February 22, 2011 ©Homer Kizer
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Endnote —
The Parakletos [From a Calling]
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~?J"< §82®Ò B"DV680J@H Ô< ¦(ã BX:RT ß:Ã< B"D J@Ø B"JD`H, JÎB<,Ø:" JH •802,\"HÔ B"D J@Ø B"JDÎH ¦6B@D,b,J"4, ¦6,Ã<@H :"DJLDZF,4 B,D¦:@Øq 6" ß:,ÃH*¥z :"DJLD,ÃJ,, ÓJ4 •Bz •DPH :,Jz¦:@ئFJ,— When comes the parakletos that I will send to you from the Father, the spirit of the truth that from the Father proceeds, that one will testify about me. And you also testify, because from beginning with me you are (John 15:26–27)
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1.
The spirit or breath of the truth [•802,\"H] is not a personage and does not have personhood, and it is only the “Comforter” in that comfort comes from a calling by God, a calling that causes separation from this world while still living in this world, a calling that it is like a thing in this world but a calling that is not of this world, a calling that gives to the person understanding of what has been concealed from neighbors, friends, family, even other Christians, and with understanding comes comfort, with this understanding being like a physical library within the person and with the truth being that which is not concealed. The Greek icon •802,\"Hthat is translated into English as truth is the negation of concealment. Its root is not positive, but represents things hidden. And there is a perceptive difference between truth being what has always been “true” and truth being the negation <•> of what has been concealed or hidden. So Jesus’ words negate what has been hidden (John 18:37) and Pilate’s response reflects the Zeitgeist of that age, what isn’t concealed (v. 38), which is different from what has always been true.
The spirit of the truth—the parakletos [ÒB"DV680J@H], a linguistically masculine singular noun—reveals what has been hidden. The spirit of the truth will declare to Jesus’ disciples “‘the things that are to come’” (John 16:13) because those things will no longer be hidden from disciples, suggesting that the things that are to come have been concealed from humankind and unknown to human beings. And if the things that are to come have been concealed, that concealment suggests that knowledge of these things has been deliberately withheld from humankind; so in declaring what is to come, the spirit of the truth functions as a spirit of prophecy that is the testimony of Jesus (cf. Rev 12:17; 19:10).
There is comfort in knowing what is to occur even when a disciple can do little to prepare for what is coming and even less to alter the future. There is comfort in knowing how the present turmoil in the Middle East and around the world will end, and even when it will end. There is comfort in knowing that by taking the Passover sacraments of bread and wine after the model Jesus left with His disciples—Jesus promising to ask the Father to send the parakletos came as part of the Passover observance—the death angels will pass over the disciple when a third of humankind, all uncovered firstborns, will be slain at the Second Passover liberation of Israel, the nation that is circumcised of heart. There is sadness in realizing that friends and neighbors cannot be saved, that they cannot understand what the disciple understands. But even in this sadness there is comfort knowing that these firstborns will appear before the Lord in the great White Throne Judgment where they will give an account of themselves up to the moment they were taken, with those who even without the law did what the law requires thereby showing that the law was written on their hearts, with their consciences accusing and excusing them in the day of their judgment.
There is sadness in realizing that of greater Christendom, very few Christians will actually enter into the kingdom of the heavens. Most will rebel against God even though the Torah is written on their hearts and placed in their minds at the Second Passover, when the New Covenant is finally—after all of these many years—implemented through every Christian being filled-with and empowered by the spirit of God [B<,Ø:" 2,@Ø], thereby liberating every Christian from indwelling sin and death. There is sadness in realizing that Christendom today is like Judaism was in the 1st-Century, when Judaism was a tangle of sects and factions: Hellenists, Herodians, Sadducees, Pharisees, to name those found in Scripture. Each has its counterpart in Christianity, with the Hellenists representing the greatest number of Christians, those who have sought to escape the archaic and primitive religion established by Moses, with Sabbath-observance serving as the focal point of Moses … Christians who enter into the kingdom will be as Jews were in the 1st-Century who entered into Christianity, many in number but few in percentage. The analogy holds: it will be as difficult for a Christian to actually believe Christ Jesus in the 21st-Century as it was for a Jew to believe Christ Jesus in the 1st-Century.
When Alexander overran Persian garrisons throughout the Near East and Africa, Greek culture collided with Hebrew culture, with the winner of this collision still in dispute twenty-three centuries later. Only a remnant of the House of Judah had returned to the Land beyond the River from Babylon, and none of the House of Israel (the Lost Ten Tribes) had returned. Thus, there were Hebrews sown throughout Asia Minor and into the steppes to the east, with these Hebrews when in the promised Land not worshiping the Lord but worshiping instead the pagan deities of Canaan, the reason they were scattered. But some of these Hebrews believed the reason they were sent into slavery was because they had abandoned the God of Abraham, with the descendants of these tribes today being Muslims in nations such as Afghanistan. However, in the 3rd-Century BCE, in the overlap between Moses and Zeus, far from the center of each culture, Hellenist Judaism emerged in what was then the backwaters of the world, with Hellenist Judaism receiving more favor from the Seleucids that traditional Judaism.
In Jerusalem itself, the center of Moses, Seleucus Philopator defrayed temple expenses and was generally friendly to the traditionalists, permitting the son of Simon II, Onias III, to be Judaism’s high priest … Onias III, a pious traditionalist, resisted Seleucid attempts to plunder the temple treasury brought about by Simon the Benjaminite in his dispute with Onias III; so when Antiochus Epiphanes IV ascended to the throne, the time was ripe for Jason, Onias III’s brother and a Hellenist, to attempt to settle the dispute between his brother and Simon the Benjaminite: in 175 BCE, Jason offered Antiochus IV money to confirm him as the high priest, a betrayal of his brother. And not only did Antiochus accept the bribe, he allowed Jason to build a gymnasium in Jerusalem and build a Greek-style polis named after the king, Antioch … Jason builds Antioch as a city for Hellenist Jews, those natural Jews who sought to be more like Greeks, modern and sophisticated, not backward Sabbatarians.
