Bully's Blog

Daily Dose of Doug

“…Another example of [the state] straining towards the divine attributes can be seen in the recent attempts by Obama through the U.S. Treasury to create wealth ex nihilo. But only God can create wealth that way. God spoke the word, and mind-boggling resources were instantly there. And God formed our first parents, and gave them the responsibility for stewarding those resources. That is the authority of the divine — He speaks, and it is. And blinkered statists want to be able to do that. They should be able to speak, and it is “there.” And so they speak, and what was there begins to vanish away. Jezebel brings in the fertility Baal to make Israel lush and green, and the first thing that happens is that Israel turns brown and crispy.”

Douglas Wilson, The Jitney Gods of Washington

or The Feasts are the Key to the Revelation

All Christians recognise Christ’s fulfilment of Passover (crucifixion) and Firstfruits (ascension), followed by Pentecost. Futurists, who major on all things Jewish, recognise that Trumpets and Atonement follow, but they push them into the future.

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Some more thoughts on “bearing the marks” of Jesus as mentioned here.

Communion in the liturgy corresponds to Atonement. The saints carry the creation before the throne of God as mediators (Tabernacles). Then, after the doxology, we ride out into the world as “chariots” carrying the decree from the emperor (notice this pattern in Revelation 18-19).

So, if we follow the biblical pattern for liturgy, we are re-enacting every week what Christ accomplished in the AD30-70 “wilderness to Canaan” period. This is exactly where Israel failed in the book of Judges. It was a Levitical failure. God raised up judges to preserve His people from total destruction, but it began with the priesthood losing the plot as mediators, a failure of both judgment (manward and worship (Godward).

A pinch of bread and a thimble of cordial while breast-beating in silence is a Levitical failure. Communion is a celebration. The time for breast-beating is the confession at the beginning of the service. You wash before you come to the table.

: ( Confession - Christ crucified – Passover – Red Sea (we are “passed over”) Judgment

: ) Communion - boasting in Christ crucified – Atonement – Jordan (we “pass through”) Worship

At Communion, the “stigmata” of Christ are rewritten in us as living epistles, tablets of flesh, an invitation to Tabernacles. The pattern is renewed in the mediators, and we ride into the world with a renewed Covenant in a new week, as the Word to the world.

Well, that’s the plan. In the west, we seem to be at the mercy of the Philistines. This liturgical pattern often has children at this last step as the horses and chariots. It concerns the next generation. (Elisha’s bears appear at this step to deal with the “children” of Jezebel!) After Communion, we are the renewed children of the Table, offspring of the Marriage Supper of the Lamb.

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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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

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.

I received horrified reactions for using this phrase. God hates divorce, and yet…

“Then I saw that for all the causes for which backsliding Israel had committed adultery, I had put her away and given her a certificate of divorce; yet her treacherous sister Judah did not fear, but went and played the harlot also.”(Jeremiah 3:8)

Q: How could God divorce and remarry, and yet keep the Law? Marriage is “till death.”

A: Through death and resurrection.

The only way the Lord could make a new covenant was through death and resurrection. Not only did Israel die, but the Covenant died – the Ark was taken by God. Jeremiah predicted the Restoration Covenant, and redeemed some Land to prefigure what God Himself would do after the captivity.

The entire pattern was repeated in the first century. Christ, the Ark, ascended to God as firstfruits, and Israel also died, and was resurrected as the Christian church. There were two feasts in AD70, predicted towards the end of the Revelation. 1 The marriage supper of the Lamb in heaven, and 2 the feast of the unclean birds as Jezebel-Judah was finally destroyed under the Covenant curses.

Peter Leithart observes that both Esther and Herodias’ daughter are promised up to “half the kingdom.”

There are echoes in the story of the book of Esther, at least in Mark’s version of John’s execution. Matthew tells us that when the daughter of Herodias danced before Herod, he promised with an oath to give whatever she asked. Mark records Herod’s words somewhat differently: He promises not just to give what she asks, but promises to give up to half his kingdom (Mark 6:22-23). This is the same promise that Ahasuerus gives to Esther when she says she has a request for him (5:3, 6).

In both passages, we have a woman, a queen, requesting something from a king. In both stories, we have a king promising half his kingdom. We could even say that both Esther and Herodias are asking for someone’s head. Esther knows that Haman is plotting to kill all the Jews, and she is asking for his life in order to protect the Jews.

But there the similarities end. Esther appeals to the king to save the faithful in Israel, while the daughter of Herodias is instructed instead to ask for the head of a faithful man, albeit a troubler of Herod’s kingdom, a prophet who has made life difficult for Herod because of his faithfulness. Instead of being like the protective Ahasuerus in Esther, Herod is more like Haman, seeking to wipe out the true Israel.

http://www.leithart.com/2008/06/21/herodias-and-esther/

Esther, like Deborah, and Jael, typifies Mary, the warrior bride whose offspring would crush the head of the serpent. A Nazirite growing his hair during a ‘holy war’ vow identified him with submission and purity. John uses Nazirite symbols to describe the bad Nazirites, the Judaising “locusts” troubling the church.

“And they had hair as the hair of women, and their teeth were as the teeth of lions.” Revelation 9:8 (and Joel 1:6)

They were negative-Nazirites, men who had taken vows to destroy the apostles (Acts 21:23). With the charm (and hair) of an army of Absaloms, their holy war was stamping out the Son of David. They were the false warrior bride, Herodias, seeking the head of the true Nazirite, Christ, in revenge for the victory over Goliath at the cross. This Herodias-Jezebel-Babylon of superseded Judaism would wipe out the true Israel at any cost.

“And he carried me away in the Spirit into a wilderness, and I saw a woman sitting on a scarlet beast that was full of blasphemous names, and it had seven heads and ten horns.

The woman was arrayed in purple and scarlet, and adorned with gold and jewels and pearls, holding in her hand a golden cup full of abominations and the impurities of her sexual immorality. And on her forehead was written a name of mystery: “Babylon the great, mother of prostitutes and of the Land’s abominations.” (from Revelation 17)

The woman’s riches and robe are described after her “bestial relations.” She made her priestly office into a counterfeit kingdom. She thought she was rich, but was in fact poor, blind and naked.

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We think that it is good simply for a man to love, for example, forgetting that it depends entirely upon what he loves. After all, John told us to love not the world, or the things in it. We believe it is a sin to hate, forgetting that this depends upon whatwe hate. But is the hatred according to the Word or not? We think that it is a virtue to tolerate, forgetting that the Lord Jesus rebuked a church for tolerating that woman Jezebel. Everything hinges on what we are tolerating, and our global love for smooth words indicates that what we are mostly tolerating is our own hardness of heart.

Douglas Wilson www.dougwils.com