Altar. In NT theology the equivalent of the Cross. Both are raising devices upon which a sacrifice was bound and slaughtered for the redemption of the offeror. On the Day of Atonement, this sacrifice was made for the whole of the congregation of Israel. On crucifixion day, it is performed by God the Father for the whole world on the sacrifice of His Son. The meaning of both devices of death is God’s Word for this future agent of redemptive justice which is historically fulfilled, hence, messianic prophecy of Jesus Messiah.

Upon this “cross,” as with the sacrificial altar, was that sacrifice bound. The Son was willingly bound by the prescient Word of God to fulfill it.  This is the epistemic challenge given to man’s moral judgment. Most of humanity will effectively render it as offensive and worthless as a basis for faith or true, but to a relatively small portion worthy of his own life to publish.

Messiah’s Person, and the righteous faith locus of God’s Word,  must be murdered (Psalm 16:8–11, Isaiah 53, Psalms 22, Daniel 9:25–26) to supremely illustrate for all time the essential sin of disbelief, relegation, apathy, and abuse of transcendent Truth. This state of antithesis to Truth that is defeated by this antithesis of love, faith, and devotion to the murdered Messiah, Transcendent Truth, the Prophetic Word of Jesus, is expressed by the murdering of the Truth of God by Man.  Man murders God’s Truth by unrighteousness, but then God’s Truth murder’s Man’s sin for him to obtain true righteousness by faith. Sin is forgiven by belief in it’s the Holy opposite, that Jesus is the Christ, the fulfillment of the Prophets.  God allows his Son’s death, Truth, to die by the hand of carnally motivated religion and disbelief, which death is to the world confirmation of that their sin will continue happy and unchanged by interference from factual transcendent phenomena. But Man’s false faith is destroyed by the True. God vindicates himself, his Word and demonstrates sin’s antithesis by supernaturally raising that Word from the dead (Psalms 16, Daniel 12:2-3,  Isaiah 53:10–11, Jonah 1:17, Hosea 6:1–2) Therefore, the Prophetic Word of Messiah is established for all time, despite the carnal impulse, to stand as an ultimate standard and a rallying point for all conceptions of divine Truth and its believers.

See https://www.jesusfilm.org/blog-and-stories/old-testament-prophecies.html

https://blog.tms.edu/resurrection-according-to-scriptures

Bible. Revelation from personal Hebrew God of His power, nature and redemptive plan for mankind. The entirety of the document as a concept is apprehended first through its leading form of revelation, which is the scriptural thematic stream of messianic prophecy, taken as the informational entity of its subject, Jesus of Nazareth, Messiah. The document source and this specific subject content are given by God to man for the attraction of man’s love of demonstrated Transcendent truth and his salvation through belief in its historical reality. The free gift of salvation is that prophetic revelation. The moral act that results in salvation is faith in that free gift. Only through this epistemic pathway can a saving faith in the God of Truth be considered “true,” because in this epistemic pathway Truth is the phenomena of God himself.

Passing by Nehushtan

INTRODUCTION

I have composed a basic Bible dictionary to demonstrate its prophecentric nature. It is by this demonstration of its consistency that it will become clear why its central theme must radically change exegetics and theology. If it is possible to show a single, unified, and consistent theme of Scripture that must also incorrigibly be held synonymous with Christ Himself, that theme being also that from which doctrine comes, rather than a dependent product of theology, then it is this prophecy from which any notion of God, and by extension, our salvation, directly comes. (more…)

Body. Soma, sarx. The body with its parts is a comprehensive, dynamic, articulated biblical symbol in the NT.[1]

σῶμα sōma, from G4982; the body (as a sound whole), used in a very wide application, literally or figuratively:—bodily, body, slave.

Other than in the literal and physiological sense, soma is used by implication as the connective center of one of its parts by way of synecdoche, where the part is used to refer to the whole (pars pro toto). The great example of this is the phrase “the body of Christ” as the Church.

Other than its explicit reference to the church (Rom 12:5; 1Co 12:12, 27; Eph 4:12), other uses are clearly for the intention of contrasting the Old Testament promise to the New Testament fulfillments in Christ. In Colossians 2:17: “Which are a shadow of things to come; but the body is of Christ.”

Found in about 150 places in the NT, the theological use of soma is unique to Pauline theology. One common source explains soma in six conventional senses: the physical body of Christ, the Eucharistic use, the community of believers… and so on.[2] “’Body of Christ’ is represented by the Passover meal, a ‘body’ about to be broken on the cross.” Also, “’body’ symbolizes the totality of the people of God in Rom 12:4ff, 1 Co 10:17;” “’sinful body’ symbolizes the finite, fallen aspect of the nature of humankind in Rom 6:6; 7:24; 8:10ff; Phil 3;21; Col 2;11.”^[3]

However, the soma of the “Passover meal,” the body on the cross, broken on the cross, the people of God, and “fallen aspect” are all its significations why do little to bring out the transcendent aspect of this “body.” The duty and challenge of Bible teaching are to consistently reapply the higher symbols of Christ to the lower ones of His parts instead of breaking the chain and descending into generic religious prosaisms such as these. The other interpretation that awaits them is informed by the prophetic centrality of “body.”

For example, the only thing that Paul calls “great mystery” (mega mysthrion, Eph 5:30-32) involves the application of the body symbol of Christ to the church.

Ephesians 5:30-32 (KJV) For we are members of his body, of his flesh, and of his bones. For this cause shall a man leave his father and mother, and shall be joined unto his wife, and they two shall be one flesh. This is a great mystery: but I speak concerning Christ and the church.

“Mystery” pertains to those prophetic truths once hidden but now at least partially revealed (Mt 13:11; Mr 4:11; Lu 8:10; Ro 11:25; 16:25; 1Co 2:7; 4:1; 13:2; 14:2; 15:51; Eph 1:9; 3:3–4,9; 5:32; 6:19; Col 1:26–27; 2:2; 4:3; 2Th 2:7; 1Ti 3:9,16; Re 1:20; 10:7; 17:5,7). “For we are members of his body (soma), of his flesh (sarx), and of his bones, osteon. It was long ago prophesied by the type of a man leaving the carnal formative principle from which he came and joined to a new spiritual one, his wife as one flesh.  The “Great mystery” is not a hidden meaning, but one that was once hidden and now revealed by the Church and Christ. In effect, the fulfillment of a typical prophetic symbol.

Paul never says explicitly how the specific symbols of “flesh” and “bones” of Christ’s body are represented in the greater church symbol, but they are clearly implied to be operational and actively used in His teaching elsewhere. It is clear that this teaching must apply to the functions of the vocational offices of the church as a whole and to individual gifts of the believer, but can we not infer Paul having even greater use for them for higher things, not merely as common parts of a whole?

For example, the marriage relationship here, compared to Christ and the church, is made pure by “the washing of water by the word” (Eph 5:26). Does “word” have a higher assignation than a general conception of “the Word of God?” If it is quintessentially the prophetic scriptures, then just as the husband loves his wife, giving himself for her (v. 25), Christ prophetically determined to enter the world and by prophecy gave Himself in love for the church. Thus, the “Word of God” is not a symbol of itself, but signifies the historical movement of God in history whereby He miraculously proves to the world His existence and faithfulness: “So ought men to love their wives as their own bodies. He that loveth his wife loveth himself” (Eph 5:28). This then is not primarily an exhortation on marriage, but the love of Christ of the church through and by the witness of the Prophetic Word. Thus, Christ represents the Word of God, the believer represents this Word of God loved, believed and communicated, not a general conception of the body Christ. If Christ has a body now, the church is symbolically His body, not its own body. If Christ has a spirit, we all partake of that same spirit (1 Co 12:13). This is a “great mystery,” its fulfillment and implications clearly set forth, but its particulars still awaiting learning and spiritual advancement.

We can conclude by this that any particular body part is an aspect of the righteous and true word of Christ, that prophetic word that signifies the people of God, Christ’s body of Scripture, and the spirit of Christ which loves such truth. The “head” is the upper extremity, the part of the PW that stands to display the personhood of the PW, which is Messiah Jesus, denoting His resolve, promises, reason, perception, and understanding of hard, mysterious things. The mouth is the letter of the PW. The eyes are its ability to penetrate into and clarify mysteries and see into the future or into souls. The heart of his body is that part of the PW that represents his entire inner being and in which reason, emotion, will, volition, and moral preference resides to locate, contemplate, judge, love and explain that revelation. Hands are that part of the body that is capable of imparting the wisdom of the PW.

We can take “body” and al it’s parts as a mirror of the logos and all its parts.

Of the Memra (logos), or “Word” from John 1, which theologians typically give six attributes: the individual yet the same as God, the instrument of creation, the instrument of salvation, the visible presence of God, the covenant maker, and the revealer of God. It occurs to us that, again, these attributes perfectly represent the Prophetic Word of demonstration: 1. The individual who is God is the fulfillment of a human Messiah in history. 2. The instilment of creation is prophecy, “let there be light, and there was light.” 3. The instrument of salvation is the only specific scriptural material that can be concluded as specialized for the engendering of a particular kind of biblical faith to salvation. 4. The visible presence of God, which is in informational, written form existing objectively in the world. 5. The covenant maker, where “covenant” is an agreement between two parties that each will do as they have (prophetically) promised. And 6. The revealer of God, the only means by which God can be positively known as real, sovereign, and faithful.

In this way, the “body” a whole is one disarticulated of its parts if those parts are not of a prophetic function and do not connect to a special prophetic body. While “body” in the NT is the symbol first of Christ’s body and the Church, that body then signifies nothing less ultimately than the prophetic scriptures of Him. All lower symbols, of that body’s parts (feet, head, hands) and their states (revealed mysteries, full of light, love of Truth), describe that Word’s functions and application as Messiah’s people as that body acts in the world to love it, bring it out, distribute it, teach it and make it honorable.

[1] See The Body of Christ in Evangelical Theology by F. Leron Shults: The “body of Christ has not functioned as a crucial material concept for evangelical ecclesiology. When biblical images of the church are examined by evangelical scholars, the body of Christ is almost always listed but does not serve a vibrant or integrative function.” (Shults 2002).

[2] (International Standard Bible Encyclopedia 1979)

[3] (Renn 2005)

Body of Sin. (Rom 6:6). If the body is the Prophetic Word, can it be said of sin? In a sense, yes, but not in the way the reader might imagine. The Word does not provide a perfect vision of transcendence, only an adequate one, just as the body is an adequate analog of the resurrection body.

Our present, adequate yet imperfect visual body is the body of potential misapplication, opacity of meaning, and the struggle for meaning—all consequences of the Fall. It is set for destruction. “Sin” in this context refers to evil as the implacable organic and behavioral resistance to God—obstacles that cannot be entirely reformed before the resurrection. Yet “sin” is also used in a lesser sense to describe the noetic and scriptural interference—static—that hinders full apprehension of Christ, and which can be improved before the resurrection.

Thus, the phrase “body of sin” contrasts the current body with the resurrection body—not to denote absolute depravity, but to signify transience, limitation, and imperfection. The impulses of this body are destined to be destroyed—not because they are inherently evil in essence, but so they will no longer tempt the individual to serve the body, or sin as a principle. The resurrection body is a pure, perfect prophetic body—“prophetic” in the sense that it is the fulfillment of what God has spoken and is certain to become real. Our teaching about sin through the symbolic framework of the “body” is therefore not only about genetic and behavioral sin, nor merely about the resurrection’s removal of these, but about the current interpretive difficulty of the prophetic scriptures themselves—a necessary but inferior vision of God.

The “body of sin” is a body that is transitory and limited, both positionally and organically. It gives us some clarity and some obscurity, especially when contrasted with the beatific vision of God and the final consummation of His economy (1 Corinthians 13:12). The Prophetic Word provides an adequate but partial vision—much like the limitations of our physical bodies and carnal minds, which continually challenge our hunger for a complete revelation. Paul’s use of “body” is primarily about the carnal mind (Romans 8:6–7), rather than the physical body alone; his use of sarx (“flesh,” v.8) encompasses both the mind and the body. Our condition is chiefly a noetic infirmity.

Paul speaks proleptically when he writes, “For if we have been planted together in the likeness of his death, we shall be also in the likeness of his resurrection: knowing this, that our old man is crucified with him, that the body of sin might be destroyed, that henceforth we should not serve sin. Now if we are dead with Christ, we believe that we shall also live with him” (Romans 6:5–7). This is not only a reference to the Person of Christ, but also to the perfected revelation of Christ, which is now obscured by our fallen, interpretively hindered state.

If the Spirit of Christ dwells in us, then the power of the carnal body and the bondage of carnal thought—though still present—are counted as dead because of sin (v.10). Yet they can be quickened. Abbot takes this quickening to mean sanctification; others see it as referring to the promised bodily resurrection by the Spirit. Likely, both senses apply. The body is not yet destroyed, but is counted as already destroyed, by virtue of the sure prophetic realization to come. Imputation itself is a proleptic category: neither the Prophetic Word nor the body is inherently evil, but only “in part.” We are not to let the challenges God has assigned to the body and the Word dominate our passion for Truth. Rather, we are to overcome them—and through them, build a clearer vision of our love, our Messiah, and His glory.

Broken (body). (1 Co 11:24). It is interesting that Christ in the Passover implies but never states that the breaking of bread is the prophetic breaking of His body and of messianic prophecy itself. It is for Paul to give this interpretation. Christ says that the Passover bread is His body, but only Paul says it represents the broken body of Christ fulfilled, in 1 Co 11:24.

In Luke 22:19, the bread is described as “given”; the breaking and eating of it are for remembrance of Christ. In Matthew 26:26 and Mark 14:22, Jesus breaks the bread and commands the disciples to eat. When it comes to the wine, Jesus is more explicit about its meaning, interpreting it as the blood of the New Covenant—His life force—“which is shed for many” and “for the remission of sins” (Mark 14:24, Matt 26:28, Luke 22:20).

Christ’s body is symbolically broken at the Last Supper, and His blood is described as “poured out” (Philippians 2:17; see also this treatment of the drink offering). Both bread and wine—body and blood—are consumed in the present. But what, theologically, is being consumed?

The bread, Christ’s body, is for “remembrance.” This is not mere recollection but the recognition, understanding, and inward reception of the prophetic promises of the Old Testament. The body will be shamefully treated, humiliated, scourged, spit upon, and broken. But within that body resides the blood—its life force—which signifies the specific promise of Messiah’s death, and by extension, His resurrection. Jesus speaks of His body and blood as presently broken and shed, yet He is referring to the sure future fulfillment of what God has already declared in His Word.

Consider Zechariah 12:10 and Isaiah 53:5,10. The blood is “for the remission of sins” not because of abstract sacrificial symbolism, but because its exegetical truth and historical enactment form the final capstone and confirmation of Christ’s identity as the Prophetic Word—its ultimate expression before vindication by resurrection. It is also, prophetically speaking, the most difficult truth to receive. Yet it is precisely this—Messiah’s death—that becomes the definitive sign of essential righteousness. The resurrection, itself a Messianic oracle, is God’s own seal upon the faith that receives this fulfillment.

