No Turning Back Now

Somewhere rooted in my older memories is the crux of a short story I once read. Earth scientists had been trying to make sense of transmissions between several star systems. In previous years, they were able to understand some of it. Suddenly, everything became senseless noise. Upon asking someone in the military, they were told that when all traffic is encrypted, it’s a sure sign the parties are at war with each other.

Until recently, I was able to read the economic and financial news sources online and get a picture of what was going on. These days, nothing makes sense. The stock markets are wholly unconnected from the fundamentals of the global economy. Even fuel prices are no longer a reflection of what is happening in the petroleum markets. Nothing makes sense right now.

I’m convinced this is intentional. If nothing else, the whole idea is to prevent us little people from estimating when things are going to hurt us. In other words, while the politicians don’t want to get their hands dirty, they have declared war on the population at large.

It has been popular with prepper types for decades to suggest the ruling elite have been at war with the rest of us. That was the reason for the formation of underground militias for such a long time. That population is aging out and most of those militias faded away. The government has stopped using the methods that gave us Ruby Ridge, Waco and the Bundy Ranch events.

Part of it is that almost everything is now centered on the Internet. First, the elites trapped everyone in the Net by requiring a smart phone just to interact with government services. Meanwhile, just about everything you can buy for daily human existence is being folded into online markets. There are whole swathes of the consumer market that can no longer be accessed via brick-n-mortar shops. Just having money you can spend is increasingly a matter of connection to the Internet.

Ask yourself: How many of your closest friends do you even see in person? Can you communicate face-to-face with your most important contacts in this world? Does “privacy” mean encrypted apps on your devices?

I’ve said for some years now that the future of war, including civil war, would be informational. The biggest threat to your future existence will come via the Internet. Whatever bad things are coming your way, it will have taken place first through electronic networking before it actually touches you physically. Even petty criminals are dependent on networked communications. Crime prevention could almost entirely be a matter of tracking human network communications before crimes are committed.

Thus, I made much of the JASA bill in Congress. The whole threat to our faith community is informational. We are at risk of being censored. Hiding behind this is the danger of being officially labeled a terrorist so that banking and government services will be cramped, including my entire personal income and medical care. Given previous government behavior, there is a risk all my devices would be confiscated somewhere in the future.

All of this comes because my faith and convictions demand I resist being enslaved to the government of Israel. Calling Israel “the Synagogue of Satan” is a matter of faith and conviction, and the government plans to make that illegal. Our government is at war with me because I don’t embrace the Dispensationalist heresy.

What this does is put me on a war footing myself. While watching to see if the JASA makes it into law, I’m preparing to resist censorship and whatever else comes in that package. Lots of leisure activities die right away. Every spare waking moment is consumed first in prayer about this threat, and then in preparations for avoiding the censorship. Somewhere out there on the edge of that is consideration how I might avoid arrest and detention.

There are a lot of open questions, such as which agency becomes responsible for enforcement, and likely procedures. How big would such an operation be. A major consolation for me is that I am such a minor figure, with a fairly small audience. It’s likely I would become a target somewhere behind thousands of others. I can assure you that the Palantir database being constructed right now (if not already in existence) has my name, because I have come to federal law enforcement attention in the past for wholly bogus reasons.

You need to be aware of this: If you have communicated online with me at any time in the past 20 years, that database will indicate it. Everything is being swept into the huge vacuum and processed as data. I can’t really know how good Palantir works, but reports indicate it holds together just fine and has delivered on smaller scales in the past, collating a vast diverse collection of database types across hundreds of federal and state agencies.

The gospel mission hasn’t changed. What’s different now is the setting in which the mission is pursued. It won’t stop until I’m dead or the State of Israel is destroyed. There’s no turning back now. Even if JASA dies in committee somewhere, Zionists will not stop trying one means or another to control all comments about their agenda by anyone anywhere on earth.

Is this a good place to mention the Vernam Cipher? Look it up; it’s the only unbreakable encryption so far. It works best for paper communications; there are variations. For relatively secure online encryption, the simplest is GPG/PGP. Make sure you exchange keys via sneaker net.

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The Evil Eye

Re: Naked Bible 162: The Evil Eye

The notion that one can bring about harm to something or someone through a nasty expression on the face while gazing at the object is perhaps the most universal superstition across every human culture in history.

However, in Scripture the concept waffles just a bit between actual power and simply expressing displeasure. It seems to signal an evil intent. Often, the nearest translation into English is an expression of envy or stinginess. There is something about projecting evil intent that signals a resolve do do harm. Heiser cites the mythical example of Sauron’s eye in the Lord of the Rings series. If the eye catches you, you are in trouble.

Examples in Scripture abound. For us, it’s mostly an idiom.

