THE ARIAN HERESY

 

In a recent edition of a Christian blog, actually my favorite, one post lamented the result of a poll taken of Evangelicals. When questioned about some key theological issues, the respondents indicated that they showed a distressingly shallow understanding of the Bible and the God whom it presents to mankind.

This apparent revelation comes as no surprise to me. For decades our collective understanding of Scripture has moved toward the superficial. In fact, the author of the post claimed that a majority of Evangelicals have gone off the reservation into actual heresy.

That’s no news to me either. Or to many of my peers. One only has to witness the number of television preachers with huge audiences who attempt rather successfully to peddle prosperity, self-improvement and positive-thinking messages to their gullible followers to gain a graphic understanding of wholesale misdirection of the true Christian message that is taking place.

After reciting some generalities, the author of the post zeroed in on what he thought was the most egregious of the Scriptural violations: the Arian Heresy, which seems to be enjoying a revival of sorts. A full seventy-eight percent of Evangelical Christians, the author claimed, subscribe to that particular heresy. He went on to define the heresy itself. According to him, the Arian Heresy asserts that Jesus was a created Being.

I wish to take exception to both the author’s definition of the Arian heresy and his claim that it is heretic. In addition, I would ask the author to go back and research more thoroughly what the heresy actually consisted of. To the readers of this blog, I present below my own take on it.

The Alexandrian priest Arius (256-336) became involved in a very heated controversy over the deity of Jesus Christ, particularly during the debates at the Council of Nicaea, convened by the emperor Constantine in 325 A.D. Arius did indeed claim that Jesus was a created Being, but that wasn’t the real issue. Jesus, identifying Himself in His message to the Laodicean Church, Revelation 3:14, claimed to have been created:

“And to the angel of the church of the Laodiceans write, These things says the Amen, the Faithful and True Witness, the Beginning of the creation of God:”

The actual heresy was what Arius inferred from that fact, which was that Jesus, having been created, was less than God. Arius violated common sense – Jesus’ origin as the Son of God in no way diminishes His status as God. The two issues aren’t even connected. Arius should have understood that just by perceiving from history the numerous examples of children who have surpassed their parents in greatness. The time factor simply doesn’t have anything to do with personal attributes. Given the Holy Father’s ability to do anything He wishes, it’s not a stretch to understand that He certainly possesses the wherewithal to create a Being equal to Himself.

Moreover, time itself didn’t begin until the Creation.

The Arian position was rejected as heresy at the Council of Nicaea, which initiated the ill-advised concept, intrinsic to the Nicean Creed and more overtly in the Athanasian Creed, that the three Members of the Trinity co-existed from all eternity. These creeds asserted further that none within the Holy Trinity were created, in effect throwing the baby out with the bathwater. It should be noted that at that time those attending the council of Nicea were fed up with the constant bickering over these issues and were motivated to shut the lid the debate once and for all. In my opinion, they behaved rashly and quite inaccurately. It should also be noted that the creeds are extra-biblical; as such they don’t necessarily enjoy the inspiration and inerrancy of Scripture in the original autographs.

The author of the blog’s misidentification of the Arian Heresy is but one facet of the post-Nicean Church’s transformation of a natural and intuitive understanding of God into a complex, confusing and self-contradictory view of God. Count me in as one of the seventy-eight percent of evangelicals who participate in the heresy as defined by the author.

THE FULFILLMENT OF HANNAH’S VOW

The Fulfillment of Hannah’s Vow

The two books of Samuel in the Bible were written over a thousand years before Jesus Christ was born, when Israel was still a young nation. The book of First Samuel opens with a story regarding Hannah, a woman of Israel from the tribe of Ephraim, married to a man named Elkanah.

Hannah wanted to have a son very badly, but she wasn’t able to have one. Yet she remained faithful to God, and every year she went with her husband up to a city in Israel called Shiloh to make their yearly worship and sacrifice. Year after year she did this, hoping to have a son by the next year. Finally, one year while she was praying, she broke down and wept in the sight of the priest for her lack of a son. In her misery, Hannah prayed to God, making a promise to Him if He would show His kindness toward her by giving her a son. Her vow went like this:

“O Lord, of hosts, if you will look on the affliction of your handmaid, and remember me, and not forget me, but will give to your handmaid a male child, then I will give him to the Lord all the days of his life.”

After speaking to God, Eli the Priest blessed her, and she trusted God and was no longer sad when she returned home with her husband.

“And the Lord remembered Hannah. And she bore a son, and called his name Samuel, saying Because I have asked him of the Lord. And when she had weaned him, she took him up with her along with sacrifices to the Lord. And they brought the child to the priest Eli. And Hannah said, O my lord, as your soul lives, I am the woman who stood by you here earlier, praying to the Lord. For this child I prayed; and the Lord has answered my prayer which I asked of Him. Therefore also I have lent him to the Lord; as long as he lives he shall be lent to the Lord.

“And he worshiped the Lord there.”

Hannah did as she had promised God: she left her son Samuel with Eli the priest to live with him and learn the deep things about God from him. Then Hannah prayed again, this time to thank God for His kindness toward her:

“And Hannah prayed, and said, My heart rejoices in the Lord, my horn is exalted in the Lord; my mouth is enlarged over my enemies, because I rejoice in your salvation. There is none holy like the Lord; for there is none beside you, neither is there any rock like our God. Talk no more so exceeding proudly; let not arrogancy come out of your mouth; for the Lord is a God of knowledge, and by Him actions are weighed. The bows of the mighty men are broken, and they that stumbled are girded with strength. They who were full have hired out themselves for bread; and they who were hungry no longer hungered; so that the barren has born seven; and she who has many children has become feeble. The Lord kills and makes alive; he brings down to the grave and brings up. The Lord makes poor and makes rich; he brings low and lifts up. He raises the poor out of the dust, and lifts up the beggar from the dunghill, to set them among princes, and to make them inherit the throne of glory; for the pillars of the earth are the Lord’s, and he has set the world upon them. He will keep the feet of his saints, and the wicked shall be silent in darkness; for by strength shall no man prevail. The adversaries of the Lord shall be broken to pieces; out of heaven He shall thunder upon them. The Lord shall judge the ends of the earth; and He shall give strength to his king, and exalt the horn of His anointed.

“And Elkanah went to Ramah to his house. And the child did minister to the Lord before Eli, the priest.’

Samuel was raised among the priests, where he learned much about God. Then God used him in a mighty way. He became a great prophet, one of the greatest in Israel.

The words that Hannah spoke in thanksgiving to God for His gift of Samuel are significant beyond her time: ‘The bows of the mighty men are broken, and they that stumbled are girded with strength.’ The message: God humbles the proud and lifts up the humble.

Hannah was a prophet herself. She foretold in the Old Testament another woman’s prayer, far into the future, in the New Testament. This other woman’s name was Mary. Hannah’s words are echoed in Mary’s ‘Magnificat’ in Chapter 1 of Luke’s Gospel, which she spoke after learning that she was to give birth to our Lord Jesus Christ:

“’And Mary said, My soul magnifies the Lord, and my spirit has rejoiced in God my Savior. For he has regarded the low estate of his handmaiden, for, behold, from henceforth all generations shall call me blessed. For he that is mighty has done to me great things; and holy is his name. And his mercy is on them that fear him from generation to generation. He has shown strength with his arm; he has scattered the proud in the imagination of their hearts. He has put down the mighty from their seats, and exalted them of low degree. He has filled the hungry with good things; and the rich he has sent empty away. He has helped his servant, Israel, in remembrance of his mercy; as he spoke to our fathers, to Abraham, and to his seed forever.’

We can glean something from this. The Old Testament is very important in that it introduces to us the things about God that He describes more fully in the New Testament. Just about everything that Jesus said and did when He came in the flesh was done before in the Old Testament by people of faith who were willing to be directed by the Holy Spirit. The same is true of those who were the closest to Him, like Mary.

We also can learn something else from this. God is our maker, and He loves each of us with a very great passion. But He doesn’t like it when we puff ourselves up as important, or when we get upset with ourselves because we don’t always win. He made us how He wanted to make us. Perhaps we should think less about how God should make us as perfect as possible and more about how we can be used by God and for His purpose the best that we can with what He has given to us to use.

THE MIGDAL EDAR STORY

 

During one Christmas season our pastor gave his Church a special treat. He began reading the familiar Christmas story from Luke 2:7:

“And she brought forth her first-born son, and wrapped him in swaddling clothes, and laid him in a manger, because there was no room for them in the inn.”

Pastor looked up at us and said, “How sad that man couldn’t find a more appropriate place for the Son of God to be born. Plan B it was, then,” which echoed our own thoughts. But then, smiling, he continued at Luke 2:8:

“And there were in the same country shepherds abiding in the field, keeping watch over their flock by night. And, lo, the angel of the Lord came upon them, and the glory of the Lord shone round about them: and they were sore afraid. And the angel said to them, Fear not; for, behold, I bring you good tidings of great joy, which shall be to all people. For unto you is born this day in the city of David a Savior, which is Christ the Lord. And this shall be a sign to you: You shall find the babe wrapped in swaddling clothes, lying in a manger.”

As our pastor recited this oft-told story, I formed my own familiar mental imagery: a large grassy field with flocks of sheep mixed with cattle, and the barn where Mary, Joseph and Jesus dwelt surrounded by the usual barnyard animals: cows, donkeys and, yes, perhaps a sheep or two. My mind drifted into a contemplation of the poverty surrounding Jesus’ birth. Of course the setting was appropriate, given the humble character of Jesus’ sojourn in the flesh. But being born in a manger certainly couldn’t have been plan A for Joseph’s family.

But then our pastor embellished on the story. It wasn’t well known, he said, that the region near Bethlehem where Jesus was born was a rather special place. He quoted another familiar passage, the prophecy in Micah 5:2 foretelling of Jesus’ birth in Bethlehem:

“But you, Bethlehem Ephrathah, though you be little among the thousands of Judah, yet out of you shall he come forth unto me that is to be ruler in Israel; whose goings forth have been from of old, from everlasting.”

Pastor didn’t stop there. He went on to read another passage out of Micah, verse 4:8, which is much less well-known:

“And you O watchtower of the flock [Migdal Edar], the strong hold of the daughter of Zion, unto you shall it come, even the first dominion; the kingdom shall come to the daughter of Jerusalem.

Before commenting further on the function of Migdal Edar, pastor took us back to Genesis 35:19-21:

“And Rachel died, and was buried in the way to Ephrath, which is Bethlehem. And Jacob set a pillar upon her grave: that is the pillar of Rachel’s grave to this day. And Israel journeyed, and spread his tent beyond the tower of Edar.”

Pastor put his Bible aside and looked at his congregation as if he had something momentous to tell us. And well he did. Finding his voice, he said that the region where Jesus was born was under the watchtower of the flock, a special lookout of the shepherds there because of the importance of that particular place. It was, he said with emotion, the place where lambs were born and raised for the Passover sacrifice. The manger of Jesus’ birth was, in fact, the birthing place for these special lambs, so maybe while it didn’t represent plan A for Joseph, it certainly did for God.

Pastor topped off that shocking disclosure by saying that, according to the Passover account in Exodus 12, the lambs had to be perfect in every way. When birthed, they tended to struggle some, putting themselves at risk to injury. There was a procedure in place to prevent this: upon their birth, these lambs were wrapped in swaddling clothes.

I was so enthusiastic about this revelation that I attempted to share it with other Christians, some of whom were rather cynical about it. It seemed that if this were to be true, they already would have known about it. Faced with that negativity, I pursued the topic on my own on the Internet, where I found a wealth of commentary regarding it, all of which was positive and some of which furnished excellent justification for accepting it as truth. I recommend the interested reader to do the same, simply by Googling “Migdal Edar”, or, alternatively, “Migdal Eder”.

RESTORATION OF THE LAND

 

When God gave his everlasting covenant of land to Abraham, as first described in Genesis 15:18 and later reaffirmed to Isaac and still later to Jacob, it amounted to the only land grant that ever came from God Himself. But the promise extended beyond mere land: the land was to be filled with the riches of life. Much later, when God appeared to Moses out of the burning bush, He spoke again about that land, as described in Exodus 3:7 and 8:

“And the Lord said, I have surely seen the affliction of my people who are in Egypt, and have heard their cry by reason of their taskmasters; for I know their sorrows; and I am come down to deliver them out of the hand of the Egyptians, and to bring them up out of that land to a large and good land, to a land flowing with milk and honey; to the place of the Canaanites, and the Hittites, and the Amorites, and the Perizzites, and the Hivites and the Jebusites.”

After the Fifteenth Roman Legion under the command of General Titus destroyed the Jewish temple in 70 A.D., much of the land fell into disuse. Moreover, there came an extended period of drought that transformed many of the lush regions into barren wastelands.

That was the environment that greeted the first modern settlers out of the Zionist movement of the nineteenth century as they trickled back into their old homeland. They formed kibbutzim, farming communities wherein they struggled to restore small areas back to life, hoping for the restoration of the land that God Himself promised them in Joel 3:18:

“And it shall come to pass, in that day, that the mountains shall drop down new wine, and the hills shall flow with milk, and all the rivers of Judah shall flow with waters, and a fountain shall come forth from the house of the Lord, and shall water the valley of Shittim.”

That promise of Joel’s is not yet fulfilled in every detail. But it has been realized to an amazing extent. God Himself had a big hand in the land’s restoration, for when the Israelites came back to the land, the centuries-long drought came to an end. After 1800 years, from the first century to the twentieth, it began to rain again. The heaviest rainfall to date came in 1948, when Israel was restored as a nation, and in 1967, when Israel reclaimed Jerusalem. Adding to the rainfall, the Israelis have created a vast irrigation system, restoring much of what once was wasteland into extremely productive farms. The country now is a major exporter of food and flowers to Europe, and is considered a world leader in the production of milk. Its cows produce more milk per year than cows in America and Europe.

Recognizing the promise of Ezekiel 36:4-8, the settlers began to plant trees with a fervor.

“Therefore, you mountains of Israel, hear the word of the Lord God, Thus says the Lord God to the mountains, and to the hills, to the rivers, and to the valleys, to the desolate wastes, and to the cities that are forsaken, which became a prey and derision to the residue of the nations that are round about; therefore, thus says the Lord God: Surely in the fire of my jealousy have I spoken against the residue of the nations, and against all Edom, who have appointed my land into their possession with the joy of all their heart, with despiteful minds, to cast it out for a prey. Prophecy, therefore, concerning the land of Israel, and say to the mountains, and to the hills, to the rivers, and to the valleys, Thus says the Lord God: Behold, I have spoken in my jealousy and in my fury, because you have borne the shame of the nations; therefore, thus says the Lord god: I have lifted up my hand. Surely the nations that are about you, they shall bear their shame.

“But you, O mountains of Israel, you shall shoot forth your branches, and yield your fruit to my people of Israel, for they are soon to come home.”

Israel now boasts two hundred million trees. Thousands of acres are devoted to date palms, the ancient source of honey production from bees. Each tree is highly productive, yielding over three hundred pounds of dates per year. Over ten thousand tons of dates are exported each year.

Scripture links the fig tree to the nation of Israel. In His Olivet Discourse (Matthew 24), Jesus tells His followers to watch for the budding of the fig tree as a sign that the end of the age is very close. Many Christians consider the budding of the fig tree as a metaphor for either the reestablishment of Israel as a nation in 1948 or the retaking of Jerusalem in 1967. But there is a natural element as well to Jesus’ assertion: fig production in modern Israel amounts to five thousand tons – not a huge amount, but not insignificant, either, and growing.

Orchards of olive trees occupy eighty thousand acres in Israel. Olives and olive oil are major export items.

In Ezekiel 36:29, 30, 34 and 35, God promises to make the land productive again:

“I will also save you from all your uncleanness, and I will call for the grain, and will increase it, and lay no famine upon you. . . And the desolate land shall be tilled, whereas it lay desolate in the sight of all that passed by. And they shall say, This land that was desolate is become like the garden of Eden, and the waste and desolate and ruined cities are become fortified, and are inhabited.”

As of 2013, Israel grew 95% of its own food and exported $2.4 billion in food to other countries.

Now there’s talk of oil. Surely there’s incentive here, with all of Israel’s modern riches, for Russia to come into the land to take a spoil, as foretold in Ezekiel 38. Nevertheless, as noted by evangelist David Reagan, the burning bush from which God spoke to Moses was itself prophetic of the indestructibility of the Jewish people in the face of the flames of hatred and violence against them.

ISRAEL’S CAPTIVITIES AND DISPERSIONS

 

Moses foretold in Deuteronomy 28 two separate instances where Israel would be removed from her land as punishment for willful, prolonged disobedience to God’s commandments, particularly for turning away from Abraham’s God to the false gods of other nations. The first instance is highlighted in two parts: Deuteronomy 28:32-34 and Deuteronomy 28:36.

According to Deuteronomy 28:32-34,

“Your sons and your daughters shall be given unto another people, and your eyes shall look, and fail with longing for them all the day long: and there shall be no might in your hand. The fruit of your land, and all your labors, shall a nation which you know not eat up; and you shall be only oppressed and crushed always: so that you shall be mad for the sight of your eyes which you shall see.”

Quoting next from Deuteronomy 28:36,

“The Lord shall bring you, and your king which you shall set over yourselves, to a nation which neither you nor your fathers have known; and there shall you serve other gods, wood and stone.”

The second instance, which is highlighted in Deuteronomy 28:64-67, is more severe and lengthy, wherein the Jews are to be scattered among all the nations of the earth:

“And the Lord shall scatter you among all people, from the one end of the earth, even to the other; and there you shall serve other gods, which neither you nor your fathers have known, even wood and stone. And among these nations shall you find no ease, neither shall the sole of your foot have rest: but the Lord shall give you there a trembling heart, and failing of eyes, and sorrow of mind: and your life shall hang in doubt before you; and you shall fear day and night, and shall have none assurance of your life: in the morning you shall say, Would God it were evening! And at evening you shall say, Would God it were morning! For the fear of your heart wherewith you shall fear, and for the sight of your eyes which you shall see.”

The prophecies do not end here. In Deuteronomy Chapter 30, God shows His mercy toward Israel with the promise that they will not remain scattered among the nations. Instead, they eventually will be regathered and returned to their land.

The first instance of Israel’s removal from her land is in two parts because following the reign of Solomon around 950 B.C., Israel broke up into two separate kingdoms (1 Kings 12) wherein Israel (later known as Samaria) consisted of the northern ten tribes and Judah consisted of southern two tribes of Judah and Benjamin. Each of these kingdoms suffered defeat at separate times. The northern kingdom of Samaria was overthrown by the Assyrians under Shalmaneser around 730 B.C. (2 Kings 17 and 18). A few years later Shalmaneser’s son Sennacherib attempted to besiege Judah also (2 Kings 18-20) but his troops were wiped out by an odd natural catastrophe; Sennacherib’s attempt simply didn’t conform to the Lord’s timing. Judah would still be subject to the reign of good kings among the bad who would remain somewhat loyal to Abraham’s God. The kingdom of Judah was later taken captive by Nebudchadnezzar around 605 B.C., a little more than a hundred years after the fall of Samaria. The Books of 1 and 2 Kings are replete with the sordid details of this first falling away from God of Samaria and Judah following the reigns of David and his son Solomon.

As foretold by the prophet Jeremiah in Jeremiah 25:12, the captivity of Judah lasted for seventy years until 535 B.C. Samaria didn’t fare so well, as the people of the northern kingdom who remained behind after Assyria relocated a large group of Israelites, as noted in 2 Kings 17:6, were forced to intermarry, thus diluting and confusing their Hebrew bloodline. It was for that reason that, at the time of Jesus, the Jews looked down upon the Samaritans, having little to do with them. Most interestingly, the tribe of Judah was not subjected to this forced intermarriage, thus preserving the bloodline to Jesus.

Another interesting side issue is the nature of the blast that killed 185,000 of Sennacherib’s troops during his attempt to besiege Jerusalem. At the time of the blast the sun moved about ten degrees, indicating a planetwide catastrophe so enormous as to alter the rotation of the earth. Immanuel Velikovsky (Worlds in Collision, 1950 and Earth in Upheaval, 1955) and others have surmised that the cause of this disaster was a near collision of the earth with a planet-sized mass, probably Mars. He thought that it was this same event that evoked Homer’s Iliad (possibly an eyewitness account rather than myth) and reinforced the gentile practice of associating planets with gods. Recently-acquired data regarding the devastation of Mars, as well as the discovery in the Antarctic continent of meteorite ALH84001 that originated in Mars, the juvenile Argon-36 in the Martian atmosphere, and the synchronous kinematic features between Earth and Mars tend to support this hypothesis.

Two important events accompanied the end of the first captivity of the Israelites. The first of these was the proclamation of Cyrus, king of Persia around 535 B.C. under which a number of Israelites under Ezra were permitted to return to Jerusalem for the purpose of rebuilding the temple there. This event is recorded in the Book of Ezra.

Another interesting side point is that the prophet Isaiah (Isaiah 44:28, 45:1) over 150 years earlier had called Cyrus by name as God’s servant in association with the rebuilding of the temple.

The second event associated with the end of the Israelites’ captivity was the decree by the Persian King Artaxerxes Longimanus allowing the Israelites under Nehemiah to return to Jerusalem to rebuild the city itself. This decree was issued in 445 B.C. and is the same decree predicted by the Prophet Daniel (Daniel 9:25) that was to initiate the countdown to the coming of Messiah after 69 weeks of (prophetic) years. Jesus made his triumphal entry into Jerusalem 173,880 days later, 69 weeks from the decree to the very day.

The second instance of the removal of Israel from her land occurred was also foretold by Jesus in Matthew 24:2 and occurred in 70 A.D., about 37 years after Jesus’ crucifixion and resurrection. The destruction was led by the Roman General Titus, but was accomplished with the use of soldiers recruited locally, which were presumably of Arab stock. The event indeed left not one stone upon another because of the soldiers’ furious scramble for the gold within, melted by the burning of the temple and which spilled into the cracks between the stones.

This time the dispersion of the Jews, called the Great Diaspora, was worldwide. But it, too, ended as foretold by Ezekiel (Ezekiel 36 and 37) as well as Moses (Deuteronomy 30) some eighteen centuries later with the creation of the state of Israel on May 15, 1948. This date also was foretold by both Hosea and Ezekiel, as was detailed in Volume 2, Chapter 5 of this book, entitled Ezekiel’s Prophecy of Israel’s Return.

SQUANTO – A THANKSGIVING STORY

 

When the Pilgrims left Holland aboard the Mayflower, heading toward the Atlantic coast of America in search of religious freedom, they embarked on a sea voyage marked by danger, misfortune, disappointment and a continuous struggle for survival. Forced to leave sister ship Speedwell behind with its much-needed provisions and burdened with the Speedwell’s passengers in addition to their own, they faced alone the North Atlantic, famous for its awful winter weather and mountainous seas. By the time they reached their destination of Plymouth, situated on the northwest edge of Cape Cod south of Boston in what is now the State of Massachusetts, they were already enfeebled by the rigors of the voyage and short of life-sustaining provisions. The date of their arrival was November 21, 1620 – the middle of a harsh, frigid Northeast winter.

Knowing nothing of the hunting and farming techniques that enabled the natives of this new land to survive, and constructing shelters inadequate to the task of staving off the constant, biting cold, they quickly began to fall sick and die of exposure, compounded by their near-starvation. Yet throughout this ordeal they remained faithful and warm-hearted to their Christian God.

The death rate from scurvy and pneumonia climbed from one to two, and then to three every day. By the middle of the next spring, thirteen of eighteen wives had died; only three families survived without suffering a dead member. Nearly half of their number had died. Yet their faith and love of God failed to be shaken. Nevertheless, as they welcomed the return of Spring, they also knew that they remained on the very edge of survival, a dark understanding thrust into their cold and hungry faces by their inability to obtain food from this strange new land. They prayed fervently to God for His aid.

Unknown to them, God had set in motion their rescue fifteen years before.

Another person had arrived near their colony just six months before the Pilgrims had arrived. He was a Native American named Tisquantum, or Squanto for short. He was a member of the Patuxet tribe, known for its savage, deadly hatred of whites for the abuses the tribe had suffered at the hands of earlier Englishmen who had come to fish these shores. Fifteen years had passed since Squanto had last seen his relatives. He was taken from them in 1605 when he had been abducted and carried off to Europe.

Accounts differ as to what happened to Squanto after his arrival in Europe. One story has him arriving in England, learning the language, and returning to New England, only to be abducted again and carried back off to Europe, this time to Malaga, Spain. There he was bought at a slave auction by kindly monks, who taught him their language and about their Christian God. Later, he went by ship to London, where he was able to obtain passage a second time to New England. Another story has him first being carried off to Malaga and being taken in directly by the monks. Several years thereafter, he managed to get to London, from where he sailed back to New England.

Whatever the version, Squanto arrived back in New England after a lengthy absence just before the arrival of the Pilgrims and equipped with a love of God and a fluent understanding of the English language.

When he came back to his Patuxet home, he was devastated to see that the village no longer existed. It had been wiped out four years earlier by a vicious disease that had claimed the lives of everyone in the village. But he had come back with a friend, an Algonquin chief from Maine. Samoset, ever the wanderer, had a fondness for travel and was given to hitching rides on the ships of Englishmen whom he’d befriended.

Squanto lived alone with his grief for a time, but when the Europeans arrived, Samoset decided to visit them. It was mid-March, and Samoset saw how bad their lot was. Walking into the poverty-stricken village, his first word to them was “Welcome!” His next words were “Have you any beer?” The Pilgrims gaped open-mouthed in astonishment over his command of their language.

The next week he dragged Squanto back with him in an attempt to get him out of his funk. Perhaps at that point he may have recalled the Spanish monks’ words of comfort to him over the pain and abuses he had suffered at the hands of Europeans. As he had questioned the motive of a God who would have let him be kidnapped, they had reassured him that God loved him and knew all the trials Squanto had been subjected to. They promised that if Squanto trusted in Him, God would use his suffering in ways beyond his imagination.

Like the Biblical Joseph, who had emerged from his own undeserved suffering to become through the Hand of God the second most powerful man in Egypt that he might save those who had wrongfully mistreated him, Squanto saw an opportunity in the Pilgrims’ squalor. Adopting them as his own family, he set about to teach them how to survive in America.

Under Squanto’s tutelage, the Pilgrims emerged from want to abundance. That fall they held a feast in thanksgiving to God for blessing them, including the valuable things that Squanto taught them as the living answer to their prayers. They invited the local tribes to join them, and the Native Americans joined in with the transplanted Europeans in praising God for His benevolent love.

PERPETUA

 

I’d often wondered where the unusual and strikingly noble name of Perpetua originated. There is a promontory on the Oregon Coast that first brought the name to my attention. The only other time I’ve seen it is in John Foxe’s Christian Martyrs of the World. I’d very much like to think that it was this Perpetua, born around 181 A.D. and who lived in Carthage in the Roman province of Africa, who inspired the name of that beautiful Oregon cape.

Perpetua suffered under the persecution which began in A.D. 200. According to Foxe, this was the fifth of ten persecutions foretold by Jesus in His message to the Church at Smyrna, Revelation 2:8-11:

“And unto the angel of the church in Smyrna write: These things say the first and the last, who was dead, and is alive. I know your works, and tribulation, and poverty (but you are rich); and I know the blasphemy of them who say they are Jews, and are not, but are of the synagogue of Satan. Fear none of those things which you shall suffer. Behold, the devil shall cast some of you into prison, that you may be tried, and you shall have tribulation ten days; be you faithful unto death, and I will give you a crown of life. He who has an ear, let him hear what the Spirit says to the churches: he who overcomes shall not be hurt of the second death.”

The Church at Smyrna was the second of the seven Churches addressed by Jesus in Revelation Chapters 2 and 3. Of these Churches, Smyrna and Philadelphia were the only two for which Jesus had nothing negative to say. It has been broadly recognized as the persecuted Church. According to Foxe and other theologians the ten ‘days’ spoken of by Jesus were ten periods of overt, usually intense persecution. Foxe listed them all in his book, which is considered to be one of the three greatest Christian works outside the Bible ever written. The following is his entry regarding Perpetua:

“During the reign of Severus, the Christians had several years of rest and could worship God without fear of punishment. But after a time, the hatred of the ignorant mob again prevailed, and the old laws were remembered and put in force against them. Fire, sword, wild beasts, and imprisonment were resorted to again, and even the dead bodies of Christians were stolen from their graves and mutilated. Yet the faithful continued to multiply. Tertullian, who lived at this time, said that if the Christians had all gone away from the Roman territories, the empire would have been greatly weakened.

“By now, the persecutions had extended to northern Africa, which was a Roman province, and many were murdered in that area. One of these was Perpetua, a married lady twenty-six years old with a baby at her breast. On being taken before the proconsul Minutius, Perpetua was commanded to sacrifice to the idols. Refusing to do so, she was put in a dark dungeon and deprived of her child, but two of her keepers, Tertius and Pomponius, allowed her out in the fresh air several hours a day, during which time she was allowed to nurse her child.

“Finally the Christians were summoned to appear before the judge and urged to deny their Lord, but all remained firm. When Perpetua’s turn came, her father suddenly appeared, carrying her infant in his arms, and begged her to save her own life for the sake of her child. Even the judge seemed to be moved. ‘Spare the gray hairs of your father,’ he said. ‘Spare your child. Offer sacrifice for the welfare of the emperor.’

“Perpetua answered, ‘I will not sacrifice.’

“’Are you a Christian?’ demanded Hilarianus, the judge.

“’I am a Christian,’ was her answer.

“Perpetua and all the other Christians tried with her that day were ordered killed by wild beasts as a show for the crowd on the next holiday. They entered the place of execution clad in the simplest of robes, Perpetua singing a hymn of triumph. The men were to be torn to pieces by leopards and bears. Perpetua and a young woman named Felicitas were hung up in nets, at first naked, but the crowd demanded that they should be allowed their clothing.

“When they were again returned to the arena, a bull was let loose on them. Felicitas fell, seriously wounded. Perpetua was tossed, her loose robe torn and her hair falling loose, but she hastened to the side of the dying Felicitas and gently raised her from the ground. When the bull refused to attack them again, they were dragged out of the arena, to the disappointment of the crowd, which wanted to see their deaths. Finally brought back in to be killed by gladiators, Perpetua was assigned to a trembling young man who stabbed her weakly several times, not being used to such scenes of violence. When she saw how upset the young man was, Perpetua guided his sword to a vital area and died.”

Additional material on Perpetua can be found on the Internet by Googling “Perpetua”. The Wikipedia entry differs in some minor details from Foxe’s, but also adds some useful information. Perpetua, for example, is identified there as of noble heritage. Felicitas (Felicity), was supposedly her slave. The Catholic Church has canonized her, along with Felicity, as a saint. Her feast day is March 7, the date of her execution.

The perceived nobility of her name has a factual basis in the circumstance of her birth. But her high birth is of little consequence compared to the nobility of her faith and the beautiful manner in which she chose to exercise it. In her nobility, Perpetua reflected that same quality of Jesus’ character.

PAUL

 

Perhaps, when Paul, known as Saul, was so down on Christians, he had an attitude toward God much like what the nominal Christian has today. Possibly, governed by what he had learned about God through the Jewish religion of the day, he saw God as rather remote, even alien, His attribute of transcendent majesty may have taken front place over any alternative understanding.

Paul in his unregenerate state was, in the words of modern conservatives, a defender of the faith. Zealous in his protection of God from the intruding Christian faith, he managed through this very devotion to see in himself a man worthy of the favor of God and the ultimate prize, heaven.

In his amazing transformation on the road to Damascus as described in Acts 9, Paul must have received from Jesus some profound insights into the real nature of God. Only an enormous shift in understanding could have led him to follow Jesus in such humble adoration thereafter. There is some evidence in Scripture that Paul was given an incredibly detailed picture of God that went way beyond what he had learned at the hands of men. It is generally accepted that when Paul spoke of a man who went to heaven in 2 Corinthians 12:2-4, he was speaking of himself, probably during the time after Jesus had approached him that he was temporarily blinded:

“I knew a man in Christ above fourteen years ago (whether in the body, I cannot tell; or whether out of the body, I cannot tell: God knows) – such a one caught up to the third heaven. And I knew such a man (whether in the body or out of the body, I cannot tell: God knows) – How he was caught up into paradise and heard unspeakable words, which it is not lawful for a man to utter.”

The most prominent feature of the Godhead must have changed in Paul’s mind and heart from magnificence to valor. What else could have led him to dote upon his baby Church so lovingly, and to willingly endure such trials as Jesus had promised him when He appeared to him on that road, becoming perhaps the greatest Christian outside of Jesus who ever lived?

“And Saul, yet breathing out threatenings and slaughter against the disciples of the Lord, went to the high priest, and desired of him letters to Damascus to the synagogues, that if he found any of this way, whether they were men or women, he might bring them under arrest to Jerusalem. And as he journeyed, he came near Damascus, and suddenly there shone round about him a light from heaven; and he fell to the earth, and heard a voice saying to him, Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me? And he said, Who are you, Lord? And the Lord said, I am Jesus, whom you persecute; it is hard to you to kick against the goads. And he, trembling and astonished, said, Lord what will you have me to do? And the Lord said to him, Arise and go into the city, and it shall be told you there what you must do. And the men who journeyed with him stood speechless, hearing a voice, but seeing no man.

“And Saul arose from the earth, and when his eyes were opened, he saw no man; but they led him by the hand, and brought him into Damascus. And he was three days without sight, and neither did eat nor drink. And there was a certain disciple at Damascus, named Ananias; and to him said the Lord in a vision, Ananias. And he said, behold, I am here, Lord. And the Lord said to him, Arise, and go into the street which is called Straight, and inquire in the house of Judas for one called Saul of Tarsus; for, behold, he is praying, and has seen in a vision a man, named Ananias, coming in and putting his hand on him, that he might receive his sight. Then Ananias answered, Lord, I have heard by many of this man, how much evil he has done to your saints at Jerusalem; and here he has authority from the chief priests to bind all that call on your name.

“But the Lord said to him, Go your way; for he is a chosen vessel to me, to bear my name before the Gentiles, and kings, and the children of Israel; for I will show him how great things he must suffer for my name’s sake.”

Paul did suffer, and willingly, for a God whom he truly loved with all his heart. As he recalled in 2 Corinthians 11:22-31:

“Are they Hebrews? So am I. Are they Israelites? So am I. Are they the seed of Abraham? So am I. Are they ministers of Christ? (I speak as a fool) I am more; in labors more abundant, in stripes above measure, in prisons more frequently, in deaths often. Of the Jews five times I received forty stripes, save one. Thrice I was beaten with rods, once I was stoned, thrice I suffered shipwreck, a night and a day I have been in the deep; in journeyings often, in perils of waters, in perils of robbers, in perils by my own countrymen, in perils by the Gentiles, in perils in the city, in perils in the wilderness, in perils in the sea, in perils among false brethren; in weariness and painfulness, in watchings often, in fastings often, in cold and nakedness. Beside those things that are without, that which comes upon me daily, the care of all the churches. Who is weak, and I am not weak? Who is offended, and I am not indignant? If I must needs glory I will glory in the things which concern my infirmities. The God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who is blessed for evermore, knows that I lie not.”

FAMILY

 

The beauty of complementary otherness within the Godhead shines forth in its ideal representation of family. I attempted to capture the essence of that beauty in my novel Buddy, where in Chapter 20 I repeated a blog that I had posted on my site friendofthefamily.wordpress.com entitled The Marriage of God with God. Excerpts are presented below.

“In previous postings I have raised the question of why God’s Trinitarian nature, a facet of Him that is accepted without question by mainstream Christianity, is so vaguely defined in Scripture. I also raised a companion question as to why, in the face of this apparently feeble portrayal of the Trinity, both Moses and Jesus declared with passion the oneness of God. I then presented the obvious answer, which was that the loving union of male and complementary female produces unity from multiplicity, a unity that continues with the fruit of the union. In this context and only in it, the description of the Trinity in Scripture isn’t feeble at all; it’s quite strong. Given that basic understanding, the wonderful truth about the Holy Trinity is expressed openly throughout Scripture beginning in Genesis 2:23 and 24:

“’And Adam said, This is now bone of my bones, and flesh of my flesh: she shall be called Woman, because she was taken out of man.

