Monthly Archives: March 2011
Understanding Healing, Sickness & Disease? The Heart of the Prodigal Father! Part 3
(Ver 1.2) This is now Part 3 in a series of advanced Bible lessons about Where Sickness and Disease Came From. If you have not read this series of lessons from the beginning, then I would suggest that you go back to Part 1 and start there. I have already revealed a lot of information in this series, so today I will try not to repeat those statements that I have already uncovered. What I want to do is to give you a different perspective on this subject of healing, sickness and disease using some scriptures that you possibly did not understand how they even applied to the subject. So today I want to talk about a story that Jesus taught us in Luke and in this story He reveals a great number of spiritual truths about some things that you should be aware of. This story is popularly called the parable of the “Prodigal Son” and I want to shift the focus off of the son and reveal what else this story teaches us. First off, many people call this lesson a parable and I am not totally convinced that this is actually accurate. You see in most of the parables that Jesus taught, He would almost always say “the kingdom of heaven is like…” and then reveal what it is like. He does not say that in this story. Regardless of if this is a parable or not, the truths given are still present and relative to my subject. However, I still believe that this story is a literal account of a hidden spiritual truth and if this is true, then it has more direct meanings than that which can be observed from the normal surface reading of the text. Almost everyone who teaches on this subject of the “Prodigal Son” teaches the story from the perspective of the son. They focus only on his arrogant attitude, the bad choices that he selfishly chooses and his coming into poverty and despair and finally his humility to return back home. This is a classic sinner story and people teach it this way predominantly. However, I believe that this story is more about the Father of the son than it is the son and people generally ignore this information. You might question in your mind what does the “Prodigal Son” have to do with sickness and disease? Here is a story that has nothing to do with healing directly, but in understanding this story you will soon learn that it has everything to do with healing. We are going to go through most of the story verse by verse for your benefit to see what we can learn from it and I want to start with Luke 15:11:
Luk 15:11 And he said, A certain man had two sons:
This is the beginning of why I said this is not a parable. Nowhere does Jesus say Heaven is like a man with two sons. There is no direct comparison statement of anything being like anything else, but instead Jesus says there is a “certain man”. When you understand how the Bible was written, you begin to see how God leaves it open to many possible interpretations of who Jesus is speaking of. You can think completely naturally and think Jesus is speaking of just an anonymous man on the earth that he knew, but wouldn’t want to tell us who it was. You could also think that Jesus is just speaking in parables of no one in particular and only trying to teach some life lessons in this story. Or you could think like me and try to see that God is describing His family in the terms that we could relate to. I want to stop here and review what the term “certain” means or at the least implies. To me the word “certain” means it is this way and not any other way. It is a very specific and unique adjective that implies Jesus knew exactly who he was speaking about. This means Jesus is not speaking of an anonymous man just to tell a natural story that has a spiritual lesson, but Jesus has someone in mind who He is talking about and this man with the two sons is actually the primary subject that we need to focus on in this lesson. It is true that Jesus never names the individuals or tells us directly who or what it is that He is speaking of. However, this is a common way that God spoke of Himself using an anonymous third party type of reference. In fact if you read my last Bible lesson that I posted, you will know that Jesus often times called Himself a man without saying He was this man. For example, there is the time in Matthew 19:4 where Jesus makes this statement:
Mat 19:4 And he answered and said unto them, Have ye not read, that he which made them at the beginning made them male and female,
Who is “He” that made them in the beginning? You can clearly see that God is speaking and He is saying that some anonymous male created them in the beginning and whoever this was made them male and female and God the creator was the one that was personally speaking these words. So God was telling a true factual story without claiming to be the creator even though that is clearly who He was. So this is the way the Bible is written many times. Jesus will tell you a story of a “certain man” and this is actually a story about Himself, but He could not say that or He would have been stoned on the spot by the religious zealots who did not understand who they were listening to. Let me give you another example of this technique used by God:
Mat 25:14 For the kingdom of heaven is as a man travelling into a far country, who called his own servants, and delivered unto them his goods.
You really need to learn this technique of Hiding the Truth in Plain Sight that God uses very often. The translators actually messed this verse up with the words “the kingdom of heaven is as”, this verse actually says “for a certain man traveling into a far country…” in the original Greek language. Again Jesus is speaking of an unnamed man who travels into a “far country” that is actually referring to God in the terms of a man. You see God was this man who had left heaven to come to the earth in person. God had previously given this world into the hands of the man Adam to tend and work His garden and Adam sells out the garden to Satan and allows God’s enemy to take control of it and this is more than I should have said on that. I am going to try not to get off of my mainline subject too much, but I want you to understand that if this is God being described to be this certain man in Luke 15, then God has more than one son. You see the NIV translators have made a huge blunder in scriptures like John 3:16 when they say Jesus is the “One and Only Son” of God. Christians are called the sons of god in several places in the New Testament and even angels are called the sons of God a few times in the Old Testament. So it is clear to me that God has more than one son. I do not have time to explain any of this here so either accept it or ignore it and let’s move on.
Luk 15:12 And the younger of them said to his father, Father, give me the portion of goods that falleth to me. And he divided unto them his living.
The younger son, or you could call him the second born comes to his father and asks for his inheritance before his father has died. So this is an impatient obnoxious son who thinks he deserves his wealth right now. It sounds like a lot of children in the world today. This is a difficult subject to actually understand if you think it is God who is the Father in this story. Because you cannot read the descriptions of either son mentioned and easily apply them to Jesus the normal Son of God that we all think of. However, the translators obviously thought this was a story of God since they capitalized the title “Father”. Anyway let’s continue on in the story:
Luk 15:13 And not many days after the younger son gathered all together, and took his journey into a far country, and there wasted his substance with riotous living.
So the younger son takes his money and goes to a far country where he squanders all of his fortune. Did you notice that the son is leaving his father’s house and going into a far country? Didn’t that sound similar to the story that Jesus told in Matthew 25:14? There are some pretty amazing little details found when you start comparing stories that Jesus used to teach with. This verse in Luke in the modern world would be like a son taking all of his dad’s money and moving to Las Vegas and then gambling, drinking and partying until he is broke. I see people like this on TV all the time.
Luk 15:14 And when he had spent all, there arose a mighty famine in that land; and he began to be in want.
So the son’s timing was not so good for him. Either he made the wrong choices to begin with or his short sighted thought process did not plan for any future. This is often the attitude of people in the world. He has spent all that he had and now a famine strikes the land. Doesn’t it seem like when things can’t get any worse, they suddenly do. Of course a famine is a symbolic reference to not having any spiritual food. God actually calls His Word the Manna from Heaven and this is spiritual food, but I guess I won’t go there either today. You see even though I do not believe that this story is a parable, I do believe that it has vast amounts of symbolic language imbedded in it. I guess in a way that means it could be viewed as a parable. I am not opposed to calling it a parable if that is what you would like. Regardless of what you want to call it, every noun still has a symbolic representation of a spiritual reality.
Luk 15:15 And he went and joined himself to a citizen of that country; and he sent him into his fields to feed swine.
I wish I could tell you more about what the implied symbolic references in these verses mean, but that would just confuse you since I am mainly talking about healing, sickness and disease. Just take note that when you join yourself to someone, that is a covenant relationship. A covenant is a marriage type of relationship between two individuals who are joined to become one flesh. That means what one of them has is what the other one has and vice versa. If you do not understand Bible covenants then you should go and read my lessons on “Understanding Bible Covenants”. I will also mention that feeding swine is a Jewish Law and a traditional no, no for any covenant man of God. The Old Covenant people of God were steered far away from pork and even today in kosher meals this is strictly forbidden. But, here this younger son was found working with that which was forbidden.
Luk 15:16 And he would fain have filled his belly with the husks that the swine did eat: and no man gave unto him.
As you can continue to read in Luke, the son is becoming fairly desperate so that he begins to eat the pig food to stay alive. There is no man that will help him. It is a classic example of how popular you are when you are rich with money and how much you are a nobody when you are at the bottom as a homeless man. This is true today in our world also. This is why this story is taught so much from the sinner perspective. It is actually a perfect example of many people in the world that each of us know.
Luk 15:17 And when he came to himself, he said, How many hired servants of my father’s have bread enough and to spare, and I perish with hunger!
So the young son finally has a G.E. light bulb brilliant idea and remembered where he came from. In his father’s house the servants ate better than he was eating. He decides that it would be better to be a servant of his old family than to die lonely in a foreign country. How can you not see what this story is saying? Is the son afraid of his father? Does the son think that his Father will hurt or harm him? The son has no one that cares, but has decided to take a chance and go back home to the last person that cared for him. I think that more Christians today need to have the same light bulb moment about their Father.
Luk 15:18 I will arise and go to my father, and will say unto him, Father, I have sinned against heaven, and before thee,
Luk 15:19 And am no more worthy to be called thy son: make me as one of thy hired servants.
Here is where it is really starting to get very relevant to sickness and disease. You see in the last lesson I taught on this subject I talked about sin was one of the primary causes for sickness. Jesus taught us this in at least two great examples. When He saw a crippled man that was healed, Jesus told him “sin no more least a worst thing come unto you”. So Jesus taught us sin was a cause and sickness was an effect of the sin. Here in verse 18 of Luke, the son clearly admits to the fact that he has sinned against his Father. So this young man has determined that he will repent and tell his Father that he has sinned and ask his Father to make him His servant. As you can see, this son has had a major change of heart from the beginning of the story. He has become humble, repentant and he clearly regrets his choices that he has made. All of this actually sounds a lot like me and if you are a real Christian it probably sounds like you also. I can easily put myself in the shoes of the young man, but that is not my message today either.
Luk 15:20 And he arose, and came to his father. But when he was yet a great way off, his father saw him, and had compassion, and ran, and fell on his neck, and kissed him.
So the son is going back home to his Father’s house. That is actually a great example for us. This is actually why I said this story is about the Father more than it is about the son. You can clearly see that the Father was looking for his son’s return daily. The Father was in faith, expecting his son to return home and this is based upon the extreme Divine Love of the Father for His son. Before the son could get home, the Father runs out to meet him so that He can beat him, curse him down and bring him to the pit of despair for wasting his money and all of the sinning that he has done against Him. This is the attitude of many very confused Christians in the world today. They believe that God is out to curse them, punish them, judge them, teach them a lesson, make them sick with cancer or wipe them out with a giant tsunami or some other natural disaster because of their sins. Is that what this Father does to his lost son? Did this Father ever send out one of his servants to hurt his child? Did the Father ever go out and try to find His son to hurt him? It appears to me that the Father really just wanted to love His son back into His house with open arms.
Luk 15:22 But the father said to his servants, Bring forth the best robe, and put it on him; and put a ring on his hand, and shoes on his feet:
Here is God the Father’s heart being revealed to us from His own mouth. God says bring out the best for my son who has returned home. Of course this son was foolish and of course this son sinned and of course he deserved to be beaten or punished, but this was not the heart of the Father. Do you understand how crazy it is to say that God puts sickness and disease upon people just because they make a mistakes and sin? It makes me want to cry when I read this story and think of the people accusing God as being the one who is teaching, judging or correcting, them with sickness and disease. This prodigal son did not get what he deserved; he got what the Father’s heart wanted to give him. This was based upon mercy and compassion and the deep love of the Father for His child. Do not ever entertain a place anywhere in your mind that your sickness is from God. If you do this you are foolishly misdirecting the consequences of your own actions. You see the Father had nothing to do with the seeds that the prodigal son had sown and reaped. The prodigal son was getting exactly what he had planted until he turned his mind back unto his father who loved him. There are many “Predestination Theologians” who will try to tell you the “Prodigal” was predestined to fail, but you see God in His love allowed the son to make his own freewill mistakes and learn from them and that is what a loving Father does. I mean a loving father will always try to teach the child the way to go, but if the child wants to go his own way then that is their choice. I know I have been there. I guess I could go on in the story to show you how the older son gets angry with the father for not passing judgment on the mistakes of the younger brother. You can see this spirit and attitude still exists in the church today when I try to write about a loving father’s heart and they want a God who kills people with cancer.
Get to know your Father God and learn to see His heart for you. When you do this you will see that God wants to bless you with the fatted calf and a feast of great proportions. God wants to cloth you with the robe of righteousness and put the ring on your finger. God desires to have you come and sit and take your place at the table like you never left or did anything wrong. This is the forgiveness of the Father’s heart and all it takes is for you to start back towards His house and He will see you a far off and run to meet you. There are still consequences for the son’s actions but, the Father’s heart is consistently dedicated to bless the son the best that He can. You have to just ignore verses and stories like these in the Bible or explain them away if you want to teach a Gospel that brings sickness from God to judge, correct and teach His people for their sins. There are just too many conflicts in the New Testament for me to believe that God ever puts sickness on people, but yet I get comments about this way too often from people who want to focus in on the Old Testament verses that they quote to me over and over like I never read them. I only wish they knew the same Father that I knew. Maybe when they finally come to themselves and turn back to the Father’s house they will also see Him running towards them also. I guess right now they are still living in Vegas and thinking everything is under control. Oh well? I hope that you enjoyed my Bible lesson and learned something that will give you hope to know your Father’s heart. God Bless!
If you would like to continue reading in this series, you can go to “Part 4“.
Solving the Riddle of the Family Members in the Unseen Spiritual Family of God! A Godly Riddle that Will Challenge You! Part 3
(Ver 1.5) Today is Part 3 of a series of lessons on Understanding the Structure of the Hidden Spiritual Family of God. Today I will continue the subject, but speak more directly to show you verses that describe some very specific family members in a complex spiritual riddle form. I will be discussing a revelation that God taught me over 10 years ago. This is an extremely advanced Bible topic and it is certainly one that you know very little about, simply because it has never been taught before. Perhaps you did not even know that God had a spiritual family and if you did not know this you should go back and start reading the first two lessons that I taught on this subject called “Understanding God’s Spiritual Family Structure”. I have also updated the first two lessons so even if you did read them before they contain new information that you should familiarize yourself with intimately before continuing. I get more people searching on my site for information about God’s spiritual family structure and design than any other search topic. I believe that people are hungry to learn about the hidden spiritual things of God and the only way to learn about this is to read God’s Word with an open mind and have a heart that craves to know the truth. I also find that because people search for this topic so much that it is a confirmation from God that people desire to learn about Him and that is why I teach a lot of things on this subject. In the previous lessons I taught that a natural family found on the earth consists of a husband and a wife with children and I revealed that this was a natural pattern from God’s creation that exposes God’s spiritual family. We also know from other Bible lessons that I have done (Understanding the Trinity of God) that the one true God is a Triune Spiritual Being called God the Father, God the Son and God the Holy Spirit. If you do not believe in the Trinity of God then you have already been deceived by the spirit of Anti-Christ who also does not want to believe that God had a Son:
1Jn 5:7 For there are three that bear record in heaven, the Father, the Word, and the Holy Ghost: and these three are one.
