The First or the Second Adam?
Lust has invaded every facet of society, including the Church and the deepest recesses of our hearts. This is a call to action for men to evaluate the spirits that we, and our ancestors, submit to and allow within our gates and homes.
By Noah McHugh
Matthew 5:28
But I say to you that everyone who looks at a woman with lustful intent has already committed adultery with her in his heart.
Job 31:1
I have made a covenant with my eyes not to gaze lustfully upon a young woman.
Proverbs 25:28
He that has no rule over his own spirit is like a city that is broken down, and without walls.
It is time to break the silence on the long-tabooed subject of lust, pornography, and adultery within the Church. This subject should be a great unifier, as all sects of Christianity and Judaism ascribe to the same writings, written by the same God who has very specific things to say about men, women, and the proper biblical relationship between them.
As with all things, I like to start back at the beginning, and dissect the intentions behind the commands that our Creator gave to our forefathers. Let’s start with some context. God created the heavens and the earth with His spoken Word, commanding all of the universe to bring forth life after its kind. He commanded life from all corners of the universe and centered His focus into the Garden in the east, making a paradise from which to work outward from. We are told that “a river flowed out from Eden and from there it split into 4 rivers which went forth to water the earth.” This is one of the innumerable facts of Scripture and holds literal truth on one level, but also holds a deeper esoteric meaning. In a literal sense, it is clear that the Garden of Eden was on a high mountain, where the rivers began, descending down onto the fertile plains below. Looking at the esoteric meaning, this was referring to the first of humanity. Bloodlines in a Hebraic sense were likened to rivers, with the mountain being a reference to the man, and the woman was referenced by the springs and rivers coming up out of the earth from below and bursting out into the world to spread life. The concept of bloodlines, and Eden in general, is a thread that ties the entire Bible together, but is a bottomless study in and of itself that I could write endlessly on. It is just a picture of the concept of man and woman and their relationship, and not pertinent to dive into the esoteric definitions of Eden entirely. For more information of the esoteric definitions of the important symbols found in the Garden of Eden, see below.
The Hebraic concept of a mountain, masculine
https://www.abarim-publications.com/Meaning/Eden.html
https://www.abarim-publications.com/Dictionary/he/he-r.html
https://www.abarim-publications.com/Meaning/Aaron.html
The Hebraic concept of a spring or well, feminine
https://www.abarim-publications.com/Meaning/Beersheba.html
https://www.abarim-publications.com/Meaning/Bathsheba.html
https://www.abarim-publications.com/Meaning/Elisheba.html
https://www.abarim-publications.com/Meaning/Elizabeth.html
https://www.abarim-publications.com/Meaning/Sheba.html
Many of the allusions are self-explanatory, but to risk oversimplification, men were given the seed to bear, and women were given the “plot of land” so to speak, with which to grow the next generation with. Men and women were created “in God’s image” in a myriad of senses. In this particular sense, they were given the command to create human offspring, the greatest and crowning achievement of God’s creation. He created the first pair, and then he handed the command off to Adam and Eve as the first King and first Queen of the earth. Eve was not lesser than Adam either before or after their sin. If God wanted to paint the picture that woman was to be subservient to man, He would have made Eve out of the same dust that He made Adam out of, showing her as a separate and younger creation. He did not do that. He took a piece out of Adam (intriguingly enough, the rib is the only type of the bone in the body that has stem cells within it, and will completely re-grow if one is removed.) God took a CUTTING off of Adam’s body, and he made that cutting grow as an equal and opposite partner in order to carry out their one primary duty which is encapsulated in the first and second commands given to the first rulers of the earth.
The first command “Go forth and multiply” was an order that would make the command “Go out and take dominion of the earth.” possible. When you study the transaction that God made with mankind at our conception in its fullness, the jealousy of the Serpent makes perfect sense, being an older, “higher” being than these strange dirt-people. He was conceived in heaven, and considered the birthright of earth to be his for the taking. However, God chose to do something profoundly interesting. He chose to submit to the rule of Adam or his heirs, and go along with any decision that Adam made relating to his “kingdom.” This is proven by the naming of the animals. God did not name ANYTHING (except for Adam). Adam was responsible for naming Eve, the animals, and everything else on earth. When we gift our children a stuffed animal, do we name that stuffed animal? No! We find joy in what our children name that teddy bear because it shows an aspect of their character and ingenuity. We are told that God brought each of the animals before Adam “to see what he would call them, and whatever he called them, that was their name.” This is complete ownership. God built the house, and then he gifted the entire house to Adam and Eve, with only one string attached. They were to submit to nobody in their kingdom, except to each other as co-laborers, and the command of their Father. “Take dominion of the earth and subdue it.” They were to “work the soil” and “tend to the animals.”
I will prove this concept further in a later discussion, but there are hints and proofs of this concept all the way through the Scriptures from the Beginning to the End. This is one of the many reasons Yeshua had to shed His divine body for that of a man. In order for God to restore the kingship of the world to man, a perfect heir, “The Second Adam”, had to walk the earth and take dominion over death and sin in order to replace the Serpent’s reign (for Adam gave his kingship away in submission to the Serpent). Now, heirs of Adam and Eve can submit to the Kingship of Yeshua, and become a spiritual heir to His Kingdom.
The earth was mankind’s house, and God himself respected and validated Adam and Eve, and their future heirs, as the kings and queens of their realm, binding Himself to the decisions they made in partnership with the Father (Only relating to the earth, heaven was singularly owned and commanded by the Father.)
So how does all of this relate to the subject at hand, you ask? It has everything to do with it. The primary reason for our current lack of self-control, the modern wave of hedonism, and lack of intimacy in all one’s relationships, is because we have forgotten what these principals mean. We have lost mankind’s purpose, and we do not know what is worth defending and what is not. Hopefully by the end of this article, you will have a better understanding of the concepts and contracts at play. That knowledge will arm you to go out and do battle against the Enemy when he comes into your garden to deceive and tempt you.
PLANTING THE SEED OF WHICH ADAM
It should be noted that the two primary transgressions at the fateful incident at the Tree of Knowledge were lust primarily, and pride secondarily. The same spiritual problems emerge in the physical and tangible world; we just live in a world of computers and electronics now, as opposed to a garden full of trees, animals and flowers. The principles are the same and the results are the same, but the fruit will look different due to the different environment we now live in.
In the Garden of Eden of Genesis 3, the Snake spoke to Eve first. He questioned Eve much like he questioned Yeshua in the wilderness. He was looking for an error, a mistake to exploit in relation to the command of the Father to his image bearers. We are not told how many times the Adversary tried before he eventually found the mistake. “Is it true that you cannot eat from any of these trees?” he asked the woman.
“No, we may eat of any of the trees of the garden that we wish, but we cannot eat from, or TOUCH the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil or we will die.”
God’s word is as unchanging as He is and He tells the beginning from the end. When He told Moses in Deuteronomy 4 to write down His commands with the note “You shall not add OR take away from this law that I am giving you..” , it is not hard to assume that Adam and Eve were under that same order. When Eve added the stanza regarding touching of the tree, the Snake found his mark. Pride. They had added to the Law. To add to the Law, is to make yourself the Maker of the Law. I have heard a myriad of intolerant men who love to pin man’s sin, including the very first sin of man, onto Eve and all her daughters with the remark that Eve was the first sinner. Blame casting is just the repetition of the First Adam’s sin. Adam disobeyed alongside Eve, but when she took of the fruit, he was standing right beside her and did not say as much as a word to dissuade her from her disobedience. You could infer, although not necessarily known, that he was waiting for her to take the first bite and see what her repercussions were before following suit. This is a pattern that men following the First Adam repeat continually. Are we, as men, called to follow the First or Second Adam? The Second Adam covered His Bride’s sins and took the burden of her mistakes onto himself.
Satan quickly doubled down and spoke venomous words about the intentions of the Father. The Serpent planted doubts of the faithfulness and good intentions of the Father, a pattern and trick he continues to play with God’s people. He tells Adam and Eve that God was trying to withhold His knowledge and mysterious ways from them. Nothing has changed. The Serpent has and continues to invite God’s people into contracts using doubt and ingratitude of the Father’s faithfulness, and causing man to forget what the Father has already given freely. “You will be like God.” This was a lie! Man was already made in the image of God. The Serpent invited both Adam at the Garden and Yeshua in the Wilderness into a contract. He promised Adam the astonishing insight and wisdom of God, and Adam accepted the contract and in submission of the Serpent, he gave his kingship of the earth to him. Yeshua already had the knowledge and wisdom of good and evil that Adam attained in his transaction with the Serpent, so the Serpent invited Yeshua into a contract tempting him with the kingship of the world that Adam lost to him.
After Eve was invited into this contract with the Serpent, she looked upon the tree and lusted after its beauty. We are told that she saw that it was very desirable and beautiful and that the fruit looked good to eat and for making wise. She stretched out her hand, while her husband stood by and watched, and ate of the fruit, and then gave some of it to him. When Eve submitted herself to the snake (one of the animals they were meant to take dominion of and rule over together) by submitting to his teaching and following his words, she made herself the daughter of the Snake. When she took of the fruit and gave it to her husband, she made him her “firstborn son” in rebellion, in a spiritual sense. Note how Paul called Timothy his “son according to the Gospel.” Satan could not get Adam to serve him directly, so he got the woman to submit to him, and then got man to submit to HER, and by proxy rule over them both. This is a skewing of the natural order. Man and woman were supposed to submit to each other and to God alone. All the spirits, and all the animals were meant to submit to the man and woman, the joint image of God, and to the needs of their offspring.
A look at the word structure behind the nation of Moab proves my point here.
https://www.abarim-publications.com/Meaning/Moab.html
The spiritual realm is simple. Whoever you submit to becomes your father or mother. Whoever you lead becomes your son or daughter. This is what Yeshua meant when he called the rabbis and Pharisees “Sons of the devil”. They thought they could hold onto their physical lineage as descendants of Abraham and Yeshua reminded them that you are the sons of whoever you copy and submit to. Abraham was only given one heir, and he had to wait almost one hundred years before he was given that son. God didn’t need him to produce a huge amount of babies, he needed him to LOVE that child and TEACH him the covenant with love at the center. Any man can make babies, the vast majority believe that is what makes you a father. But a true father sees a child as the continuation of his life, and knows that if he trains and loves that boy or girl, love will come out of them, watering the garden of the earth.
You can either follow the example of the “First Adam” and inherit a seed that will whither and die, or choose to follow YESHUA as your benefactor who sows an everlasting spiritual seed that your heirs will be grafted into, as long as you sow the eternal seed to your children.
1 Corinthians 15:45-49
Thus it is written, “The first man Adam became a living being”; the last Adam became a life-giving spirit. But it is not the spiritual that is first but the natural, and then the spiritual. The first man was from the earth, a man of dust; the second man is from heaven. As was the man of dust, so also are those who are of the dust, and as is the man of heaven, so also are those who are of heaven. Just as we have borne the image of the man of dust, we shall also bear the image of the man of heaven.
I am going to take a minute to explain that whenever I am trying to solve a riddle or overcome something like lust, for instance, God showed me that if I can stop focusing on the side effects of the imbalance for a minute and begin digging at “the roots of the problem”, I can begin understanding it enough to refuse when temptation rises. If I understand the stakes and what man and God’s Kingdom have lost, and the extent of the promises for standing firm, then I am bolstered, armored, and much less prone to fall into sinful desires.
We need to start at the beginning by studying how many times our ancestors have chosen exactly the same sins that we are still choosing today, and that God has promised to restore and save us as soon as we understand our sin, repent from it, and begin the journey of walking out that repentance and overcoming the sins we are bound to.
This is what David meant when he asked God to search him and find any unclean way in him. The cycles of righteousness mean allowing God to shed light on the areas that you are ashamed to acknowledge and not hiding yourself from his insight like Adam and Eve did. They ran and hid from His Presence, and they used fig leaves (symbolic of sin and adultery) to attempt to cover their own sin, hoping to hide their shame. How wild is it that the Scriptures depict a DEMON POSSESSED man to invert that sin and show us the way out? When Jesus came to Legion, he ran to him, naked, defiled, and filled with a host of demons. When he asked Jesus to cleanse and cover him, Jesus did more than that he gave him his own cloak (symbolic of inheritance), sent the demons away, and met with him, restoring the man’s dignity and forgiving his past sins.
In no way, shape or form am I saying that the Serpent is the literal father of Adam and Eve. Nor that Eve is the literal mother of Adam. However, submitting to the doctrine and teaching of the snake gave Satan access to be one of the two authorities to all of Adam’s sons and their offspring. You can submit to the Serpent, or the one true Father.
While God and God alone has claim to mankind and what we accomplish, the Snake has been beguiling mankind from the beginning, attempting to pervert our ways and thus creating spiritual consequences and imbalances that all stem from this transaction at the Garden. The religions of the surrounding nations of Israel all believed in a mother goddess who brought THE FRUIT OF WISDOM, fertility, and resurrection to mankind. This is a consequence of Eve submitting to the Serpent. As was the resurrecting male deity of the nations, specifically Tammuz, whom God departs His own Temple because of the worship of the male god there, who dies, loses all authority and is resurrected by his lover, sister and mother goddess on an annual basis. This is an obvious blaspheme of Messiah Yeshua, but also of the “First Adam” and a reveling in man’s death and separation from God.
The Serpent tempts man and woman throughout every generation to recreate this transaction of the Fall and perpetuate the curses of contention and strife between Adam and Eve, and between their sons and daughters.
If you as a man have come to this study and are filled with pride in your heart that I am bringing up the imbalance Eve had over Adam, you will sadly be disappointed. Womankind is not the culprit for both man and woman’s fall. The curses God presented at the Garden were consequences built into Natural Law. “Your desire will be for your husband, and he will rule over you.” This curse is a consequence of the unnatural transaction made with the Serpent in the Garden. It was not a command for men to rule over their wives as slaves. Do we just lie in our own filth? Absolutely not! God was explaining to Adam and Eve the newfound struggles they will have to overcome. Man perpetuating brutish dominance over women is living in the curse that Messiah Yeshua and His Word gave us the principles and insights to overcome. This is why it is crucial for both man and woman, for everyone of us to continually search the garden of our homes and hearts and examine where we have submitted to the curse and where it has authority over us.
2 Corinthians 13:5
Examine yourselves, to see whether you are in the faith. Test yourselves. Or do you not realize this about yourselves, that Jesus Christ is in you? —unless indeed you fail to meet the test!
I read a book years ago, when I was trying to save my first marriage. My first wife had been requesting a divorce and permission to leave the marriage. I searched for any and all ways to save it and fight for her. I was quickly understanding what God had felt in Hosea. I was given a book on my quest to save my marriage called The Garden of Peace by Rabbi Shalom Arush. The concepts of the book state that every single home on earth is a microcosm of the Garden of Eden, at its best, and it’s a microcosm of hell at its worst. If you take dominion of the animals and emotions that are trying to rule over you and lead your house with love and empathy, your home will blossom and flourish, your wife will be the delight of your eyes, and your children will love and respect you. If you submit to the animal at the door, and let any set of emotions rule over you, it will lead you to sin. Imbalances will begin surfacing in your home and among your wife, children, and animals. When you begin to see members of your house exhibiting these emotional imbalances, it is the duty of a king and a priest to look at those family members as people who are living in your garden. They are the canaries in your coal mine, being used as a mirror to show you your own shortcomings. If you properly evaluate the source of the imbalance, you can put them right. This is walked out in repentance, and you gauge your progress in overcoming that animal slowly over time by watching if the efforts you’ve taken to heal the imbalance are improving the situation or worsening them.
Men taking ownership of the chaos and conflict in his house and tending to the garden of our homes and families is being the king or priest of your home. It is our duty as men.
Let me explain this another way. My first dog was a White German Shepherd named Joy. I raised that dog from 8 weeks old. I didn’t create that dog. I didn’t know her mother. It wasn’t even my species, yet I realized that I was the only person in the world who was going to be able to train her and teach her how to behave and not behave in order to protect her. I started reading books by Ceasar Milan and other trainers to try to understand dog psychology and read their emotional state so that I could train her in a way that benefited both her as the animal, and myself as the master. One of the topics that Ceasar Milan is so good at explaining, that I later applied to training my own children was that “as the alpha of the pack”, you create the nor. You set the dynamic. Your dog (and children) will read your energy and match it. The behaviors that you exhibit will become normal for them, and if the emotional energy that you are projecting is out of balance, the animals will be the first to respond negatively to that imbalance. Your children will be the next canaries in the coal mine. The longer these issues go without being dealt with, the greater the problems will become. They sense it and will mirror you. They don’t have moral compasses to judge you by, so they merely mirror. In an emotionally chaotic environment, the weakest creatures snap first, and they usually get the worst treatment as a result, even though it is not their fault in the slightest.
Children are the exact same way. If you have secret behaviors that you think you can separate and nobody will catch you, you are playing with fire. God hard wired everything: from the spouse, to the children, to the animals, will mirror the responses that you, as the kings of your home exude. Your spouse might not know every time you’ve betrayed them, but they can FEEL the energy that you put off, and so can the children. In a subtle way, choosing to walk out toxic and secret behavior patterns is a mirror of the child sacrifice rituals of Ben Hinnom, directly behind the Temple.
Israelite men would go to the Temple and worship God in public, and then, they would go to the pagan shrines and temples, engage in abominable acts with the women who were acting as priestesses of this child-murdering deity in direct opposition to the God who dwelled in the Temple. They would sacrifice their lust and their seed to that woman, the lust reserved for their wives, who would then take their seed and sacrifice the baby in the fire. We do the EXACT same thing today, in many varying scales, it just looks quite a bit different because of the different technology.
We, as Bible believing men, go to the churches or Sabbath groups. We publicly profess our love of God and our wives, our love of our children. Then we go off on our own after we have publicly shown our piety to the world and go behind the temple, in secret, and engage in all manner of unclean acts. Whether we copy them or not, we approve of them by giving our seed and extracting pleasure from them. It doesn’t matter if you are unaware of the transaction that is taking place in the pornography industry. It didn’t matter in the Garden, and it doesn’t matter now. You enter into a spiritual contract when you use porn. It is both an interwoven blend of spiritual adultery and idolatry and a participation in their occult rituals.
We have been told by our God not to devote ourselves, our eyes, or our seed to the abominations of the nations. Our technology has made it 100 times easier to commit spiritual adultery, not only to our Heavenly Father, but against our wives and our children as well. I hear religious men excuse their addictions away by saying, “well porn is a sin, but it’s not adultery.” They show that they have absolutely zero understanding nor discernment about the porn industry and the slavery that believers participate in.
Disclaimer: Anyone who is actively struggling with a pornography addiction, know that none of this study is intended to direct shame. It is meant to begin shedding light on how these spirits speak and operate in their attempts to make you, the Adam of your house, think and operate with yourself at the forefront, instead of seeing yourself as the protector of your garden and all who live within it. Once you know how these spirits operate and cause you to inadvertently become the sword that attacks your household, you can begin to bolster your defenses, rally your strength and pick up your weapon when the Serpent slithers in. This study is made to stare your transgressions square in the face, and point the sword of Truth at yourself for repentance and freedom for you and your household. This study is to understand the fullness of your sin so you abhor it to the point where you cannot continue engaging anymore. That doesn’t mean that the battle will be easy or the transformation will happen overnight. It will be a slow process of failure, repentance, failure repentance, failure, repentance. Until one day, you will be completely set free. Hiding from yourself is not the answer. Look freely upon your suffering and struggle, so that you can turn away from its destruction. Be open with your wife and allow her to be a part of the battle. If you try to wage this war alone, you will destroy both of your spirits. In the end, the battle will be left for your children to fight if you refuse to accurately and truthfully challenge your sins.
An Ancient Fertility Cult
History’s Vanquished Goddess
Now that we all have little portals to whatever realm you want to look into (our phones), you do not have to go into a pagan temple to witness and participate in the sexual fertility rituals. You can bring the abominations into your home, right into your very own bedroom.
An article from Psychology Today did a study with 3,000 Christians and their relationship with porn use and addiction. They discovered that 57% of senior pastors and 64% of all youth pastors used pornography, and less than 1% recommended telling their home church.
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/minority-report/202001/pastors-and-porn
https://www.missionfrontiers.org/issue/article/15-mind-blowing-statistics-about-pornography-and-the-church
It is important to note that there is no problem with having a struggle or addiction. The shame is that Christian men are wearing their fig leaves, in fear and refusal to learn the steps to repent AND overcome.
I have even heard many Bible- believing men have the audacity to emotionally neglect their wives for years and call HER the adulterer for leaving the destruction that their addictions has had on their home, lives and children.
The time and the energy that you, as a man or woman are devoting towards satisfying yourself, while degrading and devaluing not only yourself, you are also robbing that energy, time, and affection from your spouse and your children. You are setting yourself up as the god of the house, expecting them to serve your needs and keep you satisfied; completely missing the fact that YOU as the man of the house are meant to be tending your garden. The garden is not supposed to be tending you. If you, as a man, believe that it is your wife’s job to cook, and clean, and submit to you, and let you ignore her, both emotionally, spiritually, and sexually, you have already brought the curse into your home. You have followed the “First Adam” and are his heir to all his curses. It is possible to get the curse out of your home, but not unless you are willing to re-train yourself and renew your mind and submit to the “Second Adam” who gave His life up for His Bride.
According to Shalom Arush, a woman is a man’s mirror, as a man is a woman’s mirror. If you are hiding sins from her, and she is having emotional outbursts or yelling at you “for no reason”, you need to become aware to the fact that she is emotionally responding to something she knows in her spirit. She can feel your unfaithfulness and unavailability, and dismissing your wife is only going to amplify the problem. That anger is a result of Natural Law. If she emotionally acts out what she does or does not know, and begins convicting you of your sin, she is acting within her function and duty as your wife; the woman of your covenant, and the reflection pool God gave you to mirror how HE feels towards you. If your wife is not being emotionally cared for, God WILL NOT bestow His blessing onto anything that you do, and your whole household will suffer. The longer you, as a man gaslight and reject her, the more that energy is going to build up, and you only have yourself to blame for the volcanic eruption that results. If you have the job of protecting your wife and children and you make their lives hell instead, you yourself will face God’s wrath as a result, even if you had the best of intentions.
Purification of the mind
In many of Yeshua’s parables, he likened a house to a person’s body, explaining that whatever you put in your house becomes a part of you.
Matthew 12:44-45
“When the spirit comes back, it finds the house still empty, swept clean, and made neat. Then the evil spirit goes out and brings seven other spirits even more evil than it is, and they go in and live there. So the person has even more trouble than before.”
Philippians 4:8
Finally, brothers and sisters, whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable—if anything is excellent or praiseworthy—think about such things.
Whatever food you eat gets digested by the body. The energy and building blocks within gets used in repairing and healing your body. In essence, you are what you eat. The same is true of whatever you consume with your mind and your eyes, the gate to your heart. Whatever you watch, whatever you listen to, whatever you think about. What you consume will be what flows out of you, and this will be the spiritual fruit you bear.
I read a book a while back, called Emotional Intelligence by Daniel Goleman. One of the studies that the author brought to light is very poignant to this subject.
The study consisted of two groups. One group was told to stand in a basketball court and practice shooting hoops for 30 minutes. The second group was told to sit in a room and imagine shooting hoops for the same amount of time. Both groups were given an accuracy test before and after the experiment, and the findings were incredible. The people who did nothing but imagine shooting hoops had almost exactly the same increase in scores as the ones who had physically trained on improvement. The neurons in your brain do not care if you did something for real or if you just imagined it. Inside your mind, there is no difference. So as a man and a husband, what are you practicing? Is your mind set on learning how to be a better husband, a better father, a better teacher, a better priest for your house? Or are you engaged in imagining all kinds of elicit sexual encounters with forbidden women?
Matthew 6:22-24
“The lamp of the body is the eye. If therefore your eye is sound, your whole body will be full of light. But if your eye is evil, your whole body will be full of darkness. If therefore the light that is in you is darkness, how great is the darkness “No one can serve two masters, for either he will hate the one and love the other, or else he will be devoted to one and despise the other. You can’t serve both God and Mammon (meaning whatever one affirms or supports with one’s eyes or actions).”
For more insight in the Greek word “Mammon” that has been mistranslated and oversimplified into money, see here:
https://www.abarim-publications.com/Meaning/Mammon.html
There is a huge body of scientific study that further validates this concept, but it is enough for me that the Bible says it. Whatever you pour yourself into, you love. Whatever you spend your time looking at, you become. Whatever you spend your energy and strength on, you build up. If you try to hold to one way in secret and another way in public, your psyche will begin splitting over time and causing many side effects and issues as your mind and body try to rectify the multiple personalities and beliefs that you are housing.
Brands and Symbols
Many naive believers falsely believe that the pagan traditions and religions of ancient were vanquished by Christianity, yet, if you look around today you will find the symbols of the ancient gods and goddesses on every street corner, every store, every movie, even in the food you eat and the coffee you drink. The genius of what these spirits did is that they went underground and spent the last 2,000 years secretly building their forces, amassing their fortunes and planning their attack. Take a look at Starbucks for instance.