“Bread” and “body” signify the corpus of Old Testament prophetic scripture, whose promises—especially concerning Messiah—often bear relatively straightforward fulfillment. Blood, however, is more difficult to “swallow,” though no less scripturally attested. “Body” is the collective oracular witness to the coming Messiah, who would be rejected. “Blood” is a particular organ within that body—the death of the Messiah. The spiritual life of the prophetic body is bound up with this organ; when it is drained, the body dies. Before its shedding, the blood is the difficult but necessary future of the Messiah’s death. Afterward, it is the blood of redemption—believed and fulfilled.

Blood—understood as the present and coming life of the prophetic body—is the vital force that must be completely poured out. Only by being fully drained, unto death, can the prophetic body be restored as a permanent moral fixture in history.

A mere beating of the scriptures—a distortion, a rejection, a misapplication—does not bring about their death. Such treatment may scandalize the scriptures, but it does not fulfill them. Prophetic failure would require something far more severe: that the oracular body be emptied of its lifeblood, beyond all natural revival, so that only God can restore it through resurrection.¹

The prophetic scriptures and their Messianic promises are self-resolving. They represent the end point of the signifying process. A broken body, as in the case of Christ, represents the shameful and scandalous treatment of the prophetic Word—misread, reinterpreted, and denied by religious authorities. It is only the fulfillment of the greatest of all prophecies—Messiah’s death and resurrection—that restores their honor, confirms their truth forever, and raises them as a rallying standard for the world: a signal under which the goodness of God saves.

Footnotes

1. The so-called “swoon theory” shares its essential premise with Rabbinic Judaism: a rejected Messiah is tolerable, but a crucified one is not. Corrupted Judaism found a way to preserve the scriptures while draining them of their dominating Messianic emphasis—by substituting the hope of faith in the crucified and risen Christ with a focus on personal law-keeping. In doing so, they revived the form but not the substance of the oracles they had rejected. Christ’s death as the Lamb who takes away the sin of the world was not optional—it was the prophetic hinge upon which all scripture turned. ↩

Cast into Hell (body). Mt 5:29–30; 18:8–9; Mark 9:45–47. “And if thy right eye offend thee, pluck it out, and cast it from thee: for it is profitable for thee that one of thy members should perish, and not that thy whole body should be cast into hell.” The key to this application is in the definition of “offend” (skandalizw, entrap, stumble, entice to sin).In Matthew 5, the Sermon on the Mount is a long introduction to the conversion of the old law to a new law. The new law is the law of faith (Ro 3:27), the law of the Spirit (Rom 8:2), the law of righteousness (Ro 9:31), the law of Christ (Gal 6:2), and the law of liberty (Jas 2:12). The law of carnal commandment (Heb 7:17) could not produce perfection, but the new law can produce the Messiah, of which Melchizidech was a prophetic type, and a prophetic faith can replace it: “For the law made nothing perfect, but the bringing in of a better hope did; by the which we draw nigh unto God” (Heb 7:19). The “hope” is a hope for a future fulfillment of the law in Christ. God made an oath (prophetic promise) to bring Messiah: “by so much was Jesus made a surety (certainty of prophetic fulfillment) of a better testament” (Heb 7:22). Therefore, the New Testament is founded on a prophetic promise of God, fulfilled and embodied in Christ, which faith in this fulfilled hope His believers are to embody and fulfill in their lives. It is not a means to perfection of action; it’s a means to replace an impossible requirement of perfection of action with the perfection of spirit by faith in the prophecies and its embodiment in Christ. Physical performance is a symbol of God’s work to bring about the Messiah, and its obsolescence to any conception of righteousness is in its objective, historical realization. This realization inaugurated by the Messiah’s personal, fulfilling appearance. He then sets out to build a new standard of righteousness by the essential work of prophetic fulfillment. The individual’s faith in those fulfillments then fulfills the new standard to replace the old of mere unfulfilled promise.

In Matthew 5 the new law is taught in contrast to the old law by that enfleshed promise, Jesus of Nazareth. Righteousness is then to believe that prophetic Good News, not to obey a carnal commandment: “And this is his commandment, which we should believe on the name of his Son Jesus Christ, and love one another, as he gave us commandment” (1 Jo 3:23)”[1] In 1 Jo 2:7 and 8, the Apostle says that the old commandment contains the new (“I write no new commandment unto you, but an old commandment which ye had from the beginning”), as it was founded in expectation of the coming light (truth) of Messiah. This is a prophetic faith, a faith that the age-old promises of God would, and did, come true. It is an oracular faith, of spiritual action and law-keeping, not carnal. Jesus gives examples of sin by the old law and sin by the new law to say that the old kind of sin and righteousness are obsolete conceptions. But He is not saying that the new law is a higher carnal standard of old law, but a higher spiritual standard by the consequences of prophetic faith. The alternatives He gives are characteristic of Jesus’ teaching technique of revealing truth but obscuring it behind the same kinds of prophetic foreshadowings that draw out those who know the promises and can see the His fulfillments through the biblical language.

This vital to the understanding of Christ’s use of the idea of a body being cast into Hell.

The carnal sin of adultery is set against the spiritual sin of planning adultery. This does not mean that adulterous fantasy and planning are the sin to which He refers; it means the adultery of the religious heart’s intercourse by the lust of religious affection that makes it disloyal to the PW. The same charge is laid against the Israelites in many places, such as in Jer 3:6,8–9, Eze 16:32, Hos 1:2,3, and Re 2:22. These and all instances have God punishing Israel by prophecy or reaffirming His original promise, as their spiritual adultery is essentially against the promises of her husband Jehovah (Jer 3:14–19, Eze 16:37, particularly in Hosea’s prophecy at every subsequent birth). This same pattern Jesus uses. The prophetic context speaks of the ultimate sin: the disbelief in God’s promises of Messianic consummation.

Murder is set against “the influence of angry, malicious, or revengeful feeling” (Abbot) which murders a person’s character or reputation, but this murder is the killing of the same verbal killing of the prophets and their words, and Christ by the unbelieving Pharisees (Mt 9:34; 12:24; Mr 3:22, et. al.), which is the quintessential murder. The new type of murder is the contradiction of the prophetic word and office which points to Messiah.

Marriage is a kind of prophetic oath made to a woman to be loyal to her, quite like Jehovah to His people. Divorce is allowed (5: 31), but only if she is disloyal, not by selfish, cruel, and capricious motivations. But this is not about carnal divorce or marriage, but about that of God to His people.

God swore an oath to bring Messiah to His people. Messiah is faithful not to capriciously break that promise (Joh 14:3), like our faith expressed in the carnal marriage vow. Evil is not resisted or retribution sought, as in an eye for an eye, but patience is prescribed as the Lamb of God to His tormentors (Isaiah 50:6–7, Mic 5:1). This reflects good overcoming evil (Calvin, and Rom 12:21), but in the context of a prophetic ministry shows the Messianic realizations in moral action (right cheek, the most worthy side), and offers in response to its abuse the Messianic promises (left cheek) which are being emulated by the individual.[2]

It was once said not to commit perjury, but to perform your oaths to God. This is a personal expression of the prophetic faith, in speaking truth and swearing to do what one swore one would do. But in light of the history of prophetic realization, the reasons once used are now obsolete. In the past it was the habit of making an oath as God made His prophetic oaths: “Thus saith the LORD, The heaven is my throne, and the earth is my footstool: where is the house that ye build unto me, and where is the place of my rest?” (See Isa 66:1.) This is the oath of promise but without a present fulfillment, which is yet far off: “For all those things hath mine hand made, and all those things have been.” These are fulfilled things, but not fulfilled people. Jerusalem and the temple, being man’s tokens of a future earthly millennial Kingdom with God on earth, are inadequate expressions of the prophetic faith of this future state, as is the law, but this state lies in “poor and of a contrite spirit, and trembleth at my word” (v. 2).

That “word” is prophecy, in distinction from heartless and prophetically disconnected religion (v. 4): ”to those I also will choose their delusions, and will bring their fears upon them; because when I called, none did answer; when I spake, they did not hear.” This “body” that is cast into hell or goes into life is the essential Messianic textual stream which is counted generally unworthy (Jesus Himself) of other scriptural assignations by false exegetical practices, which in turn leads the soul unwittingly to miss the PW as its core and lead one to damnation, or that body which believes and lives.

That one will go into (spiritual) life (spiritually) maimed rather than go into hell with his whole body ( that is, spiritual body) unchanged means that coveted religious prejudices and conceptions, and by extension practices, although held sinfully dear by habit, are also offending to the conscience, are excised. Leaving one alive but positionally diminished: “If any man’s work shall be burned, he shall suffer loss: but he himself shall be saved; yet so as by fire” (1Co 3:15). “Work” is not the work of bodily action, but spiritual action, which is supposed to precipitate and sanctify any religious physical action by the work of belief in the prophecies of Christ.

[1] For the phrase “on the name,” The Pulpit Commentary states that believing in a name means “believing those truths which the name implies.”

[2] Lightfoot says: “That the doctrine of Christ may here more clearly shine out, let the Jewish doctrine be set against it; to which he opposeth his.” In 1 Kings 22:24 there is a good illustration of this and the smiting on the cheek is when Zedekiah strikes Micaiah on the cheek for prophesying prophetic truth that was nevertheless despised. The striking on the cheek represents a denunciation of God’s prophetic Word, the prophet’s prophecy and sign of prophetism. The response, the turning of the other cheek, has the prophet reconfirming the previous prophecy by another one which is more personal to the smiter: “And Micaiah said, Behold, thou shalt see in that day, when thou shalt go into an inner chamber to hide thyself” (1Ki 22:25). This is identical to many instances, most strikingly to such where Jesus displays the Messianic sign of healing, it is ascribed to the devil, and Jesus answers in prophetic judgment: Mat 12:36, 12:41–42, Luk 11:15, 11:19; Mr 3:22, 3:29. The gentiles repented at the words of the prophet, but “this generation” has not, and will be condemned.

Christian. When all things are thought common, or of prosaic origin,  when they are classified and compared it can only be by their common traits. If the whole of religion is thought without an uncommon, demonstrated supernatural proof of its claims, then “Christian” and “Christianity” are only those common forms of religious practices and members among and the equal to other world religions. If the members of Christianity operate also on this presumption of the opacity of its faith, it is expected that the first points of contact with the concepts “Christian” and “Christianity” would be conceived on common and universal standards as well. ” Christian” would be, therefore, “a person who believes in Jesus the Son of God,” and “a religion in which a central practice is the communion of the blood of the New Covenant,” since these topographically only describe features unique to a common Christian religion. Nothing in these descriptions need carry a connotation of faith and a practice rooted in remembrance of a sharply uncommon historical proof of a transcendent claim. But “Christian” is rooted in the word “Messiah,” and Messiah is a prophetic name of one predicted and fulfilled in Jesus of Nazareth, making, if true, “Christian,” despite how it is used, a very uncommon name for a person of a faith in a supernatural prophecy and a supernatural fulfillment in proof of the nature and existence of its God.

Defiled (body). Christ, starting in Mark 7:15, gives enigmatic teaching that has confused the church for almost its entire history, that what goes out of a man defiles him, not what goes into him. This defiled concept is not used by Christ as a defiling of the body, but it does have a significant function in contrasting what is already defiled and can’t be changed,  by what it means to be truly defiled but can be changed.

Then his signal to look for a deeper meaning than the one that He will not give: “If any man have ears to hear, let him hear.”

What does this mean?

“Defiled in the Old Testament:

טָמֵא ṭâmêʼ, taw-may, a primitive root; to be foul, especially in a ceremonial or moral sense (contaminated):—defile (self), pollute (self), be (make, make self, pronounce) unclean, × utterly.

A defiled body is important in the Old Testament in indicating what is considered by God an unacceptable state for His service and contact with others. A woman who is married is defiled if she sleeps with another man (Numbers 5)> Leviticus 19:31 states that those are taw-may who consult familiar spirits or wizards. Among others, the most important is the touching of a dead body (Numbers 5:2; 9:6). This person must be purified by the ashes of the Red Heifer mixed with water (Numbers 19:2). This body is a physical body, and this defiling among physical bodies meant to symbolize a spiritual defilement between spiritual bodies. This defilement is the real kind since spiritual bodies are made up not of flesh and blood but by, among others, truth propositions and conclusions of belief. These are the essential moral essences. A physical body cannot be truly defiled because it is fallen and already defiled, and this cannot change. A spiritual body can be defiled because it can also be made Holy and undefiled. If this is so, it is made Holy by a spiritual and true moral state and action with and around faith states, their content, and motivation.

The key to Jesus in Matthew 12:37: For by thy words thou shalt be justified, and by thy words, thou shalt be condemned. Words come directly out fo the spirit, the heart. They are evidence against your defiled spirit or for your spiritual and clean Godly state. But this is not any word, it is a very specific one, on a very specific subject.

It appears that Christ is simply saying that the wickedness that comes out of men is such as in the parallel passage in Matthew 15:9, “evil thoughts, murders, adulteries, fornications, thefts, false witness, blasphemies.” Of course, the message is those trivial things like unclean hands do not defile a man. But the interesting thing here is that Jesus specifically refers to sins which we equate with a bodily motion with the spirt in his use of “evil thoughts” (διαλογισμός). This is particularly that kind which could be otherwise.

This is about obeying the Mosaic Law only if the Mosaic Law is essentially one for a moral-spiritual motion. This is a symbol, as per the context, of the same defiling of the spirit through the results of our narrow and antithetical interpretative applications of Messiah.

What man takes in is the Word of God, the equivalent of food and nourishment of the soul. Unwashed hands (impure intention, motivation by carnal concerns) are as worldly contamination, impossible to completely eliminate in our reading, but the Word of God (body), regardless, is not defiled by this but is clean when it enters the spirit, meaning the personal spirit remaining undefiled by it. What comes out of the ” is also undefiling, since this is the ordained elimination of what is not needed of the Word of God for essential faith, but acts as a carrier.  What essentially “comes out,” what is defiling, is not from the “draught,” or as a result of unwashed hands, but what comes directly out of one’s spirit pertaining to scriptural interpretation of the PW, particularly about Jesus Christ, which aligns with how man subjectively interprets this prophetic word and applies it in his life, casting it into the world for all to see. The Pharisees’ words and actions display their lack of love and understanding of the revelation of Christ.

Christ knows that the Pharisees equate a mere tradition with the law of Moses in the same way that they equate it with the end of the prophetic revelation. But, prophetically, the Law is a symbol of their use or abuse as scriptural oracles: That Messiah would be a proud and powerful military conqueror, not a suffering servant, is to the same degree a tradition born of carnality, and not scriptural. Their accusation of Christ, accordingly, is not scriptural, accusing Him of a violation of tradition, which they equate with the gravity of the Law. Christ’s “walk,” or here His disregard of the tradition of hand washing, is, therefore, a righteous walk, not a sinful one, if He is the Messiah and author of the Law, who is its ultimate fulfillment and end of the Law.

All the works of men, but never God’s fulfillment of the PW (Jesus), “shall be burned” (1Co 3:15) by the light (truth) of His appearance (fulfillment). It is vain now that man worships God by these kinds of traditions, or by the Law, which is only a pedagogue from Christ to teach true prophetic doctrine, not meaningless injunctions for self-righteousness. In Mark 7:8, Christ uses the “commandment of God” henceforth in two senses for the reader: the law of Moses and the law of Christ, both of which is the New Testament prophetic law of promise and fulfillment. The law and its strict obedience were given only to prepare a people for Messiah, not an end in itself. This includes “honor thy father and mother,” being a command not primarily to do something, but believe something about the true origin and purpose of the entire revelation, which is Christ.