“’Therefore shall a man leave his father and his mother, and shall cleave to his wife, and they shall be one flesh.’”

“To the above I add the following:

“God Himself through Scripture has provided man with certain specific images of His nature by which He apparently wishes us to understand and appreciate Him. First among these is His ability to give and to receive love. Fundamental to the exercise of that ability is the family structure, within which we have the ability to intuitively understand a corresponding relationship among the Members of the Godhead itself as well as of the relationship between God and mankind. The family is the singular means within our comprehension by which separate individuals may become component elements of a greater whole, a oneness in love that both transcends the individual person and extends his own significance.

“As the communication and functional harmony within the family approach the highest ideal of which humans are capable, in the setting of selfless love at an equally ideal level, the individuality of its component members blurs. All become subordinate to but vital elements of the greater entity called family, which itself takes on a life of its own. If the love, communication and harmony within this entity are perfect, an impossibility with mankind but perhaps a defining quality for God, one would expect a spiritual unity and mutual identification so complete that the component members could no longer rightly be thought of as separate individuals. The divine Family, in which the various Members would identify perfectly with each other as if the individual boundaries did not exist, would have its own unique identity and life.

“God, in this context, is truly one God.”

Given the family nature of the Godhead, the commandment to love this God fervently becomes natural and effortless. Indeed, as I had commented in Part 2, Chapter 2 of Family of God, within our own families we see positive attributes of our own that arise from the family relationship.

“Under the extraordinary circumstances of disaster or war, a man might bond with his companions through the sharing of hardships and fear. In some cases, this bond may become so close that he will lay down his life for them. But the individual character and the conditions that might bring this about are so unique that medals are granted for altruism of this order. More typically, man is, at best, indifferent to the welfare of his neighbors and acquaintances. At his worst, he regularly places those with whom he is in contact at a disadvantage for his own profit, caring little about his victims’ consequent loss and discomfort. He lies, cheats, covets, and steals, doing these things with impunity under a pragmatic and often twisted legal system. He may do them with little sense of wrongdoing. Hidden behind the mask of a false face or the tinted glass of his automobile, he often indulges in nasty, mean-spirited thoughts: he hates; he is quick to take offense and visualize a bad end for the offender. In this manner he might, in his mind, break most of God’s commandments without hesitation during a simple drive from home to work.

“But there is a unique relationship in which that same individual will often behave in an altogether more altruistic manner. That relationship is with his family, his spouse and children. Historically, most people on earth have willingly belonged to this unit, exercising their responsibilities to it and taking pleasure and comfort from it. The individual intuitively understands and accepts the principle that while every member of the family unit deeply and permanently belongs to him, he also belongs to them in the same way. He accepts as natural the principle of sharing: of shared responsibilities, shared activities and recreation, shared possessions and, most importantly, shared intimacy. Within the impositions and limitations of the larger society to which he belongs, the individual will also usually accept as natural and beneficial that particular division of function and labor which will result in the most secure and orderly maintenance of the family unit. Beyond that, he will often behave as nobly as the heroic soldier in the protection of his family members from harm.”

In thinking of our Judeo-Christian God as a Divine Family as Scripture suggests, I gladly and without reservation worship Him with the fervor of the Great Commandment.

OTHERNESS

 

The various Christian creeds have a number of things in common, one of which is that while for the most part they conform well to the essence of Scripture, they are in fact extra-Scriptural. They make some statements that don’t quite match up with Bible teachings. In one major issue, in fact, they oppose the clear teaching of Scripture. This issue is time, or sequence.

In this issue of time, the Nicene Creed and others like it claim that Father, Son and Holy Spirit coexisted from eternity past. The implication is that they coexisted forever, or to state it in a firmer way, there was never an occasion where they didn’t exist apart from each other. But that implication runs against the grain of Genesis in general and Revelation 3:14 specifically, in which Jesus asserts that He is the beginning of creation. This assertion of Jesus is a claim that harmonizes with Genesis 1 and John’s Prologue, in which Jesus is the first light of the spoken Word.

Paul, speaking of Jesus in Colossians 1:15, echoes that assertion:

“Who is the image of the invisible God, the first-born of all creation;”

This issue is anything but trivial. As co-existing Entities, and either genderless or weakly-gendered as well, each Member of the Godhead in the eyes of the creeds is self-sufficient with regard to attributes, powers and commitment to the others, and fully God in a manner identical with the others. This perceived self-sufficiency creates a situation that profoundly opposes the intrinsic nature of God.

Scripture often speaks out against the sin of pride. Proverbs, for example, has much to say against pride, as exemplified in Proverbs 8:13, 11:2, 13:10, 14:3 and 16:18:

“The fear of the Lord is to hate evil; pride, and arrogance, and the evil way, and the perverse mouth, do I hate.”

“When pride comes, then comes shame; but with the lowly is wisdom.”

“Only by pride comes contention, but with the well-advised is wisdom.”

“In the mouth of the foolish is a rod of pride, but the lips of the wise shall preserve them.”

“Pride goes before destruction, and a haughty spirit before a fall.”

Despite the numerous instances in Scripture where God speaks out against the sin of pride, an eternally coexistent, individually self-sufficient Godhead renders it difficult for the Christian to understand and appreciate the unity in love implicit in Jesus’ Great Commandment, Mark 12:28-30, which echoed God’s Word through Moses in Deuteronomy 6:4 and 5:

“And one of the scribes came, and having heard them reasoning together, and perceiving that he had answered them well, asked him, Which is the first commandment of all? And Jesus answered him, The first of all the commandments is: Hear, O Israel: the Lord our God is one Lord; and you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind, and all your strength: this is the first commandment.”

In attempting to maximize the majestic attributes of God, the founders of the creeds minimized the attributes of God of most importance, their selflessness and humble nature. Earlier, in Mark 7:6-9, Jesus spoke out against teaching doctrines of men in the place of Scripture:

“[Jesus] answered and said to [the Pharisees], Well has Isaiah prophesied of you hypocrites, as it is written, This people honors me with their lips, but their heart is far from me. However, in vain do they worship me, teaching for doctrines the commandments of men. For laying aside the commandment of God, you hold the tradition of men, as the washing of pots and cups; and many other such things you do. And he said to them, Full well you reject the commandment of God, that you may keep your own tradition.”

Apparently not much was changed from the time of the Pharisees to the time that Christianity became legal and began taking over the affairs of men.

The problem of eternally co-existent, self-sufficient Members of the Godhead is that such an arrangement would support the narcissim of each Member. Moreover, that situation would tend to convey to Christians that same self-centered characteristic within the Godhead.

For that reason, otherness within the Godhead is an absolutely necessary feature. How much more representative of the tenor of Scripture to impute complementary otherness between Father and Holy Spirit, where they are strongly bound together by love, a love that bears fruit in Jesus Christ, their only-begotten Son!

COMPASSION

 

God often chided the Israelites for adhering to ritual worship while foregoing the far more important compassion and mercy embedded in the spirit of the law. In Proverbs 21:3, Isaiah 11:1-17 and Malachi 3:5, for a small sample, God speaks about this issue:

“To do righteousness and justice is more acceptable to the Lord than sacrifice.”

“To what purpose is the multitude of your sacrifices to me? Says the Lord; I am full of the burnt offerings of rams, and the fat of fed beasts, and I delight not in the blood of bullocks, or of lambs, or of he-goats. When you come to appear before me, who has required this at your hand, to tread my courts? Bring no more vain oblations; incense is an abomination to me; the new moons and Sabbaths, the calling of assemblies, I cannot bear; it is iniquity, even the solemn meeting. Your new moons and your appointed feasts my soul hates; they are a trouble to me, I am weary of bearing them. And when you spread forth your hands, I will hide my eyes from you; yea, when you make many prayers, I will not hear. Your hands are full of blood. Wash yourselves, make yourselves clean; but away the evil of your doings from before my eyes; cease to do evil. Learn to do well; seek justice, relieve the oppressed, judge the fatherless, plead for the widow.”

“And I will come near to you to judgment; and I will be a swift witness against the sorcerers, and against the adulterers, and against false swearers, and against those who oppress the hireling in his wages, and widow, and the fatherless, and that turn aside the stranger from his right, and fear not me, says the Lord of hosts.”

Jesus displayed His honor of compassion in His parable of the good Samaritan, recounted in Luke 10:30-37. He added further depth to the account by having the compassionate person a Samaritan, one who was looked down upon by the Jews, contrasting him with Jewish religious elites, who failed to follow the spirit of Jewish law.

“And Jesus, answering, said, A certain man went down from Jerusalem to Jericho, and fell among thieves, who stripped him of his clothing, and wounded him, and departed, leaving him half dead. And by chance there came down a certain priest that way; and when he saw him, he passed by on the other side. And likewise a Levite, when he was at the place, came and looked on him, and passed by on the other side.

“But a certain Samaritan, as he journeyed, came where he was; and when he saw him, he had compassion on him, and went to him, and bound up his wounds, pouring in oil and wine, and set him on his own beast, and brought him to an inn, and took care of him. And on the next day, when he departed, he took out ten dollars, and gave them to the host, and said to him, Take care of him; and whatever you spend above that, when I come again, I will repay you.

“Which, now, of these three, do you think was neighbor to him that fell among the thieves? And he said, He who showed mercy on him. Then said Jesus to him, Go, and do you likewise.”

Jesus, of course, honored mercy and compassion in His own doing as well as His speaking by offering His own body as a substitutionary atonement for the wrongdoings of a helpless human race. He also showed compassion in other ways, such as His mercy toward Peter, who had denied Him three times during His incarceration. In John 21, Jesus forgave Peter three times for that, and Peter went on from there not only to fulfill Jesus’ parting commandment to feed His sheep, but also to become a giant of a Christian in the process.

The account of Joseph in Genesis 37 through 45 is an early portrait of Jesus’ compassionate nature. It foretells in detail the tender love that Jesus showed, even toward those who hated Him.

“Then Joseph could not refrain himself before all them who stood by him; and he cried, Cause every man to go out from me. And there stood no man with him, while Joseph made himself known to his brethren. And he wept aloud: and the Egyptians and the house of Pharaoh heard. And Joseph said to his brethren, I am Joseph; does my father yet live? And his brethren could not answer him; for they were terrified at his presence. And Joseph said to his brethren, Come near to me, I ask you. And they came near. And he said, I am Joseph, your brother, whom you sold into Egypt.

“Now therefore be not grieved, nor angry with yourselves, that you sold me here; for God did send me before you to preserve life. For these two years has the famine been in the land: and yet there are five years, in which there shall neither be plowing nor harvest. And God sent me before you to preserve you a posterity in the earth, and to save your lives by a great deliverance. So now it was not you that sent me here, but God: and he has made me a father to Pharaoh, and lord of all his house, and a ruler throughout all the land of Egypt.”

But the account of Joseph involves more than this central character. Joseph’s revelation of himself before his brothers was triggered by another compassionate event that pointed to Jesus as well, the offer of Judah, Jesus’ forefather, to offer his substitutional enslavement in place of his youngest brother Benjamin, just as Jesus died in our place on the cross.

God’s focus on compassion often links it with selflessness. But there is another factor in compassion: in its concern for others, it involves love of pure selflessness.

SELFLESSNESS

 

In Israel’s confrontation with the Philistines, David demonstrated a selfless nobility that was highly pleasing to God. The account begins in 1 Samuel 17:1-14:

“Now the Philistines gathered together their armies to battle, and were gathered together at Socoh, which belonged to Judah, and encamped between Socoh and Azekah, in Ephesdammim. And Saul and the men of Israel were gathered together, and encamped by the valley of Elah, and set the battle in array against the Philistines. And the Philistines stood on a mountain on the one side, and Israel stood on a mountain on the other side, with a valley between them.

“And there went out a champion out of the camp of the Philistines, named Goliath, of Gath, whose height was almost ten feet. And he had a helmet of bronze upon his head, and he was armed with a coat of mail; and the weight of the coat was about one hundred pounds. And he had shin armor of bronze upon his legs, and carried a javelin of bronze between his shoulders. And the staff of his spear was like a weaver’s beam; and his spear’s head weighed ten pounds of iron: and one bearing a shield went before him. And he stood and cried to the armies of Israel, and said to them, Why are you come out to set your battle in array? Am not I a Philistine, and you servants to Saul? Choose you a man for you, and let him come down to me. If he be able to fight with me, and to kill me, then will we be your servants,; but if I prevail against him, and kill him, then shall you be our servants, and serve us. And the Philistine said, I defy the armies of Israel this day; give me a man, that we may fight together.

“When Saul and all Israel heard those words of the Philistine, they were dismayed, and greatly afraid.

“Now David was the son of that Ephrathite of Bethlehem-judah,whose name was Jesse, who had eight sons; and the man went among men as an old man in the days of Saul. And the three eldest sons of Jesse went and followed Saul to the battle; and the names of his three sons who went to the battle were Eliab, the first-born, and next to him, Abinadab, and the third, Shammah. And David was the youngest; and the three eldest followed Saul.”

David was kept back from the challenge because of his youth and size. Instead, he was told to tend the family sheep. In modern terms, it was like he was told to stay in the car. But at one point Jesse told David to take some food to his brothers at the battleground, where Goliath held forth for forty days mocking the fearful Israelites, none of whom wanted to do battle with the giant of Gath. While he was with his brothers, Goliath was indulging in trash-speak about the Israelites and their God, while the Israelites continued to cower. The account continues with Saul offering a reward to anyone brave enough to face Goliath. In 1 Samuel 17:26 David responds:

“And David spoke to the men who stood by him, saying, What shall be done for the man who kills this Philistine, and takes away the reproach from Israel? For who is this uncircumcised Philistine, that he should defy the armies of the living God?”

When Saul heard of David’s response, he sent for him, whereupon David volunteered to face the giant. When Saul told him that he was too inexperienced to go against Goliath, David told him about how, during his shepherding duties, he had killed a lion and a bear that had threatened his flock. The record continues as David addresses Saul and then takes to the field in verses 36-50:

‘Your servant slew both the lion and the bear; and this uncircumcised Philistine shall be as one of them, seeing he hath defied the armies of the living God. David said, moreover, The Lord who delivered me out of the paw of the lion, and out of the paw of the bear, he will deliver me out of the hand of this Philistine. And Saul said to David, Go, and the Lord be with you. And Saul armed David with his armor, and he put a helmet of bronze upon his head; also he armed him with a coat of mail. And David girded his sword upon his armor, and he attempted to go; for he had not tested it. And David said to Saul, I cannot go with these; for I have not tested them. And David put them off.

“And he took his staff in his hand, and chose five smooth stones out of the brook; and put them in a shepherd’s bag which he had, even in a wallet; and his sling was in his hand: and he drew near the Philistine. And the Philistine came on and drew near to David; and the man who bore the shield went before him. And when the Philistine looked about, and saw David, he disdained him; for he was but a youth, and ruddy, and of a fair countenance. And the Philistine said to David, Am I a dog, that you come to me with staves? And the Philistine cursed David by his gods. And the Philistine said to David, Come to me, and I will give your flesh to the fowls of the air, and to the beasts of the field.

“Then said David to the Philistine, You come to me with a sword, and with a spear, and with a shield; but I come to you in the name of the Lord of hosts, the God of the armies of Israel, whom you have defied. This day will the Lord deliver you into my hand; and I will smite you, and take your head from you; and I will give the carcasses of the host of the Philistines this day to the fowls of the air, and to the wild beasts of the earth, that all the earth may know that there is a God in Israel. And all this assembly shall know that the Lord saves not with sword and spear; for the battle is the Lord’s, and he will give you into our hands.

“And it came to pass, when the Philistine arose, and came and drew near to meet David, that David hastened, and ran toward the army to meet the Philistine. And David put his hand in his bag, and took from there a stone, and slung it, and smote the Philistine in his forehead, that the stone sank into his forehead; and he fell upon his face to the earth. So David prevailed over the Philistine with a sling and with a stone, and smote the Philistine, and slew him; but there was no sword in the hand of David.”

Some unbelievers are fond of pointing out what they think is a discrepancy in this account that renders it a fable, the mention of five stones when David only used one. Why five stones, they ask in contempt of the Word. The reason why David picked up five stones is because Goliath had four brothers. David was arming himself to do battle with all five.

In this account, David surely exercised his faith, and demonstrated an abundance of courage as well. But he did something else besides: he kept his eye on the Lord instead of himself, taking offense at the ease with which the Philistine denigrated his beloved God. In modern-day accounts of the recipients of the Congressional Medal of Honor for their valor on the field of battle, there continue to crop up the medals awarded posthumously to those who knew that they were to die in the process of saving others, but who did so willingly, their minds focused on their brothers’ peril rather than their own.

Jesus spoke in John 15:13 of this selfless nobility:

“Greater love has no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends.”

COURAGE

 

To fear the Lord is to understand His reality, and the greatness of His Being. That fear however, is tempered with a companion knowledge of His goodness, permitting that fear to banish from the mind the fear of anything else. According to Proverbs 1:7, it fosters wisdom.

“The fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge, but fools despise wisdom and instruction.”

Fear of the Lord supports courage. God treasures that quality of character, as exemplified in Joshua 1:5-9, where God speaks to Joshua as he replaces Moses as leader of the Israelites in their journey into the land promised to Abraham by God.

“There shall not any man be able to stand before you all the days of your life. As I was with Moses, so I will be with you; I will not fail you, nor forsake you. Be strong and of good courage; for unto this people shall you divide for an inheritance the land which I swore to their fathers to give them. Only be you strong and very courageous, that you may observe to do according to all the law, which Moses, my servant, commanded you; turn not from it to the right hand or to the left, that you may prosper wherever you go. This book of the law shall not depart out of your mouth, but you shall meditate therein day and night, that you may observe to do according to all that is written therein; for then you shall make your way prosperous, and then you shall have good success. Have not I commanded you? Be strong and of good courage; be not afraid, neither be you dismayed; for the Lord your God is with you wherever you go.”

Joshua of the tribe of Ephraim was given that position of leadership upon the passing of Moses because, through his faith in God, he stood with only Caleb of Judah in support of their entry into the Promised Land out of the twelve tribal representatives who went into the land to spy it out. When they returned from their venture, only Joshua and Caleb had the courage to recommend that they go into it and conquer it.

Two years into their wilderness wanderings, the Israelites stopped over at Kadesh-Barnea while the twelve tribal representatives went into the land of Canaan to spy out the produce and the people who inhabited it. They returned with news that the land was lush and productive, but the people there were giants. While Joshua and Caleb stood firm in their trust in God, the other ten were afraid and, weeping in abject terror, convinced the nation to hold back from entering the land. God did just that – He kept them in the wilderness for another thirty eight years, waiting for a full forty years from the exodus of the Israelites from Egypt, until the last of that generation died out save Joshua and Caleb. For his valor God awarded Caleb Hebron, the final resting place of the Patriarchs and their primary wives, and the location of David’s first throne. For the valor of Joshua, God awarded him leadership over Israel upon the death of Moses.

The journey of the Israelites from Egypt to Canaan was a real event; it also was a type of every Christian’s personal journey from sin to salvation and fellowship with God. Our individual journeys involve our development of character from the secular traits of self-service, avoidance of trouble, greed and indifference toward others to the more noble qualities set before Christians. This process of growth demands the heavy involvement of the Holy Spirit, but also asks of the individual personal courage and eventually results in the Christian’s own possession of valor.

Jesus Himself set the standard for courage. Knowing that He was God and understanding with excruciating clarity what lay ahead, yet for our sakes He submitted Himself to disgrace and great suffering. In the Garden of Gethsemane, according to Matthew 26:36-39, He revealed His knowledge of the horror to come upon Him.

“Then came Jesus with [His disciples] to a place called Gethsemane, and said to the disciples, Sit here, while I go and pray yonder. And he took with him Peter and the two sons of Zebedee, and began to be sorrowful and very depressed. Then he said to them, My Soul is exceedingly sorrowful, even to death; stay here, and watch with me. And he went a little further, and fell on his face, and prayed, saying, O my Father, if it is possible, let this cup pass from me; nevertheless, not as I will, but as you will.”

Faith and courage are very close in nature, but there is a subtle difference. Faith involves a willingness to believe, even in times of stress when it might be thought of as beneficial to give up that belief. Courage involves faith to the extent of casting out fear, but also requires the ability to do something unpleasant, of which the flesh protests.

Persecuted Christians everywhere must exercise courage to stand fast in their faith.

FAITH

 

Faith is the ability to understand that the God of Judeo-Christian Scripture truly exists, to want that God to exist, to the point that enough Scripture is read and digested to understand intuitively that God does, indeed, exist. Faith also accepts as real and welcome the work of the Holy Spirit, who indwells all believers. Moreover, faith involves the ability to appreciate that a better world exists, the spiritual one in which God plays such a vital and loving part. Faith includes the ability to value valor over wealth. Faith is explained in a noble manner in that great Hall of Faith chapter, Hebrews 11:

“Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen. For by it the elders received witness. Through faith we understand that the worlds were framed by the word of God, so that things which are seen were not made of things which do appear.

“By faith Abel offered to God a more excellent sacrifice than Cain, by which he obtained witness that he was righteous, God testifying of his gifts; and by it he being dead yet speaks. By faith Enoch was translated that he should not see death, and was not found, because God had translated him; for before his translation he had this testimony, that he pleased God.

“But without faith it is impossible to please him; for he who comes to God must believe that he is, and that he is a rewarder of those who diligently seek him.

“By faith Noah . . .By faith Abraham . . .By faith Isaac . . . By faith Jacob . . . By faith Joseph . . . By faith Moses . . .

“And what more shall I say? For the time would fail me to tell of Gideon, and of Barak, and of Samson, and of Jephthah; of David also, and Samuel, and of the prophets. Who, through faith, subdued kingdoms, wrought righteousness, obtained promises, stopped the mouths of lions, quenched the violence of fire, escaped the edge of the sword, out of weakness were made strong, became valiant in fight, turned to flight the armies of the aliens. Women received their dead raised to life again, and others were tortured, not accepting deliverance, that they might obtain a better resurrection: and others had trial of cruel mockings and scourgings, yea, moreover, of bonds and imprisonment; they were stoned, they were sawn asunder, were tested, were slain with the sword; they wandered about in sheepskins and goatskins; being destitute, afflicted, tormented (of whom the world was not worthy); they wandered in deserts, and in mountains, and in dens and caves of the earth.

“And these all, having received witness through faith, received not the promise, God having provided some better thing for us, that they without us should not be made perfect.”

Abel’s offering to God was more excellent than Cain’s because of his more noble understanding of what would be pleasing to God, which came from his greater faith. Even back then, Abel understood that God Himself would have to die sacrificially in the place of fallen and helpless mankind to bring him back into fellowship with God. He knew that and sacrificed an animal, one of God’s creations, in honor of that future event, long before Abraham attempted to sacrifice Isaac and Moses instituted the Passover in commemoration of that same great sacrifice that Jesus made.

Cain failed to understand that same helplessness of man; he thought that he could please God through the fruit of his own labors. There are sects that attempt to do that today: storm the gates of heaven through their own efforts.

Enoch pleased God through his faith. His translation from Earth into Heaven without death was equivalent to what we look forward to today: the rapture of the Church, as described by Paul in 1 Corinthians 15:51-57 and 1 Thessalonians 4:13-18:

“Behold, I show you a mystery: we shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed, in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trump; for the trumpet shall sound, and the dead shall be raised incorruptible, and we shall be changed. For this corruptible must put on incorruption, and this mortal must put on immortality. So, when this corruptible shall have put on incorruption, and this mortal shall put on immortality, then shall be brought to pass the saying that is written, Death is swallowed up in victory. O death, where is your sting? O grave, where is your victory? The sting of death is sin; and the strength of sin is the law. But thanks be to God, who gives us the victory though our Lord Jesus Christ.”

“But I would not have you ignorant, brethren, concerning them who are asleep, that you sorrow not, even as others who have no hope. For if we believe that Jesus died and rose again, even so them also who sleep in Jesus God will bring with him. For this we say to you by the word of the Lord, that we who are alive and remain to the coming of the Lord shall not precede them who are asleep. For the Lord Himself shall descend from heaven with a shout, with the voice of the archangel, and with the trump of God; and the dead in Christ shall rise first; then we who are alive and remain shall be caught up together with them in the clouds, to meet the Lord in the air; and so shall we ever be with the Lord. Wherefore, comfort one another with these words.”

Jesus Himself stressed the importance of faith, often attributing the faith of those whom He healed to their restoration. In Luke 18:42, Jesus heals a man, and then tells him that he was saved through his faith:

“And Jesus said to him, Receive your sight; your faith has saved you.”

IN THE BEGINNING

 

Near the very beginning of Scripture, in Genesis 1:26 and 27, God asserts that man was created in His image:

“And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness; and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creeps upon the earth. So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them.”

Commentaries on this passage commonly interpret the likeness of man to God to involve qualities of character. That they do not include gender and gender-based love in their descriptions, despite the obvious intent of Scripture to include this feature, is a deliberate and unjustified attempt to equate purity with chastity, as I’ve noted elsewhere. They simply don’t address the most important underlying issue, which is that man’s character at his creation reflects the character of God.

The Reformation Study Bible, for example, describes the similarities between God and man at his creation as possessing intelligence and creativity, the ability to communicate and relate to others, and moral uprightness. Regarding man’s morality, the commentary does not go into details, other than to acknowledge that this faculty was diminished in man’s fall from grace. Other commentaries are similarly vague.

The details are important. The regenerate man, he who has been born again upon his acceptance of the selfless act of Jesus Christ on the cross, and has received the indwelling Holy Spirit as Jesus promised to His followers, is capable of much more than the moral uprightness commonly thought of as being peaceful, avoiding “sinful” behavior, and not indulging in troublemaking. The more important qualities of his regenerated character as aided by the Holy Spirit include faith, courage, selflessness and compassion for others.

These four qualities sometimes occur together in events so profound as to define the person. When they do, they display nobility of the high order associated in wartime with recipients of the Congressional Medal of Honor. The reading of the recipient’s deeds that led to the receipt of that medal often causes weeping in the audience due to the extraordinary greatness of the heroic action that is being cited.

That is the greatness of God’s character, and the character in His image with which He endowed us at creation.

Psalm 22 describes the agony of crucifixion; Isaiah 53 describes the humility and suffering imposed on Jesus for our sins; and the Gospels affirm these forecasts.

The Gospels and the various letters of the New Testament place the same expectations on the followers of Jesus. In John 14:12, Jesus claims that some will do even greater works than Him:

“Verily, verily, I say to you, He who believes on me, the works that I do shall he do also; and greater works than these shall he do, because I go to my Father.”

Jesus was able to make that assertion because after His resurrection and the subsequent Pentecost, the Holy Spirit was given by the Father in great measure to Jesus’ followers in the Upper Room of Acts 2. The Acts of the Apostles bears witness of the amazing healings, resurrections and transmission of the Gospel message performed by Peter, Paul and others. That they managed to do so under severe persecution is even more remarkable.

Or is it? Are the acts of the Apostles remarkable despite the persecution they were forced to endure, or are they remarkable because of that persecution? There has been talk in some Churches that many of those first gifts of the Holy Spirit no longer apply, for one very flimsy reason or another, the excuse most often put forward being that the gifts ceased at the final canonization of Scripture, and the establishment of Churches throughout the known world, rendering that Power from God no longer necessary. This point of view is called cessationism, for the cessation of the gifts. It is most prominent in those Churches having no outreach and whose attendance has been limited to Sunday services of a ritualistic flavor. Here there is no challenge requiring faith or courage, nor any exercise of selflessness or compassion. Here there is no manifestation of the Holy Spirit, not because the gifts have ceased, but because the Church has abandoned its fervent love of God.

The gifts of the Holy Spirit are as necessary today as they were in that Upper Room. Societies that have suppressed Christianity for decades and even centuries are re-awakening to Jesus’ message. Their need to hear the Word of God is just as urgent as those societies of the First Century that had never heard the Gospel. In Africa and China, for example, the underground Church is spreading like wildfire, and multitudes of these repressed people are being harshly persecuted. But the Holy Spirit is working signs and wonders there, just as in the Book of Acts, and Churches continue to grow.

And the multitudes who are coming to God in the midst of their persecutions are growing in faith, courage, selflessness and compassion. They are well-pleasing to God and worthy of their future spiritual marriage to Jesus Christ.

We in societies in which Christians are comfortable may not be as fortunate as we think. Perhaps we should ask, even plead, for the Power of the Holy Spirit, even if it means our physical discomfort and danger. As Jesus said in Matthew 10:24,

“The disciple is not above his master, nor the servant above his lord.”

If Jesus had to suffer for our sakes and was hated by the world, how should we expect not to encounter those same conditions? Perhaps, over the centuries, many sincere Christians were able to live out their lives in comfort and security. Perhaps they were fortunate, or perhaps not. But I know that personally, I’d like to have some things in common with Jesus. Provided, of course, that I am able to maintain my faith.

SHOWERED WITH BLESSINGS

 

Christian news outlets seem to have a common theme these days – a lamentation over the decline in Church attendance. This same theme can be seen in the frantic way that some Churches are trying to keep their flocks: daycare, latte machines, happy messages. Given the manner in which the Church seems to be falling away despite the almost hysterical attempts of pastors to stop the outward flow, it’s natural to wonder whether the exiting masses really ever understood what they had signed up for. Maybe those who evangelized them didn’t give them the big picture. Maybe the neophytes expected to get some blessings out of the deal, of the material kind.

Jesus’ parable of the sower comes to mind. In Matthew 13:18-23, Jesus explains this parable to His disciples:

“Hear, therefore, the parable of the sower. When any one hears the word of the kingdom, and understands it not, then comes the wicked one, and catches away that which was sown in his heart. This is he who received seed by the wayside. But he that received the seed in stony places, the same is he that hears the word, and immediately with joy receives it; yet has he not root in himself, but endures it for a while; for when tribulation or persecution arises because of the word, immediately he is offended. He also who received seed among the thorns is he that hears the word; and the care of this age, and the deceitfulness of riches, choke the word, and he becomes unfruitful. But he who received the seed in the good ground is he who hears the word, and understands it, who also bears fruit, and brings forth, some a hundredfold, some sixty, some thirty.”

I see this falling away as a good thing. Those who had accepted a materialistic Jesus, expecting Him to come promptly down the chimney bearing goodies or handing them a check from Publishers’ Clearing House, were worshiping a different god than Jesus anyway. I’ve seen Church spokespersons leading such people astray with blatant misrepresentations of who Jesus actually is, and what He actually represents. You can still see them on television hawking their wares. I once attended a Church where a young couple participated with fervent prayers for the removal of a cancer that was afflicting the wife; when she eventually died, the husband refused to come back to Church.

Jesus never promised such things; rather, He treated the material world with disdain, focusing instead on the spiritual world to come. In John 18:36 and Matthew 6:24, Jesus made this clear:

“Jesus answered, My kingdom is not of this world; if my kingdom were of this world, then would my servants fight, that I should not be delivered to the Jews; but now is my kingdom not from here.”

“No man can serve two masters; for either he will hate the one, and love the other; or else he will hold to the one, and despise the other. You cannot serve God and money.”

Those who received the Word of God in good soil are of a different sort. After the pseudo-Christians have left the fold, these others will remain, whatever the circumstances that try to draw them back into secular society. They see a more noble Jesus, and in their staying the course God in return is developing them into a people having a common trait, the possession of valor.

God will indeed shower them with blessings, but of a more spiritual nature. God will clothe them in riches of character, endowing them with an abundance of faith, courage, selflessness and compassion, those qualities that Jesus will treasure in His Bride, the Church. Just like Jonah, they will enjoy the spiritual companionship of souls that they have rescued with a true knowledge of God.

“And the word of the Lord came to Jonah the second time, saying, Arise, go to Nineveh, that great city, and preach to it the preaching that I bid you. So Jonah arose, and went to the city a day’s journey, and he cried, and said, Yet forty days, and Nineveh shall be overthrown. So the people of Nineveh believed God, and proclaimed a fast, and put on sackcloth, from the greatest of them even to the least of them. For word came to the king of Nineveh, and he arose from his throne, and he laid his robe from him, and covered himself with sackcloth, and sat in ashes . . . And God said to Jonah . . .And should not I spare Nineveh, that great city, in which are more that one hundred twenty thousand persons who cannot discern between their right hand and their left hand; and also much cattle?”

GOD’S MERCY TOWARD PETER

 

I’m grateful to God for Jesus’ having selected Peter to be a disciple. I can’t speak for anyone else, but before the Holy Spirit got hold of him, Peter was a lot like me – willful, impetuous and slow on the uptake. With some spectacular exceptions, he never quite seemed to get the point of what Jesus was saying. Worse, he denied Jesus to save his own neck. Not just once, but three times. It’s there in the Gospels in all the sordid details. In Matthew 26:33-35, for example, Peter, as usual, thinks that he’s good enough to follow Jesus on his own merit. He can do it all himself without help from God. Jesus rebukes him for that, saying that Peter would deny him three times before the rooster crowed. Sure enough, as Jesus was being abused by the religious “authorities”, Peter denied any association with Him three times. At the sound of the rooster, Peter realized what he had done and was devastated by his own lack of faith.

The lesson, of course, is that without God we can’t do anything, even come to Him. Peter’s failure of faith was made all the worse by Jesus statement in Matthew 10:33,

“But whosoever shall deny me before men, him will I also deny before my Father, who is in heaven.”

After that Jesus was crucified and died, leaving Peter to fret, and continue to do so as he thought, for the rest of his life over what he had done. But Jesus didn’t leave Peter in that state. Instead, the resurrected Jesus came back to Peter, as recorded in John 21. Three times He asked Peter if he loved Him, each time following Peter’s affirmation of love with the command to feed His sheep. In those three exchanges, Jesus forgave Peter three times for his denials, thus canceling out the terrible consequences of what Peter had done. But it didn’t end there.

Beyond the forgiveness, Jesus also was sharing with Peter something of immense importance. He was including Peter in His own acts of speaking His Word to mankind, in that act increasing the Church. The first account of Peter’s fulfillment of Jesus’ command to feed His sheep, after he has been filled with the Holy Spirit, is given in Acts 2:22-41. In that account, Peter’s bold exhortation resulted in the salvation of three thousand souls. It may be seen in that first fulfillment of Jesus’ command that when Jesus talked about feeding His sheep, He wasn’t talking about material food. Instead, the food of importance was the spiritual one, speaking the words of the Gospel to the salvation of souls. Having followed the prophet Jonah in ducking away from God, Peter was now following that same prophet in voicing God’s displeasure with sin and exhorting the people to righteousness.

In the second instance of fulfilling Jesus’ command to feed His sheep, Peter again spoke before a crowded audience, this time bringing five thousand souls to salvation through the Word of God.

In the third instance, Peter became involved in dialogue with the Italian Cornelius. This act, of course, involved the mighty, loving Arm of God, the Holy Spirit, who had to overcome Peter’s Jewish attitude of repulsion by Gentiles to accomplish that task.

In fulfilling Jesus’ commandment to feed His sheep, the first time Peter speaks the Word of God to the salvation of three thousand souls. The second time Peter feeds Jesus’ sheep with the Word of God, five thousand souls are saved. Until this time, the Church was pretty much limited to Jews. (Even the Ethiopian eunuch who was baptized by Philip was probably a Jew, Ethiopia having enjoyed a long Jewish history extending back to Solomon and the queen of Sheba.) Now comes the third time that Peter, empowered by the Holy Spirit, obeys Jesus’ command to feed His sheep, as described in Acts 10, and this time, after healing another lame man and raising Tabitha back to life in the name of Jesus Christ, Peter through the Word of God extends the Church, and salvation with her, to the entire Gentile world.

The immediate importance of this fulfillment by Peter of Jesus’ threefold commandments to feed His sheep, beside its obvious demonstration of God’s merciful love, is the support it gives to the assertion that God not only welcomes but desires the active participation of Peter, and consequently of mankind itself, in the sharing of His grand plan of salvation. Man is thus a participant, albeit with the necessary input of the Holy Spirit in the process, of his own salvation. Can anything demonstrate more fully than this the loving intimacy of sharing with which God relates to mankind?