1. 1 Samuel 18:6-9 — When the men arrived after David returned from striking down the Philistine, the women from all the cities of Israel came out singing and dancing to meet King Saul. They were happy as they played their tambourines and three-stringed instruments. The women who were playing the music sang,


”Saul has struck down his thousands, 
but David his tens of thousands!”

This made Saul very angry. The statement displeased him and he thought, “They have attributed to David tens of thousands, but to me they have attributed only thousands. What does he lack, except the kingdom?” So Saul was keeping an eye on David from that day onward.

Saul looked upon David with en evil eye when he noticed David managed to get more positive acclaim from the people. In this context, the evil eye signaled an intent to harm David.

2. Numbers 23:11-13 — Balak said to him, “Please come with me to another place from which you can observe them. You will see only a part of them, but you will not see all of them. Curse them for me from there.”

Balak asked Balaam to move to another location where he could cast an evil eye upon the Israeli camp in order to curse them. The literal translation of the Hebrew text points to an expectation of using the evil eye.

3. Job 40:11-12 — Scatter abroad the abundance of your anger. 
Look at every proud man and bring him low; 

Look at every proud man and abase him; 
crush the wicked on the spot!

God challenges Job to use an evil eye to actually bring down someone who is wicked, something God can clearly do without effort. God could certainly use His gaze as a blessing, as well (Psalm 25:18-20). In Job 7:19 he asks God to turn His fierce gaze away so Job can catch a break.

4. Proverbs 23:6 — Do not eat the food of a stingy person, do not crave his delicacies…

The actual Hebrew phrase “evil eye” is hidden by English translations. The literal translation would be, “Don’t eat food from [someone who has] an evil eye.” Likewise, 28:22 would read, “The evil eye hastens after riches” as opposed to someone with a “good” eye who is generous and giving.

5. Deuteronomy 15:9 — Be careful lest you entertain the wicked thought that the seventh year, the year of cancellation of debts, has almost arrived, and your attitude be wrong toward your impoverished fellow Israelite and you do not lend him anything; he will cry out to the LORD against you and you will be regarded as having sinned.

Read literally, “Beware lest your evil eye does evil to your brother…” Later in 28:54-57, referring to a warning what Israel might experience if she is unfaithful, God says, “The tender man among you will do evil with his eye against” his family. Contrast this with Proverbs 22:9 which should translate as, “Someone good of eye…”

6. Proverbs 10:10 — The one who winks his eye causes trouble…

“Whoever bites/stings with the eye…” Also, Job 16:9, to “sharpen the eye” like a weapon. It’s not just a bad habit or bad character, but it’s a stronger intent.

In the New Testament…

7. Matthew 6:22-23 (& Luke 11:34-36) — “The eye is the lamp of the body. If then your eye is healthy, your whole body will be full of light. But if your eye is diseased, your whole body will be full of darkness. If then the light in you is darkness, how great is the darkness!”

Unlike the modern concept of lighting coming into the eye, the Hebrew image was light coming out of your eyes. It’s a question of what is inside of you. See Daniel 10:6. It also shows up in Second Temple literature.

We know that we are wired to respond in some measure to way people look at us, what their gaze and face portray. It’s not so much the power of the evil eye, but the nature of human response.

In ancient Hebrew culture, much as today in any honor/shame society, it was common among peasantry to be hesitant to accept too much praise, too much reward, etc. because there would always be envious people around to give the evil eye. Never flaunt or gloat among your peers. There was this notion that one man’s gain was another’s loss unless it was shared. Among peasants, everything was in shortage. This is why “evil eye” is associated with envy in those cultures.

Thus, a good eye is the characteristic of having no hidden motives. There’s no coveting. Casting an evil eye is simply showing the darkness inside of you.

Galatians 3:1-5 — You foolish Galatians! Who has cast a spell on you? Before your eyes Jesus Christ was vividly portrayed as crucified! The only thing I want to learn from you is this: Did you receive the Spirit by doing the works of the law or by believing what you heard? Are you so foolish? Although you began with the Spirit, are you now trying to finish by human effort? Have you suffered so many things for nothing? — if indeed it was for nothing. Does God then give you the Spirit and work miracles among you by your doing the works of the law or by your believing what you heard?

Heiser relates how Paul hints at believers sandbagged by the influence of Jewish and pagan false notions about how to gain salvation through mere conduct. Paul uses the term “bewitched” (baskaino), which shows up only once in the New Testament Greek and once in the LXX OT — back in Deuteronomy 28:54-55, where starvation could make some men “begrudge with his eye” (literally “bewitch with his eye”) their own family members to point of engaging in cannibalism.

