Bully's Blog

A Blazing Torch and a Smoking Firepot

Moses spent 40 years in the wilderness, then Israel did. God’s prophet lives through the pattern, then God’s people follow him in a larger pattern. The head of the sacrifice, then the body. The Adam, then the Greater Eve. Jesus, then the church.

James Jordan observes that the Promised Land failed to support Abram both during the famine and also later concerning the flocks of Abram and Lot. Only after the Lord “purified” the Land with a sacrifice was it again a garden for the people of God. Like Adam, a deep sleep fell upon Abram, but it was animal substitutes that were divided.

The Lord passed over Abram, but in the darkness, a smoking firepot and blazing torch passed through the divided animals. God structured this event to follow Israel’s feasts, with Passover and Atonement at each end, and the Lord’s prediction of the Hebrews’ slavery in Egypt at the “wilderness” centre.

The blazing torch and smoking firepot are the Lord’s chariot throne. The blazing torch (the head) is His throne, the Ark. The smoking firepot is the Incense Altar, the cloud of angel elders in His train (the body), the Holy Place positioned ‘underneath’ the Most Holy (see Ezekiel 1).1

Revelation 8

After the ascension of Christ, Satan was expelled from his “ministry” before God as the Accuser of man. Like the evil twin of the blazing torch that measured Abram’s sacrifices, he was then used by God to bring an end to the Old Covenant upon the Land.

And the fifth angel blew his trumpet, and I saw a star fallen from heaven to earth, and he was given the key to the shaft of the [Abyss]. He opened the shaft of the [Abyss], and from the shaft rose smoke like the smoke of a great furnace, and the sun and the air were darkened with the smoke from the shaft.

The seven trumpets are a chiasm, with the third and fifth corresponding symmetrically. The “de-Ascension” of Satan mirrors his fall in the third trumpet. Like Christ, he was given a key. His throne-coming was also accompanied by clouds of smoke, but as false High Priest, instead of a sweet-smelling aroma it was the sulphur of Sodom. As Pentecost’s fire came from the Altar of Incense in heaven, its evil twin bore an army of unholy mighty men—the “smoking firepot” body of Satan’s blazing torch head. It was the children of Satan (John 8:44), an army of Judaisers, locusts who would devour the Land. As in Daniel 7, the winds of the Spirit raised up beasts.

“as with Tyre of old, the Abyss is being dredged up to cover the Land with its unclean spirits. Apostate Israel is to be cast out of God’s presence, excommunicated from the Temple, and filled with demons. One of the central messages of Revelation is that the Church tabernacles in heaven; the corollary of this is that the false church tabernacles in hell.”2

As the preaching of the seven-sealed Gospel to the Land began with a white horse, so at the destruction of Judaism, the preaching of the Gospel to the World began with the white horse passing through the divided pieces of the Land (Zechariah 14:4). However, this time, Christ did not ride alone but with His bride. He was a blazing torch, and She was now the smoking firepot—a permanent part of His Ark-chariot. A government of ascended men had replaced the government of angels. Together they passed through the midst of a divided Land to carry the seven seals to the World.

“Then passing through the midst of them, He went His way.” Luke 4:30

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1 Note also that in Exodus 25-31, the Ark is the Light of Day 1, and the Incense Altar is the “swarms” of Day 5 – birds from above and fish from below. The Tabernacle was both a portable Sinai and an image of the chariot of God.
2 David Chilton, The Days of Vengeance, p. 244.

Greater Solomon

The structure of Revelation passes through two large heptamerous cycles (1-11 and 12-19). But the book as a whole follows the same pattern as Ezekiel. In the last three chapters, following Ezekiel’s pattern, John is shown the destruction of Gog (Amalek) in the Land, and a vision of a new Jerusalem. However, unlike Ezekiel, these events are beyond the second cycle of the book, and for good reason. This final “east-west” section exiles the Accuser to the Abyss (Azal) and enthrones the Bride. It is the only part of Revelation that directly concerns our own day.

