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• Sunday, 16th of Nisan, Mat. 28:1-15: Sometime during the night of this day (from sunset on May 8th to sunset on May 9th), likely an hour or two before sunrise, Jesus’
body rose from the dead and left the tomb. Therefore, He rose from the dead on the third day (or, as the Jews might say, “after three days and nights,” since it included parts of the days and nights of three days, parts of the 14th, 15th and 16th of Nisan).
As you can see above, although the correct order of events was not a matter of great importance to the apostles (nor to us either), Matthew took the time to ensure that we knew it. And, as an honest eye-witness, we can trust that his testimony is accurate. We can also see why Matthew was so careful about getting the order correct, since it actually does help us understand and identify with Jesus, as well as with the people and events involved in His works for our salvation. And one of the first things we realize is that this particular Passover fell on a Jewish Friday (i.e., on a Roman Thursday evening). Of course, a Passover week can begin on a different day of the week each year, since the Jewish months and feast days follow the cycles of the moon, and are not artificially designated by human authorities to occur on certain days of certain months on an officially appointed calendar designed to meet financial and political needs. So Jesus ate His “Last Supper” with the twelve, and was crucified, on the 14th of Nisan/Abib, when a full moon shone at a natural, God-appointed time.
This means that God planned the death of His human body to occur on that Jewish Friday, which Jews call “the preparation day,” and near the end of that day. At sunset on that very day, an extra holy Sabbath would begin, a day in which Jews were not allowed to touch a dead body, nor do any works to prepare His body for burial. So, in the last hour that Friday, “the preparation day,” His disciples had to very quickly prepare His body for burial. They had to do it hastily, just as the Jews hastily prepared to leave Egypt on the first Passover day. Since the end of the day was near as they took Him down from the cross, His disciples had to bury His body, wash, go to a mikveh and return home, all within an hour or so before the sun set, in order to make themselves ceremonially clean for the extra holy Passover Sabbath meal just after sunset on the same day. Thus, His disciples had no time to properly wash, wrap and prepare His corpse, not in a suitable manner. They had to wait until that Sabbath ended to complete the preparation of His body. Then, since a Sabbath day ended at sunset, it would be too dark to do this work. So the preparation had to wait until sunrise on Sunday.
Now the disciples would have pooled their resources and received donations, so they could obtain many yards of expensive fine linen and pounds of perfumed spices to properly prepare Jesus’ body for burial. And some would have even begun to gather these supplies on Friday, on “the preparation day,” just before Jesus even died on the cross. Thus, if Jesus died a few hours earlier on Friday, His disciples would have had time to properly wrap His body, and stuff many suffocating spices inside the linen. Or, if the Passover occurred on any other weekday, from Sunday to Thursday, they could have properly prepared His body early the next day, and would not have had to wait for the Sabbath Saturday, as well as the dark night after the Sabbath. But, if this happened, then Jesus’ body would have been buried in a way that would make it far more difficult for Him to escape from the layers of a tightly wrapped burial cloth binding His body. More importantly, Jesus would not have been buried in the same way that the poorer people were, with a minimum of wrappings and without the spices.
Naturally, Jesus could easily use His supernatural power to escape from anything. So being buried like a rich person, in layers of strong, fine linen, and with many aromatic spices, would not have been able to stop or even slightly hinder His resurrection from the dead. Still, it was necessary for Jesus to be buried much like the common, lowly people were. Besides, it was more dignified for Him to rise from the dead in a more natural way, by simply sitting up and removing the only layer of cloth which was tucked relatively loosely over His body. So, when our God Jesus predestined that Page 1695
His body’s crucifixion would occur on a Jewish Friday, it helped fulfill His own prophecy, when He said that His dead body would rise on the third day, a prophecy which He based upon His own interpretation of the Scriptural account of how Jonah escaped from the belly of the fish on the third day. Jesus said His body would rise from the dead and escape from the belly of the earth on the third day, then minister to all nations of the world, in the same way that Jonah did. And this teaching also may be what other Jewish rabbis believed that the Messianic “Suffering Servant” would do as well.
So His hasty burial fulfilled biblical prophecies about Him, as the Messiah of Israel’s humble souls.
Furthermore, Jesus fulfilled all the deliverance and salvation prophecies inherent to God’s symbolic ceremonial laws regarding the Passover week. And this is what Jesus wanted His disciples to realize at the beginning of Wednesday, after the sunset on Tuesday, when He told them: “You disciples know that, in about two days, the Passover occurs, and the Son of mankind is being handed over, in order to have been crucified” (Mat. 26:2, ALT). Jesus was the unique Son of God, or Person of the one God who related to the family of mankind as their oldest Brother. He came to us so that He could demonstrate the fulfilling of His eternal principles of life, which He had briefly outlined when He revealed His Old Covenant Law to His priesthood of Israel in the days of Moses. Then He personally taught and trained us to do what He did, and demonstrated the fulfilling of His Law. And now He was going to demonstrate His symbolic and prophetic ceremonial laws of the Passover, the laws which reminded us about on the day when He separated and sanctified His priesthood of Israel from Satan’s world order in Egypt, so they could be free to serve the world by building His kingdom on earth. When our God Jesus delivered Israel from slavery in Egypt, it symbolized His rescue of His elect from their spiritual, emotional and physical slavery to the religions, philosophies and ways of the self-destructive and other-destructive non-elect in the world order, from those who captured and exploited His elect. And, to this day, the non-elect elect are still duping, capturing, bullying and exploiting the elect. So the elect still need to flee into His true church of Israel for His deliverance.
Look at the Passover laws of God, and see how Jesus fulfilled them as our Passover Lamb. On the 10th of Nissan, each family was to take a lamb into their home. Thus, Jesus came and stayed within the annexed boundary of Jerusalem on the 10th of Nissan. (That is, Jesus likely arrived at Bethany, which was inside the boundary of greater Jerusalem, on Sunday, the 9th of Nisan, just before sunset began a new Jewish day. Then He stayed overnight in a disciple’s home and, on Monday mourning, made the short walk to the Temple for His Triumphal Entry, on the 10th of Nisan.) But each family was not allowed to butcher the Passover lamb until the Seder on the 14th of Nissan. So, after a family fed and served the lamb for three days (as Jesus’ disciples served Him for three years), the lamb would serve them through its death, to become one with them, ingested and internalized by those who soberly and somewhat sorrowfully fed on it at the Passover feast inside their personal homes.
This law of the Passover also meant they had to butcher the lamb during the daylight hours of the 13th of Nissan, before the 14th of Nissan began at sunset. For this is what God commanded them to do in Egypt. While Israel remained in slavery to Satan’s world order, they slaughtered and butchered the lamb on the 13th of Nissan, before they ate the Passover meal after sunset on the 14th of Nissan. After this sad occasion, after they had grown to know and love the little innocent lamb in their home, they gathered to flee from Egypt in the morning of the 14th. So why did Jesus, our Passover Lamb, die on the 14th of Nisan, not on the 13th? It is because Jesus’ death on the cross is the deliverance from the power of Satan and his world order. Jesus is the gathering of the elect together, as His people of His church, on the 14th of Nissan. Jesus is our escape from Egypt, which we find in God’s Passover laws:
“They shall take [on the 13th of Nisan] some of the blood [of the lamb], and put it on the two door posts and on the lintel, on the houses in which they shall eat it. They shall eat the flesh in that Page 1696
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night [when the 14th began], roasted with fire, and unleavened bread. They shall eat it with bitter herbs. Don’t eat it raw, nor boiled at all with water, but roasted with fire; with its head, its legs and its inner parts. You shall let nothing of it remain until the morning; but that which remains of it until the morning you shall burn with fire. This is how you shall eat it: with your belt on your waist, your shoes on your feet, and your staff in your hand; and you shall eat it in haste: it is Yahweh’s Passover. For I will go through the land of Egypt in that night, and will strike all the firstborn in the land of Egypt, both man and animal. Against all the gods of Egypt I will execute judgments: I am Yahweh. The blood shall be to you for a token on the houses where you are: and when I see the blood, I will pass over you, and there shall no plague be on you to destroy you, when I strike the land of Egypt” (Ex. 12:7-13, WEB).
Sunset would begin the 14th of Nissan. And, back then in Egypt, it would be the day they would walk out the doors of their slave homes for the last time. Their new-found freedom would be a painful and deadly journey, but they would eventually become God’s true priesthood on earth and abolish all the spiritual and physical slavery in the world, through their Messiah, through their Passover Lamb. Yet, before they could leave their own slavery, they had to mark the right and left posts of their doors, as well as the beam over it (i.e., the lintel), with the blood of their Lamb. This blood would symbolize three things required by all who will become truly free: (1) sanctification, being fully set apart for God’s works alone, since only those who fulfill God’s will can do what is needed to keep freedom; (2) God’s guarding of the spirit, to the right and left, from all misleading lies and delusions, as well as from His descending wrath, a safety that only our holy God can grant because of His forgiveness earned by His blood; and (3) the inheritance of rights and power as the elect children of the High King, since He will destroy all the illicit inheritors of stolen rights and power, all the firstborn of the non-elect in Satan’s world order, so He can grant all rights and powers within all His creations to His elect heirs alone. His blood purchased our freedom from slavery to lies, delusions, sins and sinners, paid the price demanded by our accusers and the price of all justice, restoring our right relationship with Him, so He could draw us close to Himself as His sanctified children, heirs of all His kingdom.
The Lamb’s blood had to mark the door posts and lintels before sunset, before the 14th of Nissan began. Then the priesthood of Israel had to eat the flesh of that Lamb after sunset, after the 14th day began, but before its daylight hours. And each had to eat as much of the Lamb as one possibly could, each according to one’s own God-given ability to fill oneself. And, if the family of God was not able to eat all the Lamb, they had to burn all the leftover meat, leaving absolutely nothing of that Lamb for their enslavers. Other excess foods could be left behind, and not burned. Yet God forbade Israel to leave a single scrap of their Lamb behind, because the flesh of their Messiah is the nourishing and life-sustaining Word of God, which He teaches to our spirits, which He also trains us to use, as the kind of wisdom we need to live a free and abundant life. But non-elect spirits were created by Satan, without any ability to digest it. And the non-elect loath even the taste of truth, especially truths that build life. So they will either destroy His Word or use pieces as bait to capture and ensnare the elect.
The Word of God is not for the non-elect, and its truths must remain safely guarded in the hearts of the elect, where their spirits dwell. His Word should never be handed over to the non-elect. For that would be like taking your beloved mother’s precious and perfect pearls, which she gave to you as a token of her love, and tossing them into a pig pen, to be trampled under the greedy hogs’ feet. And look at how God told His priesthood to prepare that meat for their spirits. They had to eat it roasted, cooked over fire. And, in His Law, fire represented the purifying Holy Spirit of God, which killed the deadly germs and parasites of false interpretations, to make His healthy Word far more digestible and safe for consumption. They were not to eat it raw, not to interpret it with their minds of flesh, not Page 1697
without first turning it over for a long while in the cleansing heat of His Spirit’s counsel. Nor were they allowed to boil water in His holy fire, then cook this meat in that water. Human interpretations must not pass between the flames of His Spirit and the meat of His Word, before it is taken into the hearts of His elect children. Each individual has to taste His fire on the meat one took for oneself.
Furthermore, the Lamb was to be cooked intact. The skin of earthly adaptions to cultures had to be removed from His Word. But the head, legs and inner parts were to remain on the spit over the fire.
The teachings about God’s attributes are the head of His Word; the histories of His deeds among us are the legs; and God’s counsel revealing His inner thoughts are the inner organs and bones. These must not be removed from the moral and doctrinal teachings in His Word. Then each must eat His Word with bread that has absolutely no leaven of self-esteeming arrogance and unjust malice, which are both based solely upon delusions and lies that one’s mind of self-centred flesh convinces one’s soul to believe. In life, the serving priesthood of God must serve Him in humility and with just love, knowing that only God can make their works effective, and that the goal of their works is to build up God’s just and loving kingdom, and not a kingdom made by man. In addition to this, the Passover Seder stipulated that the Word must be eaten with the healing bitter herbs of repentance, since God’s forgiveness, and His atonement for the restoration of one’s relationship with Him, will require one’s spirit to turn toward the pure truth, and away from anything that is even slightly false or misleading.
While they were eating this meal, His priesthood of Israel also had to be fully dressed and ready to leave the next day. God commanded them to eat the meal “with your belt on your waist, your shoes on your feet, and your staff in your hand; and you shall eat it in haste.” The servants of God must not settle down comfortably in the darkness of Satan’s world order, accepting the night, resting as slaves of lying, deluded oppressors who destroy everything they touch, including themselves. Although some slaves might gain a few temporary rewards from their taskmasters, by labouring a little harder to build up their enemy’s strength, those rewards will soon betray both them and their siblings. Illicit rewards may comfort their flesh, but will soon be taken away, along with their flesh. So let the elect remember that freedom can never be comprehended by the flesh, nor granted to flesh. For life cannot be quickened by the ever-decaying and dying flesh. It can only be wakened in eternal spirits. And nothing but inner life can be free. This true freedom is painful and difficult for the flesh, at first, but it is the only thing that can save one’s flesh, and the flesh of all one’s siblings. Without the spirit’s freedom from the delusions and lies of enslavers, all will suffer certain death by the hands of their enemies. And this freedom grows eternally, as a gift they can take with their spirits after death. So let the elect keep their belts on their wastes, with His currency tucked in and the tools of their trades fastened on. Let their peace with God firmly lace their shoes, so they do not trip as they run toward freedom. And let their hands grip the solid staffs of His Word, to save and protect God’s other sheep of His pasture. It is now that we need to flee the devil’s world order, in great haste, lest we are found serving and strengthening God’s enemies in the hour that His unstoppable wrath strikes them down.
The day Jesus died on that cross was the very first true Passover, after God symbolically prophesied about it on the day Israel cast off their slavery in Satan’s subject kingdom of Egypt. It was the reality of the prophesying day and the meal God commanded in the days of Moses, which God wanted His serving priesthood of Israel to reenact as a memorial throughout all their subsequent years on earth.
And God did not institute this symbol merely because He freed a politically defined nation from a physical enemy, only to have that same political entity physically taken captive again and again, throughout history. Rather, the only reason God told His true church of Israel to forever remember their salvation from slavery in Egypt was because that day represented His future eternal deliverance from lies, delusions, sins and sinners. Then the years that His priesthood wandered in the wilderness, Page 1698
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freely upon His earthly creation, with the whole world remaining their homeland, was the time when God chose to reveal His Law to them, and to the entire world. This was the two-dimensional outline of the Creator God’s spiritual Law He would fulfill in them and through them when He came to them as their Messiah in a human body, to gather them into His eternal New Covenant relationship with Himself. So the Passover meal on the 14th Nisan in AD 28, in the upper room on the same Jewish day His flesh was crucified, was the Passover our God Jesus told His disciples to remember above all.
