Bully's Blog

Warren Gage/Christopher Barber and then James Jordan on Joseph’s wisdom:

“How strange Joseph’s behaviour toward his brothers appears to a modern reader! He recognises his brothers immediately but maintains his Egyptian disguise. He speaks harshly to them and then only through an interpreter. He charges them with spying — a capital crime for which he can sentence them to death. He takes one brother as a hostage. He returns their silver as they go home for the first time, and then he sets the brothers up in order to accuse them of stealing his silver cup on their second return trip, at which point he has them arrested. In short, he terrifies them.

What does this all mean? Is Joseph seeking revenge? Clearly that is not the case, for he so loves them he can hardly restrain himself fom revealing his identity — and his forgiveness — to them. Surely he is not vengeful. Why does he act this way? And why does the text go to such lengths to describe all of this?

Continue reading

Interesting stuff from James Jordan’s Trees and Thorns: A Commentary on Genesis 2-4

.
“…swarmers-creepers are described as creatures that break the boundaries of human life and invade the human house, defiling the house.”

The first two of the four curses upon the serpent are found in Genesis 3:14. Only the serpent is directly cursed, and the word You is emphatic in Hebrew. The man and the woman are not cursed directly, but mediately through the soil, an important distinction that we shall address in due course.

Continue reading

“As important as fellowship and service are, they are in the general area of the Church’s life. The special aspect of the Church’s ministry is worship. Mainstream evangelicalism is particularly weak in the area of worship, though this is beginning to change. It is the job of the elders to appoint the times and the format of formal worship.

People in our culture tend to view Church services as something which they ‘attend.’ They may sing a few hymns, but for the rest they sit quietly while the pastor does all the talking and all the praying. They don’t like it when new hymns are picked, because they have to work at getting the tune right. Worship is a time to sit passively and drink it in, they think. This tendency in worship is called ‘quietism.’

Continue reading

“Very much of human life is ‘there and back again,’ or chiastic. This is how God has designed human beings to live in the world. It is so obvious that we don’t notice it. But it is everywhere. This shape of human life arises ultimately from the give and take of the three Persons of God, as the Father sends the Spirit to the Son and the Son sends the Spirit back to the Father. We can see that literary chiasm is not a mere curiosity, a mere poetic device to structure the text. It arises from the very life of God, and is played out in the structure of the lives of the images of God in many ways and at many levels. It is because human beings live and move so often chiastically, that poets often find themselves drawn to chiastic writing. God creates chiasms out of His inner life, and so do the images of God.

Continue reading

Some excerpts from James Jordan’s thought-provoking 2 part article:

“The ordination of women to the Christian ministry, specifically the pastoral office of overseeing worship and performing preaching and the Lord’s Supper, is a recent development in Church history. From the early church until the late 20th century, women were never ordained as ministers, not in any branch of the Church, East or West, Protestant or Catholic. Only in a few sects, almost always anti-theological and/or ‘pentecostal,’ were women ‘ordained.’

It is today often assumed that the Church has been wrong about this, universally and consistently, for nearly 2000 years. This assumption holds that the Holy Spirit has either misguided the Church on this matter, or that the Spirit has allowed the Church to remain in error, for His own good reasons, and is only now correcting that error; it is assumed that only now has the Church grown and developed to the point where she is able to recognize this error.”

Continue reading

Ignorant (willfully?) of ancient literary conventions, higher critics explained the carelessness of arrangement they thought was apparent in Old Testament books with fallacies like the JEDP theory. It turns out they were very wrong. James Jordan writes:

Continue reading

or Becoming the Finger of God on the Eject Button

“Immediately, the Spirit drove Him into the wilderness.” —Mark 1:12

NOTE: THIS POST HAS BEEN REMIXED AND INCLUDED IN GOD’S KITCHEN.

You must be logged in to see the rest of this post.

Join now for a year for $15!

Oswald Chambers says:

The first thing to do in examining the power that dominates me is to take hold of the unwelcome fact that I am responsible for being thus dominated. If I am a slave to myself, I am to blame because at a point away back I yielded to myself. Likewise, if I obey God I do so because I have yielded myself to Him.

Continue reading

or Tearing the Old Adam in Two

Jesus comes to the Pharisees. Who are the Pharisees? They are us. Pharisees are the evangelicals. They are the faithful in Israel.

The Sadducees were the liberals, the zealots were the political activists and the Essenes were the dropouts, and Jesus doesn’t fool with them at all.

Continue reading

Evil Eve: The Harlotry of the First Century sons of Aaron

The Lord “called” Adam as Day 1, giving him one law (light). He divided him as Day 2 and built Eve as a Holy Place, a firmament to be filled with stars (godly offspring). As Day 3 He made a new covenant and married them, the first nearbringing. Adam as the Bronze Altar (dust elevated from the Land) then became the first High Priest, the Table. In his obedience, together they prefigured totus Christus.

Day 4 follows. As Adam represented singular light, Eve was plural light. She was the holy fire on the altar, the glory of Adam. [1] Day 4 is the Lampstand. Day 4 is also the wilderness. If Eve was seduced, it was because Adam’s priesthood was corrupt. There was strange fire on the altar, the biblical theme of harlotry. In the garden, the strange fire was the false lightbearer who filled the “firmament” with darkness.

With that background, look at how this plays out in Daniel 7. It also supports James Jordan’s assertion that the fact that the beast’s body is “feminine” carries some importance. [2] The false church is the body of totus diabolus, the locust swarm gathered as a tabernacle by the fallen head. Daniel seven is the history of the first century church as the Woman in the wilderness. But the faithfulness of the new Adam brought an end to the priesthood of the sons of Aaron.

Continue reading

Or The Tabernacle in Genesis 3

One of the best things you get from James Jordan is a big handle on the Tabernacle.[1] It was a miniature of the creation. It was also a further development of the Garden of Eden, being more glorious than the Garden itself (the trees were now worked timber, and the wood was covered in precious metal).

Jordan’s theory that Satan was to be a tutor to Adam and Eve, but fell in the moment he deceived them, finds support in the Tabernacle layout. (Angels tutor God’s people throughout the Old Testament.) Satan was the secondary lightbearer, the Lampstand, facing north.

Adam was to be broken bread and poured out wine, the Face of the Man, facing south, the Table of Showbread (the facebread).

Between them, Eve, the mother of all living, was the Altar of Incense. As element 5, Day 5, she is a “multitude” in one body. She is awesome as an army with banners. Women possess all their ova from birth.[2] Continue reading