THE SHEKINAH GLORY

 

In 1 Corinthians 3:16 and Ephesians 2:19-22 Paul asserts that the Church is a temple indwelt by the Holy Spirit:

Know you not that ye are the temple of God, and that the Spirit of God dwells in you?

Now, therefore, you are no more strangers and sojourners, but fellow citizens with the saints, and of the household of God; and are built upon the foundation of the apostles and prophets, Jesus Christ himself being the chief corner stone, in whom all the building fitly framed together grows into a holy temple in the Lord; in whom you also are built together for a habitation of God through the Spirit.

The facts embedded in these passages are no surprise to Christians, who generally accept without question that believers are indwelt with the Holy Spirit and comprise, as the Church, a holy temple. What some of us may not be aware of is that this temple and its indwelling by the Holy Spirit was represented numerous times as the Glory of God in the Old Testament. An example taken from 1 Kings 8:6-11 is given below:

And the priests brought in the ark of the covenant of the Lord to its place, into the inner sanctuary of the house, into the most holy place, even under the wings of the cherubim. For the cherubim spread forth their two wings of the place of the ark, and the cherubim covered the ark and its staves above. And they drew out the staves, that the ends of the staves were seen out in the holy place before the inner sanctuary, but they were not seen outside; and there they are to this day. There was nothing in the ark except the two tables of stone, which Moses put there at Horeb, when the lord made a covenant with the children of Israel, when they came out of the land of Egypt. And it came to pass, when the priests were come out of the holy place, that the cloud filled the house of the lord, so that the priests could not stand to minister because of the cloud; for the glory of the Lord had filled the house of the Lord.

A passage of the same flavor can be found in Exodus 40 regarding the Tabernacle in the wilderness.

Interesting as this passage and others like it may be in their apparent correlation with Paul’s understanding of the Church as constituting a temple and of its being indwelt by the Holy Spirit, they’re still not all that surprising. It’s not a difficult reach, in this context, to view Solomon’s temple as a type representing the Church and the Glory of God descending upon it as representing the indwelling Holy Spirit. Nor does it conflict in any way with our conventional understanding of Scripture.

This situation changes rapidly when we investigate the meaning of the phrase “Glory of God”. In the original Hebrew this Glory that Paul understands to be the Holy Spirit is named “Shekinah”.

There still is no problem so far, because in the English language nouns lack gender attributes. Not so, however, for the Hebrew language. The noun “Shekinah” does possess a gender attribute, which is female. Turning to the Internet, the Wikipedia entry for “Shekinah” begins as follows:

“Hebrew [Shekinah] is the English spelling of a grammatically feminine Hebrew ancient blessing. The original word means the dwelling or settling, and denotes the dwelling or settling of the divine presence of God, especially in the temple in Jerusalem.” An accompanying figure shows the Shekinah, or the Glory of God, indwelling the temple as described in 1 Kings 8.

Noting the female gender of this indwelling Shekinah, we find here by comparing the indwelling presence of the Glory in Solomon’s temple with the description in Ephesians 2 of the Holy Spirit indwelling the human temple that Scripture itself, by furnishing this direct comparison, supports an interpretation of the Holy Spirit as a female Entity. This does appear to conflict with conventional Christian thought, as driven by the use in Scripture of the male pronoun in reference to the Holy Spirit. I fully explain in the novel “Buddy” why that viewpoint of conflict is actually a misperception.

Those who are opposed to any attempt to place a feminine label on the Holy Spirit would insist that in the original Hebrew, any gender can arbitrarily be placed on an inanimate object. They miss an obvious point: the Holy Spirit is not inanimate.

This gender attribute in 1 Kings 8 was simply lost in the translation from Hebrew to English, which could have been a result of the lack of gender precision in the English language. But there is an associated gender misrepresentation in Isaiah 51:9, 10 that appears to be more deliberate. What the translators did in that passage was to substitute the grammatically incorrect ‘it’ for the gender-correct ‘she’ in reference to the Shekinah. In their desire to maintain a fully masculine Godhead, they neutered the female.

The inclusion of femininity into the Godhead endows our vision of God with a greatly enhanced attribute of love. The pervasive notion of an all-masculine or genderless God denies that beauty to Him and the other Members of the Godhead and renders Him alien to us.

NAOMI

 

In the Scriptural story of Ruth, read and recited every Shavuot (Pentecost) in the Jewish community, Naomi returns in sadness and poverty to her homeland in Israel following the deaths of her husband and two sons. She brings with her Ruth, her daughter-in-law who refused to leave her. Another daughter-in-law, Orpah, remains behind in Moab. A love story awaits Ruth in Israel, where she and the wealthy Boaz meet, are attracted to each other and marry. A son, Obed, is born through the union. Obed himself eventually gives birth to Jesse, who, in turn, is the father of David. The genealogy continues from there to the Gospels of Matthew and Luke, which list the forbears of Joseph and Mary, respectively, earthly parents of Jesus Christ.

The story of Ruth is a love story on multiple levels. At the most direct level, it involves Boaz and Ruth, Jewish and Gentile ancestors of Jesus Christ. At a higher level, Ruth represents the Church while kinsman-redeemer Boaz represents Jesus Christ, demonstrating the love involved in that spiritual union. Naomi is far more than a mere extra in this beautiful passion play, representing none other than the Holy Spirit. In my novel Buddy, I was moved by these representations of Ruth and Naomi to point to their relationship with each other as an answer to a theological question that I had posed:

“In Deuteronomy Chapter 6 is found one of the most beautifully hope-filled passages in the entire Bible. Moses, being guided by the Holy Spirit, addresses the nation of Israel, saying,

“’Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God is one Lord: And thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thine heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy might.’”

“The practical implications of this one sentence are immense. Jesus in Matthew 22 called it the great commandment, to be observed above all else, and by repeating it during His incarnation He extended its application beyond Israel to the Church as well. It tells us that we can love our God with all our hearts, which means that we were created to do just that. It also implies that God can love us back, for love is not unidirectional.

“The theological implications of that commandment are no less profound. It means that Jesus’ work on the cross was a demonstration of his love. Yet further, it says that our God is one, forming the basis of our monotheism, despite later passages that amply demonstrate His Trinitarian nature.

“Therein lies a question of exceeding import to every person who wishes, in obedience to Jesus’ words in Matthew 22, to love God: how can God be one while being several?

“In the book of Ruth is found another beautiful passage that has tugged at the strings of countless hearts over the centuries since it was written. It has evoked tears and inspired poems and love stories and been held up as a golden example of devotion and loyalty.

“‘And [Naomi] said, Behold, thy sister in law is gone back unto her people, and unto her gods: return thou after thy sister in law.

“‘And Ruth said, Entreat me not to leave thee, or to return from following after thee: for whither thou goest, I will go; and where thou lodgest, I will lodge: thy people shall be my people, and thy God my God: Where thou diest, will I die, and there will I be buried: the Lord do so to me, and more also, if ought but death part thee and me’.”

“These words of Ruth were originally directed to her mother-in-law Naomi, but, as in all Scripture, they were written under the direction of the Holy Spirit, who had in mind a much greater application, one in which both Ruth and Naomi were but types. Embedded in this song of Ruth, as a matter of fact, is an answer to the question of our monotheism toward a Trinitarian God. The answer itself is quite beautiful as well as being a wonderful promise to mankind.

“Ruth, I would say, is a type of the Church; and Naomi of the Holy Spirit. Therein is the answer: the link between God as One and God as a Multiplicity is love within a perfect Family setting, as Paul declared in his letter to the Ephesians:

“’For this cause shall a man leave his father and his mother, and shall be joined unto his wife, and they two shall be one flesh. This is a great mystery, but I speak concerning Christ and his church.’”

“The connection between Naomi and the Holy Spirit suggests a love of God that is so beautifully magnificent as to dwarf His other attributes. It is a story that begs to be told, and I attempt to tell a part of it here. The medium that I use for this treasured task is a novel that chronicles the extraordinary love that God shows toward four severely handicapped individuals, two having an affliction of the body and the other two of the heart. Many of the events described in the novel are based on fact.”

There may be yet another level to this story, a prophetic one. Ruth and Orpah, both of Moab, were married to Naomi’s Jewish sons, who may be thought of as representing the marriage between Church and Jesus in the material domain. Naomi continues to represent the Holy Spirit, at this point indwelling the members of the Church. As the crisis unfolds with the death of the sons representing Jesus and the subsequent persecution of the Church, that part associated with Orpah falls away back to the Gentile-secular world, while that part associated with Ruth follows the Holy Spirit into fellowship with a revived Israel and union with the resurrected, spiritual Jesus, represented by Boaz.

RUTH

 

The little book of Ruth gives us one of the loveliest stories in the Bible. In it, one may find strong representations of Jesus, the Church, and the Holy Spirit all interacting harmoniously and lovingly, as we ourselves can anticipate in our future spiritual relationship with God. At a higher level than the tale itself, Ruth plays the role of the Christian Church, while Boaz represents Jesus Christ. Ruth’s mother-in-law Naomi is sometimes mistakenly misrepresented here as Israel or an individual, but in truth the story carefully and deliberately places her in the role of the beautiful and noble Holy Spirit.

This narrative that begins with such desolation of spirit finds Naomi returning from Moab back to her homeland in Judah, having lost her husband and two sons. The loss, emotionally wrenching as it is, also places her in jeopardy of starvation. As she begins her sad trek back, she releases her daughters-in-law Orpah and Ruth, having lost their husbands, to return to their families in Moab. Amid much tearful keening over this parting, Orpah sets off back to her family. Ruth, on the other hand, refuses to part. In her adamant insistence on staying with Naomi, she delivers the following immortal words of devoted love as she clings to her beloved mother-in-law:

“Entreat me not to leave you, or to return from following after you; for wherever you go, I will go, and where you lodge I will lodge. Your people shall be my people, and your God, my God. Where you die, will I die, and there will I be buried; the Lord do so to me, and also more, if ought but death part you and me.”

Naomi must have imparted to her daughter-in-law Ruth much wisdom and understanding, particularly of the loving nature of God. She also demonstrated this love through her own interaction with her daughters-in-law. Ruth was able to internalize this profound heart knowledge, returning this love with the fervor that Jesus commanded in Matthew 22:37 and 38 as He echoed the words of Moses in Deuteronomy 6:4 and 5:

“Jesus said to [the Pharisee], You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind. This is the first and great commandment.”

Upon her arrival at Naomi’s homeland, Ruth’s circumstances rapidly began to change as God Himself returned Ruth’s love for Naomi with unforeseen blessings. Ruth’s departed husband had a close relative in the wealthy Boaz, who showed an interest in her from the first time he laid eyes on her. Appreciating that interest, Naomi gave Ruth an understanding of Jewish law, under which a close relative of a widow’s late husband could claim her as his own wife; moreover, Naomi also gave Ruth advice on how she might win his affection. In a few short but stirring paragraphs the tale becomes a love story between Boaz and Ruth, with the romance culminating in their marriage. The union produces a child, placing Ruth firmly into the Jewish fold as grandmother to the great King David. In the first chapter of Matthew, Ruth is further honored with inclusion into the bloodline of Jesus Christ.

Much later in time, the Apostle Paul echoes this union between Boaz and Ruth in Ephesians 5:31 and 32:

“For this reason shall a Man leave his Father and Mother and cleave unto his wife, and the two shall become one flesh. This is a great mystery, but I speak concerning Christ and the Church.”

We of the Church have a beautiful and noble Mother-in-law as well. In fact, She is the same Person who Naomi represented to Ruth: our wonderful, loving Holy Spirit. With Her guidance, the Church shall marry Jesus and will participate, as the beautiful story of Ruth suggests, in a fully-gendered relationship with Him, and that also will bear fruit, as plainly described by Paul in Romans 7:4:

“Therefore, my brethren, you also have become dead to the law through the body of Christ, that you may be married to another – to Him who was raised from the dead, that we should bear fruit to God.”

This romantic relationship is beautifully captured in the Song of Solomon, which describes anything but the brittle sterility of a non-gendered union.

The marriage between Boaz and Ruth reprises an earlier marriage that also foretold the union of Jesus Christ with His Church. This was the marriage told in Genesis Chapter 24 between Isaac and Rebekah, wherein Isaac was a figure of Jesus and Rebekah represented the Church. This union also bore fruit in the twelve Patriarchs who formed the beginning of the twelve tribes of Israel and in Judah carried the bloodline to Jesus.

Appropriately, during the Jewish Feast of Pentecost, called in Hebrew Shavuot, it is traditional to read the Book of Ruth. This tradition links the Pentecost with the Holy Spirit through Naomi and her representation. Since the Holy Spirit rushed in to indwell believers at the first Pentecost after Jesus’ resurrection, the Feast of Pentecost has even more directly honored the Holy Spirit among Christians. Yet further, this indwelling of the Holy Spirit was foretold in the coming upon the Tabernacle and Solomon’s Temple of the feminine Shekinah Glory, as described in Exodus 40 and 1 Kings 8. I note this connection in the Introduction to my novel Buddy, and expand on it in my book Marching to a Worthy Drummer.

SPIRITUAL EUCHARIST

 

When we think of feeding, we automatically relate to the stomach and material food, even when the topic is connected with God. Our material focus on food limits our understanding of what Jesus really meant when He spoke of food, even in the context of His Word. What does the Word have to do with feeding? There’s nothing material about the Word, and it can’t do anything for our stomachs.

But according to God, man possesses a soul, an attribute more precious and important by far than a stomach, or, in fact, anything material about our body. Jesus spoke of the relative importance of the soul. In Matthew 10:28, for example, He defined the soul as essential and the body as dispensable:

“And fear not them who kill the body, but are not able to kill the soul; but rather fear him who is able to destroy both soul and body in hell.”

The salvation of God, that enormous thing that Jesus died on the cross for, applies to the soul rather than to the body. In the spiritual realm, the material part of man is of little or no importance next to the soul. The Word of God, then, insofar as it leads to salvation, and, following that, an ongoing relationship with God, is an input, a nourishment, of the soul. It is spiritual food, without which the soul would wither and die. In that sense, the Word is the most important food that we can obtain. Despite the demanding nature of our stomachs, material food is of far less consequence to our well-being than the Word of God.

Jesus Himself made a direct association of His Word with food. Further, John notes in His Prologue (verses 1-18 of John 1) that Jesus is the Word of God, the very embodiment of it.

In John 6:30-35, Jesus equates Himself with the Bread of Life:

“They said, therefore, to him, What sign show you, then, that we may see, and believe you? What do you work? Our fathers did eat manna in the desert; as it is written, He gave them bread from heaven to eat. Then Jesus said to them, Verily, verily, I say to you, Moses gave you not that bread from heaven; but my Father gives you the true bread from heaven. For the bread of God is he who comes down from heaven, and gives life to the world. Then said they to him, Lord, evermore give us this bread. And Jesus said to them, I am the bread of life; he that comes to me shall never hunger, and he that believes on me shall never thirst.”

Again, in John 6:48 Jesus equates Himself with the bread of life, embellishing on its spiritual importance in verse 51:

“I am the living bread that came down from heaven; if any man eat of this bread, he shall live forever; and the bread that I will give is my flesh, which I shall give for the life of the world.”

In response to this declaration, there were people that just couldn’t lift themselves out of the material world sufficiently to comprehend the spiritual nature of Jesus’ claim:

“The Jews, therefore, strove among themselves, saying, How can this man give us his flesh to eat?”

A good many Christians, including pastors and theologians from the time that Jesus spoke until and including the present day, undoubtedly have voiced the same question with respect to this passage in John’s Gospel.

Significantly, in John’s Gospel, Jesus equated Himself, and thus His Word, with bread just after performing two miracles, both of which were intimately related to the connection among Peter, Jesus and God’s sharing of His glory with man. The first of these miracles was Jesus’ feeding of the five thousand. The second was Jesus’ walking on water and Peter’s short-lived accomplishment of the same.

In Luke 22:15-20, Jesus again associates Himself, the living Word of God, with food and wine:

“And he said to them, With desire I have desired to eat this Passover with you before I suffer; for I say to you, I will not any more eat of it, until it be fulfilled in the kingdom of God. And he took the cup, and gave thanks, and said, Take this, and divide it among yourselves; for I say to you, I will not drink of the fruit of the vine, until the kingdom of God shall come. And he took bread, and gave thanks, and broke it, and gave to them, saying, This is my body which is given for you; this do in remembrance of me. Likewise also the cup after supper, saying, This cup is the new testament in my blood, which is shed for you.”

The communion ritual of the Eucharist has been passed down in the Church to this day in honor of these words of Jesus. But for both Catholics and Protestants alike it is seen as an act unrelated to the understanding of Jesus as the Word of God. The deeper meaning of the Eucharist, however, is spiritual, as demonstrated by Jesus in linking His blood with the New Testament. We partake of this Eucharist as we partake of our daily bread: by digesting Jesus’ Word in our hearts and living it.

There is another passage in Scripture, this time in Revelation 10:9-11, that treats the Word of God as spiritual food:

“And I went to the angel, and said to him, Give me the little scroll. And he said to me, Take it, and eat it up; and it shall make your belly bitter, but it shall be in your mouth sweet as honey. And I took the little scroll out of the angel’s hand, and ate it up; and it was in my mouth sweet as honey, and as soon as I had eaten it my belly was bitter. And he said unto me, You must prophesy again about many peoples, and nations, and tongues, and kings.”

That Jesus considered the spiritual food of the Word to be of like nature but far more significant and real than physical food is demonstrated in Matthew 4:2-4, when, after Jesus fasted in the wilderness, satan approached Him, tempting Him:

“And when he had fasted forty days and forty nights, he was afterward hungry. And when the tempter came to him, he said, If you are the Son of God, command that these stones be made bread. But he answered and said, It is written, Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceeds out of the mouth of God.”

THE QUEEN MOTHER

 

In Chapter 2 of Scott Hahn’s book Hail, Holy Queen (one of my favorites), he comments on Jesus’ response during the wedding at Cana (John 2) to His mother’s words that “They have no wine.” At these words, Jesus tells her “O woman, what have you to do with me? My hour has not yet come.”

Many Bible commentators, Scott asserts, take Jesus’ words here as a rather harsh put-down to His mother, Mary. Scott defends Jesus’ response, noting that the phrase “what have you to do with me” actually can convey respect.

Without attempting to put words into Scott’s mouth or ideas into his head that he would take strong objection to, I see in this book numerous instances of what many readers readily could interpret as quite brilliant defenses of the vision of a feminine Holy Spirit. In doing so, Scott often seems to camouflage attributes rightly belonging to the Holy Spirit in the person of the Virgin Mary, just as the Catholic Church seems to do in a more general setting. Whether this tendency is intentional on Scott’s part, only he can say. I seem to remember that he has denied such an intent.

While not intentionally disagreeing with Scott’s attempt to defend the benign intent of Jesus’ words to Mary in John 2, these words evoke in my own mind the thought that perhaps Jesus, while responding to Mary, was thinking of how the wedding at Cana was but a foreshadow of His future marriage to His Church in the spiritual realm. Perhaps He was anticipating with great joy the time when His hour would finally come, when His spiritual Mother, the Holy Spirit, would participate in His future wedding to His Church. In fact, Dr. Hahn himself appears to come to that same conclusion in his Chapter 2. If such were indeed the case, this exchange between Jesus and Mary can be viewed as providing a beautiful Scriptural reference in support of the Holy Spirit’s femininity.

Farther along in the book, in Chapter 3, Dr. Hahn addresses the woman of Revelation 11:19 through 12, of which I extract parts below:

“And the temple of God was opened in heaven, and there was seen in his temple the ark of his covenant; and there were lightnings, and voices, and thunderings, and an earthquake, and great hail.

“And there appeared a great wonder in heaven – a woman clothed with the sun, and the moon under her feet, and upon her head a crown of twelve stars. And she, being with child, cried, travailing in birth, and pained to be delivered.

“And there appeared another wonder in heaven; and, behold, a great red dragon, having seven heads and ten horns, and seven crowns upon his heads. And his tail drew the third part of the stars of heaven and did cast them to the earth; and the dragon stood before the woman who was ready to be delivered, to devour her child as soon as it was born.

“And she brought forth a male child, who was to rule all nations with a rod of iron; and her child was caught up onto God, and to his throne. And the woman fled into the wilderness, where she hath a place prepared by God, that they should feed her there a thousand two hundred and threescore days.”

Many evangelical Christians associate the woman of Revelation 12 with the nation of Israel. Scott Hahn notes that some theologians identify her as the Church, and proceeds to discuss why this identification doesn’t quite fit the Scriptural description. He then applies a more fitting identification of her as Mary, adding a beautifully profound association of her with the ark of Revelation 11:19: “If the first ark contained the Word of God in stone, Mary’s body contained the Word of God enfleshed.”

The passage in Revelation 11:19, which immediately precedes Revelation 12’s description of the woman clothed with the sun, actually seems to belong to that later chapter.

While Scott’s association of the Ark with Mary may be quite true, here again I perceive a yet higher association, one that, while not taking away from Mary’s role here, adds yet another layer to it. Noting that the location of the drama in Revelation 11 and 12 is in the spiritual domain, I would rephrase Scott’s assertion as “If the first ark contained the Word of God in stone, and Mary’s body contained the Word of God enfleshed, the Holy Spirit contained the Word of God in Spirit.” I see the ultimate Woman of Revelation 12 as the Holy Spirit. To me, that image is quite beautiful.

Lately, I’ve taken to re-reading in the evenings the historical books of Scripture; Samuel, Kings and Chronicles. At the present time, in going through 2 Kings, I’ve noticed that as the kings and their deeds were recounted, mention was given of their mothers. In Chapter 4 of Hail, Holy Queen, Dr. Hahn addresses the importance of the Queen Mother to the King’s regime. His explanation of her status is most interesting: the practice of the kings of that era of taking multiple wives led to the awkward situation of selecting to whom would be bestowed the honor of serving in the primary position of queen. This situation was wisely avoided by placing the mother of the king in that exalted position. Scott Hahn revisits Revelation 12 in this chapter, enthroning Mary, as mother of Jesus, as the woman of such queenly stature as described in Revelation 12:1 and 2, as co-Regent of Jesus in His ultimate role of kingship over the earth.

While there may be some truth to Scott’s assignment here, I see a far more profound truth, and one more harmonious to the Scriptural text, in assigning to the Holy Spirit this same function.

DISCOVERING HIDDEN BEAUTY

 

For a long time now, modern Churchgoers have questioned the motive and, even more seriously, the guiding Hand of the Holy Spirit behind Paul’s descriptions in 1 Corinthians 14 and 1 Timothy 2 regarding the proper role of women in Church. Was Paul a misogynist, as some have claimed? Was he really listening to the voice of God when he wrote those passages?

“Let your women keep silence in the churches; for it is not permitted to them to speak, but they are commanded to be under obedience, as also says the law. And if they will learn anything, let them ask their husbands at home; for it is a shame for women to speak in the church.”

“Let the woman learn in silence with all subjection. But I permit not a woman to teach, nor to usurp authority over the man, but to be in silence. For Adam was first formed, then Eve.”

Given Paul’s beautiful description of the marriage between Christ and His Church in Ephesians 5:22-33, it is highly doubtful that Paul was a misogynist.

“Wives, submit yourselves unto your own husbands, as to the Lord. For the husband is the head of the wife, even as Christ is the head of the church; and he is the savior of the body. Therefore, as the church is subject to Christ, so let the wives be to their own husbands in everything. Husbands, love your wives, even as Christ also loved the church, and gave himself for it, that he might sanctify and cleanse it with the washing of water by the word; that he might present it to himself a glorious church, not having spot, or wrinkle, or any such thing; but that it should be holy and without blemish. So ought men to love their wives as their own bodies. He that loves his wife loves himself. For no man ever yet hated his own flesh, but nourishes and cherishes it, even as the Lord the church; for we are members of his body, of his flesh, and of his bones.

“For this cause shall a man leave his father and mother, and shall be joined unto his wife, and they two shall be one flesh. This is a great mystery, but I speak concerning Christ and the church.

“Nevertheless, let every one of you in particular so love his wife even as himself; and the wife, see that she reverence her husband.”

It is inconceivable to me that Paul could have written the above passage under an attitude of disdain toward women, or worse, a rebellious streak of independence from God. It is far more likely that here, as well as in the two passages cited earlier, that Paul wrote under the guidance of the Holy Spirit, who had something more profound to impart to the reader of Scripture than we have so far been able to grasp.

The problem with attempting to attribute Paul’s discussions of the woman’s role in Church to going off the reservation is that he was not the only one in Scripture to say what he did. Isaiah 3:12 and 1 Peter 3:1-5 have much the same to say:

“As for my people, children are their oppressors, and women rule over them. O my people, they who lead you cause you to err, and destroy the way of your paths.”

“In the same manner, you wives, be in subjection to your own husbands that, if any obey not the word, they also may without the word be won by the behavior of the wives, while they behold your chaste conduct coupled with fear; whose adorning, let it not be that outward adorning of braiding the hair, and of the wearing of gold, or of putting on of apparel, but let it be the hidden person of the heart in that which is not corruptible, even the ornament of a meek and quite spirit, which is in the sight of God of great price. For after this manner in the old time the holy women also, who trusted in God, adorned themselves, being in subjection to their own husbands.”

Knowing from 2 Peter 1:20 and 21 and from Paul himself in 2 Timothy 3:16 and 17 that all Scripture is inspired of the Holy Spirit and applies to all generations, I sense that something much more profound and supportive of the dignity of womanhood is in play here than what is commonly understood. Perhaps a major clue to our understanding of Paul’s words is encapsulated in Ephesians 5:33: “. . .let every one of you. . .so love his wife even as himself; and the wife, see that she reverence her husband.” Notice in this sentence the different roles played by the man and his wife: the man loves, even sacrificially, while the woman reverences him. This difference harmonizes with the difference in roles spelled out for male and female from the very beginning in Genesis 2:

“And the Lord God said, It is not good that the man should be alone; I will make him a help fit for him. . . And the Lord God caused a deep sleep to fall upon Adam, and he slept: and he took one of his ribs, and closed up the flesh instead thereof; and the rib, which the Lord God had taken from man, made he a woman, and brought her to the man. And Adam said, This is now bone of my bones, and flesh of my flesh; she shall be called Woman, because she was taken out of Man. Therefore shall a man leave his father and his mother, and shall cleave to his wife, and they shall be one flesh.”

Out of this passage one can quickly discern a significant difference in roles: the man is to be the initiator, and the woman the responder. We can directly understand this difference today in a more practical and earthly setting, merely by observing the two genders in their actions and interactions among others. This difference is more basic than cultural: it is the way that we were designed by God. It has nothing to do with equality; male and female have exactly the same standing before God, as Paul noted in Galatians 3:28:

“There is neither Jew nor Greek, here is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female; for ye are all one in Christ Jesus.”

Scripture also is quick to point out that the man’s role involves the burden of responsibility, to the point of sacrifice, and that should a man fail to assume his proper role, it is perfectly acceptable for a woman to take his place. To back that statement up, I refer the reader to the example of Deborah in Judges 4.

God made male and female different for the purpose of harmony: the woman serves as a complementary other to the man. A responsive woman performs that purpose as a complementary other to the initiator man.

In my opinion the issue extends beyond the complementary way that God designed men and women. According to Genesis 1:26 and 27,

“And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness; and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creeps upon the earth. So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them.”

This passage, along with the story of Eve’s creation out of Adam in Genesis 2, appears to point back to the very form in which the Godhead itself exists, with the Holy Spirit interacting with the Divine Will that we know as the Father as His responsive Other, the Divine Means. If in fact there is truth to this perceived connection, and if indeed the Holy Spirit is functionally feminine as I strongly suspect, Paul’s demand of women that they remain silent during Church services represents nothing less than the call for women to behave as proper types of the Holy Spirit.

What an honor it would be for Christian women to represent the Holy Spirit! If such is the case, as I believe with my heart, the passages in Paul cited above, rather than maligning womanhood, exalts this gender with an awesome connection to God.

THE ROMANCE BETWEEN JESUS AND HIS CHURCH

 

While He resided on earth, Jesus, despite some unjustified speculations to the contrary, remained celibate. That refusal to marry has been a cause of consternation to some, who see in that a lack of fulfillment, an incompleteness in Jesus.

While indeed rendering Him incomplete, Jesus’ celibacy also rendered Him faithful, for Jesus was betrothed to His Church.

That eloquent passage in Hebrews 11 of godly people who endure suffering for their faith, ends with the following phrase that tells us that these heroes of the faith did not receive the fullness of God’s blessings themselves, because of us and our own contributions:

“God having provided some better thing for us that they without us should not be made perfect.”

This statement implies that it must be equally true that “neither they nor us, without Jesus, should be made perfect.”

In quoting Adam in Genesis 2:24, Paul explained to us in Ephesians 5:31 and 32 a mystery of enormous significance, that Adam’s declaration in Genesis 2:23 and 24 applied not only to mankind, but to Jesus as well:

“For this cause shall a man leave his father and mother, and shall be joined unto his wife, and they two shall be one flesh. This is a great mystery, but I speak concerning Christ and the church.”

Given this statement of Paul’s in the light of Jesus’ celibacy during His time on earth, a second and greatly significant restatement of that ending passage of Hebrews 11 could be made: “. . . even Jesus, God having provided some better thing for us, without us should not be made perfect.”

Scripture actually gives us a sound reason to perceive that the union between Jesus and His Church will be a romantic one. The Song of Solomon is rather explicit in that regard, verses 12 through 17 of Chapter 1 being representative:

“While the king sits at his table, my spikenard sends forth the smell thereof. A bundle of myrrh is my well-beloved unto me; he shall lie all night between my breasts. My beloved is unto me as a cluster of camphire in the vineyards of Engedi. Behold, thou art fair, my love; behold, thou art fair; thou hast doves’ eyes. Behold, thou art fair, my beloved, yea, pleasant; also our bed is green. The beams of our house are cedar, and our rafters of fir.”

Perhaps the most appropriate commentary to the Song of Solomon is the one given in the Schofield Bible in its prelude to the Song:

“Nowhere in Scripture does the unspiritual mind tread upon ground so mysterious and incomprehensible as in this book, whereas saintly men and women throughout the ages have found it a source of pure and exquisite delight. That the love of the divine Bridegroom, symbolized here by Solomon’s love for the Shulamite maiden, should follow the analogy of the marriage relationship seems evil only to minds that are so ascetic that marital desire itself appears to them to be unholy.

“The book is the expression of pure marital love as ordained by God in creation, and the vindication of that love as against both asceticism and lust – the two profanations of the holiness of marriage. Its interpretation is threefold: . . .(3) as an allegory of Christ’s love for His heavenly bride, the Church. . .”

Jesus himself hints at His future joy with the Church as His Bride in the wedding at Cana, John 2:1-11:

“And the third day there was a marriage in Cana, of Galilee; and the mother of Jesus was there. And both Jesus was called, and his disciples, to the marriage. And when they lacked wine, the mother of Jesus said to him, They have not wine. Jesus said to her, Woman, what have I to do with you? My hour is not yet come. His mother said to the servants, Whatever he says to you, do it. And there were set there six waterpots of stone, after the manner of the purifying of the Jews, containing twenty or thirty gallons apiece. Jesus said to them, Fill the waterpots with water. And they filled them up to the brim. And he said to them, Draw some out now, and bear it to the governor of the feast. And they bore it. When the ruler of the feast had tasted the water that was made wine, and knew not from where it was (but the servants who drew the water knew) the governor of the feast called the bridegroom, and said to him, Every man at the beginning does set forth good wine and, when men have well drunk, then that which is worse; but you have kept the good wine until now. This beginning of miracles did Jesus in Cana, of Galilee, and manifested forth his glory; and his disciples believed on him.”

With an understanding of Jesus’ romantic relationship with His Church in mind, a careful reading of Isaac’s marriage to Rebekah in Genesis 24, the Song of Solomon, Isaiah 54, and Jesus’ first miracle in John 2 of changing water to wine at the wedding in Cana, plainly reveals beforehand the mystery that Paul revealed in Ephesians 5.

THE ROMANTIC BOND

 

Of all the possible relationships people may have among each other, the romantic bond uniquely involves three features harmoniously and synergistically combined: functional unity, mutual possession, and shared intimacy.

Of itself, the feature of functional unity is common among relationships. It is the essence of teamwork, wherein individuals, each having specialized tasks, operate together in coordinated fashion to achieve higher-level objectives. Functional unity serves as the most sought-after expectation of armies, factories, sports teams and virtually every human endeavor that requires multiple persons working toward a common goal. Most relationships, however, require instruction and training to achieve that feature of human interaction, and firm supervision to maintain it.

In a good romance, however, teamwork is achieved far more naturally than in other relationships, requiring neither instruction, training, nor coercion. Gender-based specialization automatically delineates the normal roles of the participants, enabling them to interact together in complementary fashion without giving much thought to the process. Moreover, this functional synergism within the romantic bond uniquely complements the other two distinctive features, mutual possession and shared intimacy.

Outside of romance, possession is essentially off the table for normal human relationships. As in slavery or prison, possession of one human being by another is always, with but one exception, unhappy and forced. That exception is a passionate romance, which involves mutual possession as not only a voluntary act by the partners, but a comfort as well, and an expectation that each places on the other. Any situation that threatens that possessive bond, such as a potential romantic interest outside that relationship, is seen in a vehemently negative light. Two of God’s Ten Commandments address that very issue.

Scripture itself sometimes conveys that same sense of possession regarding relationships within the Godhead, between God and humanity, and between individuals. Unfortunately, instances in which possession is the topic is very often misinterpreted by Christians as meaning something entirely different than what the text plainly states. An example of that is found in Jeremiah 10:12:

“[God] has made the earth by his power; he has established the world by his wisdom, and has stretched out the heavens by his discretion.”

This passage has often been interpreted to mean the essential opposite of what it intended to convey. In the common misinterpretation, the words “power”, “wisdom” and “discretion” are taken as attributes of the Father. As this interpretation applies these claims to the Father alone, it effectively denies their potential application to the other Members of the Godhead. In other contexts within Scripture, and particularly throughout the Book of Proverbs, all three of these so-called “attributes” are associated with the Holy Spirit rather than the Father. In an alternate interpretation these “attributes” can be taken to be possessive in nature toward the Holy Spirit. In that context the “attributes” belong to the Father’s Holy Spirit and it is the Holy Spirit who belongs to the Father. Under that very natural alternate interpretation a completely different understanding of that passage results, one with romantic implications.

Another example tends to corroborate the possessive interpretation of the passage noted above, wherein the object of the possession is an Entity rather than a mere thing or attribute. The Scriptural passage for this example is Ephesians 5:25-28:

“Husbands, love your wives, even as Christ also loved the church, and gave himself for it, that he might sanctify and cleanse it with the washing of water by the word; that he might present it to himself a glorious church, not having spot, or wrinkle, or any such thing; but that it should be holy and without blemish.

“So ought men to love their wives as their own bodies. He that loves his wife loves himself.”

In verse 28 of this passage, the body of the wife is possessively related to the man. The man owns his wife’s body, just as she owns his. Paul was very explicit in this connection in 1 Corinthians 7:2-5:

“Nevertheless, to avoid fornication, let every man have his own wife, and let every woman have her own husband. Let the husband render to the wife due benevolence; and likewise also, the wife to the husband. The wife has not power of her own body, but the husband; and likewise also the husband has not power of his own body, but the wife. Defraud you not one the other, except it be with consent for a time, that you may give yourselves to fasting and prayer; and come together again, that Satan tempt you not for your incontinency.”

The possessive ownership of each others’ bodies, while taken for granted in romantic relationships within humanity, is often avoided in the context of the relationship between Jesus and His Church. Yet Paul was quite explicit in his establishment of that as well, as Ephesians 5 continues in verses 29 through 32:

“For no man ever yet hated his own flesh, but nourishes and cherishes it, even as the Lord the church; for we are members of his body, of his flesh, and of his bones.

“For this cause shall a man leave his father and mother, and shall be joined unto his wife, and they two shall be one flesh. This is a great mystery, but I speak concerning Christ and the church.”