By the way, I cannot say exactly when the first Passover feast given to Moses occurred, except that it occurred in about 1450 BC, since the Bible tells us this. It says the fourth year of Solomon’s reign was in the 480th year of the Exodus (I Kings 6:1). This means that Solomon reigned at least three years when at least 479 years passed after Israel celebrated the first Passover in Egypt on the 14th of Nissan. And most experts think Solomon began to rule in about 971 BC. So his fourth year would begin in 969 BC and end in 968 BC. Thus, if we add the least possible number of years (479 and 968), the Exodus Passover would have occurred 1,447 BC. Or, if we add the most possible years (480 and 969), it would have happened earlier, in 1,449 BC. But, since the Levitical priesthood in Solomon’s day was likely still counting the number years from the Exodus, we can be sure this date set for the Exodus is accurate. Also, that Scripture in the book of Kings is the only place in the entire Bible which provides the year of the Exodus. And we cannot use the place names to date the time of the Exodus, as some attempt to do, since the redactors of Scriptures replaced old names with the new names existing during their own times. They seemed to do this with many well-known places, and the names existing at the time of the Exodus were lost to us. So a name like “Raamses” (Ra’amses) was the place where the enslaved Israelites lived and built cities for the Pharaoh (Ex. 1:11, 12:37), the place they left on the 15th of Nissan sometime between 1447 to 1449 (i.e., Israel left that area after sunset, after the 14th of Nisan had expired, see Num. 33:3). But, during the time of the Exodus, it was called by another name that archaeologists now know was called “Avaris” during the time of the Exodus. The same is true about the place that Jacob and his 12 sons settled in Egypt, which the redactors called “the land of Rameses,” (Gen. 47:11). It too would be Avaris, and definitely was not called “the land of Rameses” in the days of Jacob. Then we should realize that the dates which the archaeologists assign to Egyptian events occurring before about 1000 BC are disputed and cannot be completely accurate. Many seem to be between 40 and 100 years too early. So the Exodus in about 1450 BC, may have occurred during the Egyptian chronology of events that they identify with the years between 1487 and 1550 BC, or possibly even in earlier years, although not before 1600 BC.
But the exact dates of the first Passover or the fulfilling of the Passover symbolism by Jesus in about AD 28, are not that important, as long as we realize that they were actual historical events. And, in Matthew 26:2, Jesus wanted His disciples to realize that He was to be “handed over, in order to have been crucified” on the Passover. He wanted them to take the next couple of days to ponder all the ways in which the Passover events correlated to His death on the cross, how the original Passover in Egypt symbolized His salvation works on the cross. For the disciples were to be eye-witnesses of His salvation works, and partake in those works, by honestly testifying about them to all the world.
And, to this day, all the awakened elect that He gathers into His New Covenant branch of Israel are to do the same. We need to comprehend how Jesus is our Passover Lamb, our Saviour from slavery to lies, delusions, sins and sinners. Then, by our collective words and deeds, as His priesthood sent to serve His kingdom on earth, we partake in His saving works by testifying about them. This is also why we celebrate His Passover meal with His believing disciples, often called His “Last Supper,”
but now to remember His real Passover freedom, not merely His deliverance from physical slavery.
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The Works of False Churches
Next, Matthew spoke about the non-elect perpetrators of false teachings in false churches, the principal influences in the devil’s fake religious institutions, those who love to be called “elders” and seek to be esteemed above their siblings within Satan’s hierarchies of the world order. He wrote:
“Then the chief priests and the elders of the people gathered into the hall of the chief priest being called Caiaphas. And they took counsel together, so they might seize and destroy Jesus with subtle deceit. Yet they reasoned: ‘Not during the feast, so that a disturbance might not occur [afterward]
among the people’” (Mat. 26:3-5, from: Τότε συνήχθησαν οἱ ἀρχιερεῖς καὶ οἱ πρεσβύτεροι τοῦ λαοῦ
εἰς τὴν αὐλὴν τοῦ ἀρχιερέως τοῦ λεγομένου Καϊάφα, καὶ συνεβουλεύσαντο ἵνα τὸν Ἰησοῦν δόλῳ
κρατήσωσιν καὶ ἀποκτείνωσιν· ἔλεγον δέ· Μὴ ἐν τῇ ἑορτῇ, ἵνα μὴ θόρυβος γένηται ἐν τῷ λαῷ, SBLGNT). In other words, those fake “elders,” posing as spiritual guides for the people in God’s church of Israel, wanted to physically capture and murder their God who came to them in a body of human flesh. They plotted to get rid of Jesus, since He interfered with their ability to rule over their siblings as human gods. For Jesus stopped them from stealing the worship, respect and trust that the people should have reserved for God alone, and hindered their thefts of the people’s time and money.
Nevertheless, those sneaky little plotters were being used by Jesus, something like a farmer uses the useless plants and plant parts to produce nourishing compost for his crops. Of course, those robed religious elites believed they were superior human gods, much greater and more powerful than Jesus.
They thought they were using and abusing our God Jesus, as the rightful owners of the masses whom they deemed to be vastly inferior to themselves. Yet the only reason they thought so highly of their own obviously wicked selves was because they defined “superiority” in an irrational way, according to how skilfully they could commit ruthless sins with impunity. The better one was able to instantly cover one’s malicious intentions with a mask of outward friendliness and artificially sincere piety, in order to effectively manipulate other souls with carefully crafted lies for one’s own personal gain, the more others esteemed that one as a superior. Then each one had to prove his superiority and great
“strength” by torturing and murdering “inferior” innocent souls without a shred of mercy. Yet, as they diligently laboured to develop these skills of manipulation, terrorism and murder, to fulfill their selfish ambitions, they completely neglected the practice of constructing anything practical or useful.
So they soon became so incapable of good that they couldn’t even cut their own sturdy branch to use as a prodding stick, to keep their slaves “motivated,” and had to get other slaves to make it for them.
Naturally, back in God’s immutable created reality, only the ability to build something useful for the equitable and beneficial service of all, actually indicated any kind of genuine worth. But the kinds of skills that those religious “elders” highly esteemed, such as the ability to senselessly, ruthlessly and indiscriminately kill and destroy, were actually the kinds of proficiencies that God primarily allotted to tiny mindless things, such as viruses, bacteria or sparks escaping from fireplaces. So those “great”
men, who believed they were gods who had usurped the authority of the real God, so they could then exploit the people for their own profit and pleasure, had actually and objectively made themselves into the most inferior kinds of entities, and became truly inferior to most plants and animals on earth.
Still, these irrational and inferior “superiors” despised the kinds of people who refused to murder and destroy for selfish ambitions, as they did. To them, all gentle, just and loving souls must be inferior, since they sought inner fulfillment, instead of the world order’s delusions of financial and terrorizing power. And they, within the imaginary worlds they had created in their minds of flesh, considered the delusions of money and worldly authority to be the only “realities” worthy of their covetousness.
Yet those empty, useless, destructive, parasitic non-elect elite craved rewards of honour, respect and privilege from “inferiors.” So they had to trick “inferiors” into awarding them this god-like worship.
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Thus, the “elders,” who dressed their stinking flesh in “holy” garments, deceived those dupes into thinking their evil was a virtue, that they made a “great noble sacrifice” by forfeiting all true inner fulfillment for themselves, because they selflessly took on the essential grievous “burden” of building up the financial and political “realities” of Satan’s world order, for the good of all the land.
Of course, the thing they supposedly “sacrificed” was merely useless garbage to them, since they had never desired any kind of inner spiritual fulfillment in the first place. None knew what true inner fulfillment might even look like, and mocked it as a delusion, since the only “realities” they ever sought were their delusions about money and power. And they loathed every sign of God’s elect finding any of that true inner fulfillment—since the pursuit of inner spiritual joy invariably led elect souls away from them, and closer to eternal freedom through a grateful worship of the one true God.
So the devil had gathered up most psychopathic offspring and had sent them out to sabotage true churches and build fake churches to replace those true churches. Then, in order to distract the elect away from God and His spiritual fulfillment, those fake churches kept their dupes focused on masses of physical rules and rituals, but called those physical things “spiritual.” And the main mission of those Satanic spies was to preach fake salvation messages, to convince their dupes that, by doing mindless physical deeds, they could save their eternal spirits. Yet all these fakes proclaimed the same kind of slavery to other slaves of the devil, and the only rewards their dupes received were inner fear, anxiety, distrust, delusions, violence and death, the same rewards that Israel received from their Egyptian taskmasters before God delivered them from that slavery. So those “elders” had actually exalted themselves into positions of Egyptian-like slave owners, and had demoted the free Israelites into the positions of slaves, then chose to celebrate the Passover by killing the God who saves them.
Only by accepting enslavement by those deceivers, could a Jew become another “superior,” like those slaves Satan rewarded most in his unjust world order. If a Jew bowed to them, believed their lies and gave them all one’s money and time, like a slave, one could also become a self-indulgent, arrogant “elder” like them. Yet all those ruling “elders” were themselves thoroughly mindless dupes continuously manipulated by their hellish father and that devil’s other slaves, and were puppets pulled by the strings of demonically triggered emotions of the flesh, by the cords of manipulated arrogance, greed and lusts within them. So all those “spiritual guides” became utterly incapable of forming a single truly rational and beneficial thought that could possibly help anyone they claimed to save. Their fake salvation messages had lured hordes of non-elect into their fake churches, as well as many blinded elect, in the same way sweet and sickly filth irresistibly draws flies to it. So the vast majority of church “elders” and influencers, who were the non-elect, who chained their elect slaves to non-elect taskmasters, had large numbers of dupes bowing to them. And those large numbers of worshipping dupes also made them feel like almighty gods who could do anything they wanted, with total impunity. Thus, they actually thought they could get away with murdering the body of their God, so they could prevent their captive elect souls from escaping into the real salvation of Jesus.
Knowing how stupid and inferior those non-elect religious “elders” actually were, Jesus ordained and intentionally caused those dupes to murder His body of flesh at the precise time He wanted them to do it. Jesus put the thought in their minds that they should allow Him to celebrate the Passover Seder, on the 14th of Nisan, with His disciples, so He might leave His church with an understanding of His power to predestine all things. Jesus made those plotters afraid of the people, so they would not do their crimes “during the feast.” For, from the beginning of time, God appointed His flesh to die for His elect family, to pay the demanded ransom for all their sins and restore their relationships with Him, after that symbolic Passover Seder, after His “Last Supper.” In fact, our God Jesus had Page 1701
created this universe solely for this purpose, and powerfully delivered His priesthood from Egypt in the days of Moses solely to prophesy about the New Covenant salvation of Jesus worked on that day.
The reason God gave His elect children a temporary life on earth was to teach and train their spirits, so they might more deeply and wisely love His ways, as they saw His ways contrasted with an infinite array of less effective or outright destructive ways that produced only painful or deadly injustice. To do all this, God had to create a small and temporary place apart from His loving and holy heaven, a place below an infinite and fiery vacuum of space resembling hell, where He could allow His elect to experience that which does not function in His ordained ways, while they could also experience and learn from their participation in His loving, just, equitable works on the earth.
Only on earth could the spirits of His elect acquire a first-hand experience of what life would be like if God’s quintessential character and nature was not practised by some people and things they had touched and interacted with. For, in heaven, literally everything shines with God’s attributes. And, since His elect children had spiritual natures which always gravitated toward truth for the building up of love, and God had to cause them to experience the causes and effects of sin, God created Satan and the fallen angels. Then God cast those defective creatures, who all lacked His most defining attribute of just and equitable love, down to the earth, on the day He created the earth. So, by simply being what they were, those demons created their own human children, then led even the elect into sin. Thus, they inadvertently helped God’s elect children learn the difference between what is of God and what is not of God. Infantile elect spirits began to discern between good and evil. And, once the elect understood this difference, they became more like God. For, in the very beginning, only God could comprehend what He is and what He is not. Before elect human spirits experienced what their own sins did, and what it was like to be sinned against, no other created spirit knew the difference between what manifested God’s attributes and what did not, that is, both good and evil. And this is why God created the elect human spirit, the only kind of spirit with a potential ability to comprehend this distinction between good and evil. Only elect human spirits were made in God’s image, with this potential ability, so they could truly cherish and love His essence, so they would hate all that did not manifest His holy love. For this ability is essential for all who serve as teaching judges, together with God, in both His earthly and heavenly kingdoms. So, from the moment human elect spirits felt the weight of earth, where the power and Person of God was disguised by physical energy and matter, all began to see the contrast between the godly and ungodly. Then God would use their earthly observations to complete their education on a final day at heaven’s gate, before He took them home.
Likewise, the devil created and placed non-elect human spirits in bodies of human flesh, so those images of himself could do his works on earth. Satan made the non-elect to lead the elect into sin, or to sin against the elect, so the elect might feel the effects sin. Yet Jesus uses those sins and losses of the elect to make their spirits more like Him. Just as our God Jesus used the non-elect to murder His flesh at the right time, He does the same for us. For, each time the elect sin or feel effects of sin, it causes their spirits to hate sin more, but love Him and His loving ways more. God also limited the time His elect must experience sin on earth, making that time only an insignificant fraction of the eternal time they exist, although it is the first and most well-remembered time of their infinite lives.
Thus, it is never long before the elect see the end of their earthly lives and the beginning of their last day before they enter their eternal homes. The hours they remain outside of their permanent homes are few, but their days they will deeply fellowship with their Father and oldest Brother in heaven are without end. And, by then, all the children made in the image of their Father will realize how the devil and his minions have always been used by Him to sin against them in ways that were worth all the temporary growing pains caused to their elect human spirits. All will see how God employed the Page 1702
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devil and his brood as unwitting agents to facilitate His saving work on the cross, to rescue them from slavery to lies, sins and ignorance; how literally all God created will always “work together for good for those who love God, to those who are called according to His purpose” (Rom. 8:28, WEB).
As for the loveless spirits of those defective fallen angels, and the human spirits made by Satan, they are eternal entities of the spiritual realm, all made of spiritual substances too, all created for a realm without linear time that ends, for a place without entropy, decay or death. So each will exist forever, and the mind of each non-elect spirit will spend every moment of its eternal time pretending to be a god and creating its own kingdom of lies and delusions, although each one’s irrational, contradicting imaginings will never be able to harmonize and solidify into any kind of functioning reality. Still, each of those personally manufactured worlds in each one’s mind will always remain one’s greatest possession and only desire, so that not one will expend any of its time and effort seeking anything else. Each non-elect spirit’s eternal focus shall always be exclusively fixated on one’s individually chosen darkness of lies and delusions. Consequently, those are the only wages each will ever receive.
