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Understanding Hard Sayings in the Bible! Jacob Have I Loved and Esau Have I Hated! Part 6

Dec 30

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(Ver 1.2) This is now “Part 6.1” in the series of very advanced Bible lessons on “Understanding Hard Sayings” found in the Bible.  Today’s lesson is technically Part 1 of a 2 part lesson on the subject part 6 of Hard Sayings.  This is also the beginning of an independent lesson in the series, meaning you do not have to read all of the other lessons to understand what I will discuss today in this lesson.  But, of course this does not mean that you will automatically understand all of the complex subjects being covered in this lesson either.  If you are interested in studying any of the other “Hard Sayings” that I have covered in the Bible you may want to start your reading with the first lesson in the series called “Part 1”.  What is a hard saying?  The Bible contains many statements that I labeled “Hard Sayings”.  I was not the inventor of this name for these types of scriptures.  The disciples actually coined the phrase “Hard Saying” in the Gospel of John 6:60 and I just took it from what they said to Jesus.  Hard Sayings are any words of declaration that when taken literally as they were spoken or written are very difficult for us to accept because they appears to conflict with many other verses that we also know to be true.  This is what the disciples struggled with when they heard Jesus speaking about drinking His blood and eating His flesh.  These words that they heard, they knew had to be the truth, but they also knew that they caused them great difficulty because they did not first fully understand what they meant and they knew that they directly conflicted with many verses found in the Old Testament that taught them not to eat flesh with the blood still in it.  That is exactly the same problem that many people in the world today still face.  They still see the verses but do not understand what they mean and thus they stumble over them and do not know how to resolve the conflicts.  The root cause of the problem occurs when men think carnally or naturally and God is usually speaking of spiritual things. There are so many of these types of hard saying verses found in the Bible. 

Introduction to Today’s Bible Hard Saying

I am going to talk about another VERY hard saying found in the New Testament.  I will warn you up front that this lesson will get into some very deep and new subjects that may be over your head right now.  Therefore, please make sure that you are a spiritually strong swimmer before you jump into the really deep waters found in this Bible lesson.  This lesson is an attempt to answer a very tough question that I got from someone on Facebook.  I have spent a lot of time in writing the response to this question and I discovered that it was so long that I needed to split it into two lessons.  So today I acknowledge my God and I am using my faith to answer another hard saying found in the Bible.   In the book of Romans God declares something that is extremely difficult for us to comprehend and this statement from God potentially conflicts with many of the other scriptures that most Christians should already know and believe.  Here is the basic hard saying that we will be dealing with today that comes from the mouth of God:

Rom 9:13  As it is written, Jacob have I loved, but Esau have I hated.

Let’s briefly talk about the framework of this verse in order to understand where it was written and to who it was written to insure that we are not studying the verse in isolation or taking it out of context.  We should first realize that this book of Romans was written directly to us in the church.   These are words inspired by God and written down by Paul for ONLY us in the church who are believers.  In other words these verses were not written to anyone outside of the church.  Do you understand that?  Therefore everything that was written in this book must either have some application to us or be useful for us to learn something that we need to know.  In this ninth chapter there are literally several very hard sayings to understand and I am only to concentrate on this one in verse 13.  These verses in chapter 9 of Romans are almost entirely spiritual concepts that are easily taken the wrong way or misapplied to speak of things that that they do not apply to.  This chapter of Romans speaks several times about the natural nation of Israel.  These natural people are called the children of the flesh in verse 8 and God clearly says that they are not my children and many Christians ignore these types of verses because they do not wish to see them.  However, the Apostle Paul begins the chapter with an important statement that sets the tone for the rest of the chapter about his great heaviness of heart and great sorrow for the natural nation of Israel in verse 2.  Paul the writer wished that he could do something to save them all.  Therefore understand what is happening in the context of verse 13.  There are two groups of people being spoken of, one is the church and one is the natural people of Israel.  One group is saved and one group is not.

There are at the least 4 O.T. direct quotes in this chapter.  One is the prophet Hosea saying “those that were not my people have become my people” in verse 25.  Then from the prophet Isaiah God quotes “Though the number of the natural people of Israel have been as the sands of the sea, only a remnant will be saved” in verse 27.   Then in verse 15 the prophet Moses is quoted “God will have mercy upon whom I will have mercy”.  Finally in the verse 13 God quotes the prophet Malachi about “Jacob I have loved and Esau I have hated”.  I personally believe that all of these verses are connected together for us to see and to learn something new.  I can see in this chapter that God is bringing in certain information from 4 different prophets written in the Old Testament linking them together into a new clearer perspective while shedding fresh light upon our relationship to God in the New Covenant.  I also believe that one of the main themes found within this chapter of Romans is a division between those that are saved and those that are not saved.  A division occurs when one person is separated from another.  You could view it like a divorce from the natural marriage perspective where those that were once one, have now split to become two separate individuals.  I see the emphasis of this chapter to be between two different opposing groups, those that are saved and those that are not saved.   I really do not have time to teach you that part of the subject fully, but that is how I view what I read in the chapter and I believe that this information will eventually help us to understand the meaning of the reason why God says that He hates a man named Esau who died approximately 4000 years ago.  

What Are the Bible Conflicts With Romans 9:13?

What are the controversies and scriptural conflicts found within this single reportedly simple verse in Romans 9:13?  When I read this I knew immediately that this verse disagreed with the revealed nature and the character of God demonstrated to us by the physical appearing of God in the flesh in Jesus.  In John 14:9 Jesus told Phillip “When you have seen me you have seen the Father”.  Jesus claimed to be the previously hidden Father God now revealed to man for the first time.  Therefore show me any verse in the Gospels that reveals Jesus to be a hater of any man living or dead.  I looked and I could not find one, therefore this information of the revealed God in the Gospels directly conflicts with this information stated in Romans 9:13.   Romans 9:13 also seems to imply that our God is a potential Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde type of God.  A shifting God of either love or hate depending on something not revealed in this verse.  Is God theoretically good to one man while being inconsistently evil to another man?  I do not believe that He is.  How can a God who loved me, died for me and saved me also be a God that hates me?  I do not believe that He can.  You might try to say “I’m not Esau” and therefore God does not hate me.  But, that is the beginning of another conflicting problem to think that you are any better than Esau who was also a mere man, a lost unsaved son of Adam.  The Bible says “ALL have sinned and come short of the GLORY of GOD”! (Rom 3:23)  Then again in Romans 5:12 God repeats “ALL have sinned”.  “ALL” is an inclusive statement that excludes no one (me, you, Jacob or Esau).  That means you and I are sinners also.  We are each guilty of sin if we are judged upon our own personal state of righteousness.  Therefore according to Romans 3:23 and 5:13, there is no difference between me as a man before I was saved as to what Esau was in the book of Genesis.  If you think you were better than Esau then you are deceived.  Notice what Paul wrote to Timothy:

1Ti 1:15  This is a faithful saying, and worthy of all acceptation, that Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners; of whom I am chief.

As you can see Paul did not consider himself better than Esau and he was the one that wrote God hates Esau in Romans.  Paul calls himself a chief among all sinners.  That means that he thought that he was no better than any other man.  Paul had the correct perspective and view of himself and many Christians today would benefit if they would learn the example that Paul set as the humble standard.  Whenever a man or a woman believes themselves to be better than anyone else, it is a root of pride and self-righteousness. Therefore we have another conflict brewing that there is no stated difference between someone like me or a Paul, a Jacob or even an Esau in the natural realm of view.  We are just all sinners by God’s high standards.

What other scriptural conflicts arise from this verse in Romans 9:13?  The Bible declares in 1 John 4:16 that “God is Love”.  How then could a God that is Love also hate?  I believe that reveals a new problem. Then we read in John 3:16 “that God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten son” to save us.  So how can a loving God simultaneously hate someone still to this day after coming to die for them to save them?  Is not love the opposite of hate and vice versa?   John 3:16 did NOT say that “God so hated the world that He gave Jesus”.  Didn’t Jesus come into the world in His great love to die for every man?  Did this world declaration in John 3:16, not also include the natural man Esau?  Did Jesus die to save Esau?  I believe that Esau was a part of the exact same world that you and I were a part of.  Therefore, John 3:16 directly conflicts with the statement that God hates the natural man named Esau of this world.   Doesn’t God say in 1 Corinthians 15:22 “that in Christ ALL are made alive”?  Isn’t Esau a man forgiven by the shed blood of God the same as Jacob?  Did the shed blood of Jesus not include the sins of Esau?    I believe that these are major theological problems that we have encountered with the statement that God hates Esau.  Here is another interesting perspective on the subject of if God hates Esau:

1Jn 3:15  Whosoever hateth his brother is a murderer: and ye know that no murderer hath eternal life abiding in him.

Let me explain again about who Jesus was.  I already told you that Jesus when born into the world was God in the flesh.  However it is much more complicated than that.  Jesus Christ was the only man that was ever born the Son of God and the Son of Man simultaneously.  In other words God joined His Word and His Spirit to the physical egg of a woman on the earth and the these two together became the body of the man Jesus Christ with the Spirit of God on the inside of Him.  God the creator in heaven literally came down to the earth and became an intimate part of His creation.  The Bible says in John 1:14, “The Word became flesh and dwelt among us” and then in verse 1 it says God is the Word.  So Jesus was God made a man and if He ever hated anyone I can’t find it.  Then there is a deeper problem revealed here in 1 John 3:15 when the Bible says if any man hates his brother, then He has no life everlasting in Him.  Since Jesus was raised from the dead and is eternally alive now we know that it is impossible for Him to hate any of His natural brothers.  Uh oh?  What I am trying to say is that Jesus was a natural brother of Esau because they were both direct descendants of Adam.  If a human hates another human on the earth they in effect hate their own brother.  People do not see it this way because they did not share the same exact mothers, they think, but that is not true at all.  All people on the earth originated from the woman Eve and the man Adam so there is no one on the earth other than a human from this one family.  Do you see the problem that I am teaching you?    There is also another very deep and complex reality found in the Bible that directly applies to Jesus and to you and me.  Read these next two verses very carefully:

Heb 7:9  And as I may so say, Levi also, who receiveth tithes, payed tithes in Abraham.

Heb 7:10  For he was yet in the loins of his father, when Melchisedec met him.

God says Levi paid tithes because He was in his father Abraham when Abraham paid the titles.  Levi was not a direct son of Abraham.  Abraham had a son Isaac and Isaac had a son Jacob and Jacob had a son Levi.   Do you understand the far reaching concepts that these verses reveal?  God says anything that your father did, you did because you were in your father.  Therefore Jesus and Esau were both in their father Adam and therefore Jesus was a direct brother to Esau.  What we see are some natural things that teach us about some very complex principles that cannot be ignored.  If God hates Esau, then He hates His own brother and there is no eternal life in Him.  I find that to be a major problem with a literal interpretation of Romans 9:13.

Then there is this conflicting verse found in Acts 10:34 where God declares “that He is no respecter of persons”.   A respecter of persons is revealed when anyone treats one man differently from another man based upon what they do, what they say, how they look, what they own, etc.  Partiality is when a person is given special or favored status over another individual based upon any selective criteria either known or unknown.  According to verses like Acts 10:34 and Ephesians 6:9, God does not respect one person differently than another person.    Therefore, how could God NOT show any favoritism to one man over another while hating one man and loving the other?  Since that is not possible, then I have a problem with the statement that God hates Esau.  There are just too many verses in the Bible that conflict with the statement that God hates any single man.  Surely you can see that these truths that I just gave you are all incompatible verses in the Bible with the stated truth that God hates Esau.  Therefore we have a great theological issue that needs immediate resolution.  These issues can only be overcome by digging deeper to increase our spiritual knowledge and understanding on the given subjects and that is what I will attempt to do in the rest of this lesson.   Here again are some of the key conflicts revealed in the Bible:

  1. Esau is no different than me because Romans 3:23 says all have sinned.
  2. John 3:16 says God so loved Esau that He gave His only begotten son to save Esau.
  3. Acts 10:34 God is no respecter of any Esau or Jacob.
  4. Jesus said when you have seen me you have seen the father and Jesus never hated any man even asking God to forgive those that killed Him on the cross.
  5. Jesus was born a physical brother of Esau and therefore cannot hate His own brother or He has no eternal life.

These are five very good reasons why we should not take the verse in Romans 9:13 literally.  What we begin to see is the formation of certain specific central Bible truths that are apparently in direct opposition to a another misunderstood Bible truth which needs to be either re-balanced with the others or reinterpreted using the Bible in order to be correctly understood all together to eliminate all of the conflicts.  One very important rule of correct Bible interpretation is simply stated that in the true meaning of two verses, no one verse of the Bible will ever contradict with any other verse of the Bible because God is the same Author of both verses and He is a constant and a NEVER CHANGING being.  These are all complex statements and reasons that I just made.  But if we continue surely you will begin to see that our understanding of at least one of the truths need to be changed or adjusted so that our view of the entire truth is increased by allowing God to shine a new light on it that will help to show us that God is a consistently good and loving God to every human.  The mistake some fall into is to take one isolated Bible truth like God hates Esau and then try to exalt it to make it THE ENTIRE TRUTH that God hates homosexuals, murderers, rapists or whatever.   This is the common error of what some Christians try to teach using the misapplication of one verse based upon their own human interpretation.  Therefore the correct interpretation of every verse is absolutely essential to keep us from falling into error. 

What Does God Hate?

We must attempt to balance all of the truths that we know in order to resolve and completely remove any potential conflicts that have arisen.  Also understand that God is not the one that is confused; therefore it is only people that are currently experiencing the difficulty because of our current lack of complete knowledge and understanding.  We do not know everything that God knows and that is why we still struggle.  I think in order to begin to understand how to resolve these conflicts that we will first need to research in the Bible to see what it is that God says that He actually hates.  Does God hate people or is it stated to be something else?  If God hates people then that is where we need confirmation in the scriptures to establish a new truth.  However, If God does hate people like Esau, then we will establish that God is confused since He clearly told us that “He so loved the world to die for Esau”.  Let us discuss the subject of hate and find the stated things that God says that He hates.  I’ll give you some quick examples of what I found in the Bible that God hates: 

Zec 8:17  And let none of you imagine evil in your hearts against his neighbour; and love no false oath: for all these are things that I hate, saith the LORD.

You can clearly see that God still hates both an evil imagination and lies.  These are two specific descriptive actions that we will see as repeated patterns of the behavior types of people that do not know or love God or His Word.  From this one verse, I can begin to see that it is the evil thoughts and the evil actions of the people that are hated and not specifically the people.  I still believe that God so loved us that He provided a way out of our certain death and eternal separation from God, if we would only accept this free gift of salvation.  Even Christians are still capable of thinking evil and doing evil, but simultaneously God’s shed blood is sufficiently powerful to cover all of our transgressions, past, present and future.  But, this does not mean as we know that we are free to intentionally sin all we want to after we become saved, it only means if we do accidently that we are not automatically lost.   Let me show you another verse in the Bible that speaks of God hating something:

Deu 12:31  Thou shalt not do so unto the LORD thy God: for every abomination to the LORD, which he hateth, have they done unto their gods; for even their sons and their daughters they have burnt in the fire to their gods.

I think you can again see God’s stated hatred is directed at the evil actions of people killing their children.  This is clearly a parallel to the modern actions of abortionists today.  But, yet God does not say that He hates the people it only says that He hates the actions of the people killing their children.  There is a huge difference between those two stated positions and it causes much confusion in the church.  How can God love the sinner but still hate the sin?  That is because they are not the same things.  What you do is not necessarily always who you are.  If it was we would all be in prison right now.  There are churches in America that picket sinners and try to tell them that God hates them because of their sin, but that is foolishness and ignorance gone to seed.  God is not a hater of people that He died to save.  I keep saying that because I want to make sure that you get it and apply it to Esau.  That is a ludicrous thing to ascribe to a God who is called Love.   People just seem to forget that if God hates sinners then He must also hate them since God clearly says “all have sinned and come short of the His glory”.  It is only a person’s deceived state of self-righteousness that makes them believe that they are better than anyone else.  I’m only going to give you one more example of things that God hates since this could be a Bible lessons series all by itself:

Pro 6:16  These six things doth the LORD hate: yea, seven are an abomination unto him:

Pro 6:17  A proud look, a lying tongue, and hands that shed innocent blood,

Pro 6:18  An heart that deviseth wicked imaginations, feet that be swift in running to mischief,

Pro 6:19  A false witness that speaketh lies, and he that soweth discord among brethren.

There are seven direct things listed that God still hates, but none of them are directly named as people even though some can easily try to say that they represent people by the descriptive terms used like the tongue and the feet features that all people possess.  Read through the list and see if you can see where the emphasis is placed.  Is it on the people or on the actions of people?  So I believe that again we have confirmation that people can do these hated things but yet I believe that God will still loves them consistently even while hating their wrong actions.  Here is the list of the seven hated things that I saw: 

  1. Proud Look
  2. Lying Tongue
  3. Murder
  4. Wicked Imagination
  5. Mischief
  6. False Witness
  7. Sower of Discord

Wow, that is a tough list of things that people in the world and even in the church still do every day.   Speaking lies is mentioned twice and that makes it even more serious to me.  Thinking evil is again repeated as a hated action.  Being proud and sowing discord are two incredible things that speak volumes to me and helps to identify who God is speaking of using Esau.  We’ll get more to that soon.  I personally believe that God is trying to teach us something new about what we should hate.  If you go through your Bible God tells us to hate evil and to love good repeatedly (Psalm 34:14, 37:27, Isa 7:15, Amos 5:15).  This would appear to me to be the lesson learned from reading about what God hates in the Bible.  So I believe that God is trying to teach us to become more like Him in our thoughts and our actions.   There is an established Bible pattern that teaches us that if we think good Godly things we will do good things, if we think evil demonic things then we will do evil things.  Therefore, set your minds on the greater higher things above and God will direct you into the paths of life.

What I am trying to do is to show you that love and hate can coexist together simply because good and evil still coexist today in the world because of what Adam chose for us in Genesis 3.  Therefore, it is only important to learn and to know what it is that God hates and what it is that He loves to correctly understand what we should love and hate.  If God hates people we should hate people, but we clearly see that is not true.  If God hates sin, then we should hate sin and that is certainly true.  Go through your Bible and study the word “hate” and it’s forms.  There are approximately 179 verses that contain a form of this word.  Search them all and see what we are to hate and I believe you will conclude as I have that we should hate evil and not the evil doers.

We should love the good and we should hate the evil just like the God that never changes.  I believe that this principal is what God is teaching using the Jacob and Esau examples.  Based upon what we have just learned about hating evil and loving good, we would be forced to conclude that Esau was evil and that Jacob was good.  But, since God does not hate people I have to adjust my interpretation in Romans 9:13 to say Esau must be a symbolic representation for these evil thoughts and actions that are present in the world.  Any literal interpretation would force us to say that God hated Esau as a man and then God changed His mind and died to save this man.  Since God is not a being that changes that is impossible.  

Do you understand Bible symbolism?  Symbolism occurs when God calls one thing by a name, title or description that we have heard about, can see and we can know and understand, but He is actually speaking figuratively of another hidden thing that we have not heard of, cannot see and do not know or understand.  This is what I believe is happening in Romans 9:13 when God is speaking of two men that we can read about in Genesis, but have long since died and gone away from this physical reality.  Therefore the verse in Romans 9:13 must be a symbolic representation of something unknown and much greater in meaning.  If this is true, why was Esau used symbolically to represent evil deeds and why was Jacob used to represent what is done that is good?  What is God trying to reveal to us using this story?  That is why we need to go and read to find this out next.

What Does God Reveal About Jacob and Esau in Genesis?

Let’s go back to the story of the two brothers in Genesis quickly and go through the descriptive time before they were born to learn what God reveals about them.  In learning about the boys we should begin to formulate what God is doing using them to represent what He hates and what He loves:

Gen 25:21  And Isaac intreated the LORD for his wife, because she was barren: and the LORD was intreated of him, and Rebekah his wife conceived.

This story in Genesis is very interesting.  Let’s just first begin to look and observe at what is stated and then figure out what it all means later.  What we are interested in these verses are the facts that God presented to help us to better understand things we do not know yet.  You see there is nothing written in the Bible that is there by chance or accident.  Every word has a designed purpose and a meaning for being included.  Even the obscure stories of the people in Genesis contain more than just a history lesson for us to learn from.  Here in this verse, Isaac’s wife Rebekah is barren and Isaac prays to God and she becomes pregnant.  There is a lot of meaning behind this verse, but I cannot teach everything in one Bible lesson so let’s continue to the next verse:

Gen 25:22  And the children struggled together within her; and she said, If it be so, why am I thus? And she went to enquire of the LORD.

While still in the womb there appears to be a great conflict arising between brothers even while they are still developing and growing.  We could call it the beginning of an internal war between brothers that continues on the external after their birth.  Wow that was a really important point that I just made, remember it.  Put these concepts into your mind; 1). these boys are siblings, 2). they are fighting brothers and 3). the battle started before they were physically born on the earth.  I will tell you that all of this information is symbolic and represents another spiritual battle and that this natural information appears to represent a much greater conflict than just a casual disagreement between natural brothers.  But, we will get to that more soon.  Notice that Rebekah the mother observes the fight occurring on the inside of her and prays to God to ask for the answer to what is happening and here is God’s reply that was given to her: 

Gen 25:23  And the LORD said unto her, Two nations are in thy womb, and two manner of people shall be separated from thy bowels; and the one people shall be stronger than the other people; and the elder shall serve the younger.

God looks down into the realm of time to view the boys as two future nations.  God is not prophesying God is simply telling her of the future using His infinite foreknowledge.  Many times God sees things in a big picture simultaneously even while speaking or describing specific details.  Actually what God is doing is telling her of spiritual things to come, but we have not discovered that yet.  While describing this internal physical turmoil of the two brothers fighting each other, they are literally labeled using the future terms of being two nations of people.  Interesting concept isn’t it?  Knowing verses like these dispel the rights of a woman to abort her future child/nation.  Today how many nations of future children have been eliminated by ignorant mothers?  While a woman may see the fetus as only one insignificant future potential being, God clearly saw each child as being a different nation of people.  God combines every child with their descendants and speaks of them all collectively.   God describes that these brothers represent not only two nations, but two different kinds of people and that they will be separated from the womb.  God is revealing more than the obvious that they will be born and come out from their mother; He is saying they will not be the same people and even implies them to be opposed to each other and we can go further to call them opposing enemies.  The Hebrew word translated as “separated” means to divide yourself one from another.  This is a very important hidden Bible lesson subject to learn about division.  This is the second time I have mentioned this subject so far, but I still do not have the time to teach it to you fully today.  Just keep in mind, because it is very important.  I will do an individual Bible study on this subject soon. 

God also says that the older son will serve the younger son which completely reverses the normal course of inheritance where the first born son would always obtain the greater family blessing revealed in the O.T. Law of God.  God further implies that the younger son will become the stronger child than the older and gain preeminence over his elder brother.  These are all very key points to learn to associate with a greater hidden message than what is being presented from the surface historical story.  What have we learned about Jacob and Esau so far?  Here is my Top 10 List of things you should have learned: 

  1. There are two brothers in direct opposition to each other
  2. The opposition begins before they are born into the natural world
  3. The opposition continues after they are born into the natural world
  4. One brother will be divided against the other brother
  5. The younger son is stronger but is not born first
  6. The younger son becomes ruler of the older son
  7. The elder son is born first but does not inherit from the father
  8. Therefore the older son loses his stated birthright
  9. The younger son is born second but does inherit from the father
  10. Even though they are brothers from one father, they are two separate nations of people

The Hidden Allegory Aspect of Jacob and Esau

Let me introduce you to a potentially new hidden concept found in the Bible.  I briefly already mentioned that I believed that God was using Esau and Jacob as symbolism.  Symbolism is very prevalent in the Bible where God uses a natural object to convey a spiritual truth, like a field, a pearl, a seed, etc.  Allegory is like symbolism but it uses real people to introduce us to hidden spiritual beings we do not yet know fully.  Allegory is a concept that just takes symbolism a step further in the Bible.  Both allegory and symbolism use natural representations for spiritual realities.  I will attempt to briefly discuss this concept called “Allegory” or “Allegorical” information to help you better understand what God has written to us in the Bible.   If you have not already learned by now that not all of the information in the Bible is obviously presented then you have not studied the Bible for very long.  Allegory is always a hidden technique of God and it is used to conceal spiritual information in the Bible using real natural stories found within the course of human/Bible history.  Allegory is a technique that is actually very prevalent in the Bible but yet it is also well hidden at the same time.  What I have started to realize is that almost every Old Testament story written in the Bible has a greater hidden story behind it of something else that is not clearly known, obviously presented or even directly taught.  I have had people try to tell me that allegory was a manmade concept invented by people in the dark ages to try to dispel the things that I am trying to teach you about today.  These types of people are usually just naturally thinking or carnally minded categories of people who do not wish to see the spiritual things of God.  It is really not their entire fault because I believe that it is clearly Satan’s attempt at trying to keep them from knowing the truth.  Allegory is easily found in the Bible if you look for it.  Let me give you a dictionary definition of the word allegory: 

Allegory

a representation of an abstract or spiritual meaning through concrete or material forms; figurative treatment of one subject under the guise of another.

Hopefully you can clearly see what is described in this definition of the word allegory.  Two key points need to be fully grasped from this definition.  Within an allegory, there is always a story that is given which is a figurative representation of another truer story that is not given.  The given allegorical information is always a symbolic treatment of a greater hidden story with transferring identical characters, characteristics, features, relationships and actions.  The only thing that is not relevant in an allegory is the timing of the physical occurrence.  In other words the order of events is important but not the time when they occurred.  I think I’m not saying that exactly correct.  You see everything certainly matters in the Bible.  However the allegorical story given to us in the Bible is always a past historical event and the hidden spiritual story that it contains may be a representative type of an event that is a past, present or even a future event and possibly all three at the same time since God lives outside of the dimension of time.   Allegory is an absolutely amazing way used by God to hide spiritual information in plain sight using easily understood words and stories.  God tells us one true natural story about Jacob and Esau and in that story is another hidden story of information about two beings that are not named.  Modern writers like C.S. Lewis in his books often used this technique or style of writing.  In the Narnia book, the Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe there was a hidden story of Jesus, the devil and a door to salvation with our continuing spiritual battle resulting in of final victory.  Therefore, C.S. Lewis understood the concepts of symbolism and allegory and he used it to tell a fictional child’s story that had a much greater hidden spiritual meaning for adults.  That is exactly what God is doing with the story of Jacob and Esau.  God writes a historical story that has direct meaning written to carnal men while hiding the real story that was written to spiritual men.  The spiritual story clearly has the greater precedence and meaning than the natural story.  But also it is impossible to understand the spiritual story without first understanding the natural story.  Therefore the two stories (natural and spiritual) are eternally married together.  This is the demonstrated wisdom of God and He invented this technique to teach us. 

The first time that I really learned about the concept of allegory, I was reading the Bible and the Spirit of God spoke to me in my spirit for me to notice what He said in Galatians chapter 4 about Abraham, Sarah and Hagar.  If you have never seen this you should stop and read this chapter right now.  In this chapter God explains in great detail that this real historical story of Abraham is actually an allegorical picture of His own spiritual family and family members.  There are five people mentioned in this story; one father, two mothers and two sons.  God reveals to us that these two women (Sarah and Hagar) represent two different covenants with God.  Since God is the initiator of these covenants, we can understand that God is the representative figure of the man Abraham in the story and Sarah as you can read in this chapter was the figurative representation of God’ first wife and she is revealed to be the “Jerusalem Above” (Gal 4:26).  Hagar the Egyptian slave woman is used as a figurative symbolic representation of God’s second younger slave wife and she is revealed to be the “Jerusalem that now is” (Gal 4:25).   That is an awesome revelation that God taught me so do not let it slip away from you.   Therefore Hagar the slave girl represents the present earthly natural nation of Israel that was in covenant with God the Father in the Old Testament.  What God does in this chapter is to reveal the existence of two spiritual women that were simultaneously in covenant with the Almighty God in the Old Testament.  The Heavenly Jerusalem was the older first covenant wife and she is called the mature barren woman that gives birth to us the church (Gal 4:26).  The second covenant wife of God is revealed to be the natural people of Israel and they are still in bondage to the law that God had given to them on Mt. Sinai until this very day.  What I want you to do is to start putting the puzzle pieces together that I am presenting to you today.  Did you notice in this allegory described in Galatians 4 that the story was about two sons and two separate nations?  There was one nation in heaven and one nation here on the earth.  Was that not what God said about Esau and Jacob?  The Bible is repeated patterns and these patterns teach us some amazing things. I do not have the time to fully elaborate on this entire allegory to teach you everything that is revealed in great detail.  What I want to do is to teach you the concepts that are revealed in this allegory to help you to transfer this knowledge to the allegorical information revealed in Rebekah’s two children Esau and Jacob. 

In every allegorical story found in the Bible (and there are many of them) there is always a real historical story containing real people with real relationships, doing real things, in real important ways, with a specific order of events and all of these recorded words reflect a hidden aspect of something in the spiritual dimension that you would normally not even know existed.  It is an absolutely masterful way of hiding the truth in plain sight used by God.  This method presents valid truthful natural information while simultaneously concealing the greater valid spiritual information.  So if you are reading in the Old Testament and only seeing the natural things that were written you are virtually missing the most important spiritual messages that God was trying to reveal to you.    I hope you understand the concept of allegory because I can see the story of Jacob and Esau to be highly allegorical with vast hidden spiritual information in everything written in the story.

I believe that I have gone long enough in this lesson.  I have introduced you to many new things to think about.  I have taught you that there are conflicts in the Bible that we need to resolve.  I showed you five conflicting scriptural points that contradict what God says about hating Esau.  Therefore, I have concluded that God was not speaking literally but figuratively when using these two brothers to describe what He loves and hates.  I showed you multiple verses and asked you to go through the other verses searching for what God hates in the Bible.  I believe I showed you enough verses that show that God hates sin while still loving the sinner.  I also went through a part of the birth of Esau and Jacob in Genesis to show what God reveals about them before they were born and then shortly after.  Finally I introduced you to the new concept of allegory and how God uses natural Bible stories to describe to us spiritual stories that we have never seen or heard before.  In the next lesson I will attempt to expand what the Bible says about whom Jacob and Esau represent figuratively.  These symbolic natural brothers are representative types of spiritual brothers.  These are really deep complex subjects found in the Bible.  If you understand what I am trying to say please let me know.  If you have questions about anything already stated, please let me know that also.  This is probably one of the most advanced Bible lessons on my whole website.  It will probably overwhelm many baby or carnal Christians.  I have worked a long time on trying to simplify the message, but that is truly very difficult.  In the next lesson we will continue to talk about more specifically who Jacob and Esau can represent.  I pray that you will hang in there and continue trying to learn even if you do not fully get every point yet.   Until next time may God enlighten the eyes of your spiritual understanding to see all that He has done.  God Bless!

