that has
deceived the whole world (Rev 12:9) by being as subtle as the serpent in the
garden, stole “truth” given the prophet, a claim that will be just
as hard for a Muslim to accept as it will be for a “Christian according
to the flesh” to accept that Jesus
was stolen or for today’s Observant Jew to accept that Israel was stolen. However, the prophet
Malachi wrote, ‘“Behold, I [YHWH]
will send you Elijah the prophet before the great and awesome day of the Lord
comes. And he will turn the hearts of fathers to their children and the hearts
of children to their fathers, lest I come and strike the land with a decree of
utter destruction’” (4:5-6). When His disciples asked Jesus about
the Elijah to come, Jesus said, “‘Elijah does come, and he will
restore all things’” (Matt 17:11). John the Baptist was a type of
this Elijah to come, but only a type for John does not turn children’s
hearts to their fathers nor does John restore all things. Jesus is the one who
was not recognized by His people The
endtime Elijah will do the work of restoring all things through human beings to
whom He manifests Himself, or makes Himself known. And many will come claiming
to be used by Christ to restore all things and will lead many astray. Many will
come as false prophets, false apostles, false ministers, and these many will
convince the majority of the People of the Book to worship demons and the works
of their hands under the guise that such worship is serving God and is pleasing
to God. The
People of the Book are victims of a common thief, a murderer, an anointed
cherub in whom lawlessness was found and from whose belly fire comes to utterly
consume him (Ezek 28:18-19). This thief stole meaning from the Book and left a
third of humankind believing in the Book but unable to take God’s
intended meaning from it. But then, God knew that this would happen, the reason
why the prophet Malachi wrote of an endtime Elijah who would turn the hearts of
the children of God back to the Father, and the Father’s heart back to
His children. For it is through the patriarchs that the People of the Book are
divided, with these visible divisions forming shadows and copies of schisms
that have given to each “living” patriarch (Matt 22:32) as many
spiritual sons as each had physical sons, with Abraham’s offspring being
one, not many. For
Bruce Bawer, Christianity is primarily divided between “law” and
“love,” shorthand expressions for an overly simplistic analysis of
the corpse of Christ, that spiritually lifeless Body that was buried in
disbelief and disobedience centuries ago. Jesus told Simon Peter,
“‘And I tell you, you are Peter [AXJD@H], and
on this rock [BXJD‘] I
will build my church, and the gates of [Hades] shall not prevail against it’”
(Matt 16:18). The Apostle Paul [ Those
human beings who have the law and who keep it—those whom Jesus loves and
to whom Jesus manifests Himself, and those who in turn know and love Jesus by
keeping His commandments—collectively and individually form the Body of
Christ, and there will be no division in this Body … if this Body had
continued to live from the 1st-Century CE to the 21st-Century
CE, there would also be no need to restore all things. The need to restore or
to resurrect implies loss of what will be restored. The Elijah to come will
restore all things, meaning that all things have been lost. And where can be
found the undivided Body of Christ? Where is this Body? If all
things have been lost, what hasn’t been lost, a rhetorical question with
a self-evident answer? If the Body of Jesus is the collective of disciples who
inwardly have the law and who keep it outwardly [by the inside of the cup
ruling the outside of the cup], then if all things must be restored, the Body
of Jesus will be one of those things that is restored. Thus, no collective of
disciples who have the law and who keep it exists prior to when the endtime
restoration of all things begins. Is the
previous statement true? No collective of Christians exists who have been
spiritually circumcised and who keep the commandments prior to the restoration
of all things? The Sabbath commandment is the sign between God and Depending
upon which doctoral dissertation a scholar uses for support, the collective
fellowships of converted Jews and Greeks that constituted the “Jesus
Movement” in the 1st and 2nd Centuries began
observing Sunday within the apostolic era or during the reign of Emperor
Hadrian—and with the observance of Sunday came the outward cessation of
keeping the commandments of Christ. And to break the law in one point is to break
the law (Jas 2:10); the person is a lawbreaker. Thus, in the 1st, 2nd,
and 3rd Centuries to attempt to enter God’s rest on the 8th
day rather than the 7th day made the person a willful and willing
lawbreaker. This person committed blasphemy against the Holy Spirit which wrote