Look at the image and the color scheme. A two-tailed mermaid, naked, with a star over her head, and the logo in the color green. Since ancient times, green was the color of the mother goddesses, as it was the “color of life and creation” and a nod to Eve. The star coupled with the mermaid is a signature. Even the evolution of the Starbucks logo aligns with the pagan imagery and customs of old. In History’s Vanquished Goddess: Asherah by Darlene Kosnik, the evolution of the Hebraic goddess Asherah is discussed. Asherah was, in her earliest images and representations, pornographic. As cultures began implementing modesty, her image also started to appear having more clothes.
Starbucks is, without a doubt, incorporating idolatry into their business and their products. And people sell this coffee (food sacrificed as idols) at their churches! We buy their food and put their “cleaned up logo” in our homes, and never even consider what we are inviting inside. The Starbucks logo is just the cleanest of modern day idolatry in our society; porn being one of the darkest, most defiling of all modern-day idolatry. Believers are completely naive to what that spirit symbolizes, and how many homes she has destroyed. What many have never considered is that these false images of the goddess were the pornographic material of ancient times and found in ALL the temples of Egypt, Babylon, Greece, and Rome. Porn, and these unclean images, were ALWAYS a foundational element to the pagan occult worship of the nations surrounding ancient Israel. The goddess is named Ishtar, Innana, Asherah, Ashteroth, Cybele, Isis, Diana, Nut, Hathor, and many many more. She (along her male counterpart, Tammuz, which we will get into later) has infiltrated every aspect of our modern society AND churches (Revelation 2), bringing us full circle to the prophecies of Ezekiel 10 and the other prophets warning Israel about the rituals they were unintentionally engaging in and the coming wrath of God if repentance does not come quickly.
When you begin to be able to see and recognize the symbols of these fertility goddesses for what they are, you will never be able to enjoy looking at porn ever again. The women who participate in selling their bodies off to be ogled at, almost without fail, have markings and tattoos with many of Ishtar’s symbols. The bunny, the star, the dragon, the snake, the lotus, the owl, the list goes on and on. These markings are not coincidental or by chance. These tattoos are symbols of obedience to their owner, the goddess. This subject is one that God has had me digging at for 15+ years, on and off, as He began teaching me to abhor the coping mechanisms and sins I inherited from my fathers. Every time He brought me back around to it, I saw it more clearly and became more disgusted with it. Below are the links to a 4 part video series my wife and I did relating the fertility cults, their rituals, symbols, and symbolic meanings as found in the Scriptures, if you’d like more information involving other modern day worship of the gods of the nations that Israel was commanded not to assimilate with:
https://youtu.be/c2uLT9eKzYs?si=n89p7Z11nj1_2dJw
https://youtu.be/L2VZwQUvR4I?si=an6jj-G5u-ijzJMy
https://youtu.be/tSvlNC9QGr8?si=INtSST4Vl2l_DUe0
https://youtu.be/RjYyn6gxWaA?si=CKy0kA_uHTY3hZAs
There is a command in Leviticus 19 to “Not make any tattoo mark on yourself in the name of the dead.” It begins to make sense in this spiritual context. These spiritual entities who represent ancient Egyptian, Roman, Greek, Babylonian, Canaanite gods and goddesses, who God himself called demons (the offerings of the pagans are offered to demons) are all represented by unclean animals. When a man or woman permanently embeds these symbols into their body, their spiritual house, they become devoted to that entity. That spirit receives an invitation to enter their house, and they can be seen operating on behalf of each other. Do not get me wrong, I am not saying that you should not interact with, nor associate with anyone who has tattoos like this. Most people do not consciously know these rules or symbols, and many people get these symbols tattooed on themselves completely innocently. But when you look at these symbols of marks of ownership and symbols of authority, you begin to understand why so many women who sell their bodies to the illicit trades (or have had their body sold against their wills) so often tend to have these markings. Most of these “stars” also call themselves “goddesses”. What fellowship can light have with darkness? If you are eating of the fruit of adultery and slavery that these women are selling, then you are showing your obeisance to their gods and their owners, NOT to the God of Israel who demanded that women be honored and respected. Certainly they were not to be bought and sold as sex slaves, and used for the viewing pleasure of Israelite men.
If you claim that you had no control over yourself, (which is what you do when you blame your lust on any woman for any reason) you reduce yourself to the status of an animal who cannot control its impulses and you set the Snake up as your god and leader, whether you realize it or not. Joseph remained honorable in the midst the temptation of Potiphar’s wife, yet he chose to hold his obedience to God at the expense of all else, even to the risk of his life.
Greece and Rome were not nations that honored modesty in the slightest. The apostles visited these locations to spread the Gospel to the four corners of the earth. They even went into their temples of idolatry and sexual misconduct and called people away from it! I dare you to look up the Temple of Ephesus. It is NOT pretty. Do you think these men believed it was the responsibility of the godless to keep their minds pure? No! That is following the “First Adam” and blaming your unclean thoughts on an unbeliever! What kind of coddled babies do you think Yeshua called us to be if the world is responsible for our transgressions? Instead, the apostles walked blameless, filled with the Holy Spirit, and called all to the Righteous Path.
This is the caliber of men God wants in His Kingdom. If you can’t control your urges, and think and act like an animal, you do everyone a favor by staying outside the walls of God’s people, and I hope you stay there until you learn how to conduct yourself as an heir of God.
When Balak, the king of Beor was unable to place curses on the tents of Israel, Balaam came up with a conniving plot. He got the women of the pagan temples and shrines to go in and tempt the Israelite men, removing their resolve, and defiling their lineages. They committed adultery with these women, and then Balak was able to attack Israel and pronounce curses over them because God’s fury was kindled at the men of Israel for submitting to this spirit of adultery and lust.
The promises of Israel hinged on spiritual purity and the purity of their heirs.
When they bent their neck to the adulterous inclinations of the nations, they became gradually more and more perverse, eventually becoming even more of an affront than the nations they were sent in to supplant. How much more so if we call ourselves spiritual sons of God, but we are diverting our lust, and our spiritual and physical energies are being coaxed and goaded by this spiritual entity who feeds on the souls of men who cannot say no to her?
Can you, with one breath honor, your wife and your own daughters, and in the next, dishonor all women and degrade them by taking pleasure in viewing their humiliation? How can we view our wives and daughters as holy and then assist in degrading their kind? How can we also expect holiness from them?
The porn industry’s annual revenue is more than the NFL, NBA, and MLB combined. It is also more than the combined revenues of ABC, CBS, and NBC. Once you realize how much money the porn industry generates every year, and understand that what we are seeing today is exactly like the ancient context that made our Father so furious, it all starts clicking. The poems of Inanna and Ishtar from ancient Mesopotamia were the first pornographic writings, and the reliefs, paintings, carvings, statues, ect were all nude. The most beautiful women in the land were bought and sold, made to serve in the temples of these goddesses, and the art depicting the goddess was modeled after their forms.
Modern technology has advanced the realistic nature of these forms of worship, but that does not make it any better; in fact, it makes it WORSE. The Israelites who God sent into this land to overcome that spirit refused to give their lust over entirely to the Father, and each generation got successively more entrenched in the witchcraft, curses, and blood magic as the spell was woven over them. The spirit hijacked their emotions to serve this evil deity, all the while openly praising God while they engaged in abominations. Up to this point, we, as the new iteration of Israel, have failed the exact same test.
Our Golden Calf
The Golden Calf (mentioned in Exodus 32) was an Egyptian representation of this same fertility goddess, named Hathor; orgiastic rituals were performed in her honor in Egyptian tradition, corroborated by the account at Mount Sinai. When Israel was in Egypt, they began serving and following the customs and rituals of the gods and goddesses of Egypt. When God came to set Israel free from the bondage of slavery, He had to destroy their gods and sever the covenants that were legally keeping the Hebrews enslaved to them. Each of the Ten Plagues was a judgment on one of the gods of Egypt. At the end, once the gods had been stripped of all their power and authority, He took His people out of the land and protected them mightily against Pharaoh using many miraculous means. Yet, when Israel arrived at Mount Sinai (Sinai was named for Sin, the moon/fertility goddess) He had them encamp, He burned the top of the mountain with fire and called Moses to the top to carve out a covenant of marriage between Himself and the people of Israel. Moses and the elders ate of the covenant meal with the Father, and while Moses was going to get the requirements of the covenant, Israel prostitutes themselves to the goddess that God has JUST freed them from. They recreate the idols that they left behind and start a massive orgy. Some habits die hard, I guess. Once you have unified yourself to a woman who is in active covenant with this demonic entity claiming to be a goddess, you are, by proxy in covenant with that demon. This is why so many times, the Bible warns Christians not to eat food sacrificed to idols or to eat at the table of Jezebel. Partaking of her food is the first step towards partaking in her rituals, and her rituals lead down a path that openly destroys any hope of creating a healthy, safe, functional family unit.
The cornerstone of the covenant with Adam and Eve, with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob up to this point is the partnership between God and His people. He guards and protects them from evil, and they partner with him to produce holy offspring, untainted by sexual impurity and defilement. One thing that all of these fertility cults from around the world have in common, is that all of them required that the worshipers engage in acts that make passing down heirs and inheritance impossible. The firstborn son, to name one, was to be special and set apart for God. He was the first of a couple’s strength and they were supposed to devote extra energy into raising him in the covenant, as the firstborn would set the precedent within the family unit that the other children would copy. When you serve the God of Israel who demands that you approach parenting with honor and respect, you cannot serve a master who tells you to sacrifice your children and kill them. Yet that is precisely what we keep doing as a people. At the golden calf incident, many of the Israelites defiled themselves, and engaged in a marriage covenant with this deity, making it impossible for God to enter into covenant to the degree of depth that he wanted to give them.
The Serpent’s Playbook
So why then, is sexuality so central to both a righteous walk and to the occult? Going back again to the first order mankind was given, was to be fruitful and multiply, and go forth and take dominion of the earth. The Serpent has many faces, and he has an entire playbook of fail-safe’s. Believers have chosen naivety to this fact for too long. We continually invite the Serpent into our homes with the faith that we are free for consequence, no matter what our behaviors. The Serpent’ first attempt is to keep man and woman separated from each other so that they never even come together to produce heirs. If he can keep you single, sleeping around out of wedlock, and wasting your sexual energy staring at a screen; he has defeated you. If you get past that phase, and you manage to find a woman of good character to marry, who will partner with you to create the next generation of God’s image-bearers, then he has backups on backups. He will try to separate you by causing fights, strife and enmity with you and your spouse. He will try to tempt you into desiring after other women that you are not in covenant with.
When my wife was pregnant with my first and second-born, I had several snakes in my circle that began trying to damage my relationship with my wife, trying to lead me into unfaithfulness to her. These people I believed I could trust actively tried to lead me into illicit relationships against her, and it took me far too long to identify their game and kick them out of our garden. Meanwhile, my wife was suffering emotionally, feeling unloved and uncared for, and wondering if marrying me had been a mistake. Whatever the mother feels while she is carrying that child, the baby feels also, and those insecurities can easily pass on to the child before they are even out of the womb. It was only through noticing the negative impacts on my wife and children, that I found the zeal and determination to overcome my addiction and association with people who encouraged or amplified it. In these realization, I learned that being the priest of your home means cleansing YOURSELF first. I had to point the sword of Scripture inward and replace shame for repentance and empathy for my family. The only way to overcome this transgression is love.
Many husbands use the period of their wife’s pregnancy or post-partum to indulge in pornography, and they convince themselves that it isn’t hurting anyone because their wife “just isn’t available right now.” And they are doing what they need to to take care of their own needs while forgetting about the pain and emotional turmoil their wives went through and continue to endure for their heirs. Do you hear the narcissism in these types of thoughts? The Snake whispers in your ear with all kinds of self-indulgent thoughts and ideas, excusing the behavior with a self-important quip. “Your wife isn’t meeting your needs.” “She’s not interested right now.” “She’s not available.” Ect ect. “I will go and meet my own needs on my own terms”, completely disregarding the commands of God and how she would feel if she were in the room with me.
Again, the enemy will whisper all manner of things into your ear, and will continue trying until you either cast him out or he finds your weakness and gets you to sin against your spouse. Then he will have grounds to accuse you and rob you AND your family of your blessings inherited and promised by the Most High. I find it ironic that most of the men who are secretly engaging in pornography are the first people to point the finger at women, and Eve, for being the source of all evil and sin while actively eating of that same fruit, and destroying the work that their wife is putting in to build and establish their home and lineage.
The attacks that the enemy sends are subversive and hard to detect, especially in a person who is tuned to see everything and everyone, but themselves, as the problem. Someone who is not able to self reflect and judge their own fruit is a prime candidate for becoming a tyrant in their own home, and instead of depicting the love of their inheritor. the Second Adam”, they depict the opposite to their children; the wrath and unfairness of Pharaoh, the slavery of a family system that is geared toward the needs and wants of one person, at the expense of all others. This is what pornography does to the mind. It makes you into a narcissist and a tyrant; instead of serving the needs of your house, you spend all of your energy and time trying to force others into meeting your own needs.
Pornography Destroys your Wife’s Spirit
Please, God fearing men, put yourselves in the place of your wives whom you mistreat, whether intentionally or not. You marry your wife who commits her life to you in faithfulness, loyalty and faith in who she believes you are and will become. She gives her body, time, future to you. She has your offspring, your eternal heirs. For nine months, she gives them her body, and even after pregnancy, she sacrifices her body for your children. It should be insulting to an honorable wife to be tested and proved faithful through all those trials and her husband cannot commit his spiritual faithfulness to her, the faithfulness of the mind and eyes. Come on, men. It is so cruel and unfair to your wives for you to just accept the logs in your eyes and carry on with your lives.
Malachi 2:14-16
Because the LORD was witness between you and the wife of your youth, to whom you have been faithless, though she is your companion and your wife by covenant. Did he not make them one, with a portion of the Spirit in their union? And what was the one God seeking? Godly offspring. So guard yourselves in your spirit, and let none of you be faithless spring. So guard yourselves in your spirit, and let none of you be faithless to the wife of your youth. “For the man who does not love his wife but divorces her, says the LORD, the God of Israel, covers his garment with violence, says the LORD of hosts. So guard yourselves in your spirit, and do not be faithless.”
When we commit spiritual adultery as men in Covenant with Yeshua AND our wives by lusting after priestess of Baal, and literal sex SLAVES, we are rejecting the wives of our youth. The wives who committed themselves to us and we have treated them as disposable and replaceable.
The Unclean Images of Baal and Asherah are False Versions of Reality
These images are not only unclean, they are FAKE, our own form of modern sorcery. If you need further evidence that we are living in the Last Days, check no further than the unclean images of today versus the ancient world. The ancient world portrayed a normal looking woman, with all the natural curves that are synonymous with childbearing. These pictures are distorting our minds and reality on what a natural, healthy woman looks like. Not to mention, most models inject poisons into their skin. They cut and nip and tuck their bodies in the name of beauty. The goddesses of all the ancient nations, but especially Greece and Rome, represented the embodiment of beauty. All the women of those nations emulated the goddess’ physical and seductive features.
A worldly, fleeting beauty that withers just like your spirit will when you submit to the Serpent as your king.
We are a Greek-minded, vain, beauty obsessed world. Obsessing over the geometric proportions of our bodies and throwing purity and honor to the wind.
And the consequences are vast and detrimental to your marriage and the health of the generations after you that you are responsible for. Women for at least four decades have not been portrayed with natural curves a woman has, particularly after motherhood, but fetishized into an unrealistic standard.
Porn, a Modern Sorcery
This brings me to the point that pornography, just like many other facets of today’s society, is witchcraft.
Manipulating one’s mind to control, pacify and separate you from holding to the moral and natural Law that God established IS SORCERY.
Porn manipulates your mind and contorts your desires to be for many and all other women BUT your wife, just as the spell caster intends. Men become greedy under the spell of pornography and desire every other woman but the woman you vowed to be united with. You leave the wife of your youth, the woman that you are allowed to lust after, to pursue go to the temple of Baal (which can now be living in your phone) and permit the unclean images to speak abominable things in your very home, bedroom and into the eyes of your spirit. All for the greed of seeing more priestesses. When you are staring at an image of fake perfection, the realness of a real woman will become unattractive to you. The spell digs its claws further into your souls and you will desire more and more of the unattainable. OH the ingratitude to your wife and God.
Our holy wives give up their bodies for your heirs. Women’s bodies change and adapt to a baby’s needs which is the beauty that God designed.
Men looking at highly altered pictures of these enslaved priestesses allow the spell to take root in your heart and house. To be jealous after the women you are not yoked to instead of the woman God commands us to be jealous after.
Another example of the sins we have inherited from our fathers in Malachi 2 is from the apocryphal text Jasher. Now, I only look at Jasher as purely contextual and historical, showing the spiritual truths of actual canon. Take it with a grain of salt, but from all the Scriptural evidence of this concept, it’s not a stretch to ponder the spiritual context found in Jasher 2:19-22
In those days the sons of men began to trespass against God, and to transgress the commandments which he had commanded to Adam, to be fruitful and multiply in the earth. And some of the sons of men caused their wives to drink a draught that would render them barren, in order that they might retain their figures and whereby their beautiful appearance might not fade. And when the sons of men caused some of their wives to drink…And the child-bearing women appeared abominable in the sight of their husbands as widows, whilst their husbands lived, for to the barren ones only they were attached.
I have personally seen this sin committed upon many women in our current day and age. In fact, I witnessed this generational stronghold in my own upbringing, the fruit it bore and the terrible impact that it already has had within just two generations. I grew up in a Hebrew Roots cult and I have seen, and continue to see, these behaviors by the men in this cult, as well many other cults. The women have no value other than childbearing. Most husbands and elders in this very strict community use pornography and then force their wives to bear a million children with no break or rest for their bodies. Animal breeders give their animals a break from having litters. Self-righteous men from these cults force their wives to bear many children with no break, or rest for their bodies. They over obsess over the modesty of women and young girls without paying any attention to the gigantic, heaping logs in their own pornography-obsessed eyes. The despise their wives and daughters, and then in secret show favor to the hyper-edited unclean images of the women they “love”. I have seen the fruit of rejecting the wife of your youth and it leads to nothing but selfish pride and madness. In all these actions, they take God’s name in vain by teaching and demonstrating by example the opposite of what He embodies.
Many men, both religious and non-observant, in our generation use their child-bearing wife as their despised wife, just like the Jasher account. Then they use pornographic material to fill the spot of the beautiful, infertile wife (whom we know many porn stars are practicing abortion and watching is being an active participant).
All of these cults that perpetuate the abuse and slavery of their wives have many things in common, but the obsession with the role of a woman and their modesty and submission are all at the forefront. They pin all the blame for their lust on the women they lust after. Yeshua taught us very clearly that it is man’s responsibility what impure thoughts he has. Joseph remained pure and honorable through the temptation of Podifer’s wife. He took the responsibly on himself to remain pure in the sight of God, and did not cast blame on her and submit to sin. He walked in innocence and had the ability to cast blame on an actual tempter. Whoever you blame, you are in submission to. You have then given them control over your actions. Instead, Joseph was willing to die or be imprisoned with honor and purity trusting that God had the ability to restore his inheritance to him at the divine time.
Pharisaical men, whatever the sect or denomination of faith, also blame the wives of their youth, an actual victim that they are indebted to. I have seen many wives leave their slaveholders, their should-be husbands and protectors, and called adulterers and harlots. As a husband, when your wife sins, you should be covering her and being a priest who leads her in repentance and atonement. Blaming your wife, even if she is sinning, is following the First Adam who should have gone to God as a mediator for Eve’s disobedience but instead followed her into sin and blamed her and God for his own. When you blame your wife for your transgressions, you are only showing who your benefactor is. Remember men, if we are heirs to the Second Adam and truly in covenant with Yeshua, we should imitate Him.
Ephesians 5:21-33
Husbands, love your wives just as Christ loved the church and gave his life for it. He did this to dedicate the church to God by his word, after making it clean by washing it in water, in order to present the church to himself in all its beauty—pure and faultless, without spot or wrinkle or any other imperfection. Men ought to love their wives just as they love their own bodies. A man who loves his wife loves himself. (None of us ever hate our own bodies. Instead, we feed them, and take care of them, just as Christ does the church; 30 for we are members of his body.) As the scripture says, “For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and unite with his wife, and the two will become one.” There is a deep secret truth revealed in this scripture, which I understand as applying to Christ and the church. 33 But it also applies to you: every husband must love his wife as himself, and every wife must respect her husband.
Men, Repent and Turn from the Generational Curse we Inherited
Men, if this is how you treat your wife, I give you a promise: God will NEVER bestow His blessing upon you as long as you continue to repeat this sin. By giving into your lust instead of learning to rule over it, you become and emasculated priest of Tammuz (the love of the goddess) drying your family line up, and invoking God’s curse upon your house and your offspring. As a result of the generational sins my father passed down to me, I wrestled with the same sins from adolescence onward. It was not until I met my wife and began seeing the problem through the lense of love, grace, and mercy that I began learning how to turn this curse around and treating her with the respect and admiration she deserves. By all rights, my wife should have left me for the ways I betrayed her early on in our marriage, but she chose to extend mercy and grace, and I chose to put those sins of my youth to death, for the sake of my children and my wife. Only love can give you victory over shame and guilt. I saw first-hand, through the example of my father that if I loved my wife, I would not continue to hurt her and expect her to give me grace every time I failed.
Our relationship with God is exactly the same. He has immense mercy for our mistakes, and our struggles with overcoming the flesh. Mercy is given to overcome the guilt for anyone willing to take up their cross and begin the long process of overcoming that sin, continuing to ask for forgiveness every time you fail, and continuing on with the journey. A mikvah, known as a baptism in the New Testament, is a sign of our journey of repentance. Most Christians misunderstand the profound nature of a mikvah. It loses profound depth in modern theology because we have been deceived that Torah is slavery and not the path of righteousness that it is. A mikvah is a ceremonial washing that you were to do regularly. The Christian Church teaches that the baptism is this one and done symbol of obedience to Messiah, some have no idea that the baptism is even a ritual and command found in the Torah. In a mikvah, you are to wash any time you are found physically and spiritually unclean. We, as followers of Yeshua, are called to wash ourselves regularly. We don’t just wash one time when we first find the Messiah, and then we are done. No! A baptism, and especially repentance, is an on-going and regular part of our lives. In seeing that ridding ourselves of the sin is a continual process, the shame is lifted.
The Spirit of the Law is walking in paths of righteousness and repentance, a journey that is long and many times slow. Ironically, Torah which many find as slavery expects this process of cleansing rather than the theology that is taught in churches that you must be clean, or never to even care about repentance, after your allegiance to Yeshua. Continually cleansing ourselves from this unclean addiction passed down through generations is a process. Pruning out the impurities of our hearts bit by bit, and one moment, you will notice that it is not even a sin to wrestle with. This process of repentance is overcoming by the Blood of the Lamb and the word of our testimony.
Psalm 23:3
He restores my soul. He leads me in paths (in Hebrew cycles) of righteousness for his name’s sake.
Before one could come to the Temple, a priest had to take them through the mikvah and give them clean robes to wear to enter the Temple and be near God’s Presence. If we as men, are unwilling to wash ourselves as priests, and wear the wedding garments that we are offered, how then can we wash our children and enter them into the Presence of God that He longs to graciously give? How can we be the priests for our children if we ignore our wives’w and children’s needs of our physical and spiritual presence within our temples, our homes? Men, as the priests of our home, we need to be washing ourselves in the Word and learning how to be the Second Adam, Yeshua, to our wives and children. Men, we should be serving and covering them in grace and righteousness. Our women should not be begging us to be emotionally or spiritually available, but rather we should be a deeper connection point to God’s Presence for our families.
Only love can overcome the Serpent. Only love can give you relationship with your wife and help you to overcome your own failures and sins. From this moment onward, you must make a choice: continue living in your sinful patterns, hiding them from your wife and God, and ultimately losing everything you ever worked for; OR taking accountability, asking for forgiveness, repenting of your failures, and rising to your feet again, ready to take another step in opposition of the wicked patterns that you have been sold to by your parents. This is the moment of surrender. Surrender to God, or surrender to your sin. Your fruit will reveal itself by which side you surrender yourself to.
The information presented in this article is the result of decades of seeking answers and help to overcome my own addictions, and the knowledge shared here, along with the help of my wife, has truly revolutionized and empowered my battle against lust. I pray that it helps to empower all of you in your own battle in the same way it has helped me and my home.
May God bless and keep you, until next time!
Entering into the New Covenant
Defining the New Covenant
I had a dream four months ago that captivated my attention. I call it The Night Party.