If you would like to continue and read the next lesson in this series you can jump to “Part 6.2“.

 

Posted in Bible Study, Hard Sayings, Understanding

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A Christian’s Responsibility vs. the Sovereign God’s Responsibility! Part 1

Jul 20

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Responsibility: the ability or authority to act or decide on one’s own, without supervision

(Ver 1.3)  This is Part 1 in a series of basic Bible studies about the Personal Responsibility of Every Christian versus the Divine Responsibility of the Sovereign God.  Responsibility is a word that implies authority and ability to make independent decisions.  This certainly applies to God, but what about men and women made in the image of God, how would this apply to humans?  I personally believe that the word responsibility is potentially more complex than this definition.  There are independent abilities of man and there are dependent abilities of man.   So responsibilities can be independently assigned or they can be jointly assigned or they can also be corporately assigned to many.  There is a popular Christian philosophy being taught in many churches that God is in complete and absolute control of everything that happens in the world.  This philosophy relieves all Christians of any personal responsibility, accountability or judgment for doing the wrong things in the world.  I truly believe that God in Heaven is sovereign meaning that He is all powerful and is perfectly capable of doing anything that He desires at any time.  However, is this the character of God that you know and understand and base your faith upon?  Does God force people to do what He desires them to always do?  Is God overriding human freewill to manipulate the outcome or destiny of individuals?  If a terrorist kills thousands of other people was that the perfect plan of God in action and full manifestation?  Does God really control everything that happens to every Christian and non-Christian alike?  Is God the Great Puppet Master in the Sky pulling all the strings?  I personally do not believe that God is in control of every event in human history.  If it was true, then God is the most evil God that I have heard described and that definition would contradict with a God who is named Love!

I saw a very ignorant movie last night from Hollywood called The Adjustment Bureau.  This movie portrayed a God who manipulated men and women to do what He wanted them to do.  It dictated a master plan of a sovereign type of God.  If a man or woman strayed from the sovereign plan, they were immediately sent a being to adjust them for change.  These adjustment beings would have to manipulate the circumstances surrounding the individual and they would have to change the persons’ mind or thoughts to get them to conform to the good plan of the chairman upstairs.  They would have to cause them to go down the right path that they were supposed to go into to be what God had planned for them to do on the earth.  This is a very popular religious philosophy taught in many churches.  However, any time Hollywood embraces a Christian philosophy it automatically causes me to suspect it is a fallacy of the grandest proportions.   But, we still have to balance the fact that after all God is sovereign and you cannot do anything to ever lose your free gift of salvation.  It is too bad that this is not what the Bible actually teaches us.  For example look at Hebrews:

Heb 6:4  For it is impossible for those who were once enlightened, and have tasted of the heavenly gift, and were made partakers of the Holy Ghost,

Heb 6:5  And have tasted the good word of God, and the powers of the world to come,

Heb 6:6  If they shall fall away, to renew them again unto repentance; seeing they crucify to themselves the Son of God afresh, and put him to an open shame.

There are many verses in the Bible that I could give you, but I will only speak about these today.  If a Christian can never be lost after being saved, then why did God write these verses of warning to all Christians?  To be a partaker of the Holy Ghost is clearly a sign that these people being spoken of were once Christians.  But, by the time you get to verse 6 it says that they have “fallen away” from Christ and the Holy Spirit.  Some Christian read the Bible without thinking about what is said.  They will see the word “if” and think that this is not possible.  But the Greek word translated as “If” in this verse could very easily have been translated as “When” so do not write it off and think that it cannot happen.  Therefore, God says there is no further salvation available for them because they would have to crucify the Lord of Glory again and put Him to shame.  If you do not understand these verses you better learn them very soon.  These are very powerful words of warning written to ONLY the Church and not to the world.  If you believe you cannot fall away after you are saved or that it is impossible for this to occur, you are already on the verge of being deceived.  Because of your ignorance your potential deception is more likely.  This is your first and greatest responsibility as a born again Christian and that is to stay a Christian.  Don’t stray away and get lost from the goodness of God.

These verses list three specific things that you need to remain committed to.  First, it says for you to partake of the Holy Ghost.  Define the Word “Partake”!  Is that God’s responsibility or your responsibility?  If I sat a piece of chocolate cake in front of you and said “partake”.  What am I telling you to do?  To partake is clearly a freewill choice of every Christian to receive the Spirit of Christ.  Once you accept Jesus Christ as your Lord and Savior the Holy Spirit comes inside and abides.  To accept and receive the Holy Ghost implies the responsibility of keeping the Holy Ghost resident.  I know that goes against what many people try to teach from other verses in the Bible.   However, if I gave you $100 today, you could throw it in the trash or you could put it in the bank and keep it safe.  The choice would always be yours to do with whatever you have been given freely.  Next it says to taste the word of God.  This is not a onetime meal.  This is a continual everyday action of eating God’s Word to make your spirit strong.  When you eat your natural meals, who is it that is responsible for you eating and tasting?  Does anyone feed you or do you pick up the fork and do it yourself? How many physical meals do you eat a day?  You better learn to eat the Word of God as much as you eat physical food.  The physical food of this world is important, but the spiritual food of God is more eternally beneficial.   Finally, this verse says to taste the powers of the world to come.  This means we can walk in the power of God now that we will possess then in that future world.  There is an old saying that goes, “with great power comes great responsibility”.  This saying goes along with the current state of many nations of the earth who are in possession of weapons of mass destruction that can cause many other people hurt or destruction.  God’s power is greater than nuclear power.   However, this is the kind of power and responsibility that God is relating to you that you have in the spiritual realm right now.  Taste and see that the Lord is good and that His mercy endures forever.  These are basic Christian responsibilities for you to live by today right now.

Rom 8:28  And we know that all things work together for good to them that love God, to them who are the called according to his purpose.

This is a very popular verse of scripture quoted in many churches by many preachers.  It is read at funerals, it is read for divorces, it is read in hospitals after car accidents, it is read at every negative event that occurs in the lives of Christian believers as comfort to try to justify a greater unknown sovereign plan of God.  Because preachers cannot explain these negative evil events, they attribute them to a higher purpose to explain them away.  After all God is in ultimate control of everything that happens in the life of every believer so they want to think and believe.  It gives them religious comfort and relieves them from any personal responsibility.  It is what I call a No Fault Religion; whatever happens in my life, it was not my fault.  What Christians are attempting to do is to take a part of a verse and change it to say something that God does not say.  This is a major mistake of Bible interpretation that many make.  They take things out of context and they miss the conditions being given in order to qualify for God to cause everything to work out for their good.  They try to take a conditional promise of God and make it unconditional.  This verse says God only causes things to work together for your good if you love God and if you are called according to His purpose.  Again people take this as personally including them automatically, but then if you ask them what they were called to do by God; most of them could not tell you.   I am called to preach and teach the Word of God, and that is my calling and gifting.  So I have an answer to that question if you choose to ask me.  However, this verse is also in the context of the two previous verses that it goes along with.  These verses are often ignored because they are not understood.  The two previous verses are speaking about the personal prayer life of the believer.  Not just any type of prayer, it is a very specific type of prayer being mentioned, and even though it does not tell you what that type of prayer is you need to figure it out in order to qualify for verse 28.  If you do not understand what kind of prayer that is, I’m sorry I’m not going to teach it to you today.  Just realize if you do not understand it and cannot explain it to me, then you are not doing it and you do not qualify for verse 28 and I’ll leave it at that for now.

If Christians could automatically expect everything that happens to them to become a good thing from God, then why are there so many other verses in the Bible that instruct us to do something else?  It would seem to me that too many Christians are not using a balanced approach to understanding the Bible and that they are ignoring some very important verses in favor of other verses that they like better.   Let me give you a quick example of what God says for Christians to do that makes the Christian life conditional with personal responsibilities:

Jas 4:7  Submit yourselves therefore to God. Resist the devil, and he will flee from you.

My primary subject today is “Christian Responsibility vs. God’s Divine Responsibility”.  Here is God speaking to every Christian with two important instructions.  Where does it say that God will resist the devil for you?  Where does it say that God will chase the devil away from you regardless of what you choose to do?  Does this mean if you do not do these two things that God will still cause everything to work together for your good?  I assume that this is exactly what many Christians want to believe.  I personally do not believe that is the case!  I believe that all of God’s promises are always conditional and that you are required to follow His instructions in order to be successful in this life.   Is obedience a factor in this life?  Does obedience denote responsibility and consequences?

Isa 1:19  If ye be willing and obedient, ye shall eat the good of the land:

Here is God giving you a clear conditional statement of promise.  God says “IF” you do this and that you will get to eat the good of the land.  Being obedient is one of the key determining factors to being successful in this life.  The other is being “willing” to be obedient.  In other words you can do what God says and be unwilling and God will tell you that you do not qualify because you failed in one key step.  This is how the things of God work and if you do not believe it you can do without the good of the land.  Here in James 4:7 God says first for you to submit your life to Him.  This is not that hard if you actually do it.  I get up every morning and try to pray, “Not my will but yours be done today”.  I tell God “I submit my will unto you this day”.  I believe that praying and committing your ways to the Lord is the beginning of submitting to Him.  Next, God says that you must resist the devil.  Uh oh?  That is a major problem for many Christians, isn’t it?  How do you resist the devil if you do not ever see the devil?  Have you ever seen the devil?  What happens if you do not resist the devil?  Are these words of warning with implied consequences?  I think that will be a better series by itself so I will not get into how you resist the devil today.  Just realize that these are two personal instructions that have attached responsibilities with them and implied consequences for not doing them.  God is not going to do them for you, so you better learn how to do them for yourself.   Also note that if you do not do them, then God cannot cause everything to work together for your good either.  Since I’m in James, I’m going to stay here and give you another verse with personal responsibilities attached to it:

Jas 1:22  But be ye doers of the word, and not hearers only, deceiving your own selves.

You see the Bible after telling you to submit to God and to resist the devil says for you to also be a doer of the Word of God.  This implies that you must first read the Word of God, then that you study the Word of God, next you must understand the Word of God, and this is based upon the requirement that you remember the Word of God, then you must put the Word of God first place in your life and give it priority and then finally that you will actually do what the Word of God says to do.  If you think you automatically do all of this, you are probably already deceived.  There is nothing that I just mentioned to you that is automatic human behavior.  These are all learned behavioral modifications that you must do to renew your mind to God’s new ways of doing things.  God says you can deceive yourself simply by not being a doer of the Word, but you can see that being a doer of the Word requires a lot of effort on your part.  Effort implies personal responsibility and again consequences for not participating.  If you do not feel this way, then you are in trouble.  There is also no way that you can do what you do not know personally.  God says in Hosea 4:6, “My people are destroyed for a lack of knowledge”.  This means your lack of knowing can cause many of the negative things to occur in your life that you could have avoided if you only knew how to avoid them.  God is saying that all things do not work together to those of His people who do not know the Word of God and do it.  Surely you can see why things have occurred in the lives of many people that were very negative and why.  Do not think that something negative happening to you is the perfect plan of God.  This is what Satan wants you to do.  If you do not fight it or resist it and you simply roll over and accept it, you are easily defeated.  Negative things can be caused by many things in this world.  You might have forgotten to submit yourself unto God.  You might have forgotten to resist the devil.  You might have not been a doer of the Word of God in the area that you needed to know how to avoid that negative situation.  There are really many more factors of Christian Responsibility but I have gone long enough for today.  Here is a short list of a Christian’s responsibilities that I have covered today:

  1. Make an effort to remain a Christian
  2. Partake of the Holy Spirit continually (Praying in the Spirit)
  3. Continually feed on the Word of God to strengthen your spirit
  4. Continually taste the Power of God
  5. Submit yourself unto God
  6. Resist the devil
  7. Read the Word of God
  8. Learn the Word of God
  9. Put the Word of God first place in your life
  10. Do the Word of God
  11. Be willing and obedient to God

These are some of the basic Christian Responsibilities for every one of us to do daily from today’s lesson to help us have positive outcomes in our life.  If you do not understand them, then you need to learn them and find out what they mean.  If you do not understand what these are, you are free to ask questions, because I at least believe that I understand enough to be a help to those who do not know them at all.  What I am attempting to do is to teach Christians that they have a personal responsibility for what happens to them.  It is not all up to God and God is not orchestrating everything that happens to you for His perfect plan.  If God was doing that, there would be no need for Him to tell you to do anything.  God gives us His word so that we can get to know Him personally, His ways, His character, His nature, His love, His grace, His Son Jesus Christ and His divine responsibility.  Then God gives us His Word so that we can learn who we are in Christ, what He has given to us and what we are still required to do with His free gifts of grace.  These are balanced Christian Responsibilities working with the Divine God Responsibilities in partnership.  I will try to continue this series in the future.  Thanks for taking the time to study the Bible with me today.  God Bless!

Posted in Bible Basics, Bible Study, Understanding

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Understanding the Hidden Spiritual Family Structure of God’s Household! The Hidden Family of God in the Abrahamic Covenant! Part 9

Jul 14

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(Ver 1.4)  This is now Part 9 in a series of extremely advanced Bible studies about a subject that you have probably never heard anyone teach on before.  If you have not read these lessons from the beginning, I would suggest that you go back to “Part 1” and start there.   The Spirit of God revealed this information to me more than 10 years ago and I have been diligently studying it in the Bible ever since then to prove it was true.   Over these years I became totally convinced that this was accurate simply because I could see it plainly in the Bible and I knew that it was actually what the Bile said.  This is my introduction to one of the last lessons in this series of one of the most important and complex Bible studies that you may ever try to study or try to understand.  All of these lessons have come directly from my heart today to yours.  I can’t make you see anything in the Bible.  So my prayer today is that you may have an open mind, a receptive heart and may the eyes of your spiritual understanding become enlightened with the spiritual knowledge of knowing Him who was and is and will always be eternally faithful; my God of all Grace and all Peace, my Lord and my Savior Jesus Christ.  Amen.

I was a computer programmer for over 25 years.  I have worked on the development of several complex large computer software systems for some very large corporations.  I will occasionally introduce computer terms in my Bible lessons and I may do that again today.  But, I have found the design of God’s Word system to be so much more advanced and complex than anything that I have ever seen created by man that it is at times overwhelming.  God’s extreme intelligence is clearly displayed in the design of His Word.  However if you have never worked on a large scale computer system before or approached the Bible with this way of study, you will not understand what I am talking about.  This is why not very many people on the earth today actually understand how to study the Bible.  Intelligent design is displayed in every word printed right in front of them, but many do not recognize the patterns being presented.  I have been studying the Bible faithfully for over 20 years using my computer and I am not any closer to learning everything that God says because of the vastness of what is covered in the Bible.  Having said all of that, God has taught me a few things since the beginning and I am closer to knowing the complete truth today than I was 20 years ago.  The things that have taken me over 20 years to discover, you can learn in a matter of a few days if you apply yourself and actually believe what you are reading and then search and see them in the Bible for yourself.  When you do this, Satan will not be able to come and steal them from you.

In the last lesson I reviewed three distinct hidden patterns of the family of 5 divided 3 against 2 using the Micah 7:6 prophecy as the foundation and the stories of Abraham as two of the repeated models or patterns.  Abraham was both the father and the son in the family in these patterns.  In each of these examples, the pattern of family division recurred as an arrangement of 3 against 2.  The patterns were always close enough that you should have been able to recognize that they came from the same Designer.  You could call these little hidden patterns just amazing coincidences or you could call them the work of God like I do.   Today I am going to show you another even more potentially controversial hidden pattern of the family of 5 divided 3 against 2 that is also found within the life of Abraham.  This will be the third witness of God’s hidden pattern found in the life of a single man in the Bible.  I do not believe that the existence of three very similar patterns found within the story of one man in the Bible can be called a chance occurrence, a happenstance or even an accident.  If you could determine the mathematical probability of this occurring I believe it would be way beyond random probability.  If you can find this pattern in the life of anyone else in the Bible please let me know about it, I would really be interested in hearing if you can find it anywhere.  I personally believe God is trying to teach us something that is extraordinarily complex and important for us to know about.  Today we are going to explore the Abrahamic covenant and what God has initiated in a cleverly designed hidden textual format that will probably amaze some of my readers and for others they will probably just walk away being perplexed and skeptical.   I cannot predict which one you will choose to be, but I will hope that you will at least give God a chance before you shut the door on what He has to say in His Word.

I am now going to take you back to Genesis again to some prominently featured Words of God in the Old Testament that are very relevant to the family of 5 being divided 3 against 2.  Of course all of this information has been very widely studied for thousands of years and yet no one could have understood what was being said because I believe that it was only intended for us to know before Jesus returns.  I want to specifically show you these hidden secret concepts found within the Abrahamic Covenant so get ready to learn something new.  We are going to be studying the verses found in Genesis chapter 15.  You may recall while reading in this chapter of Genesis that God comes to Abram and makes some very specific promises to him and to his seed and these verses are all very interesting.  Let’s start by reviewing the general themes found in this chapter.  Here is my list of the important themes found in this chapter.

  1. Abram is very concerned because he has no heir.
  2. God comes to Abram in a spiritual vision.
  3. God makes Abram certain promises.
  4. Land is a central theme in this chapter.
  5. God makes a covenant with Abram.
  6. The seed of Abram is a central topic to this entire chapter.
  7. The majority of the statements spoken by God are prophetic.

In reading and studying Genesis 15 these were some of the central themes being related to me.  God appears to be dealing with Abram personally, but also simultaneously speaking prophetically about many subjects.  The central theme concerning an heir and the central theme of the seed are both critical to understanding the purpose and the plan of God being revealed in this chapter.  I believe that we should quickly list the promises of God made to Abram in this chapter also to understand what is being promised as well as the prophecies being revealed.

  1. Your heir will come from your own bowels (Gen 15:4).
  2. Your seed shall be as the stars of the heaven (Gen 15:5).
  3. Abram will inherit the land (Gen 15:7).
  4. Thy seed will be a stranger in a land and they shall serve them and be afflicted in bondage 400 years (Gen 15:13).
  5. God will judge this nation and the seed will come out with great substance (Gen 15:14).
  6. Abram will live a long life and die in peace (Gen 15:15).
  7. In the fourth generation they shall come here again (Gen 15:16).
  8. God makes a covenant with Abram saying the land from the Nile to the Euphrates is given to you and to your seed (Gen 15:18).

These are the basic prophecies and the promises that were made concerning Abram and his seed from direct statements of God in the spiritual vision.  I believe these are very important to note, because we will learn more about them as we go further into the lesson.  I think we need to do some introductory concept analysis to exactly what a “seed of Abraham” is in order to understand who God is talking to and why.  I have done a much more extensive Bible series on the concept of Understanding Bible Seeds so I will not repeat all of that information here, but I may touch on some of it again in this lesson.  If you want to understand this subject more completely you can stop and read that series first and then come back to here and continue or you can wing it and try to catch up with what I am teaching just today about Abraham’s seed.

Before I continue let me make a point about something that God does in the book of Genesis as well as other places in the Bible that is potentially very confusing to many Christians.  God will speak about natural things and spiritual things within the context of the same chapter, even calling them by the exact same name and description and not ever tell you which one He is talking about or if He has even changed the subject or has shifted the realm of domain of the subject from what we were just reading about in the previous verse.  Wow, I’m not sure if you really understood what I just said.  Maybe you will as we continue through the lesson.  Also know that one verse may be from a participant like Abram’s viewpoint and the next verse may be given to us from God’s viewpoint of the situation.  Scripture view point is a complex subject analysis, but one that you need to be aware of in order to understand how to rightly divide the Word of truth.  For example, Abram could ask a purely natural question and God could give a spiritual answer and both should be viewed differently.  There is also another level of complexity built into the story of Abraham based upon what we learned from Galatians 4.  The story of Abraham was and still is an allegorical representation of the family of God.  This means God tells a natural story about a natural man and these are parallel references to the spiritual realm.  All of this makes the correct interpretation of Genesis 15 infinitely more complex.

There are many spiritual things mentioned in Genesis 15 as well as many parallel natural things.  For example the concept of “seed” found in Genesis 15.  “Seed” is mentioned directly 4 times in 4 different verses.  Is every verse speaking about the same type of seed?  Is every verse speaking of the same exact seed?  Is this “seed” natural or is it spiritual or is it both simultaneously?  Is the term “seed” used as a singular reference or is it used as plural reference meaning many or is it both again simultaneously?  When I studied the subject of “seed” in the Bible I found where God called at the very least 10 different things by the exact same Hebrew word translated as “seed”.  Which one of these ten is the type of “seed” being spoken of in this chapter?  Or is every reference a different type of seed?  The Bible is so much more complex than you think it is, so let me try to answer some of these questions.  Let’s go to Genesis 15 and start reading in verse 18 first.

Gen 15:18  In the same day the LORD made a covenant with Abram, saying, Unto thy seed have I given this land, from the river of Egypt unto the great river, the river Euphrates:

I am going to start by talking about the covenant that God makes with Abraham first and then I’m going to talk about the seed of Abraham and then finally end back up at the covenant at the end of the lesson.   According to my Bible studies that I have done, a covenant is a spiritual marriage in the eyes of God.  If God makes a covenant, he is proposing spiritual marriage.  If you do not understand this concept then you should go and read my lessons on “Understanding Bible Covenants” first.  God says “Unto your seed I have given this land”.  God is speaking to Abram directly and speaking about his seed.  What or who is this seed that God is speaking of?  God actually does not define that in this verse does He?     People automatically assume it is only the natural children of Israel since they possess a small portion of that land today.   We can read in Romans 11:1 and 2 Corinthians 11:22 that Paul calls himself a seed of Abraham and Paul is very clearly speaking of a natural seed as being a physical descendant of the man Abraham.  You may recall that Abraham begat Isaac, Isaac begat Jacob and Jacob begat the 12 tribes of Israel.  We can also see in Hebrews 11:9 that Isaac and Jacob are described to be heirs of the promise.  So clearly we have some scriptures to lean towards an all-natural interpretation of Genesis 15.  We also know that Paul was born on the earth from the descendants of the tribe of Benjamin.  So there is clear precedence for a purely natural interpretation of the Seed of Abraham as being only a physical people.  This is a popular position that many Christians stand on.   But, is this all that the Bible says on the subject?  I think we are about to find out some new perspectives on this subject.

When reading the Bible it is important not to mix apples and oranges just so that you can call them all fruit.  This would be an example of trying to take the Word of God and make it all natural or to make it all spiritual by lumping both of these into a general basket category that you want to call the Truth and that would work if God wrote the Bible that way.  However God makes us divide the word of truth into categories of either spiritual or natural sections in order to understand it clearly.  What I am getting at is that there are many things that are spoken by God in this one chapter and if you think that God is only talking about one covenant, one people or even one man then you are in a position to be very confused.  You are going to have to read the Bible with a more open mind and then learn to use the Bible to interpret the Bible.  You are also going to have to discern the differences between natural things and spiritual things.  Here in this verse in Genesis it appears that God is speaking only to a natural man named Abram and that He is making a covenant which includes some physical land on the earth.  There is an explicit region described that goes from the Nile in Egypt to the Euphrates river going through Turkey, Syria and Iraq and this land has been directed to the seed of Abram.  I really do not have a problem with that general interpretation of this verse.  It is usually best to always take the Bible literally first and then stick with the literal interpretation when you can.   I said when you can, because there are some other places in the Bible that appear to expand our definition of what God was talking about in Genesis 15.  For example, read this verse in Galatians 3:

Gal 3:29  And if ye be Christ’s, then are ye Abraham’s seed, and heirs according to the promise.

Here we have a major new conflict brewing with the pure natural interpretation of Genesis 15.  You see in Galatians 3:29 it appears that God is calling all Christians the “seed of Abraham”.  God also calls us the “heirs” of the promise.  Which promise, is God speaking of and what is it that we are supposed to inherit?  This is obviously a very different new type of seed being spoken of than what we originally thought from reading Genesis 15:18.  Galatians 3:29 must be referring to a “spiritual” type of seed and not a “physical” seed since I am not a naturally born Jew and neither is the majority of the modern church today.  Since I’m not in possession of the natural land of Israel, this also means there is a potential spiritual inheritance that is different than the natural inheritance that was given to natural Israel by God in Genesis 15.  All of this new information makes correct Bible interpretation infinitely more complex for us immediately.  We are going to have to learn to rightly divide the Word of Truth if we are ever to correctly understand it.  We are going to have to balance this new spiritual information with the old natural information that we previously thought to be the entire truth.  It is important to note that this scripture implies a plural type of spiritual seed, meaning many spiritual individuals being called the seed of Abraham.  Everyone that belongs to Christ is now called the spiritual seed of Abraham.  This is the same pattern that existed when we read in Genesis 15:18 and there were many implied natural descendants of Abraham called his natural seed.  What I begin to see developing is a natural pattern found in Genesis 15 that has occurred first to help point us to a spiritual pattern that has occurred after Christ was raised from the dead.  I know I added the words “spiritual” and “natural” before the words “seed” in my interpretations but that is the only logical way to differentiate them in my view point.  Let’s back up in this chapter of Galatians and see what else God says about the Seed of Abraham.

Gal 3:16  Now to Abraham and his seed were the promises made. He saith not, And to seeds, as of many; but as of one, And to thy seed, which is Christ.

Here is another verse that complicates our efforts tremendously when interpreting any verse found in Genesis 15 with a reference to the seed subject.  Here in Galatians, God is speaking directly about the promises that were made to Abraham and to his seed and this time God clearly comes out and says that the seed in Genesis 15 is a singular reference to Christ and that it is not a plural reference meaning many.  Do you recognize how this presents more complex problems in interpreting the seed and the promises of God found in Genesis 15 correctly.  At the very least it appears to imply that God has made simultaneous promises to the natural and the spiritual seed of Abraham.  Here in Galatians 3:16, God says this promise was only made to the one seed of Abraham called Christ (Heb 2:16).  So we have a continual increasing conflict developing.  We just read in Hebrews 11:9 that Isaac and Jacob were called heirs of Abraham and God now directs us to Christ as being the only seed that was spoken of.  We have now gone from many to one and this is a totally new perspective.  I believe that we are seeing more parallels being revealed.  Abram had only one natural son that God recognized to be his natural heir.  This heir was Isaac and he represents a natural pattern of the spiritual Christ to come.  Let’s read another verse found in the New Testament from God’s commentary about the seed of Abraham:

Rom 4:13  For the promise, that he should be the heir of the world, was not to Abraham, or to his seed, through the law, but through the righteousness of faith.

These are vastly ignored verses in the Bible.  They clearly say the promise was not made to those natural seeds that were under the law, but that the promise was to the spiritual seed that would inherit the world through the righteousness of faith.  This is obviously a major problem for the exclusive natural seed interpretation of Genesis 15.  Here in this verse it does not name the specific region of the Nile to the Euphrates any more, it rather states it in the general term called the “world”.  The Greek word translated here as world means “an orderly arrangement”.  It denotes a place with structure and organization.   When God spoke to Abram in Genesis 15, the known world was centered between the Nile and the Euphrates.  That was the world back then.  I believe that this is what God is saying to us from these verses using patterns found in design and speech.

What I see developing is two realms of parallel existence.  The natural realm occurred first and Abraham produced a nation of natural seeds.  But, God then reveals that there is another type of seed that has also come from Abraham and this seed must be viewed spiritually from God’s point of view.  These verses in Romans and Galatians clearly inform us of another parallel type of seed that is spoken of by God and too many Christians want to ignore them to focus only on the natural descendants of Abraham.  There is an implied reference that the land between the Nile and the Euphrates was only a symbolic representation for the greater reference of the “world”.   Notice in Romans and Galatians God is speaking of the fulfillment of prophecies and He mentions the promises, the heirs and the seeds in these verses and this proves conclusively that God is speaking directly about what we are studying in Genesis 15.  Practically every major theme of Genesis 15 is explicitly satisfied in these verses.  To ignore God’s definitions, God’s perspective and God’s words of explanation will cause you to wrongly interpret the Bible 100 times out of 100 attempts.  I hope you are learning something today.

2Co 4:18  While we look not at the things which are seen, but at the things which are not seen: for the things which are seen are temporal; but the things which are not seen are eternal.

I believe that one of the primary goals of the New Testament is to cause Christians to transition away from looking at the temporary things of this world to try to teach us to look at the eternal things of God within the greater spiritual realm of domain.  Both in Galatians and Romans, God is attempting to shift our focus off of the natural things found in this world in an attempt to get us to see the supernatural spiritual things that He has accomplished in the unseen realm.  My mentioning these verses will probably not make me a very popular Bible teacher to a select number of people who believe that natural Israel was given the land eternally.  However, I am not going to ignore these important verses in the Bible that speak of Jesus and the church as the spiritual seed of Abraham in order to satisfy their personal private interpretation of Genesis 15.  Too many people read the fifteenth chapter of Genesis in isolation and think that God is speaking only to the natural people that will forever possess the physical land in the Middle East named Israel.  However, when we read the New Testament more closely we found some additional insight that is too important to ignore.    The New Testament appears to say that the seed of Abraham is not the natural seed, but that it is rather the spiritual seed who will inherit the promise of God.  Do not get me wrong, I’m not abandoning the natural nation of Israel.  I fully support them to get saved and come into the reality of Jesus Christ.   Let’s go through the rest of the verses in Genesis 15 that speak about the seed of Abraham to see how they might fit with what we have just learned from God in the New Testament.

Gen 15:2  And Abram said, Lord GOD, what wilt thou give me, seeing I go childless, and the steward of my house is this Eliezer of Damascus?

Here in verse 2 it is very interesting to note that Abram is speaking to God and telling God what God already knows.  It is not news to God it is only the sound of Abram complaining.  But, one hidden word stands out to me in this verse.  The word translated as “steward” is actually two Hebrew words and the translators omitted one of them.  The Hebrew word left out is “H1121” and it means “a son” and “a builder of the family name”.   Abraham is clearly saying to God I have no son; my only family builder is my servant.  So Abram desires a son.  This hidden son reference is not a coincidence.  This is the exact same Hebrew Word that Jesus used when He said “I am the Son (H1121) of Adam (man)”.

Gen 15:3  And Abram said, Behold, to me thou hast given no seed: and, lo, one born in my house is mine heir.

