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into the fire and frequently into the water. Then I led him to Your disciples and they did not have the power to heal him” (Mat. 17:15-16, from: Κύριε, ἐλέησόν μου τὸν υἱόν, ὅτι σεληνιάζεται καὶ κακῶς
πάσχει, πολλάκις γὰρ πίπτει εἰς τὸ πῦρ καὶ πολλάκις εἰς τὸ ὕδωρ. καὶ προσήνεγκα αὐτὸν τοῖς
μαθηταῖς σου, καὶ οὐκ ἠδυνήθησαν αὐτὸν θεραπεῦσαι, SBLGNT). Since Matthew was there that day, and witnessed this event, he knew exactly what the father actually said, although he probably provided only a brief paraphrase. Yet that father must have revealed more information, either before or after Jesus healed his son. For Mark revealed other details about the father and son, which he must have obtained from other eyewitnesses, most likely from the other disciples with Jesus on that day.
Mark seemed to indicate that the father himself was a disciple of Jesus, since he called Jesus his
“Teacher.” Mark wrote that the man said: “Teacher [of life and faith], to You I brought my son, after
[he was] taken [by] a mute spirit. And it convulses him wherever [he might be], if it may have seized him. Then he foams at the mouth and gnashes the teeth. And he is being withered away. Also, I spoke with Your disciples, so that they might have cast it out, and they did not have the strength.”
(Mark 9:17-18, from: Διδάσκαλε, ἤνεγκα τὸν υἱόν μου πρὸς σέ, ἔχοντα πνεῦμα ἄλαλον· καὶ ὅπου
ἐὰν αὐτὸν καταλάβῃ ῥήσσει αὐτόν, καὶ ἀφρίζει καὶ τρίζει τοὺς ὀδόντας καὶ ξηραίνεται· καὶ εἶπα τοῖς
μαθηταῖς σου ἵνα αὐτὸ ἐκβάλωσιν, καὶ οὐκ ἴσχυσαν, SBLGNT). Then Jesus asked the father, “How long a time has [it] been causing him to be like this?” And the father said, “From childhood” (Mark 9:21). So, if the man’s son was an epileptic from childhood, this implies two things: (1) his son was now an adult, or at least in his teens, and (2) that young man’s epilepsy was a physical disorder and it was not caused by demonic powers. After examinining these details, we can definitely conclude that the father’s son had a physical disorder, a poorly regulated central nervous system in his brain of flesh, a condition which we now call epilepsy. So the father was right when he said his son “is an epileptic” (σεληνιάζεται, Mat. 17:15). This was strictly a medical problem, and never caused by a demonic spirit. And here we see how Jesus recognized that the son started out with a mere physical disorder, because He asked the father how long his son had been having fits. Since the fits were from childhood, and demons cannot plague a child unless it is through extreme parental failure, this young man must have had a physical disorder which, at some time in the past, was exacerbated by a demon.
On the other hand, Jesus also clearly saw a demon plaguing the young man, in a way most would call “demon possession.” As soon as they brought the youth to Jesus, “the [demonic] spirit, seeing Him, immediately convulsed him and, throwing [him] upon the ground, he rolled about, foaming at the mouth” (Mark 9:20, ἰδὼν αὐτὸν τὸ πνεῦμα εὐθὺς συνεσπάραξεν αὐτόν, καὶ πεσὼν ἐπὶ τῆς γῆς
ἐκυλίετο ἀφρίζων, SBLGNT). The moment the demon saw how Jesus was beginning to focus upon it, that demon tried to stop the young man from being led closer to Jesus. The demon immediately triggered another epileptic fit in the young man’s brain of flesh, which threw the young man to the ground. So this was a sign that the young man was no longer suffering from epilepsy alone, but was also being tormented by a demonic spirit too. Of course, we are not told what caused the demon to plague this young man. But we do know that, at sometime in the young man’s life, a demon came.
Now God rarely allows demons enter an elect soul to exert power and influence over the mind of flesh, that is, only if the elect spirit stubbornly places faith in a lie which turns that spirit away from God and His truths (and God only lets a demon gain control over the mind of flesh in the chamber of the soul, not the mind of the elect spirit). As for the non-elect, Satan is always influencing their flesh and spirits, yet not always within them (since God rarely allows the devil to enter a non-elect soul to wake and entirely rule the non-elect spirit, to transform the non-elect person into a psychopath). But this youth obviously did not have a non-elect spirit, since his spirit resisted the demon. Thus, since Page 1139
God allowed a demon to plague this elect young epileptic man, it seems that this youth, at one time, had begun to place his trust in a spiritual lie of some kind. But how and why did he start to do that?
Of course, this is pure speculation, but we may make a few assumptions about this, based on what we have seen in our day. It is possible that this youth’s parents took him to a number of religious healers over the years, to have his epilepsy cured. And one of those healers may have been a fake, a greedy servant of Satan falsely claiming to be God’s servant. So, like many of the demonic “faith”
healers today, that fake healer may have lured the parents and their son into some superstitions and lies about God and His teachings. The false pastor may also have lured them into making a contract with Satan, by exchanging his promise to alleviate the boy’s symptoms of epilepsy if the parents and their son remained loyal to him and advertised his ministry to others, while spreading his false teachings and heeding his self-serving commands. So, if the son and his parents later broke that contract with the fake “healer,” yet did not truly repent to the real God and into His genuine truths, God may have granted the demon working through that deceiving healer permission to punish them.
So the demon started to cast the family into delusions of anxiety and despair for the destruction of their flesh, by doing things like triggering epileptic fits whenever the youth drew near any kind of danger, such as when he stood near a fire or deep water. Clearly, God did not permit the demon to murder the boy, but only remind the parents and the youth that they needed to restore their right relationship with God, and must no longer believe and spread the lies of destructive false teachers.
Similar events happen today. People will make an verbal contracts with servants of the devil, such as fake healers from the so-called “Faith Movement,” who teach and practise a form of witchcraft as the devil’s slaves, but dare to do so falsely in the name of Jesus. Yet these evil healers will only promise to alleviate or “cure” a person if that one confesses loyalty to them and their lies, if that one agrees to attend their coven, which they call a “Christian church,” and will heed every lie or delusion taught by them, as well as esteem the healer and advertise his glory to other desperate and ignorant souls. For all demons and all servants of Satan do all works conditionally, never through free and sacrificial love. They do nothing for anyone unless they can get something for themselves. And they usually want very much more than they give, and often give entirely empty promises in exchange for one’s entire soul, making slaves of human lives at no cost to themselves, through fraud. In other words, they are like Hitler and Trump, which is why they so zealously support people like Hitler and Trump. Then, if the falsely “healed” dupe maintains that contract to esteem and blindly serve the fake healer, that healer’s demon master might grant a few carnal rewards to that dupe, such as some increased wealth, but always at the cost of strengthened delusions and more servile slavery. That is, those rewards are meant to build faith in the healer’s demonic lies, which produce harmful or even deadly effects for everyone touched by that falsely healed one, and eventually destroy that dupe too.
However, if a falsely “healed” dupe stops worshipping the healer, and no longer slavishly serves that healer, the demon masters of that fake will take back the rewards and seek revenge. For the demonic healer will feel as though that slave is his rightful property and unjustly stolen from him. And the demon who rules that liar will gladly try to destroy the “betrayer” who broke the enslaving contract.
The demon will ruthlessly punish the escaping slave, as much as God allows. And God may even let the demon kill that dupe who had believed the healer’s self-serving lies, if that fleeing slave seeks only other lies, and grows more evil than before. God may allow a demon to kill its own child, to destroy the body of a non-elect soul, in order to rid the earth of that evil dupe. Or God might allow a demon to destroy the body of His elect child whose bitter spirit refuses to truly repent, in order to spare the eternal spirit of His child from becoming too corrupted and wounded on earth. On the other hand, God may cast the demon out of His elect child’s soul, if His child’s spirit will repent to Him Page 1140
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and into His realities. But God usually will only cast a demonic spirit out of one of His own elect children, not out of a non-elect soul. And this is another reason why I think this epileptic youth must have had an elect spirit, but his spirit had been deceived by a fake “healer” at some time in the past.
At this point, I should also refute those who use this Scripture to supposedly “prove” that Jesus and His disciples did not differentiate between demon possession and the cognitive disability called epilepsy. For the details here prove the opposite. The only reason Jesus would have asked the father when his son started having his fits would be to point out that this young man originally had mere epilepsy, a physical disorder in the brain of flesh, but later began to be plagued by a demon. For Jesus seldom asked a question like this. Thus, this question must have been relevant to what He was about to do. Jesus must have asked this question because He knew that, although the young man was now being attacked by a demon, his fits began as a mere medical problem of the physical brain. This is why Matthew called the disorder “epilepsy” (i.e., he used a form of the verb σεληνιάζομαι, which refers to epileptic fits that are not spiritual, not a result of demonic attacks, see Mat. 17:15). And, as we saw in Matthew 4:24, Matthew differentiated between epilepsy and demon “possession.” (By the way, let me repeat, a demon can never actually possess or own anyone, since God owns literally all human beings, and God even owns all demons too.) Back in those days, they knew the difference between physical epilepsy and demonic attacks. So this is why Matthew, Mark and Luke all seemed to portray this event, where an epileptic was also plagued by a demon, as something unusual, as a case where Jesus not only had to heal the young man’s physical body but cast out a demon as well.
Both Matthew and Luke suggest that Jesus did both, that He not only cast out the demon but also healed the physical brain in the body of the young man. Matthew, an eye-witness, wrote: “Then Jesus admonished him and the demon departed from him. Also, the youth was healed from that hour” (Mat. 17:18, from: καὶ ἐπετίμησεν αὐτῷ ὁ Ἰησοῦς, καὶ ἐξῆλθεν ἀπʼ αὐτοῦ τὸ δαιμόνιον· καὶ
ἐθεραπεύθη ὁ παῖς ἀπὸ τῆς ὥρας ἐκείνης, SBLGNT). Here Matthew said that Jesus “admonished him” (ἐπετίμησεν αὐτῷ), but did not specify who the “him” was. So, did Jesus rebuke the father, the young man or the demonic spirit? In context, Jesus seems to have authoritatively commanded the demon to leave, since it departed at that moment. Then Jesus also healed (καὶ ἐθεραπεύθη) the physical brain of this young epileptic. And this is likely why His disciples could not help that young man, because the demon had to be cast out before the physical healing could occur. If His disciples were treating this as a strictly physical disorder, they were not addressing the far greater spiritual problems. And demons need to be cast out by first steering an elect spirit to the truth for repentance.
So, if the disciples were not trying to cast out the demon and lead the youth’s spirit to repentance, but only trying to physically heal the youth, the power of the demon would prevent the healing. Yes, the power of God can cast any demon out of any chamber of any soul, even out of a non-elect soul.
But God will also let a demon back into a soul, if an elect spirit does not dwell there and that spirit does not repent into the truth. So, if God’s power worked through the disciples to physically heal the youth, but they left the demon in his soul, the youth would fall back into epilepsy within seconds.
Jesus rebuked the demon first, then physically healed the boy. For Luke recorded a testimony of an eyewitness who stated this: “So Jesus rebuked the unclean spirit and healed the youth. Then He gave him back to his father” (Luke 9:42b, from: ἐπετίμησεν δὲ ὁ Ἰησοῦς τῷ πνεύματι τῷ ἀκαθάρτῳ, καὶ
ἰάσατο τὸν παῖδα καὶ ἀπέδωκεν αὐτὸν τῷ πατρὶ αὐτοῦ, SBLGNT). Here we also see two distinct actions. First Jesus rebuked the demonic spirit. And, since a demonic spirit had no power to resist our God Jesus, that spirit left the young man. Second, Jesus physically healed the young man, which Luke, a physician, indicated by using the verb ἰάομαι. This verb’s primary meaning is: “to restore someone to health after a physical m
alady , heal, cure” (BDAG3). It can also mean: “to deliver from
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a variety of ills or conditions that lie beyond physical maladies, restore, heal” (BDAG3), but the emphasis remains on a physical restoration. So Jesus cast out a demon and physically healed him.
Yet most of those who carelessly denigrate Jesus and God’s Word like to point to Mark’s account of this incident, because Mark focused solely upon the casting out of the demon from the young man.
And, by doing this, they think they can wag their tongues and make Jesus look ignorant, since they interpret Mark in a way which makes it look like Jesus did not differentiate between the physical disorder of epilepsy and demonic possession. Then they point out how much wiser they are than Jesus, because they know the difference. Yet Mark did not write about this event in that way. Mark knew that casting out a demon, to deliver the thoughts of a soul from demonic influence and control, required a far greater power than the physical healing of a brain or body of flesh. For God provided mortal men with skills and medicines that can cure or alleviate symptoms of medical problems. Even sinners can do works of physical healing. But infantile human spirits never possess enough power to command a demonic spirit to leave anyone. A demon will only laugh at a human spirit who tries to command it, or else deceive that arrogant human spirit in ways that destroy it. Once a demonic spirit is granted permission to enter a soul and delude a person’s mind, there is absolutely nothing that any human being can do to stop it. No entity in heaven or on earth, except God Himself, can force a demon to leave a soul and cease its tormenting delusions. So this is why Mark focused on how Jesus cast the demon out of the epileptic young man, because it proved that Jesus is our God incarnate.
Yet Mark also recorded the way in which Jesus asked the father when the young man’s epileptic fits began. So Mark actually did indicate that the young man had the “physical malady” of epilepsy, since he informed us about the fact that the fits began in the young man’s childhood. Mark wanted his readers to realize that the young man originally had only the physical disorder of epilepsy, and that the young man received the spiritual problem of demonic plaguing at a later time. Then Mark focused on the power of Jesus, as our God dwelling in a body of flesh, to cast out the demon. So he wrote: “[Jesus said:] ‘Mute and deaf spirit, I Myself rebuke you. Come out of him and no longer enter into him!’ Then, after crying out and convulsing much, it departed. And [the boy] became like a dead person, causing many to say he died. Yet Jesus grasped his hand, lifted him and he rose”
(Mark 9:25b-27, ALT). Here Mark not only told us how Jesus possessed the authority to command that demonic spirit to leave the young man, but also held the power to continuously guard that young man’s soul for the rest of his life, and never allow that demon to ever enter him again. Yet none but God can possibly do such a thing, and only for a repentant elect soul! For no human knows when another human spirit has permanently repented into the truth. Therefore, no human can promise that a demon will never enter one’s soul ever again. So, although Mark did not specifically mention that Jesus physically healed the young man, he implied it. And Mark never said that Jesus did not know the young man also had the physical disorder of epilepsy, nor that Jesus did not physically heal the epilepsy after Jesus cast out the demon. Mark simply focused primarily on the authority and power of Jesus, our God, in rebuking and permanently casting out a demon who kept the boy’s body from being physically healed of its epilepsy. Then Mark implied that the youth was also physically healed.
