“Comparing the dimensions of the ark and the bride of Christ who will be made ready”

[Study Aired October 1, 2026]

In this two-part study we will look at these verses, (part 1 Gen 6:1-16 , part 2 Gen 7:1-24), which talk about the construction of the ark and the circumstances that surround this period in the bible. There are many numbers we can consider in both chapters six and seven of Genesis, and our goal is to understand what those numbers mean for us specifically today, and how these prophecies of the old covenant are written for our sakes upon whom the end of the ages are come (1Co 10:11 , 1Pe 1:12). Starting with Genesis chapter six!

Gen 6:1  And it came to pass, when men began to multiply on the face of the earth, and daughters were born unto them,
Gen 6:2  That the sons of God saw the daughters of men that they were fair; and they took them wives of all which they chose.

 These first two verses are a typical statement of how we all go into Babylon, “the daughters of men”, and then ‘come out of her my people’ in this life, if God permits (Rev 18:4 , Mat 22:14).

 Gen 6:3  And the LORD said, My spirit shall not always strive with man, for that he also is flesh: yet his days shall be an hundred and twenty years.

The first number in question is our first foundation in Babylon, symbolically represented by 120 years, which represents the marred-in-the-hand-of-the-Potter flesh that has to be made anew, each man in his own order [12×10=120]. God is not going to continue to strive with man’s faulty foundation, but in time will save all men upon the foundation of Jesus Christ using the body of Christ (Mat 16:18) who have been redeemed from the earth (Rev 7:4 , Rev 14:3 , Rev 21:7) 12x12x10=144,000.

Gen 6:4  There were giants in the earth in those days; and also after that, when the sons of God came in unto the daughters of men, and they bare children to them [false doctrine], the same became mighty men which were of old, men of renown.

What we bear while we are in Babylon with “the daughters of men” is false doctrines. Those are the giants in our land that become huge idols of our hearts, that if God is calling us out of Babylon, will one day be meat for us (Num 14:9).

Gen 6:5  And GOD saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every imagination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually.

There is a promise of liberty in the churches of this world, “the earth”, where there is no liberty (2Pe 2:19), and by God’s grace we ‘come out of her my people’ because we’ve been granted to see and hear the truth, and recognize the man of perdition on the throne of our own hearts, which can only be destroyed by the brightness of Christ’s coming into our lives (2Th 2:4-8). The wickedness is great in our earth when we come to see the truth and “every imagination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually” because our thoughts are not yet subject unto Christ at that time in our walk, and we think that we have free will, and our righteousnesses have not yet been revealed to be nothing but filthy rags in God’s sight (Isa 64:6).

Gen 6:6  And it repented the LORD that he had made man on the earth, and it grieved him at his heart.
Gen 6:7  And the LORD said, I will destroy man whom I have created from the face of the earth; both man, and beast, and the creeping thing, and the fowls of the air; for it repenteth me that I have made them.

This statement is the prophecy of how God will no longer strive with the flesh of mankind that we just read in (Gen 6:3 , Jer 18:4-6). The destruction of the flesh of mankind, “both man and beast”, typifies the destruction of our old man of sin. The start of the new man that is formed in the church, typified by Noah and his family, comes about as a result of the destruction of the old. The family of Noah repopulate the world that becomes corrupt again. The world’s baptism with water is typified by the flood that destroys mankind. That flood does not change the heart of mankind, however, the destruction of the world with Gog and Magog leading the charge from the four quarters of the earth against the camp of the saints, brings about a baptism of fire which typifies the conversion that will happen in the lake of fire that follows this event. Every man has to be baptized in water and in spirit, and so God has these two colossal events occur [the flood of Noah’s day and the Gog and Magog rebellion] that bookend this point that Christ spoke of in (Jhn 3:5).

Jhn 3:5  Jesus answered, Verily, verily, I say unto thee, Except a man be born of water and of the Spirit, he cannot enter into the kingdom of God.

Gen 6:8  But Noah found grace in the eyes of the LORD.

