ἐγερθῆναι, SBLGNT). Of course, Jesus would have proved all this from the Scriptures (such as Psalm 22, Isaiah 52:13 to 53:12, et al.). And His explanations would have been God’s own wise and perfect interpretations of those Scriptures, exegeted in a way that was perfectly harmonious with all that He ever revealed or ever would reveal through His prophets and apostles in all history, from the days of Adam to the last day of earth’s existence. Our Messiah’s words on that day would have been a wonder to hear, a “bullet-proof” theology that no entity on earth or in heaven could possibly dispute or disprove in any honest and rational way. So it would have been a great and wondrously spiritually fulfilling experience to have heard our God Jesus teach us those explanations and proofs.
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But His disciples were not accustomed to the deep, honest, wise exegesis of Scriptures that Jesus was feeding them. Nor had they yet learned to answer the sophistry of pseudo-scientific arguments against God’s Word, certainly not that which originates from the modern religion of humanism, although all the foundational principles of today’s humanism existed back then too. So their simple way of thinking could not comprehend the weight of what Jesus was teaching. And, like today, the common masses were far more familiar with the usual forms of false reasoning, with the convoluted, self-contradictory emotional or carnally appealing arguments that are used by most religious and political leaders. Since these disciples had come from the common masses, they still often thought and falsely reasoned in the same ways that the countless captives of Satan’s world order did. So one disciple, our impulsive brother Peter, interrupted this teaching of Jesus: “And Peter, having taken Him aside, began to admonish Him, reasoning: ‘[God’s] mercy to You, Lord! This certainly will not be for You!” (Mat. 16:22, from: καὶ προσλαβόμενος αὐτὸν ὁ Πέτρος ἤρξατο ἐπιτιμᾶν αὐτῷ λέγων·
Ἵλεώς σοι, κύριε· οὐ μὴ ἔσται σοι τοῦτο, SBLGNT). Thus, when Peter said this, he was reiterating the same lies that false teachers in the fake churches made concerning all the Messianic prophecies.
Many Bible teachers of that day distracted the people from the prophecies of God’s Word, from God’s promises for them, regarding what their Messiah would do for Israel. While falsely claiming to teach God’s Word, those men had twisted the meaning of God’s Word to suit their own malicious purposes, and nullified any words of God which exposed or opposed their nefarious motives. These Bible scholars said that, when their Messiah and King would come, He would not die in the flesh, as Isaiah prophesied. Instead, they taught that the Messianic King would rule the earth in the same way that pagan kings ruled. For they wanted a king who tortured, murdered and enslaved the masses, in a way where all who were willingly complicit in the king’s crimes would become the beneficiaries of that king, and gain incalculable self-indulgent wealth stolen from the oppressed classes, along with many terrorized slaves to cater to all their carnal whims. They did not want the prophesied Messianic King. For that godly, loving King would be “pierced for our transgressions” and “crushed for our iniquities,” then make “His grave with the wicked, and with a rich man in His death; although He had done no violence.” But, after sacrificing His life as “an offering for sin,” He would also “see His seed” and “prolong His days,” would rise from the dead to “see the light and be satisfied.” They did not want this Messianic King and “righteous Servant” of Yahweh, not a King who “will justify many by the knowledge of Himself,” who “will bear their iniquities” (Is. 53:5, 9, 10, 11, WEB). So, when Peter spoke those words to Jesus, he became the voice of those false pastors and their owner, Satan.
Of course, the Spirit of God in Jesus knew exactly where Peter’s words and thoughts came from. He knew that Peter was beginning to think in the way that the false teachers did, in the way that blind slaves of the devil taught him to think. From the time Peter was a little child, his parents dutifully dragged him into synagogues and forced him to highly esteem those nobodies pontificating about their self-serving Messianic predictions. So, by now, Satan had deeply etched those lies upon Peter’s mind of flesh. Then Peter acted through his emotions of his flesh, according to the principles or outer conscience that those fake pastors wrote upon his mind of flesh. Thus, Jesus turned to directly face Peter, to address the mind of flesh which was stirring up those emotions, with the lies that Peter’s mind of flesh taught to his spirit, through the agency of Satan’s lying servants. Jesus addressed the devil who was influencing and interfering with Peter’s chamber of his soul. And our God Jesus commanded: “Depart behind Me, Satan! You are an offence to Me, because you never choose to support the things of God, but rather the things of the [deceived] people” (Mat. 16:23, from: Ὕπαγε
ὀπίσω μου, Σατανᾶ· σκάνδαλον εἶ ἐμοῦ, ὅτι οὐ φρονεῖς τὰ τοῦ θεοῦ ἀλλὰ τὰ τῶν ἀνθρώπων, SBLGNT). In other words, Peter believed lies solely because so many other people believed them.
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It is interesting how Jesus used the present tense (durative) form of the verb φρονέω here, when He described what Satan was doing in Peter, when Jesus rebuked the devil for inciting these particular emotions in Peter’s mind of flesh, in accordance with false doctrines learned from fake pastors. For this verb primarily means “to think.” In this context and transitively, with objects like “the things of God” (τὰ τοῦ θεοῦ) and “the things of the people” (τὰ τῶν ἀνθρώπων), it would mean: “to give careful consideration to something, set one’s mind on, be intent on,” and, more specifically, “take someone’s side, espouse someone’s cause” (BDAG3). In this context, with a durative present tense and the negative, it might be translated as something like, “you never choose to support ...” And, clearly, the devil never chooses to espouse or support “the things of God.” But, what is interesting here, is how Jesus added a phrase which indicates that Satan does choose to espouse or support “the things of the people.” And we know what Jesus meant by this. It is absolutely certain that Satan does not espouse or support anything for the good of anyone, because literally all of the devil’s thoughts ultimately work toward the utter destruction of the people, through the psychopathic joy he has in nullifying any kind of justice, truth or God-like love. However, when the people primarily think only through their amoral, self-serving, irrational and incredibly easily manipulated minds of flesh, and do so especially when crowd mentality seizes their thoughts and powerfully compels them toward a totally submissive compliance to the group’s desires, those people shall receive Satan’s full support.
We see this all the time. Look at religious people whose “faith” is practised solely through their minds and emotions of the flesh, at all the groups marching behind some wanna-be human god for his self-serving causes. Are they not supported by Satan? Surely the devil always promotes everyone submitting to the zeal of the flesh, since all these ignore or work against God’s just, loving ways. No matter how biblical these think their cause might be, and no matter how many Scriptures they quote to justify it, it is Satan’s cause, in opposition to “the things of God.” For example, those marching to protest abortions through the thoughts and power of their flesh alone, and sometimes with weapons of this world order, march for the devil. For they clearly do not serve the real God. After all, they have not protected and counselled those desperate little girls and overburdened women coming to get abortions. So, since those protesters do not work to prevent girls and women from needing to face their pregnancies alone, in a way God never intended any girl or woman to face it alone, they do not do what God calls them to do. Instead, they do what God forbids. For they terrorize the already anxious, frightened little girls and burnt-out women desperately trying to escape stigmatization, poverty and even sometimes the effects of a man’s crimes, such as seduction or rape. When these protesters see that a little girl or woman has become pregnant, not even the most zealous religious ones will lift a finger to provide any consistent, reliable long-term help for those girls and women, that is, not in a godly, non-judgmental, understanding and just way. So this kind of self-righteous anti-abortionist actually serves Satan, and Satan supports them. Then Satan even uses those carnal, hypocritical anti-abortionists to promote more abortions, by causing a back-lash against the evil of their ruthless, unjust anti-abortion protests. In the end, the unjust anti-abortion protesters promote more abortions, with the help of Satan. In a similar way, religious zealots have promoted every evil under the sun, through their loveless, ruthless, merciless and unjust “faith” which serves the devil.
During their lives on earth, and on the final judgment day, Jesus will tell many priests, pastors and churchy people: “You are an offence to Me, because you never choose to support the things of God, but rather the things of the people.” And, if their spirits refuse to repent into His whole, just, wise and loving truth during their lives on this earth, Jesus will hand them over to the devil for the slow and painful destruction of their flesh, which Satan will do by filling their minds with his spiritual darkness of lies and delusions. Then, by the time they see Jesus on the judgment day, if they still Page 1104
love that darkness instead of His light, Jesus Himself will grant those falsely religious non-elect souls their beloved darkness of lies and delusions forever, in the devil’s home of hell. But let all spirits that are able to love in a just and God-like way, learn from Jesus, for the salvation of their souls. Let all elect spirits trust in His Holy Spirit’s true teachings and wise training, so they can build up the peaceful, truly just and loving kingdom of God on earth, as they undo the ruthless, unjust works of Satan. In all this, we see the free, unearned, unmerited grace of God toward all who possess spirits that are able to love in the same unconditional, just, equitable, wise way that He does, where that love is always built upon a foundation of genuine truths. At the same time, we also see God’s just severity against ruthless destroyers, who ultimately work for the annihilation of all existence.
Eternal Profit or Great Loss
After rebuking Satan, and sending him away, Jesus began to expose the root of many false doctrines circulating in many fake churches, especially the kinds of false doctrines that had previously stirred the emotions in Peter’s flesh. For it was always through false promises of rewards for the flesh that the people had been duped into believing false doctrines, but also always through God’s blessing of the spirit that the elect believed the truth. Now, by this time, Jesus already told His disciples that He would soon die on the cross, on the frequently-used Roman instrument of tortuous death that they had all seen in the most public places of their land, such as beside the busiest roads leading into their cities and towns. All the Jews knew how the psychopathic Romans liked to hang their siblings from humankind on wooden cross bars, to mock and murder those precious souls in the most painful way possible. And all knew that this was the gruesome death which Romans reserved for only their siblings in the lowest classes of their artificial hierarchies, for the slaves and peasants who did not fully submit to the wills of their esteemed human gods, for their siblings who did not rightly worship their human gods strictly according to the traditions of their Satanically inspired religion of Roman humanism. Yet, in this teaching of Jesus, as He denounced the heresies of the self-serving Jewish religious leaders, He commanded His own disciples to join Him there, to partake in His predestined death on the cross. Jesus even declared that this kind of humiliating, tortuous death was the only way they could serve Him, the only way to avoid participation in the sins of blasphemous false churches.
Jesus taught this reality to all His disciples back then, and to all His disciples in all history, until time on earth ends: “If anyone wills to be falling in behind Me, [I command each to] deny oneself and take up one’s cross and always follow [as a disciple] for My benefit. For whoever might will to save one’s soul will destroy it. Yet whomever might destroy one’s soul for My cause will find it. For how will it be profitable if a person might have gained the whole world, yet one’s soul may have been cast away? Or what will a person give in exchange for one’s soul? For the Son of mankind is about to come in the good opinion of His Father, among His [heavenly] angels, and will give recompense to each according to one’s practises. In certainty, I reason with you that some of those still standing in this place after taking a stand, these same definitely should not taste of death until they might clearly perceive the Son of mankind coming in His kingdom” (Mat. 16:24-28, from: Εἴ τις θέλει
ὀπίσω μου ἐλθεῖν, ἀπαρνησάσθω ἑαυτὸν καὶ ἀράτω τὸν σταυρὸν αὐτοῦ καὶ ἀκολουθείτω μοι. ὃς γὰρ
ἐὰν θέλῃ τὴν ψυχὴν αὐτοῦ σῶσαι ἀπολέσει αὐτήν· ὃς δʼ ἂν ἀπολέσῃ τὴν ψυχὴν αὐτοῦ ἕνεκεν ἐμοῦ
εὑρήσει αὐτήν. τί γὰρ ὠφεληθήσεται ἄνθρωπος ἐὰν τὸν κόσμον ὅλον κερδήσῃ τὴν δὲ ψυχὴν αὐτοῦ
ζημιωθῇ; ἢ τί δώσει ἄνθρωπος ἀντάλλαγμα τῆς ψυχῆς αὐτοῦ; μέλλει γὰρ ὁ υἱὸς τοῦ ἀνθρώπου
ἔρχεσθαι ἐν τῇ δόξῃ τοῦ πατρὸς αὐτοῦ μετὰ τῶν ἀγγέλων αὐτοῦ, καὶ τότε ἀποδώσει ἑκάστῳ κατὰ
τὴν πρᾶξιν αὐτοῦ. ἀμὴν λέγω ὑμῖν ὅτι εἰσίν τινες τῶν ὧδε ἑστώτων οἵτινες οὐ μὴ γεύσωνται
θανάτου ἕως ἂν ἴδωσιν τὸν υἱὸν τοῦ ἀνθρώπου ἐρχόμενον ἐν τῇ βασιλείᾳ αὐτοῦ, SBLGNT).
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There is much to unpack from this teaching, and we can begin by understanding what Jesus said in the Greek language. The first sentence is a first class present particular conditional statement. In the protasis, Jesus uses a present tense form of the verb θέλω (“to will”). And He was signalling, in this context, that He was referring to the will of the spirit, not to the volatile and impulsive desires of the flesh. The will of the brain of flesh can be distracted and alter its focus within seconds. But the mind of the spirit consistently and immutably desires the same kind of spiritual gratification in the same way forever. And all the propensities of the will of each spirit were established at its creation. The spirit’s will is the product of its core attributes formed from the moment it began to exist, plus all of that spirit’s experiences which God grants to it in order to shape those inherent qualities put in it. So every spirit wills to obtain certain spiritual goals from its beginning, and forever focuses upon obtaining those goals. An elect person, throughout life, has a spirit that always desires to obtain the ability to function through God-like love, the kind of just love which is entirely built on a foundation of truth. An elect spirit does not want to simply be loved, but wills to express just, equitable and honest love too. Of course, physical circumstances and the will of the flesh often interfere with the will of every elect spirit. But the will of the infantile elect spirit never changes. This will shall either grow stronger, as it discovers the gratification of its ability to love, or an elect spirit’s will may grow ever more dull and lethargic, until it virtually falls asleep, if that spirit is consistently suppressed, if it is prevented from obtaining what it seeks through circumstances and by the blind stubbornness of its easily distracted flesh. Then the wills of non-elect spirits always seek to become gods who determine their own destinies and, hopefully, to despotically rule over the wills and destinies of other souls too.
But, in the protasis of that first sentence, Jesus is talking about the wills of His disciples’ spirits, not about the wills of the non-elect. Jesus definitely was not referring to the volatile wills of their flesh.
Jesus was not saying that He wanted the wills of their flesh to hype up emotional desires of the flesh, until they blindly served the will of a golden-tongued human god ruling over a fake church. After Jesus stated, “If anyone wills to be falling in behind Me” (Εἴ τις θέλει ὀπίσω μου ἐλθεῖν), He then also described the inevitable conditions of serving as His true disciples through the immutable wills of their elect spirits. For only an elect spirit is able to trust in God and in His words, which is the act of falling in behind our God Jesus as His faithful disciple. The temporary and unspiritual (or amoral) mind of flesh is utterly incapable of possessing this kind of faith. And Jesus was not only referring to the traditional way in which disciples physically got up and walked behind their Head Teacher, whenever He went out to do God’s works. Jesus primarily referred to the way their spirits would follow their Teacher’s thoughts and ways, how their hearts would trust and reiterate what He taught, then practise doing the same works He did, in the same ways He did them, through the love and faith which their spirits gave to Him. Jesus was going to present the conditions for the spirits who became truly willing to be fully taught and trained as His disciples. This conditional statement indicated what their spirits must become in order for them to be chosen and accepted by Him as His disciples, as true members of His New Covenant priesthood and church. All must fulfill the conditions found in the second part, in the apodosis, where Jesus used three imperative verbs in His commands to them.
In the apodosis (the second part of the conditional statement), our God Jesus set the conditions that every elect spirit must fulfill to be His disciple. And all three of these conditions were the kinds of commands from God that only God Himself can fulfill in and through us. Jesus commanded: “deny oneself and take up one’s cross and follow [as a disciple] for My benefit” (ἀπαρνησάσθω ἑαυτὸν καὶ
ἀράτω τὸν σταυρὸν αὐτοῦ καὶ ἀκολουθείτω μοι). The first two aorist imperatives in this apodosis suggested that, to be His disciple, each must complete the one-time acts of: (1) denying oneself and (2) taking up one’s own personal cross. Then the third verb was a present (durative) imperative form Page 1106
of ἀκολουθέω, which indicated that, after completing the first two commands, one must always or continuously follow Him as His disciple. This verb indicated accompanying or following a Teacher of life and faith, so the disciple might learn to be as knowledgeable, wise, just and loving as Him.
