It is Enough to be an Israelite, But Enough for What?, Part 2

As we had seen in Part 1 of our critique of Bertrand Comparet’s sermon, Is it Enough Merely to be an Israelite?, he had clearly taken Romans 11:26 out of the context of the epistle itself so that he could critique Paul, and he even accused Paul of having misquoted scripture. Then he denied the veracity of Paul’s statement that “All Israel shall be saved” where he compared it to Isaiah 45:17, while he ignored Isaiah 45:25. While for many other reasons we may love Bertrand Comparet, this approach to scripture is what even he himself had professed to have rejected, and he must be corrected. If we truly believe Yahweh our God, and if we love Yahshua Christ, then we shall seek to reconcile and understand all of Scripture, without ever assuming that one verse can cancel out another, or that we can arbitrarily pick a favorite and ignore others.

In Romans chapter 9 Paul began by praying for his kinsmen according to the flesh, those who truly were of Israel, as opposed to the Edomites in Judaea for which he had then contrasted Jacob and Esau. Continuing at the beginning of Romans chapter 10, he continued his prayer where he addressed his Roman readers and said “1 Brethren, truly the preference of my heart, and supplication to Yahweh is for preservation on their behalf. 2 I attest to them that they have zeal for Yahweh, but not in accordance with full knowledge.” So there he was still speaking of his “kinsmen according to the flesh”, of those true Israelites in Judaea for which he had prayed in chapter 9.

So where he was still discussing that same subject, Romans chapter 11 opens where Paul asked “1 Now I say, has Yahweh thrust away His people?…” and he contrasted the remnant of the obedient in the time of Elijah to what he had hoped would be a similar remnant of the obedient in Judaea in his own time. Then a little later he asked “7 What then, what Israel seeks after, this it did not attain to?…” and he answered his own question in the same verse as he continued and wrote: “But the chosen have succeeded, and the rest were hardened”. But who did Paul consider the chosen to be? Did he consider the chosen to be mere believers? Or did he consider the chosen to be all of Israel?

The original podcast file was somehow corrupted and would not play. It has now been replaced. I apologize for any inconvenience. Being on the road, the Monday following the podcast I was finally able to edit the notes, and there I was also able to add a few short clarifications and make a few minor corrections.

Bible Blunders, Part 1

Here I am going to present something that I will call Bible Blunders. Ultimately this may turn into something of a series, so I will even add “Part 1”. When I made several Forum posts addressing certain things in Scripture which are commonly misunderstood, a friend suggested that I compile them into a program called Bible Mysteries, but these really are not mysteries. Rather, they are blunders because the solution to understanding them is in the Scripture, and for that reason we really have no excuse not to understand them. But some of these traps I have fallen into myself, not necessarily because I made the mistakes, but because we often trust others to be correct, especially our teachers, and we repeat things that they say without investigating them for ourselves. So here we are going to discuss queen Athaliah of Judah, a trap which I managed to avoid, and also the identity of the Rechabites of the Book of Jeremiah, and the “Kenites” of 2 Chronicles chapter 2, a trap which I was caught in until recently, because I followed older teachers without giving the subject a sufficiently full consideration.

Proof that Athaliah queen of Judah was not the daughter of Jezebel:

A version of this was originally posted at the Christogenea Forum on 17th July 2022.

Years ago, in June, 2009, I made a presentation called Women in the Genealogy of Christ. Only rather recently did I realize that it needs an update. That is because I never had a “church” background, and therefore I never knew that the churches teach that Jezebel is an ancestor of Christ. That is what at least most of them teach, and it is absolutely wrong. So in that early podcast, I discussed Tamar, Rahab, Ruth and Bathsheba, three of which women are specifically mentioned in the genealogy of Christ as it is presented in the Gospel of Matthew, but I never knew there was a need to discuss Jezebel. (Bathsheba is also referred to in Matthew, but not by name.)

Here I shall prove that Jezebel could not have been the mother of Athaliah, the queen of Judah, in spite of the fact that Ahab was her father. But this entire story of Ahab's descendants is sometimes confusing not only in the way in which years are reckoned but also because there are two men named Jehoram, sometimes also spelled Joram (in the King James Version): a son of Ahab and a son of Jehoshaphat king of Judah. There are also two men named Ahaziah: a son of Ahab and a grandson of Jehoshaphat, the son of Jehoram king of Judah. So when we mention Jehoram or Ahaziah, we always need to check to make certain we have the correct one.