In the dream, it was dusk, and there was a large group of people all having a picnic type dinner outside, and everybody was getting along. As I was walking around, I noticed two men talking with each other whose sons were pulling on a dog’s leg, hitting him with sticks and laughing about it. The men were reinforcing this behavior and telling their sons to keep going. I walked squarely up to one of the men, pointed my finger in his face and said, “We are not abusing animals here, and if I see this again, you’re out of here.” I turn to leave, and behind me, I hear the man mutter “You just committed suicide.” I continue walking and hear two pairs of footsteps behind me and whispering. I quickly duck behind a shed and hide against an alley in the shadows as the two men rush past, looking for me. I’m not hiding because I’m afraid of the men, I’m hiding because I am trying to avoid having to hurt them. One of the men keeps on running and the second man turns around and begins searching the alley I’m in. He stops about five feet from the shadows that I’m hiding out in, and I can see he’s wearing dress pants and a purple button up dress shirt. As the man stares into the darkness I can see that he’s beginning to adjust his eyes to the dark and I kept thinking I should attack him while I still have the advantage, but I don’t want to start a conflict so I wait. He finally sees me, I can tell he’s registered my presence and in that moment I woke up.
The interesting part about this one is that when I fell back asleep, the dream continued from immediately after the fight. Someone tells me to get everybody inside because the event is about to start so I yell to the group that it’s time to go inside now. I hang back to make sure everybody gets inside, and there’s a group of people who are staying outside. I told them again that it was time to go in. They insisted they were staying outside for a wedding that they had going on. When I looked around tables were set up for this wedding with decorations. I leave the group that stays outside and go inside with the rest of the group. Inside is a massive water tank that’s about the size of a football field and about waist high and I notice that everyone is standing around the water tank and there’s only one person in the tank. As they are baptizing the man, I jumped in the water and then I woke up.
The layers in this dream are clear depictions of the sifting process. Everyone is invited to the outer courts of the Temple. But abusers will froth at the mouth when told to stop hurting the weak of the flock. That is the FIRST layer. We all have to decide which group we fall into as the world continues falling apart. Are we staying in abuse? Are we staying for the Antichrist’s wedding feast? Or are we going deeper into the covenant and being washed and prepared for the Wedding Supper of the Lamb. The Bridegroom comes at midnight, we must go into his shelter and let him wash us or we get left outside in the dark. We each have to choose for ourselves which layer we are in. Israel, Jerusalem, The Temple, The court of the Gentiles, the Holy Place,The Holy of Holies. Each consecutive layer requires a more thorough cleansing to move forward.
When I had this dream, I had already been in conflict with one man who refuses to be accountable to the New Covenant and the Spirit of the Law. Weeks after I had this dream, the second man revealed himself and also showed the same refusal to the Spirit of the Law. When I attempted to gently correct him, he chased me down just like the man in the dream.
Another event that drew this dream into the real world was that the very next week we attended church with my wife’s parents on Sabbath evening, and as sunset happened, they baptized one man and the man’s name was ISRAEL! He was the only baptism they did exactly as in the dream.
This dream pressed me to share what the Covenant Yeshua has grafted us into entails and the responsibility we, as believers, have as a legal party written into the New Covenant.
We are New Covenant believers. But what does that mean? Most of us hear the term day in and day out, yet, although pastors use the phrase in response to pretty much every question, nobody has really taken the time to define the concept and explain what it means to be under the New Covenant. We just assume that now that Yeshua has died and risen again, and BOOM! We just have it. Yet, this is terribly flawed, and dangerous thinking. In the book of Acts, we see a group of believers who did not even know the Baptism of the Holy Spirit was real or possible, although they were doing everything according to the Law and believed In Yeshua. Paul had to baptize them and pray for the Holy Spirit to come and initiate them into the New Covenant.
Acts 19:1-7
While Apollos was at Corinth, Paul took the road through the interior and arrived at Ephesus. There he found some disciples and asked them, “Did you receive the Holy Spirit when you believed?” They answered, “No, we have not even heard that there is a Holy Spirit.”So Paul asked, “Then what baptism did you receive?” “John’s baptism,” they replied. Paul said, “John’s baptism was a baptism of repentance. He told the people to believe in the one coming after him, that is, in Jesus.” On hearing this, they were baptized in the name of the Lord Jesus. When Paul placed his hands on them, the Holy Spirit came on them, and they spoke in tongues and prophesied. There were about twelve men in all.
John’s baptism was the baptism of water and the forgiveness of sin. However, Yeshua’s baptism was the baptism of fire, that ignited a person for service to God and burned all obstacles before him. This baptism and its symbolism call to mind the covenant made with Moses at the burning bush, with Israel at Mount Sinai, and the covenant of protection that was over Shadrach, Meshach and Abednigo in the fiery furnace. It also calls to mind the fire of the final judgment, and the 144,000 saints who are purified through the fire, and spread that living fire to every corner of the earth.
We have not seen this fire in its fullness yet. In our lifetimes, we have not witnessed even a fraction of this fire. The accounts in the New Testament give us a taste, just a small sampling and shadow of what this final wave of believers will look like. Just to stick it in a few ears, no I do not think those 144,000 (which represent the first ripe crop) are the only people that will be saved through the tribulation. (As you may have noticed by now, I am not a believer in pre-tribulation theology). My studies and my research have been in trying to dig down and understand what elements made all the difference between the New Testament disciples after their initiation into the New Covenant, and what the conditions of that contract are; God is wise beyond all measure, and each of His Covenants are spelled out very clearly to all his would-be followers. He is not vague, nor confusing in anything He does.
I have to undo some of the majorly twisted theologies that the Church has long claimed sole interpretive rights on; and I will rely on you, the reader, in tandem with the Holy Spirit, to check what I say against Scripture and decide for yourself if I speak the truth. It must be noted that Jesus himself, whenever he healed a person, without fail told his people “go and sin no more.” In fact, after he healed the lame man at the pool of Bethesda in John 5, he found him later in the Temple and told him “Be careful, or what befalls you may be worse than what befell you the first time.”
Matthew 12:43-45
When an impure spirit comes out of a person, it goes through arid places seeking rest and does not find it. Then it says, ‘I will return to the house I left.’ When it arrives, it finds the house unoccupied, swept clean and put in order. Then it goes and takes with it seven other spirits more wicked than itself, and they go in and live there. And the final condition of that person is worse than the first. That is how it will be with this wicked generation.”
Yeshua was very clear. When he set you free of any ailment, if you go back to the sin that got you entrapped to that ailment, you are just like a dog returning to its vomit (Proverbs 26:11-12). The New Covenant is much more difficult than the Old Covenant. The Church teaches it as if it’s purely transactional, and magical, requiring no change or growth on the part of their members. Say these words in this way, raise your hand for Jesus, pay 10% of everything you earn to the pastors (and forgetting the command that the tithe also goes to widows, orphans and the disinherited), bring people to church, volunteer all your extra time to the “church family” and you will find your way into heaven. Paying your indulgences come to mind.
This is a blasphemous and destructive doctrine, and it has caused so much religious trauma that it is actually a shock to me that people still fall for it. The New Covenant was the covenant of fire that sealed and covered over the first Covenant, the covenant of Water and blood at Mount Sinai. God had intended to give this spirit of fire to all the Israelites at the mountain but the were afraid and refused it. The Church says all the time that God replaced Israel with the church, but they don’t realize that the New Covenant was only ever discussed by the Prophet Jeremiah (chapter 31), and there were only two parties listed: The House of Judah, and the House of Israel (Ephraim). These were the only legal parties involved.
Jeremiah 31:31-34
“The days are coming,” declares the Lord,
“when I will make a new covenant
with the people of Israel
and with the people of Judah.
It will not be like the covenant
I made with their ancestors
when I took them by the hand
to lead them out of Egypt,
because they broke my covenant,
though I was a husband to them,”
declares the Lord.
“This is the covenant I will make with the people of Israel
after that time,” declares the Lord.
“I will put my law in their minds
and write it on their hearts.
I will be their God,
and they will be my people.
No longer will they teach their neighbor,
or say to one another, ‘Know the Lord,’
because they will all know me,
from the least of them to the greatest,”
declares the Lord.
“For I will forgive their wickedness
and will remember their sins no more.”
If you are adamant that the Church replaced Israel, you are adamantly mistaken. You are then claiming, you have no part in the New Covenant because the three legal parties, spoken of in Jeremiah and alluded to in the New Testament, are: God, the Houses of Judah, and Ephraim (Israel uniting the two houses that were split (Zechariah 11) combining into one house again.
Ezekiel 37: 16-17
“Son of man, take a stick and write on it, ‘For Judah, and the people of Israel associated with him’; then take another stick and write on it, ‘For Joseph (the stick of Ephraim) and all the house of Israel associated with him.’ And join them one to another into one stick, that they may become one in your hand.
The Houses of Israel and Judah were not replaced with a mysterious church only mentioned in the last few books of the Bible. The Bride was, and will ALWAYS be, the Olive Tree, which is Israel.
Romans 11:17-24
But if some of the branches were broken off, and you, although a wild olive shoot, were grafted in among the others and now share in the nourishing root of the olive tree, do not be arrogant toward the branches. If you are, remember it is not you who support the root, but the root that supports you. Then you will say, “Branches were broken off so that I might be grafted in.” That is true. They were broken off because of their unbelief, but you stand fast through faith. So do not become proud, but fear. For if God did not spare the natural branches, neither will he spare you. Note then the kindness and the severity of God: severity toward those who have fallen, but God's kindness to you, provided you continue in his kindness. Otherwise you too will be cut off. And even they, if they do not continue in their unbelief, will be grafted in, for God has the power to graft them in again. For if you were cut from what is by nature a wild olive tree, and grafted, contrary to nature, into a cultivated olive tree, how much more will these, the natural branches, be grafted back into their own olive tree.
The New Covenant was an addition to the Old Covenant, seeing as how God himself annulled that covenant when He sent the Northern House of Israel away in a divorce decree, as witnessed to by the prophet Hosea. Romans 7 speaks of the requirements of the Law, and how once a woman, (or a nation) had been divorced by God and sent out of covenant, if she engaged in a covenant with another god, (the gods of the nations, symbolically depicted by the golden calf at Mount Sinai) she could never be re-married by the original husband. In this case, God had written the decree, requiring the death penalty for his nation, due to their continually lewd behavior, sexual misconducts, and servitude to the pagan fertility gods of Egypt, Canaan, Rome, Greece, and Babylon.
Except, God, being the author of the laws, wrote in loopholes that he could use to show mercy to his estranged sons:
2 Samuel 14:14
For we will surely die and become like water spilled on the ground, which cannot be gathered up again. Yet God does not take away a life; but He devises means, so that His banished ones are not expelled from Him.
This subject is so intricate, and so unbelievably complex, it is no wonder that the rabbis and priests of our age tell us to leave the thinking to them while they explain how the contracts work. They then lead us into the very sex cults and fertility rituals that our ancestors were divorced for, and all in the name of “FREEDOM IN CHRIST”.
Jude 1:4
For certain people have crept in unnoticed who long ago were designated for this condemnation, ungodly people, who pervert the grace of our God into sensuality and deny our only Master and Lord, Jesus Christ.
Every person that Jesus healed was a prophetic picture of his people, Israel, and the wounds that had been inflicted upon them, even up to death, and how he would willingly trade his own life for theirs. Lazarus was the final depiction of this scapegoat reversal, when Yeshua called him out of his tomb 4 days after his death. The name of Lazarus is important but I will cover the meanings of the names in future content. For now, we are trying to focus on the physical death that goes with, and is symbolized by the first baptism.
There is a pattern that runs through the entirety of Scripture, which I touched on in my previous post titled, ‘Christianity’s VS the Mosaic Law’ that reveals the water then fire progression for anything one wants to cleanse water can wash the physical muck and grime that collects on a utensil during use, but it cannot purify or sanitize on its own. The microscopic, defiling bacteria and germs can only be removed after the debris is washed off, and then only with fire. If you try to sanitize something before you have washed it, it will permanently bake the gunk onto your utensil or tool, ruining it forever. The earth has to follow the same pattern, and so do believers.
When Israel died for their transgressions, they died to represent all mankind. But they could not pay for or atone for the sins of all mankind, so they remained dead for 4 days (4,000 years), until the Messiah came along, called them out of their tomb, and took his place among death. The Author of Life, the Husband, watched His bride die, brought her out of the water, and took her penalty upon himself so that he could be with her.
Imagine the insult that you would feel if you found your spouse cheating with another man, and you caught her in the act of cheating on you. You would be horrified and enraged, and she begs you to forgive her, telling you it was just a one time thing, not even a big deal. You forgive her and the next day, you catch them again. You find them together day after day, and every time she insists that she is sorry and will never do it again. Eventually, God took off His wedding ring and threw it out the window, and stormed off to let his bride be with the husband she had chosen (Jeremiah 3). This is what happened at the fall of Jerusalem and the beginning of the exile of the northern house of Israel. Israel was being formally divorced and sent to live with her husband, as God could not be a righteous judge if he was in relationship with a nation that was also in relationship with the Enemy. What place does light have with darkness?
This problem is so multi-faceted, it is almost impossible to sew together all of the pieces to explain to you how many mechanisms are moving. Each of these promises made by God OR his legal heirs is legally binding for eternity.
Deuteronomy 30:19-20
This day I call the heavens and the earth as witnesses against you that I have set before you life and death, blessings and curses. Now choose life, so that you and your children may live and that you may love the Lord your God, listen to his voice, and hold fast to him. For the Lord is your life, and he will give you many years in the land he swore to give to your fathers, Abraham, Isaac and Jacob.
And God is weaving himself through time and space to ensure that every promise that every one of his sons always comes true as if it was his word from his very own mouth. When Adam ate of the fruit, his decision was legally binding for all his heirs thus forth.
Hosea 6:6-7
For I desire steadfast love and not sacrifice,
the knowledge of God rather than burnt offerings.
But like Adam they transgressed the covenant;
there they dealt faithlessly with me.
This is proof that there was a covenant, a legal and eternal union and partnership, with Adam and Eve, the first of man, and God. Both covenants are an eternal promise from God. The story of Scripture is a story of promise and the legal loopholes the Father has developed to keep human error and transgression from interfering with His promises and covenants.
When Abram married Hagar, the Egyptian, Ishmael became the legal heir of Abram and the legal inheritor of Abram’s estate. But God ordained to change Abram’s name. Abram was made into a new, spiritual man, Abraham, before he conceived a son through the Spirit; Isaac, the first-born heir of the PROMISE of God. Ishmael received the physical birthright of Abram. The son of the flesh went on to rule over and abuse Israel, the sons of the promise, for 400 years (Egypt means double bondage). So Ishmael was the heir of the flesh, and he ruled in the flesh.
Isaac was able to receive the physical birthright and the spiritual blessing of the new man, Abraham. Isaac was the heir of the promise and his rule was over that of the promise. Both the Promised Land and the priesthood were given to him. That very same promise was then passed down legally to Joseph, the firstborn next in line after Reuben his birthright by approaching Jacob’s wife. Each patriarch had both a spiritual promise and a physical promise to pass down to his heirs (and yes, women CAN be heirs as well! See Numbers 25:7-8.
So in Jacob’s case, Reuben was the first in line to be heir, as he was the firstborn son of his first wife, Leah. When Leah’s firstborn son removed himself from the birthright, the covenant passed to the firstborn son of the next wife of Jacob, Rachel.
This is why Joseph’s brothers were so jealous of him. Although he was their youngest brother, according to the Covenant of God with their family, the next heir to the promise of God was Joseph, whose name means “Multiplier”.
This is the principle of passing down the promise of the future Messiah from one generation to the next. It had to be an unbroken chain of legal heirs and inheritors from Adam to the Messiah in order for it to be a fulfillment of God’s promise at the Garden to Adam and to Abraham. It is the very concept behind the scarlet thread that runs through the entire text of the Bible from beginning to end.
Joseph is sold into slavery, having had his robe, his symbol of inheritance stripped from him. Joseph’s brothers legally sold Joseph and his authority as their ruler to the firstborn seed of Abram, the Ishmaelites, who then sold him to Egypt. Is it any wonder that in perfect justice to the 100 years of his life that Joseph served as slave to the land that had purchased his inheritance and right to rule, God then turns over the whole nation into his hands, in a perfect flip of justice. He then uses this same nation to multiply the sins of Joseph’s brothers by 4, and forcing them and their offspring to serve under the heavy yoke of bondage for 4 times what they consigned their brother to.
Luke 19:8-9
But Zacchaeus stood up and said to the Lord, “Look, Lord! Here and now I give half of my possessions to the poor, and if I have cheated anybody out of anything, I will pay back four times the amount.” Jesus said to him, “Today salvation has come to this house, because this man, too, is a son of Abraham. For the Son of Man came to seek and to save the lost.”
Again, we see the number four pop up painting a picture of a journey to repentance and redemption. Lazarus was deceased for four days just as Adam was dead for 4,000 years. Zacchaeus repented to Yeshua and vowed to repay his debtors four times the amount he took. Israel was in slavery and exile from their promised land for four hundred years, four one hundreds.
In God’s perfect justice, he consigned the sons of Jacob to 400 years of slavery under their chosen ruler, and on their exit from slavery, took all of Joseph’s and their own earned wealth with them as repayment for their time as slaves. Even the curse of bondage that came from the betrayal of Joseph, God turned for their good and made it into a blessing in the end. The most amazing part of this whole equation is that when the Messiah did come, he did not pass down any physical lineage or seed. His only inheritors were spiritual inheritors, to prove that the spiritual seed is far superior to that of the physical. His twelve disciples were his twelve adopted sons, who inherited his spiritual authority at his command after his death and resurrection. The covenant that the disciples partook of is ripe for the picking, but before we can enter into it, we have to understand the terms of this covenant.
The Covenants with Death
Isaiah 28:18
Your covenant with death will be annulled, And your agreement with Sheol will not stand; When the overflowing scourge passes through, Then you will be trampled down by it.
The covenants of God have a dark mirror. Satan also makes contracts with men and women all through the Scripture. His methods and contracts can be traced and understood just as much as the righteous contracts can. This is why it is important to understand the mechanisms that the Serpent uses to entrap God’s people in his own covenants and contracts. God has to withhold judgment upon the Serpent, for the sake of His people who He is trying to keep away from destruction. If we keep partaking in the covenants and contracts of the Serpent through rebellion, adultery and idolatry, we are outside God’s canopy of protection. This is why in Exodus and Deuteronomy, in particular, it states not to bring an abominable image into our home, or we will be set apart for destruction along with it.
When Israel left Egypt, they left the ruler and slaveholder, a legal repercussion of their enslavement of Joseph, completely destroyed. God had killed the nation, and judged its gods, symbolic of a man or husband in Scripture, who had defiled His people and He brought them out into the wilderness where He could initiate a covenant and a marriage with them. Just as in the Garden of Eden, when God was on the brink of consummating his marriage with humanity, the Serpent deceived and beguiled them into doing two things: committing sexual immorality therefore defiling their holy bloodlines and birthrights, and marrying themselves to the fertility goddesses represented by the golden calf. The ketubah was being prepared. The marriage supper had been prepared already, and even eaten by the elders of Israel alongside Yeshua on the mountain.
Exodus 24:9-12
Then Moses went up, also Aaron, Nadab, and Abihu, and seventy of the elders of Israel, and they saw the God of Israel. And there was under His feet as it were a paved work of sapphire stone, and it was like the very heavens in its clarity. But on the nobles of the children of Israel He did not lay His hand. So they saw God, and they ate and drank. Then the Lord said to Moses, “Come up to Me on the mountain and be there; and I will give you tablets of stone, and the law and commandments which I have written, that you may teach them.”
My study Christianity v. Mosaic Law takes a deeper look at Yeshua, the Angel of the Lord, and His involvement with the writing of the Old Covenant and the deliverance of the Hebrews out of Egypt.
https://www.food4thesoulmedia.com/blog/christianity-vs-the-mosaic-law
At the core of all of these threads is one very central concept. The idea of seed. Offspring. A plant continues its life from one generation to the next by spreading its seed as far as it is able.
Isaiah 49:6
He says: “It is too light a thing that you should be my servant to raise up the tribes of Jacob and to bring back the preserved of Israel; I will make you as a light for the nations, that my salvation may reach to the end of the earth.”
Each subsequent plant that grows up is a piece, a spiritual part of the last plant, and shares in the genetic code and structure of the original even if it has never seen or touched that original tree. When God gave Adam the earth, he gave them all herbs of the field and all seed bearing plants as food. They were to take dominion by working as partners with nature. They were to work as a team to create new life by producing and training their own seed while tending to all the other seed-bearing things in the Garden with them. Adam was a pure tree, and his seed was holy. The good grapevine that God laments over later in the prophets.
Isaiah 5: 1-2
My beloved had a vineyard
on a very fertile hill.
He dug it and cleared it of stones,
and planted it with choice vines;
he built a watchtower in the midst of it,
and hewed out a wine vat in it;
and he looked for it to yield grapes,
but it yielded wild grapes.
When Adam ate of the Serpent’s perverted knowledge, his seed was defiled and the stalk withered. When God told him,” On the day you eat of it you shall die,” He was speaking to Adam as a spiritual father. Adam died on the same day he ate the fruit. He was trapped in the physical dimension and his life-span dried up and now exposed to the strife and thorns of his labors and his now dying body. The more mankind disobeys the father and obeys the snake, the more our lifespans shorten and wither, from one generation to the next we grow weaker and smaller.
When Moses led the people out of Egypt and bondage, he was sprinkling them with the blood and the water of the Covenant. They were being washed from the dirt of Egypt: the physical representation of sin, slavery, and bondage to death. The Hebrews were being washed for a purpose; so that when the fire passed over them, it would consume all of the gods they left behind in Egypt and shield them. If they had either the images representing those gods in their house OR the behavior patterns of the animals that those spirits represent, then you would pass under the same judgment as the one you cling to. Will you cling to the Author of Life or the gods of chaos, death and destruction? Will you cling to the Author of Life as both a physical AND spiritual heir?
This leads us to the letter of the Law vs the Spirit of the Law.
He has made us competent to be ministers of a New Covenant, not of the letter, but of the Spirit. For the letter kills, but the Spirit gives life
2 Corinthians 3:6
Not that we are sufficient in ourselves to claim anything as coming from us, but our sufficiency is from God, who has made us sufficient to be ministers of a new covenant, not of the letter but of the Spirit. For the letter kills, but the Spirit gives life.
People use this verse to justify ignoring the commands of God ALL the time, but it actually means the opposite of what teachers try to use it to say. If you listen to the words of Yeshua on the subject, not only did he expect everyone to fully keep the Law as he did, (albeit with flaws, the effort was still required) but he expected them to go a step further. Keeping of the Law was the washing with water. Keeping and observing the Spirit of each Law was the washing with fire; The step that God was angry with the Israelites for refusing at Mount Sinai.
Ezekiel 36: 25-27
I will take you from the nations and gather you from all the countries and bring you into your own land. 25 I will sprinkle clean water on you, and you shall be clean from all your uncleannesses, and from all your idols I will cleanse you. And I will give you a new heart, and a new spirit I will put within you. And I will remove the heart of stone from your flesh and give you a heart of flesh. And I will put my Spirit within you, and cause you to walk in my statutes and be careful to obey my rules.
The heart of stone written about by the prophet Ezekiel was the stone that the commandments were written on. In Exodus 34, after the Spirit Himself had written the Words on the stone tablets, Moses came down the mountain at Sinai and finds the Hebrews engaging in spiritual and physical adultery, the commandments already being broken. Enraged, Moses throws the tablets of stone on the ground and shatters them. Moses must ascend the Mountain of the Lord once more. This time, God makes Moses write the commandments prophesying of the “Second Adam” to come who would act as intercessor and unite Israel once more into covenant with the Most High. This was also the point where God instructed Moses to build the Ark of the Covenant, the vessel that would carry and protect the tablets of their covenant until the coming of the Messiah who would come and claim that Mercy Seat as His very literal throne with the commandments, rod of Aaron, and Manna, under his feet. The symbolism is ripe for the picking! That is for another study, however.
The baptism of the Holy Spirit is only available to those who are already actively participating in the cycle of physical repentance to the commandments of God. Only after you have walked through the Red Sea, died to your Jacob, and re-surfaced as Israel, can you then be ignited as a lamp, set on fire by the Holy Spirit, activated to teach His words. If you are teaching people that you can ignore everything God ever wrote and follow whichever commands feel right to you, but ignore the ones the inconvenience or convict you, you are lying to the Holy Spirit and lying about the Holy Spirit. The Heavenly Father wants willing participants to partner with in raising up a Holy generation.
The last part to Ezekiel 36 is holds even greater truths that we miss entirely when we throw Yeshua’s commandments to the wind.
Ezekiel 36: 28-37
You shall dwell in the land that I gave to your fathers, and you shall be my people, and I will be your God. And I will deliver you from all your uncleannesses. And I will summon the grain and make it abundant and lay no famine upon you. I will make the fruit of the tree and the increase of the field abundant, that you may never again suffer the disgrace of famine among the nations. Then you will remember your evil ways, and your deeds that were not good, and you will loathe yourselves for your iniquities and your abominations. It is not for your sake that I will act, declares the Lord God; let that be known to you. Be ashamed and confounded for your ways, O house of Israel.“Thus says the Lord God: On the day that I cleanse you from all your iniquities, I will cause the cities to be inhabited, and the waste places shall be rebuilt. And the land that was his land that was desolate has become like the garden of Eden, and the waste and desolate and ruined cities are now fortified and inhabited.’ Then the nations that are left all around you shall know that I am the Lord; I have rebuilt the ruined places and replanted that which was desolate. I am the Lord; I have spoken, and I will do it. “
The truth of the matter is, that we as believers in Yeshua, have only been betrothed into the New Covenant, but the consummation of that spirit has not descended yet, nor will it until the marriage supper of the lamb after he comes to gather his people into the bridal party. The modern church teaches that we are in the age of the New Covenant, and that if you say a special prayer and tithe to them, then you will also have a portion of that spirit. According to the Torah, if a woman who is betrothed to a man gets raped, the rapist is due the death penalty for committing adultery. Even though the marriage has not been consummated, the marriage begins at the exchange of vows, when both parties put themselves to work getting preparations for the wedding in order, and the blessings of marriage do not come until the consummation. The peoples have not been gathered into Israel, and the land promised back to us is not yet like the Garden of Eden. We have not received the blessing given to Adam yet at the Garden.