This verse typifies (Eph 2:8), which talks about the free gift of salvation which salvation was naturally being displayed via the family of Noah. All 8 of his family represents the new man who is miraculously saved by being raised above the waters which symbolizes the putting off of flesh as we are raised in heavenly places in the Lord (Eph 2:6).

Noah and the Flood

Gen 6:9  These are the generations of Noah: Noah was a just man and perfect in his generations, and Noah walked with God.

Noah typifies the chasteness of the bride of Christ prepared for her husband (2Co 11:2), whose physical lineage was pure, as ours now is spiritually in the Lord (Rom 8:1)], “and Noah walked with God”. Walking with God is symbolic of being led by the spirit of God, and where the spirit of the Lord is there is liberty. This liberty blesses us to be sent of God “to reap that whereon ye bestowed no labour: other men laboured, and ye are entered into their labours.” (Rom 8:14-16 , 2Co 3:17 , Jhn 4:38).

Gen 6:10  And Noah begat three sons, Shem, Ham, and Japheth.

These three names represent the process of judgement that the body of Christ must go through to inherit eternal life. If we start off with “Shem”, whose name means ‘shame’, as we come to see ourselves as the chief of sinners, then our goal is to seek a new country whose builder and maker is God. The name “Ham” means ‘his descendants or his country’, and then “Japheth” which name means ‘prosperity’, typifying the abundant life (2Co 4:15 , 1Ti 1:14 , 1Th 4:7 , 1Pe 5:10 , Mat 13:12) that we are called unto in Christ, which comes about when we repent of our sins and keep seeking the kingdom of God first and His righteousness, having respect unto the recompense of the reward (Rom 2:4 , Heb 11:26-27).

Gen 6:11  The earth also was corrupt before God, and the earth was filled with violence.

“And as it was in the days of Noe, so shall it be also in the days of the Son of man. They did eat, they drank, they married wives [the many wives that typify the churches of Babylon today], they were given in marriage, until the day that Noe entered into the ark, and the flood came, and destroyed them all.” (Luk 17:26-28). God will flood the world again but this time with the word of God via the saints during the thousand year reign (Hab 2:14) and then all the earth will be purified in the great white throne judgement, lake of fire, second death resurrection.

Gen 6:12  And God looked upon the earth, and, behold, it was corrupt; for all flesh had corrupted his way upon the earth.

We just naturally corrupt our way upon the earth because our flesh is corrupt and there is no good thing within us (Rom 3:10 , 1Co 15:50). Only Christ can ultimately stop that process of self righteous corruption (Rom 8:9 , Col 1:27 , 1Pe 4:1), otherwise it leads to death and not to the abundant life that can only be found in Him (Pro 16:25 , Jhn 14:6).

Gen 6:13  And God said unto Noah, The end of all flesh is come before me; for the earth is filled with violence through them; and, behold, I will destroy them with the earth.

God knew the hour when the flood would come, and knows when the end of this age will come (Mat 24:36) that we’re living in. The physical destruction of all flesh does not repeat to the degree it happened in Noah’s day, but we are told this, “And except those days should be shortened, there should no flesh be saved: but for the elect’s sake those days shall be shortened.”(Mat 24:22) The judgement that is upon the house of God preserves the world from being destroyed and is one of the reasons the elect are called ‘the salt of the earth’ (Mat 5:13), salt which naturally preserves animal flesh (Rom 1:20). In time, God will deeply impress on the world the importance of His children who because of the righteousness of Christ found within them and not the iniquity that has filled the world (Gen 15:16 , Php 3:9). We’re used to physically spare the world from utter destruction, and then the same saviours will save the world spiritually through the lake of fire, great white throne judgment, the natural event preceding the spiritual (1Co 15:46). The last earthly example of ‘the sins of the Amorites filling the earth’ will be with ‘Gog and Magog’ (Gen 15:16 , Rev 20:8). Being destroyed “with the earth” is a shadow of the truth that our own wickedness will correct us (Jer 2:19).