But why, if the Church’s marriage to Jesus is to be a meaningful one in the context of our marriages to each other, did Paul in Ephesians 3:28 declare us to be neither male nor female in the spiritual realm? The obvious answer is that we as individuals are simply components of the composite Church, which herself is gendered. Paul alludes to this differentiation between individuals and the composite Church in 1 Corinthians 12:12-17:

“For as the body is one, and hath many members, and all the members of that one body, being many, are one body, so also is Christ. For by one Spirit were we all baptized into one body, whether we be Jews or Greeks, whether we be bond or free; and have been all made to drink into one Spirit. For the body is not one member, but many.

“If the foot shall say, Because I am not the hand, I am not of the body; is it, therefore, not of the body? And if the ear shall say, Because I am not the eye, I am not of the body; is it, therefore, not of the body? If the whole body were an eye, where were the hearing? If the whole were hearing, where were the smelling?

Given the common misunderstanding of Ephesians 3:28, Ephesians 5:28 is often misinterpreted as supporting the common claim that the Church is the one and only spiritual body of Christ, inferring that the Church is the exclusive repository of that body. In the more natural context of possession, however, the Church belongs to Jesus as a body integral with His own, in the same sense that a wife’s body belongs to her husband as an integral component of his own body, just as Adam in Genesis 2:24, Jesus in Matthew 19:5 and Paul in Ephesians 5:31 directly stated.

Of the three features of romantic love, the third, shared intimacy, is the strongest bonding agent to unite the couple. Other human relationships can involve intimacy, but never to the extent of the sexual union between a man and a woman in their romantic partnership. God designed it that way to impart to the gender-based relationship its unique fullness, to set the couple apart from others as a special inviolate unity. It is the intimacy of their shared sexuality, or the promise of it, in synergy with their shared possession of each other, that gives their romance its very strength of passion. Nothing other than that intimacy provides individuals with a bonding force of that strength or beauty.

WORSHIPING GOD

 

How does one go about worshiping God? In America today, there probably are as many styles and motives of worship as Jelly-Belly flavors – maybe even as much as Jelly-Bellys themselves.

We’re pretty sure that God isn’t dwarfish – most of us perceive Him as rather larger than we are. That size difference evokes a sense of God’s magnificent power, and many Churches affirm that majesty in their communal worship. Others see in that difference in size and power that God possesses considerably more “things” than we do, and consequently adjust their style of worship toward pleas to share the wealth.

Still others, knowing of the promise of the Holy Spirit indwelling believers, seek to tap into that power, just like Simon attempted to do as described in Acts 8:9-24:

“But there was a certain man, called Simon, who previously in the same city used sorcery, and bewitched the people of Samaria, giving out that himself was some great one, to whom they all gave heed, from the least to the greatest, saying, This man is the great power of God. And to him they had regard, because that for a long time he had bewitched them with sorceries. But when they believed Philip preaching the things concerning the kingdom of God, and the name of Jesus Christ, they were baptized, both men and women. Then Simon himself believed also; and when he was baptized, he continued with Philip, and was amazed, beholding the miracles and signs which were done.

“Now when the apostles who were at Jerusalem heard that Samaria had received the word of God, they sent unto them Peter and John, who, when they were come down, prayed for them, that they might receive the Holy Spirit; for as yet he was fallen upon none of them; only they were baptized in the name of the Lord Jesus. Then laid their hands on them, and they received the Holy Spirit.

“And when Simon saw that through laying on of the apostles’ hands the Holy Spirit was given, he offered them money, saying, Give me also this power, that on whomsoever I lay hands, he may receive the Holy Spirit. But Peter said unto him, Thy money perish with thee, because thou hast thought that the gift of God may be purchased with money. Thou hast neither part nor lot in this matter; for thy heart is not right in the sight of God. Repent, therefore, of this thy wickedness, and pray God, if perhaps the thought of thine heart may be forgiven thee; for I perceive that thou art in the gall of bitterness, and in the bond of iniquity. Then answered Simon, and said, Pray ye to the Lord for me, that none of these things which ye have spoken come upon me.”

This incident has left us with the word simony, which has come to mean, according to one dictionary, “The act of buying or selling places of honor in the church”, a practice that was particularly rampant in the medieval Church and contributed to Martin Luther’s choler against it. People never learn.

Simony is practiced today in a more subtle form among the Church laity, wherein tithing is related to expectations regarding personal finances and workplace successes. But all of the worship practices noted above, including the obsequious slobbering, tail-wagging groveling associated with the worship of God’s majesty, have one glaring characteristic in common: they all are, at their core, dreadfully self-serving. They all constitute nothing but lobbying God for favors. Of such practices, Scripture says in John 9:31:

“Now we know that God hears not sinners; but if any man be a worshiper of God, and does His will, him He hears.”

Self-service is not what God intended worship to be. According to the Bible, what God wants out of us is a restoration of communion with Him, as He initially enjoyed with Adam and Eve in the Garden. He even went so far as to sacrifice Jesus on the cross to provide the way for that to happen.

How, then, should we worship God in a manner pleasing to Him? Above all, we must know the God whom we worship. The only reliable way to know God is to read Scripture, His Self-revelation to us. That, of course, is a process, one which can be supported by the fellowship offered by the Church. Rather quickly, the reader of Scripture comes to understand the true majesty of God, which is pure love, always taking the form of noble selflessness and evoking the same from us. As we come to understand His greatness in love, our worship always should include the spirit of thanksgiving for what we do possess, most of all being His loving, gracious inclusion of us in His extended family.

As suggested in the passage in John quoted above, our worship also should involve active obedience to His will, as it is thoroughly described in Scripture. As Paul plainly notes, our salvation has nothing to do with works; nevertheless, as James also plainly notes, godly works come naturally through the Holy Spirit who indwells believers who have accepted the offer of salvation through Jesus’ vicarious work on the cross in our behalf, moves them to service to God and gifts them with the wherewithal to do so. This does not mean that the Christian need immediately seek out the nearest soup kitchen, but rather that he or she should be available for service as moved by the Holy Spirit. Christians who do serve the Lord in that way quickly learn that such service brings them ever closer to God in a wonderfully loving, productive relationship.

WHY SHOULD IT MATTER?

 

The usual response to my multi-year heartfelt presentations of the Holy Spirit’s femininity is glassy eyes and a shrug of the shoulders. So what? The body language says with eloquence. Why should I care? Whoever or whatever God is or isn’t, I’m a believer, so my faith is the only thing that really matters.

But is it all that matters? More to the point, is faith without love really faith? In Matthew 22:37, Jesus echoes Moses’ words in Deuteronomy 6:5 by claiming that the greatest commandment of God is that Thou shalt love the Lord, thy God, with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind. Jesus stated that not as a suggestion, but as a commandment. Jesus also said in John 14:15 If ye love me, keep my commandments. These two passages can be paraphrased to say that your love must be fervent to truly be love.

Our faith itself must involve fervent love; otherwise, it isn’t really faith at all, just some meaningless mind-exercise performed for the sake of acquiring peace of mind over the issue of where one goes after the game’s up here on earth. But the faith of most of us is exactly that – fire insurance. Our worship of God seems to be based on a self-centered desire not to be left out of the joys of heaven (if heaven actually does exist, as we wonder within ourselves, and if it actually is joyful).

Fervent love toward God is far more than an exercise of the mind, because fervor doesn’t come from the mind. It is an imprinting upon the soul akin to the passionate, possessive love between a man and a woman. It must be of such a magnitude that the thought of its removal invokes the same sense of desperate grief as the loss of a lifelong mate. It is the way that God made us to love Him. Anything less is not love, nor is it faith. Less than fervent love has the potential of crumbling at the first threat to well-being. We see it happening now in the mass exodus from Church following the recent marginalization of Christians.

Here is where the issue of loving faith collides with our understanding of the nature of God. How can we possibly love that which we so imperfectly know? The Church for centuries has treated the Trinitarian Godhead as either void of gender or somewhat masculine, all three Members having essentially the same nature. The problem with that misrepresentation is that the Godhead and the functional roles within it are both alien and confusing. Some theologians, in recognizing that problem, have put forth the idea that each Member of the Godhead is endowed with traits belonging to both genders. But such theologians failed to use their heads: on a moral basis alone God’s nobility resides far beyond such a narcissism-promoting arrangement as that would encourage. Beyond that issue, gender duality within each Member leaves unsolved the confusion of roles. Yet further, the gender ambiguity would attribute to God Himself gender traits which Scripture discourages in us. Because of the multiplicity of issues associated with it, most Churches recognize the problems inherent in that assignment, leaving us with the basic genderless or all-male model of the Godhead, returning us to confusion and alienation regarding the matter, which has led most Churches to ignore the issue completely.

But the issue is so important that it demands to be heard, for it involves faith. How can we worship God with the fervor He demands of us without even a basic understanding of who He is, and what little that we do know of Him is alien to us? That is exactly why the majority of self-styled Christians, lacking the love that God asks of us, are in blatant disobedience to God, holding to nothing more than a shallow semblance of faith. Most of us think more highly of ourselves than that, visualizing how we will hold fast to our faith in the face of persecution. But that kind of self-aggrandizing attitude is nothing but self-centered chest-pounding that will vaporize under any real threat.

The importance that I attach to this issue of the Holy Spirit’s gender raises another issue of grave importance to all the millions of Christians who have lived and died over the many centuries that the Church has mischaracterized the Holy Spirit: has their failure to obey their God with the ardent love that He commanded denied them the eternal fellowship with God that He promised to His believers? Personally, I don’t think that to be the case, particularly since the misleading came from the Church, not them. My belief that God is far more compassionate and merciful than that is reinforced by the numerous descriptions in Scripture of godly people who, at one time or another, failed to the extent of disobeying God’s commandments. I certainly hope that He is that merciful, because I, for one, have been disobedient to God with distressing frequency.

Yet, if disobedience in loving God the way we should doesn’t forever prohibit us from attaining favor with God, the issue of the Holy Spirit’s feminine gender remains important to us regarding the depth of our commitment to God and to the advantages that are conferred upon us in the here and now for that understanding. For it is a great blessing to fellowship with God, and the closer we come to Him, the nearer that He comes and displays His love toward us. Then, of course, there is the matter of a shallow faith being subject to abandonment in the face of trouble, which is an issue that is not a threat to those closer to God.

In an enormous contrast to the prevailing state of affairs with the Church’s misconception of God, an appreciation of a feminine Holy Spirit introduces the archetype of family into an understanding of the Godhead, instantly clarifying the respective roles of the individual Members and immediately removing all sense of confusion regarding the nature of God.

Most importantly, God is no longer alien to us, but One with whom we can identify through the personal experience of life itself. We can know this God intimately, and this intimacy grants us access to the kind of love that produces real faith in obedience to Jesus’ command, a faith that is capable of withstanding all the negatives that life as Christians can bring us.

Principally because of the issue of holding fast to our faith under the pressure of worldly pleasures and the threat of persecution, the understanding of the Holy Spirit as of the feminine gender does indeed matter – under certain situations, it can be as important as the destination of our eternal souls.

There’s still another reason for appreciating the Holy Spirit’s feminine gender. Equipped with that understanding, a reading of Genesis 1 and 2 becomes a breathtakingly beautiful endeavor. For in the reading the prospect becomes convincing that these passages speak not only of the creation of mankind, but of the arrangement and roles within the Godhead itself of the Members comprising it. Is it not possible, then, that the Holy Spirit Herself was formed out of the Father’s side in His effort to place Love above all other attributes of God, irretrievably far beyond self?

RECAP: TEN REASONS FOR A FEMININE HOLY SPIRIT

 

The following reasons are taken from Scripture, and are consistent with a view of the Bible as inspired and inerrant in the original.

ONE: The original Old Testament Scripture in the Hebrew language described the Holy Spirit in feminine terms. Evidence of this has been furnished by several language-expert Bible scholars, among whom is R. P. Nettelhorst of the Quartz Hill School of Theology. Dr. Nettelhorst’s specific examples include Genesis 1:2 that pointed to the role of the Holy Spirit in Creation and Judges 3:10, which represented a turning point in his understanding of God. He claims that there are 75 instances of either a feminine or indeterminable reference to the Holy Spirit, and no instances, other than descriptors of the Father, where in the original Hebrew the word “Spirit” is described in masculine terms. Other investigators have listed a multitude of specific Old Testament Bible passages that describe the Holy Spirit in feminine terms. Other passages, including Isaiah 51:9 and 10, furnish evidence of a deliberate switch of the Holy Spirit (Arm of the Lord) from feminine to masculine, as both feminine and masculine translations still exist, the feminine version being the earliest.

TWO: The original New Testament Scripture in the Greek/Aramaic language described the Holy Spirit in feminine terms, exposing a deliberate switch in descriptors from feminine to masculine. Evidence of this has been furnished by several Bible scholars, among whom is Johannes van Oort of Radboud University, Nijmegen, the Netherlands, and the University of Pretoria, South Africa. Dr. van Oort, another language expert, claims that the primitive Christian Church, until at least through the second century A.D., and in some places through the fourth century A.D. spoke of the Holy Spirit as feminine. His sources include the Gospel of the Hebrews, which, while now lost, was quoted widely by early Christians, who noted that the Holy Spirit in that Gospel was described as feminine. He observed from the extensive quotations from that Gospel that it apparently was quite popular among the early Christians. Dr. van Oort notes that more modern Christian leaders, including John Wesley and Count von Zinzendorf of the Moravian Church, were influenced by quotes from that Gospel. Other investigators, including S. Santini and R. Nettelhorst, point to the Sinaitic Palimpsest, the earliest currently known of Gospel passages still extant, as quoting Jesus in John 14:26 as referencing the Holy Spirit in feminine terms. It is the originals that are to be respected for inspiration and accuracy, not the various translations. Next in line for respect, the earliest available versions are generally considered to be the most faithful to the original. Other passages, including Romans 9:25, retain an understanding of the Holy Spirit as feminine. It is important to note also that some of the interlinear translations of the Bible in Hebrew, Greek and Aramaic have also adjusted the language to conform to the Church tradition of replacing the feminine with the masculine.

THREE: The first Chapter of Genesis in commonly available translations and versions (including the King James) unequivocally depicts the Holy Spirit as feminine, regardless of the attempts to suppress that aspect of the Holy Spirit’s nature. The passage most strongly indicative of a feminine Holy Spirit is Genesis 1:26 and 27, which identifies the gendered nature of mankind as conforming to God’s own nature. While modern commentators on this passage refuse to address this gender issue, they have no basis to do so other than participating in a slavish conformance to Church tradition, and are dishonest in their attempts to remove this characteristic from the image of God. Direct support of the depiction in Genesis 1 of the Holy Spirit’s feminine nature is found in Psalm 94:9, wherein God describes attributes of man, specifically ears and eyes, asking why man can’t understand that God possesses the same attributes. In that context, it would be appropriate for God to ask why, if man was made a gendered being, why God Himself wouldn’t possess as well that same profoundly important attribute.

FOUR: The account of the creation of Eve in Genesis 2 is a statement of the importance to God of gender. In opposition to the generally-accepted notion that the account of God’s creation of Eve in Genesis 2 took place well after the creation of Adam as an incidental afterthought, the Genesis 2 account is so central to the intention of God that it is more detailed than the original description and is presented again for the purpose of emphasis. Back in Genesis 1:26-31, God already had created both Adam and Eve as gendered and capable of reproduction. Furthermore, it is in Genesis 1:31 that God describes His creation, including gendered humanity, as very good. In Genesis 2:18, God describes Adam without Eve as being not good, which would be a contradiction to the earlier account in Genesis 1 if Genesis 2 represented anything other than an emphatic revisit of Eve’s creation. Yet more, in Matthew 19:4 and Mark 10:6-8, Jesus strongly defended the gendered nature of mankind as being the express intent of God from the beginning of Creation, pointing to its importance within the Godhead itself. This emphasis suggests the importance of Eve’s creation from Adam to the extent that it says something about the gendered nature of the Godhead, which could easily be interpreted as a continuation of the information presented in Genesis 1:27 that the creation of Eve amounts to a reprise in mankind of God’s own family nature.

FIVE: Only a union of a romantic, possessive nature between a male and a female is capable of fulfilling the passion intrinsic to God. Despite Church tradition that, influenced by the odd, cold theology of Zanchius and others of his cloth, the attributes of God include passion, and that passion includes romance. Scripture often attributes passion to Jesus and the other Members of the Godhead, most notably so in the Song of Solomon. The Song of Solomon is an overt description of gender-driven passion. Many respected Bible commentators see in this book a connection between Jesus and His Church in the spiritual domain, which places the attribute of gender firmly within the Godhead. Given the romantic, passionate nature of that Book, if romantic, possessive passion was not an attribute of God, the Song wouldn’t belong in the canon of Scripture. Moreover, according to Jesus’ greatest commandment to us in Matthew 22 (echoing Deuteronomy 6) God demands that same passion of us with respect to our relationship with Him. If God was incapable of experiencing that same passion, the commandment would be meaningless.

SIX: The selfless nobility intrinsic to God suggests a union within the Godhead of a harmony built upon complementary otherhood, which can only be fulfilled through gender differentiation. The Bible in its entirety, most emphatically presented in the work of Jesus on the cross, depicts God as selflessly noble. The alternatives to gender differentiation of an all-male or genderless Godhead would encourage narcissistic selfishness. The demand to love God with fervor requires us to view God in a family context as well. Any alternative to that view leaves us with confusion and a profound inability to obey the commandment of love that Jesus expressed in Matthew 22. The confusion is quite real: the confusion and lack of understanding has been confessed to me multiple times by theologians who possess impressive credentials, but who remain committed to a genderless or all-male Godhead. It is difficult to understand how a person who is confused about such an intimate detail regarding the nature of God would be able to worship Him with fervor.

SEVEN: In Ephesians 5, Paul claims that Jesus and His Church will be married, attributing functional gender to attributes within the Godhead. In Genesis 2, Adam states that Eve is bone of his bones and flesh of his flesh, and that therefore shall a man leave his father and his mother, and shall cleave unto his wife, and they shall be one flesh. The latter phrase represents the very words that Jesus repeated in Matthew 19:5 and 6, and in Mark 10:7 and 8. The importance of this phrase is confirmed in Ephesians 5:31 and 32, where Paul repeats it yet again, and then goes on to claim that it applies to the union of Jesus and His Church. Here, the Bible explicitly states that Jesus and the Church are fully gendered and will, in the spiritual domain, unite in marriage. That this union will be productive is asserted in Romans 7:4. The fact that Jesus is a Member of the Godhead and is slated to be married plainly suggests that the other two members of the Godhead are also gendered, and, in fact, are united with each other.

EIGHT: The Old Testament Shekinah Glory, generally acknowledged to be feminine, is revealed in the New Testament as the Holy Spirit. Paul goes to great lengths to describe the Church as a spiritual composite of individual Christians, in which the individuals are contributing elements of a whole, each individual being somewhat akin to the various organs that comprise a human body. In that context, gender is not important with regard to the individual (how would a gendered heart work?), but is a vital necessity, as in the complete human body, to the complete Church. An important aspect of the integrated spiritual Church is the indwelling Holy Spirit. As Paul declares in 1 Corinthians 3:16 and Ephesians 2:19-22, we Christians comprise a temple of God, wherein the Holy Spirit dwells. This temple described by Paul is a fulfillment of the type described in the Old Testament, where the Shekinah Glory indwelt the Tabernacle of the Wilderness and Solomon’s Temple at their dedications (Exodus 40 and 1 Kings 8). The Shekinah Glory is generally acknowledged to be feminine in nature; the indwelling fulfillment in Christians identifies the Shekinah as the Holy Spirit.

NINE: The Book of Proverbs describes as feminine the Holy Spirit in Her role as complementary other to the Father. Proverbs 8:22-36, in particular, describes the Holy Spirit working alongside the Father in the Creation. That the feminine Persona of the Holy Spirit in Proverbs is far more than simply a figure of speech, is confirmed by Jesus Christ, who in Luke 7:35 described the Holy Spirit in terms of a sentient Mother. The connection between Wisdom and the Holy Spirit is also made in the Book of Wisdom, which, while having been removed from the canon of Protestant Scripture during the Reformation, remains canonical in the Catholic Church. In that book, Wisdom as a feminine Being is directly linked to the Holy Spirit.

TEN: In multiple passages, Jesus describes the Holy Spirit in feminine terms. In the Gospel of John, Jesus frequently links the Holy Spirit with feminine descriptors, such as “Comforter” and “Helper”. This association is most direct in John 3, where Jesus connects the Holy Spirit with spiritual birth. Birth, of course, is an eminently feminine function. Moreover, many theologians see in Scripture the role of the Holy Spirit as an executive one. An executive function is feminine in nature, representing the essence of complementary otherhood in the carrying out of the will of the Father. More generally, even in translations that corrupt the original description of the Holy Spirit in feminine terms, the Holy Spirit in Genesis 1:2 is described as creatively responsive to the Father’s will. A responsive role is a feminine one.

THE EARLY MORAVIAN CHURCH

 

As I was browsing the Internet recently I came across a fascinating article written by Dr. Craig D. Atwood entitled Motherhood of Holy Spirit in the 18^th Century.

According to Dr. Atwood’s biography, his current title is the rather lengthy “Charles D. Couch Associate professor of Moravian Theology and Ministry Director of the Center for Moravian Studies”. He is a faculty member of the Moravian College and Theological Seminary located in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, where he teaches Moravian theology and history, Christian history, religion in America, and history of Christian thought.

His current interests include a desire to help the Christian community in general to “rediscover the riches of the Moravian theological heritage”. There is a hint in this aspiration, supported in the article noted above, that he sees that something quite valuable was lost in the transition of the Moravian Church away from its unique early dogma toward a more mainstream perception of our Trinitarian Godhead.

The perception that ultimately was abandoned by the Moravian Church is identified in the title: the femininity of the Holy Spirit.

The article itself, which was delivered in a presentation to the faculty of the Moravian College in 2011, traces the history of the Moravian Church in America during its most controversial (and possibly its most fruitful) period, the two decades of the 1740s through the 1750s. From the establishment of the Moravian community of Bethlehem in 1741 on a 500-acre plot purchased from the estate of George Whitefield, the Church initially adhered to the theology of Moravian (now Czechoslovakian) Count Nicholas Ludwig von Zinzendorf.

Zinzendorf’s theology is rooted in the Czech reform movement of the fourteenth century, in which John Hus’ protests against the Catholic Church a full sixty years before Luther landed him astride a stake, where he was burned as a heretic in 1415. Followers of Hus organized the Moravian Church in 1457 in the village of Kunvald, about a hundred miles east of Prague. The Church spread into Poland through heavy persecution in the sixteenth century. Continuing persecution in the seventeenth century contributed to a relative stasis in the Church. It enjoyed a revival in the eighteenth century as the Church planted roots in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania under the leadership of Count Zinzendorf. Bethlehem lies on the outskirts of Allentown in southeastern Pennsylvania, just north of Philadelphia and west of the New Jersey border. It recently was recognized as being one of the one hundred best places to live in America.

According to Dr. Atwood, Bethlehem enjoyed particular favor from God, as the community was one of the most successful in pre-revolution America. Atwood implies that this favor resulted from the theology of the Moravian Church, unique at that time, in which the Holy Spirit was considered to be the Spouse of the Holy Father and the Mother of Jesus and His Church.

The Moravian Church was recognized for its emphasis on the love of God. God blessed it by endowing the Church with a very active missionary outreach, where it attained a position of leadership in sending emissaries of Jesus Christ to other lands as well as the local Algonquin-based Lenape Indian Tribe, many members of which were converted to Christianity. Bethlehem itself was blessed with stability and commercial prosperity, becoming a center for the production of steel and shipbuilding.

The Church’s perception of the Holy Trinity continued at least for the twenty years following the establishment of Bethlehem. Following the death of Count Zinzendorf and his wife and son, the far weaker post-Zinzendorf Church leadership fell away into a desire to conform more closely to the more popular “mainstream” dogmas of the Protestant Churches in the surrounding communities. They completed their abandonment of their original dogma by burning Zinzendorf’s writings.

The Church leadership now appears to lament this transition toward “normalcy”, implying that Bethlehem and the Moravian Church did not continue in the favor of God thereafter. They have expressed disappointment in the manner in which this transition was handled, implying that in continuing embarrassment Church historians label the two initial decades of the Moravian presence in America as “a time of sifting’, wherein the theological “experimentation” of the time eventually led to the more stable dogma of mainstream Christianity. In opposition to this false and rude dismissal, some Church members claim that a substantial segment of the Moravian Church continues in the initial dogma even to this day.

Some Church leaders appear to be seeking a re-establishment of that early doctrine of the Holy Spirit, not only for its intrinsic truth but for the good of the Church and perhaps even America.

Here’s my take on this account of accommodation to popular thought: as the reader of my blog postings is well-aware, I consider the perception of the femininity of the Holy Spirit not only to represent truth, but to be the only viable way to worship our Judeo-Christian God with the love that He demands of us. Beyond that, the transition of the Moravian Church to “normal” is just another sad tale in a very long litany of similar ungodly, cowardly acts of appeasement to majority thought, begun in the New Testament by Peter’s threefold denial of Jesus and continuing on to this very day, where we see, among other examples of falling-away, the Church’s attempt to accommodate herself to the false and thoroughly secular notion of evolution.

THE NATURE OF OUR MARRIAGE TO JESUS CHRIST

 

Having denied the existence of gender in heaven, some scholars of theology have taken this absence to the extreme of insisting that Jesus will wed a building, beautiful as it might be. Individuals of this persuasion have pointed to Revelation 21:1-3 in support of that notion, interpreting it to align with their particular vision of God:

“And I saw a new heaven and a new earth; for the first heaven and the first earth were passed away, and there was no more sea. And I, John, saw the holy city, New Jerusalem, coming down from God out of heaven, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband. And I heard a great voice out of heaven saying, Behold, the tabernacle of Go is with men, and he will dwell with them, and they shall be his people, and God himself shall be with them, and be their God.”

But if that is the case, one might ask such an individual, what about the Church? Indeed, in John 3:29, where Jesus refers to Himself as the bridegroom of the bride, the object of His affection is usually interpreted as the Church.

But no, he who pictures the bride as a building would respond. The Church is the body of Christ, he would assert, pointing to 1 Corinthians 12:27;

“Now you are the body of Christ, and members in particular.”

But Paul, in Ephesians 5:28, made a more possessive association of the Church with the body of Christ than one in which the Church actually takes over Christ’s body. In developing in more detail the interpretation of the Church as being “the Body of Christ”, Paul commented there that “So ought men to love their wives as their own bodies.” In that phrase Paul emphasizes the image in which the wife is considered to belong to the man’s body. The inclusion in marriage of the notion of ownership was developed at the very beginning of the Bible in the restatement of Adam’s commentary regarding Eve of two becoming one flesh such that in the marital union the wife is considered to belong to the man’s body.

In short, the Body of Christ represented by the Church is a possessive extension of Christ’s own body, the Man and wife being considered as one flesh.

Scripture itself asserts that Jesus will marry a living entity rather than an inanimate object. In Matthew 22:31 and 32, Jesus declares that He is the God of the living:

“But as touching the resurrection of the dead, have you not read that which was spoken to you by God, saying, I am the God of Abraham, and the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob? God is not the God of the dead, but of the living.”

My own interpretation of the New Jerusalem in Revelation 20 is that this holy city is the mansion that Jesus spoke of in John 14:1-3:

“Let not your heart be troubled; you believe in God, believe also in me. In my Father’s house are many mansions; if it were not so, I would have told you. I go to prepare a place for you. And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again, and receive you to myself, that where I am, there you may be also.”

But if the New Jerusalem is itself Jesus’ bride, it is a living building. There is some allusion to that in Scripture. In His message to the Church at Philadelphia in Revelation 3:12, Jesus graphically describes a member of the Church as a component of a building:

“Him that overcomes will I make a pillar in the temple of my God, and he shall go no more out; and I will write upon him the name of My God, and the name of the city of My God, the new Jerusalem, which cometh down out of heaven from My God; and I will write upon him My new name.”

Paul, in 1 Corinthians 3:9, 10 and 16, describes the members of the Church as living temples:

“For we are laborers together with God; you are God’s cultivated field, you are God’s building. According to the grace of God which is given unto me, as a wise master builder, I have laid the foundation, and another builds on it. But let every man take heed how he builds upon it. . . Know you not that you are the temple of God, and that the Spirit of God dwells in you?”

Paul makes this same association of Christians to living temples in Ephesians 2:19-22:

“Now, therefore you are no more strangers and sojourners, but fellow citizens with the saints, and of the household of God; and are built upon the foundation of the apostles and prophets, Jesus Christ Himself being the chief corner stone, in whom all the building fitly framed together growth unto an holy temple in the Lord; in whom you also are built together for a habitation of God through the Spirit.”

Note from these examples that while the imagery is one of a building or components thereof, the components themselves are living human souls, all redeemed by Jesus Christ and therefore identical to the components of the Church. Given that identity, the imagery in Revelation 21 of the New Jerusalem is not mutually exclusive with the imagery of the Church. Indeed, if one considers the mansion of John 14 to be supplied by God and the Church its living furnishings, the two images are entirely compatible with each other and mutually supportive, each adding color to the understanding of the Church as the spiritual Bride of Christ. This understanding brings this commentary full circle through Revelation 19: 7-9 back to the character of the Church as not having spot, or wrinkle, or any such thing:

“Let us be glad and rejoice, and give honor to Him; for the marriage of the Lamb is come, and His wife has made herself ready. And to her was granted that she should be arrayed in fine linen, clean and white; for the fine linen is the righteousness of saints. And he said to me, Write, Blessed are they who are called unto the marriage supper of the Lamb. And he said to me, These are the true sayings of God.”

Not only is Jesus’ bride alive, but His relationship with her will be romantic. If that was not the case, Jesus would not have joyfully worked His first miracle at Cana as recorded in John 2, nor would the Song of Solomon or the book of Ruth, both commonly recognized as prophetic of Jesus’ marriage to His Church, have belonged in the Bible.

THE BRIDE OF CHRIST

 

The beautiful mystery explained by Paul in Ephesians 5:25-32 has instilled in me the wonderful and moving view of the Church as the Bride of Christ:

“Husbands, love your wives, even as Christ loved the Church, and gave Himself for it, that He might sanctify and cleanse it with the washing of the water by the Word; that He might present it to himself a glorious Church, not having spot, or wrinkle, or any such thing; but that it should be holy and without blemish. So ought men to love their wives as their own bodies. He that loves his wife loves himself. For no man ever yet hated his own flesh, but nourishes and cherishes it, even as the Lord the Church; for we are members of His body, of His flesh, and of his bones.

For this cause shall a man leave his father and mother, and shall be joined unto his wife, and they two shall be one flesh. This is a great mystery, but I speak concerning Christ and the Church.”

In repeating the words of Adam in the Garden and of Jesus in Matthew 19, both in the setting of marriage and in the physical union between a man and his wife, Paul, by placing this marital union in the context of Jesus and His Church, plainly stated that the Church will be the spiritual Bride of Christ in an intimate relationship with a meaning that extends far beyond that of a mere figure of speech, as is the prevailing custom within the Church.

Unfortunately, the Church for a very long time has attempted to minimize the nature of this spiritual relationship, to the extent of denying that gender and the romance associated with it exists in heaven. There are two particular passages in Scripture that are used to foster that thought. One is in Matthew 22, and the other is in Galatians 3.

In Matthew 22: 28-30, Jesus responds to the Sadducees’ attempts to trick Him by telling them that in heaven people don’t marry:

“Jesus answered and said unto the, Ye do err, not knowing the Scriptures, nor the power of God. For in the resurrection they neither marry, nor are given in marriage, but are like the angels in heaven.”

Notice that in this context Jesus mentioned the power of God. This doesn’t square with the common interpretation of the passage as describing a feature that is absent. Those who would deny the existence of gender in heaven overlook that point. Why the deniers miss this is that they’re thinking too small. Jesus didn’t deny the existence of marriage; He denied the existence of marriage among individuals. But the Church, as a composite of a multitude of individuals, is perfectly capable of marriage, and that’s where the power of God comes into play.

Paul addresses the same issue in Galatians 3:28 regarding individuals in the spiritual realm:

“There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female; for you are all one in Christ Jesus.”

Again, the subject is the individual. But in 1 Corinthians 12: 4-11 and elsewhere in Scripture, Paul very plainly develops the idea that the individual is not the Church, but rather just a component of her, and a rather small element at that:

“Now there are diversities of gifts, but the same Spirit. And there are differences of administrations, but the same Lord. And there are diversities of operations, but it is the same God who works all in all. But the manifestation of the Spirit is given to every man to profit.

“For to one is given, by the Spirit, the word of wisdom; to another, the word of knowledge by the same Spirit; to another, faith by the same Spirit; to another, the gifts of healing by the same Spirit; to another, the working of miracles; to another, prophecy; to another, discerning of spirits; to another, various kinds of tongues; to another, the interpretation of tongues. But all these work that one and the very same Spirit, dividing to every man severally as he will.”

In verses 12-17, Paul develops the role of the individual within the Church as similar to the roles of parts within our bodies:

“For as the body is one, and has many members, and all the members of that one body, being many, are one body, so also is Christ. For by one Spirit we were all baptized into one body, where we are Jews or Greeks, whether we are bond or free; and we have all been made to drink into one Spirit. For the body is not one member, but many.

“If the foot shall say, Because I am not the hand, I am not of the body; is it therefore, not of the body? If the whole body were an eye, where would be the hearing? If the whole were hearing, where would be the smelling?”

Paul continues to develop the point that individuals are only components of an integrated whole, and concludes by listing some specific individual roles of individuals within the Church: apostles; prophets; teachers; workers of miracles; healers; administrators; and speakers in tongues. His point is clear: there is a vast difference in the spiritual Church between the individual components and the whole, just as in our own bodies between our individual organs, which of themselves are genderless, even those that implement gender, and our composite selves, which are indeed gendered.

There are Old Testament prophecies of Jesus’ marriage to His Church. The elaborate and moving description of it found in Genesis 24 certainly doesn’t portray that relationship as trivial. Nor does the description in Ruth, nor in the Song of Solomon.

Genesis 24, for example, describes the betrothal and marriage of Rebekah to Isaac. In Genesis 22 God commands Abraham to sacrifice Isaac, which identifies Isaac as a type of Jesus Christ. In line with that identification, Isaac’s marriage to Rebekah identifies her as a type of Christ’s bride. According to Galatians 3:28, in which spiritual individuals do not possess gender, this bridehood cannot be fulfilled in individuals: the fulfillment must come for a collection or aggregate of individuals, which would suggest the Church. This identification of the Church as the Bride of Christ is strengthened by Paul’s characterization of the Church in 1 Corinthians 12 as a collection of individuals, each possessing specific gifts of the Holy Spirit.

In the Book of Ruth, Ruth’s husband Boaz is routinely identified by the Church as the Kinsman-redeemer, a type of Christ. It follows that Ruth, a female, represents His spiritual Wife, the Church.

Relating again to the Old Testament, it would be extremely difficult, if the Church was not a feminine entity, to justify the inclusion of the Song of Solomon in the canon of Scripture. Why, if the spiritual domain is genderless, would this overtly sexual document be a part of the Bible?

Jesus certainly didn’t dismiss His future spiritual marriage to His Church as amounting to “a figure of speech”. Jesus made numerous allusions to His own future marriage, including the parable of the marriage feast in Matthew 22, the parable of the ten virgins in Matthew 25, and, of course, his first miracle at Cana recorded in John 2, wherein He changed water into wine in anticipation of the joy of His own future wedding.

Nor, according to Paul in Romans 7:4, is this marriage to be empty of birth.

“Wherefore, my brethren, you also are become dead to the law by the body of Christ, that you should be married to another, even to Him who is raised from the dead, that we should bring forth fruit to God.”

CREATION’S ULTIMATE PURPOSE

 

God’s act of Creation was an epic of love that started with the begetting of Jesus Christ, the Light and the first Word of God, who was glorified thereafter with the colorful clothing of Creation itself.

There is a deeper purpose behind creation than material beauty. That purpose is to clothe Jesus Christ not only with the apparel of Creation, but to propagate Love, the essence of God, by endowing Him with a Bride of His own, the Church, with whom He can continue the epic of Creation as did the original Will and Spirit.