Instead, our Bridegroom is preparing our wedding supper. In Hebraic understanding a Ketubah is the formal declaration of marriage and includes the vows and oaths of both parties. At Mount Sinai, the Ten Commandments were the Ketubah of the first marriage, being prepared by Moses and Yeshua. Yeshua said as he left earth that he was preparing a place for us. That place is the Kingdom of God, Israel, which, one day, will be restored to the Garden of Eden. Just as Moses ascended Mount Sinai a second time to rewrite the marriage ketubah, Yeshua has ascended to Heaven to prepare ours for the completion and consummation of the New Covenant.
Matthew 9:15
Jesus answered, “How can the guests of the bridegroom mourn while he is with them? The time will come when the bridegroom will be taken from them; then they will fast.”
The New Covenant is being recorded in the Heavens. When “the Second Moses” comes down, do we want Him seeing us prepared, fasting and in the wedding clothes or do we want to be caught in the act of idolatry and sexual immorality like our Hebrew predecessors?
In the next study, we examine ridding ourselves of the immorality we have inherited from Egypt and being the priest Yeshua calls us to be for our hearts and households.
The Gate to Your Soul: Your Eyes
In the next section, I am going to begin unpacking how in the view of the Spirit, anything that you imagine doing, you have done, and are guilty of. Yeshua said that it’s not good enough that you don’t physically go through with the act of not committing adultery. You cannot hope to enter heaven if you run around around objectifying and degrading others in your mind. It’s no longer good enough that we simply “don’t touch the fruit.” Now the command is applied to the mind and soul too ensuring that our hearts and minds align with our actions.
The Great Harlot of Revelation: Introduction
15 years ago, I followed one single verse from Isaiah down a literal rabbit hole.
I spent six years in the Navy doing Intelligence and Analysis which trained my brain to go digging and searching for answers and
clues that weren't out in the open for people to readily find. I stumbled across Isaiah 27: 9, and I could not foreshadow the literal journey that God would take me on as I unpacked the meaning. Ultimately, this whole passage is an End Times prophecy but in verse 9, a profound mystery unfolds:
Isaiah 27:9
Therefore by this the guilt of Jacob will be atoned for, and this will be the full fruit of the removal of his sin: when he makes all the stones of the altars like chalkstones crushed to pieces, no Asherim or sun pillars will remain standing.
We know Paul talked about the cultivated tree and the wild tree saying that if the original branches could be cut off of the original tree, then we being wild branches that were grafted on afterwards are much more in danger of the fire than the original branches.
Romans 11:17-21
If some of the branches have been broken off, and you, though a wild olive shoot, have been grafted in among the others and now share in the nourishing sap from the olive root, do not consider yourself to be superior to those other branches. If you do, consider this: You do not support the root, but the root supports you. You will say then, “Branches were broken off so that I could be grafted in.” Granted. But they were broken off because of unbelief, and you stand by faith. Do not be arrogant, but tremble. For if God did not spare the natural branches, he will not spare you either.
Isaiah 27 refers to Jacob and his great sin and how it's not going to be atoned for until the complete repentance of idolatry, the fruit being the removal of these images. It is kind of a conflict of interest because we know that Yeshua came and he died and he took away our sin, yet we see here that only when the people of Jacob completely turn away from all idolatry and their idols are all destroyed will their sins truly be removed. Our sin cannot be entirely erased until repentance takes place in our hearts and actions.
We, as believers, can simplify this concept by throwing it out, saying that “it already happened”, and avoiding all accountability as the people of God, whether grafted in or of the actual tree. But when you look around, you still see these images on every street corner AND in every home. During the beginning of this 15 year study, I lived in the United Kingdom. I would read about what these occult images were, and then sure enough, the images would be on every street as I walked past in cemeteries, government buildings and CHURCHES mostly.
It's really easy to just read over this verse because it is vague to our modern understanding. Almost all Bible translations are going to modify the word “Asherim” and “Sun Pillars” or obelisks, so it's even easier to read over nearly every mention of Israel’s idolatry written by the prophets because the words are skewed and vague in definition about what sacred pillars or Sacred Stones or carved images or idols are and what they represented to the religions of the nations surrounding Israel.
There is not a lot of definition given, but it specifically mentions “Asherim” and Sun images found directly in the Hebrew. So what are these images?
There's one additional verse a little further in the passage found in Isaiah 59 verse 1 and 2.
Isaiah 59:1-2
Behold, the LORD's hand is not shortened, that it cannot save; neither his ear heavy, that it cannot hear. But your iniquities have separated between you and your God, and your sins have hid his face from you, that he will not hear.
Until the sins that Israel committed are done away with and not continued anymore I.e. repenting for our rebellion and adulteries, we cannot be atoned for in completion. Yeshua can save us any time, but he doesn't forgive us for sins that we're currently partaking in.
This is not to say the grace and blood of Yeshua does not cover us, but we will not see the fullness of the fruit of that salvation until we do away with all idolatry. As much as we as believers want to pretend we have the same spiritual gifts and fullness of the fruit of salvation that the early church and apostles had, it is not there. Look around. Is anyone healing the sick or raising the dead by the hundreds? No, we are not. And not because Yeshua isn’t willing or capable of filling us with His Spirit again.
Know that these issues that I'm bringing up are not here to castigate anybody. The research that I have found was hidden from all of us for Millennia and it's been hidden purposely by the Serpent because he knew that if we knew what participation in these customs would cost us, believers wouldn't do it. He got us to secretly carry out a lot of these practices. A huge mistake we continue to make as believers is underestimating our opponent. If his strategies were so easy to detect, then the elect would not be deceived in Revelation. We have lost the meaning of idolatry purposely just as Balak asked Balaam to get Israel to sin so that they could um wipe them out in in combat. The exact same thing has happened with the people of God where the enemy knows that if we are obeying God's Word, we receive divine protection and blessing so he gets us to sin without knowing we are sinning. This keeps us from getting the full measure of our
protection.
The great Harlot of Revelation gives a lot of detail on that final Beast Kingdom, and why the idolatry is being judged.
This also gives insight that the idolatry spoken of in the major and minor prophets is just as relevant and important to believers in the End Times. Ultimately, this great Harlot is the thing keeping Israel from reaching the fullness and completion of Yeshua’s salvation (His Second coming and dwelling with us). That is why why it stuck in my cross so much because he's saying the full fruit of Israel's sin being taken away will be
He tells the end from the beginning, so I'm going to start in the end.
Revelation 17: 1-5
Then one of the seven angels who had the seven bowls came and said to me, “Come, I will show you the judgment of the great prostitute who is seated on many waters, with whom the kings of the earth have committed sexual immorality, and with the wine of whose sexual immorality the dwellers on earth have become drunk.” And he carried me away in the Spirit into a wilderness, and I saw a woman sitting on a scarlet beast that was full of blasphemous names, and it had seven heads and ten horns. The woman was arrayed in purple and scarlet, and adorned with gold and jewels and pearls, holding in her hand a golden cup full of abominations and the impurities of her sexual immorality. And on her forehead was written a name of mystery: “Babylon the great, mother of prostitutes and of earth’s abominations.”
Every single one of these descriptors are referring to Scripture we can assess and get better picture at what this very dense vision symbolizes.
We know the Great Harlot is:
The mother of prostitutes and abominations of the Earth Rev. 17:5
2. She rides the Beast the Nations that bow down to her and cultivated her worship so she sits in rulership and an authority of them.
3. She rides in authority the beast system with many different names and forms. She has many blasphemous names. Rev. 17:4. Names also imply many languages and tongues and the Harlot will be known throughout the world under different names
4. She comes out of the waters (waters meaning the peoples or nations). Rev. 17: 15 According to verse 15, the angel then tells John that ‘the waters’ symbolizes the peoples or nations.
The Mother of Abominations
What is an abomination in Scripture?
Deuteronomy 13: 16-17
They made him jealous with strange
Gods with Abominations they provoked him to anger they sacrificed to demons who
were not Gods to Gods whom they have not known New Gods who came lately who your fathers did not dread (In other translations demons is replaced with gods, idols, detestable things.)
Deuteronomy 7: 26
Do not bring any detestable objects into your home, for then you will be destroyed, just like them. You must utterly detest such things, for they are set apart for destruction.
If we are supposed to utterly detest abominations, but do not know what they are or look like, how then can we obey what God has commanded?
Ezekiel 8:5-6
Then he said to me, “Son of man, lift up your eyes now toward the north.” So I lifted up my eyes toward the north, and behold, north of the altar gate, in the entrance, was this image of jealousy. And he said to me, “Son of man, do you see what they are doing, the great abominations that the house of Israel are committing here, to drive me far from my sanctuary? But you will see still greater abominations.”
This is the first instance of the Abomination that causes desolation that you see in Scripture, and the verbiage in the language are the same as in Revelation. God is walking Ezekiel through the evils of Israel and what they are doing in the temple. Instead of worshiping him, they're worshiping all of these elements of death and worshiping all of the pagan gods. How will we be able to identify the Idol of Jealousy when it is placed in the Holy Place in End Times, if we do not know what an abomination is or looks like? God says to Ezekiel that because of the abominations which Israel is committing in His House, He must leave. This means God will not sanctify it even in His own House! This passage goes against the Christian structure that Yeshua will sanctify any customs of man. God himself left His own Temple, His own House, because of these abominations.
If the Father will leave His own Home, it's not a stretch by any means that He will leave our homes if we have these images in them.
Abominations are idols.
Therefore, if Revelation describes a great prostitute as the mother of all Abominations she is in fact the mother of all the gods or the idols. Idols steal the rightful worship from God which is the greatest which is the great crime that the Harlot stands in judgment for. If the Abominations are idols, then the prostitute's cup is filled with the idols of the earth and the the wine in that cup is the
blood sacrifices and worship that are conducted and given to this woman and all of her idols. Riding the beast with the Blasphemous names, she's depicted as being in authority over them.
“She rides a beast with many names.”
If the deity that we find is in fact The Prostitute of Revelation she will be a single goddess or idol known throughout the world and in Scripture. She will also be known by many names and this will point us to the great prostitute. The Bible explains that the harlot goes by so many names and have to look past the
names and look at the features, identifications and elements that this woman is known for in Revelation. She was the mother of all the idols which will lead us to one entity, no matter what religion or background. She will have to be in worldwide authority to this day otherwise she doesn't fit the prophecy of Revelation 17.
There are different embodiments of this great prostitute throughout Scripture, just as there are prophetic embodiments of Jesus through the lives of David, Moses and Joseph. The way those righteous men were used to paint a picture to say who Yeshua would be, there is also the inverse where the evil men and women in the Bible all paint a picture as to the final outcome fulfillment of that evil. The righteous paint the picture of the ultimate righteous who one to come, Yeshua, and all of the wicked line up to paint the picture of the ultimate Evil.
Jezebel is one of the primary comparisons and prophetic pictures of the great harlot that was to come.
She is the most obvious embodiment of the Great Harlot. This is not a stretch in the imagination considering that the Church of Thyatira is judged in Revelation 2 for having listened to her. We will examine this verse further along in the study.
1 Kings 16: 31-33
So Ahab took for his wife Jezebel the daughter of Ethbaal king of the Sidonians, and went and served Baal and worshiped him. He erected an altar for Baal in the house of Baal, which he built in Samaria. And Ahab made an Asherah. Ahab did more to provoke the Lord, the God of Israel, to anger than all the kings of Israel who were before him.
Ahab takes for his wife Jezebel, who was the daughter of Etbaal, King of the Sidonians, who is the high priest of Baal and she brings Baal and Asherah worship to all of Israel. Jezebel here is playing the part of the Great harlot prophetically. Her sins (idolatry and sexual immorality) recorded in First Kings line up directly with the sins described that the Harlot of the world is being judged for. The name Jezebel in Hebrew means “Baal has exalted” which is a Blasphemous name against Elohim. Jezebel incited King Ahab of Israel to bring Asherah and Baal idolatry to Israel on a national scale, and Jezebel led Israel into this idol worship in the same way that the great harlot leads the world into idol worship.
Jehu judges Jezebel’s sins
2 Kings 9: 22
And when Joram saw Jehu, he said, “Is it peace, Jehu?” He answered, “What peace can there be, so long as the whoring and the sorceries of your mother Jezebel are so many?”
The Harlot’s Judgement
Nahum 3:4-5
All because of the wanton lust of a prostitute, alluring, the mistress of sorceries, who enslaved nations by her prostitution and peoples by her witchcraft.“I am against you,” declares the Lord Almighty. “I will lift your skirts over your face. I will show the nations your nakedness and the kingdoms your shame.
Judgement of the Church for following Jezebel
Revelation 2:20
But I have this against you, that you tolerate that woman Jezebel, who calls herself a prophetess and is teaching and seducing my servants to practice sexual immorality and to eat food sacrificed to idols.
In Revelation 2, Yeshua reprimands the church of Thyatira for following Jezebel along with her idolatry and sexual immorality. This passage in Revelation gives us a clear and uncharted vantage point. Yeshua was rebuking an ancient assembly, but also of one to come! This means we need to evaluate our worship and fruit, within our churches specifically. Believers will be judged for partaking in the idol worship. It is vital that we know what this worship entails and what it signifies, so that we don't partake. There is grace for deception, but there is only so much protection we can have when we align ourselves with unclean spirits and immoral acts. Natural consequences are inevitable.
David had natural consequences the entirety of his life after his egregious sins, even after God proclaimed his sins to forgiven. He still, however, had to adhere to the natural consequences of his actions. His family had disastrous suffering from his immorality. Sin, however great or small, brings conflict, pain and suffering into our lives. Grace has covered us, but carrying our cross entails that we submit to our testing, most of which is brought on by the natural ramifications of our transgressions to God.
Paul rejoiced in his suffering because he properly understood this concept of testing. Paul stoned and murdered many of the saints, and we see him later, being stoned and rejoicing over it. He was properly understanding the concept that every sin has a physical repercussion, even though we are forgiven for it. David sinned, was forgiven, and had physical consequences. Paul sinned, was forgiven, and had physical consequences. We are be redeemed by Yeshua’ s resurrection which covered our spiritual consequences. However, this doesn’t mean that we do not still have physical and natural repercussions for the sins we commit while we live on this earth.
Not only is it relevant to study what idolatry is and looks like, it is dire. Do we want Yeshua to come back to our church and be upset with how we applied His Gospel?
Through the prophetic significance of The Harlot’s counterpart Jezebel, deep perspective and insight into what the Harlot’s worship looks like in the modern era. Who did Jezebel worship? Baal and Asherah.
Since she led Israel in the worship of Baal and Asherah, examining what the worship of Baal and Asherah looked like is key to unlocking this mystery. In this next study, we will be examining Asherah worship.
What did the Asherah of the nations in the Bible look like? And why was God so enraged for Israel for following their worship?
Next chapter, these questions are answered and it gives profound discernment to the Great Harlot and how she seizes the worship of the world and authority of the Beast Kingdom of the Last Days. How does she continue to steal God’s worship today, both in and out of home and church?
2020-2027, Jacob’s Trouble, and the Unveiling of the Antichrist
A modern analysis on biblical prophecy, the emergence of the Antichrist, and the coming Jubilee and return of Jesus/Yeshua
By Noah and Anna McHugh
Contact Noah.mchugh@outlook.com for any questions, concerns or further insights. Test this teaching with Scripture and if anything comes to mind as inaccurate according to the Word, let’s have open and honest discussion. By no means, do I or anyone else in the Body have everything figured out. Let’s continue dialogue and wrestle together to find the eternal truth found in the Scriptures.
Ever since I was 12, I was enamored with the prophecies in Revelation, Daniel, Zechariah, and more. The more I read them the more confused I got, and I have spent the last 20 years of my life seeking every interpretation possible to try to understand what was written in these amazingly intricate, and spectacularly precise prophesies. I spent 6 years as a cryptologist for the US Navy, and my primary jobs can be summed up in comparative analysis, trend/pattern analysis, threat analysis, and fusion analysis. Let me translate that to English. My job was to combine ALL the sources of intel from every shop and combine them to come up with a “most likely scenario” specifically in order to protect the strike group from potential threats.
I didn’t realize it at the time, but God was training me to do my job for him and his people. He took me around the world and showed me places that I would later realize are central to the unfolding of biblical prophecy in our day, and began revealing threads to me that I was instructed to pull and seek answers for. Here’s the thing about Intel. You have to use logic and pattern analysis to find answers that nobody is going to tell you even if you asked; and you have to do it with a high degree of certainty.
After I got out of the Navy, my mind was freed to spend all of my mental energy on finding authoritative scholars in each field pertinent to my prophetic studies, and pour through their research and interpretations. I studied every angle of every prophecy I could find, and eventually the patterns began revealing themselves. I have not done this research for profit, for honor, or for personal fame. I merely dug because I wanted to understand that which was hidden. I don’t want anyone to take any of my findings for granted, or for gospel, but I do want you to open your mind and your heart to having MANY misconceptions and dogmas completely shattered and replaced with truth. Question everything. Trust but verify. Seek and you shall find. I share this information freely, and hope that it helps many of you who are confused about our present day and environment to find clarity and strength that only Messiah can give, moving forward.
There have been a lot of false assumptions that have been made about The Last Days and prophecy in general. I urge you to open your mind to reevaluate all preconceived notions on how prophecy will be fulfilled. As a body, and individually, we all must continually do this or we risk denying our Messiah like our ancestors before us. In addition, as the seals have begun to be removed, prophecy becomes more and more visible and attainable to our understanding, but ONLY if we are willing to completely re evaluate each piece and event completely, within the context of current events in addition to Scripture.
Let’s dive into this study. First and foremost, we need to address the foundational elements in how Scripture shows us to interpret prophesy.
All of prophecy has multiple fulfillments. You cannot take the literal and leave out the esoteric, nor can you do the inverse. It has to be both or you miss the point. Even the language and words used in Scripture (Hebrew) have many meanings both esoteric and literal.
The beginning of our study rests on the foundation of the jubilee count, which has been confused, destroyed, and hidden by everyone, INCLUDING the Jewish Rabbis, desperate to avoid the public finding out how Yeshua fits into the prophecies about the Messiah’s arrival.
This detail was discovered by Mark Biltz, and Dr. Christian Widener, and this one detail clicked all my years of study into place.
In Ezekiel 40:1, a riddle is extracted. The beginning of the year, on the tenth of the month, 14 years after the fall of Jerusalem. The only year that starts on the 10th of the month is a jubilee year.
Leviticus 25:8-10
And you shall count seven sabbaths of years for yourself, seven times seven years; and the time of the seven sabbaths of years shall be to you forty-nine years. Then you shall cause the trumpet of the Jubilee to sound on the tenth day of the seventh month; on the Day of Atonement you shall make the trumpet to sound throughout all your land. And you shall consecrate the fiftieth year, and proclaim liberty throughout all the land to all its inhabitants. It shall be a Jubilee for you;
Important to note, every 50th year of the calendar cycle, the beginning of the year falls in the middle of the year (specifically the tenth day of the seventh month) Ezekiel, knowing the calendar would be muddled, coded the count in a clerical and scribal detail that anyone but a true Hebrew would miss entirely.
According to Ezekiel the prophet, the jubilee year was 14 years after 587 BC. I.e. 573. Was a jubilee year. Which tracks forward to 27 AD also being a jubilee, specifically the jubilee that Yeshua announced in the synagogue. (Luke 4)
Messiah 2030 on YouTube is a really good reference of the prophetic clock. If you are needing deeper understanding and thematic links, this is a great study. The only piece I believe they are missing is the proper jubilee count as attested to by Ezekiel 40.
Let’s go through some key passages in Scripture that give us insight into the timeline of the prophetic clock and break down its significance.
Hosea 6:2
After two days he will revive us; on the third day he will restore us, that we may live in his presence.
It is important to know what the concept of time is in prophecy. There is the physical or natural meaning, but there is also a spiritual meaning. God has all the days of the earth set on a prophetic clock, so to speak. There are seasonal and annual examples of this occurrence every year with God’s appointed times, or feasts found in Leviticus 23. Those are metaphorically symbolic of the “hours” or “minutes” on the clock. This prophecy has already been fulfilled once in Yeshua’s First Coming. On the third day, Yeshua rose from the grave and conquered death. It is important to note that “a day” in prophecy can and does mean both a literal day and one thousand years.
The Essene society, as learned from the Dead Sea Scrolls, discussed this concept in detail, explaining that the 7 days of creation when compared with the events that happened and were recorded by scripture, were mirrored in the spiritual sense by the major events that unfolded within the thousand year period of the day it corresponded to. (A Jubilee period was 50 years, and an Onah was 10 Jubilees, therefore an Onah is a period of 500 years.) This means that whenever “a day” is mentioned in Scripture, it also has the large scale meaning of one thousand years. The Lost Prophesies of Qumran by Josh Peck is an excellent source that dives into the large scale prophetic clock and its mirroring of the daily and yearly cycles. We are currently in the closing period at midnight of the 6th day of which man was created. Man has taken dominion of the whole earth, and the 7th day right on the verge of beginning. The thousand year millennial reign of Messiah is a depiction of that final day of creation leading up to the beginning of the next week which bridges into eternity. It can also be noted that the rabbis have changed the count of years, and have misled most who are counting still, by giving them a false count and therefore a confused measure of where we are on the timeline.
The reason that whenever a prophet’s words came true, the prophecy was meant to be written down and recorded, was so that after it had been proven as God’s word on the small scale, the words and symbols were written down to be understood later by the later generations as pointing to a spiritual reality and a future, greater fulfillment of that prophecy, both in the spiritual and the physical sense. For instance, When Abraham was told to sacrifice Issaac on Mount Moriah (Hebrew for “Yah provides”, relating to the ram that was the replacement for Isaac.) It was written down so that later when God himself came as the ram to replace Abraham’s seed in accepting the death penalty that they deserved. He was later crucified on that very mountain, three prophetic days, or 3,000 years later, and prophesied to return from the grave after two days of absence was complete. This is a prophetic set that is part of a web of cogs and keys that lay out the clock of prophecy and reveals which events still have yet to play out in order to bring about the promises that God has given for his people and for the whole earth.
So “a day” in Scripture is also 1,000 years.
Psalm 90:4
A thousand years in your sight
are like a day that has just gone by,
or like a watch in the night.
Daniel 9:24-27
Know therefore and understand,
That from the going forth of the command
To restore and build Jerusalem
Until Messiah the Prince,
There shall be seven weeks and sixty-two weeks; (483 years)
The moat shall be built again, and the wall,
Even in troublesome times.
“And after the sixty-two weeks
Messiah shall be cut off, but not for Himself;
And the people of the prince who is to come
Shall destroy the city and the sanctuary.
The end of it shall be with a flood,
And till the end of the war desolations are determined.
Then he shall confirm a covenant with many for one week;
But in the middle of the week
He shall bring an end to sacrifice and offering.
And on the wing of abominations shall be one who makes desolate,
Even until the consummation, which is determined,
Is poured out on the desolate.”
Michael Heiser’s research finds that Yeshua was born in 3 BC, and attested to by the singular occurrence of the Revelation 13 sign of the woman clothed with the sun, which occurred on September 11, 3BC. (Feast of Tabernacles/Sukkot)
John 1:14
And the word was made flesh and tabernacled among us.
The celestial patterns in the sky are also an inbuilt physical representation of the prophetic clock the earth (and the events on it) are set to. The prophets and wise men of old knew these celestial occurrences and their meanings. The secrets of these celestial signs, and how they work as a prophetic timepiece have been closely guarded and hidden by the priestly classes of every religion, yet the Bible gives them freely and uncontaminated, for anyone willing to study. Of course the enemy takes the wisdom that God gives us as a tool to take dominion of the earth, and he twists them into a dark form of the reality into his own pagan practice of divination and idolatry. I.E. Astrology, being a form of witchcraft which keeps people confused and afraid to study the subject of biblical astronomy. It is clear that the God of the Bible intended us to use the signs of the heavens with rules and laws submitted to Scripture, or the Wise Men would not have been able to read from the stars that the Messiah had been born and come worshiping him from the ends of the earth. Joseph would not have dreamed that Jacob’s house depicted the sun, moon, and stars. As the people of Israel are the physical mirror of the celestial signs and events, those physical events are mirrored by the prophetic clock that is given to us by all of the prophets together. The entire book of Revelation is meant to be read as a celestial code-book. Angels and stars are synonymous according to the ancient and biblical world-view, so as you see a certain star do a certain thing, then the events on earth will occur to mirror that celestial event. The sign of the woman clothed in the heavens is a celestial event that heralds and predicts physical events which relate to the people of Israel (Judah and Ephraim), Israel’s King, and the beginning of her birth-pangs. The priests of the earth are heralding a new kingdom, and a new king, but if you compare the signs in the heavens with the events on earth, you begin to see that The stars serve our Heavenly Father, and any stars who do not serve his purposes are locked in the pit, bound in darkness until this specific time in history, where they are released upon the earth for a short time.