This is a controversial verse that is hotly debated by many deceived Christians. Satan would like to delete this verse from the Bible and has tried to remove it from several manuscripts. Therefore, it has been easily dismissible by people who are easily swayed. However, I believe this verse because this information is confirmed in many other places in the Bible so it is not a solitary reference. When the Antichrist shows up here on the earth Satan will use him to deny the existence of the Trinity and he will certainly say that God had no Son to everyone that he can persuade and he will claim to be God personally. Have you ever considered why it is so important to Satan that the Son of God did not come to the earth and does not exist in the Bible? Religions like Judaism and Islam teach that God had no Son. You can clearly see a pattern being formed that it is important for Satan to get people to believe that the Son of God is an imaginary figure like Apollo. Jesus confronted the Jewish leaders on this very subject in the book of Luke. Perhaps you remember this question that Jesus asked them? He asked them “Whose son is the Christ/Messiah?” Jesus said this because they believed that the Messiah was the prophesied son of David. Then Jesus asked them “How be it then that David wrote about Messiah in the Psalm and called him Lord”? That was my paraphrase of Luke 20:42. Wow, that was a loaded question for these men to answer? After this experience with Jesus many of them never asked him anymore questions. Jesus really has great questions if you listen to them.
As you continue to read these lessons you should begin to understand why this is so vital to Satan that God did not send His Son into the world. You see, God accomplished several things by having a Son and one of them was the establishment of a new Spiritual Family through a Son who had never been in covenant with anyone else before. There are also many spiritual truths that we can learn from the existence of the Trinity concerning God’s family structure. For example, from the list of trinity members we have two direct male family members named and two implied indirect female family members not named. Of course there is God the Father who is called the procreator of a child who is called the Son of God and then there is also God the Son who is the originator of the New Covenant. It also means that since there is a Father and a Son, there has to be wife and a mother to the Son. This is based upon very self-evident patterns found within creation. A male and a female are always required to create a new life of the same kind. If this is true in the natural realm, it has to be true about the spiritual realm and this will become clearer as we continue through these lessons. We understand that Mary the Virgin is the physical mother of Jesus. But, who is the spiritual mother of Jesus Christ, the Son of God. Uh oh? Who is the wife of God? Finally in the first two lessons I taught you scripturally that a Son by the Hebrew definition of the word is called the “Builder of the Family Name”. You always have a Son to keep your family name from disappearing off of the face of the planet. This is also God’s design and plan for His spiritual family. You might recall that I said Jesus Christ was a Son over His own house (family) (Heb 3:6). I also showed you where Jesus said “His Father’s house was where He came from” and this implies the Son’s house is a new separate dwelling place. These statements imply a new house that has never existed before with a new wife. Uh Oh again? Who is this implied new spiritual wife? If Jesus has married a new spiritual wife; who are the spiritual parents of this new wife? Who are all of these implied spiritual family members? There are two or three implied spiritual women in the family of God by observing just the names of the Trinity of God titles. I am about to explore this extremely new and potentially controversial subject in an attempt to solve these mysteries. If you have already closed your mind to these spiritual things that I have stated in the introduction, then you will be wasting your time to continue reading the rest of these lessons.
God has written the Bible in a way that has vast amounts of hidden spiritual information and I call this “Hiding the Truth in Plain Sight”. God has written plain text words and stories about real people, places and things that all have significance and meanings on the surface, but these same words also carry some hidden spiritual information that is greater than what we thought. If you have never read that series I would strongly suggest that you go and do so to learn some of the techniques that God uses to hide information in the Bible and this will help you to understand the complexity of what I am about to teach you today. So evaluate your spiritual maturity and make the determination if you are ready to learn some new things from the Spirit of God.
What is a family (spiritual or natural)? What makes up a normal family unit or a household? We know from the Bible that God created the first natural family on the earth in Genesis chapters 1 through 4. I personally believe that this naturally created family in Genesis was a patterned model of the design of God’s existing spiritual family in heaven and also the future configuration for His new spiritual family that was to come through His Son Jesus Christ who is called the bridegroom of the church. If you have not understood how the Church is the Bride, then you should go read my series called “The Bride of Christ Revealed”.
DISCOVERING THE RIDDLE OF GOD’S FAMILY
What I am going to do today is to show you some seldom taught scriptures in the Bible that reveal the family of God in a spiritually encoded hidden riddle format. These scriptures that I am about to give you represent a monumental spiritual riddle and a perplexing puzzle that is very complex. So if you are a puzzle solver you might enjoy this Bible lesson today. What is a riddle? According to the dictionary a riddle is a question or a statement that requires thought to answer or understand. This is exactly the nature of God and His Word if you did not know it. You can clearly see when you read the Bible that God has hidden spiritual information in the Bible, or at least I can. But there is good news about this hidden information in the book of Matthew, Jesus made this promise to us:
Mat 10:26 Fear them not therefore: for there is nothing covered, that shall not be revealed; and hid, that shall not be known.
Jesus claims that everything that was hidden in the Word of God will be made known and I personally believe that this will be accomplished before He returns. This belief contradicts with the popular doctrine of preeminence. Preeminence is a belief that there is nothing left to be fulfilled prophetically in order for the Lord Jesus to return. I strongly disagree with that belief. I can see statements like this in the Bible that indicate there are many things left to be fulfilled. Some try to explain this away by stating we will know the whole truth when we all get to heaven, but that does me no good in the here and now. I am a firm believer that God will reveal the truth of His word to us all before Jesus returns and if that is true we still have a lot to learn. You may disagree with that statement, but hopefully as you continue to read you will begin to see things differently. Today’s lesson is the continuation of God revealing His hidden spiritual family. Here are the foundational scriptures to today’s spiritual riddle:
Mat 10:34 “Do not think that I came to bring peace on the earth; I did not come to bring peace, but a sword.
Mat 10:35 For I am come to set a man at variance against his father, and the daughter against her mother, and the daughter in law against her mother in law.
Mat 10:36 And a man’s foes shall be they of his own household.
Jesus in the course of teaching His disciples about many spiritual subjects pulls out a hidden obscure prophecy verse from the writings of a very minor prophet of God in the Old Testament and He makes a statement that is totally off the charts of our current levels of spiritual understanding. You should be able to see that in this revelation Jesus is describing to us that this is one of the main reasons that God has come to the earth in the flesh. This verse is clearly not understood, because God has never revealed it to anyone before now. I looked it up in every commentary that I could find and on the internet and no one had a clue what any of it meant. Even Matthew Henry who always had something to say about every verse had some very weak comments on these verses that were clearly based upon his ignorance of the subjects being discussed. So I started studying it in more depth and God begin to unfold it to me so that I could understand it and I was truly amazed at the hidden meanings. I will therefore, attempt to teach this new information to you so that you can also see that Jesus is revealing the spiritual members in the family of God.
The first point that I need to make is to teach you a very interesting technique of how God sometimes conceals the truth in plain sight. Here in these verses of Matthew 10:35-36, God is describing to us a seemingly random anonymous man and his family. Nowhere in any of these verses or the context of these verses does God directly reveal to you who this family is or who each family member represents or even if they are actually fictional or real unnamed individuals. Even if you go back and read the original prophecy you will not find a clue to who God is speaking about. That makes it almost impossible for you to think that God is speaking about Himself or His family. However, I will tell you that this is a repeated pattern that Jesus used in the Gospels when speaking about many of the secret things of God. Jesus would speak to us in parables using symbolism about the Kingdom of Heaven and say “The Kingdom of Heaven is like a man who sowed a grain of mustard seed in a field” (Mat 13:31). Who is this random anonymous unnamed man who sowed this seed in his field and how does this information relate to God’s Kingdom? This man is certainly a hidden symbol of God. Then in Matthew 22:2 Jesus says “The kingdom of heaven is like a certain king which made a marriage for his son”. Who is this unnamed certain King and who is the son to be married in this parable? We clearly have two unnamed males, an anonymous king and his son being described as the rulers of a kingdom. You see these are examples of God’s family in hidden symbolic anonymous terms. Here in this verse we are given God the Father to be the certain King and you should be able to see Jesus Christ as His Son. We also should be able to conclude that there are at least two implied women who are also not named. These two women are an implied mother of the son and an unnamed wife of the son. We could also logically conclude that the son’s wife has a mother also that is not named directly and now we are arriving at a closer match to the family being described in Matthew 10:35. I will tell you very clearly up front that God is talking about His family here in Matthew 10:35 and He is describing every spiritual member of His spiritual family household using symbolic natural family titles with amazing relationship accuracy and clarity. Jesus who was God in the flesh is describing a major reason for Him being born here on the earth, so I have concluded that this family being described must be His family diagram given to us in complex riddle form. Hopefully as we go through this study you will better understand this family at the end of the study, than you do right now at the beginning of the lesson. So hang in there and keep reading.
God reveals so many things in these verses found in Matthew 10:34-36 that it is really awesome and almost overwhelming. For example, my next point that I want to make is from Mathew 10:36 where God says “a man’s enemies are those of his own personal household or family”. Did you know that God has enemies? There are actually many confused Christians who do not know this. You can read about this enemy of God in several places, but I would suggest you go read about him in another parable that Jesus taught us in Matthew 13:39. Knowing that God has an enemy we should be able to understand that God is describing His spiritual enemy as being an internal family member of His household. Do you get the significance of that statement? God is basically making a play on the old saying that declares “You can choose your friends, but you can never choose your relatives”. You probably do not understand this fully yet, but you will. God is revealing to us that His enemy Satan is a member of His inner spiritual family. This is one of the first revelations that you need to understand about who Satan was and is. Satan was a key spiritual member of the family of God before the creation of man. Satan pre-existed man and was called “Lucifer” the son of the Morning in Isaiah 14:12. Son of the Morning is another symbolic reference containing much hidden spiritual informatoin. The Hebrew word translated as “morning” means “early light”. Since God is called Light in 1 John 1:5, you should be able to easily conclude that morning is just a reference to God a long time ago in the past. Therefore, Lucifer is being called a son of God. Not the Son of God, just a little son. Technically Satan is actually more than that as you will learn later. Did you know all of these facts already?
These lessons are really going to get very, very deep in this study, so please pay very close attention to every point being made. I already revealed to you that God was speaking about His own family in these verses. In other words Jesus is not speaking about an unknown random male’s family; He is talking about His personal family in an indirect writing or speaking style. These verses in Matthew 10:34-36 are not allegorical, they are not an analogy, they are not symbolic and they are not a parable; they should be taken very literally in all of their interpretation. You see Jesus never said the Kingdom of Heaven is like a family with family members like these, God is instead saying this is my family. The only real tricky part of the verses is that God is referring to Himself in human terms as being a father who is the head of a family. However this father is definitely not an earthly father, He is the head of the spiritual Household of God in heaven. This is at the least one of the key factors of how God has concealed this information in these verses in Matthew from our view or spiritual understanding for thousands of years. We have looked at them and thought only of natural things and we missed the fact that God is speaking of real spiritual things in these verses. In order to see what Jesus is speaking of you must shift your focus from God speaking about a human man, to God is speaking of Himself in the terms of being a human man with a family. Over 200 times in the N.T. God is called by the title “Father”. Therefore,the father in this family is definitely the Father God and the other titles are the members within the Spiritual Family of God! Over 200 times in the N.T. Jesus Christ is called by the title “Son”. God is using familiar human created descriptive terms to reveal Himself and His family so that we can understand it. Most of us understand the concepts of fathers and mothers, children and families, don’t we? I mean think about this, God created this institution called family for a specific reason. These family units are not here by chance or accident; they all have a designed purpose in the plan of God. That is also why Satan is trying his best to redefine a family in the “modern” world as being between two men or two women. You should really pay attention to what Satan does and then figure out why he is doing it and this will help you tremendously to understand the Bible. Let’s go back and review verse 35 again:
Mat 10:35 For I am come to set a man at variance against his father, and the daughter against her mother, and the daughter in law against her mother in law.
What you should see in verse 35 is the fact that this verse contains a list of very typical family members found almost anywhere in the world. So there is nothing unique or special about the list on the surface and this is also why many people assume it to be any regular natural family. However on closer inspection and analysis of this family, this list is more unique than it appears on the surface and it subtly describes to us a set of family members that actually does not fit very many families found here on the earth anywhere. This is the beginning of the puzzle. After I studied this list, I could not think of any families on the earth that this information fits exactly. Can you think of any? You see you can go to almost anybody’s family reunion and find people with these titles present. First, there is a very common relationship of a man and his father and every son on the earth has a father. Next there is another common relationship of a daughter and her mother mentioned and every daughter on the earth has a mother. Finally it starts to get more complex and it says there is a daughter-in-law and her mother-in-law and you can find these relationships in most every common family on the earth. What we have is a list of six potential named individuals that need a resolution or identities assigned to them. An identity is always a name and that is what we are ultimately after. We are looking for the names of the family members in God’s family. Here is the list of the 6 titles from Matthew 10:35:
- Man
- Father
- Daughter
- Mother
- Daughter-in-law
- Mother-in-law
If you analyze this list it is very tricky how God uses His words. Always pay very close attention to every word spoken by God and look up the definitions and this will help you to understand what is being said. For example the son is called a man, but then his father is not called a man. You see the Bible says very clearly that God is not a man (Num 23:19), so we know that God the Father is a Spirit. However the Bible repeatedly calls God by the male “Father” title (James 3:9, 1 Peter 1:2-3, 2 Peter 1:17, 1 Jn 3:1, 2 Jn 1:3, 2 Jn 1:9 to name a few) and this implies a male. The complexity of God comes in when He becomes a man in His son and the Son of God is Jesus. Jesus is called both the “Son of Man” and the “Son of God” repeatedly in the Bible, and they are easy to find so I will not give you a list of them here. Looking at Matthew 10:35 again, since there are only two males mentioned, this information can still fit the patterns that we found in the Trinity, where there was God the Father and His Son, but we still have all of these unknown women being described to us? I think that I told you already that this verse in Matthew 10:35 is a direct quotation of a verse from a minor prophet, but I do not think I told you that it was the prophet Micah. I think this would be a good time to go back to the book of Micah and see what God says there. If you go to chapter 7 of Micah and verse 6 you will see what Jesus was quoting from and you can read the original information that was given to the prophet:
Mic 7:6 For the son dishonoureth the father, the daughter riseth up against her mother, the daughter in law against her mother in law; a man’s enemies are the men of his own house.
