Revelation Chapter Nine: Insights and Reflections

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Revelation 9:1, A star fall from heaven. Likely this is referring to Satan when he is finally, once and for all, cast out of heaven.

Key to the bottomless pit. In the end times just prior to the second coming of Yeshua the Messiah, Elohim will give Satan the freedom to release evil spirits imprisoned in the abyss who will go forth to torment men as part of YHVH’s wrath against rebellious men. Perhaps this relates to the perennially enigmatic and troubling passage found in Jude 6 (cp. 1 Pet 3:18–20; 2 Pet 2:4). It seems that the evil, locust-like spirits may be the fallen angels that either rebelled with Lucifer and or were the ones who interacted with humans in the antediluvian world (Gen 6:4–6; Jude 6; 1 Pet 3:18–20; 2 Pet 2:4).

Revelation 9:1, Bottomless pit. (See notes at Deut 32:22; 2 Pet 2:4.) This Greek term (abussos phrear) indicates a large, cavernous hole, pit or abyss with a small opening or orifice like a well and is found several other places in the book of Revelation (Rev 9:2, 11; 11:7; 17:8; 20:1, 3). The bottomless pit is analogous to the deepest sheol in the Tanakh (Deut 32:22; Ps 86:13; Isa 14:15) or tartaroo (2 Pet 2:4), and is the place where the angels who rebelled in the time of Satan’s rebellion are being held in chains of restraint awaiting their judgment day (see 2 Pet 2:4). This is also where Satan will be cast at the beginning of the Millennium (Rev 20:1–3), and is to be distinguished from the lake of fire where Satan (and presumably his demons) will be cast at the end of the Millennium to be tormented forever (Rev 20:10).

This passage indicates that YHVH will open the bottomless pit and allow the evil spirits imprisoned therein to torment men for a period of time as part of his judgments against wicked men.

Revelation 9:2, Smoke. Wherever this pit is, it appears to be a place of fire, heat and smoke. The opening of the pit by Satan first releases so much smoke that it darkens the sun and air, if the terminology here is to be taken literally rather than figuratively. If the latter, then the smoke reference cold refer to the global spiritual obfuscation that will occur. This phenomenon is the first sign that the demons of the pit are about to be released. After this follows their release and their tormenting of unredeemed humans. This is the wrath of Satan against humanity that precedes the wrath of Elohim. Since Elohim is permitting these demons to torment humans, it is, in reality, an extension of his judgment or wrath against the wicked. Since unsaved humans have rejected Elohim, and more and more are becoming enamored with and turning to outright Satan worship, Elohim his turning them over to the powerful forces of darkness they are seeking over him. These humans will discover what it’s like to live in a hellish world where those they wish to serve have full reign to torment them—a world devoid of the protective grace of a merciful Creator. 

Continue reading →
 

An October Shabbat Shalom to All!

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This means that Sukkot—the Feast of Tabernacles is almost here…HalleluYah!!

The harvest is past, the summer is ended, and we are not saved. (Jer 8:20)

I took these photos during my prayer walk this Shabbat morning.

All around my neighborhood, YHVH Elohim’s creation is bursting forth—yay, even shouting—with a brilliant menagerie of vibrant autumn colors. This occurs each fall as the trees’ green chlorophyll abandon the leaves in its descent into the trunk and roots where it will be stored waiting out the winter ready to be called upon to empower next spring’s foliar awakening. Left behind are the red, yellow and orange carotenoids colors to finally reveal their presence, which has been in the leaves all along being over-powered by the green chlorophyll.

Please enjoy!


 

Can you receive the fact that Elohim is the Author of godly leadership?

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Deuteronomy 31:23, He gave Joshua the son of Nun a charge. Upon Moses’ passing, YHVH didn’t leave the children of Israel in a leadership vacuum to wander about aimlessly in a confused state. YHVH isn’t the author of confusion! YHVH is the author of godly leadership. He prepares and trains leaders and then raises them up to lead his people in the paths of righteousness leading to his spiritual Promised Land. 

Beware of leaders who raise themselves up and promote themselves. To ensure that we don’t follow unrighteous, self-promoting and greedy leaders, let’s ask ourselves the following questions:

  • What is the purpose of righteous leadership? (See Eph 4:11–12.) 
  • What are the qualifications for leadership ? (See 1 Tim 3:1–13.) 
  • What is the premise of true, Spirit-ordained leadership? (See Matt 23:11.)

Many believers have been hurt by kingdom-building, money-grubbing and self-seeking leaders in the church world and now trust no one. They pride themselves on being “independent.” Is this good? Did Yeshua ever speak of his sheep as being “lone rangers” or did he refer to them as “a flock?” Does he ever speak of his flock as being shepherdless? 

