“…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. 

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The Bible is big on mediators. Adam’s role as faithful Showbread would link heaven and earth. He would be a god-man. Fulfilled by Christ, this is the liturgical role of a minister. He faces God as representative of the Bride, and faces the church as the representative of the Bridegroom. He is Solomon at the completion of the Temple dedication.

The ‘hell’ hybrids are the Land-beasts of the Bible. This is what Adam became, conspiring with Satan. It was an unholy alliance between God’s mediator and the Creation, in which the Creation called the agenda. The resulting peoples are hunters like Nimrod and Esau, wolves instead of shepherds, bloodthirsty children of the daughters of men.

Revelation shows the unholy alliance between Herod and Pilate (as heads) matured into full-grown bodies. The Land Beast is allied to the Sea Beast (Nero’s Satanic Rome) with Rome calling the shots.

The Bible is big on intermarriage. The Herodian line was an attempt at intermarriage between the Temple and the Roman State. Solomon’s marriage to an Egyptian was godly, because Solomon called the shots. His later marriages were ungodly, because he was no longer calling the agenda according to the Law of God.

Herod’s Jew/Gentile intermarriage was a counterfeit parallel of the one being painstakingly sewn together by Paul. Revelation is about the marriage of Paul’s ‘Esther’, and the despatching of ‘Greater Herodias.’ It portrays the Herods as a false Solomon with the symbol of 666.

The Bible begins with waters above and waters below. Symbolically, this becomes the crystal sea above, and the Gentile nations below. The rulers on the crystal sea call the agenda concerning the nations.

The mediator is now Christ’s crystal city. Totally faithful, since AD70 she is beyond reproach. Her pattern is being measured out on the earth by faithful churches.

Churches down here, however, are not beyond reproach. Churches are always mediators, for heaven or hell. They are always spiritual doorways. If, like the Pharisees, they close the door to seekers, there is still a door open–the one to outer darkness.

What is the nature of your church’s alliances? Who is calling the agenda in your church? Is it coming from above or below? Is it a flow of living water or Wormwood? Is it distributing the broken bread and poured out wine of the Man-Table, or a false promise of Dominion without sacrifice? Are the elders fathers or manipulators, Abrahams or Nimrods?

Intermarriage is God’s plan for the world, but it is the marriage of Joseph, Boaz and faithful Solomon, heavenly hybrids that produce godly warriors through the daughters of men.

De-Ascension – the Temple judged

The third angel blew his trumpet, and a great star fell from heaven, blazing like a torch, 

After the ascension of Christ, Satan was expelled from his “ministry” before God as the Accuser of man. Like the evil twin of the blazing torch that measured Abram’s sacrifices, he was then used by God to bring an end to the Covenant.

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 people died from the water, because it had been made bitter.

These first three trumpets concerned the Land (Judah), the Sea (the world empire) and the springs of water (the Temple). This same order began the song of ascension, Psalm 24:

“The [Land] is the Lord’s and the fullness thereof, the world and those who dwell therein, for he has founded it upon the seas and established it upon the rivers.”

These three levels describe the garden of Eden as it was recreated in the Restoration. The firmament above the empire extended over the Land of Israel and the Sea of the nations. Springs of water came up from under the Land (Genesis 2:6) to support the life of the Temple. From there, a single river flowed from the Laver towards the east, towards Babylon. Like Solomon in his marriages, Judah began imitating the daughters of men instead of converting them by her witness. The doctrines of the empire were flowing upstream into the Temple. But with the coming of Christianity, the inadvertent sin became “high-handed”

and God gave them up to their demonic teachings (Mark 7:7; Titus 1:14). James Jordan writes:

“The bitter waters are the poisonous doctrine that flows from the corrupted Temple, in contrast to the laver of cleansing water that God had put there. Here also we find the first of the seven names of Satan in Revelation: Wormwood, a poisonous plant.”1

The reference to wormwood is high calibre and loaded. It takes us back again to the curses upon idolaters in Deuteronomy 29 (v. 18). It also brings the Edomite (Esau) Herods into the picture as the visible cause of the bitterness through their “marriages” with the daughters of men—Hellenistic Rome (Genesis 26:35)2. In Exodus 1, Pharaoh made the Hebrews’ lives bitter with hard bondage. In the wilderness, the Israelites faced death because the waters were bitter (Marah). In Ruth 1, Naomi wanted to be called Mara (bitter) because the Lord had made her barren. There are others, but the most significant might be Numbers 5. The priest administered “the bitter water that brings a curse” to the woman suspected of adultery.

Joseph’s Mara (Mary) was innocent, but Herod’s harlot was guilty.

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1  James B. Jordan, The Vindication of Jesus Christ, p. 49-50.
2  Literally translated, Esau’s wives were “bitterness of spirit” to Isaac and Rebekah.