the laws of God on the heart and in the mind of the one who was spiritually
circumcised. The sins of this person will not be forgiven. And for the saving
of the Spirit within called disciples in a like manner to what Paul commanded the
saints at Corinth to do with the man who was joined to his stepmother (1 Cor
5:5), God delivered Israel into the hand of the spiritual king of Babylon so
that Israel’s disobedience would be covered by its servitude to the
prince of this world in the same way that natural Israel’s lawlessness in
Egypt was covered by that nation’s slave status. God
consigned all of humankind to disobedience (Rom 11:32) and servitude to the
prince of this world as humankind’s covering for its lawlessness, a
natural form of grace that causes no sin to be reckoned against [counted
against] human beings where there is no law (Rom 5:13). This consignment to
disobedience comes from Adam’s transgression [original sin] and lasts
until the person is drawn from this world (John 6:44) as natural The
Church that Jesus built is the Body of Christ, a widely accepted truism of
Christianity. And this Church is without division: what one member suffers, the
entirety of the Body suffers together. Jesus’ own body was crucified. It
was raised on the cross, where it lived from “about the sixth hour
… until the ninth hour” (Luke 23:44). Noon to three p.m. Then the
body of Jesus died. Disciples are crucified with Jesus and thus united with Him
in a death like His—and if united with Christ in a death like His,
disciples will be united with Him in a resurrection like His (Rom 6:5-6). Since disciples
collectively are the Body of Christ and individually are members of this Body,
the church that Jesus built is collectively the Body of Christ. And as
disciples are individually crucified with Christ, with their old nature or self to die with Christ, disciples
collectively as the Body of Jesus were crucified with Christ and died with
Christ, a shorter form of arriving at why no collective of fellowships exists
that keep the commandments of God. The Body of Christ was raised up as Jesus
was, and the Body died as Jesus died, and the Body will be resurrected from
death as Jesus was, with the Body suffering no decay as Jesus’ earthly
body did not see corruption. The restoration of all things assures that the
resurrected Body suffers no decay. The
Body of Christ lost its divine Breath [A<,L:" U(4@<] and
spiritually died centuries ago. But as the gates of hell could not prevail
against the physical body of Christ, resurrected from death without
experiencing decay, the gates of hell will not prevail against the spiritual
Body of Christ, which will be likewise resurrected from death after a length of
time equivalent to the three days and three nights that the earthly body of
Jesus spent buried in the Garden Tomb. There
is no division in the Body of Christ; yet, today, division is the defining
characteristic of the “Christianity of the flesh.” If the Body of
Christ were to be represented as a circle in which there is no division, then
the entirety of visible Christendom would lie outside of this circle. Bruce
Bawer’s “Protestant legalism” would lie outside this circle
as would his “Protestant non-legalism.” All of 8th day
Christendom has Jesus’ commandments available to them even if not written
on their hearts and placed in the minds of these disciples, but none of 8th-day
Christendom keeps them as evidenced by the day on which this theology attempts
to enter God’s rest; thus, 8th-day Christendom is excluded
from being of the Body for this theology neither loves Jesus nor knows Him
regardless of its protestations to the contrary (cf. John 14:21; 1 John 2:3-6). This theology represents the most
radical and most severe schism to ever divide the Body, which by definition is
not divided unless, of course, it is dissected in a post mortem examination to
determine the cause of death—the living Body cannot be divided and still
remain alive. Division causes death just as surely as does the loss of breath
and the shock of being crucified. The
Body of Christ did not “evolve” throughout the 2nd, 3rd,
and 4th Centuries CE, growing gills to take spiritual breath from
the cesspool of lawlessness in which it found itself. Rather, it died on the
cross with Jesus, a radical Observant Jew who spoke not His own words during
His earthly ministry but the words [speech-acts] of the Father manifested in
this world through Jesus’ utterances and His miracles. Jesus
will love the disciple who has His commandments and by faith keeps them. This
disciple will have his or her lack of circumcision, whether by neglect or by
nature, counted as circumcision (Rom 2:26), thereby making this disciple an Israelite
inwardly, with circumcision being a matter of the heart, by Spirit and not by