So basically we have the exact same information from Matthew using a few different descriptive terms and titles. The man in Matthew, in this verse is clearly called a son here in Micah. The father is still the father and the others are also still called by the same titles. So we now have two major witnesses to this fact given to us in the Bible. One witness is Jesus speaking in the book of Matthew and the other is a prophet of God named Micah. If you read the context verses of Micah 7:6 you will probably be like me and scratch your head and wonder how Jesus pulled this verse out to teach us about the family of God, but He obviously knew more than we did. Here is the list of family individuals using the titles given to us in Micah 7:6:
- Son (the stated Man in Matthew)
- Father
- Daughter
- Mother
- Daughter-in-law
- Mother-in-law
We have now looked at two witnesses of the same information given to us about a certain family.
Let me teach you a sound technique that I use in many of my Bible studies. When searching for subjects in the Old Testament Hebrew Bible how can we know when God is speaking of the same exact subject in the New Testament Greek language and vice versa? Since the New Testament was written in a completely different language than the Old Testament that presents a challenge of great significance for us to have to deal with. Here in this Bible study is where we can learn how to overcome this challenge. Fortunately for us Jesus was quoting an Old Testament Hebrew text. So all we need to do is to take what Jesus said in the Greek language and match it with what the prophet said in the Hebrew language and that gives us a list of the words in each language that are a perfect match. Let’s do that with the family members for a later lesson where this information will be used:
|
HEBREW |
GREEK |
| Father = H1 | Father = G3962 |
| Son = H1121 | Son = G???? Man=G444 |
| Mother = H517 | Mother = G3384 |
| Daughter = H1323 | Daughter = G2364 |
| Mother-in-law = H2545 | Mother-in-law = G3994 |
| Daughter-in-law = H3618 | Daughter-in-law = G3565 |
This list contains the Strong’s number of the Hebrew words found in Micah 7:6 that match the Greek words in Matthew. As you can see there is only one language match that cannot be completed because Jesus chose a different Greek word in Matthew 10:35 used to describe this family son as a man. However, I will resolve that very soon. What we have just learned is how words from two different languages can be legally connected together as one subject. Now from this information I will be able to search the Old Testament and the New Testament for subject references that might help us expand our understanding on what God is describing. Remember these words because I will use them again.
We are technically no closer to finding a solution to the puzzle and in fact we are probably further away from it at this point. We have just learned both the Greek and Hebrew words that apply to the family member titles and that will help us later. However, there is a third witness to this information mentioned in the book of Luke, so let’s go and read these verses and see what changes:
Luk 12:53 The father shall be divided against the son, and the son against the father; the mother against the daughter, and the daughter against the mother; the mother in law against her daughter in law, and the daughter in law against her mother in law.
I should emphasize that these words found spoken in Luke are also in red ink in my Bible, so they are the words coming directly from the mouth of God. To me that makes them significantly more valuable for us to learn everything that we can about them. Whenever God speaks something directly I believe that it has a higher degree of importance. Do not misunderstand what I am saying, every Word in the Bible is important, but I place a higher priority on the direct Words of Jesus and that is just me and how I do it. I believe that God’s words always have power, significance, purpose and meaning and they clearly give us direction, correction, knowledge, understanding and wisdom. These words about a family must have some very significant meanings behind them to be included these 3 times in 3 different books of the Bible. Do you understand this? If you read verse 53 in Luke 12 you should be able to see that God gives us the same basic information found in both Matthew and Micah but with some subtle changes being made. God uses a little bit different terminology, but the overall concept is still the same between the 6 given family titles. We will notice that here in Luke Jesus chose the word “son” and this word is a precise match for the Micah son reference. Therefore the Greek word G5207 will correspond to the Hebrew word H1121. In every verse Micah, Matthew and Luke that we have reviewed the 6 titles are always paired together in the exact same order of mention. But, in Luke each title is stated and then repeated in reverse order and I believe that this is a tricky way of bringing in more information. We have the father divided against his son, the mother against her daughter and a mother-in-law against her daughter-in-law. While there is really nothing greatly apparent being changed in this verse there is some very important additional commentary information given by Jesus found in the verse prior to this one. Jesus in verse 52 gives us some very important new information which changes almost everything about how we think of this family and this is really the beginning of the riddle. Let’s read verse 52 and see what Jesus revealed to us:
Luk 12:52 For from henceforth there shall be five in one house divided, three against two, and two against three.
Anytime God qualifies a noun description it narrows the scope of the possible interpretations. It also makes it very specific to only one family that fits the exact picture being described. We see for the very first time that God is directly speaking of a single family unit and not just any random family. God also reveals the exact number of family members in this house and it is exactly 5. Where did Jesus get this information? It was not in Micah 7:6 at all on the surface. What we are observing is the extreme intelligence of God at work. We can clearly see that Jesus in this verse is stating that there will only be 5 and not 6 members of one family household that will be divided against each other. They will be divided 3 against 2 or 2 against 3. To me this information is very revealing, but I know what it means and you don’t. Obviously we can see using simple math 2 + 3 = 5 or 3 + 2 = 5 and we know that 5 family members is definitely not equal to 6 titles. So we have a major problem and a conflict that needs immediate resolution. We have a list of 6 titles and Jesus told us there are only 5 members in this family. That is an enormous problem and a gigantic puzzle, a complex spiritual riddle or you could call it a huge Godly mystery being presented. Let’s look at the list of the titles given to us again knowing this new information.
- Father
- Son (man)
- Mother
- Daughter
- Mother-in-law
- Daughter-in-law
I hope that you are beginning to see and understand the complexity of the riddle or puzzle being presented to us from God. What I want you to do now, is to use some basic computer type logic to help you to decipher this multipart puzzle. Let’s review the list of basic facts that have been given to us:
- God is describing One Family.
- There are 6 family titles described (Father, Son, Mother, Daughter, Daughter-in-law, Mother-in-law).
- There are only 5 total members in this 1 family.
- There are 2 direct males mentioned (son, father).
- There are up to 4 direct females mentioned (daughter, mother, daughter-in-law, mother-in-law).
- This family will be divided 3 against 2 or 2 against 3.
- The Father will be divided against his son.
- The mother against her daughter.
- The mother-in-law against her daughter-in-law.
If you do not understand that this informaton represents a very complex riddle, then you are probably reading the wrong Bible Study web-site. So let me expand this basic factual information based upon the implications given but never directly named or described. Any time that you have a reference to a woman with the title of “daughter-in-law”, you must have the existence of a wedding and a marriage to a male husband. Out of the list of 6 possible named titles who can be married to who? A son does not marry his mother so that is out. A son does not marry his mother-in-law, so that is also ruled out. A son would never marry his daughter, so that is also out. A Son would also never marry his daughter-in-law and that is also out. All of these statements would also hold true for the Father. The father would never marry his mother, his mother-in-law, his daughter or his daughter-in-law so these are clearly ruled out relationships. Now a father can marry the mother of his son and that is very normal. A father can also marry the mother of his daughter and that is very normal. But, the only way for his wife to become a mother-in-law is for their child to get married and this is again more complexity since we have only 5 possible candidates and only two males in the family. Wow, this is tough, isn’t it? Logically speaking we must conclude that it is the son who marries the woman who is called the daughter-in-law and this is the only possible correct fit for the limited relationships and titles given to us by God. You will learn why this is so important as we continue to study.
I think I will end this Bible lesson here for today and leave you hanging. You may still be debating in your mind that this is describing the spiritual family of God, but that is OK for now, it will come to clearer light as we continue. Hopefully you can see that regardless of whose family is being described, it is a very significant riddle being presented to you. What kind of family has 5 different family members and six different titles and fit exactly the pattern that your were given? Therefore, see if you can use your brain and your logical reasoning power to come up with the answer to this riddle, if you can do this, you will impress me to no end. Picture the facts that have been given to you and it might help you to draw the possible family tree diagrams that might fit the facts that were given to us. I wish I could say this was easy to come up with and to solve but, it is not and this is a brain teasing challenge for you to work on this week. If you can solve this puzzle before I post the solution you will certainly be led by the Spirit of God and I will be very impressed at your ability to see spiritual things as well as your puzzle solving capabilities. I will also tell you that if you have read all of my other posts on this site, you have all of the information that you need to solve this perplexing puzzle. Until next time, God Bless You!
If you want to start reading the solution to this riddle, you may continue with “Part 4“.
Understanding Healing, Sickness & Disease? The Sin Cause and the Sickness Effect! Part 2
(Ver 1.3) This is Part 2 in a series of Bible lessons about where Sickness and Disease Came From. If you have not read this series of lessons from the beginning, then I would suggest that you go back to Part 1 and start there. In the first lesson I taught that God did not create the world originally with sickness or disease present therefore, I concluded you can see these did not originate with God and they were not a part of the original plan of God at any time. There are many Christians who would certainly disagree with me based upon a narrow minded interpretation of some Old Testament scriptures that conflict with a New Testament revelation that sickness comes from Satan. I showed you one of these Old Testament verse in the first lesson and how it was poorly translated to accuse God of putting sickness on the Egyptians. However, I also showed you two prominent witnesses found in the New Testament that said sickness came from the devil (Acts 10:38) and Jesus even called it satanic bondage (Luke 13:16). So we have a major conflict between opposing scriptures brewing. You have Old Testament verses that seem to say that God caused people to be sick and you have New Testament verses that clearly say Satan causes people to be sick. Since the Bible does not ever contradict itself in the true interpretation of the text, we must resolve the question of the cause of the sickness found in people in order to correctly determine who causes people to be healed. There are only a limited number of technical possibilities to answer these questions and they are quite complex in their relationships of responsibilities. Here is the list of possible solutions for where sickness comes from and I’ll talk about each of these in the following paragraphs:
- God causes sickness and God heals sickness
- Satan causes sickness and Satan heals sickness
- God causes sickness and Satan heals sickness
- Satan causes sickness and God heals sickness
- Some other possible cause and effect?
First we could say God controls everything and causes
all people to be sick sometimes and then God heals people sometimes and that would be what many ignorant sovereign God theologians would want you to believe. This interpretation conflicts with several scriptures like “God does not change” (Mal 3:6), with God there is no variableness nor shadow of turning (Jas 1:17) and when Jesus said “When you have seen me you have seen the Father” (John 14:9). Since Jesus never made anyone sick while he was here physically on the earth we can clearly understand Jesus was the revealed will of God in full manifestation. We must therefore conclude that God while in heaven never made anyone sick either. You of course can disagree if you would like to.
Mat 4:23 And Jesus went about all Galilee, teaching in their synagogues, and preaching the gospel of the kingdom, and healing all manner of sickness and all manner of disease among the people.
However, when you read the gospels closely you will never see Jesus doing anything, but healing the people. Jesus would heal every type of sickness and every type of disease this verse says. You can clearly see that this was the will of God being revealed to men first hand. Here is God in the flesh walking among us and doing what He could only do in person. If God wanted to teach men that sickness came from Him, He missed a golden opportunity to teach us this in person to dismiss the controversy. When you see God healing people and never making them sick you finally begin to understand the character of God, the goodness of God, the love of God, the mercy of God and the compassion of God. You finally begin to understand how much God wants you to be well and whole.
Mat 9:36 But when he saw the multitudes, he was moved with compassion on them, because they fainted, and were scattered abroad, as sheep having no shepherd.
You can find that when Jesus walked among us, He exhibited divine compassion. He demonstrated Godly mercy and He did not come to judge anyone. Were people in those days just better sinners then they are now? Too many Christians in the world think that people have gotten to be worse sinners today so they accuse God of sending judgment upon the earth in the form of earthquakes and plagues of sicknesses and diseases. Some have accused God of killing sinners and Christians in massive Tsunamis and natural disasters. One group of highly confused Christians held up signs at a recent funeral of a woman who died with cancer thanking God for her cancer. I do not understand how you can follow a God who would do such a thing. I guess it is purely out of fear and self-righteousness that these people do such things. Because they feel like they are not sinners they accuse God of killing people who they claim are sinners. How ignorant is that? In my opinion if you are afraid of God, it is only because you do not know God and if you are not afraid of God it is only because you do not know Him either. It is a paradox of a spiritual nature that is supremely complex. The Bible says “The fear of the Lord is beginning of wisdom” (Prov 9:10). However, this is the respect of God’s power and not the terror that God is going to hurt you. I am not afraid of God, because I have the love of God shed abroad in my heart and I know Him (Rom 5:5). You see my Bible says “Where sin abounds, grace does much more abound” (Rom 5:20). That verse does not say anything about the judgment of God, it says God’s grace is what dominates Him to do good to sinners and the Bible says it is “The goodness of God that leads men to repentance” (Rom 2:4). Don’t get me wrong, there is a coming judgment of God and it is coming soon. But, this is not what is happening right now in the world. When you finally see the judgment of God you will know the difference between what is happening now and it will be nothing compared to the real judgments of God. People today, who have accused God of making people sick, have done so out of ignorance. They clearly do not know the love of God and they ignore Bible verses about God’s love. A loving God does not make His children sick because they made a mistake. Therefore, I have ruled out God as both causing sickness and healing people in order to harmonize scriptures of God’s love, mercy, compassion and grace.