Paul uses the same image from Deuteronomy to point out just how deeply accursed someone is who clings to legalism. They will end up cannibalizing their fellow Christians, they will “bite and devour” each other out of selfishness and envy. They cannot see clearly the crucified Christ who was so utterly open and guileless. Instead, they keep looking for hidden meanings and keep turning it all back on themselves and their personal benefit. They are bewitched; someone has cast an evil spell upon them. The Judaizers were like sorcerers, the kind of people who would cannibalize their own kin.

Instead of magic amulets to ward off the evil eye, all you need is the Cross in your heart.

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JASA Threat

It’s called “state-sponsored religious persecution”.

In case it wasn’t obvious to you, Zionism is our federal government’s state-sponsored religion. The Trump administration has been edging closer to this steadily. Now it’s about to be officially legislated: New Bipartisan Bill Seeks to Outlaw Criticism of Israel and Jewish Power. The JASA (Jewish American Security Act) will seek to make it illegal to criticize Israel or Jews.

Most concerning is JASA’s requirement that online social media companies provide mandatory reports every six months to Congress on anti-Semitic and anti-Israel opinions being shared on their platforms, outline their strategies for content removal and suppression, as well as coordinate with federal law enforcement in real time to combat what the bill’s authors judge as “extremist antisemitic calls.”

A fixation in JASA and much of the Jewish discourse around shutting down debate is the assertion that growing American antipathy to the role of Jews and Israel in Washington is a foreign conspiracy emanating from China, Russia, Qatar, and Iran. A recent State Department report trying to make people take this claim seriously was circulated among the US Congressmen, but not made public, likely to avoid scrutiny of its methodology…

Under the new law, federal law enforcement and intelligence services will be officially transformed into a secret police force dedicated to combating “Antisemitism” and required to create reports categorizing protected political speech as violence by featuring “(i) an overview of violent extremist ideologies that include antisemitic components; (ii) a review of the extent that actors in the United States have engaged in violent conduct in furtherance of the ideologies described in clause (i); (iii) the origins and online platforming and online activity or presence of antisemitic domestic violent extremist ideologies, groups, and individuals.”

There you have it. People like me will be officially classified as terrorists simply because we don’t regard Israel with adoration. Should this law be passed, I’m guessing that either this will become an impossible boondoggle because of systemic resistance, or it will provoke an armed insurrection. Granted, I have serious doubts it would be much of a revolt, since Americans have gotten too fat and sassy to actually do much. However, I believe there are just a few out there who would not go down without fighting.

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Still Seeking False Approval

It’s not a secret: Jews were the first to persecute Christians. It started with the Crucifixion, and reached an early crescendo with Paul. He was a member of the Sanhedrin staff willing to get his hands dirty. At first the persecution waxed and waned based on whether someone was willing to follow that example. However, once anyone was turned over to authorities, the Sanhedrin wasted no time making an example of everyone who followed Christ.

The pattern was set with the Crucifixion, in which the Jewish leadership sought to convince Roman officials that Christianity was a threat to imperial order. Pilate knew right away that he had been manipulated into senseless oppression of a harmless teacher of faith. The success of Jewish leadership was uneven, but the persecution waxed and waned for the next two-and-a-half centuries. Jewish leadership worked hard to provoke Roman government to suppress Christian teaching. Under Emperor Diocletian, things got really bad.

But the Roman government began to suffer its own instability. For a brief time during this severe persecution of Christians, the imperial authority was divided. Galerius signed an edict that tolerated Christian religion. Upon the heels of that, the two primary contenders for the imperial throne both signed another edict for religious freedom in general. Eventually Constantine won a shaky control over the imperial throne. His motives are not recorded, but his actions seem to indicate he thought the Christian religion would be the best tool for unifying his control over the Roman government.

By this time, church leaders had passed through several controversies and there was serious disunity across the empire. Constantine didn’t appear to care either way which theology won, so long as there was only one that was promoted, so he sponsored scholarly work and conferences to get things in good political order among the church leaders. For their own part, church leaders were quick to seize upon the political opportunity brought by the sudden relief from persecution.

For once, the government was taking them seriously. It would naturally follow that society at large would take them seriously, as well. This became the single greatest threat to faith ever since then. Church leadership through the centuries have always assumed it was a necessity to hold leverage over government and society.

This is easily the single greatest factor in corrupting the teaching and organization of churches. With the dire need to be taken seriously, teaching and practice must pass muster with human reason. This was already a bit of a problem less than a century after the Ascension. The heavy influx of Hellenized minds swamped the early apostolic Hebraic teaching. The Christian religion was highly Hellenized as early as the second generation of apostles. The Bar Kochba revolt only confirmed this trend by alienating Hebrew Christians from Gentiles. The leadership of the revolt threatened the lives of Jews who refused to renounce Christ.