Now notice what Jesus said just before they brought the young epileptic to Him, how He responded to what the father told Him. As soon as Jesus heard that His disciples “did not have the power to heal him” (οὐκ ἠδυνήθησαν αὐτὸν θεραπεῦσαι), He told His disciples: “O people of this era, unbelieving and still remaining misled, how long will I be with you? How long will I put up with you?” (Mat.
17:17, from: Ὦ γενεὰ ἄπιστος καὶ διεστραμμένη, ἕως πότε μεθʼ ὑμῶν ἔσομαι; ἕως πότε ἀνέξομαι
ὑμῶν;, SBLGNT). Jesus’ voice would have been soft and sad, knowing He would soon leave them to their own weaknesses, subject to the delusions and lies fed to them by self-absorbed, self-serving Page 1142
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deceivers. But His sacrificial death would soon enable Him to send His very Spirit of God into some of their hearts and souls. So He would soon be able to directly counsel the minds of some spirits, so they would begin to see and believe the spiritual realities beyond the sights of their flesh. For many ages, however, most of the weak, infantile elect spirits would not be strong enough to defend either themselves or others against the ravages of evil and its power to delude. Thus, their lack of spiritual knowledge, wisdom and power to resist and overcome the lies of the devil’s world order would still cause much pain and loss. All this was predestined, and humankind had to experience all this in their flesh before they could become ready for their final teachings on the last day. Nevertheless, Jesus and the heavenly Father hated to see their beloved infants learn these lessons in such a difficult way.
It was because Jesus said this to His disciples (i.e., in Mat. 17:17) that those disciples later came to Him, privately, after the crowds had gone, and asked: “Why did we not have the power to cast it out?” (Mat. 17:19, ALT). The reason was that their spirits were not actually trusting in His authority, power, teachings and love. The twelve were not seeing the spiritual realities which they should have been seeing by now. They knew that Jesus had previously sent them out on a mission and, during that time, they healed physical bodies and cast out the demons with spoken words. But they did not seem to understand that all this occurred because their ubiquitous God Jesus was guiding each and every one of them during every moment of their missions. So it was only His wisdom and power that enabled the to heal and cast out demons, as their flesh spoke words in His name, according to the intentions of Jesus’ will. Yet, this time, Jesus did not explicitly send them to heal this young man’s physical disorder of epilepsy alone, because he was also plagued by a demon, and they did not see this. For Jesus was not physically with them, but was standing somewhere up on Mount Hermon at the time. So their spirits were not attentive, and also not trusting that their God Jesus was hearing their spirits. Their spirits were so dull that they did not realize the only way to heal the epilepsy was to first cast out the demon, with the power of Jesus working through them according to His will. The disciples began to think solely with their minds of flesh, focusing on the failure of what they were trying to do, without realizing that they were missing an important aspect of what needed to be done, and without praying for the wisdom to solve this problem. Their frightened spirits lost their faith in Jesus, retreated and hid, refusing to manage their minds of flesh in the chambers of their weak souls.
This is why Jesus rebuked them. For, while He was gone, they were acting like the other faithless
“churchy” souls, like those who follow doctrines of men, the false teachings of deceivers, who lived only according to the false reasoning practised by their minds of flesh, in ways where their flesh was allowed to suppress their spirits. So Jesus then carefully explained why they failed to heal the young epileptic and did not have the power to cast out the destructive demon: “[It is] due to your smallness of faith. For assuredly I reason with you, if you might have faith like a mustard seed, you will say to this mountain, ‘Transfer from here to there,’ and it will transfer. Then nothing will be impossible for you” (Mat. 17:20, from: Διὰ τὴν ὀλιγοπιστίαν ὑμῶν· ἀμὴν γὰρ λέγω ὑμῖν, ἐὰν ἔχητε πίστιν ὡς
κόκκον σινάπεως, ἐρεῖτε τῷ ὄρει τούτῳ· Μετάβα ἔνθεν ἐκεῖ, καὶ μεταβήσεται, καὶ οὐδὲν ἀδυνατήσει
ὑμῖν, SBLGNT). So Jesus was saying that the faith of their spirits had shrunk to a size that was even smaller than a mustard seed, smaller than one of the smallest of crop seeds. For, when they failed to heal that epileptic youth, they did not say to themselves, “We must not be seeing and understanding something important, something that God wants us to know. So let us pray and allow our spirits to wait for our God Jesus to reveal what we need to know and do in His name.” What they needed was for Jesus to plant a larger seed of faith in the minds of their spirits. And Jesus did that, when He sent His Holy Spirit to them. If our spirits will actually trust that Jesus’ Holy Spirit will counsel, teach, Page 1143
train and command our spirits, He will change the entire world for our sakes. His power will surely work through us to fully accomplish it, and nothing on earth or in heaven will be able to stop Him.
But remember, Jesus was talking about the biblical kind of faith here. Jesus was not referring to a pagan magical “faith power,” the kind that the demonic witches and warlocks of ancient Egypt had wickedly practised. The faith that Jesus taught did not have anything to do with uttering demonically empowered words according to one’s own manipulated human will, while one’s greedy and self-seeking soul eagerly seeks to be thoroughly enslaved by Satan himself. False churches now teach this kind of witchcraft to millions of so-called “Christians” in our day. And perverted forms of this carnally motivated fake faith have also existed in all the humanistic churches of the past too. So we need to realize that Jesus here spoke about an elect spirit’s trust and confidence in Him and in His counsel. Biblical faith is entirely worked by our spirits, never by our flesh. Biblical faith is a spirit’s confidence in all that God’s Spirit utters, accompanied by our trust that His Spirit hears our spirits at all times and in all places. It is a spirit’s close relationship with God, totally centred on God alone.
Therefore, biblical faith maintains a spiritual focus upon spiritual matters, such as love, truth, justice, equity, morality, compassion, mercy, grace, forgiveness, healing, delivering, freeing slaves, saving, guarding and anything else our God commands our spirits to understand and do for His creations.
Perhaps even more than Matthew, Mark made it clear that this was the kind of faith that Jesus spoke about. Mark told us that Jesus first taught the father of the young man about this kind of faith (and Mark also portrayed the father as one of Jesus’ disciples). Later, Jesus would have also taught the same to His other disciples too, when they came to Him privately. But Mark wrote about this kind of faith by first pointing out how the father asked Jesus, “If you are able [to do] anything, please help us, having been merciful upon us” (Mark 9:22, from: εἴ τι δύνῃ, βοήθησον ἡμῖν σπλαγχνισθεὶς ἐφʼ
ἡμᾶς, SBLGNT). Then Mark recorded how Jesus responded with astonishment at that father’s doubt, when the father asked if He, the almighty God, was able to do anything: “Anything? If you are able?
All things [are] possible for the continuously trusting one” (Mark 9:23, from: Τὸ Εἰ δύνῃ, πάντα
δυνατὰ τῷ πιστεύοντι, SBLGNT). Jesus was telling this man that his spirit must trust Him, because He is actually God. And no human being should doubt the power of God to do absolutely anything.
Then this loving father responded to Jesus’ exhortation in a surprisingly wise way. He said: “I trust.
Please help my lack of trust” (Mark 9:24, from: Πιστεύω· βοήθει μου τῇ ἀπιστίᾳ, SBLGNT). This father knew that faith in our spirits originates from God (Ps. 22:9-10; cf., Mat. 16:17; Acts 13:48; Rom. 12:3; Gal. 5:22; Eph. 2:8; 6:23; Phil. 1:29; Heb. 12:2). He knew that God builds up our spirits’
faith in Him in the same way human teachers build up their students’ faith in them, by always doing what is right and always speaking only the truth. First the Holy Spirit of Jesus comes to teach and train our spirits. Then our spirits learn to trust Him, because He always teaches us the deepest and truest understanding of all that pertains to God and life, while training our hearts to love in the most just, equitable, true, beneficial and wise ways. Through His works within us and through us, Jesus creates and increases our spirits’ trust and confidence in Him. And this is our saving faith. As His own faithfulness to us causes our spirits to believe in Him and in His words more each day, we are able to learn more from Him each day. So our faith in Jesus and in His words matures and grows in our spirits daily, and will eventually be complete, making us entirely fit to serve with Him in heaven.
Now, when Jesus later spoke privately to His twelve most mature disciples, He taught them the same truth that He previously taught that father of the epileptic young man. When Jesus told that father,
“All things are possible for the continuously trusting one,” this was exactly the same truth that Matthew, one of the twelve, said Jesus taught to the twelve (i.e., in Mat. 17: 20). The words Matthew used were a little different, since Jesus would have taught the twelve in a little stronger and more Page 1144
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explicit manner. Still, the teaching was the same in both Gospels. That is, Jesus told us that, if we trust in the love, truth, wisdom, power and authority of our God, if we trust Him to work in us and through us, He can do absolutely anything through us, even seemingly impossible works. If we walk in His name, letting our spirits heed His Spirit’s words as our final authority in all matters of life and faith, and seek to do His will on earth as it is done in heaven, His power will do miracles through us.
Yet Mark recorded something else that Jesus said privately to His twelve disciples. After they asked Jesus, “Why did we not have the power to cast it out?” Jesus told them: “This kind [of demon], in no one, is able to depart except in petitionary prayer” (Mark 9:29, from: Τοῦτο τὸ γένος ἐν οὐδενὶ
δύναται ἐξελθεῖν εἰ μὴ ἐν προσευχῇ, SBLGNT). Before God’s power casts out this kind of demon, the one seeking to cast it out must pray to God, asking for permission. But this implies that, in most cases, this kind of permission is not required, because most of the time the demons should not have entered the souls of human beings and they should be cast out. So, when Jesus said this, it implied that this kind of demonic indwelling is unique, that God Himself allowed this kind of demon to enter the person, in a way which serves His own purposes, such as to cause that person to repent away from some lie and into the truth. Therefore, this kind of demon will only depart through God’s will and power after that person has repented into the truth which God has been revealing to that spirit.
As we commune with our God through the biblical kind of prayer, where the spirit itself speaks in all honesty and truth with Him, we must ask Him to cast this kind of demon out. Of course, this is also true regarding the casting out of all kinds of demons. Demons will only “leave” if a human spirit commands them to leave in God’s name, that is, according to God’s will and command worked through that human spirit. Therefore, that human spirit must first pray to know God’s will and to hear His command. And some demons will also appear to obey arrogant human spirits who try to command them to do things through their own human wills, but only for a time, only in order to deceive them. A demon might heed a little human spirit’s command to depart, but only so it can let a worse demon inside, or a whole legion of demons. For demons are never honest and love to deceive.
However, as Jesus pointed out, this was a “deaf and dumb” spirit (Mark 9:25), a demon who heeded nothing uttered by human spirits about anything. It was a psychopathic lesser demonic spirit, who loved to destroy people and things, with no desire to play the complex games that other demons did.
Here the reason this epileptic young man fell under the power of this destructive demon was likely because his parents went to a religious healer who served demons. And, throughout history, most claiming to be able to cast out demons have been con men, and often serve the very demons they claim to cast out. To this day, the vast majority of “exorcists” are either totally ineffective frauds who have no ability to resist any real demonic delusions and powers, or they are Satan’s children who cause demonic plaguing to grow worse. So we need to learn what Jesus taught here, and stop going to deceivers to be healed or to cast out demons. Jesus taught us to place all our faith in Himself, in our God. For only Jesus, our God, can cast out demons, and can save us in every other way as well.
We must trust only in Jesus, to guide us into real truth and real salvation. Certainly, since only Jesus can actually cast out demons and free souls from their destructive powers, only those whom Jesus works through, those whom He personally calls and sends to speak and do works in His name (i.e., through His will, commands, authority and power), can effectively cast out real demons (yes, even this kind of “deaf and dumb” demon). All the words and deeds of one who proves to be genuinely pleasing to our heavenly Father will always be done through the trust and confidence of that one’s spirit, through that one’s faith in the authority, power, wisdom and love of Jesus. Only this kind of faith makes all things possible, and only through Jesus’ power. Also, works of eternal salvation in our elect souls are impossible tasks that we cannot do for ourselves. So, to be saved, we all must let Page 1145
our spirits grow trust and confidence in the words and loving works of Jesus too. For salvation is through faith alone. Our lives are faith, and “whatever is not of faith is sin” (Rom. 14:23, WEB).
About Mat. 17:21
Some Greek manuscripts of Matthew’s Gospel include verse 21. And the reason the some scribes put this verse there was probably because some previous scribe had written an adulterated version of Mark 9:29 in the margin of an earlier manuscript, to justify the traditions his own false church. Then latter scribes eventually incorporated the marginal note into the original text. But the first scribe who created the note, and the subsequent scribes who copied it into verse 21 of the text, clearly did not comprehend what Jesus had actually been teaching, as recorded in Mark 9:29 or in Matthew 17:20.
It seems that those scribes realized that Christ’s teachings about faith in God and His words would definitely cause some damage to their humanistic religious systems. For, since the end of the first century, false humanistic churches basically practised a pagan Roman type of religion, one which used deceptive techniques and rhetoric to enslave their people. They did not differentiate between the mind of the spirit and the mind of flesh and therefore focused solely upon the flesh, to suppress the spirit through physical rituals designed to esteem only themselves. So the reason they added an adulterated version of Mark 9:29 to the text, in Matthew 17:21, was to nullify the teaching about the human spirit’s faith, which Jesus taught in Matthew 17:20. For the false churches did not want the effective kind of biblical faith to exist in the world, the kind that God’s power works through for the elect spirits who trust Him enough to be taught and trained by Him. So, first of all, we maintain that what Mark actually wrote was this: “This kind [of demon], in no one, is able to depart except in petitionary prayer” (Mark 9:29, from: Τοῦτο τὸ γένος ἐν οὐδενὶ δύναται ἐξελθεῖν εἰ μὴ ἐν προσευχῇ, SBLGNT). Thus, here Mark was telling us that Jesus had been teaching our elect spirits to go to God in prayer, because only God can cast out this kind of demon, and God will only cast out this kind of demon once we understand His will regarding the subject’s repentance. Jesus clearly did not say that this kind of demon can only be cast out in a pagan-like ritual of mindlessly repeating form prayers using only the mind and body of flesh, like the false churches seemed to want to imply in this verse.