Here in verse 3 of Genesis 15, the term “seed” appears to be a singular natural and physical reference and it is spoken by Abram from Abram’s perspective of his personal situation.  Try to see how Abram is asking God a natural question and the answer that God gives back to him is precisely not the exact same question that was asked.  As you can see Abram is focused entirely on the singular fact that his wife Sarai has given him no children.  Abram desires to have an heir to inherit all that God has blessed him with.  Abram is seeking God for the very basic human need of a sole physical heir.  It is also interesting to note that Abram is blaming God for not having this heir.  Abram has been married to his wife Sarai for a while now and they have had no children but not for a lack of trying to have children.  Abram has only a servant in his house that is currently his sole heir if anything would happen to him.  There is a possible voiced discouragement in his question to God.   From this information so far we see a singular focus for a solitary son to be the natural physical heir.  To me this relates indirectly to another spiritual heir named Christ we saw in Galatians 3:16.  You see when Isaac was born to Abraham; God called Isaac his only son (Gen 22:2).  Jesus the Son of God is also called God’s “Only begotten” in John 3:16.  Are you seeing the parallel being established here with Abraham being a type of God the father?  Isaac is definitely a type of Jesus the future spiritual Seed of Abraham and the promised heir.  Let’s examine God’s response to Abraham’s natural problem.    Abraham tells God you have given me no seed.   This “seed” that Abraham is talking about is clearly a physical son.   Can we agree so far?

Gen 15:4  And, behold, the word of the LORD came unto him, saying, This shall not be thine heir; but he that shall come forth out of thine own bowels shall be thine heir.

As you can see God is telling Abram that this servant born in his house will not be his heir.  God then tells Abram that his heir will come directly from his own internal bowels.  From this statement we could automatically assume that God is indirectly speaking of a new second type of “seed” called sperm.  You can see this type of seed mentioned in the Bible in verses like Leviticus 12:2, Leviticus 15:16 and Numbers 5:28.   The sperm of a human male is definitely called by the same Hebrew word translated as “seed” in those verses.  Since this type of seed originates internally and then is produced externally we could think that God is speaking of this seed in Genesis 15:4.  If we do that the number of human male sperm cells (seeds) passed to the female can vary.  The number of sperm cells can range from 20 million to 400 million individual cells.  Yet this amount is a very countable number so keep that in mind.  Abraham was asking God about one natural seed called a child and God seems to confirm that this child will come from his own body (bowels) and that he will be produced from one of the millions of seed cells that were in him.  However that is a very human natural viewpoint of another actual spiritual situation and circumstance being spoken of in the New Testament. The word translated as “bowels” is more likely to mean the “womb” as in a female reference to a woman’s natural body part that produces children.  Obviously Abram does not have one of these, or does he?  You can look at this verse two different ways using the Bible.  There are specific verses that say Sarah’s body is Abraham’s body and that they are now one flesh (Gen 2:24).  So what his wife has Abram also technically possesses.  Then there is another aspect that is also highly applicable to our subject of having children.  These are called the spiritual children that will be birthed after the resurrection of Christ.

Gal 4:19  My little children, of whom I travail in birth again until Christ be formed in you,

Here is a very confusing verse for many people.  A human male named Paul is writing about being in labor with soon to be born children and clearly he is not speaking literally or more specifically physically.  Paul must be writing about a spiritual process that is taking place.  I believe God is speaking spiritually in this verse in Genesis also while people are thinking naturally.  Abraham is called the “father” of the church in Romans 4:16 and James 2:21.  This cannot be speaking naturally and it can only be revealing a spiritual fatherhood that has transpired as a result of Abraham’s faith.  Do you see how complicated these subjects found in Genesis can become?  So far we have two different types of natural seeds being spoken of and one new third spiritual kind being implied in this chapter and it is about to get even more complex in the next verse.  Genesis 15:3 was a natural question and verse 4 was a potential natural answer that I believe can simultaneously apply to the spiritual realm.  These are God’s words of promise to Abram with definite spiritual applications.  We also saw a seed transition occurring; moving from a singular reference to a potential plural reference. Now let’s see what God says next to Abraham.

Gen 15:5  And he brought him forth abroad, and said, Look now toward heaven, and tell the stars, if thou be able to number them: and he said unto him, So shall thy seed be.

Here in verse 5 of Genesis 15 the subject of “seed” seems to shift dramatically beyond the concepts of anything natural or singular.  Reread this verse very carefully and see if you can see how God has shifted the focus and the perspective has changed from a naturalistic human way of thinking to a purely spiritual divine point of view.  Notice how these words seem to be coming from how God see’s things happening up in the spiritual realm.  To me it appears that God is looking down from heaven at a new and different type of seed.  Remember that the last verse spoken by God could be taken either naturally or spiritually, but here in this verse it is practically impossible to take it naturally at all.  God is still speaking directly to Abram and this is still the same answer to his natural question about a singular natural heir (seed).  However, God is now comparing the concept of Abraham’s “seed” to be like the number of the stars in the heavens.  Do you have any idea how many stars there are in the heavens?   Using modern telescopes we have determined that there are so many that we cannot even begin to count them all.  Modern scientists have only been able to estimate the astronomical number of heavenly bodies.  This number is way over the trillions of stars level.  Therefore here in Genesis 15:5 God has escalated from one seed or even millions of seeds all the way to a range of uncountable seeds.   So obviously what God is saying to Abram is something way beyond what a natural human mind could conceive.  The current earth population is around 7 billion and this is still a very countable number.  Even if every human on the earth got saved today, we would not come close to the number of stars in the heavens.  Are you following me so far?  I know you can look at this verse other ways and reason that God was only speaking of people seeing stars with the naked human eye in order to determine the number of seeds to come.  However, since the knowledge of this is going forth in a day when we can see way beyond the naked eye constraints, I believe that God is answering Abram from a prophetical spiritual way of thinking and seeing?  Let’s estimate the count of the stars visible by the naked eye on a clear night to be somewhere in the range of the low thousands maybe even tens of thousands.  Is that all of the seed that Abraham will produce?  Even if you count to a million, there are 7 billion people on the planet.  There are currently over 4 million natural descendants of Abraham living in Israel today.  Neither of these numbers is in the thousands.  There is no logical way that God is talking about a number that low to be all of the seeds of Abraham.  After all God knows how many stars that He created.  I personally believe based upon what we learned in Romans and Galatians God was thinking eternally all along while simultaneously speaking of both natural and spiritual things.  Let’s skip down quickly to verses 13 and 18 to see the last two times the “seed” of Abraham is directly mentioned in this chapter.  One of these verses we already looked at, but it won’t hurt us to see it again:

Gen 15:13  And he said unto Abram, Know of a surety that thy seed shall be a stranger in a land that is not theirs, and shall serve them; and they shall afflict them four hundred years;

Gen 15:18  In the same day the LORD made a covenant with Abram, saying, Unto thy seed have I given this land, from the river of Egypt unto the great river, the river Euphrates:

Here in these two verses we have what appears to be the usage or a reference to the fourth type of the Hebrew word translated as “seed” of Abraham found in Genesis 15.  This time God has seemed to shift back to the plural natural perspective of the nation of Israel being the natural seed that are to be captive slaves in Egypt for a period of 400 years and that was not what Abram was asking about in verse 3 or even what God was talking about in verses 4 or 5.  This “seed” in verses 13 and 18 appear to be plural and it is definitely natural on the surface.  Yet we are still talking about the same subject of a singular seed heir of Abraham.  This makes it very complex to interpret all of these scriptures correctly.  When the children of Israel were freed from Egyptian bondage scholars estimate their numbers to be around 1 to 2 million people.  This would involve all the men, women and children that came out of Egypt.  This reference is somewhere beyond the number one, but way below the number of the stars in the heavens.  So this is why I stated that this appears to be a fourth type of seed referenced in this chapter. We have seen multiple seed references and multiple numbers associated with each reference.  Going back to Galatians 3:29, God said “If you are Christ’s then you are Abraham’s seed”.  Based upon what we just read in Genesis 15 of the 4 different types of possible seeds mentioned, which seed type is Romans 4:13, Galatians 3:16 and 3:29 talking about?

  1. Seed of Abraham = the son Isaac a solitary seed/heir (Genesis 15:3)
  2. Seed of Abraham = the sperm in his bowels in the range of millions of cells (Genesis 15:4)
  3. Seed of Abraham = something as the stars of the heavens an uncountable number (Genesis 15:5)
  4. Seed of Abraham = the natural nation of Israel in bondage 400 years 1 to 2 million people (Genesis 15:13, 15:18)

Since the majority of the church does not qualify to be seed type 1, 2, or 4, we must be found somewhere in the seed type 3 by default or we are another parallel seed type that is not directly mentioned.  We also saw that Jesus was called the singular seed of Abraham.  Which one of these seed types fit that pattern?  I believe Jesus was a pattern of the seed type 1, Isaac.  That was an introductory analysis of the very complex subject of the “seed of Abraham”.   I just showed you 3 or 4 different things that are called the seed of Abraham concurrently.  Yet God said none of these are the heirs in Galatians or Romans.  How difficult is this?  A physical heir was what Abram sought from God and Galatians 3:16, 3:29 and Romans 4:13, tells that Jesus Christ and the church are these revealed heirs of Abraham.  Yet we (the church) were not held captive 400 years in Egypt.  However, you may be able to see that according to Bible typology, the human race was held in symbolic bondage to Satan for 4000 years until Jesus Christ came and died and provided us freedom from the bondage of sin.  There are many distinct parallels given to us in the Bible about the natural nation of Israel being a pattern of the church for us to learn from.  I will not expand that part of the subject any further today, but I thought I would throw you a couple of new clues to think about.

An heir is one of the major themes of the entire story of Abraham found in Genesis 15?   A physical heir was what Abraham desired and it was a spiritual heir that God desired.  When God was telling Abraham what He would do in this chapter, you need to understand what Jesus said about this chapter in the Gospels.  Moses wrote the book of Genesis and in John 5:46 that Moses wrote about Him.  This was a very key statement to understanding anything in the Book of Genesis.  It is ulitmately about Jesus.  The truth of the Bible is rarely found on the surface text, it will only be clearly understood when we dig deep beneath the surface and find out what else God says about the subjects being discussed.  I am now ready to talk about the Abrahamic Covenant and its hidden meanings.  So far in this lesson I skipped over the primary verses that I wanted to talk about in an attempt to explain how things in Genesis 15 were given more from God’s spiritual point of view rather than they are from Abraham’s natural point of view.  What I am going to say now will further confirm that if you can see it.   We can fairly easily understand that God is doing something much greater than just making a covenant with Abraham in this chapter if we perceive the underlying messages being revealed to us.  Let’s go to verse 7 in Genesis 15 and begin to read there next.

Gen 15:7  And he said unto him, I am the LORD that brought thee out of Ur of the Chaldees, to give thee this land to inherit it.

Gen 15:8  And he said, Lord GOD, whereby shall I know that I shall inherit it?

Here we have another direct promise given to Abraham to inherit the land.  Notice in Genesis 15:7 God says to Abraham I brought you out of your former land to give you this land to inherit it.  I can see spiritual implications on that statement.  We as Christians have been brought out of our previous natural land to become the spiritual heirs within a new heavenly spiritual domain.  I think we need to look up the definition of the word translated as “inherit” in this verse to learn what it means.  I think we need to analyze this statement.   Did Abram ever possess the Promised Land?  Uh oh?  Abraham certainly sojourned in this land but there is no way that you could say that Abraham inherited it!  I think you will be surprised to find that “to inherit” does not mean what you automatically assumed that it meant.

H3423

A primitive root; to occupy (be driving out previous tenants, and possessing in their place); by implication to seize, to rob, to inherit; also to expel, to impoverish, to ruin: – cast out, consume, destroy, disinherit, dispossess, drive (-ing) out, enjoy, expel, X without fail, (give to, leave for) inherit (-ance, -or), + magistrate, be (make) poor, come to poverty, (give to, make to) possess, get (have) in (take) possession, seize upon, succeed, X utterly.

This Hebrew word represents a wide range of possible meanings and uses.  It would appear to me that many of the meanings are an aggressive action of force against an enemy.   It also appears that there is a double edged sword of blessings and cursing attached to the very definition.  The occupying people would be blessed and the occupied people would be cursed.  To occupy is a conquering term where one nation overtakes another nation.  It denotes the seizing control of, the casting out of the previous occupants, or to make the previous owners poor, consume them, destroy them, ruin them, to take possession and to seize control away from someone or something.  This is not what we normally think of when we say I inherited a house from my uncle.  Using this definition that would mean you kicked your uncle out of his house by force and you took it over to live in it for yourself.   Did Abraham ever do this?  I do not see how Abraham ever fulfilled this prophecy until after his natural descendants did it hundreds of years later when Joshua led his children into the Promised Land again to possess it.  Did you know that this story of Joshua and Israel taking the Promised Land was a type of Jesus and the church today?  Do you know what Jesus’ Hebrew name was?  The Greek word transliterated as “Jesus” is the exact same Hebrew name transliterated as “Joshua” who led his people into the land to possess it.  Do you think this is a coincidence?  I can see the parallels being given to us again, can you?

Wow, I could spend a lot of time talking about that but, perhaps I better not today.  Just take note that God is speaking here about a pending battle that will take place in the future.  God is denoting future responsibility and action that is required by Abram and his seed to inherit the Promised Land.   Then look at verse 8, where Abram says “Lord how will I know that I will possess (inherit) it”.  What is God’s answer to this question?  I am about to blow you away with God’s proof text answer.  This is the surprise that I have been building to today in this lesson.  Here is God’s reply to Abram’s question.

Gen 15:9  And he said unto him, Take me an heifer of three years old, and a she goat of three years old, and a ram of three years old, and a turtledove, and a young pigeon.

Gen 15:10  And he took unto him all these, and divided them in the midst, and laid each piece one against another: but the birds divided he not.

I can read these two verses now and see how that Abraham is given the task of dividing the Spiritual Family of God very plainly.  Can you see it?  You are going to have to learn to look beyond your natural thinking and begin to look for the spiritual pattern characteristics from what you have learned before.  In these two verses there is no mention of a family, a father, a mother or a mother-in-law, a son, a daughter-in-law or even a daughter, yet they are all right there in front of you in plain sight.  I call this the display of God’s intelligence and His ability to hide the truth in plain sight.  It is like I taught you earlier, when you are sewing together dresses from a single pattern, one dress can be made to look totally different than another dress by the simplest choice of options or the material fabrics selected.  One dress might be made from black silk with white pin stripes and the other dress could be made from a linen or cotton red polka dot pattern.  They can appear totally different on the surface.  However, the expert will always be able to recognize the reuse of the same pattern in both.  The designer can make specific selections to change the entire look and feel of a dress and still be using the exact same pattern.

In object oriented computer programming this is a cool feature called “inheritance” that exists that is related to our subject today.  One computer object inherits the characteristics and patterns of another object and the new object can make little additions or modifications to individualize the new component.  However the original pattern is still available and is clearly recognizable to the expert.  Did you notice this computer technique was called “inheritance”?  Did you notice that inheritance was one of the primary subjects within the Abrahamic Covenant?  You should really learn more about computers if you want to learn more about God’s word.   Sometimes the parallels are amazing.  I am teaching you God’s object oriented technique of inheritance today found in His word using patterns.  God reuses natural patterns to convey hidden spiritual lessons.  When you learn these things it changes how you study the Bible.

Did you notice how many animals that God has instructed Abram to use in this covenant?   It just so happens that there is exactly 5 animals used in this covenant.  Uh oh?  Since we are not directly told that there are five you are going to have to count them for yourself and this is just a small effort on your part to help you to recognize the same familiar pattern found in Micah 7:6.  How many family members did Jesus tell us were in the family in Luke 12:52?  Was it not exactly five?  Do you think that the use of 5 animals is just another strange coincidence?  I certainly do not believe that.  Now let me show you what else is revealed here in the Abrahamic covenant.  Did you notice that 3 of the animals are divided?  Do you think the number three is another coincidence?  Did you also notice that these 3 animals are given specific ages as well as their specific sexual genders?  One is specifically masculine and the other two are specifically feminine.  A “Ram” is always a mature male sheep.  A “Heifer” is a mature female cow.  The “She Goat” is also a mature female goat.  These are three very specific types of unique animals with great detail given to each of them.  It clearly tells me that a ram is not a cow and a goat is not a ram and a cow is not a goat.   We have three very different creatures even though they are all within the global animal kingdom.  But, that makes three animals with specific genders being divided.  Is that an accident?   There is absolutely no way that this occurs by accident.  What we are seeing is the Father, the Mother and the Mother-in-law in the family of God being divided and we will get to this in more depth very soon; one male and two females.

The specific genders of the two birds are not revealed within the text, but we now know from our understanding of Micah 7:6 that one bird is a male and the other bird has to be a female.  But, since they are not divided we learn some very new information about how the family of God is being divided.  It is essential that you notice that 3 of the animals are divided and 2 of the animals are not divided?  Does any of this sound familiar to you?  Isn’t this very similar to the patterned words of Jesus again from Luke 12:52 when He said the house would be divided 3 against 2 and 2 against 3?  Is this not another reoccurrence of the pattern of the house of 5 divided 3 against 2 with a slight new variation?  In every pattern given, God is revealing new details of the family division.  I’m telling you God is so smart that He can write something in the Bible for thousands of years and no one understands it until He reveals it to us and then it is so obvious that I wonder, why I didn’t see it before?   Let me give you a new picture diagram of the Abrahamic Covenant and show you how it fits the pattern of God’s family of 5:

This is the third time in Genesis that God has used something in direct association with Abraham to display a repetitive pattern of the 5 in one family divided 3 against 2.  The first time I showed you this pattern, Abraham was a type of the son.  The next time I showed you this pattern, Abraham was a type of the father.   Now we have the covenant that God is making with Abraham with another new variation of 5 being divided 3 by 2.  Keep in mind that this is God’s answer to prove that Abraham will inherit the world/land.  God is saying to Abraham this is all of the proof that you need, but it was certainly spiritually encrypted or encoded evidence that was not understood by Abraham or anyone else since Abraham until now.  I can clearly see the spiritual implications being revealed to us and I hope that you can also.

I need to address a subject here for the sake of argument.  You might can look at my diagram of the family of 5 and see how Satan has taken it and possessed it for a symbol of himself.  You see I believe that Satan figured this truth out a long time ago and this is why there many satanic symbols today that are an upside down five pointed star with the head of a ram on it.  Do you think this is also a coincidence?  I believe there is no way that this is a coincidence.  I believe Satan purposely selected this symbol to discredit the truth and to present himself as God.  I do not believe that Satan is stupid.  Satan is very intelligent and very tricky.  However, I believe that God is smarter and He is definitely going to win this battle.  What battle?  You will have to read Revelation 12 to see the coming battle in heaven.  Satan will take on God in heaven with all of his might and he will be thrown down to the earth.  Let’s get back to the Abrahamic covenant.

The animals selected by God are not specifically revealing on the surface except for the Ram.  The ram is a symbolic representation for God the Father and He is always the father of the Lamb.  A lamb is of course a type of the Son of God, Jesus Christ.  When Abraham took Isaac to be sacrificed, Isaac asked his father “where is the animal to be sacrificed”.  Abraham’s answer was “God will provide himself as the sacrifice” (Gen 22:8).  Now we see that a ram and not a lamb is caught by his horns nearby where Abraham was and Abraham goes and gets this animal and he becomes the sacrifice instead of Isaac.  Therefore God as a Ram in my diagram is a very easy association for me to make.  I personally believe that God chose these five animals to teach us some new truths while also using them to hide the pattern in more depth of surface complexity.  I do not ever recall Jesus being called a bird, but a dove did descend from heaven upon him when He was baptized by John.  So I can see an association of Jesus to a bird using this reference alone.  I personally believe that God did not tell Abraham to use a lamb because this would have given it away and made it way too obvious for everyone to focus on the Lamb of God.

I do not believe at this level of the discussion that the identities of the female animals, the heifer or the she goat are important for today’s lesson.  I could have flipped them and the result would still be the same for what I want to say about them.  The same is technically true of the given two birds; one is described to be a turtledove and the other a young pigeon.  However there is an interesting part of the Hebrew definition of the “young pigeon” that I will mention briefly.  This Hebrew word means “nestling” and it is referring to a very young bird without feathers.  In other words a newly hatched baby bird that just came into the world!   I do not see how this type of bird fits with a type of the Son of God, but the newborn/reborn church I can make that fit very logically.   What I want to teach you about briefly is what God uses in the Old Testament as a type of Jesus and the church.  This may be too much information in this lesson, but I’m going to try to show it to you anyway so that you can see the usage by God of these two birds as a type for Jesus and the church more clearly.  We are going to the book of Leviticus and we will read in the fourteenth chapter:

Lev 14:2  This shall be the law of the leper in the day of his cleansing: He shall be brought unto the priest:

Lev 14:3  And the priest shall go forth out of the camp; and the priest shall look, and, behold, if the plague of leprosy be healed in the leper;

Lev 14:4  Then shall the priest command to take for him that is to be cleansed two birds alive and clean, and cedar wood, and scarlet, and hyssop:

Lev 14:5  And the priest shall command that one of the birds be killed in an earthen vessel over running water:

Lev 14:6  As for the living bird, he shall take it, and the cedar wood, and the scarlet, and the hyssop, and shall dip them and the living bird in the blood of the bird that was killed over the running water:

Lev 14:7  And he shall sprinkle upon him that is to be cleansed from the leprosy seven times, and shall pronounce him clean, and shall let the living bird loose into the open field.

I read these verses and come near to tears when I thought of them.  If you do not see what they are saying then perhaps you should get saved.  God uses the law of the leper cleansing to reflect the redemptive works of Jesus Christ on the cross.  Practically everything mentioned in these verses are symbolic representations of something much greater in power and spiritual authority.   Two birds are used and that is not a coincidence, especially knowing who the two birds are in the Abrahamic Covenant?  One bird sheds his blood in order to free the other bird after the living bird is dipped into the blood and the water of the dead bird.  There is a direct mention of an earthen vessel, cedar wood, scarlet thread and hyssop and each of these are very significant to the story of Jesus.  Jesus came to the earth in an earthen vessel to shed His blood for us.   Jesus was hung on a cross of wood.  The Roman soldiers gave Jesus a drink of vinegar and hyssop on the cross.  When Jesus’ side was pierced by the soldier’s spear, water and blood poured out onto the ground.  The scarlet thread represented the blood line of the savior from Abraham to David to Jesus.

I personally believe that leprosy is a hidden type of sin in the Bible.  Leprosy is a physical state of uncleanness that reveals to us a greater truth about a spiritual state of uncleanness.  Did you notice what the priest was instructed to do with the two birds?  One bird is killed and his blood is collected in a pot with running water.  The living bird is dipped into the pot and then is set free to fly away after being symbolically cleansed.   I of course can see Jesus as being the type of the bird that has shed His blood to cleanse the church that is represented by the living bird.  In other words we in the church, do not have to shed our blood to be made clean from our sins.  It was only Jesus’ blood that causes our spiritual cleansing from our sins (1 Jo 1:9).  Two birds are definitely a hidden pattern for Christ and the church so these 5 animals are beginning to fall into place very nicely.

The ages of the three animals that are divided are specifically given and they are said to each be 3 years old.  That of course makes life more difficult for me to try to explain.  God the Father is an eternal ageless spiritual being and has no age.   The Heavenly Jerusalem was the elder woman first created in covenant with God as the type of Sarah.  So the Heavenly Jerusalem has a birth or a start creation date, even though I do not know when this occurred.  The Earthly Jerusalem was a much younger woman and she was a type of Hagar.   We do technically know when this approximately occurred from reading in the Bible and calculating the dates.  The covenant of Abraham was made approximately 2000 years after Adam and 2000 years before Christ.  So we generally know the age of one woman in human terms she is technically near 4000 years old earth time.  However here in this verse God calls them all three years old.  I personally believe this is symbolic and certainly not literal ages.  It also emphasizes the number 3 to us to help us to see that this is an important number to recognize in this verse.  I do however believe that this number teaches us that all three animals were called mature and not newborns.  A three year old cow, ram or goat is old enough to have children and that is in stark contrast to the young pigeon that is not yet old enough or mature enough to have children.   I believe personally that the number 3 signifies a triune characteristic of each.  God was God the Father, God the Word and God the Holy Spirit at this time in the covenant.  The nation of Israel was mankind made in the image and likeness of God and they were spirit, soul and body.  Ok, here is where I get to speculate a bit.  I believe the angels in heaven were also triune beings made in the image of God.   The number 3 given to each animal could be representative of other things as well, but I do not have time to explore them today.

So why are there three animals split down the middle in this covenant while two were not divided at all?  The birds could have very easily been divided with great ease compared to a much larger cow, ram or goat.   I told you that this lesson today was going to get very controversial so here I go again.  I’m going to start with the easier one first.  If the woman Heavenly Jerusalem consists of every angelic being including Satan and his angels, I can logically see how this female in Heaven can be divided to eliminate all of the evil while preserving all of the good angles.  Therefore I have concluded that to divide the she goat is God removing sin and evil while keeping the good.  Now we get to the younger woman called the Earthly Jerusalem and things get a little more complicated because of the vast numbers of religious beliefs that are not based upon a complete spiritual view of the Bible.  I believe the same division of good vs. evil is occurring in this woman also.  You see the controversy come in when you find scriptures in the Bible that people take to say that God will come to the rescue of the entire natural nation of Israel to save them all.  I know that this is not what the Bible actually teaches us.  The Earthly Jerusalem is only the natural people of the descendants of Jacob that are under the law.  She was a type of Hagar and I showed you in the last lesson that Hagar was cast out of the family of God by allegorical interpretation.  Therefore none of natural Israel will be saved ever.  But, that does not mean they cannot become spiritually born again in order to be saved.  It does make the salvation of natural Israel conditional.  According to what God says in the book of Romans we have to balance every scripture about Israel giving each equal priority.  Here is God quoting from Isaiah:

Rom 9:27  Esaias also crieth concerning Israel, Though the number of the children of Israel be as the sand of the sea, a remnant shall be saved

A remnant is not many based upon the sands of the sea concept that it is being compared to.  We must realize at this time that God is saying the natural house of Israel on the earth will be divided and a remnant will be saved and others will just miss out.  We of course know very clearly how they can be saved.  God says everyone that believes God raised Jesus from the dead and confesses Jesus as Lord they will be saved (Rom 10:9).  Those that do not believe or do not confess Jesus as Lord will be damned.  This is still not good news for a lot of people.  That really saddens me tremendously but this is the way that God has established salvation to work.  I guess I should change the subject off of natural Israel and get back to the rest of the family of God again before I make some new enemies.

We are getting progressively more complex as we continue up to the top of the spiritual food chain.  The Ram being divided is clearly a type of God.  This is going to make life and your understanding of the Bible infinitely more complex to try to comprehend.  How can you divide God?   Are you beginning to see my problem?  I guess I should say God’s problem, and not mine.  In every other family member I believe there was a division of the good from the evil and how do you make that fit with our understanding of a good God?  Technically you cannot divide God.  We know that the triune God is described to be “One” (Eph 4:6)!  Yet even in mathematics you can divide the number one and get fractions.  According to the Abrahamic Covenant God says He is divided here by association to a ram.  I think I mentioned this in other lessons, but it needs to be readdressed for this discussion.  If God the Father does not die on the cross and experience death for all mankind, we (the whole earth) are in serious trouble.  This would mean God the Father is still in covenant with all of the angels.  This means God is still in covenant with natural Israel.  This would also mean God’s son does not have anything to inherit.  You need to understand that God is not evil.  However, the Bible informs us that God was in covenant with evil and this represents a major problem for God.  The only legal way to end the covenant with evil is through experiencing death to separate Himself from His old wives.  The N.T. talks a lot about us being the heirs of an inheritance. An inheritance only occurs after someone dies to leave their possessions to another.  When Jesus was raised from the dead He makes this statement that is almost universally ignored:

Mat 28:18  And Jesus came and spake unto them, saying, All power is given unto me in heaven and in earth.

Why does God the Father have to transfer ALL power in both heaven and the earth to His risen Son Jesus?  I think that is an excellent question.  I also think since no one could answer it they ignored it.  It is very clear to me from this statement that God has transferred all spiritual authority to the Son Jesus Christ who was raised from the dead.  Why didn’t God do this before He died on the cross?  The term “power” in this verse means “authority”.  We know that God by definition is almighty and all powerful so it is impossible to transfer His power, but to transfer His authority to another member of the Godhead is a different concept entirely.  Authority is the rule or the government of a nation.  This transfer of authority tells us that whoever was running the Kingdom of Heaven is not the same one who now is running the Kingdom of Heaven in the eyes of God.  I told you this was deep and controversial.  But yet it is written in the Bible so do not ignore it.  I could give you many other Bible verses that reveal the death of God but I really do not have the time today.  I think I will end this Bible lesson here and perhaps continue it on another day in the future.  If you have understood anything that I have taught tell me.  If you have doubts and questions tell me.  I do not know what needs more explanation and what does not until someone raises the issue.  I know this was a long Bible lesson and I really could not cover everything that I wanted.  I tried to shift your focus from natural things to spiritual things and this will help you if you can do it.  I thought this was going to my last lesson, but I will probably need to do another to show you the other patterns found in the life of Abraham and his son Isaac.  So until next time, may God continue to bless you and keep you in your study of His Word.

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Understanding the Hidden Spiritual Family Structure of God’s Household! The Mature Women in God’s Spiritual Family! Part 7

Jun 22

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(Ver 1.2)  This is now Part 7 in a series of extremely advanced Bible studies about a new subject that I call “The Hidden Spiritual Structure of the Family of God”.  The spiritual information in this series will dramatically change your perspective of the Bible, if you can see them and if you will choose to accept them.  I have covered a tremendous amount of new ideas and revelations and I cannot take the time to go back and repeat all of them today, so if you have not read this series from the beginning I would suggest that you go back and start reading with “Part 1” first.  In the last lesson I introduced you to the last woman in the family of God as the church.  She is the youngest woman called the daughter in a new covenant marriage with the risen Son of God, Jesus Christ.  This woman was named the New Jerusalem in Revelation 3:12 and 21:2 and she is called the Holy Jerusalem in Revelation 21:10.  Three times in Revelation she has the title of the “daughter-in-law” or the synonymous interpretation the “bride” (G3565) found in Revelation 21:2, 21:9 and 22:17 and this can be seen easily by looking at the original Greek word definition.  Today I want to search the Bible for the identities of the other two mature women in the family of 5.  As you recall, God said the “daughter” would be divided against her mother and the “daughter-in-law” would be divided against her mother-in-law in Micah 7:6, Matthew 10:35 and Luke 12:53.   So we are now looking in the Bible for the information and the specific names to reveal who these two women are that are divided from our church daughter.  I found the identity of the “daughter-in-law” simply by searching the Bible for the same Greek word (G3565) translated as “daughter-in-law” and I found her identity easily revealed in the books of John and Revelation because of the limited usage of this word in the N.T.  She was described to be a city, a bride and the spiritual wife of the Lamb of God.  This woman was also described to be a spiritual nation of people that consisted of both male and female individuals that reside now as a part of God’s new spiritual family.  Therefore we are now searching for the other women with a similar pattern, make-up, characteristics or features.  We are also searching for not just two women, but more specifically two mothers and that should narrow the scope of the search significantly.  The Hebrew word used for “mother” in Micah 7:6 is H517 and there are over 200 verses in the Bible that contain this word.  That is really too many verses to be useful.  The Hebrew word translated as “mother in law” is H2545 and this word is only found in one other book of the Bible and that makes it very interesting to me.  It just so happens that the “mother-in-law” H2545 is used 9 other times in the book of Ruth and only one time in Micah 7:6.  I do not believe that this is a coincidence.  I see it to be a direct hidden clue to the identity of at least one of the women in God’s family.

