Homer Kizer Ministries

May 10, 2013 ©Homer Kizer

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7.

The problem inherent in ancient Israel was this people’s proclivity to their version of multiculturalism; to worshiping the Lord as their neighbors worshiped their deities of sticks and stones, whether in Egypt or in the Promised Land … multiculturalism denies “specialness” to any particular culture, resulting in the reality that the deity, the God of Abraham who claimed ancient Israel as His firstborn son (Ex 4:22), was simply the Lord of lesser lords that were deities of land, water, storms, fertility, harvests, everything the people of Israel did. The God of Abraham became for the people of Israel the sky God—represented by the sun—the God that oversaw the activities of many lesser deities that also must be placated (whose favor must be sought) if the children of Israel were to prosper in their new land. Thus for Israel in Egypt and for the children of Israel in the Promised Land, the Lord was indeed “Lord,” but He was not special. He was simply the chief Lord of many lords, each having power over successively smaller dominions, with the Queen of Heaven being the consort of the Lord.

In the children of Israel worshiping many lords, the children of Israel apparently believed they sincerely worshiped the Lord of heavenly hosts—

But Israel was to worship no other deity but the Lord, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, the God of Jacob. Israel was not to do as the people of the land did. Israel was not to worship sticks and stones or deities that allegedly controlled fertility. Israel was to maintain the nation’s specialness through its worship of the Creator of all things physical.

What ancient Israel didn’t understand—and what greater Christianity today doesn’t understand—is that the Adversary and his angels reign over the mental topography of living creatures, even over Israel as the firstborn son of the Lord (Ex 4:22). However, ancient Israel was truly special; for in being physically liberated from physical bondage to a physical king in a physical land (Israel’s status at the time of Moses’ birth), Israel was potentially liberated from death that reigned over all living creatures since the world was baptized into “death” in the days of Noah. It was with the Flood that all human persons were consigned to disobedience and by extension, delivered to death for the destruction of the flesh. Thus, if the Adversary were not the reigning prince of this world before the Flood, the Adversary became the reigning prince following the Flood.

Although the Lord said of humanity prior to the Flood that “the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every intention of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually” and that the Lord “was sorry that He had made man on the earth” (Gen 6:5–6), the reality expressed by the Lord to Cain that if he did well, he would be accepted (Gen 4:7) suggests that Cain was not then consigned to disobedience but had true freewill. And if the possibility existed that Cain could have done well (could have done what was right and good), then Cain was not consigned to disobedience (Rom 11:32) as a son of disobedience (Eph 2:2–3), a slave of the Adversary, as all human persons since the Flood have been.

Pause for a moment and consider: death reigned over humanity from Adam to Moses (Rom 5:14). Death reigned over Seth, Enosh, Kenan, Mahalalel, Jared,, Enoch, Methuselah, Lamech, and Noah, about whom the prophet Ezekiel records,

And the word of [YHWH] came to me: "Son of man, when a land sins against me by acting faithlessly, and I stretch out my hand against it and break its supply of bread and send famine upon it, and cut off from it man and beast, even if these three men, Noah, Daniel, and Job, were in it, they would deliver but their own lives by their righteousness, declares the Lord [YHWH]. (Ezek 14:12–14)

Or if I send a pestilence into that land and pour out my wrath upon it with blood, to cut off from it man and beast, even if Noah, Daniel, and Job were in it, as I live, declares the Lord [YHWH], they would deliver neither son nor daughter. They would deliver but their own lives by their righteousness. (vv. 19–20)

By the declaration of the Lord Himself, because of his righteousness Noah would deliver his life from death as he did in the days of the Flood that came upon the earth to blot out man whom the Lord created. But Noah isn’t with us today: “After the flood Noah lived 350 years. All the days of Noah were 950 years, and he died” (Gen 9:28–29). Thus, Noah’s righteousness that delivered Noah from death did not save his physical body forever. Death, therefore, differs from death, with the death of the fleshly body forming a type or copy of the death of the inner self—true death—and with the fleshly body initially designed to live about a thousand years, the lifespan of the antediluvian patriarchs.

