Home sick all day today with an unknown stomach malaise that is thankfully clearing at this hour--I've had more than enough internet surfing to last me a LONG while!
One of the more entertaining articles I found came from my favorite Norwegian Christian attack dog, Berit Kjos. Here is the article from her site Crossroads and below it I have copied and pasted a related article on Johnny Appleseed that I wrote many moons ago for LisaLeland.com that you might find amusing given this first article. All I can say is, thank the Good Lord I found the truth of right division, on and on!
"You can become a Reiki master in three weekends." --Lisa Oz, wife of Dr. Mehmet Oz
Perhaps it is not surprising Dr. Mehmet Oz, a key teacher in Rick Warren's 52 week health-and-wellness Daniel Plan, has been influenced by occultist Emanuel Swedenborg. Although Swedenborg rejected the biblical Christ, and communed with familiar spirits, some of Swedenborg's admirers have been culturally significant figures. At this point in his career, Dr. Mehmet Oz certainly qualifies as such.
Those who have either appreciated or followed Swedenborg's theology have included Helen Keller, Johnny Appleseed, Sherlock Holmes creator Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Carl Jung, Henry James Sr., the poet Robert Frost, and Bill Wilson, co-founder of Alcoholics Anonymous.
Swedenborg, who died in the 1700s, has been called the father of modern day spiritualism. It is likely Alcoholics Anonymous co-founder Bill Wilson's bondage to the spirit world began with his introduction to Swedenborg's teachings. Despite erroneous claims he was a Christian, Wilson's spirituality was one of seances, familiar spirits, and the ouija board. [1]
Just like Dr. Mehmet Oz, Bill Wilson was introduced to the teachings of Swedenborg through his own wife. Early in their romantic relationship, Bill Wilson "learned that [his future wife's family] were all Swedenborgians, and the mystic aspect of the faith so fascinated them they vowed to explore it more deeply one day."[2]
In Pass It On (AA co-founder's official biography), Bill Wilson states, "The Ouija board began moving in earnest. What followed was the fairly usual experience-it was a strange melange of Aristotle, St. Francis, diverse archangels with odd names, deceased friends–some in purgatory and others doing nicely, thank you! . . . Then, the seemingly virtuous entities would elbow them out with messages of comfort, information, advice—and sometimes just sheer nonsense."[3] (Bold added.)
Swedenborg had power. This cannot be denied. It was stunning to learn Swedenborg had written of a spiritual "twelve steps" more than a century before Alcoholics Anonymous was birthed.[4] Did Wilson copy this term from Emanuel Swedenborg? I do not believe so. I believe that Wilson, having opened himself up to communication with unclean spirits, received his 12 Steps from the same source as had Swedenborg.
Emanuel Swedenborg experienced mystic dreams, trances, and meditation. He believed that he was visited by Christ, who informed him he was the human appointed to write the real meaning of the Bible. He believed he communicated with Moses, Luther, Mary, Aristotle, the apostle Paul, and many others.
Author Wilson Van Dusen notes, "Swedenborg used a fairly intense form [of meditation] in which he would focus on an idea of the exclusion of all else and his breathing would slow down. There have been whole books on the breathing aspect alone."[5] Swedenborg, writes Van Dusen, "thought highly" of meditation.[6]
We are in a time when spiritual terms have been given confusing meanings; when words such as "Salvation," are not necessarily presented as biblically intended. This is particularly true of the term, "meditation." Rick Warren's Daniel Plan, his association with Oz, Hyman, and Amen, may make comprehension of this even more murky.
The meditation used by Swedenborg and numerous New Age devotees, Buddhists, and Hindus, is not biblical meditation, which is essentially reading Scripture and "chewing" (reflecting and pondering) upon it. With biblical meditation, the brain is always active, and thinking.
But thinking is the enemy of the mystical meditator. As one mystic proponent put it:
"Do not reflect on the meaning of the word; thinking and reflecting must cease, as all mystical writers insist. Simply 'sound' the word silently, letting go of all feelings and thoughts." (Zen master, Willigis Jager, Contemplation, p. 31, cited in ATOD)
This is the Eastern meditation advocated by Rick Warren's Daniel Plan team members Dr. Mehmet Oz, Dr. Mark Hyman, and Dr. Daniel Amen. This meditation, used by Swedenborg and others, involves stilling the mind, sometimes by focusing on a word or phrase to "the exclusion of all else," as Van Dusen puts it. By repeating the word or phrase over and over, a state of altered consciousness is reached. This is known as the silence .Historically, around the world, much has been experienced in this meditative silence. Spirit guides. Oneness. False "christs." "Kundalini effect" . . . and so forth.
Deception.
This is also often portrayed in scientific terms, and portrayed as beneficial, but is an invitation to the spirit realm. As others have pointed out, when the mind is stilled and void, something else may well fill that void.
There is a battle going on—between those who hold to the Word of God and those who promote the mysticism inherent in these meditative techniques.
Already the Body of Christ is infected with the "contemplative spirituality" of Richard Foster, Dallas Willard, Gary Thomas, Keri Wyatt Kent and so many others. Contemplative prayer is simply saying a "Christian-ized" word or phrase to still the mind and enter the silence. It is virtually the same as Eastern or New Age meditation, yet it has gained acceptance due to its "Christianese" disguise.
Occultist Alice Bailey, who was informed by her spirit guides, said that the New Age "illumination" would indeed come to the world through the Christian church, and she instructed her followers to leave the outer shell of Christianity intact for the time being and change it from the inside. Is this not what is happening today! (Bailey, The Externalization of the Hierarchy, p. 510)
But now, it seems, we are "advancing" past the stage of disguising. Now, it seems, outright Eastern/New Age meditation is poised to enter the church. The realm of these spirits is the realm of deception that the Bible talks about. The Bible says that in the days before Christ’s return, the mystery of iniquity will prevail and deceive vast numbers. (See 2 Thessalonians 2:7 and Revelation 12:9.)
If all this is new to you, please take the time to research.
His people perish from lack of knowledge. (Hosea 4:6)
With Dr. Oz having been granted potential influence into the lives of thousands (potentially eventually millions) of Christians through Rick Warren's Daniel Plan, it is important to consider Lisa Oz as well—because people who seek out Dr. Oz's books will likely be exposed to his wife's work also. The couple have worked together on projects and public appearances. Lisa Oz serves as the reader for many of Dr. Oz's audio books.[7] And Dr. Oz does not hide his high estimation for his wife.
In her book, Lisa Oz acknowledges, "After my parents, the most influential [teacher] by far was and is Emanuel Swedenborg, an eighteenth century scientist and theologian who saw the Bible as a divinely inspired metaphor. ... His writings on the nature of God, humanity, and marriage not only shaped my views but ultimately shaped who I am. For this reason you will find his doctrine, widely and wildly interpreted, as the foundation for just about every chapter in this book."[8]
Lisa Oz is a Reiki master. This is an ancient system of occult energy, one that brings with it the risk of familiar spirits. [9] Lisa Oz states, "You can become a Reiki master in three weekends."[10]
Many people were exposed to Reiki for the first time when Dr. Oz featured it on his popular television show. In an interview, Mrs. Oz shared that she has used Reiki on her own children.[11] The point here is not that Swedenborg used Reiki—he did not—but, rather, that Swedenborgian doctrine is often a precursor that leads into New Age practices such as meditation and Reiki.
Of course, this makes sense, because Swedenborgianism itself can be defined as a New Age belief system. The New Age, after all, is really the Old Age, and familiar spirits for thousands of years have taken the openings offered through meditation. So it is with the increasingly popular Reiki.
In fact, consider this collective Reiki/meditative experience facilitated by Lisa Oz, which took place at a workshop she conducted along with her husband:
"She followed with a couple of similar exercises, then finished with what for me was the day's highlight: the hatsurei-ho meditation,[12] this time for hundreds. The energy in that cavernous room at the Javits Convention Center shifted palpably as Mrs. Oz led the crowd through progressive relaxation, envisioning a golden light all around, drawing the light inside and then breathing it back out into the space around us, adding our own energy with each exhalation. There was no need to explain what Reiki was—everyone felt it, even without touch."[13] (Bold added)
Lisa Oz then told the crowd, "Go in wellness, knowing you have brought light into the world."[14]
What is going on with Rick Warren? Does he believe he can bring in Oz, Hyman, and Amen, and simply share only their medical teachings? Stick to the brain, Daniel Amen. Just talk about the heart, Mehmet Oz. Is that what Pastor Warren intends? Because even if these doctors don't say anything about meditation, or Reiki, their resources are still available to all who have seen and heard them at Saddleback. Exposure to these practices therefore seems certain, all from authors highly praised by Rick Warren.
This decision to use these meditation gurus is no fluke. The list of Rick Warren's ill-advised spiritual decisions is too long to believe that. It goes hand in hand with he and his wife's admiration for mysticism advocate Henri Nouwen. It goes hand in hand with his promotion of Gary Thomas who tells readers to repeat a word for 20 minutes in Sacred Pathways (p. 185) and who points readers to tantric sex advocate Mary Ann McPherson Oliver in Sacred Marriage and who carries Adele Alberg Calhoun's book, Handbook on Spiritual Disciplines in his Resource Center even though the book is riddled with New Age/panentheist references.
It goes hand in hand with his own book, The Purpose Driven Life, where he tells over 30 million readers they can become "world-class Christian[s]" if they practice "breath prayers" (Day 38). It goes hand in hand with Rick Warren's first book, The Purpose Driven Church, where he tells readers that Richard Foster's spiritual formation movement is a "valid message" and a "wake up call" to "the body of Christ" (pp. 126-127). And it goes hand in hand with Rick Warren's connections with New Age sympathizers Leonard Sweet and Ken Blanchard. (paragraph notes)
No, Rick Warren's decision to use Oz, Amen, and Hyman is no fluke. But it sure is a spiritual trap for the Christian church.
Here is my article on poor Johnny Appleseed (who I actually had kind of a "crush" on in some weird Vincent van Gogh kind-of-a-way!:
I was nine years old when my family returned from being missionaries in the Amazon jungles of Ecuador, and after a year of camping out inside my grandmother's house in Akron, Ohio (I actually slept on the floor in a sleeping bag set up beside my grandmother's bed), we moved an hour-and-a-half away to a tiny farming/resort village called Loudonville.
Loudonville is popular statewide for its canoe liveries and campgrounds on both the Mohican and Blackfork rivers. It's also home to the Mohican State Forest and nearby Pleasant Hill Dam. Tons of campers fill the area each summer.
My summer jobs in high school included working at one of the liveries and at a custard ice cream stand in town. For two summers while attending Ohio State, I worked at both a water slide and Putt Putt golf course inside Wally Campgrounds (yes, just like in the Chevy Chase movie "Vacation," but its name precedes the classic comedy by at least two decades).
I spent all my free time during these summers cross-country cycling through the gorgeous rolling farm hills or woods that stretched for miles any direction you ventured outside Loudonville's city limits.
I preferred the back roads (and sometimes had to fight off unchained dogs with my attached bicycle pump), but would also ride country highways to destinations like Millersburg (known for its large Amish community), Mt. Vernon, Mansfield, Wooster, Butler and Mt. Gilead.
Whenever I rode up Route 60 (the road my family lived on) into Ashland, I'd pass a large fruit stand my mom always bought her cooking apples from every fall. The outdoor/indoor market was named for Johnny Appleseed, who was said to have spread the apple seeds and nurtured the young trees that led to the property's apple orchards.
Because Johnny Appleseed was known to have been all through the territory surrounding Loudonville, clearing trees and brush to spread seeds and plant orchards, I'd think about him now and then on my excursions—actually more often than I should admit!
I was fascinated by the guy's story. He was a true free spirit, roaming the earth barefoot in a tattered, patched coat with a Bible buttoned inside it, using his head to haul around the cast-iron stewpot he cooked in.
He loved children, animals and nature and befriended the Indians even as he helped settlers avoid them. Historical records even verify that in the War of 1812, he traveled 30 miles to summon American troops to Mansfield, Ohio, thus forestalling a raid by Native Americans who were allied with the British.
Johnny's real last name was Chapman and he was born in Leominster, Mass., in 1774. He left home at 23, heading westward into the wilderness with a simple dream to plant apple trees. All he brought with him was his stewpot, a hatchet, a flint and steel for making fire, a bag of cornmeal and a sack of apple seeds.
"He gave away his clothes to anyone who needed a coat or trousers or shoes," says the children's book I have on him, "The True Tale of Johnny Appleseed," written by Margaret Hodges. "Most of the time he wore no shoes. One man said that he saw Johnny breaking the ice in a creek with a bare foot.
"All along his path he planted apple seeds. If he was invited to spend the night in a cabin, he would not take a bed, but slept on the floor. He would not eat until he was sure that the children in the family were full. He loved honey but would never take it from a bee tree until he saw that the bees had enough honey to keep themselves alive during the winter. A strange man indeed!"
Johnny followed creeks and rivers westward using borrowed canoes, then crossed the wild Alleghenys on foot. When a record winter storm caught him unaware, he wrapped his feet with pieces of cloth torn from his coat and wove tree branches into makeshift snowshoes.
"As time went by, Johnny walked so long and so far that his feet grew almost as tough as an animal's paws," writes Hodges in her book. "In other ways, too, he came to be like an animal. He could curl up to sleep under a bush or in the hollow of a tree."
Of course, there were people who thought Johnny was nuts, walking about in no shoes, a ragged coat and stewpot hat, but the children always loved him and they were the ones to coin his famous name of Appleseed. He would read stories from the Bible to them and even would tear Bible prayer and devotional books apart, leaving sections in tree boughs during the summertime for children to find.
By the spring of 1845, Johnny had come as far west as Fort Wayne, Ind. and was staying with a family when news arrived that cattle had broken into one of his new orchards 15 miles away.
"The weather was cold and wet, but he set off at once and never stopped to rest on the long walk," writes Hodges. "'Cloudy. Snow showers,' an Indiana farmer wrote in his diary that day. The next day the weather report was, 'Snow showers all day.' When Johnny got back to his friends' house, they put him to bed with a high fever. During the March snows, Johnny Appleseed died, and his body returned to the earth that he had loved. By early April, winter was past. The weather report read, 'In the night thunder showers—then fair—first apple blossoms."
Sunday, August 28, 2011
Saturday, August 27, 2011
RECEIVED wisdom
The Bible itself, through many different verses, tells you it’s going to be translated into all the languages of the nations. Romans 16:25-26 says, “Now to him that is of power to stablish you according to my gospel, and the preaching of Jesus Christ, according to the revelation of the mystery, which was kept secret since the world began,
[26] But now is made manifest, and by the scriptures of the prophets, according to the commandment of the everlasting God, made known to all nations for the obedience of faith.”
There’s a whole realm of doctrine in Scripture about how God’s Word is not just written, but it’s preserved and disseminated. Unfortunately, in most of the debate about the Bible, these proofs are completely overlooked and ignored.
Paul tells us in Eph. 4:11 that God “gave some, apostles; and some, prophets; and some, evangelists; and some, pastors and teachers.” The prophets referred to here are the New Testament prophets.
Paul was a prophet but he was also an apostle. He never wrote anything as a prophet; he wrote as an apostle. Paul warns in I Cor. 14:37, “If any man think himself to be a prophet, or spiritual, let him acknowledge that the things that I write unto you are the commandments of the Lord.”
Jordan explains, “One of the jobs of a prophet all through Scripture is to say, ‘Thus sayeth the Lord.’ He spoke for God. One of the jobs of the prophets in those churches Paul established was to say, ‘This is God’s Word.’ ”
*****
From I Cor. 5:9 (“I wrote unto you in an epistle not to company with fornicators.”) we see that before I Corinthians, Paul had already written a letter and an epistle to the church of Corinth that did not wind up in the Bible.