Do you recall the story of Ruth?  If you do not, I have a more in-depth lesson series on this book of the Bible that will explore and explain many of the hidden typologies found there.  I will for your benefit give you a quick synopsis of that lesson series to show you how it applies to Jesus the Son, the church the daughter and the mother-in-law of the church.  Ruth was a Gentile woman who married a Hebrew husband after this Jewish family moved to her country of Moab from Bethlehem.  Her husband and the other males in the family all died in Moab and that left two daughter-in-laws and their mother in law as the surviving widows.  One daughter-in-law returns to her family, but the other one departs with her mother-in-law to go back to Bethlehem.  This gentile “daughter-in-law” was named Ruth.  She is the primary subject of the entire book.  There in Bethlehem, while trying to survive Ruth is met by a man named Boaz.  It just so happens, that Ruth is laboring in a harvest field that is owned by Boaz.  Boaz is a near relative to Ruth’s mother-in-law’s dead husband.  This means Boaz is a potential kinsman “Redeemer”.  Ruth is given favor from Boaz and is blessed while she is working his harvest field.  To make a long story shorter, Boaz marries the woman Ruth and redeems the land of the dead relative and they become the great grandparents of David the King.  This natural story of Ruth is an amazing parallel to another New Testament spiritual story.  Today’s church is largely comprised of Gentile people, so the church qualifies to be the symbolic type of this woman Ruth and both are called “daughter-in-laws”.  We are now the laborers in God’s harvest field of the earth and He owns the field that we are working in right now.  God has granted us His favor and blessings while we are working in His harvest field.  We are of course not harvesting natural food, but we are harvesting symbolic wheat for God’s harvest and that is His people.  Boaz the kinsman Redeemer was a Jew from Bethlehem and he is a type of the man Jesus Christ also a Jew born in Bethlehem.  Of course Jesus Christ was God in the flesh that came down from heaven to the earth which is a type of the land of spiritual Moab.  Jesus Christ was crucified and died in this realm of spiritual Moab on a cross and then He was raised from the dead to redeem us from our sins and to save us from this world.  That makes Ruth’s mother-in-law a symbolic type of the nation of Israel.  You will see why I say that very soon.  In this story of Ruth we have a “daughter-in-law” who becomes a “bride”.  We have a mother-in-law that is a Jew under the Law from Bethlehem.  We also have a son from Bethlehem who becomes the husband (bridegroom) to redeem his bride.  There are many other Bible patterns in this book, but I only hit the ones that we needed for this lesson.  The story of Ruth is a story of natural Israel, God the Father, the Son of God and the church and each of these are demonstrated to us in amazing clarity in the book of Ruth using the keywords of the mother-in-law and the daughter in-law to direct us to this information.  These are the two exact words from Micah 7:6 so they must contain related information that we need to know about.  What we need is an additional witness to this hidden reality in another book of the Bible and that is where we are going soon.

John 3:3  Jesus answered and said unto him, Verily, verily, I say unto thee, Except a man be born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God.

Joh 3:6  That which is born of the flesh is flesh; and that which is born of the Spirit is spirit.

Jesus taught us something that was very profound in the third chapter of John.  When Jesus described the “new birth” He said “That which is born of the flesh is only flesh, but that which is born of the Spirit is spirit.  Jesus reveals a significant spiritual law here in this statement.  First, Jesus says spirits can give birth to spirits and second, only a spirit can produce other spirits.  Jesus goes on to say in this chapter of John, “Unless a man is born again, he cannot see the Kingdom of God”.  This verse stipulates a fixed requirement that a second birth must take place or you will never see God’s eternal kingdom.  This statement of Jesus of course blew the mind of Nicodemus and this natural thinking man asked “How can a man be born again?”  “Can he enter again into his mother’s womb?”  Of course this was not what Jesus was saying at all.  Neither was Jesus thinking naturally of another physical birth.  Jesus is not teaching physical reincarnation.  Here is a prime example of how people can hear what God is saying and totally miss it because they are not on the same level as the speaker.  This is the greatest challenge new Christians have in the world today.  To renew people’s minds to think spiritually instead of naturally is the biggest challenge that I am faced with while teaching on the internet.  Most of my critics are dominated by naturally thinking carnal minds.  They do not attempt to think outside of their little carnal box and thus they remain ignorant of what God wants them to know.   Romans 8:7, says the carnal mind is an enemy against God.  So when my critics tell me I’m wrong, they are speaking as an enemy of God.  I certainly feel sorry for them, but I have learned that I cannot help them.  Let’s see what Jesus was actually speaking of:

Joh 3:5  Jesus answered, Verily, verily, I say unto thee, Except a man be born of water and of the Spirit, he cannot enter into the kingdom of God.

Jesus is comparing two different types of birth in this one verse; one is a natural birth and the other is spiritual birth.  Jesus is saying that you are born naturally when your mother’s water breaks and you enter into the natural world through her physical door and then you are born spiritually by a similar patterned act from the Spirit of God.  Do you remember that Jesus said “I am the door” (Jo 10:9)?  Jesus is saying there is a spiritual door into the Kingdom of God and you will not enter into it unless you find it first.  Wow, that is pretty radical for those who think there are many ways to God.  Why is Jesus revealing that spiritual things are repeated patterns of the natural things that God created?  You better get a hold of this concept very fast if you ever want to learn about what God is trying to teach you.

There is a spiritual law of Genesis about seeds that is very relevant to my lesson today.  This law was a foundational principle found within the patterns of creation in Genesis.  One of the key seed law principles states that everything that God created produces after its own kind (Genesis 1:11, 12, 21, 24, 25).  Flesh produces only flesh.  Cows produce only cows.  Dogs produce only dogs.  But, also Jesus teaches us in John 3 that a Spirit produces only spirits.  It is very clear that spirits can give birth based upon the information revealed in John 3 and the natural patterns found in creation.  For example, the sperm of a man is called his seed in the O.T (Lev 15:16).  But the Word of God is also implied to be God’s spiritual sperm in 1 Peter 1:23.  Both are “seeds” but one is natural and the other is spiritual.  These are patterns that are being repeated for us to apply the concepts found in the natural to understand the concepts of the unseen spiritual dimension.  Those are radical concepts from the Creator.  What I am attempting to do is to give you verification from the scriptures that a spirit can give birth to a spirit.  Therefore, if the church is a spiritual daughter and not a physical one, we are looking for another spiritual woman that is able to give birth to us.  That statement will probably perplex many Christians who are not yet familiar with the Bible in this level of detail, but that is just the way it goes.

So far I have been giving you some basic facts of life concepts found both in creation and the Bible.  These are important patterned concepts that you need to give your attention to today, because they are very relevant to understanding God and the Bible.  God has replicated patterns from the spiritual realm into the created natural realm and these patterns will be further projected back into the new heaven and the new earth that are coming soon.  I personally believe that God created all natural things from precise patterns found within spiritual things that previously existed in the divine realm.  God then uses these temporary natural things to teach us about the spiritual concepts of eternal things to come.   It is a circular configuration of a divine design with transferred patterns from the spiritual to the temporal and then finally back to the spiritual.  It is the cycle of life as found within a progressively designed divine plan.  Things that were found originally in the beginning are the things that shall be found again in the end.   In the beginning of Genesis we see that God created everything good with the absence of all evil.  This is exactly how it will end after chapter 20 of Revelation and after Satan, the beast and the false prophet are cast into their eternal torment.  What God has created in the world is almost always an identifiable pattern for something in the spiritual realm that we have never seen.

Take the human body for example.   The human body is comprised of millions and even billions of individual cells, systems, subsystems and individual parts that are working all together to form one body.  Does any of that sound familiar?  We have more than one thing that comprises or makes up to form one unified body working in harmony.  The natural pattern of the human body’s design is the same concept that God reiterates when He describes us (the entire church) to be the spiritual body of Christ (1 Cor 12:13-27).  The spiritual church is comprised of millions or even billions of people and yet we are still just one spiritually unified body.  The concept of one being made up of many is a repeatable occurrence in the Bible that is foundational to understanding all of the identities of the women in the family of God.  None of the women in the spiritual family of God are just one person or one female individual.  Each spiritual woman is comprised of millions or even billions of people or spiritual beings that are joined together to become one spiritually named woman in covenant with God.   This was one of my main subjects from the last lesson, so please try to follow along the best that you can, it will only get much deeper than this as we continue to dig into this subject.

It is now time to reveal the mature spiritual women (mothers) in the family of God.  Both of these women were specifically described to be “mothers” therefore, both have children.  One was the mother of the daughter (bride) and other one was the mother of the son (bridegroom).   But, just as Eve is named the mother of all natural living descendants we are looking for a spiritual woman that all spiritual children can come from.  I believe to solve this puzzle we will need to look for verses in the Bible that describe two mothers and hopefully in the same verse.  Here is where it will start to get really interesting for some people and potentially more controversial for others.  I am about to show you another O.T. prophecy about the family of God that is very important for you to understand fully, but is also very difficult to understand.  This Old Testament verse reflects some more complex riddles, so be prepared for a set of new mental challenges.  I want to take you to the prophet Isaiah and get you to read about two women in the family of God from a new perspective.

Isa 54:1  Sing, O barren, thou that didst not bear; break forth into inging, and cry aloud, thou that didst not travail with child: for more are the children of the desolate than the children of the married wife, saith the LORD.

If you are not reading the Bible with your spiritual eyeglasses on you are reading it blindly. God is describing something very mysterious and profound here in another obscure prophecy found in the O.T.  Have you ever heard anyone teach about what this verse means?  I can honestly say that I have not!  However it is very difficult for anyone to teach what they do not understand.  I read some commentaries and they were all over the board to what they thought it meant.  This verse was written in the major prophet Isaiah’s work for God.  You will find in studying the Bible that God will use a technique of hiding information that I call “dissemination”.  This technique incorporates the random spreading out of related information throughout the Bible to make it infinitely more difficult for us to find it and for us to then put them all together correctly.  It is like when I sow new grass seed in my yard using a broadcast spreader, I put seeds in the hopper and adjust the flow and depending on the speed that I travel the seed is thrown out in random patterns over the spots that need it and I do not know what lands where.  Dissemination of the Word of God is a random broadcasting seed concept and God does this throughout the Bible.  You will never know where you will find some of the most valuable keys to understanding a subject in the Bible until you search for them.  Many times it will appear to be a needle in a haystack concept when looking for the truth in the Bible.  It might be found in Genesis or Revelation or anywhere in between.  Without the Spirit of God, computers and modern technology it would be impossible for any man to find the clues and then put all of the pieces together correctly.

However look closely at this verse in Isaiah and tell me if you can see that God is speaking about two wives, two women and two mothers?  There are definitely two different females being spoken of in this verse and they are directly being compared against each other.  Both women we are told are mothers of children, but we are not told who the mothers or the children are.  However the Hebrew word translated as children is actually the Hebrew word “ben” that means “son”.  When Jesus was here on the earth He would call Himself a “ben” of man.  I understand why the translators are confused and put the word for children here, but that is not the correct translation and you will understand why soon. In order to be a mother in the Bible you had to have been married.  Of course our definition of marriage in the modern world has become biased or slanted based upon the legal definition of a piece of paper or a license or a ceremony that was performed.  However, God clearly tells us in 1 Corinthians 6:16 that sex between a man and a woman constitutes a marriage in His eyes.  If you have sexual relations with anyone, by the definition from the Word of God you are married to them.  It does not matter how many partners that you have, it can be one or thousands.  If our court systems went by God’s definition there would be a lot less people doing what they are doing.  No doubt many people would benefit from this knowledge of the truth today.  It is interesting to note that only one wife in this verse in Isaiah is called married, but they must both be married in order to have any children.  Therefore, God is teaching us something else that is deeper with this statement.  I will not be able to explain this in this lesson today because this will just cloud the main subject more than it has already.

Let me tell you that God gives us a lot of hidden information in this single verse of scripture found in Isaiah.  We have two women being spoken of in very anonymous terms.  No names are given and no identities are revealed.  One woman is called barren, but she suddenly has a change of status to have many more sons than the other woman who is specifically called married.  Wow, that is pretty tough to understand and it is another monumental riddle.  What is God talking about in this statement?  I personally believe that God gives us some of the most important information in the Bible in the form of riddles to challenge us to solve them.   The way that this verse was written, it makes it completely illogical and even unsolvable unless God gives us some additional clues to what exactly He is talking about somewhere else in the Bible.  Fortunately for us, God did give us some major clues to reveal the meaning of this prophecy when He taught Paul what it meant in the New Testament and Paul recorded it for us in the book of Galatians.

Before I go to the book of Galatians, I want to make another quick point about the Hebrew word translated as “barren” in this verse.  This Hebrew word is not used extensively in the Bible and that is another clue for us.  If you search your Bible you will find that the wives of the three patriarchs of Israel were all described with this exact same word and status.  You will find Abram’s wife Sarai called barren in Genesis 11:30.  You will find Isaac’s wife Rebekah called barren in Genesis 25:21.  Finally, you will find that Jacob’s wife Rachel was called barren in Genesis 29:31.  These are very important examples to understand, but I just do not have the time to explain them all today.  I wanted to teach you how to look for clues in the Bible.  That does not mean you will understand what all of the clues mean automatically just because you find them.  I will tell you that they are all definitely related to what we are talking about today and that is all I can say about them for now.  However, we will look at one of them in much more detail, because God reveals it to be directly related by what Paul wrote in Galatians.  I have tried to teach you that there is a law of Bible interpretation that I call the “law of first mention”.  In this law I have found that God always gives us some very important information about any subject the first time it is mentioned in the Bible.  The subject of being barren is no different.  The first woman in the Bible described to be barren is Abraham’s wife Sarah.  So let’s go to Galatians and learn what this prophecy found in Isaiah means.  This verse of prophecy is repeated almost exactly in Galatians 4:27, but we will have to back up in the chapter to read the context in order to understand what is being revealed to us, so let’s start reading with verse 22:

Gal 4:22  For it is written, that Abraham had two sons, the one by a bondmaid, the other by a freewoman.

As you can see God is speaking directly about Abraham and who we are told had two sons.  Do you see that God is speaking about two women again?  Not just two random women, but specifically two mothers of two children who were called the wives of Abraham.  You may recall that Sarah was Abraham’s wife first and that she was the barren wife that I showed you in Genesis 11:30.  So this story of Abraham fits the pattern of the prophecy in Isaiah by the direct usage of the Hebrew word translated as ”barren”.  Two mothers are what we are looking for to solve our family of 5 mystery and Abraham is said to have had two wives.  One is described to be a freewoman who is a representative type of his wife Sarah and the other wife was called the bondwoman, who is a woman that Sarah gave to her husband Abraham because she thought that she was unable to have children for him.  This slave wife was named Hagar in this story and she can be found the first time in Genesis 16:1.  Let me quickly show you a scripture concerning these two women:

Gen 16:3  And Sarai Abram’s wife took Hagar her maid the Egyptian, after Abram had dwelt ten years in the land of Canaan, and gave her to her husband Abram to be his wife.

Sarai is directly called the wife of Abram first.  Sarai is first mentioned in the Bible in Genesis 11:29 so she was around for 5 chapters before the mention of Hagar.  Keep this in mind!  Hagar is the maid servant slave girl from Egypt.  This will also become very important that she is a slave from Egypt latter when we discover who she is a type for.  But, also notice what the result was of this gift from Sarai to her husband.  God informs us that Hagar has also become Abram’s wife.  God is revealing something very complex that has occurred in the spiritual realm by showing us the repeated patterns that have reoccurred in the natural realm.  Here we have one man with two wives and two children and this is either an amazing coincidence or it is God pointing us to a match for the 5 in one family pattern.

  1. Abraham              Father
  2. Sarah                   Mother            Freewoman             Barren
  3. Hagar                   Mother            Bondwoman            Married
  4. Ishmael                Son                 Slave
  5. Isaac                    Son                  Free

We have three specific parents being described to us.  One male and two females with two sons, but they are still all just one family.  This is really going to get very deep as we continue through these coming verses, so please read them very carefully.  Also notice for now that Abraham is the father and that he has two wives and two children and that definitely equals 5 in one family and this will generally fit the pattern of the family of 5 again with only some minor differences in family titles only.  While these are not exact matches for the Micah 7:6 family of 5, it is similar enough for me to see that this is not a coincidence and that God is relating to us some new information that is definitely important for us to see.  Have you ever made a dress using a pattern and a sewing machine?  While I have never done this, I did watch my mother do this and I learned the concepts behind the work.  You can choose any material and totally change the look and the feel of the dress, by using different fabrics with the same pattern.  One pattern can produce many dresses that are similar but also they can look and feel completely different to each other.  This is what God is doing in these verses of the two families of 5.  God is using the same pattern with some different spiritual fabrics.  Not everything is going to match perfectly when you do this, but the expert will still be able to identify the usage of the repeated patterns.  Do you understand this?  You probably do if you are a woman, but my example is probably  not too easily identifiable to many men.  It is the concept that is important for now and it is not important to get distracted by too many details at this level of the study.  Let us continue to the next verse in the chapter of Galatians to see what God has revealed to Paul about Abraham’s family:

Gal 4:23  But he who was of the bondwoman was born after the flesh; but he of the freewoman was by promise.

God is still speaking of two mothers and two children that came by the one father.  All of this is very familiar so far!  The only difference between these two children is that they are both males.  So they do not get married to each other to start a new family and that changes nothing, but the creation of a new family.  In this verse God further tells us that one son came by the deeds of the flesh and the other son came as a result of a promise.  We could logically make the leap that one son came from the works of man in the natural realm and the other son came by spiritual faith in the promise of God, if you want to combine other information given to us by Paul found in Romans.  But, for now we will see that we have a family of 5 that is again being divided, but this time they are being divided not by the marriage of the siblings, but by the command of Sarah to cast out the bond woman and her son, that we will soon see.  Let me skip down quickly to verse 30 in Galatians 4 to connect you with what is being taught, so that you can see more clearly what I am talking about in combination with the pattern of division found within a family of 5.

Gal 4:30  Nevertheless what saith the scripture? Cast out the bondwoman and her son: for the son of the bondwoman shall not be heir with the son of the freewoman.

This verse is a quote from Genesis 21:10.  You can clearly see another pattern is developing or being repeated using a different two members in a family of 5; yet still resulting in the division of the family with 3 against 2.  Isn’t this what Jesus said to us in Luke 12:52?  Jesus is giving you a key pattern to look for in the Bible.  Here in this verse in Galatians we are seeing the pattern being used again.  The bond woman and her son are cast out of the family of Abraham and that leaves 3 family members still in the family and two family members on the outside of the family.  It is a subtle change and it reflects more complex information that I will not be able to elaborate on at this point today.  Just take note of the reuse of the pattern of 3 divided against 2 and we will leave it at that for now.   Let me give you a new picture of what we have learned so far:

Hopefully you can see the basic patterns being redeployed in this picture digaram.  There is a split or a divisin within the family of five that is dividing them 3 agains 2.  Let’s go to the next verse in Galatians that I was going through to see how this information fits into the family of God.  What we are seeing demonstrated to us by God is a Biblical typology using natural patterns to reveal existing and prophetic spiritual truths.  Remember we are learning about the two women and how they are both called mothers.  Also take note that God is using a real man and his real two wives to teach us about His spiritual family.  In other words Abram, Sarai and Hagar are not God’s family only the examples used to show us God’s family.  God is speaking about Sarai as being the freewoman and Hagar as being the bond woman and these are revealed to be something much more significant using God’s allegorically encoded information found in Genesis 16.

Gal 4:24  Which things are an allegory: for these are the two covenants; the one from the mount Sinai, which gendereth to bondage, which is Agar.

We know this information would have been impossible for us to see or to understand by just reading the natural accounts of Abraham, Sarah and Hagar in the book of Genesis.  People have read the story of Abraham for thousands of years and no one had any clue that it was allegorical information about God’s family.  We would not have had any hint what was going on if God had not revealed it to Paul about what the story of Abraham in Genesis symbolically represented.  An allegory in the Bible is always a real historical story about real people doing real things in real places that contains a hidden spiritual symbolic meaning encoded within every adjective, noun and verb selected by God to describe them.  You can clearly see that this is God’s definition and not mine based upon what is being revealed to us in this chapter of Galatians.  This is a principle that reveals to us the words of God in the Bible have been carefully chosen many times to contain parallel meanings. In other words God could have said many things about Abraham that He did not say, but since these words were selected, they were specifically designed with a hidden purpose.  I once had a commenter try to tell me that the Bible did not contain allegory and that this was a man made concept invented in the dark ages.  This commenter obviously never read the Bible very closely, did he?

We can clearly see from this story that there is a direct connection to God based upon what is being said about these two women representing two covenants.  God is saying that these two women represent two different covenants and this is a Bible code word that means two marriages between God and two different women.  Therefore we know that God the Father was in covenant with two different women simultaneously as this chapter of Galatians is revealing to you.  You have to understand “Bible Covenants” in order to understand what is being taught.  A covenant with God is always initiated by God.  God is the author of all covenants by His design.  A covenant with God is also a divine marriage (Jer 31:32, Mal 2:14) between God the husband and the chosen people His wife.  In other words we do not go to God and ask will you make a covenant with me, He comes to us and says will you marry me?  So when God initiates a covenant with mankind or any spiritual beings, it is always a marriage proposal.  If you do not understand these concepts you should go and read my  lessons on “Understanding Bible Covenants”.

Since the Bible is divided into two covenants, many people automatically assume in error that God is speaking about these two obvious prominent Bible covenants that practically everyone knows. We are being presented another mysterious riddle by God.  We can clearly see in Galatians 4:24 that Hagar represents the covenant given to Israel on Mt. Sinai.  Which covenant was that?  This covenant is what most Christians today normally call the “Old Covenant”.  It is very interesting to note that God says everyone that was in that Old Covenant was called slaves.  You need to remember that because it is very important.  Based upon this information people automatically conclude that the only other covenant being spoken of here is the “New Covenant” given to the church by Jesus Christ.  However this is impossible based upon the allegorical information given to us in Genesis and the family of 5 revealed in Micah 7:6.  In this story in Genesis you need to pay very closer attention to who the women are a type of in the allegory and then see the ages of the two women and find out who was married to whom first.  Since a Covenant is a marriage, was Abraham married to Sarah or to Hagar first using God’s definition of marriage?  Was Sarah older than the slave girl Hagar?  Did Abraham have sex with Sarah or Hagar first?  Who gave Hagar to Abraham to be his wife?  All of this is very important and very relevant for you to understand which covenants God is speaking of.   Hagar is revealed to be the bond woman and she is a much younger woman than Sarah, so keep that in mind as we continue through the rest of these verses in Galatians.  Let’s continue down chapter 4 of Galatians and look at verse 25 to see the spiritual name of God’s younger wife given to us first.  Again we are looking at the “last being first” concept and this is a repeated pattern that I am following to teach you this information in reverse order:

Gal 4:25  For this Agar is mount Sinai in Arabia, and answereth to Jerusalem which now is, and is in bondage with her children.

Hagar is called the “Jerusalem that now is” and her name is given to us from a human viewpoint or perspective.  Keep this in mind as we go forward.   If Hagar is a representative pattern of a woman who answers to someone calling her “Jerusalem” that clearly tells us her name and it reveals to us the key duplicate features that we are looking for to solve our mystery.  This wife is a named city and she has the same name “Jerusalem” and the inhabitants of this city will consist of both men and women in covenant with God the Father (Jer 31:32).

Are you beginning to see why I said what I said about the “New Jerusalem” in the last lesson?  What I said before was if there exists a New Jerusalem there must also by logic exist an Old Jerusalem using the law of opposition or opposites. Here is God telling us about a woman, a wife, a mother and He figuratively names her “the Earthly Jerusalem”.  This Earthly Jerusalem is the city that is still in the Middle East today and is called the capital of the natural nation of Israel and she is described to be a type of Hagar.  Remember who Hagar was?  She was the young slave woman still in bondage after coming out of Egypt.  Uh oh?  Some Christians are going to have some major difficulty starting to develop from what God is saying to us in this information.  First off everyone thinks that God freed Israel when He brought them out of Egypt and God is clearly saying here in these verses that they are evidently still slaves from Egypt.  Wow, that is really tough to accept, isn’t it?  Is God lying to us?  Is God confused?  Did God forget that he freed them from Egypt?  I personally believe that it is people who are confused.  You see I do not believe God freed them, I believe that God bought them out of bondage.  To be purchased is totally different than being freed.  These concepts also apply to the future church, but I will not go there until a little later.

Are you beginning to see the riddle presented to us?  Here in Galatians 4:26, most people think that God is referring to the New Covenant of Jesus Christ as being the second freewoman, but that is not what God is saying based upon the allegorical information given to us.  Since the Bible is clearly divided into two covenants, an old and a new, everyone has assumed that God is telling us about these two covenants, but that does not work with the allegorical ages of the women given.  The only way you could get that information is to change the roles of Sarah and Hagar and flip the titles of free versus slave.  We know from studying Genesis that Sarah was the older barren woman and she was nearly 90 years old when she gave birth to Isaac, the promised child.  Hagar was the much younger Egyptian slave girl that Sarah gave to Abraham as being the one to bring forth an heir for Abraham.  So by the time Hagar had a child, Sarah was around 76 years old and she was in covenant marriage with Abraham for a long time prior to Hagar becoming a wife.  The Bible says that Abraham was 86 years old when Hagar had Ishmael.  Then the Bible says Abraham was 100 years old when his wife Sarah had Isaac.  This means there was a long time in between the two children.  That would tell me that there was 14 years that Abraham waited for the promised child.  Fourteen years is equal to two 7 year periods of time.  How many years did Jacob have to work for his wife Rachel?  Jacob I believe worked 14 years or two weeks of years.  I guess I won’t go there either today.  I just find repeated patterns in the Bible and see all kind of interesting things to teach on.

This new information is going to cause many people to get confused.  How could God be in covenant with someone else before the Old Covenant in the Bible?  That is the divine mystery being presented for your analysis.  Do you understand that Sarah could not represent the New Covenant; since Sarah was married first to Abraham?  Sarah has to represent a previous even older covenant before God’s covenant with natural Israel and this knowledge changes things up dramatically.  Remember that Abraham in this allegory is the type for God who initiates covenants.  Hagar  represents a type of God’s wife Israel in the Old Testament (Jer 31:32).  So Sarah must represent a covenant that God had a long time prior to natural Israel and this is very important for you to see.  We therefore know from these facts that an “Ancient Covenant” existed before the “Old Covenant” came into effect.   I call it the ancient covenant because God is called the ancient of days in the Bible and I thought that term fit.  God the Father had to be in covenant with someone prior to the nation of Israel, or this allegory falls apart rapidly and that makes God a liar.  Let’s look at the next verse in Galatians and get the solution to the puzzle:

Gal 4:26  But Jerusalem which is above is free, which is the mother of us all.

Wow, here is another Jerusalem being spoken of as a woman.  We can see in this verse that the free woman Sarah is being described to be a type of the spiritual woman that was up in heaven where God’s throne resides.  You can know this because “Jerusalem which is above” is definitely not the “Jerusalem that now is” here on the earth.  Remember the names of the women are given from a human perspective of a man standing on the surface of the planet.  If you look up you are looking into the heavens and this is the general direction of God’s throne.   It makes logical sense for me to think of heaven as a preexisting place.  We know that God is a Spirit (Jo 4:24) and that God is eternal.  So the spiritual realm has existed with God forever.  Did you notice that this new mature spiritual free woman is also named “Jerusalem” surprise, surprise!  However her name is qualified to be the “Jerusalem which is above” and she is being directly compared to or differentiated from another wife named the “Jerusalem that is down below” on the earth.  Next, the end of this verse reveals who this spiritual woman is.  She is called the mother of us all.  Who is “us all”?  Or I should ask who is the “us all” that the context of this verse was written to?   If you think naturally you would be clearly a confused Christian.  The “Heavenly Jerusalem” is said to be our spiritual mother; she is directly called the mother of the church of Jesus Christ since Galatians was written to the church.  Who is the church?  The church is the daughter, the last woman in the family of God.  What exactly is God revealing to us in this very key verse?  What we have just discovered is that the “Heavenly Jerusalem” is not the “New Jerusalem” that came down from heaven in Revelation 21.  Yes the New Jerusalem came from spiritual heaven, but she is not heaven.  It is just like when I was born or came down from my natural mother, but I am not my natural mother.  The New Jerusalem is the daughter of the Heavenly Jerusalem and that make her our direct spiritual mother.  Are you beginning to see how this information fits the picture diagram of the family of 5 and do you see that every woman in the family of God is named “Jerusalem”?  Who or what was this spiritual Jerusalem from above?  Just like the analogy that I gave you earlier of the needle in the haystack approach to Bible study, you have to search for the clues in the Bible in order to find the truth and since I have already done this, I will save you a lot of time looking for another needle.  Here is one of the best descriptions of this spiritual woman that I found:

Heb 12:22  But ye are come unto mount Sion, and unto the city of the living God, the heavenly Jerusalem, and to an innumerable company of angels,

Speaking to the Church of Jesus Christ, Paul writes that we have come unto Mt Zion and unto the city of the Living God!  Then she is clearly named the “Heavenly Jerusalem”.  This is a synonymous name for the “Jerusalem that is above” found in Galatians 4.  We are then told that this city consisted of an innumerable company of angels.  Angels are created spiritual beings that were resident with God in heaven before man existed.  We are told very clearly that this is a spiritual woman that is also a city and then we are told where this city was located and who lived there (God and the angels).   All of this information when combined with the allegorical information in Genesis 16 and Galatians 4 tells us that the Heavenly woman was the freewoman and that God was in covenant with all of these free angels in heaven prior to making a covenant with the natural nation of Israel.  We can further surmise that this heavenly free woman was also described to be barren and unable to have any spiritual children for a long time, until after Israel is given to God for a wife and then this Hagar (Israel) has the fleshly heir (Jesus of Nazareth) and they two are cast out of the family of God.  What God is revealing to you is that the natural man Jesus and His natural mother Israel cannot be heirs with the promised son.  Wow, is this deep stuff or what?   I really was not sure if I was even going to try to teach you those things today because they will be so controversial to many.  However, if you did not know it, the natural man Jesus was never intended to be the heir of God, it was imperative for Satan to kill Him and for Him to be raised from the dead in order to become the promised child or the spiritual seed.  Satan thought he was killing the heir of God, but in actuality he was sealing his own fate and dooming his future within God’s old heavenly family.  When Jesus said “You must be born again”, He was including Himself in that requirement.  Jesus Christ is called the “Firstborn from the dead” (Col 1:18).  If Jesus was born again and was the first to become this way, He now has spiritual preeminence over all other spiritual beings, including the angels and natural humans on the earth.  It also tells us that Satan and the other angels that were in covenant with God the Father are no longer in a covenant with God the Son, the risen chosen heir.  This is really cool stuff, so I hope you are grasping what God is revealing to you.  It is much more important than I can ever try to tell you.