As a library serves as a repository of knowledge, of things that are not concealed, of historical narratives, of construction techniques and details, of medical theses, the parakletos serves as spiritual library, revealing to the disciple those things that are concealed to those who remain a part of this world. A worldly library gives to the endtime observant Christian knowledge of Seleucus Philopator, but a worldly library cannot make the connection between Paul in the city of Antioch chiding Peter for his hypocrisy in separating himself from converts when the Circumcision Factor came from Jerusalem (Gal 2:11–14), and Jason establishing the city of Antioch. The connection lies in the centuries of civil wars between Hellenists and Traditionalists, then between Traditionalists, Sadducees against Pharisees, and Hasmoneans against Herodians. The converts at Antioch would not have been from biological Greeks, but from biological Jews, and the Circumcision Faction would have been to these Hellenists as Yankee Bluebellies would have been to Georgia farmers in the decades immediately after the American Civil War—and comprehending this relative relationship is fairly easy once the connection is made. But making this connection requires both knowledge and understanding, and when that knowledge is of those things that have been concealed by God and when the understanding also comes from God as a second spiritual thing, then the Christian begins to grasp what receiving the parakletos represents, and what receiving the parakletos in the spirit of prophecy [JÎ B<,Ø:" JH BD@N0J,\"H] represents for endtime disciples. For disciples in the 1st-Century were actual witnesses to the words that Jesus spoke, but disciples in the 21st-Century hold the testimony of Jesus [J¬< :"DJLD\"< [0F@Ø] (Rev 12:17) through receiving the spirit of prophecy (Rev 19:10).
Luke records,
And [Jesus] said to the disciples, “The days are coming when you will desire to see one of the days of the Son of Man, and you will not see it. And they will say to you, ‘Look, there!’ or ‘Look, here!’ Do not go out or follow them. For as the lightning flashes and lights up the sky from one side to the other, so will the Son of Man be in His day. But first He must suffer many things and be rejected by this generation. Just as it was in the days of Noah, so will it be in the days of the Son of Man. They were eating and drinking and marrying and being given in marriage, until the day when Noah entered the ark, and the flood came and destroyed them all. Likewise, just as it was in the days of Lot—they were eating and drinking, buying and selling, planting and building, but on the day when Lot went out from Sodom, fire and sulfur rained from heaven and destroyed them all—so will it be on the day when the Son of Man is revealed. (17:22–30)
At the beginning of Jesus’ ministry, knowledge that He, Jesus, would suffer many things and be rejected by His generation was concealed from His disciples. This knowledge was not revealed by Moses or openly revealed in the Prophets, and this knowledge was only revealed to the disciples in the weeks immediately before Jesus entered Jerusalem where He would shortly afterwards be taken and crucified. And even though Jesus said to the disciples that He would be taken, the reality of Jesus being taken and killed was difficult for the disciples to accept.
In addition, knowledge that the coming of the Messiah in power shall be as the days of Noah were, that before the Son of Man would be seen the world would have been plunged into catastrophic calamity was concealed knowledge, and even though this knowledge was revealed by Jesus to His first disciples, the details would continue to be concealed knowledge into the 21st-Century. For what did Jesus mean when He said, “‘On that day, let the one who is on the housetop, with his goods in the house, not come down to take them away, and likewise let the one who is in the field not turn back. Remember Lot's wife. Whoever seeks to preserve his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life will keep it. I tell you, in that night there will be two in one bed. One will be taken and the other left. There will be two women grinding together. One will be taken and the other left’” (Luke 17:31–35).
One taken and one left has been taken by Evangelical Christendom as a passage supporting a bodily rapture to heaven, but eagles/vultures do not gather in heaven, but gather here on earth where corpses/bodies are collected: “And [the disciples] said to Him, ‘Where, Lord?’ He said to them, ‘Where the corpse is, there the vultures will gather’” (Luke 17:37). The one who is taken will be a corpse, and will not bodily be in heaven. The one who remains asleep in bed remains alive. The one who remains grinding will be the one who remains alive. And the one who does not seek to save his or her life is the one who will live, perhaps not physically but will live spiritually. It is never better red than dead, the antiwar slogan of Vietnam-era protestors; for red is the color of the Adversary, the color of dusk and dawn when the sun shines weakly, the color of Christmas, the mingling of the sacred [the Light of men] and the profane [the birthday of the invincible sun]. It is not better to live physically by compromising the truth through mingling the sacred [revealed knowledge] with the profane [those things that remain concealed] than to die in faith.
The person who is taken shall appear before God in the great White Throne Judgment if this person has not truly been born of God. The person taken will be a biological or legal firstborn who did not cover him or herself with the blood of Christ, the Passover Lamb of God, taken on the dark portion of the 14th of Aviv. And if the person taken were truly born of God, the person would be in rebellion to God and would be resurrected into the lake of fire upon Christ Jesus’ return … this is what the parakletos in the spirit of prophecy reveals to all who are truly born of God as a son born out of season; i.e., before it is time for birth, before the Woman gives birth to a nation in a day.
What was initially concealed from Jesus’ disciples is that in a day, a great many people—metaphorically half of humanity—will be taken, and this day will be like the day Noah entered the Ark and like the day Lot left Sodom. This day will be a day, and will be the day when the Son of Man is disrobed or made naked. And when Jesus’ disciples heard His words about the Son of Man being disrobed, they did not then understand what Jesus told them; for the matter was still concealed even though it had been declared. It would take the disciples receiving the parakletos to cause the disciples to remember what Jesus had said (John 14:26), and to then transmit their remembrances to Luke who would inscribe them in his Gospel. And it would take the holy ones in the Affliction receiving the parakletos in the spirit of prophecy [JÎB<,Ø:" JH BD@N0J\"H] before these endtime holy ones could “hold to the testimony of Jesus” (Rev 12:17) that was declared shortly before Jesus was crucified in 31 CE.
Today, only a very few Christians—all born as premature sons of God—hold the testimony of Jesus. And as human preemies require a large amount of care once born and often bear evidence of their preterm birth for their first few years of life, preterm sons of God require considerable nurturing from the Father and the Son, with these spiritual preemies bearing evidence of their preterm birth for decades … I have previously argued that some correspondence exists between a genuine disciple’s childhood and adolescence and the disciple’s spiritual birth and maturation. Early physical maturation suggests early spiritual maturation. Preterm human birth with its associated problems suggests preterm spiritual birth; i.e., birth before the Second Passover liberation of Israel, the time for spiritual birth. The developmental delays seen in human preemies are seen in sons of God born in this present ante-Second-Passover periods, developmental delays that cause sons of God to deny their own spiritual birth.