Jer 2:19 Thine own wickedness shall correct thee, and thy backslidings shall reprove thee: know therefore and see that it is an evil thing and bitter, that thou hast forsaken the LORD thy God, and that my fear is not in thee, saith the Lord GOD of hosts.

Gen 6:14  Make thee an ark of gopher wood; rooms shalt thou make in the ark, and shalt pitch it within and without with pitch.
Gen 6:15  And this is the fashion which thou shalt make it of: The length of the ark shall be three hundred cubits, the breadth of it fifty cubits, and the height of it thirty cubits.
Gen 6:16  A window shalt thou make to the ark, and in a cubit shalt thou finish it above; and the door of the ark shalt thou set in the side thereof; with lower, second, and third stories shalt thou make it.

These are the symbolic dimensions of the ark that describe what must occur in the body of Christ in order for the elect to be in that blessed and holy first resurrection: Noah’s Ark was 300 cubits long, 50 cubits wide, and 30 cubits high, roughly equivalent to 510 feet (155 meters) long, 85 feet (26 meters) wide, and 51 feet (15.5 meters) high. These numbers, 300, 50 and 30, are the ones we need to consider.

300 cubits long is the process of judgement that is upon the body of Christ from start to finish of our flesh, [50 Jubile x 6=300].

The width is 50 cubits which is the narrow part of the ark that represents the narrow way by which we will be saved by grace through faith (5×10=50 , Mat 7:14).

The 30 cubits height represents the increase in our lives that comes as a result of the judgement of our flesh as we decrease and Christ increases, which is a gift from God (Jhn 3:30 , 1Co 3:6).

The three measurements add up to 380 cubits, which remind us that the new man in Christ, 8, is formed through God’s judgments in the earth, 3, that bring us to come into the same unity in Christ by understanding the length, the breadth and the height of the church, that is likened unto Noah’s ark (Eph 3:18).

The gopher wood must have had the right qualities to resist water [false doctrines the world] and being a type of the body of Christ the ark had many rooms which we liken unto the many members of Christ’s body. The material of gopher wood had to have had the correct building qualities to withstand the much tribulation that was going to come upon this vessel, all symbolic of the body of Christ (Act 14:22). The pitch would have been a very labour intensive material to apply to the ark and would take a lot of diligence and close examination to make sure that there were no open spaces or schisms on the ship (1Co 12:25 , Heb 12:15). The pitch was applied within and without reminding us that we must examine ourselves daily within knowing and proving to our own selves that we are in the faith (2Co 13:5) and the pitch on the outside symbolizing that we are to cover each other’s sins and be the light of Christ to this world by demonstrating our love to one another, which is demonstrated in obedience to God’s commandments (Jhn 13:35 , 1Jn 5:2).

Gen 6:17  And, behold, I, even I, do bring a flood of waters upon the earth, to destroy all flesh, wherein is the breath of life, from under heaven; and every thing that is in the earth shall die.
Gen 6:18  But with thee will I establish my covenant; and thou shalt come into the ark, thou, and thy sons, and thy wife, and thy sons’ wives with thee.

This is a prophecy of how God is going to bring His word upon the earth through the church (Eph 3:10) that will reshape the earth as the flood did in Noah’s day. This reshaping of the earth by the flood typifies men learning of God’s righteousness on the earth, and that word will not return void but will be purified in the lake of fire one day (Isa 55:11). All men must be baptized with water and spirit, the natural preceding the spiritual. The 1000 year reign is the natural judgement with the rod of iron on the earth. The symbolic number of 1000 symbolizes this natural process of judgment on the (10) earth x (10) earth x (10) earth = 1000, the time that law has to rule the lives of mankind. True conversion can only happen in the lake of fire, and the dimensions of the ark typify the judgement that has already occurred within the body of Christ, the new man being represented by the eight souls on the ark. This is what “But with thee will I establish my covenant; and thou shalt come into the ark, thou, and thy sons, and thy wife, and thy sons’ wives with thee”, typifies.