Jordan says, “So do we have lost scripture? Who’s to say one letter from Paul is Scripture and the other’s not? Well, hey, folks, that’s why God put a prophet in the assembly, giving him the gift of prophecy. So that that prophet could acknowledge that the things Paul’s writing here—‘This is scripture; that one isn’t.’
“By the way, in II Thess. 2:2 there were some people counterfeiting epistles, writing them and saying they were from Paul when they weren’t! But, you see, the local church there had an office, a prophet, a God-empowered person with a supernatural ability as a gift of that church to say, ‘This is scripture,’ and to speak for God.
*****
“When Paul wrote to the Thessalonians, he said, ‘I want this epistle to be read by all the brethren.’ He writes Colossians 4 and says, ‘I want you to read the epistle I wrote to the Laodiceans and I want them to read the one I’m writing you.’
“You think the Colossians sent their original copy of what Paul wrote them to the Laodiceans? No way. From the very beginning they were making copies of the Scripture and distributing and assimilating them out.
“Who made the copies and how do you know they were right? They had someone in the church there who was supernaturally empowered by God, not simply to identify, but to write them down. The prophets didn’t originate the Scriptures; the prophets were making copies of them that were just as authoritative as the original. All those copies of God’s Word were to be taken and the commandment of God is they’re to be preached and made known to all nations.”
*****
Zechariah 8:23 is a verse in Israel’s program about the Millennium Kingdom as an illustration of what it means to preach to all nations: “Thus saith the LORD of hosts; In those days it shall come to pass, that ten men shall take hold out of all languages of the nations, even shall take hold of the skirt of him that is a Jew, saying, We will go with you: for we have heard that God is with you.”
Jordan explains, “Now if you get 10 dudes come up there from 10 different languages and grab a hold of you and start talking, you got a problem because if you’re going to talk back to them, you got to do it in 10 different languages. You know what you’re going to need? The gift of tongues.
“Can you understand why, on the day of Pentecost, God gave to the apostles the gift of tongues? They’re flat gonna need the ability to speak a lot of different languages. You see this effectual reversal of Genesis 11 in Acts 2:4: ‘And they were all filled with the Holy Ghost, and began to speak with other tongues, as the Spirit gave them utterance.’ God is talking through them in other languages.
*****
“I Cor. 14:21 says, ‘In the law it is written, With men of other tongues and other lips will I speak unto this people; and yet for all that will they not hear me, saith the Lord.’ Notice God can speak more than one language. He tells Israel, ‘I’m gonna speak to you in a bunch of different languages, and when I do, it’s still going to be me talking.’ Language is not a barrier for God to talk.”
Acts 2 goes on, “Now when this was noised abroad, the multitude came together, and were confounded, because that every man heard them speak in his own language.
[7] And they were all amazed and marvelled, saying one to another, Behold, are not all these which speak Galilaeans?
[8] And how hear we every man in our own tongue, wherein we were born?
[9] Parthians, and Medes, and Elamites, and the dwellers in Mesopotamia, and in Judaea, and Cappadocia, in Pontus, and Asia,
[10] Phrygia, and Pamphylia, in Egypt, and in the parts of Libya about Cyrene, and strangers of Rome, Jews and proselytes,
[11] Cretes and Arabians, we do hear them speak in our tongues the wonderful works of God.”
Jordan says, “You see that? They’re filled with the Spirit, they take God’s Word and they translate it into all these different languages ‘and they were all amazed and marveled . . .
'How come all these dudes from up north (Galilee) can speak all these different languages?’ Look at all those different languages! ‘And we’re all hearing in our native language,’ and they’re saying, ‘What in the world does all of this mean?!’
“When Paul says that over there in Romans 16:25, he’s expecting God’s Word to be taken and placed in the languages of the nations so that they would hear God’s Word in their own language.
“I Cor. 14:21 is a quote out of Isaiah 28 and that’s God Himself talking. Notice God Himself can speak with other tongues. God speaks every language, and when His Word is placed in those other languages, it is as much the Word of God as it was in the original language as far as He’s concerned.”
*****
Another great illustration is in Esther 1:21-22: “And the saying pleased the king and the princes; and the king did according to the word of Memucan:
[22] For he sent letters into all the king's provinces, into every province according to the writing thereof, and to every people after their language, that every man should bear rule in his own house, and that it should be published according to the language of every people.”
If you look at verse 1, it says, “Now it came to pass in the days of Ahasuerus, (this is Ahasuerus which reigned, from India even unto Ethiopia, over an hundred and seven and twenty provinces.”
Jordan says, “This dude’s the ruler over 127 different provinces. Do you think there must have been a little bit of a diplomatic communication issue here?!
“Verse 22 says they’re going to take that letter and translate it into 127 different languages, and when those 127 different nations and languages got that letter in their language, it was the word of the king and it was just as authoritative as it was in the original language the king spoke and wrote it in. Because once you put it in that Receptor language, that’s what he would have said had he written it in that language to start with!
“The translators of the King James Bible wrote a preface from the translators to the reader. In it they said, ‘As the king’s speech which is uttered in parliament, being translated in French, Dutch, Italian and Latin, is still the king’s speech, no cause therefore why the word translated should be denied to be the Word. . . ’
“And then they referenced that passage in Esther 1:22. You see the translators understood they were handling God’s Word and that when you translate it, it’s still God’s Word because the commandment of the everlasting God was that His Word would be made known to all nations.
“Somebody says, ‘Well, what about the language limitations?’ Obviously it didn’t stop the word of the king from getting into the other language. You say, ‘Well, you can’t translate perfectly from one language to another.’ Duh!
“If that’s a problem for you, I suggest you go to Acts 22 and read the first 18 verses where the Apostle Paul stands at the porch of the temple and speaks to his brethren, the Jews, in the Hebrew tongue, according to the text. Paul spoke at least 7-8 different languages. He spoke that in Hebrew but when Luke wrote it down, in every copy of any text that anybody ever reads, they say he wrote it down by inspiration of God in Greek. Hebrew and Greek are very different languages with different syntax, grammar, vocabulary and even letters. They use different alphabets. Hebrew says something very condensed; Greek is fuller.
“But that’s no big thing for Luke to do that. Moses talked to Pharaoh in Egyptian, but when he wrote it down in Exodus, he wrote it in Hebrew. When God the Holy Ghost decided to write down what Moses said, God the Holy Spirit dictated it in Hebrew. So God the Holy Spirit translated it!
“This translation issue is not the blank wall people make it sound like. The issue is to take God’s Word and to put it in the various languages of the nations and that’s been done since the very beginning.
*****
“The issue in the KJB when it was translated was not to make it easier to read. When you study the history of the English Bible, you discover that the KJB is the LAST English bible in a long history that goes all the way back to Wycliffe’s era in the 1400s.
In the 6th century, beginning with John Wycliffe, Matthews, Coverdale, Bishops, Geneva; these various bibles over a 100-year period of time where they’re putting God’s Word into English, and each time they polish it, they refine it a little more, and what you have with the Authorized Version is that last polishing; that last ripe fruit.
“I Thessalonians 2:13 says, ‘For this cause also thank we God without ceasing, because, when ye received the word of God which ye heard of us, ye received it not as the word of men, but as it is in truth, the word of God, which effectually worketh also in you that believe.’
“The Bible was translated into the Gothic language in the 4th Century. In 350 AD, the Goths--they were some people from that part of the world there in Acts 2 on the day of Pentecost. The gothic territory is in what we now call Germany. It is the earliest predecessor of the English language. There are verses in your Bible that trace the origins of the phraseology all the way back to the Gothic translation in the 4th Century.
“What’s put in the 1611 version was already there in all the bibles before it. William Tyndale, the Matthews Bible, the Coverdale Bible, the Geneva Bible and the Bishops Bible, there’s only one word in that verse that’s not found in all those other bibles. There’s nothing new in that verse and, in fact, almost all of that verse is exactly the way William Tyndale first translated it.
“By the way, before Tyndale you can go all the way back to the Gothic translation and come through the Spanish, the French, the German, the Italian, as well as the old Latin, and find there it is—all those languages and you see the traces of it.
“We call the KJB the Received Text and that means it’s always been there. You hear people argue, ‘Well, where was the bible before the KJB?’ Right there! It’s always been here! That’s why we say it was received’ it’s been the one the church has always used and Erasmus finally put together his Greek text in the 16th Century . . . it was only after the fall of Constantinople in 1457 that the Greek manuscripts began to flood into Europe. They had been pushed out by you know who.
“But the Holy Mother Church had also pushed out the Believers. The Waldensians, the Albegensians, the Carthians, the Moravians. They had pushed them out too and the Bible Believers had taken their Bible and fled.
"Who do you think would have been interested in translating God’s Word into an obscure northern European language? Maybe somebody trying to win them to Christ? Maybe somebody whose relative had been won to Christ and wanted to take it back home with them? Wouldn’t you have an interest in that?
“Now, in English it took almost 100 years during the period of the Reformation, especially when Henry VIII was trying to kill them while they were doing it! Tyndale had to flee his homeland for the continent to finish his translation because Henry VIII had the secret police out after him and he was finally betrayed by one of his buddies into the hands of the papist who burned Tyndale at the stake for his trouble.
“You know what that is? That’s a good environment to translate in because only the real Bible Believers. . . people trying to make a buck off religion won’t be getting involved in it then! The translators weren’t doing it for economic interest. They’re doing it because they wanted to see the day when the simple boy behind the plow would know more of the Scripture than a pope in Rome. That was the motivation behind it and that’s what got it to us.”
[26] But now is made manifest, and by the scriptures of the prophets, according to the commandment of the everlasting God, made known to all nations for the obedience of faith.”
There’s a whole realm of doctrine in Scripture about how God’s Word is not just written, but it’s preserved and disseminated. Unfortunately, in most of the debate about the Bible, these proofs are completely overlooked and ignored.
Paul tells us in Eph. 4:11 that God “gave some, apostles; and some, prophets; and some, evangelists; and some, pastors and teachers.” The prophets referred to here are the New Testament prophets.
Paul was a prophet but he was also an apostle. He never wrote anything as a prophet; he wrote as an apostle. Paul warns in I Cor. 14:37, “If any man think himself to be a prophet, or spiritual, let him acknowledge that the things that I write unto you are the commandments of the Lord.”
Jordan explains, “One of the jobs of a prophet all through Scripture is to say, ‘Thus sayeth the Lord.’ He spoke for God. One of the jobs of the prophets in those churches Paul established was to say, ‘This is God’s Word.’ ”
*****
From I Cor. 5:9 (“I wrote unto you in an epistle not to company with fornicators.”) we see that before I Corinthians, Paul had already written a letter and an epistle to the church of Corinth that did not wind up in the Bible.
Jordan says, “So do we have lost scripture? Who’s to say one letter from Paul is Scripture and the other’s not? Well, hey, folks, that’s why God put a prophet in the assembly, giving him the gift of prophecy. So that that prophet could acknowledge that the things Paul’s writing here—‘This is scripture; that one isn’t.’
“By the way, in II Thess. 2:2 there were some people counterfeiting epistles, writing them and saying they were from Paul when they weren’t! But, you see, the local church there had an office, a prophet, a God-empowered person with a supernatural ability as a gift of that church to say, ‘This is scripture,’ and to speak for God.
*****
“When Paul wrote to the Thessalonians, he said, ‘I want this epistle to be read by all the brethren.’ He writes Colossians 4 and says, ‘I want you to read the epistle I wrote to the Laodiceans and I want them to read the one I’m writing you.’
“You think the Colossians sent their original copy of what Paul wrote them to the Laodiceans? No way. From the very beginning they were making copies of the Scripture and distributing and assimilating them out.
“Who made the copies and how do you know they were right? They had someone in the church there who was supernaturally empowered by God, not simply to identify, but to write them down. The prophets didn’t originate the Scriptures; the prophets were making copies of them that were just as authoritative as the original. All those copies of God’s Word were to be taken and the commandment of God is they’re to be preached and made known to all nations.”
*****
Zechariah 8:23 is a verse in Israel’s program about the Millennium Kingdom as an illustration of what it means to preach to all nations: “Thus saith the LORD of hosts; In those days it shall come to pass, that ten men shall take hold out of all languages of the nations, even shall take hold of the skirt of him that is a Jew, saying, We will go with you: for we have heard that God is with you.”
Jordan explains, “Now if you get 10 dudes come up there from 10 different languages and grab a hold of you and start talking, you got a problem because if you’re going to talk back to them, you got to do it in 10 different languages. You know what you’re going to need? The gift of tongues.
“Can you understand why, on the day of Pentecost, God gave to the apostles the gift of tongues? They’re flat gonna need the ability to speak a lot of different languages. You see this effectual reversal of Genesis 11 in Acts 2:4: ‘And they were all filled with the Holy Ghost, and began to speak with other tongues, as the Spirit gave them utterance.’ God is talking through them in other languages.
*****
“I Cor. 14:21 says, ‘In the law it is written, With men of other tongues and other lips will I speak unto this people; and yet for all that will they not hear me, saith the Lord.’ Notice God can speak more than one language. He tells Israel, ‘I’m gonna speak to you in a bunch of different languages, and when I do, it’s still going to be me talking.’ Language is not a barrier for God to talk.”
Acts 2 goes on, “Now when this was noised abroad, the multitude came together, and were confounded, because that every man heard them speak in his own language.
[7] And they were all amazed and marvelled, saying one to another, Behold, are not all these which speak Galilaeans?
[8] And how hear we every man in our own tongue, wherein we were born?
[9] Parthians, and Medes, and Elamites, and the dwellers in Mesopotamia, and in Judaea, and Cappadocia, in Pontus, and Asia,
[10] Phrygia, and Pamphylia, in Egypt, and in the parts of Libya about Cyrene, and strangers of Rome, Jews and proselytes,
[11] Cretes and Arabians, we do hear them speak in our tongues the wonderful works of God.”
Jordan says, “You see that? They’re filled with the Spirit, they take God’s Word and they translate it into all these different languages ‘and they were all amazed and marveled . . .
'How come all these dudes from up north (Galilee) can speak all these different languages?’ Look at all those different languages! ‘And we’re all hearing in our native language,’ and they’re saying, ‘What in the world does all of this mean?!’
“When Paul says that over there in Romans 16:25, he’s expecting God’s Word to be taken and placed in the languages of the nations so that they would hear God’s Word in their own language.
“I Cor. 14:21 is a quote out of Isaiah 28 and that’s God Himself talking. Notice God Himself can speak with other tongues. God speaks every language, and when His Word is placed in those other languages, it is as much the Word of God as it was in the original language as far as He’s concerned.”
*****
Another great illustration is in Esther 1:21-22: “And the saying pleased the king and the princes; and the king did according to the word of Memucan:
[22] For he sent letters into all the king's provinces, into every province according to the writing thereof, and to every people after their language, that every man should bear rule in his own house, and that it should be published according to the language of every people.”
If you look at verse 1, it says, “Now it came to pass in the days of Ahasuerus, (this is Ahasuerus which reigned, from India even unto Ethiopia, over an hundred and seven and twenty provinces.”
Jordan says, “This dude’s the ruler over 127 different provinces. Do you think there must have been a little bit of a diplomatic communication issue here?!
“Verse 22 says they’re going to take that letter and translate it into 127 different languages, and when those 127 different nations and languages got that letter in their language, it was the word of the king and it was just as authoritative as it was in the original language the king spoke and wrote it in. Because once you put it in that Receptor language, that’s what he would have said had he written it in that language to start with!
“The translators of the King James Bible wrote a preface from the translators to the reader. In it they said, ‘As the king’s speech which is uttered in parliament, being translated in French, Dutch, Italian and Latin, is still the king’s speech, no cause therefore why the word translated should be denied to be the Word. . . ’
“And then they referenced that passage in Esther 1:22. You see the translators understood they were handling God’s Word and that when you translate it, it’s still God’s Word because the commandment of the everlasting God was that His Word would be made known to all nations.