The dark priests of the earth also know how to read these signs, and they are using them to herald their own king by their own signs and wonders, worked in tandem with the celestial events that God has ordained for the coronation his own King.
The first sign of the woman clothed with the sun heralded the completion of the first count of 483 years and the coming of the Messiah.
The same sign of the woman was also given in 2017, heralding the Second Coming and ensuring that we know the heavens are pointing to the fulfillment of these great prophecies in the Last Days.
https://earthsky.org/human-world/biblical-signs-in-the-sky-september-23-2017/
Luke 3:23
When He began His ministry, Jesus Himself was about thirty years old, being, as was commonly held, the son of Joseph, the son of Eli,
Yeshua was born in 3BC, with celestial signs (seen and witnessed by the Maggi) and exactly 30 years later, proclaimed the Jubilee in 27 AD, matching with the time given by Luke, making him 30 at this time.
All the dates align, 483 years (69 sevens) from the issuing of the decree to restore Jerusalem by Cyrus(Daniel 9), Jesus proclaimed the Jubilee and began his final 3 years on earth, proclaiming the gospel of the Kingdom of Heaven, which he was murdered for in the middle of the week.
In 30 AD.
Ezekiel 4:6-8
Lie on your right side, and bear the wrongdoing of the house of Judah; I have assigned it to you for forty days, a day for each year. Then you shall direct your face toward the siege of Jerusalem with your arm bared, and prophesy against it. Now behold, I will put ropes around you so that you cannot turn from your one side to your other until you have completed the days of your siege.
Jerusalem, again, by the mouth of Ezekiel, was given 40 years to repent for their sins before being overthrown and destroyed. The disciples propagated the gospel and offered forgiveness of sins to those who repented. After 40 years, in 70 ad, the nation had not repented and Jerusalem was cast into exile A SECOND TIME.
The daily sacrifice was stopped by Rome, and the temple was destroyed. The first part of the prophecy was complete “he will stop the daily sacrifice. And will give over/set up, on the wing, the abomination that causes to be desolate. Standing in the holy place (let the reader understand.)
The second part of this 2 part prophecy has slipped our notice.
We need BOTH pieces, the end of the daily sacrifice AND the abomination standing in the holy place, before our count can begin.
Revelation 11:1-5
Then there was given to me a measuring rod like a staff; and someone said, “Get up and measure the temple of God and the altar, and those who worship in it. Leave out the courtyard which is outside the temple and do not measure it, because it has been given to the nations; and they will trample the holy city for forty-two months. And I will grant authority to my two witnesses, and they will prophesy for 1,260 days, clothed in sackcloth.” These are the two olive trees and the two lamp stands that stand before the Lord of the earth.
Daniel 12:11-12
And from the time that the daily sacrifice is taken away, and the abomination of desolation is set up, there shall be one thousand two hundred and ninety days. Blessed is he who waits, and comes to the one thousand three hundred and thirty-five days.
Al Aqsa mosque built on the Holy Place in 685 AD. The Daily sacrifice was stopped in 70 AD, AND the abomination was constructed in 685. the count begins, using a year as a day, according to the methodology given to Ezekiel by Gabriel.
As this was a two part prophecy the count does not begin until BOTH are completed.
I have vacillated back and forth regarding this one point, and I may be wrong, but I don’t believe that the sacrifices need to be restarted just to be stopped again, although there is potential evidence to support that stance. Either way, the one major piece is that the Temple does not need to be rebuilt again.
1260 years/days later from the construction of the Mosque to Jupiter on the Holy Place (Al Aqsa) is 1945, the formation of the UN, final world beast system.
Not only did the Al Aqsa Mosque use leftover stones from the Temple of Jupiter (Islam is rife with pagan imagery, ritual and stories found in the Quran just like Christianity and Judaism have intermingled with pagan/ occult ideologies and practices. The only difference is the Word of God is true, and Islam is just Babylonian Ashtoreth/ Baal worship packaged with a monotheistic bow. It is well known history that Mohamed did not create a new religion, he simply re-packaged the old, by taking all of the 666 gods of the Babylonian pantheon and blended them into one supreme being “Allah” who was previously known as the supreme ruler presiding over the very same Babylonian pantheon. The Dome of the Rock was built to be a religious monument of victory over the Christians. You will see a continual theme as we study other architecture, that many of these religious and secular landmarks were built in commemoration of the defeat, destruction and exile of Israel.
The Al Aqsa Mosque has been destroyed by earthquake two times, once in 746 AD and the second time in 1033. The Dome of the Rock ALSO has been destroyed by earthquake two times, 1015 and 1927. Two different pagan and rebellious structures standing on the Holy Place and have each individually been hit twice on separate occasions. In total four separate times have one of these structures been destroyed and had to be rebuilt.
Three is the smallest number of testing and finality, and the third and final time these buildings will be destroyed by earthquake will be when the King of Kings splits the Mount of Olives.
1260 years after the Al Aqsa Mosque construction, which was built with stones from the temple to Jupiter, and in the same shape and style; the abomination standing in the Holy Place, brings us to 1945; The end of WW2.
WW2 was a fulfillment of a seven year global tribulation. 7 years there was war, food scarcity, plague and death. There were 7 years of unfathomable suffering in the concentration camps for Judah (1939-1945 when the last camp was liberated).
In 1945 (1260 years after the Al Aqsa Mosque was built), another important prophetic event is the formation of the United Nations under the 4 horns of the US, the UK, China, and Russia.
Under the guise of global peace and security.
1 Thessalonians 5:3
While they are saying, “Peace and safety!” then sudden destruction will come upon them like labor pains upon a pregnant woman, and they will not escape.
In 2021, this statue was erected outside the United Nations Headquarters. A beast looking so familiar to the beast described in Daniel that Christians were making this connection, and then the statue disapeared without a word.
It is important to note that the United Nations Headquarters building looks identical to the Greco-Roman pagan temples that Greeks and Romans would erect for the sole purpose of human and child sacrifice.
“The gods of the nations” that God was so adamant that the Hebrews not follow, or make covenants with, did these abominable sacrifices in the name of fertility and economic propserity. The WEF and the United Nations keep screaming from the rooftops of their pagan temple that we need to drastically downsize the global human population all in the name of saving the planet i.e. fertility. The elites are doing the same fertility sacrifice for power and abundance by sacrificing the masses in a much less hands- on mouse trap using famine, war and disease. The action and outcome, however, is still identical to the fertility rituals of the ancient Bible, just with a modern spin to it. This is why so many will be deceived by the modern pagan theatrics of the occultists who run the world now. Christians are completely naive to what ceremonial magic, blood sacrifice and pagan fertility rituals look like, even in the past. Of course they would be completely oblivious to it happening right in front of their faces in a more modern, more polished and peaceful-looking way. AND with modern technology. From ancient times, all of the temples and religious sects would try and monopolize the most advanced of technologies of their time to deceive the masses and make their god look powerful. Pharaoh’s magicians copying the plagues that God brought through Moses is a picture of how these priesthoods operate today. Those priesthoods have not changed.
Take note of the location of this beast. It will come up later in this study.
https://www.wayoflife.org/reports/history_of_the_temple_mount.html
https://www.generationword.com/jerusalem101/67-temple-mount-muslim.html
Side note: there are a couple possible explanations for 1290 days of Daniel in context of these prophecies, but this specific marker has not been revealed to me yet, and and I will refrain from commenting on it until I have a definitive understanding. The enigma is that Revelation speaks of 1260 days and 42 months while Daniel speaks of 1290 days and 1335 days. This is a scribal riddle that has yet to be solved to my satisfaction.
“Blessed is he who waits, and comes to the one thousand three hundred and thirty-five days.”
While 1260 days hits at 1945, the connection gains further traction when you count forward to 1335 days.
1335 years forward from 685 (the building of the Al Aqsa Mosque) lands us squarely on the year 2020.
That alone cannot be used as proof, compelling as it is, so we need a second or third witness. The fact that these dates land so precisely and consistently is a witness to their accuracy and validation that we are on the right track.
US., British, Soviet, and Chinese representatives met at Dumbarton Oaks in Washington in August and September 1944 to draft the charter of a postwar international organization based on the principle of collective security. They recommended a General Assembly of all member states and a Security Council consisting of the Big Four plus six members chosen by the Assembly
Revelation 17:12
The ten horns which you saw are ten kings who have not yet received a kingdom, but they receive authority as kings with the beast for one hour.
Daniel 2:41
Just as you saw that the feet and toes were partly of baked clay and partly of iron, so this will be a divided kingdom; yet it will have some of the strength of iron in it, even as you saw iron mixed with clay.
https://cmsedit.cbn.com/cbnnews/world/2022/january/sculpture-which-some-likened-to-end-times-beast-described-in-the-bible-removed-from-un
Zechariah 4:1-4
Then the angel who had been speaking with me returned and woke me, like a person who is awakened from his sleep. And he said to me, “What do you see?” And I said, “I see, and behold, a lampstand all of gold with its bowl on the top of it, and its seven lamps on it with seven spouts belonging to each of the lamps which are on the top of it; also two olive trees by it, one on the right side of the bowl and the other on its left side.”
So then who are the two witnesses in this context? As per the prophet Zechariah, the two witnesses are the two olive trees and the two lamp stands that stand before the Lord almighty.
I.e. Ephraim and Judah.
This is not to say that two literal men will not come and witness to the world of the King who is coming, but in the large scale, and in the hour hand of prophecy, it is the body of Israel; the witnesses are Christianity and Judaism, and this beast has killed their bodies and has not allowed them to be buried. We have become blind and deaf to the signs and times we are living in.
The world and the principalities that rule it have stripped the teachings of the witnesses’ power, and taken away their identities, laws, and culture, and have intertwined them with pagan ritual which has resulted in these bodies of belief becoming impotent against the wave of evil we are currently seeing, and aligns with the Great Falling Away.
Daniel 7:25
And he shall speak words against the Most High [God] and shall wear out the saints of the Most High and think to change the time [of sacred feasts and holy days] and the law; and the saints shall be given into his hand for a time, two times, and half a time [three and one-half years].
The appointed times that God operates under, and uses to warn and shepherd His people have been stripped from us and changed. We are blind and deaf to the appointed times and feasts of the Lord.
I think that now that the final week has begun, (keep reading for additional evidence) these prophecies will take place again on a literal day scale, using literal people to send the message to the world. Prophesy is a clock with hours and minutes, so now that we are in the Last Days we are in the minutes. The hours and the larger scale of prophecy have been fulfilled in years and the actual days begin in the culmination within the final week of Daniel. I.e. 2020-2027.
The second witness relating to the timeline came from the research of Dr Christian Widener. His findings were that a second edict to restore Jerusalem was issued, by Sultan Suleiman, in the year 1537, even proven by a commemorative plaque to mark the edict.
Daniel 9:27 uses blended verbiage referring to both Messiah Yeshua and to the anti-messiah, a problem which has confused and confounded scholars to this day. However, the meaning here in hindsight is simple. The prophecy was meant to infer both. Messiah is a Hebrew term which simply means “anointed one”. Then the title of prince is given. If the verse was intended to be just about Yeshua, it would have given a specific name or title relating to him alone. If the count completed, and Israel’s prince came to them humbly, and riding on a donkey, yet they rejected and sold him to Rome; the inference is simple. The prince of the people who will come would be a king from Rome, anointed to take the place of Messiah, standing in the prophetic mantle, inheritance, and role of King Saul. The rejection of the first messiah at the completion of the first count would naturally lead to a second king to come in his stead. It would be logical to assume the same count applies to the arrival of both anointed ones. First the Messiah, then The anti-messiah.
This prophetic picture of the final king having Roman origins is further proven by Nebucadnezzar’s statue, having feet of blended Iron and Clay. Iron being representative of Rome, clay being representative of the Semitic (Hebrew and Arabic) Peoples.
If this logic holds true, the count should reveal either agreement or disagreement.
You be the judge:
The edict to restore the walls a second time was issued in 1537 AD, counting forward 483 years (69 sevens of years) lands us squarely on the year 2020. If this count is accurate, we have to have the verification, the arrival of a prince, another anointed one.
Did we see that happen in 2020?
https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2020/06/great-reset-launch-prince-charles-guterres-georgieva-burrow/#:~:text=The%20Great%20Reset,-Follow&text=He%20added%3A%20“Unless%20we%20take,Economic%20Forum%20in%20January%202021.
https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2020/01/prince-charles-the-crucial-lesson-we-have-to-learn-from-the-climate-crisis/
The symbol of the rainbow crown is the world Climate governance being given to him, along with the sigil of Solomon, the peacock feathers. 3 feathers, each composed of 6 rainbow arc. A nicely packaged 6, 6, 6, to go with his name Charles the III (Hebrew Vav, Vav, Vav)
Daniel 11:21
And in his place a despicable person will arise, on whom the majesty of kingship has not been conferred; but he will come in a time of tranquility and seize the kingdom by intrigue.
When Charles claimed the reigns of the global governance at the end of the 483 year count, he was still known as PRINCE Charles, perfectly accomplishing the prophecy a second time.
King Charles claims to be of a blended lineage from King David, and of Vlad the Impaler aka Dracula. He is also of Roman/Greek heritage and descent, via his father and his grandmother, who is buried on the Mount of Olives. He claims to be a descendant of King David through his royal British heritage. Therefore, he claims to be the rightful king to the throne of Israel.
In 2020, he went on the first ever visit to Israel by a British monarch/heir, and while there, he visited the site of Yeshua’s baptism at the Jordan River and planted several trees, designating ownership, on the Mount of Olives. (The place Yeshua’s feet will touch down on, upon his arrival.)
He also received his anointing as the King of England, and head of the Church of England, using holy anointing oil grown on the Mount of Olives, which is reserved solely for the Kings of Israel, and had it blessed by the Jewish rabbinic authorities and Catholic authorities before sending it to him.
It is important to note that the nation of Israel was only given their “autonomy” on the condition that the deed to Jerusalem, the city of David, and symbolically the robe/inheritance of Yeshua be handed over to a UN trust, which is under the authority of King Charles today.
This aligns flawlessly with the Beast and Statue prophecy found in Daniel. Each metal or animal represented a ruler and nation that would take global authority for a time. Babylon and Assyria had dominion over the rest of the world, then Medo- Persia followed by Greece, the Roman Empire and then lastly the feet and toes of Iron and Clay which represented 10 Kingdoms, but specifically of Roman and Semitic blending.
Rome divided into ten separate kingdoms after its fall, meanwhile interweaving pagan ritual and Christian belief as their main faith. The Semitic faith and ministry of Yeshua (clay) and the pagan practices of Rome (Iron).
Out of those ten divided kingdoms, one kingdom (a rather small one i.e. the little horn of Revelation), took global authority over the entire world, colonizing half of the world, teaching their language and customs to where we have a global language (English) to unite for trade and “peace”, and spread their Protestant faith (which still kept most of the Roman pagan customs) with the world. That kingdom is Great Britain, and the ruler over that nation is Charles.
Charles is both the King of England and the Head of the Church of England, making him both king and high priest (the title that only belongs to Yeshua). Every monarch of England calls themselves the ‘Defender of the Faith’, but King Charles broke from tradition and calls himself "Defender of the Faiths”. By claiming he is the protector of all faiths, he is acting in authority over the gods/ demons and by superimposing his rule over the laws of each individual god/ religion. In addition, he has longstanding history of associating and blending the religion of Catholicism, Judaism and Islam.
Daniel 11:37
He shall pay no attention to the gods of his fathers, or to the one beloved by women. He shall not pay attention to any other god, for he shall magnify himself above all.
What is Charles’ main mission as king?
He is called the ‘First Climate King’. In the name of climate change, he masquerades as a gentle sheep, concerned for the well being of the planet and the humans that dwell on it, all while stealing their lives and inheritances.
Revelation 13:11
Then I saw another beast rising out of the earth. It had two horns like a lamb and it spoke like a dragon
He is trailblazing the path for the Fourth Industrial Movement, where man merges with robotics that are reliant on the slave labor of the cobalt and lithium mines in Africa. Sounds like a humanitarian to me, don’t you think?
Remember that these goals and the sustainability movement of the elites is just one massive fertility ritual where they sacrifice the humans of the earth for prosperity and power for themselves. So, King Charles is the head of this global human sacrifice ritual as proven by The Great Reset/ UN 2030 Agenda being announced by Charles in 2020.
In an article from the Independent Journal titled “The ancient symbolism behind King Charles’s coronation invite design”, the symbols and illustrations on Charles’ coronation invitation is examined, particularly the Green Man of ancient European folklore:
“The Green Man is found in many forms throughout history, with some seeing the mysterious figure as something of a trickster. Although often thought of as a pagan symbol, carvings of the Green Man are commonly found in churches across Europe. He has been described as being a bridge between Pagan and Christian beliefs.”
https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/royal-family/coronation-invite-design-green-man-meaning-b2314444.html
https://abcnews.go.com/International/charles-iii-1st-climate-king-experts/story?id=89749798
SDG
The SDG uses the rainbow as their mark of authority. The Bible tells us that the rainbow was the first sign of the covenant between God and the earth. By using the rainbow as their symbol, they are using the sign of God’s covenant as their own, superseding His.
In short. King Charles is the legal king over Jerusalem through subterfuge and intrigue.
During King Charles’ coronation, he had Luke chapter 4:18-21 read aloud. The allusions here, knowing what we know, are purely chilling.
“The Spirit of the Lord is on me, because he has anointed me to proclaim good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners and recovery of sight for the blind, to set the oppressed free, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.” Then he rolled up the scroll, gave it back to the attendant and sat down. The eyes of everyone in the synagogue were fastened on him. 21 He began by saying to them, “Today this scripture is fulfilled in your hearing.”
King Charles read the same passage Yeshua read, in the synagogue, specifically ending the reading after he had announced the Jubilee and the beginning of his ministry.
Tim Cohen, author of The Anti-Christ and a Cup of Tea and Craig Bong do great research on Charles; they are also witnesses and have incredible research on Charles and the Horsemen. Here are some more articles that add more perspective on this research:
https://www.timesofisrael.com/king-charles-iii-a-friend-to-uk-jewry-with-special-and-historic-ties-to-israel/amp/
https://youtu.be/m9jIH9eWUPs
https://news.yahoo.com/prince-charles-plants-olive-tree-150928433.html
https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/uk-israel-embassy-jerusalem-condemned-muslim-leaders-grand-mufti
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/11/14/king-charles-birthday-photo-tree/
The name Charles means ‘free man’. Prince of Wales, Wales means ‘foreigners’ (In Hebrew it is ‘goyim’ where we get gentile). The name Charles also has the same meaning as both Pilate and Herod; the Roman leaders responsible for crucifying Yeshua.
For a deeper dive on the name etymology and origin:
https://www.abarim-publications.com/Meaning/Herod.html
https://www.abarim-publications.com/Meaning/Pilate.html
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles
Commonwealth games:
As a VERY brief summary of the 2022 Commonwealth games, then Prince Charles led and oversaw the public marriage ritual of the entire world (72 nations) to Baal, (the bull) Lucifer, and the religion of the Tower of Babel. The occult and biblical imagery in this ceremony is chilling.
Charles’ coronation also was chalked full with pagan ritual woven into the faith of the Bible. Tim Cohen does a fabulous study on Charles’ name, the ceremony he was given the title of ‘Prince of Wales’, his druidism, and how his life and titles prophetically prove he is the anti-Christ.
Back to the Jubilee Count in Daniel
Now we have studied the signs in the heavens and Charles’ role as anti Christ and its fulfillment of Daniel’s Final Week, let’s now reexamine the Jubilee count from Ezekiel 40 and see how it fits into the bigger picture. Ezekiel marks 587 BC as an anchor point to calculate the Jubilee cycle both forward and backwards. From 587 BC to 27 AD where Yeshua announced the beginning of his ministry was exactly 600 years, i.e. 12 jubilees. This count is further corroborated by the Gospel of Luke, accounting that Jesus was 30 when he began his ministry. Dr. Michael Heiser has found definitive astronomical evidence that Jesus was born on September 11, (Sukkot) of 3BC. This makes 27 AD a Jubilee year, and therefore 2 days subsequent (20 jubilees, aka 2,000 years) is 2027. 2027 will be the next Jubilee, utilizing the timeline given and counting forward.
This is a vitally important date because just as Yeshua proclaimed himself on a jubilee and closed the book in the middle of the reading, he will return on a jubilee and complete the book and all it’s fulfillments.
The final week of Daniel is not mysteriously floating in the future somewhere, it’s easily calculable if you know the signs to search for.
The Church has spread this falsehood and misrepresentation of prophecy, teaching that we cannot know when or how these things will take place, spreading the confusion of Babylon (which means confusion) instead of the light and precision found in Scripture. “No man will know the day or hour” has been used as the rally cry to put everyone reading the signs of the heavens soundly to sleep. Yeshua woke his disciples up 3 times at night (a prophetic picture of the Last Days) before he gathered them subsequent to Judas’ betrayal. World War 1, World War 2, and now, World War 3 is a fulfillment of Yeshua’s physical actions being prophetic of the Last Days. The final shaking is occurring NOW.
Matthew 24:32-40
Now learn the parable from the fig tree: as soon as its branch has become tender and sprouts its leaves, you know that summer is near; so you too, when you see all these things, recognize that He is near, right at the door. Truly I say to you, this generation will not pass away until all these things take place. Heaven and earth will pass away, but My words will not pass away. But about that day and hour no one knows, not even the angels of heaven, nor the Son, but the Father alone. For the coming of the Son of Man will be just like the days of Noah. For as in those days before the flood they were eating and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage, until the day that Noah entered the ark, and they did not understand until the flood came and took them all away; so will the coming of the Son of Man be.
In the same breath where Yeshua said no man will know the day or hour, he spoke using the ripening of the figs on the tree to show that once you see the buds and blossoms on the tree, you will then be able to know when the fruit will be ripe.
Ezekiel 7:10
See, the day! See, it comes! Doom has burst forth, the rod has budded, arrogance has blossomed!
If all this is true, then we should expect to have seen the white horseman riding, beginning in 2020, as the seals of the scroll began opening.
White horseman
Revelation 6:1-2
Then I saw when the Lamb broke one of the seven seals, and I heard one of the four living creatures saying as with a voice of thunder, “Come!” I looked, and behold, a white horse, and the one who sat on it had a bow; and a crown was given to him, and he went out conquering and to conquer.
https://amg-news.com/complete-list-of-1000-fema-concentration-camps-the-road-to-hell-nowhere-to-run-nowhere-to-hide/
In the long list of “coincidences here, Prince Charles is given the sigil of Solomon’s peacock feathers emanating out of a rainbow crown, just as the world was shutting down on account of the Corona Virus. A crown was given to him, just as he began riding throughout the world to conquer and take by conquest.
But let us break down the rest of the imagery from this passage. What does a bow symbolize?
A bow symbolizes death, secret attacks over a distance, and also symbolizes lies and deceit. Note that the horseman does not conquer with a SWORD, but with a bow.
Psalm 64:3
They (the wicked) sharpen their tongues like swords and aim cruel words like deadly arrows.
Jeremiah 9:3
They (the people of Israel) bend their tongues like bows; lies prevail over truth in the land. For they proceed from evil to evil, and they do not take Me into account," declares the LORD.
Psalm 11:2
For behold, the wicked bend their bows. They set their arrow on the string to shoot from the shadows at the upright in heart
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chi_Rho
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_hoc_signo_vinces
The color white is associated with medicine and with science, and to drive it all home, Alexander the Great’s vision of the Chi Ro sign predicted that “by this sign you shall CONQUER”.
The power and authority that was used in 2020 to conquer the people was by the authority of the priests of pharmakeia. Pharmacies worldwide stocked the vaccinations and began injecting people en-masse, with an experimental drug that had not been properly tested, and had been shown to be deadly by all studies.
The word for pharmacy stems directly form this Greek word Pharmakeia, which translates roughly to “sorcery” or “witchcraft”. Do not misunderstand me or read beyond my point. I do not believe that all medicine or all pharmacy is evil. I am simply pointing out that in this context, we have been warned of this twisted conquest and deceitful campaign against all of the earth, and of the fact that pharmacy, both the name and the symbol would be used in the great and final deception from thousands of years ago.
There is an endless amount of information I could dig into here, but I will only add one more point on this subject before moving forward. WI-38 and MRC-5 cell lines are both cloned fetal cell lines from aborted babies who were killed as part of this global fertility ritual, and both of those cell lines were included in the vaccines that they forced everyone to inject into themselves. Cannibalizing the life of aborted children, who were murdered by their own mothers, and then using those cells in a global ritual to try to use their deaths to extend our own lives and keep us from contracting sickness. It is a horrendous evil, and the whole world is being cast into judgment for engaging with it. Yet, there is hope for any who see the evil for what it is, no matter what part they took, as long as they repent and turn away from it, acknowledging it as a vile witchcraft.