Defiled by the Tongue. See: Defiled

(Jas 3:6). As above, the tongue speaks the words of the prophets, making God’s prophecies accessible audibly to the world. It is by this primary means, however, that the body of the prophetic scriptures is defiled in one’s spirit and made of no effect.[1]

[1] See Matthew 15: “But ye say, whosoever shall say to his father or his mother, It is a gift, by whatsoever thou mightest be profited by me.” Christ gives an example of this principle by a lower symbol, namely, that of the failure of the law by tradition, being a symbol of the intended failure of the PW by replacing it with the law. This is clear by context, the passage bracketed by mass Messianic healing miracles (14:36) and Christ’s condemnation of the Pharisees by quoting prophecy from Isaiah 29:13, where Isaiah immediately foretells God’s promise of Messiah.

(Mat 10:14, Mar 6:11, Luke 9:5, and Acts 13:51). The dust of the heathen world was considered defiled, unlike the dust of the Promised Land. To shake the dust off one’s feet was a sign that the Apostle regarded those people who refused the Prophetic Word of Jesus Messiah are likewise defiled and unworthy of further instruction. They are cursed and so is their land. The import for the foot implies that these people are incapable of pleasing God through a life of works if not first through the teaching of prophetic wisdom embodied and fulfilled in Christ.

Ear, ears. οὖς, אֹזֶן. Key to this word is the phrase by Jesus “he who has an ear, let him hear” (Mat 11:15; 13:9,43; Mark 4:9, 23; 7:16; Luke 8:8; 14:35; Rev 2:7,11,17,29; 3:6,13,22; 13:9). The Morrish Bible Dictionary states it means that “spiritual discernment was needed to catch the meaning of what was uttered.” This fact is not in question, but only this remains to be asked: a spiritual discernment of what, since it is assumed that a certain kind of scriptural truth is implied.

This scriptural truth brought to the ear of spiritual discernment by Jesus can be known from Matthew 10:27, where “ear” is used for this organ of receiving secrets, but particularly oracular secrets, which are to be revealed by the gospel, the good news of fulfillment: “What I tell you in darkness, that speak ye in light: and what ye hear in the ear, that preach ye upon the housetops.”

We know this because the context deals with the persecution of the evangelists as they expound the meaning of the oracles as taught by Christ to the world. This gospel is not an assertion from sentiment, and this fact is the primary “secret” that is to be revealed and not grasped by those who have no regard for them. The dangers for the evangelist, which are enumerated in this passage, do not come from preaching that Christ alone saves, or any such mere religious sentiment, but that this assertion is backed by historical events that cannot be denied, which is morally binding on the conscience. All key contextual words here are prophetic ones: “the Kingdom of Heaven” (Mat 10:7), healing, cleansing, raising the dead, casting out of devils (Mat 10:8) as signs of Messiah’s ministry denoting the spiritual purifying by the oracles; the evangelists who are sent out are called prophets (Mat 10:41).

Expanding this context to the previous chapter, in Matthew 9:36 the “sheep with no shepherd” is a Messianic allusion to the prophecy of Zechariah 11; the and the “harvest” of 37 and 38 is an eschatological event. The ear takes in the oracular mysteries in the form of Christ/biblical fulfillments, but what is amazing is that the spiritual discernment to hear is mainly that of the world’s failure to hear and attach the full implications of the last part of that clause, preferring to keep Christ as a religious figure defined as not necessarily connected to that particular word in evangelism, which is what we have seen in the Church Age.

In the OT the signification of the ear track the same:

• “I will incline mine ear to a parable: I will open my dark saying upon the harp” (Ps 49:4). David is the prefigurement of Christ, the Psalms being filled with Messianic oracular material, “dark sayings” when they have yet come to fruition.
• “Who among you will give ear to this? who will hearken and hear for the time to come?” (Isa 42:23). That is, who will believe the prophecies?
• “Hearken unto me, my people; and give ear unto me, O my nation: for a law shall proceed from me, and I will make my judgment to rest for a light of the people” (Isa 51:4). This is the promise of the New Covenant, which was not to be believed in its conclusion and especially in God’s religious method of ancient scriptural prolepsis.
• “And the LORD hath sent unto you all his servants the prophets, rising early and sending them; but ye have not hearkened, nor inclined your ear to hear” (Jer 25:4). Again, the words of the prophets are the prophecies. These are that which was not believed.
• “I have sent also unto you all my servants the prophets, rising up early and sending them, saying, Return ye now every man from his evil way, and amend your doings, and go not after other gods to serve them, and ye shall dwell in the land which I have given to you and to your fathers: but ye have not inclined your ear, nor hearkened unto me” (Jer 35:15). This is not a complaint about a lack of bodily law-keeping, but spiritual law-keeping, without which the latter is impossible to do in good conscience. The verse is about a prophecy to preserve and flourish Israel in the Promised Land, but that promise will be annulled if the people of God fail to believe it, not firstly fail to obey Law.

Faith. In the Greek pistis. In Strongs “(from 3982/peithô, “persuade, be persuaded”) – properly, persuasion (be persuaded, come to trust); faith.” Faith is a personal act of the spirit of man triggered by the presentation, moral handling and resulting trust (persuasion, conviction) in a supernatural action from the personal Spirit of God. It is specifically motivated by a conviction of the truth from Messianic Prophecy of Jesus of Nazareth as Messiah. Not to be confused with a trust based upon uninformed emotion and naivete of spiritual things, it is an action and state of the spirit as a specific effect of exposure to the truth of the messianic, prophetic revelation alone

Feet. poús, básis, katapatéō, pezēi: Using Truth and Method without H.G. Gadamer’s subjectivity of “truth,” we ask not only what this symbol meant to the Hebrews, but how God intended it used to say something about the PW, which is given to all ages and peoples. The feet are the means by which the prophetic word is carried through the world by its fulfillment, its contact with the ground of the world.  This is quite different from conventional applications.

Swedenborg says the feet are external of the church, of worship, and of the Word (Apocalypse Explained, vol. 1, p.76; I don’t recommend it otherwise). Miles Martindale said that “feet, in the language of Scripture, mean ‘inclinations, affections, conduct, and such like qualities.’” In Patrick Fairbairn’s famous dictionary (1866)  he says, “The feet being the part of the body being more immediately employed in such services as require outward action, especially in executing an entrusted commission, or prosecuting a course of action in obedience to another’s command, to have the feet rightly directed, or kept straight and steadfast in the appointed path, were natural and appropriate images for uprightness and fidelity of behavior.”[1] If feet denote the part of the Prophetic Word which establish its first connection to reality (the ground), and carry the Word to the spiritual bodies of other men, that which is seen in the apostolic office, then, in respect to morality, it is in response to the source of the affective reason for that morality.

Morality is fully itself when its motivated and addresses by the highest example of moral conduct and persons, which is seen in the PW/Jesus Christ symbol. This is then the extremity of the PW at which point its fulfillment in the world takes place when reality (method) and truth are demonstrated by a divine person. When we see images of worshiping at one’s feet or putting something under one’s feet, it is not about “submissiveness” or “taking the place of a learner,” but specifically acknowledging, submitting, and learning that we are to humble ourselves at the point of that word’s moral historical realization instead of speculation, law-keeping, emotion, or autonomous reasoning.

[1] (Fairbairn 1957)

Feet of the Evangelist. (Romans 10:15). Here Isaiah 52:7 is quoted:

Isaiah 52:7 (KJV) How beautiful upon the mountains are the feet of him that bringeth good tidings, that publisheth peace; that bringeth good tidings of good, that publisheth salvation; that saith unto Zion, Thy God reigneth!

The feet are both the moral implications and outworking of the PW, as well as the physical feet of the evangelist who brings these good tidings. That gospel is that Christ has come into the world, as the prophets foretold, on a mission to save by the fulfillment of the PW. The feet are the means by which the PW is transported through the world, carried along by its happy implications which speak of eternal life, fellowship with God, the knowledge of the truth once hidden but now revealed, and also the responsibilities of those believers who count themselves in debt to God for His redemption fo them.

Fell at, Worshiped at, Held (feet). (Mat 15:30, 18:29, 28:9, Mark 5:22, Mr 7:25, Luke 17:16, 8:41, John 11;32, Acts 10:25, Rev 1:17, Rev 3:9, Rev 19:10, 22:8). The fulfillments of Christ are so used, held, and worshiped (treated as of value, worthy). The feet are the connection between the scriptures and the world, the Old Testament promise and the historical fulfillments of Christ who satisfied the law and prophets. These feet are the means of bringing that Word to the people.

Hands, χείρ, זְרוֹעַ

To the Hebrews the hand was considered the wrist (Gen 24:22,30,47; Eze 16:11; 23:42) and fingers (Gen 41:42). Standard Bible dictionaries and encyclopedias typically use such words as “authority,” “power,” and “blessing” to carry the primarily signification of the hand when the laying on of hands is performed. These meanings are of course prosaisms, as has been discussed. The word used in the New Testament, since it is a more specialized prophetic text, powerfully and consistently carries a specialized prophetic connection.

• • At hand (Mat 3:2,10:7, Mat 4:17, Mr 1:15): Now being fulfilled.
  • Beckoning with (Acts 12:17, 13:16). Context shows: the showing/teaching of prophetic promise and fulfillment.
  • Dips hand (Mat 26:23): Enjoins himself as a worker-player in the fulfillment of a prophecy.
  • In His hand (Mat 3:12): That of God which applies a promised judgment
  • Lifted up (Rev 10:6): The time of fulfillment has come (“that there should be time no longer”), in blessing (Luke 24:50).
  • Nailed hands: Attempted immobilization of the power of Messiah to fulfill prophecy/work signs; according to the law, to bind a sacrifice in the manner of typology of Messiah in torture and death.
  • On right/left hand (multiple, esp. OT: Ps 21:8; 89:42; 110:1; 138:7; Isa 62:8; Mt 22:44; Mr 12:36; Heb 1:13; NT see Mat 25:33, 27:38): Condemnation/commendation as per prior prophetic promise.
  • Pluck out of (Joh 10:28. 29): The prophetic promise concerning the believer cannot be reversed or annulled, but must come to pass.
  • Put forth His hand (Mat 8:3, 9:18, 25, Mr 1;31, 41): Applies Messianic signs, which are all symbols of the prophetic word of demonstration.
  • Stretched forth (Mat 12:13, 14:31): Request Messiah to confer teaching, sign-making credentials; the showing/teaching of a Messianic truth.
  • Time at hand (Mat 26:18, 26:45): The time of prophecy is being fulfilled.
  • Withered hand (Mat 12:10): The believer’s inability for or infirmity for teaching, apply evidential Messianic signs.
  • Cut off: Self-inflicted action to remove the exegete’s ability to teach/impart bless/punish if that hand does so without Messianic motivation.

For Chadwick[1] and most others, the traditional meaning for hand is “power,” because without it the arm is of no use, as in “the hand of the Lord was with them, and a great number believed, and turned to the Lord” in Acts 11:21. A casual look at this passage reveals that Peter is recounting the miraculous events leading to the introduction of the gentiles into the church. This shows “hand” is none other than God’s power of prophetic demonstration in Jesus, which is the meaning of his phrase “preaching the Lord Jesus,” by which the conversion of the gentiles subsequently took place. In verse 16 Peter remembers the prophecy of John the Baptist: “John indeed baptized with water; but ye shall be baptized with the Holy Ghost.” This is a prophecy. God gave the vision of the animals on the sheet to Peter as a prophecy of the conversion of the gentiles. Peter clearly identifies what this “hand” of God was: “And he commanded us to preach unto the people, and to testify that it is he which was ordained of God to be the Judge of quick and dead. To him give all the prophets witness, that through his name whosoever believeth in him shall receive remission of sins” (Ac 10:42–43). In 11:1, this is the “word of God” which Jews and Gentiles believed.[2]

The dual character of Christ/PW is seen most powerfully in the prophecy of Isaiah, “who hath believed our report? and to whom is the arm (זְרוֹעַ) of the LORD revealed?” (Isa 53:1.) The arm, or hand of God gives Truth, revelation, to the faithful is both the person of Christ and his Prophetic Word.

This gives light to the whole book of Proverbs, such as in chapter 6 when it speaks of the hand in the negative: “He winketh with his eyes, he speaketh with his feet, he teacheth with his fingers” (Pr 6:13). This “hand” of sinful man is given as an effect of the “sleep” of the fool, which is a prophetic sleep and a sleep to the truth of Messianic fulfillment, into which in latter days the church will fall (Mat 25:5), causing them to misinterpret the overall locus of Scripture in Messianic prophecy and miss Messiah at His coming.

[1] (J. Chadwick 1849)

[2] I have dealt with Cornelius elsewhere, but a few things are now necessary. Most Bible dictionaries that try to establish how much Cornelius knew before his meeting with Peter assume that he knew only the law, the Jewish traditions, the synagogue, and the God of Israel, but it is rare that they theorize as to the extent of his Messianic knowledge Of Jesus, which was well published in Israel and of which he surely could have known. In the major nineteenth-century biblical encyclopedia (McClintock and Strong 1867-1887), we see that he learned of “intelligent Jews, from whom he learned the truths respecting the Messiah, and he seems to have been prepared by a personal knowledge of the external facts of Christianity to welcome the message of Peter as from Devine authority.” Peter’s speech in Acts at the moment of gentile assimilation from Cornelius does not suggest that he knew nothing of these things, but rather that he knew a great deal already. In 10:35 Peter says that those who fear God and work righteousness are accepted by God. We ask what this fear of God produced by what scriptural and historical facts? In verses 36 and 37, addressing Cornelius, Peter says that the word which Jesus preached was published throughout the nation is “that word, I say, ye know.” In verse 39 Peter says, “And we are witnesses of all things which he did both in the land of the Jews, and in Jerusalem; whom they slew and hanged on a tree.” Who he includes in this “we” is not clear. Clarke thinks that “St. Peter may refer, not only to the twelve apostles, but to the six brethren whom he had brought with him.” However, there is nothing in the passage preventing us from assuming that Cornelius might have also been a witness to these events as well. As to a clarification on the meaning of the biblical concepts of “fear of God” and “working righteousness,” Peter says, “Of him give all the prophets witness, that through his name whosoever believeth in him shall receive remission of sins” (Ac 10:43). Another nineteenth-century Bible dictionary (Anonymous, People’s Dictionary of the Bible 1861), gives unintentionally the answer to the question of the type of moral condition and motivation that drove the early Christians, in explanation to how Peter was able to finally understand the meaning of God’s symbol of the sheet and animals: “How often are God’s facts the best expositor’s of our duty.”

Head. κεφαλή, רֹאשׁ. In the OT the word is from “an unused root meaning to shake.” Used in both the OT and NT for the part of the body (Mat 6:7, Lev 8:12), and to indicate chief or captain, the leadership of governments and principalities, of power and authority (Col 2:10, Isa 7:8). It carries an implied signification of “top,” “identity,” “ultimate,” or “superior,”  especially for Christ himself (1 co 11:3, 1 co 11:7, Eph 1:21-22, Col 1:18, Col 2:10). Biblically, however, “head” is never directly implicated in thinking, planning, or reason as in the modern age.[1] Biblically, “head,” is to be generally taken as a superior or dominating carnal or spiritual place of the sovereignty of the body, a synecdoche for the whole of the man’s position and power, rather than a superior or dominating spiritual/mental action.