“Somebody says, ‘Well, what about the language limitations?’ Obviously it didn’t stop the word of the king from getting into the other language. You say, ‘Well, you can’t translate perfectly from one language to another.’ Duh!
“If that’s a problem for you, I suggest you go to Acts 22 and read the first 18 verses where the Apostle Paul stands at the porch of the temple and speaks to his brethren, the Jews, in the Hebrew tongue, according to the text. Paul spoke at least 7-8 different languages. He spoke that in Hebrew but when Luke wrote it down, in every copy of any text that anybody ever reads, they say he wrote it down by inspiration of God in Greek. Hebrew and Greek are very different languages with different syntax, grammar, vocabulary and even letters. They use different alphabets. Hebrew says something very condensed; Greek is fuller.
“But that’s no big thing for Luke to do that. Moses talked to Pharaoh in Egyptian, but when he wrote it down in Exodus, he wrote it in Hebrew. When God the Holy Ghost decided to write down what Moses said, God the Holy Spirit dictated it in Hebrew. So God the Holy Spirit translated it!
“This translation issue is not the blank wall people make it sound like. The issue is to take God’s Word and to put it in the various languages of the nations and that’s been done since the very beginning.
*****
“The issue in the KJB when it was translated was not to make it easier to read. When you study the history of the English Bible, you discover that the KJB is the LAST English bible in a long history that goes all the way back to Wycliffe’s era in the 1400s.
In the 6th century, beginning with John Wycliffe, Matthews, Coverdale, Bishops, Geneva; these various bibles over a 100-year period of time where they’re putting God’s Word into English, and each time they polish it, they refine it a little more, and what you have with the Authorized Version is that last polishing; that last ripe fruit.
“I Thessalonians 2:13 says, ‘For this cause also thank we God without ceasing, because, when ye received the word of God which ye heard of us, ye received it not as the word of men, but as it is in truth, the word of God, which effectually worketh also in you that believe.’
“The Bible was translated into the Gothic language in the 4th Century. In 350 AD, the Goths--they were some people from that part of the world there in Acts 2 on the day of Pentecost. The gothic territory is in what we now call Germany. It is the earliest predecessor of the English language. There are verses in your Bible that trace the origins of the phraseology all the way back to the Gothic translation in the 4th Century.
“What’s put in the 1611 version was already there in all the bibles before it. William Tyndale, the Matthews Bible, the Coverdale Bible, the Geneva Bible and the Bishops Bible, there’s only one word in that verse that’s not found in all those other bibles. There’s nothing new in that verse and, in fact, almost all of that verse is exactly the way William Tyndale first translated it.
“By the way, before Tyndale you can go all the way back to the Gothic translation and come through the Spanish, the French, the German, the Italian, as well as the old Latin, and find there it is—all those languages and you see the traces of it.
“We call the KJB the Received Text and that means it’s always been there. You hear people argue, ‘Well, where was the bible before the KJB?’ Right there! It’s always been here! That’s why we say it was received’ it’s been the one the church has always used and Erasmus finally put together his Greek text in the 16th Century . . . it was only after the fall of Constantinople in 1457 that the Greek manuscripts began to flood into Europe. They had been pushed out by you know who.
“But the Holy Mother Church had also pushed out the Believers. The Waldensians, the Albegensians, the Carthians, the Moravians. They had pushed them out too and the Bible Believers had taken their Bible and fled.
"Who do you think would have been interested in translating God’s Word into an obscure northern European language? Maybe somebody trying to win them to Christ? Maybe somebody whose relative had been won to Christ and wanted to take it back home with them? Wouldn’t you have an interest in that?
“Now, in English it took almost 100 years during the period of the Reformation, especially when Henry VIII was trying to kill them while they were doing it! Tyndale had to flee his homeland for the continent to finish his translation because Henry VIII had the secret police out after him and he was finally betrayed by one of his buddies into the hands of the papist who burned Tyndale at the stake for his trouble.
“You know what that is? That’s a good environment to translate in because only the real Bible Believers. . . people trying to make a buck off religion won’t be getting involved in it then! The translators weren’t doing it for economic interest. They’re doing it because they wanted to see the day when the simple boy behind the plow would know more of the Scripture than a pope in Rome. That was the motivation behind it and that’s what got it to us.”
Thursday, August 25, 2011
Committed unto the sea
(I am still working on that same article and will finish tomorrow now. In the meantime, here’s something I want to share)
Watching the news coverage of the hurricane in the Bahamas has me sentimental for the time I vacationed on Grand Bahama Island alone in Dec. 2004, only a few months after an intense Hurricane Jeanne ripped through that part of the former Crown Colony with 120 mph winds, causing heavy structural damage and coastline flooding.
I didn’t even know about the hurricane damage when I last-minute chose to fly to the Bahamas after butting up against an expiration date for a set of free round-trip tickets to anywhere Air Tran Airlines flies, awarded me by the airlines after a big goof-up on a return flight from Akron.
I had spent the year thinking I would simply use the tickets to go back to Ohio for a family visit but then when the deadline approached I couldn’t get just any flight home and, after looking at an Air Tran flight routes map, decided, “Let them take me to their most exclusive destination—the Bahamas.”
Taking a taxi from the airport I could see the damage everywhere. The cab driver filled me in on the hurricane and how it brought tourism to a standstill. Then he told me about the highly unusual cold snap they were having at the moment, expected to last through the weekend (the length of my stay!). I thought, “Just my luck. It’s going to be like a ghost town and it’s going to be too cold to even try to enjoy the ravaged and eroded beaches!”
What made everything “perfect” was I had a found a cheap hotel rate over Travelocity and the hotel (even though it seemed quite decent from its promotional website) was indeed cheap—and in a bad neighborhood! I was told to be very careful, in fact, walking after night and to hide any purse or wallet. Worst part, I couldn’t have been a further walk from the beach. I had to take a bus, in fact.
Fortunately I didn’t waste time correcting my situation. I had only booked it for one night (I am always too adventuresome to want to get settled anywhere) so my second day on the island I scoped out where I’d next go and ended up in very charming Port Lucaya.
Between the lack of tourists, the scraggly, rock-and-debris marred coast, and the cold breeze making the highs only in the mid-60s, I had the place to myself! No matter which beach I explored there was hardly another person in sight and for stretches I was the only one around, kind of spooking me even.
It was too cold to sunbathe or luxuriate very long in the water, so I used the vast majority of time walking the beaches while listening on my Walkman to cassette tape after cassette tape of Alexander Scourby reading Paul’s epistles from the King James Bible.
The time I had was unreal—the most special trip of my life. In continual prayer, with Paul in the background, I plotted out what I would do with the rest of my life. The kinship with my Redeemer was blissful. Paul’s words and his reportings on his travels and experiences never seemed more real—like something I was a part of as I walked along on the craggy coastal paradise as if I had private ownership of the whole island. I thought, “This would be a perfect way to spend a honeymoon.”
On my last evening before my return to the U.S., I decided I had to swim at the motel’s huge outdoor pool no matter how cold it was. After taking an ice cold dip, I plunged into the sublime outdoor hot tub, which I also had all to myself. Looking up at the night stars I felt a gratefulness and sense of security about my life that was unlike anything I ever remembered or could ever put into words.
All these years later, Grand Bahama Island is that place I instinctively and readily go to in my mind when I need comfort and assurance that I am loved through and through. It’s where I am reminded of the life blueprint drawn up for me on those shores and it being one I need never fear going forward, onward and upward!
Watching the news coverage of the hurricane in the Bahamas has me sentimental for the time I vacationed on Grand Bahama Island alone in Dec. 2004, only a few months after an intense Hurricane Jeanne ripped through that part of the former Crown Colony with 120 mph winds, causing heavy structural damage and coastline flooding.
I didn’t even know about the hurricane damage when I last-minute chose to fly to the Bahamas after butting up against an expiration date for a set of free round-trip tickets to anywhere Air Tran Airlines flies, awarded me by the airlines after a big goof-up on a return flight from Akron.
I had spent the year thinking I would simply use the tickets to go back to Ohio for a family visit but then when the deadline approached I couldn’t get just any flight home and, after looking at an Air Tran flight routes map, decided, “Let them take me to their most exclusive destination—the Bahamas.”
Taking a taxi from the airport I could see the damage everywhere. The cab driver filled me in on the hurricane and how it brought tourism to a standstill. Then he told me about the highly unusual cold snap they were having at the moment, expected to last through the weekend (the length of my stay!). I thought, “Just my luck. It’s going to be like a ghost town and it’s going to be too cold to even try to enjoy the ravaged and eroded beaches!”
What made everything “perfect” was I had a found a cheap hotel rate over Travelocity and the hotel (even though it seemed quite decent from its promotional website) was indeed cheap—and in a bad neighborhood! I was told to be very careful, in fact, walking after night and to hide any purse or wallet. Worst part, I couldn’t have been a further walk from the beach. I had to take a bus, in fact.
Fortunately I didn’t waste time correcting my situation. I had only booked it for one night (I am always too adventuresome to want to get settled anywhere) so my second day on the island I scoped out where I’d next go and ended up in very charming Port Lucaya.
Between the lack of tourists, the scraggly, rock-and-debris marred coast, and the cold breeze making the highs only in the mid-60s, I had the place to myself! No matter which beach I explored there was hardly another person in sight and for stretches I was the only one around, kind of spooking me even.
It was too cold to sunbathe or luxuriate very long in the water, so I used the vast majority of time walking the beaches while listening on my Walkman to cassette tape after cassette tape of Alexander Scourby reading Paul’s epistles from the King James Bible.
The time I had was unreal—the most special trip of my life. In continual prayer, with Paul in the background, I plotted out what I would do with the rest of my life. The kinship with my Redeemer was blissful. Paul’s words and his reportings on his travels and experiences never seemed more real—like something I was a part of as I walked along on the craggy coastal paradise as if I had private ownership of the whole island. I thought, “This would be a perfect way to spend a honeymoon.”
On my last evening before my return to the U.S., I decided I had to swim at the motel’s huge outdoor pool no matter how cold it was. After taking an ice cold dip, I plunged into the sublime outdoor hot tub, which I also had all to myself. Looking up at the night stars I felt a gratefulness and sense of security about my life that was unlike anything I ever remembered or could ever put into words.
All these years later, Grand Bahama Island is that place I instinctively and readily go to in my mind when I need comfort and assurance that I am loved through and through. It’s where I am reminded of the life blueprint drawn up for me on those shores and it being one I need never fear going forward, onward and upward!
Monday, August 22, 2011
Wintertime "blasts"
Well, as it turns out, I won’t be finished with my next piece until tomorrow. In the meantime, here are two sobering news nuggets pulled from my recent readings of the New York Times online:
“Folks around here say this is unlike any drought Texas has ever seen. In a way that’s right; it’s the worst single drought year on record. But, as scientists now tell us, historically droughts here can last decades. Worse, when the rain does fall, it evaporates faster and faster as the American Southwest become drier, threatening to turn Texas into desert. As bad as this year’s drought is, the long view tells us that things could get much worse.
“According to a paper published in Science in 2007, ‘Droughts will become the new climatology of the American Southwest within a time frame of years to decades.’ Rain will become more rare and it will evaporate more quickly, making the megadroughts of old look like periodic dry spells. And it will be in part thanks to increased carbon emissions, a fact that Texas will have a hard time confronting.”
*****
“Nearly three-quarters of the planet’s reefs are now at risk of serious degradation, according to a report by the World Resources Institute in February. Another analysis, by the Global Coral Reef Monitoring Network, found that as much as one-fifth of the world’s reefs have been degraded beyond recognition or lost entirely.
“By midcentury, virtually all reefs will be at risk, scientists fear, not just from local threats or global warming, but from an increasingly acidified ocean. Much of the carbon dioxide released to the atmosphere ends up in the oceans, where it forms a weak acid, lowering the pH level of the seas. Scientists have long speculated that the rising acidity of ocean waters would inhibit the growth of corals . . .
“Coral reefs, which cover barely 0.2 percent of the ocean floor but contain roughly 25 percent of the ocean’s biodiversity, provide a crucial source of protein for an estimated 500 million people, protect shorelines from tsunamis and tropical storms and attract tourists that sustain coastal economies with tens of billions of dollars in annual revenue.”
“Folks around here say this is unlike any drought Texas has ever seen. In a way that’s right; it’s the worst single drought year on record. But, as scientists now tell us, historically droughts here can last decades. Worse, when the rain does fall, it evaporates faster and faster as the American Southwest become drier, threatening to turn Texas into desert. As bad as this year’s drought is, the long view tells us that things could get much worse.
“According to a paper published in Science in 2007, ‘Droughts will become the new climatology of the American Southwest within a time frame of years to decades.’ Rain will become more rare and it will evaporate more quickly, making the megadroughts of old look like periodic dry spells. And it will be in part thanks to increased carbon emissions, a fact that Texas will have a hard time confronting.”
*****
“Nearly three-quarters of the planet’s reefs are now at risk of serious degradation, according to a report by the World Resources Institute in February. Another analysis, by the Global Coral Reef Monitoring Network, found that as much as one-fifth of the world’s reefs have been degraded beyond recognition or lost entirely.
“By midcentury, virtually all reefs will be at risk, scientists fear, not just from local threats or global warming, but from an increasingly acidified ocean. Much of the carbon dioxide released to the atmosphere ends up in the oceans, where it forms a weak acid, lowering the pH level of the seas. Scientists have long speculated that the rising acidity of ocean waters would inhibit the growth of corals . . .
“Coral reefs, which cover barely 0.2 percent of the ocean floor but contain roughly 25 percent of the ocean’s biodiversity, provide a crucial source of protein for an estimated 500 million people, protect shorelines from tsunamis and tropical storms and attract tourists that sustain coastal economies with tens of billions of dollars in annual revenue.”
Sunday, August 21, 2011
Behold, the Lord dwelleth in Zion
(Below is a combining of two old posts with a fresh-written newsy top. I have sent this to my friend who minds LisaLeland.com so look for the update there. Will write something new here tomorrow--promise.)
At next month’s 66th Session of the United Nations General Assembly, Palestinians will plead for recognition of statehood within the pre-1967 lines. Israelis await this with a fearful sense of increasing international isolation and pressure.
In late-May, Obama did something previously unheard of by a U.S. president—he embraced the 1967 borders for the nation Israel. The declaration went largely ignored by the liberal American media.
“That’s never been the official policy of the U.S. until now,” said Jordan at the time. “That’s sort of like saying the U.S. should go back to its borders in 1958 before the Mexican American War. Give back Arizona, California and New Mexico. Why? Because we took those territories by way of a conflict with another nation and it’s that kind of mentality, not applied to yourself, but to someone else.
“This is a strategic shift toward a future holocaust for the nation Israel and not just Israel but the world because this is a prophetically strategic in U.S. foreign policy.
“In prophecy, in the ‘last days’ before the Lord comes to set up His kingdom, before the real Judgment Day, every nation in the earth is going to be anti-Israel.
Jeremiah 33:23.
“There’s going to come a point in world history, and the strategies of the nations, where all nations are going to look at Israel and say, ‘You’ve got no right to exist as a nation.’ ”
*****
Little do people know that in Joel 3, a passage about God’s restoration of Israel at the Second Advent, the Lord says, in part, “Yea, and what have ye to do with me, O Tyre, and Zidon, and all the coasts of Palestine? will ye render me a recompence? and if ye recompence me, swiftly and speedily will I return your recompence upon your own head.”
Jordan explains, “The term Palestine was first attributed to the land of Israel by the Romans in the 2nd Century. In 70 A.D. when Titus came in, he didn’t remove the Jews from the land; he just destroyed the temple.