The death that reigned over humanity from Adam to Moses—death’s reign ending with Moses, who died atop Pisgah, opposite Jericho—wasn’t of the fleshly body but of the inner self, with the marking of Cain disclosing that a difference exists between inner self and the fleshly body, with no one to kill Cain’s fleshly body even though the Lord had already condemned Cain’s inner self through personifying the ground, the soil upon which Cain would wander as a fugitive as the Adversary wanders to and fro on the earth (Job 1:7; 2:2); for Cain did not physically wander far but settled in the land of Nod [wandering], east of Eden (Gen 4:16), where he built a city that he called after the name of his son, Enoch (v. 17).

When the ground speaks, the ground is no longer physical soil but is spiritual or metaphorical. So when the Lord says to Cain, “‘The voice of your brother’s blood is crying out to me from the ground. And now you are cursed from the ground, which has opened its mouth to receive your brother’s blood from your hand’” (Gen 4:10–11), the Lord who is not physical speaks of those things that are also not physical. So previously when the Lord spoke to Cain, saying that if he did well he would be accepted by the Lord, the possibility existed for Cain to have done what was right and good—and if Cain could have done well and have resisted sin that crouched [lurked] at the door and was hence outside of the person, Cain was not born consigned to disobedience and by extension, born as a son of disobedience. Cain was born as Noah was. Eventually, his physical body would have worn out and he would have died, but his inner self would not be delivered to death as the inner selves of most of the antediluvian patriarchs were because every intention of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually (again, Gen 6:5).

Therefore, ancient Israel’s liberation from indwelling sin and death was limited by only Moses having entered into the presence of the Lord. The veil that Moses placed over his face—the veil that served as a type of the veil separating the Holy of holies from the sanctuary (i.e., from the Holy Place of the temple [Heb 9:2])—separated ancient Israel from “life” as Christians receive life through receipt of the breath of God [pneuma Theou] in the breath of Christ [pneuma Christou].

As Death is not death, Life is not life … human persons receive physical life from physical parents, with the father of the person entering the mother of the person (God didn’t intend for a person to be conceived in a Petri dish, or with a turkey baser), but the person receives spiritual life from spiritual parents, with the spirit of the Father [again, pneuma Theou] entering into the spirit of the Son [pneuma Christou] when Jesus rose from baptism, and the spirit of the Son entering into the spirit of the person, a euphemism for the inner self of the person. So yes, what Paul wrote is both true and understandable:

Yet among the mature we do impart wisdom, although it is not a wisdom of this age or of the rulers of this age, who are doomed to pass away. But we impart a secret and hidden wisdom of God, which God decreed before the ages for our glory. None of the rulers of this age understood this, for if they had, they would not have crucified the Lord of glory. But, as it is written, nor the heart of man imagined, what God has prepared for those who love him"— these things God has revealed to us through the spirit [of Him]. For the spirit searches everything, even the depths of [the] God. For who knows a person's thoughts except the spirit of that person, which is in him? So also no one comprehends the thoughts of [the] God except the Spirit of [the] God. Now we have received not the spirit of the world, but the spirit from [the] God, that we might understand the things freely given us by [the] God. And we impart this in words not taught by human wisdom but taught by Spirit [pneuma], interpreting spiritual truths to those who are spiritual. The natural person does not accept the things of the Spirit of God, for they are folly to him, and he is not able to understand them because they are spiritually discerned. The spiritual person judges all things, but is himself to be judged by no one. "For who has understood the mind of the Lord so as to instruct him?" But we have the mind of Christ. (1 Cor 2:6–16 emphasis added)

