Bully's Blog

How were the gentiles related to Passover?
By watching it, and putting faith in it.

In order for a stranger to eat Passover, he had to circumcise himself and his household (Ex. 12:45-49). If he did so, he became “like a native of the land” (v. 48). We are so accustomed to connecting Passover with the Lord’s Supper that it seems strange to consider that perhaps Passover was only for the priestly people, but such was the case. Converted gentiles were not to eat of it unless they were circumcised, and thereby were incorporated into the seed line of Abraham. Did this exclude them from salvation? No, it only excluded them from priestly duties. Did it make them second class citizens? Only in the eyes of the Pharisees. Biblically speaking, their downstream cultural labors in Havilah were just as important as Israel’s sanctuary task. After all, if everyone had become an Israelite, then who would mine the gold of Havilah? Who would bring it to the sanctuary? Israel had its task, and the converted nations had theirs.

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A House of Bread

There are two kinds of whiteness in the Bible, and an understanding of this explains a great deal. There is the whiteness of covering and the whiteness of uncovering. And, as mentioned, the Bible makes a great deal out of the concept of covering.

Bone Collector

Purge me with hyssop, and I shall be clean; Wash me, and I shall be whiter than snow.

Touching a corpse made an Israelite unclean. The remains of those slain in battle were marked with lime for two reasons: so that they could be avoided by the clean, and so they could be gathered up and burned to lime by the bone collectors. Jesus said that the righteousness of the Pharisees was like a whitewashed sepulchre. Not only were they full of the ceremonial uncleanness of broken Covenant, their so-called righteousness was actually a mark from God upon them. They would be gathered to their people not by the Father sending His angels to the four corners of the Land, but by the father of lies and his scavengers sent by God to clean the wound.

This image goes right back to Genesis. Like the angels, the Covenant scavengers, though demonic, are also God’s servants. They are the raven of Noah surviving on floating corpses until the water goes down; they are the scavenging dogs that lick up Jezebel’s blood; they are the maggots in misused manna and abandoned grapes (false bread and wine); they are the unclean birds and animals that screech and howl inside the corpse of a defeated Babylon; they are worms inside Herod ‘enthroned’ as a human Gehenna.

The whiteness of the Pharisees was the whiteness of Miriam’s and Gehazi’s skin-plague. It is the whiteness of flesh and bones exposed as unclean to the eyes of God. Satan himself appeared as an angel of light, but like the Pharisees, he was a false lightbearer, a tutor guiding his children the wrong way.

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My comment on iMonk’s article, Why Do They Hate Us? is here. Below is another comment that I thought interesting:

As a former rabid atheist, I disliked Christians because I saw them as ignorant, intolerant and absurdly convinced that they had the Truth. The only evidence for this was TV and the people I came in contact with. Also, many of my College Professors found them easy targets and I enjoyed laughing at these poor deluded souls. But I was empty if the truth be told. However, I was won over to the other side, in the San Francisco Bay area because I personally witnessed the love amongst Christians and I had had enough of the self righteousness of New Agers and fellow Freethinkers to know they were a bunch of lost souls. Continue reading

Rieu’s theory of Jesus as a ‘man of letters’ is borne out by the structure of the Sermon on the Mount. As with many of the prophets, His “book” begins with a preamble that follows the themes of Israel’s 7 feasts in Leviticus 23.

Jesus begins with the Sabbath rest of those who have a humble spirit, works through those who mourn for their sins at Passover, and ends with the Atonement covering of the blood of those who would be persecuted yet to be shed on the Land. And at Tabernacles, their reward is in heaven.

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Ezra took a great risk to bring Levites and riches to the Temple from Persia. Mixed marriages were suddenly of more concern, which poses a difficult question. Things seem to be heading backwards—away from the New Testament rather than towards it.

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Matthew 23:15 “Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you travel land and sea to win one proselyte, and when he is won, you make him twice as much a son of Gehenna as yourselves.”

They cross Land and Sea to make one disciple for their corrupted religion, and make him twice the child of Gehenna as themselves. “Ge-Henna” is Greek for the despised Valley of Hinnom southwest of Jerusalem, the previous location of Tophet’s child sacrifices that became an open, mass grave during the Babylonian seige. It became the rubbish dump, full of maggots, with the refuse continually burning. Jesus quotes Isaiah 66:23-24 to describe it. The Roman siege would begin when Jews from all over the empire were in Jerusalem for Passover. Their “Table” was made a snare, and Gehenna was filled with the bodies of these deceived “children.”