2.
When the truth is the negation of what has been concealed; and when Jesus came into this world so that He might testify to the truth [•802,\‘]; and when everyone being of the truth [JH•82,\"H] hears the voice of Jesus, then everything that is not revealed by Jesus is false, a lie, regardless of how true the claim made seems to be. And to hear the voice of Jesus, to hear His words, requires that the person first believe Moses’ writings (John 5:46–47) … to believe Moses requires a person to keep the Sabbaths of God, which immediately places the person at odds with the remainder of the world. So the schism between Hellenist Judaism and traditional Judaism that existed at the beginning of the 2nd-Century BCE remains a type of the schism that separates an observant Christian from greater Christendom and the remainder of the world.
Language in its usage and by its use does just reveal divisions between peoples, nations, and sects, but serves as the principal cause of separation; for language usage conceals meaning.
The meaning for words—the signified, or the linguistic object—must be assigned by the reader and by a reading community to inscribed words [signifiers or linguistic icons]. The writings of Moses do not carry meaning in little knapsacks that can be opened as each word is read. Rather, readers [auditors] must bring their own meanings to these words, and must give to each word the meaning that the reader believes (by faith) is correct for the word in its context. Dictionaries merely reveal the fossilized record of past meanings that have been assigned to the word; whereas the parakletos reveals the meaning that God the Father intended for the word to have, reveals the meaning that has been concealed by separation of signifiers from signifieds at the Tower of Babel. And when the words pertain to future events, the spirit of prophecy discloses what the parakletos reveals.
The greatest strength inherent in using language to conceal meaning from a person or from a people comes from language’s ability to hide a thing in plain side and then reveal the thing at a future time or place when a differing meaning is assigned to the same words. Thus, when the person or when a people substitutes one word for another word as necessarily occurs in translations of a text from its original language to a second or a third language, the concealed thing is no more concealed than it was in its original language: because of the separation of linguistic icon from object, any object could theoretically be assigned to any icon so through the parakletos, God can cause His sons in whatever language they speak to assign His meanings to the words of Moses and the Prophets.
For practical purposes, there is a limiting factor for what linguistic objects can be assigned to a linguistic icon: an element of Thirdness lies in stereotypical images; hence, a cow is a large four legged animal by its stereotype preventing a cow from being a small flying insect. For an English speaker to call a thing a cow immediately conjures up the stereotype; so the person who derogatorily calls another person a cow insults the person by saying that the person has one or more bovine-like characteristics. The element of Thirdness prevents a third person from assuming that the person being called a cow is petite and flighty.
When meaning is assigned to words, any close translation of Scripture into a foreign language is close enough for the parakletos to cause the son of God to assign divinely inspired meaning to the word while, at the same time, this meaning remains concealed from a person of this world. And by a human example concealment of meaning by words can be shone:
The picaresco style of the novel Don Quixote, a founding work of Western Literature’s canon, permits a farcical surface reading and a more serious, philosophical exploration of themes as a subtext, with the most commonly known scene of Book One, the old gentleman jousting with windmills, being an example: the fictional chronicler of the exploits of one, Alonso Quixano, is the Moor Cide Hamete Benegeli, so first, to believe any of Don Quixote is to believe a Moor, with Moors and Jews having been expelled from Catholic Spain more than a century earlier … from the opening lines of Don Quixote, there is an unstated tension in play: to believe the popular novel about a good Catholic being deceived by books of chivalry—a good Catholic who believes every word of these books to be true despite the impossibility of being so—requires believing the writings of a Moor, which would be akin to believing the writings of the Quran, or ofa Jew, with Moses being the representative of all Jews. To believe Don Quixote and its debunking of Christian books of chivalry is akin to believing Moses and his, from the ancient past, debunking of Christian dogma—or to believe the Quran and its debunking of Catholic dogma. But is this tension plausible: in Alonso Quixano jousting with windmills that he claims are giants is farcical humor, but is also the reality that the windmills represented the beginning of European industrialization, which would bring the age of chivalry to an end, with knights-errant being relegated to the dustbin of history.
The old gentlemen, Alonso Quixano, if that is his name, had been deceived by books that claimed to be true … what book is the pinnacle of books claiming to be true? For the people of the Book—Jews, Christians, Muslims—the ultimate book that claims truth as its domain is Holy Writ for the ideology. Thus, as the old gentlemen identified windmills as giants and they are but not in the way the old gentleman claimed, the Catholic Christian will identify Jesus the Nazarene as fully man and fully God—an impossibility—as He was, but not in the way the Catholic Christian claims. The Muslin will identify Jesus the Nazarene as a great prophet as He was but not in the way the Muslim claims. The Jew will identify Jesus the Nazarene as a bastard as He was but not in the way the Jew claims. For Jesus, whose Father was the Logos [Ò 8`(@H] who was God [2,ÎH — note, no definite article in John 1:1] and who was with the God [JÎ< 2,`<] in the beginning, was fully man, mortal, and tempted in all things as any other man prior to receiving a second breath of life, the breath of the Father, following baptism. But receiving the breath of the Father did not make Jesus fully God: Jesus did not have indwelling eternal life until the breath of the Father [B<,Ø:" 2,@Ø] descended upon Him in the visible form of a dove (Matt 3:16) so that John the Baptist could see Jesus crossing over death as Noah in the Ark crossed from one side of death to the other. Therefore, even during His earthly ministry, Jesus was not fully God. He was fully man through His early life and throughout His earthly ministry, and He was fully God after Calvary and after He ascended to the Father where He received the glory He had before He entered His creation as His only Son. So Jesus was, indeed, fully man and fully God, but not at the same time. His father, the Logos, was fully God before Jesus’ earthly ministry, and His Father, the God, was fully God before and throughout Jesus’ earthly ministry, but Jesus was not fully God until He was glorified after being raised from death by the God. Hence, Jesus’ earthly father, Joseph the carpenter, was not His biological father; so by Pharisical traditions, Jesus was a bastard even though His father, the Logos, had married all of Israel at Sinai. And Jesus was the prophet like Moses and the prophet about whom Moses wrote. So the claims all people of the Book make about Jesus are true but not the truth as is the case for windmills being giants.