Because lies and delusions are all the non-elect strive to possess, God made a place where each is able to keep all that darkness that each strove to create for oneself throughout one’s entire existence, a place where each can continue to earn an infinite amount of that currency of dark lies and irrational delusions. God made a separated and totally different “paradise” for the non-elect spirits, since they would suffer extreme pain if they had to dwell in heaven. Because the beloved lies and delusions that each non-elect spirit laboured to build for oneself would be instantly dissolved by the penetrating light of God’s beautiful, diverse and rational realities in heaven, God made a home of complete and utter darkness for the non-elect. There each loveless non-elect spirit can drift alone, continuously building up one’s own kingdom of troubled dreams, where each remains the sole god of one’s own personal dark, empty, futile world. Each will be frustrated by one’s own inability to steal any real person or thing from God, by not being able to exploit, abuse or destroy His realities, just to make oneself feel powerful and god-like. Nevertheless, hell is a “paradise” for loveless non-elect spirits.
So God allowed the non-elect spirits of demons and humans to torture and murder His body, and to continue doing this ever since. For, after that day, both the Old and New Covenant branches of God’s body of true Israel have been feeling the pains of hatred and sins expressed by the non-elect. Yet the non-elect have never harmed nor even slightly hindered the real Jesus, nor any of His created truths.
They have never damaged even one consistent, harmonious, rational reality that ever existed within the loving Creator’s Spirit, not one of the truths He employed to bind all of His creations into one reality, so His eternal spiritual creations could function flawlessly forever. And all elect spirits, all human and other spirits created for eternal life in heaven, will inherit those truths. Likewise, all the non-elect spirits He created will inherit all their desires. All this was planned and all perfectly works together for His just, equitable and loving purposes, without even one error or unforeseen problem.
Yes, there will be sins and sin’s wages of death, even until the material universe ends. But He will soon end all our sufferings and all sins. And the pains of life on earth are an investment that will grant the elect more than a hundred times what it cost them, through the works of Jesus upon the cross and by His resurrection from the dead. Because of Jesus works and His Holy Spirit sent into our hearts and souls, our lives on earth are now able to nullify Satan’s works and build up God’s just and loving kingdom here on earth. Now we can gain spiritual treasures on earth for our eternal lives in heaven, as we partake in Christ’s works of constructing His earthly kingdom, and as we nullify the devil’s loveless works, as we enjoy His company and one another in our shared labours on the earth.
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So now remember, it was not the Jews who crucified Jesus. Rather, it was Satan working through his human offspring. Some of that devil’s human children were sent into the Old Covenant branch of God’s true church, as that demon’s sabotaging spies. Then some non-elect were sent into God’s New Covenant branch of Israel too, for the same purpose, as Judas Iscariot was. But most of the criminals who had deliberately tortured and murdered God’s body were Gentile citizens of the Roman Empire, Satan’s fourth kingdom. And Jesus willed to die, then ultimately caused His own death through His own power. Jesus chose to die on that cross for our sakes, and caused Satan to kill His body, so He could pay for the sins of both His Jewish elect and His Gentile elect. “For as [the Gentile elect] in time past were disobedient to God, but now have obtained mercy by [the] disobedience [of the Old Covenant Jewish elect spirits whom God had blinded], even so these [Jewish elect] also have now been disobedient, that by the mercy shown to you they may also obtain mercy. For God has shut up all to disobedience, that He might have mercy on all. Oh the depth of the riches both of the wisdom and the knowledge of God! How unsearchable are His judgments, and His ways past tracing out! For who has known the mind of the Lord? Or who has been His counsellor? Or who has first given to Him, and it will be repaid to him again? For of Him, and through Him, and to Him, are all things
[even our earthly sufferings and deaths]. To Him be the glory for ever! Amen” (Rom. 11:32-36, WEB).
The Works of Future Disciples
To review, remember that, after sunset on Tuesday (the 11th of Nisan), a new Jewish day began. So on Wednesday (the 12th of Nisan), Jesus walked with His disciples back to Bethany, which was a small town of a few hundred souls located about three kilometres (2 miles) from Jerusalem. Now the name “Bethany” seems to mean “house of the poor.” So it was likely a place where many of the men and women there, including Mary and her household, ministered to the sick and destitute. Then we should also realize that Pharisaic traditions forbade their sect of Jews from travelling more than about 960 meters (3,049.5 feet, 0.596 miles) on Sabbath days, either on Saturday Sabbaths or on feast days which God’s Law designated as Sabbath days, including the Passover day on the 14th of Nisan. Thus, after Jesus and His disciples ate the Passover meal in Jerusalem after sunset, at the beginning of the 14th of Nisan, they could only walk as far as the Mount of Olives, within 960
meters. But on Wednesday, when a woman poured oil on Jesus’ head and feet, it was not a Sabbath.
Consequently, Jesus, His disciples and many other Jews stayed in Bethany to wait for the Passover.
For accommodations within the walls of Jerusalem were very difficult to obtain, and very costly during the feast days in the first century, that is, while God’s temple was still standing. After all, Jerusalem’s population would swell from about 25 or 30 thousand to about 70 or 80 thousand, since Jews from all over the known world came to the temple for the feasts which God’s Law commanded them to celebrate in Jerusalem. So Jerusalem would become extremely overcrowded, and property owners would often charge very high prices for the privilege of sleeping on the floors of their houses or in their barns. Thus, the less wealthy Jews, like Jesus and His disciples, had to stay in the cheaper places outside Jerusalem. Because of this, some Jewish rabbis and other Jewish authorities had made the concession that satellite communities like Bethany were acceptable places for Jews to stay during the high holy days, and recognized those places as technically within the greater area of Jerusalem.
In Bethany, Jesus and His core twelve disciples stayed at a home belonging to a family of His true disciples. In this family, there seems to have been two brothers: Simon, who was likely the oldest, and probably a Pharisee who had become a leper, but was healed by Jesus; and Lazarus, whom Jesus had recently raised from the dead after he lay in the tomb for four days. Then there were two sisters, or possibly sisters-in-law, Mary and Martha. Now these people were probably not rich, and almost Page 1704
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certainly did not own a mansion with a dozen bedrooms, as some irrationally assume. This family would consist of ordinary lower-class or middle-class people, like almost all the other disciples of Jesus. And they would have had a common house, likely with only one or two enclosed rooms and a covered kitchen area in a small open-air courtyard surrounded by a wall. Then a flat roof over a room or two would have also been a well-used living space. And this roof is probably where Jesus and the twelve would have wrapped their cloaks around themselves and slept that night. For people in that area often slept on the roof during the spring, summer and fall seasons, since the region had warm spring evenings. But, on this evening, at the beginning of Wednesday, the 12th of Nissan (i.e., the evening of May 3rd, AD 28 on our Gregorian calendar), Jesus and the disciples ate their supper.
Matthew was in that house that evening and testified: “Now, when Jesus was in Bethany at the house of Simon the leper, a woman approached Him, having an alabaster stone bottle of very valuable scented oil and poured [it] upon His head while [He was] sitting at the table. So, after seeing [this], the disciples became indignant, reasoning, ‘For what [is] this waste, since this was bearing the potential to be sold for much, to give to the needy ones also?’ Then, having known [exactly what they were thinking], Jesus said to them, ‘What troubles are you [disciples] offering to the woman?
For she worked a good work for Me. After all, you always have the needy ones [living] among yourselves. Yet you do not always have Me. Besides, this woman did [it], having poured this scented oil upon My body, in order to conduct a burial ceremony for Me. Most certainly I reason with you, wherever this Gospel might have been publicly proclaimed in the whole world, what this woman did will also be mentioned for her memorial’” (Mat. 26:6-13, from: Τοῦ δὲ Ἰησοῦ γενομένου ἐν Βηθανίᾳ
ἐν οἰκίᾳ Σίμωνος τοῦ λεπροῦ, προσῆλθεν αὐτῷ γυνὴ ἔχουσα ἀλάβαστρον μύρου βαρυτίμου καὶ
κατέχεεν ἐπὶ τῆς κεφαλῆς αὐτοῦ ἀνακειμένου. ἰδόντες δὲ οἱ μαθηταὶ ἠγανάκτησαν λέγοντες· Εἰς τί ἡ
ἀπώλεια αὕτη; ἐδύνατο γὰρ τοῦτο πραθῆναι πολλοῦ καὶ δοθῆναι πτωχοῖς. γνοὺς δὲ ὁ Ἰησοῦς εἶπεν
αὐτοῖς· Τί κόπους παρέχετε τῇ γυναικί; ἔργον γὰρ καλὸν ἠργάσατο εἰς ἐμέ· πάντοτε γὰρ τοὺς
πτωχοὺς ἔχετε μεθʼ ἑαυτῶν, ἐμὲ δὲ οὐ πάντοτε ἔχετε· βαλοῦσα γὰρ αὕτη τὸ μύρον τοῦτο ἐπὶ τοῦ
σώματός μου πρὸς τὸ ἐνταφιάσαι με ἐποίησεν. ἀμὴν λέγω ὑμῖν, ὅπου ἐὰν κηρυχθῇ τὸ εὐαγγέλιον
τοῦτο ἐν ὅλῳ τῷ κόσμῳ, λαληθήσεται καὶ ὃ ἐποίησεν αὕτη εἰς μνημόσυνον αὐτῆς, SBLGNT).
In John’s Gospel, the woman with the stone jar of scented oil was identified as Mary, one of the family members living in that house. So she was one of the hosts providing accommodations for these disciples, and one of the women who helped cook the meal they were eating. Then Judas Iscariot was identified as the one who made the comment about how that expensive scented oil might have been sold for high price, supposedly so the money could be given to the needy. Yet Matthew and Mark both realized that all the other disciples agreed with Judas. Only John, another eye-witness at that meal, pointed out that only Judas made the comment about the potential monetary value of the scented oil. Thus, John did not seem to be one of the ones thinking about the “waste” of money. But John was a teenager at the time, and had not yet been terrorized into a fear of lacking enough cash to feed his loved ones. Only the older disciples had been brainwashed by the world, and thought in the same way Judas did. For they had been tortured until they cringed before the ruler of the world order. All had experienced painful and soul-crushing times when Satan forbade them and their hungry little children the right to eat the food God Himself created and freely distributed throughout the earth. All the older disciples knew that they and their loved ones would be left to die, unless they dutifully worshipped that devil, unless they gratefully served him according to all his psychopathic demands, and partook in Satan’s dehumanizing ritual of exchanging his religious invention of money for the right to let their families live. All the older disciples had been forced to Page 1705
bow before Satan and his life-enslaving currency, to worshipfully revere those useless tokens of exploitation more than God and other human lives, and to somehow think this was a normal thing.
So most of the disciples were so deluded that the few ounces of God-made oil they saw in Mary’s hand was somehow associated with a pile of silver coins, as that simple gift was being poured on our God’s physical head and vanishing into thin air. But Jesus saw the reality of what actually existed and what was occurring. Jesus’ Holy Spirit of God saw how the spirit of Mary believed His words about His immanent death on the day of the Passover, within two days. And Jesus’ eyes only saw a bottle of nicely scented oil that the labour of human hands created from the fruits He produced on His fields of the earth, and through the works of His created time and energy, through the gravity, heat and months of soaking some flower petals and herbs in olive oil and spikenard oil (extracted from the roots of the Indian Himalayan spikenard plant with alcohol). That reality consisted of olives, herbs and other plants that He designed, created and patiently grew in the soil, air, sunshine and rain He provided, and had nothing to do with Satan’s invention of money. Then Jesus also saw the real alabaster vessel, in which Mary stored that oil, a little jar that human hands carefully carved out of a stone He had formed upon the earth. Our Creator God Jesus saw all these realities when His elect little sister, Mary, poured oil on His head, not a bag of money. Jesus never even considered how many useless, intrinsically worthless tokens of Roman or Jewish currency the blinded citizens of Satan’s world order may have been willing to exchange for that little jar of oil. To Jesus, that vessel of oil was what it actually was, made of all He created and owned. Its financial worth meant nothing.
Likewise, Jesus knew that money had absolutely nothing to do with that household’s decision to freely provide hospitality for Him and His disciples, nor for any other needy souls. The love, mercy and compassion of their spirits were the primary considerations in their choice to feed Jesus and the twelve, as well as to give them a place to sleep within the boundary of their property, in what they called God’s property, which they managed in stewardship for Him, as His grateful slaves who would soon become His heirs. The only thing money ever actually did was limit their ability to express love to other spirits. To them, money was an anti-spirit and anti-love force in their lives.
Most of the disciples had not yet realized how much they had been influenced by the propaganda of the world order, nor how much the devil’s invention of money was deluding their perceptions of the physical and spiritual realities existing all around them. But they would soon see through all of those dark shadows, all that obscured the seeing of their spirits’ eyes, because the light of God’s Holy Spirit in Jesus would soon enter the homes of their spirits, like tongues of bright fire exposing lies to their hearts and souls. For Jesus’ death on the cross would enable the insight of God to fill them, so His counsel would cause the repentance of their spirits into the realities He taught and trained them to comprehend. Seven weeks after the Passover, all these elect disciples would live in the real reality.
Now, before further examining the words of Jesus, look at what Mark and John told us about this event. Mark points out that Mary broke the small jar open, snapped off the narrow neck of the stone vessel (Mark 14:3). Yet a carefully crafted twelve-ounce stone jar would have been very valuable, a treasure that a woman would have handled delicately and saved as a keepsake, using it to dab on her perfume for special days. And, whenever it was emptied, she would have refilled it with a quantity of the finest perfume she could afford. So those who saw life through the opaque lens of money, would have been shocked by this “waste.” Worldly souls would be offended, and would see it as a criminal act of “vandalizing” the world order’s foundational idols, since they think all which bears significant financial value is regulated by their god Mammon, by the priestly administrator of Satan’s kingdom, and is deemed “holy” by that demon, separated and sanctified unto Satan. But Mary’s elect spirit was a true citizen of God’s kingdom, not a citizen of the world order. Therefore, when she heard Jesus Page 1706
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say that He was going to die in two days, it broke her heart. Her spirit mourned. So she broke what her flesh had been coveting, because her spirit coveted the presence of Jesus in her life much more.
And she intentionally broke that vessel which her flesh cherished in order to force her flesh to pay attention to her spirit’s great grief, to subdue her flesh to the will of her spirit. And she broke the valuable jar to demonstrate her spirit’s love for Jesus, and to communicate to Him that His death would break her heart in the same way she broke that stone jar. Mary walked in spiritual realities, and broke the delusions of her mind of flesh to walk more fully within those far greater realities.
