Song for the afflicted - 3

Outstanding.

luke 3:1 -

The Lord’s prayer.

days.

The burden on the chosen people.

Joel’s Occurrence of seven.

Why a Carpenter?

Outstanding.

Let me first start with issues i’ve raised which are still outstanding, as in, what i talked about and have yet to expound on.

Adam and eve, and that serpent.

Egypt is south, wilderness is north, cryptic, huh?

A quickie, luke 3:1, just what it is saying.

Jer 31:22, why do i keep coming back to that woman encompassing a man?

Why is a kosher animal kosher?

Another quickie, the Lord’s prayer.

The messages to the churches, expanded.

The gospel accounts, expanded, specifically the crucifixion(s).

Haven’t mentioned this yet, i’ll call it so why was our Saviour a carpenter?

Another occurrence of seven, Joel 1:11-12.

I say two Teachers, what do i mean by that?

What is this peace that i keep saying needs to be made?

Ezekiel’s temple.

The worm.

The burden on the chosen people.

Well, don’t know if i covered all of them, but clearly i need to roll up my sleeves.

I’m not going to follow the order of the list, i’m trying to build in a coherent manner, and, some of the points are overlapping each other.

Let’s deal with the quickies first.

Quick confession - these articles are sort of preparation for me actually writing everything up in a coherent manner, they are more note-taking in form, my intention is just to get you to ponder the words of the Word.

luke 3:1 -

In the fifteenth year of the reign of Tiberius Caesar, while Pontius Pilate was governor of Judea, Herod tetrarch of Galilee, his brother Philip tetrarch of Ituraea and Trachonitis, and Lysanias tetrarch of Abilene,

So, what it saying?

Now this is a preparatory statement announcing the start of the ‘process’ from the point of a voice crying in the wilderness. A call, if i may say so.

And this is what it’s saying is the state of the (one’s spiritual) world at that moment.

I’m going to build up from last to first.

Lysanias of abilene

When egypt was ruled by an ishmaelite who loosened bonds, or drives away grief.

Philip of ituraea and trachonitis

And assyria was ruled by a canaanite who loved to rely on his horses, his own strength.

Herod of galilee

And israel was ruled by (in his own eyes) a ‘heroic’ canaanite.

Pontius pilate of judea

And jerusalem was in the grip of the world.

A seriously important point i need to emphasize is that duality is one of ‘the’ themes running through the Word.

So the loosening of the chains of the prisoners is always a reference to the chains of slavery one is in while in egypt.

That’s the bad side. But the brotherhood experienced when we get to the point of loving our neighbour is expressed as bonds, cords, holding us together. (see silver later)

(Ecclesiastes 4:12 - And though one may be overpowered, two can resist. Moreover, a cord of three strands is not quickly broken.)

And so this ishmaelite is not breaking chains, he’s loosening bonds, not good, and we’re in egypt, remember? And so we should be mourning, grieving, for fear of the Lord.

Assyria and its dependence on horses should be clear enough.

Israel is still suffering the problem it had since the divided kingdom, because it is indeed the kingdom of israel, not judah, and it’s also known as ephraim, aka samaria, and at this stage politically aka galilee. And that problem started with Saul, even before the division, aggrandizing and relying on himself.

And the city is in the grip of the ruler of the world, represented at this time by a man whose name incorporates the sea (from which men have to be fished out of to salvation, and from which that ten-horned beast comes) and a spear, among other interpretations.

So, let’s say that’s ‘dissecting a verse-101’. 

Look, again, i’m not trying to start a church here, i’m just saying there’s meaning in every single thing said in the Book, if you search for it.

The Lord’s prayer.

Now there are two versions, for a reason, but that will become clearer as i expand on the differences between the gospels, so we’ll work on ‘definitive’ matthew’s version.

‘Our Father in heaven,

hallowed be Your name.

Your kingdom come,

Your will be done,

on earth as it is in heaven.

Give us this day our daily bread.

And forgive us our debts,

as we also have forgiven our debtors.

And lead us not into temptation,

but deliver us from the evil one.’

The four grounds are being covered here.

In the set-apart sanctuary of jerusalem we will hallow His name, once He resides with us.

We are desiring that His Son sets up His kingdom of israel.

And that YHVH’s will be obeyed, His counsel (of Law) followed in assyria.

And that the bread of knowledge be given us in egypt, with an inappropriate translation.

It’s not so much ‘daily’ bread, although it’s really useful to consider it as such, with the understanding that one reads the Book every day, helpful, that, but the original word is a problem for translators. Lots of grammatical terms get thrown about, but the essence to me is in an attempted translation which says ‘for being’. Give us our bread for being, which is preferable to ceasing to be…

And now the second pass through, where i recognise what is usually said as one sentence to be two,

Forgive us our debts, let Your judgement on us be mercy, for when You look at us You see Your Son, thank you so much (understatement that that is) for giving Him.