Most significantly, κεφαλή is used in the messianic prophecy of Psalms 118:22,23, Acts 4:11, Luke 20:17, Mark 12:10 and Matthew 21:42: 

Matthew 21:42 (KJV) Jesus saith unto them, Did ye never read in the scriptures, The stone which the builders rejected, the same is become the head of the corner: this is the Lord’s doing, and it is marvellous in our eyes?

Being the most crucial instance of the word to the whole of the NT revelation of the OT, we may infer that “head” has a superior signification of the ultimate spiritual authority of Messiah Jesus and His Prophetic Word of demonstration: the only single part of the whole of theology which cold be said holding the rest together, but is rejected because of its seemingly small quantitive and qualitative appearance.

[1] “The connotations of the word “heart” in 1st-century use are also not the same in our modern age. For us, the heart is related to affective life. From his heart, man loves or hates, desires or fears. The heart has no part in the intellectual life. The Hebrew uses the heart to indicate a wider range of meaning, including sentiments, but also memories, thoughts, reasoning, and planning.” (Leon-Dufor 1967). Also see (Hastings, Dictionary of the Bible 1963), (McKenzie 1965).

Healed (feet). (Acts 3:7, et. al.). The context is  conversion by prophetic knowledge of the Messiah as an effect of its evangelism: “In the name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth rise up and walk.” The “name of Jesus Christ” is the name of God, which is the name that promises and fulfills. This is identical to our use of one being “a man of his word.” The symbol of spiritual salvation by this Word is miraculous healing of the body, which is a figure for the healing of the spiritual body through faith. The leaping and joy of this healing in the Temple and praising God is by the word that Peter then proclaims in Acts 3:18: “But those things, which God before had shewed by the mouth of all his prophets, that Christ should suffer, he hath so fulfilled.”

The physically healed need not have known this Word for this to be a symbol of faith in that Word. It is meant to represent the prophetic gospel, and in man’s spirit its hearing, its righteous and honest judgment, its acceptance, and its trust as True.

Jesus. Literally, “Yahweh saves.” This name is a prophetic name, fulfilled on the advent of Jesus of Nazareth. Before his coming, “Yahweh saves” is eschatological, salvation promised and set for the future by his agent of salvation. “Messiah,” the anointed, is the ultimate King of the people of salvation, again a sharply prophetic title, thus, “Jesus Christ,” or “Jesus Messiah.”

The designation of this Messiah which will come to save is given explicitly and by implication in the OT and NT as “the Word of God,” since he represents God’s faithfulness to his promise to save. This crystallized in the Targumic period, where the word memra is used liberally in the place fo God’s person and his actions. For example, in the Jerusalem Targum of Genesis 1:27, “And the Word of the Lord created man in His likeness.” In Targum Onkelos of Genesis 3:8: “And they heard the voice of the Word of the Lord God walking in the garden in the evening of the day.”

In the New Testament, John explicitly states in John 1:1: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” “Word of God, the informational equivalent of Jesus Messiah, is consistently given as Messianic Prophecy itself. For example in Luke 3:2: …”the word of God came unto John the son of Zacharias in the wilderness.” Then the Word is speciated:

Luke 3:4-6 (KJV) As it is written in the book of the words of Esaias the prophet, saying, The voice of one crying in the wilderness, Prepare ye the way of the Lord, make his paths straight. Every valley shall be filled, and every mountain and hill shall be brought low; and the crooked shall be made straight, and the rough ways shall be made smooth; And all flesh shall see the salvation of God.

Salvation is then set not only on faith in the Person of this Word but the Father’s Word of prescience and fulfillment itself.

Joined With a Harlot (body). (1 Co 6:16).  The man and woman are in the eyes of God considered one flesh, but particularly the result of their union: the child.  Man is the active principle of fact and reason, the woman is the passive principle of love and experientialism. They combine in love to produce new life. These symbols translate into a PW made up of historical facts that impact the spirit in a penetrating but ineffable way.

If man were to be married to or have relations with a harlot, it is the figure for a union with an experientialism uncontrolled by these facts and without careful thought about them. The woman is indiscriminating in her relations with men except by their ability to carnally profit her. Paul reapplies these as the antithesis to the believer-to-Christ/Holy Spirit, body-to-spirit.

The key to Paul’s warnings to flee the sin of the body is found in 1Co 6:18: “Flee fornication. Every sin that a man doeth is without the body, but he that committeth fornication sinneth against his own body.” Burkitt (1650-1703) remarks: “all other outward sins, as drunkenness, murder, theft, etc. have the body as an instrument for committing them; yet in this sin of uncleanness the body is not only the instrument, but the object also, for the unclean person doth not only sin with his body, but he sins against his body.” However true this is, while keeping the symbol in orbit around bodily sins, Paul obviously means that these sins are symbols of greater sins, and we should be teaching through this that there are greater sins. If when one commits fornication one also sins against his own body, it being both instrument and object, then to sin against the body of the prophetic scriptures is also a sin greater than a sin against any commandments, since it is also both instrument (means of application of the law) and object (quintessential cause of the law). A violation of any commandment is murder or theft, but a violation of the importance and outworking of the prophecies is also a sin against the whole of the scriptures, as fornication. If bodily fornication is an example of quintessential sin, then it is easy to accept that the PW is quintessentially a book of platitudes, stories, moralisms, sayings, religious declarations, and commandments for the behavior of the flesh, and the Messianic prophecies are therefore to be considered only mere addenda for less faithful and hardhearted people as a possible reason (instrument) for accepting Christ, not necessarily faith objects as well.

Laid at (the feet). (Acts 4:35,37, 5:2, 7:58). In Acts 7, the people laid their possessions at the feet of Saul as they stoned Stephen. Saul (Paul) was a persecutor of the church, his feet being a symbol of his evil works. Their laying their clothes at Saul’s feet is a symbol of their trust in his evil intentions, as the laying of our possessions at the feet of the Apostles is about our trust in Christ’s intentions and fulfillments through the Prophetic Word. As Christ’s analog, the righteous feet are those of Stephen.

In this scene, Stephen recalled the prophetic history of Israel and their rejection of that prophetic revelation before his death. This is a fact overlooked by all expositors and doing so renders the sin which murdered him obliquely aligned to any that are transcendent and final. It is a sin of abuse, relegation, dismissal, apathy, and denial of messianic prophecy with respect to Jesus of Nazareth.

The early church sold their items and laid them at the feet of the Apostles (Acts 4:35), which is a gesture to signify belief in Christ and the conclusion of the oracles in Him. One need only note the content of Peter’s speech upon healing the lame man just prior to this event to know what their faith was responding to: Psalms 2:1–6 and 83:2–8. In verse 30, the prophesied healing miracles of the Messiah are mentioned. In verse 29, the preaching of the word is the recitation of the fulfilled prophecies of Christ by miraculous displays.

Lame (feet). (Acts 14:8). The lame foot is one which is incapable, not by choice, of carrying the Good News abroad, or incapable of living one’s life in such a way as to fully carry out this command. The lame walking is, therefore, a figure of giving moral locomotion and obedience to the personalized Prophetic Word of Jesus, giving back the ability to publicize it. The PW lies dormant, humble, even debased and cursed in the eyes of the unbelievers until God breathes on it and it stands it on its feet by the scriptural, Messianic miracle of Jesus Christ, now fulfilled and prepared to carry its good tidings to the world.

Law. The mosaic Law is not training for you to do something, it’s training for you to love through doing something. It’s missing God’s standard, but God’s standard is not a symbol of the standard, its that symbol’s spiritual essence, and meaning.

In that way, it’s a prophetic Law of the spirit.  For mortals, it is made for one’s moral future as an independent and free spirit, to be judged in its performance by inward instead of outward obedience. But for any other, it is a statement that He will in the future come and obey it with perfection. Merging the mortal and immortal future senses, we  render Law as “training of the immature human spirit for the control the body for a religious reason so that it can be fulfilled by one’s honest and moral handling of spiritual Truth pertaining to its perfect, bodily fulfillment by Jesus Messiah.”

After you love what this primitive form of doing was meant for you to love, what was in place for you to do is still done, but it’s not done for achieving that love. It’s done because its a symbol of what is now your love of Truth. It’s binding now not because your father is telling you to do it, it’s only binding in the sense of its a habitual representation of the love that it engendered.

This is exactly the same figure using the body and spirit as a guide.

Resurrection, speaking theoretically, takes your old body and gives you a new body based on the same elements. You still are active in a body, but it’s not the old body, it’s a new one. You are still capable of doing what you did in your old body, but your new one is responsible for the old one only by analogy. If it was said you sinned, sin a sin either by analogy to the old body or by direct correspondence to the laws of the new one.  If to the new one, it’s to an entirely different standard of which the bodily sin signs but does not stand as the kind of essential action by which it is judged. What is judged is the extent to which the sign of the sin accurately reflects the spiritual sin, not the extent to which the primitive sin is sin in itself.

So is the sin which was meant for carnal bodies moving in spatial reality but committed after you are judged responsible for a spiritual body. That is, after salvation by Christ. After you are counted an “adult,” so to speak, which is not set by whether or not you are spiritually mature but by the extent to which there is an ultimate means of Truth for which you are responsible as an adult. This is the truth of the Messianic promise and fulfillment in Jesus of Nazareth. It is possible, and certain, that you will sin like a child after being held responsible for your moral handling of this truth, but if thought an adult by God, you will be judged by the adult standard, a standard equal with the spiritual nature of what you are responsible for.

The only effective sin is now a spiritual one because you are now a person not of stricture and command, but of conscience. If of conscience, spiritual sin is about the moral handling of the highest kind of knowledge that exists to which you are expected to be cognizant, attracted and responsible in handling morally. Sin is a spiritual act of that failure, or righteousness is a spiritual act of its success. This, is not your success, because the means of that success was given to you freely for your conscience by God in the Revelation of Christ. But it is your failure since you are free to deny it.

In both cases, it is sin or righteousness against or with your moral conscience with respect to Christ’s perfect fulfillment of the same Law of the Prophetic Word, which now swallows up the mosaic Law in what it always was: “a schoolmaster to bring us to Christ.” (Galatians 3:24)

 

 

Less Honorable (body). (1 Co 12:23). Speaking of the spiritual gifts of the individual and corporate spiritual body must also be taken as a message about what parts of the prophetic word appear less honorable or important, but are in fact all include as having a value to God: “And there are diversities of operations, but it is the same God which worketh all in all. But the manifestation of the Spirit is given to every man to profit withal“ (1Co 12:6–7). That is, minimally, the corpus of the Prophetic Word of Jesus has many metaphorical members, such as the Proverbs, Esther, the genealogies, and many obscure passages, but they all serve their own prophetic purpose for the entire revelation which works together as one. This interpretation is never given explicitly but is strongly implied. This figure of the Word then works itself out into corresponding spiritual gifts within the body of the believer. Since this Body of Christ the body of the Prophetic Word, the gifts are not gifts for personal power, self-aggrandizement or happiness, but for the specific advancement of the power of that prophetic body as it moves through the world.

Messianic Prophecy. The vital center of the Bible, Christian theology, faith, and practice. Messianic prophecy is that particular oracular stream running through the Old Testament by God’s future promises and the New Testament as God’s historical fulfillments of those promises. By this phenomena, for the first time in history, the world was given an objective, demonstrable, exposable means by which it can know with reasonable certainty that a God exists, who this God is, and what is his nature and plan for mankind. This is the “informational entity” of Christ Jesus of Nazareth, which was set by the Holy Spirit to remain in the place of his physical presence until he comes in parousia. Without this testimony of the prophets, there are no mediatory means of knowing God, no valid faith in Him and no salvation by Him to be expected, and it represents the sole abstract “door” through which any conception of God can be righteously formed.

Nailed to the Cross (hands, feet). Christ was nailed by His hands and feet. This, and the general abuse heaped upon Messiah, is an Old Testament prophecy of the Messiah when he comes:

Psalms 22:16; Zechariah 12:10; Isaiah 53:1, 3, 10; Micah 5:1-2.

He was thereby bound to fulfill the prophecies, bound to the promises (PW) which the cross signified. His points of binding are the hands and feet because, for the wicked, this immobilizes the ability of the agent in his ability to change faith and carry that change to the world, and renders him at the mercy of circumstances. But to the Man and God of the PW (Christ), it a display of the highest possible act of compliant fulfillment of a prophecy, since the PW, in being abused and temporarily slain, was a part of Him, being prophesied by God. That the highest possible fulfillment of a prophecy of redemption can take place in a predicted resurrection.

There is an unbreakable bond of death for all except the prophetic Word of God, which must be fulfilled (Ps 16:10; Ac 2:27; 13:35). Carnal bodies and carnal spirits do not fulfill but die.

When the PW is so bound, the moral walk (feet), and wise teaching or impartation of grace (hands) is immobilized, but when the PW is bound it is also bound to realize a great and final promise, for nothing can prevent God’s Word from coming true. The prophetic scriptures will seem to the wicked extinguished with Christ’s death, but will be vindicated as true one last time as this embodiment of the PW is raised from the dead as the prophets foretold.

Pillars of Brass (legs, feet). (Rev 1:15, 2:18, Rev 10:1). Brass is the metal of permanence, strength, and impermeability, and as such, feet of brass are feet which are strong, sure, and firmly planted to stand for the realization of the Prophetic Word. They realize the will of God, both in Messiah as fulfilling prophecy and the believer ministering to the saints of the fact and consequences of the truth of that fulfillment.

Prolepsis. Literally “flash-forward,” prolepsis is the anticipation of a thing before it appears, applied biblically as speech which tells of things as if they exist when they do not as yet, as with Paul of speaking of God in Romans 4:17; “whom [Abraham] believed–the God who gives life to the dead and calls things that are not as though they were.”

This anticipatory, prophetic speech was typified in Luke 22:19–20; Matthew 26:26–28; Mark 14:22–24; 1 Corinthians 11:23–25: “This is my body, which is broken for you. Do this in remembrance of me…” The present tense is used for a future event as if it had already been fulfilled. This is a great insight into a hermeneutical corruption from the refusal to allow the prophetic principle to determine overarching meaning. Christ is here not giving a religious rite for his remembrance and forgiveness of sin or is about remembrance of objects, events, and persons, but the prophetic revelation of himself and its particular faith for his remembrance and the forgiveness of a sin of through him.

Prophetic. Not used here as a general term for a claim of God by historical fulfillment of a prediction, but of Messianic Prophecy itself. There are no prophetic phenomena outside of this, only naive wish-casting and pareidolia of correspondence. “Prophetic” is the Word of God forecasting the future, fused with its demonstrable historical fulfillment. This and only this phenomena is capable, short of God’s personal appearance, of confirming the existence and nature of any supernatural entity, and is, therefore, the basis for all of Christian theology, faith, practice, and its hope.

Put off Shoes From (feet). (Acts 7:33, Ex 3:5): “Then said the Lord to him, Put off thy shoes from thy feet: for the place where thou standest is holy ground.” It is crucial to note the scriptural stream in the passage, which is God prophesying that He will bring the children of Israel out of Egypt. That is, let no artificial covering, no unauthentic faith, no humanly produced religious motivation or means, come between the believer and the source of the real and ordained transcendent kinds. Nothing artificial will come between man’s moral demeanor and God’s, demonstrated by his Word, or what God promises and fulfills.