Furthermore, in this context, a Jewish or ecclesiastical usage of ἀκολουθέω with a dative pronoun (i.e., ἀκολουθείτω μοι, Mat. 16:24, cf., Mark 8:34; Luke 9:23) referred to “continuously following as a disciple for the benefit of” Jesus. It meant that the heart’s desires of one’s good Teacher must also be one’s own desires of one’s own heart. And the biblical way of following as a disciple of our God Jesus, while serving from one’s heart for His benefit, was not something that anyone could possibly cause oneself to do through one’s own power. For one’s own will of the spirit can never alter itself.
It is impossible for an infantile elect spirit’s mind to educate itself until it gains a wise, God-centred, mature will. However, all elect spirits always inherently and spontaneously bear a strong desire to become disciples of Jesus, and only elect spirits can be taught to willingly follow our God Jesus as His disciples. For God Himself created this will to become His disciples in all elect spirits. At each elect spirit’s conception, God made that spirit in the image of His Spirit, put His own core attributes and desires in each disciple’s spirit. So all elect spirits want to learn how to use all these attributes He put in them, how to fulfill all their potential abilities. Yet the heavenly Father assigned each individual elect spirit to experience certain earthly events, which He will use to illustrate principles behind all the works that each will do both on earth and at home in heaven. And God appointed some elect spirits a greater portion of their earthly lives to applying the truths they learn from experiencing these events on earth. That is, some elect begin their discipleship with our God Jesus while they are young, and serve as His priests throughout most of their lives on earth. Other will not begin their discipleship until they are physically older. And, at this present time, most will not even begin their discipleship until their flesh dies, until they go to be taught and trained on the judgment day at the gates of heaven. Still, Jesus wants all of His elect to experience whole lifetimes of good and evil events on earth, to use as illustrations for the lessons He will teach them on that final day. Jesus will use all our earthly experiences to better prepare us for our joyful eternal works with Him in heaven.
Jesus merely chooses some elect to be taught and trained as His disciples while they are still living on earth in flesh. These are to be His priesthood on earth. Yet these are never any greater nor more privileged than any other elect. For many of the elect that God later gathers into His priesthood on the judgment day are, during their lives on earth, being shaped and prepared for an even greater role in heaven, for greater works than He will assign to some of the elect from His earthly priesthood. So being chosen to become disciples of Jesus for His earthly priesthood do not ever make anyone into an “upper-class” elect. And no elect can boast about being chosen to become Christ’s disciple during life on earth, since no one is able to make oneself into His disciple. For no elect soul can serve Jesus until Jesus shapes the innate will of one’s spirit. Literally all that makes one into His disciple comes from Him. Jesus freely gives every circumstance and spiritual lesson that each receives on earth. He leads each one’s spirit into His Holy Spirit’s teaching and training. The only way one is able to meet all the conditions necessary to be His disciple are through His works inside one. All the others can never become His disciples on earth, because Jesus does not make them able to meet His conditions.
So, through the shaped inherent and spontaneous will of one’s elect spirit, one first has “to deny oneself,” as a one-time decision influencing the remainder of one’s life on earth. For the aorist imperative third person singular form of ἀπαρνέομαι was commanding each potential disciple “to refuse to recognize/acknowledge [self interests] ... to act in a wholly selfless manner, deny oneself”
(BDAG3). This is a one-time action, but for a lifetime, and is remembered or performed every time a temptation to act selfishly presents itself to one’s spirit. Now, one whose mind of flesh is taught, Page 1107
trained and naturally inclined to be selfless will have an easier time fulfilling this exhortation. But one who is raised in the self-indulgent home environments of the worldly middle-class or wealthy, or anyone having a mind of flesh which bears a natural inclination to only trust in one’s own abilities, will find this command far more difficult to fulfill. But all kinds of the elect will always find it to be extremely difficult to extend that selflessness to the extent where they are able to fulfill His second one-time commandment, which is to take up one’s own personal cross, to die on a pagan instrument of torture designed to mock one as one suffers an extremely painful death. In other words, each time one is threatened by unbelievers with utterly dehumanizing, painful and deadly vengeance, one must just accept their psychopathic, demonic, ruthless actions as the cost of continuously following Jesus.
If an elect spirit knows full well that one must remain egoless and selfless, in order to build up the just, equitable, joyful, peaceful and loving kingdom of God on earth, even if one must cope with the violent resistance of Satan and his most vile children against this necessary work, then Jesus will accept one as His true disciple. Then one will belong to His one and only true New Covenant church.
Then Jesus will call and enable one to do His works, as a member of His new and eternal priesthood.
Of course, the flesh will always want to preserve itself and oppose the elect spirit’s will in all of this.
But, if a spirit does not do this, or innately refuses to accept this, Jesus will not allow that one to be His disciple, will not gather that one into His New Covenant priesthood of Israel. Yet, an elect spirit cannot truly apply and accept these commanded conditions without first being taught exactly what Jesus meant here. Nor can one ever create enough courage to willingly accept these conditions, if the spirit has not been first trained until it acquires the resolve to accept them. And Jesus will not teach and train all the elect to be His disciples while they are living on this earth. Not all elect in the flesh will be active members of His New Covenant priesthood on earth, although all will be taught and trained for His priesthood on the judgment day. In fact, even the elect who are chosen to be His true disciples on earth will need to complete their teaching and training on that final day too. But, until an appointed time occurring shortly before Jesus returns, the vast majority of the elect will not become His disciples nor the true priesthood of God on earth. And, as for non-elect spirits of all kinds, they cannot even begin to accept these conditions. So meeting these conditions will never be a matter of personal choice, but will always depend on when and if Jesus decides to make one into His disciple.
A fictitious “free will” cannot recreate itself to become an inherent and spontaneous will desiring to meet these commanded conditions of God’s Old Covenant Law. Nor can a non-existent “free will”
ever fulfill that Law in order to cause the will of our God Jesus to accept oneself as His disciple.
Rather, our Creator God Jesus Himself must decide to create one’s human spirit in His image when one is conceived. Jesus must “genetically hard wire” the will of a spirit at its birth, so that the spirit inherently desires to love responsibly and justly in the way God’s Law outlines. Then His will must choose to wake up that elect spirit at His appointed time, so He can teach and train that spirit as His disciple. Then that elect will learn to fulfill God’s Law through the concepts which Jesus’ Holy Spirit pours into the mind of that spirit, and through the experiences by which He shapes the will of that spirit. No matter how selfish a mind of flesh might be, an awakened elect spirit will begin to mature and develop a selfless will, as the Holy Spirit of Jesus directly teaches and trains the spirit. Through the inner works of Jesus, an elect spirit grows a desire to serve Jesus, for His benefit, and develops a compulsion to build up Christ’s just and loving kingdom on earth. No matter how weak, cowardly and fearful a mind of flesh may be, an awakened, the well-taught and well-trained elect spirit will learn to manage its mind and body of flesh to make it strong for the works of God, overcome the trembling of the flesh and bravely walk into righteousness, no matter what Satan and his ruthless children might threaten against the flesh. The elect spirits will know that it is absolutely necessary to Page 1108
follow Jesus and do His will on earth, for the sakes of loved ones and for all the Father’s other good creations. Only Jesus’ Holy Spirit can possibly counsel, teach and train an elect spirit to overcome evil with good, to break down the gates of hell in fake churches and in the rest of Satan’s kingdom, to selflessly do God’s works through love even while facing deadly resistance from God’s enemies.
As we read that conditional statement of Jesus, we must take into account all His other harmonious teachings. That is, we must understand what Jesus meant in the context of who He truly was, in the global context of all He revealed about Himself throughout all the Scriptures. And, if we do this, and also examine the grammatical evidence, we find that Jesus was commanding us to swiftly and wisely nullify the works of Satan, build up His just and loving kingdom on earth, and to do all this through His will and power. Yes, Jesus actually commanded all true Christians in all time to selflessly deny the desires and even some needs of their flesh, possibly even die to do His will for His good causes.
His twelve disciples back then had witnessed the many conflicts Jesus had with God’s enemies, especially with the fake Evangelicals. So here we see how Jesus was telling these more spiritually mature disciples what was in store for them. Yet, when He told them that they too might face the torture of being crucified to death, none of those twelve, except Judas Iscariot, fell away from Jesus.
After being told how they must take up their own personal cross and die an ignoble death, they more firmly resolved to follow Jesus as His disciples. But, clearly, the mind of flesh in all surely would have feared that kind of death, just as much as any of us today. None would have been like heroes in the movies, able to face a tortuous death without anxiety, without a hint of fear (because the heroes in the movies are mere actors who know the torture and deaths they face will be pretended and not real). When Jesus proclaimed that such things would likely be the destiny of their flesh, He knew those disciples had often seen that kind of psychopathic Roman torture, and definitely feared it in their flesh. Yet, for the opportunity to learn from Jesus, their awakened elect spirits willingly faced it.
Later, after the faithful disciples received the Holy Spirit of Jesus on the day of the Pentecost, they faced that kind of gruesome death even more boldly, with a firm resolution of their hearts to build up God’s just and loving kingdom on earth. Once His Holy Spirit dwelt next to their spirits, within their hearts and souls, His counsel and power caused them to focus on their God-given callings, missions and goals with such determination that it did indeed cost them their lives to bring the Messiah’s truth and justice to the people. Yet, even before Jesus sent His Spirit to dwell in them, their spirits were awake enough to desire Jesus and His loving truths above all else. For in the face of public rejection, personal loss and danger, their elect spirits were not able to let their flesh depart from Jesus, and they all declared, “Lord, to whom would we go? You have the words of eternal life” (John 6:68, WEB).
An awakened elect spirit, even before the Holy Spirit comes to dwell in the home of its heart and in the chamber of its soul, cannot help but be irresistibly drawn to the truths of Jesus. Because God created the spirits of His children to innately desire love and truth, none can resist the real Jesus of Bible. And this is the ultimate test that determines whether a person has an elect or non-elect spirit.
For Jesus told us: “No one can come to Me unless the Father who sent Me draws him, and I will raise him up in the last day” (John 6:44, WEB). When Jesus’ Holy Spirit speaks to elect spirits from outside of their hearts and souls, as He knocks on the doors of those hearts and souls, it wakes their spirits. Then their spirits listen intently to His words, even if their minds of flesh strongly resist Him.
And, if an awakened elect spirit in the soul barely hears the genuine truths Jesus speaks, because the flesh is screaming in protest, that spirit cannot forget those truths. Even if Jesus speaks in the words that some other elect soul, who wrote or spoke words through His Holy Spirit, the awakened elect spirit will firmly cling to those words and cannot let go. Minds of flesh cannot comprehend nor remember those words, but an elect spirit can and will. All the elect do this, just as those twelve Page 1109
disciples did before His Holy Spirit entered them. Once Jesus wakes an elect spirit, and that spirit hears the real truths of God, either revealed directly by His Holy Spirit or through His priesthood of Israel, opposing teachings from others ring hollow and empty in the ears of those spirits. So literally all elect spirits gravitate toward the real Jesus and go to Him, because there is nowhere else to go.
Now, after Jesus set these conditions for His disciples, He told them why they must risk a violent and dehumanizing death at the hands of His enemies: “For whoever might will to save one’s soul will destroy it. Yet whomever might destroy one’s soul for My cause will find it.” There is no reason for any elect soul to bow before Satan and comply with his loveless, ruthless laws and ways in his evil and destructive world order. Doing that may selfishly, but temporarily, save one’s own “soul,” that is, one’s life in the flesh. Yet, in an elect soul who does this, in the place where one’s mind of flesh meets with the mind of the spirit, the oppression of one’s spirit will be necessary. Unless a person possesses a non-elect spirit, the esteeming and serving Satan, by bowing to that devil’s chosen heads of institutions which destroy the innocent, will cause tortuous and irreconcilable conflicts within a soul. Of course, non-elect spirits do not experience such conflicts, but literally all elect spirits do. So, if the elect do not war against the unjust lies of Satan’s world order, their violent internal battles will become so severe, with the spirit and flesh wounding one another so deeply, that one will die inside.
Whenever an elect one’s mind of flesh meets with the mind of one’s spirit in the chamber of one’s soul, the amoral flesh will insist upon its own comfort and survival. So the mind of flesh frequently rises up against its own spirit, to save itself. One’s flesh will try to silence the voice of its life-giving manager, if that one does have an elect spirit. Then an infantile elect spirit, without the maturing works of Jesus, will remain cowardly and weak, fearful in its ignorance and barely able to stand in its malnutrition, because it has not fed on the healthy bread of heaven. Thus, the elect spirit usually will submit to the flesh, or flee into the chamber of the soul, leaving the mind of flesh to manage one’s entire life without any input, counsel or managerial control from its wiser elect spirit. And, since all morality, wisdom and love comes from God through one’s spirit, that one’s life will neither possess nor apply any love, wisdom and responsible justice. For one’s elect spirit will lock itself in the heart and remain silent, until its flesh dies. And death will usually come sooner for an immoral, foolish and loveless soul. Even so, that one’s life will not be worthwhile for the elect soul, since its elect spirit will be hiding in a death-like existence throughout that earthly life, as a virtual prisoner in that one’s heart—unheeded, unacknowledged and unawakened. So that one’s life will indeed be lost.
On the other hand, if Jesus knocks on the door to an elect one’s heart and soul, that one’s elect spirit will not be able to remain asleep. His actions and words will wake that spirit, even if it has fallen into a totally death-like slumber. For our almighty God knocks so loud that He shakes up one’s entire life. And, if Jesus sees that an awakened spirit is terrified and not willing to open the door, He will soon open that door Himself. For He holds the keys to all doors and, if He must, He is well-able to break open any door which is blocked with heaps of heavy lies. So, once Jesus comes to awaken that elect spirit, He will begin to complete the teaching and training of that spirit, whether or not the spirit is too afraid to follow Him as His disciple. And that elect spirit will not be able to ignore nor deny the truths that Jesus utters from the Holy Spirit of God in Him. For every fibre of that elect spirit will inherently love every concept pouring out of the mouth of the real Jesus, because that elect spirit was created in the image of the Creator God Jesus, who teaches and trains one in the principles that have originated from His own heart. Thus, no elect spirit is able to resist the appeal of those truths. And, as the teaching and training continues, that elect spirit begins to trust in Jesus and in His truths, with saving faith, until that spirit realizes that this Creator God Jesus is the only source of all the love and wisdom needed by one’s own life and the lives of all creations. In time, that elect spirit begins to Page 1110
gain the courage and wisdom to take control of its own soul, and commands its flesh to submit to its wiser management. And the flesh, seeing the almighty God standing with that elect spirit, does bow to the will of that spirit. So, when the elect person stops walking according to the will of the flesh, and begins to walk according to the will of its spirit, as its spirit is guided by Jesus, then that one begins to live an abundant and eternal life of love, no matter how short the life of its flesh may be.
No awakened elect spirit is able to deny its insurmountable longing for just and God-like love, which can only be built on a foundation of the truths taught by Jesus. So, as Jesus teaches an elect spirit, that elect spirit eventually will bravely return to the chamber of its soul to rebuke its servant, to take control over its rebellious mind of flesh. A terrified, infantile elect spirit will even learn to accept that its earthly soul must risk destruction, that its earthly flesh may need to sacrifice itself in death, in order to build up the loving, just kingdom of God on earth. For only the spirit’s works for Jesus bring it joy and life. Yes, if the mind and body of flesh die, the earthly body will be destroyed. And a soul is the interface allowing communication between the body and spirit. So the loss of the body renders the earthly soul useless. Nevertheless, neither the spirit nor the soul can die with the flesh, but all spirits and souls will be granted new bodies made of eternal spiritual substances after death. Yet a lost elect human spirit, together with all non-elect human spirits, will “sleep” in the skies of the spiritual realm after death, in an almost totally unconscious state. Only if Jesus awakens and teaches an elect spirit, so that spirit becomes willing to risk the destruction of its earthly mind of flesh in its soul, will that one be able to walk with Jesus among the other awakened elect upon the vast lands at the gates of heaven, being further taught and trained by Him, until the day when all shall be judged.