“In 115 A.D. there was another rebellion. Finally in 135 A.D. the Romans were so sick and tired of the Jews they came in and renamed the land after the Philistines and that’s where the name Palestine comes from. So the first inhabitants of Palestine were the Jews. They were the first Palestinians!
“The way the term is used today is a political term, started in the ’50s and ’60s to be used as a ‘political football’ because in 1947 when Israel reestablished itself as a state all the Arab nations attacked them. The Brits created Jordan as the homeland for the Arabs.
“After Israel became a nation, one of the political tactics to try to squeeze them out was to say, ‘We need a homeland for all those Arabs over there in the land you guys have.’ Well, take ’em home! Take them to Jordan and let them reconnect with their people! ‘Oh, no, no, no.’ You see, that’s all a political mess. So this West Bank stuff and the petitioning of the thing; that’s all bunk.
“I read that chapter in Joel and it isn’t just that they scattered Israel, they parted the land. All of that political stuff is just defiantly flying in the face of God Himself about what He says to do with the land.
*****
“Zephaniah 3:8 is my favorite verse about the United Nations: ‘Therefore wait ye upon me, saith the LORD, until the day that I rise up to the prey: for my determination is to gather the nations, that I may assemble the kingdoms, to pour upon them mine indignation, even all my fierce anger: for all the earth shall be devoured with the fire of my jealousy.’
“You see, globalism will never work. We have this global economy and all this stuff. All you’re doing is heading for destruction. God established nationalism. He established nations—borders, languages, cultures--in order to facilitate man’s ability to be evangelized.
“If you think you can deny that for the economic advantage, the only people gaining an economic advantage from globalism are these big money people--the statused people who run the governments and the corporations: ‘Now we can get money from all these people easy instead of going through each individual country kind-of-thing!’
“One of the geniuses of the American system of government is that all authority is local. We sit here in San Juan Capistrano. If a U.S. marshal has a warrant for your arrest he has to contact the local authorities to come and execute activity. You can’t have this federal police department coming down; the Secret Police and all that stuff you hear about. You have a system that’s the opposite of that.
“If San Juan has an arrest warrant for somebody in San Clemente they can’t just go up there and arrest them. You need a San Clemente policeman to go and arrest them and hand them over to you. Jurisdiction is jurisdiction, which hampers the Big Guy from taking over. Well, if you take that and make that global, well, if you’re trying to milk them with political power or milk them with their money, you’ll like that. It’s a whole lot harder to go through all that paperwork.
*****
“So the globalism stuff is doomed to failure because God set humanity up to function just like people are interested in their families; you’re interested…
“I’ve been to country after country after country in the world and you know what is the first question people ask me? ‘How do you like our country?’ People naturally, instinctively, love their own country and so they should. Well, it’s natural. But if you’re just going to homogenize it all . . . When a conflict comes up, whose interest are you going to follow? Your own naturally. That’s the way it should be.
“You’re watching Europe fall apart right now. The E.U. is a great utopian idea. It can’t work because there are two countries in Europe that have always beaten the snot out of everyone else--Germany and France. And they do it because of money. If you make more money you can make more things to break. But now they’re not making money; it’s costing money. Someone’s got to pay but nobody wants to pay.
“So when the Antichrist tries to put the Last Days together—you got to remember Satan doesn’t have a kingdom that’s made of peaceful, loving, sweet people. He’s crafty enough to keep all these different creatures, who’d cut each other’s throats if they had a chance to get ahead . . . He’s crafty enough to stay ahead of it. He sits on a boiling pot with the lid jiggling. The Antichrist is going to be that master craftsman putting this thing together but it’s just not going to work.”
*****
Psalm 83 is a cry, a prayer, of a member of the nation Israel—the believer in Israel during that time when the nations of the earth have turned on them.
Jordan explains, “There are ten nations gathered together against the nation Israel in the Promised Land, gathered there to say Israel has no right to exist. The believers in Israel are hidden among the rocks from the persecution, crying out, saying, ‘They have taken crafty counsel together to destroy us.’
“Zechariah 12, written in about 500 B.C., is one of the most remarkable prophecies you’d ever want to see in the Bible. Israel’s been in Babylonian captivity but the 70 years are over and a remnant has gone back to the land.
“The city’s been destroyed, the walls are broken down, the temple’s gone, and this little remnant comes back to reestablish itself in its homeland. The Lord looks at this and says, ‘Here’s something that weighs my heart down for Israel.’
He promises verses 2-3, ‘Behold, I will make Jerusalem a cup of trembling unto all the people round about, when they shall be in the siege both against Judah and against Jerusalem. And in that day will I make Jerusalem a burdensome stone for all people: all that burden themselves with it shall be cut in pieces, though all the people of the earth be gathered together against it.’
“Here’s God, the Creator of all things, saying, ‘Behold’!
At next month’s 66th Session of the United Nations General Assembly, Palestinians will plead for recognition of statehood within the pre-1967 lines. Israelis await this with a fearful sense of increasing international isolation and pressure.
In late-May, Obama did something previously unheard of by a U.S. president—he embraced the 1967 borders for the nation Israel. The declaration went largely ignored by the liberal American media.
“That’s never been the official policy of the U.S. until now,” said Jordan at the time. “That’s sort of like saying the U.S. should go back to its borders in 1958 before the Mexican American War. Give back Arizona, California and New Mexico. Why? Because we took those territories by way of a conflict with another nation and it’s that kind of mentality, not applied to yourself, but to someone else.
“This is a strategic shift toward a future holocaust for the nation Israel and not just Israel but the world because this is a prophetically strategic in U.S. foreign policy.
“In prophecy, in the ‘last days’ before the Lord comes to set up His kingdom, before the real Judgment Day, every nation in the earth is going to be anti-Israel.
Jeremiah 33:23.
“There’s going to come a point in world history, and the strategies of the nations, where all nations are going to look at Israel and say, ‘You’ve got no right to exist as a nation.’ ”
*****
Little do people know that in Joel 3, a passage about God’s restoration of Israel at the Second Advent, the Lord says, in part, “Yea, and what have ye to do with me, O Tyre, and Zidon, and all the coasts of Palestine? will ye render me a recompence? and if ye recompence me, swiftly and speedily will I return your recompence upon your own head.”
Jordan explains, “The term Palestine was first attributed to the land of Israel by the Romans in the 2nd Century. In 70 A.D. when Titus came in, he didn’t remove the Jews from the land; he just destroyed the temple.
“In 115 A.D. there was another rebellion. Finally in 135 A.D. the Romans were so sick and tired of the Jews they came in and renamed the land after the Philistines and that’s where the name Palestine comes from. So the first inhabitants of Palestine were the Jews. They were the first Palestinians!
“The way the term is used today is a political term, started in the ’50s and ’60s to be used as a ‘political football’ because in 1947 when Israel reestablished itself as a state all the Arab nations attacked them. The Brits created Jordan as the homeland for the Arabs.
“After Israel became a nation, one of the political tactics to try to squeeze them out was to say, ‘We need a homeland for all those Arabs over there in the land you guys have.’ Well, take ’em home! Take them to Jordan and let them reconnect with their people! ‘Oh, no, no, no.’ You see, that’s all a political mess. So this West Bank stuff and the petitioning of the thing; that’s all bunk.
“I read that chapter in Joel and it isn’t just that they scattered Israel, they parted the land. All of that political stuff is just defiantly flying in the face of God Himself about what He says to do with the land.
*****
“Zephaniah 3:8 is my favorite verse about the United Nations: ‘Therefore wait ye upon me, saith the LORD, until the day that I rise up to the prey: for my determination is to gather the nations, that I may assemble the kingdoms, to pour upon them mine indignation, even all my fierce anger: for all the earth shall be devoured with the fire of my jealousy.’
“You see, globalism will never work. We have this global economy and all this stuff. All you’re doing is heading for destruction. God established nationalism. He established nations—borders, languages, cultures--in order to facilitate man’s ability to be evangelized.
“If you think you can deny that for the economic advantage, the only people gaining an economic advantage from globalism are these big money people--the statused people who run the governments and the corporations: ‘Now we can get money from all these people easy instead of going through each individual country kind-of-thing!’
“One of the geniuses of the American system of government is that all authority is local. We sit here in San Juan Capistrano. If a U.S. marshal has a warrant for your arrest he has to contact the local authorities to come and execute activity. You can’t have this federal police department coming down; the Secret Police and all that stuff you hear about. You have a system that’s the opposite of that.
“If San Juan has an arrest warrant for somebody in San Clemente they can’t just go up there and arrest them. You need a San Clemente policeman to go and arrest them and hand them over to you. Jurisdiction is jurisdiction, which hampers the Big Guy from taking over. Well, if you take that and make that global, well, if you’re trying to milk them with political power or milk them with their money, you’ll like that. It’s a whole lot harder to go through all that paperwork.
*****
“So the globalism stuff is doomed to failure because God set humanity up to function just like people are interested in their families; you’re interested…
“I’ve been to country after country after country in the world and you know what is the first question people ask me? ‘How do you like our country?’ People naturally, instinctively, love their own country and so they should. Well, it’s natural. But if you’re just going to homogenize it all . . . When a conflict comes up, whose interest are you going to follow? Your own naturally. That’s the way it should be.
“You’re watching Europe fall apart right now. The E.U. is a great utopian idea. It can’t work because there are two countries in Europe that have always beaten the snot out of everyone else--Germany and France. And they do it because of money. If you make more money you can make more things to break. But now they’re not making money; it’s costing money. Someone’s got to pay but nobody wants to pay.
“So when the Antichrist tries to put the Last Days together—you got to remember Satan doesn’t have a kingdom that’s made of peaceful, loving, sweet people. He’s crafty enough to keep all these different creatures, who’d cut each other’s throats if they had a chance to get ahead . . . He’s crafty enough to stay ahead of it. He sits on a boiling pot with the lid jiggling. The Antichrist is going to be that master craftsman putting this thing together but it’s just not going to work.”
*****
Psalm 83 is a cry, a prayer, of a member of the nation Israel—the believer in Israel during that time when the nations of the earth have turned on them.
Jordan explains, “There are ten nations gathered together against the nation Israel in the Promised Land, gathered there to say Israel has no right to exist. The believers in Israel are hidden among the rocks from the persecution, crying out, saying, ‘They have taken crafty counsel together to destroy us.’
“Zechariah 12, written in about 500 B.C., is one of the most remarkable prophecies you’d ever want to see in the Bible. Israel’s been in Babylonian captivity but the 70 years are over and a remnant has gone back to the land.
“The city’s been destroyed, the walls are broken down, the temple’s gone, and this little remnant comes back to reestablish itself in its homeland. The Lord looks at this and says, ‘Here’s something that weighs my heart down for Israel.’
He promises verses 2-3, ‘Behold, I will make Jerusalem a cup of trembling unto all the people round about, when they shall be in the siege both against Judah and against Jerusalem. And in that day will I make Jerusalem a burdensome stone for all people: all that burden themselves with it shall be cut in pieces, though all the people of the earth be gathered together against it.’
“Here’s God, the Creator of all things, saying, ‘Behold’!
Tuesday, August 16, 2011
Reconstructive 'surgery'
In Luke 24:39, Jesus says, “Behold my hands and my feet, that it is I myself: handle me, and see; for a spirit hath not flesh and bones, as ye see me have.” Paul says in I Cor. 15:50, “Now this I say, brethren, that flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God; neither doth corruption inherit incorruption.”
Jordan explains, “This is where the idea of blood poisoning came from. (Adam and Eve) had something flowing through their veins but it was not contaminated blood that had to be shed for remission of sins as you find later on. ‘Male and female created he them,’ we’re told.
“Well, the man is the initiator and the woman is the responder. The man is the intellect; he’s the one who is to think and operate on volition. The woman is the emotional side. She is to respond to his will. Just like in you there is a will and your emotions are to respond to your will and when that functions properly you function the way God intended it.
“The man is the determiner and the prime mover. The woman is the emotional comparison. Men are more cerebral and women have more of an emotional intuition. It’s an ability to FEEL things that’s intuitive. You need to dwell with her according to knowledge, Peter says. You need to understand her makeup and that she’s made to be a responder and she’s going to respond and give you back what you give to her. When they do that, they’re one flesh, verse 24 says. One complete humanity. One person.
“Marriage is the reconstruction of man; it’s the completion of man. Man has that part that was taken out of him and put back in him and they become one functioning unit. Eve put back into Adam in marriage results and the reconstruction of the original item and the ability to function the way God created them to function.
“Neither the man nor the woman can be completely whole without the other because they’re interdependent, but since the fall sin has so disrupted this divine order that the oneness is never completely achievable. You’re never going to completely, totally achieve it in this life, but you can get close, and the more compatible you are with walking in the Spirit (the way God intends you to walk) the closer you get to it.
*****
“There’s an idea that floats around that says Adam’s original wholeness was he was male and female and he was bisexual and that’s just nonsense. The teaching is then said that because Adam’s made in the image of God and the likeness of God, therefore God is male and female in one. Again, that’s just not true.
“When you take two elements and combine them together they have qualities and a nature of their own. You take oxygen and hydrogen and you can combine two hydrogen and one oxygen molecule and you come up with water. Now you can’t breathe water; it will suffocate you. But it’s got oxygen in it that you need to live!
Oxygen and hydrogen are compressible gases. Both of them you can compress them, put them in cylinders, compress them down, put them under pressure and store them. You’ve seen hydrogen cylinders and oxygen tanks. But you put them together to form the compound of water—water is non-compressible.
“So you take two compressible gases, put them together and it forms a liquid that is non-compressible. When you combine two separate things you form a new nature.
“So it isn’t that Adam was talking to himself inside and feeling some female and male hormones. Adam was Adam, out of whom could be taken . . . Adam was neither simply male nor simply female; he was Adam, out of whom those male and female elements could be separated and they are separated now.
“When you put the man and the woman back together you’re recreating that wholeness. That can be understood in some measure when you understand what marriage is in its ultimate. Don’t let somebody take a passage like that and say therefore God is male and female and all that kind of stuff.
*****
“From the family you separate off the marriage unit and you can’t have a successful family without it being built on the institution of marriage.
“You leave your father and mother, folks, and then you cleave unto your spouse. You separate yourself and establish yourselves as a new and separate entity and a man must accept the responsibility for accomplishing that, including establishing a marriage wherein his wife is protected.
“In the issue of marriage, the husband is the head and the wife is the helpmeet. The wife comes along with her husband and is joined to him and her purpose is to fulfill him; to make him a larger, bigger person than he is by himself. To complete him; to be his helpmeet. The one who mirrors him. The one who answers to him. Adam is no longer sufficient and complete in himself; he needs this woman to come along and to complete him.
“God created Eve for the purpose of being married to Adam. It’s a creation institution and it’s the basic stabilizer of the human race and of society and, folks, families won’t function without the institution of marriage as its base.
*****
You read the passage in Genesis 29 and there ain’t no doubt about it, there isn’t no ‘I Dos’ there. I mean, here’s Jacob and he’s worked for seven years--he’s got an agreement with Rachel’s daddy that he can have her to be his wife but he doesn’t get Rachel; he gets Leah. The old man tricked him.
“The daddy had a daughter he wanted him to marry first so he tricked him, but the point is when he went in unto her who had been his pledged wife, he went in expecting it to be Rachel and it turned out to be Leah, and going in unto her and having the intimate relationships that he had with her, as far as the situation in Scripture is concerned, she became his wife and there wasn’t any ceremony and any ‘I Do’ kind of a thing. It just was done.
"There’s more involved in marriage and the reason we call the consummation of marriage ‘the marriage act’--the reason that thing is there is that’s involved in marriage.