You could also theorize that Satan causes people to be sick and Satan heals people and again this is a very wrong teaching based upon scriptures taught directly by Jesus. When Jesus would heal people, many times Jesus would cast out the evil spirits that were causing the sickness (Mark 1:23-26, Mark 5:2-8, Mark 7:25, Luke 9:42). Jesus was even accused of casting devils out by the power of Satan (Mat 9:34). But, Jesus said in Matthew 12:26 “How can Satan cast out Satan, his house would be divided and his kingdom would not stand”? This is actually a very important verse to understand and it contains a lot of spiritual information that you better know. Jesus was clearly saying no kingdom working against itself will prevail. Therefore, God will never make people sick and then change to make them well again or His kingdom would be divided. Jesus tells you very clearly that Satan also has a kingdom. This is not the kingdom of God and this is not the kingdom of Heaven. So this is a separate spiritual kingdom that Christians must come to understand that it exists. This spiritual kingdom is called the kingdom of darkness. In Colossians 1:13 it says “Christ has delivered us from the power of darkness…”. To be delivered is a salvation from a place we did not even realize that we were in. If you are not a Christian today, you are in this kingdom of darkness. If you are a Christian then you have been set free from the kingdom of darkness by the power found in Jesus. These are all Bible truths that are essential to understand. If you do not understand this then you can easily stray into false teachings that claims God is in control of everything. Jesus clearly taught us that there is an opposing spiritual kingdom in existence and it is not the Kingdom of God. Based upon this information and the words of Jesus it is impossible for Satan to make people sick and to heal them simultaneously. This information also transfers to God’s kingdom and it says that it is impossible for God to make people sick and then to heal them, or His kingdom would be divided. God is saying you cannot have it both ways. Jesus is teaching you that one kingdom makes you sick and one kingdom heals exclusively and that is the only definition of an undivided Kingdom that fits.
Next we could say God makes people sick and Satan heals them, but this is clearly shot down by many of the scriptures that I have given you already. Acts 10:38 said Jesus healed those that were oppressed by the devil. So sickness can never be attributed to God and healing can never be attributed to Satan. This is just basic Bible interpretations of the Gospels and the New Testament that makes it very clear. I have by direct scripture references ruled this possibility out completely. There are just no supporting scriptures for this possibility that exists. I mean you can find scriptures in the Old Testament that imply that God causes sickness, but I have never seen a scripture that implies Satan heals people.
Next, you could say that Satan causes people to be sick and God heals them and this theory is more scripturally accurate based upon the verses that I have shown you today already, but, it cannot be the complete and total truth since there is not any mention of the involvement or the contribution of the human factor. If you believe that man has no choices to make or no ability to exercise their freewill, then you believe in a theory based upon God’s sovereignty and a false teaching called “Predestination”. This teaching claims God has caused everything in the world to happen with a preset outcome. This teaching claims that some people were created to go to hell and some people were created to go to heaven. You could further claim that some people were designed to be sick and some people were designed to be well. There are many problems with this erroneous teaching and you have to ignore vast numbers of scriptures that teach against it in order to believe in it. If you have read my series of lessons on Understanding Bible Faith you should understand that Jesus always claimed it was the person’s faith that caused them to receive healing. Jesus would never point us to any other factor as being the cause for their healing. This did not mean that this person healed themself; it only means that it was their faith that allowed the power of God to flow into them to resolve their situation. In the Gospels, there was always a direct partnership between a man’s faith and God’s divine power and grace that resulted in any person receiving their healing, salvation or deliverance. Therefore, we can very easily conclude that if human faith was a necessary determining factor for a person’s healing to be made manifest, we must also conclude by reverse applied logic or implied antithesis truth that it must have been another human factor like something that the person believed, said or did to allow sickness to come into their bodies in the first place.
Think with me again about the factor of faith allowing God’s power to heal them in the Gospels. Then take this knowledge and look back into time to see how a sickness might be allowed into a human condition. Take for instance the factor of fear. If fear is one opposite of faith, then it might have been possible for someone’s fear to allow Satan to put the sickness on them. In other words I believe that it is almost always the choice of the person on the earth to determine what happens to them. This belief is based upon what God said to people in Deuteronomy 30 that we read earlier. God said very clearly I set before you life and death, therefore choose life that you and your seed may live. Whose choice was it for you to live, God’s or yours? I think you can see this makes it our choice.
However, it is certainly more complex than that simple statement. For example, a person is not all knowing and can be deceived into allowing things to happen and not realize the consequences to what they have done until it is too late. Someone might have gotten hot and sweaty playing a sport in the middle of winter and then walked outside without a jacket and they will probably regret that choice before they make it home. It could also be that someone has a casual one night stand with someone that they just met in a bar and a few weeks later they find out they got a sexually transmitted disease and they only have themselves to blame. It is mostly out of ignorance that people do things that they are extremely sorry for doing after they see the consequences. God says “My people are destroyed (made sick, weak, killed, hurt) for a lack of knowledge” (Hosea 4:6). So making ignorant decisions can result in some catastrophic circumstances. Another known factor that is thrown into the mix is the presence of evil in the world. Sometimes things happen to you just because people are bad and want to do what they want to do regardless of what you want them to do. When a woman is raped, that is not what she had in mind for a good time like the man was thinking. Therefore, she could get a sickness passed upon her by something that was not her choice. You soon begin to see that life is very complex and there are many possible factors that can contribute to anyone being sick. So regardless of what I teach you today, there are other factors that could be involved in the things that you are experiencing. So having said all of that there is a spiritual law that is very applicable to our subject today and I will introduce you to it now:
Gal 6:7 Be not deceived; God is not mocked: for whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap.
You see God says that people will always reap what they have sown in life. So we need to figure out if sickness is a fruit of a seed that we have sown. You might recall in the last lesson I showed you in Deuteronomy 30 where God said “I have set before you a choice, life or death, blessing or cursing, therefore choose life…”. 
God appears to place the responsibility for sickness on man as well as for healing, so we must learn how to choose wisely. Could it be that we just need to learn to plant the right seeds for healing? This is a very tough lesson to teach, because there are so many factors and even unknowns that you can never say that everybody’s sickness was caused by only one specific thing. In fact many times sickness is caused by a combination of things and I may have time to talk about that later. Sowing and reaping is a cause and effect reality. You plant seeds and you get crops to harvest. So this truth is certainly heavily involved in the rest of this lesson. What I want to do is to explore what Jesus emphasized in the Gospels as being a potential cause or we could say the seed for the sickness of certain people. Jesus did teach us that there were some special contributing key factors to at least some sicknesses and I will attempt to talk about these today and you can make up your own mind to what the truth is.
If Satan causes sickness to come on people we must determine what permitted or allowed this to occur or can Satan just make anyone sick that he wants to at any time? If you read the book of Job many have concluded that Satan must ask God for permission and then when God says OK, it is Satan’s responsibility to go and carry out the sickness. However, this is a very bad interpretation of the truth and a clearly ignorant man can easily jump to this conclusion on a surface only reading of the text, but the truth of God is almost always deeper than that found normally on the surface. You can see this is a tough subject to teach, but I believe it is one that is certainly important for you to understand, so keep reading. We know from Acts 10:38 and Luke 13:6 that Satan causes sickness, so I will not debate that fact anymore. I have accepted this as the truth of the Bible and I will move on with determining why this occurs.
Mat 9:2 And, behold, they brought to him a man sick of the palsy, lying on a bed: and Jesus seeing their faith said unto the sick of the palsy; Son, be of good cheer; thy sins be forgiven thee.
Here is a sick lame man being brought to Jesus for healing and Jesus says something that is very profound and difficult to accept for many Christians. Jesus looks at the lame man and tells him “your sins are forgiven”. Why does Jesus say this and what do we need to understand about this statement? Were this man’s sins a contributing factor for his sickness? This man is asking for physical healing and Jesus is speaking to him about his sins. Do you understand the difference between spiritual things and natural physical things? There are many people who do not. People look at the external actions of a man and focus only on what people have done and God looks at the internal and focuses on why people do what they do. The lame man was interested only in a natural thing that he thought would solve his problems, and Jesus was focused on the spiritual root cause of the problem. It is also interesting to note that Jesus does not cast out an evil spirit or even blame the sickness on a spirit as the cause. Now we know from Acts 10:38 that whoever Jesus healed was called someone who was oppressed of the devil, but this is not where Jesus is focused in on in today’s lesson. You see there is more than one truth in the Bible and this is some people’s greatest problem with understanding the Bible; they only want to learn one thing and ignore the rest. That would be way too simple if that is all that is required. I have no doubt that this man’s infirmity was caused by Satan, but that does not mean that this is the entire story. Jesus is pointing us to a sin factor that allowed Satan to come in and bring the sickness on the man. This is actually the same conclusion that I came to when I studied the book of Genesis and the creation account. God created everything and called it all “very good” and therefore there was no sickness or disease in the earth before Adam sinned. However, after Adam sinned things started to change in the world and therefore we can conclude it was sin that allowed sickness and disease to enter into the world. I cannot come up with any other basic event in Genesis other than man’s sin that would have caused this evil to occur. Maybe you can go through the Bible and find something else and I would be happy to hear about. Here is God’s commentary on the cause of sin, sickness and death in our world:
Rom 5:12 Wherefore, as by one man sin entered into the world, and death by sin; and so death passed upon all men, for that all have sinned:
You can clearly read that it was the actions of one man that caused sin and death to pass to every man on the planet. If you are smart enough you understand that sickness and disease is just a form of diminished life before death occurs. Therefore, it was Adam who allowed sickness to enter into the world by his sin. So that is another interesting contributing factor. Your current sickness could have been caused by your ancestor’s sin. You see God speaks of a generational cursed upon families in scriptures found in Exodus 20:5, Exodus 34:7, Numbers 14:18, and Deuteronomy 5:9 that speaks of the sins of the fathers being passed down three or four generations. I will not teach on this directly today, but I do want you to be aware of it as a factor. You see it does not have to be your sin that causes you to have a sickness. In fact in John 9 the disciples asked Jesus “Who sinned, this man or his parents that he was born blind”. You can see by the question that the disciples were looking at the effect and trying to determine the cause. They also said it could have been caused by the sin of the parents and Jesus did not dispute or contradict them, he just didn’t answer their question. If you do not understand this story of the blind man in John 9, please take the time and read my lesson on this healing called “Who Sinned”.
Let’s get back to Matthew 9 and to what Jesus was telling the lame man. Go and read Matthew 9:2 and the surrounding context verses. Jesus continues to say “which is easier to say rise take up your bed and walk or to say your sins are forgiven”? Jesus then looks at the religious leaders and says “So that you will know that the Son of Man has power on earth to forgive sins, rise, take up your bed and walk”. In other words Jesus was teaching a fact that these are interchangeable events or words. If you are forgiven you ought to be healed. If you are healed then you are forgiven. Wow, that is probably one of the most important things that I have said so far today, but you need to hear again. If you have been forgiven of your sins, then you ought to be healed. Are you forgiven by God? Let’s move on to another story found in the Gospels:
Joh 5:14 Afterward Jesus findeth him in the temple, and said unto him, Behold, thou art made whole: sin no more, lest a worse thing come unto thee.
Here is another major story of healing that has some very profound spiritual truths associated with it. Jesus has just healed another paralyzed cripple man and He tells him something that is very important to note. Jesus basically says “Stop sinning or something else worse could come on you”. Do you understand the connection being tied in here between sickness and sin? Jesus is teaching the direct cause and effect of a spiritual reality. It would appear that sin is an opening of the door for sickness to come in. This of course is very tricky since the Bible says that we are all sinners (Rom 3:23) and we can see that not everyone is sick in the world. Nevertheless we can still learn a potential cause and effect law being demonstrated to us. Do you understand the laws of Physics? An object in motion tends to remain in motion and an object at rest tends to stay at rest. Then there is the law that states for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. There are just too many natural laws that demonstrate to us the cause and the resulting effect of a natural force, for me to talk about them all. According to laws never is there an effect without a cause. Never is there a cause without a resulting effect. Never is the resulting effect greater than the cause. It would be like getting a crop without planting the seeds, it just doesn’t happen that way. These are just a few of the basics surrounding physical laws.
Rom 8:2 For the law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus hath made me free from the law of sin and death.
We can see two spiritual realities being outlined and compared in this verse. These are two spiritual laws of opposing force being revealed. In the natural realm it is kind of like the Law of Aerodynamics has set me free from the Law of Gravity reality. However, Romans 8:2 is the spiritual law of the spirit of life in Christ Jesus has set us free from the law of sin and death. You can clearly see that sin is the cause and death is the effect. What is the definition of death? In the natural realm it is a secession or termination of life. Then what is the definition of sickness? To be sick is a state of un-wholeness, incompleteness, or even just a state of physical weakness. Jesus when healing people in the Gospels would tell them “your faith has made you whole”. So being whole is a state of health where no sickness exists and being un-whole a state of sickness. Therefore I have concluded that sickness is just a lesser stage of death in operation but not in full conclusion. So when God told Adam don’t eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, for in the day that you do, you shall surely die, I believe God was warning of the coming of sickness into the world but this does not mean that God sent it. Here is a simple verse that is basically saying what I am trying to teach you about sickness:
Mat 9:12 But when Jesus heard that, he said unto them, They that be whole need not a physician, but they that are sick.
Jesus is saying there are two different states of the human condition; this is either wholeness or incompleteness. Jesus is calling the state of not being whole a sickness. This Greek word translated as whole has a meaning to be healthy, well, sound, and even true. I can clearly understand based upon this definition that there are direct opposite truths to each of these statements. Sick, infirmed, weak, and even false are all words that demonstrate the state of sickness. The Bible calls sickness the opposite of good which is healing and health.
