|
The following Scripture passages are offered to aid beginning fellowships. The readings and commentary for this week are more in line with what has become usual; for the following will most likely be familiar observations. The concept behind this Sabbath’s selection is typology. Printable/viewable for Greek or Hebrew characters PDF format Clickable hymns on this page require RealPlayer to be installed on your computer. The download is free. Possible songs include the following hymns: Weekly
For the Sabbath of August 16, 2008
The person conducting the Sabbath service should
open services with two or three hymns, or psalms, followed by an opening prayer
acknowledging that two or three (or more) are gathered together in Christ
Jesus’ name, and inviting the Lord to be with them. The person conducting the service
should read or assign to be read Isaiah chapter 7, followed by Matthew chapter
1, verses 18 though 25. Commentary: Luke records the angel
Gabriel telling Zechariah, a priest of the division of Abijah, a man who with
his wife had walked blameless in the commandments and statutes of the Lord
(Luke 1:5–6), that “‘your wife Elizabeth will bear you a son,
and you shall call his name John [[TV<<0<]. … And he will
turn many of the children of Israel to the Lord [6bD4@<] their God [JÎ< 2,`<], and he will go before him in the spirit and power of
Elijah, to turn the hearts of fathers to the children, and the disobedient to
the wisdom of the just, to make ready for the Lord [6LD\å] a people
prepared’” (vv. 13,
16–17). Greek was the lingua franca of the day, and Greek was
case dependent: the word, either as an utterance or as an
inscribed symbol[s], was the linguistic icon assigned to a linguistic object. In
a revealing expression of the mind of God, Gabriel speaks to posterity in
Greek, not in Hebrew or Aramaic or in any Semitic language, for the Apostle
John begins his gospel with the Word
[Ò 8`(@H] being God [2,ÎH—nominative case],
and in the beginning being with God [JÎ< 2,`<—accusative case or the
direct object of Ò 8`(@H]. The Word is not the thing [the linguistic object] that the Word represents in any language with
onomatopoeic words being possible exceptions. In John’s linguistic play, JÎ< 2,`< is the object of the clause but also the linguistic
object that Ò 8`(@H represents—and
this is what the remainder of God’s gospel reveals through many more
words. The element of Thirdness [the linguistic trace] that connects the icon to the object is the divine breath of
God [B<,Ø:" 2,@Ø] that descended as a dove to visibly link the
Father to the Son by giving to the Son of Ò 8`(@H life through receipt of the divine breath of JÎ< 2,`<. Prior to the confusing of
languages at the Gabriel directing
Zechariah to name his son “John” now becomes of importance
considering the movement of aspiration, /oh/, from in front of the
nasal consonant /n/ in
“John” to behind this nasal consonant in “Jonah” [[T<], with “John—[TV<<0<” in making straight the way to the Lord
functioning as the icon for which “Jonah—[T<” serves as the
representative sign of the Lord. Both “John” and
“Jonah” function as signs (one inside the other as Jonah was in the
whale) for what Jesus told Nicodemus about being born of water [of the womb]
and being born of spirit. Because of the separation
of icon from object, the hermeneutics of the angel Gabriel provides the basis
for spiritual understanding. And Gabriel’s hermeneutics are evident when
Gabriel cites Malachi’s prophecy: Behold, I [YHWH] will send my messenger and he will prepare the way before me. And the Lord [Adon] whom you seek will come suddenly
to his temple. (3:1) Behold, I will send you
Elijah the prophet before the great and awesome day of the Lord [YHWH] comes. And he will turn the hearts
of fathers to their children and the hearts of children to their fathers, lest
I come and strike the land with a decree of utter destruction. (4:5–6) When moving from physical
to spiritual, the angel Gabriel’s realm, Malachi’s prophetic lest I come and
strike the land with a decree of utter destruction becomes to make ready for
the Lord a people prepared. What Jesus said in His Olivet discourse