Mark also tells us that Mary’s jar of scented oil was worth 300 denarii, that is, equivalent to 300 days of wages for a skilled worker, or like something worth more than $30,000 to a North American middle-class person today. So it was a luxury item that only the wealthiest in Israel would possess.
Thus, it was likely a gift, probably given to Mary after she provided care for a suffering rich woman over a lengthy period of time, perhaps a year or more. For Mary was living in the “hospital” town of Bethany. So, if an elderly wealthy woman in Jerusalem needed to be “nursed” in an “extended care facility,” she would be sent to an apartment in the quiet and clean town of Bethany, only a short walk from the city, so her family could frequently visit her. And, if Mary did the “nursing,” the grateful older woman, or her daughter, may have paid for her services with goods-in-kind, that is, by giving Mary the expensive jar of perfume. For wealthy women often gave valuable possessions to servants or friends, instead of money, since their husbands directly controlled most of the household income.
Then John, another disciple at that meal, provided information that neither Matthew nor Mark had revealed. In His Gospel, John first told us that the leaders of the false churches were searching for Jesus and wanted to seize Him. Then John wrote: “Therefore, [during the] prior six days belonging to the Passover, Jesus came into Bethany, where Lazarus was, [the one] whom Jesus raised out of the dead. Thus, they made a supper for Him there and Martha served, but Lazarus was one of those sitting at the table together with Him. So Mary grabbed a litre [λίτρα, which cannot be translated as a
“pound” of weight here, since it was oil and requires a unit of liquid measurement, which would have been about 12
ounces or 350 millilitres] of very costly genuine myrrh [and] spikenard oil. She oiled the feet of Jesus and wiped His feet with her hair. So the house filled with the scent of the myrrh. But Judas the Iscariotes (one of His disciples, the one about to betray Him) reasoned: ‘For what reason was this myrrh not sold for 300 denarii and [the money] being given to the needy ones?’ Yet he said this, not in that it was a concern for him about the needy, but rather because he was a thief and he was carrying the money bag having the [donations] being put [into it]. Therefore, Jesus said, ‘Leave her alone. She should have guarded it so that [it would be] for the day of My burial. For you [disciples]
always have the needy among yourselves. Yet you do not always have Me” (John 12:1-8, from: Ὁ
οὖν Ἰησοῦς πρὸ ἓξ ἡμερῶν τοῦ πάσχα ἦλθεν εἰς Βηθανίαν, ὅπου ἦν Λάζαρος, ὃν ἤγειρεν ἐκ νεκρῶν
Ἰησοῦς. ἐποίησαν οὖν αὐτῷ δεῖπνον ἐκεῖ, καὶ ἡ Μάρθα διηκόνει, ὁ δὲ Λάζαρος εἷς ἦν ἐκ τῶν
ἀνακειμένων σὺν αὐτῷ· ἡ οὖν Μαριὰμ λαβοῦσα λίτραν μύρου νάρδου πιστικῆς πολυτίμου ἤλειψεν
τοὺς πόδας τοῦ Ἰησοῦ καὶ ἐξέμαξεν ταῖς θριξὶν αὐτῆς τοὺς πόδας αὐτοῦ· ἡ δὲ οἰκία ἐπληρώθη ἐκ τῆς
ὀσμῆς τοῦ μύρου. λέγει δὲ Ἰούδας ὁ Ἰσκαριώτης εἷς τῶν μαθητῶν αὐτοῦ, ὁ μέλλων αὐτὸν
παραδιδόναι· Διὰ τί τοῦτο τὸ μύρον οὐκ ἐπράθη τριακοσίων δηναρίων καὶ ἐδόθη πτωχοῖς; εἶπεν δὲ
τοῦτο οὐχ ὅτι περὶ τῶν πτωχῶν ἔμελεν αὐτῷ, ἀλλʼ ὅτι κλέπτης ἦν καὶ τὸ γλωσσόκομον ἔχων τὰ
βαλλόμενα ἐβάσταζεν. εἶπεν οὖν ὁ Ἰησοῦς· Ἄφες αὐτήν, ἵνα εἰς τὴν ἡμέραν τοῦ ἐνταφιασμοῦ μου
τηρήσῃ αὐτό· τοὺς πτωχοὺς γὰρ πάντοτε ἔχετε μεθʼ ἑαυτῶν, ἐμὲ δὲ οὐ πάντοτε ἔχετε, SBLGNT).
So here we see that Jesus knew the chief priests and “leaders” of the false evangelical church were looking for Him, and that they wanted to seize and murder Him. So, “therefore” (οὖν), Jesus had gone to Jerusalem. Jesus deliberately went to the place where the fake church “leaders” had gathered Page 1707
for the Passover, specifically so they could could capture and kill Him during the Passover week.
John told us that Jesus intentionally went to be seized and murdered by them. And also notice how John said that Jesus entered Bethany, a “suburb” of Jerusalem, at a time which he called the “prior six days belonging to the Passover” (πρὸ ἓξ ἡμερῶν τοῦ πάσχα). Although John wrote to Gentiles, and mostly used Roman terms regarding time, here he was talking about a biblical feast, one which God commanded the Jews to celebrate on a biblically defined day. And biblical days are always from sunset to sunset. So here the Jewish disciple John meant that Jesus arrived during the six biblical days which included the Passover day. Thus, since Friday was the Passover, the 14th of Nisan, here John was saying that the day Jesus arrived was Sunday, the 9th of Nisan, the previous sixth day of the days which included the Passover day (9th = 1, 10th = 2, 11th = 3, 12th = 4, 13th = 5, 14th = 6). And Jesus would have arrived shortly before sunset. Then Monday, the 10th of Nisan, would have begun at sunset, and all Monday’s events would be during the “prior five days belonging to the Passover.”
So, by our Roman Gregorian calendar, Jesus arrived in Bethany during the daylight hours of May 1st, AD 28. And John said that Jesus, on that day, went to the home of Lazarus. But John did not even mention “Simon the leper.” Now, in those days, if two brothers inherited a house, the oldest brother would inherit a double portion and would be the head of the house, as well as the principal owner. So Matthew and Mark would have recognized that the house belonged to Simon, if Simon was the older brother of Lazarus. However, Lazarus was the most famous member of that family, since numerous Jewish rabbis and their people had witnessed the resurrection of Lazarus from the dead, then testified about this miracle to thousands of souls in Jerusalem and throughout the entire region. Also, elders in the Gentile churches of subsequent decades would have often preached about that miracle as well.
Thus, in John’s account of that day, which was written many decades later, in his old age and to a Gentile audience, he only mentioned Lazarus. For all of his readers would have heard the story about Lazarus rising from the dead, even after his body had been decaying in a tomb for four days. But almost none of those Gentiles would have heard or known much about Simon, the oldest brother.
Next, John wrote, “Thus, they made a supper for Him there.” So, when John used the word “thus” or
“therefore” (οὖν), he was indicating that the household of Simon and Lazarus made a supper for Jesus because it was a great honour for them have their house chosen by Jesus, as the place He would stay during the Passover season. But John was not saying they made this supper within a few hours after Jesus arrived. For it would have been almost impossible for two women to so quickly cook enough food to feed 13 extra unexpected men, even if the men helped them (which men seldom did). And remember, at this meal, there was Jesus, His core twelve disciples and a number of other guests with Jesus, plus the four in the family. So the meal John was writing about involved a large gathering, and was not spontaneous. Also, after sunset on the day Jesus first arrived at their house, the next Jewish day began, and that next day was Monday, the 10th of Nisan, the day in which God’s Law required them to bring a lamb into their home. So, when Jesus first arrived, they would have been already preparing to take in their household’s Passover lamb, and would have then celebrated a quiet, private, family meal in the evening with Jesus and the twelve. Thus, they would not have had the groceries nor the time to prepare a meal to feed about twenty adults, all within just a few hours.
So the large gathering that John spoke about occurred a couple of days later, after sunset, at the beginning of the 12th of Nisan, just as Matthew said it did. When we read John’s Gospel, we need to realize that he was not even attempting to write a sequential account of Jesus’ ministry. Rather, John focused more on the theological implications of the Messiah’s words and deeds. So, when he told us about the supper in that home, and how Mary poured expensive scented oil on Jesus, he was not implying that it occurred on the same day that Jesus arrived in Bethany. And John would assume that Page 1708
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his readers would realize that a household of four people would not have been prepared to feed 13
adult men who unexpectedly showed up at their door, plus a number of other guests who showed up to speak with Jesus. Thus, this meal did not occur on that Sunday evening, after the sun set, which was the beginning of Monday. Rather, the family would have gone out during the daylight hours of Monday to harvest food from their garden, then to the marketplace to purchase enough meat and other items. After this, the two women of the household, Martha and Mary, would have spent the rest of Monday, as well as the entire next day (Tuesday), preparing enough food for the crowd. So the supper would have occurred after sunset on Tuesday, the day indicated by the writings of Matthew and Mark. That is, since a new day began at sunset, the supper was on Wednesday, the 12th of Nisan.
Then John told us that Mary “oiled the feet of Jesus and wiped His feet with her hair.” But he did not even mention that she had poured some on His head too. So some think it is strange that John told us how Mary poured the oil on His feet, while Matthew and Mark did not mention it. And they wonder why John neglected to mention anything about her pouring it on His head, while this is the only thing Matthew and Mark mentioned. Yet Mary, the sister or sister-in-law of Lazarus, was likely still alive when Matthew and Mark wrote their Gospels, but had probably passed away by the time the much younger John had grown very old and wrote his Gospel. So Matthew and Mark would have wanted to avoid embarrassing Mary, and avoided any mention of her very “emotional” actions that day, when she poured most of that extremely expensive oil on Jesus’ feet and wiped His feet with her own hair. Yet John saw this as her principal and most spiritual deed of loving devotion on that day.
We also must remember that Mary broke the neck of that bottle, which contained about 12 ounces of precious oil. So this indicated that she intended to sacrifice all of it, and even the expensive jar itself, to express her overwhelming grief over the impending death Jesus. Then she would have poured only about an ounce of that oil on His head, and smeared it across His forehead. So she would have used up only a small fraction of that oil on His head, but poured the majority of it upon His feet, while bowing, weeping and spreading the oil all over His feet and ankles with her long hair. Thus, Mary did not simply anoint His head with oil, as one might do for the living. Rather, Mary was also symbolically anointing His whole body, by anointing both His head and feet, as one might do while preparing the deceased body of a beloved one for burial. Consequently, in the eyes of John, Mary’s anointing of the feet with a greater amount of the oil, in this most humbling way, was the aspect of her deed that he most vividly remembered and honoured in his heart. And it would be presumptuous to think that John contradicted anything Matthew and Mark wrote, regarding this event on that day.
There is also one more thing to notice in John’s account of how Jesus defended Mary’s actions, the way He said: “She should have guarded it so that it would be for the day of My burial” (John 12:7, ALT). Here Jesus used an aorist subjunctive form of the verb τηρέω (“keep watch over, guard,”
BDAG3). By using this form, He indicated that Mary “should have” done this in the past, that she was right to have guarded and saved her treasure of expensive scented oil in the little stone jar, until she could use it wisely. The way Jesus said this implies that Mary had never opened this bottle of extremely costly oil, and had never put any of it on herself. Yet she could have used it herself, if she wanted to. For scented oils like this were not made for one sex only, not in the way we usually make scents for men only and perfumes for women only today. Back then, men or women would often use the same scented oil. So Mary could have dressed up for special occasions and dabbed on a drop of this expensive perfume several times a year. And that scent would make her the envy of her friends, until she eventually used up every drop. But she must have thought that using it herself would be selfish and vain. So she kept it sealed and guarded, until she found a better use. And what could be more worthy of such a treasure than to sacrifice it, valuable vessel and all, in an expression of her Page 1709
broken heart, when she heard that the beloved Teacher of her grateful soul, who also returned her dear brother to her from the dead, was about to die? This was the only suitable use for this treasure.
Now look at the words of Jesus, what He said to the disciples at that table, and to all His future true disciples in all history. After the still somewhat spiritually immature disciples asked a rhetorical question designed to shame Mary for “wasting” the costly oil that could have been sold to feed the needy, Jesus responded with a rhetorical question designed to cause their repentance into the truth:
“What troubles are you disciples offering to the woman?” Indeed, “what troubles” (τί κόπους) have so many worldly Christians offered to more spiritually mature worshippers of our God Jesus? For duped elect have derided, mocked and shoved the faithful ones into the background, so they could worship Satan’s invention of money. The inwardly sleeping elect have believed the propaganda of the devil, when he told them they could only serve God by bowing before Mammon and his other demons. Those foolish children of God think Satan’s wicked world order must first allow them to obtain his filthy lucre before they can do any good works. Then, after they buy a few crusts of bread for the desperately needy, the devil commands them to abandon those crushed needy souls, to send them back into poverty and death, as though the needy were not their siblings. Meanwhile, those blind fools deride all who faithfully serve Jesus through love, all who do not make the decisions of their souls according to financial considerations, but build life in the hearts of their needy siblings.
The fact is that the disciples at that table were breaking God’s first-order commandments, which are the foundation of all His other laws, the cornerstone of all loving, merciful and genuine justice. The first-order laws state that we must have no other gods before the one true Creator God, whose very essence is a just and pure kind of love. Therefore, to truly fulfill His first-order laws, all the thoughts in the minds of our spirits must manage and subjugate all the thoughts in the minds of our flesh, in a way where our spirits hear, learn from and willingly follow the counsel of God, so that all the rational, just and loving conclusions we make in our souls, all the decisions we make in life, will be carefully harmonized with the will of our true Creator God. And fulfilling these first-order laws will never leave even one of our thoughts to be harmonized with the minds of demonic false gods, nor human gods. None of our thinking should be made according to demands of other entities, because that would be an act of esteeming and serving those other entities, an act of worshipping them, by striving to appease and serve them. This includes Satan’s invention of money. If a deluded disciple sees each inanimate object, or living creation, or sometimes even a human being, as a certain number of coins, in the way those disciples saw that jar of scented oil, then their thoughts are submissively obeying and serving the demon Mammon, for the glory of Satan and his unjust kingdom. Whenever a disciple is placing a monetary value on something or someone, and is not seeing the created reality of the person, deed or thing, that disciple is breaking God’s first and foremost laws of loving justice.