Gen 6:19  And of every living thing of all flesh, two of every sort shalt thou bring into the ark, to keep them alive with thee; they shall be male and female.
Gen 6:20  Of fowls after their kind, and of cattle after their kind, of every creeping thing of the earth after his kind, two of every sort shall come unto thee, to keep them alive.

The ark is likened unto the church or temple of God that we are, where we are being blessed to bring all soulishness into subjection unto Christ, represented by “of every living thing of all flesh”, the ‘beasts’ of (Ecc 3:18). It is Christ who is giving us the victory over our flesh, which victory is typified by each beast of every sort being brought into the ark 2 by 2, meaning by the true witness Christ, 2, who alone can give us victory over our sinful beastly flesh. The fact that they are male and female is to show that the offspring of those beasts will also in time need to be brought into subjection to Christ, each man in his own order. The initial or preeminent beasts that are brought into the ark typify those who have been given dominion over our beastly nature in this age, that being the body of Christ (Eph 2:8).

Gen 6:21  And take thou unto thee of all food that is eaten, and thou shalt gather it to thee; and it shall be for food for thee, and for them.
Gen 6:22  Thus did Noah; according to all that God commanded him, so did he.

These final verses we will look at remind us that we are to labour for the meat that does not perish (Jhn 6:27 , Mat 6:19-21), and that our labours are not in vain and will sustain us spiritually on this earth during that time that, after we have done the will of God by building the ark, which Christ built through the body of Christ, we now have need of patience. The “word of my patience” (Rev 3:10) is likened unto this food on the ark – Rom 15:4-5 , Jas 1:4 , Jas 5:10-11 , Rev 1:9 , Rev 2:19. We live off of those things that we have laid up in store on the ark (Heb 10:36 , Heb 12:1 , Luk 21:19). What this obedience of Noah typifies in making provision for the ark is mirrored with the thought in the book of Malachi where we are told to bring our tithe, meaning our whole life, into the temple as an offering unto God where we feed each other (Rom 12:1-2 , Jhn 6:55 , Eph 5:30).

Rev 3:10  Because thou hast kept the word of my patience, I also will keep thee from the hour of temptation, which shall come upon all the world, to try them that dwell upon the earth.

Rom 15:4  For whatsoever things were written aforetime were written for our learning, that we through patience and comfort of the scriptures might have hope.
Rom 15:5  Now the God of patience and consolation grant you to be likeminded one toward another according to Christ Jesus:

Jas 5:10  Take, my brethren, the prophets, who have spoken in the name of the Lord, for an example of suffering affliction, and of patience.
Jas 5:11  Behold, we count them happy which endure. Ye have heard of the patience of Job, and have seen the end of the Lord; that the Lord is very pitiful, and of tender mercy.

Rev 1:9  I John, who also am your brother, and companion in tribulation, and in the kingdom and patience of Jesus Christ, was in the isle that is called Patmos, for the word of God, and for the testimony of Jesus Christ.

Rev 2:19  I know thy works, and charity, and service, and faith, and thy patience, and thy works; and the last to be more than the first.

Jas 1:4  But let patience have her perfect work, that ye may be perfect and entire, wanting nothing.

Book of Colossians 2:16-19 Not Holding the Head

[Study Aired September 29, 2026]

“Let no man therefore judge you in meat, or in drink, or in respect of an holyday, or of the new moon, or of the sabbath days: which are a shadow of things to come; but the body is of Christ. Let no man beguile you of your reward in a voluntary humility and worshipping of angels, intruding into those things which he hath not seen, vainly puffed up by his fleshly mind, and not holding the Head, from which all the body by joints and bands having nourishment ministered, and knit together, increaseth with the increase of God” (Colossians 2:16–19).

Therefore…

The last study ended at the cross. Something had been written against these people — a bond made of the ordinances of the law, holding them the way a signed note holds a debtor. Three things were done to it. It was blotted out. It was taken out of the way. It was nailed to his cross.