We understand spiritual things because we have within us the spirit of God in the spirit of Christ. We understand spiritual things because we have the indwelling of Christ Jesus that gives to us the mind of Christ. Hence, when we come to the Apostle Paul writing, “Yet death reigned from Adam to Moses, even over those whose sinning was not like the transgression of Adam” (Rom 5:14), we understand that Death didn’t reign over humanity from Adam until the coming of Christ Jesus, but reigned over humanity from when Adam was driven from the presence of the Lord (Gen 3:23) until Moses entered into the glorified presence of the Lord (Ex 33:14, 17–23). Thus, through Moses all of Israel could have had life if the people of Israel had not rebelled at Mount Sinai when Moses was in the presence of the Lord.

Liberation from physical slavery in Egypt at the first Passover placed all of Israel in an analogous state to that of Cain: if Israel would have done well once sin was made alive by the giving of the Law, sin would have lurked outside of Israel, waiting to devour the nation but unable to do so. The people of Israel would have lived long physical lives with the promise of resurrection to everlasting life awaiting them as this promise now awaits Noah, Job, and Daniel. But spiritual wisdom differs from physical wisdom as spiritual life differs from physical life and as spiritual death differs from physical death … the physical reveals and precedes the spiritual: before a person can have spiritual wisdom, the person must have physical maturity and the wisdom that comes with physical maturity, not necessarily the wisdom that comes through the study of philosophy or economics or military tactics.

The person who is not yet mature will inevitably succumb to the teachings of con men and hucksters that attempt to pass off the wisdom of this world as the wisdom of God. These false teachers have received the spirit of this world from the Adversary, who remains the prince of the power of the air. These false ministers do not and cannot understand the things of God … leave them alone. Depart from them, and stay away from them; for their teachings are as the leavening of the Sadducees and Pharisees (Matt 16:11–12).

Those who have the indwelling of the spirit of God in the spirit of Christ have no fellowship with the teachers of this world, or of this world’s Christianity. Consider the fear of climate change that has been advanced by the intelligentsia of this world: whereas in 1975, that last year as cold as this present year, climate alarmists warned of global cooling and a soon coming mini ice age. Within a decade, these same climate alarmists, using the same hyperbole, warned of global warming and melting ice caps, rising sea levels, and an earth with a fever. None of these alarmists understood Beer’s Law that discloses the levels at which atmospheric gases reflect energy rather than continue to absorb energy and by extension atmospheric heat: carbon dioxide as a greenhouse gas was capped (topped out) before Christ walked the dusty roads of Galilee. So while there was rise in measured temperatures from 1890 CE through the Depression of the 1930s, there was a decline going into the 1970s, a serious enough decline that alarmists were certain that an ice age was at hand. Then global temperatures started to again rise until 1998 when they stabilized before dropping noticeably in 2012/2013.

Does the wisdom of man when encountering climate change adequately account for global temperature variations? No, it does not! But have humanists in charge of Western education instilled fear of climate change in the minds of youths in America, Europe? Certainly, with this fear leading to the worship of Gaea, the goddess of the earth, who allegedly bore and married Uranus and became the mother of the Titans, the Furies, and the Cyclopes … the climate alarmists are modern worshipers of the goddess of the earth, with the power of democratic States to impose carbon taxes forming a modern adaptation of the power held by Titans, who were allegedly defeated by Shem and a handful of mercenaries—

When I was on Kodiak in 1982, I entertained the idea of writing a novel based on Shem chasing down and slaying Ninus, the legendary founder of Nineveh and husband of Semiramis; for it would have taken someone familiar with the violence and warfare of the antediluvian world to have taken on Ninus and the Titans and to have defeated them. There isn’t much material with which to work, but I was prepared to go ahead with the project when Luther Nichols, Doubleday’s West Coast editor, asked me to send him a draft of Shelikof, a draft he held for twenty months before making the decision not to publish. In those twenty months, I wrote mostly magazine articles for hunting/fishing publications and didn’t undertake another long project; for I knew I would have to make changes to Shelikof. So now, three decades later, I again speak of Noah, the man who looked into two worlds, sending his son Shem (the Hebrew word for, name) after Nimrod (a title) to slay him and the Titans.