A knight-errant is a wandering knight, one not attached to a lord, with “errant” meaning wandering or roving as in searching for adventures to prove worth. The first surviving recorded usage of the phrase knight-errant occurs in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, when Sir Gawain in search of the Green Knight’s castle where he is to stand for a blow from this mythical knight arrives at the castle of Sir Bercilak de Haudesert, and Sir Bercilak welcomes the knygt erraunt. For those not familiar with the 14th-Century Middle English poem, the Green Knight had, at Christmas, suddenly appeared at King Arthur’s court and challenged anyone there to play a game with him: he would stand for a sword blow from any knight if the knight would then stand for a blow from him. To save Arthur’s reputation, Sir Gawain accepted the challenge, and lopped off the Green Knight’s head, which the Green Knight immediately picked up and tucked under his arm, saying from his head that was tucked under his arm that he would collect his blow in a year, at Christmas the following year.
That the old gentleman, Alonso Quixano, if that was his name, identified himself as a knight-errant, a knight not attached to a lord, now assumes greater importance; for Sir Gawain was attached to Arthur and for the honor of Arthur and all of his house, Sir Gawain was obligated to stand for a blow from a mythical knight that could not be killed. For the sake of the honor of the Round Table, Sir Gawain had to locate the castle of the Green Knight, which would seem to be a fool’s errand for the Green Knight gave no indication of where his castle lay—and it lay in faerie, that mythical land where Nordic oral cultures could explore the hypothetical, such as how far should honor be pursued.
The old gentleman, Alonso Quixano, identified himself as a knight-errant (not attached to the Lord) and indirectly with Sir Gawain: jousting with windmills was a fool’s errand, but the windmills were really giants, the first representatives of industrialized Europe. So Miguel de Cervantes, in Don Quixote, uses words in a human way to conceal meaning from Catholic censors, with the name Quixote, itself, being a concealing, with cuixot being the Catalan word for thighs, a reference to a horse’s rump [a horse’s ass], and with the word quijote referring to cuisses, the plate armor that protected the thighs. Quixote is Cervantes’ original spelling in Old Castilian Spanish and the spelling retained in English, but the “x” was pronounced like the English “sh” — a voiceless post-alveolar fricative, usually represented by the modern “j” sound in Spanish; hence Quixote has become Quijote, and the old gentlemen remains a horse’s rump.
The mental image produced by cuixot, in the privileged reader, connects the old gentleman with the Metamorphoses of Apuleius, the 2nd-Century Latin novel that Augustine called, Asinus aureus [The Golden Ass], in which the character Lucius, while trying to perform a spell to transform himself into a bird turns himself into an ass, undergoes many perils, but is saved by the goddess Isis, whose cult he joins. Cervantes, by assigning the narrative about the old gentleman to a Moor and by using names as puns and as allusions, writes a concealed critique of the Catholic Church, the cult of the Virgin Mary (the connection between the Virgin and Isis is textually implied but never stated). In addition, as Hermann Melville does in Moby Dick, Cervantes checkmates his critics: reading too many books transforms literary critics into horse’s asses, but not having read enough books leaves Christians like Sancho Panza, naïve enough to believe the rants of mad men.
The pillars of society and those of his own house lie to the old gentleman, telling him that he has been deceived by a Moorish enchanter when the deception occurring within the text comes from believing books that protest their truthfulness and from the pillars of society trying to get the old gentleman not to believe what protests its truthfulness … though all of humankind is false, God remains true, with God being the One who negates the concealment of what has been hidden by words in books and hidden by burning these books.
The novel Don Quixote, in translation or in Spanish, can be read and enjoyed without any of the above being known, but what is read by the naïve reader is not the same novel as the one read by the privileged reader even though the words on the page are the same. The difference comes from the naïve reader’s inability to assign the same meanings to the words of the novel as the privileged reader assigns. And this is the story of Scripture, for the person without the spirit of the truth cannot assign to the words of Scripture the same meaning as the holy one who has received the parakletos can. Divine meanings remain concealed from even the Christian without the parakletos.
Because divine meaning cannot be assigned to the words of Scripture by scholars, Christian or Jew, who have not received the spirit of the truth, human meaning is assigned to these words, with many very intelligent men and women wrestling with the text to assign what they believe is the best possible meaning. And when these men and women just cannot make the text be read as they believe it should be read, they fudge meanings and mess with words … today, Sabbatarian Christians—the New Christians of this present age—who have succumbed to the Sacred Names Heresy use their own translation of Scripture to support their Arian dogmas. And Roman Catholics—the Old Christians of this age—use their translation of Scripture to support their dogmas, with the most apparent rewriting of the sacred text being their splitting of the tenth commandment into two commandments and eliminating the second commandment thereby causing the Sabbath commandment to be the third instead of the fourth commandment.
When small translation errors occur, the context of a passage straightens—as if the passage were a rifle barrel—the flight of meaning so that targets are hit and the message understood. But Trinitarian Christendom in its many flavors has gone beyond making small translation errors through their translations of Scripture: these translations consistently assign male personhood to the spirit of the truth. They are, all of them, dishonest lies, produced by liars who have stolen the worship of the Father and the Son and given the honor due both to the Adversary, thereby sealing up with a wall the library of knowledge and blaming a Jewish enchanter for having done so. They are sons of the Adversary; they are his ministers, disguised as servants of righteousness as the Adversary is disguised as an angel of light (2 Cor 11:14–15).
Jesus’ disciples, who were with Him from the beginning, were to testify about those things that Jesus said, with the spirit of what is no longer concealed bringing to the disciples’ memories all that Jesus had said to them (John 14:26). In this sense, not even the passage of time and the dimming of memories could conceal the words of Jesus—and for endtime holy ones who will have the spirit of prophecy in the Affliction, not even lack of a printed text, of a translation, will conceal the words of Jesus.
In the first disciples hearing what Jesus said from the beginning, these first disciples held the testimony of Jesus, which the parakletos would bring to their remembrance. So did Matthew get the words Jesus spoke correct? In receiving the parakletos which would bring to remembrance all that Jesus had said from the beginning, the answer is, Yes! If the answer were anything other than a resounding Yes, then the parakletos did not do what Jesus promised that it would do.