Now Paul draws the conclusion, and the first word of it is “therefore.”

“Let no man therefore judge (G2919) you in meat, or in drink, or in respect of an holyday, or of the new moon, or of the sabbath days.”

The plain sense is simple. The writing is gone, so no man may sit over these people and pass sentence on them by what was written on it.

That is narrower than it may sound, and it is worth seeing how narrow before going on. Paul does not say here that no man may keep a day or refuse a food. He says no man may judge another by them. He handles the same matters the same way writing to Rome, and there the warning runs in both directions: “Let not him that eateth despise him that eateth not; and let not him which eateth not judge (G2919) him that eateth: for God hath received him… One man esteemeth one day above another: another esteemeth every day alike. Let every man be fully persuaded in his own mind. He that regardeth the day, regardeth it unto the Lord” (Romans 14:3, 5–6). Paul puts a question to the man in that seat: “Who art thou that judgest another man’s servant? to his own master he standeth or falleth” (Romans 14:4). The servant is not his to judge.

The same word for judging, and the same subjects. A man may keep a day, and keep it unto the Lord. What is forbidden is the verdict. That is the first thing to hold onto in this passage: it is about who may sit in judgment, and on what grounds.

Four verses, and they move in four steps: a verdict forbidden, a shadow explained, an umpire exposed, and the Head he has let go.

Holyday, New Moon, Sabbath

Then the list, and it is not a random one.

Meat and drink come first, and the last study met them already. Hebrews assigned “meats and drinks, and divers washings” to the first covenant (Hebrews 9:10). Then come three more: a holyday, a new moon, a sabbath.

Those three travel together in the Old Testament. They are named as a set when the offerings of the law are ordered — “for the sabbaths, and for the new moons, and for the set feasts, as it is written in the law of the LORD” (2 Chronicles 31:3). They are named as a set when God says He will bring Israel’s worship to a stop: “I will also cause all her mirth to cease, her feast days, her new moons, and her sabbaths” (Hosea 2:11) — the same three, and here in the very order Paul gives them.

So the list runs from the yearly feast to the monthly moon, to the weekly sabbath. The law itself calls certain days within the feasts sabbaths. The day of blowing of trumpets is “a sabbath” (Leviticus 23:24); the day of atonement, “a sabbath of rest” (23:32); the first and eighth days of tabernacles, each “a sabbath” (23:39). Then it sets all the feasts “beside the sabbaths of the LORD” (23:38). So the sabbath named third is the weekly one. It is the calendar of the law, whole, and no man may judge these people by it.

A Shadow of Things to Come

Then he says what that calendar is. He does not say it is nothing.

“Which are a shadow (G4639) of things to come; but the body (G4983) is of Christ.”

A shadow is what it sounds like. The word is skia (G4639), and Scripture uses it plainly: the sick were laid in the streets “that at the least the shadow (G4639) of Peter passing by might overshadow some of them” (Acts 5:15). It is also used as a figure, of those who “sat in the region and shadow (G4639) of death” (Matthew 4:16).

Where it is used of the law, it means something more particular. Hebrews says the priests “serve unto the example and shadow (G4639) of heavenly things” (Hebrews 8:5), and says it again in words very close to Paul’s: “the law having a shadow (G4639) of good things to come, and not the very image of the things, can never with those sacrifices which they offered year by year continually make the comers thereunto perfect” (Hebrews 10:1). Things to come in Colossians; good things to come in Hebrews.

The point is this. A shadow is not a lie. It is cast by something real, and it carries that thing’s outline. A man who sees a shadow on the ground knows something stands between the shadow and the light. So Paul is not dismissing the feasts and moons and sabbaths. He is saying what they were for. They were the outline of something. A shadow was never meant to be held; it was meant to be followed back to what cast it.

He says whose it is: “the body is of Christ.” The KJV supplies “is”; the Greek sets the words side by side. Either way the sense is plain enough. The body belongs to Christ.

Which body? Here the verse allows two readings, and we name both.