Since most scribes knew that Jesus’ words in Mark 9:29 could be interpreted in this spiritual way, they took the time and effort to also add the words “and fasting” (καὶ νηστεία) to Jesus’ simple exhortation to pray for God to cast out this kind of demon—primarily so the spirit of the one praying can first learn God’s will about the one needing to be healed. And the reason that the scribes added the words “and fasting,” to adulterate Mark 9:29, seems to be that they wanted to transform what Jesus taught into a more fleshy teaching that more closely resembled their humanistic system of using physical rituals to achieve fake “spiritual” results. Of course, in Mark 9:29, Jesus obviously was not talking about performing pagan-like rituals of “prayer and fasting” to manipulate God into using His power to satisfy their own human desires. In both the local and global context, Jesus was clearly teaching us that our spirits must rely on God Himself to cast out such a demon. He wanted us to pray from our spirits and learn directly from His Spirit why He did not allow us to cast out such a demon, so we could then discover His reasons and His will, so we could then work together with Him for the repentance of one needing the healing, and beg Him to do this work of His redemption.
Through His love for us, God will never fail to do what we need spiritually. God will move the entire earth and even the whole universe to accomplish all that is necessary for the eternal elect spirits of His own children. This is the will of the Creator God Yahweh. And His will is always done on earth and in heaven, in a way that no created being in heaven or on earth can alter in any way. Therefore, it is the duty of eternal elect spirits to learn His will and how He wants His desires to be applied. Then, Page 1146
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if our spirits ask Him for absolutely anything which is according to His loving, just and wise will, He will use all His power to grant that request. So absolutely nothing is impossible for those who pray from their hearts, with a right and honest humility of their spirits before the face of God. But false churches who trained and employed those scribes hated the kind of faith that elect spirits place in God Himself. For those fake churches wanted all their people to trust only in the self-exalting men ruling over their fake churches, not in God. For they were humanists, who taught souls to worship human gods as their highest gods, then possibly a few non-human gods which humans created in the image of themselves. And, by simply adding those two little words (καὶ νηστεία, “and fasting”), the scribes could make it seem as though physical actions had something to do with faith. They wanted their dupes to think that Jesus was actually saying: “By physical rituals, which human gods ruling over churches will invent and command you to practise, like the mindless uttering of form prayers and the fasting of your flesh, you can magically cast out this kind of demon. So worship those men instead of Me, or you too will risk being possessed by demons, like that poor epileptic man was.”
We need to be aware of how the true New Covenant church of Jesus, after the days of the apostolic true church, became “invisible,” how Jesus has inwardly built up His true church throughout the last two millenniums, by teaching and training elect spirits about His loving and just principles of life, and about Himself. Therefore, we have no need for “visible” churches created by men through their humanistic corruptions, which caused the true apostolic church to hide and become invisible by the end of the first century, after the last of the apostles died. As false churches bullied and hounded all true and faithful disciples of Jesus, the Holy Spirit began to save God’s elect and change the world in secret ways, by privately teaching and training elect spirits to love in more just and wise ways. And Jesus no longer gathered the elect He was saving into a priesthood that men could observe, avoiding a visible and discernible gathering distinguishable from all the fake churches. By the second century, only fake churches remained visible to the world order. By then, itinerant Platonists had nullified the Gospel of salvation and transformed all churches into mystical cults which they alone ruled. All the human-god-heads of fake churches created typical self-serving Roman systems selling their own brands of fake salvation. And this fake salvation was supposedly gained only through human wills choosing to perform rituals and other works of the flesh, and only if all those rituals were performed under the strict supervision of the human gods whom they worshipped. So churches kept their dupes utterly dependant upon them through a fear of losing a fake eternal salvation. They became the mere kingdoms of men, created by men and serving men, providing power and wealth for fraudulent men.
For instance, look at the widely distributed document called the Didache (meaning “The Teaching
[About Life and Faith]”). This is one of the earliest extrabiblical church documents known, since it was written either at the end of the first century or within a few decades after that. And, in this broadly disseminated document, we already find totally false humanistic doctrines. So these were already circulating in churches of the day, the very same false teachings that filled the fake churches in subsequent centuries. For instance, those early deceivers taught the churches to recite the Lord’s Prayer three or more times every day, which was in direct contradiction to Jesus’ command: “In praying, don’t use vain repetitions, as the Gentiles do; for they think that they will be heard for their much speaking” (Mat. 6:7, WEB). And Jesus commanded this immediately before He taught us “The Lord’s Prayer,” which He intended to be a model of all prayers from our hearts, a prayer that would consist of all the elements found in all of our honest prayers from our spirits. Thus, when these early false teachers taught their dupes to mindlessly repeat the Lord’s Prayer every day, it was a direct attack against the clear will of Jesus. And the only reason those liars would teach this kind of heresy was to nullify the spiritual elements, teachings and ways of our God Jesus. Those fakes distracted Page 1147
their people away from their need to develop a close personal relationship between their elect spirits and their God. Those deceivers wanted their dupes to mindlessly repeat words through their flesh in order to disengage and suppress the minds of their spirits, until their carnally centred dupes became dependent on those human gods for all their comfort and falsely “spiritual” emotions of their flesh.
At that time, many false churches also began to judge others according to external and extremely superficial criteria as well, in the same way that the unjust and psychopathic Roman humanists did.
And this was in direct opposition to the command of Jesus: “Don’t judge according to appearance, but judge righteous judgment” (John 7:24, WEB). An example of this total mockery of what Jesus commanded is how they taught their churches to judge according to foods for the flesh, and when the body either eats or does not eat: “But let not your fasts be with the hypocrites, for they fast on the second and fifth day of the week. Rather, fast on the fourth day and the Preparation [day] (Friday),”
(chapter 8, Didache, translation by Kirby, Peter; "Historical Jesus Theories," Early Christian Writings; http://www.earlychristianwritings.com). This teaching was not only superficial, unjust and plain ridiculous, but it nullified the words of our God Jesus, and also contained elements of antisemitism, which the New Covenant forbids. So, clearly, the early churches had become totally pagan Roman institutions by the end of the first century, and hated Jesus. They refused to teach faith in His words, but substituted teachings of men for teachings of our God. So we cannot trust their carnally inspired subtractions from the Scriptures, nor their flesh-oriented additions to God’s spiritual teachings. And we see that their intent was to nullify His words and His salvation, so they could take over all the churches and transform them into institutions ruled by men, not by Christ.
Now return to look at how various scribes added different versions of the sentence in Mat. 17:21.
There were three different verbs in three different versions of the main clause, where each verb provided a slightly different implication. Those three were: “This kind [of demon] (1) does not depart; (2) is not cast out; or (3) is not taken out except in/by petitionary prayer and fasting” (from: Τοῦτο τὸ γένος οὐκ ἐκπορεύεται [ or ἐκβάλλεται or ἐξέρχεται] εἰ μὴ ἐν προσευχῇ καὶ νηστεία, see Nestle-Aland’s Novum Testamentum Graece, 27th edition, 1993, p. 48, bold print is mine). So, in those humanistic churches, the first version would imply that this kind of demon will “depart”
through its own will, if a powerfully “spiritual” person, such as a wanna-be god pretending to be the head of a local church, plagues the demon through one’s physical efforts to repeat prayers and fast.
The implication was that physical actions of a human being could make a demon want to go away.
The second version, to those humanists, suggested that, if a person prayed and fasted, he or she could personally create enough spiritual power in oneself to “cast out” the demon. The third version implies that an elite member of the church’s Roman-style hierarchy will possess enough power to
“take out” or “remove” this kind of demon, by force, but only after performing the magic physical rituals involving the mindless repetition of prayers with fasting. Yet the one thing these scribes did not imply was what actually Jesus taught, that God’s power alone can cast out this kind of demon.
Like the Didache, and like most fake churches throughout history, the scribes who inserted verse 21
had one purpose. They wanted to destroy our spirits’ faith and total dependence upon God, to replace it with a faith and dependence upon human beings. These humanists wanted the people to worship only the heads of their false religious institutions, to heed only those men, as their principal gods, to put those liars in charge of dictating all matters of life and faith to all souls. Church leaders insisted that they were greater than the Creator God, that only they possessed a secret knowledge and power that was able to save souls, forgive sins, and manipulate God’s decisions on the judgment day. Only they had enough spiritual power and authority to cast out demons, while the real Creator God had no such power nor authority, unless they allowed Him to have some from themselves. All matters of life Page 1148
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and faith had to revolve around them alone, and they assured that this would happen by making their dupes fear an eternity in a physical kind of hell, being tortured with physical fire burning their flesh.
Of course, even those wanna-be gods, who felt that they were greater than the Creator God, needed to collect their thoughts and build up their great “spiritual” power at times. After all, although they were greater than the Creator God, they were human too. So the people had to let them perform their magic rituals, such as mindlessly repeating form prayers as a kind of eastern-style, mind-blanking meditation that reduced their ability to feel empathy for their victims. And the people also had to let them fast too, sometimes to induce hallucinations in their minds of flesh, but always to make a good show of their superior “spirituality.” And they did these physical works because only physical rituals like these would convince their dupes to focus entirely on physical things, so their dupes would walk only according to thoughts from their minds of flesh. For the last thing fake churches wanted was to see their people begin to walk according to thoughts from the minds of their spirits. For, as soon as their spirits awoke and began to think clearly, the Holy Spirit of our risen God Jesus would direct their thoughts, and start leading them into real salvation. Then, if elect spirits began to heed God, they would cast out those fakes, stop tithing, and cause the complete financial ruin of those frauds.
So I hope you now see why some scribes thought it was so important to insert verse 21 in the 17th chapter of Matthew, in the place where Jesus taught a critical doctrine about saving faith. In the days of those scribes, all were practising humanistic traditions, doctrines invented by vain and ignorant men, the same traditions practised by the Jewish scribes whom Jesus had soundly condemned. Since the scribes who added Matthew 17:21 based it upon Mark 9:29, which they had no desire to rightly interpret or actually comprehend, I entirely reject the addition of Matthew 17:21 by those scribes.
Mat. 17:22-27,
Jesus Pays God’s Tax
“While they were staying in Galilee, Jesus said to them, ‘The Son of Man is about to be delivered up into the hands of men, and they will kill Him, and the third day He will be raised up.’ They were exceedingly sorry.
“When they had come to Capernaum, those who collected the didrachma coins came to Peter, and said, ‘Doesn’t your Teacher pay the didrachma?’ He said, ‘Yes.’ When he came into the house, Jesus anticipated him, saying, ‘What do you think, Simon? From whom do the kings of the earth receive toll or tribute? From their children, or from strangers?’ Peter said to Him,
‘From strangers.’ Jesus said to him, ‘Therefore the children are exempt. But, lest we cause them to stumble, go to the sea, cast a hook, and take up the first fish that comes up. When you have opened its mouth, you will find a stater coin. Take that, and give it to them for Me and you’” (Mat. 17:22-27, WEB).
After a couple weeks, the Evangelicals, and the people swayed by them, had fallen back into their daily routines, with their minds of flesh once more becoming far too focused on their own selfish ambitions to bother about pursuing Jesus. Thus, after Jesus was certain that His enemies had settled back into their worldly complacency, He brought His disciples back from the Gentile regions to the Jewish lands of Galilee, and to His hometown of Capernaum in particular. As they drew near, Jesus once more reminded His disciples that He was soon going to be handed over to His enemies and killed. But they must not fall into despair since His body would be raised from the dead on the third day. For Jesus realized that His disciples feared the venomous hatred of the fake churches in Jewish territories. But reminding them about how those violent criminals would kill Him only made matters Page 1149
worse. They “felt a great heaviness” (ἐλυπήθησαν σφόδρα) when He spoke about the persecutions that God’s enemies would violently inflict upon Him and them. Yet this anxiety, with their growing resolution to face that danger, were also signs that they were finally starting to believe what Jesus prophesied about His works on earth. They were learning that His New Covenant salvation would be a lot more complex than they had been taught by their rabbis, and that His kingdom would be far more inward and spiritual, as well as more massive and gradually evolving, than they had imagined.
Jesus had already explained how He would rise from the grave according to the sign of the prophet Jonah. Now, since Jonah was the prophet God sent to save Gentiles, Jesus was implying that He would die and rise in the flesh to save elect Gentiles as well as elect Jews, that He would gather Gentiles into His New Covenant church of Israel, to worship Yahweh together with the descendants of Jacob. Yet all this talk about His future death and resurrection had previously seemed unreal to them, and depressing. They did not want the present earthly ministry of their beloved Teacher and Messiah to end, because they did not yet feel ready to serve as elders without His help, and had not yet fully understood all that Jesus taught them. Nor did they fully comprehend why Jesus had to die, or why His body of flesh would need to rise from the dead within three days. However, after Jesus had given them a couple of weeks of “vacation” time in the Gentile lands, where the fake churches would not relentlessly hound them, and after Jesus exposed His glory as their God during His bright transfiguration on the mountain, those disciples were beginning to trust that Jesus knew what He had to do for their sakes, for their eternal salvation. Their saving faith had grown and their spirits were refreshed. Therefore, as soon as they came to Capernaum, Jesus caused Peter to experience a brief event that would serve as an illustration, to help Peter better understand the death and resurrection.
Tax men usually gathered beside the roads leading into and out of cities, especially those near the borders of various territories, like Capernaum. Most of these men collected taxes for Roman officials governing each state and province. But, at times, those collecting the temple tax would erect their own booths nearby. Since Jesus and His disciples were not carrying goods to sell or trade, they did not pay secular taxes. But they were Jewish men over the age of twenty, so each was expected to pay the temple tax (Ex. 30:12-16), to be counted among the faithful within the priesthood of Israel. For this temple tax was an atoning ransom for a man’s soul. Thus, this small half shekel tax was much more than simply a fee used for the maintenance of the temple. It was a formal declaration of the equality of all men under God, stating that all are equal sinners in need of God’s atonement, since a rich man and a poor man paid exactly the same “ransom for his soul.” Then this ransom, to restore each man’s relationship with his God was used to maintain the temple, because that temple was the place where the Father of their souls promised to maintain His communicating presence for them. So every man had to give that half shekel, which was two drachmas or one didrachma, to symbolically demonstrate that he too chose to be counted among the repentant sinners who communed with God.
Just as they entered Capernaum, a devout Jewish man or Levite was collecting the temple tax. As Jesus and His disciples walked by him, that man took hold of the oldest leading disciple, Peter, and asked him, “Does the Teacher of you [disciples] not pay the didrachma?” (Mat. 17:24, ALT). Since it would be embarrassing for a Jewish man to avoid paying the temple tax, Peter said, “Yes.” But this was shortly after Jesus had explained to them, “The Son of Mankind is ready to be betrayed into the hands of [certain] people, and they will kill Him. Then He will rise up [from the dead] on the third day” (Mat. 17:22, from: Μέλλει ὁ υἱὸς τοῦ ἀνθρώπου παραδίδοσθαι εἰς χεῖρας ἀνθρώπων, καὶ
ἀποκτενοῦσιν αὐτόν, καὶ τῇ τρίτῃ ἡμέρᾳ ἐγερθήσεται, SBLGNT). So this occurred immediately after Jesus told them that He would pay for their inclusion as brothers in the priesthood of Israel with His very life. He would be the true atoning sacrifice for all the sins of all the elect. He is the reality of all Page 1150
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the Old Covenant symbols of atonement. He was going to pay for the restoration of literally all equal brothers and sisters in the priesthood of Israel, and for all the elect Gentiles whom God was about to gather into His New Covenant priesthood, for a freedom greater than Israel’s Exodus. Since the temple tax represented a price for their atonement, Jesus’ sacrifice would also pay this symbolic ransom for elect souls as well. And Jesus would give His body of flesh for each elect man equally, for rich and poor elect sinners, for elect souls from every race on earth who might repent unto Him.