“In the Bible, marriage is more than a church institution. You see the church, especially the Roman Church, is the one who instituted the ceremony of marriage as a religious institution. It’s one of the seven sacraments of the Roman Church and that’s where that kind of a thing comes from where, if you hadn’t stood in front of a preacher or priest and had the thing blessed by the church, then you’re not really married.
“On the other hand, there’s more involved in it than just going to bed with each other. Sex and sexual relations are not what marriage is in the Bible either. Marriage demands this kind of a vow and a covenant.
"Malachi 2:14 says, ‘Yet ye say, Wherefore? Because the LORD hath been witness between thee and the wife of thy youth, against whom thou hast dealt treacherously: yet is she thy companion, and the wife of thy covenant.’ That means being his helpmeet.”
Jordan explains, “This is where the idea of blood poisoning came from. (Adam and Eve) had something flowing through their veins but it was not contaminated blood that had to be shed for remission of sins as you find later on. ‘Male and female created he them,’ we’re told.
“Well, the man is the initiator and the woman is the responder. The man is the intellect; he’s the one who is to think and operate on volition. The woman is the emotional side. She is to respond to his will. Just like in you there is a will and your emotions are to respond to your will and when that functions properly you function the way God intended it.
“The man is the determiner and the prime mover. The woman is the emotional comparison. Men are more cerebral and women have more of an emotional intuition. It’s an ability to FEEL things that’s intuitive. You need to dwell with her according to knowledge, Peter says. You need to understand her makeup and that she’s made to be a responder and she’s going to respond and give you back what you give to her. When they do that, they’re one flesh, verse 24 says. One complete humanity. One person.
“Marriage is the reconstruction of man; it’s the completion of man. Man has that part that was taken out of him and put back in him and they become one functioning unit. Eve put back into Adam in marriage results and the reconstruction of the original item and the ability to function the way God created them to function.
“Neither the man nor the woman can be completely whole without the other because they’re interdependent, but since the fall sin has so disrupted this divine order that the oneness is never completely achievable. You’re never going to completely, totally achieve it in this life, but you can get close, and the more compatible you are with walking in the Spirit (the way God intends you to walk) the closer you get to it.
*****
“There’s an idea that floats around that says Adam’s original wholeness was he was male and female and he was bisexual and that’s just nonsense. The teaching is then said that because Adam’s made in the image of God and the likeness of God, therefore God is male and female in one. Again, that’s just not true.
“When you take two elements and combine them together they have qualities and a nature of their own. You take oxygen and hydrogen and you can combine two hydrogen and one oxygen molecule and you come up with water. Now you can’t breathe water; it will suffocate you. But it’s got oxygen in it that you need to live!
Oxygen and hydrogen are compressible gases. Both of them you can compress them, put them in cylinders, compress them down, put them under pressure and store them. You’ve seen hydrogen cylinders and oxygen tanks. But you put them together to form the compound of water—water is non-compressible.
“So you take two compressible gases, put them together and it forms a liquid that is non-compressible. When you combine two separate things you form a new nature.
“So it isn’t that Adam was talking to himself inside and feeling some female and male hormones. Adam was Adam, out of whom could be taken . . . Adam was neither simply male nor simply female; he was Adam, out of whom those male and female elements could be separated and they are separated now.
“When you put the man and the woman back together you’re recreating that wholeness. That can be understood in some measure when you understand what marriage is in its ultimate. Don’t let somebody take a passage like that and say therefore God is male and female and all that kind of stuff.
*****
“From the family you separate off the marriage unit and you can’t have a successful family without it being built on the institution of marriage.
“You leave your father and mother, folks, and then you cleave unto your spouse. You separate yourself and establish yourselves as a new and separate entity and a man must accept the responsibility for accomplishing that, including establishing a marriage wherein his wife is protected.
“In the issue of marriage, the husband is the head and the wife is the helpmeet. The wife comes along with her husband and is joined to him and her purpose is to fulfill him; to make him a larger, bigger person than he is by himself. To complete him; to be his helpmeet. The one who mirrors him. The one who answers to him. Adam is no longer sufficient and complete in himself; he needs this woman to come along and to complete him.
“God created Eve for the purpose of being married to Adam. It’s a creation institution and it’s the basic stabilizer of the human race and of society and, folks, families won’t function without the institution of marriage as its base.
*****
You read the passage in Genesis 29 and there ain’t no doubt about it, there isn’t no ‘I Dos’ there. I mean, here’s Jacob and he’s worked for seven years--he’s got an agreement with Rachel’s daddy that he can have her to be his wife but he doesn’t get Rachel; he gets Leah. The old man tricked him.
“The daddy had a daughter he wanted him to marry first so he tricked him, but the point is when he went in unto her who had been his pledged wife, he went in expecting it to be Rachel and it turned out to be Leah, and going in unto her and having the intimate relationships that he had with her, as far as the situation in Scripture is concerned, she became his wife and there wasn’t any ceremony and any ‘I Do’ kind of a thing. It just was done.
"There’s more involved in marriage and the reason we call the consummation of marriage ‘the marriage act’--the reason that thing is there is that’s involved in marriage.
“In the Bible, marriage is more than a church institution. You see the church, especially the Roman Church, is the one who instituted the ceremony of marriage as a religious institution. It’s one of the seven sacraments of the Roman Church and that’s where that kind of a thing comes from where, if you hadn’t stood in front of a preacher or priest and had the thing blessed by the church, then you’re not really married.
“On the other hand, there’s more involved in it than just going to bed with each other. Sex and sexual relations are not what marriage is in the Bible either. Marriage demands this kind of a vow and a covenant.
"Malachi 2:14 says, ‘Yet ye say, Wherefore? Because the LORD hath been witness between thee and the wife of thy youth, against whom thou hast dealt treacherously: yet is she thy companion, and the wife of thy covenant.’ That means being his helpmeet.”
Monday, August 15, 2011
The whole skinny
Genesis 3 is the turning point and one of the most important chapters in all the Word of God. You find the divine explanation for the presence of evil.
“The fall of man, folks, is the only possible explanation for evil, and for sin and for sorrow and suffering in a world made by a benevolent, perfect Creator," says Jordan. “In this chapter you see the subtlety of the devil, the powerlessness of human nature, human performance and human merit. You see the effects of sin. You see the grace and love of God to guilty sinners. You see human nature’s tendency to cover up its shame with human performance. You see the seed line of a promised Redeemer.
“Genesis 3 is one of the most unsavory, objectionable passages to tear up a college education that’s ever been written. In this passage, you find the root source of all questioning of the Word of God comes from Satan. Where do people get off questioning God’s word? The devil.
“Genesis 3 shows that the desire to be godlike in knowledge is satanic in origin: ‘I gotta know, I gotta know, I gotta know.’ That isn’t something God gave you. Satan is a real force to be reckoned with when it comes to the intellectual realm.
“By the time you get to the end of Genesis 3 you see that man is a fallen, deluded, deceived, self-righteous buck-passer who’s hiding from God and using his religion as a means to disobey God’s Word. In one chapter, God lays out the whole skinny of the whole human history right here.
*****
“When God talks about two becoming one flesh, hey, that’s what makes marriage marriage. And when you go into that (mate) you’re doing the ultimate. Now, there’s a lot of things going up to it. There’s vows, companionship, but the covenant of agreement that you make to become one, husband and wife, and the companionship and the sharing and the molding together that you have, it all consummates and finds its ultimate expression in something that here is casually plagiarized.
“I Cor. 6:16 illustrates the heinousness of illicit sex. They’re doing what constitutes marriage and it’s a light thing to them. In our society today people object to what I’m saying because they have a light attitude toward the sinfulness of what we’re talking about. God Almighty means one man, one woman, forever, ’til death do us part. That’s the length of it and anything else is a violation of His intent and His will and His instructions and it’s sin.
“I Timothy 3, when it says the bishop is to be the husband of one wife, he’s supposed to be a one woman man just like this passage says he is. I know a lot people say if you got a divorce in your background you can’t be a pastor. Well, now wait a minute. You mean, if you went down before a judge and got separated from one wife and so forth . . . if a judge can destroy a marriage, a judge can make a marriage, can’t he? You see it isn’t a ceremony. Marriage and divorce isn’t something made like that.
“God takes Adam’s hand and Eve’s hand and places them together and He pronounces the marriage vows over them. He pronounces them one flesh and Jesus Christ said 'what God has joined together let no man put asunder.' You see, it’s God joining you together! You’re joined together on the basis of what God said in God’s institution and that’s God doing it.
"And a society and a people and a church and an individual that disregards that; it’s just going to bring wreck, ruin and havoc on himself, his family and his nation because we’re talking about the very basic bedrock upon which all social order among human beings is to be based. So when you attack the family and marriage you’re attacking the thing that’s going to destroy everything.
“Genesis 2:25. They didn’t have any physical clothes and they just had a complete openness without any fear, without any problems. Perhaps they had a garment on. Psalm 104:1. Notice there’s a garment of light involved in God’s clothing. They were clothed in a raiment of translucent light that actually did cover them.
“They weren’t standing there with the wind blowing by and getting them cold. Of course, the guy didn’t sweat too much because sweat didn’t come ’til after the fall.”
“The fall of man, folks, is the only possible explanation for evil, and for sin and for sorrow and suffering in a world made by a benevolent, perfect Creator," says Jordan. “In this chapter you see the subtlety of the devil, the powerlessness of human nature, human performance and human merit. You see the effects of sin. You see the grace and love of God to guilty sinners. You see human nature’s tendency to cover up its shame with human performance. You see the seed line of a promised Redeemer.
“Genesis 3 is one of the most unsavory, objectionable passages to tear up a college education that’s ever been written. In this passage, you find the root source of all questioning of the Word of God comes from Satan. Where do people get off questioning God’s word? The devil.
“Genesis 3 shows that the desire to be godlike in knowledge is satanic in origin: ‘I gotta know, I gotta know, I gotta know.’ That isn’t something God gave you. Satan is a real force to be reckoned with when it comes to the intellectual realm.
“By the time you get to the end of Genesis 3 you see that man is a fallen, deluded, deceived, self-righteous buck-passer who’s hiding from God and using his religion as a means to disobey God’s Word. In one chapter, God lays out the whole skinny of the whole human history right here.
*****
“When God talks about two becoming one flesh, hey, that’s what makes marriage marriage. And when you go into that (mate) you’re doing the ultimate. Now, there’s a lot of things going up to it. There’s vows, companionship, but the covenant of agreement that you make to become one, husband and wife, and the companionship and the sharing and the molding together that you have, it all consummates and finds its ultimate expression in something that here is casually plagiarized.
“I Cor. 6:16 illustrates the heinousness of illicit sex. They’re doing what constitutes marriage and it’s a light thing to them. In our society today people object to what I’m saying because they have a light attitude toward the sinfulness of what we’re talking about. God Almighty means one man, one woman, forever, ’til death do us part. That’s the length of it and anything else is a violation of His intent and His will and His instructions and it’s sin.
“I Timothy 3, when it says the bishop is to be the husband of one wife, he’s supposed to be a one woman man just like this passage says he is. I know a lot people say if you got a divorce in your background you can’t be a pastor. Well, now wait a minute. You mean, if you went down before a judge and got separated from one wife and so forth . . . if a judge can destroy a marriage, a judge can make a marriage, can’t he? You see it isn’t a ceremony. Marriage and divorce isn’t something made like that.
“God takes Adam’s hand and Eve’s hand and places them together and He pronounces the marriage vows over them. He pronounces them one flesh and Jesus Christ said 'what God has joined together let no man put asunder.' You see, it’s God joining you together! You’re joined together on the basis of what God said in God’s institution and that’s God doing it.
"And a society and a people and a church and an individual that disregards that; it’s just going to bring wreck, ruin and havoc on himself, his family and his nation because we’re talking about the very basic bedrock upon which all social order among human beings is to be based. So when you attack the family and marriage you’re attacking the thing that’s going to destroy everything.
“Genesis 2:25. They didn’t have any physical clothes and they just had a complete openness without any fear, without any problems. Perhaps they had a garment on. Psalm 104:1. Notice there’s a garment of light involved in God’s clothing. They were clothed in a raiment of translucent light that actually did cover them.
“They weren’t standing there with the wind blowing by and getting them cold. Of course, the guy didn’t sweat too much because sweat didn’t come ’til after the fall.”
Sunday, August 14, 2011
Who He sees
Angels are watching us and it’s like a spectator sport. They’re watching and scrutinizing.
Jordan says, “You see that for a whole week following a Bears game there are people reviewing and analyzing and talking on and on. There’s a whole industry for that. Angels are spectators—‘Man, look at all this stuff out there—let’s rush to see it!’
“Not only are we Christians a spectacle to the world and to men, but the angelic creation comes in to look as they hear about what’s going on.”
*****
I Cor. 11 says, “For the man is not of the woman; but the woman of the man.
[9] Neither was the man created for the woman; but the woman for the man.
[10] For this cause ought the woman to have power on her head because of the angels.”
Jordan explains, “Lady you ought to live in submission and under the authority of God. If you’re a wife, you ought to live under the God given authority of your husband. The angels are watching and they’re interested to see whether or not, and how it is, believers function under the authority of the Word of God. They’re wanting to see the impact that Word of God has in your life and whether it’s important to you and whether it works. And when it works, how it works.”
*****
There were things about the prophetic program angels, who watched the prophets write down, desired to look into. I Peter 1 says, “Of which salvation the prophets have inquired and searched diligently, who prophesied of the grace that should come unto you:
[11] Searching what, or what manner of time the Spirit of Christ which was in them did signify, when it testified beforehand the sufferings of Christ, and the glory that should follow.
[12] Unto whom it was revealed, that not unto themselves, but unto us they did minister the things, which are now reported unto you by them that have preached the gospel unto you with the Holy Ghost sent down from heaven; which things the angels desire to look into.”
Jordan says, “The prophets would write down the information about the sufferings of Christ and then they would write down the information about the glory of His Kingdom. And then they would say, ‘Lord, we don’t understand what we wrote! What are we talking about here?! And how is this stuff going to work together?! How is it time wise gonna fit together?!’
“There’s something you need to notice in verse 11 very clearly. They didn’t understand what the sufferings of Christ was a reference to. They write it down and then they say, ‘What are we writing?!’
“Now I know something from that. Nobody in time past in the prophetic program—Moses, Isaiah, Daniel, Jeremiah, David, any of the prophets back there—they were not looking forward in faith to the Cross, believing one day God would send the lamb to die at Calvary for their sin.
“When Isaiah wrote Isaiah 53, he didn’t understand he was writing about Calvary. That’s what the verse says. They were not looking forward in faith. What they did is they looked at what they wrote and said, ‘What is this?!’ and God told them, ‘It isn’t for you to know. It’s for people after it happens to know.’
“And the angels are watching the prophet write it and they’re saying, ‘C’mon, man, get it! Figure it out, would you! Study a little harder!’ They desired to look into that but they couldn’t get it because the time hadn’t come for it hadn’t been revealed yet.
*****
“In Acts 8 the Ethiopian eunuch has been to Jerusalem. He’s a proselyte to Judaism and he’s left Ethiopia and gone all the way to Jerusalem to worship, and he goes home and he’s reading Isaiah 53, and Philip says, ‘Do you understand what you’re reading?’ And he said, ‘How can I? I need somebody to teach me. I can’t get this.’ And he says, ‘Who’s he talking about here?!’ And that’s in Acts 8 that they don’t understand it!”
*****
Ephesians 3: 9-10 says, “And to make all men see what is the fellowship of the mystery, which from the beginning of the world hath been hid in God, who created all things by Jesus Christ:
[10] To the intent that now unto the principalities and powers in heavenly places might be known by the church the manifold wisdom of God.”