Of course, Yeshua is the Chief Shepherd, but does he not also speak of undershepherds or humans shepherds who faithfully work under him? (Read John 10:1–18.) In this regard, consider the following:

  • Isn’t a flock that is under the guidance of a true servant-shepherd of Yeshua a place of safety or harm? 
  • Is being outside the flock a place of safety or harm? (See Matt 18:12.) 
  • Yeshua says that those who are outside of a flock are “lost” and have “gone astray” and are in danger of perishing (Matt 18:11–14). Are you part of a literal flock of believers, or have you spiritualized this passage away to justify your independent (rebellious?) spirit against YHVH-ordained authority?
 

Is YHVH’s face shining on you?

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Deuteronomy 31:18, And I will conceal my face. YHVH making his face to shine upon his people (Num 6:25; Ps 80:3, 19) or conversely concealing or turning his face away from his people is a Hebraism meaning “to be in the favor or disfavor of YHVH.” He said that he would hide his face from those who disobey him and do evil (Deut 31:17, 18; 32:20; Ps 132:10; Ezek 7:22; 39:29.) 

Are your prayers being answered? Or do you sense that the heavens are brass (a symbol of judgment)? 

If things are not going well for you in your life, perhaps you need to search out those areas in your life where evil still exists. Ask him to reveal them to you. Then repent and change and bring your life back into alignment with YHVH’s Word.

 

From Sabbath to Sunday—How the Early Church Forsook the Sabbath for Sunday Worship

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Purpose of This Study

The study of how the early (post-apostolic) church turned away from a Torah-centric orientation and embraced the theology that is now the skeletal framework of modern mainstream Christianity is a complex and difficult one, since we have to look back 2000 years to review scanty historical data. Different researchers will view the same tiny amount of documentation that remains from that era and arrive at different conclusions. The final analysis is often determined by the theological glasses the scholar is wearing and thus viewing the data from. Those who start with a pro-Torah penchant or even bias versus an anti-Torah bias will likely come to different conclusions.

Suffice it to say, the brief study that follows will in no way do justice to the subject of how the early church turned Sabbath to Sunday. Our goal is merely to introduce the reader to a different point of view than they have commonly heard in the mainstream church. In this study, we will have achieved our goal if we can gently persuade the reader at least to have an open mind, and to prove all things to see if they are true, and, perhaps, they will, at least, consider the idea that some long-held and institutionalized mainstream Christian beliefs may be more fiction than fact.

Christian Tradition With Regard to Sunday

Why the mainstream church embraces Sunday over Sabbath observance can be summarized succinctly as follows:

The celebration of the Lord’s Day [Sunday] in memory of the resurrection of Christ dates undoubtedly from the apostolic age. Nothing short of apostolic precedent can account for [its] universal religious observance in the churches of the second century. There is no dissenting voice. This custom is confirmed by testimonies of the earliest post-apostolic writers, as Barnabas, Ingnatius and Justin Martyr… (History of the Christian Church, vol 2, pp. 201–202, by Philip Schaff).

In his book, Our Father Abraham, Christian scholar Marvin Wilson takes a more moderated approach when discussing the issue of the early church’s switch from Sabbath to Sunday. He admits the existence of tension between the Jews and Gentile believers over adherence to the Torah making a move from Sabbath to Sunday “exceedingly difficult, if not virtually impossible.” Potential Jewish converts to Christianity, he notes, would have been suspect of any faith that would abandon the Torah (law of Moses) or the Jewishness of one’s past (Ibid., pp. 79–80). Unlike some of his more dogmatic scholarly colleagues, Wilson admits that it is not known when the early church began Sunday worship. He seems to concede to some possible allusions to Sunday worship in the New Testament (NT) by citing several of the scriptures that Christians perennially use to “prove” Sunday observance in the primitive (apostolic) church (e.g., Acts 20:7; 1 Cor 16:2), but he’s reluctant to see these as a clear apostolic mandate for a switch from Sabbath to Sunday. He admits that the Acts 20 passage may be a reference to the Saturday evening (Heb. havdallah or Motza’ei-Shabbat) service, which was, in reality, simply an extension of the regular daily Sabbath service into the evening (Ibid., p. 80).

Our approach to analyzing the subject of when Sunday worship began in the Christian church will be somewhat different than the conventional method of sabbatarians to simply refute the arguments Sunday-keepers make in favor of Sunday worship by quoting NT verses that may suggest a Sunday replacement of the Sabbath. This approach, though seemingly a valid one, ignores the proverbial elephant in the room. That “elephant” is the undeniable pro-Torah views and practices of Yeshua and his apostles, which, when considered, makes their changing Sabbath to Sunday observance a highly incongruent if not an impossible proposition without making the Word of Elohim to lie and the apostles to be lying hypocrites.

To continue reading go here: https://hoshanarabbah.org/blog/2015/02/01/from-sabbath-to-sunday/

 

The Hebraic Meaning of “Souls Under the Altar”

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“Souls under the altar”—a reference to the immortal soul of man?

