He Came as a Thief in the Night

As we know, God not only gives prophets teachings to share with the Church but also uses them as neon reprogrammable billboards to express matters like the spiritual health or unhealthiness of the Church. When we covered the meaning of bricks as spiritual falsehoods, we looked at how the Lord told Ezekiel to draw Jerusalem on a brick to represent their spiritual darkness; and then to play-act besieging the city with divine truth. He told other prophets to behave similarly. Jeremiah, for instance, got told not to marry: "2 Thou shalt not take thee a wife, neither shalt thou have sons or daughters in this place. 3 For thus saith the Lord concerning the sons and concerning the daughters that are born in this place, and concerning their mothers that bare them, and concerning their fathers that begat them in this land; 4 They shall die of grievous deaths; they shall not be lamented; neither shall they be buried; but they shall be as dung upon the face of the earth: and they shall be co...

In Isaiah we read: "Thus saith the Lord to his anointed, to Cyrus, whose right hand I have holden, to subdue nations before him; and I will loose the loins of kings, to open before him the two leaved gates; and the gates shall not be shut; 2 I will go before thee, and make the crooked places straight: I will break in pieces the gates of brass, and cut in sunder the bars of iron: 3 And I will give thee the treasures of darkness, and hidden riches of secret places, that thou mayest know that I, the Lord, which call thee by thy name, am the God of Israel" (Isaiah 45:1-3). In the literal sense this passage appears to refer to the historical Cyrus, a monarch of the Persians. But as usual, we do not want the plinth but the statue; we do not want the literal sense but the spiritual sense of prophecy.  Spiritually, then, this passage involves the Lord's representing Himself with the personage Cyrus. The Word very frequently uses some personage such as Cyrus or Zerubbabel here to ...

The sharp, two-edged sword of the Word lays bare what is sinful and excusing of sin, inspires us to shun these, and implants what is good and true in their places. It is not an ordinary document but an intricate interface. Jeremiah 1:10 - King James Version (KJV) <10> See, I have this day set thee over the nations and over the kingdoms, to root out, and to pull down, and to destroy, and to throw down, to build, and to plant. Nations pertain to the heart and peoples to the mind. This verse confers authority over sins and errors, authority to rebuke and shun them; that in their places, in their nice clean empty places, the good and truth of the Lord may enter and marry. We are neither married nor given in marriage but as the angels of Heaven when the plate is clean and the cup is clean and the bread is hot and the wine is light and the divine love of the Lord marries the divine truth of the Lord in our souls. To root out has to do with loves; in this case evil loves. It is over nat...

 We have briefly touched on the meaning of nations and peoples, a very frequent double expression in the Word, as being either goods and truths or those in them; or contrarily sins and errors and those in them. The driving out of the nations of Canaan here, sometimes abbreviated Canaanites and Perizzites, involves the driving out of sins and errors from the Church and from the individual: "20 Behold, I send an Angel before thee, to keep thee in the way, and to bring thee into the place which I have prepared. 21 Beware of him, and obey his voice, provoke him not; for he will not pardon your transgressions: for my name is in him. 22 But if thou shalt indeed obey his voice, and do all that I speak; then I will be an enemy unto thine enemies, and an adversary unto thine adversaries. 23 For mine Angel shall go before thee, and bring thee in unto the Amorites, and the Hittites, and the Perizzites, and the Canaanites, the Hivites, and the Jebusites: and I will cut them off. 24 Thou shalt...

Today we will cover positive and negative senses of cannibalism in the Word; not obviously to be gross but because the Word mentions both senses frequently. Everyone even superficially familiar with the Gospel knows that believers effectively eat His flesh and drink His blood; which has been amply explained as making His love and excuses to be loving (or divine truth) a part of our spiritual bodies. So we will look first at the Lord's Sermon on Flesh and Blood, where He says: "Verily, verily, I say unto you, Except ye eat the flesh of the Son of man, and drink his blood, ye have no life in you" (John 6:53). He continues in the same vein, and He obviously means that we are to make His love and teachings part of ourselves. For: "He that eateth my flesh, and drinketh my blood, dwelleth in me, and I in him" (John 6:56). This familiar language representing a network of knowing love between God and all who worship Him in spirit and truth has simply been expressed usin...

Today we will look at a subject dear to my heart, and dear to the heart of every religious person whose heart is not made out of stone: the fate of people who die in other religions than that of the Church. The typical doctrine that people hear from supposed Christian teachers goes something like this: people can only be saved if they convert to Christianity. Some of these 'teachers' will mumble a bit of add-on about 'only God knowing their hearts', and they are well to do this! Because it is correct, and they should not simply, pointblank say that people of other religions go to Hell after they die as too many say and believe. The common verse quoted to 'prove' the assertion that people who die in other religions go to Hell comes from Acts: "Salvation is found in no one else, for there is no other name under heaven given to mankind by which we must be saved" (Acts 4:12). If people only have the literal sense to go by, then even if they do have hearts ...