Who are the dogs and pigs whom Jesus warns His hearers against in Matthew 7?

[This post has been refined and included in Sweet Counsel: Essays to Brighten the Eyes.]

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And he opened his mouth and taught them, saying: “Blessed… Blessed…”
(Matthew 5:2-11)

Part 1 is here.

Just so, the first natural words formed a testimony given before the first natural audience. They follow the structure of the Ten Commandments. [1] This was the first prophecy.

Reading the Ten Words back into the first speech by the first human Lawgiver also shows a movement from the natural to the ethical. It recapitulates the movement from the “sacrifice of blood” to the “sacrifice of praise,” from the Tabernacle of Moses to the Tabernacle of David, etc. Eve is not spoken to. She is referred to in the third person. Her naming is a legal blessing and witness before God. You might notice that this stanza is the Sanctions of the greater pattern, and Succession follows in vv. 24-25, with the requirements for the foundation of a new household, a new “delegation.”

You might also notice that each horizontal row moves from Adam to Eve, and the entire process also moves vertically from Adam to Eve. Adam is protology (Genesis) and Eve is eschatology (Revelation). The Woman is always the “at last.”

The Veil of Flesh

Adam did not need to learn to speak (or presumably, to write). He was physically (naturally) mature. But now (“at last”) for Adam, the natural was also bifurcated. It was Social. Adam was now corporate. For the Physical to become Ethical, there must be a Social in between, that is, a veil of flesh. Bone is to flesh as law is to love. Adam is structure and Eve is glory. The spiritual/ethical words spoken by God were to become the “environment of fire” between them, for good or ill, blessing or cursing.

We see this triune order in the architecture of the first three chapters of Genesis.

In Genesis 1, Adam is a Physical creature, part of the created order. In Genesis 2, the focus zooms in on Adam to tell his story as a Social being. This involves cutting flesh and reuniting flesh, something which did not occur with the animals, whose law is earthly, tied to the blessing or cursing of the ground. Genesis 3 tells the story of Adam as an Ethical creature, one who is not only to represent the created order to God above, but to represent the heavenly order to the creation below. The movement is from being, to knowing, to loving. Of course, loving (of God and of Eve) is where he fails.

This brief history of Adam (the individual) becomes the history of corporate Adam. As discussed, the first Covenant was tied to nature, thus all nature which had “breath” was destroyed. But after Noah, Covenant history moved from the Physical to the Social. The cutting of circumcision avoided another “natural” destruction by creating a microcosmic “world model” in Abraham. Just as it was for Adam, this was a time of promises and foreshadowings. The subsequent history deals with a Social creation, that is, Israel and her Tabernacle as a microcosm of the Physical world. The revelation at this point is fundamentally Social. The expectations of the Law concern external obedience. The fight against evil is a fight against its expression in the flesh, both within Israel and through holy wars with other nations. When Israel sins, the flood that comes is not water, but the restless sea of the nations, first Babylon, then Rome. This explains why the prophets use “creation” language in their “social” judgments. The wrath against all flesh would fall upon a “firstfruits,” Israel as God’s firstborn. [2]

The final world model was Christ (“Now is the judgment of this world” [John 12:31]). In Jesus’ baptism and the giving of the Spirit at Pentecost (head and body), history moved from a Social architecture (based upon circumcision) to an Ethical revelation. Consequently, the Law also changed. The “external” Laws of Moses were replaced by the indwelling Law of Christ, expressed in the Sermon on the Mount.

The serpent was finally crushed, and the revelation given to us now is the mind of Christ, not an inflexible moral code but an organic, living, adaptable one (which is why the Pharisees had so much trouble with Jesus — they did not understand the Spirit of the Law). Jesus fulfilled the ethical demands of the “Social law” and began the age of a different kind of Ethics, the era of obedience in the Spirit. [3]

History in Adam

Jesus, as a blameless Adam, became the mouth of God, The Prophet Like Moses (Deuteronomy 18:15-19; John 1:20-21). He breathed on His disciples with natural breath, a liturgical act prefiguring their reception of the breath of the supernatural Spirit after His ascension. He was the first “Angel of the Lord” who not only took on human form, but took that human form, that flesh, justified, into heaven, to represent the entire earth in the heavenly court (see Part 1). He then shared that Spirit with the disciples who would be a new kind of “heavenly visitor,” founding a new microcosmic Social model, the Church.

So, the pattern of the history of mankind follows the shape founded in the creation of Adam.

Now, although the process is chiastic, it is also a progression. As with all good chiasms, the correspondences in the second half are developments upon their counterparts in the first half. Eve is a “development” beyond Adam. He is protological. She is eschatalogical.