now pertains: “‘And if those days had not been cut short, no human
being would be saved [alive]. But for the sake of the elect those days will be
cut short’” (Matt 24:22). The people prepared are the Elect—if the Elect were not to exist, then God
would strike
the land with a decree of utter destruction. So it is the messenger
that God sends to prepare a way for the Lord who prepares a people so that the
Lord doesn’t strike the earth with a decree of utter destruction. John
the Baptist, preaching repentance, went before the Lord in the spirit but not
the power of Elijah—John did not do any miracles—to prepare a
people, the children of Because of heaven’s
peculiar property of timelessness, the angel Gabriel knows that the Lord will
not strike the earth with a decree of utter destruction, for the one sent to
prepare the way for the Lord will prepare the
Elect as the temple of God, able to receive the sudden coming of the Lord
(Matt 25:6–9). Thus, Gabriel is free to ignore the physical application
of a prophecy: he is of heaven and his thoughts are not on things physical as
“natural” human thoughts are. Rather, when quoting a prophecy he
moves the physical words into the spiritual realm as in, ·
And he will turn the
hearts of fathers to their children and the hearts of children to their fathers
(Mal 4:6) — versus ·
to turn the hearts
of fathers to the children, and the disobedient to the wisdom of the just
(Luke 1:17). Turning the hearts of the children of Jesus spoke only in
figures of speech [i.e., in metaphoric language] for the words—linguistic
icons, either uttered orally or as inscribed symbols—He used, whether in
Hebrew or Greek or Aramaic, pertain to the things of this world in an arbitrary
assignment of icons to objects, or said in more precise language, mimetically
seek to represent “real” things that can be observed or measured. A heart is a real thing (an inner organ)
that pumps blood. As such, it cannot be circumcised with a flint or steel knife
for to cut away any portion of it will cause death, excepting of course during modern
heart surgery. So for the prophet Jeremiah, in the 6th-Century BCE, to
record the Lord saying that He will punish all those circumcised merely in the
flesh and that all of the house of Israel is uncircumcised of heart
(9:25–26), and for the prophet Ezekiel to record the Lord saying that no
foreigner uncircumcised in heart and flesh shall enter the sanctuary (44:9)
requires that circumcision of the heart
not be performed with knives but by the soft breath of God when the heart has
been cleansed by faith, thereby causing both the linguistic icon /heart/ and the icon /circumcision/ to have a differing
assignment of meaning from any “real” thing in this world. The “real”
things of this world as linguistic objects can only serve as metaphors for the
things of heaven. A linguistic icon in any language, including Hebrew, is now
twice removed from the things of heaven and at best can only indirectly
reference a heavenly thing. The hermeneutics of the
angel Gabriel gives disciples a better understanding of how the visible things
of this world, such as turning the hearts of children to their fathers, reveal
the hidden things of God: turning the
disobedient not to a thing or to a Church in this world, but to the wisdom of the just becomes the
reality of “repentance,” or turning from lawlessness to obedience
… the wisdom of the just is
obedience that will cause a person to walk as Jesus walked (1 John 2:3–6).
The Apostle Paul expressed this wisdom
when he wrote to the saints at Corinth, “Be imitators of me, as I am of
Christ” (11:1), and when he wrote to the saints at Philippi,
“Brothers, join in imitating me, and keep your eyes on those who walk
according to the example you have in us” (3:17). He said of himself,
“‘Neither against the law of the Jews, nor against the temple, nor
against Caesar have I committed any offense’” (Acts 25:8). The wisdom of the just separates those who practice righteousness and are
righteous as Jesus was/is righteous (1 John 3:7) from those who make a practice
of sinning and are of the devil (v.