Revelation 18:23
and the light of a lamp will shine in you no more, and the voice of bridegroom and bride will be heard in you no more, for your merchants were the great ones of the earth, and all nations were deceived by your sorcery (pharmakeia).
Revelation 9:21
nor did they repent of their murders or their sorceries(pharmakeia) or their sexual immorality or their thefts.
What nation did the COVID vaccinations begin from? The UNITED KINGDOM
It is very easy to conclude that the conquest of the people by their governments, in every corner of the earth began in tandem in 2020. The governments utilized the lies and deceit from the priesthoods of the medical and scientific community to force their citizens into submission. Citizens were giving up their businesses, work, families, friendships, freedoms, personal identities, their health and fertility (all in the name of fertility,) and even their faith in God. Forcing the entire world to wear masks and to take dubious (at best) injections, entered mankind into a global trauma bond and enslavement ritual, taking away our personal identities and replacing them with our collective identities under mantras such as:
“We’re all in this together”, “4 weeks to stop the curve” “build back better” “Wear masks/ vaccines save lives” and “The New Normal”.
The medical and scientific communities/priesthoods are the two horns on the beast who spoke like a lamb but deceived like a serpent. The false lamb is the Antichrist, and his authority is granted by people’s submission to the twisted science (symbolic water) that spews out of their mouth.
Before we examine if the other horseman if and when the other horseman have been released, an important note must be made:
When one horseman is released it does NOT stop riding when the next is released. They keep riding and escalating until their completion.
We will continue to see the white horseman with new plagues at an increase in danger of both health and lawlessness at the expense of freedom and holiness. There will be greater deceit and far greater defilement of the human body to come.
Disclaimer: This is really good information on what the Mark of the Beast will look like and the merging of human and robotics. He is, however, adamant that there will be a pre-tribulation rapture for Christians. As my entire thesis is that we have been in the tribulation for three and a half years, it is safe to say I disagree with that point. Pre-tribulation theology is just a false theology that the enemy uses to keep believers asleep and comfortable and eventually deceive them into taking the Mark and submitting to the Anti-Christ because they believe they won’t be here when he comes and takes power. It is one big spiritual mousetrap. Do not be naive and fall for the appealing cheese that is pre-tribulation rapture theology where you don’t have any trials or testing. The tribulation IS the great testing of the saints, and we will be better for it. We will be refined like fire in the furnace of affliction, just like Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego were. Remember, WE OVERCOME BY THE LAMB! What many researchers mistakenly do is completely throw out all aspects of a teacher’s research if it has ANY points that they disagree with. some of it is inaccurate. Might as well completely ignore everyone’s research because everyone, including myself, gets certain information wrong.
Red horseman
When my wife and I began seeing the connections and symbolic fulfillments of COVID and how well it paralleled the rider on the white horse, we began studying the red horseman. Knowing that if the pandemic truly was the fulfillment of the white horseman, then the red horseman would begin riding next. I set that as the second witness and test of whether we were understanding it properly or not. We prayed and asked God to help us to see clearly, and began searching for clues and signs relating to the next horseman on the list.
Revelation 6:3-4
When He broke the second seal, I heard the second living creature saying, “Come!” And another, a red horse, went out; and to him who sat on it, it was granted to take peace from the earth, and that people would kill one another; and a large sword was given to him
On February 24th of 2022, the answer began revealing itself, and the next seal on this research project was broken. Russia invaded Ukraine in an unprecedented show of aggression. However, there were whispers of this horseman even before this major event, I simply did not know yet if they were part of the equation or not. Everyone thinks the red horseman only defines war between nations, but a closer examination of the text reveals that “people will kill one another” and “a large sword was given to him.”
In May of 2020, mass riots in the United States began breaking out in protest of police brutality against minorities, and the entire nation began a new wave of upheaval and conflict between individuals and political groups. Whole city blocks were burned to the ground, many people were killed, and peace began wavering. These riots and protests were not reserved just for America, but they began breaking out worldwide, as the people began realizing the invisible shackles of their government were only going to get tighter as things continued. I took note at the time, seeing these events as harbingers of the Red horseman and early symptoms of his authority, but it was not until Russia invaded Ukraine that I had confirmation that these events truly were the next domino of the prophetic timepiece, falling exactly in the place and time that one would expect, upon studying the prophecies for our day.
Further confirmation of the second seal having opened struck on September 24th, 2023. The planet Mars, the heavenly harbinger of war and conflict passed through Virgo, the same woman that God used to declare through the heavens would use to predict and herald the coming of the Messiah. What is more intriguing, Mars did not only pass through Virgo, but it passed through Spica, the star that depicts the sheaf of wheat in the woman’s hand, which symbolizes the harvest of the saints. The picture gains even more potency when you add the fact that this celestial event fell on the evening of Yom Kippur, the day of Atonement, which is the same day of the year the Jubilee year is declared.
When I saw the sign in the heavens, in connection to all the other symptoms of the red horseman’s ride through the earth, I thought that it would likely predict war and conflict coming to the land of Israel, the place where God placed Jerusalem (who was called the Mother City of Israel.) Exactly six days later, on on October 7th, Hamas launched a barbaric and vile surprise attack on Israel, and performed unspeakable evils against the people and the land of Israel.
Dr. Christian Widener extensively delves into this event and specifies it is highly likely that this specific attack is the abomination that causes desolation, spoken of by Daniel the Prophet.
As events have unfolded since this October attack, which happened on the Biblical feast of Sukkot (The festival that symbolizes the saints fleeing into the wilderness in remembrance of the first flight of Egypt) global war has become more and more of an inevitability. greater conflict between Israel and the Middle East. Greater conflicts between Ukraine, Russia, America, Taiwan, and MANY more. The red horseman is nowhere near finished, but it is safe to conclude that he is. in fact, riding in force. Further fulfillments of the red horseman will come. I do believe we are on the brink of WW3, as do most political analysts. The entangling alliances we see among the nations today are just as messy and volatile as the previous two world wars. Just as with the white horseman, we will see greater calamity, war and cruelty in progression.
On April 13, 2024 prophecy is fulfilled again when Iran (Persia) attacks Israel just six days after a solar eclipse in the US (almost acting as Israel’s mirror).
Daniel 10:13
The prince of the kingdom of Persia withstood me twenty-one days, but Michael, one of the chief princes, came to help me, for I was left there with the kings of Persia
I will get into a deep study on the Biblical significance of Israel and the United States as historically a lot of the ten tribes of Ephraim dispersed to Europe and eventually many migrated to the Americas. The United States also has esoteric and prophetic connections to Egypt as well as Ephraim. That is a deeper study for another time.
So on the October 7th attack, there was a Red Harvest moon, Mars passed over Spika within Virgo, and an annual lunar eclipse within less than a week of this attack. On the April 13th attack, there was a total solar eclipse in the United States. There will be more and more of these astronomical signs, of which I am trying to get a better understanding to calculate the season we are in.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_invasion_of_Ukraine
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Israel–Hamas_war
https://apnews.com/article/ukraine-missiles-russia-military-aid-us-10508d1ea26ed047a183a1daea02d773
https://amp.cnn.com/cnn/2024/04/14/middleeast/israel-air-missile-defense-iran-attack-intl-hnk-ml
https://asia.nikkei.com/Editor-s-Picks/Interview/China-wants-ability-to-invade-Taiwan-by-2027-U.S.-admiral-says
Black horseman
Revelation 20:5-6
When He broke the third seal, I heard the third living creature saying, “Come!” I looked, and behold, a black horse, and the one who sat on it had a pair of scales in his hand. And I heard something like a voice in the center of the four living creatures saying, “A quart of wheat for a denarius, and three quarts of barley for a denarius; and do not damage the oil and the wine.”
Exodus 5:3-15
Then they said, “The God of the Hebrews has met with us. Please, let us go a three days’ journey into the wilderness so that we may sacrifice to the Lord our God, otherwise He will strike us with plague or with the sword.” But the king of Egypt said to them, “Moses and Aaron, why do you let the people neglect their work? Get back to your labors!” Again Pharaoh said, “Look, the people of the land are now many, and you would have them cease from their labors!” So the same day Pharaoh commanded the taskmasters over the people and their foremen, saying, “You are no longer to give the people straw to make bricks as previously; have them go and gather straw for themselves. But you shall impose on them the quota of bricks which they were making before; you are not to reduce any of it. Because they are lazy, for that reason they cry out, ‘Let us go and sacrifice to our God.’ Let the labor be heavier on the men, and have them work at it so that they will pay no attention to false words.” So the taskmasters of the people and their foremen went out and spoke to the people, saying, “This is what Pharaoh says: ‘I am not going to give you any straw. You go, get straw for yourselves wherever you can find it; but none of your labor will be reduced.’” So the people scattered through all the land of Egypt to gather stubble for straw. And the taskmasters pressed them, saying, “Complete your work quota, your daily amount, just as when you had straw.” Moreover, the foremen of the sons of Israel, whom Pharaoh’s taskmasters had set over them, were beaten and asked, “Why have you not completed your required task of making bricks either yesterday or today, as before?”
We don’t think about this correlation, but inflation is the same as Pharaoh taking away our straw. We still have to complete the exact same amount of completed work as before, but it usually takes us more time and labor to reach the same end result, and our pay is reduced although it is “technically” the same wage. Hyperinflation is the era we are living in, and the scales show a change in the valuation of goods, to the point where a day’s ration of food will cost a day’s labor. I.e. we will work all day every day for nothing more than the food that goes in our mouth.
Pharaoh is on an agenda, Agenda 2030 to be more specific. Where the masses will own nothing (and the kings will own all), and everyone will be happy.
https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/grocery-prices-increase-tiktok-b2443974.html
Globally food prices are significantly high. Thus, the slaves have more work for Pharaoh for the same outcome.
Green horseman
(typically translated as pale horseman)
Revelation 6:7
So I looked, and behold, a green horse. And the name of him who sat on it was Death, and Hades followed with him. And power was given to them over a fourth of the earth, to kill with sword, with hunger, with death, and by the beasts of the earth.
Revelation 20:4-6
Then I saw thrones, and they sat on them, and judgment was given to them. And I saw the souls of those who had been beheaded because of their testimony of Jesus and because of the word of God, and those who had not worshiped the beast or his image, and had not received the mark on their foreheads and on their hands; and they came to life and reigned with Christ for a thousand years. The rest of the dead did not come to life until the thousand years were completed. This is the first resurrection. Blessed and holy is the one who has a part in the first resurrection; over these the second death has no power, but they will be priests of God and of Christ, and will reign with Him for a thousand years.
The world population is to be dramatically reduced by 2025.
To be beheaded means more than just having your head cut off, it goes much farther than that in the Hebrew sense. The firstborn was the first, and the greatest of a family’s strength. The one who would inherit the double portion from the father, and carry the responsibility OF the father himself when he died.
https://www.abarim-publications.com/Dictionary/b/b-k-r.html
To have your firstborn killed was to be beheaded in the spiritual sense, and when Egypt’s firstborn were killed across the board, the whole nation ceased to be. It’s no surprise then, that being beheaded for the Gospel means not only to have your social status removed (not allowed to enter restaurants, work, or go out to public events without taking certain shots) but it also means that your lineage ends. You cease to be able to produce heirs. That is exactly what we are seeing with fertility/death rates.
https://time.com/4144897/birth-rate-abortion-miscarriage/
https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2022/08/02/miscarriage-risk-pregnancy/
https://www.openaccessgovernment.org/miscarriage-risk-in-america-increased-by-44-during-summer-months/139433/
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33538338/
The seven year covenant with the many
If King Charles is truly the prince that was promised, we should see a 7 year covenant “with the many,” however, much dogma needs to be addressed about this prophecy, especially as it does NOT specifically state it will be a peace treaty between Israel and Palestine. That is the sign everyone was told to look for. Scripture NEVER gives us that detail. It is a possibility, yes, but it is not the ONLY possibility in reading the language of the prophecy. The only stipulation given in the text of Daniel’s prophecy was that it would be a “confirmation/strengthening of a covenant with the many for one 7”
Have we seen a covenant like that come to pass? Yes. We have.
King Charles began his 7 year covenant with Israel, then confirmed it at the UN HQ in New York, and finalized it at the COP28 event in Dubai.
https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/2030-roadmap-for-uk-israel-bilateral-relations/2030-roadmap-for-uk-israel-bilateral-relations
https://www.un.org/en/conferences/SDGSummit2023
https://unfccc.int/news/cop28-agreement-signals-beginning-of-the-end-of-the-fossil-fuel-era
When Peter (Rock) denied Messiah, he denied him three times. When Yeshua confronted him and turned back his fate, he asked him three times “Peter, do you love me?” The number three in Scripture is the number of the shortest possible cycle of testing and confirmation. The 7 year covenant was confirmed 3 times by the many.
https://www.abarim-publications.com/Dictionary/si/si-l-si.html
In the Cop27 event in 2022, the event directly before the 7 year covenant was signed, the globalists ensured to lead the world in a tablet of the commandments God gave Moses smashing ceremony on Mount Sinai, symbolically breaking with the covenant God placed over Israel, and preparing them to receive the “new covenant for mankind” that was being prepared.
https://www.timesofisrael.com/activists-smash-tablets-atop-mount-sinai-to-launch-faith-based-climate-push/amp/
These 7 year covenants are a strengthening or enhancement of the Paris accords, signed into law in 2015
Daniel 9:27
And he will strengthen/confirm a covenant with many [for] one period of seven, and [in] the midst of the period of seven he causes sacrifice and present to cease, and by the wing of abominations he is making desolate, even until the consummation, and that which is determined is poured on the desolate one.”
https://unfccc.int/process-and-meetings/the-paris-agreement
First, before we can understand how this all relates to Mystery Babylon. Obviously, Babylon refers to “confusion”, as it was named due to the confusion of the tongues of man, but there is much more embedded in the Hebrew that conventional religious teachers have failed to draw out.
We must dissect what the term Babylon also infers: the Gate of Deity.
https://www.abarim-publications.com/Meaning/Babel.html
Why is this significant? Because the place where a covenant takes place becomes the gate that the deity in question gains access from, acting as a gate. This is the concept behind every triumphal arch worldwide.
Rabbi Jonathan Kahn does an excellent analysis of the gates and access points being utilized by the ancient Canaanite deities, and their resurgence in our modern world in his book Return of the Gods. All of his work is highly recommended, especially for someone seeking to see the physical world with spiritual eyes and understand the prophetic pictures unfolding before us.
Let’s take a look at Paris (where the Paris Accord/ the covenant that COP28 is a based on) and see what we can find there:
Britannica’s definition of the Arch of Titus helps elaborate:
“Chalgrin’s design is Neoclassical, inspired in part by the Arch of Titus in the Roman Forum. Decorative high-relief sculptures celebrating military victories of the Revolution and the First Empire were executed on the facades of the arch’s four pedestals”
https://www.britannica.com/place/Arch-of-Titus
Britannica’s definition of the Arch de Triomphe in Paris (where the Paris Accords were signed) gives us further information on who the elite truly rejoice in victory over (God’s people):
“It is decorated with a series of carvings celebrating Titus’s most illustrious victory—the struggle against Jewish rebels that culminated in the capture of Jerusalem in 70 CE. The sculptures depict Roman soldiers carrying off treasures looted from the temple; they also refer to the emperor’s deification after his death.”
https://www.britannica.com/topic/Arc-de-Triomphe
The covenant that was strengthened and given global precedence was the Paris Accord , signed under the authority of the Triumphal Arch in Paris, which was built in order to directly call to mind the destruction of Jerusalem in 70 AD and the victory of Rome over the Holy people of God.
I cannot for a second believe that is a coincidence.
Now we need to look at the final place of the confirmation of this covenant with the rest of the world and see if there is any similarity to this line of thinking.
The COP 28 event occurred In Dubai in December of 2023, in the United Arab Emirates, under the shadow of the world’s tallest building; the Burj Khalifa.
“The Burj Khalifa (known as the Burj Dubaiprior to its inauguration) is a skyscraper in Dubai, United Arab Emirates. It is the world's tallest structure. With a total height of 829.8 m (2,722 ft, or just over half a mile) and a roof height (excluding antenna, but including a 242.6 m spire) of 828 m (2,717 ft), the Burj Khalifa has been the tallest structure and building in the world since its topping out in 2009.”
Wikipedia
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burj_Khalifa
This tower calls to mind Genesis 11:4
Then they said, “Come, let us build ourselves a city, with a tower that reaches to the heavens, so that we may make a name for ourselves; otherwise we will be scattered over the face of the whole earth.”
And in case you had any doubt, Dubai is also the home to the newly opened “Abrahamic Family House” which is the blending of all the Abrahamic religions (Judaism, Islam and Christianity) and a mixing of Roman Catholicism/iron and clay/ the Semitic peoples.
https://www.abrahamicfamilyhouse.ae
Daniel 2:41
Just as you saw that the feet and toes were partly of baked clay and partly of iron, so this will be a divided kingdom; yet it will have some of the strength of iron in it, even as you saw iron mixed with clay.
The religion and the government are both being blended, under the symbols of Babel. Creating the system of blended iron and clay. The Abrahamic family house is blending the Roman Catholic tradition (iron) with the traditions of Islam and the traditions of Judaism (clay), exactly as prophesied by Daniel.
And just in case you had any doubt that the UN is confirmed as the final beast system, let’s look at one more angle.
In the book of Enoch, the fallen angels touched down upon the heights of Mount Hermon, and it was from Hermon that the water of the Jordan River descended, which Yeshua was baptized in. The waters of death, brought upon by the rebellious angels who usurped their positions in heaven. Upon this mountain was more pagan worship than any other site in the region, and was home to Pan’s labyrinth and a plethora of rituals centering around human sacrifice, and the dumping of the sacrificial corpses into the source water.
Yeshua was knowingly baptized in that water, being dipped in death and coming out victorious showing that the death can only touch us if we engage with it. If we commit ourselves to a holy way, and a righteous walk with the Father, even if they immerse you in their death, we will be resurrected with our Messiah at the final trumpet.
The highly esteemed, late Dr. Michael Heiser does amazing and in-depth analysis on this subject in his book ‘Reversing Hermon’ for anyone interested in studying out the details of Yeshua’s unspoken and secret conquest over the fallen angels through his ministry, death, and resurrection.
https://whc.unesco.org/en/tentativelists/6432/#:~:text=Description,back%20to%20the%2017th%20century.
And here we see the UN setting up on these same heights and making Mount Hermon the highest UN base in the world, considering how these fallen angels are obsessed with the “high places” it lines up flawlessly, making it pretty indisputable that the UN is the final beast system that is being operated by the fallen angels.
Conclusion
There have been 3 major exiles of Israel. Ephraim was exiled once, while Judah was exiled twice. He tells the end from the beginning, all of the timelines for the exiles and the redemption from them was laid out at the beginning, and this final return is no different. We are standing at the culmination of all of prophecy. The regathering of the exiled Hebrews from both Judah (Judaism) and Ephraim (Christianity)
We are Commanded to study and show ourselves approved. To store up oil, and light. To seek and to find. To ask and receive, and to KNOW and be wise to the times and the seasons that we are living in. Two or three witnesses confirms a matter, and in this realm I have waited until I had far more witnesses than I can even count, because I feared putting this information out and being wrong.
The timeline perfectly predicts that after the exile of Judah, an anointed one would come for Judah but that they would reject him, and get themselves exiled along with their Ephraimite brothers. A second anointed one was promised, as a result of that rejection, and a timeline for his arrival is also given to us.
This final anointed one will take and gather the whole world under his wing and lead the final and great falling away, following the pattern of King Saul, leading the way to our ultimate fulfillment of King David taking the throne after Saul falls upon his own sword.
These prophecies are woven through the entire book and the seals are being removed one by one. With each subsequent seal being removed, the truth becomes more unmistakable, yet some will decide to choose the darkness and blindness of confusing doctrines and falsehoods that tickle the ears. There is a plan for our redemption. Only one. If we don’t care to understand that plan, we have no hope of being rescued.
When it comes to prophecy, we cannot afford to be dogmatic about details. I leave constant room for error in my own research, especially when dates, times, and hours spoken of since thousands of years before I was even alive are being discussed. It could be 2030, it could be 2025, it could be 2027, it could even be 10 years from now (although highly doubtful) the vitally important piece is that I am a watchman, searching for the signs and warnings, along with my fellow watchmen, and I do not consider them my competitors. We are each taking the information we find and blowing the trumpet, attempting to warn, waken, rouse, and enliven our brothers so that we can stand as a body, and take up our sword against this great beast. The dragon will only be wroth with the saints when we take up our sword, look him in the eye and proclaim the coming of our eternal King.
In these final two passages, you will find my heart.
Jeremiah 6:1
Flee to safety, you sons of Benjamin,
From the midst of Jerusalem!
Blow a trumpet in Tekoa
And raise a warning signal over Beth-haccerem;
For evil looks down from the north,
Along with a great destruction.
And finally, my favorite passage for the whole of my life. I was born in Skull Valley, Arizona, and this passage has always felt near and dear to my heart. It is very near to being fulfilled, when the exiles of the people of Ephraim and Judah stand together on their feet under Yeshua our Eternal King, and strike fear in the hearts of his enemies. May all reading this be blessed, encouraged, and strengthened in these final hours.
Ezekiel 37
Valley of Dry Bones
The hand of the Lord was upon me, and He brought me out by the Spirit of the Lord and set me down in the middle of the valley; and it was full of bones. He had me pass among them all around, and behold, there were very many on the surface of the valley; and behold, they were very dry. Then He said to me, “Son of man, can these bones live?” And I answered, “Lord God, You Yourself know.” Again He said to me, “Prophesy over these bones and say to them, ‘You dry bones, hear the word of the Lord.’ This is what the Lord God says to these bones: ‘Behold, I am going to make breath enter you so that you may come to life. And I will attach tendons to you, make flesh grow back on you, cover you with skin, and put breath in you so that you may come to life; and you will know that I am the Lord.’”
So I prophesied as I was commanded; and as I prophesied, there was a loud noise, and behold, a rattling; and the bones came together, bone to its bone. And I looked, and behold, tendons were on them, and flesh grew and skin covered them; but there was no breath in them. Then He said to me, “Prophesy to the breath, prophesy, son of man, and say to the breath, ‘The Lord God says this: “Come from the four winds, breath, and breathe on these slain, so that they come to life.”’” So I prophesied as He commanded me, and the breath entered them, and they came to life and stood on their feet, an exceedingly great army.
The Vision Explained
Then He said to me, “Son of man, these bones are the entire house of Israel; behold, they say, ‘Our bones are dried up and our hope has perished. We are completely cut off.’ Therefore prophesy and say to them, ‘This is what the Lord God says: “Behold, I am going to open your graves and cause you to come up out of your graves, My people; and I will bring you into the land of Israel. Then you will know that I am the Lord, when I have opened your graves and caused you to come up out of your graves, My people. And I will put My Spirit within you and you will come to life, and I will place you on your own land. Then you will know that I, the Lord, have spoken and done it,” declares the Lord.’”
Reunion of Judah and Israel
The word of the Lord came again to me, saying, “Now you, son of man, take for yourself one stick and write on it, ‘For Judah and for the sons of Israel, his companions’; then take another stick and write on it, ‘For Joseph, the stick of Ephraim and all the house of Israel, his companions.’ Then put them together for yourself one to another into one stick, so that they may become one in your hand. And when the sons of your people speak to you, saying, ‘Will you not declare to us what [h]you mean by these?’ say to them, ‘This is what the Lord God says: “Behold, I am going to take the stick of Joseph, which is in the hand of Ephraim, and the tribes of Israel, his companions; and I will put them with it, with the stick of Judah, and make them one stick, and they will be one in My hand.”’ The sticks on which you write will be in your hand before their eyes. And say to them, ‘This is what the Lord God says: “Behold, I am going to take the sons of Israel from among the nations where they have gone, and I will gather them from every side and bring them into their own land; and I will make them one nation in the land, on the mountains of Israel; and one king will be king for all of them; and they will no longer be two nations, and no longer be divided into two kingdoms. They will no longer defile themselves with their idols, or with their detestable things, or with any of their offenses; but I will rescue them from all their dwelling places in which they have sinned, and will cleanse them. And they will be My people, and I will be their God.
Davidic Kingdom
“And My servant David will be king over them, and they will all have one shepherd; and they will walk in My ordinances, and keep My statutes and follow them. And they will live on the land that I gave to My servant Jacob, in which your fathers lived; and they will live on it, they, and their sons and their sons’ sons, forever; and My servant David will be their leader forever. And I will make a covenant of peace with them; it will be an everlasting covenant with them. And I will place them and multiply them, and set My sanctuary in their midst forever. My dwelling place also will be among them; and I will be their God, and they will be My people. And the nations will know that I am the Lord who sanctifies Israel, when My sanctuary is in their midst forever.”’”
