Commentaries and Podcasts

Matthew Chapter 24, Part 2 - 2011-08-19

Last week we ended with Luke's version of the discourse given by Christ which is found here at Matthew 24:15-22. In Luke we saw the exact historical fulfillment, as recorded by the historian Flavius Josephus, of Christ's words as they are recorded at Luke 21:20-25, concerning the forecast destruction of Jerusalem. Yet it is evident that Christ must have given a longer statement, and that Luke's record of it focused more specifically on what was said about Jerusalem, while the accounts of the discourse recorded by Matthew and Mark relate a more general prophecy.

Matthew 24 15 Therefore when you should see the abomination of desolation, which was spoken by Daniel the prophet, standing in the holy place he reading must understand 16 then those who are in Judaea must flee into the mountains; 17 he upon the house-top must not go down to take his things from the house, 18 and he in the field must not turn back to take his garment. 19 But woe to those being pregnant and those with infants in those days! 20 And you must pray that your flight should not be in winter nor on the Sabbath. 21 For at that time there shall be great tribulation, such as has not happened from the beginning of Society until now, nor by any means should happen! 22 And unless those days would be shortened, there would not be any flesh saved. But on account of the elect shall those days be shortened.

Matthew Chapter 24 - 2011-08-12

Last week we saw at the end of Matthew Chapter 23 that Christ exclaimed to the Judaeans “Behold, your house is left to you desolate!” We then saw from Daniel 9:24-27 that Christ was really only confirming something that Yahweh had long ago prophesied through Daniel. Here I shall repeat Daniel 9:24-27 once again, which is Daniel's 70-Weeks Prophecy concerning the advent of the Messiah: “24 Seventy weeks are determined upon thy people and upon thy holy city, to finish the transgression, and to make an end of sins, and to make reconciliation for iniquity, and to bring in everlasting righteousness, and to seal up the vision and prophecy, and to anoint the most Holy. 25 Know therefore and understand, that from the going forth of the commandment to restore and to build Jerusalem unto the Messiah the Prince shall be seven weeks, and threescore and two weeks: the street shall be built again, and the wall, even in troublous times. 26 And after threescore and two weeks shall Messiah be cut off, but not for himself: and the people of the prince that shall come shall destroy the city and the sanctuary; and the end thereof shall be with a flood, and unto the end of the war desolations are determined. 27 And he shall confirm the covenant with many for one week: and in the midst of the week he shall cause the sacrifice and the oblation to cease, and for the overspreading of abominations he shall make it desolate, even until the consummation, and that determined shall be poured upon the desolate.” Christ then exclaimed “For I say to you, by no means may you see Me from now until you should say ‘Blessed is He coming in the name of Yahweh’!” But His triumphant march into Jerusalem had already happened prior to this statement, and therefore those words must have yet another fulfillment.

XXIII 1 Then Yahshua spoke to the crowds and to His students 2 saying: “The scribes and the Pharisees sit upon the seat of Moses. 3 Therefore all things whatever they should tell you, you do and you keep. But according to their deeds you do not do. For they say and do not do.

The seat of Moses is the seat of authority in Judaea. Many Christians, being rebellious, do not like this, but Yahshua Christ was indeed telling His students to submit to the worldly authority. One lesson which is fully evident throughout the Old Testament is that God uses worldly authority to punish a sinful people. And when that happens, even the good people among them suffer on account of it. The children of Israel did evil before Yahweh on many occasions, and He gave them over to both wicked rulers and other nations. 

Judges 10:7-8: 7 And the anger of the LORD was hot against Israel, and he sold them into the hands of the Philistines, and into the hands of the children of Ammon. 8 And that year they vexed and oppressed the children of Israel: eighteen years, all the children of Israel that were on the other side Jordan in the land of the Amorites, which is in Gilead.