But to Trinitarian Christendom’s shame, these Christians are not particularly troubled by (in their perception) Jesus getting the things of God wrong, for Jesus said He would give only one sign that He was from God:
Then some of the scribes and Pharisees answered him, saying, “Teacher, we wish to see a sign from you.” But He answered them, “An evil and adulterous generation seeks for a sign, but no sign will be given to it except the sign of the prophet Jonah. For just as Jonah was three days and three nights in the belly of the great fish, so will the Son of Man be three days and three nights in the heart of the earth. The men of Nineveh will rise up at the judgment with this generation and condemn it, for they repented at the preaching of Jonah, and behold, something greater than Jonah is here. The queen of the South will rise up at the judgment with this generation and condemn it, for she came from the ends of the earth to hear the wisdom of Solomon, and behold, something greater than Solomon is here. (Matt 12:38–42 emphasis added)
If Jesus is to be believed—and He is—then Jesus was three days and three nights in the heart of the earth: in the short Book of Jonah, the Hebrew expressions for three days and three nights are unambiguous. A day is the hot portion of a 24-hour period, and a night is the twisting away or turning away from the light in a 24-hour period. But Trinitarian Christendom claims Jesus’ reference to three days and three nights represented inclusive reasoning; so these three days and three nights represent the period between sunset Friday night and dawn Sunday morning: so-called Christian inclusive reasoning falsely claims that three hot portions of a day and three twisting-away from the light occurred between Friday sunset and Sunday morning, and this just isn’t true.
In summary of what I have written many times over the past decade, I will here say again: if Jesus is believed and because Jesus was resurrected and gone from the tomb one day after the Sabbath, the wording used in the Gospels (J±:4” Jä< F"$$VJT< — John 20:1; Luke 24:1), Jesus’ body would have been placed in the Garden Tomb at sunset on the Preparation day for the great Sabbath of the Sabbath (cf. John 19:31, 42), with this great Sabbath or High Sabbath of the Sabbath [the Feast of Unleavened Bread] being the 15th of Aviv. Jesus would then be in the tomb all of the 15th and all of the 16th and all of the 17th. One day after the Sabbath would not be the 16th of Aviv, the day on which rabbinical Judaism (and Pharisees before) observe the Wave Sheaf Offering, but was Sunday, the 18th of Aviv and April 29th, 31 CE on the Julian calendar. Jesus would have been crucified on the 14th of Aviv, Wednesday, April 25th Julian, and the great Sabbath of the Sabbath would have been on Thursday, the 15th of Aviv, and the weekly Sabbath would have been the 17th of Aviv. This day-to-date dating would have Jesus entering Jerusalem (cf. John 12:1, 12) on the colt on the Sabbath, the 10th day of Aviv, the day that the paschal lamb was selected and penned.
In addition, Matthew identifies the 14th of Aviv as the First Unleavened—read Matthew 26:17 in Greek—thereby making the 13th of Aviv the preparation day for the First Unleavened, which is, again, the 14th of the first month and the day on which Israel in Egypt sacrificed and roasted with fire the first paschal lambs, the day on which Israel spoiled the Egyptians. For on the night when Israel in Egypt sacrificed and ate the first Passover, Israel was not to go out of their houses until the morning (Ex 12:22): except for Moses and Aaron, no Israelite left his houses until dawn for there was a great cry throughout Egypt for there was not a house in which someone was not dead (v. 30). It simply would not have been safe for an Israelite to be out and about until the reality of what had occurred was truly realized by Egyptians, who would have wanted someone to blame.
Rabbinical Judaism does not observe the Wave Sheaf Offering on the morrow after the Sabbath-within-the-Sabbath, that is the weekly Sabbath that occurs during the Feast of Unleavened Bread. Despite having a little understanding, neither Pharisees of the second temple nor rabbinical Judaism today assigns to the “Sabbath” identified in Leviticus 23:11 a meaning related to the Wave Sheaf Offering being part of the Passover sacrifice of paschal lambs. For both, the Wave Sheaf offering only pertained to the literal early barley harvest of the hillsides within the Promised Land.
The concepts of the First Unleavened and the Sabbath within the Sabbath are central to understanding the Second Passover liberation of Israel and the kingdom of this world being given to the Son of Man. Failure to understand these two concepts will result in the Christian worshipping the Adversary, who will be cast into time and to the earth halfway through the seven endtime years of tribulation.
Sadducees of the second temple period had a better though not perfect understanding of the early barley harvest representing the spiritual harvest of firstfruits than did Pharisees. Whereas Pharisees and rabbinical Judaism permanently attached the Wave Sheaf offering to a specific calendar date, the 16th day of Aviv, and the High Sabbath that is the Feast of Weeks [Shavuot] to a fixed calendar date, the 6th day of Sivan, Sadducees began their count for the Feast of Weeks [Pentecost] from the Sabbath-within-the-Sabbath, or from one day after the weekly Sabbath that occurred within the Feast of Unleavened Bread, thereby permanently attaching both the Wave Sheaf Offering and the Feast of Weeks to a specific day, the first day of the week, and not to a specific date.
The above becomes important to early Christendom since the Sadducees did not have control of the second temple, had serious complaints against the High Priest and his minions, and were, therefore, ripe for conversion whereas the Pharisees, through having control of the temple, were not. But the sect within Judaism that was most ripe were the Hellenists, who necessarily felt justified by Jesus’ earthly ministry and in His rejection by Pharisees.
From their emergence before and during the Hasmonean dynasty, Hellenists, Sadducees, and Pharisees were primarily political parties holding religious differences: all three were emotionally and financially invested in civil governance, with the Pharisees being the antiwar party, opposing Hasmonean expansion of the Kingdom of Israel; for the conquered peoples [especially the Edomites] could not, in purity, worship the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. Therefore, expansion of Israel through the conquest and assimilation of neighboring peoples and lands, in Pharisaical thought, posed a grave threat to the integrity of the kingdom and invited a repeat of divine intervention as occurred in the days of the prophet Jeremiah. Thus the Pharisees were willing to work with the Herodian kings as long as the office of king and the office of high priest were not held by the same person.
Even after having tasted Roman rule followed by a brief return of Hasmonean rule (40–37 BCE), Pharisees were willing to endure Roman and Edomite rule [Herod the Great as king] so long as Hasmoneans and Sadducees didn’t rule.