I have given you around three examples in the Bible of people that Jesus encountered and Jesus attributed a sin cause to the effect of their sickness. I also showed you that it does not necessarily have to be your sin that is the cause, but it could have been one of your ancestors. However, there are more complex factors than that found in the Bible, but I have gone long enough in this lesson for today. I will wrap this up by reemphasizing that Jesus basically taught that if you are forgiven you ought to be healed. If you need forgiveness, then repent and ask for it and do it fast to begin to receive healing. Do not over simplify anything that I have taught today and say I said it is only sin that causes sickness because that is NOT what I said. In fact I gave you several other potential reasons for the existence of sickness, one was ignorance, another was the presence of evil, another is sowing wrong seeds, then I could go on and on with other factors that I have not mentioned. In order for us not to be destroyed by Satan in the world we need to achieve to a higher level of knowledge of the truth. So we still have a lot to learn, including me! I hope you come back and read the next lesson about Where Sickness Comes From. God Bless!
If you would like to continue reading in this series of lessons you can go to “Part 3“.
Understanding Healing, Sickness and Disease in the Bible! Where does it Come From? Part 1
(Ver 1.5) Today is the beginning of another in-depth spiritual study about “Understanding where sickness and disease came from”. I have been teaching a lot on the subject of Bible Faith and I got a comment that caused me to back up and think that I was teaching potentially in reverse order. You see there has been a long theological debate in many churches about the origin of sickness and disease. I have even heard preachers teach that sickness is a punishment or a correction sent from God. Of course this is based upon the erroneous assumption that just because God is sovereign that He always gets His will done no matter what. Also, there has long been a teaching in the some churches that since Paul had a thorn in his flesh that we must endure sickness the same way with great humility. These people have concluded again in error that Paul’s thorn was a sickness and thus they are wrong without reading what the Bible actually said. There are really too many false teachings for me to tell you about them all. What is important for us all to know and learn, is did sickness come from God? If it is something sent by God, then we should not be trying to get healed and this causes many people to stay sick. When I taught on faith I said one of the enemies to faith was doubt. Doubt represents a mental question in an area that you have insufficient knowledge or incorrect knowledge. For example, Jesus actually taught us in the Bible that healing does not occur as long as there are questions in our mind to whether healing is the will of God. Here is the lesson Jesus taught us:
Mat 8:2 And, behold, there came a leper and worshipped him, saying, Lord, if thou wilt, thou canst make me clean.
Here is a man that was fully diseased with leprosy. He believes that Jesus is fully able and powerful enough to heal him, but he does not know if it is the will of God to accomplish this request. This is a common point of failure to correct Bible faith even today. We have countless Christians in churches today that are taught the same things. It is not God’s will to heal today! God healed through the apostles, but that passed away when they died. I have heard many ignorant men making excuses for why they have no faith, blaming it either on others or God. They act like it was the apostles that were healing the people, when it was only God using the apostles to heal the people. Has God changed since the apostles died or is He still the same today? No God is the same today as He was yesterday! Then there are ministers who are like this leprous man, they believe that God is powerful enough to heal people so they pray “Lord if it be your will, heal this man”. What kind of prayer is that? It is a questioning or questionable faith full of doubts. These men who pray that way do not have the question in their mind answered to whether or not we can know the will of God about anything. But, if that was true then God would not have given us His Word in written form. We have the basis of proof of the will of God by examining the Word of God. As soon as God wrote down His spoken words in a book form, He has committed Himself to do what He has said or He will become a liar. Notice how Jesus answered this question given to Him by the leprous man and see if God is telling you right now what His will is for your healing.
Mat 8:3 And Jesus put forth his hand, and touched him, saying, I will; be thou clean. And immediately his leprosy was cleansed.
You can clearly see the will of God for healing being revealed by the Words of the Most High God. Jesus when He was physically walking the planet, taught us when you have seen me you have seen the Father (John 14:7). Jesus further went on to say “I do nothing of my own, but the will of the Father, I do” (John 5:30). If Jesus Christ is the revealed will of God from heaven, did Jesus ever make anyone sick? Take the time and go back and reread the Gospels and notice everything that Jesus does. Write them in a list on a piece of paper if you like, and then know this is the will of God for you. If you cannot ever find Jesus making anyone sick, then you cannot ever say God made anyone sick even if you have mistranslations in the Old Testament that say otherwise. I searched the Bible and I found Jesus only healing people after he would preach and teach. Healing must be the will of God then. Don’t take my word for it, you go and reread and search for yourself. It doesn’t take that long to learn the truth if you look for it. And if you cannot find it in the Gospels where Jesus ever made anyone sick, then this was God’s will for everyone in personal manifestation. So Jesus by His words and His actions has revealed the will of God is to heal ONLY! Please be smart enough to see this truth.
One religious man who graduated from a theological cemetery told me his wife had cancer that came from God. This man had a zeal for God but, no knowledge of God. If this was true, I will tell you right now that I would not want to follow that kind of God or that kind of religion. How do you tell people in the world come and get saved so God might give you cancer? Does that motivate you to want to get close to this God? Or is this a fear based religion like Islam, where you obey the law or we will cut off your hands. If God gives people cancer because they sinned, then here in the United States God would be easily convicted in any court of law as being a child abuser. Yet religious people think that God answers to a different law than man does. That is a very foolish presumptive thinking. If cancer is what a loving God does to His children, then what would an evil God do to his children? You see when the Bible says God is Love, how do you justify that He gave you cancer? You would have to redefine what Love is and that is a scary way to interpret the Bible. If I loved my wife so much and then I beat her because she did something wrong, I would be thrown in jail. Yet this reasoning is OK for a God you cannot see and throw in jail. It was also very hilarious to me that this man’s wife with cancer from God went to the doctor and received treatment to get out of the will of God for her life on the earth. Why go to a doctor to cure cancer if God gave you the caner? In this situation according to this man who was smarter God or the doctor? Why couldn’t this man go to God for healing instead of the doctor? It is simply because he thought that it was God that gave his wife the cancer so why pray for healing, just go to the doctor. It would appear that the doctor was smarter than God according to this man, if the doctor wants to cure people and God does not that is a major problem. People can truly be blinded by religion and not even know they are wrong. Let’s go back to the beginning of our world and see what God says to us about the things that He created:
Gen 1:31 And God saw every thing that he had made, and, behold, it was very good. And the evening and the morning were the sixth day.
Here is God’s opinion of all of the things that He created. God looks at everything from the six days of creation and says it is all very good. What does “very good” mean to you? Did God create Adam or Eve as a weak or sick man or woman? Did God create them with cancer and call it good? I think you can easily conclude that after creation, there was no sickness or disease present in the world. If nothing else you can see that Adam lived over 900 years on the earth and that does not sound like a sick man at any time. In fact you cannot even find the words sickness or disease in this book of the bible until near the end of the book and into the next books of the Bible. The book of Genesis encompasses the first 2000 years of human history and there is barely any mention of sickness or disease in this time period. It is very clear to me that sickness and disease did not come from God and was not a designed plan of God by what He created in the beginning. But, you can believe whatever you want. If you look up the Hebrew word translated as “good” it comes from another word that can also mean “well”. If you are well, then you are not sick. If you are well then it is good! So obviously God thinks being well is good and being sick is bad or evil. This is not rocket science; surely you can see the truth of God’s word today.
Jas 1:17 Every good gift and every perfect gift is from above, and cometh down from the Father of lights, with whom is no variableness, neither shadow of turning.
You see if you believe your sickness is God teaching you, correcting you or testing you; then you must conclude that it is something good based upon James 1:17! Is sickness ever good? Is wife beating ever good? Is child abuse ever good? If you think these are all good things then you are clearly confused and vastly deceived. I do not know of anything good about sickness. But, my opinion is the same as your opinion, worthless! Show me a Bible verse that says sickness is a blessing from God and I will believe it. It would have to be a blessing in order to qualify for it being good! Sickness steals your time, it takes your strength, it removes your ability to be a blessing to others, it causes your life to be shortened, it sucks away slowly your ability to do anything positive and your money is wasted in great quantities to get rid of it. Sickness and disease is a thief and a robber of your well-being, strength, your life and substance; I do not know what else to call it but an impressive evil. I have only shown you a few Bible verses and I can tell from this information that God did not send you sickness. If Jesus came to the earth to heal and cure people from sicknesses that God had sent on them, then that would be a house divided (Mat 12:25). God would have had to have been divided against Himself. Jesus would have been working against God and not for God. That would mean that God is schizophrenic, double minded and confused? God makes them sick and Jesus heals them. Too many Christians want to believe in a Dr. Jekyll and Mister Hyde type of God. Sure God will make you sick so that He can prove His power by healing you. That is a crazy mixed up Theology! Why heal them if you were the one that made them sick by your will. Do you understand the problem with many people’s confusing beliefs? God cannot be the same one that heals people that causes them to be sick or God would not be consistent and never changing (Mal 3:6), He would instead be the ever changing God. This is not what the Bible says to us, is it?
Act 10:38 How God anointed Jesus of Nazareth with the Holy Ghost and with power: who went about doing good, and healing all that were oppressed of the devil; for God was with him.
You can clearly read from the Bible where sickness comes from, if you want to know the truth. Here is a verse that I use all of the time because it contains a lot of great spiritual information about good and evil. This verse is a self-evident claim that doing good is healing and this always comes from God. Think about it! How was the human body designed by God? It was designed with a built in immune system that fights against sickness and disease. If you get cut or scrapped, you do not have an eternal sore, your body has a built in self-healing machine mechanism. This was God’s designed plan in action. So when you read the Gospels did you ever see Jesus making anyone sick, lame, blind, crippled or diseased? Do you ever see anyone that Jesus said it is not my will to heal you? If you cannot find Jesus who was God in the flesh doing these things while He was personally here on the earth, then why would think that the same God in heaven does them to people now? Jesus clearly taught us, “When you have seen me, you have seen the Father”, so whatever we saw Jesus doing is what God does all of the time and Jesus only went about doing GOOD and healing. Do not make your God an Evil God who goes about doing EVIL and making people sick unless you can find where Jesus did it.
Here is where more people are confused. They allow Satan to blind their minds to the truth so that he can continue to cause sickness and disease to abide in them. A man recently told me that Satan is only allowed by God to do what God wants. So if Satan makes people sick, then it was God’s will for them to be sick. Again this is just more C.R.A.P. (Christian Rhetoric Applied Poorly)! I’m sorry I can be very blunt sometimes and I do not mean it to be hurtful, I only mean it to shock people into seeing the truth.
Where did God say sickness came from in Acts 10:38? God clearly called sickness satanic oppression in Acts 10:38. The devil is clearly Satan and sickness is from him and Satan is not God’s policeman sent by God to make people sick. Therefore sickness and disease is satanic oppression and the direct opposite of God’s definition of good. Go back and read the Gospels again and see who got healed. You have blind people seeing (Mat 15:31, Mat 21:14, Mar 10:51, John 9); you have leprous people’ made whole again (Luke 17:17), a woman with the issue of blood (Mat 9:20), a man with the withered hand (Mat 12:13), the dumb to speak (Mat 15:31), the lame to walk (Mat 15:31, Mat 21:14, John 5:9). These are just a few verses to show you who Jesus healed. There are many others that I did not mention. There are even several verses that teach us that Jesus healed every type of disease and infirmity (Mat 9:35) and everyone present (Mat 12:15) so if you did not see your problem being healed it is included in the other all-inclusive category of the type of people and sickneeses that Jesus healed. What I want you to notice is that God calls all of this satanic oppression. If it was sent by God then it would be Godly oppression and that is not what the Bible said. Neither would God have been there to heal them if He had been the one to make them sick.
Luk 13:16 And ought not this woman, being a daughter of Abraham, whom Satan hath bound, lo, these eighteen years, be loosed from this bond on the sabbath day?
Here is another verifiable witness to the fact of the origin of sickness is from Satan. Jesus is asking a direct question that is still relevant and applicable to you today. He says that this woman is a daughter of Abraham; therefore she should be freed from this bondage of Satan. Think with me again and ask yourself this question; are you a son or a daughter of Abraham? If you are then you should also be freed from the bondage of Satan. Bondage is being held against your will as a prisoner. Did you know that was what sickness was? You could call sickness a spiritual jail cell that has kept you physically locked up from your freedom. It is clear to me that Jesus is saying you ought to be free today and this is why I say that.
Rom 4:16 Therefore it is of faith, that it might be by grace; to the end the promise might be sure to all the seed; not to that only which is of the law, but to that also which is of the faith of Abraham; who is the father of us all,
According to God we in the church are called Abraham’s spiritual children today by our faith in Jesus Christ. Therefore what did Jesus say? Didn’t Jesus just say “ought not this woman, a daughter of Abraham be freed from this bondage of Satan?” When you begin to see who you are in Christ, it should begin to change your perspective on if you should be healed. According to Jesus, you should be healed even on the Sabbath. Let’s back up and look at an Old Testament verse to change our perspective. Many times people look at scriptures in error found in the Old Testament to justify their erroneous beliefs that God makes people sick, so I’ll talk about one of these to potentially help someone:
Exo 15:26 And said, If thou wilt diligently hearken to the voice of the LORD thy God, and wilt do that which is right in his sight, and wilt give ear to his commandments, and keep all his statutes, I will put none of these diseases upon thee, which I have brought upon the Egyptians: for I am the LORD that healeth thee.