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“[Revelation 20:7] tells us that the Millennium, which began 40 years after Jesus’ ascension, will not last all the way to His second coming. There is a brief period of time after the Millennium in which Satan will once again be released from the Abyss. Once again he will deceive the nations, Gog and Magog (prince and people; Ezekiel 38-39), to attack the Church. This final assault will be cut short by fire from heaven and the Last Judgment.”1

The allusion to Gog and Magog brings us to Ezekiel 38-39. Satan is Haman (head), ejected from the Emperor’s court but still desiring to destroy the people of God by deceiving the nations (body). The Lord, however, has prevented him from carrying out that plan. David Chilton writes:

“The stated goal of the Dragon’s deception is to entice the nations to join forces against Christ for the final, all-out war at the end of history. Satan’s desire from the beginning has often been to provoke a premature eschatological cataclysm, to bring on the end of the world and the Final Judgment now. He wants to rush God into judgment in order to destroy Him, or at least to short-circuit His program and destroy the wheat with the chaff (cf. Matt. 13:24-30). In a sense, he can be considered as his own agent provocateur, leading his troops headlong into an end-time rebellion that will call down God’s judgment and prevent the full maturation of God’s Kingdom.”2

Not only does this identify Satan as the true Amalek, surrounding the camp of the saints as he did in Exodus 17, and the beloved city as he did in Ezekiel 38, it also identifies this Conquest period of the greater Bible pattern with the Book of Esther. It is the time of God working unseen in the affairs of mankind, masterfully orchestrating all events for His ultimate purpose. After all, the kingdom of God is like leaven hidden in dough (Matthew 13:33). It is this process Satan would wish to stop.

The “binding” does not mean Satan has no influence in the world. He was bound in one aspect of his “ministry”, that of deceiving the nations. He is unable to mount another “universal” attack—a conspiracy of nations—against the church until he is released.

Finally, Satan is loosed again. And what does he immediately do? As He did in the late 60′sAD, he AGAIN gathers a conspiracy of nations against the church, this time on a world-scale. And what does this attack do AGAIN? It brings about the end of the age and a resurrection – this time on a world-scale. The second resurrection and the final judgment.

So, hyperpreterism misunderstands and truncates this entire process back into the first century. But this limits the conquest of Christ to Garden and Land. Jesus is now conquering the World. As Greater Amalek, Satan is powerless to gather the nations as “the sand by the sea”, while Jesus, as Greater Solomon, has been given all power to do so.

“Judah and Israel were as numerous as the sand by the sea in multitude, eating and drinking and rejoicing.” 1 Kings 4:20

 

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1 James B. Jordan, The Vindication of Jesus Christ, p. 84-85.
2 David Chilton, The Days of Vengeance, p. 504.

Analysing the repeated structures of Scripture can bring some insights. Most interpreters would call these speculation, but that’s like saying Middle C is not the same note as High C. Such an attitude renders very sharp people obtuse. And these structures are repeated many more times than there are octaves on the piano.

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or ‘How to Raise Monsters’

Peter Leithart points out that the very early verses in John’s gospel can be corresponded with the Creation week:

DAY 1: The Light of the World (1:1-18)
DAY 2: The Baptism of John (1:19-28)
DAY 3: Jesus’ Baptism (1:29-34): dry land emerges from water, “the next day.”
DAY 4: John Points Disciples to Jesus (1:35-39)
DAY 5: Disciples Bring Brothers (1:40-42)
DAY 6: Jesus and Nathanael (1:43-51): “the following day,” the first day
DAY 7: [nothing]: Sabbath; the second day
DAY 8: The Wedding at Cana (2:1-11): “the third day”

More detail here.

It seems to be the case with many Bible books that they start off with a small seven, which is part of a larger one, which is then part of a great seven that structures the book (among other internal structures).

As with Matthew’s gospel, the next level in John covers the first few chapters, and might even solve a textual difficulty:

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“I know your works: you are neither cold nor hot. Would that you were either cold or hot!
So, because you are lukewarm, and neither hot nor cold, I will spit you out of my mouth.” (Revelation 3:15-16)

In the book of Revelation, many sentences contain multiple Old Testament allusions knotted together. Sometimes these are more obvious (the Judaisers as Babylonian locusts from Joel with long hair added to make them ‘bad Nazirites’, for example), but sometimes they only become apparent from their position within the structure of the passage in question.

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David Field1 says the Totus Christus, the Whole Christ, is “one and many in federal union = in covenantal oneness.” It is Jesus as head and the church as His body.

Whenever God does something in redemptive history, the Devil produces a counterfeit. Something I have just noticed about the Revelation is another aspect to this ‘evil twin’ pattern. It is a counterfeit Totus Christus.

After the ascension of Christ, Satan was thrown down from heaven to the Land, and took up residence in Herod’s Temple as Jesus predicted (Matthew 12:45). (Notice that Jesus’ ministry as Adam was heaven-garden-heaven, and Satan’s counterfeit usurping was thus garden-heaven-garden.)