The Hellenists that Luke mentions in Acts 6:1 were a remnant of the Tobiad Jews that had politically sided with Jason who as high priest had established a gymnasium for public games in Jerusalem early in the Maccabean period, a period that didn’t neatly end with the death of Antiochus Epiphanes IV as the mostly illiterate historians of the splintered churches of God would have their disciples believe. Civil war between Jews continued for two centuries, and continued inside the Church of God, with Hellenists being far more inclined to believe in Jesus than were Pharisees, with Sadducees somewhere in-between. For Hellenist Jews had long sought to free Israel from Moses as understood by traditionalists—Christianity was for them, an escape from Moses. And they constituted for Paul, the majority of the mystery of lawlessness that was already at work within the early Christian Church in cities such as Antioch.
Again, the mystery of lawlessness about which the Apostle Paul wrote (2 Thess 2:7) most likely had its roots in the Hellenists who thought their widows were receiving short shift from the Hebrews, Jewish traditionalists who had come to believe in Jesus. The language that Luke used when referencing these Hellenists assumes privileged knowledge, that of the civil wars within Judaism throughout the Maccabean period. Without an understanding of what is recorded in 1st and 2nd Maccabees, the civil strife among Christian converts that led to mass rejection of Moses in the 2nd through 4th Centuries CE will not be understood. Yet the two books of Maccabees are not canonical Scripture for they do not reveal the shadow and type of how endtime sons of light will defeat the demonic king of the North whereas the writings of Moses do.
3.
The Church of God both in the 1st-Century and in the 21St-Century retains the Sadducee’s practice of having the Wave Sheaf Offering and the Feast of Weeks occur on the day after the weekly Sabbath, a practice that precludes the Law from being given at Sinai on Shavuot. The confirmation of this practice comes for Christians in Jesus, as the reality of the Wave Sheaf, ascending to the Father and being accepted by the Father on the day after the Sabbath-that-is-within-the-Sabbath, with the “Sabbath” representing God’s rest and with this Sabbath-within-the-Sabbath forming the shadow and type of entering into God’s rest [the Sabbath] while within God’s rest [Judea].
The above might seem confusing when it shouldn’t be: the children of Israel were to keep the Sabbath when the children of Israel followed Joshua [again, [0F@Ø] across the Jordan to enter into God’s rest (from Ps 95:10–11). For Abraham, dwelling in the land of Canaan that represented the Promised Land was enough: Abraham may or may not have kept the Sabbath, but whether he did or didn’t doesn’t matter for he dwelt as a sojourner in God’s rest … the Law had not been given when Abraham lived; thus sin had not been made alive. But the children of Israel had the Law, which had slain all of Israel numbered in the census of the second year except for Joshua and Caleb. Therefore the children of Israel needed to keep the Sabbath when in the geographical land that represented the Sabbath. And when moving up to Christians being born of God, the geographical land of Canaan [the Promise Land] is analogous to Sabbath observance, with keeping the Sabbath within the Sabbath becoming the representation of placing the High Sabbaths of God inside the Sabbath commandment. Hence, Christians born of God in this era are to keep all of the Sabbaths of God, weekly and annual. But when Christians are filled-with and empowered by the spirit of God and thereby liberated from indwelling sin and death, keeping the Sabbath within the Sabbath will have them serving as the reality of the Body of the sacrificed paschal Lamb of God: they, too, will be sacrificed. In the Affliction, all Christians other than the Remnant (from Rev 12:17) will die either physically (as in being martyred) or spiritually through their rebellion against God, rebellion that comes from mingling the sacred with the profane.
For faithful Christians in the Affliction—for Christians who have not taken a second journey of faith before the Affliction begins, their second journey of faith will be into martyrdom.
The Hellenists complained of discrimination against their widows: there was certainty discrimination against the Hellenists by Christian converts who had been Pharisees and Sadducees. Strong discrimination existed in Jerusalem before conversion, and strong discriminated existed after conversion although it shouldn’t have. But there is today discrimination by Christians who have ideologically descended from 1st-Century Hellenist converts against observant Christians, non-conformists who believe the writings of Moses — Jesus as the First of the firstfruits is the first of many sons of God, all conforming to the image and likeness of Christ Jesus through walking as He walked, so non-conforming Christians in reality conform to Christ Jesus whereas the majority of Christendom does not just as the majority of 1st-Century Judaism did not.
As the Wave Sheaf Offering, Jesus represents the first handful of barley harvested before the general harvest of new crop barley could begin. Jesus represents the only handful of barley to be waved before God that was not beaten [ground] into fine flour and baked as bread. And if disciples do not look like Christ Jesus (i.e., look like barley flour) when beaten fine, they are not of Christ but are of the Adversary.
Led by Moses and Aaron, “the people of Israel journeyed from Rameses to Succoth, about six hundred thousand men on foot” (Ex 12:37). They left at night, not the night on which they roasted their paschal lambs with fire—Israel could not have eaten the Passover much earlier than midnight, the hour when the death angel passed throughout the land (they did not gut their lambs, so roasting would have taken hours), but the following night. They were commanded not to leave their houses until dawn of the day on which they roasted their paschal lambs (v. 22). So the night on which the people of Israel commenced their journey from Rameses to Succoth would have been the 15th of Aviv, the first night that the body of Jesus spent in the Garden Tomb. And after gathering flocks, spoiling the Egyptians, and trekking for a while, the people of Israel camped for the first time as free people at Succoth, apparently a town within the Land of Goshen, in the eastern Delta region of Egypt. So the 15th of Aviv did not see the people of Israel leaving Egypt, did not see the people of Israel traveling far geographical, but did see great distance set between being slaves to Pharaoh, a representation of the present prince of this world, and being the free firstborn son of the Lord (from Ex 4:22). This day’s journey is to be remembered as the great Sabbath of the Sabbath that is the Feast of Unleavened Bread, and is to be remembered as Sukkoth, the Feasts of Booths (Lev 23:42–43) … Succoth is a place of dwelling in tents, in temporary shelters, and the distance between Rameses and Succoth is a Sabbath day’s journey, which geographically is not far but spiritually [for Christians] is from the inner self being consigned to disobedience (Rom 11:32) as a son of disobedience (Eph 2:2) to being born free, receiving indwelling eternal life as a son of God through receipt of the breath of God. The distance is halfway through a living human being; is from circumcision of the flesh to circumcision of the heart; is from the hand and the body to the desires of the heart and the thoughts of the mind.