The shoe is the artificial exegetical, theological, philosophical, doctrinal covering, or anything man busies himself with of Scripture which is not that prophetic utterance itself. The same figure is used in Genesis 3 with fig leaves, the requirement of the Nazarite not to shave the head, and the natural unhewn stone leading up to the altar of sacrifice.

PW. Acronym for “Prophetic Word.” That is, the supernatural, scriptural phenomenon of the Messianic Prophecy of Jesus of Nazareth promised in the OT and fulfilled in the NT. see Messianic Prophecy.

Redurrected (body). The antithesis to this is the following:

Vile Body, Broken Body, Body Cast into Hell.

 

Serpent, snake. The first thing we notice about serpent symbolism in the Bible is that, although there is much linking it to evil and Satan, there is also a great deal biblically that led the ancients to consider it as something good.

There are several principal words used in the Bible for serpent: ophis, tanniyn, seraph, and nachash.

Ophis, ὄφις. The Greek word.

The Hebrew has these:

Tanniyn, תַּנִּין

The word is first used in Genesis 1:21, then in Job 7:12 and Ezekiel 32:2 for what the KJV translates as “whales.” It is frequently used in the KJV for the word “dragon,” meaning generally a large and fearsome creature. As for “serpent,” this application comes primarily from the context of Exodus 7, where we find Moses and Aaron proving the power of God over the power of the Egyptian gods by his staff transforming into a tanniyn and swallowing the magicians’ serpents—thus Moses’ good serpent destroyed paganism’s evil serpents.

Some commentators think that the tanniyn was more like a crocodile in this scene, but Moses probably had more “fearsome” than “large” In mind. The translation of this as “serpent” seems much more reasonable since the staff that became a serpent has a form close to that of a serpent, there is a frequent association in Egyptian mythology and art of the staff with the serpent, and there is a clear association with another form of the staff used with a serpent, the ensign pole, used by Moses to hang the brazen serpent in Numbers 21.

Most importantly for our study is the fact that when we pay careful attention to the contest of Moses and the magicians in Genesis, we see that Moses describes not one animal devouring another, but one “rod” devouring another: “For they cast down every man his rod, and they became serpents: but Aaron’s rod swallowed up their rods.” Most commentators fail to note anything remarkable here, but obviously Moses observes the serpent symbolism in parallel with the rod symbolism. Rods swallowing other rods? Does “serpent” symbolize “rod,” or “authority,” or does “rod” symbolize “serpent,” or “evil”? Remember, we are going through this under the assumption that a concept like “power” as the symbolic meaning of the rod is too general; it says nothing about what particular kind of power we might assume God was most interested in representing Himself in the faith of the children of Israel. We will resolve this riddle when I comment on the meaning of the rod symbol.

Seraph (שָׂרָף)

Strong’s Hebrew Dictionary says its primary meanings are serpent, fiery, burning, and poison. It is used in Genesis 11:3 for the word “burn” in reference to baking bricks. In Genesis 38:24, Judah used it in his description of Tamar as harlotry, when he ordered her to be “burnt.” Throughout the Pentateuch, it is used frequently for “burnt” and “burn” in reference to the preparation of the sacrifice. Also, the ministering angels around God’s throne in Isaiah 6:2, 6 are called the plural seraphim. This might indicate the bright appearance of the angels, but I believe it suggests the particular ministerial function of these angels to purge uncleanness from prophets by fire, so that the prophet may speak clearly God’s word, as the seraph is described as taking a coal from the altar and touching Isaiah’s lips.

In Isaiah 14:29 and 30:6, seraph is used twice to indicate a fiery (seraph) flying serpent (seraph).

For our particular interest, seraph is used interchangeably in Numbers 21 with the other word meaning snake

Nachash, נָחָשׁ,  from the root Nhsh.

There are several words that are derivatives of this primitive root word used in the OT:

• nahēt, meaning to penetrate, go down, descend
• n^e hōshet, lust, harlotry, found in Ezekiel 16:36. Elsewhere, copper, bronze, brass, brazen, bright, shining.
• nāhash, divination
• nāhāsh, snake

Nehushtan, phonetically n^ehushtān. The only instance that occurs in the Bible is in 2 Kings 18:4[1]

N^e hōshet and n^e hūshā mean brazen, brass, bronze. N^e hōshet and n^e hūshā occur 140 times. This is the word for copper, bronze, brass or brazen, fiery or bright. This is used for a thing and the appearance of a thing and a corresponding moral quality.

The metaphorical use of the word is our concern here. We can sum this up wonderfully by quoting James A. Patch in the ISBE:

“Brass,” naturally, is used in Scripture as the symbol of what is firm, strong, lasting; hence, “gates of brass” (Ps 107:16) [negative. Probably referring to Babylon’s pagan strength, God has broken it], “hoofs of brass” (Mic 4:13) [positive, Holy strength], “walls of brass” (Jeremiah is made as a “brazen wall,” Jer 1:18; 15:20) [positive, righteous steadfastness], “mountains of brass” (Da 2:35, the Macedonian empire; the arms of ancient times were mostly of bronze) [neutral, descriptive of power]. It becomes a symbol, therefore, of hardness, obstinacy, insensibility, in sin, as “brow of brass” (Isa 48:4) [sin, negative]; “they are brass and iron” (Jer 6:28, of the wicked) [negative, sinful stubbornness]; “all of them are brass” (Eze 22:18, of Israel)[ negative, sin].

Nāhash, divination

We must keep in mind that the original Hebrew had only 22 consonants and no vowels. The Massorites in the Middle Ages added vowels and vowel pointing to distinguish between Hebrew words that were identical but used for completely different things.

This is probably nowhere more true when we realize that among the four words above the Hebrew word nhsh, the root of them all, is identical for “snake” as it is for “divination.” When they uttered “snake” they also uttered “diviner” or “divination,” only the context determining its meaning. In English we do the same thing. The word “poke” means both to jab someone with something and to travel slowly. We know the difference by the context in which it is used. If we were studying English 2,000 years later, after it passed out of existence, and without any dictionaries to tell us what words mean, we don’t conclude a vital connection between the two concepts just because they are represented by the same word. However, because they are the same word we must assume it is a good possibility. It can be shown by context that “poke” has a completely different meaning according to context. But for a word like “rabbit,” which means a certain animal and its quick running speed, the vital connection is apparent by context and apparent connections: “You are a rabbit!” obviously means speed, not an animal, because everyone knows that people are not animals but can possess the quickness of a rabbit.

Now, as for snake and divination, we are not so fortunate to rely either upon context or apparent connections. If there is a vital connection between snake and divination, which we hold as a distinct possibility because of the identical word, we know that there is going to be some vital connections between two dissimilar things that were perhaps clear to an ancient culture that are not obvious to us. If the Hebrews were able to study twenty-first-century English, “pig” might be known easily to mean “filthy” because that would resonate with them as well. Also by context, they would know one thing is like the other if the context is about sexual impertinence. But if “pig” were used to be equivalent to male “chauvinism,” this would not jump out at you in the context, and would be extremely difficult for them to grasp given that culture’s respect for males and without some knowledge of the historical setting of the women’s movement.

Therefore, if there is a vital connection between snake and divination to the Hebrews that the same word might suggest, we use context and history, and set aside our cultural and theological biases.

Divination as an Evil

This leads us into a discussion of divination and its relation to the serpent. We find that, like the serpent, it is a good thing and a bad thing.

We know full well about the evil side. 1 Kings 11:7 says that Solomon built a high place before Jerusalem for the worship of Molech (presumably on the Mount of Olives). In reference to King Manasseh, 2 Kings 21:6 says he made his son pass through the fire, and observed times, used enchantments, and dealt with familiar spirits and wizards: “He wrought much wickedness in the sight of the LORD, to provoke him to anger.”

But there is another, good form of divination, just as we find a concept of the good serpent in Scripture:

Arrows [A3] (belomancy, rhabdomancy) were apparently widespread in Mesopotamia and used by the ancient Arabs to divine hidden wisdom, a practice that Mohammed allegedly prohibited.

The cup (scyphomancy) and water (hydromantia). This refers to water gazing (Assyrians, Chaldeans, and Egyptians). Kittos mentions that this was more prevalent in the east. Examples are the Persian cup of Jimshid, and Nestor’s cup (from Homer), and many accounts and legends, as late as Tippo Saib in India against the British, who is said to have consulted the cup during the heat of battle, and then suddenly rush out into the fray to meet his death.

Dreams (esp. Egypt) and their interpretations are rife in ancient literature. I mention Tummuz, Gilgamesh and Enkidu, Kessi the Hunter in Hittite literature, the dream of Xerxes, and Gudea.

The staff (rhabdomancy: the Egyptian sorcerers,) I will detail shortly.

Foretelling and forthtelling, called prophecy. Among the pagans there are too many examples to mention. It was present in Canaan and shown by  Balaam before the Hebrews entered the land.

The pagans added many others, including hepatoscopy[A4] , divination by the liver, by smoke, clouds, and birds (augury). This is hardly an attempt at a comprehensive list.

The AV has enchanter for Nāhash among a fairly comprehensive list of sins of the same kind, as described in Deuteronomy 18:10–11:

“There shall not be found among you any one that maketh his son or his daughter to pass through the fire, or that useth divination (qecem), or an observer of times (`anan), or an enchanter (nachash), or a witch (kashaph), Or a charmer (khaw-bar), or a consulter with familiar spirits (‘owb), or a wizard (yiddehonee‘), or a necromancer (combination of daw-rash‘, consulter, and mooth, kill or die).”

Some scholars believe that this is a technical list of specialized methods of divination. Others believe that these are synonyms.[2] I am certain, however, that there is a lot of obscurity to these terms.

Causing one’s children to pass through the fire is Molech worship, probably to induce the god to answer an important prayer. Scholars are divided as to the etymology of the name “Molech.”[3] Some give it the meaning “king”; others say it refers to a certain god or religion of Canaan. Many scholars make it synonymous with Chemosh, Ba’al, and many other names among the Moabites, Edomites, and Amorites. What is important here is that there is no conception of ancient pagan religion without divination, and, is often accompanied by sexual sin or blood sacrifice.

The “observer of times” literally means “to cover,” or use covert arts. “Witch” might be “one who pretended to cure diseases or to procure some desired result, by means of nostrums and philtres” (quackery). “Charmer” is one who casts spells. “Wizard” means “knowing one” or “wise one.” Necromancers are those who call up the dead.[4]

The two I left out are the enchanter and the consulter of familiar spirits.

Enchanter is literally those consonants nhsh, the word used for the “general term descriptive of the various illusionary arts anciently practiced for the discovery of things secret or future.”[5] It does not seem likely that this is not used here as a technical term for ophiomancy of some sort, which is divination by serpents, since the word is literally “serpent.” Ophiomancy was snake charming and divination by snakes through watching their movements and otherwise using them as oracles. It is well known that the serpent was regarded as a divine source of wisdom.

Interesting about this word owb is that it is an Egyptian derivation for the word for female serpent.[6] In fact, the very mainstream Pulpit Commentary notes that the word means “one who asks or inquires of an Ob,” that is, a python or divining spirit. The witch of Endor that Saul consulted in 1 Samuel 28:7 is literally a “serpent woman.”

I point these out only to stress the prominence that the Hebrews gave the snake in their conception of divination. It might be reasonable to assume that if one animal emblem were used to signify divination, it would have been the serpent. Given that divination definitely has a bad side to the Hebrews, is there any evidence that divination, and therefore the serpent as a symbol of divination, has a good side to them?

To the conservative biblical reader, this idea of divination being a good thing may already be off-limits because of the above information. But we must remember that divination the idea is different from divination the usual practice. The purest form of divination is prophecy through the prophet, and this office and method of communication with God are not biblically presented as optional to the life of faith for the nation of Israel. The idea of prophecy is at the root of all these divinatory practices—something man does and is done to Man in the discovery and promulgation of the secret knowledge of God. We know that false prophecy and the prophetic were part of a divinatory sin, but certainly not prophecy and the prophets of Israel.

Having established that the Hebrews were probably not using the words divination and serpent in mutually exclusive ways, but that when they thought “serpent” they thought divination and when they said “divination” they were likely to think of the serpent, this would so far only suggest that they might have thought of them as metonymies of something negative, and then something negative only in a general sense of divination. But did they consider an aspect of divination as something good, and would it be reasonable for us to assume that when they thought of divination they thought of it in its purest representational form, such as the prophetic?

To see if they perhaps thought of the serpent concept as also having a good divinatory application in its purest form, we now must see if divination contains a good side for the Hebrews.

Divination as a Good

The TWOT[7] has divination as: “Lean by experience, diligently observe, divine, practice divination or fortunetelling, take as an omen.”

The Webster’s of 1828 seems to have a good definition of divination: “Foretelling future events, or discovering things secret by the aid of superior beings, or other than human means.”

David. E. Aune makes the crucial distinction between magic and divination here. Magic does not necessarily presuppose God or a pantheon of deities. Divination does. Divination seeks to discover the future, while magic seeks to influence the future or manipulate it. Divinations “presuppose a form of cosmic harmony whereby the divine elements and aspects of the material and spiritual universe form an interrelated whole.” The divination approved by that Bible is accepted because of the doctrine of God that sees Him as sovereign in the affairs of men and nature.[8]

In fact, we find biblical characters using several forms of divination without any hint of sin.

In Genesis 30:27, Laban tells Jacob that she has “learned by experience” (נִחַ֕שְׁתִּי ) that God has blessed her for his sake. “Learned by experience” is a way for the translator to avoid the obvious meaning of Nāhash here, (the same word used for the serpent of Genesis 3;1), which would in context mean that she learned by a form of divination, probably omens.

In Genesis 44:5, Jacob tells his steward to accuse his brothers of stealing his silver cup by saying, “Is not this it in which my lord drinketh, and whereby indeed he divineth (nāhash)?” In v. 15, Jacob addressed the men who have been brought back: “What deed is this that ye have done? wot ye not that such a man as I can certainly divine (nāhash)?” He speaks as a diviner of hidden truths by the cup. This is hydromancy, the art of divining by gazing into water.

Of all the places in the Hebrew text where we find Nāhash, these are the only ones where examples are given of it being practiced by certain individuals. All other occurrences mention it in a list of divining sins or use it in a neutral way.

The lot was used as a sanctioned form of divination. In fact, the Ummim and Thummin, which mean “lights and perfections,” and as far as we can tell, two stones on the breastplate of the High Priest. To know the will of God through either of them was done through posing questions, with one or the other stone presumably changing color in answer. This is mentioned as one of three ways Saul was expected to be answered by God in 1 Samuel 28:6—dreams, prophets, or Urim. It is obvious that in Judges 1:2 and 20:18 the Thummin and Urim were being consulted.

The lot was used outside the Urim and Thummin as well. In Joshua 14:12 the lot was used to divide the Promised Land by tribe.

In Proverbs 16:33, Solomon says, “The lot is cast into the lap; but the whole disposing thereof is of the LORD.” Solomon had ample opportunity to condemn this form of divination, yet he obviously thought that it was not the form of divination that was most important, but what God spoke through it.