These disciples at that table, especially the non-elect fake disciple who betrayed Jesus, did not see the reality of Mary’s bright and beautiful soul, nor the reality of the pleasantly scented oil created by God through human hands, nor the reality of her loving sacrifice which her grief poured out from her worshipping elect spirit. All their blinded eyes could see was a large pile of metal coins sitting in the darkness of a money bag tightly clutched by greedy hands. For that vile delusion was what Satan’s unjust, brutal ruthlessness in the world order had taught and trained their souls to see. So they were still making the devil into their Lord and chief rabbi, still worshipping that demon and his invention of money, still breaking God’s first-order laws, even after our God Jesus came in a body of flesh to teach and train their elect spirits, and walked with them throughout the last three years of their lives.
Worse yet, they were unjustly judging God’s awakened elect child, Mary, according to the laws of the devil’s world order, trying to force her to acknowledge and repent into their demonic delusion, as Page 1710
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though the principle they cited was justice. And the only reason they were worshipping money, as the saviour of the needy and themselves, was because Satan’s world order declared money to be the lord of their lives, and said justice revolved solely around financial considerations. But Satan lies!
When the disciples claimed the oil was highly valued by the demon Mammon, and that the only way to feed the needy was to give that demon whatever services and goods he demanded from them, they were worshipping Mammon. They were bowing before him and serving him through obedience to his laws and commands. Their souls were acknowledging thoughts that harmonized with the will of that demon, in a way which judged and condemned those who did not worship that demon as they did. But obedience to a demon’s laws will always produce unjust, ruthless and destructive results.
The true worshippers of the real God must judge all things according to the realities that the real God created and maintains. And, as our God Jesus pointed out, the reality of the situation was that Mary
“worked a good work” for Him, with the jar that human hands fashioned from a stone He created, and with the oil that human hands produced from the plants He created, with the myrrh, spikenard and olives that He gave life to and caused to grow. Mary did a simple, beautiful, “good work” in the pure love of her radiant, awakened elect spirit. And, since good works can never be judged by the quantity of the assets used to perform them (since God alone supplies the whole of the quantity), nor by the amount of money spent, but solely by the quality of the spirit’s motives and intentions, by the God-like love that did those works, we can rightly say Mary did a good work. We can objectively conclude that her good work was greater than the “good work” of a rich person giving ten percent of one’s monthly income, far more than 300 denarii, to a hundred needy souls, as an advertisement to increase the book value of one’s intangible good-will assets, in a way that profits one’s business by 3,000 denarii. For a rich man’s self-serving gift is nothing, but the pure love of a spirit is priceless.
Of course, Jesus was not saying that we should never evaluate anything in financial terms, nor that we should never feed the needy. Rather, our God Jesus was telling us to make more complex and right judgments according to His spiritual laws of love, through our spirits’ love for Him and for our siblings in the family of humankind. For money, in this present season, is needed for transactions with Satan’s world order, and we need to buy food for the needy from it. We know Jesus was not entirely forbidding the use of money nor the feeding of the poor because the very next thing He said was: “After all, you disciples always have the needy ones living among yourselves. Yet you do not always have Me.” So, if the needy will always be living among us, until the day of His return, then the devil’s financial systems will always be making them needy, until He comes to destroy Satan’s world order. And, until He returns, we have no body of Jesus to feed the five thousand miraculously.
Based on all Jesus taught His disciples previously, and based on His wise laws in the Scriptures, He was here implying that, if any disciple has some frivolous thing which the worldly and wealthy covet, and they are willing to pay a large sum of Satan’s currency to obtain it, then we should sell it to them, and demand the price that Satan’s world order puts on it. For one must not give “charity” to the wealthy, whom the devil has promoted within his unjust kingdom. And the only reason the rich covet ridiculously esteemed excesses is because they are the deluded non-elect predestined for hell (Mat. 19:24). Besides, although things coveted by the world order are neutral in reality, the sin of coveting is evil, and we should give what is evil back to the evil, and back to their hellish father. So it is good for a disciple to transform the delusions of the devil, and a coveted thing’s unreal financial value, into tangible and useful goods which can serve God’s loving purposes, such as necessities made by God for the benefit of His creations. And one cannot become His disciple (i.e., a true Christian) unless one forsakes or abandons all those kinds of worthless excesses (Luke 14:33). Also, our spirits need to follow Jesus, so our spirits can be taught and trained to fulfill His loving, just laws Page 1711
and ways. And to follow Jesus as His disciples means that we must serve Him, and Him alone. But
“no one can serve two masters, for either he will hate the one and love the other; or else he will be devoted to one and despise the other. You can’t serve both God and Mammon.” (Mat. 6:24, WEB).
Then Jesus also implied that, whenever we make a decision to do anything, we must consider what God wants us to do. And this is not a simple matter. For there are no trite laws of God, no works of God which do not require a deep understanding of our reasons for doing them. We all need prayerful hearts that learn His reasons for all things. God never tells us to blindly obey simple rules, such as to always live in poverty and give every cent we receive to the poor. For God sometimes wants His disciples to amass a fortune, then give that delusion back to the world order, so Satan’s kingdom will relinquish their false claims to the ownership of God’s property, so we might peacefully and freely give what God actually owns to His creations. And Satan’s kingdom will give us none of what they stole from God unless we first give them their required amount of the devil’s delusion of currency.
So this is what we sometimes do, because God does not want us to use violence to take back His property from their thieving, grasping hands, not if we can use wisdom instead. If we can give them the delusion of money to get them to relinquish their delusional claim, then we do so. God does not want us to force the transfer of His land or goods back to Him, to be used for His purposes, not if non-violent ways can accomplish it. Yes, force must be applied at times, to save the innocent. But true wisdom seldom needs to use violence. Our God Jesus wants us to see these realities, to weigh them on the scale with His loving ways, then take the time to allow our spirits to seek His counsel, before we make decisions. For all His laws are interwoven into one truth, where each is carefully balanced by the others. All His laws require the careful consideration of each situation’s unique circumstances, as well as the motives and intentions of spirits causing or being affected by them.
The disciples sitting at that table that day did not do all this, and Judas Iscariot was utterly incapable of doing any of this. This is why they offered trouble to Mary, why they were gaslighting her, trying to make her feel bad about breaking the expensive jar and pouring that extremely valuable oil out upon Jesus. But, if the spirits of the elect disciples had taken the time to actually observe the loving tears and inward motives of Mary, if they prayerfully looked into the realities of the things she used with her holy intention of expressing her love for our God Jesus, they would not have tried to trouble the glowing elect soul of their sister in God’s family. This is what Jesus wanted them to understand.
This is why our God Jesus declared that “she worked a good work for Me.” This particular circumstance was unique, just as every circumstance is unique. Yes, in most circumstances like this, where someone somehow gains the possession of a thing that Satan’s world order covets, might require one to sell that thing back to the citizens of the devil’s unjust, ruthless kingdom, to transform the devil’s currency back into tangible goods which serve God and His earthly kingdom, such as food for the needy. And, even then, Jesus wants all His disciples to feed the needy who are “among yourselves” (μεθ’ ἑαυτῶν). That is, He does not want them to look down on the needy, to sit apart from them, as though they are not equal members of our family of humankind, or not worthy of our love and acceptance, since we are all owned by God. Rather, if circumstance warranted the sale of a coveted thing, the money belongs to the whole family. And Jesus is the only Head of that family, the only one able to decide what to do with Satan’s currency in His family. Yet this was not one of those more common circumstances which required the sale of His own property to the devil’s world order.
Of course, some will insist that feeding the needy is more important than expressing love for God.
For they may reason that, since God knows all things, He knows when a person loves Him. Thus, Mary “wasted” that expensive jar of oil to express her love for Jesus, and she should have had enough “faith” to trust that Jesus already knew that she loved Him. If she had this kind of knowledge Page 1712
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and “faith,” then the jar of oil could have been sold to provide much food for the needy. But those supposed pragmatists who think this way are not rational. For Mary was not merely play acting, to convince Jesus that she loved Him. Nor was she doing this to convince herself or anyone else that she loved Jesus. Rather, she simply did this good work spontaneously, from her heart, as a result of her spirit’s love, to express her love. And to assume that she did this through a lack of knowledge and “faith” is to assume that she was merely engaging in a theatrical show of her love, which she did not do. Mary did a good work which her spirit felt compelled to do, in spite of protests from her own mind of flesh and from other carnal fools. And her spirit was not compelled by guilty feelings stirred up the commands of God’s Law. Her spirit was solely compelled by its pure and God-like love. So Jesus wanted her to do this for the same reason all good works are done, to teach and train her spirit to love and serve Him first, because truly loving and serving Him translates into truly loving and serving His creations, and one cannot truly love and serve the needy if one doe not do this for Him.
Those who think physical good works are more important than spiritual good works are totally ignoring spiritual realities, which are the most important factors in all aspects and times of life. For our moral, legal and ultimately spiritual decisions profoundly affect all the physical aspects of our corporate and personal lives. But physical things hardly affect our inner lives at all. Even when we suffer physically, such as through poverty, it is the unjust, inequitable dehumanization of sins done by other spirits which torture our souls, far more than the lack of food, clothing and shelter. For, when a family equitably suffers the very same physical deprivation together, with support from loved ones and for a just cause, their spirits feel fine. They may even be inwardly joyful. The fact is that the most critical element of truly good works is the way our spirits assess the spiritual needs of other spirits, and how we do those works to fulfill spiritual needs, to promote love, justice, equity, respect and joy of the spirits in the bodies we serve. Then all physical needs will be met by default, through the providence and works of God. And this is what Mary’s faith knew more than the others.
Mary was expressing love for our God Jesus, as an example to all of us. And this is why Jesus proclaimed, “Most certainly I reason with you, wherever this Gospel might have been publicly proclaimed in the whole world, what this woman did will also be mentioned for her memorial.” For all who learn to love our God Jesus, as much as she did, will always do good works for the needy, every hour of every day. This kind of person will also have an elect spirit which will often set aside the frivolous duties of the day, to sit at His feet, to learn truths and wisdom from their Lord and God.
In the end, it is always better to set an example of one’s love for God than it is to simply throw food at the needy, since food perishes, but witnessed love for God causes the elect to rise up, join hands and work together, with one mind and purpose, for the just, equitable benefit of all. And, no matter how much food, clothing and shelter one gives to dehumanized, lost, deceived, deluded and unloving souls, they will remain in the same self-destructive state they were found in, if we do not lead them into the abundant life that our God offers us, a life of loving and being loved. Our first duty is to love God, and to let our spirits openly express this love without shame, in faithful confidence before the faces of our elect brothers and sisters. Then the other elect in God’s family will realize that they too can live for their Father and oldest Brother—that they too can spontaneously grieve with Him in His sorrows and pains, while also inwardly rejoicing in His joys and triumphs, becoming one with Him, in the same way Mary did. Then, with this new life in them, with their spirits quickened, God will help them find a way to obtain all their bodies of flesh might need to live in His kingdom on earth.
Now some cynics might insist that this “spiritual” talk never does any pragmatic, real and useful good. They proclaim that they are far more rational, and that everyone should heed them, instead of this “religious nonsense.” Then, eventually, all declare the same thing, that it is far better to place all Page 1713
one’s faith entirely in their economic systems, and eliminate all forms of religion, so all can serve as their “freed” slaves, and as slaves of the lesser human gods they appoint to rule with them. For they think they know, with all certainty, that only they can provide their worshippers with plenty of food, clothing and shelter—albeit by plundering and murdering the countless innocent souls who disagree with their ways of salvation. But literally all history proves us right, and always proves them wrong.
Throughout history, wanna-be human gods have duped a minority of the people in their homelands, convincing them to blindly believe every word they utter, and to worship them. They like to deceive a willingly self-deceived number of people into thinking they are superior to their siblings, and that anyone who does not believe the same lies they believe must be evil inferiors, an enemy whom they should murder. So they do murder them, and plunder whatever God has given to those “inferiors.” At first, they only do this to a few “enemies.” But the murdering makes them feel like gods, and their plunder makes them into wealthier and more powerful gods. So they take up arms to oppress more people, even the majority of their own people. Yet they call themselves “patriots,” dedicated to the welfare of their own people, since they make themselves believe the lie that they are doing all this self-serving murdering and plundering for the good of their nation’s people. And the “proof” that it is doing good for their nation is that it does good for them, for the only ones they consider to be true
“citizens,” since the neighbours they murdered were their enemies and, therefore, enemies of their nation. Then they go out to murder and plunder in other lands too, but still delude themselves into thinking they must do this to transform the world into a grand utopia, because their human gods told them to believe this lie, and convinced them that their own greed and selfish ambitions were “noble”
and “just,” merely rational commitments to do “good works” to improve the world for future times.
So, throughout history, these pragmatists have been claiming that their supposedly more “rational”
and “realistic” economic systems, where they are worshipped as human gods, are the only practical ways to provide food, clothing and shelter for everyone. Yet literally all of them have only provided for a small minority, while they have oppressed, enslaved, murdered and plundered the majority of their own siblings in their own lands, as well as countless siblings in other lands. It has always been the same for thousands of years. Psychopathic despots in ancient Babylon, Persia, Greece and Rome did this, and now Nazis, Trump-worshippers, communists, capitalists and others are doing it. Over and over again, those deluded souls cause only injustice, inequity, pain, despair and death for the majority, while they themselves are never truly happy. And, after they have destroyed most others, after they fill their own lands with the darkness of fear and futility, they destroy themselves as well.
On the other hand, the Christians of the true first-century apostolic church were almost all poor, oppressed and persecuted victims of a Roman gangster hierarchy ruled by psychopathic elite. Yet reliable historical records show that these “irrational” Jewish Christians, who were supposedly “too spiritually minded to be of any practical good,” did indeed feed, clothe and house many thousands of indigent souls from every race, creed and other religion, while taking care of the sick, comforting the grief-stricken, visiting brutalized prisoners, providing hospitality to weary and hungry strangers, as well as counselling governors with a wisdom unrivalled in the ancient world. They did countless good works that greatly encouraged and uplifted the general populations in all the places they lived.
If the Jewish, non-citizen, impoverished, true, “spiritually minded” disciples of Jesus could do all this “practical good,” while being opposed by the vast wealth, power and military might of the supposedly “practical,” “pragmatic” and “worldly wise” Roman and Jewish elite who feared and hated them, why were they called “useless parasites” upon society? Why did the elite, who kept themselves very busy by starving, murdering and plundering the majority of their own people, as well as millions of foreigners, think they were so much more “useful” and “beneficial”? Well, it was Page 1714
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a matter of perspective. In the eyes of those psychopathic elite, the true Christians were evil because they did not advance the wealth and power of the elite, but merely built up the lives of the very souls those elite were trying to beat down and oppress for their own financial and political purposes. So one might say that all perspectives are equally subjective, so we should accommodate them all. But do we not actually need to respect only the perspective of the Creator, who maintains all existence and formed all the immutable laws of beneficial spiritual and physical behaviours in the beginning?