Let me briefly make another point on the definition of what free vs. being in bondage or a slave means from a Bible perspective.  Natural slavery is of course not a positive reality so spiritual slavery is the same level of negativity.  Why are we being told that the natural nation of Israel is still in bondage and are still ”slaves” today and that the heavenly spiritual beings are being called “free”?  The only explanation that makes logical sense is to see that Israel was given God’s law to fulfill in order to be called righteous.  I assume by that knowledge that the angels were righteous by default and even after sin was found in Lucifer; God was unable to convict Satan of wrong doing since there was no law in place to convict him.  If you read the next chapter of Galatians you will hopefully see that God is immediately after speaking of a free woman and a bond woman is speaking about the law in these terms of bondage.  Therefore, Israel is still in bondage because they are attempting to establish their own righteousness by works.  This was not God’s intention for them, the Law was designed to point them to a need for a savior, but yet they still for the most part have not embraced the plan of Redemption provided by Jesus Christ.  Do you understand what the concepts of free and slave means now?  Are we now free in the church today?  Uh Oh?  That is a trick question because the answer is yes and no.  We are not under the Law of Moses nor are we under the bondage of sin, Satan or this world, but we are still under the New Law of Jesus Christ who said “A new commandment I give to you”.  So technically the church is eternally bound to the law of Love!  Therefore, this is also further confirmation what the church is not the covenant that is representative of the type o the woman Sarah.  The Church is not a Free Woman!  The church is a purchased bride and that make us His property.  If you do not agree with those statements, I’m sorry I just do not have time to explain them all today.

What was the daughter’s name in the family of 5?  We know that the daughter is called the “New Jerusalem” and we now know that her mother is called the “Jerusalem Above” or I’ll call her the “Heavenly Jerusalem” because that is what God calls her in Hebrew 12:22.  We are told the “Heavenly Jerusalem” is the spiritual mother of the spiritual church in Galatians 4:26.  The Heavenly Jerusalem is being differentiated from both the “Earthly Jerusalem” and the “New Jerusalem” by definition and adjective qualification.  If a woman is a mother, she cannot be her own daughter.  This is an amazingly complex Bible study as you can tell.  If you are not careful you will get lost very easily.  Do you see what God is teaching us?  Why are all of the females in God’s family, named Jerusalem?  That is a really tough question to try to answer in a short Bible lesson but, is this cool or what?  I personally believe that every woman in the family of God is named Jerusalem because every male in the family of God is named “Israel”.  I really do not have the time to explain all of the scriptures that this belief is based upon in today’s lesson fully.  But, I will give you some basic clues.  Several times in the Old Testament God calls the people of Israel those people that are “called by my name”.  You can see statements like these in verses; for example 2 Chronicles 7:14 and Jeremiah 7:10-14 to name two places for you to research.  What you should observe is that God is saying Israel is my name and I gave it to you because you married me.  The name change of Jacob to Israel; was it God’s idea or Jacob’s idea?  I think when you read in Genesis you will see the angel of God gave Jacob this name because Jacob wrestles with him and prevailed.  Therefore the name Israel came from God.  Knowing these facts should change your perspective on how you view any verses that speak about Israel or Jerusalem in the Bible.   I think the way that God does things in His Word are very multifaceted and extremely complicated and for me to say that I understand them all would be a joke.  But, we now have three women who are representative of 3 separate cities all named Jerusalem in 3 different covenants with a God named Israel and this makes interpreting Bible prophecy correctly infinitely more complex.

In the Bible the name Jerusalem occurs over 800 times in over 700 different verses.  Now I’m going to blow your mind, the name “Israel” occurs over 2300 times in the Bible.  Why is the name Israel a dominant name or subject found in the Bible?  I believe that is it is because the name points us to the True Living God and God is certainly the dominant theme found in the entire Bible.  Based upon what we have learned today, we can never read a verse in the Bible about either Israel or Jerusalem and not stop and immediately ask, which one is God speaking about?  Is it natural or is it spiritual?  Is it new or is it  old?  Is it holy or is it unholy?  If you assume God is speaking about only the earthly city of Jerusalem in the Middle East or the natural nation of Israel you would be wrong many, many times.  God further complicates this problem by calling Jerusalem by many code names, symbolic names and other descriptive titles that I also cannot go into in this lesson.  If you are interested in seeing some of these other names for the earthly city of Jerusalem you can read my lesson on “Names, Titles, Descriptions and Symbols of Jerusalem”.

I think I have gone long enough for one lesson.  I know this is very complex and very new to you.  I know you cannot find anyone else that is teaching it anywhere in the world.  But, that does not mean it is not what is written in the Bible.  All you have to do is to open your spiritual eyes and perceive what God is saying.  This Bible study is probably the most important one that I have on my website.  If you can understand this one, you can understand the rest of my lessons very easily.  I’ll leave you today with a new picture of the spiritual family of God with all of the names of the women filled in:

I appologize for the long lesson today, I guess I had a lot to say.  God Bless until next time!

If you would like to continue reading the next lesson in this series you may continue with “Part 8“.

Posted in Bible Study, God's Spiritual Family, Understanding

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Understanding Deception in the Bible! Can a True Christian be Deceived? Part 6

Jun 1

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(ver 1.1) This is now Part 6 in a series of very advanced Bible lessons about the subject of deception.  I have uncovered a lot of new information in this series and today’s lesson is some more information on the subject using the Bible to help answer and clarify a comment that I got recently.  In today’s lesson I will focus on a very important question that was raised when someone told me that a Christian cannot be deceived because God will not permit them to be lost.  That is a very common doctrine of theology in many churches, but is that what the Bible actually says?  If you have not read this series from the beginning, I would suggest that you go and start reading from “Part 1” first.  I will warn you up front that this will be a long lesson.  I have a lot of things to cover today.  But, if you read it all I believe you will learn much more than just the primary subject about deception.  In one of my last Bible lessons I taught about Understanding Bible Prophets, what they are, why they exist and what they can and cannot do.  In that lesson I paraphrased a verse that Jesus gave as a warning to us (the church).  I thought it was a valid paraphrasing, but my commenter thought otherwise and told me why they thought this was wrong about what I said.  I basically said a Christian could be deceived, so Jesus was warning us to be careful.  I basically took the scripture personally and felt like this was God speaking to me.  But, my commenter had a different point of view using a very different perspective of the Bible and tried to teach me how they understood the Bible.  I want to say first that I believe my commenter was a Christian and that we are both climbing the same mountain to reach the peak of knowledge and understanding.  However, our views of the scriptures were clearly from very different perspectives, like me being on the north side of the mountain and them being on the south side of the mountain.   What I was looking at was not what they were looking at so this will at times cause many of the theological differences to occur within the Body of Christ.  The only legitimate way to resolve these types of conflicts is for each party to change positions in order to try to gain the view from the other side of the mountain and then combine the two realities into the view from the top of the mountain.  Maybe you do not understand mountain climbing.  At the early altitude you are many times within the tree line and you have to rise beyond the trees to finally be able to see out.  Then as you ascend your view becomes increasingly different until you reach the top and can see in 360 degrees of every side.  In between the bottom and the top there are varying stages of revelation, the higher you go is based upon how much you know and have seen.  I’m sorry I like mountains so I may have used this analogy before in another blog.  When I was younger I liked camping in Colorado on the top of the mountains.  The views were so awesome and the lessons of life are clearly learned from the things that God has created.  I believe the world was created by design and that nothing occurs by chance or accident.  We therefore, have to become smart enough to learn the lesson that God is trying to present to us with creation while simultaneously giving His written Word first priority in everything.  Here were all of my commenter’s words that were shared with me.

In the initial paragraph of this week’s publication you state that, “Jesus also warned us that even the very elect could be deceived by their trickery, Matt 24:24.” KJ

Actual quotation from Matthew’s text:  “For there shall arise false Christs, and false prophets, and shall show great signs and wonders insomuch that, if it were possible, they shall deceive the very elect.” 

Readers need to know that this verse indicates, “IF POSSIBLE!”  In other words, God does not allow this to happen to those who are truly saved nor does he even make it possible. However, he is using this language to cause the reader to understand the intensity of deceit that will be in the world during the last days.

Those who abide in Christ and have the Holy Spirit will not be taken captive by the world. The “perseverance of the saints,” is made possible through the indwelling Holy Spirit… “Being confident of this very thing, that he which hath begun a good work in you will perform it until the day of Jesus Christ.” Phil 1:6 KJ

We’ll I read their comment and I know why they said what they did, but the root of the problem is that there is more than one truth in the Bible and it appears to me that my commenter might have been closed to try to see the scriptures from my view point.   This is why we have so many Christian denominations in the world today.  One church likes the view from their side of the mountain that they are on and another church stays on the other side of the mountain and we have isolationism occurring from a limited perspective view of the Bible.  I have said this repeatedly and I will continue to teach it until we all get it, “there is more than one truth in the Bible and we as believers must see them all in order to view the actual truth”.  No church should exalt one truth and claim that is ALL of the truth that is necessary to know.  When people do this that is a very serious misrepresentation of the Bible and it oversimplifies God and His Word.  It is also a common ploy used for deception by Satan.  The devil will tell someone one thing so that they ignore the other more important things and he then has them defeated and they do not even understand that they are in this condition.  This was Satan’s approach with Eve when she was deceived in the garden.  God said “Do not eat or you will surely die”.  But, Satan never mentions that part of the subject.  Satan says “You shall be as gods, knowing good and evil”.  That was a new truth that replaced what God said in Eve’s mind.   God never told Adam and Eve about what the consequences of death meant and Satan avoided the subject by telling them something else that sounded good on the surface.  This was a tricky way to deceive someone, if you ask me.  It is also the first time Satan deceived anyone in the Bible so it would be a very good future lesson to explore in this series.

You see I do not deny my commenters scripture references, I just have a problem with the fact that they have ignored the other parts of the Bible in order to interpret them in the way that they have.  If we do not use the entire Bible to interpret the Bible we are doing nothing but promote the selective isolated doctrines of men and that is foolish.   I tried to explain to my commenter that the law of gravity is a physical law of truth that states it is impossible for a man to fly.  So the law of gravity was a valid truth that ruled men for thousands of years.  Man believed this truth and lived by this law until finally they discovered another greater truth.  When mankind learned of the law of aerodynamics and how that it supersedes the law of gravity this new truth allowed man to fly like a bird.  So both laws are truths, but one truth causes the other truth to become minor or insignificant when applied correctly.  This is how the Bible is written.  The Bible contains many truths, with some of them being dependent horizontal truths while other truths are independent vertical or hierarchical truths. Ok, I probably went over the head of many readers with that last statement, but this is an advanced Bible study so I will say things occasionally to get you thinking about old concepts in new more complex ways.  Please just try to understand that one truth can supersede another truth.  Let me give you a Bible example for what I am trying to say; the Bible says “The law of the Spirit of Life in Christ Jesus has freed us from the law of sin and death” (Rom 8:2).   This is exactly what I was attempting to say with the example of gravity and aerodynamics.  The law of Life in Christ is a much higher law of truth that has nullified the law of sin and death just as the law of aerodynamics has nullified the laws of gravity.  I hope you understand these truth concepts, they are very important to know.  Let me start by giving you the actual verse that I paraphrased again and show you what Jesus says:

Mat 24:24  For there shall arise false Christs, and false prophets, and shall shew great signs and wonders; insomuch that, if it were possible, they shall deceive the very elect.

Ok here is the exact words written in the KJV ible and we need to actually see what it says.  My first point is to notice the words “it were” are in italics and that reveals these words were not written in the original language and they have been added by the translators so we should technically ignore them.   So the original verse says “If possible, they (the false Christs and false prophets) shall deceive the very elect”.  I immediately wondered who my commenter thought the “very elect” were if they are not Christ’s church.  Then I began to wonder what do the words “If possible” mean?   According the Strong’s the Greek word translated as “If” is a particle of conditionality.  In other words if this is true this occurs, if this is not true then something else occurs.  This is a classic programming paradigm called If Then Else Logic and if you are not a programmer you probably do not have a clue what I just said.  Nevertheless, the word “If” is always a conditional statement where something is a determining factor for whether what is stated can or cannot occur.  Going back to my programming paradigm, when a compiler comes to an If statement a test is made in order to determine the next instruction to execute.  When a test occurs, the next instruction that is executed is based upon resulting True or False condition of the test.  Do you understand this?  You do not have to be a computer programmer to understand this is how you behave every day.  If you are hungry you get something to eat and if you are not hungry you don’t.  The term “If” certainly does not mean it is NOT POSSIBLE for this to occur.  You cannot get that from the definition of the word at any time.  The term “possible” is a Greek word (G1415) that means “powerful” or “capable”.   We know from the Bible that with God all things are possible.  So we must determine what the word “If” coming before the word “possible” can mean.  God uses three other Greek words in the New Testament for “impossible” and these are G101, G102 and G418.  If God knows the difference between what is possible and what is not possible, I believe that He knows which word to use in what verse.   I would suggest that you go and search the New Testament for G1415 (possible) and G102 (impossible).  If you look up the definitions of these two words they are actually very revealing.  Impossible is a word of “weakness” and possible is a word for “strength”.  Which one is God?  All things are possible with God meaning all things are strong with God.   However, the Bible says “It is impossible for God to lie”.  So God displays “weakness” when it comes to speaking lies.  These are fascinating concepts that many Christians have not considered.  Weakness is a positive when it comes to sin.  But, strength in virtue and truth must be admirable.  Because the word “If” occurs before the word “possible” God is saying this is possible but it has specific conditions which must be present to cause it to happen.  This is a very simple way of saying you can be deceived under the right conditions.  According to my commenter, they said it is not possible for a Christian to be deceived, because God would not allow or permit this to occur.  I assume from their logic that they believe God controls the outcome of everything based upon the very popular Sovereign God theological doctrine found within many churches and they must feel that man has no further contribution to make to determine their eternal destiny.  Go back and read my commenter’s words again.

Readers need to know that this verse indicates, “IF POSSIBLE!”  In other words, God does not allow this to happen to those who are truly saved nor does he even make it possible. However, he is using this language to cause the reader to understand the intensity of deceit that will be in the world during the last days.

Hopefully you can see what they are trying to say?  My commenter said “IF POSSIBLE” could be substituted for GOD does not allow this to occur”.  Wow, is that what it said?  I am really not sure how anyone can arrive at that conclusion or interpretation of the verse, but obviously that is what they said.   That is not what Strong’s said the words meant.  Since Strong was a Greek and Hebrew expert I rely on his expertise more than my own.  In other words I’m not going to try to say what the verse says without some collaborating evidence from someone who is smarter than I am.  If God tells me in another verse in the Bible that it is not possible for a man to be deceived, then that would be the best.  If Strong, Thayer or Nave does not say that either then I just cannot override their expertise with my opinion of what I think it means.  So whenever someone says “In other words” you better be careful that what is being stated is an actual equivalent phrasing for what was actually stated.  The only way that I know of to how you can legitimately do that, is for you to look up all of the words in a dictionary or a thesaurus and then to see what they mean and if they are really valid synonyms.  This is just basic Bible study guidelines and rules to follow.  I’ll ask you again “What do the words If Possible mean”?  Does it mean it is not possible?  I do not think so.  God tells us in other places in the Bible “It is impossible for Him to lie” (Heb 6:18).   God obviously knows when something is possible and when something is not possible to occur and He knows when to use what word for either case.  My commenter seemed to think that God wrote it this way to emphasize a point.  But, I still think that this is trying to interpret the Bible in isolation without using the other verses found on the subject to help us to understand what is actually being communicated.  For example, if you search the Bible you will find that these exact same Greek words translated as “If Possible” are used in other verses in the N.T.  If you go and look at one of them they ought to show us if God uses the words in the same way in order to determine if God is being consistent with His words.

Rom 12:18  If it be possible, as much as lieth in you, live peaceably with all men.

As you can hopefully see if you try to say “If possible” means that it is not possible, you must use that logic in this verse also in order to be consistent.  So if you try to apply that logic to this verse in Romans, you would make it say “God does not permit you to live peaceably on the earth with all men.  I do not think that this is what this verse is saying, do you?  Do you understand this logic?  Can you find anywhere in the Bible that it says “God does not permit” when used with the words “If Possible”.  If it were not possible for a Christian to be deceived then why would God not tell us that anywhere?  I think that would be a very good thing to know if that was actually true.  Another point that I want to address is the implied statements being made by my commenter.  My commenter implies that they are the “true Christians” and therefore they cannot ever be deceived.  Since my commenter did not tell me otherwise I have to assume this is what they meant by examining what they have said.  If this is what they believe, I feel very strongly that this is an extremely dangerous theology to base your faith.  This would be a great theology if they were right, but if they are wrong then what guarantee do they have that they are not deceived already.  Since Bible doctrine and theology is a moving target based upon your current knowledge, there is technically no one that can guarantee what they are preaching today is what they will preach tomorrow exactly.  I do not know if you understand that statement or not?  Truth is a complex subject and many people want to base their eternal destiny upon their limited knowledge of the Bible and God just might show you a new Bible verse tomorrow that completely changes your theology.  Since neither you nor I are God we must be open to learning more at all times and this reality alone should cause us to change our theology as we all attempt to get to the summit of the Bible knowledge mountain.   What we all need to do is to research the Bible to figure out the actual truth the best way that we can using all of the information that we can obtain on the subject.  Study to show ourselves to be approved a workman that will not be put to shame because we rightly divide the Word of Truth (2 Tim 2:15).  So that is what I will try to do again today.  You see, I am smart enough to know that I do not know everything.  I also think that God is still revealing new things every day.  So these two beliefs lead me to be open to change.

Bible study is a rules based system of learning.  In other words if you do not know the rules you cannot follow them and therefore there is no way that you will figure out what the truth is.  I will not try to give you all of the rules for Bible interpretation today; I have tried to do this in many other Bible lessons so go and read them to learn the correct way to interpret the Bible.   I will give you a secret that I use to study the Bible constantly and this may help you if you apply it.  When you study a subject search the Bible for the words that you are interested in and find all of the Bible verses that contain those words and then go read what they say.  If God uses the same Greek or Hebrew word in every verse then you can be assured you are learning about the exact same subject.  Therefore what God says in each verse applies to what is said in every other verse with that same word.  This is just a very basic Bible study methodology.  You see I know for sure my commenter did not do this or they would have seen what I am going to show you today about the subject of deception.  Another Bible study basic is for you to look up the words that you are reading in a Greek or Hebrew dictionary to see what they mean in the original languages.  Many times English words have changed and the meanings are no longer the same.  For example, in the King James Bible many times the Greek word “agape” is translated as “charity” and this is a total inaccuracy using modern day concepts of the English word for charity.  Agape is the Greek word that describes “the God Kind of Love” and that is an important difference between the English word and the Greek word.  In fact in the Bible there is more than one Greek word translated as love, how are you going to know the difference if you do not go and search for it?  Let me give you the Greek Word definition for “deceive” as it is translated in Matthew 24:24.  I think I have given you this definition before in previous lessons, but this is so important that I feel it needs to be restated:

G4105

From G4106; to (properly cause to) roam (from safety, truth, or virtue): – go astray, deceive, err, seduce, wander, be out of the way.

You should see by the definition of this Greek word translated as deceive alone that it causes major problems for my commenter’s theology.  To roam or to go astray is a clear description of someone who once was on the path of safety, virtue and truth and they have now wandered from it to become lost.  Uh oh?  It is very clear to me that the Greek word definition shows someone who once knew the truth, but wandered away from it.  Are you a Christian today?  If you are then it is because someone presented you the truth and you decided to believe it.  Can you knowing the truth now choose to walk away from it?  According to the definition of this word it is more than possible.  The definition of this word “deceive” says people were in the town of Truth and they wandered off and got lost and now cannot find their way back.  What are we going to do with that information?   Can you see and understand how to apply this?  Do you remember when Jesus said “I am the Good Shepherd?  Do you know that we are His sheep?  Do you know that His sheep can wander off and decide not to follow the shepherd?  According to my commenter’s theology this is not possible, because every one of God’s sheep must have a tight choker collar around their necks with a leash that is tied around the shepherd’s staff, so they cannot stray and get lost.  The only way to keep a sheep from straying is to tie them and no shepherd that is good will do this to their animals.  Please go search the web and see how shepherds lead their sheep.  If you want to learn more on this subject you can read my lesson on “Understanding Sheep in the Bible”.  Jesus told a story of a sheep getting lost and Him having to go out and find it (Mat 18:12).  Jesus is using a story with natural symbolism to convey a spiritual truth about God and us His people.  If you look up the words in this verse you will see “go astray” is the same word translated as “deceive” in Mat 24:24.  Uh oh?  Therefore, we are talking about the same subject, yes in both verses?  In this story Jesus says He will leave the 99 to try to find the 1 who was deceived to stray.  Who is guarding the 99 while He is out looking for the one that was deceived?  Can a wolf come and kill one of the 99 sheep while Jesus is looking for the one?  Can the wolf already have killed the one that left?  Why did God allow one sheep to leave and become deceived?  Oh, yea God is sovereign, omnipotent, omniscient and is omnipresent.  If that is the case why did God use such human examples to describe Himself when He possessed such deity qualities?  If God is permitted to use all of His supernatural powers then it would be impossible for any of His sheep to get lost in the first place.  Since He clearly tells us that a sheep left the flock and must be searched for this tells us God is not in control of what that sheep did.  That sheep was deceived to leave the safety of the flock and the shepherd and that is not good for them.   I believe that God chooses not to use His supernatural powers by His own choice.  If you can find me scriptures to contradict this belief, I will be happy to change.  But, I believe that this is the only viable explanation of how a human example of a shepherd losing a sheep could apply to God.  If God does not give His sheep the freewill choice to leave, that would make God a controlling manipulator.  If you are a married person, is that the kind of spouse that you desire to be married to?  I do not think so!  Otherwise I have no explanation of why Jesus used this example to describe Himself and us His sheep.  Just notice the story of the sheep and see that Jesus says there are 100 sheep and one is deceived and has been lost because they wandered off by their own choice or will.  This is what Jesus is teaching to us; His sheep have the right to leave and they can be deceived.  Do you understand this?

Let’s back up in the chapter of Matthew and read some other words that Jesus spoke before this statement in Mat 24:24 in order to examine the context of the statement.  If you go back to the first part of the chapter you will see Jesus describing things that will occur in the last days.  Since we are living in the last days I believe that means whatever Jesus is about to say applies to us.  The disciples then come to Jesus privately in Matthew 24:3 and ask Him, when will these things occur?  Who is Jesus speaking to in this chapter?  My commenter thinks that Jesus is only speaking to the readers, whoever they are.  I do not know about you, but I am reader?  I wonder if my commenter is also a reader.  I guess they think they are not?  Since I know of hardly any unsaved people who read the Bible, I’m not really sure who they are thinking Jesus is speaking to.   God says in Matthew 24:3 that He was speaking to the disciples and they were the founding fathers of the church.  But, my commenter has determined Jesus was speaking to someone else.  However, here is the beginning of Jesus’ answer to the “disciples” question:

Mat 24:4  And Jesus answered and said unto them, Take heed that no man deceive you.

Wow, this is obviously a hard saying if Jesus the Son of God is speaking in private to only His own disciples.  Jesus clearly says “Beware” and “do not let anyone deceive you”.  Does Jesus ever say “It is impossible for them to be deceived”?  Is Jesus speaking to the founding fathers of the church?  Obviously Jesus does not even come close to saying they cannot be deceived.  If Jesus warns His personal disciples, His inner circle of 12 students not to be deceived, it is very obvious to me that they could easily become deceived at any time going forward from that warning.  What is a warning?  A warning is like when you tell your children do not touch the stove because it is hot.  When you said that did you mean it was not possible for them to touch it?  Obviously that was not why you warned them not to touch it.  This is really not that hard and it only takes a little common sense to see that Jesus would never warn His disciples of something that was not possible to occur.

This revelation alone disqualifies the “Predestination” theology.  This knowledge alone invalidates the “Once Saved Always Saved” theology.  Here Jesus is speaking to many of the future writers of the New Testament and He says you better be careful or you will be deceived.  I will tell you this directly, if it was possible for the disciples to be deceived, then any regular Christian today is in dire straits if they think they cannot ever be deceived.  These are very strong words and very important words for you to understand.  I also want to point out that this Greek word translated as “deceive” is the exact same word found in Matthew 24:24 so Jesus is definitely giving you relevant information that you need to know about the subject of deception in the last days.

Let’s explore the same information found in Matthew, but this time read it in Mark.  Many times one writer will phrase the text in one way differently than the other or they will give you the same information with different words.  Plus I like to find two or three witnesses in the Bible to everything that I teach in order to help establish the truth.  So let’s turn to Mark 13 and read what Jesus says there:

Mar 13:5  And Jesus answering them began to say, Take heed lest any man deceive you:

Mar13:6  For many shall come in my name, saying, I am Christ; and shall deceive many.

If you continue to read down in this chapter you will again see that Jesus is speaking of the last days.  Since I believe strongly that we are living in the last days, I believe that if you do not take this warning personally as a True Christian that you can be deceived very easily.  Every word of God is written to you personally and this verse does not say “If Possible”.  It says “Take heed” and that is something that you are required to do, not God!  Too many Christians want to put the responsibility all on God.  God will not permit me to be tested.  God will not permit me to be tempted.  God will not permit me to be deceived and that is just not what the Bible says anywhere.  Jesus would not have given us a warning if it were not possible for us (the church) to be deceived.  If you ignore these Bible verses and think they do not apply to you, I’ll say it again you are in trouble.  Think with me for a second and determine who was present to hear these words of Jesus.  Weren’t Judas and the other 11 disciples always present when Jesus spoke?  What did Judas do?  You probably know that Judas betrayed Jesus and turned Him over to be killed for silver.  Was Judas deceived?  Absolutely, Judas was deceived.  He heard the exact same words of truth that Peter heard and every other disciple heard and he still decided not to believe in them and do his own thing.   You can clearly read in the Bible that Satan entered into Judas and this caused him to betray Jesus.  It is very clear to me that Satan was present to cause any disciple to fall into deception that would permit him to do so.  Only Judas because of his greed for money was motivated to ignore his eternal outcome for a monetary short term gain which he soon regretted.  However, if one disciple of the twelve can be deceived every disciple can be deceived.  If any disciple can be deceived then you can be deceived.

Think with me for another moment about what Jesus said in Matthew 24:24 knowing the context of the verse are about the end time events.  Jesus said beware of the “false Christ”.  This is a direct reference to the coming anti-Christ which is probably in the world today somewhere.  We know there have been foolish men who have claimed to be the Christ and they have caused many to die and be lost.  But, if the anti-Christ is a false Christ and Jesus is speaking a warning to the church, what is going to happen when he shows up doing great signs and wonders that only a supernatural being can do.  I believe that many Christian will buy into his false message based upon his overwhelming knowledge of how to deceive people.  This is why Jesus said in Matthew 24:24 that it is possible for even the elect to be deceived, they should be careful not to allow this to happen.

My commenter said that a “True Christian” cannot be deceived and by this they imply there are false Christians in the world.   They further imply they are one of the “True Christians” that are incapable of being deceived.  This is of course a very convenient theology to believe in with great personal benefits.   It is no wonder that so many Christians have bought into this philosophy.  Now whenever, anyone comes up as having been deceived, they can simply say they were never a “True Christian” in the first place.  Of course this is not true using the definition of the word “deceive” that we found.  Jesus warned us of the coming “False Christs” and the “False Prophets” who will deceive many.  By definition a false prophet is a man who says he is a prophet but who is not.  It is the same with a false Christ.  Finally, a false Christian is one that says they are a Christian and they are not.  I do believe that all of these exist in the world today right now.  Both the true and the false must coexist in the world simultaneously by simple logic and reasoning..  However, I am not addressing false Christianity because they are already deceived.  You do not ever warn someone about something they have already fallen into, right?  You can only try to help them out of their pit of deception if they are interested in getting your help.  If not, they will remain in the their deception and be content.   So by simple logic found in Matthew 24:24 we can determine that Jesus cannot be speaking to anyone, but a Christian who is walking in the Light of Truth.  This would be someone who knows the truth, but chooses to walked away from it to do the wrong things.

Let me talk to you about some modern day preachers that have been deceived.  I know of several and I could name their names and you would know who I am talking about, but I will not do that.  You will probably know who I’m talking about anyway because they were in the news.  Anyway one preacher had a national TV ministry and a major Bible school and obviously was doing great things for God when one day he was discovered with a prostitute.  This was not good news for his church or his wife and family.  Was he just a false Christian or was he a Christian who was deceived?  Remember the definition of the word “deceive” from Strong?  I recall that “deceive” seems to be defined as someone who was safe in the truth, but who has now wandered off from it.  Was this famous preacher a false Christian or just one that knew the truth and decided to do the wrong things anyway?  Do you see how complicated this subject really is?  I believe that you cannot say this preacher was not a Christian to begin with or that he was a false Christian based upon the fruits that he had exhibited.  Jesus said you will know them by their fruits.  But, even a preacher, saved and filled with Spirit of God can be deceived to do the wrong things.   Plus the fact that this preacher asked for forgiveness and the Bible says that when you do this God will forgive you (1 Jo 1:9).  Let me say that deception comes in varying degrees.  I believe that any Christian can be deceived to sin, but not be lost completely if they turn and see their mistake and repent.  If my commenter thinks they are a perfect Christian that never sins, they are definitely deceived.  If they think that it is impossible for them to sin, again there is deception that has already occurred and they better wake up soon.  Let me say again that any Christian is capable of sinning and knowing this fact alone we should realize that Satan is out to try to trick us into going back to what our flesh use to want to do all the time; whether it was drugs, sex, cigarettes, alcohol, food or whatever.