Jordan says, “What the angels were curious about finding out about and couldn’t, now is made known and now they can learn it. Now they not just saying, ‘Well, tell it to us!’ and the prophet says back, ‘But I don’t know it yet.’ Now they’re saying, ‘Man, all those years we were trying to figure that out! . . .’
“They learn from us as members of the Body of Christ what they were looking for. What’s manifested there is the manifold wisdom of God. It’s important to understand what it is we’re demonstrating. They’re not looking at you and me to see a demonstration of the power of God. If they wanted to see God’s power, they were witnesses to the creation of the universe (look in Job for references).
“There’s something about His wisdom that WE’RE manifesting. The issue today is demonstrating God’s wisdom, not His power. You need to remember that in the details of your life-- it’s the wisdom of God that He’s manifesting!”
“No. 1 we’re going to be fellow heirs. Angels’ watch this and say, ‘What in the world?! Explain this!’ They’re trying to comprehend what does it mean to be a ‘fellow heir.’
Romans 8:15-17: ‘For ye have not received the spirit of bondage again to
fear; but ye have received the Spirit of adoption, whereby we cry, Abba, Father.
[16] The Spirit itself beareth witness with our spirit, that we are the children of God:
[17] And if children, then heirs; heirs of God, and joint-heirs with Christ; if so be that we suffer with him, that we may be also glorified together.’
“I mean, we’ve been made members of the immediate family of God. Able to cry, ‘Abba Father!’ The only person in all of the Bible who ever addresses God the Father as Abba Father is Jesus Christ. We have the same relationship with him as Christ does. That intimate FAMILY relationship. Angels never … they don’t know anything about being a part of the IMMEDIATE family of God.
“They’re part of the creation, but to be a part of the immediate family and sit at His table and to call Him Daddy. They don’t know anything about that and they’re saying, ‘A bunch of old lost sinners? Wow, what is that?!’ That’s the wisdom of God through the Cross.
“In Galatians 3 He says were of the same body. When they see us standing as who we are in Christ as heirs, part of the family of God, and accessing into the presence of God and Abba Father . . . They see you do that and they’re instructed about the wisdom of God that made it so.
“Galatians 3:27 says, ‘For as many of you as have been baptized into Christ have put on Christ.’ That word ‘put on,’ it’s like this: Here’s my coat. I take my coat off the hanger and I put on the coat. What did I do? I clothed myself with the garment, didn’t I?
“When you look at me today, what do you see? You don’t see my t-shirt, do you? You see my coat. When God the Father looks at you today, you know who He sees? He sees His Son, Jesus Christ. You stand before God in the identity and accomplishments of His Son. Oh my friend, don’t waste your time trying to define yourself by your failures.
“That’s sure not the way God defines you today! And when He looks at you He sees Christ and the angels look behind and they see you! And they say, ‘Wow, man, look at this!’ and they see the wisdom of God manifested!”
Jordan says, “You see that for a whole week following a Bears game there are people reviewing and analyzing and talking on and on. There’s a whole industry for that. Angels are spectators—‘Man, look at all this stuff out there—let’s rush to see it!’
“Not only are we Christians a spectacle to the world and to men, but the angelic creation comes in to look as they hear about what’s going on.”
*****
I Cor. 11 says, “For the man is not of the woman; but the woman of the man.
[9] Neither was the man created for the woman; but the woman for the man.
[10] For this cause ought the woman to have power on her head because of the angels.”
Jordan explains, “Lady you ought to live in submission and under the authority of God. If you’re a wife, you ought to live under the God given authority of your husband. The angels are watching and they’re interested to see whether or not, and how it is, believers function under the authority of the Word of God. They’re wanting to see the impact that Word of God has in your life and whether it’s important to you and whether it works. And when it works, how it works.”
*****
There were things about the prophetic program angels, who watched the prophets write down, desired to look into. I Peter 1 says, “Of which salvation the prophets have inquired and searched diligently, who prophesied of the grace that should come unto you:
[11] Searching what, or what manner of time the Spirit of Christ which was in them did signify, when it testified beforehand the sufferings of Christ, and the glory that should follow.
[12] Unto whom it was revealed, that not unto themselves, but unto us they did minister the things, which are now reported unto you by them that have preached the gospel unto you with the Holy Ghost sent down from heaven; which things the angels desire to look into.”
Jordan says, “The prophets would write down the information about the sufferings of Christ and then they would write down the information about the glory of His Kingdom. And then they would say, ‘Lord, we don’t understand what we wrote! What are we talking about here?! And how is this stuff going to work together?! How is it time wise gonna fit together?!’
“There’s something you need to notice in verse 11 very clearly. They didn’t understand what the sufferings of Christ was a reference to. They write it down and then they say, ‘What are we writing?!’
“Now I know something from that. Nobody in time past in the prophetic program—Moses, Isaiah, Daniel, Jeremiah, David, any of the prophets back there—they were not looking forward in faith to the Cross, believing one day God would send the lamb to die at Calvary for their sin.
“When Isaiah wrote Isaiah 53, he didn’t understand he was writing about Calvary. That’s what the verse says. They were not looking forward in faith. What they did is they looked at what they wrote and said, ‘What is this?!’ and God told them, ‘It isn’t for you to know. It’s for people after it happens to know.’
“And the angels are watching the prophet write it and they’re saying, ‘C’mon, man, get it! Figure it out, would you! Study a little harder!’ They desired to look into that but they couldn’t get it because the time hadn’t come for it hadn’t been revealed yet.
*****
“In Acts 8 the Ethiopian eunuch has been to Jerusalem. He’s a proselyte to Judaism and he’s left Ethiopia and gone all the way to Jerusalem to worship, and he goes home and he’s reading Isaiah 53, and Philip says, ‘Do you understand what you’re reading?’ And he said, ‘How can I? I need somebody to teach me. I can’t get this.’ And he says, ‘Who’s he talking about here?!’ And that’s in Acts 8 that they don’t understand it!”
*****
Ephesians 3: 9-10 says, “And to make all men see what is the fellowship of the mystery, which from the beginning of the world hath been hid in God, who created all things by Jesus Christ:
[10] To the intent that now unto the principalities and powers in heavenly places might be known by the church the manifold wisdom of God.”
Jordan says, “What the angels were curious about finding out about and couldn’t, now is made known and now they can learn it. Now they not just saying, ‘Well, tell it to us!’ and the prophet says back, ‘But I don’t know it yet.’ Now they’re saying, ‘Man, all those years we were trying to figure that out! . . .’
“They learn from us as members of the Body of Christ what they were looking for. What’s manifested there is the manifold wisdom of God. It’s important to understand what it is we’re demonstrating. They’re not looking at you and me to see a demonstration of the power of God. If they wanted to see God’s power, they were witnesses to the creation of the universe (look in Job for references).
“There’s something about His wisdom that WE’RE manifesting. The issue today is demonstrating God’s wisdom, not His power. You need to remember that in the details of your life-- it’s the wisdom of God that He’s manifesting!”
“No. 1 we’re going to be fellow heirs. Angels’ watch this and say, ‘What in the world?! Explain this!’ They’re trying to comprehend what does it mean to be a ‘fellow heir.’
Romans 8:15-17: ‘For ye have not received the spirit of bondage again to
fear; but ye have received the Spirit of adoption, whereby we cry, Abba, Father.
[16] The Spirit itself beareth witness with our spirit, that we are the children of God:
[17] And if children, then heirs; heirs of God, and joint-heirs with Christ; if so be that we suffer with him, that we may be also glorified together.’
“I mean, we’ve been made members of the immediate family of God. Able to cry, ‘Abba Father!’ The only person in all of the Bible who ever addresses God the Father as Abba Father is Jesus Christ. We have the same relationship with him as Christ does. That intimate FAMILY relationship. Angels never … they don’t know anything about being a part of the IMMEDIATE family of God.
“They’re part of the creation, but to be a part of the immediate family and sit at His table and to call Him Daddy. They don’t know anything about that and they’re saying, ‘A bunch of old lost sinners? Wow, what is that?!’ That’s the wisdom of God through the Cross.
“In Galatians 3 He says were of the same body. When they see us standing as who we are in Christ as heirs, part of the family of God, and accessing into the presence of God and Abba Father . . . They see you do that and they’re instructed about the wisdom of God that made it so.
“Galatians 3:27 says, ‘For as many of you as have been baptized into Christ have put on Christ.’ That word ‘put on,’ it’s like this: Here’s my coat. I take my coat off the hanger and I put on the coat. What did I do? I clothed myself with the garment, didn’t I?
“When you look at me today, what do you see? You don’t see my t-shirt, do you? You see my coat. When God the Father looks at you today, you know who He sees? He sees His Son, Jesus Christ. You stand before God in the identity and accomplishments of His Son. Oh my friend, don’t waste your time trying to define yourself by your failures.
“That’s sure not the way God defines you today! And when He looks at you He sees Christ and the angels look behind and they see you! And they say, ‘Wow, man, look at this!’ and they see the wisdom of God manifested!”
Tuesday, August 9, 2011
Designer parallels
There’s an absolute fascinating symmetry between Peter and Paul in the Book of Acts, which is divided into two sections. The first 12 chapters focus on Peter and the ministry of the apostles and the last half (chapters 13-2) focuses on Paul.
In the first section, the center of activity is Jerusalem and they apostles move out to Samaria. In the other section, the center of activity is Antioch and Paul finally winds up in Rome. In the first section, chapter 12 ends with God’s judgment on Herod. The second section ends with God’s judgment on Israel.
Jordan says, “It’s a standard thing in the Bible for someone who is a minister. Moses ministered to Israel and then when he died, Joshua took his place. Elijah ministers to Israel and when he goes off, his mantle falls on Elisha. Joshua carries on what Moses does just like Elisha carries on what Elijah does.
“Jesus Christ has His ministry and goes away and Luke tells you that Peter and the 12 carry on His ministry and He works through Peter to carry it on but the nation Israel refuses it and so then the Lord Jesus Christ chooses another minister, the Apostle Paul, to replace that ministry and Luke in his book demonstrates that so clearly.
*****
“I’ve got 24 parallels that demonstrate what Peter does in early Acts Paul does exactly the same. You know, when Paul said, ‘I’m not a chief whit behind the very chiefest apostles,’ everything Peter does Luke says Paul did it. Don’t tell me it isn’t by design. You know what that tells you? You’ve got an absolute equality and independent apostleship over here in Paul and he completely replaces what was there before him.
“Peter received a new name (John 1:42). Paul was called Saul and he got a new name (Acts 13). Peter was ‘baptized by the Spirit’ in Acts 2. Paul was ‘separated by the Spirit’ (Acts 13). Peter was thought to be drunk (Acts 2). Paul was thought to be mad (Acts 26). Peter’s first sermon in Acts 2 is almost balanced out perfectly like Paul’s first sermon in Acts 13.
“Peter heals a lame man (Acts 3) and Paul heals a lame man in Acts 14. Peter strikes with death in Acts 5 and Paul strikes with blindness in Acts 13. Peter’s first miracle was a dispensational miracle (Acts 3) and Paul’s first miracle was a dispensational miracle (Acts 13).
“Peter repudiates silver and gold in Acts 3 and Paul repudiates silver and gold in Acts 20. Peter’s arrested in Acts 4 and Paul’s arrested. Peter stands before the counsel in Acts 4 and Paul stands before the counsel in Acts 23. Peter’s action produces fear (Acts 5) and Paul’s action produces fear (Acts 19). Peter’s shadow had healing virtue in it and Paul’s body gave even handkerchiefs healing virtue (Acts 19).
“Peter benefits by the liberality of Gamaliel; Paul benefits by the liberality of Gallio at Corinth in Acts 18. Peter communicates the Holy Spirit by the laying on of hands in Acts 8; Paul communicates the Holy Spirit by the laying on of his hand…
“You see how this is working?! I back off and look at that and say, ‘Wow! That fascinates me!’ Don’t let anybody come along and say, ‘We’re robbing peter to pay Paul!’ Horse feathers!
"Everything Pete had God gave Paul something else. And that isn’t the half of it. I’m going to show you another one comparing Luke’s gospel and the Book of Acts where what Christ does shows up almost in the same words in Paul. That’s why Luke’s important, see?
*****
“Peter condemned Simon Marcus, the sorcerer, in Acts 8; Paul condemned Bar Jesus, the sorcerer, in Acts 13. Peter raises Dorcas from the dead; Paul raises Uticus from the dead. Peter’s first Gentile convert had a Latin name, Cornelius; Paul’s first Gentile convert had a Latin name, Paul (Acts 13).
“Peter, at mid-day, has a vision and hears a voice; Paul at mid-day has a vision and hears a voice (Acts 9). Peter is almost worshipped by Cornelius; Paul is almost worshipped in Acts 14 by the Lyconians. Peter’s delivered from prison by an angel; Paul’s delivered from prison by an earthquake. Peter goes immediately to the house of Mary; Paul goes immediately to the house of Lydia. Peter said he was ready for prison and death for the Lord’s sake; Paul said the same.
“Peter was not taught by flesh and blood; Paul ‘conferred not with flesh and blood.’ Peter winds up in Babylon; Paul winds up in Rome.
“I read that and I say, ‘Bless God, hallelujah!’ There isn’t any man you ever met could write a book with all that and intertwine it all together. But, you know, not only is there an equality where Paul perfectly replaces Peter, there’s a thing here about the Lord and His servant Paul . . .”
(To be continued)
In the first section, the center of activity is Jerusalem and they apostles move out to Samaria. In the other section, the center of activity is Antioch and Paul finally winds up in Rome. In the first section, chapter 12 ends with God’s judgment on Herod. The second section ends with God’s judgment on Israel.
Jordan says, “It’s a standard thing in the Bible for someone who is a minister. Moses ministered to Israel and then when he died, Joshua took his place. Elijah ministers to Israel and when he goes off, his mantle falls on Elisha. Joshua carries on what Moses does just like Elisha carries on what Elijah does.
“Jesus Christ has His ministry and goes away and Luke tells you that Peter and the 12 carry on His ministry and He works through Peter to carry it on but the nation Israel refuses it and so then the Lord Jesus Christ chooses another minister, the Apostle Paul, to replace that ministry and Luke in his book demonstrates that so clearly.
*****
“I’ve got 24 parallels that demonstrate what Peter does in early Acts Paul does exactly the same. You know, when Paul said, ‘I’m not a chief whit behind the very chiefest apostles,’ everything Peter does Luke says Paul did it. Don’t tell me it isn’t by design. You know what that tells you? You’ve got an absolute equality and independent apostleship over here in Paul and he completely replaces what was there before him.
“Peter received a new name (John 1:42). Paul was called Saul and he got a new name (Acts 13). Peter was ‘baptized by the Spirit’ in Acts 2. Paul was ‘separated by the Spirit’ (Acts 13). Peter was thought to be drunk (Acts 2). Paul was thought to be mad (Acts 26). Peter’s first sermon in Acts 2 is almost balanced out perfectly like Paul’s first sermon in Acts 13.
“Peter heals a lame man (Acts 3) and Paul heals a lame man in Acts 14. Peter strikes with death in Acts 5 and Paul strikes with blindness in Acts 13. Peter’s first miracle was a dispensational miracle (Acts 3) and Paul’s first miracle was a dispensational miracle (Acts 13).
“Peter repudiates silver and gold in Acts 3 and Paul repudiates silver and gold in Acts 20. Peter’s arrested in Acts 4 and Paul’s arrested. Peter stands before the counsel in Acts 4 and Paul stands before the counsel in Acts 23. Peter’s action produces fear (Acts 5) and Paul’s action produces fear (Acts 19). Peter’s shadow had healing virtue in it and Paul’s body gave even handkerchiefs healing virtue (Acts 19).