the letter of the law. For the outward mangling of the flesh does not make the
person an Israelite before God: the clipped foreskin of neither a Jew nor a Muslim
nor a Christian makes this person holy to the Father. It is hearing the words
of Jesus and believing the One who sent Him (John 5:24) that causes a person to
pass from death to life without coming under judgment. This belief is
manifested in the Christian through this circumcised or uncircumcised person keeping
the precepts of the law by faith. This belief is manifested in the Observant
Jew through this circumcised person professing by faith that Jesus is Lord and
believing that the Father raised Jesus from dead (Rom 10:6-10). This belief is
manifested in the Muslim through this circumcised person professing that the
Prophet Jesus came to His people Israel as the Son of Allah, His only Son (John
1:1-2, 14; 3:16), to reveal to the called-out ones His God and His Father (John
20:17; 17:1-33, 7-8, 18, 21-26), whom the world did not previously know. The
People of the Book, physically circumcised and uncircumcised, will come to God
by one standard (the righteousness counted to Abraham) and by one gate, the man
Jesus of Nazareth, the last Adam and the living Abraham. There are not many
Bodies of Christ, each vying with the other as the “true” Church to
which was given the keys of the kingdom of heaven (Matt 16:19). There is but
one indivisible Body of Christ, dead and now concealed in the grave. It is this
Body that will be resurrected to life when empowered by the Holy Spirit at the
beginning of seven endtime years of tribulation. But the
Body of Christ, when resurrected to life, will not then be immediately raptured
away to be with God. It will be as the earthly body of Jesus was in the
darkness of the first day of a new week— ·
As the selected Passover Lamb of God, a Lamb
appropriate to the size of the household of God (Exod 12:3), the man Jesus
entered Jerusalem on the 10th day of the first month (John 12:1, 12)
to be “penned” there in the city. ·
As the Passover Lamb of Israel, Jesus was
crucified and slain on the Preparation Day, the 14th of the first
month (John 19:31), dying the ninth hour when the Pharisees then reckoned when
Passover lambs were to be sacrificed between the evenings (Exod 12:5-6). ·
Jesus gave only one sign that He was of God, the
sign of Jonah, that as Jonah was three days and three nights in the belly of
the great fish, the Son of Man would be three days and three nights in the
heart of the earth (Matt 12:39-40). ·
Joseph of Arimathea and Nicodemus took
Jesus’ body from the cross at dusk as the 15th day of the
first month was about to begin, and laid His body in a new tomb in the garden
close-by (John 19:38-42) ·
The 15th day of the first month is a
high day (John 19:31), the first High Sabbath of Unleavened Bread (Lev 23:6-7). ·
The earthly body of Jesus lay in the heart of the
earth the night and the day of the 15th, the night and the day of
the 16th, the night and the day of the 17th, the weekly
Sabbath; and the body of Jesus was gone from the tomb before dawn on the 18th,
the first day of the following calendar week (John 20:1). ·
Since the only sign Jesus gave was that of Jonah,
twelve hours or more are unaccounted for between the conclusion of the three
days and three nights and when the resurrected Jesus appears to Mary (John
20:17). ·
These twelve plus hours are equivalent to the
seven endtime years of tribulation that can be likened to the seven days of
Unleavened Bread during which leavening represents sin, and Israel lives
without sin. The Body of Christ, in the
spiritual darkness of the Tribulation, will have been resurrected to life and
will be invisible [or nearly so] to the inhabitants of this world. What will be
visible is the lawless Church [“Christians according to the flesh”]
that long ago appropriated the name of Christ: the linguistic icons /Jesus/, /Jesus Christ/, and /Christian/
were stolen before the 1st-Century CE ended, and were employed by
imaginative Greek philosophers to construct a Trojan horse by which these
Greeks could overturn the emperor-worship cult that sustained the Roman Empire.
As Odysseus and his men gained entrance inside the walls of The
Church not the representative of God, how can that be? The Body of Christ dead— If the
Body of Christ is presently dead, with the terms for inclusion into this Body
being possession of the Holy Spirit, the Divine Breath of God [again, A<,L:" U(4@<], then
by logical extension, there is not today a collection of individuals who have
received the Holy Spirit or who have been born of Spirit … does this
agree with critical observation of self-identified Christians? Concerning
divisions, is there even a sect without divisions? No, unfortunately not, and
especially not within the sects that claim to keep the commandments of God.