Another preacher that will remain nameless had a 5000 member church in the Bible belt of America.  His TV ministry was seen nationwide.  I went to his church and I saw all of this first hand, so this is not hearsay or speculation.  I saw the church and the ministries grow, I saw the salvation of many people while I was in the church.  People would get saved in almost every service.  I felt the power of God present and things were happening supernaturally so God was present.  I sat under the anointing of God and felt the power of God present so I know he was a Christian.  I could hear the sermons and read the Bible verses that were being taught and they were sound doctrine.   However, over time I saw a change occurring in the senior pastor and the church.  He eventually left his wife and married another woman and began to preach some really strange things.  There were many personal and church related problems and issues and this senior pastor soon left his new wife and married another woman.  The church went from over 5000 members to it is non-existent today.  That church went from awesome to nothing in a very short time all because of one man being deceived by Satan. There was clearly a level of deception that had taken place to take this senior pastor from a great man of God to his downfall.  All of these examples are warnings for Christians today.  I could give you many more examples, but that is just pointless.  Just understand that if it can happen to a major church pastor, it can happen to you.  If it can happen to a disciple of Jesus it can happen to you.

Let’s go through some Bible verses in the New Testament and see if God says if a Christian can become deceived or not?  You are going to have to read your Bible and study it, but they are not complicated if you can open your spiritual eyes and see what God is saying.  I will only focus on scriptures written to the church.  The Church is the target readers of the Epistles.  All of these letters were written to True Christians for instruction and for correction and that is what I hope they do for you today.

1Co 15:33  Be not deceived: evil communications corrupt good manners.

1Co 6:9  Know ye not that the unrighteous shall not inherit the kingdom of God? Be not deceived: neither fornicators, nor idolaters, nor adulterers, nor effeminate, nor abusers of themselves with mankind,

Gal 6:7  Be not deceived; God is not mocked: for whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap.

These are three direct witnesses that convey the message that Christians can be deceived.  You do not write to anyone in the Church and tell them not to fall into deception if it is impossible for them to do this.  That would be stupid for God to do.  Do you understand that?  Are these the Words of God written to you and I?  I believe they are.  I’m sure there are some people who can explain away what the Bible says, but I choose to take the words of the Bible to be truth.  I want you to see that three times God writes to the church and tells them it is their responsibility not to fall into deception.  If God could stop it from happening, He would not warn you that it could happen.  If you look up the Greek word translated as “deceived”, you will see that it is the same one used by God in Matthew 24:24.  Therefore, these verses apply to the subject given and it clearly tells us based upon context that a Christian can be deceived.  Let’s go though some more scriptures that say this also using some different phrasing.

Eph 5:6  Let no man deceive you with vain words: for because of these things cometh the wrath of God upon the children of disobedience.

2Th 2:3  Let no man deceive you by any means: for that day shall not come, except there come a falling away first, and that man of sin be revealed, the son of perdition;

1Jn 3:7  Little children, let no man deceive you: he that doeth righteousness is righteous, even as he is righteous.

Here are three more direct witnesses from the scripture that clearly say “Let no man deceive you”.  Notice that none of them said “God will let no man deceive you”.  These words are clearly written to the church and the Apostle John even calls us the “children” of God.  It is self-evident that even real Christians can be deceived by an active or inactive participation of their own freewill.  If you let someone deceive you, you can make the right choices to keep from being deceived.  This is a clear assignment of self-responsibility.  If God says “Let no man” there is an alternative outcome to being deceived and it comes back to a conditional statement of dependency upon what you do or permit to be done.   Therefore, it is an act of your will or the omission of action by your will that causes you to be deceived.  Wow, that is an important statement to learn.  Let me give you a funny example.  When my wife was young her mom would make her a sandwich and she would need a drink or something and have to get up from the table to get it and when she came back someone had taken a bite out of her sandwich.  Well this was a cruel joke by her dad, but she got the point very fast.  She never left her food again on the table if she got up to get something.  It is like the old saying fool me once shame on you, but fool me twice shame on me.  I guess what we need to do as Christians is to learn what we need to do to keep the devil from taking a bite of our sandwich and then keep him from doing it ever again.

Deception is a very important subject and that is why I teach on it so much.  It is critical for you to know as much as possible on this subject so that you understand how deception can come so that you will be able to avoid it.  Deception will come to you in many forms, in many ways and for many purposes.  But, one of the ways is through men who wear sheep’s clothing, but are the hidden wolves underneath (Mat 7:15).  God would not warn Christians Not to be deceived, if it were not possible.  This is just basic reasoning and logic using simple Bible study techniques to help discover the truth.  What we as Christians must realize is that we are in a spiritual warfare for the eventual outcome of our eternal spirits.  Satan is highly motivated to deceive even “God’s elect ones”.  Satan has the knowledge, power and experience to do it and he does not need God’s permission in order to try to do it and this is what you need to know today.

I’ll end this lesson today with another set of witnesses found in the Bible, but these are a little bit different in what they say and how they say it.   But you will still notice that they are definitely written to the Church and spoken by Jesus to us.  These verses have some very profound words within them and they definitely apply to the subject of deception, even if the word does not appear in these verses.  You see there are more rules to Bible interpretation than what I can tell you about in this one lesson.  You will just have to read what Jesus is saying and then figure out how it applies to God, to you, the church, Satan and the subject of deception.

Rev 2:7  He that hath an ear, let him hear what the Spirit saith unto the churches; To him that overcometh will I give to eat of the tree of life, which is in the midst of the paradise of God.

Rev 2:11  He that hath an ear, let him hear what the Spirit saith unto the churches; He that overcometh shall not be hurt of the second death.

Rev 2:26  And he that overcometh, and keepeth my works unto the end, to him will I give power over the nations:

Rev 3:5  He that overcometh, the same shall be clothed in white raiment; and I will not blot out his name out of the book of life, but I will confess his name before my Father, and before his angels.

Rev 3:12  Him that overcometh will I make a pillar in the temple of my God, and he shall go no more out: and I will write upon him the name of my God, and the name of the city of my God, which is new Jerusalem, which cometh down out of heaven from my God: and I will write upon him my new name.

Rev 3:21  To him that overcometh will I grant to sit with me in my throne, even as I also overcame, and am set down with my Father in his throne.:

Why does Jesus speak these 6 times about “those that overcome”?  Do you understand that these are all promises or rewards from God of something for something?  In other words every one of these promises are conditional.  It is totally depends upon the fact that if you qualify for the promises then and only then will you be rewarded with the promises.   Do you understand that all of these are the words written to the Church?  Are not these people the True Christians who have been given these messages?  Maybe you think that you are not in the same church as these people that Jesus is speaking to, and if that is the case you are in trouble.  I believe Jesus is making a very serious point by repeating this phraseology this many times.  Jesus is clearly saying that you have a Major Responsibility to become an overcomer.  What does it mean to be an overcomer?  Wow, I guess that is something not too many Christians understand unless they were in the military or played a competitive sport or had cancer and finally got a clean bill of health from their doctor.  You see an overcomer is only someone who is victorious.  Clearly an overcomer is a winner of a battle or conflict.  These statements have vast implications written on them.  It means you can be a failure by default.  It means that you can be a quitter by choice.  It means you can be defeated by your enemy.  It means you can stray from the narrow path and follow the crowd down the wide path to destruction.  These verses tell me that a Christian can be deceived and not be victorious.  It is your choice, your will, your decisions and your actions that will either cause you to win or to be defeated.  If you follow God and the truth of His word this will never happen, but if someone comes to you with a great false message and you follow that, you have left the truth and been deceived and God will let you go.  It means you are in trouble if you believe that God is not going to allow you to be deceived.  I do not see anywhere in these verses in Revelation where God guarantees you victory if you quit or don’t fight or don’t want to win, what do you think God is going to do about that?  Do you believe that God is going to override your desire to do your own thing to force you to His things?   If you think this you are clearly mistaken.  God is not going to make you do the right things.  God will not force feed you so that you grow in the truth.   All God can do is send someone like me to try to steer you back into the right path and if you refuse to listen I’m sorry but there is nothing else He will do for you.

God expects you to do something and you need to learn what that is.  One of the first major prophecies in the Bible is one found in Genesis 3:15 where God says “The seed of the woman shall bruise the head of the serpent”.  I know I paraphrased again.  But, that was the verse in a nutshell. We all know the serpent is Satan, but few understand who the Seed of the Woman is referring to.  If you want to learn who this is you can read my other Bible lessons to find out for sure.  But, I will tell that this woman is the church and she is the one that God expects to be victorious.  To be under someone’s foot is a symbolic sign that they are defeated by that person whose foot is on them.  You can see this many places in the Bible and one place is in Joshua where God told the nation of Israel everywhere the sole of your feet tread I have given to you.  Well Israel is a natural typology of the church in this example.  Just as Joshua fought to take the promise land, we are forced to fight a spiritual battle to possess God’s promises.  What did we read in Revelations 6 times?  We read conditional promises?  Was the Promised Land conditional for Israel in the O.T.?  What if they had not fought the giants, they would have died in the wilderness like everyone else and missed out on the promise.  Hopefully you can understand my point.

You see in Romans 16:20, God writes to the church and says “The God of Peace shall bruise Satan under your feet shortly”.   According to this verse in Romans, we are the Seed of the Woman that was prophesied about in Genesis 3:15.  It is the feet of the church that God is going to use to bruise the head of Satan.  If this is true, then we as a church have a role of responsibility to participate in its fulfillment.  I know there are many Christians who believe God controls everything that happens in the world.  These Christians have been deceived already into believing they have no role to play, no responsibility for anything and no accountability if it is not done.  It is what I preach to be a “No fault” Christian religion.  No matter what happens, it was not my fault.  I never planted the seeds that caused that to happen!  I never stopped it from happening, but that was not my job!   I wonder how these types of Christians get up in the morning and do anything all day long.  If everything is completely up to God, it would seem to me that we should not try to do anything all day.  It would be best, if we all become vegetables and stayed in bed until God bruises Satan’s head and then comes and takes us all away.  You see while Christians believe this C.R.A.P. (Christian Reasoning Applied Poorly) they fail to know that God is waiting on them to become strong enough to fulfill what He has planned.  Is God waiting for the church?  Is that possible?   When God describes to us that He has long patience as He does in James 5:7 that is a clear revelation that God is not controlling everything that happens and He is waiting patiently for something to occur in order for the end to happen.  If you do not understand what that is, you better learn it quickly because the end is coming soon ready or not.  I plan on me being one of the ones that is ready for the end so if you care to join me let’s work together to fulfill the prophecy of Genesis 3:15.  It is only when the church is victorious over Satan that Jesus can look at us as being the overcomers as He clearly stated 6 times that He was looking for in the book of Revelation.

If you have read this entire lesson and still want to believe you can never be deceived, I’m not sure if I can say anything else to prove to your otherwise.  Deception is a very large and complex subject found in the Bible.   Because you do not understand it, you easily misapply the verses to say that it is impossible for you to be deceived.  However, God is never going to force you to see the truth.  God will let you go to your grave believing in you erroneous theology.  But, you will have to tear those pages out of the Bible of all of the Bible verses that I have given to you today in order to still go to church and believe wrong about deception.  There were at least 14 Bible verse witnesses to the fact that church members can be deceived.  Since the Bible says in the mouth of two or three witnesses let every word be established, I have given you overwhelming evidence to the truth.  If you deny it your blood is not on my hands.  If you have 3 Bible verses that say a Christian can NEVER be deceived, I would love to hear about them.  I have gone on long enough today, so please come back next time and I’ll try to speak about a different subject that may be more popular with everyone and less controversial.  Just understand my motivation for doing what I do.  If I did not care, I would not try to help you.  If I did not love you I would not bring you an alternative viewpoint.  Do not think that I am here to criticize you; I am only here to try to help.  I know I’m not perfect and I know can say things that offend people, but I do not do it to deceive you or cause you harm.  If you could see my heart I think you would understand why I address the subject of deception with such a passion.  God Bless!

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Understanding Prophets in the Bible! Introduction to the Bible Concepts of Prophets! Part 1

May 26

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(ver 1.2)  This is a totally new subject for me and one that few people have studied.  However, this is an essential subject to understand for many reasons. I recently got a comment from someone who brought up the subject and I thought it would be good to clarify what a prophet of God is and what they can and cannot do using the Bible.  You see we have recently had a string of several false prophets that have proclaimed things to the world that are clearly false.  But, these false prophets have had at least a few people who have easily fallen for their deception and that is what concerns me.  Jesus actually warned us in the Bible that there would come false prophets (Mat 7:15).  Therefore we should become smart enough to recognize the difference between the real and the fictitious.  If we do not learn about real prophets, Jesus also warned us that even the very elect could be deceived by their trickery (Mat 24:24).  Clearly Jesus had a lot to say about the subject.  Yet there are still an extensive number of followers of the false who obviously do not see the deception that is taking place.  One current false prophet said that the world was ending on May 21, 2011 and this obviously did not occur but I’m sure he had some good reason for this error.  This man was sent millions of dollars that came from people who had given him their money and they were clearly lied to.   It could be that this man who predicted the end of the world truly believed that he knew something or he could have been a charlatan who intentionally duped people for their money.  I do not know if either of these is true, so I do not judge him.  I do however see clearly that his message was false based upon my knowledge of the Bible so I was not deceived.   Obviously this was not the case for many other people in the world.

Today we are going to explore Bible verses about prophets and see what God reveals to us about them.  Here is a verse found in the New Testament that applies to my subject today directly:

1Co 14:29  Let the prophets speak two or three, and let the other judge.

Here we have God giving us some specific instruction and directions of the correct order within a church service.  If prophets speak in church let it be limited to only 2 or 3 and then let the rest present judge what is said.  This is pretty plain to me.  It tells me first off that prophets still exist even in the modern church of God and that we do not accept the words of any one prophet just because he said something.  This verse implies that there should be other prophets with the same witness.  That is an interesting concept to consider.  Did God always send more than one witness (prophet) to a city or a nation with the same message?  I personally believe that God did do this.  But, it would take hundreds of hours of Bible study to prove it.  If you have knowledge in this area, I would appreciate hearing about it.  If you look at the obvious Bible examples, I found several places where it would appear that God always sent more than one prophet with the same message.  For example the prophets Isaiah, Jonah Nahum and Zephaniah all mention the city Nineveh.  Of course they do not have to prophesy at the exact same moment in time, it could be during different times with the same general message.  Then there is Isaiah, Jeremiah and Ezekiel who say a lot of the same things about the city of Jerusalem.  I believe these are examples of God following His own word, which I believe God always does. God says “In the mouth of two or three witnesses let every word be  established” (2 Cor 13:1).  What is a witness?  A witness is someone who has seen something and can testify of it in a court of law under oath.  Guess what a prophet is called many times in the Bible?  A prophet is called a “seer” (1 Sam 9:9).  A seer is someone who is a witness and can see or has seen something that will happen in the future.  How does a prophet see into future things?  God does this using many methods.  Sometimes a prophet gets a message from God by visions.  Sometimes a prophet gets messages from God by dreams.  Daniel and John the Revelator were both sent an angel from God with the message.  Sometimes a prophet will hear the voice of God like Moses on the mountain top of Mt Sinai or the voice of God from the burning bush.  Elijah taught us that God spoke to him in a still small voice in his spirit. It really does not matter right now how the message came, I believe that it primarily matters if there was more than one witness with the same message.  I believe this is a very important concept to apply to modern day prophets.  If a man stands up in the world and proclaims the end of the world will be on May 21, 2011 that is only the words of one man and that should be an automatic red flag warning that it is a false message.   I’ll try to talk more about the concept of more than one witness with the message as I continue in this lesson.  I want you to take away from 1 Corinthians 14:21 that we should be able to judge prophecy and that God has established rules to help us to know how to do this.  One rule is to let every word be established in the mouths of 2 or 3 prophets and not just any one.  Another rule of prophecy is no words of prophecy are open to private interpretation (2 Peter 1:20).  This rule implies that God will interpret the prophecy and we cannot make up meaning using human reasoning or logic.  These are two laws of correct Bible interpretation that cross over into the realm of prophecy since God has given both by His Spirit.

Another interesting fact of the New Testament is I do not know of any scripture that God says we as Christians should be led by prophecy or the words of a prophet.  This of course is a challenge because I believe things have changed from the Old Testament into the New Testament on how God deals with His people.  In the Old Testament, God gave the law written on tablets of stone, but in the New Covenant God has written the Law of Love upon our hearts.  Clearly these were two different approaches with one being totally natural and the other being completely spiritual.  God constantly used prophets in the Old Covenant to get the attention of the people of Israel.  But, the church has God inside of them and God can speak directly to our hearts.  The words of a prophet are not our God and they should not cause you to do anything that God has not already told you to do by His Spirit that is inside of you.  The Bible clearly tells us as Christians “Those who are led by the Spirit of God they are the sons of God” (Rom 8:14).  That means the Spirit of God will tell you personally what you should do, when you should do it and anything else that is important for you to know.  This of course requires that you know how to hear the voice of God and that you will obey what He says.  If you are a born again Christian and you refuse to listen to the voice of God, God just may send you a prophet to warn you that you are about to die for your lack of willingness to change.   I heard the testimony of a man who was sent by God to another preacher to warn him that he needs to examine himself, but the preacher ignored the warning and as a result died a young man.  Now a modern prophet can also come to you and confirm what God has already told you, but you will not hear it first from a prophet and then figure out if you should ask God if you should do it.  However, this also does not mean we do not need to study the Bible and the words of the prophets to gain the understanding of God.  I believe that we should definitely study the Bible and the words of God’s prophets.  Here is another similar truth that is important to know.  Christians are not to be led by prophecy, but you are supposed to be a doer of the Word of God.  I’m not sure if you really understand the difference?  I have heard of people in the world who have read about the coming war in Revelation and they have decided to be led by that prophecy to buy guns to help Christ defeat His enemies.  This is clearly a misguided approach to being led by a prophecy to do something that God did not tell you to do.  Just because God tells you what will happen in the future does not mean you are involved in causing it to happen.  Get it?  It is God’s responsibility to cause things to be fulfilled as He has spoken and not you.  Jesus taught us that we should do what is written, but this was not an all-inclusive statement.  If you tried to repeat everything that was written in the Bible you would do some very wrong things that God never told you to do.  Being a doer of the Word of God requires that you know how to rightly divide the Word of God and also that you know the difference between good and evil.  These are probably some of the most important things that I will say today, so I hope you understood them.

In order not to become deceived, it is best to become educated with as much of God’s truth as you can.  Today we will look into the Bible to discover, what is a prophet?  How does someone become a prophet?  Can a person choose to become a prophet or is it God’s choice?  How does God use a prophet?  When does God use a prophet?  What can a prophet do?  Are there still prophets today?  Does a prophet know and see everything?  Can a prophet actually predict the future?  If so, where does this knowledge come from?  Is it from God or is it the prophet’s ability?  If a prophet prophecies a coming event, can it be changed?  These are tough questions to answer but they are all relevant to find the answer so that none of us will be deceived by someone who comes along and predicts an event that obviously contradicts the Bible.  I’m not sure if I will be able to answer all of these questions today, but I will get it started so that you will begin to learn some of the basics.  I have already tried to answer a couple of them in the introduction so let’s continue to learn.

I searched the Bible for references to prophets and found there were many.  The Bible speaks of many men and women who are called prophets and prophetesses of God.  Several of the prophets are named and many others are never named.  I technically believe that there are more that are not named than those that are named, but it does us the most good to study only those that are named for now.  There are actually too many references in the Bible for me to give you all of them so I will only focus in on a few of them.  It is also interesting to note that a prophet is not isolated to the Old Testament only.  There are many men and women even in the New Testament that do prophesy and speak for God about coming world events.  Let me give you a few examples of the named prophets that I found in the Bible:

Bible Prophets:

  1. Enoch (Jude 1:14)
  2. Abraham (Gen 18:17, Gen 20:7)
  3. Isaac (Luke 13:28, Heb 11:20)
  4. Jacob (Luke 13:28)
  5. Moses (Genesis – Deuteronomy, Psalms)
  6. Aaron (Exo 7:1)
  7. Joshua (Joshua)
  8. Balaam (2 Peter 2:15-16)
  9. Eldad (Numbers 11:27)
  10. Medad (Numbers 11:27)
  11. Samuel ( 1 Sam 3:20)
  12. Gad (1 Sam 22:5)
  13. Nathan (2 Sam 7:2)
  14. King David (Psalms, Acts 2:29-30)
  15. King Solomon (Song, Lamentations)
  16. Obadiah (Obadiah)
  17. Eliezer (2 Chron 20:27)
  18. Hosea (Hosea)
  19. Amos (Amos)
  20. Micah (Micah)
  21. Elijah (1 Kings 18:22)
  22. Elisha (2 Kings 2:15)
  23. Jonah (2 Kings 14:25, Jonah)
  24. Isaiah (2 Kings 19:2, Isaiah)
  25. Joel (Joel)
  26. Nahum (Nahum)
  27. Habakkuk (Habakkuk)
  28. Zephaniah (Ezra 5:1)
  29. Jeremiah the mouth of the Lord (2 Chron 36:12)
  30. Ezekiel (Ezekiel)
  31. Daniel (Daniel, Mark 13:14)
  32. Shemaiah (2 Chron 12:15)
  33. Iddo ( 2 Chron 13:22)
  34. Haggai (Ezra 5:1, Haggai)
  35. Zechariah (Zechariah)
  36. Malachi (Malachi)
  37. Mordecai (Esther)
  38. Chanani (2 Chron 19:2)
  39. Oded (2 Chron 15:8)
  40. Jehu ( 1 Kings 16:7)
  41. Ahijah  (1 Kings
    12:15, 1 Kings 14:18)
  42. Zacharias (Luke 1:67)
  43. John the Baptist (Luke 7:28)
  44. Caiaphas (John 11:49-51)
  45. Judas (Acts 15:32)
  46. Silas (Acts 15:32)
  47. Agabus (Acts 21:10)
  48. John the Revelator (Revelation)

Bible Prophetesses:

  1. Miriam (sister to Moses) (Exo 15:20)
  2. Deborah (the only female among the Judges) (Judges 4:4)
  3. Huldah (2 Kings 22:14)
  4. Noadiah (Neh 6:14)
  5. Abigail (1 Sam 25:3-32)
  6. Esther (Esther)
  7. Anna (Luke 2:36)

Jesus called himself a prophet in Matthew 13:57 and John 4:44.  The people of Israel called Jesus “the Prophet” in John 7:40.  This was a reference to another prophecy of Moses that said “God will raise up a prophet from your brethren” spoken by Peter in Acts 3:22 when he quotes Moses from Deuteronomy 18:15.  So when a man comes along and claims to be a prophet I always go back and judge what he says by what the greatest prophet Jesus has said.  If the words of a modern day prophet contradict the words of Jesus, I run away from the modern day prophet very fast.  Yes there are real modern day prophets of God.  Yes they are called by God, appointed by God, anointed by God and used by God still today to bring out a new message or even a new revelation.  But their words will never contradict the Bible, they will only reveal it.  These modern day prophets are in existence and differ greatly from the false prophets and you need to understand the differences so that you are never deceived.  My recent commenter quoted this next verse to me twice and it can easily be misunderstood so I will address it now:

Amo 3:7  Surely the Lord GOD will do nothing, but he revealeth his secret unto his servants the prophets.

As you can clearly see this verse seems to contradict another verse that I taught you recently that Jesus said in Matthew 24:36.  You may recall that I told you Jesus said “No man knows the day or the hour” and yet we have a prophet of God saying God does nothing without revealing it to His prophets first.  Which one is it?  Or can they both be true at the same time?  Here is where you can fall into error very fast, if you are not careful.  If Jesus told us that no man will know when He returns to the earth and the prophet Amos seems to imply that God will not send Jesus back unless He first tells His prophets we have a major conflict that needs immediate resolution.  The only way that I know of to solve this dilemma is for us to go into the Bible and actually see what God tells us about prophets and what they know and this will enlighten your confusion dramatically, I hope.

Let me start by asking you this question.  What if Albert Einstein came to you about 70 years ago and said, “I am going to split an atom and with this act I will unleash such power that no nation will be able to withstand you”.  At this point in time there were no nuclear weapons in the world.  There were also no nuclear reactors and no one has a clue what is going to occur or how it is going to happen or even when it will happen.  Nor does anyone have any comprehension to the hidden power that is about to be unleashed upon the world.  Did Einstein not tell you exactly what he was going to do but, yet you would still be in the dark to what he was saying to you?  I mean come on, are you a nuclear scientist?  Do you have the understanding of how to split an atom?  Back in the 1940’s when this was happening you certainly did not.

I believe that this is exactly the situation the human race was in whenever God came to them and tells them what He was going to do.  You might know exactly what will happen, but how it will happen, when it will happen and the impact of why it was happening would cause you to still know very little.  You have to understand that God’s intelligence is so far above your intelligence that He could tell you exactly what He was going to do and in your mind you would not be able to comprehend much of anything but the general concept of what might happen.  Let me give you a direct Bible example of something that God told the prophet Isaiah.  Isaiah was told by God that a virgin shall conceive and bear a son and shall call his name Immanuel (Isa 7:14).  Nowhere did God tell Isaiah how this would occur, when this would occur or why this would occur so Isaiah was given some very important but limited future facts with a very limited capacity of understanding what any of it meant.  No one had ever seen a woman have a child without the involvement of a human man, so this was a foreign impossibility.  If you think that Isaiah knew more than this or understood more than this, you would be greatly mistaken.  Isaiah was clearly one of the greatest Old Testament prophets and he was told many things but only in limited quantities and he understood almost none of them.  He wrote down what God had said to him but there is absolutely no way that you can say Isaiah understood what was written.  This is the nature of how God works.  If God told you everything, you would not need to walk by faith because you could walk by sight.  If you knew everything you would not need a God who does know everything.  Interesting concept, isn’t it? But, since God teaches you a little bit here and there you are forced to use your faith and believe the things that He has told you without understanding how they will occur or even when they will occur.

Take the book of Revelation written down by John.  John prophesies many complex things that will soon occur, yet this book of the Bible is clearly the most misunderstood and controversial book that I know of.  The numbers of opinions that surround this book are so vast that it is humorous to search the internet to see what people are saying and thinking about it.  It is obviously very clear that God gives us a lot of information in this book while not telling us much of what it actually means on the surface.  This is the nature of the prophet!  A prophet is a messenger that brings to us words from God, but that does not mean the prophet knows everything about what God said or meant.  If John knew more than he wrote in the book of Revelation then he must have withheld the keys to understanding what he wrote.  So a true prophet is a man with a message from God that he possibly does not fully comprehend.  You need to see that a prophet can bring a word from God, but the message may be a riddle, a puzzle or a hidden secret that needs to be revealed by God in order to be accurately understood by men.  This is one of the key reasons when I see someone giving us a prophecy of an exact date and time that I can say they are not a true prophet of God.  I think I am going to prove these statements using the Bible to give you examples of how God uses a man to be one of His prophets.  In this way you will hopefully see that I am not teaching you my opinion, but that I am teaching you what God has said in His Word.

Have you understood my points so far?  Just because God tells the prophet what will happen, it does not mean God will have to tell the prophet when it will happen.  Nor does it mean that God has to tell the prophet how it will happen.  You cannot find this in the Bible.  If you try to make Amos 3:7 say that you are clearly overstepping what the verse says and making it say something beyond what was actually stated by God. You must get very nit-picky when you read the Bible and you must pay attention to every word and then you must not add to them to make them say something additional.  Here is a further confirmation to what I am attempting to teach you today about a prophet of God:

1Co 13:9  For we know in part, and we prophesy in part.

Here is Paul calling himself a prophet.  Paul tells us that people only know part of the whole truth and therefore they can only prophesy about the small part that they know.  If a prophet can only prophesy in part then there is a great deal of information that is not known and not spoken of by the prophet.  Do you understand this concept?  A prophet of God is not God and therefore they will not know everything.  A prophet will only know what he has been told and God is not going to tell one man everything.  Let’s go back to the example of a witness to a crime that is called to testify in a court of law.  Can a witness testify about the whole crime or only the part that they may have observed?  Hopefully you can understand that if a witness testifies about anything that they did not see firsthand that their testimony becomes hearsay and speculation and it is invalid for them to speak in that area.  This is how a prophet works also.  They either will say what God says to be true or they will say what they want to say and this makes their words invalid.

Let me try to show what else the Bible says about prophets and I want to show you what the prophet Jesus says again on the subject because I believe these words take precedence over all the other words in the Bible and I don’t have time to explain that statement fully today.  You can read the words written in the Bible in Red Ink as if they were not any more important than the rest if you want to, but I will not approach the Bible with this attitude.  Jesus was God in the flesh, personally here on the earth physically for the first time.  Never before had God made Himself known first hand to man in this manner.  Sure the Spirit of God would speak to men and even tell them what to tell others, but this time God does not send an angel with a message, God does not tell a man a message to tell others, but God sends Jesus to speak firsthand.  Since, I learned that God was so much smarter than I am, I learned that I better pay attention to what He said while He walked among us.  Read this verse very carefully because God is speaking here directly to us first hand:

Mat 13:17  For verily I say unto you, That many prophets and righteous men have desired to see those things which ye see, and have not seen them; and to hear those things which ye hear, and have not heard them.

Here is Jesus speaking to His disciples about Himself and what did He say to them?  He says the prophets desired to see what they were seeing.  Obviously this means the prophets did not see what the disciples were seeing.  You could take this to mean the physical manifestation of what they prophesied would come, but I believe this statement goes way beyond that.  The Greek word translated as “see” in this verse is much more diverse than just physical sight.  This word is more three dimensional and it has a spiritual and an intellectual side to it that is very profound.  It actually means “knowledge” and “understanding”.  To know something is a profound subject found in the Bible that conveys sexual intimacy.  Adam “knew” his wife and she conceived a son.  You see Jesus was telling the disciples that the prophets did not understand what they were told to prophesy about.  It was over their head and beyond their capacity of spiritual and intellectual knowledge.  Jesus came into the world to bring us light.  It was only after the light had come into the world that men began to understand in part and come out of their darkness that they lived in.  The Bible says that Jesus came and taught things that were kept hidden from the foundation of the world (Mat 13:35).    These are clearly the things that the prophets and righteous men of old wrote about and desired to see but, were totally incapable of understanding because they were still secrets of God.  Let me give you another witness to help establish the truth.