“Peter benefits by the liberality of Gamaliel; Paul benefits by the liberality of Gallio at Corinth in Acts 18. Peter communicates the Holy Spirit by the laying on of hands in Acts 8; Paul communicates the Holy Spirit by the laying on of his hand…
“You see how this is working?! I back off and look at that and say, ‘Wow! That fascinates me!’ Don’t let anybody come along and say, ‘We’re robbing peter to pay Paul!’ Horse feathers!
"Everything Pete had God gave Paul something else. And that isn’t the half of it. I’m going to show you another one comparing Luke’s gospel and the Book of Acts where what Christ does shows up almost in the same words in Paul. That’s why Luke’s important, see?
*****
“Peter condemned Simon Marcus, the sorcerer, in Acts 8; Paul condemned Bar Jesus, the sorcerer, in Acts 13. Peter raises Dorcas from the dead; Paul raises Uticus from the dead. Peter’s first Gentile convert had a Latin name, Cornelius; Paul’s first Gentile convert had a Latin name, Paul (Acts 13).
“Peter, at mid-day, has a vision and hears a voice; Paul at mid-day has a vision and hears a voice (Acts 9). Peter is almost worshipped by Cornelius; Paul is almost worshipped in Acts 14 by the Lyconians. Peter’s delivered from prison by an angel; Paul’s delivered from prison by an earthquake. Peter goes immediately to the house of Mary; Paul goes immediately to the house of Lydia. Peter said he was ready for prison and death for the Lord’s sake; Paul said the same.
“Peter was not taught by flesh and blood; Paul ‘conferred not with flesh and blood.’ Peter winds up in Babylon; Paul winds up in Rome.
“I read that and I say, ‘Bless God, hallelujah!’ There isn’t any man you ever met could write a book with all that and intertwine it all together. But, you know, not only is there an equality where Paul perfectly replaces Peter, there’s a thing here about the Lord and His servant Paul . . .”
(To be continued)
Monday, August 8, 2011
Just like family
Joel 3 is a passage about the restoration of Israel at the Second Advent. It reads, “For, behold, in those days, and in that time, when I shall bring again the captivity of Judah and Jerusalem,
[2] I will also gather all nations, and will bring them down into the valley of Jehoshaphat, and will plead with them there for my people and for my heritage Israel, whom they have scattered among the nations, and parted my land.”
Jordan explains, “God’s going to bring the nations to Israel and judge them in order to deliver Israel. You see the partitioning of the land, which is our solution for the Middle East problem. Our answer is, ‘Let’s partial up the land, petition.’ Verse 4 says, ‘Yea, and what have ye to do with me, O Tyre, and Zidon, and all the coasts of Palestine? will ye render me a recompence? and if ye recompence me, swiftly and speedily will I return your recompence upon your own head.’
“The term Palestine was first attributed to the land of Israel by the Romans in the 2nd Century. In 70 A.D. when Titus came in, he didn’t remove the Jews from the land. He just destroyed the temple.
“In 115 A.D. there was another rebellion. Finally in 135 A.D. the Romans were tired of them and they came in and renamed the land after the Philistines because they were so sick of the Jews and that’s where the name Palestine comes from. So the first inhabitants of Palestine were the Jews. They were the first Palestinians.
“The way the term is used today is a political term, started in the ’50s and ’60s to be used as a ‘political football’ because in 1947 when Israel reestablished itself as a state all the Arab nations attacked them. The Brits created Jordan as the homeland for the Arabs.
“After Israel became a nation, one of the political tactics to try to squeeze them out was to say, ‘We need a homeland for all those Arabs over there in the land you guys have.’ Well, take ’em home! Take them to Jordan and let them reconnect with their people! ‘No, no, no.’ You see, that’s all a political mess. So this West Bank stuff and the petitioning of the thing, that’s all bunk.
“I read that verse in Joel and it isn’t just that they scattered Israel, they parted the land. All of that political stuff is just defiantly flying in the face of God Himself about what He says to do with the land. Zephaniah 3:8 is my favorite verse about the United Nations: ‘Therefore wait ye upon me, saith the LORD, until the day that I rise up to the prey: for my determination is to gather the nations, that I may assemble the kingdoms, to pour upon them mine indignation, even all my fierce anger: for all the earth shall be devoured with the fire of my jealousy.’
“You see, globalism will never work. We have this global economy and all this stuff. All you’re doing is heading for destruction. God established nationalism. He established nations—borders, languages, cultures--in order to facilitate man’s ability to be evangelized.
“If you think you can deny that for the economic advantage, the only people gaining an economic advantage from globalism are these big money people. The statused people who run the governments and the corporatists—people who run the corporations. ‘Now we can get money from all these people easy instead of going through each individual country kind-of-thing!’
“One of the geniuses of the American system of government is that all authority is local. We sit here in San Juan Capistrano. If a U.S. marshal has a warrant for your arrest he has to contact the local authorities to come and execute activity. You can’t have this federal police department coming down; the Secret Police and all that stuff you hear about. You have a system that’s the opposite of that.
“If San Juan has an arrest warrant for somebody in San Clemente they can’t just go up there and arrest them. You need a San Clemente policeman to go and arrest them and hand them over to you. Jurisdiction is jurisdiction, which hampers the Big Guy from taking over. Well, if you take that and make that global, well, if you’re trying to milk them with political power or milk them with their money, you’ll like that. It’s a whole lot harder to go through all that paperwork.
*****
“So the globalism stuff is doomed to failure because God set humanity up to function just like people are interested in their families; you’re interested…
“I’ve been to country after country after country in the world and you know what is the first question people ask me? ‘How do you like our country?’ People naturally, instinctively, love their own country and so they should. Well, it’s natural. But if you’re just going to homogenize it all . . . When a conflict comes up, whose interest are you going to follow? Your own naturally. That’s the way it should be.
“You’re watching Europe fall apart right now. The E.U. is a great utopian idea. It can’t work because there are two countries in Europe that have always beaten the snot out of everyone else--Germany and France. And they do it because of money. If you make more money you can make more things to break. But now they’re not making money; it’s costing money. Someone’s got to pay but nobody wants to pay.
“So when the Antichrist tries to put the Last Days together—you got to remember Satan doesn’t have a kingdom that’s made of peaceful, loving, sweet people. He’s crafty enough to keep all these different creatures, who’d cut each other’s throats if they had a chance to get ahead . . . He’s crafty enough to stay ahead of it. He sits on a boiling pot with the lid jiggling. The Antichrist is going to be that master craftsman putting this thing together but it’s just not going to work.”
[2] I will also gather all nations, and will bring them down into the valley of Jehoshaphat, and will plead with them there for my people and for my heritage Israel, whom they have scattered among the nations, and parted my land.”
Jordan explains, “God’s going to bring the nations to Israel and judge them in order to deliver Israel. You see the partitioning of the land, which is our solution for the Middle East problem. Our answer is, ‘Let’s partial up the land, petition.’ Verse 4 says, ‘Yea, and what have ye to do with me, O Tyre, and Zidon, and all the coasts of Palestine? will ye render me a recompence? and if ye recompence me, swiftly and speedily will I return your recompence upon your own head.’
“The term Palestine was first attributed to the land of Israel by the Romans in the 2nd Century. In 70 A.D. when Titus came in, he didn’t remove the Jews from the land. He just destroyed the temple.
“In 115 A.D. there was another rebellion. Finally in 135 A.D. the Romans were tired of them and they came in and renamed the land after the Philistines because they were so sick of the Jews and that’s where the name Palestine comes from. So the first inhabitants of Palestine were the Jews. They were the first Palestinians.
“The way the term is used today is a political term, started in the ’50s and ’60s to be used as a ‘political football’ because in 1947 when Israel reestablished itself as a state all the Arab nations attacked them. The Brits created Jordan as the homeland for the Arabs.
“After Israel became a nation, one of the political tactics to try to squeeze them out was to say, ‘We need a homeland for all those Arabs over there in the land you guys have.’ Well, take ’em home! Take them to Jordan and let them reconnect with their people! ‘No, no, no.’ You see, that’s all a political mess. So this West Bank stuff and the petitioning of the thing, that’s all bunk.
“I read that verse in Joel and it isn’t just that they scattered Israel, they parted the land. All of that political stuff is just defiantly flying in the face of God Himself about what He says to do with the land. Zephaniah 3:8 is my favorite verse about the United Nations: ‘Therefore wait ye upon me, saith the LORD, until the day that I rise up to the prey: for my determination is to gather the nations, that I may assemble the kingdoms, to pour upon them mine indignation, even all my fierce anger: for all the earth shall be devoured with the fire of my jealousy.’
“You see, globalism will never work. We have this global economy and all this stuff. All you’re doing is heading for destruction. God established nationalism. He established nations—borders, languages, cultures--in order to facilitate man’s ability to be evangelized.
“If you think you can deny that for the economic advantage, the only people gaining an economic advantage from globalism are these big money people. The statused people who run the governments and the corporatists—people who run the corporations. ‘Now we can get money from all these people easy instead of going through each individual country kind-of-thing!’
“One of the geniuses of the American system of government is that all authority is local. We sit here in San Juan Capistrano. If a U.S. marshal has a warrant for your arrest he has to contact the local authorities to come and execute activity. You can’t have this federal police department coming down; the Secret Police and all that stuff you hear about. You have a system that’s the opposite of that.
“If San Juan has an arrest warrant for somebody in San Clemente they can’t just go up there and arrest them. You need a San Clemente policeman to go and arrest them and hand them over to you. Jurisdiction is jurisdiction, which hampers the Big Guy from taking over. Well, if you take that and make that global, well, if you’re trying to milk them with political power or milk them with their money, you’ll like that. It’s a whole lot harder to go through all that paperwork.
*****
“So the globalism stuff is doomed to failure because God set humanity up to function just like people are interested in their families; you’re interested…
“I’ve been to country after country after country in the world and you know what is the first question people ask me? ‘How do you like our country?’ People naturally, instinctively, love their own country and so they should. Well, it’s natural. But if you’re just going to homogenize it all . . . When a conflict comes up, whose interest are you going to follow? Your own naturally. That’s the way it should be.
“You’re watching Europe fall apart right now. The E.U. is a great utopian idea. It can’t work because there are two countries in Europe that have always beaten the snot out of everyone else--Germany and France. And they do it because of money. If you make more money you can make more things to break. But now they’re not making money; it’s costing money. Someone’s got to pay but nobody wants to pay.
“So when the Antichrist tries to put the Last Days together—you got to remember Satan doesn’t have a kingdom that’s made of peaceful, loving, sweet people. He’s crafty enough to keep all these different creatures, who’d cut each other’s throats if they had a chance to get ahead . . . He’s crafty enough to stay ahead of it. He sits on a boiling pot with the lid jiggling. The Antichrist is going to be that master craftsman putting this thing together but it’s just not going to work.”
Saturday, August 6, 2011
Taking us in
The Bible has pictures and prototypes; computers call them “macros.” God says, “It’s going to be like this so let me preform it.” That’s what’s going on with Exodus.
Jordan explains, “The Israelites come out (they’re the sons) and now they need to go in, but because of unbelief they don’t, and when they finally do they’ve got to come to Jordan.
“The Red Sea is the Cross. You come out of Egyptian bondage into the new life God has for this new nation; the new creature that He’s made here. They didn’t have to wait all those years; they could have gone right in into the possessions for which God created them.
“The first five books of Romans demonstrate how you get out of Egypt into new life ground. Romans 6-8, that’s Canaan. There’s possessing your possessions, and your identity in Christ, and who God has made you living in you. You’re not supposed to have that big Romans 7 wilderness thing—it’s unbelief that puts you there.
“In Joshua 4, when they finally get to go in, there’s a fascinating bunch of stuff that happens. In the Red Sea, Moses, the law man, leads them, but when you come to the Jordan, the Ark of the Covenant is going to lead, so it’s going to be a different kind of a thing. It’s the Lord of all the earth who is going in to possess the land. Joshua 3 is wonderful picture of ‘here comes Jehovah to possess His inheritance.’ ”
Joshua 3:14-17 says, [14] And it came to pass, when the people removed from their tents, to pass over Jordan, and the priests bearing the ark of the covenant before the people;
[15] And as they that bare the ark were come unto Jordan, and the feet of the priests that bare the ark were dipped in the brim of the water, (for Jordan overfloweth all his banks all the time of harvest,)
[16] That the waters which came down from above stood and rose up upon an heap very far from the city Adam, that is beside Zaretan: and those that came down toward the sea of the plain, even the salt sea, failed, and were cut off: and the people passed over right against Jericho.
[17] And the priests that bare the ark of the covenant of the LORD stood firm on dry ground in the midst of Jordan, and all the Israelites passed over on dry ground, until all the people were passed clean over Jordan.”
Jordan says, “Look at the symbolism there. From a city named Adam flows a river named Jordan. The name Jordan means ‘descender.’ Another name for the Salt Sea is the Dead Sea. From a man named Adam there’s a life descending that ends in death and what he did, he didn’t open up like the Red Sea; he literally cut off that life. When they went across that Jordan River there was no water within 30 miles for them to even see; that’s how fully God put away the life that comes from Adam to deliver them into the land! I look at that and say, ‘That’s a super thing!’
“It gets even better in chapter 5 because you get this quirky little thing about how they’re not circumcised but they’ve got to be. Oooh. And then they go in and eat the old corn of the land. Moses delivered the circumcision (the nation Israel) from bondage. You remember Moses’ son wasn’t circumcised and he had to circumcise him?
“God works with an uncircumcised people for a whole long time and then God goes back to working with the circumcision people and they have to get circumcised here. All that time in the wilderness they weren’t circumcised. I read that and I say, ‘Now that is a weird thing. You couldn’t have known any of this until you come over to Paul’s ministry and yet there’s a picture of it in Joshua 5. Whoever orchestrated the events back in Joshua really knew some things about the future. He knew how to draw Paul’s right division timeline.’
“The point is when they go across Jordan into Canaan what they’re doing is going across into the possessions that God had for them and now they’re to go and possess what was their inheritance. And the conflict and the possession was their responsibility.
“There is a comparison between the Book of Ephesians and the Book of Joshua. Oftentimes Joshua is described as Israel going in and possessing their possessions. But that’s what Ephesians is about. It’s about entering into a full understanding of your Sonship; what it is God chose you for and bringing those things into your experience and you being in them.
“There are five times in Ephesians that Paul talks about the ‘heavenly places.’ And there’s a fascinating comparison between those five things and things in the Book of Joshua.
“The point I’m making is if we’re going to be functioning in the Spirit, walking in the identity God’s given us in Christ and have an appreciation of it, we’re going to have Romans as a foundation and Ephesians and so forth as our understanding.
“We’re oriented to His grace and the reason He has the Body of Christ and we need to bring that into our experience; not just have it in our head but have it in our life. It needs to be our life. That’s exactly what God was demonstrating through the nation Israel was their opportunity to be sons.
“In Ephesians 1 we’re told we’ve been predestinated to an inheritance and the spiritual blessings in heavenly places is an inheritance God has given to a CHOSEN group of people. It’s ‘according as he hath chosen us (the Body of Christ) in him before the foundation of the world.’ Notice He didn’t say He chose you to be in Him.
“So the parallel is Israel is going into an earthly possession that God gave to them and we’re going to go into a heavenly realm that God gave to us. It’s all His plan. He’s got a plan for Israel and a plan for us. Israel is blessed with material blessings in earthly places in Abraham. We’re blessed with spiritual blessings in heavenly places in Christ Jesus. You got to be careful to focus on your calling.
“You know who’s going to open up the heavenly places? Who’s the head of all things in the heavenly places? Christ. God opens this stuff up for us through Christ. He’s the leader. Nobody’s going to take us there but Him.
“Now there’s an interesting thing. Who took Israel into the Promised Land? Joshua. Who couldn’t take them in to the Promised Land? The Law man, Moses. Joshua 1:6. Notice its Joshua’s responsibility to divide the land; divide the inheritance. In verse 11:23 you see Joshua took the whole land according to all that the Lord said to Moses.