The first is the one the contrast calls for. A shadow is set against the thing that casts it, so sōma (G4983) would mean the substance, the real thing — and the substance is Christ’s.

The second comes from how this letter uses the word. Paul has already called Christ “the head of the body (G4983), the church” (Colossians 1:18). He has spoken of “the body (G4983) of his flesh” (Colossians 1:22), and of “his body’s (G4983) sake, which is the church” (Colossians 1:24). Two verses on he will speak of “all the body (G4983)” growing from the Head (Colossians 2:19). On that reading, the body here is the same body — the church — and it belongs to Christ.

We do not choose between them here. On either reading, what is real belongs to Christ. The argument that follows rests on the first.

So the verdict of verse 16 is forbidden for a reason, and the reason lies in what a shadow is.

Paul calls these things “a shadow of things to come,” and much in this letter still lies ahead; it waits for the day Christ “shall appear” (Colossians 3:4). Hebrews says of the same good things: “Christ being come an high priest of good things to come” (Hebrews 9:11). The copies differ over whether those good things are “to come” or already come, and we rest nothing on that. Every copy says Christ has come. What cast the shadow is not waiting.

Now picture a man who picks up the shadow and turns it into a measuring rod. He stands over people who hold Christ and tells them they fall short, because they do not keep the outline. He has it backward. He is measuring the substance by its own silhouette, and demanding from the shadow what it never had to give.

Paul says the same thing elsewhere, and says when the change came: “Wherefore the law was our schoolmaster to bring us unto Christ, that we might be justified by faith. But after that faith is come, we are no longer under a schoolmaster” (Galatians 3:24–25). The schoolmaster was not a bad man. He had a charge, and his charge was to bring a child somewhere. Once the child is brought, his authority over him is finished. No man may hold another to the outline after the thing itself has come.

Let No Man Rule Against You

Paul now gives a second warning, and it is shaped like the first.

“Let no man beguile you of your reward (G2603) in a voluntary humility and worshipping of angels.”

Two prohibitions, both beginning “let no man,” both about anyone who sets himself over these people and passes a verdict. Paul does not use the same word twice. What repeats is the sentence itself: no man is to sit over you and hand down a ruling.

The word here is katabrabeuō (G2603), and it is used nowhere else in Scripture. Its root names the umpire at the games — the one who decides who has run rightly. With a prefix meaning against, it means to rule against a man: to decide the contest against him, to disqualify him. Paul uses a plain form of the same root later in this letter, of the peace of God ruling in the heart (Colossians 3:15), and the figure is taken up there.

The whole English phrase, “beguile you of your reward,” translates one Greek word. There is no separate noun for “reward.” The translators drew the prize out of the verb, since an umpire rules over a prize, and that is a fair reading. However, the verse never says what the prize is or what a man loses.

The KJV used “beguile” at 2:4 as well — “beguile (G3884) you with enticing words” — but that is a different word, one for cheating a man with false reasoning. Here it is part of the umpire’s word.

Part Four sent the question of what a man loses to this verse, drawn by the KJV’s “reward”; Part Six moved it to the one place in the letter where a reward is named: “ye shall receive the reward (G469) of the inheritance” (Colossians 3:24). This verse could not have answered it in any case. As the next verse shows, the one who lets go of the Head here is the umpire, not the man he rules against.

No man has that seat to take. Paul denies it of himself and his fellows: “Not for that we have dominion over your faith, but are helpers of your joy: for by faith ye stand” (2 Corinthians 1:24). If an apostle claimed no dominion over their faith, the man at the door has none.

What the verse does tell us is what kind of man takes that seat.

Humility, Angels, and Things Unseen

He comes with humility. That is the first surprise.

The word the KJV renders “humility” here is the very word Paul commands a chapter later: “Put on therefore, as the elect of God, holy and beloved, bowels of mercies, kindness, humbleness of mind (G5012), meekness, longsuffering” (Colossians 3:12). So the trouble is not humility; Paul demands it. The trouble is humility of a particular kind — a “voluntary” humility, the KJV says. The word returns at the end of this chapter, and the next study takes up there what kind of humility Paul means.