After much teaching and training from Jesus, there is a significant loss of fear. For we can no longer cringe in terror before the demons and demonic human gods of Satan’s world order, not after Jesus makes us realize that even the most powerful of evil human gods are nothing but worthless and weak liars, who shall all be cast into the eternal prison of their own spiritual lies and delusions. We cannot bow before those fake gods, after the light of Jesus exposes them and their evil works. For we begin to see that those esteemed gods of the devil’s kingdom have no power to do anything effectively, and are no good for anyone. An awakened elect spirit can no longer worship those useless gods, cannot inwardly force itself to respect and serve those vile gods. We realize that the only thing those gods possess is the devil’s power to delude and destroy, but only if God allows that devil to exert that power. And that devil is just as happy to destroy his own children, as he is to destroy us. So how can we be afraid of those self-destructive fools if we serve God? Once an elect spirit wakes, and the ears of that spirit hear the real God uttering genuine truths, while its opened eyes see God’s power wisely work effective good, an elect spirit is not able to willingly worship any other god. For all good, all that is just, wholesome, true and loving, originates from the Creator Spirit dwelling in Jesus. All that an elect spirit was created to desire resides in Jesus, in Him alone. The more an elect spirit realizes this, the more that spirit accepts the fact that it must become Jesus’ disciple at all cost, even if it means that God’s enemies may destroy one’s earthly soul by killing one’s body of flesh. For earthly souls shall be restored after God lifts the eternal spirit into His eternal shelter of the third heaven. All elect spirits will receive new bodies made of better spiritual substances, with revived souls as well.
So here (in Mat. 16:25), Jesus did actually say it is only possible for an elect spirit of a true disciple to find abundant life if that spirit is willing to sacrifice one’s earthly soul through the death of one’s body of flesh. But that soul will only cease to possess a body for a moment, will only die for a mere instant, because a new body will be granted to that soul almost as soon as it leaves the flesh behind.
Of course, Jesus’ disciples, at that time, must have been horrified by this teaching, since they did not yet have the Holy Spirit of Jesus dwelling in their hearts. Nevertheless, the elect spirits of those Page 1111
disciples had been taught truths by Jesus. Therefore, even then, even before their elect spirits saw the Holy Spirit of Jesus enter their hearts and souls, they clung to Jesus, and refused to part from Him.
All knew exactly what Jesus meant when He asked their elect spirits to reason through what He had been teaching and said: “For how will it be profitable if a person might have gained the whole world, yet one’s soul may have been cast away? Or what will a person give in exchange for one’s soul?”
After Jesus told His disciples that they must be willing to lose their earthly souls for His cause, for the building up of His just and loving kingdom on earth, He also told them the reason why they must do this. For, even if Satan let one who bowed before him become the human king of his entire world order, that one would remain nothing but a subject ruler who was always required to obey Satan’s demands like his slave. So, even if one’s temporary flesh gained the whole world, this could never actually profit one’s eternal spirit and soul. The aorist passive subjunctive form of ζημιόω indicated that, if they received all this from the devil, their life-giving spirits in their souls would have been caused “to experience the loss of something, with implication of undergoing hardship or suffering, suffer damage/loss, forfeit, sustain injury” (BDAG3). That is, their elect souls would suffer a kind of living death if they did this. And many elect endure the bondage of Satan for far less than the wealth and power of his entire world order. They often sell their souls for shiny car or a few fancy bobbles.
It is better for the elect to suffer the temporary destruction of their earthly souls, through the deaths of their flesh, and truly be inwardly alive. For Jesus would will restore their souls to an infinitely better state in heaven after the flesh dies. No matter what the devil can offer elect spirits on earth, they will need justice and love more. Even all of Satan’s possessions, all that exists in his wretched, loveless, greedy, grasping, unjust, psychopathic, foolish, self-destructive kingdom, could never be enough to pay for the loss of life and joy that love built on truth can provide. And, if that prince of the world order can never give anything valuable enough to exchange for the loving life in one’s soul, then how can any of his human slaves or non-elect children possibly offer enough to buy one’s soul? If the owner of the world order cannot offer enough to buy a true elect disciple’s soul, then none of the wanna-be human gods belonging to that devil can offer enough to give in exchange for a true disciple’s soul either. So let the elect understand these words of Jesus. The world’s most wealthy and powerful are merely petty slaves owned by Satan, who must anxiously labour night and day to gratify his unjust and sadistic whims. Therefore, nothing they can offer will satisfy our eternal souls.
Of course, no one can actually sell one’s soul to Satan, nor to anyone else, since every soul always remains the permanent property of God. And God is immutable. Therefore, He will never relinquish His ownership of any property that He has chosen to create. God even maintains His ownership and rule over Satan himself. For all eternity, God will own and take care of all that exists. And God never allows anyone else to sell His property, because His immutable laws forbid anyone to sell anything which does not belong to oneself. Furthermore, God always enforces this law and never lets anyone break this law, because He, the omnipresent Owner, is always standing beside His property, to guard it. Therefore, not one of God’s elect will ever be able to sell one’s own soul to the devil. Some may think they have done this, and liars may even convince some that they have done so. But no elect soul can possibly become Satan’s property, not for one moment. Jesus may temporarily hand some of His more stubborn and carnal elect souls over to Satan, to be deluded for the destruction of their flesh. But that is for His ultimate goal, so their elect spirits can be taught and trained through those earthly experiences, so they can learn from those experiences on the final day, and better fulfill their destinies in heaven. Meanwhile, those losses on earth save their elect spirits from further damage.
The teaching judgments of Jesus will save literally all elect spirits on the judgment day, even the elect who have been temporarily handed over to Satan for the destruction of their flesh (I Cor. 5:5).
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Not even one elect human being who has ever lived on earth will be lost to hell, for not one has every possessed a “free will” with the right or the power to sell one’s own soul to the devil. Not one possesses the ability to “cast away” one’s own soul into hell. As for the non-elect, they do not sell themselves to Satan either. For they too are God’s property, not their own property. But God, the Owner of all existence, has agreed to hand over all the non-elect to be ruled by their hellish father, to be forever manipulated by that demon. Nevertheless, Satan will always be a mere subject ruler of a subject kingdom, since God remains the High King ruling over that devil. God remains the only and ultimate authority over the entire creation, where the temporary kingdom of the world order and the eternal kingdom of hell are merely small and extremely limited parts of God’s entire kingdom. So the non-elect may think they are gods who own themselves, and therefore able to “sell” their souls to the devil. But, in reality, God owns them outright. Creations cannot own themselves, nor anything else. And the devil does not buy non-elect souls, since God granted him a permanent stewardship over them in the beginning, and he cannot gain anything more than that stewardship he was already granted. Since Satan and all his property are entirely owned by God, that devil cannot own anything.
So, when Satan offers up part of or the whole of his kingdom to anyone, as a bribe, it may seem as though he wants one to sell one’s soul to him in exchange for his worthless reward. But that devil is actually lying through his devouring mouth. For he owns nothing and has nothing to offer. And only dupes, like the non-elect, believe him. Then, if the devil sees that one’s soul will obey his whims, he will give a part of his kingdom to seal the deal. This is why so many of the highest positions of authority, power and wealth in Satan’s world order are filled by the non-elect. However, let all the elect realize that Satan merely rules a subject kingdom on earth, and God ultimately rules over the devil’s world order too. God owns the entire earth and all that is upon it, including all the spirits, all the souls, all the human bodies of flesh appointed to death, and literally all physical things that are falsely claimed to be the properties of Satan’s world order. Thus, all whom Satan appoints to the elite upper class in his unjust kingdom, all his non-elect children, belong to God, and our God Jesus is able to cause them to do His will whenever He pleases, and can also destroy whenever He chooses.
In the end, good always triumphs over evil. Truth will always shine into and destroy the darkness of lies and delusions. The just, equitable and loving will of God will always overcome over the wills of the devil and his minions. And, from the moment that Christ’s Holy Spirit first entered an awakened elect heart on that day of the Pentecost two millenniums ago, all God’s elect children on earth have born the potential authority of God to silence the voices of liars, and to nullify all the illicit claims of authority in this world. In Jesus’ name, all elect can potentially bind or free any other souls on earth.
Thus, every position of legitimate authority on earth—the kinds that God Himself upholds and makes effective for the good of all His creations through His own personal will and power—can only be filled by the elect, especially by the true and faithful disciples of our God Jesus. The partially awake elect (the just and loving souls who may not consciously know Jesus but are frequently and inwardly compelled to speak the truth and do His just works), along with the fully awakened elect, should be chosen for all tasks requiring the teaching and judging of other human beings. For these are the men God has chosen for all positions of authority, the mature and wise men God commanded us to chose as our governing brothers. And these kinds of men always partner with mature and wise women in making critical decisions or judging in ways which substantially affect other lives, since women help them see and remember details that might otherwise be overlooked. However, if we choose lying, thieving, immoral, murderous authorities to rule over us, or those who compromise with evil, we have sinned, and God will hold us accountable for submitting to illegitimate rulers.
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Naturally, all positions of just, loving legitimate authority and power are opposed by the devil. For Satan wants to be his own god, which causes him to covet the power to make and enforce his own laws and rules for his own benefit. Yet that demonic spirit is never able to overcome God, nor any of the human authorities appointed and empowered by God. For God upholds all the elect who do His will. In fact, all legitimate human authorities and powers, all that are appointed and upheld by God Himself, will be able to overcome powers far greater than themselves, and even the very gates of hell itself. And the more that elect spirits heed the wise and just counsel of God, the more rapidly they will be able utterly defeat Satan and the institutions within his world-wide kingdom. For God wants the lies and injustice of the devil to be vanquished as soon as possible, for the sake of His people and His other creations. So, yes, there are some who love the darkness of lies and delusions, and these may be able to hand their nations over to rulers appointed by Satan. But God will grant His wisdom and power to the loving, just, awakened elect in those nations, to all who inherently seek the light of justice and reality. And the elect whom our God Jesus appoints, who acknowledge Him as their one and only Head, will become the decision-making authorities ruling over those non-elect in the end. Then Jesus will restore their land through His power, transforming it into a part of His just and loving kingdom on earth, into a strong land that Satan’s power can no longer corrupt or destroy.
Since all real wealth (all the healthy physical and spiritual good in this world) is owned by God alone, and God wills to share it all equitably with all His living creations, God only chooses His trustworthy, just, equitable, loving elect children to distribute His wealth. All the non-elect who claim the authority to manage God’s wealth, but do so in unjust ways for their own personal gain, were never actually appointed by God to be His stewards. They are all illegitimate authorities who must answer to both God and His true teaching-judging elders. Through grace, God wills His true stewards to equitably grant food, clothing, shelter and other needs of the flesh to all of His beloved creations. More importantly, God demands that we shall freely administer His spiritual wealth of truth, justice and love for all human and animal spirits, to work peace for their eternal souls and throughout God’s property of the earth. But the devil’s wealth is his own invention of money, which is totally unreal, worthless and bears no intrinsic value at all. Yet Satan deludes his citizens into thinking money is the most valuable thing on earth, and must be used to control the distribution of all necessities for all life on earth. But money is not a food grown by God’s will, according His works of providing light, rain and fertility upon His land. Nor is money a skill of a human being which enables both oneself and others to survive and thrive, as one tends God’s gardens and takes responsibility for His other creatures. Money is just a lie used by Satan’s world order to manipulate and control his citizens, to enslave souls to his psychopathic children. And the only reason a nation might actually need to print and distribute some kind of currency is to be able to exchange goods and services with nations belonging to Satan’s kingdom. All else needed by the people can be distributed through the simple, unbiased, equitable, just and loving authority of compassionate, wise and fully trustworthy servants of God, who overlook many sins for the sakes of God’s infantile, weak children.
Money is neither a good nor a service, and cannot obtain any goods or services from anyone who refuses to be deluded by it. Thus, since the only kind of wealth the devil can offer is that worthless money, all who are deemed wealthy solely in terms of the money they possess will soon be most impoverished souls on earth, as well as absolutely useless and of no real value to any nation. For, as soon as the people are no longer deluded by money, they will have no use for that kind of wealth. Yet Jesus is about to strike very heavy blows against all the economies of Satan’s world order during the approaching end times. And most of those systems will completely collapse during the ravages of the sixth seal, at the very beginning of the end times. Then the beast’s kingdom and other evil nations Page 1114
will revive their own financial systems for a time, and forbid anyone to buy or sell critical necessities unless one worships the human gods of those nations. But those systems will also be crushed by the plagues of the seventh seal’s era. And this will occur within the lifetime of the generation which sees the devastation and the true revival of God’s priesthood during the sixth seal’s era. So all wealth in all bank accounts will soon become discarded electronic charges on digital media, or erased to allow the memory of computers to store useful data. All paper money will become kindling or wallpaper.
All coins will be melted down and reused for pots, tools and other functional items. Gold and silver will be a metal used for electronics and other functions, and exchanged pound for pound with good steel. Consequently, the elect must prepare for those times, and learn to share equitably with one another, as well as work for the good of all one’s siblings in mankind, and for the rest of God’s good creations, rather than for money and selfish ambitions. Now is the day we must begin to be real.
Since all physical and spiritual realities have been created by God, and are owned solely by God, there is absolutely nothing of any real value that Satan or his minions can possibly offer any elect soul. Satan, together will all of his most powerful and wealthy human servants in his hierarchical class systems of his unjust world order, provide only the delusion that they bear the right to exert control over the labours of other equal human beings, over other life on God’s planet and over the resources within God’s lands. Yet none of the most wealthy and powerful wanna-be gods in that devil’s system ever do enough genuine useful work to earn even one real loaf of common bread. In fact, all those elite fools have been parasites and leaches strutting upon God’s lands, and owe an insurmountable debt to the Owner of all existence. Of course, literally all humans are sinners, so we should not unjustly discriminate against those deluded puppets of Satan’s world order. Rather, we need to realize that a few might be God’s elect and confront them with a right interpretation of God’s compassionate Law, with His truths about life and faith. This may cause some to repent, to learn to be more just and equitable. Yet, since the only real skills they know are exploiting and destroying, which we cannot allow, we must limit their freedoms. For all freedoms bear responsibilities. Thus, until one is capable of handling those required responsibilities, neither can one have those freedoms.
When Jesus returns to rule the world with His loving and equitable justice, and after He removes all the financial systems of Satan’s world order, the practising and perfecting of evil little skills required to cruelly exploit one’s siblings in mankind, even to the point of enslaving and murdering one’s own brothers and sisters, end. All the delusions and training of the wealthy and powerful in the devil’s world order will actually become a great liability. For those monsters will either need to unlearn all of it and repent into the just, compassionate, equitable truth, or face the consequences of completely lacking freedoms and an eventual death, possibly the payment of their huge debt in hell. As for the money and power they now possess, it is not real, and the only reason they can get away with the gratification of their whims is because the people have also been deluded. Yet their money bears no real intrinsic value, nothing that can be legitimately traded for real goods or services. And their illicit power is not from God. Thus, none of them bears any real authority. All those arrogant despots and oppressors remain under God’s Law. So the only right any of them have is to be justly judged and condemned by God’s Law. Therefore, if the devil and his dupes of that spiritual kingdom possess nothing to trade, even for a loaf a bread, and bear no real power, then how will they buy our souls?
Let the awakened elect remember that Jesus “is about to come in the good opinion of His Father, among His [heavenly] angels, and give recompense to each according to one’s practises.” All the biblical prophecies suggest that Jesus’ second advent will occur soon, likely within a century. And, before He comes again, He will dichotomize the earth’s entire population. His almighty Spirit will cause the elect to choose His just, loving ways, while Satan’s spirit will cause his non-elect to choose Page 1115
the humanistic ways of his beast. So some nations will become truly biblical Christian democracies, although most will belong to Satan’s kingdom. Still, the elect will exist in all nations, and almost all will have turned to Jesus, while almost all the non-elect will either worship Satan’s messiah, the Satan-possessed man called the beast, or else rebel against him in jealousy. Then all the humanistic nation will later join that beast in a final battle against God, where all will be destroyed. For, just as they are now, the non-elect will be so deluded that they will be unable to see how their compulsion to destroy others, and ultimately themselves, contradicts the reality of everything in creation, which always strives to balance the principles of God, and continuously builds up life at all times. Now, since the economic, military and political systems of Satan’s world order will have lost much of their power at the beginning of this dichotomization process, during the worst days in the earth’s history, they will need to abandon much of their advanced technology. Yet they will be desperate and engage in the most destructive wars of all history, in their attempts to regain their former power. And their remaining infantries will kill more than a third of the earth’s population. But, although outnumbered by eastern and northern powers, the devil’s beast will be granted the most favour in Satan’s world order and become the dominant power among the nations that oppose God. Then the end will come.