Main Sources:
Scott Dunn
Josh Peck
Mark Biltz
Tim Cohen
Dr. Christian Widener
Craig Bong
Abarim publications
dsscalendar.org
Dr. Michael Heiser
Jonathan Kahn
Billy Crone
Christianity VS the Mosaic Law
This post is in response to the countless Christian pastors who I have heard speak on the relevance of the Law and the Old Testament for believers in Messiah, and how badly our current generation has been mislead as to its intended purpose, and the fruit of following it. It was never meant to condemn anyone. It was not given to the Jews because “They were evil and God wanted to punish them.” It was not “done away with at the cross.” From the very beginning, every word that proceeds out of God’s mouth is good, and holy, and life-giving. If death came from the law, (which plenty has) it was not because the Law was flawed, but that our hearts as men and women were twisted and we twisted the life-giving nature of God’s commands into something they were never meant to be. If death is coming out of something good, we don’t change the good thing, we change our relationship with it, until it brings life instead. Many well-meaning Christians have been misled with the belief that the stories of the Old Testament are intended to depict the Old Testament and its judgment and shame, and that the New Testament depicts the way of the New Covenant; grace, forgiveness, and mercy. I would like to take a deeper look at some of the pivotal concepts and verses here and re-evaluate, and see if they hold any water. I am going to do my best to draw the connections necessary between the Old and New Testament to show us what the intended relationship between the New and Old Testament are.
At the end of the day, my desire is not to sound intelligent or prove my point, but to share the understandings and the fruit that God has fed me with as I dug into His scriptures. Before you weigh my words, weigh my actions. If I have acted haughty or “better than thou” then please let me know so I can change my approach. My intention in everything I do is to show the love that I have for everyone around me, for God, and for myself. Jesus said that the whole of the law could be summed up in love, so if I have done a good job at showing love, please approach my thoughts with an open mind, as they will likely provide an approach to scripture that you have not yet seen. Jesus said that you would know a tree by its fruit; so, I ask you, if you disagree with me, before dismissing what I say, if my love has shown through to you, pray about it, and give it some consideration. That is all I ask. If you still disagree with me after consideration, I would be thrilled to talk about it with you and hear what you have to say.
This subject is vast. The main reason that I have continued to pick up the project of putting this down on paper and quit so many times was because I continued to realize I didn’t have a deep enough understanding of the fundamental principles to learn the key discrepancies in theology, and so my attempts to draw any meaningful and provable conclusions eventually hit a dead end at every attempt. I didn’t have any structure for the connections I had drawn, so the only place they could live was in my head. When pen hit paper, I came up with a jumble of ideas, words, verses, and it wasn’t pretty.
Jesus and the Law
The first, and most vital question to ask when digging into the difference between the Old and New Covenants is, “What did Jesus say on the matter?” As the ultimate authority and king over his people, his words need to be investigated first, in comparison to the Old Testament passages before turning to any other source. I think everyone will agree with me when I say that everything Jesus said was incredibly intentional and poignant. His words and actions regarding the law and the Covenant are foundational. If Jesus says one thing, and Paul, or your pastor, or your parents say something else, I can take a good guess at who is right, and who is wrong. This was the first question I had when I set out to answer the question of the disparity between the perception of the law in the Old and the New Testaments. It didn’t seem right to me that the two parts of God’s own book would be so deeply contradictory to itself. If God doesn’t change, you should be able to see one single thread of thought all the way through the Scriptures. The old and the New should both be saying the same thing, unless God changes his mind and his personality, which I fervently believe is not the case. Wherever they seem to say something different, I have made it my goal to deeply study these disparities and figure out how they each fit into the whole.
To begin, I will start with a list of some of the things Jesus said about himself:
-He is the Light of the World- John 8:12
-He is The Word- John 1:1
-He is the Good Shepherd -John 10:11
-He is the Living Bread from Heaven- John 6:35
-He is the Way, the Truth, and the Life – John 14:6
-He is the first and the last, the Alpha and the Omega- Revelation 22:13
-He is faithful and true- Revelation 19:11
These are only a few of the titles given to Jesus, but they are sufficient to set a solid groundwork for the purposes of this commentary. Anyone who has read the Bible has probably realized that most of the time, when Jesus talked, his words had face value, but they always had a deeper, hidden meaning as well. In proclaiming himself to be the holder of these titles, he was pronouncing to his people that he was the one prophesied about who would save them from sin. I believe most would agree with me on that point; however, he was alluding to something else. He was making a statement that only those who truly knew the scriptures and prophecies would understand. So what was this hidden message? Let’s investigate that! Let’s take a look at the passages he was drawing from, so that we can get some context.
As with most concepts, it’s best to start from the beginning. In this case, the beginning says a LOT.
In Genesis 1:8, Adam and Eve heard God walking in the garden, and hid from his presence. Initially, this doesn’t cause a lot of thought, until you take into consideration that Jesus states in John 1:18 “No man has seen God’s presence and lived.” This theme continues on through the entirety of the Old Testament. In Judges 2:1-4, the Angel of The Lord appears to Israel and states that HE led them out of Egypt, and that HE had promised to never break his covenant with them. This angel can be none other than Jesus, or he would have been committing blasphemy in taking God’s credit for what he had done. This Angel pops up ALL THROUGH the Old Testament. In Joshua 5:14-15 this angel is described as a man who appeared to Joshua. When he told Joshua that he was the Captain of the host of heaven, Joshua fell on his face and worshiped. The Angel then commanded him to remove his sandals, reiterating what he told to Moses at the burning bush with the phrase, “you are standing on holy ground.” In verse 2 of the following chapter, it changes the dialogue and calls the mysterious man “The Lord.” This makes complete sense in the progression of the narrative; at first Joshua only sees a man, and once he reveals his title, the writer changed his description and addressed the man as God. In Exodus 3:2, we are not told that God himself appeared in the burning bush, but, you guessed it, The Angel of the Lord.
It is important to note that in Revelation, when John bowed to an angel, he was firmly rebuked, and told “I am a fellow servant with you.” A simple angel cannot receive our worship, and they certainly cannot take any claim for what God had done. In John 1:1, we are told that “In the beginning was the word, the word was with God, and the Word was God. And the word was made flesh, and dwelt among us.” Once you begin to look, you see Jesus in every story throughout the Old Testament. It was the Angel of the Lord who spoke to Abraham, (Genesis 18). It was the Angel of the Lord who wrestled with Jacob, (Genesis 32:24-30) spoke to Sampson’s parents, (Judges 13) stood in the path of Balaam, (Numbers 22:25) and sent Gideon on his conquest. (Judges 6:12) The proof texts continue on and on, but these serve as a solid foundation. The main point is that Jesus shows himself at every pivotal point in Israel’s history from the earliest point in the Bible. One common thread between all of these encounters is that when people learned who he was, they all fell flat on their face, worshiped him, and expressed worry over having “seen God’s face.” These people all knew that none could see God and live. Yet, they did see God, and they did live. This is a powerful illustration of the sanctifying power that Jesus had over those he chose to reveal himself to, even back to the very first passages of the old testament. Whenever God appears up until Moses, he refuses to tell his name to any who ask him. In fact, when Jacob asked his name, he even scoffed, saying “Why do you ask my name?” It was then, that he renamed Jacob Israel, which means “He who struggles with Elohim/God.” The point I want to direct your attention towards is this: We know by this point that Jesus did in fact appear as God’s mediator between the Father and his people. He was the very one on the mountain who confirmed the covenant with Israel through Moses. This is huge!! From THE VERY BEGINNING, it was Jesus who espoused himself to the nation of Israel. This is where it gets interesting. In Zechariah 7:4, Zechariah accounts that The Word of the LORD came to him and delivered a message. The language he uses is not consistent with the language someone would use had he simply heard a voice, like Samuel. No, instead, he accounts a visit from the Word. John tells us that the Word is Jesus. Once this connection is made, all the prophets gain so much more depth. Instead of imagining a man sitting under a tree and randomly hearing a voice, they all say the same thing: “The Word of the Lord came to me.” Now we begin to see the prophets of the Old testament as men and woman whom were personally visited by Jesus, in order to tell them to deliver a message. Depending on who is writing, Jesus is described as either A man, The Word of the Lord, the Angel of the Lord, or in some cases, such as with Abraham, just calling him “The Lord” Exodus 33:11 tells us that “The Lord spoke to Moses face to face as a man would speak to his friend.” Yet, later, when Moses asked to see God’s face, God declined, saying that it wasn’t possible, but that he would pass by and let Moses see his back, while God proclaimed his name to him. This seems like a contradiction. Or is it? There are countless verses where it tells us that the Word of the Lord spoke to Moses and told him to tell the Children of Israel something. It is vital to recognize that these encounters were none other than Jesus appearing to Moses and teaching him about himself and the Father. In fact, he tried to show himself to the whole community of Israel and forgo the Middle-man, but Israel was afraid, and chose a system of slavery to the flesh instead. There was nothing wrong with the system God set in place, but rather, it was the people’s relationship to the system that was faulty. This is why Hebrews 8:8 says that he found fault with them, and established a better covenant built on better promises. All of those laws and regulations passed down through Moses literally came right out of Jesus’s own mouth. It was his very own finger that carved the ten commandments into the tablets of stone, after all! (Exodus 31:18) Please bear with me, we will get back to the New testament soon! Before we can jump forward though, a few other things need to be brought to light. All of those things Jesus said about himself were purposeful quotes from the scriptures. Let’s take a look and see what secrets they hold!
The Light of the World
In John 8:12, Jesus tells the people, “I am the light of the world, and any who follow me will never walk in darkness, but will have the light of life.” What did he mean by this statement? We know by now that the only scriptures in play in Jesus’s day, were the Law, the Prophets, and the writings. In other words, the Old Testament. From the age of five, Jesus was sitting in the synagogue with the rabbis and teaching them profound insights from the scriptures. He did not make any allusions to the scriptures by accident. So what passages was he alluding to here?
Proverbs 6:23 reads:
“The commandment is a lamp, and the law a light. Reproofs of instruction are the way of life.
And Psalm 119:105:
“Thy word is a lamp unto my feet and a light unto my path.”
Matthew 5:14-16 makes this comparison completely unavoidable.
“You are the light of the world. A city that is set on a hill cannot be hidden. 15 Nor do they light a lamp and put it under a basket, but on a lampstand, and it gives light to all who are in the house. 16 Let your light so shine before men, that they may see your good works and glorify your Father in heaven.
Wow! Are you hearing this? This was not done by accident! Jesus has called himself the light of the world. Any that have him within them become lamps for the world to “see your good works.” If you continue reading on through the next couple verses, it becomes even more unavoidable. Let’s see what he says next. Verses 17-22 reads as follows:
Do not think that I came to destroy the Law or the Prophets. I did not come to destroy but to fulfill. 18 For assuredly, I say to you, till heaven and earth pass away, one jot or one tittle will by no means pass from the law till all is fulfilled. 19 Whoever therefore breaks one of the least of these commandments, and teaches men so, shall be called least in the kingdom of heaven; but whoever does and teaches them, he shall be called great in the Kingdom of Heaven. 20 For I say to you, that unless your righteousness exceeds the righteousness of the scribes and Pharisees, you will by no means enter the Kingdom of Heaven
21 “You have heard that it was said to those of old, ‘You shall not murder, and whoever murders will be in danger of the judgment.’ 22 But I say to you that whoever is angry with his brother without a cause shall be in danger of the judgment.
So, what are we to make of this dialogue? First, we bear witness to Jesus calling HIMSELF the law. And he will continue to do such in almost everything he says. He is drawing upon verses that every Israelite knew and had learned as children. He tells them that he is the living law; he then tells them that any who follow him will never be in darkness, because, he is the true light. Remember the parable of the ten virgins? I could get way off track talking about the oil and the olive tree, but I will do my best to keep this simple. The virgins are waiting in the dark, and five of them had enough light. They had enough of Jesus, and of his ways. Five of them were not prepared and had to go “study up” when they heard the bridegroom coming, and ultimately missed the wedding party. In saying that he fulfilled the law, Jesus was making a simple statement, and that statement was “I will bring it to its fullness.” This is what Paul meant when he said that Christ is the goal of the law. The law is the shadow, and Christ is the reality. The physical, living, breathing law. If Jesus annulled the law at his crucifixion, why would he have contradicted himself by saying until heaven and earth pass away, not a single letter will pass away from the law OR the prophets until all is fulfilled. Once we understand that he is the living law, which I will further prove as we progress, it becomes much easier to understand that clearly, not one letter of the law can pass away, any more than HE can pass away. I realize that this flies in the face of a LOT of conventional theology, but stay with me as I continue to draw out the reality of this truth. Once you begin to see the pattern, you will see it EVERYWHERE. To me, that’s an indication that I’m on the right track. Once you see this pattern, you will be able to open to any place in the Bible and the message will be the same message. The message didn’t change at the cross. The method is what changed. The message was always about grace and forgiveness. The entire Old Testament builds upon the theme of salvation from sin, and God’s perfect loving kindness. Both the New and Old testament go to great lengths about the importance of obedience among God’s people. Some things DID change at the cross; It would be impossible and foolhardy to deny that. However, many of the changes that we are told about, are actually in contradiction to scripture point blank.
It is important to note at this point, that salvation and sanctification NEVER came through observance of the law. We are told that Abraham believed God and it was accounted to him as righteousness. Rahab and Noah were also saved by faith. They all listened to the word of God and believed; their belief became apparent because they acted upon what they knew to be true. True faith requires action. Noah wasn’t accounted as righteous because he built the ark, but because of his righteousness, he obeyed God’s command, which was given for his protection, as well as the protection of his family and all the animals on the earth. Rahab was not accounted as righteous because of what she did, but her actions showed her faith. She believed Israel had been given Jericho by God, and she put in her lot with them. She risked her life to protect the spies, and we are told that after the events of Jericho, she and her family lived out the rest of their lives among Israel, as Israelites. From the very beginning, God made concession after concession for the foreigner who wanted to come into covenant with him. All through the old testament, this theme keeps re-occurring; the same theme Jesus kept telling his followers. No one who wants to join himself to God and join into his covenant was meant to be turned away, according to the Scriptures. Jesus never once spoke against the law, or of obeying it. In fact, in the last passage I quoted, he stated blatantly that any who kept the law and taught others would be great in the kingdom of heaven. His problem with the Pharisees is made clear in Matthew 15:1-7.
The Pharisees came to Jesus and accused him and his disciples of breaking the law for eating without washing their hands. Jesus’ reply is “and why do you break the commandment of God for the sake of your own traditions?” He just turned the tables on them! What Jesus said to them without saying was simple. He said, God commanded you not to add or take away from the law which I have given you. (Deuteronomy 4:2) Yet here you are, adding to my laws, and teaching it as doctrine. My body isn’t defiled by not washing my hands! My body is defiled by the immorality that comes out of the heart! Lies, adultery, theft, slander, and the like. The Pharisees picked up on this message, and were offended! Whenever they accused Jesus of breaking the law, he always replied the same way. He pointed out that he was in perfect observance of the law as it was written, and that they were the ones in transgression because their traditions were superseding God’s commandments. In fact, the rabbis held as doctrine, that any law that they added to the scriptures was so binding that heaven itself had to bow to its authority. So here comes Jesus, walking onto the scene, telling them something to the effect of: Oh, not only am I the manna and the son of God sent from heaven, but I’m not bowing to your blasphemous laws. In fact, I rebuke you! Naturally, they were livid at this blatant disregard for their so-called authority.
John 1:5 tells us that “The light shone in the darkness, and the darkness comprehended it not.”
Once again, Jesus is the word, the light, and those who knew the Scriptures did not miss the brazen comparison to the Biblical verses calling the law a light. Why do you think the Pharisees called him a blasphemer at every possible chance? They had no idea what to do with a man who called himself the Word of God!
Bread of Life
In John chapter 6, Jesus is having one of his many show-downs with the Pharisees, and he is trying desperately to get through to them about his identity as the bread of life, and what that really means in a spiritual sense. It’s a very long chapter, so I won’t quote it here, but I encourage you to read the chapter at some point.
Jesus states at least 5 times in this conversation that he is the bread of life who came down from heaven, directly after the Pharisees asked him for a sign of his identity, saying “Our fathers ate the manna in the wilderness. As it is written, he gave them the bread out of heaven to eat.”
Jesus is quick on the draw, as usual, and immediately makes a distinction. Let me clarify this for you, he says. It was not Moses who gave you the bread from heaven, but my father who gives you the true bread of heaven. And that bread gives life to the world. The Pharisees were fixated on the law, and Jesus wanted to make sure they got the point. It wasn’t Moses who fed them. It was God. Well the Pharisees’ interest is immediately piqued, and they take the bait. “Lord,” They say, give us this bread always!” Jesus pounces with his left hook. “I am the bread of life. He who comes to me will not be hungry, and he who believes in me will never thirst.” At this comment, the Pharisees knew exactly what he was saying. Had Jesus been anyone else, this comment was pure blasphemy to anyone who knew the Scriptures. He is alluding here to Deuteronomy chapter 8:3-6 where it says:
He humbled you and allowed you to be hungry, and fed you with manna, which you didn’t know; that he might teach you that man does not live by bread alone but on every word that proceeds out of the mouth of God. Your clothing didn’t grow old on you, neither did your foot swell, these forty years. You shall consider in your heart that as a man disciplines his son, so the Lord your God disciplines you. You shall keep the commandments of the Lord your God, to walk in his ways and fear him.
This is the same verse he used to combat Satan’s temptation when he spent 40 days fasting in the wilderness, walking out in perfection the failed attempts of Israel. Later in the passage in John, the Pharisees grumble that Jesus is telling them to eat his flesh and drink his blood. Jesus tries to get it through their thick skulls that what he is saying, is that they were meant to get sustenance from “every word that proceeds out of God’s mouth,” and that he was that very word. He was the physical fulfillment of the manna that God sent from heaven. Bread was the primary food back in that day. Bread was life. It was sustenance. But God showed Israel that their sustenance wasn’t’ ever intended to be in the physical. Manna was a symbolic fulfillment of God’s words. Psalm 119:103 proves this connection, saying:
“How sweet are thy words unto my taste! yea, sweeter than honey to my mouth!” Exodus recounts that the manna tasted sweet like honey wafers, and Jesus, again, is the word made flesh. Taste and see that the Lord is good!”
The first account in Matthew 14:13-21 recounts Jesus feeding 5,000 men with only five loaves and two fish. Once a few pervading Biblical associations are explained, this becomes a simple matter of plugging in the meanings.
Psalm 19:7 helps make the sustenance word picture clearer “The law of the LORD is perfect, restoring life.” Think back on the story of David taking the show-bread from the high priest, for his men to eat. They were hungry, and the bread gave them life and strength to carry out their mission. It is not a stretch by any means to associate bread to life, especially if you can put yourself in the shoes of a man or woman in the ancient world.
Jesus clearly depicted himself as the living, breathing Law, or word of God, and the association with the law was bread; feeding the hungry and restoring life and vitality.
When Jesus fed the 5,000 men with five loaves, he was symbolically feeding them with the words of God, the bread of heaven. remember the symbolic number 5 being the number of books contained in the Law. Five loaves, one for each book of the law. To further draw out this point, it becomes much more evident when you compare the numbers used in the association. there is only one other account in the entire Bible where the number 5,000 is mentioned. That fact is poignant because it almost necessitates a spiritual connection. The account is from Joshua 8, Israel’s attack on the city of Ai. To summarize the main points, Joshua and his men attack the city and are defeated on the first attack, so Joshua took 5,000 men and set them behind the city to ambush it once the occupants came out to fight Israel’s army. The story ends in a total victory, and a decimation of their enemies, because they were walking in obedience to God’s Word.
Let us move on to the next account, and see if this connection holds any water.
The account with the 4,000 appears in Matthew 15:29-39.
Jesus and his disciples gather another crowd, shortly after the events of the 5,000, and Jesus feels compassion on them and decides to feed them. But this time, when he asks how much food is available, his disciples bring him seven loaves. At this, he breaks it and passes it to the crowd of 4,000 men. What is the association with the number 7? A cursory look forward will provide some insight on that matter:
Matthew 16:5-12:
“When they went across the lake, the disciples forgot to take bread. “Be careful,” Jesus said to them. “Be on your guard against the yeast of the Pharisees and Sadducees.” They discussed this among themselves and said, “It is because we didn’t bring any bread. “Aware of their discussion, Jesus asked, “You of little faith, why are you talking among yourselves about having no bread? Do you still not understand? Don’t you remember the five loaves for the five thousand, and how many basketfuls you gathered? Or the seven loaves for the four thousand, and how many basketfuls you gathered? How is it you don’t understand that I was not talking to you about bread? But be on your guard against the yeast of the Pharisees and Sadducees.” Then they understood that he was not telling them to guard against the yeast used in bread, but against the teaching of the Pharisees and Sadducees.
If you recount basically any event where Jesus goes toe to toe with the Pharisees, he is always making the same point: That they are breaking God’s law by adding their own laws to his. He said countless times, “Why do you break the commandment of God for the sake of your traditions?”
His grounds for accusation here was Deuteronomy 4:2 “Do not add to what I command you, and do not subtract from it, but keep the commands of the LORD your God that I give you.”
Deuteronomy 12:32 states the same thing in slightly different phrasing. But the point is, that adding to the Law was just as bad, if not worse than subtracting from it. If you are familiar with the Oral Torah of the Jews, you will know that the rabbis had two separate books or “Mishnahs” of additional laws, taught by different sects of Judaism. These two teachings were tacked on to the original 5 books of Moses.
Isn’t that interesting? Now we see the priests and the Pharisees “puffing up” the original law with yeast, and turning the five loaves into seven. The yeast is added into the dough, before it is baked, and causes it to rise and expand in an unnatural way. If this train of thinking is accurate, there should be a linking Old Testament story to prove the disparity.
Once again, the specific number 4,000 is only used one other time in the entire Bible. The passage is 1 Samuel Chapters 3-4.
The account goes into God’s calling of Samuel and pronouncing judgement on Eli and his house, because they were living in active rebellion and disdain for God and his way/laws. As a result of this pronouncement, God sends the philistines against Israel and 4,000 Hebrew men are killed in the battle. The ark of the covenant is also lost, which is the biggest blow of all, as the ark was the symbol of God’s presence in Israel. Here is story that depicts the other side of the coin. When Israel ignores his commands, or adds to them, it leads to defeat, and death. Not only death, but a removal of God’s protection and presence over his people.
Now the final element is in the number of baskets picked up after each encounter. In the feeding of the 5,000 with 5 loaves, they collected twelve baskets after everyone was satisfied. This is no coincidence, as the nation of Israel consisted of 12 tribes. With obedience came fullness and satisfaction for the whole of Israel. In the second account, they collect only seven baskets; the same number as loaves. The only reasonable explanation for this comparison is that once the Pharisees have added their yeast, and the law has been multiplied, there is only excess for the scribes and pharisees who sell their bread to the people for a price.
To summarize, Jesus has proven the connection between himself and the law he gave to Moses. When God created the universe, he did it by speaking. He spoke the world into existence with his word. Every word of God stands forever, and Jesus is a perfect example of that. He came to show us that his words were meant to bring life, love, and healing. Not bondage and slavery. In fact, how ridiculous would it be for God to free his people from slavery in Egypt only to re-establish a new type of bondage for those people by giving them a set of laws that were meant to enslave them. The Christian doctrine on this point is pure heresy against the love the Father has for his people, and his desire to have them free and fulfilled. Jesus first showed us that he was personified in every word that God ever spoke; to Noah, Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Moses, David, and all the prophets. Once his word emanates from his mouth, it stands forever. (Psalm 119:89/160) Jesus is the bread of life, and the manna from heaven. He is the Word of God made flesh, who dwelt among us to show us how to follow him. Jesus fed the crowds to draw out a very powerful message. He was the word that feeds us, and we can get sustenance from his words and our life will be multiplied; but on the other side of the coin, if we take his words and add the yeast of the Pharisees (traditions and laws tacked onto his words), the multiplication effect is severely damaged, and it leads to a removal of God’s blessing.
The First and the Last
If what I have theorized about Jesus and his words regarding the law are accurate, the rest of the Bible should bear testimony to their truth, or to their invalidity. There can be no inconsistency in the Bible, so the rest of the scriptures and prophecies will cross-reference and it all should fall in line perfectly.
Isaiah 46:10 is the foundation of this leg of the study.
I make known the end from the beginning, from ancient times, what is still to come. I say, my purpose shall stand, I will do all that I please.
In this section, we will compare the approach to the law in the scriptures, relating to the very beginning of time, and check them against the prophecies of the last days and the millennial kingdom of Jesus. He is the first and the last; and in such a way he has told us what he desires through the ages.
As with all stories, it is important to start at the beginning, so that is where we shall begin.
Our first verse is Genesis 2:1-2:
Thus the heavens and the earth were completed in all their vast array. By the seventh day God had finished the work he had been doing; so on the seventh day he rested from all his work. Then God blessed the seventh day and made it holy, because on it he rested from all the work of creating that he had done.
We are told by Church doctrine that the Sabbath day was first given to the Jews as part of the Old Covenant, and that When Jesus rose from the dead he changed it to Sunday. However, the Sabbath day was a blessing from God from the very beginning of time for all of mankind.