1Peter 1:10  Of which salvation the prophets have enquired and searched diligently, who prophesied of the grace that should come unto you:

Again we can see Peter this time writing about the prophets who searched diligently for what?  Do you see the implied meaning within these words of God?  The prophets of old prophesied about the coming Grace of God, but yet they did not have a clue how it would come or when it would come or even who it was to come to.  If you do not understand that this is the way God operates with a prophet then you still have a lot to learn from the Bible.  This is why many people are easily deceived in the world today.  They do not understand that God does not tell His prophet’s everything, so when a man comes along saying I am a prophet and I have been told by God that the end of days will occur at 6 PM on May 21, 2011 they fall for it without seeking to know the real truth.  They can easily misapply Amos 3:7 to say I am this prophet who knows the end.  However, if the message contradicts what the other prophets of God have said you better run away from him fast.

Let me teach you an Old Testament example that is critical for you to understand how the prophets of God work.  We are going to the book of 1 Samuel and read about the prophet Samuel and hopefully you will be able to see how God speaks to His prophet and what He tells them and more importantly what He does not tell him.  We will begin with chapter 16 after Saul was anointed by Samuel to be king, but rejected by God for his failure in his character and other factors that I will not get into.

1Sa 16:1  And the LORD said unto Samuel, How long wilt thou mourn for Saul, seeing I have rejected him from reigning over Israel? fill thine horn with oil, and go, I will send thee to Jesse the Bethlehemite: for I have provided me a king among his sons.

God tells Samuel to go to Jesse’s house and he will anoint one of his sons to be the new king of Israel.  Here is God speaking to the prophet and telling him what He was going to do before He did it as Amos 3:7 said to us.  However, notice what God did not say!  God did not tell Samuel which son was to be king.  God does not name him or tell him what to look for or give him anything specific that I would think would be absolutely critical to know in order to fulfill the prophecy.  Why does God leave out such important information as who is to be anointed as the next king of Israel?  Did God not know or did God purposely choose not to say?  I personally believe that Samuel was required to walk by faith and not by sight?  Faith is a requirement in order to please God (Heb 11:6).  Faith dictates that you must believe something without having the evidence to prove its existence.  Samuel was required by God to go somewhere and believe that God would show him which son would be king.  Obedience is another key factor.  If Samuel had not gone to Jesse’s house there would have been no King David either.  So Samuel is obedient and goes to Jesse’s house by faith:

1 Sa 16:6  And it came to pass, when they were come, that he looked on Eliab, and said, Surely the LORD’S anointed is before him.

You can read every verse if you like, but I’m going to skip down to verse 6 next to show you that Samuel the prophet of God still did not know who the right son is yet.  Samuel looks at the son named Eliah and thinks that this one must be him, but you will soon see that it is not.  Truly the prophet of God is still walking by faith waiting for God to reveal the right son, but he almost made a mistake and got into the flesh.  Samuel almost began to walk by sight by thinking he had found the new future king by observing his external appearance.  But, God tells Samuel something very important:

1Sa 16:7  But the LORD said unto Samuel, Look not on his countenance, or on the height of his stature; because I have refused him: for the LORD seeth not as man seeth; for man looketh on the outward appearance, but the LORD looketh on the heart.

This is the profound wisdom from God.  As Christians we should all learn the lesson being given.  We should then apply it to how we elect a president.  Ignore how he looks externally, what color he is, or how tall he is, or how skinny he is and see what kind of spiritual fruit that he is producing.  I guess I won’t go there today, but you get the idea, I hope and pray.  You can continue to read down in this chapter and see that Jesse sends his sons to the prophet one by one from the oldest to the youngest.  Seven sons in and seven sons rejected by God.  It sure would have saved a lot of Samuel’s time if God had only told him the name of the son that was to become king.  Samuel looks at Jesse and asks are these all of the children?  Jesse says the youngest is in the field watching the sheep.  Sound’s familiar doesn’t it?  Was not Jesus also called the Good Shepherd?  What I want you to observe is the fact that the prophet of God is not told every detail and was required to walk by faith in order to please God with his obedience.  God finally fulfills the original prophecy but it does not occur because of Samuel’s knowledge it only happens because of his faithful obedience.  This is a very important key factor for anybody that is called to be a prophet.  This is how God operates with every prophet.  God never tells the prophet everything that He knows.  God only tells the prophet enough to take him to the next step of faith.  Faith is one of the most important subjects found in the entire Bible and people want to ignore it to try to figure out how God operates with people.  You just cannot do that and correctly interpret the Bible.  If you have read my other Bible lessons then you have probably heard me say this before, that there is more than one truth in the Bible and you must use them all to come up with the correct interpretation of God‘s Word.  I’m going to keep saying that until everyone gets it.

So I have been going on in this lesson long enough today.  I’ll end this lesson with this question.  Who is a prophet and how do they become one?    Let’s read from the words of the prophet Moses and see another great Old Testament example that is important to understand:

Num 11:29  And Moses said unto him, Enviest thou for my sake? would God that all the LORD’S people were prophets, and that the LORD would put his spirit upon them!

This verse tells us that it is the Spirit of God that makes a man or a woman a prophet.  Therefore they cannot make themselves a real prophet without God’s involvement.  Just because someone calls themselves a prophet does not mean they are one.  I found this fact crosses over to other offices of God in the church.  There are people in the world that call themselves an Apostle and clearly this was a self-appointed title.  Others assign themselves to be teachers and clearly they are not.  But, let’s get back to Moses.  You may remember that God selected Moses and Moses did not select himself to be a prophet.  If you read the context of this verse in Numbers 11 you will find a man coming to Moses and complaining of others who were prophesying for God outside of Moses.   In other words a man under Moses thought this should not be happening because Moses did not authorize it.  It did not go in the proper chain of authority.  It is funny that God does not have to follow what men think in order to do something new, especially if one of them is questioning God.  In this chapter you will find that God was making a point to Moses.  God told Moses the prophet what to say to the people and Moses questioned God’s ability to fulfill what He had spoken.  You can read this in Numbers 11:18-22 and the surrounding verses.  You need to figure out this was a major problem with God for Moses to question His ability.  Moses did not want to walk by faith and he wanted the explanation of how God could possibly give the children of Israel flesh to eat for a month.  Here is another example of how God desires faith from even His prophets.  Since Moses refused to walk by faith God withdrew His Spirit and placed it upon other elders of Israel and they began to prophesy for God.  Anyway that is a separate valuable lesson and another conformation that God does not tell even His prophet everything.  But you can see what Moses’ reaction to the complaint was.  Moses wished that God would put His Spirit upon everyone so that they all could prophesy and become prophets of God.  I actually believe this was a prophetic statement of what God intended for us, the church.  The prophet Joel actually says this:

Joe 2:28  And it shall come to pass afterward, that I will pour out my spirit upon all flesh; and your sons and your daughters shall prophesy, your old men shall dream dreams, your young men shall see visions:

This prophecy began to be fulfilled in Acts 2 when the Spirit of God was poured out on the first 120 church members in the upper room and it actually continues to be fulfilled even to today.   To prophesy is the action of a prophet and this tells us that it was God’s intention that all could potentially do this.  Wow, I do not know if you understand what this is saying.  To me it is saying you do not have to be directly labeled a prophet in order to prophesy.  If you have the Spirit of God on you and in you, you have everything that you need to prophesy.  Wow, that is a tough concept for many Christians to accept and this is probably because they have the Spirit of God in them, but not on them and there is a major difference between these two experiences.  If you do not understand that, I’m sorry I do not have time to explain it.  Let me review some of my major points about prophets today:

  1. A prophet knows in part and prophesies only in part.
  2. A prophet is required to walk by faith.
  3. A prophet is required to be obedient.
  4. A prophet may tell you what will happen, but will probably not understand how it will happen, why it will happen or even when it will happen.
  5. A prophet is just one man and not God and does not know everything.
  6. The Spirit of God upon someone causes someone to be a real prophet that can prophesy.
  7. A real prophet’s message is always from God and not from a man and thus will not contradict any other real prophet or the Word of God.
  8. The words of a prophet should not be taken in isolation, but there should be two or three witnesses (seers) to the actual reality that agree with each other.
  9. The Bible says we have the capability to judge all prophecy to see if it is legitimate.
  10. Jesus warned us that there will be coming many false prophets.
  11. So not everyone that says they are a prophet is a prophet.
  12. God says look not at the external things of a man, but examine his heart to determine a real prophet.
  13. There are many, many prophets in the Bible.
  14. If you can find two or three of them that agree then believe what they say even if you do not understand how it will happen or even when it will happen.
  15. In the church we are not to be led by prophets or prophecy we are led by the Spirit of God instead.

These are the beginnings of some very important concepts to remember and to learn to live by.   In a future lesson on prophets we will explore some more scriptures to expand our knowledge on this subject.  Until next time, may God continue to bless you to see and understand His Word!  If you have any questions or comments about prophets you are welcome to post them and I will try to respond to each of them.  God Bless.

Posted in Advanced Topics, Understanding

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May 21, 2011 Stupid Award! Beware the Chicken Little False Prophets Who Proclaim the End of the World is Today!

May 20

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(Ver 1.1)  I am on vacation in the mountains and I had not planned on posting anything this week.  But, then a national news report came on about a religious zealot in California that I will not name today and he has predicted the end of the world to occur tomorrow at 6 PM Eastern Standard Time in the USA.  When a man calls himself a Christian and then ignores the Bible to teach something so ridiculous that it makes national news it causes a negative perception to be reflected upon every Christian.  One false prophet will cause every real prophet to look foolish.  What if God had sent a prophet to Israel and Israel had already heard 12 other men who called themselves prophets say something that is opposite or different than the message from God?  Doesn’t this make it easy to reject the real message?  Sure it does!  I did notice in the life of Elijah that he called down fire that consumed the other prophets and thus God got His message out in spite of the false prophets who attempted to corrupt the truth.  Well this man in California has supposedly studied the Bible for many years.  He is not a young man and he has many followers who have quit their jobs to travel to tell everyone about the prediction.  They have spent over a million dollars on billboards to warn the people of the earth.  The late night comedians in the U.S. have made light of this prediction in countless jokes.  Atheists are planning rapture parties for tomorrow at 6 PM to defy the message.  People have even printed T-shirts to say how they survived the rapture.  Christians are being mocked and ridiculed and are made to look like fools because of the foolish actions of a man who is clearly confused.

When God gives someone revelation of His word, it is never going to contradict any other previous revelation of the Word of God to cause confusion.   Real truth will always build upon truths that you already know.  Therefore, we as Christians are forced to know the scripture for ourselves.  This man who has predicted the end of the world tomorrow made a very similar prediction back in 1994.  Since this prediction did not occur it is very easy to see that he is a false prophet.  God never sent a man with the truth today and lies yesterday.  A prophet of God will always speak the truth and what they say will occur.  If you are following a man who has lied to you before then you are deceived.  If you are following a man who contradicts another prophet of God or the written word of God you are deceived.  This man claims his calculations were off in 1994, but he is absolutely convinced that he has not made a mistake about tomorrow.  I wonder what he will think about his prediction on Sunday when nothing has happened.  I wonder what his followers will think on Sunday.  I know for sure what the world will think of his ignorant godless prophecy; they will laugh at him as they are doing right now.  How can you follow a man who lies?  How do I know that he is lying?  It is simple, it because the greatest prophet Jesus Christ said this and I believe Him more than a fool who contradicts Him.

Mat 24:36  But of that day and hour knoweth no man, no, not the angels of heaven, but my Father only.

Jesus implies that He does not even know the day or the hour that He is returning to the earth.  If Jesus does not know and the angels do not know, this includes Satan, Michael and Gabriel, how then can this man know more than Jesus and the angels?  He must be the Father God to be able to predict the end.  I do not care what revelation that you have found from the Bible, if you ignore the prophet Jesus to predict the end of the world you are a fool.  Sorry I can be very blunt and direct sometimes.  But, somebody needs to awaken Christians to see the real truth.  If somebody doesn’t speak the truth, then everyone will follow fools who can say anything.  If you are following a man who has set a date for the end of the world, you are the blind being led by the blind.  So to the deceived people of the world who have predicted tomorrow to be the end, I do not criticize you personally (after all I did not name any names in this message), I do however reject your message.  If the world ends tomorrow then I will look like a fool for countering your message.  However, since I base my prediction on the Words of Jesus I feel very confident that the world will never end on any day that a man has predicted.  I believe my God and not the words of just a man.  I will pray for you that God may open the eyes of your understanding so that you are not deceived by false prophets.  But to those who want to reject the Bible, the prophet Jesus and the truth to follow your fantasy, here is your 2011 Stupid Award. I hope you will learn your lesson and not make other Christians with real messages look like we are all as ignorant as you have portrayed yourself to be today.  Make sure you are following the Word of God that you know and see in your own Bible and not the words of any man.  I hope this message helped someone today.  God Bless!

Posted in 2011 Stupid Awards, Stupid Awards

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Understanding Deception in the Bible! Satan Sacrifices His Pawn Osama Bin Laden in the Chess Game of Life! Part 5

May 4

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(Ver 1.1)  This is Part 5 in a series of very advanced Bible lessons on the Bible concepts of deception.  Today’s lesson will be a little bit different than the normal, but yet it will challenge you to think about some things that you may have never thought of before about deception.  I have taught you a lot of new and very different things found in the Bible about deception and I pray that you have taken the time to read everything about this subject that I have posted.  If not, please go back and start reading this series with the first lesson “Part 1” so that you do not miss anything important that I have said.   In the news a few days ago late at night a special report broke into the regular programming with a news bulletin that informed us “Osama Bin Laden was killed”.  I listened to these reports for nearly an hour and then the President of the United States came on and gave us the official announcement that it was true.  I do not know about you, but when I see things this significant happen in the world I look at them from a spiritual perspective and try to figure out why this occurred right now at this exact point in time.  You see I personally do not believe that anything in the world occurs by chance or accident.  Nor do I believe that God causes things to occur to fulfill His will or purpose.  Based upon my knowledge of the Bible, I believe there are multiple factors involved in everything that transpires on the earth and most of them are either human or demonic initiated rather than those events which are the occasional work of divine intervention.  God will intervene when people pray and ask Him to intervene.  However, we know from the prayer that Jesus taught His disciples that God’s will is not done on the earth unless we pray and ask for His will to be done (Luke 11:2).  This prayer also asks for the kingdom of God to come, so we know the kingdom of God was not already present when Jesus taught us this prayer.  If you disagree with those statements, you should learn how to read and see what God says in the Bible before you demonstrate your ignorance and write me a comment about how I’m wrong.  The Bible goes on and tells us in 2 Corinthians 4:4 that Satan is the god of this world which implies that God is not the God of this world system.  Please understand that God rules in His Kingdom, but we are not living in His Kingdom right now.  Maybe you do not understand what I am saying.  If you are a Christian, you have the Kingdom of God inside of you, but this is not what you are walking around in physically in the world.  God is a Spirit and His kingdom is an internal spiritual Kingdom.  If God rules in your heart, then you can show people in the world the Kingdom of God in demonstration, but they cannot see it otherwise.  There is also the factor that God says that whatever a man sows, that is what he will reap (Gal 6:7).  So when things occur in this world suddenly you need to look at what seeds were sown to cause the things that we are observing to spring up.  I know for a fact that Ben Laden sowed seeds of death and I know he reaped death back this week. These are just a few of the factors that cause things to happen in this world.  Do you understand these factors?

I personally believe that Adam was created to be the god of this world in the beginning.  Then Adam sinned and allowed Satan to come in and now Satan is the god of this world system (2 Cor 4:4).   People are the cause of all of the manifested evil in the world as we can clearly see from the life of Osama Bin Laden.  But we are also told something else that is very important for us to know and to understand in the Bible.  God tells us in the Bible that people are not our problem.  Wow, that is not what I saw on TV this week.  We had a nation of people rejoicing at the death of a person who was nothing but just a man.  I also saw the President’s approval rating that was dropping, suddenly rise through the roof because the U.S. killed a man.  There were people in the streets of N.Y. and Washington D.C. that were clearly overjoyed that an evil man was killed.  Take a look at this Bible verse and you please tell me what it says:

Eph 6:12  For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places.

What does this verse say?  Doesn’t God tell us that people are not our problem?   If we are in a spiritual battle as this verse implies, we need to understand who the enemy is.  Osama Bin Laden is not the enemy since clearly he was flesh and blood.  It is the spirit that controlled Osama Bin Laden that is our problem.  Guess what is going to happen now?  Since we just killed the U.S. number one natural enemy, Satan is going to promote another man to become the new number one.  Terrorism has not ceased just because someone died.  Satan is the terrorist maker and he is still alive and well on the planet.  God clearly tells us there is nothing new under the sun, the thing that has been is the thing that shall be again (Ecc 1:9).  Therefore, please do not be lulled into a false sense of security simply because one natural enemy was killed.  You can look down through history and see that there have been many evil men who have killed people in the world.  Every time an Adolf Hitler is killed a new man is raised up to become another of the same types of evil initiators.   Do you understand this?  Why does this happen?  It is because the same spirit will cause another man to be deceived into doing what the preceding one failed to finish.

The Holy Spirit woke me up early the morning after Ben Laden’s death in order to explain what is happening in the world and since God is smarter than me, I listened to what He was saying.  I am going to tell you what He said to me and you can choose to believe it or reject it, I personally do not care which one you choose.  God explained to me that our life and the world that we live in are like a spiritual Chess Game.  If you have never played the game of chess, you will probably not have a clue what I am about to tell you, but I’ll try to explain it so that you can gain the overall concepts.  Chess is a warfare game between two opposing sides, which is played on a board of 64 squares.  Sound familiar?  The Bible is divided into two opposing sides, God and Satan.   Each side in the chess game has 16 different game pieces.  One side is usually 16 black pieces and the other side is usually 16 white pieces.  But, this is not a racial game, just two colors that are opposites.  It really is a traditional good vs. evil type of game.  One side is you and the other side is the evil enemy trying to kill you.  You are faced with the challenge of defending your pieces while simultaneously attacking your enemy to take his pieces.  Does any of this sound familiar like in the war on terror that the U.S. has been fighting for the last 10 years?  In the game of chess each game piece has a rank and an order of value associated with them.  A pawn is the least valuable piece and the King is the most valuable.  You can lose every piece that you have except the King and survive.  However, power is another factor and the queen is the most powerful piece on the board and the pawn is the least powerful.  There is one unique factor of the game that a pawn can become a queen if it is moved to the extreme farthest square that it can move to.  The game of chess is a thinking game of strategy based upon a battle of wits.  Therefore, chess is a mental game usually for very intelligent people.  Which I do not claim to be one, since I never achieved to the level of a Grand Master in this game.  The more you understand about chess warfare the better chess opponent you can become.  Chess game players are usually rated based upon their win and loss record.  The higher you rating, the better a player you are viewed to be.  That was a very quick synopsis of an extremely complex game, but I am not here to teach you about chess today.  I am only here to tell you about just one strategy found in a chess master’s execution library that God says happened this week on the news.  Many times a Chess Master will use a deception technique called “sacrifice” that will allow his opponent to take one of his pieces, but usually this act of sacrifice is a hidden ploy to gain a future advantage.  In other words one side sacrifices one piece now to gain a greater advantage in the future part of the game that has not yet occurred.  Did you understand this concept?  It is a very advanced technique of deception and it requires extreme intelligence, forethought and planning.  In other words the Chess Master may have looked foolish for giving up a key piece right now, but as you watch the game develop you will see the strategy take place and the advantage will change.

You see this is exactly what Satan did this week with his pawn “Bin Laden”.  Satan gave up one key piece of his current game plan to gain a greater advantage in the future.  Keep in mind Satan has more than one game piece in play at any given time.  Satan is using a strategy play here with the sacrifice of Ben Laden.  You can tell this by the fact that if suddenly after 10 years of not being able to find Ben Laden we are now able to miraculously find him there was something that transpired to cause it to happen.  People like to think that it was the U.S. intelligence ability and that proves our superiority, but this is not the case.  Yes the killing of Osama was based upon intelligence work, but who let the information out to them?  I personally believe it was Satan and that this was not an accident.  If you can see the power of this play you will not fall into the deception that is being presented like many have already done.  If you do not understand chess very well then you may not be able to understand what I just said.

What does the world seek after more than anything?  Those in the world are seeking after peace.  However, Satan will never fully give anyone full peace, only the deception of peace will be presented.  People in Washington D.C., in New York and other parts of the U.S. have been jumping on a false security of new found peace and victory and this is what Satan is after.  The majority of the U.S. population is suddenly more united and feeling good about the world’s situation.  It is funny that nothing technically changed from a week ago, except that one man was killed but the attitude of accomplishment has promoted a single man back into political prominence and dominance.  Because there is a coming presidential election next year, Satan desires even Christians to feel like we have the correct man in this U.S. office.  You see after the elimination of America’s number one enemy this week, our president Obama went from a non-re-electable man to become a favorite front runner with a very high popular opinion.  My personal opinion of the president has not changed, but I am not deceived like many others.  I did not vote for the man in last election and I would not vote for him in the next either.  You see Jesus said you will know them by their fruits and whenever a man promotes abortions and homosexuality they are not a Christian or a Christ follower.  That is just the way it is, even if you do not like it.  Jesus said “Why call me Lord and do not the things that I say”.  Our president claims to be a Christian, yet his actions prove him as being far from it.

Be not deceived from the things that are external that mean little to nothing in the world.  Open the spiritual eyes of your understanding to see the high cost spiritual chess game of life that is being played out behind the scenes.  First, start by recognizing who the real enemy is in the world.  Satan is the only enemy that you should be focused on.  Then the Bible tells us to submit ourselves unto God and to resist the devil and he will flee from us.  Then begin to see and understand the world events more clearly in the light of God’s Word which also implies that you know God’s Word.  If you do not know and understand Bible prophecy, like the book of Revelation, you are an easy candidate for deception.  As long as there is a Satan in the world, we will have evil taking place around us and it will get worse as we go and not better.  Take a look at this next Bible verse and pay attention to the warning given:

Rev 12:12  Therefore rejoice, ye heavens, and ye that dwell in them. Woe to the inhabiters of the earth and of the sea! for the devil is come down unto you, having great wrath, because he knoweth that he hath but a short time.

Once you begin to realize that Satan knows that his time is very short, you will soon see that his rage and anger will increase and he will move into desperation mode trying to kill everyone that he can take with him.  But in order to do this he is going to have to raise to power the people in the world that he needs to support his plan.  Satan does not want a Christian to be President of the most powerful nation of the world.  Satan will use any form of deception that is necessary to accomplish his plan.  There is a man of sin coming to the earth and he could be here already.  This man is called the antichrist in the Bible and he will oppose God, Jesus, the Bible and Christians and will do everything in his power to disrupt the plan of God from happening.  Satan will cause the antichrist to rise to power using these deceptive strategies that I have just taught you about in this series.  Deception will cause a false sense of accomplishment and a feeling of new found safety to come on people and this will cause them to look to a man on the earth to solve their problems.  I saw this attitude when people elected Obama the first time.  They saw him as a savior and exalted him based upon no accomplishments, just words.  Now people are doing it again, they have rallied around a president because they think he accomplished something when in reality he has done nothing to solve the root cause of the problem.  Satan would not have allowed Obama to find Ben Laden if there was not something else on the agenda.  There would have been no accomplishment for anyone to see if there was no dead evil man for the world to witness this week.

Ok, do not get me wrong.  I am not saying Obama is the antichrist, I do not know that and I would be crazy to try to speculate who the antichrist is right now.  I personally do not believe people will know who the antichrist is until it is too late.  But I do believe that we can look for certain clues based upon the Word of God.  The antichrist will come in like a man of peace looking like the world’s savior and this should be your first clue of warning.  So far this sounds a lot like Obama who was given the Noble Peace prize while never establishing any peace.  It just may be an amazing coincidence I don’t really know, unless God says something we will not know.  There are other factors, that also point against Obama and one of them is the prophecy in Daniel that seems to say the antichrist will be a homosexual.  Obviously if Obama is a homosexual he has us all fooled with a wife and two daughters.  So take into account every prophecy and not just some of them.  If you have not read my series on the “Antichrist” I would recommend that you do that.  I am not technically finished with that series, but since I lost my computer hard drive a week ago I will have to start over on it.

So should the U.S. be in a war on terror?  I personally believe that the U.S. had no choice but to enter this fight.  So I am not saying that we should have turned the other cheek and not done anything against Ben Laden the terrorists who attacked us.  I am not saying Christians should be passive.  Nor am I saying we should not defend ourselves.  Since there are evil men in the world and the only thing that gets their attention is physical force and power, I believe both of these, need to be demonstrated.  That is until Jesus shows up in the clouds and then things will certainly change and that will get their attention all right.  No I believe in guns!  I believe in using them when necessary!  But, I am also saddened to think a man is in hell right now and he has no opportunity to get out.  Eternity is a concept and proposition that we cannot really comprehend.  Being eternally punished just because you were tricked into believing a lie is a concept that many Christians do not want to believe that a loving God could do.  Yet the Bible clearly tells us that the path to destruction is very wide and there are many who go there.  This is exactly why I teach like I do.  I am plain and direct and I tell it like it is regardless of what it costs me, so that somebody may be able to see it and learn the truth.

When you begin to understand that deception is Satan’s only weapon against you, then you begin to understand you need to learn this subject extensively.  If people go to hell because they have been deceived you better make sure you know the truth and that you are not being deceived into this same eternal state that Ben Laden has found himself in.  Today’s lesson is a complex small part of the subject of deception but yet it is so powerful that I felt you needed to read about it and to understand it clearly.  A sacrifice of one evil man for the promotion of another evil man is how the antichrist will come into power.  I believe this with all of my heart.  How else would the entire world fall into the rapid deception of following a man, unless they could see him to be the answer to their deepest problems?  If a man’s popularity can rise dramatically simply because he killed an evil man, to me that is a sign of a clear act of hidden deception.  Since Satan is still the god of this world, we must realize then who is causing these types of things to occur and then figure out why.  If you want to believe they are caused by God, you can do that and be wrong.  If you want to believe they are just a coincidence, then you can do that and still be wrong again.  Please understand and learn to see things with your spiritual eyes and then perceive them with the spirit inside you.  Be sensitive to hear the voice of God and He will direct you to know the truth.

I began to learn the game of chess as a kid in 7th grade and I never mastered it.  However, I obviously learned enough for God to teach me something from it.  When I learned this game, a man named Bobby Fisher was the world champion chess master.  I remember reading about his games that he played in the pater and trying to learn the moves that he made and the try to understand why.  These concepts apply to Bible study and God if you understand them.  The more you know the more God can use to speak to you about.  It is a simple concept that God knows everything and we are just kids in His eyes.  Learn everything you can from God’s word but then use what you know to understand God, Satan and the world around you.  Thanks for taking the time to read my unusual Bible study and for listening to the words of God that He spoke in my heart this week.  Until next time, may God bless you and keep you until next time.

If you could like to continue reading in this series about Deception you can go to “Part 6“.

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Understanding the Hidden Spiritual Family of God! Part 4

May 1

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(Ver 1.2)  This is now my second attempt to write and publish this article.  I had written and finished this article a long time ago, but I was waiting to publish it when my computer hard drive crashed last week and I lost many of my unpublished works that I had been writing.  Therefore, I am now in a recreate or recovery mode attempting to get back what I lost.  It is never a good thing when you lose computer files.   But, it is not an insurmountable obstacle, since I know it was God who gave me the information in the first place and I know He still knows what it all says.   Therefore, I’ll just trust Him to give it to me again, and I will retype it for you with a smile and I’ll be happy in my work for God.  Today’s lesson may not be the exact words that I typed before, but it will be close enough for you to see what He wanted to say.  One of the greatest frustrations with working with computers is when they do not work correctly or when they fail.  Since we live in a world that is deteriorating rapidly around us we just all need to become smarter in how we back up our work.  I learned this the hard way and I was reminded that just because a computer is not very old it does not mean that it cannot still fail and your work is lost.  Therefore, I have implemented a data backup plan that hopefully will fix this problem going forward.  But, enough about me and let’s move on to the Word of God which is why I’m here.  I have been doing a series of lessons on the “Hidden Spiritual Structure of God’s Family”.  This is now Part 4 in this series of extremely advanced Bible lessons and I know today’s lesson will contain more information that you have never heard of before.  If you have not read this series from the beginning, you really have no idea what I am talking about.   Therefore, I would strongly recommend that you go back and start your reading with “Part 1” to make sure you do not miss out on any important information that I have already covered.  I simply cannot guarantee that I will repeat everything that you need to know in every lesson.

In the first two lessons I taught about the direct family members in God’s spiritual family based upon patterns found in God’s created family of man.  I firmly believe that Adam was a pattern of Jesus who was to come and I also believe Adam’s family was a pattern of God’s family that already existed in heaven.  Since Adam had a natural wife that came out of his side, I believe that Jesus has a spiritual wife that came out of His side.  When the Roman soldier pierced the side of Jesus on the cross and blood and water flowed out, I believe this is a repeated pattern of what occurred when God took Eve from the side of Adam.  Certainly you can see the comparison that I am making and then you can choose to accept it or reject it.  But, hopefully you will see the significance of these two events given to us in the Bible as being something greater than just a coincidence.  I have also previously discussed that the theological doctrine of the Trinity of God directly identifies two males in the Family of God and these are God the Father and God the Son.  This foundational Bible doctrine of the Trinity of God further implies the existence of at least two females indirectly by logical association.  One female is the wife of the Father who is also the mother of the Son and the other female is the future wife of the Son of God.   You could go on and logically determine that the wife of the Son must also have a mother.  So we have at the minimum three unnamed and unidentified females that we will still need to try to ascertain.   People need to realize that when God created the natural world that the Bible says that He made these natural things to reflect and to reveal to us the things of the unseen spiritual world which I believe included His family.  We know this fact based upon Romans 1:20 and if you need to review this verse and see what God tells us, please do that.    So if God made them male and female in the beginning of human history, this must have been a reality that existed in the spiritual world by simple logical deduction.  We know that God is always called a male in the Bible so we are at the crossroads where we need to determine the existence of a spiritual female.   If she exists what is she, who is she and where did she come from?  The only way I can teach you this is to go into a lot of Bible verses that I do not have time to do today.  I will not be able to prove the spiritual existence of females to you in today’s lesson, but I will address this in a future lesson.  I know I sometimes say things that are hard to accept, but since you do not know everything that I know, you will either have to keep reading by faith or just stop here, go away and remain in your ignorance.