Deuteronomy 28:28-34, and the consequences, or curses, that result from disobedience to God warn us of these things: 28 The LORD shall smite thee with madness, and blindness, and astonishment of heart: 29 And thou shalt grope at noonday, as the blind gropeth in darkness, and thou shalt not prosper in thy ways: and thou shalt be only oppressed and spoiled evermore, and no man shall save thee. 30 Thou shalt betroth a wife, and another man shall lie with her: thou shalt build an house, and thou shalt not dwell therein: thou shalt plant a vineyard, and shalt not gather the grapes thereof. 31 Thine ox shall be slain before thine eyes, and thou shalt not eat thereof: thine ass shall be violently taken away from before thy face, and shall not be restored to thee: thy sheep shall be given unto thine enemies, and thou shalt have none to rescue them. 32 Thy sons and thy daughters shall be given unto another people, and thine eyes shall look, and fail with longing for them all the day long: and there shall be no might in thine hand. 33 The fruit of thy land, and all thy labours, shall a nation which thou knowest not eat up; and thou shalt be only oppressed and crushed always: 34 So that thou shalt be mad for the sight of thine eyes which thou shalt see.

Matthew Chapter 22 - Christogenea on Talkshoe 07-29-2011

Among the things which we spoke about last week, it was demonstrated from the parable of the vineyard workers, and from Leviticus, how hard it is for us to keep the letter of the law in this day and age. And while Yahweh's eternal morals are encoded into the laws found in Leviticus and Deuteronomy, as well as the entire Bible, we easily lose sight of several Biblical truths. First, the law was created for the benefit of man, and not man for the sake of the law. Second, the Levitical laws were specifically given along with a priesthood to enforce them, for the purposes of the Israelite kingdom and its function in relationship to Yahweh its God. When Israel was divorced from God for its constant unfaithfulness, the entire nation being under the law was liable to the judgement of the law, and therefore the entire nation was liable to death. Yahweh preserved the nation according to His law, as He promised, by dying on behalf of it, thereby freeing the nation from the law of its (or allegorically her) husband! That is what Paul explains in Romans chapter 7. Now we live not under the law, but under the favor – the grace – of our God. We are told that if we love Him, we keep His commandments. Those commandments are not found in the Letter of the hundreds of old laws. They are found in the ten commandments, which encapsulate the Spirit of the Hebrew law, along with the few things which the apostles clarified and the admonition to love our brethren. The law was our – the Israelite nation's – tutor for Christ, as Paul explains in Galatians chapter 4. The Hebrew laws are our ideal, but since none of us can live in this world and strictly keep them, we do not judge our brethren by them. This is proven over and again in Paul and the epistles from the other apostles and the Gospels. 

Matthew Chapters 20 and 21 - 2011-07-22

There is one aspect of Matthew chapter 19, verses 27 and 28, which I did not discuss last week. That is where Peter says to Christ: “Look, we have left everything and have followed You! What then is there for us?” 28 And Yahshua said to them: “Truly I say to you that you are those who shall be following Me in the regeneration, when the Son of Man shall sit upon the throne of His honor, and you also shall sit upon twelve thrones judging the twelve tribes of Israel!” Note that there is never any mention in any of these eschatalogical sayings of Christ about “Israel and the beasts of the field” or “Israel and the Chinese” or “Israel and the Africans”. That is because it is simply not true, and whoever teaches such a thing deceives himself. Yahshua said in John chapter 3 that “unless a man should be born from above, he is not able to see the Kingdom of Yahweh.” Only the Adamic Man has that Spirit of Yahweh which makes him born from above, and in the image and likeness of God. In 1 John chapter 4 that same apostle tells us that we are born of God, as Adam our father also was, and the others are born of the world. We are from above, and all who are not of us are from below. Therefore none of the others shall ever see the Kingdom of Heaven when it is instituted on earth! How can one claim to be a Christian Israelite faithful in the Scriptures, and pronounce otherwise? He is a liar and a fraud!

Matthew Chapters 18 and 19 - 2011-07-15

Last week we discussed once more the Canaanite woman and why Yahshua healed her daughter. Then we discussed the sign of Jonah, the leaven of the Pharisees, the apostles' belief that Yahshua was the Christ as well as the expectation of the coming of the Messiah which was prevalent in Judaea at that time. We also touched upon the phrase “the gates of Hades” and the belief in life after death as it was held by all branches of our race, evident again in the event known as the Transfiguration on the Mount. We also saw the non-scriptural belief of Herod and others in Judaea in reincarnation and we discussed what was meant by John the Baptist's having come in the “spirit of Elijah”. Then we discussed at length what Christ meant when He said that “If one desires to come behind Me, he must deny himself and take up his cross and follow Me!” We saw, as we presented for an example, how Germany's Christian government under Adolf Hitler actually built that precept into their political philosophy, that an individual should live for the sake of his nation, and devote his life to its well-being. If we all lived in such a manner, that we put the interests of our kinsmen ahead of our own, then we would have heaven indeed.