The free people of Israel camped their second night at Etham, on the edge of the wilderness (Ex 13:20), and the third night at Pi-hahiroth: after camping at Etham, the “Lord said to Moses, ‘Tell the people of Israel to turn back and encamp in front of Pi-hahiroth’” (Ex 14:1–2) … Moses had asked Pharaoh to let the people of Israel go three days’ journey into the wilderness that the people of Israel could sacrifice there—three days’ journey—unto the Lord (Ex 5:3). Israel’s sacrifice, if Pharaoh had then let Israel go would not have been on the third day, but on the fourth day. As it turned out, on the 18th day of Aviv, the fourth day, Israel crossed the Sea of Reeds on dry land.
· On the 15th day of Aviv, Israel journeyed from Rameses to Succoth;
· On the 16th day of Aviv, Israel journeyed from Succoth to Etham;
· On the 17th day of Aviv, Israel; journeyed from Etham to Pi-hahiroth;
· On the 18th day, the day when Jesus ascended to His Father and our Father, the people of Israel became their own Wave Sheaf Offering, crossing dry shod from death to life as Noah and the seven with him, crossed from death to life in the Ark he constructed with his own hands, but constructed according to the instructions of the Lord.
Pharisees of the second temple (and rabbinical Judaism today) looked to Joshua [again, in Greek, [0F@Ø— Jesus, from Acts 7:45] leading the children of Israel into God’s rest rather than to Moses and the people of Israel crossing the Sea of Reeds for the model that they should employ to establish the Wave Sheaf Offering, but even then, they misread Joshua.
The scenario of Moses leading the people of Israel across the Sea of Reeds on the 18th of Aviv, with Pharaoh and his army being unable to follow as Satan is unable to pursue saints into the Wedding Feast, is analogous to Christ Jesus as the Wave Sheaf Offering entering into heaven and coming before the throne of the Ancient of Days where He was accepted on the 18th of Aviv.
When Jesus returned to Nazareth after the Temptation, Jesus entered the synagogue on the Sabbath as was His custom, and He stood up to read:
And the scroll of the prophet Isaiah was given to him. He unrolled the scroll and found the place where it was written,
“The Spirit of the Lord is upon me,
because he has anointed me
to proclaim good news to the poor.
He has sent me to proclaim liberty to the captives
and recovering of sight to the blind,
to set at liberty those who are oppressed,
to proclaim the year of the Lord's favor.”
And He rolled up the scroll and gave it back to the attendant and sat down. And the eyes of all in the synagogue were fixed on Him. And He began to say to them, “Today this Scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.” And all spoke well of Him and marveled at the gracious words that were coming from His mouth. (Luke 4:17–19 emphasis added)
All spoke well of Him and marveled at the gracious words that were coming from His mouth—yet within minutes, the Jews of the synagogue were wanting to kill Him (Luke 4:29–29).
The two centuries old civil war within 1st-Century Judaism that is today concealed in Christendom’s general historical ignorance of the life and times of Jesus the Nazarene is imbedded in the Gospels and underpins the foundational constructs of greater Christendom, but this civil war is not understood by either those Christians who openly practice lawlessness as Hellenist Jews who sought to remove the evidence of their circumcision (so they could enter public baths without stigma) openly practiced lawlessness, or understood by Sabbatarians who have succumbed to the Sacred Names Heresy, thereby transforming themselves into suicidal Zealots.
Because endtime Christians are unable to assign meaning to simple words and a simple dispute—
Now in these days when the disciples were increasing in number, a complaint by the Hellenists arose against the Hebrews because their widows were being neglected in the daily distribution. And the twelve summoned the full number of the disciples and said, “It is not right that we should give up preaching the word of God to serve tables. Therefore, brothers, pick out from among you seven men of good repute, full of the Spirit and of wisdom, whom we will appoint to this duty. But we will devote ourselves to prayer and to the ministry of the word.” And what they said pleased the whole gathering, and they chose Stephen, a man full of faith and of the Holy Spirit, and Philip, and Prochorus, and Nicanor, and Timon, and Parmenas, and Nicolaus, a proselyte of Antioch. These they set before the apostles, and they prayed and laid their hands on them. / And the word of God continued to increase, and the number of the disciples multiplied greatly in Jerusalem, and a great many of the priests became obedient to the faith. (Acts 6:1–7 emphasis added)
—endtime Christians do not understand why ordination would be needed to serve widows, or even grasp the significance that Stephen was ordained to wait tables because without the authority imbued in the Twelve, Stephen could not straddle the schism between the descendants of Hellenist Jews and the descendants of traditionalists. Nothing was going to be resolved. The Hellenist widows would simply do without.
If the Hellenists would have been converts to Judaism as is usually taught within the Sabbatarian churches of God, Luke would have identified them as he identified Nicolaus, a proselyte of Antioch: they would have been identified as proselytes.
I spent thirty years attending Sabbath services without once hearing about Jason of the Oniad family, brother of Onias III, becoming the high priest of Israel in 175 BCE, after Antiochus Epiphanes began to rule the Seleucid Empire. I heard about Antiochus Epiphanes, but from a 3rd-grade perspective. I didn’t hear about Menelaus being sent to Antiochus to deliver tribute, and while there outbidding Jason for the priesthood so that Antiochus confirmed Menelaus as high priest, which was then nothing more than a political office. Thus, when I looked out across greater Christendom, I could only wonder how so many Christians could have so easily fallen into lawlessness, little realizing just how difficult it would have been for an observant Christian to maintain faith during the Jewish-Roman wars from 66 CE to 136 CE, wars that were the direct result of the civil wars within Judaism that had been ongoing since the beginning of the 2nd-Century BCE, wars that are still ongoing within greater Christendom, wars that will not end until the Second Advent. Through revelation by realization, much understanding and considerable compassion has come since being called to reread prophecy. I understand why the Second Passover liberation of Israel at the beginning of the seven endtime years is unavoidable, and why the selective deaths of only uncovered firstborns [about 2.3 billion people] in a day will erase existing belief paradigms in even the Sabbatarian churches of God.
What has been concealed has been in plain sight all along. It has been the godly assignment of meaning to what’s seen that has eluded greater Christendom.
4.