Scripture captures this notion in Matthew 9:14 and 15, Romans 7:4, and Ephesians 5:28-32, leaving no room for a lesser understanding:

“Then came to [Jesus] the disciples of John, saying, Why do we and the Pharisees fast often, but thy disciples fast not? And Jesus said unto them, Can the children of the bridechamber mourn, as long as the bridegroom is with them? But the days will come, when the bridegroom shall be taken from them, and then shall they fast.”

“Wherefore, my brethren, you also are become dead to the law by the body of Christ, that you should be married to another, even to him who is raised from the dead, that we should bring forth fruit to God.”

“So ought men to love their wives as their own bodies. He that loves his wife loves himself. For no man ever yet hated his own flesh, but nourishes and cherishes it, even as the Lord the church; for we are members of his body, of his flesh, and of his bones.

“For this cause shall a man leave his father and mother, and shall be joined unto his wife, and they two shall be one flesh. This is a great mystery, but I speak concerning Christ and the church.”

Note from Romans 7:4 above that the marriage will be consummated, being far more than symbolic or a mere figure of speech. Further Scriptural confirmation of this future promise to the Church may be found in the preview of it in Jesus’ parable of the marriage in Matthew 22, the wedding at Cana, as described in John 2, and the Lamb’s wife in Revelation 21.

Just as Scripture suggests that the Holy Spirit was brought forth out of the essence of the Father as He parted Himself to form Her, and as Scripture describes Eve as having been formed from Adam’s pierced side, so did Jesus bring forth the Church from His pierced side as he suffered on the cross on Her behalf.

In his book Destined for the Throne, reviewed and recommended by Billy Graham, Paul Billheimer expands with eloquence on the theme of Jesus’ marriage to the Church. Excerpts from Billheimer’s Introduction and Chapter 1, as extracted from my book Marching to a Worthy Drummer, are given below:

“The following chapters present what some consider a totally new and unique cosmology. The author’s primary thesis is that the one purpose of the universe from all eternity is the production and preparation of an Eternal Companion for the Son, called the Bride, the Lamb’s Wife. Since she is to share the throne of the universe with her Divine Lover and Lord as a judicial equal, she must be trained, educated, and prepared for her queenly role.”

“From this it is implicit that romance is at the heart of the universe and is key to all existence. From all eternity God purposed that at some time in the future His Son should have an Eternal Companion, described by John the Revelator as ‘the bride, the Lamb’s wife’ (Rev. 21:9) John further revealed that this Eternal Companion in God’s eternal purpose is to share the Bridegroom’s throne following the Marriage Supper of the Lamb (Rev. 3:21). Here we see the ultimate purpose, the climactic goal of history.”

“As in the case of Adam, God saw that it was not good for His Son to be alone. From the very beginning it was God’s plan and purpose that out of the riven side of His Son should come an Eternal Companion to sit by His side upon the throne of the universe as a bona fide partner, a judicial equal, to share with Him His sovereign power and authority over His eternal kingdom. ‘Fear not, little flock, for it is your Father’s good pleasure to give you the kingdom’ (Luke 12:32). ‘To him that overcometh will I grant to sit with me in my throne, even as I also overcame and am set down with my Father in his throne’ (Rev. 3:21).

“To be given a kingdom is more than to internalize kingdom principles and ethics. That is only one phase of it. To be given a kingdom is to be made a king, to be invested with authority over a kingdom. That this is God’s glorious purpose for the Church is authenticated and confirmed by Paul in 1 Corinthians 6:2-3: ‘Do ye not know that the saints shall judge the world? . . . Know ye not that we shall judge angels?’ This is an earnest of what Jesus meant when He said, ‘The glory that thou gavest me I have given them’ (John 17:22).

“This royalty and rulership is no hollow, empty, figurative, symbolical, or emblematic thing. It is not a figment of the imagination. The Church, the Bride, the Eternal Companion is to sit with Him on His throne. If His throne represents reality, then here is no fantasy. Neither joint heir can do anything alone (Rom. 8:17).

“We may not know why it pleases the Father to give the kingdom to the little flock. We may not know why Christ chooses to share His throne and His glory with the redeemed. We only know that He has chosen to do so and that it gives Him pleasure.”

Billheimer stopped short of asserting that the Church, in her spiritual form, may be integrated into the Godhead, nor did he directly imply that a feminine element exists within the Trinity. For example in his Chapter 2, page 37, he commented: “As sons of God [speaking of the individuals within the Church], begotten by Him, incorporating into their fundamental being and nature the very ‘genes’ of God, they rank above all other created beings and are elevated to the most sublime height possible short of becoming members of the Trinity itself.”

But Billheimer came very close to those two intimately related associations. Two pages earlier, on page 35, he stated “Thus, through the new birth – and I speak reverently – we become ‘next of kin’ to the Trinity, a kind of ‘extension’ of the Godhead.” Even more telling, in a footnote at the end of that chapter, he claimed “There is a clear and convincing implication in Genesis 1:27 that sex, in its spiritual dimension, constitutes an element of the image of God.”

Regarding Billheimer’s comment on not knowing “why it pleases the Father to give the kingdom to the little flock”, I do believe that Scripture supplies the answer to that question as to why Christ chooses to share: because, in harmony with the selflessness intrinsic to the Him, the Father Himself chose to share, elevating love over majesty.

THE SIGNIFICANCE OF A FEMININE HOLY SPIRIT

 

A major and rather instant result of perceiving the Holy Spirit’s femininity is the replacement of confusion with understanding. Once that connection is made, the Godhead’s attribute of Unity in the face of Trinity is no longer a logical inconsistency; the understanding itself immediately emerges with the depth of full intuition, so boldly as to evoke not only a sense of functional differentiation among the Members of the Godhead, but also to resolve the former paradox of unity in Trinity and to encourage the assignment of specific functions to each of them.

The Trinity, given the inclusion of femininity, at once is seen in a Family context. Viewing the Godhead in context of Family, the Family Entity is seen to reside above the three Members of the Trinity, representing the oneness of God in loving relationship, to which the individual Members are subordinate. In that setting, the Trinitarian Godhead represents the unity of Family, whereas the individual Members of the Godhead represent the three familiar functional roles of Father, Mother and Son.

In the context of function, the Father naturally represents the Divine Will in accordance with that assignment as given in Scripture, whereas the Holy Spirit responds to that Will by furnishing the Means by which it may be actualized. Pursuing that context, the Son represents the result of the union between Will and Means, being the Will’s actuality in Creation.

Key to understanding the Divine Family is the notion of complementary otherness implicit in the relationship. The importance of complementary otherness is its very partiality, which in the incompleteness of one partner without the other removes the exaltation of the individual. Even, or perhaps especially in the Godhead, ego is deliberately minimized by design.

It is my conviction that the Father Himself, in his own selfless nobility, willed the implementation of His subordination to Family, with love as His motive for doing so. Parting Himself in two, He voluntarily limited His unrivaled personal sovereignty over the universe to a shared arrangement with that element of His former essence that we call the Holy Spirit. This parting created gender differentiation within the Godhead Itself As the Complementary Other to the masculine initiative essence of the Divine Father, the Holy Spirit necessarily possesses the responsive gender attribute of femininity.

This Family-based gendered view of the Godhead elevates several verses of Genesis 1 and 2 beyond mere descriptive images of mankind, as we are used to understanding them, to very elemental depictions of the Godhead Itself.

Note in Genesis 2 that God described the state of Adam being without a companion as not good. Being without a feminine companion would render Adam, for all practical purposes, genderless. The attribute of gender was important to God, which suggests that God considers gender and its exercise as intrinsically good, rather than bad. The passage goes out of its way to make that plain. In an interpretation more in line with what the Scripture suggests, the formation of Eve from Adam echoes rather distinctly the Father’s extraction of the Holy Spirit from His own essence.

Scripture tells us that before man’s fall from grace the primal couple was not ashamed of their nakedness. It was only after the Fall that sexual shame came into the picture.

In Matthew 19 Jesus repeats Adam’s statement in Genesis 2 regarding Adam and Eve’s gender-based relationship in which the man cleaves to his wife, but attributes the act to God Himself, concluding that what God had put together, no man should separate.

In the like passage in Ephesians 5, Paul repeats the event of God having made man in male and female versions for the purpose of the man’s leaving father and mother and cleaving to his wife to become one flesh. Then he makes the starkly momentous statement that he’s really talking about the relationship between Jesus and His Church.

Adam’s quote about leaving father and mother and cleaving to his wife is obviously important to God, not only because it was echoed by Jesus and Paul, but makes the claim that Jesus, as a Member of the Godhead, will marry the Church. The implication in this is that if gender union applies to one of its Members, it places the attribute of gender squarely in the Godhead, suggesting that gender is an attribute shared by the Father and Holy Spirit as well. Moreover, gender appeals to our intuition, making sense of the relationships within the Godhead. It is easy to picture the fruit of the union between Father and Holy Spirit being the Son Jesus, the glorious actualization of the Will as given birth by the Divine Means.

Here’s the great beauty of what the Father did in his selfless parting of Himself to form the Holy Spirit: what He gave up in doing that He regained in love in union with Her. That is the true significance of Adams words: “a Man shall cleave unto to his Wife, and they two shall be one Spirit.”

Just as Adam’s side was rent to form Eve, and as the Church was formed out of Jesus’ pierced side on the cross, so did the Father part Himself to form the Holy Spirit, with Whom He united in love to form Jesus Christ.

God intended our relationship with Him to be intimate and romantic. Only through our perception of the Godhead in Family terms can we begin to appreciate and love God as Jesus calls us to do in Matthew 22:37 and 38:

“. . .You shall love the Lord, your God, with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind. This is the first and great commandment.”

SCRIPTURE EXALTS FEMININITY

 

Having dispensed with the gorillas in the room, we’ll turn next to a review of some elements of Scripture that support our view of the femininity of the Holy Spirit.

Spiritual birth: In John 3, Jesus describes the Holy Spirit as giving spiritual birth. Birth is an eminently feminine function.

Original Scriptural references to femininity: As several qualified scholars have noted, the feminine gender is applied to the Holy Spirit in the original Hebrew Old Testament Scripture and in the original Aramaic and Syriac New Testament Scriptures. These references include Genesis 1:2, numerous instances in Job and Judges, Isaiah 51:9 and 10, John 14:26 (Sinaitic Palimpsest) and Romans 9:25. In the instances cited, the application of feminine descriptors went beyond mere grammatical convention.

The Shekinah Glory: The Shekinah Glory, seen as fire and smoke from God, indwelt the Tabernacle in the Wilderness (Exodus 40) and Solomon’s Temple (1 Kings 8) at their dedications. This indwelling was a type of the Holy Spirit’s indwelling of the human temples of believers, beginning at the first Pentecost following Jesus’ resurrection (1 Corinthians 3:16, 2 Corinthians 6:16 and Ephesians 2:19-22). The Shekinah Glory is grammatically feminine and was seen as feminine in Jewish tradition as well.

The marriage of Christ with His Church: In Ephesians 5:31 and 32, Paul plainly writes that in the spiritual realm, Jesus will marry His Church. His manner of description identifies that marriage as more than a trivial play on words. There and elsewhere, the Church is identified as feminine. In Romans 7:4, Paul reveals that this marital union will bear fruit. If Jesus, a Member of the Trinitarian Godhead, marries the gendered Church, it is likely that the other Members are married as well. This would require that the Holy Spirit be feminine.

The femininity of Wisdom in Proverbs: The gender of Wisdom in Proverbs is consistently feminine throughout. The linkage of Wisdom with creation, particularly in Proverbs 3 and 8, suggests that Wisdom represents the Holy Spirit.

The linkage of Wisdom with the Holy Spirit in the Book of Wisdom: The Book of Wisdom, which remains canonical in the Catholic Scriptures, depicts Wisdom as the Holy Spirit and feminine.

The executive function of the Holy Spirit: The Holy Spirit is described in Scripture in the role of executive to the Father. The executive function of the Holy Spirit is acknowledged by multiple mainstream theologians. This responsive role to the Father’s will is feminine in nature.

The creation of Adam and the formation of Eve are suggestive of the femininity of the Holy Spirit: The creation of mankind as gender-differentiated in the image of God (Genesis 1:26 and 27) is suggestive of the gendered nature of the Godhead and consequent femininity of the Holy Spirit; the follow on description of the formation of Eve out of Adam (Genesis 2:18-25) probably is a repetition for the sake of emphasis instead of its usual awkward and confusing interpretation as a redundant secondary creation account. The account may well be a type of events within the Godhead Itself.

The romantic nature of the Song of Solomon: The Song of Solomon, considered by many Bible commentators to be representative of the romantic and passionate nature of the marriage between Christ and His Church, depicts the Church as feminine. The romance in Songs must typify either the relationship between Christ and His Church, or between the Father and the Holy Spirit, or both; otherwise it wouldn’t belong in the Bible. The same comment made with regard to the marriage between Christ and His Church in Ephesians 5 applies here: if one Member of the Godhead marries, it is suggestive that marriage applies to all within the Godhead.

Monotheism vs. the Trinitarian Godhead: Christianity is a firmly monotheistic religion. In the face of this, it also acknowledges a Trinitarian Godhead. Only in the context of marriage and family can the declared oneness of God (Deuteronomy 6:4) be intuitively reconciled with a Trinitarian Godhead. I personally have been exposed to admissions of confusion by multiple theologians who, while not accepting the family nature of the Godhead, remain oblivious to the importance of the unnecessary paradox that results from their view.

Biblical proscriptions against the gay lifestyle and other violations of a single male/single female marital bond: In the context of a genderless or all-male Godhead, the proscriptions against the gay lifestyle in Leviticus 18 and 20 and Romans 1 appear to be arbitrary, as does the Seventh Commandment regarding adultery; in the context of a gendered masculine and feminine Godhead, on the other hand, the gay lifestyle would represent a violation of the type of the Godhead Itself.

ARGUMENTS BASED ON FALSE PREMISES

 

If we’ve managed to shove the 800-pound “He”-issue gorilla out the door, there’s still a few 200-pound gorillas lurking in the corners of the room.

Scriptural references to gender neutrality: Two such references stand out in particular: Galatians 3:28, which declares that in the spiritual realm humans are neither male nor female, and Matthew 22:30, in which Jesus asserts that in the resurrection, men and women neither marry nor are given in marriage. These passages are frequently interpreted as declaring that the realm of God in heaven is genderless.

The obvious alternative interpretation, which also is a more logical one, is that while individual humans aren’t gendered in the spiritual realm, their aggregate, as the Church, is indeed gendered, that gender being female. Paul himself, in describing spiritual gifts in 1 Corinthians 12, depicts spiritual humans as components of the church, likening them to body parts such as ears. Body parts of themselves are not gendered. In the material realm, the exercise of gender requires a multitude of body parts, including the mind, interacting in close cooperation. Scripture indicates that this is precisely how gender works in the spiritual realm. That being the likely case, the Scriptural references noted above make no statement whatsoever about a supposed lack of gender in the spiritual realm.

Wisdom associated with the Holy Father as a personal attribute: To those who consider the Godhead to be either masculine or genderless, the intra-Godhead bond is seen in somewhat similar terms to that which may be found in a corporate boardroom. In that context, in Jeremiah 10:12, where God describes His creation as being made by His power and wisdom, those descriptors are naturally interpreted as His personal attributes.

But there is an alternate interpretation that not only makes more logical sense, but is beautifully descriptive. In that alternate interpretation which again is obvious, the Father and Holy Spirit are considered to be a tightly-bonded couple, each possessing the other in a romantic relationship. Under that alternate understanding, the Holy Spirit, along with Her attributes of Wisdom and Power, are naturally seen as an intimately-loved possession of the Father, and therefore belong to Him as part of Him in the same context as Adam’s understanding of Eve and his description of two joining to become one.

The personification of Wisdom in Proverbs is often interpreted as simply a literary device: Those who would deny the femininity of the Holy Spirit correspondingly deny the Personhood of Wisdom. Instead, they view the feminine voice of Wisdom in Proverbs as a literary embellishment of the wisdom of God.

An alternate and more reasonable interpretation exists here as well. It is supported by Jesus Himself who in Luke 7:35, in opposition to the interpretation of wisdom as a mere literary device, confers motherhood on Wisdom. Motherhood is an eminently personal attribute, was well as being a hallmark of femininity. Jesus more emphatically personifies wisdom in Luke 11:49 and 50, having Her speak and perform actions.

Femininity is viewed as inappropriate to Godhood: This slanderous, misogynistic rebuke of womanhood is surprisingly common among theologians. Paul’s commentary in 1 Corinthians 14 on the role of women in Church (“it is a shame for women to speak in the church”) is often taken as justification for this view.

Given Paul’s beautiful description of the future spiritual woman, the Church, in Ephesians 5, and his friendship with many women and use of them in Church activities, his probable intent with regard to womanhood is much more benign than the usual interpretation of this passage would suggest.

My view in opposition to that stance attributed to Paul, as I had noted in Marching to a Worthy Drummer, sees Eve’s error in the Garden as a transgression on her proper role as a type of the feminine Holy Spirit by failing to limit her responsive role to that of the will of either her husband Adam or of the Holy Father. In that context, Paul’s commentary in 1 Corinthians 14 actually supports a feminine Holy Spirit.

God is above the passion that a gendered Godhead would suggest: This view arose from the attempt to purify the Church of all sexuality. It was supported by Augustine and other Church Fathers and, centuries later, was formalized by medieval cleric Jerome Zanchius in his tome on Absolute Predestination. This work consulted very little, if any, Scripture.

Scripture itself provides a rich source of alternate viewpoints, all of which endow God with passion, including love, possession, anger and sorrow. Examples include Exodus 32:10, Hosea 1, Matthew 19, 21, 23 and 26, and Luke 24. Jesus’ response to the Pharisees in Matthew 19 indicated a familiarity beyond His human form with love and its implications regarding inter-gender relationships. He was fully aware of the passionate nature of the marital bond and went so far as to claim (Matthew 19:6) that the source of the bond was God Himself.

The grammatical “she” in the Hebrew language does not necessarily indicate femininity: There has been much ado made by deniers of femininity in the Godhead about the fact that some objects are given feminine designators when no actual femininity is involved. The situation here is similar to the standard practice in English of calling a genderless object such as a ship “she”.

This argument would typically apply to objects, but not to sentient beings such as humans or Members of our Trinitarian God. If indeed the personification of Wisdom in Proverbs did not refer to an actual Person but was simply a literary device, then this argument might apply. But, as already noted, the Holy Spirit is indeed a Person within the Godhead.

Moreover, the gender distinction in Hebrew (the original versions of the manuscripts) is more rigidly applied in the modifiers, which very often define the Holy Spirit as feminine. This important point is often overlooked by those who would claim that a noun in Hebrew doesn’t necessarily depict gender.

The bottom line is that for every argument of which I am aware that calls into question the femininity of the Holy Spirit there is at least one alternate explanation, often considerably more reasonable than the original argument, that negates the argument itself and supports the notion of a feminine Holy Spirit. Furthermore, where the argument references Scripture, the rebuttal also appeals to Scripture.

As I review these arguments I find myself thinking of those responsible for establishing and maintaining Church doctrine in terms of the Pharisees of Jesus’ day. Did the Jews get it wrong in refusing to see Jesus as God? So did we in refusing to see the Holy Spirit as the feminine complement of the Father.

THE “HE” ISSUE

 

Something’s definitely wrong about the Church’s current understanding of the Holy Spirit. A recent poll of evangelicals revealed that 68% of us consider the Holy Spirit to be an impersonal force, indicating the shallowness of a large group of Christians that would permit the movie Star Wars to influence their perception of God to such an extent. But shallowness isn’t the only culprit. Theologians with advanced degrees in Divinity admit to being stumped by the nature of the Holy Spirit.

The problem is at once both simpler and more profound than confusion or shallowness of thought. The primary source of our misapprehension of the Holy Spirit has been with us for a very long time and is our presupposition, inculcated by the Church herself, that the Holy Spirit is either genderless or weakly masculine.

With regard to the common perception of the Holy Spirit’s masculinity, the enormous gorilla in the room is the use, in virtually all translations and versions of the Bible, of masculine pronouns in reference to the Holy Spirit.

Examples of this include John 14:16, 14:26, 15:26, 16:7 and 8 and 13-15, and Hebrews 3:7 and 10:15, although some verses reference the Holy Spirit as neuter. These references constitute the most common argument against a feminine Holy Spirit.

The most likely reason for all those “he”s in the Bible is the certainty that the Bible we use today does not represent the original. While I believe that the original autographs of Scripture are inspired and inerrant, I don’t extend that trust to the various translations and versions that are available to us today. There is ample reason to suspect that a gender switch took place around the time of Constantine under the misguided motive of purifying the heavenly domain from all connotations of sexuality. Many well-known Church Fathers at that time have conveyed, through their writings, their repulsion of matters involving gender and their equation of purity with chastity.

We know that the Hebrew name of Spirit, ruah, is feminine, while the Greek equivalent is neuter and the Latin equivalent is masculine. These language-based gender differences may partially account for the gender switch in the translations. The more likely scenario, unpleasant as it may be to consider, is that the switch was deliberate. The Jewish religion had, for the most part, viewed the Holy Spirit as feminine, as did a large group of early Christians, as demonstrated by the femininity of the Holy Spirit in the Syriac Scriptures. In addition, the Sinaitic Palimpsest, the original writing of which is thought to be close or identical to the Gospel that Paul taught from, depicts Jesus in John 14:26 as describing the Holy Spirit as feminine.

There are multiple reasons why it is thought that the switch was deliberate: first, the neuter description of the Arm of the Lord in Isaiah 51:9 and 10 is known to be a deliberate switch from the feminine; second is the motive: the prevailing sexual debauchery of the secular society surrounding the Christian community led the Christian leaders to set the Church apart in perfect purity, even to the extent that motivated some early Christian males to attempt to castrate themselves. Sometimes, as was possibly the case with Origen (according to Eusebius), the attempt was successful. Many of the early Church Fathers, including Justin Martyr, Clement of Alexandria, Tertullian, Origen, Ambrose of Milan, and, most famously, Augustine, vehemently equated purity with chastity. Some of them were misogynistic as well. Supporting that urge to switch genders was the pressure of numerous heresies that confronted the early Church. One important threat to the Church was Gnosticism, which favored a femininity of the Holy Spirit. The heresies embraced by the Gnostics placed their belief in a feminine Holy Spirit, which was common to Jewish faith and early Christian expressions in general, in disrepute. The rejection of gender in God seems to have been a classic case of throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

The switch to the masculinity of the Holy Spirit was probably complete around the time of Constantine.

It’s a matter of concern to me how reluctant the Church leadership has been throughout the past several centuries to see God in the light of His Word rather than blindly adhering to Church doctrine in the face of Scriptural passages that are inconsistent with dogma. There are plenty of indications in Scripture, even in the versions we use today, to support the femininity of the Holy Spirit in opposition to the use of male pronounce in reference to Her. All it takes to see this is scripturally-compatible eyes.

We revere Christians of the past who had the insight and courage to reform the Church in the face of the corruption that attended her political power. But these Church Greats were human just like the rest of us. None of them was perfect, nor were their insights complete. Martin Luther, for example, was a rabid anti-Semite; he also thought that Jesus had an affair with Mary Magdalene. Those who are inclined to avoid any questioning of the Bible as it stands now should apply that same inclination to Luther, who lashed out against the Book of James and supported the removal of the Book of Wisdom and others from the Protestant canon of Scripture.

CREATION’S EPIC LOVE

 

In re-reading the Creation epic of Genesis 1, I was rather surprised to see in it an intense and beautiful love story. I was more surprised that I hadn’t picked up on that sooner, as my view of the Godhead and Creation dovetailed quite well into that understanding.

That same understanding is emphasized throughout Scripture itself. 1 John 4:8 defines God as the very essence of love:

“He that does not love does not know God; for God is love.”

Scripture virtually pleads with us to apply that understanding to the relationship between the Father and the Holy Spirit.

With respect to Creation, I understand Scripture in the original to be inerrant and inspired of God as both Paul, in 2 Timothy 3 and Peter, in 2 Peter 1, have claimed. That means that I accept the Creation epic as truth, and its competing worldview, (macro)evolution, to be false. That clash with secular wisdom led me into a rather lengthy research of modern molecular biology which, in the end, more than justified my rejection of evolution on purely scientific grounds as itself being mythical in nature and not to be trusted.

With evolution out of the way, the Creation epic stood boldly as an account that deserved much reflection. From the many hours spent in consideration of Genesis 1, I eventually reached an understanding that not only reconciled a large number of ill-fitting odds and ends regarding the nature of the Godhead, but also managed to blow my mind with its simple, majestic elegance. I couldn’t have come up with the ideas myself, so I give credit where credit is due: to the Holy Spirit and the Wisdom She embodies. I have written of my vision of the Godhead before in numerous places, so here I will limit myself to a brief review of what was touched on in a previous chapter: the Godhead as I perceive it consists of three Divine Members, Father, Holy Spirit and Son, tightly united as a Divine Family, and each with different but complementary roles: the Father as the Divine Will, the Holy Spirit as the Divine Means, and the Son as the Divine Reality.

That view of the Godhead implies much about the relationship between gender and love as well as about the origin and function of the Trinity. There are many forms of love, as reflected in the several names for love in the Greek language: fileo, agape, eros. Of these differing forms, eros or gendered love is unique in its possessive nature. That quality of mutual ownership grants gendered love an intensity and passion of an altogether higher level than the other forms. Love of that nature is fervent.

The functional relationship involving Will, Means and Reality, where the functionally male Father, in marital union with the complementary functionally feminine Means, gave birth to the Reality, is an intrinsically gendered one. The intimacy involved in this functional relationship identifies gendered love as the driving force behind all of creation.

At its core, the nature of this functional relationship evokes the notion of complementary otherhood, where the other responds to initiation and in complementary harmony with it. The joyful execution of this teaming activity elevates love to beauty of the highest order. When it is performed in selflessness, it becomes noble as well.

If complementary otherhood is considered to be the essence of gender, virtually all of creation exhibits that characteristic. Even at the cellular level, as biologists have recently discovered, cell division involves the search for a complementary other. Below that level as well, a complete atom has matching numbers of protons and electrons; a mismatch of these causes the atom to search for balance.

The ubiquitous display of love in Creation verifies Paul’s words in Romans 1:19 and 20:

“Because that which may be known of God is manifest in them; for God has shown it to them. For the invisible things of him from the creation of the world are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even his eternal power and Godhead, so that they are without excuse;”

It was with Adam and Eve that God brought gender and love together in the form that most closely matched that which exists within the Godhead. Had not the Fall of man occurred, man would have been free of the numerous perversions that produce debauchery in the place of love. Because of Jesus, man can look forward to a restoration of love to its original meaning.

It is fervor of this order that lies at the center of Moses’ Shema in Deuteronomy 6:4 and 5, connecting the oneness of God with love of a passionate nature:

“Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God is one Lord: and you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your might.”

Gendered love and its associated fervor is why Scripture describes the spiritual union between Jesus and His Church in terms of marriage, and why Jesus, in Matthew 22, repeats the commandment of Moses to love God with passion and labels it the greatest of commandments.

If we look beyond the level of the individual to the composite Church, we see that there is nothing in Scripture to suggest, as do many pastors both now and in the distant past, that this marriage is no more than a figure of speech connoting a relationship that in actuality lacks gender and its corresponding intensity. A profound joy of gendered love is implied by Jesus’ turning water into wine through His first miracle at the wedding in Cana. Jesus obviously is anticipating in His marriage a far more intimate bond with His Church than a genderless relationship would produce.

The desire of God, as revealed in the Bible, to endow us with appealing personal qualities of character, speaks to His loving plan for His Church as Jesus’ worthy partner in her future role as the Bride of Christ.

IN THE IMAGE OF GOD

 

Man is typically treated as the primary subject of Genesis 1:26 and 27. This passage is routinely viewed as descriptive of the manner in which God created man to reflect certain attributes of His own. These attributes are generally considered to be related to character and intellect, chiefly man’s personality, rationality, and morality.

“And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness; and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creeps upon the earth. So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them.”

Reference to man’s gendered creation is usually omitted or, at best, treated as incidental. But there it is in Scripture, in black and white, in a context that discourages it from being disregarded with such appalling ease. This passage speaks as much about God as of man. The attribute of gender isn’t trivial, but instead is presented as among the most profound of the attributes of which man was made in God’s image.

And to what end have we denied this beautiful attribute to God? So that we may maintain a distance from Him in direct opposition to what He desires in His relationship with us? So that we can equate purity with chastity, when the two are manifestly different concepts? The key to this blatant falsehood is found in the end of the passage above: . . . “And they were both naked, the man and his wife, and were not ashamed.”

As I had noted in Marching to a Worthy Drummer, it is the shame, not the act, that has driven us to think of gender as inappropriate to God. And the shame came not from God but from Adam’s fall. It persists to this day, and prevents most of us from perceiving the Trinitarian Godhead in all its beauty and glory.

In Genesis 2:18 and 21-24 is another passage that tends to be trivialized. As is commonly accepted, God the Father existed forever. Our minds, particularly in the material realm, are too limited to grasp any more of the nature of the Father, the Divine Will. But that same limitation doesn’t apply to the Holy Spirit, as Scripture itself gives us a clue as to Her origin. In Genesis 2, Scripture brings out details for emphasis of Eve’s creation out of Adam. This account of the creation of Eve out of Adam is commonly but quite mistakenly treated as a secondary or afterthought account of the creation of man, simply providing additional detail to the first account in Genesis 1:26 and 27.

“And the Lord God said, It is not good that the man should be alone; I will make him a help fit for him. . . And the Lord God caused a deep sleep to fall upon Adam, and he slept: and he took one of his ribs, and closed up the flesh instead thereof; and the rib, which the Lord God had taken from man, made he a woman, and brought her unto the man. And Adam said, This is now bone of my bones, and flesh of my flesh; she shall be called Woman, because she was taken out of Man. Therefore shall a man leave his father and his mother, and shall cleave to his wife, and they shall be one flesh.”

But the repetition of the latter part of this passage by both Jesus, in Matthew 19, and Paul in Ephesians 5, places it far above the trivial in importance. This account of the creation of Eve out of Adam, rather than furnishing incidental details of man’s creation, was far more likely to have been included in Scripture for emphasis as describing the romance of the loving formation of the Holy Spirit out of the essence of the Father.

The thought that this portion of the creation epic might be descriptive of the Godhead Itself points back to the very beginning, Genesis 1:1-5:

“In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.

“And God said, Let there be light: and there was light. And God saw the light, that it was good: and God divided the light from the darkness. And God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And the evening and the morning were the first day.”

In this first passage of Scripture, the Holy Spirit is seen responding to the Father in giving birth to the first spoken Word of God, the Light. But that is precisely what John said in verses 1:1-5 of the Prologue to his Gospel of Jesus Christ:

“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. The same was in the beginning with God. All things were made by him; and without him was not anything made that was made. In him was life, and the life was the light of men. And the light shone in darkness; and the darkness comprehended it not.”

We in the Church have been conditioned to believe, in opposition to the notion of Jesus being a created Being, that Jesus eternally co-existed with the Father. But that comes from the various Christian creeds, not from Scripture. Scripture itself, in Revelation 3:14, stands in plain opposition to that notion:

“And to the angel of the church of the Laodiceans write: These things say the Amen, the faithful and true witness, the beginning of the creation of God.”

Can it be that the Holy Spirit, in union with the Father, did indeed give birth to Jesus Christ? John, in Chapter Three of his Gospel, attributes spiritual birth to the Holy Spirit. The details of the Holy Spirit’s participation in creation are provided in Proverbs 8:22-31:

“The Lord possessed me in the beginning of his way, before his works of old. I was set up from everlasting, from the beginning, or ever the earth was. When there were no depths, I was brought forth – when there were no fountains abounding with water. Before the mountains were settled, before the hills, was I brought forth; while as yet he had not made the earth, nor the fields, nor the highest part of the dust of the world. When he prepared the heavens, I was there; when he set a compass upon the face of the depth; when he established the clouds above; when he strengthened the fountains of the deep; when he gave to the sea its decree, that the waters would not pass his commandment; when he appointed the foundations of the earth,

“Then I was by him, as one brought up with him; and I was daily his delight, rejoicing always before him, rejoicing in the habitable part of his earth; and my delight was with the sons of men.”

Why did God emphasize the detail of Eve’s formation out of Adam? And why, if it was not good for the man to be without a complementary woman, would it be good for God Himself to be so, as theologians commonly assume? Could it be that at one stage before the beginning of time all the attributes of the Godhead resided within the Father alone, and that in self-denial the Father parted an element of Himself to form the Holy Spirit as a separate but complementary Entity in order that love transcend all other attributes of God? Could it be that what He lost in the parting He regained in love according to the words of Adam that a man shall cleave unto his wife and they two shall be one?

PSALM 22

 

Psalm 22 was written by David about a thousand years before Christ and several hundred years before the punishment of crucifixion was known in Israel.

“My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? Why are you so far from helping me, and from the words of my roaring?

“O my God, I cry in the daytime, but you hear not; and in the night season, and am not silent. But you are holy, O you who inhabits the praise of Israel. Our fathers trusted in you; they trusted, and you did deliver them. They cried to you, and were delivered; they trusted in you, and were not confounded. But I am a worm, and no man; a reproach of men, and despised by the people. All they who see me laugh me to scorn; they shoot out the lip, they shake the head, saying, He trusted on the Lord that he would deliver him; let him deliver him, seeing he delighted in him.

“But you are he who took me out of the womb; you made me hope upon my mother’s breasts. I was cast upon you from the womb; you are my God from my mother’s belly. Be not far from me; for trouble is near; for there is none to help. Many bulls have compassed me; strong bulls of Bashan have beset me round. They gaped upon me with their mouths, like a ravening and a roaring lion.

“I am poured out like water, and all my bones are out of joint: my heart is like wax; it is melted within me. My strength is dried up like a potsherd, and my tongue cleaves to my jaws; and you have brought me to the dust of death. For dogs have compassed me; the assembly of the wicked have enclosed me; they pierced my hands and my feet. I may count all my bones; they look and stare upon me. They part my garments among them, and cast lots for my vesture.

“But be not far from me, O Lord. O my strength, hasten to help me. Deliver my soul from the sword; my darling from the power of the dog. Save me from the lion’s mouth; for you have heard me from the horns of the wild unicorns. I will declare your name to my brothers; in the midst of the congregation will I praise you.

“You who fear the Lord, praise him; all you, the seed of Jacob, glorify him; and fear him, all you, the seed of Israel. For he has not despised nor abhorred the affliction of the afflicted, neither has he hidden his face from him; but when he cried to him, he heard. My praise shall be of you in the great congregation; I will pay my vows before them who fear him. The meek shall be satisfied; they shall praise the Lord who seek him; your heart shall live forever. All the ends of the world shall remember and turn to the Lord; and all the kindreds of the nations shall worship before you. For the kingdom is the Lord’s; and he is the governor among the nations. All they who are fat upon the earth shall eat and worship; all they who go down to the dust shall bow before him, and none can keep alive his own soul.

“A seed shall serve him; it shall be accounted to the Lord for a generation. They shall come, and shall declare his righteousness to a people that shall be born, that he has done this.”

Matthew 27:46 records Jesus, after suffering for at least three hours after He was nailed to the cross, as echoing the cry given by David at the start of his psalm:

“And about three o’clock in the afternoon, Jesus cried with a loud voice, saying, Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani? that is to say, My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”

It was noted in another volume of this series that God had to forsake Jesus, as He, in his moral perfection, could not look upon the sin that Jesus had personified. Jesus knew this beforehand, probably no later than while praying in the Garden of Gethsemane the evening before, and this knowledge may have contributed greatly to his agony there. He certainly agonized over it on the cross, but He also may have intended this utterance to point the future reader of Scripture to that Psalm.

Psalm 22 itself described in detail the physiological effects of crucifixion. The account has a supernatural element, as the Psalm preceded the punishment of crucifixion in Israel.