There are hundred of slivers that have come from the splintered Sabbatarian
Church of God. So where might a sphere of Believers be that is without inner
schisms? Within just Among
self-identified Christians in God
used the prince of this world to carry knowledge of the man Jesus to all
corners of this world. Clever, huh? If the prince of this world had not stolen Jesus and After
the Body of Christ was buried in a grave of lawlessness, the visible Christian Church that overturned the
Roman emperor-worship cult and won an empire for Greek philosophers and
theologians was the only “Christianity” known to the world, but
this “Christian faith” bore so little resemblance to the Christianity of Christ Jesus that even a
Germanic rustic with a divining rod could not have located where the glorified
Jesus had manifested Himself to a disciple. And that “making known”
remains the test for discipleship: the one who has the commandments and who
keeps them shows that he or she loves Jesus, and it is this person that the
Father and the Son loves and to whom the Son will manifest Himself. So when
Judas (not Iscariot) asked Jesus, ‘“How is it that you will
manifest yourself to us, and not to the world”’ (John 14:22), Jesus
sidestepped a direct answer, saying instead, ‘“If anyone loves me,
he will keep my word …. Whoever does not love me does not keep my words.
And the word that you hear is not mine but the Father’s who sent
me”’ (vv. 23-24). So the
person who has the commandments uttered by the Logos from atop The
assumption that when Jesus said the gates of Hades would not prevail against
the Church meant that His Body, the Church, would not die out is a logical and easy
conclusion to make. But as soon as the Church becomes His Body as Paul states,
the assumption should have been modified to mean that the Church would be
resurrected from death as the man Jesus was resurrected from death. Now Jesus
saying that Elijah would come and would restore all things can be placed in the
context of the Church being returned to life after having died on the cross
with Jesus. But the conclusion that the prince of this world intended for
“Christians according to the flesh” to draw from Jesus’ words
is that the Church would not fail and that the Elijah to come was only John the
Baptist. I was taught that Church would not die out, and I have read the very
bad scholarship of Sabbatarians who have attempted to prove that certain fringe
cults and sects kept the 7th-day Sabbath throughout the Dark Ages.
Their scholarship remains an embarrassment to Sabbatarian Christianity.
Nevertheless, even today there are Sabbatarian disciples who will insist that
the Waldensians observed the Sabbath, not Sunday. Same for the Cathars. But if
a Waldensian observed the Sabbath—it is doubtful that any did—he or
she kept the person’s observance a secret from the society around them.
Thus, I have been sloppy, assuming that the Body of Christ would not die out;
assuming that every person who outwardly comes to Christ has been drawn by the
Father from this world; assuming that those who would keep the commandments
have been born of Spirit. Observant Jews keep the commandments, but deny
Christ; so by extension, they have not been born of Spirit. So being born of
Spirit constitutes more than professing that Jesus is Lord and by faith keeping
the commandments. If it did not, then the Body of Christ would be alive today,
and alive without division or schism. And there is no fellowship without
schism. Even one united by name, such as the Sabbatarian “United Church
of God,” is regularly riddled by schisms. The
Body of Christ is today dead, buried in dissension and disobedience, and
awaiting resurrection when the seven endtime years of tribulation begin. Prior
to when these endtime years begin, the work of restoring the teachings of
Christ Jesus will be accomplished by the last Elijah working through a few
disciples who have been called to this task. 2. Realization that Jesus saying
the gates of hell would not prevail against the Church does not preclude the
Body of Christ from dying but only precludes the Body from remaining dead opens
to endtime disciples the question that Bruce Bawer anticipates but does not
answer in Stealing Jesus; for it
isn’t the so-called “Christian political right” that stole
the linguistic icon in the late 20th-Century, but Hellenistic
philosophers in the 1st-Century. The “mystery of lawlessness,”
already at work while the Apostle Paul lived (2 Thess 2:7), expunged all things
Jewish from “Christianity” when constructing the theological Trojan
horse used to steal an empire from If the
Body of Christ is, indeed, today dead for want of Divine Breath, who will
constitute this spiritual Body when it is resurrected through empowerment by
the Holy Spirit? The
above question has more relevance than initially perceived. If the Body of
Christ consists only of those human beings who have been born of Spirit
[literally, the “A<,L:"–Breath”
of God], and if the Body dies when it loses its Breath [again, A<,L:"], then
there is no Body to resurrect when the second Passover occurs. That constitutes
a major problem in both perception and logic. And it is here where
understanding the construction of the Church is essential: ·
The Church began as the last Eve when Jesus, in
the late afternoon of the day when He was resurrected from death and had
ascended to his Father (John 20:19), stood among His disciples, breathed on
them, and said, “‘Receive the Holy Spirit [A<,L:" U(4@<
– or Breath
Holy]’” (v.