Elisha told Joash to shoot arrows as a sign of his faith in victory over the Syrians in 2 Kings 13:17. He shot three arrows, and Elisha rebuked him for not shooting more, as now he would only have three victories.

In Deuteronomy 18, we have the famous passage where God declares His list of divination sins and immediately gives Israel His approved replacement for them: prophecy and His appointed prophet:

Deuteronomy 18:14–16: “For these nations, which thou shalt possess, hearkened unto observers of times, and unto diviners: but as for thee, the LORD thy God hath not suffered thee so to do. The LORD thy God will raise up unto thee a Prophet from the midst of thee, of thy brethren, like unto me; unto him ye shall hearken; According to all that thou desiredst of the LORD thy God in Horeb in the day of the assembly, saying, Let me not hear again the voice of the LORD my God, neither let me see this great fire any more, that I die not.”

If divination is a method of discerning the will of the divine, God is converting a false form of divination, for false deities, to a good form of divination, ending in the ultimate revelation of God in the Messiah.

It is also interesting that Daniel, for his skill in dream interpretation, was put in charge of all the sorcerers and magicians of Babylon. A strange thing if God did not intend to convert pagan divination into divine divination.

We also see this connection taking place with Balaam, the pagan prophet for hire.

In Deuteronomy 24:1, the Bible says that Balaam saw that God was going to bless the children of Israel, and he, therefore, did not go to seek enchantments concerning them, but “set his face toward the wilderness” to view their encampment. The spirit of the Lord then came upon him. In v. 3, his “eyes are opened” and he prophesied.

In 23:3, Balaam says to Balak: “Surely there is no enchantment against Jacob, neither is there any divination against Israel: according to this time it shall be said of Jacob and of Israel, What hath God wrought!” This is good divination, a prophecy from God, from the mouth of a converted pagan prophet. It is therefore not divination that God condemns, but unsanctioned divination and prophecy.

We see the same in God’s command to prohibit the making of images in Exodus 20:4–5. God commanded the making of the cherubim over the Ark of the Covenant. He commanded the making and erecting of the brazen serpent. In fact, all the furniture of the ceremonial law was accounted for in Exodus 25:40: And look that thou make them after their pattern, which was shewed thee in the mount. The word for “pattern” is the same word (tab-neeth) used in Deuteronomy 14:16–18 for idols (male or female, bird, fish).

In Deuteronomy 18:10, God wards against the sin of false divination. In 1 Samuel 15:23, Samuel rebukes Saul for disobeying the Word of the Lord, and calls this the same as the sin not of divination, but of false and prohibited divination. Given that Samuel was God’s diviner, his ministry as a prophet was, therefore, delivering good, true prophetic utterances to Israel, and the “Word of the Lord” is always a divine command with a foretelling of events. This sin of divination is a sin equivalent to false prophecy. Jeremiah 14:4 uses the word again as a lying prophetic vision but does not, of course, condemn prophetic vision in general. The same is in Ezekiel 13:6,23 and 21:21, which is a condemnation of false divination or prophecy by various means.

It is God’s prophetic form of divination that is our focus, which is quite different from pagan prophecy.

Prophecy and prophetism were not new to the Hebrews. “All of the extra-biblical evidence indicates that prophetic activity existence elsewhere in the ancient near east both before and during the biblical period, and some scholars have therefore suggested that prophecy originated on the periphery of the Mesopotamia, in Canaan, or even in Egypt…” [9]

Whether or not it was a cultural inheritance from other nations is unimportant. We find God constantly using culture, as much as He would use the present language and not speak in a difficult or unintelligible one, as a means of communicating eternal things, things that are crucial. There are, however, sharp distinctions to be made.

“In contrast to foreign prophecies, divination was not an approved method of prophetic communication in Israel, and the prophet’s function was not focused on preserving or supporting cultic and royal institutions. Foreign prophecies did not use God’s holiness and justice as their criteria for measuring society; nor was Israel’s privileged covenant relationship with God paralleled in other Nations.”[10]

Henry Wace adds that “the experience of the Jews is in this respect unique. Other nations had great hopes in the future and have indulged in visions of a great destiny, at least for a time. But no other nation had its whole existence and its whole career based upon a specific promise, which enabled in compelled it to look forward to a definite destiny.”[11] Most importantly, “Jewish and Christian prophecies carry with it the evident marks of its validity.”[12] One boils down to incidental fluff, the other reaching far past its own time, its many and all too evident fulfillments changing the world.

Of the many forms of divination, we must keep in mind that the prophetic-type prophecy and the prophet lies at the heart of the basic concept. The prophet is the one who divines, and the information obtained is prophetic. The purest form of prophet is ordained by God alone, where his ordination or the ordination of the founding prophet in his line of prophetism accompanies miraculous signs. The purest method of the prophet is that without the aid of a device or an outward sign or talisman, but divine information is placed directly into the mind of man or man is directly visited by God Himself or His messenger. The purest form of prophecy as information are those which are not of a practical or selfish application, pertain to spiritual mysteries, become historically, verifiably fulfilled, and especially those which become fulfilled hundreds of years after its pronouncement in a miraculous way.[13]

I must also point out that not only is the prophetic the root concept in divination, but knowledge (of the divine). Knowledge is neither good nor bad, and neither of these judgments come immediately to mind when we think of the concept. If we were to think of “knowledge” in a specific context, such as in a religious one, we are obliged to think of good and bad religious knowledge. If we spend any time thinking about it further, it can then split again into, for example, good or bad religious knowledge represented by a certain type or fact. The word symbol “knowledge” and its general concept do not change, but its signification has split.

Given that “serpent” may have denoted a general conception of divination, much like the word itself, we have reason to believe so far that “serpent” may have indicated in the minds of the Hebrews both good and bad divination, particularly of knowledge through the prophetic type. What seals the deal is if the serpent might have had not only the denotation of good or bad prophetic divination but good or bad knowledge or wisdom. Then we have a symbol that is more three-dimensional, that can be used to represent not only wrong and right practice and office of religious knowledge, but a precise bad or good fact of religious knowledge.

Nāhāsh, Snake, Serpent

What did the animal “serpent” denote?

The word Nāhāsh for serpent is first simply a general one for snake, venomous or non-venomous.

This word occurs 31 times in the Bible and is prominent theologically; the church has given it much more attention than the other two words. Much of our moral discernment, however, is probably influenced more by a personal, visceral revulsion at the sight or thought of a snake, not its plain biblical symbolism, which is something bad as well as good. The reality of the serpent is often not in accord with the reality of the serpent in biblical symbolism either. In reality, there are far more harmless species of snake than there are poisonous. It is also a fact that serpents, in general, do far more good for humanity than they do bad, as snakes eat all kinds of vermin that would overrun us without their help. I make the point in a previous book that the indiscriminate killing of any snake on sight actually increases the chance of someone being bitten by a poisonous snake in regions where the two are present. Since many non-poisonous snakes prey upon poisonous ones, and there are far more species and numbers of non-poisonous snakes, chances are you are killing a harmless one, meaning that a major predator of the dangerous species is being removed[A5].

Genesis 3 is the first mention of a serpent with a corresponding sentient and moral character. This is our first clue to its symbolism as knowledge to the Hebrews, making it apparent that they had a more realistic idea of the serpent than we do, as well as a more realistic and theologically accurate view of knowledge than we do.

“Serpent” in Genesis is a symbol for Satan[14] in disguise, or simply a representation for a lying beast that is like Satan. That is, the serpent is the symbol of a person who acts with intelligence but immorally applied knowledge. In Genesis, this serpent is conventionally a negative image to remain throughout the Bible for both the serpent and its moral signification, especially in any respect to knowledge, but it does not work out that way.

This Serpent in Genesis 3:1, the Nāhash, is taken among some scholars an upright, intelligent being similar to a human, such as with Dr. Michale Heiser. He points out that the word merely describes the being as a “shining one.” In Isaiah 14: 12-15, Satan is called “the shining one, Son of the Dawn.” Divine beings are described elsewhere in the OT as shining, as in Daniel 10.[15]

Of course, this is just another example of how difficult it is to deny all of the plain meanings of the appearance of the Nāhash that are at play in the Hebrew conception of the serpent, at least for innuendo and wordplay. More certainly, it stresses the convertibility of good and bad for “shining” as applied to divine beings. This takes care of the appearance of the Nāhash. What can we also gather about a possibly exchangeable idea of knowledge that occupies the spirit of the Nāhash?

The Nāhash is described as also “subtil” (aw-room). The word is used in the KJV for “crafty” in the negative sense in Job 5:12 and 15:5. It is also translated as the effect of prudence, in Proverbs 12:16, for example: “A fool’s wrath is presently known: but a prudent man covereth shame.” The wisdom of the prudent is to understand his way, but the folly of fools is deceit. In 13:6, Solomon says the prudent man is one who deals in knowledge of the good kind, but the foolish one deals in deceit. In 14:18, he says again the prudent are “crowned with knowledge.” The idea of this cunning and prudence, or subtlety, is an intelligence in the use of knowledge for the purpose of obtaining by some form of stealth the desired end.

We, therefore, have many more verses in the positive than in the negative for aw-room. It is the word for intelligence, knowledgeableness, and wisdom. Why Strong’s Hebrew Dictionary says it is usually in the bad sense we can only wonder. Of course, in the context of Genesis 3:1, it certainly refers to the bad kind as associated with the serpent, but is this consistent throughout the Bible?

The “prudent” thing for us to do is expect the serpent to be portrayed both negatively and positively in Scripture as a symbol of a minister of good knowledge or bad knowledge—good knowledge being that transcendent and from God, bad knowledge from Satan or only of the natural reason or world.

We all know that nāhāsh, as a certain animal, is overwhelmingly a bad thing biblically and we don’t have to prove this point. It is only necessary to show the times when this does not always apply to the serpent when its character is mentioned.

In Genesis 49:17, Jacob prophesies that Dan will be a serpent by the way, an adder in the path, that biteth the horse heels, so that his rider shall fall backward. Matthew Poole represents most expositors on this as ascribing a positive characteristic of Dan in the future. He notes the subtlety of that tribe, which should conquer their enemies more by craft and cunning than by strength or force of arms.

In Exodus 4:3 and 7:15, Nāhāsh is the serpent that God made of Moses’ staff.

Job 26:13 has it as one of the animals God made, the “crooked serpent.” The Hebrew word for crooked is bariyach, which means “fugitive” or “fleeing.” It is here just another swift animal that God created.

In Isaiah 14:4 we have: “Rejoice not thou, whole Palestina, because the rod of him that smote thee is broken: for out of the serpent’s root shall come forth a cockatrice and his fruit shall be a fiery flying serpent.” This serpent is almost unanimously said to refer to King Uzziah.

Christ explicitly ascribes a good sense to the serpent in respect to knowledge when He says in Matthew 10:16 to be “wise as serpents and harmless as doves.” This is a strange expression for a people who considered the serpent the emblem only of evil or bad religious knowledge.

Most importantly, in Numbers 21 nāhāsh were biting the people and nāhāsh was the image that Moses made that the people were to look to for healing. This is here both for evil and Christ, as Jesus explicitly says in John 3:14, “as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, even so must the Son of man be lifted up.”

In antiquity, the serpent was regarded as a general symbol for divine wisdom. We have to understand that although is hard for us to separate the object from the law, or the serpent from a certain theologically advantageous signification, it is not hard to see that the Jews, and God, borrowed the serpent imagery from the local culture, which stood for the good and the bad, and applied it to their own use.

We see this first with the Egyptians, which was Moses’ heritage. Acts 7:22 says that Moses was learned in all the wisdom of the Egyptians. The word Sophia is used for higher or lower, natural or spiritual wisdom. In context, we can assume that Phillip was referring to Egyptian religious/spiritual wisdom.

All of the pharaohs of Egypt wore the Ureaus, the crown of the unification of upper and lower Egypt. On the crown was the serpent goddess Wadjet, literally “the green one.” She represented resurrection, life, and health, particularly of plant life. Also called “the eye of Re,” Wadjet spat fire at attackers and guarded the crops and the tombs.[16]

Apap was the evil serpent, the devourer of souls. Apap (Apophis) daily attacks the boat of Re, which he seeks to overturn as the sun passes over the heavens. Re’s companion was the good serpent Mehen, who attacks and slays Apap daily.

The serpent is the symbol of the Knowledge of Good and Evil at the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil in Genesis. Rene Guenon and Angus Macnab make these comments:

“The serpent is most commonly associated with the ‘Tree of Knowledge,’ in which case it is regarded under its maleficent aspect: in fact symbols often have two opposed meanings, as had been shown elsewhere. The serpent that represents life must not be confused with the one representing death, nor the serpent that is a symbol of Christ with the one symbolizing Satan. It may be added that the relationship of these two contrary aspects is not without a certain likeness to that of the ‘tree of Life’ and the Tree of Knowledge.”’[17]

Animals when used in a moral sense are always symbols for people, both good and bad.

Any animal symbol that will be chosen to stand for a sentient trait will be chosen because of its behaviorally or morphological qualities that resemble a sentient or divine trait. The serpent sheds its skin, which is analogous to resurrection. It flies gracefully along the ground without legs, like the heavenly host. It waits patiently and intelligently in a strategic location for its prey. Most snake species need only eat once per year, appearing more independent of its body as the angels On the other hand, the poisonous species bite and can kill people. It appears reclusive and secretive, like Satan. It signifies both quite easily. Our focus is to uncover the biblical context in each instance.

[1] (Harris, Archer and Waltke 1980)

[2]“The variety of OT words used for “divination,” together with the inconsistent ways in which modern versions translate these terms, indicates that the Hebrew terms are essentially synonyms and not descriptive forms or aspects of the practice of divination in ancient Israel.” IIBE, Bromley.

[3] The rabbis (Rashi) tell that Molech was represented as a brazen calf with outstretched arms. A fire would be lit under it and the worshipers gave their children as offerings to the god by placing it in the red-hot arms. Many have surmised that Molech was the equivalent of Saturn, who devoured his children. Tertullian (Chapter 9, Apology) says that there was a cult of Saturn in Africa that the Roman army put down. It seems that this type of religion was too much even for the Romans.

[4] (Spence and Excell 1950)

[5] (Kitto, A Cyclopaedia of Biblical Literature 1870) See the original, two-volume edition under “divination.”

[6] (Howey 1900)

[7] (Harris, Archer and Waltke 1980)

[8] (D. Aune 1983)

[9] (Wilson 1996)

[10] (G. V. Smith 1986)

[11] (Wace 1911)

[12] (Buck 1851, 491)

[13] I might also add that the difference between pagan and Hebrew religions is that the pagan religions built divination and the diviner on their religion and the Hebrew religion built their religion on prophecy and the prophet. Not simply the claim of the miraculous, but that which is dependent upon its historical presence; not of the pagan divinatory type but of the pure Hebrew prophetic type. Lord Bolingbrooke made the point that “the miracles of the Bible are not like those in Livy [the Roman historian], dethatched pieces, that do not disturb the civil history, which goes on very well without them. But the miracles of the Jewish Historian are intimately connected with all the civil affairs, and make a necessary and inseparable part. The whole history is founded on them; it consists of little else; and if it were not a history of them, it would be a history of nothing” (brackets mine). The argument was that only civil evidence of history of Israel can be brought in as evidence for the truth of the whole revelation because it is impossible for us to bring in a witness of Moses’ possible impostures in these miracles. Wharburton counters that Israel, as opposed to the pagans, built their religion on the divination of prophecy, not their divination on their religion. Since the pagans built only on rubbish, the only thing that was left of it to the world’s posterity was now and then only a shire or temple. (Wharburton 1811, 19, 48)

[14] Hastings’ Religion and Ethics says the following on the serpent’s connection with Satan: “The connection of the serpent with the devil is nowhere hinted at in the OT, but appears first in the Wis 2:24, and was a rabbinic conception, with profound influence upon Christian and Gnostic thought. The idea of a chaotic force, personified – e.g., as a dragon (Tiamat) – hostile to creative divinities, was more or less combined with this.” (Hastings, Encyclopedia of Religion and Ethics 1955)

[15] See his PDF file The Nachash and his Seed at http://www.scribd.com/doc/3972311/Serpent-Seed-Dr-Michael-S-Heiser.