In the last lesson on this subject I revealed to you God’s hidden family prophesied to us from the Old Testament book of Micah.  Jesus took a seemingly isolated insignificant scripture from a very minor prophetic book of the Bible and revealed to us that this is one of the main reasons that He came to the earth in the flesh.  This statement was so profound that you do not even have a clue how important it is right now.   From this lesson I showed you scriptures in Matthew and Luke where Jesus reestablished the importance of this information without ever explaining it or telling you what He was talking about.  This is exactly why this information has never been revealed until now.  I believe that if God had not revealed it, it would still be unknown.   I hope that does not sound like I am trying to tell you that I’m anything important because He revealed it to me, because that is not what I am saying at all.  I am just a messenger who God chose and I did not ask for this revelation specifically, since I would have not known what to even ask for in the first place.  When I study the Bible, there are many times I do not know what I am studying until God shows it to me.   So it is always God’s glory for showing it to us, and never our ability that discovered it.  I learned this a long time ago and I believe that is why He gave it to me.

I think we should review the known facts for the spiritual family of God to make sure we understand what we know and what we do not know.  Let’s start by reviewing the family member titles given to us by God to see who they are called again and their relationships to each other.  If you would like to go back and reread these scriptures, you can go to Micah 7:6 to see the original prophecy or you can go to Matthew 10:34-36 or Luke 12:52-53 and see Jesus’ exact words on the subject.   Here are the family titles that were given to us:

  1. Son (the Man in Matthew)
  2. Father
  3. Daughter
  4. Mother
  5. Daughter-in-law
  6. Mother-in-law

We had 6 directly named family titles and these occur in almost any family on the earth.  However, Jesus reveals some other information that makes this family unlike almost any other family on the earth that I know of.   Reading from Luke 12:52-53 and Matthew 10:34-36 we came up with a short list of known facts and I will review this list for you so that you can refresh your mind on the complexity of this riddle:

  1. God is describing One Family.
  2. There are only 5 members in this 1 family.
  1. There are only 2 direct males mentioned by title (the son and the father).
  2. There are up to 4 direct females mentioned (daughter, mother, daughter-in-law, mother-in-law).
  3. This family will be divided 3 against 2 or 2 against 3.
  4. The Father will be divided against his son.
  5. The mother against her daughter.
  6. The mother-in-law against her daughter-in-law.
  7. A marriage is implied by the titles of “daughter-in-law” and “mother-in-law”.
  8. A man’s enemies are those of his own family.

These facts make this family so different, that it can only fit God’s family by design.  Hopefully you will better understand that statement as we continue.  I posted this puzzle on the internet over a month ago and still no one was able to come forward to solve it.  I suggested that you go through and read my other postings so that you could find some more clues, because I have all of the necessary information given and even a diagram of this family on my website and no one still could come up with the solution.  I can only assume that no one really extended any effort to solve the puzzle, so I am in a personal struggle to determine if I should do all of your Bible study for you and give you the answer or to just leave you hanging in the dark.  There are many times when I put lessons on the internet that I have to ask myself, am I casting my pearls before the swine that Jesus told us not to do (Mat 7:6)?  If a person does not see the same value of the Word of God that I do is that casting my pearl of great value to be trampled on?  To give away the Word of God for free is a perplexing contradiction.  Jesus seems to imply that some will value His Words and others will just trample upon them.  What I am teaching you today has opened up the Bible for me more than any other revelation of the Word of God that I have ever heard or learned about from anyone.  Therefore, I clearly understand the value of this knowledge, whether you do or not.  You need to decide what is valuable to you, if the word of God is not valuable, please stop reading my lessons and go away.  I know I said that already, but I am being very serious and I will probably say it again before I’m done today.  If you are an individual who sees value in what I am teaching you, then please be brave enough to tell me so that I do not decide to stop teaching because of everyone’s silence.

Since no one has solved God’s riddle, I will teach you how to solve it using Bible examples.  Today I want to start by exploring the first created family members and see what God describes to us about them in the Bible to help us to understand God’s spiritual family.  We will look at some of the children of Adam (but not all of them) to shorten this Bible example being described to us.  We know from the Bible that from the one created man Adam came every other human on the planet.  We know this based upon 1 Corinthians 15:22 since Adam’s sin was passed to every human.  Likewise we know that from the one woman Eve came every other human on the planet.  Eve is called the “mother” of all living in Genesis 3:20.  We do not technically know how many children Adam and Eve had in their 900+ years of life on the earth.  But, I personally believe that Adam and Eve had many children and I base this on a verse in Genesis where God says:

Gen 5:4  And the days of Adam after he had begotten Seth were eight hundred years: and he begat sons and daughters:

If Adam lived over 900 years on the earth, he had to have had a lot of children.  The number of children could possibly be in the range of several hundred children.  Everyone likes to ask the question “where did Cain get his wife” and God tells you indirectly right here in this verse in Genesis that Cain and Seth married their sisters.   Since that was all of the women that existed on the earth in those days this was a permissible occurrence.  Later I will show you that this was a common thing in the early days of human civilization, where men would marry their sisters.   But, for now take note that God says Adam had many daughters and we will leave it at that.  I will now give you a limited family tree diagram of Seth one son of Adam.   We know from Genesis 5:7 and Luke 3:38 that the son Seth has another son named “Enosh”.  Therefore we must conclude that Seth married one of his sisters to have this son in the family lineage of Jesus.  Now look at this family diagram and see what it reveals to us:

I am only focused in on the one son of Adam named Seth and his wife and both of these children had to come from Adam and Eve.  So we have one mother, one daughter, one father and one son.  That makes 4 in one family doesn’t it?  If the son Seth marries a daughter of Eve (his sister), then we have the new addition of the mother-in-law title to the mother simply by the definition of marriage even though she is still the new wife’s mother simultaneously.  Just take note that one single woman can carry multiple family titles by definition and circumstances.  For example, any daughter can become a wife, a daughter-in-law, a mother and a mother-in-law and she can possess all of these family titles simultaneously.   In my picture of Adam’s family the daughter of Eve would also become Eve’s daughter-in-law when she married Seth her brother.  Again we see that one woman can possess two family titles and this is a major clue to resolving the puzzling fact that God’s riddle had 6 named titles but then He said there were only 5 actual individuals.  Therefore it is essential to conclude that one woman in the family of 5 must have two of the titles given to us in order to resolve the difference correctly.  Do you understand this logic?  Since the females are the only in-law references given to us in Micah, Matthew and Luke I have ignored the male role titles.  Hopefully you can see in Adam’s family diagram that we have all six titles that were given to us in the prophecy, but yet we only have four family members and this does not match the 5 in one family that God has revealed to us in Luke 12:52-53.  So we have a family tree that is close, but it is not accurate enough to solve the mystery.  So we still have a monumentally perplexing puzzle to solve.  Do you understand what I have said so far?  I pray that you do.  So let’s shift gears to a different family tree diagram of a modern day family and see how that compares to the information given to us by Jesus.  This week in the news Prince William of England married a commoner name Kate and this next family diagram could very well apply to this marriage.

The son in this diagram would be Prince William, the daughter would be the woman Kate and then the parents of each would also apply.  As you can easily tell, using this diagram it has added too many family members to satisfy the riddle requirements.  It further complicates the matter by introducing a second family and that does not fit with the Words of Jesus either.  Instead of the 4 family members of Adam’s and Eve’s family we now have 6 members like in my family tree.  This diagram has two fathers, one son, two mothers and one daughter.  We also have a daughter-in-law and a mother-in-law in this diagram and all of this information is only partially accurate to the riddle information.   What we have done is gone from one too few, to one too many family members.  We have also increased the number of families from one to two, so we have moved further away from solving the riddle.   However, look again at the diagram, study it and see why we have too many family members and then determine which one we can take away to make five and still have the same necessary six resulting family titles?  To me it is very logical to see that there are “too many” fathers in this diagram.  From reading the original prophecy we know that there is only one father and one son so we must take away one father and this will resolve every problem to solve this puzzle.  Since we are talking about God’s spiritual family and there is only one God the Father in the trinity, this tells me that there are not two Fathers in God’s family tree diagram.  These are some of the factors that make a riddle a riddle.  If you could solve the riddle without giving it any thought it would not be a riddle.  Looking again at this diagram of the 2 two families with 6 total family members, how do we remove one father and still leave two mothers that results in one family?  Wow, I think I just gave you a major clue.  If you only have one father, he is the head of one household and everyone that comes from him is in the same family regardless of who the mother of the child is.  You can see this logic found in the Bible in many places.  David had more than one wife, Solomon had way too many wives, and even Jacob had 4 wives that birthed the 12 tribes of Israel.  So we have just made some huge strides to solving the puzzle.  Are you getting it?  According to the Bible, a man is the head of a family and no matter how many wives he has had, they are still one family.  Please do not think that I teaching polygamy.   Wow, this is really getting tough isn’t it?  God as you will soon learn is forced to do something that is normally frowned upon in order to accomplish the ultimate plan of God.  You see before the human race existed, I believe that God had a monogamous relationship.  After the plan of God is finished He will end up with another monogamous relationship in the end, but the in the in between time in order to implement the plan, God had to do something that He would not have normally choose to do.   We know that God is opposed to polygamy by the nature of creation.  Jesus taught us that in the beginning did you not read that he made them male and female?  In other words God said He did not make them male and females (multiple wives).   Do you see how smart God is, with His riddle and His words?

I guess it is time to reveal the family of God to you.  There is only one family diagram that I could come up with that solved this riddle exactly and amazingly enough God uses this pattern as His family diagram.  This diagram will probably shock most of you.  You see when you look at this diagram it strongly resembles a known Satanic symbol that causes you to retract from believing it.  I purposely believe that Satan stole God’s family symbol and tried to pervert it intentionally to discredit it so that no one would accept it as being something from God.   By Satan taking a Bible pattern and making it his own, it will cause you to more easily reject the truth and this is a common way that he uses to deceive people.  Take a look very closely at this diagramed family tree and then I will discuss the facts of how only this diagram will solve the riddle completely.

Here we have a family of five and it is totally different than any family that I know of on the earth today.  However, that does not mean it is not possible.  I believe my Bible says with God all things are possible (Mat 19:26).  What I want you to do today is to change your perspective and to think about this diagram from a spiritual point of view.  Try to see it from God’s point of view.  Who are the two males in this family?  We know from the Bible that God is a Spirit (John 4:24).  We also know that God is called our Father (Rom 1:7, Rom 15:6, 1 Cor 8:6, 2 Cor 1:2).  We further know from scripture that God existed in the spiritual realm eternally before there was a natural realm ever created.  Now think, where was the Son of God conceived and born?  Clearly Jesus Christ was born a natural man in the physically created world.  So we can clearly understand that we have a natural Son that came from the spiritual realm of heaven to be born in the physical world as a man.  Therefore, we have two direct realms of reality being described to us in one diagram.  In other words this diagram originates in the spiritual realm, but it then crosses over into the natural realm simultaneously.  This is why we have two women who are married to God the Father, one is a natural woman and the other is a spiritual woman and if you have ever read my other Bible lessons you already know their names.  If you do not understand that a covenant is a marriage, then you should go and read my lesson on “Understanding Bible Covenants”.  God the Father was in covenant with two women in the Bible and I will explain this more clearly in the next Bible lesson.   So before I continue, I want to confirm this family diagram using an Old Testament family that God gives us as a natural type of His family.  It is found in the family of Abraham and this should not surprise you at all, but the reality of this family matching God’s family will take you by surprise since it was a well hidden secret.

You will look at my diagram and probably scratch your head and wonder how I got this information.  I will have to tell you that it was not me that got it at all; it was the Spirit of God revealing it to me that caused me to see it.  You see I was listening to the Bible on CD one day over 10 years ago and while I was listening to the book of Genesis chapter 20 all of sudden God said, “Did you hear that?”  I had to stop and back it up and then listen to it again and then God said that was an example of the five in one family.  Sometimes I think I shock people when I say that God speaks to me, but yet if you think that God doesn’t speak to you it is because you are not listening and for no other reason.  After I read the verse in the Bible, I saw it immediately and here is the exact verse that God spoke to me about, see if you can see it also:

Gen 20:12  And yet indeed she is my sister; she is the daughter of my father, but not the daughter of my mother; and she became my wife.

Did you see it?  Did you notice that Abraham married his sister?  I told you that this was a common early Old Testament occurrence in the recorded events of human history and this verse proves it.  You see Abraham was born nearly 2000 years after Adam and this proves to us that men still married their sisters even then.  However, it changes things slightly when you see that his wife was only his half-sister.  Sarai had the same father as Abram but not the same mother.  Guess how many family member that comes up to be?  If you guessed that there were exactly 5 in one family you would be exactly right.  If you also saw that they were 2 males and 3 females you would also be exactly right.  If you go on and think with me  logically you will see that every family member title fits exactly the titles given to us in Micah 7:6.  It is only because Abraham’s father Tera had two wives that make it possible for there to be 5 in one family.  We have a precise match to the spiritual family of God using an Old Testament type and shadow that has been written about for thousands of years before Jesus came to the earth to tell us about it.  I believe that when you understand that God knew the end from the beginning that it made it easy for God to hide important information in the book of Genesis that we would need to know about before Jesus came back to the earth almost 4000 years later.  It is an awesome example of the extreme intelligence of God at work.  If you do not understand the complexity of the Bible after studying this Bible series, you are just reading the wrong Bible teacher and you should really just go away.  Sorry I said it again!

In conclusion today I want to show you how this family tree diagram causes you to understand the plan of God in action from beginning to the end.  Hopefully you will recall that Jesus taught us that there would be five in one family divided 3 against 2 and 2 against 3 (Luke 12:52).  This division of 3 against 2 is actually present in the Old Testament shadow of Abraham’s family given to us by God in Genesis 20.  The exact same divisions occur that have been stated in the prophecy of Micah 7:6.  You’ll see what I mean as we continue.   Why are these specific numbers important to mention?  Why is it exactly 3 against exactly 2?  What exactly is a division?  A division by definition is a separation of one thing from another, a departure from, or even isolation from.   Why would it be necessary for God to divide His spiritual family?  God actually answers this last question in the prophecy and you should review this fact to understand what the plan of God is doing using this division concept.  Remember the prophecy said “a man’s enemies are those of his own household”.   If God’s spiritual enemies are His family members and possibly His wife or His children or both, then that makes things much more complex for God to solve.  It goes back to the old adage that you can choose your friends but you cannot choose your relatives.  It means if God’s enemies are a part of His internal spiritual family, how does He get His enemies out of His house?  The answer to that question boils down to, God has to start a new family and that is the only solution that is legal while being morally sound preserving the character and nature of a loving God.  God is so much smarter than you or I, and He always does things in a legal justified way that does not reflect upon Him negatively.    Division can be a positive or a negative depending on the reason for the division being implemented.  A negative division would occur if you committed a crime and were convicted of that crime and sent to prison, you have now been divided from society by your personal bad choices.   A positive division occurs when you can see how our roads have been built; we have divided highways where one side cannot invade the space of the other side’s traffic to cause accidents or deaths.   These are two different types of divisions.  They both are in effect implemented to prevent something negative from happening.

But, what is a division in the terms of a family unit?  There are actually several different types of family divisions and I will discuss some of them briefly.  One possible family division occurs when a loved one dies.  Whenever a family member dies, that family member is no longer in the family.   Of course they do not cease to exist; they just do not exist in the natural realm, so death is a clear dividing line.  We learn this concept from the book of Ruth when Ruth says to Naomi “I will be with you until death separates me from thee”.   You need to understand that this is why Jesus was born a man, so that He could die a natural death.  Once you understand that death is a separating force for covenants, you begin to understand why Jesus had to die.   Another possible family division would be a type of divorce where one parent separates from another and one gets custody of the children and the other one does not.  These are types of family divisions, but all of these are not what is happening in this riddle from Micah 7:6.  You see based upon the fact that the daughter is called a daughter-in-law we have an established marriage of the son to the daughter.  We therefore, know from scriptures that a marriage is also a division even if you have never thought of it this way.  Marriage is a separation in the eyes of God and that is exactly how He views it.  Perhaps I will do a future series on the subject of division to explain these concepts more in-depth to you, but for now let’s move on.   If you look at the diagram that I have given you of the family of 5, this family is a perfect representation for this reality of 3 divided against 2.  Let me try to explain that statement by going back to Genesis again and showing you what God says to us about the covenant of marriage.  God tells us something in Genesis 2:24 that is very relevant to this situation and here is where I am going to connect some more dots for you to see something radically new and different from the Bible:

Gen 2:24  Therefore shall a man leave his father and his mother, and shall cleave unto his wife: and they shall be one flesh.

You can clearly see that when a son takes a wife, there is a definite division that is stated.  To “leave” one’s old family is a dividing line occurrence that begins a new family.  God says the son will leave his father and his mother and he will now be joined in covenant with his wife.  Anytime a son leaves his mother and father to become married, a division has occurred.  This is a separation of being in the father’s family that results in the establishment of a new son’s family.  So when Jesus, the Son of God comes to the earth to establish a new covenant in His blood, He has just separated Himself from His Father’s covenants by definition given to us by God’s created patterns and His specific Words.  Both the son and the daughter must leave their respective parents to become joined in covenant to form a new family household that is both new and separate from the existing Father’s family household.  If you do not understand how this works, I’m sorry for you, I do not know how to explain it more clearly.  You see when I married I moved out and got my own house.  My wife and I created a new family unit that was now separate from our parents.  Our parents were no longer responsible for us to provide for us or to give us anything.   This is simply how life works, we still recognize where we came from, but we now do not live with that old family since we have a new one now with our own children.  Someday our children will grow up and get married and they will then become a new separate family and the endless cycle will continue until God’s timetable ends it.

So we have the son and his wife who are now two and using the diagram of the family of 5 they must leave their 3 parents that have been excluded from their new household.   We have two children who have become One New Family and we have an old One Family that was five members that now have become three by themselves.  I’m really not sure if you understood the simple math behind what I just said, but it was very deep and I know it went over many people’s head.  My Blog is called “Advanced Bible Studies” and this is why.  It is written for spiritually mature Christians who want to think.  I want you to see from my 5 in one family diagram that there are two children that leave 3 parents to be married and this is a division of 3 against 2.  This was the plan of God in a new revealed reality.   God has dissolved two covenants for the creation of one new covenant that is far better.  You probably still have a lot of questions and you are probably still lost to who these three women are, but I will explain them more in the next lesson and it will become much clearer.  If you are impatient and want to see who they are faster, just go and read my other Bible lessons and it will become much clearer more quickly.

I hope that you do not write me off as being crazy, because you do not understand all of these new Bible concepts yet.  Just realize that you still do not know everything that I know and it is just impossible for me to teach you everything that I know in one Bible lesson or even one series of lessons.  Anyway until next time, I will pray “may the Spirit of Wisdom and Revelation in the knowledge of Him who created us be there to open the eyes of your understanding to enlighten you with all of His truth”.  If you like what you are reading I would encourage you to tell me and then go tell a friend about what you are learning that is so different.  Thanks and God Bless!

If you would like to continue reading in this series you may proceed to “Part 5“.

Posted in Bible Study, God's Spiritual Family, Understanding

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Understanding the Value of the Word of God? God’s Word is Seed, Water and Light! Part 1

Apr 22

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(Ver 1.3)  This is Part 1 in a series of advanced Bible lessons designed to help you to recognize the extreme value of the Word of God.   I had a funny thing happen to me the other day when a three year old picked up a kids book and said to me, “this book is broken, I can’t read any of the words”.   I thought that was very cute reasoning from a three year old.  Well I laughed and said to myself that is the way the Bible is to many people.  There are a multitude of people in the world who have tried to read the pages of the Bible and they have concluded “this book is broken” because it does not make any sense to them.  Because of this, we have many in the world that look down on the Bible and like my three year old little friend, they do not understand what they are doing or saying.  I have seen others on TV laugh at Christians and they look at the Bible and call it a foolish book of fables.  All of these erroneous conclusions are based upon ignorance and their inability to see any value of the words that are written on the pages.  I use to be this exact same way until God opened my eyes and I began to understand the deep hidden spiritual information that is encoded on the pages.  All of a sudden the pages of the Bible became alive to me and these living words began to speak to my heart and I began to see and understand the real spiritual things of God like never before.  This new perspective changed my life forever!

1Co 3:6  I have planted, Apollos watered; but God gave the increase.

1Co 3:7  So then neither is he that planteth any thing, neither he that watereth; but God that giveth the increase.

I was given a question from one of my readers; so I thought if one person had this question there might be many others that could benefit from the same answer.  As you can see from my key verses, God is describing a spiritual ministry process in the terms of planting seeds and watering them and God causes them to grow.  This seems to not be that difficult on the surface, but yet what does each of the elements represent in these verses and how do they work together?  Why does someone plant and someone else water?  What is the seed and what is the water?  These are some of the questions that I will attempt to answer in the rest of this lesson.

The Bible describes itself in many fascinating and unique ways that make it a book like no other.   Today I will attempt to address just three of these unique descriptors to allow you to see the Word of God from a new and different perspective.  I will be teaching about seed, water and light primarily and what they each represent.  If you have ever planted a garden in your backyard, then God has taught you several spiritual lessons without you even knowing it.  You see God tells us the hidden things of God are clearly revealed in the things that He has made, so men are without excuse (Rom 1:20).  I remember one year we planted tomatoes, cucumbers, squash and broccoli to name a few vegetables in a garden and we carefully tilled the soil and put the seeds and the plants into the ground and then watered them, cared for them, built a fence around them and over time they grew.  We enjoyed and ate a lot of really fresh food from just a few rows of vegetables in a garden over that summer.  After studying the Bible I learned that farming was a created concept from God that applies to us learning about the Bible.  You see God created these natural farming processes to reflect a much greater truth about how things work in the unseen spiritual realm.  I have written on this subject before, but not in this direct relationship of God’s word being three different aspects that are essential elements to our spiritual growth process.  So today’s lesson will be watering some seeds that I planted before.  Uh oh, I think I just got ahead of myself.

In the natural garden world there exist four natural elements that are essential for our natural food production.  These four essential elements are light, water, seed and soil.  Without any one of these four we would not exist on this planet.  These four essential natural elements are all symbolic representations of spiritual things and that is my primary subject today.  Of course light comes from the sun and is probably the first major basic element that permits all life to exist on our planet.   We live in a solar system that is our life sustaining force and our planet exists in the perfect position in order to sustain this life here.  If we were closer to the sun, it would be too hot and if we were further away it would be too cold.   So we live on a Goldilocks planet, one that is just right for human habitation and this is not by chance or accident.  I totally believe that it was by design.  So the first subject that I want to focus on is the Sun and who or what this represents to us in our Christian walk.

Mal 4:2  But unto you that fear my name shall the Sun of righteousness arise with healing in his wings; and ye shall go forth, and grow up as calves of the stall.

We will briefly examine why Jesus Christ is described to us to be the “Sun of Righteousness”?   I will briefly tell you that God does not have to call Him the “Sun of Righteousness” if there are no other suns that exist.  In other words God qualifies Jesus to be righteousness and this implies there is a sun that is unrighteousness.   I do not have time to explain this fully today, but Satan is the unrighteous sun, I believe.  You see in Isaiah 14:12, Satan is called “Lucifer” and this name in the Hebrew means “bright morning star”.  Wow, that is tough to understand isn’t it?  You see Jesus is also called the “bright and morning star” in Revelation 22:16.  Both Jesus and Satan are called by the same name, but one is the Sun of Righteousness and the other is the “sun of unrighteousness”.  You have to understand that this “morning star” is a coded reference to our sun, the star that rises in the east every morning that lights our day.  I’m sorry I do not have time to elaborate on that more today since it is not my primary subject.  Just understand when you are looking at the night sky that every star that you are looking at is a different sun than ours.  So there exist many suns by the design and creation acts of God.  Let’s continue to look at Jesus.  You see Jesus called Himself the “Light of the World” and the “Light of Life” in John 8:12.  Jesus is clearly telling us that He is the source for all Spiritual life.  There are many verses in the New Testament that confirm this reality, if you choose to see them.  If you want to look up some of the names, titles and descriptions of Jesus in the Bible you can read my lesson on this subject called “Names, Titles, Descriptions and Symbols of Jesus in the Bible”.   I have concluded that Jesus is the Spiritual Sun of the Spiritual Day and you can read about this in more depth in my Bible lesson called “Understanding Night and Day”.  The next factor that I want to associate with the sun is who Jesus is according to the Bible.  We certainly understand that Jesus is called the Son of God, but God describes Him in another key way that you should see:

Rev 19:13  And he was clothed with a vesture dipped in blood: and his name is called The Word of God.

This verse in Revelation is describing Jesus Christ and God is calling His name something entirely different.  God calls His name the “Word of God”!  By the laws of mathematics created by God we can substitute Word of God for Sun of God and we can even go further and say the Sun of Righteousness is equal to the Word of God.  This is a very substantial part of my lesson today.  God’s Word is the key factor that brings us Spiritual Light and Life and this is an essential part of God’s spiritual farming lesson.

The second essential element for life on our planet is the existence of water in mass quantities.  Our planet is often called the water planet since there is so much water on it that this water could cover it many times over if the world was flat.  However in the farming process, water is not the next essential element so I’ll leave this one to last today.  Next I want to address “seed” and you should know if you have read my other Bible lessons what this is or at least know parts of what this is.  I did a long series of lessons from the Bible on what Seeds represent and there are many things that conform to these types of created and spiritual realities.  If you would care to read about them all in detail, you can go and read “Understanding Seeds”.  However, today I just want to focus in on one lesson and really just a part of that lesson to define what Paul was sowing and Apollos was watering.  You see if you recall in the Parable of the Sower, Jesus taught us the Seed was the Word of God.  You can read this in Matthew 13:23 and Luke 8:11.  So God’s word is clearly defined to be God’s spiritual seed.  We also know from this parable that the ground or soil is man’s spiritual heart.  God tells us that those who hear and understand the Word of God are those that will eventually produce spiritual fruit.  Let me give you another key verse found in the Bible about the Seed of God:

1Pe 1:23  Being born again, not of corruptible seed, but of incorruptible, by the word of God, which liveth and abideth for ever.

Here is God contrasting two seeds, one is corruptible and one is incorruptible and that is two ends of two opposites.  The concept of corruptible is a Greek word that means mortal or decaying.  To be mortal is to be subject to death.  It is often associated with organic matter in the world.  The laws of thermodynamics state that everything that we can perceive around us is in a state of decay.  God is basically comparing natural things (seeds) to spiritual things (seeds) and God inform us that His spiritual Seed is incorruptible.  We can understand from the definition of this word that it means “immortal” or incapable of death.   God is basically telling you His Words are everlasting Seed that will never die, never pass away and never cease to exist.

We have now discovered two key factors to identify or describe the Word of God.  These are God’s Word is Spiritual Light and God’s Word is Incorruptible Seed.   I hope you are beginning to see and understand the increasing value of the Word of God.  It appears to me that the more I learn about God’s word, the more valuable it becomes to me.  God is telling us without His word we would all cease to exist instantly.  So let’s continue in the farming analogy and discover if God’s word is also water?  There are actually many things in the Bible that are described to be water or symbolically related to water.  People are said to be water, seas, oceans, etc. whose waves roar endlessly.    But, this is not God’s water, just the people made in the image of God who many seem to be clueless to whom they really are.   Let me show you what Jesus says to His disciples in the Gospels about water and this will hopefully begin to change our perspective on the subject:

Joh 15:3  Now ye are clean through the word which I have spoken unto you.

If God’s word can make you spiritually clean, then God is implying a washing process like when you take a bath or shower.  God is basically telling you that the Word of God is the Water of God in indirect terminology.   Water is an essential element for life on our planet.  We drink water, we wash in water, we use water for many purposes.  You should be able to understand that water is a vital and indispensable part for life on our planet and that God is saying “My Words are also this essential” in the spiritual realm.   Let me give you verification and a second witness for this reality:

Eph 5:26  That he might sanctify and cleanse it with the washing of water by the word,

Ephesians chapter 5 is predominately a marriage covenant chapter and in the context of this information, God describes that His Word is a cleaning force or power.    This verse leaves no doubt in my mind that the Word of God is equal to the Water of God.   All of this information might be confusing to you or it could be very enlightening to you.  You see in the natural realm, light is not water and they are two different elements or substances, so we think.  Seeds are also not light and a seed is not water either.  So it is very complicated isn’t it?   This is why there has been a great debate in the church to the existence of the Trinity of God.  How can God be three and still be one?   It is a huge perplexing puzzle that only God can solve.  What you need to understand though is that everything that we see around us in the physical realm was created by the Word of God from the spiritual realm, so essentially all of these things are the same one thing, the Word of God.  When I learned how God created the world, it changed my perspective to many things in the Bible.  God saw and God said and then it was.  You can read this over and over in Genesis 1.  God was trying to teach you that His words became what we see around us.

Today is Earth Day and I do not profess to be a supporter of this man made cause or event.  It appears people in the world want to say “Save the Planet” and ignore the people and let them all go to hell.  The problem with this reasoning is that God tells us “heaven and earth shall pass away, but my word will never pass away” (Mat 24:35).  So people are focused in on the wrong priority entirely.  God’s word is eternal and you should be consumed with knowing as much about it as you can learn.

2Co 4:18  While we look not at the things which are seen, but at the things which are not seen: for the things which are seen are temporal; but the things which are not seen are eternal.

The things of this world are very temporary and not eternal so we as true Christian should not give these natural things like our planet the first priority.  Do not get me wrong, I did not say to pollute it or to treat it badly, I am in fact saying you should be a good steward of what God has given to you to enjoy, but do not make it your life’s focus to save the planet because it will not matter in a short time from now.  Keep your eyes on the eternal things and this is just the Word of God.  Make God’s Word your first priority and it will make other temporary things seem very insignificant.

So I have given you at least three different aspects of the Word of God today.  The Word of God is Spiritual Light that causes us to live and grow.  The Word of God is Spiritual Water that causes us to be clean.  The Word of God is Seed that is planted in the spiritual soil of our hearts and it is these three factors from God that causes us to produce fruit unto God.  This is why Paul could plant God’s word first and then Apollos could come along and water those seeds that were planted by Paul.  It all reverts back to the same eternal words of God.  These are not new words; they are the same words being spoken by different preachers or teachers.  This is how it works.  God is the essential factor that causes the seed to grow.   God gives us the seeds to plant with His Word.  God gives us the water to cause these seeds to continue to produce and this is also His word.   So it is always God and His Word that is the important factors and never the preacher who sowed or watered.  Do you understand these concepts?  Do you see why I’m not important?   However, what I say is very important, but me, I am just a farmer who is either planting new seeds in you or watering old seeds that have been sown already by someone else.  I hope and pray that you enjoyed my simple Bible lesson today and may God continue to bless you until next time.

If you would like to continue reading in this series you may go to “Part 2” now.

Posted in Bible Study, Understanding, Word of God

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