So the original Physical world of Adam and Noah was not as glorious as will be the final Physical restoration. Moreover, and here’s the rub, the Social world of Israel-according-to-the-flesh was not as glorious as this fragrant new Social world of the Church. If we overlay this “all history” cycle upon the process we observed in Genesis 2:7, we can see that Israel is to the Church as the formed shape of Adam in the dust was to Adam breathing, speaking, naming. Of course, the same pattern is found in Adam’s qualification for the heavenly breath.

Since the process in the cycle above is cumulative (as is the entire Bible), we should modify it to express this.

The Spirit becomes the heart of a new society, then that new Spirit-filled society becomes the heart of a new physical order. We see this prefigured in God’s Ethical preparation of Israel before her inheritance of the Land of Canaan. But the first Pentecost was a Pentecost of death. It was much like the disqualification of Adam, who like Aaron, failed to speak against the shiny beast and his strange fire. The Last Pentecost changed everything.

The new social body is not like the old social body which concerned the cutting of flesh. It is a body of those indwelt by the Spirit because their hearts have been cut. It is not about the cutting of Adam to construct a bride (circumcision). This New Covenant body does what Adam was supposed to do. It does not represent the Physical creation to God, nor represent a “forming” Social moral code to its counterpart. Filled with the Spirit, it represents God to the Social and Physical orders with plenipotent authority — the mind of Christ. [4] Baptism is about mediation and representation as a co-regent with Christ. The New Covenant sociology is entirely different to the Old. It works from within, not from without.

As mentioned, to complete the chiasm the physical order must be restored. This is not what we are working towards because it is beyond our power. Those who want to argue about “Natural Law” are confused about the triune construction of reality. Natural Law is still corrupted, as reflected in our own bodies, in the animal kingdom, and in the corrupting autonomy of certain “natural” processes, which have become laws unto themselves. Our domain is Social. It is the transformation of individuals and culture. The natural laws themselves, and indeed the “natural breath,” are still instruments of cursing, which is why the last enemy that will be destroyed is death, when every natural mouth will be stopped. AD70 was only the end of the old Social order, not the end of the corrupted physical order, although each level is a type of the other. (The “Covenant Creationists”, confusing the “social” flood of AD70 with the “physical” flood of Noah, want to cut the beginning and end off this chiastic process. [5])

History as architecture

The difference between the Abrahamic social model and the Christian one is the difference between the Bronze Altar (earthy – sacrifice of blood) and the Incense Altar (heavenly: elders – sacrifice of praise). It, like Adam’s prophecy, is the move “from silence to song” which we see prefigured in the breaking up of the Mosaic Tabernacle and its reconstruction as the Tabernacle of David.

Between these two altars is the Laver, water contained in bronze, a purifying “lake of fire.” All this leads to my point, which concerns the definition of what a Christian is in the light of the architecture of the Scriptures. If baptism defines the Church as a “slightly upgraded” Abrahamic body, so that it includes infants, what did Pentecost achieve? Is the Church just a corpse washed? Or is there also an Ethical transformation, a new nature received as a gift and heralded by faithful confession?

If the Church is basically the same kind of body as Old Covenant Israel, then Pentecost did nothing. Membership of the “body” begins with faithfulness to a moral code rather than with the indwelling of a moral life, the Spirit of God. Paedobaptism makes nonsense of the architecture inherent in every passage, at every level, of the Bible.

If we follow the order intended in Eden, the gift of the Holy Ghost can only be received by those who have taken the first step of obedience, the one upon which Adam stumbled. This is exactly what we see in Jesus’ baptism. The Father’s pleasure was due to His prior obedience. He was certainly blameless before then, as Adam’s children would have been, but the actual gift of “representing God to others” is for those who truly image God and are subsequently given the authority of God.

In the Old Testament, we see the Spirit “coming upon” certain people to gift them for service, but never an “indwelling” of their flesh. The only indwelt house was the one which was truly clean, the Tabernacle, beginning with its foundation in the sacrifices of Abraham for the Land of Canaan [6]. Not only was the Law external but lawful cleanliness was external. Jesus was the first clean human, and the first permanently clean house. Israel, on the whole, fixated with the externals based upon circumcision, a Social divide, rejected Him, blaspheming the Spirit, and she was filled with demons instead.

To claim that New Covenant conversion and baptism does not follow the same pattern found in every other “forming and filling” process found in the Bible is to ride roughshod over the ways of God. Fire and water, baptism and the Spirit, are for mediators between heaven and earth, for the elders, prophets, witnesses, musicians who are not only welcome in God’s court, but welcome the nations (including infants) into God’s court that they may minister to them.

