February 5, 2013 ©Homer Kizer
Commentary — From the Margins
Seeing is Believing?
Part Two
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Some of the people of Jerusalem therefore said, "Is not this the man whom they seek to kill? And here He is, speaking openly, and they say nothing to Him! Can it be that the authorities really know that this is the Christ? But we know where this man comes from, and when the Christ appears, no one will know where He comes from." So Jesus proclaimed, as He taught in the temple, "You know me, and you know where I come from? But I have not come of my own accord. He who sent me is true, and Him you do not know. I know Him, for I come from Him, and He sent me." So they were seeking to arrest Him, but no one laid a hand on Him, because His hour had not yet come. Yet many of the people believed in Him. They said, "When the Christ appears, will He do more signs than this man has done?" (John 7:25–31)
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2.
If disciples are to test spirits, one spirit that must be tested is the so-called Spirit of the Age, the Zeitgeist of the early 21st-Century; for this spirit and this age with all of its technological advances is condemned by its lack of morality. The present age is not simply immoral, but amoral: its morality is without defining parameters. Anything goes, including a Super Bowl halftime show enjoyed by tens of millions that was soft porn and Super Bowl commercials embracing the occult … half of the stadium lights went out for a half hour shortly after Beyonce’s halftime performance, coincidence or a divine “sign”?
What constitutes a sign? After Hurricane Katrina flooded New Orleans (2005), several Sabbatarian wannabe prophets proclaimed that Katrina was a sign from God, a sign disclosing His disapproval of the city’s libertine lifestyle. But no such thing was the case … when God, Himself, has consigned all of humanity to disobedience so that He could have mercy on all (Rom 11:32), would God doubly condemn an already condemned people or would God show His disapproval of what He has already condemned? He will doubly repay Israel, His firstborn son, for Israel’s iniquity (Jer 16:18), but this passage pertains to bringing death onto both the inner and outer selves of the people of Israel, not those who are of this world in general.
What would be the point of doubly condemning a people that have little or no knowledge of God, that never knew God, that don’t even pretend to walk in this world as Jesus walked? This nation, the United States of America, is not of God; is not the modern nation of Israel as some Sabbatarian pastors claim. The United States Constitution is not a divinely-inspired document as too many Evangelical Christians as well as Latter Day Saints believe. Democracy is not of God, but of the Adversary. If democracy were of God, tell me what Korah’s fault was (Num chap 16); for what Korah told Moses is the best expression of democratic ideals found in Scripture: “‘You [Moses and Aaron] have gone too far! For all in the congregation are holy, every one of them, and [YHWH] is among them. Why then do you exalt yourselves above the assembly of [YHWH]?’” (16:3). And what Korah discovered was that Israel was not a democracy. All of the congregation was, indeed, holy (Ex 19:5–6), but the congregation had no say in its own governance. Moses wasn’t in the position he held because he chose to be there, but because the Lord had put him in that position. And anyone who challenged Moses perished, a lesson Sabbatarian pastors need to take to heart before the endtime two witnesses begin their ministry.
There is no democracy when dealing with God; there is no governance of the people, by the people, for the people. There is God’s way, God’s governance, or rebellion against God, what the Adversary learned when iniquity was found in this anointed guardian cherub. But the one whom God has put in authority is in that position to serve those over whom the person has authority, and not in that position to be served by the people: the trappings of authority seen in this world are contrary to the ways of God … the least in the nation shall be served by the greatest, not the other way around.
The Lord is the same yesterday, today, and tomorrow, meaning that the governance of God was not, is not, and will never be a democracy. The endtime two witnesses will not be “elected” by either Christians within greater Christendom, or by a theological Committee of Public Safety, but rather, will be empowered by God to do the task at hand, publicly defeat Death, the fourth horseman of the Apocalypse and the fabled King of the North, represented in type by the ancient king of Assyria as Pharaoh in the days of Moses [the Son] represented in type the demonic King of the South, Sin. Thus, the Second Passover liberation of Israel, the nation to be circumcised of heart, will be from indwelling Sin and Death, thereby making this latter liberation of such greater significance to Israel that Israel will no longer remember the Exodus from Egypt in the days of Moses (see Jer 16:14–15; 23:7–8).
Returning to the question, what is a sign … a sign can be anything, with the context in which the “sign” occurs giving meaning to the sign. So half of the stadium being plunged into darkness after Beyonce flashed the symbol for the all-seeing eye of Horus could be read as a “sign,” but most likely not from God—she wasn’t flirting with God, but with the Adversary. Who knows. The Adversary may have winked back at her.