Revelation 6:9, Under the altar…souls. Souls under the altar, in biblical Hebraic thought, is another way of saying that when you die, your soul dies too and goes into the grave of the earth or ground along with your body awaiting the resurrection when your body and soul (i.e. your personality—your mind, will and emotions) will be reunited with your personal spirit or divine essence that goes back to heaven when you die. 

The altar is a poetic metaphor for the earth. Remember that the Bible says that heaven is Elohim’s throne and earth is his footstool (Isa 66:1; Matt 5:35; Acts 7:49). For example, the altar in the tabernacle was constructed of a pile of rocks placed on the bare earth and the blood of sacrificed animals was poured out on the earth. To me, the phrase “under the altar” (Rev 6:9) speaks of the human body being buried under or in the earth when they die where they await the resurrection. 

We know that souls are not immortal; they don’t go to heaven when a person dies, contrary to what the church teaches—a false teaching they picked up from the Greek philosophers, not from the Tanakh! 

On the contrary, the Tanakh tells us that the soul that sins dies (Ezek 18:4) and goes into the grave (Ps 16:10). Yeshua’s soul died when he went into he grave (Ps 16:10; Isa 53:12), but his spirit (his breath and his personal spirit) went up to heaven to be received of his Father (Luke 23:46) as did Stephen’s (Act 7:59). The same is true for all humans (Eccl 12:7). 

The idea that the altar is the earth is further corroborated in Jewish thought. The Jewish sages teach us that the four horns on the four corners of the altar of sacrifice in the tabernacle symbolically represent the four corners of the earth. “[T]he expanse of the earth is more than a huge altar, dedicated to God” (The ArtScroll Tehilim/Psalms Commentary on Ps 118:27), and at death, the soul is not immortal, but simply goes into the grave with the body awaiting the resurrection (Pss 16:10; 49:15; Ezek 18:4). 

Moreover, if the soul were immortal, than the lie the serpent told the first humans about not dying after going against Elohim’s instructions (i.e. committing sin) would be true wouldn’t it (Gen 3:4)?

 

Christian “Double-Speak” When It Comes to the Torah

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Deuteronomy 31:10–13, You shall read this Torah before all Israel.Verses like this tend to expose the theological confusion that occurs in the minds of many Christian Bible teachers. For example, Christian commentator Matthew Henry on this verse writes about the need to read the Word of Elohim and that doing so will “help us to keep his commandments.” Yet elsewhere he says in the same commentary about the same laws that the commandments or laws of YHVH “are done away with.” 

Statements like these are representative of a split and incongruous, “double-speak” thinking on the part of many Christian Bible teachers and people when it comes to the commandments or laws of Elohim. Some laws, they say, we are to keep (e.g. thou shalt not murder, lie, commit adultery, etc.), but other laws we can disobey (e.g. the Sabbath, dietary laws, and biblical feasts). 

Is it possible to have it both ways: to believe that we need to keep his commandments, yet teach they are done away with? If so, then what is the meaning of such biblical phrases pertaining to YHVH’s Torah or Word as “forever,” “for a thousand generations,” “the same yesterday today and forever,” “till heaven and earth pass away,” “I change not,” and “think not that I came to destroy the Torah-law?” Is ­YHVH’s Word inconsistent and contradictory, or is this, instead, the case with the thinking of men? Is YHVH’s immutable character flawed with regard to keeping his Word, promises and standards or is man the one at fault?

In reality, we need to ask ourselves an important question: Do we have a high enough view of YHVH Elohim and fear him and tremble at his Word (Isa 66:2), or have we, in reality, demoted the veracity of his Word by contorting YHVH and his Word to fit the mindset of changeable and inconsistent man (which the Scriptures define as idolatry)? 

Moreover, have we, by denying the validity of some aspects of YHVH’s Word, bought into the lie that the serpent proffered at the tree of knowledge in the Garden of Eden when he told the man and the woman that YHVH really did not mean what he said and that humans can take the “have it your own way” and “pick and choose” approach when it comes to obeying the Word of YHVH (a philosophy that forms the basis for the religious movement called secular humanism, which is at the heart of all the religions of the world—including much of Christianity—except the true religion of the Bible)?

In reality, how many aspects of Christian theology are no more than a thinly veiled version of the religion of humanism in disguise? 

These are tough questions that the saints who are the Israel of Elohim (Gal 6:16) need to ponder seriously. Let’s not forget the words of Yeshua in John 14:15, “If you love me, keep my [Torah] commandments” and the words of the apostle in 1 John 2:5–5, “He that says, ‘I know him,’ and does not keep his [Torah] commandments is a liar and the truth is not in him. But whosoever keeps his Word in him truly is the love of Elohim perfected: hereby know we that we are in him.”

Let’s be honest with ourselves. The bottom line reason why man has a hard time submitting to all of YHVH’s commandments is nowhere stated more concisely in the Bible than in Romans 8:7,

[T]he carnal mind is enmity against Elohim: for it is not subject to the law of Elohim, neither indeed can be.