A strong Hebrew influence left the churches. Yes, there was still mixing in some areas of the Roman Empire, but the break was noticeable in the writings of the Early Church Fathers. The Hebrew mystical outlook of Christ and His disciples was exchanged for a rational outlook that twisted the teachings of church leaders. This is where all the debates came from, in that the scholars of Christian faith kept asking impertinent rational questions that would have never occurred to a Hebrew mind.

This incessant demand to define and delineate the means and mechanisms of God has crippled the call for believers to build a spiritual kingdom of hearts. Instead, Christian religion was reduced to one more political ideology. Since then, it’s been ripe for devilish dilution and manipulation.

The modern State of Israel is carrying on their tradition of suppressing Christian faith by afflicting their demands on churches today. Let me recommend that you read FARA Docs: Israel is Spying On Millions Of Christian Americans In Their Churches from MintPress News. Not that I’m a fan of their site, but sometimes MintPress has a good angle on things. At the bottom of the article, the author names all the churches subject to Israeli espionage against Christians. The Israeli government is spending millions on an influence operation to turn Christians in their favor, a favor Israel forfeited by her naked brutality against every neighbor they have.

Tactics have changed, but the Judaizers are still trying to destroy churches. As long as Christians assume they must be taken seriously by the surrounding society, they will present themselves for the Devil’s approval. Jesus warned the world would hate us if we stuck too close to Him.

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Three Small Issues

Re: Naked Bible 158: The Fate of the Ark of the Covenant

The Ark of the Covenant required ritually prepared priests to move it. Anyone else who touched it risked dying. It didn’t happen 100% of the time, but close enough.

We know the Philistines took off with it under Saul’s reign. There are no details as we might expect. Did they hijack the priests to move it? Apparently nobody was struck down except their idol to Dagon. The story of this would not be forgotten; all the neighboring nations would have been aware of it, maybe with a few embellishments.

Pharaoh Shishak would have known, so the Ark survived his expedition on behalf of Jeroboam (1 Kings 14:25). His own records don’t declare any action at Jerusalem at all, so it’s hard to figure how he would have taken the Ark, anyway.

There’s every reason to believe the Ark was in the Temple when Nebuchadnezzar laid siege to Jerusalem. We have no idea what happened after that. It’s missing from the lists of things he took, and from the lists of things returned to Israel under the Persians. It is significant by its absence.

It’s possible someone hid it before the city was taken. It’s likely the Babylonian troops got it (2 Esdras 10:22 — the Ark was plundered). Did they destroy it there, or later? We don’t know. What we do know is that it never made it back.

God said it would never be needed again (Jeremiah 3:16-17, Lamentations 2:1).

Re: Naked Bible 159: Noah’s Nakedness, the Sin of Ham, and the Curse of Canaan

Genesis 9 — A more precise Hebrew translation has Noah getting drunk and entering his wife’s tent. There’s every reason to believe she got drunk, as well. While they were both incapacitated, Ham goes in and impregnates his own mother. Seeing or “uncovering the nakedness of his father” is an idiom that means he had sex with his father’s woman (Leviticus 18:7).

The intent was to seize authority from his own father. It’s an ancient protocol to seize a ruler’s women and have sex with them to proclaim usurping the ruler’s authority. In this case, she became pregnant and Noah became aware at some point that it was not his child, but Ham’s. The whole point was to establish a new dynasty by this child. The name was to be Canaan, so Noah cursed the child to ensure he could not inherit anything.

Re: Naked Bible 160: Q&A 21

Matthew 12:28-29 (NET) — “But if I cast out demons by the Spirit of God, then the kingdom of God has already overtaken you. How else can someone enter a strong man’s house and steal his property, unless he first ties up the strong man? Then he can thoroughly plunder the house.”

In response to a question about the meaning of “blasphemy of the Holy Spirit”, the key to understanding this is the advancement of the Kingdom. Casting out demons always takes place wherever the Kingdom begins to reclaim the Elect from the nations; it’s a marker of the Kingdom moving in to claim it’s own turf (i.e., it’s people). Evangelism is not simply persuading someone to change brands of religion. We are invading, advancing the Kingdom of Christ into new territory. We are helping people to see the glory of changing their allegiance.

The image here is that Satan’s turf is being overrun. Thus, to accredit this work of the Holy Spirit to Satan is tantamount to rejecting the Kingdom. It’s in the same category as those high-handed sins God mentioned in Leviticus, for which there can be no ritual sacrifice to restore the sinner. The Pharisees would have recognized this reference. See also Hebrew 6:1-8. If someone rejects Christ as Lord, there is nothing anyone else can do for them.