22). ·
The Church does not begin on that day of Pentecost
following ·
The ten received the Holy Spirit and birth by
Spirit (John 3:3-8) at relatively the same narrative moment as when God
presented Eve to the first Adam, a type of Jesus (Rom 5:14), who said that Eve
was bone of his bone and flesh of his
flesh (Gen 2:23). ·
The ten when born of Spirit through receiving the
Divine Breath of Jesus became one with Jesus through possessing “the
Spirit [A<,L:"] of
Christ” (Rom 8:9) in a manner analogous to how the first Eve was made one
with the first Adam; the ten become the last Eve, the Body of Christ in
metaphoric relationship. ·
Until a “group” or division of
humankind is visible baptized by the Holy Spirit, the Divine Breath [again, A<,L:" U(4@<] must be directly passed
to another individual as in Peter and John laying hands on the Samaritans that
Philip baptized (Acts 8:17), but once a representative group is baptized by the
Holy Spirit [A<,L:" U(4@<] as
occurred on that day of Pentecost following Calvary when natural Israelites
were filled or empowered by the Holy Breath of God (Acts chap 2), and as
occurred when Peter went to the house of the Gentile Cornelius (Acts chap 10),
the Holy Spirit [A<,L:" U(4@<] no
longer requires being directly transferred. No laying on of hands occurs on
that day of Pentecost when three thousand were added to the Church, nor were
hands laid on Cornelius and his household that had visibly received the Holy
Spirit prior to baptism. ·
The third time that a visible manifestation of
empowerment by the Holy Spirit occurs when Paul went to ·
Prior to being baptized by Paul, the twelve at
Ephesus were as the Samaritans were after hearing the preaching of Philip and
being baptized by Philip (Acts 8:12-13) but before Peter and John came to lay
hands on them. The Samaritans had only been baptized in the name of the Lord
Jesus (v. 16). ·
Peter and John, however, do not rebaptize these
Samaritans, but only pray for them that they might receive the Holy Spirit, and
lay hands on them for the same reason (vv.
15, 17). ·
So Paul’s rebaptism of the twelve is
scripturally a new thing, not previously done to those who had been baptized
unto repentance to believe in Jesus as Philip did the Samaritans. Prior
to On that
day of Pentecost when three thousand were added to the Body of Christ (to be
added, Acts 2:41, the Body had to already exist), the three thousand do not
speak in languages of another’s youth, nor do these three thousand
prophesy. Only the disciples, now all Galileans [Judas Iscariot was the only
non-Galilean] (v. 7), were speaking
in words heard by each of the multitude in the language of his youth—so
two men standing together if from different lands heard the Galileans speaking
in the language of his youth, not in the language of the other’s youth.
The miracle was in the hearing, not in the speaking. And when this multitude
asked, “‘Brothers, what shall we do’” (v. 37), Peter said to them,
“‘Repent and be baptized every one of you in the name of Jesus
Christ for the forgiveness of your sins, and you will receive the gift of the
Holy Spirit. For the promise is for you
and for your children and for all
who are far off, everyone whom the Lord our God calls to himself’”
(vv. 38-39 – emphasis added).
God must call the person to Himself. The Holy Spirit is to be given to only
those whom God calls, not to everyone at this time. But this invisible division
of humankind will end when the Holy Spirit is poured out on all flesh. Since
Jesus breathed on the ten, the waters of humanity have been divided by
spiritual birth given to those whom God calls to Himself. The separation made
in the flesh through circumcision becomes a separation made within hearts and
minds through spiritual circumcision; thus, physical circumcision becomes a
shadow and copy of spiritual circumcision. Physical circumcision can only be a
copy of a heavenly thing for blood is shed (again, Heb 9:22-23). The
Holy Spirit will be poured out on all flesh when the kingdom of this world is
taken from its present prince and is given to the Son of Man. It is this
transference of authority to rule the single kingdom of this world that all of
biblical prophecy is about. God is
not a respecter of persons, calling some, offering salvation to some, not
calling others, not offering salvation to those not called. Rather, there are
two harvests of God, with these harvests seen in the grain harvests of ancient All the
while barley was being harvested in ancient Judgment
is not today upon those human beings who have not been born of Spirit. Their
judgment occurs after the seven endtime years, after the Wedding Supper, after
Jesus’ 1000 year long reign, after Satan is released for a short while,
after Satan is again taken and cast into the lake of fire. Only then, in
“a sixth day” period immediately prior to the coming of a new
heaven and new earth, the mass of humankind will be resurrected and given a
second birth, a birth by Spirit, and will be judged by those things done while
they lived physically. Those who sinned without knowing the law will also
perish without being judged by the law, but by being judged by what they knew
was right and wrong from the natural law within them; whereas those who did not
have the law but who did what the law requires [the person who did good and
loved his or her neighbor] will have their consciences accuse and excuse them
and thereby receive everlasting life (Rom 2:12-16). As Satan dragged a third of
the stars down from heaven, the Son of Man will drag a third of humankind into
heaven, with the glorified firstfruits forming the Body of the Son of Man,
Christ Jesus being the Head of this Body. The
importance of the twelve at ·
Following that day of Pentecost (Acts chap 2), no
natural Israelite needed to have a direct transfer of the Holy Spirit. The Holy
Spirit would be given to whichever natural Israelite the Father drew from the
world (John 6:44, 65) prior to the Israelite’s baptism, with baptism now
becoming the inclusionary rite that brought this natural Israelite into the
household of God and under judgment. ·
Following the baptism of Cornelius and his
household, no Gentile needed to have the direct transfer of the Holy Spirit.