There are very real principles which govern all that exists; absolute truths that cannot be altered by the whims of any living beings; complex, highly homogenized and harmonious spiritual and physical ways by which all can most effectively produce the best results for all existence; immutable laws of the material and spiritual realms which cannot be broken without harmful or even deadly effects. So there is also one right perspective about what is good and useful, as well as an infinite number of slightly or overtly wrong perspectives about what is good and useful. And, since the mind of the Spirit who created all these ways for the best functioning of all existence is wise beyond all human comprehension, and knows all those absolute and immutable truths He Himself created, perhaps we should listen to His perspective on all matters of life and faith. For it is possible that we, as infantile spirits with extremely biased and amoral minds of flesh, might be wrong at times, possibly even deadly wrong. So should we not carefully study all that God wrote, in His material and spiritual creations and in His Book, about what He has called the right ways, to correct our own opinions?
Now I know that the preachers in most evangelical and mainline churches love to point out all the faults of the true first-century apostolic churches, then diligently magnify those relatively minor faults into all kinds of imagined dangers that would doom all life on earth, then warn their people about the inevitable destruction of their own financial and political well being if anyone believes and practises those words of our God Jesus and His faithful apostles. But are the humanistic Roman views of those preachers and their churches correct? Or are they preaching virtual lies? We need to make a decision about this, a right judgment that does not depend on how friendly their smiles might be when they see a potential tithing dupe walk through their doors. And one factor we definitely should consider are the effects of the various perspectives when applied to human lives. For the effects reveal the effectiveness and rightness of the methods based on perspectives. So we know that the people in the true first-century apostolic churches, in the churches that actually knew and fully believed the words of Jesus, were the most free and happiest people in the world at that time, in spite of being heavily slandered and persecuted by liars. For none worshipped any human beings, and even soundly rebuked Peter, the senior apostle, when he was wrong. They were a true biblical kind of democracy, which only heard the teaching and judging elders whom God Himself appointed for them, but followed Jesus as their only Head and final authority in all matters of life and faith. Then the problems they had in their own truly Christian communities were so insignificant, compared to the problems of the more “pragmatic” churches of our day, that it is laughable. Those true Christians were filled with joy, and lived such free, equitable, happy lives of compassionate, wise and just love that it puts us all to shame. Meanwhile, the Jewish and Roman people suffered greatly and without relief under their elite human gods in their humanistic hierarchical systems, and none were truly free.
Wherever we have seen a revival of genuine biblical truths in a land, wherever a minority became loving, spiritual and more concerned about the teachings of God than the economy, the quality of life and even the economy of that land has grown exponentially through the good works, honesty and love of those people who are “too spiritually minded to be of any practical good.” But every time we have seen a “pragmatic,” “practical,” purely political and economic solution applied, without any regard to spiritual and moral truths, it has produced a living hell for its people. So it is time to look Page 1715
more scientifically and objectively at the spiritual effects resulting from these opposing views and perspectives, so we might make right judgments regarding them. If we see one kind of perspective characterized by lies, exploitation, oppression, death and ultimate failure, perhaps it might be partly wrong, possibly in dangerous ways, or almost completely wrong in every way. But, if we see one or more perspectives that are characterized by honesty, truths, justice, equity, freedoms, joyful lives and ever-growing successes, then that view or those views might be partly right, or almost entirely right.
The Reformation in 16th century Europe, then the Great Awakening in 18th century Great Britain and America created a biblical form of democracy in those lands, along with all kinds of justice reforms, rights and freedoms for the people. All remain incomplete and ongoing works to this day, yet all have been copied and emulated even by atheistic secular humanists, since the 16th century, because they saw the good effects of those practises in those lands. And the early Calvinistic Baptists in particular, before the humanistic forms of covenant theology infiltrated their ranks, focused on the New Covenant spiritual fulfillment of God’s Law in individual hearts, and solely by the personal works of the Jewish Messiah’s Holy Spirit, and turned away from the worship of human gods in the pulpits and positions of authority. So their teachings transformed the exploited, demoralized, crime-ridden, impoverished elect into compassionate, strong, generous, independent, capable communities of loving souls, joined as one in Jesus, and able to stand upright, facing and conquering the winds of the world order’s lies. The Spirit of Jesus filled their lives with fruits of abundant love, joy, peace with God and simplicity of life in the flesh, with much freedom from selfish ambitions, lies and sins.
True biblical Christians throughout history have learned enough truth and wisdom to grow massively productive figurative and actual gardens, which have fed the souls in many lands for centuries, and with more healthy nutrients than their mouths could possibly consume. From these came the good fruits of godly justice, the abolition of slavery, freedom from human tyranny, equitable rights to life and safety, educational opportunities to overcome the shackles of ignorance. Unfortunately, Satan has also always sent in fake preachers with golden tongues to sabotage and destroy their fruits and the workers who produced them. So their lying rhetoric within the infiltrated churches has distracted many with greed, selfish ambitions and profitable exploitations worked through the humanistic worship of sinners. Liars have caused masses to seek only the gratification of their emotions of the flesh, stirred by carnal entertainment and the arrogant preaching of smiling, friendly and humble-looking deceivers. Yet the truth of the Creator cannot be overcome, and still advances everywhere.
So many fake preachers are now offering troubles to the awakened elect, in ways far worse than Judas Iscariot and other fake disciples offered to Mary on that day long ago. Now betrayers of our God Jesus condemn, dehumanize, confuse, demoralize and even kill the elect, all in the name of doing what “pragmatic” and good for the economy. All want to gather more money into the public purses, but only so they can reach in and steal handfuls of Satan’s currency for themselves. And they do all this by the instigation, commands and counsel of their hellish father. Most fake churches have become seasoned veterans in warring against, hindering and sabotaging the good works of the elect, boldly vilifying them and causing unjust persecutions of all who speak the truth or express their love for our God Jesus. Therefore, the awakened elect have much work to do in Christ and beside Him.
There have always been many works of Satan to undo and tear down, and many broken works in God’s kingdom to repair, renovate and expand, as well as countless new structures which need to be constructed for the spiritual and physical welfare of our siblings in humankind. And, as we do all these works, which feed our souls until we are filled with abundant life in joy, remember that Jesus will defend our expressions of love, before the courts of men and heaven, just as He did for Mary on that day long ago. Mary was a real woman living in a real day and ministering to a real Jesus through Page 1716
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real love from her real spirit, within her real home in Bethany. And she was also predestined by God to serve as a symbol of the entire New Covenant church on earth throughout the future millenniums.
This is why Jesus told us that what she did that day shall be a memorial for us forever, whenever and wherever the Gospel is publicly proclaimed in the world. So a time will come when all who trouble the true New Covenant branch of Israel will be silenced by His judgments, when some will be turned to the truth through repentance, but others will be sent back into Satan’s world order and destruction.
Mat. 26:14-16,
A Pragmatist’s Betrayal
“Then one of the twelve, who was called Judas Iscariot, went to the chief priests, and said,
‘What are you willing to give me, that I should deliver Him to you?’ They weighed out for him thirty pieces of silver. From that time he sought opportunity to betray Him” (Mat. 26:14-16, WEB).
This is the testimony of Matthew, an eye-witness of the three years in which our God Jesus taught and ministered to us in His body of flesh. Matthew was present during the entire time God revealed and ratified the Gospel of His New Covenant salvation for us. And this eye-witness stated that Judas was indeed one of our Messiah’s twelve core disciples, just like he was. Thus, Judas, together with the other eleven core disciples, served as one of Jesus’ twelve assistant teachers, whom our God sent out on missions, as “apostles” or “missionaries.” Jesus sent Judas out to answer theological questions asked by thousands of His other disciples. Judas was also one of those to whom Jesus gave His own authority and power, to do same kinds of miraculous works He did, that is, by His will in His name.
Yet this same Judas went to “the chief priests” (τοὺς ἀρχιερεῖς), to those whom Judas knew full well were fake priests, the rogue teaching and judging elders trying to seize and exact revenge on Jesus, who wanted to beat and torture Jesus, who wanted to murder Jesus in the most brutal way possible.
Those illicit religious authorities wanted to make an example of Jesus, to terrorize all who believed His words into silent submission. Judas went to those enemies of God, those who warred against the salvation of Israel and the world. And Judas betrayed Him at night, in secret, fearing those who may have recognized him as one of the famous twelve teaching assistants of the immensely popular Jesus. So Judas seemed to want to maintain his status as a great teacher of truth. Also, Judas asked God’s enemies how much they would pay him. Thus, we can conclude that those fake priests did not first go to Judas with an offer of a specific sum of money as a bribe. And, since Judas boldly asked them for money, we can also assume that those fake priests had not been trying to coerce him into betraying Jesus with threats of violence either. Rather, Matthew and other honest witnesses knew Judas well, and said that his betrayal of Jesus was his own deliberate choice, free from any coercion.
Judas asked those ruthlessly exploiting enemies of justice, truth and God: “What are you people willing to give to me [if] I also hand Him over to you?” (Mat. 26:15, from: Τί θέλετέ μοι δοῦναι
κἀγὼ ὑμῖν παραδώσω αὐτόν;, SBLGNT). So I repeat, since Judas had to ask them what they were willing to give him, if he betrayed Jesus to them, it logically means that they had not first come to Judas to offer him a bribe. Rather, Judas was seeking a bribe all on his own initiative, and wanted as much as he could get. Judas was telling these fake priests that he was entirely willing to hand over Jesus, knowing that Jesus would be tortured and murdered by them. And Judas was willing to do this for money, not as a matter of principle. Yet Judas was not a drug addict or alcoholic made insensitive and mindless by the insatiable cravings of his body. Nor was Judas someone who needed the money to save his family and himself from the threats of ruthless criminal debtors. No, Judas asked this Page 1717
question with a sound mind and body, without any mobsters demanding anything from him. Also, Judas did not do this in the spur of the moment, in a fit of blind rage, impulsively. Rather, Judas did this in a carefully planned covert meeting, secretly, with all his senses completely under his control.
Likely after some bartering, Judas settled on the sum of 30 pieces of silver, or about 30 days wages for a skilled working man, a sum that the vast majority of common people would never be able to save up. So this was a small fortune, enough to purchase all the tools required for a trade or to use as a down payment on a small plot of farming land. Nevertheless, it was a very small sum to pay for a man to betray his compassionate Teacher, whom he lived and worked beside for the last three years.
In comparison, ask yourself what kind of person would intentionally send a kind, gentle man to a slow, painful death for a bribe of something like 3,000 to 6,000 American dollars in our day? Only a loveless monster could calmly and rationally hand over a good man to such a death. Judas sent a wise, compassionate Counsellor, whom he knew well and had lived with for three years, over to a tortuous death for that sum. Yet the majority of criminals in our federal prisons are actually too kind and compassionate to even hand over an evil stranger to that kind of death, and would not do so for any amount of money. Only the worst of worst would do that. Only a totally loveless, self-serving and high-functioning psychopath could do that to a well-known good man. For most criminals would never hand over someone they knew to be a good man for any sum, certainly not a good man whom they had lived and worked beside for the past three years. Yet Judas did this. And Judas also knew that, if he betrayed Jesus, he would risk the lives of all the other eleven core disciples, since the fake priests might torture and kill them too. Still, Judas valued all those lives as worth such a small sum.
Then there is an even more astounding, solid confirmation that Judas willingly betrayed Jesus and his close family of core disciples in a cold, merciless, calculating way. Matthew testified that his well-known “brother in the Lord,” Judas Iscariot, thought like this: “Also, from that time, [Judas]
was searching for an opportunity, so that he might fully betray Him” (Mat. 26:16, from: καὶ ἀπὸ τότε
ἐζήτει εὐκαιρίαν ἵνα αὐτὸν παραδῷ, SBLGNT). Here Matthew used an aorist subjunctive form of παραδίδωμι to indicate that Judas Iscariot intended to fully complete the action of betraying Jesus, of handing Jesus over to those ruthless murderers. So Judas helped those murderers create the plan to seize Jesus. It was Judas who told those murderers when and where to capture Jesus, so they could catch Him with the least number of interfering supporters gathered around Him. It was Judas who plotted the best method of grabbing Jesus, with the least amount of trouble. And, obviously, Judas did not make these decisions emotionally and irrationally. Rather, Judas carefully thought through his betrayal, with clear, strategical, plotting precision, with intelligence and malicious, evil motives.
Many begin their exegesis of the passages about Judas Iscariot by trying to figure out an excuse for his betrayal. Then, as they “analyze” his motives and intentions, they project their own thoughts of their own minds of flesh onto Judas and, worse yet, the thoughts of their own untaught, unwise and infantile spirits. But one thing they seldom do is actually examine the facts we know about him from the Scriptures. And those facts reveal much about the soul of Judas, both his spirit and his mind of flesh. Also remember, we can trust what those Scriptures say, because the souls of the disciples who wrote them were so dedicated to complete honesty that they willingly suffered pains, hunger, thirst, perpetual poverty, frequent beatings and death for those truths. Not only this, but their human spirits were indeed willing and able to hear and heed the Holy Spirit of their Creator God, Jesus. And this is why they willingly died for the truths they witnessed, after they had walked beside the body of God for three years, and after His Holy Spirit revealed truths to them in the subsequent years—as they walked in the morning light of gentle tongues of fire, which fell upon them during the Pentecost, after God’s bodily resurrection. Thus, those men who wrote about Judas, who were with him day and Page 1718
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night for three years, were not the kinds of men to lie about him. Those kinds of men told us about the facts and true revelations regarding Judas. So first, before analyzing the reasons for Judas betraying Jesus, we need to know more about him, which will also reveal much about the similar ruthless betrayers which we have faced throughout history and continue to face to this very day.
In chapter ten of Matthew’s Gospel, we learned that Judas Iscariot was sent out to serve the church of Israel in Jesus’ name, even with “authority over unclean spirits, to cast them out, and to heal every disease and every sickness” (Mat. 10:1, WEB). And, as long as Judas faithfully fulfilled the missions that Jesus sent him on, Jesus’ power worked through him. Also, the tradition of rabbis in those days was to send out their disciples in pairs. So the lists of the twelve suggest that Jesus paired Judas with Simon the Canaanite (Mat. 10:4, Mark 3:18-19). But Luke, a Gentile, likely did not know about this tradition and seemed to list the disciples in the order of their status or positions of trust, as teaching elders in the church (Luke 6:14-16). And Judas was always at the bottom of those lists, as the least of the twelve. Of course, since the Gospels were written after Judas betrayed Jesus, it would have been only natural to place him last in the lists. However, it implies that something was always off about the way Judas behaved. Yes, he must have been intelligent enough to recite teachings, but not pure.