You can see a clear conflict in the English translation of this verse. This is why so many people are confused today. They do not research the words or study the definitions and they conclude things based upon Old Testament verses that you cannot find repeated in the New Covenant teachings. Yet, these are tough words to read. It would appear that God is inconsistent and that God shows favoritism and that God treats one nation differently than the other nation. If God heals Israelites and makes Egyptians sick then God is not the same to everyone. That is a major problem to me. It means that you cannot count on what God said and you cannot trust in God doing anything good for you or to you. It tells me that the definitions of God and Good are inconsistent and unreliable. It means the sun might come up in the west tomorrow because we just never know about how God does anything. Why would God give us a huge book of information about Himself if God did not want us to know who He really was? It does not make any sense to me. Let’s get back to the Hebrew words in this verse found in Exodus and become extremely picky to see exactly what God is saying to us. I want to make one extremely important point up front. First it does not say that God put the disease on Egypt. It was the translators that said that. Look at the Hebrew words translated as “I” will and see that in that statement within the context of Egypt there is no Hebrew word in the verse that can be translated directly as “I”. Do you understand this? It is an assumed reference and inserted because the translators thought that God was the one that made people sick. Now look at the end of verse and see the difference in the last part of that statement. “I am the Lord that heals you”. Now God uses a direct Hebrew word that can only be a personal pronoun of who God is and what God does. If God wanted you to believe that He is the one that puts sickness on people He would have used the same personal pronoun in the other parts of the verse so that you can associate it with Him. No, sickness does not come from God it only originates there by the minds of men who credit God with everything good or evil. Here is the same verse with the removal of the words “I” that do not occur in the Hebrew:
Exo 15:26 And said, If thou wilt diligently hearken to the voice of the LORD thy God, and wilt do that which is right in his sight, and wilt give ear to his commandments, and keep all his statutes, will put none of these diseases upon thee, which have brought upon the Egyptians: for I am the LORD that healeth thee.
No you can see that someone still put sicknesses on the Egyptians, but we learned from the New Testament that this was not God, but Satan. It does not say God put the sicknesses on them. I am attempting to use the Bible to understand the Bible and to get you to see the subtle differences a few mistranslated words in the Old Testament can make. This verse still says “I am the LORD that HEALS” very plainly. So God is attributing healing to His work and not sickness. You of course can remain in darkness and still believe otherwise.
The major difficulty that people are facing today is the fact that the Bible contains two separate covenants. The Old Covenant was with a natural nation of people and the New Covenant is with a spiritual nation of people. In the Old Covenant, God hid the existence of Satan largely in symbolic references, unnamed references and in ways that allowed you to know something was there but not always understand what it was. In the New Covenant, Satan is revealed for who he is directly. Yet the majority of people today, who are confused, are those that are focused in only on the law of God and the prophecies of God without interpreting them using the revelations of God in the New Covenant given to the church. That is a huge mistake, it is no wonder we have so many different opinions in the world.
Let’s ask ourselves some really basic theology questions:
- Which Covenant are we in today?
- Which Bible pages and verses should hold more importance to us as Christians? Genesis or Revelation? Deuteronomy or Galatians?
- Are we under the Law or are we now under Grace?
Too many times Christians want to emphasize the Old Covenant and ignore the New Covenant reality. They only read things in the Old Testament that are important to them thinking that they apply to them. I can go through your Bible and look at what verses you underline to see what you choose to believe is important. If you spend more time in the Old Testament than you do reading the letters written to the church directly, then you are living under the Law of Moses and you ignore God’s Grace. I would strongly recommend that you take the time to go and read Deuteronomy chapter 28 and see what God says about blessing and cursing under the law. But before you do this go and read what God says about it in chapter 30 first:
Deu 30:15 See, I have set before thee this day life and good, and death and evil;
God clearly says Life is GOOD and death is EVIL! These are two different perspectives of contrasting opposite events. Births are good and deaths are evil. You could also say healing is good and sickness is evil. You can go down the list of opposites and clearly see God is teaching you something you should understand clearly. Then God says this to you:
Deu 30:19 I call heaven and earth to record this day against you, that I have set before you life and death, blessing and cursing: therefore choose life, that both thou and thy seed may live:
It appears the choice to live or die has been placed upon humans. This goes against a Sovereign Predestination theology that is clearly wrong. Now go back and read chapter 28 about the blessing and the cursing of the Law of Moses. If you go and read down the whole chapter you will see many diseases being named by name. Then in verse 61 you will find this statement:
Deu 28:61 Also every sickness, and every plague, which is not written in the book of this law, them will the LORD bring upon thee, until thou be destroyed.
So the curse of the Law includes “every sickness and every disease” that is not named in this book as well as those that are named. Do you understand this so far? What we conclude from this chapter is sickness is a curse and healing and health is a blessing. What did God tell us to choose? Was it not life to live? These are very simple truths found in the Bible yet many people just ignore them. Here is a New Testament reality that will help you if you can see it:
Gal 3:13 Christ hath redeemed us from the curse of the law, being made a curse for us: for it is written, Cursed is every one that hangeth on a tree:
According to God, what were you redeemed from? You soon learn the difficulty in the teachings of confused people who do not know the truth. We can very clearly see that if Christ has redeemed us (PAST TENSE) we have been freed from all sicknesses and all diseases that were listed in that chapter 28 of Deuteronomy and even those that were not named directly. According to God He did not leave out any sicknesses or diseases in that chapter so that means all of them! If Jesus Christ came to redeem you from sickness and disease then there is NO WAY that God is sending you sickness or disease to kill you. This would again be God working against Himself and a clear Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde type of theology.
I am attempting to alleviate the questions in your mind that God sent you sickness. It is a difficult subject for some people to accept because of the things that they have been deceived into believing about God. I hope if nothing else you will start to go through your Bible and see the Jesus who revealed the true nature of God in the Gospels. Then go and read the Letters written to the church about how God is Love, the Grace of God, the Goodness of God and the mercy of God. Learn to see the real God and who He is today in the New Covenant. If you want to, you can also go through the names of God given to you in the Bible. The names of God in the Bible always reveal the character of God! You will see God called “Jehovah Raffa” which means “I am God Your Healer”! You will never see the name of God called Jehovah Makes You Sick! Yes there is coming a judgment of God and this will occur during the tribulation and the time shortly thereafter. But, do not confuse the Judge God with your Father God. Perhaps I will have time to discuss a balanced approach to understanding the character of God. Ok, I have a lot more to teach on, but I have gone too long today. If you want to learn more about where sickness came from in the Bible, please come back and read with me again. God Bless!
If you want to continue reading in this series about the origin of sickness and disease, please continue with “Part 2“.
Understanding the Signs of the End of the Age! Great Earthquakes in the Last Days!
Mat 16:3 And in the morning, It will be foul weather to day: for the sky is red and lowring. O ye hypocrites, ye can discern the face of the sky; but can ye not discern the signs of the times?
(Ver 1.1) This is Part 2 in a series of advanced Bible lessons on the subject of the signs of the end times. If you have not read from the beginning of the series I would recommend that you go and start with “Part 1“. In the news the last few days the great earthquake in Japan has been very disturbing to many people. However, this is really nothing new, is it? Here we have a major Biblical prophecy unfolding before us and people are very surprised that it is happening. If they would only read their Bibles they have had seen God tell them it was coming. Over the course of the last few years we have had major quakes in Japan, New Zealand, Chile and Haiti. As recently as 2004 we had one of the greatest earthquakes ever registered in the Indian Ocean that caused a massive Tsunami that killed almost a quarter million people. They are predicting that the earthquake in Japan has killed up to 10,000 people. In Chile and New Zealand there were both less than a 1000 deaths. But, in the Haiti earthquake last year there were around 170,000 killed. These are not all of the quakes, just some of the major ones that have made the news because of the deaths and devastations that have occurred. I believe looking back over our history; the largest recorded earthquake occurred around 1964 in Alaska and it measured 9.2 on the Richter scale. So this was less than 50 years ago. While I do not like what is happening, I can read the signs that are being presented to us that the earth is coming to the end of the age. I know there are many confused Christians that do not believe that and I’m sorry that you cannot see the truth. From everything that I have read in the Bible, it is not going to get any better; but, according to God it is going to get much worse. In other words what we have witnessed in the last 50 years is nothing compared to what is about to happen on the earth. I do not want to be a doom and gloom preacher, but I feel like it is somebody’s responsibility to be realistic and warn people of what is coming. I am not here to sell you a book by hyping something up. What I tell is for free. Here is some of the important things that Jesus taught us in the Bible about what is happening right now:
Luk 21:10 Then said he unto them, Nation shall rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom:
Luk 21:11 And great earthquakes shall be in divers places, and famines, and pestilences; and fearful sights and great signs shall there be from heaven.
I am not acting as a prophet and telling you what will happen today, I’m simply reading the greatest prophet Jesus and seeing what He said to us. In verse 11 Jesus said there are coming “great earthquakes”. Look up the definition of this word “great”. It is the Greek word “megas” that means big, large and mighty. These are just a few things in the Bible that describe what is happening in the world. All of these could be from a story given on the evening news cast. We have seen wars, but these are nothing compared to what is coming.
1Th 5:3 For when they shall say, Peace and safety; then sudden destruction cometh upon them, as travail upon a woman with child; and they shall not escape.
God says that there are more wars on the horizon to come and therefore, be warned! Many will die! Be warned! God says that when everyone cries for peace and safety in the world that destruction will fall suddenly upon them. Notice I’m not calling for peace or safety in this blog. Did you notice that? There will be Global climate changes, floods and natural disasters that will cause the world’s food supply to dwindle to nothing. Many will die! Be warned! We are not through with the earthquakes either, there are more big ones coming and many will die. Be warned! Fear will become prevalent with all non-Christians. Be warned!
Luk 21:26 Men’s hearts failing them for fear, and for looking after those things which are coming on the earth: for the powers of heaven shall be shaken.
Jesus in the same discourse tells us of great fear that will begin to come on men. This fear will cause their hearts to fail and for them to fall dead in the streets. Do not think this is not happening today, it is all around you. Heart failure is the number one killer in the world. Look it up and see if heart failure is not the leading cause of death in the world today.
Luk 21:25 And there shall be signs in the sun, and in the moon, and in the stars; and upon the earth distress of nations, with perplexity; the sea and the waves roaring;
The potential for Tsunamis is also a growing threat to many people. If you live near a coast, be warned! If you live near known fault lines then be prepared, it is coming! If the seas and waves are roaring as Jesus had said, then there is something causing them like the Japan earthquake this week. The roaring sea wiped out many things, cities, boats, trains, cars, houses, buildings and these all happened in a matter of seconds.
I do not believe that God is causing these things to happen, but yet God knows that they will happen and He tells us of them before they occur. Always remember that God knows the end from the beginning, so nothing is catching Him by surprise, it is only those who ignore His Word that are caught by surprise. I believe that we are very, very close to the return of Jesus. I saw a man on TV the other day that Jesus appeared to in a vision and told him, tell my people I am coming soon. I don’t know about you, but I believed him. Jesus is preparing those who are listening to be ready. To those who do not believe in the rapture, he is saying this is what will happen and why we are gone. You see when we disappear from the face of the planet, there will be many deceivers trying to tell you what happened to us. Since these people were so easily deceived in not believing in the rapture, I think they will continue to be easily deceived into other lies.
Rev 16:18 And there were voices, and thunders, and lightnings; and there was a great earthquake, such as was not since men were upon the earth, so mighty an earthquake, and so great.
Here in this chapter of Revelation, it appears things get dramatically worse. We also seem to see that God has gotten personally involved and has sent angels to pour out the wrath of His fury. God predicts the greatest earthquake in the entire human history is coming in Revelation 16. If you have never read the book of Revelation you are missing a view into a seven year descriptive time that is about to happen. I do not know exactly when it will happen, I just know it is not long from now. So I sound like a “Chicken Little” Christian telling you the sky is falling. If you think this year is bad and the worse that it can get, I can only tell you to ignore me and tell me what happens next year, if I am still here. I am not setting a date, I am not telling you the world is ending tomorrow, I just know things are happening very fast right now. It is like time is accelerating to a climax.
So if you don’t agree with my assessment of the world’s situation from the Bible viewpoint, then that is OK. You do not have to write me a nasty comment. If you just wait a few months we will both see who is right, you or me and you won’t sound like a fool if I’m right. If I am right then I won’t be here to look like a fool, because Jesus said this to me:
Luk 21:28 And when these things begin to come to pass, then look up, and lift up your heads; for your redemption draweth nigh.
Jesus personally told me that when I see these things beginning to happen. Did you notice that? Jesus said this was the beginning and not the end of them, so there are definitely more to come. Do you choose to believe what Jesus is saying to you? I definitely do! Jesus told us, fear not, for when these things start to occur you should look up and see that I am coming. I personally believe that Jesus is coming only for those who are looking for Him. So if you are not looking for Him to come, He will not bother you.
Luk 21:27 And then shall they see the Son of man coming in a cloud with power and great glory.
We shall behold Him in His Power and Glory in the sky. Therefore, He is not coming to set foot on the earth this time. This is just a coming to catch away His people from the coming turmoil and destruction that will occur on the earth. I really do not understand why people would not want to believe in the rapture, it is right there in front of them and even Jesus describes it to us. Please be wise and heed the Word of God. These are not my words so I am not offended if you do not believe them. Just know that someone tried to tell you what was happening before it happened and you had a chance to hear it. Do you discern the signs of the times? God Bless you to see them!
Understanding Bible Faith! Great Faith? Even Dogs Eat the Crumbs from the Masters’ Table! Part 11
(Ver 1.3) Today is Part 11 in a series of advanced lessons on Understanding Bible faith. If you have not been reading this series from the beginning I would recommend that you go and start with “Part 1”. I think I shocked people with my last Bible lesson on faith and sex. It is amazing how many people read it but did not comment. What do you think when God said you can clearly see the invisible qualities of me in the things that I have made (Romans 1:20)? When I read that verse it made me start looking around at the things that God has made and then I would attempt to learn about God from them, but I guess many people close their eyes and ignore the fact that God made things like sex and marriage and they pretend they don’t exist. As a result they miss the obvious spiritual things in the Bible that God is trying to teach them. You need to start becoming a Sherlock Holmes type of Christian detective and start looking for God in the clues that He has created all around you, for you to find. These are the invisible things of God hidden in plain sight. If you like this series of lessons and have learned something, be brave and leave me a comment.