Jesus knew Peter said this to the collector of the temple tax, but kept quiet at the time, because He did not want to humiliate Peter in public. “Then, after Jesus went into [His] house, He prevented him
[from entering], reasoning, ‘What do you think, Simon? From whom do the kings of the earth take a tribute or tax? From their sons [who are heirs of their kingdoms] or from strangers?” (Mat. 17:25, from: καὶ ἐλθόντα εἰς τὴν οἰκίαν προέφθασεν αὐτὸν ὁ Ἰησοῦς λέγων· Τί σοι δοκεῖ, Σίμων; οἱ
βασιλεῖς τῆς γῆς ἀπὸ τίνων λαμβάνουσιν τέλη ἢ κῆνσον; ἀπὸ τῶν υἱῶν αὐτῶν ἢ ἀπὸ τῶν
ἀλλοτρίων;, SBLGNT). First notice how Jesus called him “Simon,” not by the name He previously gave him, not “Peter” (“Little Rock”). For the faith of Peter was not very rock-like in front of that collector of the temple tax. And Jesus had let all His other disciples into His house, but held Peter back at the door, to speak with him privately. For Jesus wanted Peter to remember that the temple tax was actually a sign provided by God in His Law, a symbol which prophesied about God’s future and plenary payment of the required ransom for sins—especially for the sins of omission committed by the men in His church, because they did not justly and equitably uphold all His loving requirements.
Since the temple tax was a mere sign or symbol in God’s Law, and provided a prophesy about the Messiah’s sacrifice of His body to pay the full price of atonement, the Messiah Himself did not need to pay that symbolic tax. Jesus did not need to acknowledge the prophetic sign of Himself and His works to pay the Accuser’s demanded penalty for our sins, in order to allow the utterly holy God to engage in a full relationship with us, without being accused of aiding and abetting our sins. For the reality has no use for any signs and symbols representing it. Neither were His disciples required to pay that tax, since the Messiah had already arrived to pay it for them, with His blood, once and for all time. Furthermore, Jesus’ body, now dwelling within His church of Israel, was the true temple of Yahweh, the genuine and everlasting presence of God among His serving priesthood and among all the elect on earth. Therefore, since the stone temple was simply a symbol of Him, any temple tax should be used to maintain His body on earth, that is, His awakened elect priests who serve as His hands and as His mouth on earth. And soon every elect soul on earth would commune with their heavenly Father through Jesus, when His Holy Spirit chose to enter each one. The tent of Yahweh in the days of Moses, and the stone temple Herod built, represented all of His New Covenant church.
All the elect on earth, after Jesus returned, would be awakened and begin to do just and loving works in the Messiah’s name, as the temple of God, as His body on earth. And mere days after Jesus stood at that door speaking with Peter, He would die, rise and send His Holy Spirit to begin the building up of His body and His temple upon earth. So what kind of temple tax—aside from a faithful heeding of Jesus during His teaching and training—would God require from any of His elect male disciples, and especially if that tax was primarily used to pay for the maintenance of their Messiah’s body on earth, for the assurance of continuing God’s promised presence among His people of Israel, for the health of the symbolic stone body He used to hide His Spirit’s presence as He communed with the spirits of His priesthood of Israel and all the world? Furthermore, His chosen disciples were His brothers, and also the children of the heavenly Father—that is, all but Judas Iscariot, whom He chose to perform the task of betraying Him at the precise moment He predestined for His payment of our atonement.
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Also, since a king represents His entire kingdom and is the kingdom, all the king’s heirs are also the kingdom. Thus, any tax or tribute paid to maintain the kingdom is paid to both the king and his heirs.
Only the property of the kingdom, along with strangers visiting the kingdom, pay taxes or tributes to maintain the kingdom, not the king himself, nor the king’s family and friends. So Jews and Gentiles who loosely and imperfectly strove to obey God’s Old Covenant laws through the wills of their own minds of flesh were strangers visiting God’s kingdom. But the true family and friends of the King Himself, of God, are those whose spirits are being taught directly by Himself, to spontaneously do His will on earth, in the same way His will is done in the rest of His kingdom, in heaven. Then those family members and friends contribute to His kingdom in the same way the King does, by meeting all the needs of His kingdom, by serving the kingdom directly, as the King Himself does. Therefore, the king’s heirs do not pay taxes and tithes to support themselves, like the strangers and property do.
At that time, Peter answered Jesus’ question correctly, when he admitted that kings only exact taxes and tributes “from strangers.” But he would not fully comprehend exactly what Jesus was trying to reveal to him until decades later, after he saw a vision and realized that Gentile elect also receive the same utterly holy Spirit of God. So our King Jesus reinforced the meaning of this allegory about the King. With His knowing eyes and likely a nod, Jesus said, “Consequently, the heirs are indeed free
[from any obligation to pay].” With these few words, Jesus caused Peter to remember this lesson He taught. Later, when Peter truly comprehended, he realized that, after Rome destroyed the symbolic stone temple, God’s presence in His eternal true temple would remain on earth to the end of days, with the temple tax forever fully paid for each and every member in God’s true priesthood of Israel.
Now the Spirit who created all spiritual and physical existence has come to us and remains with us.
Jesus walked with us for one purpose, to gather us into His New Covenant relationship with Him, to build up His priesthood of Israel on earth. According to His promise in this covenant, He atoned for all our sins and provided the final and full “ransom” for our souls. Therefore, in a new, clean and honest relationship with Him through His grace, His Holy Spirit now has the right and authority to justly teach and train our spirits for our eternal salvation. And He set us free from any accusations or obligations which the devil may throw at us, the foolish sinners. For it is true that every sinner must be handed over to that demon’s kingdom, to his deluding destruction and separation in hell. But our sinful temporary bodies of flesh died for our sins with Jesus’ body on that cross, and our spirits are now being shaped into the image of our utterly holy God Jesus. So we are not the devil’s citizens any longer. Now we belong to the priesthood of God on earth, to serve our High Priest and King in all the wise love that His just kingdom builds here, even as we also destroy Satan’s works in His name.
Probably after a long pause, Jesus then told Peter to do something else: “Now, so that we do not cause their downfall, take a trip into the sea, cast out a hook and remove the first fish taken up. Then, after opening its mouth, you will find a coin. Having taken that to them, give [it] over against [the temple tax] for Me and you” (Mat. 17:27, from: ἵνα δὲ μὴ σκανδαλίσωμεν αὐτούς, πορευθεὶς εἰς
θάλασσαν βάλε ἄγκιστρον καὶ τὸν ἀναβάντα πρῶτον ἰχθὺν ἆρον, καὶ ἀνοίξας τὸ στόμα αὐτοῦ
εὑρήσεις στατῆρα· ἐκεῖνον λαβὼν δὸς αὐτοῖς ἀντὶ ἐμοῦ καὶ σοῦ, SBLGNT). In Capernaum, Peter could have completed this task within an hour or so. For his fishing boat sat on the shore of the Sea of Galilee, likely a few hundred yards from that house. So this was not a huge favour to ask from a professional fisherman. And it was Peter who obligated both Jesus and himself to pay the temple tax.
Therefore, the payment should come from Peter, from the work of his hands, not from funds donated to their ministry. Peter had to take responsibility for his impulsive words. Yet Jesus did not want the funds to come directly from Peter’s pocket either, since He knew Peter and his family had sacrificed much, in order to allow him to follow Jesus as a full-time disciple and as His assistant teacher. Most Page 1152
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professional fishermen, like Peter, were middle-class workers who had a comfortable, reliable, year-round income. But Peter had cast all that aside in order to learn more about life and faith from Jesus.
Consequently, Jesus sent Peter out to do the kind of physical work Peter did best, fishing. If the tax collector wanted physical money, the invention of the devil, then his physical work would provide it.
To us, it may seem strange that Jesus told Peter to get the temple tax in this way. But this was just another allegory granted to Peter for the teaching of his spirit. (And, no, none of us can find gold in the mouths of the fish we catch, not even after we obligate ourselves to pay taxes and pray.) But remember how God’s kingdom operated under the principle of “give unto Caesar what is Caesar’s, and unto God what is God’s.” Peter had impulsively obligated both himself and Jesus to pay that temple tax to a human authority. So, regardless of the legitimacy of that authority, Peter made a contract with that authority, by promising to perform the legal task of giving money to that authority.
So now Peter had to be good to his word, and uphold the reputation of his name, as well as the name of his God and Messiah. However, God and His natural creations would provide the payment for that mistake and unintentional sin, together with a little labour of faith from Peter’s own hands of flesh.
At some time in the past, with a knowledge that Peter would cause this problem in the future, God had caused some person to lose a coin worth a shekel or four drachmas, in that lake. Then God caused a certain fish to be attracted to that shiny coin and gobble it up in its mouth. But the fish God chose to grab it was too small to swallow it. So the coin remained stuck in its throat. For some time, that fish swam around and was not caught by other fishermen. Then, later, when the appointed time came for Peter to catch that fish and remove the coin, God caused that fish to swim to the precise place where Peter cast out a baited hook, and God then caused the fish to take that bait. So, with a little work of Peter’s hands, God solved the problem Peter created. This was a miracle, but the kind which manipulated circumstances to provide Satan’s invention of money for Peter’s needs, because God obviously did not want to miraculously create an invention of Satan, not even the one little coin.
Once Peter landed his boat and ran to pay the temple tax, all was made right again. And this is how God looks after us, if our spirits heed His words spoken to our spirits. Today, mankind has almost utterly destroyed the earth’s atmosphere, lands and oceans. But God, from the very beginning, knew man would do this, and has provided the means to heal the atmosphere, lands and oceans through the labours of our hands, with help from His created plants and creatures, even from invisible bacteria and types of “useless” fungi. By God’s providence, our most terrible mistakes, like the inert plastic we spread throughout this planet, can be corrected—if we repent to our God, stop our stupidity, and do the wise works that He tells us to do. All our foolish mistakes can be undone by heeding our God.
Mat. 18:1-10,
A Teaching Elder’s Humility
“In that hour the disciples came to Jesus, saying, ‘Who then is greatest in the Kingdom of Heaven?’ Jesus called a little child to Himself, and set him in their midst, and said, ‘Most certainly I tell you, unless you turn, and become as little children, you will in no way enter into the Kingdom of Heaven. Whoever therefore humbles himself as this little child, the same is the greatest in the Kingdom of Heaven. Whoever receives one such little child in My name receives Me, but whoever causes one of these little ones who believe in Me to stumble, it would be better for him that a huge millstone should be hung around his neck, and that he should be sunk in the depths of the sea.
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“‘Woe to the world because of occasions of stumbling! For it must be that the occasions come, but woe to that person through whom the occasion comes! If your hand or your foot causes you to stumble, cut it off, and cast it from you. It is better for you to enter into life maimed or crippled, rather than having two hands or two feet to be cast into the eternal fire.
If your eye causes you to stumble, pluck it out, and cast it from you. It is better for you to enter into life with one eye, rather than having two eyes to be cast into the Gehenna of fire.
See that you don’t despise one of these little ones, for I tell you that in heaven their angels always see the face of My Father who is in heaven’” (Mat. 18:1-10, WEB).
Here we see how these core disciples of Jesus, His chosen assistant teachers, were still thinking in terms of pagan hierarchies, the kind that Satan had always established in all the parts of his kingdom since the beginning of his reign on earth. In particular, these disciples still believed in the humanistic concept of using their own wills and abilities of their own minds and bodies of flesh to control their own destinies, that is, to become the “greatest in the Kingdom of Heaven.” Even after physically observing and hearing their God Jesus for years, they somehow thought God’s kingdom was like the barbaric, unjust, oppressive, exploiting, uncivilized, psychopathic slave societies of Rome, Greece, Persia, Babylon, Egypt, Assyria, India, China and so on, where the most worthless criminals seized illegitimate power over their siblings in humankind, and ruthlessly stole life and limb from God and His creations. None understood that true civilization consists of people who are informed by true priests of God, and where their secular affairs are ruled solely by legitimate authorities whom God has chosen for them. A genuine civilization must choose legitimate authorities chosen by God, only His honest and self-sacrificing servants who work extremely hard to equitably grant all the spiritual and physical needs of God’s people and His other creations. True civilizations will provide equitable housing, clothing, food and drink for all, even for strangers in their land, as they also labour to ensure that all have access to God’s kind of loving justice, together with all the other spiritual rights and freedoms that take responsibility for the welfare of all siblings and God’s land. Therefore, in the kingdom of God, the greatest is the one who does not concern himself with greatness, but only with the spiritual and physical well-being of all, because he knows all originates from God, because he knows that he can only serve God’s people and God’s creations through what God has granted him.
All Elders are Infantile Children
After His formal declaration of His covenant at His transfiguration, Jesus now primarily focused on training future teaching elders for His New Covenant branch of His church. He concentrated on the task of providing all the knowledge and skills they required to continue the works He began. For, as He repeatedly told them, He was about to leave them, so that He could rule His earthly church and kingdom from heaven, so He could personally teach each spirit of each disciple, and so they would no longer rely on His physical presence to teach their flesh. Jesus would soon die, rise and ascend into heaven. But all of them were human. All their spirits were mere babes, easily manipulated by evil spirits, or by the non-elect puppets of those demons. So Jesus worried about leaving them as little orphans without a parent on earth. Now He wanted His siblings to know they all had the most powerful King in all creation as their loving Father. And He wanted their spirits to know and always be aware of the realities He taught, then heed His reminding Holy Spirit like trusting children, when He would send His Spirit to dwell in their hearts, beside their human spirits, as a private Counsellor.
So one of the main truths Jesus wanted them to know was that their infantile spirits must not trust neither men nor demons. Rather, their spirits must all look up to their heavenly Father and to Him, at all times, seeking His counsel above all others, to be taught and trained by Him, so all would have Page 1154
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one mind, so all would acknowledge the same spiritual realities, then use those truths in the same just, equitable, loving ways for the same godly purposes. But these disciples still believed a lie taught by Satan’s world order. And that lie would utterly destroy them, if that lie was not destroyed, if it was not replaced with their acknowledgement and acceptance of reality. This is what Jesus did when He brought a little child to sit among them, and proclaimed their spirits to be just as infantile.