Very importantly, last week we also saw that the “restoration of all things” is in scripture the restoration of the children of Yahweh to the recognition of the covenants of their fathers, and in the context of Scripture it is nothing more than that. A lot of universalists in Christian identity somehow try to use this phrase, taken out of context, to promote their lies, but they cannot do so with any honesty and they may as well be Catholics. Christ said that the Elijah who is to come “shall restore all things” and when we read of the prophecy of him in Malachi, all we see is the restoration of Israel to their rightful place in the covenants and polity God.

Matthew Chapter 16 - 2011-07-08

Last week we talked about the Canaanite woman of Matthew chapter 15, which has long been a topic of controversy and a subject so often misinterpreted in Christian discourse. Here I have something further which I believe strengthens the arguments concerning the customs of the times and the traditional roles of the suppliant in relation to the man in authority. This is from the book, Clemency and Cruelty in the Roman World, by Melissa Barden Dowling, from the chapter entitled “Clemency and Cruelty Under the Julio-Claudians”, pages 169-170:

“Let them hate so long as they fear. Gaius Caligula’s policy toward those who offended him, and those who did not, was carried out in actions of open saevitia [brutality]. His use of fear as a tool of rulership, and his disinterest in even the appearance of mercy, stood in contrast to the averred principles of his predecessors and of most of his successors. For others, clementia [clemency] was the watchword, advertised by princeps. senators, and subjects alike. The reality of imperial crudelitas [cruelty] was inescapable, however, and the proclamations of imperial clemency were often loudest when an emperor's savagery was most sharply felt. Gaius departed from Augustus and Tiberius in discarding the careful assurances of clementia that softened their rule; Gaius's successors did not repeat his error. During the reigns of Claudius and Nero, the dialogue of clementia continued in both imperial and elite propaganda. In fact, the definition of clementia  developed further under the Julio-Claudians, surpassing the scope it had held under Augustus.

“It was under Nero that the first philosophy of clemency was described by Seneca. As part of his theory of mercy, Seneca constructed a parallel philosophy of cruelty, outlining the degrees of irrationality that underlie cruel actions and highlighting the contrasting benefits of clemency. From Gaius’s naked crudelitas: to a sophisticated philosophy of clemency, in the ]ulio-Claudian Age Romans experimented with the vocabulary of power and ultimately created a stronger ethic of mercy to offset the power of the emperor. The normalization of imperial advertisements of the clementia principis and the creation of a philosophy of virtus [manly virtue] incorporating clementia as an expression of a good man's success were the outstanding developments of the ideology and social history of the Early Empire. These developments and the emergence of a parallel philosophy of cruelty, in which the degradation of a man’s nature was expressed through his crudelitas [cruelty], are the focus of this chapter.... “

Christogenea on Talkshoe – Matthew Chapters 14 and 15, July 1st, 2011

XIV 1 At that time Herodas the Tetrarch had heard the report of Yahshua, 2 and he said to his servants: “This is Iohannes the Baptist! He has risen from the dead and for this reason works of power operate in him!”

This is the first time we have seen the name Herod since chapter 2, but this is not the same Herod. There are ten different men named Herod, all of the same family of Edomites, identified in the index to Whiston's Works of Josephus. That first Herod, whom the jews like to call “the great”, is better known as the usurping murderer of the Hasamoneans and the son of the Edomite Antipater. He died just a short time after the birth of Christ, about 1 or 2 BC. He was succeeded by his son, Herod Archelaus, who was so cruel that after only a few years the Romans took the kingdom from him and exiled him to Vienna in Gaul. From that point on Judaea was split into four pieces, and rulers called tetrarchs were set over them, a tetrarch being a ruler of a fourth. Rather, this is Herod Antipas, another son of the first Herod, and he and his brother Philip each received a tetrarchy from Rome.