I will go on to amplify this by saying that it’s all about the Covenant and its boundaries. In that passage in Matthew, the Old Covenant is shutting down and the New is displacing it. To reject this move from God is to reject God Himself. Anyone who can do that has gone too far and cannot be forgiven. It’s simply too blatant of an insult to God.

This is connected to John’s “sin that leads to death” (1 John 5:16-17). It is particularly heinous when someone who has entered into fellowship turns and publicly denounces Christ. That’s what Hebrews 6 refers to specifically.

We need to ditch the legalism of American culture in thinking this refers to some immutable law that stands apart from God. It’s altogether personal; you have poked at God and declared His work satanic. It’s hard to imagine any path back from that. It’s not to say He can’t break you down eventually and you repent. It means that there is no other hope for you. The Son is the only way to God.

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It Just Is

My understanding of the Hebrew language is not that of a translator. It wasn’t my calling from God to take that path. Instead, I was led to understand Hebrew as the expression of how Hebrew minds operated. I studied the language as a whole, approaching it from the philosophy and cognitive science angle.

A fundamental assumption of the Hebrew mind is that this world is inherently false. Not in some simplistic way, but that much of what we experience in life can mean more than one thing at the same time. Any particular experience is good and bad together. The forces of nature and reality are not divided out like Yin and Yang, but it’s a matter that the distinctions we make can be arbitrary and subjective. The Hebrews didn’t take themselves too seriously, only their roles and duties.

The inherent ambiguity of our existence shows up in Pageau’s The Language of Creation. This book is a masterful examination of the balance between space versus time, of land versus water, of building versus dilapidation, etc. Everything in this world is temporal in nature, so to find meaning requires that we reflect on things not of this world. A thing is only so good as it manifests for humans the moral certainty of our Creator, and even then, it’s always contextual.

I’ve said this repeatedly: In Hebrew, words don’t carry meaning. Rather, words are like flags or signposts indicating a path for exploration. Meaning is in the context; meaning is not something that stands on its own. Truth is a Person. It is not a fixed anchor existing in this reality. It must move with the intentions of our Lord, following Him around and doing whatever He requires.

Thus, the expiration of this life is both good and bad at the same time. In one context, death is our enemy (1 Corinthians 15:26). Yet death is certainly acceptable if one has invested the moments of this life in glorifying the Creator. That’s because life and death are both bound up in the mortal existence itself. It’s a single package. The mortal existence is both good and bad. It’s bad because it’s mortal, not what God intended, not what we started with in the Garden. It’s good because it’s a string of opportunities to glorify God.

Throughout the Old Testament, we see plenty of evidence that facing death nobly in pursuit of God’s glory is always a good thing. Fear of death is for those who have failed to live up to God’s calling. That phrase, “I go the way of all humanity” is the voice of equanimity in facing the inevitable expiration of the flesh. In the end, we are all powerless against the conditions in which we exist.

Yes, we sorrow over the loss of those we love. However, there is no sorrow for someone who died, as if they lost anything valuable. Life is not a precious possession in itself. It’s only value is in how well it’s used. We are but vessels; even a chamber pot can serve well.

Death is ultimately in the hands of God. It can be punishment or reward. It’s is not an unalloyed bad thing. It simply is. The Hebrews never failed to understand that this fleshly body is not the real person; it’s just the conveyance we use while we are here. There will most certainly be a resurrection into a completely different kind of body for those who belong to God.

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Insufficient Change

The Enlightenment brought to life a fervor to remake the systems that had been around for hundreds of years. That philosophy included a hope for some humility in seeking to build new systems to guard against our own flaws. Sounds noble, no? The rules took the place of the nobility. Those systems have run their course and are breaking down. We see it in government and in church management.

There are genuine efforts to rebuild once again. Here’s one: Buying Pastors & Stalking Churchgoers: Israel’s Longtime Heist on the Christian Church Exposed. It’s a little over an hour-and-a-half long. It includes ads that may annoy some of you. I’m not recommending it, but I’m referring to it.

Anything involving Tucker Carlson will be infected by his biases. I’m not with him on most of that. The whole interview is infested with hopes for a renewed Enlightenment with a Christian flavor, instead of the historical anti-religion movement behind it. It’s still the same basic assumption that we can come up with a better system. The featured interviewee, Nathan Apffel, does a good job of identifying flaws in the current system, the one that’s dying. He does a good job on certain emphases of the New Testament that have been long lost in the West.

For example, he notes vividly how the early churches did not teach tithing because that belongs in the old dead covenant. Rather, they taught freewill generosity to the poor, and didn’t build little earthly empires with budgets, bodies and buildings. He gets that part right. Indeed, he reveals some shocking data on how the current entrepreneurial churches are grabbing up all the material resources to make the leadership wealthy. The histrionics are really moving.

