Bully’s Blog

I say then, has God cast away His people? Certainly not! For I also am an Israelite, of the seed of Abraham, of the tribe of Benjamin. God has not cast away His people whom He foreknew. Or do you not know what the Scripture says of Elijah, how he pleads with God against Israel, saying, ”LORD, they have killed Your prophets and torn down Your altars, and I alone am left, and they seek my life”? But what does the divine response say to him? “I have reserved for Myself seven thousand men who have not bowed the knee to Baal.” Even so then, at this present time there is a remnant according to the election of grace.  Romans 11:1-6

Romans 11 is one of those watershed passages. How one interprets it depends on one’s “plan of the ages” paradigm. If you haven’t read James Jordan’s The Future of Israel Re-examined, you need to. Due to its ramifications for interpretation of much of the New Testament, I believe it should be recognised as one of the most important writings of our time. It puts Romans, and especially chapters 9-11, fairly and squarely within a first century context. All would be fulfilled before AD70. God would make “a short work” in the Land. And He did.

It also helps with the interpretation of Revelation. Christ was a new Moses, just as Elijah was. He ascended and gave a double portion of His Spirit to the church as Elisha. The new body witnessed to Gentiles to provoke the hard-hearted Jews to jealousy. This has nothing to do with our day. It was a process confined to the end of the Old Covenant.

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Elijah’s twelve stone altar “died” in the place of Israel, paying the debt for her idolatries, burned to nothing as a priest’s daughter who had committed harlotries. That passage follows the Bible matrix, with the prophets of Baal slaughtered as the scapegoat (washed from the Land in the “Laver” of Kidron, no less).

Did Ahab and Jezebel repent? No, they filled up their sins.[1] So Elijah made an exodus to Sinai. This, too, follows the pattern. Elijah is a new Moses, and he makes a new Covenant for the remnant which will bring about the destruction of Ahab’s dynasty. His “new creation” will be built on the corpse of the old.

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All the names and the numbers in Revelation are symbols based on historical facts. The names are easy. Jezebel, Antipas, Balaam… But we mathematical moderns have trouble taking numbers as symbols. We are only interested in descriptions, not relationships. In the Bible, symbols describe relationships. As David Chilton observes in The Days of Vengeance [PDF], the symbolic value of someone or something is not a description of its nature, but a description of its relationship to someone or something else. Hence, as Jordan observes, Satan is both a dragon and a serpent in Revelation 12. He is a serpent to the Woman and a dragon to her children. Continue reading

or Limited Redemption

“For if we sin wilfully after that we have received the knowledge of the truth, there remaineth no more sacrifice for sins” - Hebrews 10:26

Did Christ die for all? If Jesus’ blood was not shed for all, how can it possibly be a sin to “trample it underfoot” as the unbelieving Jews did? (Hebrews 10:29)

Elijah set up a 12 stone altar as a substitute for Israel. The sacrifice ascended to the Lord (goat #1) and the prophets were slain (goat #2). Thus, the Baal worship was atoned for.

But Jezebel trampled this sacrifice underfoot, and continued in sin. In retaliation, she slew the prophets that Obadiah had hidden. Consequently she was trampled underfoot. (2 Kings 9:33).

The New Testament history, including the Revelation, follows this pattern. Jesus set up a new 12 apostle priesthood and Israel slew Him and them. Consequently, Israel was slain, as Jezebel. That is the context of the Hebrews passage, and the meaning of the harlot of Babylon.

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A House of Bread

There are two kinds of whiteness in the Bible, and an understanding of this explains a great deal. There is the whiteness of covering and the whiteness of uncovering. And, as mentioned, the Bible makes a great deal out of the concept of covering.

Bone Collector

Purge me with hyssop, and I shall be clean; Wash me, and I shall be whiter than snow.

Touching a corpse made an Israelite unclean. The remains of those slain in battle were marked with lime for two reasons: so that they could be avoided by the clean, and so they could be gathered up and burned to lime by the bone collectors. Jesus said that the righteousness of the Pharisees was like a whitewashed sepulchre. Not only were they full of the ceremonial uncleanness of broken Covenant, their so-called righteousness was actually a mark from God upon them. They would be gathered to their people not by the Father sending His angels to the four corners of the Land, but by the father of lies and his scavengers sent by God to clean the wound.

This image goes right back to Genesis. Like the angels, the Covenant scavengers, though demonic, are also God’s servants. They are the raven of Noah surviving on floating corpses until the water goes down; they are the scavenging dogs that lick up Jezebel’s blood; they are the maggots in misused manna and abandoned grapes (false bread and wine); they are the unclean birds and animals that screech and howl inside the corpse of a defeated Babylon; they are worms inside Herod ‘enthroned’ as a human Gehenna.

The whiteness of the Pharisees was the whiteness of Miriam’s and Gehazi’s skin-plague. It is the whiteness of flesh and bones exposed as unclean to the eyes of God. Satan himself appeared as an angel of light, but like the Pharisees, he was a false lightbearer, a tutor guiding his children the wrong way.

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