This was not just a cute, fuzzy, warm little story for our minds of flesh to get emotional about. This was a war story. Here Jesus launched a full-scale attack against the most demonic religious kingdom that ever existed on the earth. And these true disciples of Jesus preserved an account of this event so that we too would war against that unjust spiritually immoral kingdom, so we too would not perish through the lies that Satan taught in and through his hierarchical world order. And, in our day, we desperately need to learn this lesson from our God Jesus, and take our priestly duties very seriously.
After our Messiah left this earth, to sit on His heavenly throne, some of these twelve future teaching elders, like Matthew, John and Peter, wrote down these lessons Jesus taught, even though His words had humiliated them when they were first spoken. Then the next generation of teaching elders, like Mark and Luke, who interviewed the twelve, also wrote down these testimonies from these twelve, regarding these humbling teachings and works of Jesus. So the twelve, directly or indirectly, sought to carefully preserve these invaluable teachings of our God, Jesus. And Jesus Himself, through His Holy Spirit, also directly taught and trained the spirits of that next generation, to be teaching elders of all kinds, including apostles sent out to perform missions for Him. In fact, Jesus’ Holy Spirit has granted all future true teaching elders, throughout the history of His New Covenant branch of Israel, the opportunity to be personally and directly taught by His Holy Spirit as well. However, by the end of the first century, almost all teaching elders forfeited that right to become true disciples and the true teaching assistants of the risen and living Jesus. Instead, they all sought the false hope and delusion of becoming “great” in the eyes of other deluded humanists. They all ignored the critical lesson that Jesus taught against the devil’s chiefest of false religions. None heeded the words Jesus taught here. Consequently, Satan’s religion of humanism, and its promise of “greatness” in his own unjust kingdom, transformed those fake teaching elders and their false churches into mere subject kingdoms within his dark and oppressive world order. They became filthy destroyers, not builders of God’s kingdom on earth. Yet God Himself kept building up His loving, just, true kingdom on earth.
All teaching elders and apostles are to be mere faculty assistants serving the one living Teacher. All are simply equal disciples of Jesus, called to serve Him by performing a certain kind of work that is equal to all other kinds of work. And the only reason they do this kind of work is because He made them a little more mature and knowledgeable than most others, but only so they would teach and help the others in His name. Jesus equipped them with this greater knowledge and wisdom so they would appropriately cite all that He had personally taught to their spirits, while they also called on His authority and power to oppose whatever mankind and demons said and did against our heavenly Father and His just kingdom. But the love of Jesus has never allowed teaching and judging elders, as His mere disciples, to make themselves into the inept heads of churches, nor arrogantly take on their own disciples. For Jesus lives. And only Jesus is able to personally teach and judge each and every individual elect spirit, as the one and only Head of each one. Jesus is the only just and loving Judge in every true local church and in the whole eternal true church of Israel, on earth and in heaven. So, as the only Head, Jesus is the only Teacher with final authority to guard all that is taught in every church, even every doctrine, literally all matters of life and faith, for everyone. Yes, Jesus assigns more knowledge to some infants in His family, then calls some of these to help Him teach and judge their equal brothers and sisters. Yet those teaching and judging elders, like all of their other siblings, Page 1155
remain infants as they teach and judge, mere little children who know almost nothing. Until the end of the judgment day, no human being can ever become mature enough to be a truly qualified elder.
Now, when Jesus was training the twelve as future teaching elders for His New Covenant branch of Israel, each was to become a certain kind of teaching elder, that is, either predominantly a teacher of His truths with empathy for the unlearned, or a prophet who reveals the secrets of human hearts to cause repentance, or a judge with the power of God to overcome evil and restore losses to victims, or an organizer and administrator of spiritual and physical resources in the church, or some other kind of elder. And I repeat, throughout history, Jesus did call, teach, train and send four basic kinds of true teaching elders into His church. “And He gave some [to be] apostles, others [to be] prophets, others
[to be] evangelists, others [to be] shepherds who are teachers [about life and faith]” (Eph. 4:11, from: καὶ αὐτὸς ἔδωκεν τοὺς μὲν ἀποστόλους, τοὺς δὲ προφήτας, τοὺς δὲ εὐαγγελιστάς, τοὺς δὲ ποιμένας
καὶ διδασκάλους, SBLGNT, note the use of the particles μέν and δέ to delineate the four kinds, then how the TSKS construction near the end indicated that the last kind of elders were meek counselling shepherds who also taught doctrines). So all four kinds of elders were men who taught God’s own intended interpretations of the Scriptures and also made judgments based on those truths. And the principal role of all four kinds was to teach right doctrines, the wisdom of God which enables an elect spirit to love in the purest and most just, wise, equitable way. Yet, when we examine the lives of individuals in each of the four categories, we find that each was unique and served Jesus in a very different way. No two apostles were alike, no two elders received the same gift of prophecy, no two evangelists taught the Gospel in the same way, and no two teaching shepherds counselled the same kinds of souls for the same reasons. Yet, because of all these differing gifts from God, the people enjoyed a full and plenary providence from God, which met all of their physical and spiritual needs.
But what exactly were these four categories of teaching and judging elders in His New Covenant church? Well, from examples in the New Testament, we see that the “apostles” were teaching elders with the greatest understanding of God’s truths and wisdom, and with the greatest variety of spiritual gifts from God. These were the most mature infants whom Jesus personally “sent out” on specific missions, usually to establish new churches in areas where the Gospel had not been preached before.
Then the teaching and judging elders who were called “prophets” were much like the apostles, since God allowed their spirits to hear His Spirit and to articulate what they heard from Him, into a local language of the flesh spoken through their mouths of flesh. Actually, one of the main spiritual gifts God granted was prophecy. This is because God wanted to speak directly to the people through the prophets. In prophecy, God speaks to individuals and groups in their own earthly language, so the ears of their flesh can hear His words, and so their spirits can process that information. But not all the prophets were teaching elders. Some were common church members. And here two kinds of elders with the gift of prophecy are listed: (1) Local teaching and judging elders who received the gift of prophecy, who remained near their own homes and local churches, although, at times, God sent them to speak to an individual or group outside of their region; and (2) The apostles whom God sent out on missions throughout the known world, who prophesied to souls of all kinds everywhere.
“Evangelists” were teaching elders sent out to establish new churches in the area surrounding their own local church. These did the long-term work of ensuring that new churches were build on a solid foundation of right teachings. So these teaching and judging elders were older men with a deeper understanding of Scriptures than most of the other local elders, men with almost perfect doctrines and possibly with other spiritual gifts. Lastly, there were the “shepherds who are teachers. ” This referred to local pastors (i.e., the word “pastor” also means “shepherd”). They were mature men, usually over the age of forty, whom Jesus’ Holy Spirit had called, taught and trained to understand Page 1156
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His created truths, those whom He made able to teach biblical doctrines rightly to those with little or no understanding. So they were patient and humble, willing to answer all kind of questions, and counselled souls through all kinds of hardships or challenges to their faith. In every church, about a tenth of the mature males became local shepherds who helped younger souls in many different ways.
But Jesus only gave a deeper and more accurate understanding of His Word to a few of the older men in each church. So only a few became elders who taught His Word and judged for the equitable benefit of the people. And, when all of the men in the church, young and old, discussed Scriptures at the teaching time every Saturday (i.e., on the Sabbath), these “shepherds who are teachers” would be the most helpful in answering the most difficult questions. And these teaching shepherds always were around to help others, since they lived in the community. For they were usually retired men or else had their modest needs supported by the church. So these local pastors could always be found at the gates to counsel, guide, answer questions, provide for needs, and judge in all personal, family and church matters. They kept the heart and soul of God’s New Covenant church alive and active.
Of course, the four kinds of church elders never held any titles, and none were recognized as holding any kind of superior office or authority in the church. All four kinds were simply called “brothers,”
or by their given names. For each received his gifts from God and had been sent to perform one kind of work in the church, even a work that was no more important and no less important than any other work done by God through His church. In fact, God often made the seemingly lesser works, like giving two small fish and five loaves of bread, more effective for the advancement of His kingdom than the teachings and judgments of the elders. Nevertheless, just as our God Jesus saw teaching the truth as the most critical work He could do through His body of flesh, so it is also the most critical work of an elder’s flesh. Without it, all else fails. Still, each teaching elder was considered to be an equal disciple with the rest, equally dependent upon Jesus and all the other workers whom Jesus had gathered into His priesthood of His church. The people did recognize the truth granted to these elders, but only recognized Jesus as the sole authority in the church, to only one with the final say in all matters of life and faith. So elders were called by their given names, like Peter, James, John and Paul. Not one ever claimed to be a head of any church, and not one ever wanted anyone to call him a
“rabbi” or a “lord,” since only our living God Jesus was the Head and Lord of all. However, as each man and woman in the church contributed to the whole in different ways—depending on the spiritual and physical gifts and skills Jesus granted to each—all four kinds of teaching elders worked for this:
“... for the perfecting of the saints, to the work of serving [God], to the building up of the body of Christ; until we all attain to the unity of the faith, and of the knowledge of the Son of God, to a full grown man [i.e., the “full grown man” here is the body of Jesus on earth], to the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ; that we may no longer be children, tossed back and forth and carried about with every wind of doctrine, by the trickery of men, in craftiness, after the wiles of error; but speaking truth in love, we may grow up in all things into H i m,
wh
o is the H e ad, Christ ; from whom all the body, being fitted and knit together through that which every joint supplies, according to the working in measure of each individual part, makes the body increase to the building up of itself in love” (Eph. 4:12-16, WEB).
Of course, today’s churches do not do the building of themselves in the just, equitable, pure and God-like love, of the kind this apostle spoke about. Rather, they prefer to focus on building up equity in their building, a so-called “evangelism” which is actually an advertising program to attract more tithers and donations, and other programs to promote the world order. So we see hate, divisions, and virtually no biblical works done by the pastors. Now almost all of our churches are led by humanistic fakes, where many of these false shepherds are wolves in sheep’s clothing and lead the flock to Page 1157
slaughter, to feed criminals like Hitler, Trump and other servants of Satan. But every true church of Israel in history, especially every true New Covenant branch of God’s one church, all of its multiple teaching elders are actually called, taught, trained and sent by the personal will of Yahweh, to build up just and equitable love. For learning to love like that is salvation. And every true church will do the same loving works Jesus did during His earthly ministry. For every true church will become His body on earth. Furthermore, all His kind of building up is upon a foundation of real truth, exactly the same truths He created in the beginning, since God-like love can only be built on His genuine truths.
Since every true church is what Jesus and His apostles described in the Scriptures, then, logically, there can never be any personal “greatness” for anyone in any true church. It means that any worldly
“greatness” is a lie. Individual “greatness” is a delusion taught by the pagan religion of humanism.
That religion, created by the devil, teaches each individual to strive against all other individuals, so the “great” one may gain the status of a human god in Satan’s kingdom of the world order, within his delusion of a social hierarchy. Since God does not teach such demonic delusions and lies, there can never be any such thing as individual “greatness” in any true church, and there can never be anyone who is “greater” than any other individual sinners. Because all originates from God, and all is either granted or taken away by God, and all good must be continuously maintained by God Himself, and absolutely no person nor thing can ever be independent or free from God’s providence, power and authority, then literally all people are equal under God. Consequently, we all must work together with equal respect for all, so God can speak and work through each one to truly benefit everyone.
When our God Jesus heard the inner-circle of His most well-taught and mature disciples engaging in the wicked and spiritually infantile argument about who is the “greatest” in God’s kingdom, it must have pierced His hands and heart as much as His crucifixion would. Now remember, the disciples were gathered in a house at that time, and it was likely the home of Jesus. Also, they had just seen how Jesus took Peter aside and sent him out on a mission to provide the temple tax for Himself and for Peter. So witnessing this private and somewhat secretive interaction between Jesus and Peter had likely stirred up a little jealousy among the eleven other disciples. For they either: (1) did not realize that Jesus was actually rebuking Peter at the time, when Jesus sent Peter away to catch a fish, to pay the temple tax for only the two of them and not for the other eleven; or (2) the other eleven actually knew that Jesus was rebuking Peter, and now assumed they must be “greater” than Peter. Either way, it was after seeing Jesus talk to Peter that the other eleven began to discuss their “greatness.” And Jesus likely sighed, then waited for them to ask for an answer to what they had been arguing about.
Since Jesus was listening to the eleven, but not participating in their conversation, the disciples did finally turn to ask Him, “Therefore, who is greater in the kingdom of the heavens?” Yet Jesus did not answer immediately. Instead, He called a little child to sit among them, probably the youngest of His disciples’ children. For, when the disciples returned from their long trip into the Gentile lands, their wives and children would have come to greet them, and would have been with them when they went into the house. Once the disciples’ puzzled eyes fixed upon the little child, whom Jesus put there to illustrate the true nature and capabilities of all human spirits born on earth, He uttered this teaching:
“Assuredly I reason with you [disciples], if you might not be turned back and be come like
little children, you definitely may not enter into the kingdom of the heavens. Therefore, whoever humbles oneself as this little child, this one is the greater in the kingdom of the heavens. And whoever accepts one little child such as this, in My name, accepts Me. Yet whoever might lure one of the least [of those] placing trust in Me into sin, it is always more profitable for him that a [large] millstone, the kind [turned by] a donkey, might be hung onto his neck and he might be submerged down in the depths of the sea” (Mat. 18:3-6, from: Ἀμὴν
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λέγω ὑμῖν, ἐὰν μὴ στραφῆτε καὶ γένησθε ὡς τὰ παιδία, οὐ μὴ εἰσέλθητε εἰς τὴν βασιλείαν
τῶν οὐρανῶν. ὅστις οὖν ταπεινώσει ἑαυτὸν ὡς τὸ παιδίον τοῦτο, οὗτός ἐστιν ὁ μείζων ἐν τῇ
βασιλείᾳ τῶν οὐρανῶν· καὶ ὃς ἐὰν δέξηται ἓν παιδίον τοιοῦτο ἐπὶ τῷ ὀνόματί μου, ἐμὲ
δέχεται. Ὃς δʼ ἂν σκανδαλίσῃ ἕνα τῶν μικρῶν τούτων τῶν πιστευόντων εἰς ἐμέ, συμφέρει
αὐτῷ ἵνα κρεμασθῇ μύλος ὀνικὸς εἰς τὸν τράχηλον αὐτοῦ καὶ καταποντισθῇ ἐν τῷ πελάγει
τῆς θαλάσσης, SBLGNT).
These are stern words. So we must heed them. Here Jesus used a negative with an aorist passive subjunctive form of στρέφω and a conditional particle to tell us, “if you might not be turned back
and become like little children.” And, as usual, this was a theological passive. So Jesus was saying that God Himself must turn us back. But what do we need to be turned back from? In context, Jesus was telling us that His Holy Spirit must turn us back from striving to become “great” in the eyes of men, from seeking the delusions of status and wealth in Satan’s world order. For, if God does not turn us back from those destructive lies, we will not be grounded in the truths of reality, and cannot become like little, humble, trusting children. If God does not cause us to realize that our spirits are infantile, then we will not be able to learn anything from His Spirit, from our heavenly Father and oldest Brother. But our spirits need to learn how to justly love, from our God. For this is salvation.