[16] (Lurker, Cummings and Clayton 1986)

[17] (Macnab and Guénon 2001, 57)

Sheep. προβατον. Universally, in the NT and OT (Isa 53), as a prophetic type of Christ and the believer in His PW: Mt 7:15; 9:36; 10:6,16; 12:11–12; 15:24; 18:12–13; 25:32–33; 26:31; Mr 6:34; 14:27; Lu 15:4,6; Joh 2:14–15; 5:2; 10:2–4,7-8,11–16,26–27; 21:16–17; Ac 8:32; Ro 8:36; Heb 13:20; 1 Pe 2:25; Re 18:13.

The sheep are the humble, innocent sacrifice, first in Christ, then in the PW, which foretells Christ, which is relegated as Christ, humbled in the face of religious culture as religion’s main motivation, which is tortured, torn, mistreated, nailed as in failure and killed. But in vindication of God’s faithfulness, it resurrects alive from the dead.

Chadwick says, “Young believer.” Christ is the “Lamb of God,” of the Mosaic sacrifice. But what kind of lamb?

The lamb is a prophetic lamb: Gen 22:7–8; Ex 12:3–13; Nu 28:3–10; Isa 53:7. This Lamb of God “taketh away the sins of the world” (Joh 1:29,36). This, at the moment John the Baptist uttered it, was yet future, and therefore a prophecy founded upon OT prophecy. Again, the lamb is a powerful example of prophetic truth, as the ultimate signification for Christ and Scripture, hiding in plain sight within such significations that we instead prefer as “great sacrifice” (Easton), and “symbolical of meek submissiveness” (Moorish). The great sacrifice was through God willing to place His holy reputation on the line, as a God of certain fulfillment, by giving the world something that He knew they would destroy and cause the appearance, albeit briefly, of Him failing.

This prophetic knowledge is a lamb because in a fallen world truth is at hand, apparent, obvious, without nuance and mystery, quiet, meek. The PW is unassuming, lowly, passive, and willing to be placed under the knife of man’s evil heart because it knows that God will rectify Man’s failure by its resurrection. Therefore Christ is the perfect Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world by the final expression of God’s unfailing word in keeping His promises, even when the world rises against Him with all its might. Moses offered a lamb as a type of Christ who would come, being inefficacious because its fulfillment was yet far off, unlike Christ, who completely fulfills that prophetic Law.

Shod (feet). (Luke 15:22, Eph 6:15). In Ephesians, the “preparation of the gospel of peace” is another way of saying that by which the fulfillments of the PW were prepared in the Old Covenant in God’s foreknowledge. This is not a shoe made by humans, but it entirely transcendent.

The evangelist is to protect the knowledge of Christ in the Word by his learning of the Old Testament revelation. The spiritual shoe protects the evangelist’s foot (the point of God’s Word in contact with the world, the moral demeanor and life of the believer, God’s supernatural motivation) is a spiritual device that preserves his moral walk, but a morality through belief in the prophetic gospel and its evangelism. It preserves the means of the Word’s transport, the impetus of divine motivation so that it is not weakened or worn down by the friction of its contact with a corrupt world religious paradigm (see Mark 4).

In the Parable of the Prodigal Son, there is another application, although comparatively minor.

Luke 15:22 (KJV) But the father said to his servants, Bring forth the best robe, and put it on him; and put a ring on his hand, and shoes on his feet:

The ring is sonship with the Father by faith in Jesus of the Prophets. The robe is his righteousness given for this by the Father for such particular faith. The shoes are the divine protective protection from the wounding effects to the World of the spiritual foot of motivation and morality of the Messiahs’s prophetic Truth.

Shown (feet). (Luke 24:39,40). In a post-resurrection appearance of Christ, he said: “Behold my hands and feet.” That they are not ephemeral, but flesh, real, true, showing nail holes, or effective in the world as fulfillments of prophecy and ready to work teaching and carrying this prophetic gospel, of which they are proof, to other spirits. These hands and feet show the nail holes of his crucifixion, proving not only that he is the same as that Crucified, but he is the fulfiller of the Prophetic concerning Messiah.

The nature of that evangelistic knowledge revealed and to be explained is immediately stated by Christ in Luke 24:44–48: “And he said unto them, These are the words which I spake unto you, while I was yet with you, that all things must be fulfilled, which were written in the law of Moses, and in the prophets, and in the psalms, concerning me. Then opened he their understanding, that they might understand the scriptures, And said unto them, Thus it is written, and thus it behoved Christ to suffer, and to rise from the dead the third day: And that repentance and remission of sins should be preached in his name among all nations, beginning at Jerusalem. And ye are witnesses of these things.”

Sin. The Mosaic Law is not mere training in what to do or not do; it is training in what to love or not love, through the vehicle of doing or refraining. Sin is the missing of God’s standard—but that standard is not the symbol itself. It is the spiritual essence and meaning behind the symbol.

In this way, God’s standard—and the missing of it—is governed by a prophetic law of the Spirit. For mortals, the Law is preparation for one’s moral future as an independent and free spirit: a training in inward rather than outward obedience. For any other, it is a statement that God Himself will come and fulfill it in perfect obedience. Merging these mortal and immortal senses of the future, we may say that the Law is the training of the immature human spirit to bring the body under submission for a sacred purpose—so that it may be fulfilled by the honest and moral handling of spiritual Truth, which pertains ultimately to its perfect, bodily fulfillment in Jesus the Messiah.

Once you come to love what that primitive form of doing—outward behavior—was meant to lead you to love, the external act itself remains. But it is no longer done to achieve or prove that love. It is done because it has become a symbol of your love for Truth. Its binding power no longer comes from a father commanding obedience, but from its function as a habitual expression of the love it once served to cultivate.

Resurrection, theoretically speaking, takes the elements of your old body and gives you a new one—continuity through transformation. You remain embodied and active, but no longer in the same body. You are still capable of doing what you once did, yet your new body bears responsibility for the old one only by analogy. If it is said that you sinned, that sin exists either by analogy to the old body or by direct correspondence to the laws governing the new. If by the latter, it is judged against an entirely different standard—one in which the bodily act is a sign of sin, but not the essential action by which judgment is rendered. What is judged is the degree to which the sign corresponds to a deeper spiritual sin—not the primitive act in itself.

So it is with sin committed in carnal bodies, moving in space and time, yet judged after one becomes accountable in a spiritual body—that is, after salvation in Christ. After you are counted, so to speak, an “adult.” This spiritual adulthood is not marked by your maturity per se, but by your accountability to an ultimate standard of Truth—the fulfillment of the Messianic promise in Jesus of Nazareth. It is both possible and inevitable that you will still sin like a child even after becoming accountable to this Truth. But if God has counted you an adult, then you are judged by the adult standard—one proportionate to the spiritual nature of what you now know and are responsible for.

The only effective sin now is spiritual, because you are no longer a person of mere stricture and command, but a person of conscience. And if of conscience, then spiritual sin concerns your moral handling of the highest knowledge to which you are called: a knowledge you are expected to recognize, be drawn to, and treat with reverence. Sin, then, is the spiritual act of failing to rightly handle this truth; righteousness, the spiritual act of rightly responding to it. But this righteousness is not your achievement—for the means of success was freely given to your conscience by God in the revelation of Christ. Yet the failure is yours, because you are free to reject it.

In either case—sin or righteousness—it is measured against your conscience in relation to Christ’s perfect fulfillment of the same Law, the Prophetic Word, which now encompasses and completes the Mosaic Law in what it always truly was: “a schoolmaster to bring us to Christ” (Galatians 3:24).

 

 

Sitting at (the feet). (Luke 8:35, 10:39, John 20:12, Acts 5:10). It is hard to find much attention paid to exegeting Luke 8:35, since it only says that the demoniac, after being in his “right mind,” was found sitting at the feet of Jesus. This opens up the whole issue of Jesus and exorcism, particularly concerning the “accommodation theory,” but is marginalized by the overriding import of the figure here.

The point of the image is simply that of submission, as in the scene of Jesus and Mary in the house of Lazarus (Luke 10:38–42)—the hearer and learner of the Prophetic Word contained informationally in Jesus Christ the Messiah of God. The exorcised demoniac is showing humbled attention turned to the Word which delivered him from his spiritual madness, loving and ready to know Him.

Jesus’s Messianic sign of casting out the demon is a casting out of an evil spirit of thought which causes otherwise sane spirituality into insanity. The demon is the symbol of an anti-prophetic religious confusion, contradiction, overbearing speculation, corrupt affection, and unrealistic and unprofitable results of an invasion of a false personal identity.

Did Jesus believe in evil spirits? We have no reason to doubt such phenomena, particularly at the time of Christ’s coming, in which personalized evil forces, if true, would be reasonably expected active in turning Israel from the truth. But the denotation of “evil forces” here is as much an informational entity within the carnal human spirit as Jesus Christ is an informational entity in His Word of prescience.

Sown in Corruption (body). (1 Co 15:42). In this passage Paul clarifies the difference between the natural body and the heavenly body, stating by inference that the natural body is not evil but only weak and transitory.

1 Corinthians 15:42 (KJV) So also is the resurrection of the dead. It is sown in corruption; it is raised in incorruption:

It is only necessary to have one kind of body before having the other. Calvin on 15:24: “It is necessary that before we are restored in Christ, we derive our origin from Adam, and resemble him. Let us, therefore, not wonder, if we begin with the living soul, for as being born precedes in order being born again, so living precedes rising again”[1] Paul says that there is a glory (doxa) connected with both (15:41), but they are not of the same “flesh.” That is, the prophetic word which is difficult because of our sin must be a necessary evil before we are granted the full range of its truths.

[1] (Calvin, Calvin’s Bible Commentaries: Corinthians, Part II 2007)

Submission under (feet). (Romans 16:20, 1 Co 15:25, 27, Eph 1:22, Heb 2:8). When an enemy is put under one’s feet, the enemy is put under by the triumphant will of the victor and his strong resolve to conquer and fulfill his plan. One becomes subject to another’s will, word, whim, desire, and law. The foot of the PW is an expression of the superior will and power of its author and His Word, which tramples and subjects to it all other claims to spiritual truth.

Swine (animal). χοιρος.

It begins in Leviticus 11:7: “And the swine, though he divides the hoof, and be cloven-footed, yet he cheweth not the cud; he is unclean to you.” The decision to take this in any figurative sense is drawn from a prior assumption on the nature of God, which is built from Scripture elsewhere, primarily from the prescient stream which we call the PW (prophetic word). That God fulfilled prophecy is also an admission that God reveals a plan and a reason for acting in history, for this is the very definition of biblical prophecy, making Jehovah God unique among other claimed deities who are touted as real only by their priests and devotees primarily through tradition and emotion.

In the case of swine, and all animals in the OT used in a religious context, a symbol is expected because of this prior edification from the prophetic, namely, that God’s nature does not command man to obey laws simply because God wants them to, but that there is both a specific reason for this law and a specific meaning to this law beyond the command itself.

This “beyond” applies also to time and place, as God is expected to use history to slowly reveal meaning to the extent that man is capable of understanding and using it, what is called a “progressive revelation.”

We ask: Why does God forbid eating animals who are either not cloven-footed or who don’t chew the cud? If this is not a symbol of something else, then the command is similar to God saying, “Wear your underwear outside your pants thirty times each year,” and therefore becomes an absurdity, an inherited regional religious observance blindly copied from the pagans, or it becomes, as with the orthodox, a mere generally applied concept such as “unclean.” If we are informed by the lessons of prophecy, however, this allows all of these to be in operation as long as the missing meaning, which has been forced out by them, is to remain supreme and rule over them. It can be a kind of absurdity because to the majority of the population who operate on religious assumptions outside this prophetic example, past and present, it is an absurd and worthless biblical detail and quirk, and is functionally or expressly useless to them. It does not matter if it was borrowed from the pagans because the prophetic is also given to generations far in the future, God using and redeeming the things of that present ancient world that will remain and can be understood in that future. It is also a concept, as “unclean.” However much the faithless world misuses the symbol and bits of truth that lingers in their interpretations, it never removes or violates the overriding, implacable scriptural emphasis on God’s promise of future transcendent meaning through the use of present temporal things.

So, what does an animal that divides the hoof symbolize and what does a hog symbolize that is beyond blind, reflexive tradition, absurdity, and philosophical concepts? The space required to handle detail such as the cloven hoof we will leave for another book, but as for the pig, and other animals used in the law, they receptively stand for people, and those unclean by their misuse or disregard for the PW, for the swine being unclean by its willingness to eat anything (to take to heart any other religious text besides that of God’s) and to wallow in the filth of the earth (to uncaringly become involved in the cares, traditions, sins, and schemes of the carnal world). The chewing of cud is a symbol for the meditation and careful thought on the prophetic scriptures, which the swine does not do. Those that eat such an animal are eating, or taking as nourishment, the religious influence of such people. Sheep and goats and cows are good, sacrificial animals, and are qualified to stand for the swine’s opposite, Messiah, who will be sacrificed for the sins of the world (that is, primarily the sins of the misuse and disregard of the PW). “Give not that which is holy unto the dogs, neither cast ye your pearls before swine, lest they trample them under their feet, and turn again and rend you” (Mt 7:6). That meaning, “Do not give the pearls of the knowledge of the Messianic revelation to those who who have construed religion as scripturally founded on other things, as you will not convert them, but will provoke them to move to protect their sinful religious investments and kill you.” In chapter 8, we see Jesus meeting the demoniac who was possessed. The reason for this possession is not important. What is important is the expressed religious view of the spirit which was within them: “what have we to do with thee, Jesus, thou Son of God? art thou come hither to torment us before the time?” (See Mt 8:29, also in Mark 5 and Luke 8.) That spirit, either of them or inhabiting them, exhibited knowledge of the time prophecies of Messiah’s coming, that Messiah was Jesus, but refused to be informed by them and instead spiritually oppressed that individual. This is a figure of the religious leaders who oppressed the true faithful if Israel. These spirits knew that Jesus would cast them out, so they replied: “If thou cast us out, suffer us to go away into the herd of swine” (Mt 8:31). The request, granted by Jesus, was for this truth, this signification of the Messianic coming, to be applied to the objects of the law, being that signification of Messiah (clean animal) and His enemies (unclean animals) that are used in the law to teach Messiah as Jesus of Nazareth. The evil spirits made the request to go back into the rudiments of the Messianic revelation rather than into its ultimate implications, as if to save itself. This, however, is impossible, because of the prophecy that Jesus Messiah will in the latter days destroy all such swine, or such evil of Messianically de-centered religion, spirituality, and philosophy. The effect of the demons’ attempt at self-preservation was the madness that occurs in religious circles who see before them the true revelation of their scriptures but refuse it for lesser things contained within it.