Now, of course, all human beings will still be sinners during those end times, even after the great revival which gathers most of the elect into the Messiah’s New Covenant branch of Israel. However, when Jesus comes the second time, He will find a true New Covenant church, which has advanced in the knowledge and wisdom granted by His Holy Spirit, a church that is even more faithful and pure than the apostolic church of the first century. So, although Jesus refrained from judging the earth during His first advent, He will not hold back His judgments when He comes the second time. For, since the truths of His loving justice will be readily available to all upon the earth at that time, none will bear the excuse of ignorance to temper His wrath. So, just as Jesus clearly warned us, He will punish the unrepentant with His judgments at His second coming, and surely “will give recompense to each according to one’s practises” (ἀποδώσει ἑκάστῳ κατὰ τὴν πρᾶξιν αὐτοῦ). As He said this, He used the noun πρᾶξις, which refers to “a function implying sustained activity ... way of conducting oneself” (BDAG3). In context, it refers to a sustained focus on certain principles chosen to guide the conduct of one’s life, the overall pattern of behaviours, the sum of wilful “practises.” It does not refer to a few good or bad works one has done, but to the entire direction of one’s life set by the will of one’s spirit. So the non-elect spirits that practise war against God will be destroyed by Jesus. But Jesus will spare the elect spirits seeking to learn and attempting to practise all His just, loving ways.
Then, related to this statement (Mat. 16:27), Jesus added: “In certainty, I reason with you that some of those still standing in this place after taking a stand, these same definitely should not taste of death until they might clearly perceive the Son of mankind coming in His kingdom” (Mat. 16:28, ALT). Now we must ask if Jesus was referring to the disciples standing with Him in that place north of Galilee long ago, or to the future elect standing in Israel during the end times. We see how some might translate the phrase, τινες τῶν ὧδε ἑστώτων, as “some standing here.” But look at how Jesus intentionally used a genitive plural perfect participle in this genitive phrase (τῶν ὧδε ἑστώτων), and the way in which this entire phrase modifies the plural nominative pronoun (τινες). This perfect tense of the participle emphasizes the effects of the multiple entities having “stood up” or “taken a stand” in the past. Then the genitive case of the whole phrase simply indicates that those effects were
“of” or “from” those entities. So these implied effects would be the resulting upright position of the entities (τινες), who “took a stand” at an indeterminate time in the past. Then the adverb ὧδε (“here,”
“in this place”) is embedded in the genitive phrase and modifies the participle, indicating where the multiple entities are still standing and upright. But, when Jesus said this, the place where they stood Page 1116
was the town of Caesarea Philippi, situated below Mount Hermon, north of Israel and Galilee, in a Gentile territory. However, that particular place was actually a part of the land of Israel that God had granted to Abraham’s descendants. And that cluster of mountains is the northern part of the Golan Heights, located at the borders of Syria, Lebanon and Israel. It is actually the highest peak in Israel.
So here Jesus was referring to Old Testament prophecies, which stated that a remnant of Gentile and Jewish elect would refuse to join with the beast, and will take a stand against the beast’s kingdom of seven European nations, although that beast’s kingdom will be the dominant world power for seven years. And a remnant of these elect Jews and Gentiles will see the physical return of Jesus, when He will eliminate all the non-elect upon the earth, all who sided with Satan and the beast. But this shall only occur after the armies of the beast and all the other humanistic nations join together and march against Israel, to destroy that source of all their Christian and Jewish opposition. So, in Matthew 16:28, Jesus was simply stating that He will preserve some of the elect who take a stand against that beast. He was telling the awakened elect of the end times that they must not lose hope. For the army and refugees of Israel who will be standing on the Golan Heights, below Mount Hermon, will live.
The beast will not kill them during his invasion. Nor will that beast be able to behead all of Christ’s elect in the world, not all who place their faith in Him and in His words of truth. That beast shall behead most of the believers in his own lands, and many in the lands of his allies. But, although the Roman beast will definitely try to murder literally all the loving, just and honest Gentile and Jewish elect on earth, our God Jesus will not allow him to do so. A remnant of the true disciples of Jesus, even millions who have denied themselves and willingly risked a painful death at the hands of Satan’s servants, will not “taste of death.” Many will see Jesus return in glory to judge the earth.
In Matthew 16:27-28, Jesus referred to the Jewish and Gentile elect in the end times, those living during the last few decades before He returns to rule the earth. So, if these commands of Jesus were also given to them, as well as to the disciples there that day, then all the commands He gave here must apply to all His true disciples today and throughout history. All awakened and trusting elect, all who heed and faithfully follow Jesus until the end of earthly time, are called to deny themselves and take up their own personal cross of loss, pain, humiliation and death inflicted by Satan’s ruthless world order. And, by the almighty power of our God Jesus, all the elect will be caused to walk in His ways, by His Holy Spirit’s teaching and training of their spirits. All will continuously serve Jesus and His just kingdom through love for Him and trust in Him, because His New Covenant promised that He would cause us to do so. Now let every true disciple realize that all flesh will surely die. So, since all flesh dies, all that remains for each disciple, until death, is a great rejoicing of one’s eternal spirit in the little works of love one can do on earth, together with Jesus and His other disciples. For Jesus shall multiply all these little works of love from our spirits, even enough to redeem the entire earth.
There is one other thing that should be mentioned. When Mark and Luke wrote down the words of Jesus to the disciples on that mountain at that time, they provided an expanded version of Matthew 16:27 for their Gentile audiences. That is, Mark and Luke wrote some of what Jesus only implied to His Jewish disciples. Both recorded the proclamation of Jesus in this way: “For whoever might be ashamed of Me and My words of reasoning among the generation that [is] adulterous and sinful, then the Son of mankind will be ashamed of [this] one as soon as He might have come in the good opinion of His Father with the holy angels” (Mark 8:38, from: ὃς γὰρ ἐὰν ἐπαισχυνθῇ με καὶ τοὺς
ἐμοὺς λόγους ἐν τῇ γενεᾷ ταύτῃ τῇ μοιχαλίδι καὶ ἁμαρτωλῷ, καὶ ὁ υἱὸς τοῦ ἀνθρώπου
ἐπαισχυνθήσεται αὐτὸν ὅταν ἔλθῃ ἐν τῇ δόξῃ τοῦ πατρὸς αὐτοῦ μετὰ τῶν ἀγγέλων τῶν ἁγίων, SBLGNT, cf., Luke 9:26). Mark and Luke wanted to ensure that the Gentile disciples of Jesus would clearly understand that Jesus will surely judge the thoughts, that is, the motives and intensions, of Page 1117
one’s spirit. If the mind of one’s spirit does not have any confidence and trust in Jesus, but loves the devil’s ways of his world order enough to be ashamed of this perfect, wise Teacher of life and faith, as well as embarrassed by His words of sound reasoning regarding justice and equity, then Jesus will be ashamed of that one when He returns to judge His kingdom on earth. And, if our God Jesus is ashamed of an elect child of the Father, that worldly soul will bear many deep regrets in one’s soul as He descends from the sky. Then one will not be able to show one’s very red and disgraced face in public, not until one bears many good fruits of repentance and spends years learning to walk rightly.
Look at how Mark added a phrase pertaining to the tendency of carnally minded souls to fall to peer pressure “among the generation that [is] adulterous and sinful.” In context, this would refer to the generation living during the last few decades before Jesus returns, which is the time we are currently experiencing. Naturally, since the beginning of time, every generation of weak and infantile human beings has been “adulterous and sinful,” and the non-elect have always forcefully stuffed their lies and delusions down the throats of the elect, to corrupt the thoughts of their spirits. Yet, throughout most of history, the elect could use the excuse of ignorance to alleviate some of their shame, to lessen the blows of punishment for their many sins. They could say that they had never heard the laws and teachings of God, which Jesus came to fulfill in them and through them. Or they could say that, when they heard or read God’s Word, all they received were bad interpretations and corruptions of those truths from the fake pastors and priests. Thus, they could not understand the intentions of the real God regarding His precepts. And Jesus will indeed accept this excuse from many of those elect souls on the judgment day, then transfer their punishments to those who had deceived them.
However, all the just and equitable principles found in God’s Word, as well as all His examples of the effects of injustice, were immutably written in His creations on earth and in the heavens above.
And now we know more about His creations than we ever did before. Not only this, but we also know more about the original languages of the Scriptures than we did before, as well as more about the historical context of those teachings, through archaeology. So the excuse of ignorance has always been a little thin, but it is now growing thinner every day. In our day, ignorance is becoming totally wilful and intentional, because anyone can expose the liars and their lies with a little research. For all that exposes them is readily available to all, and most of it is freely offered. As a result, all that wilful ignorance has become just another sin to add to the sins which already condemn carnal souls to destruction. By the end times, our God Jesus will be able to justly judge and destroy all who ignore His truths, all who greedily indulged in selfish pleasures of the flesh while watching their siblings in humankind suffer and die through hunger and deprivation. Jesus will crush all who partake in the dehumanizing slander and violent persecutions done by wanna-be human gods, all who worship those exploiters and murderers in order to receives rewards of the flesh. The elect who help Satan’s world order destroy the entire earth, and all life upon it, may now take pride in the financial benefits, praise and esteem offered by that devil’s kingdom. But all those things are actually worth nothing.
And all of it is wounding their elect spirits. So all will deeply regret it after death or at Jesus’ return.
If Jesus awakens any elect spirit of a Jew or Gentile, and causes one’s resolve to learn and apply His just, equitable, wise and loving ways through the will of one’s spirit, then the entire soul and life of that elect one will soon realize where all internal joy and gratification come from. Only if one heeds Christ’s command to deny oneself, and willingly faces the vengeful, psychopathic, murderous wrath of Satan and his servants, can one truly live and find an abundant life of love. In some lands, the elect will limit or stop the devil’s malicious wrath through their just and godly governments. And, in the other lands, some elect may be able to flee from it. But the injustice of Satan and his exploiting children will exist throughout the earth until Jesus removes that devil and his offspring through His Page 1118
judgment of the earth at His second coming. Until then, the elect must practise a continuous and watchful service to Jesus, as His faithful disciples, and build up His just kingdom of love in truth, for the good of our beloved family of God and all that exists on earth. To nullify the works of Satan and construct pieces of heaven on earth, it will require the self-denial of the elect in ways that risk death.
An attempt to save one’s own earthly soul from self-denial and danger will result in an inner “death,”
and one’s flesh definitely will not be truly happy nor remain alive for very much longer either. And, since the devil always demands absolute loyalty, with a slavish focus on himself and his destructive whims, but he is never loyal to any who serve him, not even to his own children, there is no point in serving him. Consequently, if an elect soul seeks to save his or her own greedy little worldly life by bowing to the devil, that selfish one might still end up being tortured and murdered by the devil or by his servants regardless. Besides, Satan and his servants work their elect slaves to death, without any concern for their lives, and love to find an excuse to gleefully torture and murder them, even if they must lie and invent an excuse. For, whenever they inflict pain and death on God’s cherished children, it makes them feel powerful, even like greater gods than God. Thus, absolutely nothing in Satan’s world order can possibly be worth an elect soul’s betrayal of Jesus. The only real hope of the elect is to trust in Jesus and follow Him. Only Jesus can release us from the demonic delusions of the world order, from false beliefs about money, class systems and all the rest. Only Jesus can lead us into His created and eternal spiritual realities of justice, equity, truth, freedom, hope, peace and love.
Only Jesus can save His elect from a second “death” in hell’s eternal darkness of delusions and lies.
Because Jesus will grant new, eternal, spiritual bodies to our elect spirits, and deliver us all into our true homes above, the loss of our earthly souls is a small price to pay in exchange for the justice, grace, peace, joy and genuine love of Christ’s kingdom. To do His will on earth, as it is done in His home of heaven, brings an abundant life of joyful love upon this earth. But doing Satan’s will works only death, through painful slavery worked in hate and selfishness. Thus, the elect do not have much to lose by denying their worldly desires of the flesh and partaking in the crucifixion of their flesh with Jesus. By learning and practising the ways of our wise, just and loving Creator God, even if it costs us the death of our flesh and destruction of our earthly souls, we gain eternal treasures of real and everlasting value, and can enjoy those treasures even as we live on earth. Then, on the final judgment day, literally all elect will gain even more for any just and loving ways we practised on earth. And all the elect who survive until He returns will rejoice in these wages during a long, fruitful life on earth. Some still living then, and some of the first resurrection, will live for a thousand years.
Jesus Trains His Elders
The training Jesus was providing for the disciples and elders of His New Covenant branch of Israel was now drawing to an end. The appointed time of His departure approached and threats from God’s many enemies were mounting up against Him. The Evangelicals (Pharisees) were especially zealous to attack, primarily because Jesus and His followers were technically the only genuine Evangelicals in Israel, which made those fake Evangelical feel extremely threatened by them. But Jesus had never established an exploitative hierarchical system based upon religious principles of Roman humanism, like those hypocritical Evangelicals did. Therefore, this lack of hierarchy among brothers in Jesus’
sect helped to maintain honesty and a greater integrity of teachings in the Messiah’s assembly. Yet hierarchies in the humanistic Evangelicals made them blind, stubborn and murderous—much like the Evangelicals rallying around Hitler, Trump and other racist fascists or lying criminals in our day.
And, as a whole, those Evangelicals of the early first century also followed the same organizational Page 1119
structure and philosophy as the humanistic Roman Catholic church, with all its comforting rituals of the flesh. In other words, those past Evangelicals were thoroughly committed to usurping God’s rule over His church and His lands, and striving to establish the rule of man over all of God’s earthly properties. So they were like almost all churches are today, who also pray for a humanistic kind of Messiah who shall violently force their own brands of man-centred, autocratic theocracies upon the entire subjugated world. Thus, like the other fake churches, they absolutely refused to worship Jesus!
The major problem that the ancient Evangelicals had with this real Messiah was that He had come to gradually build up His people’s deeply informed trust and hope in God alone, instead of a blind trust in the elite human gods of fake churches. Related to this, those Evangelicals also hated the fact that Jesus laboured steadfastly and lovingly to write His truths upon the hearts of each individual elect disciple, and those sacrificial efforts caused their spirits to resolutely trust in Him. Also, the fake leaders wanted a Messiah to come and instantly gratify their lust for power. Yet Jesus chose to renovate God’s earthly kingdom slowly, by personally teaching and training one elect spirit at a time, until He could personally and individually teach and train all the elect spirits in the entire world.
Then there was the fact that Jesus was able to multiply and empower each one’s small, loving faith and their works for Him, in a way where one’s two small fish and five loaves could then feed five thousand or more. Yet all those Evangelicals could do was steal more and more from their disciples, until their disciples either died or fled from their ruthless exploitation. And one more thing irked those Evangelicals. They were spending every waking hour trying to motivate their disciples to become mindless, irrational puppets who served their every lawless whim. Yet Jesus came to fulfill God’s Law in and through an ever-increasing number of individual elect Jewish and Gentile hearts, until He could build up His loving, just, wise kingdom throughout the earth. And He claimed that He would return only after He had accomplished this goal, in order to remove Satan’s unjust world order from this planet, with all in it, even that devil himself. But this was the last thing those fakes wanted!
Clearly, both the fake non-elect church and secular elites hated the way Jesus was influencing the elect in the land, and the way in which He became the only Head Teacher and Counsellor of each individual. They utterly despised the way Jesus was teaching the people to choose all their teaching and judging elders from those whom He had chosen as His most mature disciples. For, whenever the people did this, they began to cast out and reject all the self-serving fools illicitly ruling over them, since all who were taught and trained by Jesus’ Holy Spirit refused to allow any exploitation of their people. Yet the ability to exploit was the only reason the non-elect sought any kind of authority. True disciples of Jesus were becoming loving, honest, faithful, wise, humble, selfless, just, compassionate and full of grace toward the truly repentant. Jesus was making His disciples into the antithesis of the humanistic human gods that Satan raises up to serve him in his world order. So, since Evangelicals wanted Israel to be ruled solely by the most politically ambitious and outwardly impressive men, by those who taught all to follow their own man-made heresies, they now had to slander and murder Jesus, then denounce His words of reasoning and stop God from justly ruling over His own lands.
