Esau’s Ladder
“…when the blood goes up, the Spirit comes down.”
The battle between the Son and the serpent rages throughout the Old Testament. Every time the Lord renews the Covenant, Satan is ready with a counterfeit. God uses the phonies to test and purify His people, wipes the failures off the slate, then starts again.
Aaron and Jeroboam set up patently false worship in their golden calves. But false worship in the guise of true was much more difficult to discern, especially when it usurped the exact location of the true. When the Lord took Ezekiel to the Temple as a legal witness, it was a whitewashed tomb. He dug through the wall and discovered that it was a house of hypocrisy, the synagogue of Satan. All that remained of Israel’s witness to the nations was a thin veneer.
The Tabernacle/Temple was cruciform. It was a stairway to heaven, its stairs daubed with blood every step of the way. Jacob’s ladder was a bloody tree with angels ascending and descending upon it, a holy priesthood, a picture of Totus Christus. Under the corrupt kings the ritual worship promised ascension but offered in practice a greasy pole.
The usurping began, of course, when Satan took failed Adam’s place at the right hand of God. Instead of imaging the Father as lightbearer, he was all about pointing the spotlight on Adam’s sins. This made Christ’s ascension all the more sweet.
In Tabernacle and Temple, the blood was applied from earth to heaven: Bronze Altar - Incense Altar - Ark [1]. To coin Jordan’s phrase, when the blood goes up, the Spirit comes down. So, the acceptable blood went up at the ascension of Christ, but as with David and Saul, two spirits came down: the Holy Spirit anointing upon the new kingdom, and an evil spirit from God to eat the old from the inside out.
The Spirit of God filled the saints as a new temple at Pentecost. At the same event, Satan fell like lightning. Where did he go? Revelation 8 fills in the gap:
Then the third angel sounded: And a great star fell from heaven, burning like a torch, and it fell on a third of the rivers and on the springs of water. The name of the star is Wormwood. A third of the waters became wormwood, and many men died from the water, because it was made bitter. [2]
Satan went back to Eden, or at least its current form. He found the old temple swept and decorated but empty, as Jesus had predicted, so he filled it (false Ark) with seven of his friends (false Lampstand).[3] At Pentecost, the Temple of Herod the Edomite became Esau’s ladder, a Babelic tower to heaven. At Pentecost, Judaism joined every other faith on earth as a tent of greasy poles, snakes pretending to be ladders.
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[1] Jordan observes that these three locations combined give us “ten horns” to be bloodied.
[2] Satan is the “head” in the third trumpet, and the Judaisers are the “body” from the pit in the fifth. See The Altar of the Abyss - 3, Counterfeit Kingdom Come and Wormwood.
[3] See Black Eyes.