The wisdom of this world is not wisdom at all. Scientific truth has a shelf life of approximately seven years. And the core curricula of American education elevate multiculturalism and religious diversity while devaluing traditional Christianity that is itself a modified form of Greek paganism … let us worship Gaea, mother of the Titans, and not Mary, mother of God—or so modern American culture seems to dictate when worship of both should be abandoned.

8.

The height of Mount Sinai as a type of the mountain of God separated Moses from the people of Israel. Whereas the people of Israel could not set foot on Mount Sinai and still live, Moses repeatedly climbed the mountain, initially with Aaron before the Law was given (Ex 19:24), then with Aaron, Nadab, Abihu, and the seventy elders of Israel going up part way after the Law was given (Ex 24:9), followed by Joshua going up farther but still only part way to the summit when Moses was called into the cloud (v. 13). Thus, the height of Mount Sinai served as a schism that separated Moses [the Son] from the people of Israel, a schism representing the distance between life and death, a schism that required the second Sinai covenant to be made with both Moses and with Israel, two covenantees, not one. And Moses kept faith while Israel rebelled against the Lord, again and again, until Israel was ready to stone Moses and Aaron, Joshua and Caleb when the twelve spies returned from scouting the Promised Land (Num 14:10).

The Adversary as the prince of this world—as the deity that reigns over the people of this world—is the “god” that greater Christendom, rabbinical Judaism, and all sects of Islam mistakenly worship as Lord.

The Apostle Paul said of the Adversary, “And no wonder, for even Satan disguises himself as an angel of light” (2 Cor 11:14). Thus, unless the person truly walks in this world as Jesus walked, believing the writings of Moses and hearing the voice and words of Jesus, living inwardly as a Judean and outwardly as an uncircumcised Jew, the person worships the Adversary as his or her prince. And this means that all of greater Christendom worships the Adversary as its prince.

All authority in this world presently comes through the Adversary, a situation disclosing that Satan rules over a divided house, that his reign over this world has been doomed from its inception, that it is only a matter of time before his underlings, all princes over this world, rebel against him as he rebelled against the Most High God. Hence, the deities of field and harvest that ancient peoples worshiped; the deities that Hindis and Shintoists worship; the triune deity that Christians worship; the single deity that Jews and Muslims worship—all are the Adversary or are of the Adversary as his underlings.

The multiculturalism of ancient peoples permitted the Adversary and his underlings to be simultaneously worshiped individually and collectively: one demonic spirit would seem to reign over the land of Hittite peoples while a differing demonic spirit reigned over the harvests of Amorite peoples and yet another host of demonic spirits reigned over Egypt—and a differing host of demonic spirits reigned over China. But Gaea to the Greeks was the protogenos [masculine case ending] or primeval deity of the earth, one of the primal elements (along with air, sea, and sky) that emerged at the dawn of creation: she was the great mother of all. The heavenly gods descended from her coupling with Uranus [Ouranos — the sky]; thus, she was Mary, mother of God, not something Catholics openly teach.

The sea gods descended from Gaea fornicating with Pontos [the sea]; the Gigantes from her liaison with Tartaros, [hell, or the underside of a flat earth]. Thus Gaea was the primary opponent of the heavenly gods; for she rebelled against her husband Ouranos. And today, according to former vice President Al Gore, Gaea has a temperature. She is feverish …

Once, Al Gore told middle school students that they knew things their parents didn’t know. That is probably true; for how many parents know to worship Gaea, not that any should. But the wisdom of this world, its spirit and its knowledge, are pitted against the wisdom of God—

For a year (1976) I worked for Ron Swanson of Ron’s Rental of Kenai, Alaska. When he hired me, I told him, “I have a funny religion.” Knowing that I kept the Sabbath, he said, pointing to his wife, a devout Roman Catholic, “No, you don’t have a funny religion, she does.”