We also must not forget that many secular Roman humanists also felt deeply obligated to join that unholy war of the false churches against God. We tend to focus on the enmity between humanistic Jews and secular Romans. But Satan’s kingdom has always been factious, since selfish ambitions and hatred are the only motivating factors of its citizens. There is never any loving faithfulness to build true unity among them, not while each is trying to stab the other in the back in order to steal power, status and money from the other. Nevertheless, Satan’s children will unite for a common cause, especially to preserve their immoral and evil “rights.” So they will join forces in wars against God, or against His people and against His works of truth, justice and equity. Thus, the Evangelicals, Page 1120
the more politically savvy Sadducees, and most other false sects of Jews easily convinced the Gentile Romans to join their battles against God, to help them usurp God’s sovereignty over all.
No matter how much the various sects of humanism might hate and murder one another, all need to be able to rule as gods over their own little kingdoms on earth. And all inwardly know that all their humanistic kingdoms are ultimately ruled and rewarded by Satan. So all humanists dread the enemy of their hellish father, and are willing to set aside all their differences in order to war against the one Creator God. For all have seen how the real God rules, by developing a loving trust in the spirits of His elect, and how He personally guides each individual in His perfectly united kingdom. The real God labours inside each, until all work together as equals, all with one mind and for one common purpose. God’s elect soon become a formidable force against the devil, since God Himself enables them to pursue His goal of justly, equitably and wisely serving all His creations through the love that He builds inside them. Thus, if humanists allow God to even begin those works within His elect children on earth, their factious little exploitative and illicit kingdoms on earth would soon collapse, and those human gods would need to work for a living, even at the only jobs they are qualified to do, such as rock-breaking in prison chain gangs. Consequently, because they have everything to lose if the truths of God are preached and believed in their lands, all sects of humanism, and even all the most evil of pagan religions which have not yet become humanistic, will unite to war against God.
At this point in His ministry, Jesus knew He had very little of His appointed time on earth remaining, and the predestined hour of His body’s death was near. So He had to complete His demonstration of how the kingdom of God on earth functioned. That is, He had to finish teaching and training the future elders of His New Covenant church, so they could teach and train others during the revival of His church, when He sent His Holy Spirit to them. For, after the Pentecost, His new branch of Israel would need men to remind them that He lived, that He would personally teach and train their spirits, so that His people would not be deceived by those who created religions of the flesh and tried to rule over them as their worshipped human gods. Some elders had to remain, to write the truths which He came to teach and to ratify through His blood on the cross. And, in all this, our God Jesus succeeded.
Soon Jesus would pay the price of atonement, for the flesh of all the elect who ever felt the gravity of this earth. God’s enemies would soon torture and murder His body of God, just as He predestined before time began. But, after they did this, He would become even more powerful and effective as the personal Teacher of elect spirits. For He would physically rise from the dead, ascend from the earth, transfigure His risen body of flesh into a body made of spiritual substances, and sit upon His heavenly throne. From there, He would send His Holy Spirit directly into the hearts of the elect, into the individuals He chose to awaken. For His death on the cross would purchase His right to work in them. Then His Spirit of God could teach and train each elect spirit as much or as little as He chose, so He could advance His heavenly kingdom throughout the earth, even as fast as His infantile elect were able to receive it. Previously, in the days before His first advent, His Spirit had to remain outside and apart from the spirits of the elect. But now, with the payment of their sins of the flesh, He could enter their bodies of flesh and reside in them, beside their spirits. So, by doing this, our God Jesus could gradually build up His kingdom on earth, like an ever-expanding and unbreakable rock growing throughout the world, until the appointed time for Him to return and judge the earth.
Since His time in a body of flesh was about to end for a time, Jesus had to spend more personal time with the disciples He appointed as His assistant teachers, those who would become the teaching and judging elders in His New Covenant branch of His priesthood of Israel. That is, while He was with them in the flesh, He wanted to further illustrate how they were to do works in His name, as they Page 1121
served Him in administrative roles, as they taught and judged according to His will, as they served His people according to the reasoning and commands He would pour into the minds of their spirits.
When Jesus did all this for the future apostles back then, for the apprenticing elders He had sent out on missions, He wanted them to write down all that He taught and demonstrated to them. For, what He gave to them was also for all the future truly faithful elders of all history, for all whom He would ever choose and appoint for His true churches and for His legitimate secular governments. All the teaching and judging elders of all kinds in all lands were to serve the people in the same totally God-centred way, where no man was allowed to become a god of the people, and where every elder was subject to the rebukes of all their siblings whose spirits were able to hear God, even if those rebukes from God might be delivered by the lowliest and least esteemed souls among all the Father’s elect children. Now Jesus began to bring His most mature disciples into experiences that would solidify and direct their faith in Him and in His words, for the sakes of all in His future church. Naturally, not all He taught would be entirely understood by the disciples at that time. But most would become clear after He sent His Holy Spirit to them on the day of a future Pentecost, though some teachings would not be fully comprehended until His Spirit could nullify the false teachings which persisted for centuries. Yet these men would be able to write down all those truths for the future church, and those truths would eventually replace the delusions and lies of Satan’s world order. So Jesus had to provide these teachings to them now, while He dwelt with them in the flesh. Then His Holy Spirit would counsel future elders as they read or heard these teachings and demonstrations of Jesus. His sovereign Spirit would cause various men throughout history, but especially when the end times approached, to more fully comprehend how His just, loving kingdom was to function on the earth.
Mat. 17:1-13,
The Formal Proclamation
“After six days, Jesus took with Him Peter, James, and John his brother, and brought them up into a high mountain by themselves. He was transfigured before them. His face shone like the sun, and His garments became as white as the light. Behold, Moses and Elijah appeared to them talking with Him.
“Peter answered, and said to Jesus, ‘Lord, it is good for us to be here. If you want, let’s make three tents here: one for you, one for Moses, and one for Elijah.’ While he was still speaking, behold, a bright cloud overshadowed them. Behold, a voice came out of the cloud, saying,
‘This is My beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased. Listen to Him.’
“When the disciples heard it, they fell on their faces, and were very afraid. Jesus came and touched them and said, ‘Get up, and don’t be afraid.’ Lifting up their eyes, they saw no one, except Jesus alone. As they were coming down from the mountain, Jesus commanded them, saying, ‘Don’t tell anyone what you saw, until the Son of Man has risen from the dead.’
“His disciples asked Him, saying, ‘Then why do the scribes say that Elijah must come first?’
Jesus answered them, ‘Elijah indeed comes first, and will restore all things, but I tell you that Elijah has come already, and they didn’t recognize him, but did to him whatever they wanted to. Even so the Son of Man will also suffer by them.’ Then the disciples understood that He spoke to them of John the Baptizer” (Mat. 17:1-13, WEB).
Here our God Jesus chose three disciples to witness the realities of His created realms, and revealed the oneness of time, space and energy in His two systems, demonstrating how the lesser temporary Page 1122
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continuum is actually within the greater eternal one. For the sum total of time experienced on earth and in the universe, even in all material reality, is one moment of “now” that is real and significant, but a mere aspect of God’s spiritual realm. All physical existence is actually His spiritual energy or power creating its one moment, which spirits in earthly flesh experience as the linear flow of time.
Our God Jesus chose to reveal this very simple and infinitely complex duality to those whom He was training to be teachers of life and faith, because it is critical to understanding the depths of theology, to the development of knowledge about our loving, wise, just and infinite God, to all that He teaches and trains our spirits to do with our flesh on earth. He wanted us to realize that the spirit is all, and flesh counts for nothing. This duality of reality is a concept which any spirit instantly comprehends.
Yet our self-seeking human physical minds of flesh, which are prone to sin, which break our spirits’
union with God, rebel against accepting this fact. For this truth exposes the flesh as nothing more than a somewhat insignificant instrument being temporarily used by a spirit to enhance its spiritual relationship with God, and likewise employed to build up the love in our spirits for other spirits who share the same experience of material time. Since our flesh wants to be the centre of all attention, it hates the fact that it is temporary and that its reality is entirely superseded by the reality of its spirit.
Jesus revealed this only to the disciples with the most receptive hearts and minds at that time, only to three of His assistant teachers, to three of those He chose to become elders in His New Covenant branch of Israel: (1) Peter, the oldest and most zealously loving servant among His disciples; (2) a loving young man called Jacobus or James, who was probably in his early twenties and came from a devout family known to the high priest, and (3) the inwardly trusting and loving little brother of James named John, who was likely about fourteen years old by now but, when he was an old man, wrote the most spiritual Gospel for the Gentiles, as well as four other New Testament books. It was these three whom Jesus “led them up in a high mountain [for reasons] concerning Himself” (Mat.
17:1, from: ἀναφέρει αὐτοὺς εἰς ὄρος ὑψηλὸν κατ’ ἰδίαν, SBLGNT). To aid their future works for Him as teaching elders, Jesus climbed that mountain with them, so He might illustrate how all the past and present words and deeds of all servants of God came together in Him, their Messiah God.
After they ascended, Jesus likely began by praying in the normal way, by causing His lips of flesh to utter the words which His Spirit desired to make known to the three who were listening. But He must have been praying for some time, since the three fell into a deep sleep (see Luke 9:32). Yet that sleep was probably planned and caused by Jesus, because sleep inhibits the control of the flesh over the thoughts in the chamber of the soul, allowing the spirit to exert more control over one’s thoughts.
Then, at the moment of waking, one’s spirit is still exerting a greater level of control in the soul. So a bright light woke them, and these three saw that Jesus “was altered in physical appearance before them, and His countenance shone as the sun. Even His garments became white as the light” (Mat.
17:2, from: μετεμορφώθη ἔμπροσθεν αὐτῶν, καὶ ἔλαμψεν τὸ πρόσωπον αὐτοῦ ὡς ὁ ἥλιος, τὰ δὲ
ἱμάτια αὐτοῦ ἐγένετο λευκὰ ὡς τὸ φῶς, SBLGNT). Here Jesus was enabling their minds of flesh to perceive spiritual realities as more brightly lit entities, in forms which their flesh could comprehend.
Thus, the three disciples would have been shocked, and the only thing they were able to do was stare silently in awe at Jesus. But Jesus was not the only man their eyes witnessed standing before them.
“And, behold, Moses and Elijah appeared to them, exchanging thoughts together with Him” (Mat.
17:3, from: καὶ ἰδοὺ ὤφθη αὐτοῖς Μωϋσῆς καὶ Ἠλίας συλλαλοῦντες μετʼ αὐτοῦ, SBLGNT). The living, awake spirits of Moses and Elijah now stood there, beside Jesus, presented in a way their eyes of flesh could detect. Jesus wanted these three future teaching elders to see Him, Elijah and Moses for several good reasons. One purpose was to convince those disciples that elect spirits cannot die.
Since the flesh of Moses and Elijah departed from the earth many centuries before that day, seeing Page 1123
them alive and well, able to intelligently converse with their God Jesus, proved that not all spirits of the dead will sleep until the judgment day. Rather, the elect spirits whom God awakens while they live in flesh on earth, will surely remain awake after their earthly flesh is cast aside. Their spirits will continue to think, keep on communicating with God and other awake spirits, and walk in heaven’s eternal lands after leaving the world. Knowing this reminded them that they cannot die either, and provided courage to face their future tribulations, their deadly persecutions from God’s enemies.
Think about this. Moses and Elijah, two common elect men like ourselves, were “exchanging thoughts together with” Jesus (συλλαλοῦντες μετʼ αὐτοῦ). And the three disciples recognized them instantly as Moses and Elijah. This could have been because they overheard Jesus address them by their names. But, more likely, it was because our spirits actually see into the spiritual realm and know the other spirits existing there, not only God, but our fellow human spirits dwelling there. And Jesus’ Spirit would have confirmed their identities to their spirits without needing to speak in their earthy language of the flesh, because spirits communicate whole concepts instantly to other spirits.
So Jesus presented the eternal spiritual bodies of Himself and these two prophets in a way that the disciples’ eyes of flesh could perceive, and also made the disciples able to hear Moses and Elijah share their thoughts with their God, Jesus. These three disciples witnessed how, although Jesus clearly revealed Himself as their Lord, King, High Priest, God and Owner, Jesus did not dictate commands to these two prophets, like a pagan king speaks to “inferiors.” Rather, our God Jesus let those two ordinary elect men, Moses and Elijah, stand in His presence and freely share their thoughts, engaging in a personal conversation with Him, as though their God was their Brother and Friend. Those two prophets were comfortably expressed their own opinions while Jesus respectfully and lovingly listened. The two prophets spoke to Jesus in the same way that His disciples spoke with Him while He walked in flesh. The glorified heavenly bodies of Moses and Elijah were acting just like them, while they were there, on the earth, walking and talking with Jesus in their bodies of flesh.
Yet not even the greatest heavenly angel would dare or desire to speak with God like this! For the awe of God in them rejoices in His will, and they eagerly seek it. So do awakened elect human spirits, but there is great difference. All heavenly angels are utterly holy and sinless, while Moses, Elijah and all human elect have been sinners. But angelic spirits were created by God’s power and human spirits were created directly from God’s Breath or Spirit. Then sin made those human spirits more aware of what God is, and what He is not. Moses and Elijah were both acutely aware of this, and spoke with God as His beloved and familiar children. Both also knew that literally all their knowledge and wisdom, all their words of prophecy and miracles, all that was in them, originated from Yahweh alone, from the Spirit who dwelt in Jesus. Then these three disciples accepted these truths as well, that they too were common sinners, like all the rest of mankind, and had no reason to boast in anything they did or possessed, since God granted all to all, solely through His grace alone.
Therefore, after witnessing Moses and Elijah standing there, alive and entirely familiar with their God Jesus, these three disciples would have soon realized that literally all elect souls are very special to God, and will forever bear a close relationship with Him. No elect soul in all the world, neither a Jew nor a Gentile, would ever fail to be respectfully heard by God. Our God Jesus is always willing to engage in a candid conversation with any and every elect spirit, as with His beloved sibling. No matter how “lowly” or how “high” the people of this world might perceive an elect soul’s “status” to be, there can be no status above the others in God’s eyes, just as Moses and Elijah were not above the three common disciples there that day. All the elect are equal and equally unique. All their spirits bear the same status as the heavenly Father’s beloved children, as the younger siblings of Jesus. And literally all the elect on earth and in the heavenly realm above bear the inalienable right to approach Page 1124
Mat. 17:1-13, The Formal Proclamation
the King, to stand before and pour out the heart to our God whenever they desire. And, since God exists outside earthly and heavenly time, He is always able to take the time to hear each elect soul.
When these three disciples saw Jesus with Moses and Elijah, it was also proof that Jesus is Yahweh, the God whose finger wrote the summary of His Law on stone tablets for Moses, then dictated the rest of His written Law to that mortal servant’s spirit for the rest of his life on earth. And now Jesus was about to write a fulfilled version of that same Law on the hearts and in the spirits of all His elect siblings who ever existed or will exist. Now Jesus was going to fulfill His just and loving ways in and through all He chose to serve as priests in His new branch of His earthly church. And the sign of His writing on those tablets of stone could not be broken by sins of the people. Once our God Jesus began to teach and train their spirits, each and every elect spirit would be completed to perfection on the last day, since our infallible Teacher can never choose wrongly nor underestimate His creations.