Because the Super Bowl power outage occurred after Beyonce flashed the occult sign of the all seeing eye during her halftime performance, meaning can be rightly or wrongly assigned to the power outage. Whether any meaning (beyond the obvious associated to Beyonce’s seductive costuming) should be assigned to the occult symbolism that has become part of her repertoire is open to speculation. But the lights in half of the stadium did go out for reasons that have been inadequately “explained” — why half of the lights for half an hour?
Virtually every aspect of American and European culture—from mass murders to single murders, from embracing to celebrating homosexuality, from revolving marriages to live-in girlfriends and boyfriends to children born out-of-wedlock, from children conceived by children to children conceived in petri dishes to biological engineering of children—represents a culture no longer bound by the limitations of tradition and nature … Beyonce’s performance was designed to appeal to “human nature,” but appeal without delivering upon the implied promise as if promises are made to be broken. The world watched the merging of nature and culture in a way that again objectified the female body, returning the “person” to non-person status through importance being placed on appearance over substance, not in an unusual or non-typical way but in the way that has “evolved” as humanity returns to being pond scum, not that it ever was green slime.
When a culture no longer places limitations on what can be done or what should be done, the culture has determined its own destiny: the culture will shortly perish. Without a culture placing internal limitations upon itself, telling itself this is right, or this is wrong, external limitations will be imposed upon the culture by the “nature” of the ongoing demonstration in which this seemingly limitless culture has emerged. And truly, what is occurring worldwide with all humanly born persons being consigned to disobedience so that God can have mercy on all (Rom 11:32) is a demonstration that self-governance in whatever form will not succeed, but breeds only rebellion, moral stench, and carrion flies.
Regardless of what Americans believe, all of the world—including the United States—functions as one living organism as the shadow and type of heaven, the timeless supra-dimensional realm Christians, Jews, and Muslims seek to enter. Thus, what happens in India or in China has always affected people in the Americas, more so now than three centuries ago; perhaps no more so now than ten centuries ago. … Individually, people are as living cells in a human body, each cell having importance, life expectancy, and redundancy. When glorified, individual sons of God in heaven will be as living cells in a human body here on earth, only heaven is timeless; is without the passage of time. And without the passage of time, what has life will always have life. What is not alive will never be alive; for the presence of life and the absence of life cannot coexist in the same moment. Again, what has life in heaven will always have life because the moment doesn’t change.
In timelessness, a “moment” is like a geographical location inside of space-time, but a geographical location with walls, boundaries, barriers that prevent entry by entities not of the particular moment in a hierarchy of moments, with the moment in which God dwells being the Most High in an amalgamation of figurative and literal meanings for the concept of <height>. Thus, to be with God where He is necessitates having “life” that has come from the heavenly moment in which the Most High dwells, with this hierarchy of moments represented in the physical height of Mount Sinai … the people of Israel camped around the base of Mount Sinai, but they were not permitted to climb the mountain: the Lord told Moses, “‘And you shall set limits for the people all around, saying, “Take care not to go up into the mountain or touch the edge of it. Whoever touches the mountain shall be put to death. No hand shall touch him, but he shall be stoned or shot [with an arrow]; whether beast or man, he shall not live”’” (Ex 19:12–13).
Moses is permitted to come and go, climbing the mountain with Aaron before the commandments are given (Ex 19:24), then climbing the mountain to receive the covenant, then again climbing the mountain after the covenant is ratified, and finally climbing the mountain after the people rebelled and the covenant was broken, necessitating the giving of a second, eternal Sinai covenant, one ratified by the glory that shone from Moses’ face for the remainder of his life. But the people of Israel, the firstborn son of the Lord (Ex 4:22), were as angels created by God in heaven are—they can never enter into the presence of God unless He relocates His throne to where they are as Daniel saw Him do in vision (Dan 7:9–10).
The name “Moses” means the Son and is a descriptive name given to the child after his discovery in the Nile by Pharaoh’s daughter. Moses’ mother would not have called her son that she could not keep by the name <Moses>. Pharaoh’s daughter, however, probably did call him the unadorned modifier, Moses, for the child was not the son of any Pharaoh, or any Egyptian; so no identifier would have preceded Moses when the modifier was uttered.