Revelation then moves into a description of two warring armies, the saints with lion faces, and the ‘bad Nazirites.’ The Jews and Judaisers as Jezebel, the false church, are finally destroyed; the true church is massacred but ascends to be with Christ “in the air.”

So the church is Christ’s permanent body. Satan’s brief possession of Judah (Land Beast/False Prophet) and Rome (Sea Beast) was the Totus Diabolus in the Land. He will not be able to do such again until he is released for a short season at the end of World history.

I guess this also means that, in response to the marriage supper of the Lamb, and the faithfulness of Christ to His bride, the best Satan could manage was a one night stand.

1 http://davidpfield.blogspot.com/2006/10/totus-christus.html

Counter-FEET

The gospel was on its way to conquering the Roman empire. Jewish persecution had failed (read Acts). A flood of false doctrine had failed (read the later epistles for the fight). So Satan used persecution from a Jew-Gentile conspiracy to persecute the new church.

The thought is this:

The feet of the statue in Daniel 2 became Satan’s answer to the by-now successful “intermarriage” of Jews and Gentiles in one body, the Christian church. As a Jew-Gentile conspiracy, the metal man became an evil twin of Paul’s Jew-Gentile Tabernacle. With unclean feet of Roman iron intermarried with Edomite (red) clay, Judaism became the church of Esau.

(For more, see Esau’s Ladder).

Beasts and Antichrists

“Scripture describes for us the sin of being antichrist, the Greek word being antichristos. There are four uses of the word in 1 John, and one in 2 John, and that’s it for the Bible. Surprising to many, the antichrist is not found in the book of Revelation at all. The recipients of John’s letter had heard that the antichrist was going to come, and indeed, John says, many antichrists had already come (1 Jn. 2:18). The antichrist is defined as one who denies the Father and the Son (1 Jn. 2:22). And the spirit of antichrist is a refusal to confess that Jesus Christ had come in the flesh (1 Jn. 4:3). The same thing is said again in 2 Jn. 1:7. The spirit of deception and antichrist is a rejection of Jesus come in the flesh.

So what is the sin of being an antichrist. Through long-standing misunderstandings about eschatology, the definition of this sin has gotten almost completely distorted. A common understanding is to see The Antichrist and The Beast as the same character out of poorly written end times novels. But this is not the case at all. In Scripture, a beast is a civil ruler, persecuting the Church. An antichrist is a false teacher from within, one infected with all the latest ideational leprosy. For a beast, think Stalin, Hitler, Nero. For an antichrist, think of a mild, soften-spoken Anglican bishop — one who denies that Jesus was God enfleshed.” www.dougwils.com

The distinction is between fallen Adam and the serpent. Ezekiel sarcastically called the bejewelled high priest the “King of Tyre” and the worship “Queen Sidon” – but they were still human, still “Adam”, still worshippers. In Revelation, however, the fallen priesthood was no longer human, but a beast, ie. political. A dragon with lamb’s horns and a speaking “graven image” picture a very different sort of idolatry.

Did God replace Judaism or merely put it on hold?

Being a Jew was never a matter of bloodline, but of Covenant. Think of Abraham’s servants circumcised in Genesis 17, the Egyptians at the Exodus, Caleb the Kenizzite, Rahab, Ruth, Uriah, etc. It seems the Old Testament keeps throwing us examples of people “grafted in.” The only actual bloodline of any importance is the one we are given, the family tree from Abraham to Christ.

Israel’s captivity and Restoration gave us a perfect picture of the New Covenant events. The Temple and walls of the old Israel were ‘de-created’ and God Himself (the ark) died in Babylon for the sake of a new Jerusalem with impregnable walls.

Christ was the human ark. Judaism, intermarried with Roman political power, became Babylon.

My point is, the captivity was a death-and-resurrection of first century Israel (the resurrection as predicted in Ezekiel 37) in type. The first century was the antitype. Thus, whatever remains of Judaism today is like exhumed idols from the eras of Jeroboam, Ahab*, Omri and Manasseh.

It is not about blood. It never was. It is about Covenant, and there is only one of those. Despite its various death-and-resurrection renewals, there has only ever really been one covenant. There is no replacement of God’s people, only transfiguration from glory to glory.

*Remember it was Jezebel’s daughter Athaliah that almost DID destroy this single bloodline that mattered. Jehoash was the single son who escaped, an echo of Moses and a type of Christ.