Now, since rabbis usually paired complementary disciples with one another, that is, those who worked best together, where one would be stronger in in the ways that the other was weak, this implies something else about Judas and his partner. Since Judas’ partner, Simon, was called the
“Canaanite,” he seems to have been previously associated with the “Cananaeans” or Zealots, who were essentially Pharisees. And those Cananaeans believed that, because God alone is the true High King over all the earth, Israel must free itself from Roman rule. In other words, those Zealots had an extremely literal view of God’s Word. They believed that all Scriptures were the words and concepts of God, words that God sent into the hearts of the prophets who wrote them down on paper. So it is no surprise that one of these Cananaeans became a disciple of Jesus, since Jesus was a thoroughly biblical Teacher. But this also implies that the reason Jesus paired Simon the Cananaean with Judas Iscariot was likely because the greatest weakness of Judas lacked zeal, and did not fully believe in the inerrancy and infallibility of Scriptures, and Judas did not take the time or effort to learn God’s own intended meanings of His words. It suggests that Judas Iscariot did not take the words of God as literally as Simon did, nor lived a truly biblical life. Of course, assuming all this may look like mere speculation. But, judging by all what Judas did, we can assume some of this speculation may be true.
Another thing we can assume about Judas, by the way he spent three years working beside Jesus as one of His core twelve assistant teachers, is that he was intelligent and very good at mirroring the behaviours of the other eleven disciples. That is, Judas must have been capable of speaking and acting just like the other eleven did in public, whenever the twelve served as the assistant teachers of Jesus, and were sent on missions. Yet Judas did not, and never even wanted to actually trust Jesus, since Judas stole from the money purse, from the donated funds used to further Jesus’ ministry of teaching biblical truths about life and faith, including how to fulfill God’s laws against theft. Nor did Judas, as a thief of donations, serve the people through sacrificial love like Jesus and the other eleven did. And we also know this because Judas deliberately and consciously betrayed Jesus into a tortuous death, which also put the other eleven and numerous other disciples of Jesus in danger of receiving the same fate. So the inner motives of Judas were never pure, especially since the reason He betrayed Jesus and the others seemed to be because he began to realize that his selfish ambitions would not be fulfilled. For the evidence suggests that Judas was only using Jesus and the others as a means to achieve his own personal goals, to obtain financial and political rewards, to gain wealth, power and glory through His association with the immensely popular Messiah. And these are all Page 1719
common traits of ambitious, intelligent, high functioning psychopaths. Such a psychopath is able to
“blend in” with any group of people, able to make those people believe he is one of them. But the psychopath, unlike the rest of them, is also able to easily betray his friends into death, as Judas did.
Of course, Jesus saw the lovelessness of Judas Iscariot, and his ulterior motives, even from the beginning (John 6:70-71). Yet Jesus chose Judas as one of the twelve because He also knew that He had to die for the sins of His elect siblings. Jesus intentionally chose Judas precisely because Judas was an intelligent psychopath, because Judas was a fully awakened child of the devil who was able to betray Him into a tortuous death, because Judas was the kind of person who would willingly do it without any pangs of conscience, even after he had been living and working beside Him and the other eleven disciples everyday for three years. And there were few psychopaths who were capable of doing all Judas did, probably about one out of a hundred psychopaths. Then there is the other obvious reason for Jesus choosing to be betrayed by one of His core twelve assistant teachers, in order to teach us that we should not judge by external appearances. Rather, we must seek and find the inner motives and intentions of each one’s spirit before we trust them with our lives and the lives of our loved ones. Jesus wanted us to look at the hearts of our siblings in humankind, to assess and make judgments about who can or cannot labour with us is in His works of His loving ministries.
Now notice how Judas made his transaction with those selfishly ambitious religious exploiters, to betray Jesus into a tortuous death for a mere 30 pieces of silver, very soon after he saw Jesus “waste”
a year’s worth of wages, by letting a woman use an item of that value to prepare Him for His burial.
During the meal on the night of his decision to betray Jesus, Judas saw two things: (1) Jesus clearly intended to die within a few days, which meant that Jesus was not intending to establish an earthly kingdom of dictatorial rule, where He would oppress the Gentiles in order to make the 12 disciples obscenely wealthy and powerful; as well as (2) Jesus obviously did not value the wealth and prestige items of Satan’s world order, like that insanely expensive jar of perfume. Seeing all this seems to be what made Judas realize that Jesus was not the one who would enable him to fulfill all of his selfish hopes and dreams. Since Jesus was not a materialist coming to build a Roman-like empire for him and the Jews, but only a spiritual empire, this triggered Judas into finally deciding to betray Jesus.
When Judas heard Jesus tell them that Mary poured the oil on Him for His physical burial in a physical grave, Judas realized that Jesus was absolutely serious about physically dying for the sins of His people on the Passover day, within a couple of days. So, at that moment, Judas knew, with all certainty, that Jesus clearly did not intend to become a pagan type of despot ruling over all the earth, and was not going to grant him vast power over massive lands and countless people. Yet that seems to have been the only Judas was serving Jesus as His disciple. When Judas knew that Jesus was not going to make him into an obscenely wealthy and powerful court official, he felt betrayed. For Judas saw how the multitudes worshipped Jesus, both Jews and Gentiles. And that popularity could have been used to physically conquer the entire known world, since the majority of people hated and distrusted the current Roman despots. Thus, to forfeit such an opportunity, seemed to be negligence of criminal proportions. Judas even counted the lack of ambition in Jesus as a great sin against him and all Jews, since the prophecies declared that the Messiah would conquer the entire world, and now this Messiah refused to do what the Scriptures told Him to do. So, in his psychopathic mind, Judas felt that he was the real victim here, whom Jesus sinned against, and Judas wanted revenge.
Jesus had not been talking about some kind of figurative death, but about His actual bodily death.
And, to Judas, that meant all his works as Jesus’ disciple over the last three years had been “wasted.”
All his selfish ambitions went up in smoke. Jesus was not the kind of Messiah he wanted. Like many Jews in the false church, Judas desired a pagan-like conquering king, and was willing to suffer years Page 1720
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of danger and hard work, whatever was necessary, to gain a high position in the court of such a Messiah. But now he saw how this Messiah came to bring Israel a “spiritual” salvation, that Jesus would die to save their spirits from destructive lies and sins. But what good would that kind of thing do? In the mind of Judas, lies and sins were necessary tools for obtaining wealth and power, and that wealth and power was necessary to maintain order, to prevent extremely costly or deadly chaos from destroying Israel and the world. To Judas, Jesus was only worried about things which did not matter, about useless “spiritual” mumble jumble, about eliminating the lies and sins which every wise and effective Roman ruler actually deemed to be absolutely necessary and good. Jesus did not understand the realities of wealth and power, or the violence required to truly save the world from destruction.
So we can conclude several things from the way Judas reacted after Jesus let Mary “waste” the equivalent of a year’s wage, to prepare Jesus for burial. We can see that Judas was as shallow and short-sighted as all the psychopathic rulers have always been in Satan’s world order, since he somehow thought the people must be ruled by adept liars who terrorized them into submission, and that this kind of rule could somehow create the just, free, peaceful, Utopian kingdom of the Messiah.
Judas could not comprehend that a just, free, peaceful, Utopian kingdom had to equitably distribute all forms of physical, intellectual and spiritual property among all the people, and that this could only be done if the distributing authorities were faithful, honest and just servants of all the people. It could never be done by self-serving dictators. By carefully examining the Scriptures describing the actions of Judas, we can glean this revealing information about Judas, about his inner character: 1. At the Passover Seder meal (the Last Supper), when Jesus told the twelve that one of the ones who shared that family meal with Him was about to betray Him, Judas tested Jesus, to find out if Jesus knew it was him (Mat. 26:25). And this obviously means that Judas did not believe Jesus was God. It clearly indicates that Judas thought Jesus had a mere human spirit of life in Him. For Judas would not have tested Jesus, to see if Jesus knew that he betrayed Him, if Judas truly believed that the Spirit of life within Jesus was the all-knowing God. So Judas did not have an awakened elect spirit, like the other eleven. Judas was not a Christian, did not have and elect spirit to whom the heavenly Father revealed Jesus as the Creator God in a body of flesh. All the others knew this. Only Judas remained without this saving faith.
2. Since Judas betrayed Jesus immediately after finding out that Jesus intended to physically die, with His physical body buried among the dead, we can assume that Judas had been hoping that Jesus would be the kind of Messiah that the fake rabbis portrayed in their sermons. That is, Judas wanted the kind of Messiah who would conquer Rome and make all Jews into wealthy and self-indulgent lords. Judas wanted a Jewish king of the world who forced all the Gentiles to submissively serve them as slaves. Judas and those materialistic Jews wanted to be like the self-indulgent Romans lords in Satan’s world order, who forced Jews to serve as their slaves. If this is not what Judas believed, he would not have become so disillusioned with Jesus when he found out that Jesus intended to literally, physically die.
3. Judas seemed to be a psychopath. For no other kind of person could possibly maintain the composure to calmly sneak out so he could betray the Man who had been one’s caring, patient Teacher and Companion for the past three years, and hand Him over to be tortured and killed, while also endangering his other eleven close companions for past three years as well. Only a psychopath could betray Jesus and the other eleven in such a deliberate, ruthless and self-serving way, taking the time to secretly obtain a financial reward for the betrayal and helping the enemies of Jesus plot a convenient time and method for seizing, torturing and Page 1721
murdering Him (Mark 14:11), then leading the mob of murderers to Jesus and the eleven, while saying goodbye with a vindictively mocking kiss (Mat. 26:47-49; Luke 22:47-48).
There is not much written about Judas. But all that is written about him is damning evidence which indicates that Judas was an unbeliever and a totally ruthless citizen of the devil’s world order, that his spirit was born of Satan’s spirit, with the same loveless, wicked desires as all non-elect spirits, but with a truly psychopathic aptitude, as an awakened non-elect spirit. Now some defend Judas, by pointing out that, after Judas saw Jesus sentenced to death, he “regretted” what he had done (see Mat. 27:23, which uses an aorist passive participle form μεταμέλομαι, indicating that Judas had
“regrets about [it], in the sense that [he] wished it could be undone,” BDAG3). However, his regret did not lead to a biblical repentance into the truth about himself, about God or any other truth. It was not a godly sorrow that turned him away from his sins. Rather, his regret was the common kind of regret that all non-elect experience, the kind that even demons feel at times, whenever they fail to obtain what their selfish and arrogant hearts desire. Judas regretted only his failures, not his sins.
The reason Judas had regret was clearly because he realized that all he had hoped to gain was now out of his reach, that all he worked for and strove to obtain in the last three difficult years had been denied to him. This is what made him more bitter than wormwood, and extremely depressed, even suicidal. For he had followed Jesus everywhere, and had endured countless attacks by fake church leaders, together with Jesus and the other eleven core disciples, all while frequently going hungry and sleeping in the open fields, daily trudging through the heat of the day to serve the beleaguered masses of God’s Israel. But he had endured all this selfishly. For the only reason Judas put up with all this was the same reason that Roman nobles willingly suffered the extreme hardships of war, in the hope of gaining the rewards of plunder and court appointments, to become great lords, esteemed officials possessing the ear of Caesar. Judas hoped to become a great and wealthy man in the court of the future King of the world, even far more wealthy and powerful than the Roman officials whom Caesar favoured most. From all we read, this is exactly what this very intelligent psychopath actually desired with all his heart. Yet Judas now realized that his materialistic dreams of carnal greatness were no longer possible. And this consumed his wicked soul. So now the mere 30 pieces of silver he received seemed pathetic and useless in comparison. Thus, he tossed them aside in disgust (Mat.
27:5), although he could have used that small fortune to build a modest, secure life for himself. For, to a blindly ambitious soul like Judas, a common mundane existence like that would be unbearable.
So Judas murdered himself, possibly by cutting himself vertically from his sternum to his lower abdomen, then dropping himself off the limb of a tree with a rope tied around his neck. This would cause his guts to spill out and likely resulted in instant death. It was one of the most gruesome, messiest ways one could choose to die. So we must ask ourselves why Judas chose this method of suicide, when so many other ways were available. Well, first, we should understand that psychopaths always think the best solutions to most problems involve violence and death. Second, they love to transfer blame and punish others for all the perceived wrongs committed against themselves. Thus, like a typical bitter psychopath, Judas chose the most violently gruesome death he could imagine, in order to punish the entire nation of Israel, whom he falsely blamed for the loss of his own worldly success. He wanted to force the Jews to clean up his repulsive remains strewn on the ground, since Jewish laws did not allow them to leave one particle behind, to sanctify the ground where he died.
By his extremely vile method of suicide, Judas made the Jews do the maximum amount of very unpleasant work to bury his remains. For their laws required them to untie his body from the tree, then gather up his spilled bowels and blood from the ground, then bury them, then wash off the physical filth, then go to a mikveh for a ceremonial cleansing, and even more than this. By choosing Page 1722
Mat. 26:14-16, A Pragmatist’s Betrayal
this method of suicide, Judas “punished” Israel for not letting him become a wealthy, self-indulgent lord with great power, not even an officer in the temple guard. Then there is the other thing psychopaths love, which is becoming the centre of attention. So, by dying in this horrifying way, his gruesome death would be discussed by many people. For many years, many would talk about the way he died. He might even be immortalized in their writings as a famous soul who died in a terrible way, who cursed himself by hanging on a tree (Deut. 21:22-23). All of this would make him proud.
In reality, the only way we can harmonize all the Scriptures about Judas, and understand why our God Jesus chose to make him into one of His twelve assistant teachers, is by acknowledging that Judas Iscariot must have been a high-functioning psychopath. The only way Judas could have done all he did, in the way he did those things, is if his spirit was born of Satan and was fully wakened by that devil, to become able to hear and obey his demon father (Luke 22:3). Jesus must have allowed Judas to be one of the twelve because he was a high-functioning psychopath, because he was able to fool most people into thinking he sincerely served as Jesus’ disciple, because Judas could accurately reflect His teachings to others, seemingly with the same faith possessed by His other disciples, yet without even the tiniest mustard seed of genuine faith in his ambitious soul. Jesus needed a ruthless betrayer who would, nevertheless, correctly preach the words He taught. For our God Jesus knew that He could make His true words live inside His elect hearers, even if He allowed His words to be preached through an unbelieving agent like Judas. “Some indeed preach Christ even out of envy and strife, and some also out of good will. The former insincerely preach Christ from selfish ambition ...
but the latter out of love.... What does it matter? Only that in every way, whether in pretense or in truth, Christ is proclaimed” (Phil. 1:15-18, WEB). So Jesus’ power ensured that no harm came to His elect in Israel, even though He had intentionally allowed an awakened child of Satan to serve them.