Moses functioned has the shadow and type of the Christ Jesus, the unique Son of the Logos, Theos, who was God and was with the God in primacy (John 3:16; 1:1–3, 14). And as Christ Jesus could enter into the presence of God the Father at anytime, Moses could enter into the presence of the Lord and live; thus, the words Moses uttered, the words he inscribed in a partially alphabetized Semitic script [the partial alphabetizing being theologically important] form the shadow and copy of the words Jesus spoke ala John 5:37–47.
Because Moses wrote in a Semitic script rather than in Egyptian hieroglyphs, the words Moses wrote are incomplete: the vowels are missing. The aspiration is missing. The breath that gives to consonants their peculiar sound is missing for a consonant comes from interruption of the vowel stream at a particular place in the mouth; thus, consonants tend toward silence, the death of the word. In consonants alone, there is no sound, no life—and both Hebrew and Arabic are partially alphabetized Semitic languages. In the words of both languages there is no life.
The New Testament was written in Greek. It could have been written in Aramaic, also a partially alphabetize Semitic language, as Aramaic served as a new universally understood language in the Near and Middle East in the 1st-Century. But Greeks, having borrowed a script from the Phoenicians, used Phoenicians characters representing consonants not used in Greek utterance to represent vowel sounds that were used; thus, a reader of a Greek text did not need to know what the text said before the text could be read as was the case for all partially alphabetized inscriptions. Of theological importance, Greek inscription included voicing via aspiration and thereby represented the fullness of the words Moses inscribed; of the words Jesus uttered. In the New Testament being written in a fully alphabetized language, Koine [Common] Greek, both the silence of consonants and the voicing of vowels are present in the inscribed word: both death and life are present in New Testament texts, which would give to the Adversary ample reason to subvert the New Testament through the inclusion of false texts, with the most easily seen example being the Book of Acts which is a well received Greek Sophist novel, with all of the obligatory motifs for a Sophist novel present in the book.
Nearly a decade ago, a person wanted to discredit what I write about there being a Second Passover liberation of Israel by saying that I am a novelist, a writer of fiction. True. I have written several novels, many essays, one lengthy collection of poetry. I have a Master of Fine Arts degree in Creative Writing; so who is better qualified to recognize a “novel” than a novelist. And the Book of Acts is a fictional novel—the book borrows its narrative structure from Paul’s epistles, and through the technique of voice merging, attempts to borrow credibility from Paul’s ministry. But as Governor Sarah Palin said when accepting the Republican nomination for Vice President in 2008, You can put lipstick on a pig, but it’s still a pig … the author of Luke’s Gospel and of the Book of Acts put lipstick on a Sophist novel, and made the “fantastic” believable by nearly all of Christianity for 1,900 years.
The writings of Moses were linguistically incomplete until they were translated into Greek, with their translation open to ideological abuse. However, it was in the loss of the Book of the Covenant (see 2 Kings 22:8–13) where the most serious translational problems occurred; for the loss broke the generation-to-generation transmission of voicing needed to supply meaning to the partially inscribed words of Moses. Hence, when a remnant of Israel returned from Babylon to Jerusalem to build for King Cyrus a temple for “‘the God of heaven … who is in Jerusalem’” (Ezra 1:2, 3), this remnant did not understand the function of linguistic determinatives, and treated these determinatives as regular nouns and names, thereby sealing their own spiritual fate in how they translated old Hebrew into the Hebrew then in use.
Words are “signs,” what any reader of Augustine’s On Christian Doctrine comes to understand before quitting the work (in addressing the subject of words as signs, Augustine revealed the educational limitations of his age). As such, the meaning of words derive from the context in which they appear: for most Christians, the words of the Book of Acts are true because they are found in the New Testament. Same for the words of Luke’s Gospel. Same for the words of the Pastoral Epistles. But Paul doesn’t contradict himself as would be the case if the Book of Acts were true. The genealogy of Joseph, husband of Mary, mother of Jesus, does not come through both David’s son Solomon (Matt 1:6) and David’s son Nathan (Luke 3:31)—and contrary to what I was taught, neither genealogy is of Mary, mother of Jesus; for Mary was the cousin of Elizabeth according to the author of Luke’s Gospel. If this were true, her ancestry would have come through Levi and through Aaron.
A word in any Semitic language is an incomplete sign that not only requires its context to supply its meaning (the condition in which a fully alphabetized word is received), but also that its context completes its formation; thus a word in a partially alphabetized Semitic language can represent many signs in its incompleteness—and to each of these many signs meaning must be assigned, these meanings being both literal and figurative.