Then the living, awake spirit of Elijah was from the same one who recognized the quiet whispering of God upon a mountain, whose vexation at the sight of evil had raged so violently within him that he slaughtered all the wilfully deceiving and greedy cult leaders whom a wicked queen was paying to delude God’s children. And, throughout their lives, especially every Passover, these three disciples heard the prophecy about Elijah, how would come just before the Messiah’s second advent, “before the great and terrible day of Yahweh comes.” All knew that God said Elijah “will turn the hearts of the fathers to the children, and the hearts of the children to their fathers, lest [or until] I come and strike the earth with a curse” (Mal. 4:5-6, WEB). Then this prophecy claimed that the people would also “remember” the Law of Moses when Elijah came again (Mal. 4:4), which meant that Moses would likely come with Elijah, to teach the people about God’s Law. Consequently, the spirits of both Moses and Elijah will likely be born or resurrected again into bodies of flesh shortly before Jesus’ second advent. That is, Moses and Elijah likely will be the two prophets of John’s Revelation, who preach in the temple for three and a half years just before Jesus returns. Then the Roman beast will murder both, but both will rise from the dead and ascend into heaven within three and a half days (see Rev. 11:1-14). After this, both Elijah and Moses may return again at the first resurrection.
God’s Word also seems to have provided us with another sign that both prophets would return to the earth in bodies of flesh. For the histories in the Scriptures tell us that neither the body of Moses nor the body of Elijah were buried and abandoned among the dead on earth. For, after Moses walked up a mountain, to look upon the promised land of Israel, he died. Yet it does not specifically say that he was buried, and his body was never found again (Deut. 34:5-6). So, did God resurrect and raise his body up to heaven’s gate, transfigured into a spiritual body? Then Elijah’s living body was visibly taken up from the earth in a chariot (II Kings 2:11). These details seem to indicate that their works on earth were not yet completed. They may have been signs, telling us that Moses and Elijah would return to us in earthly bodies, so they might complete their works on earth for God. Also, God later told us that Elijah was appointed to return twice in a body of flesh: once as John the Baptizer, to announce the Messiah’s first advent; and again (as one of the two prophets in Jerusalem?) to prepare the world for the Messiah’s second and terrifying advent, when Jesus will judge the entire world.
Because the time of His departure from the earth was drawing near, Jesus was obviously providing these future teaching elders of His New Covenant branch of His eternal church with the proofs of His deity and with eschatological prophecies. Jesus had just finished teaching them that He would soon die on a cross, be buried in a tomb, and rise from the dead on the third day. So now He was assuring them that all these horrifying events were predestined, that His death and resurrection were to occur according to God’s infallible planning, as necessary elements which served for the salvation of all the elect Jews and Gentiles on earth, none of whom were actually able to die, just as Moses Page 1125
and Elijah did not actually die. And Jesus also waited for six days after teaching them about His death and resurrection, before He revealed Moses and Elijah to them. So this was yet another a sign that these two would come to announce His second advent just before the millennium of Sabbath rest began for the entire world, just before Jesus returned to rule the earth in peace for a thousand years.
In Matthew 17:1, the accusative object after the preposition in the phrase, μεθʼ ἡμέρας ἓξ, means
“after six days. ” So Jesus had likely camped at the foot of Mount Hermon, outside the Gentile city of Caesarea Philippi, for about six days, before He ascended that mountain with three disciples. So He took the disciples up the mountain on the seventh day. And, a day before they camped there, Jesus taught His disciples about His future death and resurrection—that is, about how He would seal His New Covenant with Israel. Mark confirms that they went up on the seventh day (Mark 9:2). And Luke said the transfiguration occurred “about eight days after these sayings” (Luke 9:28, from: μετὰ
τοὺς λόγους τούτους ὡσεὶ ἡμέραι ὀκτὼ, SBLGNT). But Luke’s language, such as his use of the word ὡσεί, indicates that he was uncertain about the precise chronology of these events. Yet the eye witness whom Luke interviewed must have stressed the number of days, since Luke felt compelled to write down that number of days. So the witness seemed to have counted the number of days since Jesus first revealed that He would be killed and rise from the dead, and it would have occurred a day or two before they camped at the foot of Mount Hermon. Now this detail may seem irrelevant to some. But the number of days that Jesus and His disciples waited at the foot of the mountain is quite important. For, by waiting for a full six days before revealing Moses and Elijah, Jesus drew a direct parallel between this event and an event which occurred almost 1500 hundred years before that day.
In about 1450 BC, after the people of Israel camped below Mount Sinai for six days, God told Moses to climb that mountain, to hear His formal proclamation of His Old Covenant. Later God also ratified that Old Covenant with the blood of symbolic animal sacrifices. So God had formerly and officially proclaimed His Old Covenant relationship with Israel after Moses and Israel waited at the base of Mount Sinai for six days. We were told that “Yahweh’s glory settled on Mount Sinai, and the cloud covered it six days. The seventh day [God] called to Moses out of the midst of the cloud. The appearance of Yahweh’s glory was like devouring fire on the top of the mountain in the eyes of the children of Israel” (Ex. 24:16-17, WEB). And Jesus is God. So Jesus is “Yahweh’s glory” which settled on this new mountain, on Mount Hermon with His disciples, for six days. This is why Jesus waited for six days before revealing His radiant transfiguration, which was beautiful and not nearly as threatening as “devouring fire,” when His New Covenant glory shone in the eyes of His people.
So the six days on Mount Sinai and the six days on Mount Hermon were both symbols of how God would one day bring the entire earth into its Sabbath rest, where all the earth would become a just and loving place, where all would take responsibility for the freedoms God had granted to them. But this brings us to another theological teaching illustrated by Jesus on that day of His transfiguration.
For the mountain Jesus climbed with His three disciples clearly was not Mount Sinai. It was Mount Hermon, far to the north. So, did Jesus simply chose a convenient high place to express God’s glory and His supremacy over all the earth? After all, this was all Jesus required, not the actual place where Moses met God, not Mount Sinai itself. For all glory belongs to God alone, not to a large rock sticking out of the ground, no matter how high or big or beautiful it might be. And God alone is holy.
Therefore, God is the only one able to make any person or any thing holy, such as a mountain. Then a holy person or thing is only able to remain holy while God’s manifest presence remains upon that person or thing. Therefore, neither Mount Sinai nor Mount Hermon are intrinsically holy in any way.
At the same time, when Jesus transfigured Himself on that particular mountain, we should realize that Mount Hermon was in a Gentile region and was a border between what many Jews considered Page 1126
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to be the end of Israel’s land, or the beginning of Gentile land. For Mount Hermon marked the most northern border of the tribe of Manasseh, thus Israel too. So, when Jesus met with both Moses and Elijah, it suggested that His New Covenant salvation would be for both the Jews and Gentiles, that He would gather elect souls from everywhere on earth into His priesthood of Israel—first the Jews, then the Gentiles. And every place God chooses to manifest His presence will be made holy, while our God chooses to manifest His presence there. Even the most lowly place on His property of the earth becomes utterly holy ground when God stands there, just as Mount Sinai was when Moses first met with God there (Ex. 3:4-5). Our God Jesus often chooses to meet with the most lowly elect souls in the most lowly places imaginable, to allow those elect spirits to personally commune with Him.
And notice how the name of this mountain was not specified by Matthew, nor in any of the other three Gospels. For none of them wanted souls with weak and misinformed faith to make a pilgrimage to that mountain, foolishly thinking they will find and worship Jesus there, that His presence will still exist there, believing that their emotions of their flesh can worship Him better if they go to that physical location. But God holds all existence together, maintaining it with the power of His “hands.” So God is literally everywhere, and we need not travel to see Him. Our God wants us to worship Him in our spirits, and in the truth He teaches to our spirits. So our flesh profits us nothing regarding the worship of our God. Our flesh is simply a temporary instrument of our spirits.
For a brief moment, that physical mountain, Mount Hermon, became far more important than Mount Sinai. The mountain where Jesus transfigured was used for an event that was far more critical to God’s true church of Israel than the revelation of God’s Law through Moses. And when our God Jesus chose to reveal His glory on Mount Hermon, it was a place where Gentiles were worshipping demon gods. Jesus chose to formally proclaim His New Covenant with His church of Israel, as well as His coming millennium of Sabbath rest for the entire world, near a pagan temple dedicated to the debauchery and orgies of Romans worshipping Pan. So, on a mountain which the Gentiles dedicated to pagan gods, Jesus asserted His sovereignty over all those pagan gods, as well as over Rome, even over all other places and all other religions on earth. And His New Covenant was an everlasting covenant with His eternal priesthood of Israel, to fulfill His everlasting covenant with Abraham, to complete His promise to bless Abraham’s spiritual children. But God Himself would save His people through this New Covenant. The hands of God Himself promised to fulfill His Law inside His people, which would make their fulfilling of His Law infallible. So this New Covenant was far greater than the temporary Old Covenant, which human wills were left to fulfill, though none could ever do so. On Mount Hermon, Jesus manifested all that He desired of His people when He first formed His sanctified priesthood of Israel through Abraham, affirming His choice of a people to serve the world as His priests. So His proclamation of His New Covenant and the world’s Sabbath rest here was indeed more glorious than His proclamation of a temporary, transitional Old Covenant.
Now some have argued that this critical and transitional event did not occur. Some irrationally insist that this Gospel account of the transfiguration was a lie invented by the apostles, by the same men who made it their life’s work to proclaim truth at all cost to themselves, by men who suffered severe persecutions for speaking the truth, by men who endured a lifetime of poverty, beatings, countless other hardships and eventual death for the sake of the truth. Well, yes, we can easily believe that Roman Catholic, Protestant and especially Evangelical leaders will lie for their own personal gain.
But these disciples were nothing like them. These men had no selfish ambitions and never sought personal gain, nor the esteem of any human beings, not while they followed Jesus, and certainly not after they were truly and factually filled with the Holy Spirit of Jesus. So these disciples were the polar opposite of the humanistic church leaders and religious scholars we see today. And it is Page 1127
impossible to believe these three men lied about this event. Neither were they deluded or hypnotized into thinking they saw it. For the disciples of Jesus practised to ground their thoughts on the physical and spiritual realities God had created. None of them ever used any pagan methods of causing their minds of flesh to hallucinate, such as by starving themselves, taking drugs or doing other foolish things like that. These disciples were all sane, devout Jews who did not lie and kept their minds in a rational state, able to differentiate between reality and delusions. Besides, it is highly unlikely that anyone would be able to invent this kind of a lie. Since all the details surrounding the transfiguration of Jesus perfectly described a fitting formal proclamation of the New Covenant by Jesus, it would require a team of very adept and deeply devout scholars many weeks to devise a lie as perfect as this.
All the reports about this transfiguration—with its formal proclamation of the New Covenant and its eschatological inferences that perfectly align with the signs God gave on Mount Sinai—seem to be reliable. And all these reports came from honest, reliable, God-fearing witnesses. For Matthew was a close personal friend of Peter, James and John, since he too was one of the twelve disciples chosen to travel with Jesus as His assistant teachers. So Matthew was waiting below that mountain as Jesus was transfigured. Then he would have heard a first-hand report about this event directly from Peter, James and John immediately after it occurred, either on the same day or not long after that. Also, Peter was one of the three witnesses of the transfiguration on that mountain and he said: “For we did not follow cunningly devised fables, when we made known to you the power and coming of our Lord Jesus Christ, but we were eyewitnesses of His majesty. For He received from God the Father honor and glory, when the voice came to Him from the Majestic Glory, ‘This is My beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased.’ We heard this voice come out of heaven when we were with Him on the holy mountain” (II Pet. 1:16-18, WEB). Here Peter is referring to that transfiguration event on Mount Hermon. Then Mark and Luke must have also interviewed the twelve, and likely heard about the transfiguration event from all three eyewitness who were on that mountain with Jesus, which is why their accounts agree with the one in Matthew’s Gospel (see Mark 9:2-13 and Luke 9:28-36).
Therefore, we can be certain that those three sane, rational and honest men saw Jesus transfigured into a glorious, radiant Being on that mountain, and that He stood their with the living spiritual bodies of Moses and Elijah. But some might then argue that this was not really a pivotal moment in Jesus’ ministry, and that He was not actually making a formal proclamation of His New Covenant, nor implying signs of a future Sabbath rest for the earth. They may refuse to admit that Jesus was conveying proofs and confirming future events to these future teaching elders of His New Covenant church. Yet, at the same time, none of those scholars offer any meaningful exegesis of anything here.
Clearly, this transfiguration event was intentionally designed by Jesus to remind those disciples about the time Moses, with the High Priest Aaron and all of Israel’s elders, approached Mount Sinai, but with obvious differences which Moses himself had prophesied about. On Mount Sinai, Moses left all the others behind, walked up to the foot of the mountain with his helper, Joshua, and waited there for six days. Then God called Moses up to the mountain on the seventh day (Ex. 24). At that time, God told Moses to come alone. Moses was to be the one teaching elder who would represent all of the priesthood of Israel which God created through Abraham. For Abraham was the only priest whom God chose for this purpose, from all the other solitary priests descended from Seth. God commanded Moses to ascend the mountain alone, to see His glory manifested. He only allowed Moses to stand before His presence, to represent all Israel before His glory and to receive His Law.
So that was the day God formally brought Israel into His Old Covenant relationship. But our God Jesus chose three representatives to ascend a mountain, to bear witness of His glory. Jesus wanted three teaching elders to serve as representatives of the new branch of His church. Still, He allowed Page 1128
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only these three to represent the new branch of His church, and did not present His manifestation of His glory, nor the confirmation of His New Covenant (complete with prophetic signs about the end times), to all His disciples, nor to all of Israel. For, just as Moses was the only Israelite spiritually mature enough to handle the Old Covenant relationship with God, these three disciples were the only members of Israel’s priesthood who were spiritually mature and open enough to handle this New Covenant relationship with God. Nevertheless, both covenants were with all of Israel. And this time our God Jesus chose three future elders to witness His glory and receive His formal confirmation of His New Covenant. Why? Well, one reason was because, when Moses went up on Mount Sinai, there was no Law stating that two or three witnesses were required for legal matters. But there was a Law when this far greater eternal New Covenant relationship between God and Israel was revealed at the transfiguration of Jesus. And Jesus came to fulfill that Law. Therefore, this event needed to be established by the testimonies of two or three witnesses (Deut. 19:15). And this is why Moses and Elijah were two witnesses from heavenly realms. Then Peter, James and John were three witnesses from Christ’s earthly church. Consequently, the revealing of the New Covenant was legally sealed.
But the three disciples obviously did not make this connection, did not see how this extremely great and unique miracle was to be the Messiah’s formal confirmation of His New Covenant with Israel.
For Jesus did not tell them why He wanted them to ascend that mountain, neither before nor after they went up with Him. At the time, they likely thought Jesus was simply going there to pray, since He often seemed to seek relative solitude when He communed with the Father. This would explain why they fell asleep while Jesus was praying. For the would not likely have fallen asleep if they were expecting a major event like His transfiguration, with His glorious formal proclamation of His New Covenant. Then, after they woke to see His transfiguration, the shock of Jesus glorified in the form of His spiritual body, with Moses and Elijah standing in their spiritual bodies beside Him, would have left them without much of any ability to think clearly and analytically. Yet, after Jesus and the two prophets finished their conversation, Jesus must have turned toward the three disciples, just before Moses and Elijah were about to depart. So Peter would have felt obliged to respond, and said the first thing that entered his mind of flesh: “Lord, it is beautiful for us to be here. If You are willing, I will make three tents here, one for You and one for Moses and one for Elijah.” (Mat. 17:4, ALT). And, since all three Gospels record Peter’s somewhat embarrassing statement (see also Mark 9:5 and Luke 9:33), it is highly unlikely that Peter invented this account of the transfiguration, then personally testified that he was there (II Pet. 1:17-18), as the one who most humiliated himself. So Peter’s foolish remark is yet another proof that Matthew wrote about a real event. Jesus did reveal His glory exactly as the Gospels described it, to formally proclaim God’s New Covenant with Israel.
Of course, Jesus did not want three tents set up on Mount Hermon, to compete with the alters of the pagan demon gods sitting below there. For our God forbade the worship of idols, and hoping a spirit of a god would speak through a carved piece of wood, stone or metal in monument which ignorant human hands dedicated to it. For God and all other external ruling spirits communicate with human spirits in the heart, and in the spiritual realm, not with the flesh in physical places. And God’s New Covenant salvation begins inwardly, as the Messiah’s Spirit of God personally counsels the spirits of the heavenly Father’s elect children. Since physical monuments, even massive temples with golden alters, are all totally ridiculous works of superstitious minds of flesh, and have absolutely nothing to do with God’s pure and undefiled teachings about His ways to human spirits, Jesus simply ignored Peter’s remark. However, in the same way that God gave His Law when He formally initiated His Old Covenant, God also gave His people a Law when He formally initiated His greater, eternal New Covenant salvation that day. And it took forty days for God to give Moses the Old Covenant Law on Page 1129
Mount Sinai. So it took our heavenly Father forty days to give us His Holy Spirit after He rose from the dead and sealed His New Covenant. After forty days, His Spirit began to teach and train our spirits about His New Covenant Law, the effective Law which truly fulfilled the Old Covenant Law.