“Talking about that, Hebrews 4 says, ‘Let us therefore fear, lest, a promise being left us of entering into his rest, any of you should seem to come short of it. For unto us was the gospel preached, as well as unto them: but the word preached did not profit them, not being mixed with faith in them that heard it.
“Drop down to verse 8: ‘For if Jesus had given them rest, then would he not afterward have spoken of another day.’ Who’s He talking about there historically? He’s actually talking about Joshua. Now why would He call him Jesus? Well, the Hebrew name Joshua means ‘Jehovah Savior.’ The Greek name is Jesus. My name is Richard and in Spanish it’s Ricardo. By the way, did you know Jacob is James in English? Isn’t it interesting that it was when James was on the throne that your Bible was finished?
“Joshua leading Israel in is a type of the resurrected Christ who’s going to divide the inheritance to the nation Israel one day in the future and bring them out for their planting in the land. How are they going to get their blessings? Joshua’s a picture of the Lord Jesus Christ taking them into the land.”
Jordan explains, “The Israelites come out (they’re the sons) and now they need to go in, but because of unbelief they don’t, and when they finally do they’ve got to come to Jordan.
“The Red Sea is the Cross. You come out of Egyptian bondage into the new life God has for this new nation; the new creature that He’s made here. They didn’t have to wait all those years; they could have gone right in into the possessions for which God created them.
“The first five books of Romans demonstrate how you get out of Egypt into new life ground. Romans 6-8, that’s Canaan. There’s possessing your possessions, and your identity in Christ, and who God has made you living in you. You’re not supposed to have that big Romans 7 wilderness thing—it’s unbelief that puts you there.
“In Joshua 4, when they finally get to go in, there’s a fascinating bunch of stuff that happens. In the Red Sea, Moses, the law man, leads them, but when you come to the Jordan, the Ark of the Covenant is going to lead, so it’s going to be a different kind of a thing. It’s the Lord of all the earth who is going in to possess the land. Joshua 3 is wonderful picture of ‘here comes Jehovah to possess His inheritance.’ ”
Joshua 3:14-17 says, [14] And it came to pass, when the people removed from their tents, to pass over Jordan, and the priests bearing the ark of the covenant before the people;
[15] And as they that bare the ark were come unto Jordan, and the feet of the priests that bare the ark were dipped in the brim of the water, (for Jordan overfloweth all his banks all the time of harvest,)
[16] That the waters which came down from above stood and rose up upon an heap very far from the city Adam, that is beside Zaretan: and those that came down toward the sea of the plain, even the salt sea, failed, and were cut off: and the people passed over right against Jericho.
[17] And the priests that bare the ark of the covenant of the LORD stood firm on dry ground in the midst of Jordan, and all the Israelites passed over on dry ground, until all the people were passed clean over Jordan.”
Jordan says, “Look at the symbolism there. From a city named Adam flows a river named Jordan. The name Jordan means ‘descender.’ Another name for the Salt Sea is the Dead Sea. From a man named Adam there’s a life descending that ends in death and what he did, he didn’t open up like the Red Sea; he literally cut off that life. When they went across that Jordan River there was no water within 30 miles for them to even see; that’s how fully God put away the life that comes from Adam to deliver them into the land! I look at that and say, ‘That’s a super thing!’
“It gets even better in chapter 5 because you get this quirky little thing about how they’re not circumcised but they’ve got to be. Oooh. And then they go in and eat the old corn of the land. Moses delivered the circumcision (the nation Israel) from bondage. You remember Moses’ son wasn’t circumcised and he had to circumcise him?
“God works with an uncircumcised people for a whole long time and then God goes back to working with the circumcision people and they have to get circumcised here. All that time in the wilderness they weren’t circumcised. I read that and I say, ‘Now that is a weird thing. You couldn’t have known any of this until you come over to Paul’s ministry and yet there’s a picture of it in Joshua 5. Whoever orchestrated the events back in Joshua really knew some things about the future. He knew how to draw Paul’s right division timeline.’
“The point is when they go across Jordan into Canaan what they’re doing is going across into the possessions that God had for them and now they’re to go and possess what was their inheritance. And the conflict and the possession was their responsibility.
“There is a comparison between the Book of Ephesians and the Book of Joshua. Oftentimes Joshua is described as Israel going in and possessing their possessions. But that’s what Ephesians is about. It’s about entering into a full understanding of your Sonship; what it is God chose you for and bringing those things into your experience and you being in them.
“There are five times in Ephesians that Paul talks about the ‘heavenly places.’ And there’s a fascinating comparison between those five things and things in the Book of Joshua.
“The point I’m making is if we’re going to be functioning in the Spirit, walking in the identity God’s given us in Christ and have an appreciation of it, we’re going to have Romans as a foundation and Ephesians and so forth as our understanding.
“We’re oriented to His grace and the reason He has the Body of Christ and we need to bring that into our experience; not just have it in our head but have it in our life. It needs to be our life. That’s exactly what God was demonstrating through the nation Israel was their opportunity to be sons.
“In Ephesians 1 we’re told we’ve been predestinated to an inheritance and the spiritual blessings in heavenly places is an inheritance God has given to a CHOSEN group of people. It’s ‘according as he hath chosen us (the Body of Christ) in him before the foundation of the world.’ Notice He didn’t say He chose you to be in Him.
“So the parallel is Israel is going into an earthly possession that God gave to them and we’re going to go into a heavenly realm that God gave to us. It’s all His plan. He’s got a plan for Israel and a plan for us. Israel is blessed with material blessings in earthly places in Abraham. We’re blessed with spiritual blessings in heavenly places in Christ Jesus. You got to be careful to focus on your calling.
“You know who’s going to open up the heavenly places? Who’s the head of all things in the heavenly places? Christ. God opens this stuff up for us through Christ. He’s the leader. Nobody’s going to take us there but Him.
“Now there’s an interesting thing. Who took Israel into the Promised Land? Joshua. Who couldn’t take them in to the Promised Land? The Law man, Moses. Joshua 1:6. Notice its Joshua’s responsibility to divide the land; divide the inheritance. In verse 11:23 you see Joshua took the whole land according to all that the Lord said to Moses.
“Talking about that, Hebrews 4 says, ‘Let us therefore fear, lest, a promise being left us of entering into his rest, any of you should seem to come short of it. For unto us was the gospel preached, as well as unto them: but the word preached did not profit them, not being mixed with faith in them that heard it.
“Drop down to verse 8: ‘For if Jesus had given them rest, then would he not afterward have spoken of another day.’ Who’s He talking about there historically? He’s actually talking about Joshua. Now why would He call him Jesus? Well, the Hebrew name Joshua means ‘Jehovah Savior.’ The Greek name is Jesus. My name is Richard and in Spanish it’s Ricardo. By the way, did you know Jacob is James in English? Isn’t it interesting that it was when James was on the throne that your Bible was finished?
“Joshua leading Israel in is a type of the resurrected Christ who’s going to divide the inheritance to the nation Israel one day in the future and bring them out for their planting in the land. How are they going to get their blessings? Joshua’s a picture of the Lord Jesus Christ taking them into the land.”
Friday, August 5, 2011
Out into new life
In I Corinthians 10, Paul reaches back into the life of Israel, starting with the Exodus, examining first what happens when God delivers the Israelites by bringing them through the Red Sea and then going through the events of the wilderness, warning the Corinthians, “Those things in the wilderness are patterns of things you don’t need to do!”
Jordan says, “What that tells us about the things we do is we can look back there and see us! The thing about Israel is they were also sons of Adam. When you look at the failure of Israel, you’re seeing the failure of the only part of the human race that still had a relationship with God.
“That’s why Paul says what he says in Romans 3. Israel represented everybody, and in Israel and her failure, you see the failure of Adam’s race. Right division has to do with using all of the Bible in light of Paul’s epistles. The only person who really can understand all of the Scripture is the one who rightly divides it because you’re not trying to make it all be addressing you.
“When you see the failures of man in Israel, what God’s doing is laying out a template about what humanity itself in its best relationship turns out to be.”
*****
Jordan highly recommends looking up every chapter 6:23 in the Bible, explaining, “You’ll be amazed how many 6:23s are fun to study. 3:16s are the same way!
“Deuteronomy 6:23 is a statement about God’s intent when He brought Israel out of Egypt. He brought them out across the Red Sea that He might bring us in ‘to give us the land which he swore unto our fathers.’ He didn’t bring them out of Egypt so they would wander in the wilderness for 40 years. He brought them out so He could bring them into Canaan, the land that He promised Abraham and his descendants.
“The fact they wandered for 38 years in the wilderness was their fault. It was their unbelief that shut them out. The murmuring and complaining and all that kind of business took place in the wilderness. All of that is a picture of wilderness life. He says in Exodus 15:7 ‘thou hast overthrown them that rose up against thee. He says ‘out of Egypt have I brought my first born son.’
“The first nation that had Sonship status, he brings them out of Egypt by blood and by power. The Passover blood takes care of the death angel. He brings them to the Red Sea. Here comes Pharaoh (a picture of Satan) and God opens up the Red Sea and the Israelites go down into the place of death and come out on the other side and then He closes the sea, destroys the horse and his rider and delivers the Israelites in power into a new life.
“The Red Sea is a picture of what happens in ‘type’ with the Cross. It’s a picture of salvation. You have the blood that delivers them and then you have the power being delivered into this new life. They literally got a newness of life. The nation Israel was BORN coming across that Red Sea. Their 4th of July came into existence there. That was their Independence Day. That’s why the Red sea is used all through the Old Testament as the power symbol--the standard for Israel.
“As they stood on that new life ground in Exodus 15 they sing that Song of Moses that looks all the way to God’s intention to establish them in His kingdom and you read about this and say, ‘Man, what these dudes knew at the very beginning was fantastic! They understood exactly what was going on!’
“The verse says, ‘The LORD is my strength and song, and he is become my salvation: he is my God, and I will prepare him an habitation; my father's God, and I will exalt him.’ See that? ‘I’m going to prepare a place for God to live!’
“All those phrases in there describing the Lord are used in the books of the prophets and the Book of Revelation to talk about Jesus Christ at His Second Coming. What you have is Israel coming out of Egypt; God has His nation in existence now to go out and reclaim His earth and reclaim the place on earth where He’s going to put His throne.”
The song of Exodus 15 sings, [13] Thou in thy mercy hast led forth the people which thou hast redeemed: thou hast guided them in thy strength unto thy holy habitation.
[14] The people shall hear, and be afraid: sorrow shall take hold on the inhabitants of Palestina.
[15] Then the dukes of Edom shall be amazed; the mighty men of Moab, trembling shall take hold upon them; all the inhabitants of Canaan shall melt away.
[16] Fear and dread shall fall upon them; by the greatness of thine arm they shall be as still as a stone; till thy people pass over, O LORD, till the people pass over, which thou hast purchased.
[17] Thou shalt bring them in, and plant them in the mountain of thine inheritance, in the place, O LORD, which thou hast made for thee to dwell in, in the Sanctuary, O Lord, which thy hands have established.
[18] The LORD shall reign for ever and ever.
Jordan says, “By this passage you should write down Psalm 132 where He talks about here in Zion is the place where He’s going to live.
“You remember Joshua 2 when the spies go in to meet Rahab? She says, ‘We heard what happened to the Egyptians and how your God destroyed them, and we been waiting on you guys to show up because we know your god’s the God of gods!’ She’s confused about why it took them 40 years to get there, but she knew based on the events who the God of heaven was.”
(Edtior's note: To be continued tomorrow--promise!)
Jordan says, “What that tells us about the things we do is we can look back there and see us! The thing about Israel is they were also sons of Adam. When you look at the failure of Israel, you’re seeing the failure of the only part of the human race that still had a relationship with God.
“That’s why Paul says what he says in Romans 3. Israel represented everybody, and in Israel and her failure, you see the failure of Adam’s race. Right division has to do with using all of the Bible in light of Paul’s epistles. The only person who really can understand all of the Scripture is the one who rightly divides it because you’re not trying to make it all be addressing you.
“When you see the failures of man in Israel, what God’s doing is laying out a template about what humanity itself in its best relationship turns out to be.”
*****
Jordan highly recommends looking up every chapter 6:23 in the Bible, explaining, “You’ll be amazed how many 6:23s are fun to study. 3:16s are the same way!
“Deuteronomy 6:23 is a statement about God’s intent when He brought Israel out of Egypt. He brought them out across the Red Sea that He might bring us in ‘to give us the land which he swore unto our fathers.’ He didn’t bring them out of Egypt so they would wander in the wilderness for 40 years. He brought them out so He could bring them into Canaan, the land that He promised Abraham and his descendants.
“The fact they wandered for 38 years in the wilderness was their fault. It was their unbelief that shut them out. The murmuring and complaining and all that kind of business took place in the wilderness. All of that is a picture of wilderness life. He says in Exodus 15:7 ‘thou hast overthrown them that rose up against thee. He says ‘out of Egypt have I brought my first born son.’
“The first nation that had Sonship status, he brings them out of Egypt by blood and by power. The Passover blood takes care of the death angel. He brings them to the Red Sea. Here comes Pharaoh (a picture of Satan) and God opens up the Red Sea and the Israelites go down into the place of death and come out on the other side and then He closes the sea, destroys the horse and his rider and delivers the Israelites in power into a new life.
“The Red Sea is a picture of what happens in ‘type’ with the Cross. It’s a picture of salvation. You have the blood that delivers them and then you have the power being delivered into this new life. They literally got a newness of life. The nation Israel was BORN coming across that Red Sea. Their 4th of July came into existence there. That was their Independence Day. That’s why the Red sea is used all through the Old Testament as the power symbol--the standard for Israel.
“As they stood on that new life ground in Exodus 15 they sing that Song of Moses that looks all the way to God’s intention to establish them in His kingdom and you read about this and say, ‘Man, what these dudes knew at the very beginning was fantastic! They understood exactly what was going on!’
“The verse says, ‘The LORD is my strength and song, and he is become my salvation: he is my God, and I will prepare him an habitation; my father's God, and I will exalt him.’ See that? ‘I’m going to prepare a place for God to live!’
“All those phrases in there describing the Lord are used in the books of the prophets and the Book of Revelation to talk about Jesus Christ at His Second Coming. What you have is Israel coming out of Egypt; God has His nation in existence now to go out and reclaim His earth and reclaim the place on earth where He’s going to put His throne.”
The song of Exodus 15 sings, [13] Thou in thy mercy hast led forth the people which thou hast redeemed: thou hast guided them in thy strength unto thy holy habitation.
[14] The people shall hear, and be afraid: sorrow shall take hold on the inhabitants of Palestina.
[15] Then the dukes of Edom shall be amazed; the mighty men of Moab, trembling shall take hold upon them; all the inhabitants of Canaan shall melt away.
[16] Fear and dread shall fall upon them; by the greatness of thine arm they shall be as still as a stone; till thy people pass over, O LORD, till the people pass over, which thou hast purchased.
[17] Thou shalt bring them in, and plant them in the mountain of thine inheritance, in the place, O LORD, which thou hast made for thee to dwell in, in the Sanctuary, O Lord, which thy hands have established.
[18] The LORD shall reign for ever and ever.
Jordan says, “By this passage you should write down Psalm 132 where He talks about here in Zion is the place where He’s going to live.
“You remember Joshua 2 when the spies go in to meet Rahab? She says, ‘We heard what happened to the Egyptians and how your God destroyed them, and we been waiting on you guys to show up because we know your god’s the God of gods!’ She’s confused about why it took them 40 years to get there, but she knew based on the events who the God of heaven was.”
(Edtior's note: To be continued tomorrow--promise!)
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