The Holy Spirit would be given to whichever Gentile the Father drew from the
world prior to this Gentile’s baptism [why would this Gentile come to God
if God did not make the first overture], with baptism being the inclusionary
rite that makes this Gentile part of ·
No other division of humankind exists besides ·
But if the Body of Christ dies and has to be
resurrected from death, the twelve at Ephesus are not an anomaly that differs
from the Samaritans who were not rebaptized by Peter and John, but are the
basis for the Father giving the Holy Spirit to those who have repented in a
manner consistent with the second covenant made with Israel at Moab (Deu chaps
29-32). ·
Today, and continuing on until the Holy Spirit is
poured out on all flesh halfway through the seven endtime years of tribulation,
the Father draws a person from this world by giving the person His Spirit and a
second birth following the person’s repentance in a manner that would be
represented by John’s baptism, and by the terms of the Moab covenant. ·
The patriarch Abraham received use of the Holy
Spirit when his named was changed from Abram to Abraham, with the /ah/
radical linguistically representing aspirated breath or “rough
breath,” but he was not born of Spirit. The same applies to King David
and to the prophets of old. And contrary to what has been taught by the The
Body of Christ will be resurrected and will consist of those natural Israelites
and Gentiles who, while in a far land, turned to God and by faith began to obey
His voice in all that God commanded Israel in the book of Deuteronomy (Deu
30:1-2, 9-10), loving God with the person’s hearts and mind, and loving
neighbor as oneself; professing that Jesus is Lord and believing that the
Father raised Him from the dead. The resurrected Body of Christ will consist
only of those who have demonstrated their faith and belief through repentance
and obedience prior to receiving the Holy Spirit. Everyone else, regardless of
whether he or she calls him or herself a “Christian,” will appear
before God in the great White Throne Judgment when the person will be born a
second time. And this resurrected Body of Christ will be empowered by the Holy
Spirit when liberated from indwelling sin and death at the second Passover. The
Christian Church today, in all of its many sects and denominations, is a
“feel-good” association that cooperatively markets guilt and
arrogance as if human misery were milk to be churned into cheese. Collectively,
the People of the Book are today equally ignorant of what God expects from
them: Judaism would have Israelites live good lives through benevolent social
works whereas Christendom would have spiritual Israelites live good lives
through individual enlightenment and Islam would have Muslims live good lives
through the “struggle.” But when Jesus was called
“good,” He rebuked the rich young ruler, saying, “‘Why
do you call me good? No one is good except God alone’” (Luke
18:19). If Jesus, a man without sin, denied that He was good while being of
flesh, then no person is “good.” No person is truly without sin (1
John 1:8). And it isn’t goodness that God seeks, but faith and belief that
leads to child-like obedience. The
Apostle Paul wrote, citing Isaiah concerning Israel, ‘“Though the
number of the sons of Israel be as the sand of the sea, only a remnant of them
will be saved, for the Lord will carry out his sentence upon the earth fully
and without delay’” (Rom 9:27-28). And why will the Lord carry out
His sentence of death? The prophet Isaiah writes elsewhere, Behold
the Lord will empty the earth and make it desolate, and he will twist its
surface and scatter its inhabitants. … The earth shall be utterly empty
and utterly plundered; for the Lord has spoken this word. The earth mourns and
withers; the world languishes and withers; the highest people of the earth
languish. The earth lies defiled under
its inhabitants; for they have transgresses the laws, violated the statutes,
broken the everlasting covenant. Therefore a curse devours the earth, and
its inhabitants suffer for their guilt; therefore the inhabitants of the earth
are scorched, and few men are left. (Isa 24:1, 3-6 – emphasis added) The everlasting covenant is not
the Sinai [Horeb] covenant for that covenant was ratified by blood, but the Only a
remnant of Evil is
nothing more than determining for oneself what is right and what is wrong. Even
if the person decides that he or she should obey the commandments of God
because the commandments reflect the goodness of God, the person has committed
the same sin that the first Eve committed; the person has judged the law, and
by extension, has judged God. A person
is to keep the commandments because God said to. That reason alone is
sufficient. What about free will? What about God giving human
beings minds with which to reason and to make decisions? Surely God
doesn’t expect blind obedience. Surely He values informed choice. What if
He does expect blind obedience? Will endtime “Christians according to the
flesh” follow their convictions into lion dens, or into Coliseum arenas?