Faith is a complex subject found in the Bible. God teaches us something about faith in practically every book of the Bible. Faith is a predominate theme of the Bible. Yet so many people do not understand it or they would understand that God says that without it you will never please Him (Heb 11:6). This subject of Bible faith is complex because it involves many other dependent factors and subjects that are also taught in the Bible. In previous lessons, I taught you that everyone in the world has faith in one thing or the other. But, few people have faith in God and His Word. If you believe that Buddha is your way to the state of eternal happiness, then you will soon be very disappointed, but you at least do have faith in Buddha. Jesus the God of the Bible taught us that there is a very narrow way to God that few find and He taught us to search for this path (Mat 7:14). Since we know that Jesus is this path (John 14:6) and that He was the only way to the Father we can have confidence in His words as being faithful and true, if we have believed in Him. Today I heard the national news report on an upcoming book written by a self-proclaimed man of God. You must realize that just because a man says he is a Christian and writes a book, does not mean what is written is based upon the truth. This preacher is teaching people in error and has written a book that claims there is no hell. What an ignorant deceived blind man. Here is what God says about this man’s opinion:
2Ti 4:3 For the time will come when they will not endure sound doctrine; but after their own lusts shall they heap to themselves teachers, having itching ears;
We are living in the last days as this scripture is being fulfilled right now. The sinners of the world are departing rapidly from sound doctrine and they want to exalt men who will teach only what they want to hear. A spirit of tolerance and acceptance is what they are after and they will flock to a deceiver whose lies scratch their itchy ears. Beware when a man ignores a large part of the Bible to teach you another part while misapplying it. The word “hell” occurs over 50 times in the KJV Bible. It is also referred to many other times in other scriptures while not being directly named. For example, Jesus spoke frequently about it, telling you there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth there (Mat 8:12, Mat 13:42, 13:50, Mat 22:13, Mat 24:51, Mat 25:30 to show you 6 references found in only 1 book of the Bible).
This blind man is teaching that a loving God would not send people to hell. We obviously understand from scripture that God is love and I do not deny this fact. However, this man has exalted one truth in the Bible and has made it the entire truth and this is a very dangerous type of man to follow. You see he is ignoring the Holiness of God, the Wrath of God, the Power of God, and the Judgments of God in favor of only the Love of God. If you do not balance your theology and teaching with every truth in the Bible you are falling into error and deception. You see, I do not deny the fact that God so loved the world that He gave Himself as a sacrifice for us. What I am teaching you today, is that there is more in the Bible than Love. I’ve already written other Bible lessons on this subject of “Why Do People Go to Hell”, and “The Biblical Evidence for the Existence of Hell”. So if you want to know the truth go and read about it, otherwise I’ll miss you in heaven.
I’m sorry I got off the subject of faith, but liars and deceivers cause me to get into righteous anger. I do not appreciate people who are leading others down a path of destruction simply to sell a book and to make some money. Somebody needs to stand up and tell the truth regardless of what it costs them. I have determined to try to do this. Today’s lesson is about “How to have great faith”. If you have read this series you know that your faith is measureable. You also know that your faith level can vary from none to overflowing. Jesus only looked at two people in the Gospels and told them they had great faith. This was not a derogatory put down; rather it was a praise of the highest magnitude from the Supreme Spiritual Power of the Universe. Jesus tells us very clearly in the Gospels that He was looking for people with faith while He was here on the earth. It further goes on to say that He will be looking for people with faith when He returns for us (Luke 18:8). So it must still be important to learn how to have great faith today. When Jesus ran across individuals who possessed a level of faith that exceeded His expectations, Jesus would stop and marvel saying “I have not found so great of faith in all of Israel”. Therefore, we are going to examine these people that marveled Jesus to find out, why they had such great faith and see if we can become a God marvel also. We will begin with this verse about a woman that caught God’s attention:
Mat 15:28 Then Jesus answered and said unto her, O woman, great is thy faith: be it unto thee even as thou wilt. And her daughter was made whole from that very hour.
I want you to notice in this verse that the Bible says because of this woman’s great faith, her daughter was made whole again. The Greek word translated as “made whole” means to cure or heal. We can therefore conclude the daughter was sick or diseased. The majority of the time when people came to Jesus asking for help it was because they needed physical healing. So today’s lesson is about how to receive healing from God and you might need to know this also, because He is still the same today as He was back then (Heb 13:8). This is actually a very good faith lesson found in the Bible to learn from. We will back up in the chapter and go verse by verse through the information to learn from the context of how this woman possessed such great faith.
Mat 15:21 Then Jesus went thence, and departed into the coasts of Tyre and Sidon.
Here is Jesus going into the outer fringes of Canaan into the Gentile population. In these days the Jews mostly settled in and around Jerusalem, but the cities outside of this realm were heavily populated with the Gentile nations. I want to point out that Tyre and Sidon are not even close to Jerusalem. The cities were on the Mediterranean coast nearly 30 miles from the Sea of Galilee through mountainous terrain. Jesus was obviously getting far away from the Jews to be in such a place. It also had to take Jesus significant time to travel to reach this area. You might recall that I have said before that God will move heaven and earth to get to someone with faith and I believe that Jesus is not in this area by chance or accident. Keep this in mind as we continue through the lesson.
Mat 15:22 And, behold, a woman of Canaan came out of the same coasts, and cried unto him, saying, Have mercy on me, O Lord, thou Son of David; my daughter is grievously vexed with a devil.
Now we are told about the woman for the first time. She is being described to us as a person that is from the coast. She is also described to be a Canaanite which is the greater region’s name sake. Canaan consists of a broad stretch of land and is often called Palestine by many non-Jewish people. This is a wide land area that encompasses land from south of Jerusalem all the way to the north where Tyre and Sidon are located. We know from Genesis 9:18 that Canaan was a son of Ham, one of the three sons of Noah saved in the ark by God. So the Canaanites were descendants from this branch of the family of Noah. It is also interesting to note that in Genesis 9 that Canaan is cursed to be a servant of his brothers by Noah. These are just interesting Bible background facts that are good to note. When I read this story of the Canaanite woman in Matthew, I wondered how the description and message of Jesus had reached a woman all the way on the coast. It is obvious that news traveled in this land even without cell phones. Also note that she is not a Jew, but she calls Jesus the Son of David a covenant title of respect and honor. It also implies that she understood what God had said to David in the O.T. that David’s Son would sit on his throne forever. God had told David that his son would build God a house for His name and He would sit upon your throne. I also wondered how she knew it was Jesus. Was it the presence of the disciples with Jesus or was it what He was wearing, or how He was acting or speaking? Jesus obviously did not walk around with a giant name tag hanging around his neck saying “I’m the Son of David Your Messiah”. Neither was Jesus identifiable by a halo around His head. The angels of the Lord did not surround Him with a visible wall of protection and His appearance had to resemble every other man. It does not say that Jesus has spoken or taught anyone directly in this area. I could only find the following scripture about Tyre and Sidon in Mark:
Mar 3:8 And from Jerusalem, and from Idumaea, and from beyond Jordan; and they about Tyre and Sidon, a great multitude, when they had heard what great things he did, came unto him.
It would appear that information about Jesus spread by word of mouth. I could not find a direct reference where Jesus ever taught in these cities, yet it clearly says the people there heard of Him and came looking for Him. So when a stranger comes to your town, do you automatically assume it is Jesus the Messiah? I honestly do not know how to answer that question. There was something that this woman must have heard about Him to cause her to know it was Him. We have learned that the Bible says that faith comes by hearing and hearing by the word of God. So we can easily assume that since Jesus said this woman had faith, she must have heard the Word of God at some time in her recent past. We are told that she comes to Jesus and asks Him to deliver her daughter from a devil. What was Jesus’ reaction to the words of this woman? This is where the story starts to really get good to me.
Mat 15:23 But he answered her not a word. And his disciples came and besought him, saying, Send her away; for she crieth after us.
Silence was the answer from the Master. That is not what she was after, was it? The disciples who were with Jesus asked Him to send her away. They think that they are the reason for her presence, but they are clearly confused. She had not said anything to them at all. I want to introduce you to a new factor for having great faith and a new partner to receiving anything from God. What does it take to come and ask anyone for help? In the world we live in there are homeless people everywhere you turn. What does it take for them to ask for help? Wow, that is a tough question for people with pride to answer. You can clearly understand that it takes humility to come to ask anyone for help. Of course if you are desperate then you might say people act out of desperation. But, even desperate people can die with pride and not ask for help. No, you have to humble yourself to ask anyone who is capable of helping to help. There is no room for having pride if you need something from God. If you are too proud to ask God to help you, then you are truly in trouble. The Bible says that God resists the proud, but gives grace to the humble (James 4:6). So if you are need of anything that God can do for you, please learn to come to Him in reverent humility. Watch the actions and words of this woman and see what you can learn about what your ways should be.
Mat 15:24 But he answered and said, I am not sent but unto the lost sheep of the house of Israel.
Jesus finally speaks and says something very strange. He tells the woman that He was only sent to the lost sheep of the house of Israel. That is a very revealing insightful statement about many things, especially since we see the fact that Jesus purposely left the lost sheep of Israel to get to where this woman was. What is a lost sheep of Israel? First, the name implies that they are no longer in the house of Israel, because they have wandered away and become lost. Do you understand the conflict that is arising in what Jesus has said? Where is Jesus right now? Who is Jesus speaking to? Jesus is in a Gentile costal village of people who He just said He was not sent to. Wow, is God confused? I don’t think so! What we understand from this lesson is that faith will cause God to go out of His way to help someone no matter who it is or how far He has to go. Next notice this, what was the woman’s reaction to the words of Jesus? Jesus had basically told her I was not sent to help you.
Mat 15:25 Then came she and worshipped him, saying, Lord, help me.
Here is where her humility begins to kick in and to shine. Notice how she remained focused, persistent and confident that she was in the right place at the right time. This woman did not give up, nor did she throw away what she had heard because of what she is experiencing right now. You should learn from this woman all that you can to duplicate her efforts. Also notice she is worshipping God. If you want to receive from God, learn to worship Him. If it could not get worse for this woman, it suddenly does:
Mat 15:26 But he answered and said, It is not meet to take the children’s bread, and to cast it to dogs.
Jesus calls this woman a dog and that would cause most religious people to get angry and start yelling about “Who do you think you are?” “Who do you think you are calling a dog?” If Jesus called you a dog, what would have been your reaction? Here is a golden opportunity to get offended at the word of God. Do you know that people getting easily offended is one of the greatest enemies to why they do not possess the Promises of God? I guess I didn’t teach on this enemy before. Offense is a powerful weapon of Satan. Take and learn from this woman, she is not angry, upset, offended nor does she get up to walk away from her answer. This woman was too smart and wise to allow the words of God to offend her and she says this:
Mat 15:27 And she said, Truth, Lord: yet the dogs eat of the crumbs which fall from their masters’ table.
This woman simply agrees with God and said you are right I am a dog, but even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from the masters’ table. WOW! Was that a great reaction or what? You see if you have ever had a dog in the house while you are eating supper you know exactly what she is saying. Children and people accidently drop things off of the table and before you can bend over and pick it up they are gone. A crumb falling from the table is not there long enough to be a problem. Learn what she is saying today. The dog is so focused on getting anything dropped, they do not care what it is and it can be a very small crumb and they are all over it. Do you see why this woman is about to receive from God? She is the dog looking for the crumb. Always agree with God and always stay on God’s side. If He calls you a dog, you just smile and agree. Of course if you are His child now, He is not going to call you a dog, just learn what is happening here and do not get easily side tracked.
What is Jesus teaching us in this faith lesson? Do you remember what the woman came for? Her daughter was being grievously vexed by a devil. What does that mean? By looking up the words “grievously vexed by a devil” in the Strong’s we learn that the child was possessed by an evil spirit that caused her to be greatly sick or diseased. We understand one of the reasons that Jesus came to the earth was to do the following:
Act 10:38 How God anointed Jesus of Nazareth with the Holy Ghost and with power: who went about doing good, and healing all that were oppressed of the devil; for God was with him.
The Bible tells us very clearly that Jesus was anointed by God to heal those oppressed of the devil. So when a woman comes to Jesus because her daughter is possessed by a devil that makes her sick, this is one of the reasons we are told that Jesus was here. However, notice again what Jesus said in Matthew 15:26. He said “I have the children’s bread and it is not for dogs”. Remember she is asking for Jesus to heal her daughter and Jesus says this “bread” is only for the “children”. Do you understand what Jesus is saying? Jesus is saying healing is the children’s bread. This of course is a hard saying of Jesus to fully comprehend. The woman is talking about healing and Jesus is talking about bread. How did He make that transition? It is clear to me that Jesus is not speaking of physical bread, butHe is speaking symbolically of something spiritual. Therefore we must determine what this spiritual bread is? This is why you have to use the Bible to interpret the Bible or you will be totally confused.
Mat 4:4 But he answered and said, It is written, Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of God.
Here is Jesus teaching us using another radical shift with the transition of words. Here we have God in the flesh beginning to talk about natural bread and then moving into the spiritual realm and telling you that the Word of God is this true bread from heaven that will cause you to live. Jesus is basically revealing the definition of spiritual bread in this verse. God’s word is proclaimed to be this spiritual food. Of course Jesus is simply quoting this information from an Old Testament prophet Moses found in Deuteronomy 8:3. If you read this verse you will know that the bread from heaven was a type of food given to the children of Israel called manna. This was equivalent to a spiritual food source and Jesus teaches us that this bread comes from the mouth of God when He speaks.
Joh 6:32 Then Jesus said unto them, Verily, verily, I say unto you, Moses gave you not that bread from heaven; but my Father giveth you the true bread from heaven.
If you read the context of this verse you can clearly see that Jesus is comparing two things. Natural things are being compared to spiritual things. Jesus is calling natural things false and spiritual things to be the true. I hope you can see this. Here is God telling you something very significant about spiritual things. Jesus is saying I have come to bring you the words of life. Jesus is inferring His words have life in them that causes people to live and even to get healed. Here is an Old Testament scripture that will fit in very nicely with our study today:
Psa 107:20 He sent his word, and healed them, and delivered them from their destructions.