THE ROAD TO EMMAUS

 

This touching account in Luke 24:13-22 is notable on several levels. At its most poignant, it shows the loving intimacy with which the risen Jesus associates with the human race. He speaks to the two men as would a loving, compassionate Parent intent on comforting their grieving souls.

The story also shows how closely the Old Testament is associated with the New, and how highly Jesus regarded it. When He revealed to the two travelers how the Scriptures foretold Him, the only Scriptures that were available to them were those of the Old Testament.

“And, behold, two of them went that same day to a village called Emmaus, which was from Jerusalem about seven and a half miles. And they talked together of all these things which had happened since Jesus’ crucifixion.

“And it came to pass that, while they talked together and thought of these events, Jesus himself drew near, and went with them. But their eyes were prevented from recognizing him. And he said to them, What manner of communications are these that you have one with another, as you walk, and are sad? And one of them, whose name was Cleopas, answered him, saying, Are you only a stranger in Jerusalem, and have not known the things which are come to pass there in these days? And he said to them, What things? And they replied, Concerning Jesus of Nazareth, who was a prophet, mighty in deed and word before God and all the people; and how the chief priests and our rulers delivered him to be condemned to death, and have crucified him. But we hoped that it had been he who should have redeemed Israel; and, besides all this, today is the third day since these things were done. Yea, and certain women also of our company amazed us, who were early at the sepulcher; and when they did not find his body, they came, saying that they had also seen a vision of angels, who said that he was alive.

“Then he said to them, O foolish ones, and slow of heart to believe all that the prophets have spoken! Ought not Christ to have suffered these things, and to enter into his glory? And beginning at Moses and all the prophets, he expounded to them, in all the scriptures, the things concerning himself.

“And they drew near to the village, to which they went; and he made as though he would have gone farther. But they constrained him, saying, Abide with us; for it is toward evening, and the day is far spent. And he went in to linger with them. And it came to pass, as he sat eating with them, he took bread, and blessed it, and broke it, and gave it to them. And their eyes were opened, and they recognized him, and he vanished out of their sight. And they said one to another, Did not our heart burn within us, while he talked with us along the way, and while he opened to us the scriptures?

Perhaps Jesus explained to the travelers how He had to die for their benefit, presenting that information in terms of Joseph in Genesis, and how Joseph suffered for the salvation of his brothers who hated him, and, in the end, how he did so willingly. He could have added the account of Abraham’s attempted sacrifice of Isaac, and of how that story foretold the Father’s suffering as He had to turn His head away in sorrow from the sin that Jesus had become on the cross. He also could have explained how Moses prophesied of Him becoming sin by holding up the bronze serpent on a pole to heal those in the wilderness who had been bitten by snakes. He could have topped that off with Psalm 22, which foretold in agonizing detail how it felt to be crucified.

Maybe Jesus also explained to them why He had to wait for four days before He resurrected Lazarus, and how in doing so he was prophesying of His own resurrection after the fourth millennium from Creation.

It could be that Jesus went on to speak of the love of God toward mankind, quoting from passages of the Song of Solomon to show the exquisitely romantic nature of that love. In looking forward to that day when the Church would become the Bride of Christ, Jesus could have noted His first miracle at the wedding in Cana, where He changed water into wine to make complete the joy of marriage.

SEA STORY

 

Going back in time from the revolutionary period of our history, those who look for them can find many examples of God’s Hand, both positive and negative, in the affairs of the American political experiment in freedom.

Why negative? Because that’s how God operates, as He has told us numerous times. In Deuteronomy 11:26-26-28, for example, Moses told the Israelites who had left Egypt with him:

“Behold, I set before you this day a blessing and a curse; A blessing if ye obey the commandments of the Lord your God, which I command you this day: And a curse, if ye will not obey the commandments of the Lord your God, but turn aside out of the way which I command you this day, to go after other gods, which ye have not known.”

This admonition applies to every Christian today just as much as to the Israelites whom Moses addressed back then. It applied as well throughout the American experience. According to the authors of The Light and the Glory, it took only one or two generations after they landed before the pilgrims, in experiencing an increasing ease of existence, began to fall away from their daily devotion to God. At first the chastising was mild, and quickly returned to blessing as the people heeded the correction:

“Perhaps the most extraordinary chastisement in this vein was the rain of caterpillars which Winthrop reported in the summer of 1646. ‘Great harm was done in corn (especially wheat and barley) in this month by a caterpillar, like a black worm about an inch and a half long. They eat up first the blades of the stalk, then they eat up the tassels, whereupon the ear withered. It was believed by divers good observers that they fell in a great thunder shower, for divers yards and other bare places where not one of them was seen an hour before, were presently after the shower almost covered with them, besides grass places where they were not so easily discerned. They did the most harm in the southern parts, as in Rhode Island, etc., and in the eastern parts in their Indian corn. In divers places the churches kept a day of humiliation, and presently after, the caterpillars vanished away.’”

God also is a champion of justice, particularly when mixed with compassion. There are several Old Testament references to how God prefers justice and mercy over lip service to Him. One example is found in Hosea 6:6; another in Isaiah 58:6 and 7:

“For I desired mercy, and not sacrifice, and the knowledge of God more than burnt offerings.”

“Is not this the fast that I have chosen- to loose the bands of wickedness, to undo the heavy burdens, and to let the oppressed go free, and that you break every yoke? Is it not to deal your bread to the hungry, and that you bring the poor that are cast out to your house? When you see the naked, that you cover him; and that you hide not yourself from your own flesh?”

Jesus repeated these sentiments in Matthew 12:7 while He explained to the

Pharisees how much more important it is to show mercy, even on the sabbath, than to participate in spiritually empty adherence to the law:

“But if you had known what this means, I will have mercy, and not sacrifice, you would not have condemned the guiltless.”

It is much more fun to describe blessings than curses, and justice served rather than justice denied. Here is a good sea story, also taken from The Light and the Glory regarding that time period in America’s history:

“Our favorite of these sea stories involves two ships in distress. The first, under the mastery of William Laiton, was out of Piscataqua and bound for Barbados, when, some thousand miles off the coast, she sprang a leak which could not be staunched. He crew was forced to take refuge in their longboat. It happened that they had a plentiful supply of bread, more than they could possibly eat, but so little water that after eighteen days of drifting, they were down to a teaspoon per man per day. Meanwhile, another ship, captained by one Samuel Scarlet, was having its own difficulties, being ‘destitute of provisions, only they had water enough, and to spare.’ The spied the drifting longboat, but as Scarlet made ready to take them aboard, his men ‘. . .desired that he would not go to take the men in, lest they should all die by famine. But the captain was a man of too generous a charity to follow the selfish proposals thus made unto him. He replied, “It may be these distressed creatures are our own countrymen, and [anyway] they are distressed creatures. I am resolved I will take them in, and I’ll trust in God, who is able to deliver us all.” Nor was he a loser by this charitable resolution, for Captain Scarlet had the water which Laiton wanted, and Mr. Laiton had the bread and fish which Scarlet wanted. So they refreshed one another, and in a few days arrived safe to New England. But it was remarked that the chief of the mariners who urged Captain Scarlet against his taking in these distressed people, did afterwards, in his distress at sea, perish without any to take him in.’”

JESUS’ FULFILLMENT OF THE MOSAIC FEASTS

 

At the time of Jesus’ crucifixion, three events occurred in rapid succession: His crucifixion, His resurrection, and the Pentecost, where the Holy Spirit indwelt believers and empowered them to do exploits. All three of these events were imprinted in the minds of the Israelites over a millennium earlier by Moses in terms of feasts and observances.

The first event, Jesus’ crucifixion, was initially foreshadowed in detail by God’s call to Abraham to sacrifice his son Isaac, as related in Genesis 22. But the commemorative feast for this event is the Passover, as instituted by Moses just before the Israelites were to cast off their enslavement and depart for Egypt. The account of the institution of this feast is given in Exodus 12:1-3, 5-7, and 12 and 13:

“And the Lord spoke unto Moses and Aaron in the land of Egypt, saying, This month shall be unto you the beginning of months: it shall be the first month of the year to you. Speak you to all the congregation of Israel, saying, In the tenth day of this month they shall take to them every man a lamb, according to the house of their fathers, a lamb for a house . . . Your lamb shall be without blemish, a male of the first year: you shall you shall take it out from the sheep, or from the goats. And you shall keep it until the fourteenth day of the same month; and the whole assembly of the congregation of Israel shall kill it in the evening. And they shall take of the blood, and strike it on the two side posts and on the upper door post of the houses, wherein they shall eat it. And they shall eat the flesh in that night, roast with fire and unleavened bread; and with bitter herbs they shall eat it . . . For I will pass through the land of Egypt this night, and will smite all the first-born in the land of Egypt, both man and beast; and against all the gods of Egypt I will execute judgment: I am the Lord. And the blood shall be to you for a token upon the houses where ye are; and when I see the blood, I will pass over you, and the plague shall not be upon you to destroy you, when I smite the land of Egypt. And this day shall be to you for a memorial; and you shall keep it a feast to the Lord throughout your generations; you shall keep it a feast by an ordinance forever.”

The lamb was kept in the house for four days, just long enough for it to become a household pet with the formation of a loving bond between the people and this innocent creature. Then it was slain and its blood spread on the doorposts and lintel as a sign to God to spare the occupants within as He went out to slay the firstborn of Egypt.

The Passover Lamb was a type of Jesus, who was crucified on the day of preparation for the Passover, the exact time when the lambs were traditionally slain. He was described as the Lamb of God by the Apostle John, first in John’s Gospel and then in the Book of Revelation. Christians claim the remission of their sins and their spiritual salvation by the washing of Jesus’ blood: He is our Passover Lamb.

The second event that was linked to a feast was Jesus’ resurrection after three days and three nights in the grave following His crucifixion. The corresponding feast established by Moses is the wave offering of first fruits of the barley harvest, traditionally held during the week of the Feast of Unleavened Bread from the 15^th to the 21^st of Nisan. The exact day is given in Leviticus 23:11 as the day following the Sabbath. The Sabbath after Jesus’ crucifixion was Saturday, Nisan 16, making the Feast of First Fruits the following day, or Sunday, Nisan 17. The account is given in Leviticus 23:9-14:

“And the Lord spoke unto Moses, saying, Speak to the children of Israel, and say to them, When you are come into the land which I give unto you, and shall reap the harvest thereof, then you shall bring a sheaf of the first fruits of your harvest to the priest, and he shall wave the sheaf before the Lord, to be accepted for you: on the next day after the sabbath the priest shall wave it. And you shall offer that day when you wave the sheaf an he-lamb without blemish of the first year for a burnt offering to the Lord. And the meal offering thereof shall be two tenth parts of fine flour mixed with oil, an offering made by fire unto the Lord for a sweet savor: and the drink offering thereof shall be of wine, a quart. And you shall eat neither bread, nor parched corn, nor green ears, until that same day that you have brought an offering to your God: it shall be a statute forever throughout your generations in all your dwellings.”

The wave offering was intended to commemorate Jesus’ resurrection from the dead, as Jesus was the first fruit of resurrected mankind.

The third feast is related in Leviticus 23:15-21:

“And you shall count to you from the next day after the Sabbath, from the day that you brought the sheaf of the wave offering; seven sabbaths shall be complete: even to the next day after the seventh sabbath shall you number fifty days; and you shall offer a new meal offering unto the Lord. You shall bring out of your habitations two wave loaves of two tenth parts; they shall be of fine flour; they shall be baked with leaven; they are the first fruits unto the Lord. And you shall offer with the bread seven lambs without blemish of the first year . . .”

The passage continues with additional offerings, ending with the command that the feast is a holy convocation, no work being permitted, and a statute forever.

As it traditionally occurred fifty days after the Feast of First Fruits, this event is called the Feast of Pentecost. It is named after the root word pente, which means fifty. Pentecost is known by Christians as the mighty presence of the indwelling Holy Spirit that took place fifty days after Jesus’ resurrection and ten days after His return to heaven as related in Acts 1.

The event itself is described in Acts 2:1-18:

“And when the day of Pentecost was fully come, they were all with one accord in one place. And suddenly here came a sound from heaven like a rushing mighty wind, and it filled all the house where they were sitting. And there appeared unto them cloven tongues as of fire, and it sat upon each of them. And they were all filled with the Holy Spirit, and began to speak with other tongues, as the Spirit gave them utterance. But Peter, standing up with the eleven, lifted up his voice, and said unto them, You men of Judaea, and all you who dwell at Jerusalem, be this known to you, and hearken to my words; for these are not drunk, as you suppose, seeing it is but [nine o’clock in the morning]. But this is that which was spoken through the prophet, Joel: And it shall come to pass in the last days, said God, I will pour out of my Spirit upon all flesh; and your sons and your daughters shall prophesy, and your young men shall see visions, and your old men shall dream dreams; and on my servants and on my handmaidens I will pour out in those days of my Spirit, and they shall prophesy.”

We can glean a number of facts from this correspondence between the Mosaic feasts of the spring and major events associated with Jesus’ crucifixion.

First, Jesus’ crucifixion was a preplanned event. Some false theologians are fond of asserting that Jesus was caught unawares by His arrest. That notion violates the clear teaching of the Old Testament.

Second, Scripture is not only truthful, it is precise. It is truthful in every detail. The days of Jesus’ crucifixion, His resurrection, and the birth of the Church were set with precision over a thousand years before the events took

place.

Third, the Church is an integral part of God’s master plan. The mystery of Ephesians 5:25-31 wherein the Church is defined as the Bride of Christ is not trivial. It is essential.

ARK OF THE COVENANT IN FLESH AND SPIRIT

 

In the previous chapter the Ark of the Covenant was described as the enclosure located in the area of the temple known as the Holy of Holies. It was noted there that the ark of the covenant is mentioned again in Revelation, but that this ark is probably a very different one. In my novel Jacob, book three of the four-book Buddy series, Earl Cook connects this later ark with the earlier one in his talk to fellow Christians in a Bible study:

“This one’s about the Ark of the Covenant. This ark was a wooden box, overlaid with gold and topped with two cherubs. Inside the box were relics of past interactions between God and man, including the staff that Aaron used, the one that turned into a snake in front of pharaoh, and a sample of the life-sustaining bread that fell from heaven during the great exodus from Egypt and, most important, the tablets upon which God had written the Ten Commandments and which he gave to Moses on the mountain. These tablets encapsulated the Law of the Old Testament in covenant between God and man. The Ark of the Covenant was placed within the Holy of Holies of the Tabernacle in the wilderness, and later in Solomon’s temple. At the dedication of both of these temples the glory of God, called the Shekinah, descended in a cloud and dwelt within the temples. There is a great significance to this indwelling of the Shekinah glory, and I’ll probably go into it in another sermon. But for now I want to focus on the Ark, which has had a very colorful history. There’s a question as to whether Menelek, the queen of Sheba’s son with Solomon, went back to Ethiopia with a copy of it or actually had stolen the real thing. To this day, that version is jealously guarded by Ethiopians. The ark that remained in Israel was eventually lost. Apparently, the prophet Jeremiah buried it in a cave toward the end of the sixth century B.C. when Jerusalem was in danger of being overrun by enemy forces. There’s another story in that too, but to forge ahead, the Ark of the Covenant is finally mentioned again toward the end of the Bible, in the Book of Revelation, where John sees it in heaven. But this may be a different Ark altogether.

“Let me tell you why. In Revelation 12, immediately after John’s sighting of the Ark in heaven at the end of Chapter 11, he goes on to describe another heavenly wonder: a woman clothed with the sun, who gives birth to a man-child who is to rule the world, obviously Jesus. This woman has variously been identified as several different personages by people of differing faiths, each one being the favorite of one faith or another. Many have thought of this woman as representing Israel. Catholics have picked up on this passage, claiming her to be Mary. For reasons that I won’t go into now, I don’t think that’s quite accurate. But it’s very close. Whether this woman actually is Mary or not, it does evoke an image that makes me want to say, ‘Of course! It can be no other way.’ That image, which I cherish now with all my heart, I know to be true, and I want to share it with you now. Mary herself, in containing the Word of God in her womb, was herself the flesh-and-blood Ark of the New Covenant in Jesus Christ. That may well have been the Ark that John saw in heaven.”

But there may also be a yet greater Person to whom this later ark may be attributed, wherein the connection is spiritual rather than fleshly. The Biblical account of this ark is presented in Revelation 11:19 through 12:17:

“And the temple of God was opened in heaven, and there was seen in his temple the ark of his covenant; and there were lightnings, and voices, and thunderclaps, and an earthquake, and great hail.

“And there appeared a great wonder in heaven – a woman clothed with the sun, and the moon under her feet, and upon her head a crown of twelve stars. And she, being with child, cried, travailing in birth, and pained to be delivered.

“And there appeared another wonder in heaven; and, behold, a great red dragon, having seven heads and ten horns, and seven crowns upon his heads. And his tail drew the third part of the stars of heaven and did cast them to the earth; and the dragon stood before the woman who was ready to be delivered, to devour her child as soon as it was born.

“And she brought forth a male child, who was to rule all nations with a rod of iron; and her child was caught up unto God, and to his throne. And the woman fled into the wilderness, where she hath a place prepared by God, that they should feed her there a thousand two hundred and threescore days.

“And there was war in heaven; Michael and his angels fought against the dragon, and the dragon fought and his angels, and prevailed not, neither was their place found any more in heaven. And the great dragon was cast out, that old serpent, called the Devil and Satan, who deceiveth the whole world; he was cast out into the earth, and his angels were cast out with him. And I heard a loud voice saying in heaven, Now is come salvation, and strength, and the kingdom of our God, and the power of his Christ; for the accuser of our brethren is cast down, who accused them before our God day and night. And they overcame him by the blood of the Lamb, and by the word of their testimony; and they loved not their lives unto the death. Therefore rejoice, ye heavens, and ye that dwell in them. Woe to the inhabitants of the earth and of the sea! For the devil is come down unto you, having great wrath, because he knoweth that he hath but a short time.

“And when the dragon saw that he was cast unto the earth, he persecuted the woman who brought forth the male child. And to the woman were given two wings of a great eagle, that she might fly into the wilderness, into her place, where she is nourished for a time, and times, and half a time, from the face of the serpent. And the serpent cast out of his mouth water like a flood after the woman, that he might cause her to be carried away by the flood. And the earth helped the woman, and the earth opened her mouth and swallowed up the flood which the dragon cast out of his mouth. And the dragon was angry with the woman, and went to make war with the remnant of her seed, who keep the commandments of God, and have the testimony of Jesus Christ.”

Could this spiritual Woman be the same Shekinah who indwells Christian believers, as described in an earlier chapter? Could She be the same Holy Spirit of whom Jesus spoke in John 3 as giving spiritual birth? Could She be the spiritual Mother of Jesus?

Just as Revelation 11 and 12 symbolize Mary as the ark of the covenant in flesh, so do those same passages symbolize God the Holy Spirit as the ark of the Word, God’s covenant to mankind, in spirit.

HOLY CLOUD

 

If one looks up the word “cloud” in a Bible concordance, even a modest one, he will see well over forty entries. They don’t all have the same meanings, of course, but there are several that do. And some that do have the same meanings don’t seem to at first, because they are used in different contexts. The Biblical clouds that are mentioned here all have the same meaning, and that meaning is a holy one.

In Exodus 40 and 1 Kings 8, the Glory of the Lord, called by the Hebrews the Shekinah, indwelt as a Cloud both the tabernacle in the wilderness and Solomon’s Temple at their dedications. This indwelling feminine Presence was a type – a representative precursor to – the Holy Spirit who indwelt Jesus’ disciples at the Pentecost described in Acts 2 and now, as the Comforter promised by Jesus in John 14, indwells every constituent of Jesus’ entire Church, described by Paul as living temples of God.

The Shekinah Glory of the Wilderness Tabernacle is described in Exodus 40:33-38:

“And [Moses] reared up the court round about the tabernacle and the altar, and set up the hanging of the court gate. So Moses finished the work. Then a cloud covered the tent of the congregation, and the glory of the Lord filled the tabernacle. And Moses was not able to enter into the tent of the congregation, because the cloud abode thereon, and the glory of the Lord filled the tabernacle. And when the cloud was taken up from over the tabernacle, the children of Israel went onward in all their journeys; but if the cloud were not taken up, then they journeyed not till the day that it was taken up. For the cloud of the Lord was upon the tabernacle by day, and fire was on it by night, in the sight of all the house of Israel, throughout all their journeys.”

The description “cloud of the Lord”, “fire by night” and “taken up” leaves no doubt that this “cloud” is equivalent to the Shekinah of the Red Sea adventure and of Isaiah 4:5.

The Shekinah Glory of Solomon’s Temple is described in 1 Kings 8:5-11:

“And King Solomon, and all the congregation of Israel, who were assembled before him, were with him before the ark, sacrificing sheep and oxen, that could not be counted nor numbered for multitude. And the priests brought in the ark of the covenant of the Lord unto its place, into the inner sanctuary of the house, to the most holy place, even under the wings of the cherubim. For the cherubim spread forth their two wings over the place of the ark, and the cherubim covered the ark and its staves above. And they drew out the staves, that the ends of the staves were seen out in the holy place before the inner sanctuary, but they were not seen outside,; and there they are unto this day. There was nothing in the ark except the two tables of stone, which Moses put there at Horeb, when the Lord made a covenant with the children of Israel, when they came out of the land of Egypt. And it came to pass, when the priests were come out of the holy place, that the cloud filled the house of the Lord, so that the priests could not stand to minister because of the cloud; for the glory of the Lord had filled the house of the Lord.”

In Daniel 7:13 and 14, and Matthew 17:1-5, the Holy Spirit, still represented by a Cloud, accompanies Jesus in His spiritual appearance before men.

“I saw in the night visions, and, behold, one like the Son of man came with the clouds of heaven, and came to the Ancient of days, and they brought him near before him. And there was given him dominion, and glory, and a kingdom, that all people, nations, and languages should serve him; his dominion is an everlasting dominion, which shall not pass away, and his kingdom that which shall not be destroyed.”

“And after six days Jesus took Peter, James, and John, his brother, and brought them up into a high mountain, privately, and was transfigured before them; and his face did shine like the sun, and his raiment was as white as the light. And, behold, there appeared to them Moses and Elijah talking with him. Then answered Peter, and said to Jesus, Lord, it is good for us to be here; if you will, let us make here three booths; one for you, and one for Moses, and one for Elijah. While he yet spoke, behold, a bright cloud overshadowed them; and, behold, a voice out of the cloud, which said, This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased; hear you him.”

In Matthew 24:30, Acts 1:8-11, and Revelation 1:7 and 14:14 that same Cloud conveys Jesus between earth and heaven:

“And then shall appear the sign of the Son of man in heaven; and then shall all the tribes of the earth mourn, and they shall see the Son of man coming in the clouds of heaven with power and great glory.”

“But you shall receive power, after the Holy Spirit is come upon you, and you shall be witnesses to me both in Jerusalem, and in all Judea, and in Samaria, and to the uttermost part of the earth. And, when [Jesus] had spoken these things, while they beheld, he was taken up, and a cloud received him out of their sight. And while they looked steadfastly toward heaven as he went up, behold, two men stood by them in while apparel, who also said, You men of Galilee, why stand you gazing up into heaven? This same Jesus, who is taken up from you into heave, shall so come in like nammer as you have seen him go into heaven.”

“Behold, [Jesus] comes with clouds, and every eye shall see him, and they also who pierced him; and all kindreds of the earth shall wail because of him. Even so, Amen.”

“And I looked, and behold, a white cloud, and upon the cloud one sat, like the Son of man, having on his head a golden crown, and in his hand a sharp sickle.”

In 1 Thessalonians 4:16 and 17 and Revelation 11:11 and 12, the cloud also conveys from earth to heaven special humans, constituting the Church and the prophetic witnesses in Jerusalem at the last days of the age:

“For the Lord himself shall descend from heaven with a shout, with the voice of the archangel, and with the trump of God; and the dead in Christ shall rise first; then we who are alive and remain shall be caught up together with them in the clouds, to meet the Lord in the air; and so shall we ever be with the Lord.”

“And after three days and a half the spirit of life from God entered into [the two witnesses], and they stood upon their feet, and great fear fell upon them who saw them. And they heard a great voice from heaven saying unto them, Come up here. And they ascended up to heaven in a cloud, and their enemies beheld them.”

In each of the passages noted above, the settings, associations and contexts readily identify the Cloud as representing the Holy Spirit. But our appreciation of and involvement with the Holy Spirit is greater than mere recognition or even conveyance. As I noted in my book Marching to a Worthy Drummer, the connection between the precursor temple Presence and the indwelling of Christian believers is given in 1 Corinthians 3:16 and Ephesians 2:19-22, wherein Paul asserts that the Church herself, through her constituents, is a temple indwelt by the Holy Spirit:

“Know you not that ye are the temple of God, and that the Spirit of God dwells in you?

“Now, therefore, you are no more strangers and sojourners, but fellow citizens with the saints, and of the household of God; and are built upon the foundation of the apostles and prophets, Jesus Christ himself being the chief corner stone, in whom all the building fitly framed together grows unto a holy temple in the Lord; in whom you also are built together for a habitation of God through the Spirit.”

SOLOMON’S WISDOM

According to 1 Kings 3:5-28, Solomon asked for wisdom and received it – in abundance:

“In Gibeon the Lord appeared to Solomon in a dream by night; and God said, Ask what I shall give you. And Solomon said, You have showed to your servant David, my father, great mercy, according as he walked before you in truth, and in righteousness, and in uprightness of heart with you; and you have kept for him this great kindness, that you have given him a son to sit on his throne, as it is this day. And now, O Lord my God, you have made your servant king instead of David, my father; and I am but a little child: I know not how to go out or to come in. And your servant is in the midst of your people whom you have chosen, a great people, who cannot be numbered or counted for multitude. Give, therefore, your servant an understanding heart to judge your people, that I may discern between good and bad. For who is able to judge this your great people?

“And the speech pleased the Lord, that Solomon had asked this thing. And God said to him, Because you have asked this thing, and have not asked for yourself long life; neither have asked riches for yourself, nor have asked the life of your enemies, but have asked for yourself understanding to discern justice, behold, I have done according to your words: lo, I have given you a wise and an understanding heart, so that there was none like you before you, neither after you shall any arise like unto you. And I have also given you that which you have not asked, both riches, and honor, so that there shall not be any among the kings like unto you all your days. And if you will walk in my ways, to keep my statutes and my commandments, as your father, David, did walk, then I will lengthen your days.

“And Solomon awoke, and, behold, it was a dream. And he came to Jerusalem, and stood before the ark of the covenant of the Lord, and offered up burnt offerings, and offered peace offerings, and made a feast to all his servants. Then came there two women, who were harlots, to the king, and stood before him. And the one woman said, O my lord, I and this woman dwell in one house, and I was delivered of a child with her in the house. And it came to pass the third day after that I was delivered, that this woman was delivered also, and we were together. There was no stranger with us in the house, except we two were in the house. And this woman’s child died in the night, because she lay on it. And she arose at midnight and took my son from beside me, while your handmaid slept, and laid it in her bosom, and laid her dead child in my bosom. And when I rose in the morning to nurse my child, behold, it was dead; but when I had looked at it in the morning, behold, it was not my son whom I did bear. And the other woman said, Nay; but the living child is my son, and the dead is your son. And this said, No; but the dead child is your son, and the living is my son. Thus they spoke before the king.

“Then said the king, The one says, This is my son who lives, and your son is the dead; and the other says, Nay; but your son is the dead child, and my son is the living. And the king said, Bring me a sword. And they brought a sword before the king. And the king said, Divide the living child in two, and give half to the one, and half to the other. Then spoke the woman whose the living child was unto the king, for her heart yearned over her son, and she said, O my lord, give her the living child, and by no means slay it. But the other said, Let it be neither mine nor yours, but divide it.

“Then the king answered and said, Give her the living child, and by no means slay it; she is the mother of it. And all Israel heard of the judgment which the king had judged, and they feared the king; for they saw that the wisdom of God was in him, to do justice.”

The wisdom of God indeed was in Solomon, far beyond imparting to him the ability as king to elevate the nation of Israel over all others in space and time. For his noble desire to place his service to God above self, God gave him an understanding of Wisdom as a Person, the Divine Member of the Godhead whom we know as the Holy Spirit and the Person of whom Solomon wrote in the Book of Proverbs.

In like manner God gave his father David an understanding of the Divine Will, the Holy Father. Subsequently, David wrote about Him in the Book of Psalms, of which David was the primary author.

The Psalms and Proverbs do more than inform us of the nature of God; they also informed the Jesus who came in the flesh about His own Divine Roots. To that end, the Book of Psalms was a loving letter of greeting and instruction from the Divine Father to His only begotten Son. In that circumstance, David was the surrogate Father who, in writing that letter, inserted that knowledge of the Father into Scripture for Jesus to read and study. Perhaps that is why Jesus called Himself the Son of David.

In the same way the Book of Proverbs also was a loving letter of greeting and instruction from Jesus’ other Divine Parent, the Holy Spirit.

If that is the case, He would have understood Psalms and Proverbs to have been written especially for His intimate understanding of his Divine Parents. Proverbs 1:8 is a particularly appropriate remark in that context:

“My son, hear the instruction of your father, and forsake not the law of your mother;”

Perhaps also Jesus would have rejoiced in reading Proverbs 8:22-31:

“The Lord possessed me in the beginning of his way, before his works of old. I was set up from everlasting, from the beginning, or ever the earth was. When there were no depths, I was brought forth – when there were no fountains abounding with water. Before the mountains were settled, before the hills, was I brought forth; while he as yet he had not made the earth, nor the fields, nor the highest part of the dust of the world. When he prepared the heavens, I was there; when he set a compass upon the face of the depth; when he established the clouds above; when he strengthened the fountains of the deep; when he gave to the sea its decree, that the waters should not pass his commandment; when he appointed the foundations of the earth, then I was by him, as one brought up with him; and I was daily his delight, rejoicing always before him, rejoicing in the habitable part of his earth; and my delight was with the sons of men.”

Perhaps a filial concern clouded Jesus’ features when he came to Proverbs 8:36:

“But he who sins against me wrongs his own soul; all who hate me love death.”

If so, it explains why Jesus spoke so protectively in Matthew 12:31 and 32 against blaspheming the Holy Spirit:

“Wherefore, I say to you, All manner of sin and blasphemy shall be forgiven men; but the blasphemy against the Holy Spirit shall not be forgiven men. And whosoever speaks a word against the Son of man, it shall be forgiven him; but whosoever speaks against the Holy Spirit, it shall not be forgiven him, neither in this age, neither in the age to come.”

NAMING THE ANIMALS

 

In Genesis 2, God pronounces it not good that Adam should be without a mate. But before He proceeds to do something about it, He brings the animals of His Creation to Adam and asks him to name them. Then he forms Eve out of Adam’s rib.

“And the Lord God said, It is not good that the man should be alone; I will make him an help fit for him.

“And out of the ground the Lord God formed every beast of the field, and every fowl of the air; and brought them unto Adam to see what he would call them: and whatsoever Adam called every living creature, that was the name thereof. And Adam gave names to all cattle, and to the fowl of the air, and to every beast of the field; but for Adam there was not found an help fit for him.

“And the Lord God caused a deep sleep to fall upon Adam, and he slept: and he took one of his ribs, and closed up the flesh instead thereof. And the rib, which the lord God had taken from man, made he a woman, and brought her unto the man.”

This passage raises a number of questions, particularly in the sequence of events, but with other issues besides. Why did God insert the naming of the animals between His concern over Adam being alone and His forming of Eve? What was so important about Adam naming the animals? How could he possibly name all the animals, given the enormous diversity of life?

As to the first issue, the sequence of the Biblical narrative, I like best an answer picked off the Internet on the Creation Moments website: God was using the simple tool of names to teach Adam to communicate, a skill that he would then pass on to Eve, enabling them to bond through joint communication. That answer is appealing, as it would be a valid prerequisite to the event of bringing Adam and Eve together, much to be preferred to the two staring dumbly at each other and at a total loss for words.

This reason also answers in part the second issue, the importance of Adam naming the animals. But there are other important reasons other than helping Adam to communicate with Eve, one of which is that in having Adam name the animals, God was asserting that these creatures were fixed kinds, finished designs whose basic properties would remain intact throughout history. Thus, this episode in Adam’s life is a slap in the face to Darwin’s theory of evolution, which postulates that life is unceasingly undergoing change. In Darwin’s view, all life is in constant transition from one form to another, so that the animals we see now are simply snapshots in time of what may be very different in the future.

Noted biochemist Douglas Axe captures the essence of this contrast between God’s stability of form with Darwin’s corresponding instability in Chapter 6 of his book Undeniable: How Biology Confirms our Intuition that Life is Designed. There, under the heading “Life A La Darwin”, Axe speaks of the salmon and the Orca whale, each very different but “utterly committed to being what it is”. Life, as Axe sees it, magnificently represents completion of form, creatures living precisely as God designed them to live.

This stability of form leads to the next issue, the question as to how Adam could have named all the animals, even within his very long lifetime. If all kinds of life are stable as was asserted above, the very diversity of life would not only indicate that this variety existed at the time of Adam, but also would make his task extremely difficult. At this point I’ll make a statement that appears to directly contradict this supposed stability of life: there were a relatively few “kinds” of animals that Adam was asked to name; first they were limited to birds and the larger animals; second, these “kinds” were the much-fewer basic precursors whose offspring branched out after Noah’s Flood to the diversity we see today. But then one might say, “See? Animals aren’t stable in form at all!” But the post-Flood diversity has much more to do with designed-in adaptability than actual change corresponding to the evolutionary model. The difference is that God’s engine of change is His inclusion in DNA of pre-existing alternate design modifications, whereas Darwin’s “engine” is dumb, random variation.

Take, for instance, the dog. There exists today an enormous variety of dogs of varying shapes, sizes and attributes. But they’re all still dogs, having the wolf as a common ancestor. The DNA of the wolf is information-rich, capable of accommodating plans “B”, “C”, and so on according to environmental conditions or the human interference of breeding. Most common breeds today are the product of the intelligent operation of selective breeding, and some, but not all, of their features would quickly revert back to those of their common ancestor if they were to be divested of their human overseers and go into the wild. It is true the Mexican hairless creature would be in serious trouble in another ice age because some features such as length of hair might be incapable of reversion. But that would be due to DNA information loss arising from forced breeding.

PERFECTION IN IMPERFECTION

 

This chapter is a digression from the primary theme of this volume, but is included here because it is so closely related to the information regarding Jesus’ feedings of the multitudes.

Having finished the analysis of the feedings as described in the previous chapter, I was left with a sense of disappointment in the little deviations from what I had pictured as what would be an ideal description of the details. Things just didn’t come together as I would have wished. The missing company of eleven in the array of the five thousand, for example, gnawed at me. Why would God do that?

Then I remembered that Elijah had fed a hundred individuals with twenty loaves. Those hundred, in a 20 x 5 configuration, actually furnished the template for a company. If Elijah’s company were to be inserted into the missing slot in the array of five thousand, it would make a perfect rectangle. Did God actually intend to imply that this should be done? What was His point?

The point, I finally realized, may have been that the arrays were intended to be integrated together. Applying that factor to the problem with the array of the four thousand being at right angles to the first array, I was astonished at the figure that was emerging from the integration: the array of the four thousand, placed atop that of the five thousand, began to look like a familiar figure, but yet imperfect in itself.

At this point, it will be useful to explore the Scriptural meaning of bread, and of Peter’s role with respect to it. In John 21, the risen Jesus shares breakfast with His disciples, and then addresses Peter, asking him the same question three times:

“Peter, do you love Me?”

Peter responds each time by affirming his love for Him, to which Jesus follows with a command:

“Feed my sheep.”

Peter, not appreciating that Jesus was gifting him with a threefold pardon for his denying Jesus three times, responds to each question with increasing anxiety. With the coming of Pentecost ten days after Jesus has left the earth, Peter is filled with the indwelling Holy Spirit, enabling him to fulfill Jesus’ commandment to feed His sheep. He does so, three significant times. The first time he preaches Jesus to the salvation of three thousand.