Did you know that churches can buy out other churches? Did you know that churches could subsume for-profit businesses under their tax-free umbrella?

Still, Appfel clings to the root of Enlightenment confidence in human ability to design a system that’s better than the one the early churches used. Maybe he simply hasn’t noticed because his theology assumes that one doesn’t need genuine biblical scholarship, with all the wealth of background material that isn’t in the Bible itself. I certainly don’t like elitism either, but you can’t trash all of that background just because it’s not in the pages of your favorite Bible translation. Otherwise, you won’t have a clear idea what the authors of the Bible were thinking, and you won’t understand very well that mattered to them.

You won’t have the mind of Christ. You’ll be projecting your own thinking back onto some image of Him.

I really liked the early part of the interview, exposing how the State of Israel is spending a lot of money trying to manipulate church folks into supporting their rapacious agenda. If you attend one of those monster churches, Google’s geofencing technology is employed to target your accounts with pro-Israel propaganda. It’s anti-Christian espionage.

I still say it should be common-core teaching for churches to restore a Hebraic philosophical orientation and the Hebrew literature background that supports Scripture. Not many others are saying that. Neither Carlson nor Appfel are saying that in this interview. It’s all about transparency and oversight of systems. That’s a start on one kind of problem, but it’s not a sufficient answer by itself.

It promotes merely a slightly better version of the same old thing.

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The Coming Shock: Coda

Yesterday’s Bible lesson was already a bit long, but I need to add something that may not be obvious. In 2 Thessalonians 2, Paul quotes from Daniel’s description of a type of Antichrist. Daniel does the same thing we saw in Isaiah 14 and Ezekiel 28: A denunciation of some earthly figure echoes with the sins of the Devil in his fall from his high position as God’s bodyguard. It’s not about the Devil, but the nature of the human figures’ sins are the same kind of mistake the Devil made.

Daniel does the same thing regarding, near as we can tell, Antiochus IV. In the same way Isaiah and Ezekiel embellish and dramatize through exaggeration the evil of devilish human rules, so Daniel adds some dramatic extravagance to his portrayal of someone who would come in his future. And Paul does the same thing, warning that there would be an Antichrist figure at the close of the Church Age (the gathering of Gentiles into the New Israel) who carries echoes of previous figures like Antiochus IV.

What kind of man was Antiochus IV? How did he wreak havoc on the Judean kingdom of his day?

The man was very intelligent. He saw the political wrangling among the Judeans and took advantage of it. Over a period of some few years, he employed agents who would bribe or make promises, provoked all sides of the quarrels, etc. When they were internally weakened, he was ready to drop the bomb, technically making Judean religion illegal. He defiled the Temple and no one was there to oppose him. Then he launched his campaign to sweep across the whole territory.

The Judeans pulled together briefly under the Maccabees, but then promptly shattered again and one side invited Rome to get involved. And then came the Herods, etc. They never recovered their political independence because God had no use for it; they certainly had no use for His Son.

The inherent flaw in the system was that they mistook the Law of Moses for something else entirely. As we’ve already seen in the previous post, it was never about the ethnic nation, but about Abrahamic faith. God gave them the Law because the covenant people were encumbered with a large number of people who simply never got the covenant in their hearts. The Law would grant a certain level of order among the faithless, allowing the faithful to focus on what really mattered.

Thus, in the applicable Romans passages, Paul quotes where God told Elijah that it wasn’t time yet to destroy the Northern Kingdom because there were still 7000 faithful. He wanted to protect that small group. As the size of that remnant dwindled over a few generations, God was ready to finally divorce the 10 Tribes as just another Gentile horde to place under the hands of His Divine Council. He would later exchange them for the Gentile Elect He wanted to build up His new Israel.

But the churches have the same problem, loaded with faithless people, same as Israel was. While God is calling the fullness of the Gentiles out of the nations of the world, there has to be a system that will allow the faithful within the churches to keep operating. Churches have developed a system that accommodates those who lack Abrahamic faith. If they take this system too seriously and neglect the command of Christ to love each other as He does, then churches will spiritually atrophy the way the Northern Kingdom did.

And when the final Antichrist arises, it won’t be too hard to seduce the churches and bring about a loss of religion. He’ll be able to employ agents and bribes, provoking divisions and quarrels, and bring about an apostasy. That’s what Paul foresaw in 2 Thessalonians 2.

On the one hand, we know that God won’t send His Son back until He’s finished calling out enough Gentile Elect to rebuild the Lost Tribes. But We know that the close of that period will be marked by the rise of an Anitchrist that will attack genuine faith, making it illegal, so that he can be the new god of mankind. We can reasonably estimate that he will try to manifest himself as the Second Coming of Christ. That’s the question Paul was trying to answer there. We will need to see someone trying to deceive nominal Christians into proclaiming him Christ. There won’t be any justification for having churches when that succeeds.

