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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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