Here’s the first of my replies to Brian’s contentions. I’ve put a 50 Failed Predictions? link under featured articles so all posts in this series are easy to find.

1. The bodies and souls of the wicked were not thrown into Gehenna (Matt. 10: 28).

Gehenna was the Valley of Hinnom. It was the site of the child sacrifices before the exile. The Lord atoned for this shedding of innocent blood to false gods by filling it with the bodies of the idolaters—a mass grave. Then the Land was ceremonially clean. Fittingly, Ge-Hinnom was the site of Jeremiah’s terrifying threats in Jeremiah 18, which Paul draws upon in Romans 9:21.

Jesus’ context in Matthew 10 is the witness of the apostles. They too would be slaughtered—more innocent blood to appease the synagogue of Satan that Herodian worship would become. Because the Herods “revived” the slaughters of Tophet (begun with the slaughter of the innocent infant boys), Jesus would revive the Valley of Hinnom and fill it with corpses under Rome as He did under Nebuchadnezzar.

The point of His comment is that the apostles would be resurrected—the first resurrection. They would ascend robed in fire and smoke as the first goat of atonement. But the rest of the dead would not be revived until the second resurrection. Like Judas before them, Judah would be sent by Christ from the supper of the Lamb.

Just as Judas the man pictured the fate of Judah the nation, Herod was “eaten with worms” on his throne as a human Gehenna.

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See also Children of Tophet,  The Altar of the Abyss – 4, The Rest of the Dead.

2. The beast wasn’t taken alive at the destruction of Jerusalem (Rev. 19: 20). According to Prets, he committed suicide in A.D. 68.

This is a fantastic observation. It highlights where many preterists go wrong in identification of the man of sin, the Land Beast. The man of sin is a blemished “Adam”, one who stands before God as a mediator without an acceptable shedding of blood. Instead of a “Land-Man”, Herod’s Jew-Gentile hybrid kingdom was a “Land-Beast.” Nero’s Rome was the Sea Beast, empowered by Satan to slay the saints after Jewish persectution and false doctrine failed to halt the progress of the Jew-Gentile church.

The Bible begins with Adam, Eve and the serpent as “heads” of the Creation in the Garden Tabernacle. It ends with the fullgrown “bodies” of these three–a false prophet, a harlot and  beast in Herod’s completed but corrupt Temple. The structure of Revelation 19, like all of Revelation, follows the Bible matrix pattern. The lake of fire appears where the Laver should be. The true sons of God stand on the crystal sea, purified by the Laver. For the false sons, the “holy water” is like acid.

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See also The Man of Sin, That Which is Perfect, The Second Death.

50FPDZ

Matthew 23:15 “Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you travel land and sea to win one proselyte, and when he is won, you make him twice as much a son of Gehenna as yourselves.”

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 seige. It became the rubbish dump, full of maggots, with the refuse continually burning. Jesus quotes Isaiah 66:23-24 to describe it. The Roman siege would begin when Jews from all over the empire were in Jerusalem for Passover. Their “Table” was made a snare, and Gehenna was filled with the bodies of these deceived “children.”

“And another angel came out from the altar, the angel who has authority over the fire, and he called with a loud voice to the one who had the sharp sickle, “Put in your sickle and gather the clusters from the vine of the Land, for its grapes are ripe.” So the angel swung his sickle across the Land and gathered the grape harvest of the Land and threw it into the great winepress of the wrath of God. And the winepress was trodden outside the city, and blood flowed from the winepress, as high as a horse’s bridle, for 1,600 stadia.” Revelation 14:18-20

Like Pharaoh, the “plagues” Trumpet warnings only hardened the hearts of the Jewish leaders. Like Pharaoh, he had raised up the Herods only to demonstrate His power in their destruction (Romans 9:17).

Their final response, when under siege, was to scapegoat the Christian converts in the city. This massacre of Christians in the middle of this final “week” of Judaism is the subject of Revelation 14. Jesus forgave His murderers, but for the murder of His bride in the same manner, He would not forgive. James Jordan writes:

“…the fact that the wine press is outside the city is not a sign of judgment but of union with Christ. The saints die as their Master did. In fact, Hebrews 13:12-13 makes the association clear: “Therefore Jesus also, that He might sanctify the people through His own blood, suffered outside the gate; hence let us go out to Him outside the camp, bearing His reproach.”

Bearing His reproach to the ultimate extent means martyrdom. Moreover, Jesus had predicted that the saints would be put out of the synagogues (John 16:2), and in Acts 8:1 they were driven from the city (compare Revelation 12:14, which speaks of the same event). Thus, dying outside the city is not a symbol of judgment but of blessing, for the city in 14:20 has already been identified as apostate Jerusalem (11:8).”1

Mother Israel was giving birth to a son of man (the totus Christus), and in childbirth she would die. The body of the sacrifice was now following the head, fulfilling the Law (Lev. 1).

For Mother Babylon, however, it was an issue of blood that made the Land ceremonially unclean and called up the Avenger upon all her firstborn, men and animals.2

Symbolically, the entire four-square Land was flooded to its uttermost edges with the blood of the saints. The Ark lid was covered with blood after the first goat ascended.

It was time to deal with the second goat—Judas—in the Field of Blood. The Jews had revived Tophet. Using the Roman armies, Jesus was about to revive the Valley of Hinnom, Gehenna. TAOTA

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1  See James B. Jordan, The Grape Harvest of Revelation 14:17-20 .
2  See Genesis 4:10; Exodus 1:22; 7:20; 12:23; Numbers 35:9-34; Deuteronomy 21:1-9.