It’s long past time for us to build a more accurate eschatology, taking these things into account.

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The Coming Shock

(I’m drawing here from both Heiser and Moreau, and they don’t precisely agree.)

In Romans 11, Paul says “all Israel” will be saved. We’ve established in a past lesson that this had a specific meaning in Paul’s day, referring not to ethnic Jews, but to the covenant structure of the 12 Tribes of Israel. This is consistent across the whole of Second Temple literature and the Dead Sea Scrolls. It’s a very specific covenant phrase that does not overlap cleanly with “ethnic Jews”.

So, when Pauls says “all Israel will be saved”, he’s not saying all Jews will be converted at some future date. Paul uses “all Israel” as a theological term. It refers to something God talked about from the very beginning: covenant people. It does not exclude ethnic Jews by any means, but it does include Gentiles.

Drop back to Romans 9 and you get the language where Paul makes this distinction painfully clear. But there’s a lot more to this. He mentions Isaac, who is the very symbol of the child who should not have existed. He was born of parents 90+ years old, and then almost died on Mount Moriah.

Later in the same chapter, Paul makes note of Jacob versus Esau. Jacob was renamed Israel, and the whole thing refers to the second-born as the progenitor of the covenant nation. How many anomalies accompany this special nation? How about Joseph’s children, all half-Gentile? And the numerous major figures in Jesus’ own genealogy who were Gentiles? Why were they included? Why break all the rules?

Galatians is probably Paul’s first published letter still in existence, and in chapter 3 he flatly says that those who inherit the promises of Abraham are both Jews and Gentiles of Abrahamic faith, not Abraham’s DNA. Jesus said the same thing when He told the Pharisees that God could raise up stones who were better children of Abraham. Isaac was born of faith. His son Jacob was a man of faith, whereas Esau was incapable of it. And every Gentile who was included was someone of Abrahamic faith.

By quoting Hosea in Romans 9, Paul flatly replaces the Northern Kingdom, the Lost 10 Tribes, with Gentiles. Consider the logic. Hosea was writing just before the exile of the Northern Kingdom, warning them that God was divorcing them. They were no longer His people. They would be scattered across the Assyrian empire and be assimilated. They would become Gentiles.

If God is going to keep His promises of restoring the whole 12 Tribes, where will He get the Lost 10 Tribes? Since they became Gentiles, He would just pull from that open stock to restore His covenant nation. Further, He would suspend the still extant Judean Kingdom for a time.

Back to Romans 11:25-26 — a partial hardening, meaning most Judeans would not come to Christ during the time God is restructuring the Northern Kingdom from among the Gentiles. If the Jews were still involved in the process, they would reject the Gentiles God had chosen. He isn’t giving them a choice. He’ll keep them out of the way until He’s finished.

This is biblical eschatology. What then are we to make of 2 Thessalonians 2? We’ve talked about this before quite a bit: What hinders the Antichrist from manifesting himself? What is the order of events required for the Devil’s last hurrah before Christ returns?

The sequence is Israel’s rejection > Gentile fullness > Israel’s salvation. The first had already come; Paul had been part of that. In his letters, he was then trying to play his part on the middle item. And the mark for the last item would be the rise of the Antichrist.

In good translations of 2 Thessalonians 2:6-7, you’ll notice two different hindrances to the Antichrist. In the Greek, the first is neuter — a “what” — and the second is a masculine — a “who”. The “what” is the fullness of the Gentiles. Paul has in mind Isaiah 66:18-20, where God promises He would send His people out into the nations. This began in Acts 2, where Jews from all over the known world gathered for Passover, witnessed the crucifixion of Christ, and then heard the gospel message. Some were converted and went back out whence they came to share that gospel with the nations.

Paul had in mind Tarshish in particular, the farthest nation on the Table of Nations in Genesis 11. He wanted to insure that the process was fully under way with bringing in the Gentiles who belonged in the Covenant. Paul was convinced he was the “who” that restrained the Antichrist, but that’s not the only thing. Paul knew he had to die in order to complete his role in the items of the sequence. Once he had fulfilled his mission of planting a witness in the last nation on the list, the actual harvest of Gentiles could begin in earnest.

Paul had warned in the verses before that (2 Thess. 2:3-4) of a falling away, echoed in Jesus’ words in Matthew 24. This is part of my persistent warning that the End Times must manifest in an attack on faith itself, not just religion. Paul comes close to quoting the several OT passages that echo God’s condemnation of the Devil (Isaiah 14, Daniel 11 and Ezekiel 28). Whether symbolic or literal, the only way some figure can claim the throne of God is to clear away faith in any kind of transcendent deity. Once that begins, people who lack genuine faith will fall away. We will be shocked at how many that turns out to be from among our church memberships.