“While [Peter] was talking, behold, a bright cloud enveloped them and, behold, a voice [came] out of the cloud, reasoning: ‘This is My beloved Son. Hear Him!’” (Mat. 17:5, from: ἔτι αὐτοῦ λαλοῦντος
ἰδοὺ νεφέλη φωτεινὴ ἐπεσκίασεν αὐτούς, καὶ ἰδοὺ φωνὴ ἐκ τῆς νεφέλης λέγουσα· Οὗτός ἐστιν ὁ
υἱός μου ὁ ἀγαπητός, ἐν ᾧ εὐδόκησα· ἀκούετε αὐτοῦ, SBLGNT). Rather than do foolish physical things which do nothing for either God or His creations, the Father of our spirits gave this command to all the elect He chose for His New Covenant priesthood on earth: “Hear Jesus!” If our spirits do this, we shall fulfill all the Old Covenant Law in the precise way our loving living God desires. If we silence our little distracting minds of flesh, to let our elect spirits hear Jesus, He will personally teach and train our spirits to fulfill all His intended meanings and applications of His Law. He will counsel us in the ways of His just, equitable, responsible kind of love. When our heavenly Father interrupted Peter’s thoughts and words of the flesh, and commanded this, He was telling us that Jesus is our only Head Teacher, High Priest, infallible Prophet, Lord, King and God. Jesus is the final authority over all the priests in His New Covenant branch of Israel. Since Jesus is one with our heavenly Father, He alone knows how to perfectly balance the application of His loving Law. So all our spirits must be attentive to His utterly holy and wise Spirit, ready to hear our Messiah’s words, or query Him until He grants us a full understanding. We must trust His voice with all our hearts and strength, then set our spirits’ wills to apply His words in wise, just, equitable, loving ways according to His training.
God once told Moses this very same thing, that all the elect must listen to Jesus: “I will raise up [for the congregation of Israel] a Prophet from among their brothers, like you. I will put My words in His mouth, and He shall speak to them all that I shall command Him. It shall happen, that whoever will not listen to My words which He shall speak in My name, I will require it of him” (Deut. 18:18-19, WEB). When Yahweh said, “I will put My words in His mouth,” and that “He shall speak in My name,” our God was telling us that His own Spirit would speak through the Messiah’s body of flesh, that God’s own Spirit would be the life-giving Spirit of a Brother among us, in a Man whose body would be just as human as Moses. The Creator God Himself would talk to us through a mouth of flesh, using His own mind and body of human flesh to reveal His will. God, in that human body of our Messiah and Prophet, would someday speak to Israel with all God’s authority, power and love.
Yet all that God will requires of us is that we “listen” to His words with trusting elect spirits. For His authority, power and love will accomplish all the rest inside us and through us (Deut. 30:6). But, if anyone does not recognize His words—although all this Prophet’s words shall fully draw out the meaning of God’s laws revealed through Moses—God will require recompense from that arrogant God-hater. If anyone rejects the truth granted by God’s Spirit directly to our elect spirits, and loves the darkness of lies and delusions more than His light, it will be self-destruction. For it is a spirit’s hatred of God which ignores God’s words, and a spirit’s love of God that causes one to hear them.
So this law of Moses, instructing us to hear our Messiah, is actually exhorting us to receive the New Covenant salvation of our God. And if we look upon and hear the Messiah, we will also fulfill the Abrahamic Covenant, through which God created His priesthood of Israel to serve the entire world.
This simple New Covenant salvation, by an elect spirit’s trust in the words of the Messiah, is also what God taught to the messenger He would send to prepare His priesthood of Israel for the coming of that Messiah. Throughout Elijah’s life, God taught him to listen to His voice, so his elect spirit would recognize it when he heard it. And God succeeded in training Elijah’s spirit to recognize His voice. For the Scriptures tell us: “Behold, Yahweh passed by, and a great and strong wind tore the Page 1130
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mountains, and broke in pieces the rocks before Yahweh; but Yahweh was not in the wind. After the wind an earthquake; but Yahweh was not in the earthquake. After the earthquake a fire passed; but Yahweh was not in the fire: and after the fire a still small voice. It was so, when Elijah heard it, that he wrapped his face in his mantle, and went out, and stood in the entrance of the cave. Behold, a voice came to him, and said, ‘What are you doing here, Elijah?’” (I Kings 19:11b-13, WEB). God addressed Elijah by name, compassionately, as His beloved child, through His “still small voice.”
Elijah did not listen to the “strong wind” of spirits who tear apart all the world, because they are not gods and never speak in God’s name. These are not the voice of God. Elijah ignored an “earthquake”
too, since all who boast about being the “shakers” and “movers,” who spoke of new ways in their
“modern” times long ago, are just quivering little souls cast to and fro by predestined events. As for the raging “fire” of angry despots and their dupes, they burn out and soon pass away. So Elijah did not even bother to go out when the fire passed by. Only when Elijah’s elect spirit heard a “still small voice” did he rise up to meet the one true God, the Creator and Owner of all that ever existed. Only when Jesus came to gently teach God’s own interpretation of truth to the spirits of His humble and eager elect siblings, did Elijah return from that tomb in the rock to speak with His wise, loving God.
But, back then, more than 800 years before his spirit returned in the body of John the Baptizer, Elijah grew weary of the violent souls usurping power over Israel, of those who rose up against God and himself, seemingly with impunity, without ever being held accountable for their crimes. So Elijah fled into the wilderness. There God gave him food and rest, then sent him to a safe place to hide, to a cave where he would not worry about being found. Yet his work was not done yet. There were a few more prophecies and deeds to do while he lived in a body of flesh. So, as soon as Elijah’s spirit, soul and flesh were ready, Yahweh reminded Elijah that His voice was not like the voices of His enemies.
That day, when God’s voice spoke directly to Elijah’s spirit, it stirred up his zeal once more. God did this simply by asking Elijah what he was doing, why he was still sitting there, brooding in the cave, hiding from the wicked. This question forced Elijah to realize that God and His servants need to take action, and must not hide from those weaker, factious, self-serving wicked souls who often end up murdering one another. Yes, the actions of God’s priesthood must be wise, always according to the counsel of God’s “still small voice” in their hearts. But now it was the time to reassess his life and the current situation. Now Elijah had to admit that an unquenchable zeal for God still filled his heart, even as his spirit deeply grieved over the insane injustice of countless murders committed by those demonic usurpers of God’s authority in Israel. And Elijah had also begun to think that he was the only faithful one left among the elect, the only spirit in the priesthood of Israel who kept on listening for and hearing God’s “still small voice.” For, as he walked the streets of Israel’s cities, he saw no one else serving through love in the name of Yahweh, the true Creator God. All he saw were shallow, greedy and empty eyes suspiciously staring at him. So then God reminded Elijah that only He saves His people, and each individual elect soul among them. Thus, even in those days when psychopathic rulers murdered the innocent, God had reserved and preserved many elect children to serve Him in His priesthood of Israel, besides Elijah himself. God guarded the life of Elisha, with seven thousand others who had never bowed a knee to the demon god of financial prosperity. And soon all haters of God, who slavishly laboured for injustice without repentance, would receive their well-earned wage.
So we can begin to see why, many centuries after Moses and Elijah left this earth, they both stood alive on that mountain beside Jesus. It was for a good reason, to remind the disciples about their Messiah’s eternal New Covenant salvation which had been gradually revealed through the ages. And it was also so that His disciples would discuss their future works for their Creator God, just as Moses and Elijah did during their days on earth, and as those two prophets were doing now as they were Page 1131
listening to Jesus on Mount Hermon,. During the Messiah’s transfiguration, Moses and Elijah came to clearly and memorably demonstrate that they still lived and still served God, even that they would return someday, and once more call elect spirits to hear the still small voice of Jesus. These two prophets preached saving faith when they first walked on the earth, although almost no one heeded their words with real understanding. But now God revealed the spirits of both prophets to these three disciples, who represented all the true disciples of Jesus in His New Covenant church. Now those three witnesses would testify that God’s kingdom would be completed in the future end times, when Elijah and Moses will once again proclaim God’s salvation. Elijah and Moses will come again as the two prophets standing in God’s third temple of Jerusalem, to “restore all things” at that time. For God will revive His true church shortly after the sixth seal opens. Then Elijah will teach a faithful church to hear and heed the still small voice of the Messiah’s Holy Spirit, until they become even more pure and spiritually gifted than any in the true apostolic churches were at the very beginning.
But, on the day that Jesus stood on that mountain with Moses and Elijah, the three disciples did not yet comprehend all this, even after our heavenly Father repeated the same salvation message He had taught through Moses and Elijah long ago. Even after the voice of God spoke from a cloud on the mountain, as He did in the days of Moses, but to reveal His New Covenant, and even after He told them to hear Jesus, those three still did not comprehend much. Their elect spirits did not embrace this New Covenant salvation with rejoicing, even though their flesh no longer required the terror that God had to instill in wills of flesh at Mount Sinai, when He audibly uttered His Old Covenant Law summarized by the Ten Commandments. For not much had changed in Israel since the days of the Exodus. God’s priesthood still walked according to their flesh, and their spirits still did not hear God’s still small voice. Yet now their Messiah and God had come to them, to make life very different for elect descendants of Abraham and even elect Gentiles, all whom God would gather into Israel.
When Egypt’s Jewish and Gentile slaves followed Moses into God’s freedom, then stood at the foot of Mount Sinai, they heard their Creator utter the Ten Commandments, which summarized all the conditions or laws of His Old Covenant relationship with them. Of course, the people knew it would be utterly impossible to fulfill any of God’s ten archetypal laws in a way which truly pleased Him.
So the only thing those laws were good for, other than suppressing the extreme crimes of some God haters, was to expose them all as sinners before the face of the one, true, almighty God. Therefore,
“All the people perceived the thunderings, the lightnings, the sound of the trumpet, and the mountain smoking. When the people saw it, they trembled, and stayed at a distance. They said to Moses,
‘Speak with us yourself, and we will listen; but don’t let God speak with us, lest we die’” (Ex. 20:18-19, WEB). So Moses comforted them and told them not to be afraid, because his elect spirit knew God well, and he placed all his hope upon the salvation of the coming Messiah. Then Moses taught them more about God’s Law, more about how God wanted them to fulfill the Ten Commandments.
After this, God called Moses up onto that mountain, where God spoke with him for forty days. Then Moses came down to find Israel already breaking the covenant of their relationship with God. Not even a full season had passed before His priesthood began to worship a fake god, a golden calf which they had called by the name of “Yahweh,” in the very same way churches today worship a fake god which they call “Jesus.” But the tribe of Levi, the tribe of Moses and Aaron, repented and sided with God. Then God commanded these Levites to kill the stubbornly unrepentant, and they slaughtered three thousand of the most grievous offenders. After this, God also sent a plague to kill the rest of the unrepentant and loveless spirits remaining in His church, causing the elect survivors to seek Him and complete their repentance. Then Moses ascended Mount Sinai once more, to renew Israel’s covenant relationship with God. And it was only then that God revealed His love and Page 1132
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forgiveness for those who inwardly repent. For God hated the utterly loveless haters, and could not tolerate the selfish, brutal exploitation that His people practised, or their idolatry which led to every kind of sin, even to the murdering of innocents. So God grieved over the deaths of the wicked, but stood His ground to protect His elect from their crimes, even if He had to kill the destroying sinners.
Just a Jesus revealed His glory to His disciples on Mount Hermon, Yahweh God described His own heart to Moses on Mount Sinai. The Creator God was “Yahweh! Yahweh, a merciful and gracious God, slow to anger, and abundant in loving kindness and truth, keeping loving kindness for thousands, forgiving iniquity and disobedience and sin; and that will by no means clear the guilty, visiting the iniquity of the fathers on the children, and on the children’s children, on the third and on the fourth generation” (Ex. 34:6-7, WEB). God did not destroy repentant elect sinners in Israel for their “iniquity and disobedience and sin,” although literally all in Israel did indeed sin. God spared the repentant, all who turned to Him, all who sought Him and returned to His just and loving ways.
God only destroyed those who refused to repent, who insisted that they would serve their own self-indulgent desires, who rose up to defend a fake golden god which their human hands made in their own wicked image, a spirit of a demon which they intentionally named “Yahweh” to slander the name of the real God, so they could lead the elect into sin and death. So, especially at that critical time when the utterly just and holy God was establishing the foundation of justice and equity, He could not simply ignore deliberate and unrepentant sins, could not tolerate Satan’s children seeking to corrupt His priesthood. Although all humans are sinners, worthy of death, God saves only those whom He created with elect spirits, those with a potential ability to love, whose spirits are able to trust His words of justice, equity and love, who can repent into the truth through their spirit’s faith.
Salvation is by the spirit’s faith alone. God proclaimed this from the beginning. The sinner Abraham, the father of all whom God gathers into His priesthood of Israel, was saved by faith alone. For God counted Abraham’s faith as righteousness (Gen. 15:6), not only for his salvation from death and hell, but as His reason to reward Abraham with the eternal covenant of His priesthood. So, after Christ’s three disciples fell in fear, after hearing God’s thundering voice from a cloud, in the same way Israel did at Mount Sinai, Jesus came to them and commanded, “Rise and do not fear” (Mat. 17:7). Here Jesus gave two commands, both using the imperative mode. But these were not commands that Jesus expected them to obey through the wills of their flesh, nor even by the strength of their own infantile spirits. Rather, these commands actually stated that His own power would fulfill them. Jesus would cause their spirits to stop hiding from God and stop fearing. For, as with Moses and Elijah, our God Jesus wanted to speak with them “face to face, as a man speaks to his friend” (Ex. 33:11, WEB). And Jesus is thee Great Prophet, our God who speaks to us from a body of human flesh. Our God had to come to us in the body of Jesus because we feared Him too much when He came as an almighty Spirit in a cloud. God saw our terror. So He came in Jesus, “according to all that you desired of Yahweh your God in Horeb [“Horeb” is another name for “Sinai”] in the day of the assembly, saying,
‘Let me not hear again the voice of Yahweh my God, neither let me see this great fire any more, that I not die’” (Deut. 18:13, WEB). Just as God spoke through Moses, because His people did not fear that man who was like them, God also came in the body of the Man Jesus, so none would fear Him.
Because Jesus gave these two commands in a way that He Himself would cause to be fulfilled, and did not expect their weak flesh or infantile spirits to fulfill them, the disciples immediately rose up and were no longer afraid. But, when they did this, and looked at the place where Moses and Elijah had been standing, they saw only Jesus remaining there, and He had transfigured back into His earthly form. Thus, while their eyes were shut, God must have removed the temporary ability of their eyes of flesh to see spiritual beings and substances. And, within the blink of an eye, Moses and Page 1133
Elijah had returned to the gates of heaven, where they would dwell until God called them to return to the earth. And that trip only took a moment, because heaven is not far from the earth. In fact, the material universe exists within the spiritual realm, and our spirits actually exist within heaven. Then Jesus began to lead the three disciples down the mountain. And, as they were walking, He said, “You men must describe what you saw to no one, until [the time] which the Son of mankind might be raised out of the dead ones” (Mat. 17:9, ALT). This exhortation was clear in one way, and the three understood that Jesus did not want them to talk about what they saw. They knew they must not mention His transfiguration, at least not publicly, until He rose from the dead. However, when Jesus said this, it reminded them that He would first have to be killed before He could rise from the dead.