8) … John isn’t establishing an opposition of
“Christians” versus the world, but rather of obedient disciples
from lawless disciples, who have twisted Paul’s epistles into instruments
for their own destruction (2 Pet 3:16–17). The angel Gabriel’s
focus is not upon lawless Christians—the many who are not chosen (Matt
22:14)—but on those few Christians who are the Elect, who are vessels sculpted for honorable use. The hermeneutics of
Gabriel should frighten every lawless Christian, but they won’t. The
lawless have been sculpted into vessels of wrath, prepared for destruction,
endured with much patience for a season—the lawless are secure in their
lawlessness, smug in their teachers’ assurances that heaven awaits them
when what actually awaits them is condemnation and the lake of fire; for when
these lawless disciples could have chosen to walk as Jesus, an observant Jew,
walked, they chose instead to walk as the Gentiles of this world thereby
reintroducing the division between circumcised [now of the heart] and
uncircumcised, with themselves though born of spirit being the uncircumcised
that have not cleansed their hearts by a journey of faith equivalent in length
to the patriarch Abraham’s physical journey of faith from Ur of the
Chaldeans [Babylon] to Haran [Assyria or death, symbolized by baptism] then on
to Canaan, the Promised Land of God’s rest—or in the hermeneutics
of the Elect, Sabbath observance;
i.e., the new creature born of spirit as a son of God bringing the tent of
flesh [the temple] in which he dwells into the presence of God on the Sabbaths
of God. As the Lord entered the Holy of holies of the temple Solomon built one
day a year (Yom Kipporim), bringing
His presence into the earthly temple on this most holy of the high Sabbaths,
disciples are to bring the spiritual temple (themselves) into the Lord’s
presence on the Sabbaths of the Lord. The new creature born of spirit is not
the tent of flesh in which this new creature dwells, for this new creature is
not male or female, Jew or Greek; yet the tent of flesh remains male or female,
Jew or Greek, free or bond And while this new creature can enter into the
Father’s presence at any time because of Christ Jesus being this new
creature’s high priest, this new creature remains under the obligation to
bring the temple [the body in which this new creature dwells] into the presence
of the Father on the Sabbaths of God, and to neglect so great a
responsibility—to treat this responsibility as a trivial
matter—discloses to the Father how little this new creature wants to be
with Him and how much this new creature desires the company and acclaim of this
world … this new creature will receive what it desires, the fate of this
world that is passing away. The
hermeneutics of Gabriel enter into Matthew recording what the angel of the Lord
told Joseph about Mary’s pregnancy: Now
the birth of Jesus Christ took place in this way. When his mother Mary had been
betrothed to Joseph, before they came together she was found to be with child
from the Holy Spirit. And her husband Joseph, being a just man and unwilling to
put her to shame, resolved to divorce her quietly. But as he considered these
things, behold, an angel of the Lord appeared to him in a dream, saying,
“Joseph, son of David, do not fear to take Mary as your wife, for that
which is conceived in her is from the Holy Spirit. She will bear a son, and you
shall call his name Jesus [[0F@Ø<], for he will save his people
from their sins.” All this took place to fulfill what the Lord had spoken
by the prophet: “Behold, the virgin shall conceive and bear a son, / and
they shall call his name Immanuel” (which means, God with us). When
Joseph woke from sleep, he did as the angel of the Lord commanded him: he took
his wife but knew her not until she had given birth to a son. And he called his
name Jesus [[0F@Ø<—Jesoun]. (1:18–25) The angel of the Lord,
probably Gabriel, tells Joseph to call the boy Jesus [[0F@ØH/<],
meaning among other things, Son of the
Most High God [Ze-] in Greek and
when translated into Hebrew, in Yah is
salvation. Therefore, considering how the Septuagint’s translators identified the young
woman [עלמה—’almah]
that Isaiah verbally brings before King Ahaz (7:14) as a virgin [a possible
rendering of /’almah /] who will bring forth a son to be named
Immanuel, meaning God with us, it is
reasonable for Matthew, following in the hermeneutics of Gabriel, to apply this
prophecy to Mary and Jesus, whose name in Greek would have God [2,ÎH], in the form of His
Son, being with Israel … when moving from Greek into English, /2,-/ is usually pronounced
as /the-/, with the /theta—2/ having the /th/ pronunciation, a different
but not distant phoneme from /Ze-/. The Hebrew icon /’almah
/ has a usual assignment of meaning close to the archaic assignment given to
the English /maiden/, a young woman
presumed not to be sexually active. Hebrew has an icon that is assigned to a
woman who has not had sexual intercourse: /bethulah/.