As we forgive those who owe us, for as in our wisdom we judge so shall we be judged.

And please lead us away from following tempting wrong counsels.

And deliver us from missing the mark, the objective of the adversary.

There’s not so much something new in understanding i’m giving here, i’m just showing how it reflects the four grounds. In order.

As God is, the Word is very ordered, under the veil.

days.

I’d like to talk about the burden on the chosen people a bit more, and then start with why is a kosher animal kosher. I need to explain that if i am to properly explain the crucifixion(s).

I keep bracketing the crucifixion to indicate more than one, let me explain that a bit first to  make sense for now, but the fuller explanation will come later. Our Saviour was only crucified once, we, on the other hand, are told to pick up our cross daily. 

 i am working towards showing you it taking a death of the old to move to the new, or a death in the old ground to move into the new ground. If you look at the spiritual progress as taking a day to cross each ground (therefore there are four spiritual days in total), one does not pick up the cross to carry it around forever, one picks it up to get crucified on it. Every (spiritual) day. Doing this every literal day of our lives( while sounding very admirable, it’s why some people attempt it, and are lauded for it.) is rather nonsensical, if you ask me, just get someone to literally hammer you to some wood while you’re at it.

Ouch, hope i’m not offending too much here.

Look, every day we do struggle with our favourite areas of sin, and we are to work toward conquering each area. But there are things that need to be built up before we can get around to the conquering, or we leave that area empty, whereupon the problems come back 7(!) times stronger…in your full journey you pick up your cross four times.

So, that’s why there are four crucifixion stories, that’s the deaths WE are required to go through.

Let me show something. God is truth, He does not lie. Some people make an uneasy point.

In exodus 3:18 it does look suspiciously that God actually told moses to tell a lie.

Exodus 3:18

The elders of Israel will listen to what you say, and you must go with them to the king of Egypt and tell him, ‘The LORD, the God of the Hebrews, has met with us. Now please let us take a three-day journey into the wilderness, so that we may sacrifice to the LORD our God.’

Now one of the most popular reasonings goes something like, well, IF pharoah had let the israelites go, then that WAS what God had intended, for them to worship Him and then things would have been fine, but because he didn’t let them go, that changed the whole ballgame.

Poppycock. This reasoning that the storyline had/has different potential endings is doubting the surety of God’s infallible plan, and making it dependent on the independent individual will of the characters involved. He moves our hearts, remember, and it’s even made very clear with pharoah that this is all the time happening. Everything that happened already is cast in stone, as it were, and even though everything in the future is as well, from our perspective we yet undergo the struggle of making our free-will choices, for we do not know how we are cast.

God being spirit His vision is a spiritual one, and the children of israel already being in egypt, and it taking a day to cross each ground, well, three days is the length of time needed for them to get to jerusalem where at last God can be worshipped. He’s already looking to the end of the road, as it were.

I don’t know if you’re noticing, but on a lot of these ‘sticky issues’, where we get what i can only call creative answers as to why or what etc, the reasoning i am giving just makes sense, instead of pulling the veil even tighter. That’s why i describe it as connecting the dots. 

The burden on the chosen people.

Looking at the storyline of the Book from non-believers point of view, there’s a massive incongruity between the OT bloodthirsty murderings and the NT peace and goodwill messagings. They shake their heads at us followers.

Spiritually, seeing it as a process occurring inside oneself, brings things into a proper perspective, to me.

There’s a lot of bad stuff that needs to be exterminated, and to be replaced by the real good stuff. 

These commandments to wipe out the other nations should be clear enough, also stoning one’s own who break the commandments. 

What i do appreciate is that (apart from the necessary literal wiping out of the nations, which wasn’t done properly anyway, just as we don’t get rid of the bad things inside us properly either.) literal accounts of performing sentence on infractions of the commandments are very infrequent indeed. 

Then we get the incessant quarrelling between the israelites and the depressing series of kings of both kingdoms. In my youth we had a marathon runner who had the nickname loop-en-val, which means run-and-fall, which was an apt description of his running style.

Speaking for myself here, but that’s pretty exactly how i would describe my progress.

Our loving Father is not harsh, nor cruel, nor two-faced, only as much as was needed to tell the physical shadow story of the spiritual reality was performed, and no more. In His wisdom, and i am not going to question that at all, He decided to do things this way. I do see that, in a time when nothing was clear yet, this storyline that was followed sketched out everything that is needed to gain understanding.

And that is our debt we have to the true branches of the Vine. don’t all the ones chosen by God  undergo a terrible destiny?  To act out the story? The reward for that will assuredly be proportionate.

Joel’s Occurrence of seven.

Joel 1:11-12

Be dismayed, O farmers,

wail, O vinedressers,

over the wheat and barley,

because the harvest of the field has perished.

The grapevine is dried up,

and the fig tree is withered;

the pomegranate, palm, and apple—

all the trees of the orchard—are withered.

Surely the joy of mankind has dried up.