After this, a double negative (οὐ μὴ) emphasizes that, if God does not make a spirit realize its own infantile condition, then one definitely cannot enter the kingdom of the heavens. And that plural form of “heavens” refers to both God’s kingdom on earth and His kingdom above, in the spiritual realm. Therefore, unless God causes a spirit to become child-like, and ready to learn from Him, one can neither enter the priesthood of His church on earth nor embrace the light of heaven after death.
Yet, to this day, Roman humanism tells us that the world will end if we stop striving for the esteem of men, which they used to call “being.” To even be classified as a human being, Romans required one to seek a carnal “greatness” of some kind. This could be gaining recognition for one’s power, wealth, skill, popularity, knowledge, cunning, wit, creativity or anything other worldly status. But, in their view, it was critical for an individual to be admired for something, or else that one would be nothing, a non-human, even less than an animal. And that one’s life was forfeit, either to be used as a slave or murdered. This is why Roman humanists did not value children much, since children had not yet become “human beings,” according to their system and philosophy of life. So, if a child was born defective, or became damaged in some way that might cause it to become a “nothing,” they would take that child to an appointed hill and leave that child to die. Yet they were right about all this. For, if they did not highly esteem the rich and powerful, especially the ones who obtained their wealth and power through psychopathic means, then Satan’s world order would indeed collapse. The world, as they knew it and wanted it to be, would end. But would the demise of their ruthless, empty, unjust slave society be such a bad thing? For, if Satan’s kingdom perished and they began to cherish all, for all that God made each to be, then all had to wisely, equitably and justly love one another, God’s kingdom would thrive on earth. Unfortunately, most Romans desired the humanistic kingdom of Satan, and have always fought God to maintain it, although God’s kingdom has advanced much against that devil’s fourth kingdom over the last two millenniums. So Rome will soon be defeated.
Clearly, it was Roman humanism that caused Jesus’ disciples to argue among themselves about who was the greatest, who was the most valuable among them. For, in the humanistic Roman view, which most Jewish rabbis had begun to espouse as well, an adult man was considered to be totally useless, worthless and non-human if he was not esteemed by others in some superficial, worldly way. If one was not able to be highly esteemed and useful to their churches belonging to the Roman empire, if a man was not able to achieve some kind of “greatness” in building up their worldly institutions, or, Page 1159
worse yet, if anyone damaged or denigrated the vile delusions of Satan’s “great” men or “great”
kingdoms, then that one was deemed to be a non-human. That human soul was dehumanized, valued less than most animals, useful only as a mindless slave or brutally tortured to death for the pleasure and entertainment of Rome’s elite psychopaths. Anyone who did not build up their hierarchical economic, military and political system was just a thing they could use as a tool to do their work, or torture to death for their own enjoyment. Now the disciples were falling for this lie, were infected by the devil’s religious disease of humanism. Satan’s creation of humanism, which only values souls according to worldly and artificial criteria, is still used by churches and societies today. Everywhere on earth, churches and governments still place souls into classes and categories within their ignorant and self-destructive hierarchical structures. Therefore, Jesus denounced and taught against that entire religious system of Rome, including its viral concept that currently deluded His disciples and made them want to be “great.” His disciples had to realize that He had designed life on earth for only one purpose, to teach and train individual infantile elect spirits to love in a just, pure, God-like manner.
Jesus was telling us that God Himself must turn us back from believing the lies and delusions of humanism. For it is impossible for a person to discern when one’s own heart believes and follows delusions. We need an external, objective, knowledgeable and wise to reveal this to us, to make us aware of our own errors and faults, to contrast the lies we believe with the actual realities of spiritual and physical truths. And our spirits also need to trust the external source of these revelations, or we will not accept the truths which we desperately need to hear. Now, of course, there are some honest souls who are willing to speak the truth to us, through their love for us. And our experiences can force us to abandon some of our misconceptions and delusions too, because these are ordained by God to do this for us. Even animals and nature can help us see some truths, can help us discern between truth and lies, good and evil. Many people and things in life assist our growth into a fruitful life and cause a maturing of our spirits. But God’s Spirit is our only ultimate trustworthy Source.
The spiritual, moral, religious and philosophical lies and delusions are the most destructive, since our spirits act upon them in every aspect of our lives. Thus, they affect every aspect of our own lives, and the lives of everyone we touch. So these spiritual lies and delusions need to be exposed above all else. We require spiritual truths more than any other kind of truths, in order to expose and fully nullify our destructive spiritual lies and delusions. For, no matter how good our material situation might be, we will suffer great injustice, inequality, hatred, violence, pain, oppression and every type of sin if we do not gain and hold onto spiritual truths. Yet it is these spiritual truths that Satan’s non-elect children are the most unwilling to accept, no matter how much evidence supports them. And that devil’s world order suppresses and attempts to extinguish these spiritual truths the most as well.
Now physical and scientific facts are often able to slap a deluded soul in the face hard enough to knock some lies and delusions, about material existence, out of a brain of flesh. Even if person’s spirit wants to believe those physical lies and delusions, because they support their own spiritual biases, physical evidence can sometimes persuade souls to abandon false beliefs. We have seen this regarding racist views based on fake science, misogynistic perspectives about women, the lies about smoking tobacco as a health practice, delusions about being able to forever exploit nature without suffering any negative consequences, and so on. Even some non-elect souls have cast aside their deeply cherished lies after being confronted with much irrefutable scientific evidence. But the mind of flesh is very weak, and easily overcome with physical evidence. The mind of the spirit is not so weak. Thus, spiritual realities or moral truths must strike a very hard blow against the mind of the spirit, in order to knock out spiritual lies and delusions. And non-elect spirits possess no ability to accept any spiritual truths at all. So nothing can prove to them that they must accept spiritual and Page 1160
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moral truths for the good of all. As for the infantile and ignorant minds of the elect sinners’ spirits, they need the authority, power and absolute truth of the Creator’s Spirit to actually enter their human hearts and force their spirits to acknowledge spiritual truths. Without the intervention of our God’s Holy Spirit, it is impossible for elect spirits to step into the light. And, without that light, we cannot love. Thus, our spirits must first realize how small, foolish and ignorant they are. Only through the inner works of our God Jesus can we become humble and fully trust our heavenly Father’s words.
Jesus was teaching our ignorant little infantile elect spirits exactly who we can trust and who we cannot trust. Since every human spirit is infantile, we can seldom believe another human being’s words about spiritual matters, about morals, laws, faith and love. Then false gods, who are demons, are far more powerful spirits, and far more persuasive than mere mortal men. They are even able to convince infantile human spirits to lay down their lives to defend the lies they teach. Yet, by now, we should all realize that all those demonic spirits, and the puppets they work through, are not honest.
They will even use real truths to lie and deceive. So we cannot trust them. But God never lies, and is even willing to explain all the reasons for all the spiritual laws He created, as well as how to apply them for the most effective, beneficial functioning of our own personal lives, or for whole societies and nations. Therefore, elect spirits should trust His Holy Spirit’s counsel above all else. Only His candid, wise Holy Spirit can shine a light so bright that it exposes all lies, so we might discern the realities from the unreal. God alone bears the wisdom, truth and power to drive away spiritual lies.
We can only rely on God Himself to burn away the dark humanistic delusions that teach the ignorant to become blindly confident, self-esteeming, bullying, selfishly assertive fools. Satan deceives souls into thinking they are independent and self-sufficient, that they are gods with a “free will” that can even manipulate a supposedly “slavish will” of the Creator God. But the honest Holy Spirit of our Messiah Jesus causes our human spirits to admit that we totally depend upon Him, that we also need His other human creations as well as His natural world, and that we are all His weak little children.
Because the devil and his wanna-be gods hate reality, and always refuse to admit that literally all human beings possess infantile, easily manipulated, foolish and utterly dependent spirits, they never stop trying to suppress this truth, and continuously slander it. Satan’s servants always love to tell themselves that this truth is negative and destroys progress in their kingdoms. And they are right, because reality does destroy their societies. Spiritual and moral truths always prove that their unjust hierarchical slave societies should not exist, since they destroy themselves, their other siblings in humankind and God’s green earth as well. All history has now proved, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that God’s loving, just, equitable, humbling truths build prosperity, equality, justice and love in every society where it is believed and applied. So the only real reason they reject the truth is because they all love the flattering delusions offered by Satan much more. They all want to be told the lie that they are masters of their own destinies, great men and women who can bully and destroy their way to the top of delusional hierarchies, until they become fake gods ruling over all. And Satan’s invention of money is a huge part of this lie. For his financial systems have subjugate the people, so they can be exploited by those stupid gods. Once souls are thoroughly darkened by the devil’s lies of humanism, which feeds them more self-inflating lies than any other religion in history, they irrationally protect those unjust and destructive humanistic lies. As Satan and his minions strengthen and terrorize their minds of flesh, their untamed emotions of the flesh will fight to uphold those delusions even if it will cost them their lives. And they will not lose trust in the ignorant gods that devil places at the top of their false hierarchies, or his invention of money, no matter how much those fools suffer and die. To the bitter end, those humanists will think their murdering is necessary for the survival of everyone in their land, essential to maintain their system of unjust laws which enslaves themselves and all others.
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But let us acknowledge the reasoning of our God Jesus, and remember that He will never allow even one of those non-elect elite humanists into His church on earth, nor into His eternal home of heaven.
Naturally, many “great” humanists will create false churches and fake “heavenly” gods, demanding that the souls in their churches worship them as the highest of all gods, as the gods who rule over all the decisions of all their false non-human gods. And they will use the Bible in very devious ways to define their fake “heavenly” gods, including each one’s own different creation of a “Jesus.” But we must make no mistake. Every humanistic, carnal, ruthless, worldly, greedy, self-esteeming human god in those churches, and all their invented “heavenly” gods that they name “Jesus” (which they have created in their own images), is an enemy of the real God Jesus. They may try to distract us from the fact that every teaching and every work of their humanistic church serves only Satan’s world order. They may tell lies lies like: “Our thrice holy church may have some heads and leaders who sin in very minor ways, such as by deliberately practising murder, adultery and fraud without even a hint of repentance. But this is simply because no human beings are perfect. And God merely created a visible church, not a true church. So our leaders may intentionally sin through their own free will, but God cannot stop them from doing this, since He is weaker than us. And, due to God’s extreme weakness, He left His church to human heads and leaders, who rule through their own free wills. Jesus will always let sinful human gods rule over His church—even though all these human gods deny His truths, even though all are actually Platonic humanists, and even though they teach only the doctrines of the four kingdoms of Satan’s beast, which all the prophets and apostles had soundly rebuked.” But Jesus stated that only God Himself determines who will enter His church on earth, and His eternal homeland of heaven. Jesus taught that God alone rules all, and that He created only one true church priesthood on earth and for heaven, a church only consisting of His true elect.
When Jesus used a double negative here, it was a Greek grammatical construct which was strongly emphasizing that those who strove for any type of humanistic greatness “definitely may not enter into the kingdom of the heavens. ” Then the plural word “heavens” indicated that He was referring to all three heavens. God’s kingdom on earth included the priesthood of His church. But His earthly kingdom also consisted of all the elect whom He had not yet gathered into His church family, but would enter it during the judgment day, after their flesh died. And every spirit of every other entity dwelling in some kind of body of flesh—that is, every living creation which God did not hand over to Satan, all on earth and all that might live in outer space—belong to God’s temporary kingdom now existing outside the eternal spiritual realm of His heavenly homeland. But the main and most substantive or real part of His kingdom is His spiritual realm. Consequently, this double negative leaves us with no other possible logical conclusion. It forces us to acknowledge that our omnipotent and omniscient God will only allow entrance into His just and loving earthly church and into His heavenly homeland to the elect whom He created and chose for it. Only the spirits of His true children can enter His priesthood on earth, into His church, which is the most precious part of His earthly kingdom. So, if only His elect can enter His church, then His church is a true church, and there can be no such thing as a “visible church” in which some members are the non-elect children of the devil. Yes, His true church can be either “visible” or “invisible” in the eyes of the world. If His awakened elect meet together in public, in full view of the rest of the world, then they are a visible church. But, if God has not awakened some elect, then those sleeping elect are His potential true church, and will not actually become His true church until He awakens, calls, teaches and trains their spirits. And, if His awakened elect find it necessary to fellowship in hidden places, undetected by the rest of the world, then it is His invisible true church. But God created only one genuine church, only one true church, while literally all the others claiming to be churches are actually just false churches.
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When Jesus told us this, He reasoned with us, all His disciples, in a way that had no alternative meaning, asserting what is “assuredly” the absolute truth directly from the mouth of God. Therefore, anyone coveting a position which is “greater” than anyone else, in the superficial terms of Satan’s humanistic world order, is believing an evil and destructive lie of demonic spirits. On the other hand,
“therefore, whoever humbles oneself as that little child, this one is the greater in the kingdom of the heavens.” There are no esteemed “saints” canonized by humanistic fools. There are only ordinary people who know their elect human spirits are little infants which must trust, with awe and respect, their infinitely knowledgeable and wise Father and Brother. The lowly, humble and trusting among us, who place all confidence in Jesus and His words, who do all He asks, are the “greater” ones in God’s eyes. For this kind of elect serves all creations. Yet these true servants of God will also be the most hated and despised in Satan’s world order. This is why the devil’s kingdom slanders them and tries to make us ashamed of them, even drives them away from us. Nevertheless, our God Jesus declared, “whoever accepts one little child such as this, in My name, accepts Me.” So, when we see loving and humble servants of God and His people, but the “great” false preachers of fake churches, together with the secular “great” gods of Satan’s unjust world order, mock these true servants of God, we need to turn from the ungodly wretches, and instead embrace those humble, self-sacrificing souls doing God’s just, equitable works, helping them in Jesus’ name, in His love, will and authority.
As for those who promote humanistic self-esteem and selfish ambition in fake churches, they have caused so much harm to the world that it is impossible to describe. If there were true churches in any land, those faithful priesthoods would cast out the lies and delusions of humanism, and their light would shine so brightly that all elect would respect or fear them. For Jesus’ power would mightily enable their works, enough to utterly nullify the works of Satan, then replace his evil with the loving, equitable, just works of God. So there would be healing, harmony, prosperity, true redemption and restorative justice in their lands, instead of wars between greedy human gods and incessant enslaving exploitation. By not being faithful, humble, honest little children before our God, churches let the worst of Satan into their lands, for their own destruction, and steal life from their own children. By not doing what they should have done, they have committed the worst of all sins and have broken all ten orders of God’s Law, caused every form of apostasy, blasphemy, murder, immorality, theft and lie imaginable. By not being true churches, where infantile spirits trust in Jesus, they lure all into sin.