What Ron said may have been more true than he knew; for the visible early Christian Church did spiritually what the children of Israel did physically when they entered the Promised Land: when the children of Israel crossed the Jordan and entered into the Promised Land, it seemed good to the people to continue worshiping the demonic spirits that provided abundant harvests to the peoples the children of Israel were dispossessing. These children of Israel found a land overflowing in milk and honey, a land that produced much, a good land that was unlike the land from which they came. They found a land that was not watered with their feet (i.e., flood irrigation through ditching and laterals coming from the Nile), but a land watered by the early and latter rains—a land entirely dependant upon the favor of the gods, the demonic spirits, the Canaanite peoples had worshiped. For the Lord, in bringing the children of Israel into the Promised Land brought Israel into a land already producing much, having heavy harvests, grape clusters so heavy that one cluster required two men with a pole between them to carry the cluster (Num 13:23).

What more could worshiping the Lord provide for the children of Israel in the way of harvest than the demonic spirits provided for the people already occupying the Promised Land? Could grape clusters be even larger? The land produced pomegranates and figs in abundance. The land produced an early and a latter grain harvest, wine and oil (Deu 11:14), grass in abundance (v. 15). The Lord could not give to the children of Israel even greater abundance (for theological reasons—entering the Promised Land was analogous to entering heaven), but could only take from the children of Israel the abundance the children of Israel found upon entering the Promised Land. And when the children of Israel rebelled against the Lord and material blessings were removed, the children of Israel logically assumed that the material blessings were disappearing because Israel was no longer worshiping the demonic spirits that had provided so well for the Canaanite peoples, the previous occupants of the land.

In a perverse way, bringing the children of Israel into a Promised Land flowing with milk and honey doomed Israel; for any disciplinary action taken by the Lord against the lawlessness of the children of Israel quickly drove Israel into the welcoming arms of the demonic spirits that Canaanite peoples had worshiped. Withholding rain in its season became “proof” for the children of Israel that their failure to worship the familiar spirits of land and water, seed and harvest was causing the land not to yield its abundance. Thus, the children of Israel turned to idolatry with a vengeance … likewise, Christians today assume that if a Christian is not prospering in this world, the Christian needs to return to the ways of traditional Christianity: if a Christian turns from keeping Sunday as the Sabbath and begins to keep the Sabbath and then doesn’t physically prosper in this world, the Christian’s friends and family will tell the Christian that it is his or her neglect of traditional sacraments and observances that is the source of the Sabbatarian’s lack of material prosperity. What these friends and family members do not realize is the Adversary doesn’t bless with material prosperity the person who rebels against him. Why should he? For as long as the Adversary remains the prince of this world, the Adversary has the power (and authority) to deliver the things of this world to whomever pleases him, with the Roman Church having acquired much wealth.

Contrary to what many Christians believe, there is no ongoing struggle between God and the Adversary, who appears before God when commanded to give an accounting of his activities (see Job chaps 1 & 2). There is no struggle between the sons of light and the sons of darkness. The Adversary was defeated before the Creation came into existence in the Abyss.

The Adversary’s rebellion produced a lopsided war between unequals, a defeat so great God could permit the Adversary to demonstrate that all of the Adversary’s forms of self-rule will ultimately fail when put to the test. Hence, God delivered the world to the Adversary for a certain time so that angels that hadn’t joined with the Adversary in rebellion could see the futility of self-governance—but no one permits a defeated enemy to freely go where he will. God doesn’t permit the Adversary to go where he will or to go beyond certain boundaries (again, consider the restrictions God placed on the Adversary when Job was tested). If the Adversary were not already defeated, the Adversary would not answer to God, or be limited by God, or report back to God when commanded to do so. So for Christians to contend there is still an ongoing struggle between good and evil reveals that the Christian is without spiritual understanding.