But Peter’s feeding is with the word, not the bread. Perhaps, with the doing, he came to understand John’s characterization of Jesus in Chapter One of his Gospel that Jesus is the Word in the flesh. Maybe he began, then, to appreciate Jesus’ words, recorded in John 6:30-35 and 51-58, that the Word is the spiritual equivalent of material bread, and that the bread Jesus gave the multitudes was only incidental to the Word.

“They said, therefore, to [Jesus], what sign do you show us, then, that we may see, and believe you? What do you work? Our fathers ate manna in the desert; as it is written, He gave them bread from heaven to eat.

“Then Jesus said to them, Verily, verily, I say to you, Moses gave you not that bread from heaven; but my Father gives you the true bread from heaven. For the bread of God is he who comes down from heaven, and gives life to the world. Then they said to him, Lord, evermore give us this bread. And Jesus said to them, I am the bread of life; he who comes to me shall never hunger, and he who believes on me shall never thirst.”

“I am the living bread who came down from heaven; if any man eat of this bread, he shall live forever; and the bread that I will give is my flesh, which I will give for the life of the world.

“The Jews, therefore, strove among themselves, saying, How can this man give us his flesh to eat? Then Jesus said to them, Verily, verily, I say unto you, Except you eat the flesh of the Son of man, and drink his blood, you have no life in you. He who eats my flesh, and drinks my blood, has eternal life; and I will raise him up at the last day. For my flesh is food indeed, and my blood is drink indeed. He who eats my flesh, and drinks my blood, dwells in me, and I in him.

“As the living Father has sent me, and I live by the Father, so he who eats me, even he shall live by me. This is that bread which came down from heaven, not as your fathers ate manna, and are dead; he who eats of this bread shall live forever.”

Appreciating that the bread of significance in Scripture is the immortal Word of God, Peter’s feeding of three thousand with the Word took on real importance, to the extent that it should be integrated into the figure that was being formed. Accordingly, the three thousand were encapsulated in an array of ten symbolic rows of companies of 100 by three columns.

When this was added atop the array for the four thousand, which itself was atop the array of five thousand, the resulting figure stood out as a cross.

But what about that extra little three-company array? The answer was found in Matthew 27:37, which declares that a sign was placed on the cross over his head that stated in three languages, Hebrew, Greek and Latin, “This is Jesus of Nazareth, the King of the Jews” The sign is called the titulus, and belongs with the cross.

In passing on this message of the sign of the cross in Jesus’ feedings, I encountered a person who pointed out to me that my assumption that all the baskets had the same size was false. The basket for the feeding of the five thousand, I was told, was a small handbasket, whereas the basket for the feeding of the four thousand was larger. The smaller handbasket would be appropriate for 5 loaves per basket, but the larger basket could hold more.

Actually I didn’t assume a common basket size; rather, I assumed that the leftovers from the feeding of the menfolk were of a common number of five per basket.

There were women and children in addition to the menfolk in both feeding events. According to Mark 7:31 the four thousand were fed near Decapolis on the south shore of the Sea of Galilee, while, according to Luke 9:10, the five thousand were fed near Bethsaida on the north shore, the implication being that the four thousand were mostly Gentile, while the five thousand were primarily Jewish. Further weight is given to this difference by the fact that the seven baskets of the four thousand correspond to the seven representative Churches that Jesus addressed in Revelation 1:20, while the twelve baskets of the five thousand match the twelve tribes of Israel.

Christianity is more inclusive of women than Judaism as suggested in Acts 2:16-18, and this difference supports the possibility that the larger baskets for the four thousand included the leftovers from the womenfolk as well as those for the men. Yet the contribution from the menfolk in each basket would have remained at five.

THE GOOD SEED

 

Matthew Chapter Thirteen begins with Jesus speaking the Parable of the Sower to a multitude of people from a boat. In that parable of seeds that represent people who hear the salvation-promising Word of God, only a portion of them are able to understand what they heard, bring it in fullness into their hearts, and maintain it through the tribulations and attractions of the material world. Jesus finishes this parable with an obscure reference to numbers, saying that these will bear fruit, some a hundredfold, others sixtyfold, and yet others thirtyfold. He places no difference in attributes or character among those who produce more fruit and those who produce less.

The only arithmetic relationship that I have found among these numbers that is both simple and meaningful is the partial sums of the arithmetic sequence

K∑^M_n=1 (n + (n+1) + (n+2) + (n+3) + . . .)

For the values K = 10 and M = 2, 3 and 4, the corresponding sums are 30, 60 and 100. I presented this pictorially in Part 5, Chapter 2 my book Family of God as four columns of people, where each column consisted of the number of people associated with a particular value of M, and where the top person in the first row bore fruit by passing the Word of God to those behind them, and, if there was an adjacent column, to the top person in the next column. In that pattern, the top person in the column would feed 30 people if there were two columns, 60 if there were three columns, and 100 if there were four columns. In such an arrangement, the amount of fruit that the top person in the first column would bear would be entirely dependent on the number of adjacent columns, which would be beyond his control, and, in fact, something he might not even know if he was able to perceive only his column and the next. I saw in this parable and the associated numbers an intimate connection between it and the accounts of Jesus’ feedings of the multitudes, as both processes resulted in manifold increases. In numerous places, especially in the Gospel of John, Jesus clearly equates bread and eating with Himself as the Word of God. When He was feeding the multitudes He also was delivering the Word of God. The expansion of bread in these acts may be seen as merely symbolic of how the word of God is multiplied through word-of-mouth distribution. In fact, the miraculous element of the feedings was simply the restoration of the broken pieces of bread to wholeness with their transfer from one hand to the next, which is symbolic of the indestructible nature of the Word of God as it is handed from mouth to ear.

If some reasonable assumptions are made beforehand, there is sufficient numerical information in Scripture to calculate the answers to the numbers missing in the feeding accounts and to establish patterns by which the multitudes would have been fed. A vital piece of information beyond the Gospel accounts of the feeding of the five thousand and the four thousand is the account in 2 Kings 4 of Elijah feeding a hundred people with twenty loaves of bread; another piece of information is the account, in Acts 2, of Peter feeding three thousand with the Word of God.

Picturing the feedings to be a process within an orderly array of people breaking bread, retaining a portion and passing the other to neighbors, I established the following restraints and relationships, particularly the ones that Jesus reminded His disciples about in Mark 8:

For the feeding of the five thousand: 5 thousand, 5 starting loaves given to His disciples to distribute per Matthew 6, 12 baskets of remainders.

For the feeding of the four thousand: 4 thousand, 7 starting loaves given to His disciples to distribute, 7 baskets of remainders.

All the twelve apostles, and only the twelve apostles, would participate in the initial distribution of loaves; thus five apostles would distribute for the five thousand and seven apostles would distribute for the four thousand.

The apostles would give one loaf each to a single company nearest them.

The basic organization of the men would be in companies of 50 and 100 per Mark 6, where the companies, per Elijah’s feeding in 2 Kings 4, would be arranged in a pattern of 20 x 5 for a company of 100, and 10 x 5 for a company of 50.

The collection of leftover bread would be on the basis of individuals rather than companies; each person in the final position would hand his leftover to a collector with a basket.

Performing the required calculations, the relationships were used to solve first the number of remainders per basket from the menfolk. The resulting number of 5 supported the following details:

For the five thousand, there were 5 columns corresponding to the 5 loaves and 5 apostles participating in the initial distribution; the center column consisted of companies of 100; the four outside columns consisted of companies of 50, resulting in 60 columns of individuals and 12 baskets of remainders; there were 17 rows of companies, resulting in 85 rows of individuals and producing 5100 individuals; one company of 100 was subtracted from this array to produce an exact number of 5000 individuals.

For the four thousand, a solution demanded that the orientation of this array be at right angles to that of the five thousand, requiring a substitution of rows for columns. With that orientation, there were 7 rows corresponding to the 7 loaves and 7 apostles participating in the initial distribution; all companies were of 50, resulting in 35 rows of individuals and 7 baskets of remainders; there were 11 columns of companies, resulting in 110 columns of individuals and producing 385 individuals, and leaving a much smaller array of 150 individuals in 3 companies of 50.

These patterns weren’t perfect. Jesus’ two feeding events seemed to generate three arrays rather than two, the largest array had a missing piece, and two of the arrays were at right angles to each other.

Yet the derived numbers matched perfectly with the numbers given in the Gospel accounts, and the patterns described above were the only ones that did so.

I found that once the calculations established the patterns for the feedings, the math was not necessary to verify the satisfaction of all the information in the Gospel accounts. A mere visual inspection of the patterns is all that is needed to confirm that they correctly represent that information. The calculations are presented as appendices in Family of God. A verbal description of the feedings with figures is included in my book Marching to a Worthy Drummer as Appendix Two. A strictly verbal description also is given in my novel Cathy.

If there is nothing else to say about the results, it is their proof of the amazing self-consistency of Scripture, even down to the smallest details. Scripture, as the Word of God, is pure truth.

But there is more to say about the results. It turns out that there is a message in the very characteristics that are thought of as imperfections. That will be the topic of the next post.

SIX MILLENNIA OF MANKIND’S HISTORY

 

Like the number forty in Scripture, the number seven also appears often, and actually is the most prominent of numbers. The multiple associations of a day with a millennium as presented earlier in Chapters One, Two and Five of this Part suggests that God has taken seven days of Creation and stretched them out into seven thousand years of human history.

That in this stretching of a day of the Lord into a thousand years is clear from Psalm 90 and 2 Peter 3:8. Beyond those direct equations of days to millennia is God’s obvious equation of the first day to a millennium in Genesis 2:17:

“But of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, thou shalt not eat of it; for in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shall surely die.”

As P.J. Hanley remarked in Chapter Five his book The Seven Lost Keys of End-Time Prophecy, Adam died before the end of a millennium at the age of 930 years. In fact, no human has ever lived to be a thousand years old. Given that limitation of Adam’s life to just under a thousand years, the “day” intended by God in Genesis 2:17 must have been a millennium. Hanley also asserts that the association of a day with a thousand years of human history was a common interpretation among the Jewish prophets and rabbis.

Further confirmation of this is abundant: the four days of keeping the Passover Lamb; the four days Jesus waited to resurrect Lazarus; the fourth millennium that had passed before Jesus’ first advent; the third day after the fourth day that Jesus referred to multiple times regarding His return to earth, the third day after the fourth day that brought Jesus to the wedding at Cana in anticipation of His marriage to His Church; Hosea’s prophecy in Hosea 6:2 of the restoration of Israel after two days; and the final millennium specified in Revelation.

A number of ideas were spawned around the middle of the nineteenth century that had a large effect on our perception of Scripture. Many of these ideas arose from our successes in technology and science. Some of them attempted to toss God away as no longer necessary, while others displayed a growing awareness that the time of Jesus’ return to earth may be approaching.

The latter half of the nineteenth century produced two men of exceptional intellect, vision and devotion to God, and who possessed a glimpse of the closure of this age. Their names were Sir Edward Denny, who wrote The Seventy Weeks of Daniel in 1849 and Henry Grattan Guinness, who published The Approaching End of the Age in 1878. Both of them pictured human history as occupying six millennia prior to the return of Christ on earth with His Church for the final millennium of Revelation. Each of them constructed cyclic representations of the six millennia of human history, but on very different logical bases and with equally different numbers. Astonishingly, they ended up at the same place. Just as amazingly, they were complementary, one cycle displaying the prominence of the number twelve, and the other of the number seven.

The numbers twelve and seven are both Scripturally significant, one being associated with Israel and the other with the Church.

Israel had twelve tribes; Jesus had twelve apostles; when Jesus fed the five thousand, Luke 9:10 tells us that the event took place near Bethsaida on the north shore of the Sea of Galilee, a locale consisting primarily of Jews; from that event there were twelve baskets of leftovers.

In Revelation 1 through 3, Jesus addressed seven Churches; according to Mark 7:31, the four thousand were fed near Decapolis on the south shore of Galilee, where Gentiles were the dominant group, as with the Church; from that event there were seven baskets of leftovers.

Taking his cue from Daniel 9:24, Sir Edward Denny split his seven millennia of human history into twelve periods of 490 years each.

“Seventy weeks are determined upon your people and upon your holy city, to finish the transgression, and to make an end of sins, and to make reconciliation for iniquity, and to bring in everlasting righteousness, and to seal up the vision and the prophecy, and to anoint the most Holy.”

Daniel’s weeks were periods of seven years each; seventy of them amount to 490 years. A period of 490 years also can be derived from the Books of Exodus, Deuteronomy and Joshua. Exodus 12:40 and 41 is very specific regarding the length of the Israelites’ stay in Egypt:

“Now the sojourning of the children of Israel, who dwelt in Egypt, was four hundred and thirty years. And it came to pass at the end of the four hundred and thirty years, even the selfsame day it came to pass that all the hosts of the Lord went out from the land of Egypt.”

After that 430-year duration, the Israelites wandered in the wilderness for forty years, and then spent the next thirteen years, according to the Jewish historian Josephus, in conquering the Promised Land. These three durations add up to 483 years, or sixty-nine weeks of years. A final seven years is assumed for a period where the Israelites settled into their new home in peace. Denny himself constructed a 490 period somewhat differently, using the 430-year duration of the Israelites’ stay in Egypt as the final segment of that period.

Each 490-year interval of Denny’s cycles, consisting of seven seventy-year periods, also introduces the number seven into his system. His twelve cycles amount to five thousand eight hundred and eighty years, which seem to be rather random until one realizes that each period of 490 years also includes ten symbolic Jubilee years. If these are added together, they amount over the twelve cycles to one hundred twenty years. Adding these 120 years to the 5880 years yields a total of six thousand years, or six millennia of human history.

Henry Grattan Guinness constructed his cycles from an entirely different perspective. He noted from Genesis 25:7-11 that Abraham died at the age of one hundred seventy five years, during which some important events in his life, like the birth of Isaac, occurred at twenty-five year intervals. From that, Guinness perceived that Abraham’s lifetime, in seven cycles of twenty five years, might represent the entire six-thousand-year sweep of human history. Dividing six thousand by seven, he came up with a figure of 857 and a lot of numbers past the decimal place. But then he may have noted that in six millennia there would be 120 Jubilees. If he subtracted these 120 symbolic years from the six thousand, he would arrive at a number of 5880 years. In dividing that number by seven, he found that it came out exactly to 840 years, furnishing a firm basis for his seven cycles. Furthermore, if he divided the number 840 by seven again, he came up with the number of 120, or twelve times ten. Attempting next to expand the 25-year duration of each cycle to 840 years, he came up with the number of 33.6, which he discovered to be the lifetimes of both Adam and Jesus.

So Denny, with his grand cycle of twelves, and Guinness, with his grand cycle of sevens, managed to come up with the same numbers for the six-millennium duration of man on earth prior to the final millennium: 5880 actual years plus 120 symbolic Jubilee years. Associated with these cycles is a wealth of information yet untapped.

FORTY DAYS IN THE LIVES OF MOSES AND JESUS

 

After Moses’ return from the top of mount Sinai with the stone tablets upon which God had written the Ten Commandments, he found that the people had returned to worshiping a golden calf cast from jewelry. In his intense anger, he broke the tablets. In his mercy, God allowed him to return to the mountain, where God would inscribe a second set of tablets with the Ten Commandments. The episode is recorded in Exodus 34:1-10 and 27-29:

“And the Lord said to Moses, Hew you two tables of stone like the first; and I will write upon these tables the words that were in the first tables, which you did break. And be ready in the morning, and come up in the morning to Mount Sinai, and present yourself there to me in the top of the mount. And no man shall come up with you, neither let any man be seen throughout all the mount; neither let the flocks nor herds feed before that mount. And [Moses] hewed two tables of stone like the first; and he rose up early in the morning, and went up to Mount Sinai, as the Lord had commanded him, and took in his hand the two tables of stone.

“And the Lord descended in the cloud, and stood with him there, and proclaimed the name of the Lord. And the Lord passed by before him, and proclaimed, The Lord, the Lord God, merciful and gracious, long-suffering, and abundant in goodness and truth, keeping mercy for thousands, forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin, and who will by no means clear the guilty, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children, and upon the children’s children, to the third and to the fourth generation.

“And Moses made haste, and bowed his head toward the earth, and worshiped. And he said, If now I have found grace in your sight, O Lord, let my Lord, I pray you, go among us; for it is a stiff-necked people; and pardon our iniquity and our sin, and take us for your inheritance. And [the Lord] said, Behold, I make a covenant: Before all your people I will do marvels, such as have not been done in all the earth, nor in any nation: and all the people among whom you are shall see the work of the Lord; for it is an awe-inspiring thing that I will do with you.”

“And the Lord said to Moses, Write you these words; for after the tenor of these words I have made a covenant with you and with Israel. And [Moses] was there with the Lord forty days and forty nights; he neither ate bread nor drank water. And he wrote upon the tables the words of the covenant, the ten commandments.”

Moses’ time spent on Mount Sinai had a prophetic element, as the forty days and forty nights of his stay on the mountain in the presence of the Lord pointed to Jesus Christ and the identical time which He spent in the wilderness as His first act after being baptized. The account is given in all the synoptic Gospels (Matthew, Mark and Luke). The following is Matthew’s version of the event, Matthew 3:16 and 17, and 4:1-11:

“And Jesus, when he was baptized, went immediately out of the water; and, lo, the heavens were opened to him, and he saw the Spirit of God descending like a dove, and lighting upon him. And, lo, a voice from heaven, saying, This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased. Then was Jesus led up by the Spirit into the wilderness to be tested by the devil. And when he had fasted forty days and forty nights, he was afterward hungry.

“And when the tempter came to him, he said, If you are the Son of God, command that these stones be made bread. But [Jesus] answered and said, It is written, Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceeds out of the mouth of God. Then the devil took him up to the holy city, and set him on a pinnacle of the temple, and said to him, If you are the Son of God, cast yourself down; for it is written, He shall give his angels charge concerning you, and in their hands they shall bear you up, lest at any time you dash your foot against a stone. Jesus said to him, It is written again, You shall not put the Lord, your God, to the test. Again, the devil took him up to an exceedingly high mountain, and showed him all the kingdoms of the world, and the glory of them, and said to him, All these things will I give you, if you will fall down and worship me. Then said Jesus to him, Begone, Satan; for it is written, You shall worship the Lord, your God, and him only shall you serve. Then the devil left him, and behold, angels came and ministered to him.”

Shortly after this forty-day period of trial, Jesus started His ministry. The Gospels don’t mention the number of days that passed between the two events, so one cannot dogmatically assume that it was ten. Nevertheless, it is a possibility that fifty days passed from the time of Jesus’ baptism to the beginning of his active ministry.

If that is indeed the case, the pattern of forty plus ten days continues beyond Jesus. In John 12:26 and 14:12, Jesus indicates that His disciples will follow His lead:

“If any man serve me, let him follow me; and where I am, there also shall my servant be: if any man serve me, him will my Father honor.”

“Verily, verily, I say unto you, He that believeth on me, the works that I do shall he do also; and greater works than these shall he do, because I go to my Father.

In John 20:22, apparently on the day following His resurrection, Jesus breathes on His disciples, conferring on them the Holy Spirit. He remained with them for forty days. From the time of Jesus ascension until the Pentecost ten days later, the disciples didn’t appear to have responded to the indwelling Holy Spirit. Their power from God came at the Pentecost, as described in Acts 2. Could that forty-plus-ten-day period have been a time of testing and strengthening for the disciples, as it may have been for Jesus?

The number forty is common in Scripture. Moses communed with God with a backdrop of terrifying violence while Jesus as God communed with His Word with a backdrop of terrifying evil. Both of them fasted for the duration. God granted Nineveh through Jonah forty days to get its act together.

The Israelites wandered in the wilderness for forty years; both David and his son Solomon reigned as kings for forty years.

THE TEN PERIODS OF SMYRNA’S PERSECUTION

 

In Revelation Chapters 2 and 3 Jesus dictated messages to John regarding seven Churches located in what is now Turkey. At the time John was in exile on the Island of Patmos, having been banished there by the Roman emperor Domitian for placing his Christian belief above the worship of the emperor. John’s vision occurred toward the end of the first century, before John was released at Domitian’s death in A.D. 96.

These Churches are, in the sequence that Jesus presented them, Ephesus, Smyrna, Pergamos, Thyatira, Sardis, Philadelphia, and Laodicea. The messages generally followed the same seven elements: Church name, the name Jesus chose for Himself in addressing them, a commendation, a concern over a matter that needed correction, an exhortation, a promise to the overcomer, and a closing statement. The closing statement was identical for all seven Churches: He that hath an ear, listen. Two Churches were singled out for having no commendation: Sardis and Laodicea; another two Churches were singled out for having no concern: Smyrna and Philadelphia.

These seven Churches are variously identified as seven Churches representative of Christianity at the time that Jesus delivered the message, as well as Churches that typified the prevailing character of the Church over seven sequential eras of Christianity, and Churches representative of Christianity over the entire Christian era from the first Pentecost to the Second Coming of Christ. In actuality, the views are not mutually exclusive; they all have some validity. Corresponding to the sequential view, Christian theologians have associated an identification and time period for each Church, as follows:

Ephesus: Apostolic, first through fourth centuries

Smyrna: Persecuted, first through fourth centuries

Pergamos: Heretical, first through fourth centuries

Thyratira: Post-Constantine, fifth through ninth centuries

Sardis: Medieval, tenth through sixteenth centuries

Philadelphia: Missionary, sixteenth through nineteenth centuries

Laodicea: End-Time, twentieth century to the return of Jesus Christ to earth

The specific message given to Smyrna is presented in Revelation 2:8-11:

“And to the angel of the church in Smyrna write: These things say the first and the last, who was dead, and is alive. I know your works, and tribulation, and poverty (but you are rich); and I know the blasphemy of them who say they are Jews, and are not, but are the synagogue of Satan. Fear none of those things that you shall suffer. Behold, the devil shall cast some of you into prison, that you may be tried, and you shall have tribulation ten days; be you faithful to death, and I will give you a crown of life. He that has an ear, let him hear what the Spirit says to the churches: He that overcomes shall not be hurt of the second death.”

Over the years many Christians have wondered what Jesus meant by the ten days of persecution. I favor the opinion given by John Foxe in Foxe’s Christian Martyrs of the World. During the time interval ranging from A.D. 64 under the reign of Nero to A.D. 313 under Diocletian, Foxe in Chapters 1 and 2 of his work identified ten separate periods when persecution was particularly violent and widespread, typically a result of the Christian refusal to worship the Roman emperor as god. During these and subsequent persecutions, Christians remained nonviolent, holding fast to Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount, particularly His Word in Matthew 5:43-48 regarding the treatment of enemies:

“You have heard that it has been said, You shall love your neighbor, and hate your enemy; but I say to you, Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them who despitefully use you, and persecute you. That you may be the children of your Father, who is in heaven; for he makes his sun to rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the just and the unjust. For if you love them who love you, what reward have you? Do not even the tax collectors the same? And if you salute your brothers only, what do you more than others? Do not even the heathen so? Be you, therefore, perfect, even as your Father, who is in heaven, is perfect.”

In fact, as a rule Christians under persecution have, in the spirit of Titus 3:1, generally attempted to follow the dictates of the governments of which they have been subjects. It only has been under a direct conflict of loyalty between God and the government that Christians have practiced civil disobedience. An example of that is given in Acts 5:26-29:

“Then went the captain with the officers, and brought [the apostles] without violence; for they feared the people, lest they should have been stoned. And when they had brought them, they set them before the council; and the high priest asked them, Saying, Did not we strictly command you that you should not teach in [Jesus Christ’s] name? And, behold, you have filled Jerusalem with your doctrine, and intend to bring this man’s blood upon us.

“Then Peter and the other apostles answered, and said, We ought to obey God rather than men.”

Persecution typically is not unexpected in the Christian community, except, perhaps, in those Churches having the Laodicean character. Jesus Himself gave Christians plenty of warning about it, typical examples being given in Matthew 5:10-12 and John 15:18-20:

“Blessed are they who are persecuted for righteousness’ sake; for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. Blessed are you, when men shall revile you, and persecute you, and shall say all manner of evil against you falsely, for my sake. Rejoice, and be exceedingly glad; for great is your reward in heaven; for so persecuted they the prophets who were before you.”

“If the world hates you, you know that it hated me before it hated you. If you were of the world, the world would love its own; but because you are not of this world, but I have chosen you out of the world, therefore the world hates you. Remember the word that I said to you, The servant is not greater than his lord. If they have persecuted me, they will also persecute you; if they have kept my saying, they will keep yours also.”

It is an interesting fact that the persecution of the early Christians didn’t harm the Church in the least, but rather helped it grow. It strengthened those Christians who held fast in its wake and in the scattering of those who fled, it served to propagate the Gospel to lands that otherwise would not have known of Jesus Christ and the salvation that He offered.

A summary of Foxe’s take on the ten “days” of Smyrna’s persecution is presented in the table below.

PERIOD DATES PERSECUTOR COMMENT

1 54-68 Nero Peter and Paul killed

2 95-96 Domitian John Exiled to Patmos

3 104-117 Trajan

4 161-180 Marcus Aurelius Polycarp martyred

5 200-211 Septimus Severus

6 235-237 Maximus

7 249-251 Decius

8 257-260 Valerian

9 270-275 Aurelian

10 303-313 Diocletian worst persecution

After Diocletian’s persecution, Constantine became Emperor of Rome and legitimized Christianity, which led to growing complacence thereafter, a condition that continued to worsen until the Reformation, of which Martin Luther played a major part. The persecutions that occurred during the Middle Ages were largely associated with the Catholic Inquisition. Modern persecutions are primarily the result of the Muslim hatred toward Christians and the attempt of morally weak governments to maintain an uneasy peace between themselves and the Muslim communities within their borders.

JESUS’ RIDE TO DESTINY

 

Daniel had foretold the appearance of the Messiah around five hundred years earlier in his famous prophecy of the seventy weeks. In Daniel 9:25, the angel Gabriel tells Daniel that from the commandment to restore and rebuild Jerusalem to the Messiah the Prince would be a total of sixty nine “weeks” of years, or 483 prophetic years, which amounts to 173,880 days. When that very day arrived 483 prophetic years from Artaxerxes’ command to rebuild Jerusalem in 445 B.C., Jesus presented Himself at Jerusalem as King and Savior. The event is recorded in Matthew 21:1-11, the first three verses of which describe Jesus’ acquisition of two asses for His journey into Jerusalem:

“And when they drew near to Jerusalem, and were come to Bethphage, to the Mount of Olives, then sent Jesus two disciples, saying to them, Go into the village opposite you, and immediately you shall find an ass tied, and a colt with her; loose them and bring them to me. And if any man say anything to you, you shall say, The Lord has need of them, and immediately he will send them.”

It has been said that Jesus rode into Jerusalem on an ass to show His humble nature. But He was following the lead of King Solomon as well, who also came on a mule to receive his kingship over Israel. That earlier event is described in 1 Kings 1:33,38 and 39:

“The king [David] also said to them, Take with you the servants of your lord, and cause Solomon, my son, to ride upon my own mule, and bring him down to Gihon . . .So Zadok, the priest, and Nathan, the prophet, and Benaiah, the son of Jehoiada, and the Cherethites, and the Pelethites, went down, and caused Solomon to ride upon King David’s mule, and brought him to Gihon. And Zadok, the priest, took a horn of oil out of the tabernacle, and anointed Solomon. And they blew the trumpet; and all the people said, God save King Solomon.”

Around the middle of the nine hundred or so years between Solomon and Jesus, the prophet Zechariah in verse 9:9 predicted this very event, where Jesus would follow Solomon’s lead in riding a lowly animal to be crowned King of Israel.

“Rejoice greatly, O daughter of Zion; shout, O daughter of Jerusalem; behold, your King comes to you, he is just, and having salvation; lowly, and riding upon an ass, and upon a colt, the foal of an ass.”

The foretelling of this event is one of a large number of prophecies in which the Holy Spirit, through the writings of obedient humans, displayed the character of the Jesus to come. In this case, Jesus showed His humble nature, but also acknowledged His rightful Kingship over Israel and His believers throughout history.

Elsewhere in Scripture the Gospels affirm that Jesus also acknowledged His Godhood and the importance that He placed in the Spiritual domain as opposed to the material world. In John 8, for example, Jesus identified Himself as God of Abraham who also had spoken to Moses in the burning bush:

“Your father, Abraham, rejoiced to see my day; and he saw it, and was glad. Then said the Jews to him, You are not yet fifty years old, and have you seen Abraham? Jesus said to them, Truly, truly, I say to you, Before Abraham was, I AM.”

Notice here how the Pharisees were so fixated on the material world that they couldn’t comprehend Jesus’ pre-existence in the spiritual domain. Yet, through His healing acts, Jesus demonstrated how thoroughly He controlled the material world, showing man that the spiritual world is of far greater significance than the material domain. Jesus constantly told His disciples that a greater life awaits them out of this world that we find ourselves in, a domain that is worthy of a greater allegiance than our material world. Jesus brings this point home in John 17 as He prays to His heavenly Father:

“And now I come to You; and these things I speak in the world, that they might have my joy fulfilled in themselves. I have given them Your word; and the world has hated them, because they are not of the world, even as I am not of the world. I pray not that You should take them out of the world, but that You should keep them from the evil. They are not of the world, even as I am not of the world.”

THE TIMING OF THE WISE MEN’S VISIT TO JESUS

 

This discussion of the timing of the Wise Mens’ visit to Jesus includes a reconciliation between the alleged inconsistency between the Gospels of Matthew and Luke in their accounts of Jesus’ birth.

At first glance, the story of Jesus’ birth in the Gospel of Matthew appears to conflict with the account given in the Gospel of Luke. The event, in Matthew’s account, is accompanied by violence against the young males in Bethlehem, danger for Jesus, and the flight of Jesus’ family into Egypt to escape the wrath of Herod. Luke, on the other hand, presents a peaceful scenario surrounding the birth of Jesus.

According to Matthew 2:1-16:

“Now when Jesus was born in Bethlehem of Judea in the days of Herod the king, behold, there came wise men from the east to Jerusalem,

Saying, Where is he that is born King of the Jews? For we have seen his star in the east, and are come to worship him. When Herod the king had heard these things, he was troubled, and all Jerusalem with him. And when he had gathered all the chief priests and scribes of the people together, he demanded of them where Christ should be born. And when they said to him, In Bethlehem of Judea: for thus it is written by the prophet [Micah in Micah 5:2], And you Bethlehem, in the land of Judah, are not the least among the princes of Judah: for out of you shall come a Governor, that shall rule my people Israel.

“Then Herod, when he had privately called the wise men, enquired of them diligently about what time the star appeared. And he sent them to Bethlehem, and said, Go and search diligently for the young child; and when you have found him, bring me word again, that I may come and worship him also.

When they had heard the king, they left him; and, lo, the star, which they saw in the east, went before them, till it came and stood over where the young child was.

When they saw the star, they rejoiced with exceeding great joy. And when they were come into the house, they saw the young child with Mary his mother, and fell down, and worshiped him: and when they had opened their treasures, they presented to him gifts; gold, and frankincense, and myrrh.

Keep in mind two items from the above account: first, to enquire diligently is to ask for details. The details were such that Herod must have suspected that Jesus was up to two years old at the time of the Wise Men’s visit.

Second, the wise men came into Jesus’ house, not the manger. Both of these facts point to the visit of the Wise Men having taken place at some time after His birth.

The corresponding account of the event of Jesus’ birth from Luke’s perspective is presented in Chapter 2 of his gospel:

“And she brought forth her firstborn son, and wrapped him in swaddling clothes, and laid him in a manger; because there was no room for them in the inn. And there were in the same country shepherds abiding in the field, keeping watch over their flock by night.

“And, lo, the angel of the Lord came upon them, and the glory of the Lord shone round about them; and they were sore afraid. And the angel said to them, Fear not: for, behold, I bring you good tidings of great joy, which shall be to all people. For to you is born this day in the city of David a Savior, who is Christ the Lord. And this shall be a sign to you: You shall find the babe wrapped in swaddling clothes, lying in a manger.

And suddenly there was with the angel a multitude of the heavenly host praising God, and saying, Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace, good will toward men.

“And it came to pass, as the angels were gone away from them into heaven, the shepherds said one to another, Let us now go even to Bethlehem, and see this thing which is come to pass, which the Lord has made known unto us. And they came with haste, and found Mary, and Joseph, and the babe lying in a manger. And when they had seen it, they made known abroad the saying which was told them concerning this child. And all they that heard it wondered at those things which were told them by the shepherds. But Mary kept all these things, and pondered them in her heart. And the shepherds returned, glorifying and praising God for all the things that they had heard and seen, as it was told to them.

“And when eight days were accomplished for the circumcising of the child, his name was called JESUS, which was so named of the angel before he was conceived in the womb.

“And when the days of her purification according to the law of Moses were accomplished, they brought him to Jerusalem, to present him to the Lord; (As it is written in the law of the Lord, Every male that openeth the womb shall be called holy to the Lord;) and to offer a sacrifice according to that which is said in the law of the Lord, A pair of turtledoves, or two young pigeons.”

Luke’s account, unlike that of Matthew’s, paints a peaceful scenario, one in which the family of Jesus makes an uneventful return from Bethlehem, one that includes the presentation of Jesus to the Lord at Jerusalem. But Mary also had to wait until her purification was completed before Jesus was presented at the temple. The Mosaic law that specifies the post-birth purification is given in Leviticus 12:

“And the Lord spoke to Moses, saying, Speak to the children of Israel, saying, If a woman has conceived seed, and born a man child: then she shall be unclean seven days; according to the days of the separation for her infirmity shall she be unclean. And in the eighth day the flesh of his foreskin shall be circumcised. And she shall then continue in the blood of her purifying thirty three days; she shall touch no hallowed thing, nor come into the sanctuary, until the days of her purifying are fulfilled.”

According to this purification rite, Mary had to wait at least forty one days, and possibly longer, depending on her health, before presenting Jesus to the temple. During this time, there is no suggestion in Luke’s account of any violence or effort of Herod’s attempt on Jesus’ life. Rather, in harmony with the details of Matthew’s account, this peaceful interlude points to the likelihood that the visit of the Wise Men didn’t occur until after Mary’s purification period, and possibly years after.

The distance that the Wise Men had to travel after seeing the star in their homeland also suggests a lengthy time duration between their first sight of the star and their arrival at Bethlehem, which would place their arrival well after Jesus’ birth. But why would the Wise Men associate that star with the birth of Jesus? Bible scholar Hal Lindsey has suggested that the Wise Men were members of a cadre of Persian mystics whose Chaldean forbears had access to the teachings of Daniel during his captivity in Babylon. The information imparted to them by Daniel may well have included the prophecy of seventy weeks in Daniel 9:24-27, which would have given the Wise Men an understanding with virtually pinpoint accuracy of when Jesus would appear. When the star appeared to them, its timing must have identified it with Jesus as well as pointing to the direction of Jesus’ birth from their location.

The Wise Mens’ wisdom consisted in their faith in Daniel’s prophecy and their diligence in observing the sky for confirmation and direction.

THE IMPORTANCE OF JONAH

 

The book of Jonah in the Old Testament is tiny, occupying but one or two pages in the Bible. Because his story is so short, Jonah is often mistaken for the most minor of prophets, interesting to us only for his adventure with the fish where he gets swallowed alive and comes out of it still living. But if this is true, why did Jesus refer to him several times in a way that makes Jonah out to be a pretty important person? As a matter of fact, Jesus seems to puff him up out of all proportion to anything that Jonah might have done to deserve this honor. But then, we already appreciate that the Word of God is far deeper than we might see from a quick reading of it.

At first, the story of Jonah makes him out to be anything but noble. Jonah had run away from God after He had told him to preach to the inhabitants of Nineveh to repent of their wickedness. He went aboard a boat that was going in the opposite direction from where God told him to go.

“But the Lord sent out a great wind into the sea, and there was a mighty tempest in the sea, so that the ship was like to be broken. Then the mariners were afraid, and cried every man to his god, and cast forth the wares that were in the ship into the sea, to lighten it of them . But Jonah was gone down into the sides of the ship; and he lay, and was fast asleep. So the shipmaster came to him, and said to him, What are you about, O sleeper? Arise, call upon your God, if so be that God will think upon us, that we don’t die.