Well, i shall call it the seven seeds.

Wheat and barley (seeds from grass) in the ground of egypt,

Then the fruits, which contain the seeds inside of them,

Grape and fig in assyria,

Pomegranate and date palm in israel,

And the apple in jerusalem.

This dried up negative side of the duality expressed here is what Jesus is talking about in His message to laodicea, i’ll get back to that, the positive side is when everything flourishes again, of course, and for now may i point out the eating of bread from grass seed(of the flesh, not milk) of knowledge and the drinking of wine from grape (of the blood, not water) of counsel that we are commanded to do in remembrance while we are ignorant? I will explain why i phrase it like that, when we get to the gospels.

Now i’ve learnt the limitations of space in an article, so let me cover why Yeshua was a carpenter, and then move on to that kosher animal in article four.

Why a Carpenter?

Jer 10:3-4

For the customs of the peoples are worthless;

they cut down a tree from the forest;

it is shaped with a chisel

by the hands of a craftsman.

They adorn it with silver and gold

and fasten it with hammer and nails,

so that it will not totter.

And isaiah 41:5-7

The islands see and fear;

the ends of the earth tremble.

They approach and come forward.

Each one helps the other

and says to his brother, “Be strong!”

The craftsman encourages the goldsmith,

and he who wields the hammer

cheers him who strikes the anvil,

saying of the welding, “It is good.”

He nails it down so it will not be toppled.

And again isaiah 44:14-18

He cuts down cedars

or retrieves a cypress or oak.

He lets it grow strong among the trees of the forest.

He plants a laurel, and the rain makes it grow.

It serves as fuel for man.

He takes some of it to warm himself,

and he kindles a fire

and bakes his bread;

he even fashions it into a god and worships it;

he makes an idol and bows down to it.

He burns half of it in the fire,

and he roasts meat on that half.

He eats the roast and is satisfied.

Indeed, he warms himself and says,

“Ah! I am warm; I see the fire.”

From the rest he makes a god, his graven image.

He bows down to it and worships;

he prays to it and says,

“Save me, for you are my god.”

They do not comprehend or discern,

for He has shut their eyes so they cannot see

and closed their minds so they cannot understand.

So, this is eminently clear, the irrational, insane, erroneous, sinful etc inclination we have to make idols for ourselves, because we don’t understand. Yes, we. i’m going to be highly impressed with your progress if we were to sit down and talk about idolatry and i cannot find an idol in you that you worship. Insidious and hard to spot, they are, once the obvious ones that everybody can see are crossed out. Unless of course, you’re already in the fourth ground.

But let’s look at the first mention in isaiah of the idol subject - Isaiah 40:18-21

To whom will you liken God?

To what image will you compare Him?

To an idol that a craftsman casts

and a metalworker overlays with gold

and fits with silver chains?

To one bereft of an offering

who chooses wood that will not rot,

who seeks a skilled craftsman

to set up an idol that will not topple?

Do you not know?

Have you not heard?

Has it not been declared to you from the beginning?

Have you not understood since the foundation of the earth?

Now that last quote of isaiah 44 says more before the part i quoted, and afterwards too, but i cut like this to show what is going on with the wood, and the fact that this happens for lack of understanding. Note cedars btw, and cypresses, hidden in plain sight, as usual.

Back to this last one, it’s super subtle, and you may not agree with me on this one, but i look at what’s said straight after, because i know that when the Word uses phrases like ‘do you not know? Have you not heard? Has it not been declared? Have you not understood?’ what it is saying is ponder this text, once your eyes are opened you will understand.

‘Behold, he who has ears, truly,truly (repetition)’, all these phrases are wake-up calls, work on what’s being said.

So what do i see? Well, here i see it in the ‘good’ way, who is an image of God but we our(spiritual)selves? And what is an idol but an image? We are ‘cast’ in egypt by the call, gilded in the gold of counsel in assyria, covered in silver chains of wisdom (wouldn’t that shimmer like white clothing from a distance? Just saying.) In israel, and lastly, as laodicea tells us, we must realise we are too poor, even as we think we are rich, and so we must seek the wood of a tree that will not rot, and search for a carpenter to shape it so it will stand firm, not to be toppled. (This is not the hammer and nail-banging of a shelf on the wall here, or dagon.)

And so i see why His trade was ‘simply’ that of a carpenter…

Oh, remember i talked about bonds of unity, beautiful chains of silver that they are, adorning and binding us together, not imprisoning us…

I don’t know, i just really really like looking at this text as i have described. My wonderful Carpenter, shaping me.

Acacia is a wood that has rot-resistance to water, now i knew that, but i didn’t know that the woodworking world distinguishes between these types of woods basically as a whole field of study, interesting in this context, and let that acacia tree be in the arm of fear of the Lord, and we’re told fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom, and it is such wood we must seek out for the carpenter to work on.

Right, i’ll get back on track, song number 4 coming up, kosher…