As you can again see from this verse, God says “I sent my Bread and the bread Healed them”. So when Jesus is telling the Gentile woman that healing is the children’s bread, He is referring to His words as being the bread of life that brings healing. Jesus then told the woman these words are only for the children at the table. But, the woman makes a statement that truly astounds God. She said it won’t take but a crumb from the table to heal my daughter. This is so powerful if you can see it. The woman did not ask for any of the bread, she only needed a crumb and God called this having great faith. The woman recognized that the Power of God was in His Word and that it did not take great power to heal even a significant disease. Change your perspective today to see your disease as insignificant compared to the power of God which is far superior. Many times people are so consumed by their circumstances they lose sight of the power of God’s Word. Shift your focus so that you understand that it does not take very much power to heal any disease. You only need a crumb like this woman needed to fix her problem. God called this great faith. If you noticed this story of the woman, she went away to her home and her daughter was healed already when she got there. Here is a review of the key factors we learned in this faith lesson today:
- Humility, Stay Humble to Receive God’s Grace.
- Persistence, don’t give up even if it looks worse.
- Not being offended when you are called a dog.
- Worship the God who can solve your problem.
- See your problem as being small and insignificant.
- See the Word of God as Powerful and capable of solving any problem.
- Expect a Crumb to solve Your Problem.
Today’s study was another very different faith lesson found in the Bible about the faith of dogs eating crumbs from the table of the Master. Remember what Jesus said? Jesus told us that “Healing was the children’s bread”. Are you one of His children? I know that I am. The Bible calls us His children in several places for example: Romans 8:16-21, 9:26, Galatians 3:26, Ephesians 5:8, 1 Thessalonians 5:5 and 1 John 3:10. If God calls us children and God says “healing is our bread” now, then why don’t we have it? You better learn to partake of the true bread from heaven. I hope and pray that you learned something from this lesson today and that you can apply it to your situation. If the Word of God is not relevant to you today then it will never be relevant to you at any time. You may not need healing, but there is always something that can be challenging you. The Bible faith concepts work for whatever the situation when applied correctly with the right attitude. God Bless!
If you would like to continue reading in this series of lesson on understanding Bible faith you may go to “Part 12“.
Understanding Bible Faith! Are You Expecting? How Far Along Are You? Part 10
(Ver 1.2) Today is Part 10 in a series of advanced lessons on Understanding Bible faith. If you have not been reading this series from the beginning I would recommend that you go and start with “Part 1”. These words in my title ask some specific questions that you might ask a pregnant woman. Did you know that God created these natural processes to mimic and reveal to us the spiritual process of having faith? You might be amazed to find the parallels in the Bible to these two realities, if you search for them and you can see the connections being taught. Hopefully I will not get to graphic today, but this is a mature Christian subject since I might have to discuss sex. I am personally glad that God created sex and not me. Since it was nothing that I invented it is nothing that I can take credit for. Obviously God created this activity for the bonds of covenant marriage and I might talk about that today also. Do you recall how people get faith? If you do, then make the transition to this next question. How does a woman normally get pregnant? You see my difficulty beginning to teach this subject today, don’t you? In the modern world this can happen artificially, but in the world created by God if there was no sex, there were no babies. We can tell by the nearly 7 billion people and growing on the planet that there has been a lot of sex. Well today I am going to teach you about the spiritual concept revealed in sex and pregnancy that corresponds to God’s spiritual development of you having faith in God. So natural babies, start by people having sex. That is a basic viewpoint that seems rather obvious to me, but yet on the news and in our government they seem to forget this fact when it comes to allowing abortion. If there was no sex there would be no abortions in the world and nobody wants to talk about that. Oh well, I guess I better not go there today or I’ll get off track again.
The concept of the husband sowing seed into his wife to have children is definitely a self-sustaining and self-perpetuating God created design of nature. If you have never read my Bible lessons on “Understanding Seeds” then you might not understand that the sperm of a man is called his seed. The human sperm is the natural seed of human life and it is required to perpetuate our race. Calling multiple things by the same name “seed” is a complex technique used by God to conceal and reveal spiritual information in the Bible. God uses the word “seed” to refer to around 10 different things in the Bible and all of these while different are very similar in design. You see the “Word of God” is also called the “Seed of God” in Mark 4:14 and Luke 8:11. We understand that God is a Spirit so God’s words are spiritual in nature. Jesus said “the words that I speak unto you they are Spirit, and they are life” (John 6:63). We can therefore, conclude that God’s Words are the spiritual seeds of life. We are already beginning to establish a direct connection between natural things and spiritual things by God’s interchangeable usage of the word “Seed”. You might recall that in an earlier Bible lesson I taught you where Bible faith comes from. Let’s review a verse that I gave you before:
Rom 10:17 So then faith cometh by hearing, and hearing by the word of God.
How does faith come? It comes by you hearing God’s Seed! Did you get the transition that I just made? I can legally interchange “Seed” for “Word” by the laws of mathematics created by God. If you do not understand these laws then you have never taken an Algebra class or you took the class and you didn’t learn anything from it. What God is telling you, is that planting God’s Spiritual Seed into your heart (spirit) is the equivalent to a husband planting seed into his wife and them having a baby. You plant a seed and you get a crop. It is a basic design from God and it is really not that complicated.
Psa 62:5 My soul, wait thou only upon God; for my expectation is from him.
You see there are many strange verses found in the Bible that can literally be taken several different ways simultaneously. This one in Psalms is no different. Here is a verse that speaks of someone expecting from God. This is the same concept that my wife told me when she said “you are the reason that I am expecting”. Since I am teaching on the subject of being spiritually pregnant with the Word of God, what does a spiritual pregnancy infer? Technically speaking if you have faith, you are expecting God to do what He has promised. This is the concept of being spiritually pregnant. Now, this concept is certainly more familiar to women, but yet if your wife has been pregnant you have at least an external perspective of the situation. What occurs when a woman gets pregnant? Things inside her begin to change and as time goes along, there is a growing force of eager expectation for the baby to come to fruition. This concept is really no different than a farmer planting a field with a crop seed. He plants the seed into the ground and then goes into expectation mode to wait for the crop to produce so he can harvest it. Harvest time is akin to delivery time in a pregnancy. This is the basis of Bible faith also. God is revealing to you that you better be expecting His word to come to pass. A woman is expecting to be delivered of her child when the time arrives and so it is with having faith. If you expect God to deliver you from your current situation, then He will, however if you do not expect God to do anything then He will do that also.
Pro 10:28 The hope of the righteous shall be gladness: but the expectation of the wicked shall perish.
If you do not look up the definitions of the words in the verses that you read in the Bible, then you can easily miss what God is trying to say to you. Unless you know Hebrew or Greek and can read the original languages, you need to study to figure out what is being stated. There are just too many translation errors in every version of the Bible for you not to do this research. This is the case for this verse, because the Hebrew word translated as “hope” is a word that means “to expect” or “expectation”. This word expresses a human response of “waiting patiently”. Uh oh? That is a problem for many Christians, isn’t it? We have just introduced a new key word to the faith equation of believing God. God is teaching you that sometimes things take time. Most people understand that a woman’s pregnancy term can vary, but that it generally takes 9 months to produce a healthy child. So it is also with crops planted by the farmer in his field. No seed planted is going to instantly produce the end result immediately. Before the concept of harvest occurs there is always seed planting and a duration of time that occurs where we wait patiently for the result. This is why many people start out walking by faith and then they give up because they think it is not working. I have heard many faith critics teach against faith simply because they do not understand the complex dependent factors of how faith works. These types of teachers obviously teach out of ignorance to their own downfall.
It is also important to note the difference between waiting patiently and waiting anxiously. If you are worried you are not in faith. If you are nervous, then you are not in faith. If you are in fear, then you are not in faith. Waiting patiently is another demonstration of having confidence in God. If you are confident in God’s ability, power and His word then you are waiting patiently. If you are worried or anxious if God is really going to do what He said, then you are about to abort your miracle. Fortunately for Christians, patience is a fruit of the Spirit. So learn to develop patients when standing on the word of God.
Heb 6:12 That ye be not slothful, but followers of them who through faith and patience inherit the promises.
Here is a verse that certainly applies to our series about faith and possessing the Promised Land. God is taking and connecting two different factors to produce one positive result. Faith is intertwined with patience for you to inherit the promises of God. So patience is a key ingredient in your successful positive outcome. This is why the Word of God is so complicated. It takes several simple concepts or ingredients to mix together to produce a good result. That is why I could not teach you everything all at once. It would have been too complicated and overwhelming. So I try to introduce you to new concepts in stages so that you learn in manageable chunks of information. Today subject is primarily about expectation and expectancy but you can see we just learned about a higher dimension of how patience plays a vital role in waiting for the harvest or the delivery.
Rom 4:18 Who against hope believed in hope, that he might become the father of many nations, according to that which was spoken, So shall thy seed be.
Here in this chapter of Romans, God gives us a major faith example for us to live and learn by. God is speaking of the faith of Abraham. Here was a man who was 99 years old with a 90 year old barren wife and God told him that I have made you a father of many nations. If a human situation ever looked hopeless, Abraham’s situation was there for an example for us. This verse says that “against hope, Abraham still had hope”. However, this word for hope is not our modern word for hope. When people in the modern world say “I really hope so”, they are meaning to say “I wish it were so”. Abraham did not wish he would become the father of the promised child, this word says Abraham “expected” it to happen. There was a level of expectancy within the spirit of Abraham that was conceived by the Word of God spoken to him. This is an example of a spiritual pregnancy test that you should be taking on yourself today. When a woman in the modern world thinks she is pregnant, there are things she can buy at the drug store that can be used to determine if she is pregnant. These are natural “pregnancy tests” that confirm what she already thought was happening. So I am making another spiritual transition from a physical reality and telling you that you need to do a spiritual pregnancy test to see if you are in faith. If you do not have the promise of God in your spirit you need to get it into your spirit by speaking it to yourself as Abraham did. Abraham went around calling himself the “father of nations” as his name in Hebrew meant. This seed that was placed in Abraham’s heart developed and grew into a strong belief that God’s word was true despite the outward circumstances and appearances. This is a faith lesson for you in your current circumstances. No matter what it looks like on the outside, you need to look to the picture of a successful outcome on the inside of you. If you are sick, you call yourself well. If you are poor, you call yourself rich. You do what God did for Abraham by saying what God said about you.
Gal 4:19 My little children, of whom I travail in birth again until Christ be formed in you,
Paul of course was a man of God and that means he was a human male. Yet Paul still compares the process taking place inside of him as an internal conception and birth process. There are actually two conceptions being spoken of in this verse. Paul had conceived and Paul was waiting for the people in Galatia to conceive and for Christ to be formed within them. If we are looking at spiritual births, we must back up and see the steps that must have occurred for Paul to give birth spiritually speaking. Paul is using his faith for the good of the people in Galatia. However, this process is referred to in the terms of a child birth. It is not a natural process it is a spiritual process that parallels the natural. The Word of God is sown in the hearts of men and after time it produces the result of the word that was sown. In other words if you need a specific answer to prayer, you better go get the specific promises of God Word that says you have it. You put it into your heart and allow it to conceive there. If you keep it in your heart and do not abort it, it will produce the result that you desired by faith. I’ll give you one more example before I wrap this lesson up today. Here are a couple of verses that demonstrate the spiritual concept of the heart giving birth that I have been teaching on, but in the reverse. You see these are negative things that your heart can also produce:
Isa 59:4 None calleth for justice, nor any pleadeth for truth: they trust in vanity, and speak lies; they conceive mischief, and bring forth iniquity.
Jas 1:15 Then when lust hath conceived, it bringeth forth sin: and sin, when it is finished, bringeth forth death.
As you can clearly read God is speaking of a conception in the human spirit again, but this time it is of lust and iniquity. We learn several things from these verses. We learn the spirit of people can conceive either good or evil. Do you remember the lesson that I taught on seeds? One of these lessons I taught on the seed parable that Jesus instructed us about the wheat and the tares. The Wheat was produced by the Word/Seed of God and the tares were produced by an enemy sowing evil seed. You heart is the soil and the words you allow into it are the crops that are producing either the good or the evil in your life. What did God tell Adam in Genesis 2? God said do not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil or you will surely die. We obviously learn that Adam lusted and ate of the tree of evil and thus conceived and gave birth to death. You see Adam could have chosen life, but his heart caused him to make the wrong choice and die (Gen 2:17). You today have been given a redo opportunity by God. Since Jesus came to the earth and redeemed us from the hand of Satan, we now have the opportunity to conceive life within us. Remember what Jesus taught us? Jesus said in John 10:10 that “I have come that you might have life and that life more abundantly”. Yet here we are still downcast and trodden by the misconceptions of deceit from Satan that it can’t get any better than what we have in our life right now. This is not true however, since God has given us His promises to possess. These promises of God can produce the life that we need today to change our circumstances around. If Abraham would have looked at the circumstances he would have given up. But, since Abraham called himself a father of nations before he was one, he conceived it in his heart by faith and Sarah birthed the promised child. Do you think that God is talking about Abraham and Sarah getting pregnant and having a child by accident or chance? God is making a direct connection between natural pregnancy and that of spiritual pregnancy and you have to learn how to get spiritually pregnant by faith. Let me expound on this point in conclusion. If you understand natural things you know that the human male places literally millions of sperm cells inside of a woman. Why did God do it this way when all it takes is one to get the result you desire? After all there is only one egg and not millions of eggs in the woman. God is giving you a spiritual lesson in this natural information. There is only one spirit inside of your body and if you want to get it pregnant you better bombard it with a lot of the Word of God. God’s Word is God’s Seed and Jesus taught us that from the abundance of the heart, things come out of it (Mat 12:34). Whatever you put abundantly in your hear is what you will get it to produce. If you want to follow after the wrong things in life God will allow this to happen. You can conceive the wrong things in your spirit and die or you can put the Word of God there to give birth to good things. This is how spiritual things work. If you know how to have sex, then you know how to get faith and give birth to the promises of God. Genesis 4:1 says “Adam knew his wife Eve and she conceived…”. Do you know God? Do you know God’s word? Then it will conceive in your heart if you allow it to work and stay there the same way. Get to know the Word of God and see if it will not produce life. We still have a lot more to talk about in this series so come back expecting to learn. God Bless you until next time!
If you would like to continue learning in this series, please continue reading with “Part 11“.
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