In those days, while Jesus was still living with them, His teachings about dying and rising to life on the third day did not make much sense to them. For, after seeing His transfiguration, with Moses and Elijah standing alive beside Him, those disciples were now more certain than ever before that Jesus was indeed the Messiah and God, the one whom Yahweh promised to send them. Yet where was this Messiah’s conquering power and His world-wide kingdom? They also heard Moses and Elijah talk about Jesus dying (Luke 9:31). But how could the Messiah rule the earth, as it was prophesied in the infallible Scriptures, if He died, even if He did later rise from the dead? They knew that Isaiah said the Messiah would die for their iniquities. But what kind of King of the universe would Jesus be if He let Himself get murdered then rose from the dead on the third day? And would He keep doing this dying and rising again? Would He be assassinated over and over again, but rise over and over again? None of this made much sense to the apostles at that time. In their minds, surely the Messiah and God could prevent His own death! And He certainly could not die yet, not before He established His physical kingdom on earth! The many contradicting misinterpretations of Messianic prophecies they had heard from rabbis all their lives did not even begin to explain what Jesus had done or said.
Since they did not comprehend any of this, the disciples wanted to ask Jesus about it, and find out exactly how His kingdom would come. Yet they also saw how Jesus had severely rebuked the materialistic Jews, all who desired a Messiah who would bring them carnal power and wealth. And they did not want to be so rude as to ask Jesus, the greatest Bible scholar who had ever lived: “Are You forgetting how the Scriptures say the Messiah will conquer the entire world?” But, when they saw Jesus with Elijah and Moses, and all three were glorified in brilliant light, this must surely be the event that fulfilled the prophesy about Elijah, which said he would come just before the Messiah destroyed the wicked, conquered the world and restored Israel (Mal. 4:1-6). So the disciples began to discuss exactly what Jesus meant when He said He would rise from the dead (Mark 9:10). Did it mean that He would destroy the wicked, restore Israel and rule the earth immediately after He rose from the dead? And, after this discussion seemed to resolve nothing, they chose to ask Jesus a less direct question about the prophecies about Him coming to conquer and rule all the earth. They asked:
“Then why are the [Bible] scholars saying that it is necessary for Elijah to come first?” (Mat. 17:10, ALT). However, Jesus knew that they were actually asking Him: “Did Elijah appear before us just now because You are about to destroy all the wicked and conquer the earth, as Malachi prophesied?”
Jesus also knew that the disciples were still far too focused on the physical kingdom that God would establish through the Messiah, and they were not focused enough on His spiritual kingdom, which had to be built up first, to make the physical kingdom possible. For no physical power could ever be established without a spiritual and moral foundation. But these disciples somehow wanted Him to raise His priesthood of Israel into a position of power over all the world while it remained ignorant, foolish, unjust and unloving. And it would actually take millenniums before the people of the earth would be convinced that His just, loving spiritual ways could be trusted. Before the world could be Page 1134
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ruled in a just way, through wise love, the spirit in each of Jesus’ elect brothers and sisters had to first possess a sound knowledge of His laws and ways, then develop the skill to build their love upon an extremely solid foundation of His genuine truth. Only after He personally taught and trained most elect spirits, in a way where each was able to fulfill His Law, as well as each one’s own unique role within His earthly kingdom, could He manifest and exalt His kingdom over all the earth. If He did not first reveal the truth of His spiritual teachings throughout the world, and grant enough elect an adequate knowledge of that truth, with the wisdom to rightly administer all that truth justly through God-like love, there could be no physical kingdom of God on earth. With the elect in their current state, and as they would remain for many centuries, granting them power would simply result in a completely unjust, despotic, ruthless theocracy, much like the Roman Catholic and Muslim empires.
Before Jesus destroyed the wicked and ruled the world, His elect had to be removed from the world order. They had to be sanctified first. That is, their spirits had to be taught and trained to serve God rightly. Otherwise, Jesus would need to destroy them too. Before Jesus ruled over a just kingdom of elect souls who loved one another, those elect first had to learn to walk according to their spirits, and let their spirits instantaneously hear and willingly heed His counsel. And, before His elect could do that, they had to see how His wise teachings proved true in all the earth. Jesus first had to allow the sins and lies of many nations take their deadly toll, so that His elect would see how they were wrong and how only God’s ways proved to be effective in producing just and loving results. Only after centuries of these proofs, would He divide His elect from the non-elect through a great revival. His physical kingdom on earth would indeed come, but only after the Father’s children were purified, after He taught their spirits to differentiate between truth and lies, between His created realities and the delusions manufactured by men and demons. Only after all the darkness of Satan’s world order had been made manifest by His light, and after the elect spirits on earth cast aside all hope in human powers, so they could place all their hope in Him and His truth, could Jesus return to rule the world.
Thus, Jesus reminded them about the current state of the earth: “On the one hand, Elijah is coming and he will restore all things. On the other hand, I reason with you that Elijah already came, and they did not recognize him, but they did as much as they willed with him. So too the Son of mankind is also about to suffer under them” (Mat. 17:11-12, from: Ἠλίας μὲν ἔρχεται καὶ ἀποκαταστήσει πάντα·
λέγω δὲ ὑμῖν ὅτι Ἠλίας ἤδη ἦλθεν, καὶ οὐκ ἐπέγνωσαν αὐτὸν ἀλλὰ ἐποίησαν ἐν αὐτῷ ὅσα
ἠθέλησαν· οὕτως καὶ ὁ υἱὸς τοῦ ἀνθρώπου μέλλει πάσχειν ὑπʼ αὐτῶν, SBLGNT). Here Jesus was basically telling the disciples: “No! The appearance of the glorified body of Elijah, which you just witnessed, does NOT fulfill Malachi’s prophecy. Elijah will come again to prepare the hearts of the people, but in the future. Right now, I am NOT going to destroy the wicked and I am NOT yet going to rule over all the earth as the King of Israel. Yet Elijah has also already come to prepare the hearts of the people for Me. But the people allowed him to be killed, just as they will also allow Me to be killed. For I have ordained that Elijah would come twice, once to prepare the people to learn My truth and once to prepare the people to apply My truth, just as I predestined two advents for Myself, once to teach and save, and once to cleanse the earth of all lies and liars, so I might rule all justly.”
Of course, Jesus’ disciples not only had to learn God’s true interpretation of the Scriptures, but they also still had to unlearn much from their confused and often self-serving rabbis. So they did not fully comprehend all that Jesus said at that time. Yes, they would receive many clarifying teachings and prophecies in the future, after Jesus sent His Holy Spirit into their hearts, to counsel, teach and train their elect spirits. But, for now, based on what Jesus had taught them so far, they only understood what Jesus meant when He said that the people of Israel did not recognize Elijah, when he came to them already. “Then the disciples understood that He spoke to them of John the Baptizer” (Mat.
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17:13). And, since Israel murdered John the Baptizer, it meant that Israel would murder Jesus too, because Jesus told them that He was “about to suffer under them” in much the same way John did.
Jesus’ disciples found the fragments of His teachings about His plan for Israel and the world to be difficult to piece together. And they only partially succeed in doing so during their lives on earth. But as the seed of His New Covenant church had almost completely disintegrated into the soil, leaving the sapling of His κυριακόι to grow and spread its roots throughout the earth, the risen Jesus gave a lengthy Revelation to the apostle John. During the last years of his life, after all the other apostles had passed away, when the humanists sent by Satan had almost entirely conquered and corrupted the visible church, Jesus helped John (and us) understand the plan for His New Covenant kingdom in all the earth. He showed John how the rest of history would unfold like scroll with seven chapters, and where each chapter was sealed by the heavenly Father in the beginning. And our God Jesus alone would be able to unseal each chapter, to begin a new era of greater woes and enlightenment on earth.
In our day, we have already witnessed the opening of the first five seals described in that book of the Revelation. Yet God led John’s spirit throughout earthly time to the very end, and beyond, even to the end of the last day at the gates of heaven. So, before his flesh died, John witnessed more of the greatest events of history than anyone else in history, far more than we ever will. Still, even the least of the disciples at that time soon realized that the Messiah’s works of His New Covenant kingdom had only begun. His works of the New Covenant would take much time, just as all His other works for us did. In the Scriptures, they read about God laying the foundation of His priesthood of Israel with many generations of solitary priests descended from Seth, until the days of Abraham. Then, only after another 400 years, did He build the structure of that human temple with His Old Covenant Law. Finally, after a further 1500 years, He created the furnishings and operational requirements of His church with His saving works in our elect spirits, after paying the price of our guilt through His death on the cross. But His world-wide kingdom had to increase gradually, because our God is a God of wisdom and peace, who never seeks gain by violent conquest. And He is a Teacher, who takes the time to thoroughly educate and train His siblings before He allows them to administer His kingdom.
Thus, His elect would not be ready for His rule over the world until some millenniums had passed.
At the time Jesus transfigured His flesh on that mountain, His disciples had not yet even discovered that His Spirit could not dwell in our hearts, beside our spirits, until He purchased the atonement of our relationship with our Creator. None yet realized that the utterly holy and just God had to uphold the eternal principles He infused into all His spiritual and physical creations, since all those truths and laws originated from His inherent attributes of just love, and He was not capable of opposing those ways within His almighty Self. But Peter, James and John, together with all the other disciples, did learn all this and more during their lives on earth. And all we know now came through those disciples, through that seed of the New Covenant church, through the teachings and prophecies Jesus granted them. But that early church had not experienced what Jesus has built up within His true church of the κυριακόι and in all humanity over the last 2,000 years. So none knew what we are able to know in our day. Of course, none of their truths changed. The truths God created in the beginning are the same now, and always will be. But the details of how those truths function in our personal lives and in the societies of humankind are better understood than ever before. Jesus has been and is now revealing a greater fullness His Law and His ways to His κυριακόι throughout history. He has been directly teaching and training elect spirits ever since He first sent His Holy Spirit to us on that first Pentecost of the New Covenant times. So the very words He spoke to us through those three apostles, and through all His other apostles, can be better understood and applied in our present day.
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Therefore, the message of the transfiguration, with the return of Moses and Elijah, is almost ready to be fulfilled. The κυριακόι and the people of this earth are now almost ready for His return. So, not long after the knowledge of the κυριακόι is broadcast to all the elect on earth, and the revival of the sixth seal takes place, the end times of the seventh seal shall begin. And, in our generation, we may be seeing the births of the generation who will experience the greatest trials and tribulations that this earth has ever seen or ever will see again. We are nearing “the time of the end,” which was to occur only after “many shall run back and forth, and knowledge shall be increased” (Dan. 12:4, cf., v. 1).
The number of people travelling throughout the earth has “increased” beyond the imaginations of the prophets and apostles, and so has our knowledge, regarding both physical and spiritual realities. Yet the principles of salvation and damnation remain exactly the same as they were in the beginning. So, to this day, we still see identical conflicts between the very same kinds of sin and righteousness, evil and good, injustice and justice, lies and truths, delusions and realities, hate and love. Even with all the new material things and experiences in this world, there is not one single new spiritual truth nor inner experience under the sun. For the inherent nature of all that is righteous, good, just, true, real and loving originates from our God’s immutable innate nature and attributes. And He, together with all that is in Him, had no beginning. He always existed in a timeless and eternal “moment” before the first moment of either material or spiritual time. Therefore, no amount of time can possibly change His attributes, nor anything created according to them. As for all that is called sin, evil, injustice, lies, delusions or hate, such things are merely the infinite number of ways that do not emulate God’s immutable ways. Thus, all that spurns God’s ways may continuously change shape.
But all those lies and sins are exactly the same as they always have been, and all the non-elect still pursue the same goal of becoming gods who rule their own destinies, while they delude themselves into thinking they have usurped God’s ownership of His creations. Just as they have throughout all history, the wicked still rise up, then die, leaving their evil works behind, to fade like dissipating smoke. Meanwhile, Jesus keeps on building up His kingdom of God on earth and His κυριακόι.
Almost 2,000 years have passed since Jesus, together with Elijah and Moses, formerly proclaimed His New Covenant, since He gathered His elect into the shelter of His tent of Israel, into the one church He created about 2,000 years before that day through Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. And during those 4,000 years, God never let His true tent of Israel become nearly as visible as the loudly advertised flimsy tents of the fake religions erected by men. In most places on earth, we have only ever seen or heard from the boasting tents which arrogant deceivers have designed to slander the names of God, in which they assemble only those who hopelessly rely upon their own flesh to fulfill their own wills. Non-elect souls have erected tents on every corner, and each trusts in their own flesh to destroy their rivals and enemies, including the true elect. Yet most elect still do not seem to see how filthy those tents are, nor how useless they are, with their adulterous beds of wood, hay or straw on dirt floors of compacted lies and delusions. Make no mistake, all were indeed created by selfishly ambitious souls who intentionally try to usurp God’s authority. Nevertheless, although His one true church has stood in the unseen places of our hearts, its walls are more sturdy than stone and its bricks are cemented together with the indestructible love He forms in our elect spirits. This true church also has been growing all this time. So Jesus will soon make it very visible, just before He returns to rule the world. Naturally, in eyes of flesh, it may seem that the elect have waited a very long time for this. But those millennia are very short, since all earthly time is just a moment. In terms of all eternity, earthly lives are only as long or as short as our spirits will choose to remember them.
Yet our earthly lives will be eternally remembered and always personally important, as the days of our spirits’ precious childhoods. They will be memories that our spirits will meditate upon as we sit Page 1137
comfortably in our eternal heavenly homes. And, in those days, we will also see all the lifetimes of all who ever lived on earth, for our education, like the detailed illustrations in a good reference book.
Mat. 17:14-20,
God’s Works by Faith
“When they came to the multitude, a man came to Him, kneeling down to Him, saying,
‘Lord, have mercy on my son, for he is epileptic, and suffers grievously; for he often falls into the fire, and often into the water. So I brought him to Your disciples, and they could not cure him.’
“Jesus answered, ‘Faithless and perverse generation! How long will I be with you? How long will I bear with you? Bring him here to Me.’ Jesus rebuked him, the demon went out of him, and the boy was cured from that hour. Then the disciples came to Jesus privately, and said,
‘Why weren’t we able to cast it out?’ He said to them, ‘Because of your unbelief. For most certainly I tell you, if you have faith as a grain of mustard seed, you will tell this mountain,
“Move from here to there,” and it will move; and nothing will be impossible for you’” (Mat.
17:14-20, WEB).
Jesus had just come down from His transfiguration, where He had talked with Elijah and Moses. And it seems that He and His three most mature disciples stayed there the whole night (see Luke 9:37).
Now, as they drew near the place where the rest of His disciples were waiting for them, they saw that a crowd had gathered. Mark tells us: “And, after coming to the disciples, He saw a large crowd around them and [biblical] scholars making arguments to them” (Mark 9:14, from: Καὶ ἐλθόντες
πρὸς τοὺς μαθητὰς εἶδον ὄχλον πολὺν περὶ αὐτοὺς καὶ γραμματεῖς συζητοῦντας πρὸς αὐτούς, SBLGNT). Yet Jesus did not speak first to His disciples, nor to the crowd. Mark notes that He was most concerned about the scholars. For He did not want His beloved disciples to be deceived by their corrupting doctrines. So the first words He uttered were to those scholars: “What arguments are you making to them?” (Mark 9:16, from: Τί συζητεῖτε πρὸς αὑτούς;, SBLGNT). The foremost concern of Jesus was about the teachings which His disciples and His people received, since their saving faith in their New Covenant relationship with their holy Father depended on the true teachings they believed.
However, Jesus did not have a chance to correct the damage done by those scholars, because a man came and interrupted His conversation. And, while Jesus was distracted, all those scholars apparently ran away. For His stern question would have frightened them since, by now, they all knew how Jesus invariably and easily destroyed their lies and false reasoning, in ways that disgraced them before the glaring eyes of the people. This Messiah’s perfect knowledge of God’s Word and His indisputably wise reasoning, which so adeptly applied God’s laws, left every biblical scholar exposed as a mere foolish hypocrite, unable to convince honest souls that Jesus was wrong and they were right. The only way they could preserve their self-esteem and financially lucrative positions of prestige and power was to murder Jesus. Yet Jesus let those scholars flee from His truths and turned to the loving man who interrupted Him. For Jesus knew this father was desperate to have his beloved son healed.
Actually, that father was begging for the healing of his only son (Luke 9:38). For, if his son was not healed, there would be no man left to care for his family when he died. So that son’s healing was critical to his whole family. Thus, as soon as the scholars fled, Jesus turned His love and attention to that man and to his son, not just to save the lives of the family, but also through compassion for the pains of that son as well. For, when the father fell to his knees, he pleaded: “Lord, please show mercy to my son, because he is having epileptic fits and suffers badly. For he is falling frequently Page 1138