“And they said every one to his fellow, Come, and let us draw straws, that we may know who is responsible for this evil. So they drew straws, and Jonah got the short straw. Then they said to him, Tell us, we ask you, why this evil is upon us; What is your occupation? And where do you come from? What is your country? And of what people are you?

“And he said to them, I am a Hebrew; and I fear the Lord, the God of heaven, who has made the sea and the dry land.

“Then were the men exceedingly afraid, and said to him, Why have you done this? . . .Then said they to him, What shall we do to you, that the sea may be calm to us? for the sea wrought, and was tempestuous.

“And he said to them, Take me up, and cast me forth into the sea; so shall the sea be calm to you: for I know that for my sake this great tempest is upon you. . .So they took up Jonah, and cast him forth into the sea: and the sea ceased from her raging.

“. . .Now the Lord had prepared a great fish to swallow up Jonah. And Jonah was in the belly of the fish three days and three nights. . .”

When Jonah was expelled from the fish he went on to serve the Lord by preaching to the Ninevites. From the king on down they heeded his words, so that to him was attributed the saved souls of the entire city (which now is overlain by the city of Mosul, in Iraq).

The reason for Jesus’ promotion of Jonah to the ranks of the great prophets is that Jonah was allowed to represent the sacrificial Jesus who willingly laid down his life for his fellow man. In being swallowed by the sea creature and eventually being vomited out, Jonah also represented the Jesus who descended into the claustrophobic grave for three days and was resurrected.

Jesus recognized Jonah’s contribution to His nature and purpose by the most intimate of methods: He re-enacted the essence of Jonah’s Old Testament drama in the New Testament, and by so doing notified His disciples that He, too, must die and descend into the grave for three days and three nights. The account is given in the eighth chapter of Matthew’s Gospel:

“And when he was entered into a ship, his disciples followed him. And, behold, there arose a great tempest in the sea, insomuch that the ship was covered with the waves: but he was asleep. And his disciples came to him, and awoke him, saying, Lord, save us: we’re about to die.

“And he said to them, Why are you fearful, O you of little faith? Then he arose, and rebuked the winds and the sea; and there was a great calm.”

As a side point, there are several accounts, some as recent as the past century, in which whalers have been swallowed whole by their quarry and emerged alive through the ordeal, some having been trapped for several days. In one of the modern events of this nature as related in a Readers’ Digest story, the seaman was blinded by the gastric juices and remained an albino for the rest of his life. But he lived.

In John 21:15-17, after Jesus’ resurrection, He forgave His disciple Peter three times for the three times Peter denied Him. In this instance, Jesus again refers to the prophet Jonah, this time applying the name to Peter.

“So when they had dined, Jesus said to Simon Peter, Simon, son of Jonah, do you love me more than these? He said to him, Yea, Lord; you know that I love you. He said to him, Feed my lambs. He said to him again the second time, Simon, son of Jonah, do you love me? He said to him, Yea, Lord; you know that I love you. He said to him the third time, Simon, son of Jonah, do you love me? Peter was grieved because he said to him the third time, Do you love me? And he said to him, Lord, you know that I love you. Jesus said to him, Feed my sheep.”

Peter eventually must have figured out that instead of grieving over Jesus’ repetitive commands, he should have been very grateful, for in commanding Peter three times to feed His sheep, Jesus was also forgiving him three times, once each for Peter’s three denials of Him. As described in Acts, Peter did indeed go on to feed Jesus’ sheep three times: in the first incident, given in Acts 2 Peter brought three thousand people to salvation in Jesus; in the second, described in Acts 3, Peter saves five thousand; and in the third, according to Acts 10, Peter through the conversion of the Italian Cornelius, extends salvation to the entire Gentile community.

Why did Jesus label Peter as the son of Jonah? Probably because, like Jonah, Peter feared the anger of those around him if he were to try to fulfill what God wanted to do with him. In Jonah’s case, God had told him to preach repentance to the citizens of Nineveh. Jonah tried to duck out of this responsibility by boarding ship and sailing away as far as he could from that business. In Peter’s case, he tried to distance himself from Jesus in the face of the crowd’s clamor for Jesus’ punishment and death. Both Jonah and Peter eventually mustered the courage to complete God’s tasks for them, at considerable risk to their lives. Peter himself was eventually crucified for his commitment to the risen Jesus but by then, of course, he had the comfort and guidance of the indwelling Holy Spirit.

As another side note, Nineveh’s repentance lasted only a little over a century. The city’s debauchery eventually grew to such an awful extreme that God was moved to destroy it through the armies of Nebudchadnezzar in 612 B.C. This sad event was foretold by the prophet Nahum in the book of that name in the Bible. Eerily, this book reads like a modern news account of trends in the United States and God’s response to them.

THE TIME OF THE ABOMINATION IN DANIEL

 

An effort to understand where we are in time with respect to Jesus’ second advent is considered to be improper in some Christian circles. After all, Jesus Himself declared in His Olivet Discourse (Matthew 24) that “But of that day and hour knows no man, no, not the angels of heaven, but my Father only.” Pastors for centuries have used those words to justify their neglect of prophecy despite the fact that at least a fourth of the Bible is devoted to prophecy, and that in Matthew 24 and elsewhere, including Revelation, Jesus Himself provided us with some very detailed prophecies of end-time events. Moreover, Jesus also chastised the Pharisees regarding their indifference toward end-time prophecies, saying in Matthew 16 “When it is evening, you say, It will be fair weather; for the sky is red. And in the morning, It will be foul weather today, for the sky is red and overcast. O you hypocrites, you can discern the face of the sky; but can you not discern the signs of the times?”

The bottom line is that although we may not have access to the specific day or hour of the end of the age, we are encouraged – no – commanded to understand that approximate time, perhaps even to the year and month. Paul seconds this perception in 1 Thessalonians 5:1-6:

“But of the times and seasons, brethren, you have no need that I write to you. For you yourselves know perfectly that the day of the Lord so comes as a thief in the night. For when they shall say, Peace and safety, then sudden destruction will come upon them, as travails a woman with child, and they shall not escape.

“But you, brethren, are not in darkness, that that day should overtake you as a thief. You are all children of light, and children of the day; we are not of the night, nor of darkness. Therefore, let us not sleep, as do others, but let us watch and be sober-minded.”

Courageous Christian scholars like Hal Lindsey have taken those words to be marching orders, developing a view of end-time events and timing that is now accepted throughout the Christian community as standard. In that view, derived chiefly from Daniel 7 and 9, Matthew 24 and Revelation, the world will endure a seven-year Tribulation Period, the latter three and a half years of which will be the terrible Great Tribulation of widespread suffering and enormous destruction. A prime cause of this pain will be a general descent into ungodliness and rejection of God which will support the rise of a one-world government, including an economic system in which anybody who wishes to conduct a normal life will be required to worship the dark leader to come by accepting an electronic implant. In the light of Daniel 9:26, the world leader will have Roman roots. Christians will escape the brunt of this awful period through the pre-Tribulation Rapture, where they will meet Jesus Christ in the air.

More recently, Irvin Baxter has challenged some of these assumptions. Among these differences, Baxter views the Rapture as occurring at the end of the Tribulation, rather than at the beginning. Because the actual destruction of Jerusalem and the Jewish temple was carried out by local Arab conscripts under the Roman leadership, Baxter interprets Daniel 9:26 as allowing for an Arab antichrist. I agree with Baxter on both of these points.

Lindsey and Baxter agree on a seven-year Tribulation, in the midst of which the antichrist commits the Abomination of Desolation in the Jerusalem temple. For that reason, they hold to the expectation, as do virtually all other prophetic scholars, that a third temple will be built on the Temple Mount in Jerusalem in order that an abomination may be committed against it.

The seven-year Tribulation and its midpoint deserve further clarification. The source of this view is Daniel 9:27, in which the antichrist will confirm the covenant (interpreted as a peace treaty) with many for one week (of years); in the middle of the week he stops the temple sacrifice and initiates the Abomination of Desolation. Jesus Himself referred to this abomination in Matthew 24:15:

“When you, therefore, shall see the abomination of desolation, spoken of by Daniel the prophet, stand in the holy place (whosoever reads, let him understand), . . .”

The problem with that is that since the beginning of the Christian era, the temple of God has been considered the Church, with its members indwelt by the Holy Spirit as did the Shekinah Glory indwell the Tabernacle in the wilderness and Solomon’s Temple. Moreover, and of more immediate import to the present discussion, the Al-Aqsa Mosque and the Dome of the Rock also occupy space on the Temple Mount. Their presence there, having taken place after Jesus spoke of Daniel in Matthew 24, is itself an abomination that attempts to glorify Islam over the God of Scripture, a situation which is as monstrous as imaginable. I find it difficult to understand why such an important event would have been overlooked by Bible scholars and not have been spoken of in Scripture.

After some reflection on this state of affairs, I have come to the conclusion that this event was indeed spoken of in Scripture, being the very Abomination of Desolation noted by both Daniel and Jesus. The relevant account is Daniel 9:27:

“And he shall confirm the covenant with many for one week; and in the midst of the week he shall cause the sacrifice and the oblation to cease, and for the overspreading of abominations he shall make it desolate, even until the consummation, and that determined shall be poured upon the deslate.”

If indeed the mosque and the dome are the abominations, history records the start of their construction as 687 A.D. and their completion as 705/6 A.D. This would be the midpoint of the week spoken of by Daniel. The span of time involved would appear to be considerably longer than the present understanding of seven years. This assessment is confirmed in Daniel 12:11:

“And from the time that the daily sacrifice shall be taken away, and the abomination that makes desolate set up, there shall be a thousand two hundred and ninety days.”

The temple was first destroyed by Nebudchadnezzar of Babylon in 586 B.C., an event that was foremost in Daniel’s mind. There is a precedent in Ezekiel 4:4 and 5 for assigning a day for a year. Another precedent, borne out in the fulfillment of Daniel’s prophecy in Daniel 9:26 regarding the timing of Jesus’ first advent, is that a prophetic year consists of 360 days.

Given this information, the 1290-year interval between the destruction of the temple in 586 B.C. and the abomination of desolation can be calculated in terms of actual time. Applying a conversion of prophetic to actual years to the 1290 figure results in 1272 actual years. Adding that to the time of the temple’s destruction in 586 B.C. one arrives at a date of 687 A.D. As noted above, this is precisely the date that construction began on the mosque and dome, and represents the midpoint of the week in Daniel 9:27.

That particular week begins with a different event, the confirmation of a covenant, commonly understood as the antichrist’s signing of a peace treaty with Israel. The duration of this “week” can be found in Revelation11:1 and 2:

“And there was given me a reed like a rod; and the angel stood, saying, Rise and measure the temple of God, and the altar, and them that worship in it. But the court, which is outside the temple, leave out, and measure it not, for it is given to the gentiles, and the holy city shall they tread under foot forty two months.”

If the gentiles here are taken as the followers of Islam and the court outside the temple refers to that area occupied by the Al-Aqsa Mosque and the Dome of the Rock, a time duration of forty two months would apply from the time that these structure were built. The projects were completed in 705/6 A.D.

A prophetic month has a duration of thirty days. Just as Daniel’s “weeks” were intended to represent “sevens” of years, so also may the “months” in this passage represent “thirties” of years. In that interpretation, forty two months is equivalent to 1260 years, which would be the midpoint of a 2520-year duration. The beginning of this “week” would be 555 B.C., the date at which Balshazzar of the famed handwriting on the wall (Daniel 5) became co-regent of Babylon.

The corresponding interpretation of this passage in Revelation regarding the latter half of the “week” is that the Temple Mount is given to the gentiles for a duration of 1260 prophetic years, or 1242 actual years, from their completion in 706 A.D.

This leads to the year 1948 A.D., the year that Israel resumed as a nation.

In Daniel 12:12 another duration is listed, this one being considerably more optimistic:

“Blessed is he who waits, and comes to the thousand three hundred and thirty five days.”

This duration is usually taken to include the 1290-day period noted in the previous verse. This interpretation is not necessary – it is just as likely that it refers to an entirely separate duration, consecutive rather than an extension. Assuming that to be the case, also assuming that the “days” represent prophetic years, a conversion from prophetic to actual results in the number 1316, which, when added to the completion date of the mosque and dome, results in the year 2021 A.D. Given the blessed nature of this date, it is possible that it represents the end of the Tribulation period, which would be the time of Jesus’ second advent.

But there’s other information to consider. Many prophecies have two fulfillments, one being of a long duration and the other being of a shorter time period. It is possible that this prophecy is one of them, wherein besides the long-term fulfillment noted above, the more common interpretation of a shorter, seven-year period at the very end will also come into play.

Suppose, in that context, the year 2021 A.D. does indeed represent the end of the seven-year Tribulation. The Great Tribulation, then, would begin three and a half years before that, or in the middle of 2017 to early-to-mid 2018. Interestingly, this would also be around the seventieth anniversary of Israel’s nationhood in 1948, and around the fiftieth anniversary of the 1967 War in which Israel took back the Temple Mount. This anniversary could be immediately subsequent to a Jubilee Year for Israel, as there is a Jubilee after every forty-nine years, and the reclamation of the Temple Mount in 1967 would have been an excellent occasion for a Jubilee year.

.

THE ABOMINATION OF DESOLATION SPOKEN OF BY DANIEL

 

In His Olivet Discourse, recorded in Matthew 24, Jesus calls Daniel to mind in the following statement (24:15-22):

“When you, therefore, shall see the abomination of desolation, spoken of by Daniel the prophet, stand in the holy place (whosoever reads, let him understand), then let them who are in Judea flee into the mountains; let him who is on the housetop not come down to take anything out of his house; neither let him who is in the field return back to take his clothes. And woe to those who are pregnant, and to those who are nursing their children in those days! But pray that your flight be in the winter, neither on the sabbath day; for then shall be great tribulation, such as was not since the beginning of the world to this time, no, nor ever shall be. And except those days should be shortened, there should no flesh be saved; but for the elect’s sake those days shall be shortened.”

Jesus went on from there to speak of signs of what is called the tribulation period and of the time directly following that. In this passage Jesus is considered by most theologians to be speaking of a seven-year time of terrible events detailed more thoroughly in the Book of Revelation that have a worldwide effect just before Jesus Christ comes either for (post-tribulation rapture) or with (pre-tribulation rapture) His Church.

Daniel 9:24-27 speaks of an abomination of desolation, and this passage is usually interpreted as being in lockstep with Matthew 24:15, describing the death of Jesus for our sakes, followed by the destruction of Jerusalem and the temple by the Antichrist in the middle of a seven-year tribulation period that is to be initiated by a peace treaty with Israel. After causing the normal sacrifice to stop, the Antichrist sets up the abomination of desolation.

“Seventy weeks are determined for your people and for your holy city, to finish the transgression, and to make an end of sins, and to make reconciliation for iniquity, and to bring in everlasting righteousness, and to seal up the vision and prophecy, and to anoint the most Holy.

“Know, therefore, and understand, that from the going forth of the commandment to restore and to build Jerusalem until the Messiah, the Prince, shall be seven weeks, and sixty-two weeks; the street shall be built again, and the wall, even in troublous times.

“And after sixty two weeks shall Messiah be cut off, but not for himself; and the people of the prince to come shall destroy the city and the sanctuary, and the end of it will be with a flood, and to the end of the war desolations are determined.

“And he shall confirm the covenant with many for one week; and in the midst of the week he shall cause the sacrifice and the oblation to cease, and for the overspreading of abominations he shall make it desolate, even until the consummation, and that determined shall be poured upon the desolate.”

The portion of this passage that deals with the timing of Jesus’ first advent was covered in an earlier chapter. Sixty nine weeks of years after the rebuilding of Jerusalem, Jesus appears in the flesh. Daniel tells us here that after Jesus’ crucifixion at the end of the sixty-nine week period, there will be a prince to come. This prince is usually interpreted as the Antichrist, whose people, according to Daniel, will destroy Jerusalem and the Temple again. This destruction is usually perceived as coming much earlier than the coming of the Antichrist, being the destruction of Jerusalem and the burning of the temple that occurred in 70 A.D.

Because the General who commanded the soldiers who destroyed the temple in 70 A.D. was the Roman Titus, the people of the Antichrist to come are usually thought of as being Romans as well, or as Europeans. I question this association, noting that the soldiers under Titus were local Arabs who were conscripted by Rome. This, to me, opens the door to a Muslim Antichrist. After the destruction of the temple, this prince, the Antichrist, will finally appear at a time yet in the future to confirm a covenant, usually interpreted as a peace treaty between Israel and its antagonistic neighbors. This event, it is commonly said, will initiate the beginning of the final seven-year fulfillment of the seventy weeks of which Gabriel instructed Daniel, which is separated from the previous sixty nine weeks by the Church Age. It is this seventieth seven-year period spoken of in Daniel 9:24, along with comparable passages in Revelation that speak of periods of three and a half years that has led Bible scholars to think of the tribulation period as consisting of seven years, with the Great Tribulation occurring at the latter half of that period. Whether or not there is to be a third temple built during the time of tribulation, and a consequent third destruction, is an open issue. Paul speaks of our bodies being temples of flesh; perhaps the Church, being an aggregate of such temples, will be the one that is involved in the Tribulation.

In Daniel 11:31 is another passage that appears to match what Jesus spoke of in His Olivet discourse.

“And forces shall stand on his part, and they shall pollute the sanctuary of strength, and shall take away the daily sacrifice, and they shall place the abomination that makes desolate.”

Because Jesus, being on earth five centuries after the birth of Daniel, spoke of Daniel’s Abomination of Desolation as being yet in the future, Bible scholars commonly interpret the passage from Daniel quoted above as also being a future event. But others, thinking back on history, see that this passage and the surrounding verses match quite well with an event that occurred after Daniel but before Jesus, at around 165 B.C. The villain in this precursor event is Antiochus Epiphanes, a brutal persecutor of the Jews and a type of the Antichrist to come. Antiochus did indeed invade the Temple in Jerusalem, stopped the normal sacrifice, and he sacrificed instead a pig on the altar there. A pig is considered by the Jews to be an unclean animal.

Actually, Daniel may have been speaking of both the precursor event and the follow-on event, yet in the future, spoken of by Jesus. The future event is almost universally anticipated as happening at the beginning of the latter three and a half years of an upcoming seven-year tribulation period just before the return of Christ to Earth.

DANIEL’S PROPHECY OF JESUS’ FIRST ADVENT

 

The angel Gabriel gave Daniel an amazing wealth of prophetic information in response to his supplication to the Lord. More remarkable yet is that it is encapsulated in a mere four verses: Daniel 9:24-27:

“Seventy weeks are determined upon your people and upon your holy city, to finish the transgression, and to make an end of sins, and to make reconciliation for iniquity, and to bring in everlasting righteousness, and to seal up the vision and prophecy, and to anoint the Most Holy.

“Know, therefore, and understand, that from the going forth of the commandment to restore and to build Jerusalem to the Messiah, the Prince, shall be seven weeks, and sixty two weeks; the street shall be built again, and the wall, even in troublous times.

“And after sixty two weeks shall Messiah be cut off, but not for himself; and the people of the prince that shall come shall destroy the city and the sanctuary, and the end of it shall be with a flood, and to the end of the war desolations are determined.

“And he shall confirm the covenant with many for one week; and in the midst of the week he shall cause the sacrifice and the oblation to cease, and for the overspreading of abominations he shall make it desolate, even until the consummation, and that determined shall be poured upon the desolate.”

Not only is there an abundance of information in those four verses, but some of that prophetic information already has been fulfilled. The timing of its fulfillment is of astonishing accuracy. Of particular interest in this regard is the second of these four verses, Daniel 9:25, which foretells when Jesus will appear in His first advent. This event, which was to take place about five hundred years after the prophecy was written, occurred just as foretold, even to the very day that Jesus made His triumphal entry on an ass into Jerusalem.

As a side note, Jesus’ riding on an ass re-enacted Solomon’s riding on a similar animal to be crowned King over Israel. The account is given in 1 Kings 1:38:

“So Zadok, the priest, and Nathan, the prophet, and Benaiah, the son of Jehoiada, and the Cherethites, and the Pelethites, went down, and caused Solomon to ride upon King David’s mule, and brought him to Gihon. And Zadok, the priest, took an horn of oil out of the tabernacle, and anointed Solomon. And they blew the trumpet; and all the people said, God save King Solomon.”

Moreover, Jesus’ entry on an ass was specifically foretold in Zechariah 9:9 by that prophet:

“Rejoice greatly, O daughter of Zion; shout, O daughter of Jerusalem; behold, your King comes to you; he is just, and having salvation; lowly, and riding upon an ass, and upon a colt, the foal of an ass.”

But it was Daniel who had captured the event’s timing. According to verse 9:25, there would be a time interval of sixty nine weeks from a certain event to Jesus’ appearance. There is no coded equivalence here. A week is simply a group of seven units of time. Here, it is obvious from the prophecy’s fulfillment that the unit of time that Daniel was writing of is a year, which is usually understood to be a prophetic year of 360 days’ duration. A week in this prophecy, therefore, is a time interval of seven prophetic years.

The event that was to start the prophetic time interval was a commandment to restore and rebuild Jerusalem. The commandment that matches that event was a decree issued by Persian King Artaxerxes Longimanus in 445 B.C. to rebuild the city of Jerusalem. This event is detailed in the Book of Nehemiah. The situation is summarized in Nehemiah Chapter 2:

“And it came to pass in the month Nisan, in the twentieth year of Artaxerxes, the king, that wine was before him; and I took up the wine, and gave it to the king. Now I had not been sad in his presence. Wherefore, the king said unto me, Why is your countenance sad, seeing you are not sick? This is nothing else but sorrow of heart. Then I was very much afraid. And said to the king, Let the king live forever. Why should not my countenance be sad, when the city, the place of my fathers’ supulchers, lies waste, and its gates are consumed with fire? Then the king said to me, For what do you make request? So I prayed to God of heave. And I said unto the king, If it please the king, and if your servant has found favor in your sight, that you would send me unto Judah, to the city of my fathers’ sepulchers, that I may build it. And the king said to me (the queen also sitting by him), For how long shall your journey be? And when will you return? So it pleased the king to send me; and I set him a time.”

The walls were rebuilt in troublous times indeed; in Nehemiah’s account, the workers had to have their weapons ready at hand as they worked. The rebuilding project took 49 prophetic years (the first 7 weeks of Daniel 9:25).

Including the additional 62 weeks (434 prophetic years) prophesied in Daniel 9:25, the 69-week time to Messiah from Artaxerxes’ decree was 173,880 days, (the product of 483 and 360), which agrees with astonishing precision with the estimated date of April 6, 32 A.D. for Jesus’ triumphal entry into Jerusalem.

For the person who wishes to delve deeper into this prophecy, further details can be obtained by Googling “Jesus’ triumphal entry 69 weeks after Artaxerxes’ decree”.

It is important to keep in mind that the decree of Artaxerxes was made after the decree of Cyrus to end the seventy-year captivity of Judah. The decree of Cyrus was to rebuild the temple in Jerusalem and is covered in the Book of Ezra, while the decree of Artaxerxes, as described in Daniel 9:25, was to rebuild the city of Jerusalem itself and is covered in the Book of Nehemiah.

JESUS’ RESURRECTION OF LAZARUS

 

Chapter 11:1-44 of John’s Gospel describes the event of Jesus’ resurrection of Lazarus.

“Now a certain man was sick, named Lazarus, of Bethany, the town of Mary and her sister, Martha. (It was that Mary who anointed the Lord with ointment, and wiped his feet with her hair, whose brother Lazarus was sick.) Therefore, his sisters sent to him, saying, Lord, behold, he whom you love is sick. When Jesus heard that, he said, This sickness is not for death, but for the glory of God, that the Son of God might be glorified by it.

“Now Jesus loved Martha, and her sister, and Lazarus. When he had heard, therefore, that he was sick, he remained another two days in the same place where he was. Then, after that, he said to his disciples, Let us go into Judea again.”

Jesus’ disciples thought at first that Lazarus was merely asleep. They questioned Him as to why, if that were the case, he needed to go to him, along a route they knew was dangerous for him. Jesus responded directly by telling them that Lazarus was dead. He followed that with an enigmatic statement:

“And I am glad for your sakes that I was not there, to the intent that you may believe; nevertheless, let us go to him.”

By the time that Jesus got to Lazarus’ place, he had already been dead for four days. When Martha and Mary complained about His delay in getting to Lazarus, He reassured them that Lazarus would rise again. Then He made the following statement:

“I am the resurrection, and the life; he that believes in me, though he was dead, yet shall he live. And whoever lives and believes in me shall never die. Do you believe this?”

When Jesus saw Mary weeping along with Lazarus’ friends, He asked where Lazarus had been laid, and wept along with them. The friends marveled at this demonstration of Jesus’ love for Lazarus. When Jesus came to the cave where Lazarus was, He asked that the covering stone be removed. Martha responded with horror, reminding Jesus that after four days, Lazarus would have the stench of death. At this, Jesus reminded her that if she would believe, she would see the glory of God. When the covering stone was removed, Jesus lifted up His eyes and, for the sake of the belief of the onlookers, thanked His Father for hearing Him. With that, He commanded Lazarus,

“Lazarus, come forth.”

Lazarus responded to this command by stepping alive out of the cave, still in his graveclothes.

On the surface, this story is worthwhile for demonstrating Jesus’ compassion toward Lazarus, and for His supernatural ability to perform a resurrection. But the story prods us to look for a deeper significance, in the odd circumstance of Jesus waiting for another two days before performing the resurrection. Surely He knew how Mary, Martha and Lazarus’ close friends would be grieving, and that his loitering around would serve to prolong their suffering. It would almost seem that Jesus was rather indifferent to the whole business, a thought that clashes with the fact that Jesus made a hazardous journey to reach Lazarus, and that He wept, and that He did perform the resurrection.

The apparent contradictions of motive in the story point out that something else is in play here – that the resurrection was a far more important event than simply reviving Lazarus. Jesus was actually prophesying His own resurrection. Sense can be made that He waited until Lazarus was dead four days before resurrecting him only if there is a significance to the period of four days that is associated with this prophecy.

Verse 4 of Psalm 90 gives us an interesting clue as to what that significance might be.

“For a thousand years in your sight are but as yesterday when it is past, and as a watch in the night.”

If this was the only passage that presented a specific relationship among specific periods of time, one might be tempted to dismiss the association as reading too much into the verse. But there is another verse, 2 Peter 3:8, that describes that same relationship:

“But, beloved, be not ignorant of this one thing, that one day is with the Lord as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day.”

Moreover, the implication of Jesus raising Lazarus after the fourth day is not the only association of four days with Jesus’ appearance. There is an even more basic one, the Passover that pointed to Jesus as the Lamb of God. The Passover event, as described in Exodus 12, includes a significant four-day period in verses 3 and 6 just before the killing of the lamb:

“Speak you to all the congregation of Israel, saying, In the tenth day of this month they shall take to them every man a lamb, according to the house of their fathers, a lamb for a house . . . And you shall keep it until the fourteenth day of the same month; and the whole assembly of the congregation of Israel shall kill it in the evening.”

Here is that same time period, when the lamb has been kept until after the fourth day, after which he was killed. Jesus as the Lamb of God was crucified after the fourth millennium from Creation.

Furthermore, God in Scripture makes other precise relationships among time periods, as in Ezekiel 4:6, where the following sentence may be found:

“I have appointed you each day for a year.”

In the sense of a day for a thousand years, Jesus came to Earth on the Fourth Day since Creation, confirming that His birth in the midst of a seven-millennium history of man of itself was a prophecy of His own resurrection.

It also confirms God’s use of time equivalence in Scripture.

JESUS QUOTES THE PROPHET ISAIAH

 

The prophet Isaiah, who lived in the eighth century B.C., is a prominent source of Old Testament prophecies that address the Jesus to come. Among these prophecies is the passage in Isaiah 7:14 where the prophet describes Jesus as being born of a virgin, and the passage in Isaiah 9:1 and 2, where Isaiah claims that Jesus will come from Galilee. Because so many of his prophecies depict such accurate facts about Jesus, some would-be Bible scholars attempted to claim that the Book of Isaiah was written after Jesus’ first advent. This claim was shown to be false by the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls in 1947, the documents of which were dated to before Christ and which contained the complete Book of Isaiah.

Jesus also quoted passages of Isaiah, confirming their truth. Isaiah 61:1-2a reads as follows:

“The Spirit of the Lord God is upon me, because the Lord has anointed me to preach good tidings to the meek; he has sent me to bind up the brokenhearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives, and the opening of the prison to those who are bound; to proclaim the acceptable year of the

Lord . . .”

Jesus, in Luke 4:16-21, is quoted as saying essentially the same words as Isaiah. And well He should, as He was reading from a scroll.

“And he came to Nazareth, where he had been brought up; and, as his custom was, he went into the synagogue on the sabbath day, and stood up to read. And there was delivered unto him the book of the prophet, Isaiah. And when he had opened the book, he found the place where it was written, The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to preach the gospel to the poor; he has sent me to heal the brokenhearted, to preach deliverance to the captives, and recovering of sight to the blind, to set at liberty them that are bruised, to preach the acceptable year of the Lord.

“And he closed the book, and he gave it again to the minister, and sat down. And the eyes of all them that were in the synagogue were fastened on him. And he began to say to them, This day is this scripture fulfilled in your ears.”

But what adds authority to Jesus’ words is that in quoting Isaiah, He didn’t finish the entire verse, the rest of which reads:

“. . .and the day of vengeance of our God; to comfort all that mourn; to appoint unto those who mourn in Zion, to give them beauty for ashes, the oil of joy for mourning, the garment of praise for the spirit of heaviness, that they might be called trees of righteousness, the planting of the Lord, that he might be glorified.”

Isaiah goes on to describe the blessings with which God will endow the nation of Israel.

Why did Jesus break off Isaiah’s prophecy in mid-sentence? Because in the synagogue He was describing just what He would accomplish regarding Isaiah’s prophecy in His first advent. The remainder of Isaiah’s prophecy was related to Jesus’ Second Coming, as foretold in the Book of Revelation.

Another passage of Isaiah that was quoted by Jesus is in Isaiah 6:9 and 10:

“And he said, Go, and tell this people, Hear you indeed, but understand not; and see you indeed, but perceive not. Make the heart of this people fat, and make their ears heavy, and shut their eyes; lest they see with their eyes, and hear with their ears, and understand with their heart, and are converted, and be healed.”

Jesus often spoke of the necessity of having eyes to see and ears to hear what He is teaching. In Mark 4:12, He quotes Isaiah 6:9 and 10 almost verbatim:

“That seeing they may see, and not perceive; and hearing they may hear, and not understand; lest at any time they should be converted, and their sins should be forgiven them.”

These passages seem to say that God gives a saving knowledge of Him to some people but denies it to others. Is this what He’s really saying? There is another passage, in Matthew 11:25-27 that seems so say just that.

“At that time Jesus answered and said, I thank you, O Father, Lord of heaven and earth, because you have hidden these things from the wise and prudent, and have revealed them to babes.

“All things are delivered to me by my Father, and no man knows the Son, but the Father; neither knows any man the Father, but the Son, and Him to whomever the Son will reveal Him.”

Why would God deny knowledge of Him to some, as this passage clearly states? In Matthew 13:11-16, Jesus repeats this denial, and gives us an answer as to why, with a commentary similar to that in His Parable of the Talents (Matthew 25).

“[Jesus] answered and said to them, Because it is given to you to know the mysteries of the kingdom of heaven, but to them it is not given.

“For whoever has, to him shall be given, and he shall have more abundance; but whoever has not, from him shall be taken away even what he has.

“Therefore I speak to them in parables, because they seeing, see not, and hearing, they hear not, neither do they understand. And in them is fulfilled the prophecy of Isaiah, which says, By hearing, you shall hear and shall not understand, and seeing, you shall see and not perceive; for this people’s heart is become gross, and their ears are dull of hearing, and their eyes they have closed, lest at any time they should see with their eyes, and hear with their ears, and should understand with their heart, and should be converted, and I should heal them.

“But blessed are your eyes, for they see; and your ears, for they hear.”

What Jesus was saying is that some people are so full of selfishness and pride and so caught up in the secular, material world that they don’t think of God as even relevant to their lives. They cannot understand, primarily because they don’t want to. Paul picked up on this failing of secular-minded people in 1 Corinthians 1:18-25:

“For the preaching of the cross is to them that perish foolishness; but unto us who are saved it is the power of God For it is written, I will destroy the wisdom of the wise, and will bring to nothing the understanding of the prudent. Where is the wise? Where is the scribe? Where is the disputer of this age? Has God not made foolish the wisdom of this world? For after that, in the wisdom of God, the world by wisdom knew not God, it pleased God by the foolishness of preaching to save them who believe. For the Jews require a sign, and the Gentiles seek after wisdom; but we preach Christ crucified, unto the Jews a stumbling block, and unto the Gentiles foolishness; but to them who are called, both Jews and Gentiles, Christ the power of God, and the wisdom of God. Because the foolishness of God is wiser than men; and the weakness of God is stronger than men.

THE ROAD TO EMMAUS

 

This touching account in Luke 24:13-22 is notable on several levels. At its most poignant, it shows the loving intimacy with which the risen Jesus associates with the human race. He speaks to the two men as would a loving, compassionate Parent intent on comforting their grieving souls.

The story also shows how closely the Old Testament is associated with the New, and how highly Jesus regarded it. When He revealed to the two travelers how the Scriptures foretold Him, the only Scriptures that were available to them were those of the Old Testament.

“And, behold, two of them went that same day to a village called Emmaus, which was from Jerusalem about seven and a half miles. And they talked together of all these things which had happened since Jesus’ crucifixion.

“And it came to pass that, while they talked together and thought of these events, Jesus himself drew near, and went with them. But their eyes were prevented from recognizing him. And he said to them, What manner of communications are these that you have one with another, as you walk, and are sad? And one of them, whose name was Cleopas, answered him, saying, Are you only a stranger in Jerusalem, and have hot known the things which are come to pass there in these days? And he said to them, What things? And they replied, Concerning Jesus of Nazareth, who was a prophet, mighty in deed and word before God and all the people; and how the chief priests and our rulers delivered him to be condemned to death, and have crucified him. But we hoped that it had been he who should have redeemed Israel; and, besides all this, today is the third day since these things were done. Yea, and certain women also of our company amazed us, who were early at the sepulcher; and when they did not find his body, they came, saying that they had also seen a vision of angels, who said that he was alive.

“Then he said to them, O foolish ones, and slow of heart to believe all that the prophets have spoken! Ought not Christ to have suffered these things, and to enter into his glory? And beginning at Moses and all the prophets, he expounded to them, in all the scriptures, the things concerning himself.

“And they drew near to the village, to which they went; and he made as though he would have gone farther. But they constrained him, saying, Abide with us; for it is toward evening, and the day is far spent. And he went in to linger with them. And it came to pass, as he sat eating with them, he took bread, and blessed it, and broke it, and gave it to them. And their eyes were opened, and they recognized him, and he vanished out of their sight. And they said one to another, Did not our heart burn within us, while he talked with us along the way, and while he opened to us the scriptures?

Perhaps Jesus explained to the travelers how He had to die for their benefit, presenting that information in terms of Joseph in Genesis, and how Joseph suffered for the salvation of his brothers who hated him, and, in the end, how he did so willingly. He could have added the account of Abraham’s attempted sacrifice of Isaac, and of how that story foretold the Father’s suffering as He had to turn His head away in sorrow from the sin that Jesus had become on the cross. He also could have explained how Moses prophesied of Him becoming sin by holding up the bronze serpent on a pole to heal those in the wilderness who had been bitten by snakes. He could have topped that off with Psalm 22, which foretold in agonizing detail how it felt to be crucified.

Maybe Jesus also explained to them why He had to wait for four days before He resurrected Lazarus, and how in doing so he was prophesying of His own resurrection after the fourth millennium from Creation.

It could be that Jesus went on to speak of the love of God toward mankind, quoting from passages of the Song of Solomon to show the exquisitely romantic nature of that love. In looking forward to that day when the Church would become the Bride of Christ, Jesus could have noted His first miracle at the wedding in Cana, where He changed water into wine to make complete the joy of marriage.