This is why Hebrews 4:11 says that we should make every effort to enter into his rest; it was given to help us remove ourselves from our own works for a time and remember that his works are the ones that truly give us life.
Mark 2:23-28
Now it happened that He went through the grainfields on the Sabbath; and as they went His disciples began to pluck the heads of grain. And the Pharisees said to Him, “Look, why do they do what is not lawful on the Sabbath?”
But He said to them, “Have you never read what David did when he was in need and hungry, he and those with him: how he went into the house of God in the days of Abiathar the high priest, and ate the showbread, which is not lawful to eat except for the priests, and also gave some to those who were with him?”
And He said to them, “The Sabbath was made for man, and not man for the Sabbath. Therefore, the Son of Man is also Lord of the Sabbath.”
We know that Jesus was part of the creation process, and he was there with the Father in the blessing of the seventh day. Of course Jesus is the Lord of the Sabbath! From that very first moment when he blessed the Sabbath, he made it FOR man. He created a pattern in that moment; a pattern of creation, exertion, and then relaxation once the work is complete. When he commanded Israel to observe the Sabbath, it was, once again, a command for their own benefit. It was the day where they gained relief from their hard work. Yes, at Jesus’s resurrection, he brought the imagery of the Sabbath to a fullness that had never before been seen. He is our Sabbath rest, and he will be our rest for 1,000 years when he reigns on earth. A day is like a thousand years, and a thousand years is like a day to God, and this concept is put into application here. From the beginning of the Bible to where we are now, we have come to the sixth day of history and prophecy. When the sixth day reaches its fulfillment at the chosen time, Jesus will initiate his final rest and rule on the earth. We will enjoy a full millennium of rest with Jesus as our king. But the question needs to be asked: When Jesus fulfilled the Sabbath, did he leave us any indication that the physical act of resting and honoring his blessed day should still be kept? Instead of speculating, I will look to the scriptures to answer this vital question. This is where the prophecies about the time of judgment and reign, become incredibly powerful, because they clearly depict how things will operate when the whole world is firmly under Jesus’s rule.
Isaiah 66:19-23
And I, because of what they have planned and done, am about to come and gather the people of all nations and languages, and they will come and see my glory.
“I will set a sign among them, and I will send some of those who survive to the nations—to Tarshish, to the Libyans and Lydians (famous as archers), to Tubal and Greece, and to the distant islands that have not heard of my fame or seen my glory. They will proclaim my glory among the nations. And they will bring all your people, from all the nations, to my holy mountain in Jerusalem as an offering to the Lord—on horses, in chariots and wagons, and on mules and camels,” says the Lord. “They will bring them, as the Israelites bring their grain offerings, to the temple of the Lord in ceremonially clean vessels. And I will select some of them also to be priests and Levites,” says the Lord.
“As the new heavens and the new earth that I make will endure before me,” declares the Lord, “so will your name and descendants endure. From one New Moon to another and from one Sabbath to another, all mankind will come and bow down before me,” says the Lord.
I am continually surprised by how many people have never read or heard this passage from Isaiah. This is an end-times prophecy, clearly depicted by God referring to the New Heavens and the New earth. It is an account of how things will be at Jesus’s return to judge the earth. After he is finished judging, not only does he appoint new priests to minister before him, but he assures us that in his kingdom, all flesh will come to Jerusalem from Sabbath to Sabbath and from New Moon to New Moon, to worship before him. It simply would not make sense for God to consecrate and bless the seventh day at creation, only to abolish it at Jesus’s crucifixion, and then change his mind and re-instate it in his millennial reign. Our God is a God who never changes, and although it may contradict modern theology to say that the Sabbath remains valid and important for his people from the beginning of time to the end of time, it does line up with what we know about God’s unchanging character, and all of the scriptures on the subject seem to validate the idea. But what about some of the other hot button subjects, such as the feast days that Jesus fulfilled or clean and unclean foods? If he remains unwavering in one area, one would expect to see an unwavering approach in all subjects. Let’s see what the scriptures have to say on these key issues.
Another foundational end-times passage is from Isaiah 2:2-4, reading:
It shall happen in the latter days, that the Lord’s house will be lifted up on top of the mountains, and shall be raised above the hills, and all nations shall flow to it. Many peoples shall go and say, “Come, let us go up to the mountain of the Lord, to the house of the God of Jacob; and he will teach us of his ways, and we shall walk in his paths.” For out of Zion the Law will go out, and the Lord’s word from Jerusalem. He will judge between the nations and will decide between many peoples; and they will beat their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks.”
If the law has been done away with at the cross, why is it going out again from Jerusalem once Jesus takes the throne? The answer lies at the heart of this entire discussion. The New Covenant. But we aren’t ready to tackle that subject quite yet.
Zechariah 14:16-20 is set immediately after Jesus comes back at the end of the age to save his people from the nations who are attacking them. After his enemies have been put under his feet, all the nations fall under the law of his rule. This particular passage specifically draws out the importance of the Feast of Tabernacles.
Then the survivors from all the nations that have attacked Jerusalem will go up year after year to worship the King, the Lord Almighty, and to celebrate the Festival of Tabernacles. If any of the peoples of the earth do not go up to Jerusalem to worship the King, the Lord Almighty, they will have no rain. If the Egyptian people do not go up and take part, they will have no rain. The Lord will bring on them the plague he inflicts on the nations that do not go up to celebrate the Festival of Tabernacles. This will be the punishment of Egypt and the punishment of all the nations that do not go up to celebrate the Festival of Tabernacles.
Once again, there can be no doubt of the time-frame of this passage. During Jesus’s rule. At no other point in time will the whole world be expected to come worship at Jerusalem. These were requirements for Israel’s covenant with God, but God’s plan is to bring all nations on the earth into that covenant. The final judgment will be the final act to fulfill that promise. (Psalm 110:1)
In Genesis 7:2 we have an interesting paradox:
“Take with you seven pairs of every kind of clean animal, a male and its mate, and one pair of every kind of unclean animal, a male and its mate…”
This command was given to Noah, LONG before the law was given on Mount Sinai. Clean and unclean animals in Noah’s day? What’s more, God didn’t have to explain it to Noah. He said clean and unclean, and Noah knew exactly what was meant. Could this be an indicator that the whole issue goes back farther, and is much more complicated than our current theology makes it out? I think that at the very least, it needs further investigation at this point. Genesis 8:20 recounts Noah and his family disembarking their cruise from hell, and Noah builds an altar to God, sacrificing one of every clean animal in thanks and gratitude. This begs the question, if clean and unclean animals only became clean and unclean at Mount Sinai, it is a rather arbitrary commandment in the first place. Yet, as we know, nothing God says is arbitrary. From the beginning, those that followed God knew the difference between clean and unclean animals, and this was far before God gave us permission to eat them in the first place! Permission to eat animals wasn’t given mankind until Noah got off the ark. (Genesis 9:3) Yet Noah already knew that there were some animals which God considered clean, and some which he considered unclean. Think about that for a minute.
God has established clean and unclean animals from the very beginning of the Scriptures. But what about the end?
Isaiah 66:14-18
When you see this, your heart will rejoice
and you will flourish like grass;
the hand of the Lord will be made known to his servants,
but his fury will be shown to his foes.
See, the Lord is coming with fire,
and his chariots are like a whirlwind;
he will bring down his anger with fury,
and his rebuke with flames of fire.
For with fire and with his sword
the Lord will execute judgment on all people,
and many will be those slain by the Lord.
“Those who consecrate and purify themselves to go into the gardens, behind the one in the center, who eat the flesh of pigs, rats and other unclean things—they will meet their end together with the one they follow,” declares the Lord.
“And I, because of what they have planned and done, am about to come and gather the people of all nations and languages, and they will come and see my glory.
Where even to begin with this passage? I find it incredibly powerful when realizing that his cleansing of the earth follows the same pattern as his cleansing of mankind. He first cleansed it with water, removing the evil and the dirt; Only then does he come and purify with fire to make it new and holy as it was before the fall. (Mark 10:38, James 1:2-4, 1 Peter 1:7, 1 Peter 4:12) In Matthew 3:11, John the Baptist promised the people that the one who came after him would baptize with the Holy Spirit and with Fire. There are only two accounts of worldwide judgment in the Scriptures, and they follow this pattern of water followed by fire. So also, Elijah himself depicted this truth by dousing the altar with 12 jars of water, filling the trench around it, and soaking the sacrifice. Only then did he pray for the fire of the Almighty to fall and consume the offering. This word picture can be seen time and time again. Water cleanses, and only after something or somebody has been cleansed with water, can they be purified by fire. In the medical industry, and in modern science we know this truth to be evident. When surgical tools have been used on a surgery, they have to be washed with water first to clean off the blood and other refuse, and only after washing with water can they be sterilized and cleansed of the invisible bacteria with fire. If you try to sterilize before washing with water, all the gunk gets baked onto the utensil and the tool is no longer good for anything except the garbage dump. In this instance, the whole world is the stage for this lesson. Getting back to the original topic though, Jesus is first extending comfort and protection over his people; assuring them that he is coming in love for them. But he then turns his fiery gaze to the nations who have persecuted and misled his flock for so long, killing and abusing them. He doesn’t mince words as he lays out his intentions; and as we know, once God has spoken, and his intention has been defined, nothing in the world will annul the word that he speaks. He comes to judge the nations for the sake of his people, and in order to restore peace to the world. It is impossible to miss the fact that he expresses fury over those who he finds “Eating the flesh of pigs, rats, and other unclean things.” Now hold on a minute. If Jesus made all things clean at the cross, he is completely insane to come back and be angry that people are eating those things. I don’t want a king who tells me something is okay, and then comes to judge and kills me for eating the very thing he told me was okay to eat! This simply does not make sense. There MUST be a more realistic understanding to make these verses fit together without contradicting. Just like the Sabbath, the precedent was set all the way at the beginning of the scriptures, and is re-affirmed at the end of the age. Are we to believe then, that Jesus came in the middle of that to temporarily change the way he did things? Establish a foundation, tear it down, and then return and build it again? I believe that as we keep digging, the answers will make themselves more clear.
We have addressed the beginning and the end of the unclean debate, but what about the middle? What does Jesus have to say on the subject?
Clean and unclean meat was not something that Jesus directly spoke about, simply because it wasn’t a question for debate. The Pharisees accused him of being defiled by eating with unwashed hands, but that was simply oral tradition. It had no foundation in God’s law, which is why Jesus so easily dismissed it. He was never accused of eating unclean meat, because he clearly did not do it. Had he eaten unclean meat, he would have revoked his title as the Messiah, as he had to be a sinless sacrifice. We know from 1 John 3:4 that the definition of sin is transgression of God’s law. So the silence on unclean meat is a powerful indicator in the manner. The Rabbi’s were looking for anything and everything they could possibly find to accuse him with, and had eating unclean been something he did, we would have all heard about it. But we need more before we can draw a solid conclusion.
In Matthew 8:31, right as Jesus is about to cast the legion of Demons out of a man, they beg him not to cast them into the pit, but to send them into the herd of pigs nearby. Jesus grants this request, and sends them into the pigs. This story raises all kinds of questions and ideological concerns; the first of which is, If demons can inhabit a pig, can they inhabit any unclean animal? Can they go in and out at will at will, or do they have to be sent? You see Jesus casting demons out of people, but you never see him blessing or casting them out of any animal. If you eat the flesh of a pig whom a demon had inhabited, are you giving that demon access to your body? I don’t have answers to these questions, but my first thought was of alarm when I read from every gospel account that the demons BEGGED Jesus to send them into the pigs. You never hear any other place in the Bible where demons inhabit an animal, much less beg to be sent into them. After reading the passage in Isaiah, I believe there is a warning for us. God instructed us not to eat these animals because there was danger in it, not because he wanted to give us arbitrary laws. If there was danger in eating certain things before the cross, the danger is still there, as the physical nature of the world has not changed. We know not to eat certain plants because they are poisonous, and we know not to pick up a snake with slitted eyes and a pointy head, and these things have not changed, nor will they until Jesus completes his mission on earth. At his first coming, he laid the groundwork. He completed the first half of the prophecies about him. His first coming was prophesied to be in the manner of the suffering servant, following the picture of Joseph. His second coming will complete all things as he comes in the manner of King David; the ruling and conquering King. Many Christians have been taught to expect a passive, quiet, peaceful Jesus to return, and they are going to be surprised and upset when he comes to rule with power and authority wielding a sword and blood soaked garments. We are told that at his second coming, the lion will lie down with the wolf, and the small child will put his hand in an adders den, and not be harmed. (Isaiah 11:6) Until that time though, God’s word contains a list of warnings to his children of all the danger in the world; things to avoid for our own good, and the good of his body. It’s his “Don’t touch the stove” speech, to oversimplify the matter.
Deuteronomy 4:6-8
Observe [these laws] carefully, for this will show your wisdom and understanding to the nations, who will hear about all these decrees and say, “Surely this great nation is a wise and understanding people.” 7 What other nation is so great as to have their gods near them the way the Lord our God is near us whenever we pray to him? 8 And what other nation is so great as to have such righteous decrees and laws as this body of laws I am setting before you today?
From the very beginning, God intended his laws to be for protection and instruction in wisdom. He established them as a covenant of peace with the whole world. The church fathers taught that the laws were given to the Jews because they were evil and God wanted to punish them, but that for the Christians, God loved them without them having to do anything at all. This teaching is so backwards, so anti-Semitic, and so contrary to the entire scripture, I could write an entire book on the subject. Suffice it so say, God loves ALL mankind and ALL of his laws are good for the whole of creation. The Hebrews were meant to take those laws and shine the light to the world so that they saw how good and loving the God who gave them was, yet the people rebelled and refused, using them for personal gain and twisting them into slavery and bondage for the people. When evil men twist what is good, we cannot afford to throw the baby out with the bathwater; it is incumbent on us to divide the good from the bad, accept the good, and reject the evil.
Acts chapter 10 is where most people within the Christian faith see a clear depiction that we are not held to the letter of the old law anymore, and that God intends us to eat whatever we like. I would like to investigate this matter. In light of full investigation, we need to look at all the elements of Peter’s vision.
Acts 10:1-31
At Caesarea there was a man named Cornelius, a centurion in what was known as the Italian Regiment. He and all his family were devout and God-fearing; he gave generously to those in need and prayed to God regularly. One day at about three in the afternoon he had a vision. He distinctly saw an angel of God, who came to him and said, “Cornelius!” Cornelius stared at him in fear. “What is it, Lord?” he asked. The angel answered, “Your prayers and gifts to the poor have come up as a memorial offering before God. Now send men to Joppa to bring back a man named Simon who is called Peter. He is staying with Simon the tanner, whose house is by the sea.” When the angel who spoke to him had gone, Cornelius called two of his servants and a devout soldier who was one of his attendants. He told them everything that had happened and sent them to Joppa.
About noon the following day as they were on their journey and approaching the city, Peter went up on the roof to pray. He became hungry and wanted something to eat, and while the meal was being prepared, he fell into a trance. He saw heaven opened and something like a large sheet being let down to earth by its four corners. It contained all kinds of four-footed animals, as well as reptiles and birds. Then a voice told him, “Get up, Peter. Kill and eat.” “Surely not, Lord!” Peter replied. “I have never eaten anything impure or unclean.” The voice spoke to him a second time, “Do not call anything impure that God has made clean.” This happened three times, and immediately the sheet was taken back to heaven. While Peter was wondering about the meaning of the vision, the men sent by Cornelius found out where Simon’s house was and stopped at the gate. They called out, asking if Simon who was known as Peter was staying there. While Peter was still thinking about the vision, the Spirit said to him, “Simon, three men are looking for you. So get up and go downstairs. Do not hesitate to go with them, for I have sent them.” Peter went down and said to the men, “I’m the one you’re looking for. Why have you come?” The men replied, “We have come from Cornelius the centurion. He is a righteous and God-fearing man, who is respected by all the Jewish people. A holy angel told him to ask you to come to his house so that he could hear what you have to say.” Then Peter invited the men into the house to be his guests.
Peter at Cornelius’s House
The next day Peter started out with them, and some of the believers from Joppa went along. The following day he arrived in Caesarea. Cornelius was expecting them and had called together his relatives and close friends. As Peter entered the house, Cornelius met him and fell at his feet in reverence. But Peter made him get up. “Stand up,” he said, “I am only a man myself.”
While talking with him, Peter went inside and found a large gathering of people. He said to them: “You are well aware that it is against our law for a Jew to associate with or visit a Gentile. But God has shown me that I should not call anyone impure or unclean. So when I was sent for, I came without raising any objection. May I ask why you sent for me?”
Cornelius answered: “Three days ago I was in my house praying at this hour, at three in the afternoon. Suddenly a man in shining clothes stood before me and said, ‘Cornelius, God has heard your prayer and remembered your gifts to the poor. Send to Joppa for Simon who is called Peter.
Several principles jump to the forefront of this passage upon the first glance. The narrative starts out following Cornelius, a roman centurion who follows God devoutly. According to the tradition of the rabbis, it was unlawful for a Hebrew to associate with a gentile, because they feared becoming unclean. From the very beginning, however, this was not the case. The biblical accounts from the Old Testament show us that any man or woman who joined himself to the Lord was grafted in to the tree of Israel. The stories of Ruth and Rahab are proof enough of that. A woman from Moab, one of the nations Israel was at war with for a good part of their history, became one of the women in Jesus’s own lineage! Rahab and her whole family were saved because of her faith, and we are told that a “Mixed multitude” Left Egypt with Israel, unifying into one nation. (Exodus 12:38) So you see, even in the Old Testament, the Gospel message was meant for the whole world, yet Israel took their light and put it under a basket. Jesus told them to shine their light to the whole world!
Cornelius gets word from God to send for Peter, and he sends three men to find him. When the narrative turns to Peter, he is on the roof waiting for the meal to be prepared, and he has a vision where a blanket full of unclean animals is lowered down and he is told to eat. Peter responds with shock and horror, and all three times he refuses. While Peter is still contemplating what this vision could mean, the three men Cornelius sends arrive. The vision repeated the call to eat three times, one for every gentile at his door. Peter immediately understood what the spirit was telling him. “Call no man unclean.” In the following chapter, he is criticized by the leaders in Jerusalem for going to the house of a gentile, and he repeats the vision, reiterating the call that the spirit put upon him: You shall call no man unclean.
Nowhere was food mentioned, aside from the picture that God needed to use. Peter and the Jews had been blinded to the true nature of the gospel, by the yeast of the pharisees and saw all gentiles in the same light as they saw unclean animals. They wouldn’t even touch them! By associating the uncleanness of the animals with the gentiles, God clearly told Peter three times, that he was to go speak the message to every gentile who would follow God. It is actually surprising that Peter didn’t learn this lesson during his time with Jesus, as Jesus healed the Centurion’s daughter, and blessed the Canaanite woman. The Scriptures are full of passages that state the same thing: any foreigner who wanted to join themselves to God’s covenant would be accepted. (Isaiah 56:3-8)
It could be argued that God meant to send both messages with this vision, but there is still one piece of evidence to assess.
In Ezekiel 4:9-15, Ezekiel receives a similar command from God as Peter. He is told to lay on his left side for 390 days, one day for every year of Israel’s rebellion, and another 40 days on his right side, for the rebellion of Judah. Then God commands Ezekiel to cook himself bread over human excrement during that time, to symbolize the unclean food God’s people would eat among the nations in their exile. Yet Ezekiel is appalled, and responds in the same way Peter did. He says “Not so, Sovereign Lord! I have never defiled myself. From my youth until now I have never eaten anything found dead or torn by wild animals. No impure meat has ever entered my mouth.” God makes a concession for him, and tells him to use cow dung instead. In both instances, God makes a point with the unclean food, but he doesn’t force his prophet to go through with eating it, as it was his initial command to NOT eat it that they are following. With Ezekiel, he made a concession, and with Peter, he removed the blanket back to heaven, as the purpose of the vision had been met. There was no need for Peter to actually eat the unclean animals, only to understand the picture that they presented. If God had not changed his mind about unclean foods with Ezekiel, it is illogical and unfounded to believe that Peter’s vision did either. God is a God of precedents, and his precedents don’t change just because he uses them to prove a point.
So far, all of the verses on the subject back up Jesus’s judgment as accounted in Isaiah. He does have the right to judge those who eat impure things, because he never changed his mind. He is the Righteous and Holy King, and he can choose to judge the world by whatever standards he chooses to judge by.
Which of these two variations of God is more gracious? One who always made room for anyone of any nation to be saved and accepted since the beginning of creation, or one who snidely rejects anyone who isn’t a “Jew” until he suddenly had a change of heart and then out of nowhere removed his standards completely, realizing how impossible and insane those standards were? The Queen of Sheba heard of Solomon’s wisdom from the ends of the earth, and came to pay homage, and SHE was praised by the Master Yeshua more loudly than many of those who were Jews by blood. There is no wonder we have so many atheists in this world; logical people who want to serve a logical creator read the mishmash of church doctrine, and see the rampant abuse and neglect of the poor and needy in the church and they run the other way; for good reason!
Neither churches, nor individual members of God’s assembly can have a “commandment buffet”, where they choose whatever laws are appealing to them while rejecting the ones that they don’t like. The people in Yeshua’s wedding parable who were not wearing the proper attire were kicked out of the feast and sent out into the cold. Revelation tells us plainly that the righteous deeds of the saints equate to white, linen robes, which are constantly washed in the blood of the lamb. I am NOT saying that it is possible to be righteous by keeping the laws, so don’t misunderstand me here; instead, as we learn the commands of our Messiah, we continually kill our flesh as we learn to obey his commands and seek life, becoming more in tune to his life giving ways as we go through cycles of sin and repentance. You continually ask him to search your heart and sift out the bad, and show you what wickedness is hiding out in your inmost depths, and when he shows it to you, you roll up your sleeves and begin working alongside him to stop behaving that way.
Psalm 139:23-24
Search me, God, and know my heart;
Put me to the test and know my anxious thoughts;
24 And see if there is any [m]wicked way in me,
And lead me in the everlasting way.
Ezekiel 20:25-30
because they had not obeyed my laws but had rejected my decrees and desecrated my Sabbaths, and their eyes lusted after their parents’ idols. 25 So I gave them other statutes that were not good and laws through which they could not live; 26 I defiled them through their gifts—the sacrifice of every firstborn—that I might fill them with horror so they would know that I am the Lord.’
27 “Therefore, son of man, speak to the people of Israel and say to them, ‘This is what the Sovereign Lord says: In this also your ancestors blasphemed me by being unfaithful to me: 28 When I brought them into the land I had sworn to give them and they saw any high hill or any leafy tree, there they offered their sacrifices, made offerings that aroused my anger, presented their fragrant incense and poured out their drink offerings. 29 Then I said to them: What is this high place you go to?’” (It is called Bamah[a] to this day.) 30 “Therefore say to the Israelites: ‘This is what the Sovereign Lord says: Will you defile yourselves the way your ancestors did and lust after their vile images? 31 When you offer your gifts—the sacrifice of your children in the fire—you continue to defile yourselves with all your idols to this day. Am I to let you inquire of me, you Israelites? As surely as I live, declares the Sovereign Lord, I will not let you inquire of me.
Traditional church doctrine has made most people fearful of even attempting to be obedient to God’s laws, as they tell you you have to keep ALL 613 commandments if you try to keep any, and if you fail at that you will go to hell; so don’t even try, rest in the blood and completed work of Jesus. This teaching is heretical at best, and has been accepted by the masses because it tickles the ears and sounds easy, yet it actually makes your life MUCH harder because in exchange for the easy laws that God gave, to those who refuse to align themselves with HIS laws, he will send them masters who will rule over them ruthlessly, like the pharisees and kings of today, and who will give them laws that they are not able to keep. It is important to mention that while there ARE 613 commandments, not all of them were for every person. Most of the laws were for the king and the priests. Some were for men, some were for women, some were for children. But all of them were meant to be utilized in creating an easy, fulfilled, satisfied life without strife or conflict.
Deuteronomy 30:11-14
For this commandment that I command you today is not too hard for you, neither is it far off. It is not in heaven, that you should say, ‘Who will ascend to heaven for us and bring it to us, that we may hear it and do it?
If your pastor or teacher tells you that these laws are too hard to keep, then point blank, they are calling God a liar. (Although many of them we are no longer able to keep, because God has removed his presence and his temple from the earth until we learn to obey the spirit and intention behind these laws. I will get into that in another, subsequent post.) If God himself says that these commands are good for you and will give you life if you apply them correctly, no man on earth, be he the pope or your own father can discount that truth. If that is how they see God’s laws, they are viewing him as an unjust and unfair father who enjoys the suffering of his children. I, for one, refuse to view my heavenly father that way. I have tested these laws in my own life, and have continually asked him to show me my failures. I have worked to attune myself to his understanding and in every instance his commands have saved me from all kinds of mistakes and suffering.
This really and truly is just the tip of the ice-burg. There is so much confusion relating to the new Covenant and what it means for believers of Jesus today, and that is the next subject that I will dig into.
Until next time, blessings! and thanks for tuning in.