Christians in the 1st-Century were killed in every way imaginable.
Or will endtime Christians say, My God
wouldn’t expect that of me! My God is a God of love and peace. Well,
God is the same yesterday, today, and tomorrow. If He allowed intelligent men
and women in the 1st-Century to be slain as Jesus was, He will allow
equally intelligent men and women to be so slain in the 21st-Century.
And they will be so slain (Rev 6:9-11). Love for God will have endtime
disciples dying by faith for their beliefs. The person who places the life of
his or her flesh ahead the person’s love for God is not worthy of
following Christ Jesus. The
“decision theology” of Billy Graham and of Evangelical Christianity
places human beings in charge of their own salvation: making a decision for Christ now becomes the
responsibility and work of the person, thus placing upon every person the
obligation to choose life (Deu 30:15) on a fixed and unchanging day of
salvation And this is bad theology. If fact, it is worse than bad for it is
fatally flawed. The Father draws from this world those whom He chooses, and
ever since the Body of Christ died on the cross with Christ Jesus, the pool of
human beings from which the Father draws individuals consists only of those who
have repented after the order of John’s baptism. Whereas the Father
initially drew individuals from natural The
typical Evangelical “born again” experience is usually nothing more
than a burp of guilt. If the A
lawyer seeking to test Jesus, asked, ‘“Teacher, what must I do to
inherit eternal life’” (Luke 10:25). This lawyer understands that
he does not have eternal life, that eternal life is something to be inherited,
and he knows what the Law says about inheriting everlasting life. So Jesus
answered the lawyer by asking, “‘What is written in the Law? How do
you read it”’ (v. 26).
The lawyer answers correctly (v. 28).
The righteous requirement of the Law is to love God with heart and mind, and
love one’s neighbor as one loves him or herself. Keeping the commandments
fulfills the righteous requirements of the Law; keeping the commandments is the
manifestation of love toward God and neighbor. And the lawyer could not keep
the commandments—Jesus said none were doing so—because the lawyer
had no love for his neighbor … the lawyer had all of the correct answers,
but he lacked belief and faith, which together are counted as righteousness to
the one who loves God and neighbor. A person has no love apart from the person
keeping the commandments. If a man respects his wife and his neighbor’s
wife, loving his wife and loving his neighbor, the man will never commit
adultery. Likewise, if a man values his word and loves the one to whom he
speaks, the man will utter no lie, bear no false witness. And so it is with
every commandment when these commandments are written on hearts and placed in
minds. Love becomes the interface between the law inscribed on hearts and the
actions of the hands. Without this interface of love, the inner law remains a
thing not seen by man or angels. Thus, fulfilling the law of God requires
loving God and neighbor. The
better promises—they include (1) everlasting life rather than physical
life, (2) return to heavenly 3. How does a person know if he or
she has been born of Spirit, a question that has an answer? But its answer
opens a debate about the real Jesus and about what He taught. The Apostle Paul
wrote, For
those who live according to the flesh set their minds on the things of the
flesh, but those who live according to the Spirit set their minds on the things
of the Spirit. To set the mind on the flesh is death, but to set the mind on
the Spirit is life and peace. For the mind that is set on the flesh is hostile
to God, for it does not submit to God’s law; indeed, it cannot. (Rom
8:5-7) If a person does not submit to
God’s law, without question the person’s mind is set on the flesh:
this person has not been born of Spirit, regardless of whether the person has
had a dozen “born again” experiences. If a fellow, because he is a
fellow, looks with lust at a provocatively attired female, the fellow’s
mind is set on the flesh. Yes, it is! He has not been born of Spirit. Wow! That
rules out most of the male half of humanity from being born of Spirit. Indeed,
it does. It truly does. And the protestations can be heard from here— The
mind that is set on the things of the Spirit really does not experience the
lustful desires, or the anger, the urge to kill that this same mind experienced
prior to being born of Spirit. How can that be? How can you say that? I say from
personal experience. For me,
the extraction of a mental thorn, somewhat like Paul’s physical thorn,