To be continued…

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Hidden Church History

Here’s a little church history you won’t learn from any books or courses.

John was the last of the original Twelve Apostles. We believe he wrote his Revelation while in his 90s, right at the end of the First Century AD. One of the themes you can pick up when reading between the lines of his contributions to the New Testament is his disappointment that there were so few believers who were even aware of the uniquely Hebraic outlook of the Bible and the gospel message. He seems to lament the loss of that orientation as the churches are overtaken with Greek rationalism and the Judaizers. I’m convinced he saw it coming.

At the same time, the middle eastern churches were overtaken with a wild mythology that was already a problem in some of the Second Temple Jewish literature. The way so many of those branches of early churches embraced non-canonical books as part of their Bibles says a lot about their ability to discern the difference. They lacked the sobriety of the first disciples, becoming a sucker for Jewish fantasies. There was more than one kind of Judaizer at work destroying Christian doctrine.

While we cannot blame the Judaizers alone, they contributed to the early churches losing track of the broader mission of Christ and how the Covenant is supposed to work. The deep historical understanding of the Divine Council Worldview (AKA, thesis of the Unseen Realm) was lost rather quickly. We have no way of knowing why God would allow this to happen.

Nor is it really obvious why the tail end of the Boomer generation is the time God has appointed the restoration of that worldview. Suddenly, the long decades of labor by men like Michael Heiser has caught fire with a new generation of scholars and pastors.

For nearly two millennia, the church has been captured by a western focus on individual spiritual redemption, as if this was the whole gospel message. Today, in mainstream churches of all brands, the sole concern in actual practice is individual self-development. Whether it’s bluntly taught or not, most church people are convinced by the church atmosphere that personal moral improvement is going far enough to get to Heaven. You can get them to talk about the Kingdom of God and loyalty to Christ, but they seem to have no idea what that really means. They are especially ignorant of what “covenant” means.

Our society and most churches have this false assumption that humanity is born morally neutral. No, the Bible flatly says we are born mortal, and this means captive of Satan under sin. The Devil has you from birth; you are doomed. Only God can breathe life into your dead spirit, making a member of His family household. Everyone believes they can find a path that keeps them from the Devil’s chains.

All they know about is the Fall in the Garden of Eden (if that much). Only a tiny few today understand what was common knowledge among Second Temple rabbis: The Watchers in Genesis 6 crossing the boundary was a rebellion, giving birth to the Nephilim, today’s demons. This resulted in the corruption and depravity of the human race. Further, another rebellion was the failure of the Divine Council to faithfully carry out their duties as God’s satraps over the seventy nations listed in Genesis when God decided to parcel them out to His staff at the Tower of Babel. While those divine satraps are individuals with their own personal agendas, the net result of their shepherding of the nations was that God warned them they had failed their commission and they would eventually be destroyed like mortals.

Very few believers today understand that the Cross didn’t remedy only the Fall in the Garden, but has empowered us to go back and claim God’s Elect from the nations He had doled out to His staff, and that our service in building His Kingdom keeps the Nephilim in check. Believers today have almost no clue about the Covenant of Christ as a covenant. They don’t know what a covenant does and what comes with it. Even among those who get the Divine Council Worldview, we still have precious few who think of the Covenant as a covenant, a change of allegiance from the Devil to Christ.

When we obey that covenant by coming together as real family and loving each other despite all the fleshly reasons not to, we are breaking the bondage of the Enemy over this world. Our love for each other is spiritual conquest. It’s not our speculative theology or organizing, not our budgets and buildings, that do anything at all to weaken the Devil’s grip on our lives. It’s only when we conquer the fleshly nature, which inhibits the love of Christ in our hearts, that we begin to oust the Enemy forces in our world.

You can’t get the Kingdom simply by getting your own individual life morally straight. The only way you can bring the Kingdom to life is by getting involved in the lives of other believers. Help them wrestle their own demons; stabilize their lives by embracing the local covenant family; help them handle bad finances, etc. Build that bond of love with others, a love that defies secular law and society.

I can’t help but believe that the reason this has been unleashed at this time in human history is because we are about the enter a time of tribulation when nothing else will work. Without that vision of cosmic warfare against spiritual forces of great power, we cannot begin to understand the mission. Yes, there is something eschatological about this, though I’m in no position to claim that we are entering the End Times. We were flatly warned in Scripture not to get hung up on that. Rather, we must realize that things are going to get very ugly; we cannot hold our witness together without holding it together with others of like conviction.

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