Over time, language changes; and the language of earlier generations, even when speaking the same tongue, must be translated from itself into itself, a seemingly paradoxical statement until a 21st-Century English reader encounters written English of the 14th-Century … there has been less time passed between Chaucer and today’s reader than there was between Moses and the prophet Jeremiah, and while a reader today can understand the English language in which Chaucer wrote by sounding out his words, hearing the sound and recognizing the sound image that in print doesn’t seem to be the same word (the advantage of a fully alphabetized language), the prophet Jeremiah didn’t have this option; for first, the Book of the Covenant had been lost throughout Jeremiah’s youth. No one alive knew what vowels to insert between the consonantal stops. Oh, they had some idea: they could guess at which vowel combination went where, but they didn’t know. That knowledge was lost. And second, the context for keeping the Law had so radically changed that the remnant of the poorest of Israel that Nebuchadnezzar’s army left in the land after carting off all of the Israelites who seemed to have worth—even this poorest of the poor would not cease making sacrifices to the queen of heaven when they fled to Egypt from where they would not return.
The name <Moses> was, itself, a sign that has been missed for generations; for the name <Moses> is the Egyptian-to-English equivalent of the Greek <‘o Uios>, which in English is rendered “the Son.” … Again, was there any meaning to half of the stadium lights going dark for half an hour—no, not unless meaning is assigned to this possible wink by the Adversary as he nodded his approval of Beyonce’s half time performance.
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Returning to the timelessness of heaven, the human person who hasn’t received heavenly life while still inside the creation cannot enter heaven. Unless this person receives a second breath of life that comes directly or indirectly from God the Father, this person will never have life in the “moment” in which God has life. But if the person does receive the indwelling of Christ, in Whom is the breath of God, this person will have life in a symbolically “higher” location in heaven than angelic sons of God have. Thus, what the Adversary desired but could never obtain because of the limitations of timelessness, human sons of God will be given for simply enduring to the end in faith, walking in this world as Jesus walked, even to the death of the fleshly body. And it is for this reason that human sons of God will be higher in heaven when glorified than are angelic sons of God—
Human persons are born without indwelling heavenly life; without immortal souls. A human person is humanly born with only life that has come from inside the creation, life that has come from the first Adam. Any other teaching is a lie. But when a human person receives a second breath of life, the breath of God [pneuma Theou] in the breath of Christ [pneuma Christou], the human person receives life that has come from the “moment” in heaven in which the Father dwells. However, the human person receives this heavenly life in a vessel that also comes from heaven, Christ Jesus. So with receipt of the breath/spirit of God, the inner self of the person is made alive through receipt of heavenly life, with this indwelling heavenly life having come from God the Father and from the same “moment” in heaven that God occupies; whereas angels, not having life in this moment but having been created in heaven must necessarily have life in a different “moment,” a lower moment (again, in the timelessness of heaven a moment functions as a geographical location functions in space-time); for again, the presence of life and the absence of life cannot simultaneously exist in the same moment. As realized here inside of space-time, for a living creature to die one moment (when the creature has life) must become another moment, the next moment. Same for receipt of life. Thus, a living angel in heaven will not die for as long as the angel remains in heaven, but when an angel is cast into the creation where one moment routinely becomes the next moment, angels can die as easily as men die: space-time is a glorious death chamber that was created for taking the lives of rebellious angels. But the creation of mass, gravity and the passage of time brought the side benefit of human persons being able to directly receive life from God in the same heavenly moment/location as God has life, something that no angel created in heaven could have. However, before any human person could receive indwelling heavenly life, there needed to be a vessel that had also come from heaven to hold this life for as long as this life remained inside space-time; hence, the coming of the man Jesus of Nazareth.
Again, as every cell in a human body directly or indirectly affects every other cell, every person in this world is directly or indirectly affected by every other person … at the Boston Tea Party, barrels of “tea” were thrown into the harbor, with this tea not having been grown anywhere in the Americas. And from this early Tea Party grew the United States, perhaps the logical outgrowth of the Treaty of Paris that formally ended a world war between Protestant and Catholic brothers that began before the Reformation—that began when Danes occupied much of Britain and their cousins settled in Normandy—and that continued into the 19th-Century CE. And from the United States comes Beyonce’s halftime performance that may or may not have triggered an angelic response.
What would happen if half of the world’s lights ceased to shine?
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This commentary will continue with Section 3.
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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."