It is time to hear Jesus, and know that the “greatest” in the kingdom of God is the servant of all. He takes the time to see the human physical and spiritual needs of the people, and gets to know them, as his equal brothers and sisters, though all are sinners like himself. He realizes that he is not a god, not able to “lead” anyone, but searches for other loving, caring, honest, knowledgeable, wise and just souls to help him serve the people, under Jesus, seeking to accomplish His will on earth as His will is done in heaven, in a just, beneficial and loving way. But he does not esteem those helpers above any other people, and certainly does not esteem himself either. Rather, he simply works together with them for the people, as they do the tasks which our God Jesus requires them to do for His people and for His other creations. Every true elder, in churches, governments, businesses and families or tribes, is to do this, because Jesus is the King of all elders and all belong to Him alone.
Therefore, all who lure souls into the demonic doctrines of humanism are destroyers of life, the murderers of themselves and their own people, the enemies of God. And this is why Jesus so deeply condemned those who taught His disciples to seek “greatness” through selfish ambitions. The worst evil in their land originated from lies and delusions perpetrated by such humanistic teachings, and those false doctrines have always led to inner self-destruction. Consequently, Jesus was absolutely right when He proclaimed: “Whoever might lure one of the least of those placing trust in Me into Page 1163
sin, it is always more profitable for him that a large millstone, the kind turned by a donkey, might be hung onto his neck and he might be submerged down in the depths of the sea.” Arrogant souls, who think they are omniscient omnipotent gods of the church and rule over the real God, commit sins of the first four orders, sins far worse than murder or the various kinds of sexual immorality. Now, it may have been Judas Iscariot who started this conversation about who is the greatest in the kingdom of God, since he was the humanistic prototype of false pastors and fake priests back then and to this day. But, whoever caused the disciples to think in that worldly way of humanistic selfish ambition, it would have been better for him to die and be lost at sea rather than steer God’s elect into that error.
We must never doubt that Jesus was rebuking the selfish ambitions of His disciples here, as well as warning them away from all they had ever learned from Satan’s humanistic world order. Jesus hated every aspect of Satan’s fourth kingdom. Rome developed the fourth and final version of the religion of humanism, the perfect application of the devil’s core attributes. Rome taught their people to strive to be gods ruling their own destinies, to seek “greatness” in the eyes of other deluded human souls in their demonic kingdom. And Rome taught them to punish all who did not do this, to kill and enslave all mild, gentle, just and loving souls. So Jesus wanted His disciples to be despised by that Roman world order, to be seen as non-humans by them, to be cast out like useless and worthless inanimate objects by them. For, if His disciples were to be “greater” in the eyes of their holy heavenly Father, and in His own eyes, it meant becoming nothing in the eyes of hell’s citizens. For God is a wise and skilled builder of life, while Satan and his legions are merely foolish and unskilled destroyers of life, who always and invariably bring ruin to themselves too, as they break everyone and to everything they touch. There can never be any peace between those who love “greatness” in Satan’s world order and those who admit their own infantile weaknesses in order to become “greater” children of God.
Now Rome, through its evil heart of darkness, through its exploitative religion of humanism, has conquered the entire world. Now they have deluded every nation and become the dominant world power through their religion. It seems that everyone everywhere wants to be “independent” and become the gods of their own destinies, hopefully even the “greatest” and most revered of gods in the murdering humanistic hierarchies of Satan’s world order. But the one truly omniscient, wise and almighty Creator of the entire universe, whose presence is ubiquitous, waits for the appointed time when He will awaken the spirits of His children, then gather them into His eternal heavenly home.
So His Holy Spirit is always calling to their sleeping and lethargic spirits, offering salvation from that inner death offered by Rome. All elect spirits hear whisperings about the ways of abundant life.
Yet, because God’s humble, egoless, just, equitable and loving way is worked by our God Jesus in elect human spirits who trust Him like little children, and only in those who know they are not gods, the non-elect citizens of Satan’s world order hate them, deceive them and even kill them. Still, here is a secret that Jesus openly proclaimed: “whoever accepts one little child such as this, in My name, accepts Me.” The spirits of even the most deluded elect, of those trapped in the darkness of Roman humanism, cannot help but love and find affinity with the awakened children of the Father, with the hearts of those being taught and trained by Jesus. Even the most hardened of elect souls, even those duped into believing the worst lies of humanism, as well as all the elect enslaved by the lies of other false religions, are drawn to true disciples of Jesus. For elect spirits are inherently attracted to the reality of Jesus and His truths residing within the loving elect who know they are foolish infants.
Therefore, the spirits of those “lost” elect slaves of humanists, and the elect slaves of other false religions, often warm to God’s awakened elect children. And when those captured elect spirits begin to accept the true disciples of Jesus, they are also accepting the real Jesus and are saved from hell.
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Therefore, we do not need to worry about “evangelizing” souls to save them from hell. All we need to worry about is allowing our elect spirits to see, hear and heed our God Jesus, to grow a deeper and more trusting relationship with Him, so that He can teach and train us to do His works on earth for His creations. Then He will bring the “lost” elect to us, cause their spirits to accept our spirits, and then they will also accept Jesus. Besides, Jesus is not trying to saves anyone living on this earth from hell, because His final judgment will save literally all His elect from hell, and that final judgment will not occur on earth. Furthermore, every truly just and biblical kind of judgment will grant every sinner’s spirit the opportunity for repentance into the truth taught by the judge. So our Judge, our Teacher of life and faith, will finish revealing all to all our elect siblings on that last day. Then, since the inherent attributes of literally all elect spirits cause all to desire those truths, they all will repent.
In the meantime, here on earth, God will also awaken, teach and train some elect spirits, to serve as His priests, to become those whom the other elect spirits will readily accept, so the other elect can also accept Jesus as they accept those serving elect. Then the kingdom of God will grow on earth through this acceptance of Christ’s truly serving priests. Therefore, we do not count the number of heads willing to recite a certain creed and submit to a human god ruling over an institution that belongs to Satan’s kingdom, like they do in fake churches. For our creed is actually infinitely long, and includes all that God has ever revealed to His elect children on earth. And we have no human gods in our churches, only one God and one Head. We are just a group of infants who depend on their Father and oldest Brother, then help one another according to the commands that Jesus gives to our spirits. Therefore, if we one who trusts in a salvation by the human will, worked by one’s spoken words, or we see one willing to submit to a human church god, we know that one’s spirit has not yet been awakened by Jesus and does not yet know about His true salvation. On the other hand, we can actually and truly recognize our elect brothers and sisters, those who will enter our eternal home with us after the final judgment. We can recognize them by their acceptance of us, by their consistent love for us throughout their lives, and by their internal desire to fellowship with us in any way they possibly can, even if some of them will not talk about Jesus. Then we also know we are God’s elect children because we love those loving ones, who seek equitable justice by their love in their spirits.
The Sins of Churches
Then we come to the part where Jesus condemned those who taught His disciples to believe in the humanistic lie of “greatness.” Our God Jesus infallibly promised great suffering for those deceivers when He said, “woe to the person through whom the luring into sin comes” (Mat. 18:7b, ALT). Of course, like all judgments of God, the severity of this woe will be in accordance with the motives and intentions of the deceiver’s spirit, whether the lie was fully intentional, or whether it was merely through the ignorance of the mind of flesh. But, rest assured, many will be forever tormented due to their lies, cast into an infinite emptiness with only their dark delusions to keep them company. Thus, after saying this, Jesus also warned us to cut off a hand or foot, or pluck out an eye, if any of these might cause us to lure others into sin. But He did not explain how such things might us to lure others into sin. And, obviously, He was not referring to our physical hands, feet and eyes, since none of these are able to cause us to lure others into sin. That which causes us to lure others into sin are evil thoughts and beliefs, either in our minds of flesh or in the minds of our spirits. Furthermore, God’s own laws forbade us to mutilate the temples of our bodies in any way, and certainly prohibited us from cutting off a physical hand or foot, or plucking out a physical eye. And doing so would do absolutely nothing to eliminate any cause or root of sin. Therefore, we know that Jesus here spoke Page 1165
allegorically. But, since He did not explain the allegory to His Jewish disciples, we must assume that this was a figure of speech that they already knew very well, and one that all Jews would recognize.
So we are left wondering what the hand, foot and eye figuratively represented. Was Jesus referring to the removal of a thought or belief from our minds? Are the hands, feet and eyes types of thoughts or beliefs? Not likely! I say this for two reasons: (1) it is not possible to remove a thought or belief from a mind through the will of that same mind, and (2) neither the Bible nor the church has ever presented any kind of figurative portrayal of different kinds of thoughts and beliefs as hands, feet or eyes. So it would be highly speculative and irrational to assume that the hands, feet and eyes in Jesus’ sermon figuratively referred various kinds of thoughts and beliefs. Yet, if His disciples were to understand His words, Jesus would have figuratively referred to a hand, foot or eye that they would have instantly recognized. And the Jews of that day would figuratively call a human being “my right hand.” The members of a corporate body were figuratively referred to as the hands, feet and eyes of that body. Consequently, when Jesus commanded us to remove a hand, foot or eye, He was clearly referring to the removal of the person who was causing one of us to lure others into sin. Jesus was commanding us to avoid or expel a deceiver who figuratively served us as a hand, foot or eye, to remove that liar from of our personal lives or cast them out from the corporate body of our church.
Like most other Jewish rabbis, Jesus and the apostles referred to persons in the church of Israel as parts of a body. In the New Covenant Scriptures, we actually see other statements about the church body parts: “But now they are many members, but one body. The eye can’t tell the hand, ‘I have no need for you,’ or again the head to the feet, ‘I have no need for you’” (I Cor. 12:20-21, WEB). Of course, treating the church of Israel as one unified body, consisting of many parts, was a relatively new concept at the time. For all the Old Covenant Scriptures always emphasized individuality, and would seldom define a group of people, either the church or any other group, as a corporate body.
So the Old Testament did encourage unity among brothers in God’s church, and God often judged the whole church of Israel as a corporate body. Nevertheless, the Old Testament invariably portrayed God as an individual, with very unique and personal attributes. Likewise, each of His people were always portrayed in the same way. Then God’s teachings and commandments were personally granted to each individual’s heart and soul, in a way where each one’s own private and individual relationship with God would be affected by the way each one personally responded to His words.
God’s laws primarily used singular pronouns, indicating a personal responsibility to obey them. All were to be fulfilled by every individual in His church of Israel. But see very few commands of God using plural pronouns, very few for the entire church of Israel, as a corporate body. Naturally, the same is true regarding the New Covenant teachings and exhortations as well, where each one’s own personal relationship with God is emphasized. But, in the New Testament, the effects of many very unique individual elect souls faithfully serving God produced a unity that had never been seen in all Israel’s history. The New Covenant branch of the church in apostolic times became a people who worked together in such perfect harmony that they seemed to be one body, with one mind ruling over all to accomplish one purpose, where that purpose was to serve God rightly, to do His will on earth.
This ideal of a unified, harmonious and effective church body was also sought by the Old Covenant branch of Israel, as well as by the false churches that formed after the apostles died. But those false churches attempted to unite their people through pagan and humanistic means, by centralizing the authority over all the people. They tried to put all authority into one small group of men (to form an oligarchy, like the Sanhedrin), or they gave all authority to one man (to form a dictatorship, such as the groups who worshipped a fake Messiah). So the false churches always utterly failed to produce any true unity, because those humanists taught each individual to worship oneself and other human Page 1166
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gods. So humanists could never be truly united in any real way, not in their spirits, not as long as all the human gods strove to usurp the authority of one another and cut the throats of their rivals. Even apart from these core doctrines of the religion of humanism, pagans cannot truly unite as one body with one mind and one purpose of their spirits, not with their infantile spirits while they live in their amoral, self-seeking bodies of flesh. And a centralized authority of men can never cause any genuine unity of any people. The most that corporate bodies of people belonging to Satan’s world order can ever achieve is a tenuous temporary truce between warring individuals, or between internal factions of loosely bound groups to overcome a common threat. God is the only authority able to bind only one kind of people, His awake elect, into a harmonious corporate body with one mind and one goal.
Our God Jesus created all the spirits of His elect children with innate attributes which will invariably cause each one to strongly desire to do His kinds of works. Thus, each individual elect soul will only be able to find pure joy and immense satisfaction when that one finds and performs the kind of work that God has appointed and predestined for that individual. And each unique elect soul was put on the training ground of this earth to be taught and trained for one’s own particular kind of work. Also, each kind of work, each destiny of each elect soul, is ultimately spiritual and fits seamlessly within the works and destinies of all the other elect souls. Each one’s work and destiny will either directly or indirectly affect all the works and destinies of all the other elect souls one touches on earth, and will actually unite with literally all the works and destinies of the entire population of all the elect who have ever lived or ever will live on earth. All will build up God’s kingdom on earth, as a people working together for one common cause, through the thoughts of one mind, because all their minds were created and taught by one mind, by the mind of the one and only God. In the final analysis, all of the elect will accomplish the one final and harmonized purpose of the one mind of the one God.
So each elect soul was created to infinitely and eternally rejoice in a certain kind of spiritual work, in a kind of work which is equally essential to the whole kingdom as all the other works. Of course, once each goes home to heaven, each will begin to labour in a job for God’s homeland, doing a very similar kind of work that was done on earth, the kind that one was precisely designed to do. And all these predestined and planned destinies of the elect will work together for the good of all, so all the works and purposes of God shall be completed in heaven. Meanwhile, on earth, each must pray that God’s will might be done on earth as it is in heaven, so His earthly kingdom might become like His heavenly kingdom, as much as possible. And God grants us this request, if He has awakened our spirits, causing us to seek His just and loving will to be done on earth. So each individual elect soul on earth, while dwelling in a body of flesh, begins to fulfill one’s own eternal destiny, begins to learn to do what God has predestined that one’s spirit to do in heaven. Each one’s spirit is taught and trained to work together in perfect harmony with all the other elect in His church. Even all of the undiscovered elect, whose spirits remain asleep and who still walk outside of God’s true priesthood of Israel, are experiencing lessons for their spirits which shall be useful to their appointed trade in heaven above. But all the awakened elect on earth will begin to think and work as with one mind, sharing the thoughts and goals of our God Jesus, our true central authority over all. All work for the very same purpose—to fulfill their heavenly Father’s loving, just, merciful will, for the benefit of all.