brought light from darkness. And as Paul never explained what that physical
thorn was, I have no need to relate what that mental thorn was. But unlike
Paul’s physical thorn that God did not remove, the mental thorn was
removed so that I could address, albeit somewhat vaguely, the profound mental
change that occurs when a person is truly born of Spirit. Paul
addresses the mental change that occurred in him with spiritual birth in Romans
chapter seven. And the entirety of Paul’s ministry comes about because of
this mental change. He goes from persecuting Christians and from approving the
stoning of Stephen to being the one who lays the foundation for the heavenly
house of God (1 Cor 3:10-11). This is truly a profound change, and a change
that most “Christians according to the flesh” recognize as not
having happened to them. Bruce
Bawer is gay, and according to Evangelical legalists, he cannot be a Christian
because of his sexual orientation and practices. Yes, God condemns homosexual
practices; they are abhorrent to him [sorry, Bruce, Scripture doesn’t
change because of who you want to love]. But what Bawer might understand but
what Fundamental legalists certainly do not yet understand is that his sexual
orientation is part of a received human nature that will be changed when he is born
of Spirit, and instantly changed if born of Spirit after the second Passover
occurs. When gays say that they were born the way they are, they speak from a
post-puberty perspective. They were not born oriented to having sexual
relationships with their own gender, but as their perception of self was being
formed while very young, something happened differently from what happened to
the majority of the population. And whatever happened modified the
person’s so-called human nature, which again, is a received nature from
the prince of this world, “the prince of the power of the air, the spirit
that is now at work in the sons of disobedience” (Eph 2:2 –
emphasis added). The prince of this world is a spirit being, not the
Secretary-General of the United Nations, or whichever human being conspiracy
theorists currently believe is in control of a shadowy secret world government. Chapter
four of the book of Daniel is a message from King Nebuchadnezzar to all
peoples, nations, and languages. It is his story, and it begins with him again
having a vision that Daniel interprets for him, a vision about an angel of God
directing the majestic tree seen in the vision be chopped down and its limbs
lopped off, with its stump banded and left in the ground. The angel in the
vision says, ‘“Let his mind be changed from a man’s, and let
a beast’s mind be given to him’” (Dan 4:16). And a year after
receiving this vision, the event happens: “While the words were still in
the king’s mouth, there fell a voice from heaven, ‘O King
Nebuchadnezzar, to you it is spoken: The kingdom has departed from you, and you
shall be driven from among men, and your dwelling place shall be with the
beasts of the field. And you shall be made to eat grass like an
ox”’ (vv. 31-32) …
how did God make the king eat grass? By changing the nature of the king, taking
from Nebuchadnezzar his human nature and giving to the king the nature of a
castrated bull, not the nature of a young calf or a breeding stud. For seven
years, the king did not realize that he was the king. Instead, he contentedly
lay in the field, wet with the dew of heaven, grazing like an ox for his
sustenance. The
human nature that was taken from Nebuchadnezzar was restored to him after seven
years—and when his human nature was restored, the king blessed and
praised and honored God (Dan 4:34-37). In
Daniel’s vision recorded in his seventh chapter, Daniel saw a beast rise
from the sea that was like a lion and had eagles’ wings. This beast was
lifted up and made to stand on two feet, “and the mind of a man was given
to it” (v. 4). This spiritual
king (v. 17) was given the nature of
a man; he has his nature/mind instantly changed from what it was before to that
of a man. Human
nature is less the product of biology than it is a gift from God. Thus, the
person whose nature is today what learned men call “human nature,”
that nature received from the prince of the power of the air when humankind was
consigned to disobedience—this person will lift up his or her eyes when
born of Spirit, and will bless and praise and honor God, for this
person’s nature will not then be what it is now. The person who is today
unwillingly gay will give great honor to God when this person is truly born of
Spirit, far greater honor than will give the person who believes that he or she
is “okay” with God. The prophet Isaiah des |