Taught at (the feet of). (Acts 22:3). To learn at the feet is to learn the scriptural foot, being that part of Scripture’s pertaining to moral instruction (the law), but that scriptural source of moral instruction which Paul refers in this passage is insistent on teaching, which is against the common notion that the gist of the law is prescriptive, not prophetic.

The foot symbolizes the morality in one’s thoughts and actions through life, particularly in carrying the body of Truth through the world to teach others. It is then not “teaching” or “morality” or “thought” that is central to the signification of the foot, but with what are we moral, about what do we think, and what we teach which the foot is an instrumentality to carry it along to all inner and outer realms. This is obviously the Prophetic Word of Messiah, who was prophesied and fulfilled those promises.

Paul’s summation of his epiphany ends with a reminder of the prophecy of Isaiah 42:6, 49:6, 60:3, Jer 16:19, Hosea 1:10, Zechariah 2:11, and many others. In this scene, the Jews of the law then howl for Paul’s death, the very idea that the prophecy would be fulfilled, The new morality is a morality of a love of truth and honest handling of the prophetic Word of God.

The most profound illustration of this teaching at the feet of the Messiah occurs in Luke 10:25–37 when Jesus attends a supper at the home of Lazarus. Mary sits at Jesus’ feet and listens and Martha complains that she is not helping her prepare. This is a figure and a prophecy of the coming Church. The true Church sits at Jesus’ feet and learns, Jesus, being the singular enfleshement of the Prophetic Word. Learning from Him is the same as learning from that Word and that Word alone. Martha, however, is, as Jesus says, “worried and upset about many things, but only one thing is needed. Mary has chosen what is better, and it will not be taken away from her. Rites, dinners, candles, baptisms, the Law, creeds, doctrines, ideas, feelings, reason, generalized religious concepts, the infinite choices that the Church has chosen to focus upon are not the point of Jesus’ presence. The point is the Oracles of the Messiah. If the church has found their faith locus there and there alone, they would have been praised instead of dismissed/ Praised for a spiritual life of exclusive focus on listening to what the Word of God predicted and came to pass about Jesus.

 

Theology. Literally, “the study of God.” This is outside of true Christianity. “Theology” is a foreign and philosophical conception that may be engaged devotedly and exhaustively without the motivational belief that a definitive and final demonstration of the reality of the God of its subject has been revealed. As a purely intellectual activity, this theology cannot show God to be more than a concept. Christian theology of the NT writers was never systematized and codified but was assumed predicated exclusively upon the implications from the outworking of the messianic oracles as fulfilled in Jesus of Nazareth, which eclipsed the era of the past, before the revelation of Christ, when all man had to discern God was concept, proposition, reason, emotion, tradition and logical axioms.

Trampled Under (foot). (Mat 7:6). The foot of the wicked (swine), the workers only of law-keeping, and the preachers of obedience without the PW as their master use the feet to trample the truth of the PW (pearls). This occurs when precious truths of what is primarily the Messiah Jesus and his foreshadowings as the basis for the law are mistakenly preached to those who hate the truth. The audience can turn on the preacher violently, and “trample” the Prophetic Word by making it so relegated and common that it becomes mixed with the religious offscouring of the world. This trampling of the Prophetic Word is not its deletion from the Church, but its debasement by priority. The lesson is that must identify the audience before we risk not only disgracing the PW but threatening our own lives by the resulting rage of the swine.

This evangelistic discernment is illustrated dramatically by Paul in Acts 14, preaching in the cities of Lystra.

And there sat a certain man at Lystra, impotent in his feet, being a cripple from his mother’s womb, who never had walked: The same heard Paul speak: who stedfastly beholding him, and perceiving that he had faith to be healed, Said with a loud voice, Stand upright on thy feet. And he leaped and walked.

The problems inherent in indiscriminate, mass evangelism is in view. Mass evangelism in our age has, however, removed the threat of physical abuse and murder as a reaction to the gospel specifically because of nearly 1800 years of the trampling of the “pearls,” making a certain debased view of the Prophetic Word mainstream. The Gospel has been transformed into a proposition, a concept, a feeling, a declaration without a necessary concomitant demonstration. This makes it go down easy as a homey, platitudinous, prosaic notion that many more people will gladly accept. A Gospel message symbolized by “Jesus saves,” “the blood of Jesus Christ cleanses from all sin,” and “for God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten son” are not pearls trampled underfoot, they are more like cheap, shiny stones that have been made to replace them so that the Church can seem to gain converts. Without these phrases conceptually qualified only by the supernatural prophetic word of demonstration, they are powerless. Were it only the case we still lived in an age when Man was without so many of his advanced linguistic and philosophical methods of equivocation that Messianic Prophecy could again be trampled unambiguously as “pearl of great price.”

Vile (body). (Phil 3:21). We align “body” not only with the body of Christ, the Church body, and the believer’s body but with the body of the Prophetic Word. But how can the PW in any sense be said to be vile (tapeínōsis)? First, the word is too strongly translated. Strong’s says: “depression (in rank or feeling):—humiliation, be made low, low estate, vile.”

The aspect of lowliness is key. Paul says, “Brethren, I count not myself to have apprehended: but this one thing I do, forgetting those things which are behind, and reaching forth unto those things which are before” (Php 3:13). This he does by “the excellency of the knowledge of Christ Jesus my Lord” (v.8). That is, the knowledge of Christ that comes through the PW. By this, he looks forward to the same prophetic consummation and resurrection of the body, where finally the present, vile body (body, mind, and present limited [v. 12, 13] apprehension of Christ through the PW) will be finished.

Walking (feet). Getting this right can be a key to the whole signifying process. Expositors are unanimous that this refers to one’s “moral bearing.” “Then the Pharisees and scribes asked him, Why walk not thy disciples according to the tradition of the elders, but eat bread with unwashen hands?” (Mark 7:5.) A “Walk”  that means “moral bearing” is standard, and a very prosaic meaning.

However, if we begin with a good “walk” in contrast between a bad one, and we conclude that Christ is the Word and His feet are the point of His fulfillment of His Word in reality, then “walk” changes to a very transcendent kind.  The feet and walking are the means of propelling that body of PW through the world and the motivation behind it. Walking is then by a righteous man not merely a moral display, but it is a moral display of particular prophetic beliefs and duties. The Pharisees, in complaining about hand washing, unconsciously complain against Messianic religion and how the religion of their choosing, though self-gratifying, cannot please God and save. This is why in Mark 7:6 Christ’s retort to the Pharisees charge that the disciples not washing their hands begins with Him using Isaiah: “He answered and said unto them, well hath Esaias prophesied of you hypocrites, as it is written (Isa 29:13), this people honoureth me with their lips, but their heart is far from me. Howbeit in vain do they worship me, teaching for doctrines the commandments of men” (Mr 7:6–7).

Isaiah, in the next verse, gives a prophecy which is now being fulfilled by the Pharisees in raising tradition over the true signification of the law:

“Therefore, behold, I will proceed to do a marvelous work among this people, even a marvelous work and a wonder: for the wisdom of their wise men shall perish, and the understanding of their prudent men shall be hid.”

With both the inhabitants of Jerusalem with Isaiah and the Pharisees with Christ, it about their stiff-necked disobedience to God’s supreme command to believe the prophesied Truth about Messiah Jesus. Disobedience of the commands of what the law signifies, which is the emerging Messiah of Scripture which He promised. God sends them a Messiah, as predicted, but one unexpected, so their guilt for breaking the law, and their corrupt “walk,” will be so sealed when Christ comes.

Washed, Wiped, Kissed, Anointed (feet). (Luke 7:38, 7:44,45, John 11:2, 12:3, 13:5,6,8,9,10,12,14, 1Ti 5:10). The most illuminating instance of this is found in the Last Supper, when Christ washed the feet of the disciples. When finished, in John 13:10: “Jesus saith to him, He that is washed needeth not save to wash his feet, but is clean every whit: and ye are clean, but not all.”

The key to this enigmatic saying is the preface in verse 7: “Jesus answered and said unto him, What I do thou knowest not now; but thou shalt know hereafter.” That is, the understanding of the prophetic symbol will only come after the greatest fulfillments of the PW: the crucifixion and resurrection. Does this mean, as with Albert Barnes, that they will see “more and more the necessity of humility and of kindness to each other, and would see that they were the servants of Christ and of the church, and ought not to aspire to honors and offices, but to be willing to perform the humblest service to benefit the world”? This is typical of our exegesis of the passage. But this is not a uniquely Christian interpretation to meet the needs of a uniquely supernatural revelation. It is prosaism.

If the foot is the fulfillments and conclusion of the predictions, and the disciples are those expected to carry it in the world and become their own moral images of that Word themselves, it is no wonder why Christ said that they are now clean, having been washed by that Word. “Clean” is not here of their understanding of those oralces, but a preparation to enter a Holy place where illumination and faith happen concerning Jesus in respect to them. Jesus, even after washing the feet of Judas, said by implication that they are still not all clean. This was confirmed when Judas rejected Jesus, but, most importantly, that Judas rejected in his heart the Word of God, the Messianic prophecies, by which Jesus came to rule such hearts. Washing the prophetic feet is preparing them by the clearest of signs of fulfillment, which instrumentality they are ordained to serve in evangelism and one’s daily walk.

A clean fulfillment, which is not a symbol but its essence, is un-obscure and informed by the Holy Spirit of truth (water). A clean heart is one responding to a revelation outside of the dregs and effluent of scriptural obscurity and arcanery, equivocation, speculation, historical bean-counting, and bad philosophy.

Peter wants Christ to wash his head (speculation, promise) and hands (his ability to teach the truth). This is a figure of the belief in the power of a ritual to effect Holiness. But Jesus rejects this and redirects Holiness to God’s Word alone. Christ says that when one has bathed he is clean everywhere, and only his feet need cleaning. The head and hands, along with the rest of the body (the corpus of the revelation of Christ to faith), has since been clean daily by interaction with Jesus. But the feet, which hare in constant contact with the filth of the World, particularly in contact with false and anti-revelational religion, the carnal and dead antithesis of true faith, must always be last.

Peter’s head, the perception, reason, identity, or, in purely scriptural terms, all the promises pertaining to Christ are known, are already fixed to accept the full Truth coming. Because of a mind prepared for Truth, both that mind and the Truth is set to become fully what they are when Truth historically realizes hose promises.

The hands are those instirments not carrying the prophetic Word, but, when it reaches its destination, causes that Word to be applied to the world: acts of charity, patience, mercy, meekness, morality and, most importantly, the instruction of Truth. Again, those hands, like the feet, are set to their vocational destination but have not engaged it yet.

Judas, having his feet washed by the Word, however, is still not ready to go into service for that Word’s final revelation of Christ. Implied is that he is also not clean elsewhere, having all along a heart set on other things, not the Messianic Prophecies.

“Clean” is known by its antithesis. The opposite of this cleanliness, this forthright and clear understanding and commitment to the PW, is one who, for a religion of personal benefit, tries intentionally to fight against God and prevent the fulfillments from taking place so that he may continue in his dissembling.

Christ demonstrates His synonymity with the PW by uttering prophecy and quoting prophecy, predicting Judas’s betrayal by the sop of bread, which prophecy none of the disciples anticipated.

Christ says that none of the disciples is the master of the other, but they are all equal servants of the PW, which is Master, and therefore Christ: the ultimate equalizer and destroyer of all human pretense to power and truth. Christ confirms this in John 13:18–19, quoting the prophecy of Psalm 41:9: “I speak not of you all: I know whom I have chosen: but that the scripture may be fulfilled, He that eateth bread with me hath lifted up his heel against me. Now I tell you before it come, that, when it is come to pass, ye may believe that I am he.”

When feet then are kissed, what is being kissed is the moral reputation of the individual when his fulfilled presence is before us. With Christ, this is the admission and revering not of Christ’s moral obedience to the law, but the law of the PW, which He was bound to carry out perfectly in both His aspects: before He is confirmed as Messiah (promise) and after (fulfillment).

Anointing of the feet. This occurred in Luke 7:36-38, Matthew 26:6-13, Mark 14:3-9 and John 12:1-8.

The case in Luke is an unnamed woman called a “sinner.” The implication is that she is weeping in grief over her sin.  Why she does this to Jesus is only generally here implied as indicating her belief in Jesus as the course of her forgiveness, but what scripturally informs her of this is not given. This is, however, clearly seen in the next account found in three passages.

In John, Mary of Bethany, the sister of Lazarus, whom Jesus raised from the dead, and Martha. This is a dramatic example of Jesus being prophecy and uttering prophecy at once. Judas, the anti-revelational but religious principle, essentially complains that such an expensive appointment should have been sold and given to the poor as a better example of morality. This is a figure of the coming Church that will shift love for the Messianic Word aside for ritual, acts of piety, faith statements, philosophy, the products of reason and emotion, and generally the physcial or symbolic act, not the crucial spiritual action in advance of a Truth. Jesus says :

Then said Jesus, Let her alone: against the day of my burying hath she kept this. For the poor always ye have with you; but me ye have not always.

He says that the peculiar motivation for her annotating was what the Hebrew Prophets said should come in Jesus, that he will be pierced, murdered. In this time, before Jesus dies and rises from the dead, he is in “Promise” mode, not “Fulfillment” mode. The corpus of the messianic revelation is not yet complete, but is in progress. In this time priority goes to the pure religious act of faith in scripture-to-Jesus, not the religious act serving the consequences of necessary religious expression with which we must deal after that fulfillment. This is set for a time when Jesus physically departs and leaves behind only his informational entity of the completed Prophetic Word and the Holy Spirit as its teacher. Religious acts will come to define the superficial appearance of the Church, but then only as long as they are motivated exclusively by messianic Fulfillment of Promise.

This interpretation is again conformed in Mark, with Jesus adding another prophecy: “Verily I say unto you, Wheresoever this gospel shall be preached throughout the whole world, this also that she hath done shall be spoken of for a memorial of her.” A Prophecy of a worldwide faith in a prophecy. It will become for all time a supreme example of giving one’s all to the supreme Truth of Jesus Messiah. Matthew has the same words, adding that it was not Judas alone that complained about the woman, but “the disciples.”

But what about the symbol of the anointing of the feet? The woman washed (bréchō) Jesus’ feet with her tears, the anointed (aleíphō) the with oil.  You bathe and then you put on a fragrant oil, as a perfume. Washing is removing the offscouring of the earth, the clinging carnal influence. The anointing is the adding of joy, happiness, emotion, and blessing to a state clean of it.  Again, the foot is the figure for motion, the organ that carries the Truth into the world. Even Jesus did not anoint the feet of the disciples that he washed. If he did this is making for them what is set to be made only by them: the love and happiness experienced upon knowing the Truth. Only then will their feet be “beautiful” (Isaiah 52:7, Romans 10:15). This woman, however, unlike the disciples, already knew the truth and its truth resonated in her spirit. Her anointing of Jesus’ feet is her faith that forgiveness of sin has come in the form of the first-ever supernatural proof of the existence, nature and redemptive plan of God that will now move into and conquer all darkness.