No one but a very intelligent psychopath is capable of mirroring the words and behaviours of others so well that those others embrace him as one of their own, and continue this deception while living in close proximity to those he is deceiving for three years. Jesus allowed Judas Iscariot into His inner camp because Satan had already transformed Judas into a psychopath. Jesus chose Judas for this role of His betrayer for the same reason Nazis, Communists and despots often choose psychopaths to serve as spies in democratic nations, because only psychopaths can live under deep cover for years at a time, acting like the “good friends” of the good people they betray unto death. Then again, we must also realize that democratic nations have often known who these spies were, but kept silent and did not arrest nor expose them, so they could use those spies to their own advantage. And Jesus did the same with Judas. In the end, that little psychopath served the purposes of our God Jesus, both by delivering His body to those who nailed Him to the cross for our salvation, and by showing His true disciples that they must learn to better assess and judge through the motives and intentions of spirits.
In conclusion, Judas was not someone for whom we should have any empathy, even though many false preachers today even portray him as a hero. For those fakes only do this because they hope to be seen as more “open-minded, informed, contemporary and compassionate” than the preachers who condemn Judas for his psychopathic betrayal of our God Jesus and the other disciples. In reality, what some of those fakes actually want to do is trick the people into thinking that psychopaths, like many of the most famous mass-media preachers and Trump, are heroes. Some may not be doing this consciously, but their blindness to clear facts is nurtured by the psychopathic human gods they are worshipping. Then this causes those dupes to accept obvious psychopaths as their saviours, and to warmly embrace them, though they should be opposing those loveless monsters like their worst enemies. In the eyes of humanists, the best leaders need to be high-functioning psychopaths, able to mercilessly destroy even good people for the sake of wealth and power, able to promote and hold Page 1723
onto the “freedoms” of other elite psychopaths to exploit and enslave their “inferiors.” Yet those psychopathic leaders always end up destroying the truly wise and loving souls contributing to the well-being of all, as well as everything else that is good in their lands, so the demonic can commit crimes and sins with impunity. Then, once all good is gone, they destroy themselves too, usually in the same violence of transferred blame and self-pity that Judas demonstrated when he committed suicide. We need to get real about psychopaths like Judas, Trump, Hitler, big-name preachers, popes and the others. We absolutely need to learn to recognize psychopaths when we see them. And Judas was a good example of a famous preacher who was actually just a selfishly ambitious psychopath.
Mat. 26:17-29,
The Lord’s Supper
“Now on the first day of unleavened bread, the disciples came to Jesus, saying to Him,
‘Where do you want us to prepare for You to eat the Passover?’ He said, ‘Go into the city to a certain person, and tell him, “The Teacher says, ‘My time is at hand. I will keep the Passover at your house with My disciples.’”’ The disciples did as Jesus commanded them, and they prepared the Passover.
“Now when evening had come, He was reclining at the table with the twelve disciples. As they were eating, He said, ‘Most certainly I tell you that one of you will betray Me.’ They were exceedingly sorrowful, and each began to ask Him, ‘It isn’t me, is it, Lord?’ He answered, ‘He who dipped his hand with Me in the dish, the same will betray Me. The Son of Man goes, even as it is written of Him, but woe to that man through whom the Son of Man is betrayed! It would be better for that man if he had not been born.’ Judas, who betrayed Him, answered, ‘It isn’t me, is it, Rabbi?’ He said to him, ‘You said it.’
As they were eating, Jesus took bread, gave thanks for it, and broke it. He gave to the disciples, and said, ‘Take, eat; this is My body.’ He took the cup, gave thanks, and gave to them, saying, ‘All of you drink it, for this is My blood of the New Covenant, which is poured out for many for the remission of sins. But I tell you that I will not drink of this fruit of the vine from now on, until that day when I drink it anew with you in My Father’s Kingdom’”
(Mat. 26:17-29, WEB).
Here Matthew described how Jesus and His disciples, as a family, celebrated the Passover Seder (an orderly practise of the meal, Bible readings and prayers after sunset, when the 14th of Nisan began).
God commanded the unleavened bread of haste to nourish Israel’s flight from slavery in Egypt, which symbolized His disciples flight from slavery to lies and sin. Then the alcoholic red wine, made from the whole fruit of the vine, had once been given to slaves in the Egyptian region of the devil’s world order, by their taskmasters and owners. Those ruthless citizens in Satan’s kingdom gave Israel this wine because they hoped it would appease Yahweh God, since Egypt began to fear Israel’s God, believing He might utterly destroy them due to the pains they caused in His people. So now this wine of the Passover Seder represented the Holy Spirit of Israel’s God, Yahweh, the Guard of His people and the Avenger of those who harm His beloved, the apple of His eye. This wine had aged in their outer lives over the centuries, and become strong—and would soon enter their inner lives, to counsel their spirits of life. This very day, Jesus would make that immanent time possible, when God would enter their hearts and souls. The works of the Messiah’s New Covenant, to restore Israel’s relationship with their one Creator God, so that His priesthood might learn to fulfill His just Page 1724
Mat. 26:17-29, The Lord’s Supper
and loving ways, so that His awakened elect might serve the earth in His name, had arrived. Now Jesus would die an ignoble death on a criminal’s cross, as the atoning sacrifice for our lives of sin.
The night before this, Jesus celebrated a feast with His extended family of disciples, at their home in Bethany. In the Jewish reckoning of days, that previous evening meal began after Wednesday’s sunset, which was the start of what the Jews called Thursday, the 13th of Nisan. So that meal would have occurred on what our Roman Gregorian calendar might call, until midnight, the day of Wednesday, May 4th, AD 28. Then both our Roman calendar and the Jewish calendar would call the following daylight hours Thursday. But our calendar would call it May 5th, until midnight, while the Jewish calendar would end that day, Thursday, the 13th of Nisan, at sunset. Then, at sunset, the Jews recognized the beginning of a new day, Friday, the 14th of Nisan, the first day of the Passover, the evening when the Passover Seder would be celebrated. And, since the first day of the Passover was designated as a Sabbath day by God’s Law, the Jews set aside the daylight hours of Thursday as a
“preparation day,” just as all days before all Sabbaths were “preparation days.” Therefore, Jesus also set aside those daylight hours of Thursday for the preparation of the Passover Seder meal that night.
The Passover Preparations
Regarding that Thursday, the day of preparation for the Passover Sabbath on Friday, Matthew told us: “Now, for the first [day] of unleavened [bread], the disciples drew near to Jesus, reasoning:
‘Where do you will [that] we should prepare for You to eat the Passover?” (Mat. 26:17, from: Τῇ δὲ
πρώτῃ τῶν ἀζύμων προσῆλθον οἱ μαθηταὶ τῷ Ἰησοῦ λέγοντες· Ποῦ θέλεις ἑτοιμάσωμέν σοι φαγεῖν
τὸ πάσχα;, SBLGNT). Our Lord’s Jewish disciples knew this would be a very busy preparation day, since they had to find a place in the extremely crowded city of Jerusalem for them to celebrate their last Passover Seder together. And preparing for this celebration in Jerusalem, without having made arrangements for months in advance, was an almost impossible task, and it normally would be extremely costly as well. Then they also had to ensure that all the elements of the Passover Seder would be adequately provided—all the kosher foods and wine, which would also be scarce and hard to come by, at highly inflated prices. Yet Jesus had obviously told them that He was firmly resolved to celebrate this Passover Seder in Jerusalem itself. For this is why Jesus also celebrated a Passover meal in Bethany the night before, with many disciples, for the sakes of those others. But the biblical Passover, on the 14th of Nisan, was a prophetic ceremony ordained by God. As a memorial of Israel’s freedom from slavery to Satan’s world order in Egypt, it prophesied the deliverance of His church from their slavery to lies and sin. So our God Jesus insisted that this actual Passover day must be fulfilled within the official boundary of Jerusalem, in the city representing the eternal heavenly home of all the elect who had ever lived on earth, and of all who would ever live on earth in the future.
Yet, procuring a place to eat the Passover meal would turn out to be an easy task for His disciples to accomplish, even with their limited budget. For Jesus is God, and arranged for a place in Jerusalem to remain available, even a free place with all the elements of the Passover Seder having been made ready for Him and His twelve core assistant teachers. This was a miracle, considering the situation in Jerusalem at that time, when the population swelled to almost triple its normal number, where tens of thousands were now looking for a place to celebrate the Passover Seder. Now some think Jesus had secretly made these Passover arrangements beforehand, with a disciple or family member living in Jerusalem. But that seems unlikely, since at least one of the Gospel writers, would have mentioned those plans, and likely would have even named the person who provided that service. So it seems more likely that our omniscient God Jesus knew the owner of the “Upper Room” had prepared it for Page 1725
a large group, but that group had cancelled their plans at the last minute, which had made the room available for Jesus and His closest family members, for His twelve brothers within His true Israel.
When we look at the way Jesus responded to the question made by His disciples, we must conclude that finding a place to celebrate the Passover Seder must have been a miracle worked by our God Jesus. Now Matthew merely tells us that Jesus answered, “Go into the city, to the stranger, and tell him, ‘The [doctrinal] Teacher [of life and faith] says, “My appointed time is near. I am making the Passover with My disciples up to you [as your responsibility]”’” (Mat. 26:18, from: Ὑπάγετε εἰς τὴν
πόλιν πρὸς τὸν δεῖνα καὶ εἴπατε αὐτῷ· Ὁ διδάσκαλος λέγει· Ὁ καιρός μου ἐγγύς ἐστιν· πρὸς σὲ ποιῶ
τὸ πάσχα μετὰ τῶν μαθητῶν μου, SBLGNT). The way Jesus said this, it sounds like Jesus spoke to His disciples about a man whom none of them knew, a “stranger” (δεῖνα, “a person or thing one cannot or does not wish to name,” BDAG3). But Jesus did not tell them to mention His name to the man. Instead, Jesus instructed them to tell that man that the religious Teacher needed that man’s facilities for the Passover Seder because His “appointed time is near.” That is odd. This cryptic message Jesus told His disciples to give that “stranger” implies: (1) The stranger would know that the disciples were talking about Jesus, because he was familiar with Jesus and the twelve; (2) The stranger deeply believed in Jesus, and knew Jesus was about to die during the Passover week, so he was very willing to help Jesus; (3) The stranger seemed to live with others who opposed Jesus, and must have needed the excuse of saying an unnamed party of 13 men wanted to use their facilities that evening. This is speculation again, but the most logical conclusion considering all the facts.
Mark and Luke were more specific about this event, indicating that Jesus sent only two of His disciples, Peter and John, to make these preparations. And Jesus sent them during the day, not long before the Jews would be slaughtering their Passover lambs, which had been staying in their house since the 10th of Nisan. That butchering of the lambs had to be done in great haste during the daylight hours of the 13th of Nissan, and in the houses where the Passover meal was eaten, just before sunset, before the 14th of Nissan began (Deut. 16:6). Then, since Jesus only sent out two of His disciples, it implied that Jesus did not need them to do all that much to prepare for the Passover. For two men could never complete all the preparations before sunset that day—find a place to celebrate, remove all forms of leaven from the place, ceremonially cleanse all kitchen pots and dinnerware, butcher the lamb, purchase and prepare all the other foods, and take care of many other details. Rather, to do this much work in such a short time, Jesus would need to send out all twelve, with a lot of cash, and expertly divide those tasks among them. Therefore, Jesus must have know beforehand that house of that “stranger” had already made all of those preparations for a party of about the same number, including the purchase of a lamb on the 10th of Nissan, so it could be butchered on that 13th day, but that the people for whom those preparations had been made had cancelled their reservation that day.
Luke provides the most informative account, which he may have obtained from a testimony by Peter or John: “And He sent Peter and John on a mission, saying: ‘After having departed, prepare the Passover for us, so we might eat [it].’ So they said to Him, ‘Where are You willing that we should prepare [it]?’ Then He said to them, ‘Look, after your entering into the city, a person carrying a jar of water will [approach to] meet with you. Accompany him into the house into which he is entering.
Then say to the head of the house, “The [doctrinal] Teacher [of life and faith] is reasoning, ‘Where is the guestroom where I might eat the Passover with My disciples?’” And he will even show you a large upper room, having been furnished and now standing ready. You complete preparations there.’
So, after going out, they found [it] just as He had told them, and prepared the Passover” (Luke 22:8-13, from: καὶ ἀπέστειλεν Πέτρον καὶ Ἰωάννην εἰπών· Πορευθέντες ἑτοιμάσατε ἡμῖν τὸ πάσχα ἵνα
φάγωμεν. οἱ δὲ εἶπαν αὐτῷ· Ποῦ θέλεις ἑτοιμάσωμεν; ὁ δὲ εἶπεν αὐτοῖς· Ἰδοὺ εἰσελθόντων ὑμῶν εἰς
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Mat. 26:17-29, The Lord’s Supper
τὴν πόλιν συναντήσει ὑμῖν ἄνθρωπος κεράμιον ὕδατος βαστάζων· ἀκολουθήσατε αὐτῷ εἰς τὴν
οἰκίαν εἰς ἣν εἰσπορεύεται. καὶ ἐρεῖτε τῷ οἰκοδεσπότῃ τῆς οἰκίας· Λέγει σοι ὁ διδάσκαλος· Ποῦ
ἐστιν τὸ κατάλυμα ὅπου τὸ πάσχα μετὰ τῶν μαθητῶν μου φάγω; κἀκεῖνος ὑμῖν δείξει ἀνάγαιον μέγα
ἐστρωμένον· ἐκεῖ ἑτοιμάσατε. ἀπελθόντες δὲ εὗρον καθὼς εἰρήκει αὐτοῖς, καὶ ἡτοίμασαν τὸ πάσχα, SBLGNT). Now notice the perfect passive participle form of στρώννυμι in verse 12, indicating a completed action with current effects. This verb means: “to equip something with appropriate furnishings” (BDAG3). But this verb was used to indicate many kinds of equipping, preparing and distributing preparations. So it would include cooking the Passover meal itself, since Jesus did not expect Peter and John to cook it. Thus, what they found was a place where most preparations for the Passover already had been completed, even for a family equivalent in size to their family of disciples. The complex Passover preparations were standing ready, except for a few minor details.
So, in Luke’s account, and somewhat in Mark’s account (14:12-16), we see how Jesus prophesied about this event. Specifically, Jesus described the event using a future form of the verb συναντάω,