Herod Antipas was tetrarch over Galilee and Peraea (which was just east of the Jordan). Philip was tetrarch of Gaulanitis, Trachonitis and Panaea, which were all north of Peraea and east of the Sea of Galilee. Some time after Philip's death, another Herod, named Agrippa, was by the emperor Caligula made a king of this tetrarchy, since Philip had left no sons. Herod Agrippa was a grandson of the first Herod by Aristobulus, a son whom Herod had put to death. It is Herod the tetrarch, however, Philip's brother, the Herod who had his brother's wife, who is the Herod so prominent in the Gospels during the ministry of Christ. When John the Baptist upbraided Herod for taking Philip's wife as his own, Philip was still alive – for which see Josephus, Antiquities, 18.5.4. This Herod the tetrarch was later banished to Spain by Caligula (who was emperor from 37-41 AD), and his tetrarchy was added to the kingdom of Herod Agrippa (Josephus, Wars, 2.9.6). It is Herod Agrippa whose death is described later, in Acts chapter 12.

Matthew Chapter 13 - 2011-06-24

Discussing Matthew chapter 12 last week, I think the principle lesson was the difference between Christ's interpretation of the Law, and that of the Pharisees. The Pharisees would claim to uphold the minute letter of the law to the greatest extremes, and often to the detriment of the common people. The examples set by Christ show that we first must have care for the predicament and needs of our brethren when they are in distress, and then we care for the law. Our brethren are more important than the letter of the law. The law is our ideal, but since we all fail to live up to it, we are grateful to have mercy in Christ. We must treat our brethren with the same mercy which we ourselves expect from Him. Therefore Christ, quoting Hosea, exclaimed that “It is mercy I desire , and not sacrifice”. [I hope to treat of this topic at length, from Paul's epistles to the Romans and to the Galatians, at Christogenea.net on my Open Forum program on Monday.]

This leads to another point which we saw Yahshua make last week, and that is at Matthew 12:31 where He said that “For this reason I say to you, every error and blasphemy shall be remitted for men, but blasphemy of the Spirit shall not be remitted.“ Last week I said, and I will elaborate again here, that there are people who claim to be Christian Identists, who deny the words of Paul where he says that “all Israel shall be saved”, or of Isaiah where he wrote Yahweh's promise that “all the seed of Israel shall be justified, and shall glory”. These same Pharisees, while they want to throw their own Israelite brethren into the lake of fire, they themselves do such things as engage in usury, enrich themselves by trading jewish securities, sell snake oil or engage and enrich beasts in business. They are no better than Judaean Pharisees or Romish Catholics. They need to extract the beams from their own eyes. Here Christ says, and I will quote the King James Version, that “All manner of sin and blasphemy shall be forgiven unto men: but the blasphemy against the Holy Ghost shall not be forgiven unto men.” Salvation is not for “good boys and girls”, but rather for the race of Israel only and entirely. That is the foundation of understanding the promises in Christ, because it is the express purpose behind His ministry and every promise of salvation made by God through the prophets. Yahweh promised to cleanse all of the sin of Israel, and makes no exception. Advocating integration and mingling of Israel with non-Israelites, one blasphemes the Holy Spirit. There is much more to the gospel, and to the responsibilities of the true Israel of God as a people, but we cannot proceed without first having a firm foundation in the racial covenants of our God. All Israel shall indeed be saved, whether the Pharisees and the Catholics like it or not. There shall indeed be weeping and gnashing of teeth.

Matthew Chapter 12 - 2011-06-17

XII 1 At that time Yahshua had gone through the planted fields on the Sabbaths, and His students hungered and began to pluck and to eat the grain. 2 Then the Pharisees seeing it said to Him: “Look! Your students do that which is not lawful to do on a Sabbath!” 

This account is paralleled in Mark 2 and Luke 6. The law which enabled the apostles to pick another's grain to feed themselves is found in Deuteronomy 23:24-25: “24 When thou comest into thy neighbour's vineyard, then thou mayest eat grapes thy fill at thine own pleasure; but thou shalt not put any in thy vessel. 25 When thou comest into the standing corn of thy neighbour, then thou mayest pluck the ears with thine hand; but thou shalt not move a sickle unto thy neighbour's standing corn.”

The law which the Pharisees accused them by must have simply been the law of the Sabbath found at Deuteronomy 5:14: “But the seventh day is the sabbath of the LORD thy God: in it thou shalt not do any work, thou, nor thy son, nor thy daughter, nor thy manservant, nor thy maidservant, nor thine ox, nor thine ass, nor any of thy cattle, nor thy stranger that is within thy gates; that thy manservant and thy maidservant may rest as well as thou.”