So when you are tempted to baptize an infant, it is the flesh lusting against the Spirit. It the claiming of a spiritual inheritance through fleshly, unethical means: prophesying “peace” when there is no peace. The New Covenant is about those who are indwelt by God, not those who “set apart” and cut the flesh in mere anticipation, as did the Jews.

Those who maintained an allegiance to the first Pentecost over the second, and held onto an an obsolete genealogical inheritance from an earthly father, also rejected peace with God and true sonship. Because they were unwilling to be a blessing to all nations, the other promises, the open Land and the open womb, were taken away (Matthew 13:12). Contrary to the delusions of paedobaptists, the New Covenant is not about a pregnant Woman but a resurrected, ascended, prophetic Man.

While people are saying, “There is peace and security,” then sudden destruction will come upon them as labor pains come upon a pregnant woman, and they will not escape. (1 Thessalonians 5:3)

What peace there is, is not fundamentally Social. It is fundamentally ethical, spiritual. It is announced, by the Gospel, from God in heaven to the ears of our children on earth from our own clean lips as baptized mediators, those who are hybrids of heaven and earth, New Covenant “angels.” [7] All the Lord’s people are now prophets, as Moses desired. The true Church is not only visible and tangible, it is audible. It is not only formed but filled and prophesying the future. The Scriptures never confuse or conflate the speakers with the hearers, and neither must we. Paedobaptism is the carnal expression of carnal thinking, confusing bone and flesh with witness, protology with eschatology, Delegation with Vindication.

Those who are in the flesh cannot please God. You, however, are not in the flesh but in the Spirit, if in fact the Spirit of God dwells in you. Anyone who does not have the Spirit of Christ does not belong to him. (Romans 8:8-9)

We must not be like those who confused their Physical, Social circumcision with the Ethical circumcision, the repentance required by God.

They have healed the wound of my people lightly,
saying, ‘Peace, peace,’ when there is no peace.
(Jeremiah 6:14; 8:11)

Art: Bryan Ahn, Sermon on the Mount
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[1] See Bible Matrix II: The Covenant Key for the reasons behind this architectural arrangement of the Ten Words. See also No Common Ground for their systematic (architectural) reversal by the secular state.
[2] See Cosmic Language.
[3] See The Ethics of the New Testament.
[4] See Images of God.
[5] See Covenant Creationism.
[6] See A Man of Beasts.
[7] See Shekinah People.

“Because narrow is the gate and difficult is the way which leads to life, and there are few who find it.”  Matthew 7:14

Oh dear. This verse proves postmillennialism wrong. It also proves the rest of the Bible wrong because that is postmillennial too. Fortunately, this problem seems almost as simple to deal with as Irenaeus’ ambiguous text that non-preterists use to “unfound” preterism.[1]

Jesus built the sermon on the mount upon the Bible Matrix pattern. [2] Why wouldn’t He? He is the living Word without Whom nothing was made that was made (heptamerous Creation). He is Yahweh Who led Israel from Egypt to the promised Land (heptamerous Dominion). He is the fulfilment of all the annual festivals of the nation (heptamerous Feasts).

At this point in the sermon, the Lord has reached Yom Kippur. It is also Day 6, Adam standing at the door as mediator; it is Joshua as Captain crossing through the Jordan (the Laver), choosing between blessing and cursing at Mounts Ebal and Gerizim (a veil split in two) and letting Canaanite blood sate the horns of the “four-cornered” Land.

The narrow gate was guarded by real cherubim, God’s bouncers, veiled from the eye of every priest but One, guarded again by cherubim sewn into the tent curtains, and again by the Aaronic priesthood, who incidentally carried swords to deal with any man or beast that dared to approach.

When Jesus said the way was narrow and difficult, this is what He meant. It was a tunnel in the Temple of Doom.

It’s not that this narrow gate is now obsolete. There are still guards on the door – the saints – but as the body of Christ grows to fill the earth, so does the door. It is still difficult, but no longer narrow. Or should be say that it is still narrow but increasingly ubiquitous? It is anywhere faithful, vocal saints find bread, wine and water.

“See, I have set before you an open door, and no one can shut it; for you have a little strength, have kept My word, and have not denied My name.” Revelation 3:8

The “harlot” is also an open door, a narrow door given wide appeal through compromise. She wears the robes (veils) of chaste religion to cover her  nocturnal “inclusiveness.” Her forehead says “all-embracing” to men but “SLUT” to God. If we are postmillennial, we believe that as history progresses, the “narrow” door will eclipse the wide way. The other woman always ends up alone and destitute. As Solomon said, it is she who is the true Temple of Doom. [3]

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[1] David Chilton’s brief mention of this in The Days of Vengeance [A4 PDF] led Kenneth Gentry to write a big book about it: Before Jerusalem Fell. Gentry makes an, I believe, irrefutable case for a pre-AD70 date of authorship of the Revelation.