This is how the apostolic church, consisting almost entirely of peasants and marginalized souls in the Roman Empire, achieved a greater, more solid and more effective unity among its people than history has ever witnessed before or after that time. And this is why God worked through them so powerfully that the entire Roman Empire felt an urgent need to shut them down and replace them with their own fake, deceiving, humanistic churches. There was such deep and strong unity in that early church because our God Jesus Himself united the minds and hearts of all believing, trusting, Page 1167
awakened elect in His New Covenant branch of the church during those apostolic times. Jesus was their one and only Head, their God who directly taught and trained each individual’s spirit. But all corporate bodies, not just the apostolic church, had individuals or subgroups whom they called their hands, feet and eyes. All corporate bodies have these figurative kinds of members in their body, the ones who do the work of handling external relationships for the body. The hands, feet and eyes are not internal parts of the body. They do not perform the kinds of tasks which serve only the other parts of the body. Rather, the individuals or groups who serve as the hands, feet and eyes perform the bodily functions which interact with outsiders, with bodies of other corporate bodies or individuals, including external authorities and powers, even God. The hands, feet and eyes that Jesus commanded us to cut off or pluck out, if they deliberately caused sin, are these kinds of workers. We are not to associate with them. We must remove them from our personal lives and expel them from our church.
Therefore, we do not personally or corporately cut off all sinners. We do not avoid or expel all the sinners from our personal lives or from our church. We only cut off or pluck out those who lure us or our siblings into sin, only those who cause others to sin, especially those who enter and unfaithfully serve Christ’s true church body as false hands, feet or eyes. And the hands would be defined as the individuals or groups assigned to do the works of the church in the name of God, such as feeding and providing for the needs of the poor, or those who ensure equitable justice for the church or in the land, those taking responsibility for the physical or spiritual welfare of God’s creations. If hands will only feed and provide for themselves, or they act unjustly in any way, if they justify and promote selfishness and injustice, then those kinds of people cannot be our personal friends and must be expelled from our church. The only reason we might talk with them would be to convince them to repent into God’s loving, just, equitable truths. And, if they are not open to these truths leading to repentance, then we must have nothing to do with them, and possibly hand them over the police.
The feet would be those who carry the body of the church, who provide for its needs, including the tools and resources required for the hands to do the church works in Jesus’ name. That is, the hands give from the church in Jesus’ name, but the feet give to the church. And the kind of work done by the hands provides an opportunity to steal from the church, not only goods and money from the needy whom they are supposed to help, but also trust and truths away from the elect, thus turning elect souls away from God Himself. But the feet who carry the church handle even more funds and resources, all that the church needs to provide for its spiritual and physical works. So these feet have an even greater opportunity to steal from the church and from God. They can also steal by doing nothing, by not giving what God commands their spirits to give, which is a direct form of theft from God Himself. By not giving, they can hinder or even halt the works of elders and members. Or, by giving conditionally, by demanding that their gifts must be used in a way which serves their selfish ambitions or selfish interests, those feet can usurp the role of God in the church, and turn the whole church away from doing God’s will. So, if any feet are corrupt, then try to justify their selfishness and promote their kind of injustice, they surely must be cut off, must be rejected as friends and expelled from the church. This would include the wealthy who claim to be members of Christ’s body, yet live in self-indulgent opulence and refuse to equitably distribute their income among their elect siblings and their community, who refuse to repent into the truth and live modest, loving lives.
Above all, the eyes of a church body must be pure. For they inform all that a church will do inside and outside of its body. They gather information and some eyes are needed to oversee the works of the church. Most importantly, the eyes would include the mature men appointed to the task of teaching and training church members, the teaching and judging elders. Their doctrines must be watched and judged by the other eyes in the church, and in the most strenuous ways, ensuring that all Page 1168
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do their jobs with as much care as possible, always through the prayers of their spirits, begging their Creator Jesus to make them completely faithful. But the eyes are also those who merely administer the works of the church, the deacons and deaconesses who develop and enforce policies for church workers and make judgments in the allocation of labour, resources and funds. These must also be watched and judged by other eyes in the church. For the eyes possess the greatest potential to destroy the entire body. Even a little carelessness, even the smallest errors in doctrine or the least little bad judgment, can tear the church apart and kill it, if that error or injustice is not immediately corrected.
The entire church body can be led into very evil and destructive lies and sins, which can even cause unjust deaths, if the eyes are wrong. If your own physical eye does not see a deadly danger that you are walking toward, that one little mistake might kill you. And it is the same with the church. So, if a teaching elder proclaims any doctrine that is against God’s Word or judges in a way that is against God’s will, and if a deacon or deaconess does not administer the church works entirely according to God’s Word and will, then is should be corrected as soon as possible. It is a huge priority for the church and must not be treated as insignificant. Then, if the pastor or administrator does not repent and correct that error, then that one must be plucked out of the church. And, if that church refuses to do so, then the individual who sees this kind of unfaithfulness must leave that blind guide, as well as the blind souls who are following that blind eye into a pit. This is what Jesus commanded His awakened elect disciples to do for their own good, and for the benefit of all the other elect in their churches. For the sins and errors of the eyes of a church cause the worst slander the name of Jesus, far more than the hands and feet do. Thus, to keep His name from being blasphemed, we need to rebuke the eyes of the church most harshly and most promptly. And we must have nothing to do with the deluded and blind eyes who refuse to repent into the truth, since many will be liars sent by Satan.
One last thing needs to be mentioned before taking a closer look at what Jesus taught here, in Mat.
18:7-10. We must remember the biblical principles which make us equally guilty the sinners who actually committed sins, if we do not rebuke those sinners for their sins, or if we are not vexed about those works of the devil. And we are especially guilt of their sins if we actively support the sinner who commits those sins. God told us that we partake in all the sins committed by a sinner if we aid and abet the sinner, or even if we ignore the sins of that sinner. In the days of Jesus, these biblical principles were widely known among the Jews. And, in our day, many still know them, particularly in the lands most affected by the Reformation and 18th century revival. Most courts today will also convict a getaway car driver with the same penalty as the thieves who performed the actual theft, even if that driver did not set his foot in the place where the theft occurred, and did not touch any of things which were stolen. For that driver aided and abetted that theft. Courts may also sentence those who know those thieves stole property, but willingly feed or house those thieves without calling the police or doing anything to make them responsible for their theft. And this is just, for those who aid and abet crimes. Of course, we must also realize that some do not call the police because the police and courts themselves are unjust. In that case, those who aid and abet thieves are innocent. Still, all who condone sins, even the past sins of fathers and ancestors, do indeed partake in those sins, and ultimately promote more of the same kinds of sins. They cause sins to multiply and destroy the land.
Consequently, whenever we see some kind of sin, we must speak and work against that sin, although with wisdom, taking into account all relevant and applicable considerations. Or, if no one is willing to hear the truth, and the legitimate authorities or powers refuse act against the sinner, then we must abandon that sinner. A church must expel that sinner, and not allow that sinner to partake in any works of the church. Or, if the church will not expel the sinner, then one must leave that church. This is a good command of Jesus, our Creator and God. For, if one says and does nothing, so the sinner is Page 1169
allowed to sin without consequence, and without any judgment that might teach the sinner to repent into the truth, then one is indeed partaking in that sinner’s sin, and has made oneself equally as guilty for that sin, just as much as the one who actually committed the sin. If a hand, foot or eye sins, there must be consequences and a judgment, or else others will be lured into sin. If one condones the sin by not separating from the sinner, one is also, together with that sinner, luring others souls into sin.
So all teachings from the Bible must be kept pure and right for the good of everyone. And Jesus said:
“Woe to the world order, because of [its] luring into sins. For [it was] a necessity [for] the luring into sins to have come [Notice that Jesus said the “luring into sins” had to exist here on the training ground of this earth, but did not say that the sins themselves had to exist.]. Nevertheless, woe to the person through whom the luring into sin comes. So, if your hand or your foot is causing you to lure [someone] into sin, cut it off and cast it from you. It is beautifully useful for you to enter into thee life maimed or lame, rather than have two hands or two feet, to have been cast into the eternal fire. And if your eye is causing you to lure [someone] into sin, pluck it out and cast it from you. It is beautifully useful for you to enter into thee life one-eyed, rather than have two eyes, to have been cast into the hell of fire. Clearly see to it that you [disciples]
do not look down on one of the least of these. For I reason with you that their angels in the heavens are seeing through all things, this before the face of My Father in the heavens” (Mat.
18:7-10, from: οὐαὶ τῷ κόσμῳ ἀπὸ τῶν σκανδάλων· ἀνάγκη γὰρ ἐλθεῖν τὰ σκάνδαλα, πλὴν
οὐαὶ τῷ ἀνθρώπῳ διʼ οὗ τὸ σκάνδαλον ἔρχεται. Εἰ δὲ ἡ χείρ σου ἢ ὁ πούς σου σκανδαλίζει
σε, ἔκκοψον αὐτὸν καὶ βάλε ἀπὸ σοῦ· καλόν σοί ἐστιν εἰσελθεῖν εἰς τὴν ζωὴν κυλλὸν ἢ
χωλόν, ἢ δύο χεῖρας ἢ δύο πόδας ἔχοντα βληθῆναι εἰς τὸ πῦρ τὸ αἰώνιον. καὶ εἰ ὁ ὀφθαλμός
σου σκανδαλίζει σε, ἔξελε αὐτὸν καὶ βάλε ἀπὸ σοῦ· καλόν σοί ἐστιν μονόφθαλμον εἰς τὴν
ζωὴν εἰσελθεῖν, ἢ δύο ὀφθαλμοὺς ἔχοντα βληθῆναι εἰς τὴν γέενναν τοῦ πυρός. Ὁρᾶτε μὴ
καταφρονήσητε ἑνὸς τῶν μικρῶν τούτων, λέγω γὰρ ὑμῖν ὅτι οἱ ἄγγελοι αὐτῶν ἐν οὐρανοῖς
διὰ παντὸς βλέπουσι τὸ πρόσωπον τοῦ πατρός μου τοῦ ἐν οὐρανοῖς, SBLGNT).
Jesus gave this woe against Satan’s world order, especially against his religious kingdom of the unjust and highly factious Roman Empire, which has now conquered every nation on earth by teaching its core doctrines of humanism to everyone everywhere. And Jesus spoke of how that demonic kingdom was “luring into sin” (σκάνδαλον). Those works of the devil were a hard and difficult “necessity” (ἀνάγκη) which God had to allow in the training ground of this earth. For His elect had to experience both ruthlessness and love, both destroying sin and redeeming justice, so their spirits could learn to cherish all that conforms to God’s attributes, and love God spontaneously from their hearts. So this presence of the “luring into sin” was for a good purpose. This temporary existence in the flesh was created solely to teach and train His elect children, to test their spirits like metal in a fire, to strengthen their spirits against all things lacking the full attributes of their Father.
To teach and train His elect, God also created Satan and his fallen angels in a way that totally lacks His core attribute of love, then cast them down upon this temporary training ground. In turn, He let that devil also create human spirits in his own image within bodies of flesh. Then those destructive and loveless demons, through their human offspring, have continuously lured the elect into sin, through the selfish and malicious motives of their hearts, through their hatred of God and their desire to be gods. Thus, God has cursed them forever, doomed them to possess nothing but their beloved delusions and lies for all eternity, especially their insane desire to be gods. God appointed a home in hell for all these non-elect entities, a place where none will be able to exploit or destroy any of God’s good creations ever again, where their one and only comfort will be the darkness they created for themselves. And an everlasting existence trapped in one’s own lies and delusions is surely the worst Page 1170
Mat. 18:1-10, A Teaching Elder’s Humility
of all woes and punishments. But those loveless souls, who deliberately lure others into sin, want no other home than hell, since they all desire a place where they can pretend to be gods and hide from the real Creator God and His light of verity, reality and truth. This is why our just and loving God Jesus commanded these eternal spiritual woes against them, and why those non-elect spirits will not escape those woes, since the are not able to oppose the will of our omniscient, omnipotent Creator.
Because the “luring into sins” is a “necessity” that God Himself ordained “to come” into the world, we left to conclude that God’s elect children were placed on earth to stop the non-elect from “luring others into sins.” The elect must learn about God and His ways to they themselves will never partake in luring others into sin. God’s teaching and training of our elect spirits, to fulfill all He promised for us in His New Covenant salvation worked by His Messiah, causes us to undo the works of the devil and his minions, so we can build up God’s just and loving kingdom on earth. For we cannot build up His kingdom on earth unless we undo the works of Satan’s world order, because Satan’s kingdom will continue to incessantly destroy or undo all our works by “luring others into sins.” First we must stop the “luring into sins,” then we can continue to build up all that is loving, just, equitable, good and from God. For Satan is as dedicated to destruction as God is to building up His earthly kingdom.
Therefore, if a person in our church or in our personal lives does works that negatively influence or affect our relationships with God and others in any ungodly way, in a way that God’s Word forbids or condemns, we must cut off that one who is “luring others into sin,” or pluck that one out of our church and our lives. Whether the one “luring into sin” is our “hand” or “foot,” and especially if that one is an “eye,” he or she must be taught the truth and must repent into that truth. And, if there is no repentance, then that one must be abandoned to Satan and his dark world order, until that one’s spirit does repent, and the one who never repents is destined for hell. For the awakened elect have too much love to give, too much work to do and life to live during this very short time in flesh, to let others continuously tear down that love, justice and life we are building up in Jesus and for Him. We cannot afford to waste our love, works and lives by falsely thinking it is compassionate to let Satan and his human children freely work hate, destruction and death through their dark lies and delusions.
Refusing to cut off the diseased hands that destroy our works for God, while they lure us and others into sin through their lies which we politely refuse to rebuke, is extremely costly to everyone. If we do not cut them off, we will end up serving Satan’s world order, not God’s kingdom, and we will actually be tearing down God’s kingdom, not building it up. And God does not allow attacks on His kingdom to go unanswered. Therefore, if a church does not repent into the truth and cut off the evil hands, they too will suffer the same woes that Satan will. Likewise, we must cut off the sinning feet who lure souls into sin, no matter how much money they might give to the church. Otherwise, we will be serving Satan. If a church takes their support, and lets them use the church to lure others into sin, God’s woes will be even more painful for that church than the woes for their secular non-elect siblings, since that church will be slandering God by doing evil works in God’s name. Above all, we must pluck out any lying eyes that falsely teach, guide, direct, counsel and judge in our churches, since they possess the most power to lure into sin. Deceiving eyes are always the most devastating to our lives in the flesh, since they can corrupt the entire souls of anyone who trusts them. We need to realize that Jesus’ Holy Spirit teaches and trains our spirits to reject and oppose destructive hands, feet or eyes for a very good reason. Our God cannot build up His kingdom on earth if we allow the devil’s brood to destroy our works as we are doing them. Nor can there be any peace or joy within our souls until we cut them off and pluck them out of our churches and personal lives, since they will constantly muddy the clear waters of truth, corrupt or destroy our works, gaslight us, frustrate us and Page 1171