The Abyss was created from a wound in the side of heaven, which functions as a living organism composed of many individual cells that together form one entity … as Eve was created from a wound in the side of the first Adam and as the Christian Church was created from a wound in the side of the last Adam, the Abyss in which the Creation was spoken into existence was created from a wound in the side of heaven, a wound made necessary when iniquity was found in an anointed cherub for with this iniquity no place for this anointed cherub any longer existed in heaven. This anointed cherub became as a cancerous tumor that had to be cut from the body and placed in a specimen jar where it could be studied.

There were reasons why the children of Israel began to worship the idols of the people they dispossessed—none valid—for once the Lord brought Israel into a land flowing with milk and honey, the Lord really couldn’t give to the children of Israel greater prosperity and abundance than He had already given them. All He could do was take from them what they already had: houses and barns that they had not built, fields they had not cleared, orchards and vineyards they had not planted. Thus, by delivering to the children of Israel too many good things, the Lord hindered His ability to positively reinforce good behavior while punishing bad behavior. He was limited to only punishing bad behavior; for if He caused rains not to come in their seasons, He drove the people not into repentance but into idolatry. If He did nothing, the bad behavior continued until it became the norm of the people; thus, the Lord boxed Himself into a corner, something the Lord would have realized beforehand.

Why would the Lord place Israel in a position where any action He took against Israel would cause the people to further turn to idolatry?

For a long time the question at the root of what’s revealed in Ezekiel 20:25–26 has not fully been answered, but the answer to both questions was probably unintentionally addressed in the Apostle Paul’s analogy that has Gentiles as wild olive scions being grafted onto the root of righteousness (Rom 11:17–24) … a wild scion being grafted onto differing rootstock bears the fruit of the scion’s parent tree, not the fruit of the rootstock. For a wild scion to bear the fruit of the root of righteousness, the scion has to go against nature and do what nature prohibits. That is, the scion must not bear its own fruit but the fruit of the rootstock. Likewise, for an Israelite chastised by the Lord not to turn to idolatry and seek to serve the demonic spirits that the dispossessed peoples worshiped when the land bore abundantly, the Israelite must reject what came naturally and turn against “nature” to do the will of God.

If human nature and the nature of beasts comes from the Adversary, the prince of the power of the air, to do what comes naturally to a person is to follow the Adversary. To do what Moses did when he reasoned with the Lord in attempting to save the lives of all Israel at Sinai is to do what goes against nature; for the Lord told Moses, “‘Now therefore let me alone, that my wrath may burn hot against them and I may consume them, in order that I may make a great nation of you’” (Ex 32:10). Moses had to devalue himself and him being the founder of a great nation in order to save Israel, a people that had rejected him as their prince forty years earlier. Moses had to suppress his own human nature (as controlled by the Adversary) in order to save Israel—and he did: Moses went against nature before he entered into the glorified presence of the Lord. And so must every other person who is or would be of Moses.

The Lord’s intention to build of Moses [the Son] a greater nation than that of Israel never changed. But is wasn’t from Moses’ bloodline that this great nation would come: this great nation would come from the writings of Moses for believing the writings of Moses became the prerequisite for hearing the words of Jesus (John 5:46–47).

Moses went against so-called human nature before he entered into the presence of the Lord. Israel never went against its own nature, and never entered into the presence of the Lord, but was instead permanently barred from having life in the presence of God, the meaning of not kindling a fire on the Sabbath (Ex 35:3). Thus, the veil that covered Moses’ face and separated Israel from the glory of God remains in place to this day; for Israel did what came naturally to the people of Israel, with those things that seem natural being of the Adversary, again the prince of this world. For too long, the children of Israel worshiped sticks and stones and demonic spirits, something that early Christians determined that they would never do.

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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."

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