[2] You can see the whole thing in my book, Totus Christus. Interestingly, the Lord’s prayer follows the pattern as a”seven-sealed scroll” within the larger pattern (the sermon), which is also the “Deuteronomy” of an even larger pattern that covers the first section of Matthew’s gospel.

[3] See Godly Intolerance.

[Jesus] was a master of ready speech and witty repartee, but most of the sayings that have come down to us bear every sign of careful preparation. They have the qualities of poetry, and with the aid of paradox, exaggerations, or play on words, were cast in such a shape as would enable them to find their way into the dullest mind and stay there.

His way of putting things was as original as the things themselves. He told his disciples to say: ‘We are unprofitable servants. We have done our duty.’ Who but he would have avoided the less memorable wording, ‘We have only done our duty’? In fact he chose his wording to make people use their brains, and his biographers have faithfully recorded its peculiarities, seldom venturing to ‘correct’ him when he looks down on mortal time from the high viewpoint of eternity and uses the present tense for past and future events.

He was a learned man, who knew the ancient Hebrew writ by heart. And though, as far as we know, he wrote nothing for publication, he was a man of letters too, for his parables are literary masterpieces. They had to be, or the lessons they conveyed would never have sunk in.

And they are full of quiet humour. The crowds must often have laughed. But did Jesus himself laugh? Later writers say that he did; but the Gospels leave us only to read between the lines and yearn for some record of a lighter-hearted moment. He was certainly no glum ascetic, and when he joined these easy-living friends of his to enjoy a glass of wine with them, what was his conversation? Again, we have no reports. Yet it must have been irresistible charm or they would not afterwards have not gathered around ‘to hear him speak’.

From the Introduction to The Four Gospels – A New Translation by E. V. Rieu for Penguin Classics
Read Translators’ Impressions:http://www.bullartistry.com.au/pdf_bestill/037BeStill.pdf

Jesus begins with the Sabbath rest of those who have a humble spirit, works through those who mourn for their sins at Passover, and ends with the Atonement covering of the blood of those who would be persecuted yet to be shed on the Land. And at Tabernacles, their reward is in heaven.

The next cycle follows the seven speeches of God concerning the construction of the Tabernacle (Exodus 25-31), which in turn follow the seven days of the Creation week. He begins with the saints as salt (which is symbolically solid fire) and Light. He deals with anger, lust and reconciliation before God in the firmament (the Holy Place between the veil and the Laver). He gives us the Lord’s prayer at the Altar (the Land), and speaks about the eye being the Lamp (governing lights) of the body. Flocks of birds and fields of lilies and grass are clouds of Incense (I know it sounds a bit odd but there is much more Old Testament background to this one. Israel’s armies, as the Lord’s enrobing church, were summoned at Trumpets.) The saints are to be wise, self-examining judges, as Adam the High Priest, and not waste the truth on unclean animals - dogs (faithless Jews) and pigs (faithless Gentiles) who would return to attack both Jesus and the church. Finally, at Tabernacles, Jesus speaks about fruitless trees and thornbushes being cut down and incinerated. True rest would come to the believing Jews and Gentiles united at the fulfilment of this feast.

All of which supports a great deal of preparation – and of course the inspiration of the Spirit – in Jesus’ role as prophet, the living, walking Word of God.

(Also note that Jesus’ “woes” upon the Pharisees follow the same pattern, but in a negative sense.)

“Leave your gift there before the altar, and go your way. First be reconciled to your brother, and then come and offer your gift.” Matthew 5:24

Interestingly, these blessings are mirrored by the curses upon the saints’ evil twins in Matthew 23, the Jews who sat in Moses’ seat of judgment.2 The “woes” follow exactly the same pattern, and climax with Christ’s prophecy of the destruction of the Old Covenant Temple. And what do we find in this passage at Day 3?

They cross Land and Sea to make one disciple for their corrupted religion, and make him twice the child of Gehenna as themselves. “Ge-Henna” is Greek for the despised Valley of Hinnom southwest of Jerusalem, the previous location of Tophet’s child sacrifices that became an open, mass grave during the Babylonian siege. It was made the rubbish dump, full of maggots, with the refuse continually burning.

Jesus quotes Isaiah 66:23-24 to describe it. Just like the Babylonians, the Romans would besiege the city. This time the invading armies would trap Jews from all over the empire who were in Jerusalem for Passover. Their unclean “Table” was made a snare, and Gehenna was filled with the bodies of these deceived “children” of corrupt Judaism. Like Jeroboam’s evil altar, it would be defiled with bones, and their world would be destroyed in a “flood” (Daniel 9:26).

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TAOTA