So presumably if Isaiah intended to reference a virgin as opposed to a young
woman who might or might not be a virgin, he would have used /bethulah/ instead of /’almah
/—and this is in line with the adjective /harah—Strong’s #2030/ referring to a present pregnancy
(Gen 38:24) instead of “will conceive” as in a distant future
pregnancy. So in Isaiah 7:14, the passage that Matthew assigns to
Christ’s birth could well be translated as, “the young woman is
pregnant,” or “the young woman is about to conceive.” In
either case, Mary living centuries in the future is not the physical referent
for Isaiah’s citation, and the referent for the vague pronoun
“he” in verse 13 now becomes at issue for Jesus upon His Ascension
to the Father tells Mary to tell His disciples that He is going to His Father
and to His God (John 20:17). The vagueness of referent for “he” in
Isaiah 7:13 permits this “he” to be Ò 8`(@H, which actually makes more sense than for Isaiah to say,
“‘Hear then, O house of David! Is it too little for you to weary
men, that you weary my God also?’” The prophet is not speaking before Ahaz
answers, and it would be presumptuous for Isaiah to speak of wearying God
unless he was directly uttering the words of God. The young woman about
whom Isaiah writes might be a member of the royal family, or might be
Isaiah’s wife (less likely): she is of nobility either of the royal
family or of the Levitical priesthood. But there no child name Immanuel
recorded in Isaiah’s lifetime—and in the hermeneutics of the angel
Gabriel, a disciple would not expect the young woman to be a
contemporary of the prophet Isaiah, or for the “sign” to pertain to
a physical emptying of Syria and Samaria, the lands of the two kings that Ahaz
feared. The two kings that
threaten spiritually circumcised [i.e., circumcised of heart] Again, Isaiah writes of a
young woman [’almah], so translated into English by Jewish scholars
and by some Christian translators, with the icon’s Aramaic and Ugaritic
cognates used for women who are not virgins. But in the hermeneutics of the
Septuagint’s translators, who rendered /’almah/ as “B"D2,<@H—parthenos” which refers to an actual virgin, the young woman
pregnant or soon to be pregnant would have borne the child centuries earlier
and that sign had not happened; thus, the “literal” rendering of
the passage could not be the intended meaning. Only a spiritual application of
the passage could be the intended sign, for Isaiah hadn’t named his son
Immanuel or Emmanuel nor had any relative of King Ahaz. God as a human being
was not with ancient A
controversy has developed about how Matthew presumably mistranslates and
misapplies Isaiah’s prophecy when he does no such thing: because of
inherent immediacy of Isaiah’s prophetic sign if a physical application
of the sign were the intended meaning, the Septuagint’s translators,
having more spiritual understanding than most scholars of today, passed over
the physical application and moved to a spiritual application as if Gabriel
himself had inspired them. Then Matthew, writing after Jesus’
crucifixion, has confirmation that, indeed, Isaiah’s sign pertained to a
virgin, and to Mary in particular, with this confirmation coming first through
what the angel Gabriel told Mary and what the angel of the Lord told Joseph. The hermeneutics of the
angel Gabriel always moves from the physical [the visible] to focus on the
spiritual [the invisible], using the visible only to “set up” or
reveal the invisible—and it is this movement that forms the central
metaphor of typological exegesis. Those scholars and disciples who only permit
the use of “typological exegesis” to reference New Testament intertextual use of types badly miss the
hypertextuality of the angel Gabriel.
They also miss the significance of the Whenever a disciple
clings to a physical object as the referent for a scriptural prophecy, the
disciple wrongly understands the prophecy. Disciples do not need biblical
prophecies to comprehend the danger It isn’t a man or
many men and woman who prepares a people for the Lord, but the glorified Christ
Himself. * The person conducting the Sabbath service should close services with two hymns, or psalms, followed by a prayer asking God’s dismissal. * * * * * "Scripture
quotations are from The Holy Bible, English Standard Version, copyright ©
2001 by Crossway Bibles, a division of Good News Publishers. Used by
permission. All rights reserved." [ Home ] [ Sabbath Readings ] |