On the Revelation of Yahshua Christ, Part 26: The Camp of the Saints

After explaining the parable of the tares of the field to His disciples, as it is recorded in Matthew chapter 13, Yahshua Christ then related to them the parable of the net, where it seems that this parable along with those of the treasure hidden in the field and the man seeking the pearl had all been meant to further elucidate the meaning of that parable of the wheat and the tares. In the manner in which Matthew recorded this, these parables were given to the disciples after they requested and received the explanation of the wheat and the tares. So we read, in the closing verses of that chapter, that “47 Again, the kingdom of the heavens is like a net having been cast into the sea and it gathers from out of every race, 48 which when it is full, bringing up upon the shore and sitting they gather the good ones into vessels, but the rotten ones they cast out. 49 Thusly it shall be at the consummation of the age, the messengers shall go out and they shall separate the wicked from the midst of the righteous 50 and they shall cast them into the furnace of fire. There shall be weeping and gnashing of teeth!” Next, after they received the explanation of the wheat and tares and these other parables, we read: “51 ‘Have you understood all these things?’ [and] They say to Him: ‘Yes!’”

The word for race in verse 47 of that passage is γένος, which is a race or a kind. It is the same word which we see in the Greek scriptures of the Septuagint where it says in Genesis chapter 1 that “25 … God made the beast of the earth after his kind, and cattle after their kind, and every thing that creepeth upon the earth after his kind: and God saw that it was good.” Likewise the underlying Hebrew word, מין or miyn (4327) is defined as a kind or species according to the Brown, Driver, Briggs Hebrew and English Lexicon. Yahshua Christ having used these terms in His explanations to His disciples as they are in Matthew chapter 13, the disciples would have understood words such as γένος in the parable of the net, or σπέρμα, which is seed, in that of the wheat and tares in their plain, literal meanings, and not in the manner in which the philosophical so-called “Church Fathers” defined them centuries later, which are corruptions of those meanings. Just as in the ancient prophets, Yahshua Christ had employed many parallelisms, and the use of γένος in the parable of the net helps us to more definitively understand the use of the word σπέρμα in the parable of the wheat and the tares, that what God created is good, but the corruptions of men or of angels are wicked and in the end God shall not accept them since He does not accept bastards.

On the Revelation of Yahshua Christ, Part 25: Violence of the Lambs

As it is described in the vision of Revelation chapter 18, at the fall of Babylon the children of Israel, who are the exclusive people of Yahweh God, are called to come out of her and to separate themselves, whereupon they are told to “6 … return to her as she also had rendered, and you double twice the things according to her works. 7 As much as she had magnified herself and lived wantonly, so much you give torment and grief to her!” So it is fully evident that according to the Revelation, the children of Israel shall indeed have a role in executing the vengeance of Yahweh God upon His enemies. As we have already said in relation to this, Paul of Tarsus had also made the same expression to the Corinthians, where he had written to them in his second epistle in chapter 10: “4 For the arms of our warfare are not fleshly, but through Yahweh they are able to destroy strongholds, 5 destroying reasonings and every bulwark raising itself up against the knowledge of Yahweh, and taking captive every thought into the obedience of the Anointed; 6 also being in readiness to avenge all disobedience, whenever you shall have fulfilled your obedience.” Paul of Tarsus wrote that epistle perhaps 40 years before John recorded this Revelation of Yahshua Christ, and must have had his own understanding from the words of the Old Testament prophets, with whom this Revelation certainly agrees, magnifies, and augments.

With this we may understand that before Babylon falls, Christians must constrain themselves to fighting for the hearts and minds of their own people, so that they do not worship the beast. But then, being obedient to the commandments of Christ, once Babylon does fall then Christians shall indeed have a part in the execution of God’s will against His enemies. So while Revelation chapter 19 began with a description of the bride preparing herself for the marriage supper of the lamb, that preparation is evidently fulfilled as the children of Israel come out of Babylon and turn to obedience in Christ. The Word of God offers no other path to redemption other than repentance and separation from the wicked Society, but evidently Yahweh God also informs us that such a separation cannot be successful until the Society itself crumbles.