Bully's Blog

On the AV forum, Matthew Cart wrote:

When I was first a Christian I used to believe that it was always wrong to tell a lie, no matter what. Both Leviticus 19:11 and Colossians 3:9 talk about not lying to one another. There are scores of verses that talk about honesty.

I was first introduced to the idea of exceptions to this rule by a friend of mine. He spoke about the Chinese Christians who lie to communist authorities while they are escaping from prison and persecution type situations. Also there are Bible smugglers who lie to get Bibles to Christians in persecuted countries. There is a lot of deceit that happens, even with Voice of the Martyrs, doing things in secret and using deception for the sake of the gospel. You could consider this lying.

Didn’t Christians also practice deception and lying during Hitler’s reign to have the Jews? Someone would come to their house and ask if there were Jews there and they would say, “No”.

I am also challenged by the story in 1 Kings 22 where God put a lying spirit in the mouth of his own prophets in order to purposely deceive someone…

The repeated theme is (I think) actually that of the “warrior-bride” tricking the “serpent” before making an escape, as observed by James Jordan in his lectures. This would possibly include all the examples above plus the Hebrew midwives, Rahab’s hiding of the spies, Jael’s deception of Sisera, Michal’s lie after David’s escape and Esther’s “invitation” to Haman. These and many more were “eye for eye” justice from Eve upon the father of lies, the serpent, fulfilled of course in the cross.

It appears again in Revelation, when the serpent vomits out counterfeit living waters (false doctrine) which is swallowed hook, line and sinker by the Judaisers and Jews (the “Land”), but not the saints. In this case it was like Solomon’s sword – a deception that made plain which woman was the true mother of the living child and which woman was lying.

So Eve deceives the serpent. It is ironic justice.

Belshazzar curses the day he let the Chaldeans talk him into signing up with Facebreadbook.

“In the same hour the fingers of a man’s hand appeared and wrote opposite the lampstand on the plaster of the wall of the king’s palace; and the king saw the part of the hand that wrote.” Daniel 5:5

“The fact that the Watcher Lampstand oversees the Facebread in the Temple means that Israel undergoes a continual inspection of jealousy. God watches all the time. In Daniel 5, the Lampstand “arrives” and sees Belshazzar’s face, “facebread” because it is at his great “bread”, and his face is undone as his “splendours change”. It is precisely as Belshazzar is drinking the wine that the judgment appears, as in the case of the woman in Numbers 5. As a priestly agent is involved in bringing judgment in Numbers 5, so Daniel is involved in bringing judgment in Daniel 5. As the woman’s loins are undone, so are Belshazzar’s. The woman’s judgment is barrenness; in the case of Belshazzar the king, the judgment is the same: no future.”1

Notice the “Holy Place” configuration. The Lampstand, the Table, and the graven Word (Ark). Daniel is the Incense Altar, the accepted elder. Why do pictures of this event never include the Lampstand? It is crucial.

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1 James B. Jordan, The Handwriting on the Wall, p. 289.
See also Jesus at Belshazzar’s Feast: An Explanatory Disquisition on an Aspect of the Story of the Woman Taken in Adultery for an interesting read.

“The Psalms are not full of citations from the Torah. The Prophets are not full of quotations from the Torah and the Psalms. But the New Testament is filled with quotations and paraphrases of the earlier Scriptures. What does this mean?

It means that the renewal of civilisation comes only when we become totally saturated with the written Word of God. This is always true, of course, generation after generation. But it is particularly true at times of crisis, when the wineskin breaks in a dramatic way. Jesus ushered in His New History by calling on men to become radically and totally steeped in the Bible. This is the fountainhead of the whole cycle of civilisation. It all flows from the Grand Imperative of God’s Word. God’s Imperative produces history, and recharges it at every crisis.”

– James B. Jordan, Crisis, Opportunity and the Christian Future. 
Booklet available from www.biblicalhorizons.com

“…one of the most important Christian virtues possessed by the effective evangelist is hospitality. The practice of household hospitality by Christian saints and elders is an image or copy of God’s hospitality, seen as He invites us into His house to eat at His table. Because the modern church does not understand the importance of the Lord’s table, and because Christ’s supper is not visibly displayed week by week, the virtue of hospitality is not clearly understood in our day. As a result, numerous less-than-effective evangelistic techniques have developed that do not take advantage of the Biblical model. In order to reform our evangelism, we need to reform our churches, so that God’s hospitality is made visible to all.”

James B. Jordan, The Sociology of the Church, p.221

“Worship is not a cozy time with Jesus. Worship is a ritual act that involves bringing all creation into God’s presence and asking Him to change it.”

James B. Jordan, The Offertory, Rite Reasons No. 97. www.biblicalhorizons.com

Saul and Agag

I puzzled over Ezekiel chapters 38 and 39 for years. Bible commentators suggested many things but nothing seemed to fit the historical context of the surrounding chapters. It seems James B. Jordan was the first to put the pieces together.1

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Counterfeit Kingdom Come

Then the dragon became furious with the woman and went off to make war on the rest of her offspring, on those who keep the commandments of God and hold to the testimony of Jesus. And he stood on the sand of the Sea. Revelation 12:17 [ESV]

“After a number of years of peace for the Church (Acts 9:31), Wormwood poured out his poisonous waters, false Judaising doctrines, to try and corrupt the woman. God raised up Paul to defeat Satan and the Judaisers, and meanwhile the land (the Circumcision) drank up his false doctrine. Satan has engaged in two tactics: persecution and corruption. These have failed. So now he decides to return to persecution, but this time against the non-Jewish believers, the “rest of her offspring”. He stands on the sands of the sea, addressing the Roman Gentile sea, and raises up the Sea Beast.”1

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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.

“[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.

“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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