Christians do not want to submit to Christ Jesus as their Head, nor are Christians willing to believe the Father. Rather, the historical evidence of the past 1900 years is that Christians are hostile to God, with this hostility being the telltale mark of not being born of God; of not having the spirit of God (see Rom 8:7). And to support this hostility, the testimony of the first disciples had to be corrupted, with the most common corruption coming in assigning personhood to the breath of God; i.e., to indwelling eternal life.
When a Christian assigns personhood to eternal life, the Christian nails him or herself into the Christian’s own spiritual coffin.
When truth is the negation of concealing a matter as it is in Greek, with even Pilate asking what isn’t concealed; and with the Apostle Paul telling the holy ones at Rome that the concealed things of God—the invisible things of God; the things of God that are not things in the world—are revealed by the things that have been made, then a calling from God that reveals what has been concealed is a spiritual thing that, though unlike any physical thing, functions as a library of spiritual knowledge, revealing to its possessor those things that have been concealed by the creation —
The outwardly circumcised nation of Israel, the firstborn son of the Lord (Ex 4:22), is a physically living thing that has been made, beginning with the patriarch Abraham: the Lord gave to Abraham via Sarah one son, Isaac, the son of promise, and a son who is of this world as things are. And in Abraham, a man of this world, is the man chosen from among the descendants of the sons of righteousness that crossed into this present age on the Ark, with the criteria for his choosing being his belief of the Lord, not a physically tangible attribute such as great strength or great height. Yet, belief becomes tangible when it determines a course of action: to believe God will cause the person to obey God. Disobedience is unbelief.
All of humankind alive today descends from the sons of righteousness that rode the Ark across death-by-drowning and onto the solid ground on the other side of death, but not all are righteous today even though that is their lineage … Noah’s Ark was a type, a shadow and copy of the Ark of the Covenant, with the Ark of the Covenant that was a construction of acacia wood overlaid inside and out with pure gold, with a gold molding, forming the shadow and copy of disciples, with the inner self of glorified disciples being like the acacia wood box and with the mortal flesh that has put on immortality being like the gold overlaying the wood.
In this world, God has used gold to represent immortality, and wood to represent physical life, with the difference between wood and gold suggesting the relationship between spiritual life dwelling in physical life and spiritual life in a spiritual tabernacle. In this analogy, stone becomes a representation of human beings that have not yet been born of spirit. Thus the physical temple that was a wood and stone building was in type a representation of the Christian Church that was [in the 1st-Century] composed of inwardly living and inwardly dead Christians.
Noah’s Ark was a vessel of wood construction, a vessel analogous to the living inner selves of sons of God who have been born of spirit—and inside the Ark were Noah and the seven with him, with these eight representing in type Christ Jesus and the seven spirits that serve as eyes for Him (Rev 5:6), with these seven spirits being the angels to the seven named churches which will have the seven churches being the seven horns on the head of the Lamb. Inside the living inner selves of disciples born of God is the spirit of Christ [B<,Ø:" OD4FJ@Ø] and inside the spirit of Christ is the spirit of the Father [B<,Ø:" 2,@Ø].
Without the indwelling of Christ Jesus in Christians, with this indwelling represented by the jar of manna in the Ark of the Covenant, with Jesus identifying Himself as the true bread of life, the true bread that came from heaven (John 6:35 et al), no Christian—no human person—has indwelling eternal life … in analogy, a dead Christian church would be akin to Noah’s Ark being a ghost ship, adrift on the waters of this world, without crew or cargo. But there was no one dwelling in Noah’s Ark until the 10th-day of the second month. Yes, there would have been those working on the Ark (Noah and his sons), but until the Lord told Noah, “‘Go into the ark, you and your household, for I have seen that you are righteous before me in this generation … in seven days I will send rain on the earth forty days and forty nights, and every living thing [all existence] that I have made I will blot out from the face of the ground’” (Gen 7:1, 4), the Ark stood empty.
In the spring of 1979, I bought a boat, a double-ender, sitting on oil barrels in Homer, Alaska. It had sat on those oil barrels for more than a year, and it seemed unreasonably cold, lifeless, a dead thing when another fisherman lifted it by straps and with a frontend loader I backed a trailer under it and we launched it in the small boat harbor. For a week, I hauled supplies aboard, swung the compass, tested radios, changed the oil in the engine, partially filled fuel tanks—and the boat, a 29-foot Bartender rigged as a lobster boat would be rigged (its builder was from Maine), began to come alive, assuming the life that was aboard it. Likewise, Noah’s Ark would have seemed to come to life when the seven pairs of clean animals and single pair of every unclean animal began baaing, neighing, braying, barking, trumpeting as these pairs settled into stalls where they would be for the next year and ten days.
The fleshly bodies of disciples, without a living inner self, are lifeless vessels —
Because the jar of manna was placed in the Ark of the Covenant, there is today eternal life dwelling within Israel, the nation circumcised of heart, with the spirit of Christ functioning as the vessel that held the manna and the manna functioning as the spirit of the Father. The true Bread of Life is the spirit of Christ in which is the spirit of God. The flesh of Christ Jesus represents the vessel that holds true manna, with His flesh represented by the broken unleavened bread taken in the Christian Passover sacraments of bread and wine, with the life of Christ representing the blood of Christ Jesus being the spirit of the Father.
Blood represents life (Gen 9:4). Bread equates to the flesh. The Passover sacraments of bread and wine represents the spirit of God [B<,Ø:" 2,@Ø] in the spirit of Christ [B<,Ø:" OD4FJ@Ø], which is analogous to the Sabbath-within-the Sabbath that denotes the transition from death to life, with this transition coming for the majority of humanity halfway through seven endtime years of tribulation, when the kingdom of this world is given to the Son of Man. This is knowledge that remains concealed from the majority of humanity, but is knowledge given to those holy ones called by God.
Again, the Passover sacraments of bread and wine serve as a representation of the spirit of God [B<,Ø:" 2,@Ø], the wine, in the spirit of Christ [B<,Ø:" OD4FJ@Ø], the broken bread. And unless a Christians takes these sacraments on the dark portion of the 14th of Aviv, the person—a Christian—has no indwelling life, but is spiritually dead, the present status of greater Christendom, which is like Hellenist Judaism, eager to shake off the shackles of the Law and remain slaves of the Adversary.
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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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