He comes with angels. An earlier study weighed this phrase, and nothing here reopens it. It will bear either sense: worship offered to angels, or the worship of angels the teachers claimed to have joined. Paul’s answer is the same whichever is meant. Christ made every such rank (Colossians 1:16), and He is head over all of them (Colossians 2:10). A man who reaches past Christ toward them is reaching toward what Christ made.

He comes with things unseen: “intruding into those things which he hath not seen.” The word is embateuō (G1687), and it too appears nowhere else in Scripture, so there is no second verse to weigh it against. The lexicons give it as setting foot on, stepping into, and so going into a matter. From its use outside Scripture, some take it as the step of entry into a sanctuary. Whether Paul means that cannot be settled from Scripture, and we leave it. The manuscripts also differ over whether the verse speaks of what “he hath not seen” or of what he has seen, and we rest nothing on that either. What stands in every copy is a man entering into things.

Last, Paul says what is really going on inside him: “vainly puffed up (G5448) by his fleshly mind.”

This is the diagnosis, and it turns on one word. Phusioō (G5448) means to swell, to be inflated. Every other time the word is used, it is in 1 Corinthians, and it is never once good. The Corinthians were “puffed up (G5448) for one against another” (1 Corinthians 4:6). Charity “is not puffed up (G5448)” (1 Corinthians 13:4). The place that matters most for a church being offered a higher knowledge: “Knowledge puffeth up (G5448), but charity edifieth” (1 Corinthians 8:1).

Now see what Paul has done. The man comes humbled. He denies himself. He talks of angels, and of things he claims to have entered into. Paul says he is swollen. The lower he bows, the larger he gets — and the source is “his fleshly mind,” not the spirit of God. He is the one who wants the umpire’s seat.

Not Holding the Head

Paul now names what that man has let go of. It is the sentence this study exists to face.

“And not holding (G2902) the Head.”

Everything in the letter so far has been setting up this Head. He is “the head of the body, the church” (Colossians 1:18). He is “the head of all principality and power” (Colossians 2:10). And the man at the door, for all his humility and all his claims, does not hold Him.

The word for holding is krateō (G2902), and the Lord used it of men much like these: “For laying aside the commandment of God, ye hold (G2902) the tradition of men, as the washing of pots and cups” (Mark 7:8). An earlier study met that verse at “the tradition of men” in verse 8. Now its verb comes round too. A man is always holding something. He holds the Head, or he holds what men have handed down about pots and cups and days.

What the Head is to the body, Paul says in the rest of the verse.

“From which all the body (G4983) by joints and bands having nourishment ministered (G2023), and knit together (G4822), increaseth (G837) with the increase (G838) of God.”

First, a small word with weight. The KJV reads “from which” here. Where Paul writes the same words to the Ephesians, the KJV itself renders them “from whom”: “which is the head, even Christ: From whom the whole body fitly joined together and compacted (G4822) by that which every joint supplieth (G2024)” (Ephesians 4:15–16). The supply does not come from an organ. It comes from a Person.

Next, what comes from Him. Epichorēgeō (G2023) means to supply, to furnish what is needed. Mostly Scripture uses it of God supplying: He “that ministereth (G2023) seed to the sower” (2 Corinthians 9:10), and He “that ministereth (G2023) to you the Spirit” (Galatians 3:5). But not always. Peter tells the saints themselves to “add (G2023) to your faith virtue” (2 Peter 1:5). And in the Ephesians verse just quoted, it is “every joint” that supplies.

So the supply has a source and a path. It comes from the Head, and it reaches the body through its joints and bands — through the members, one to another. That is why the man who lets go of the Head is not merely mistaken. He has let go of the source the whole body lives from.

Then “knit together.” The word is sumbibazō (G4822), and Part Seven marked it for this verse. It stood first at 2:2, where Paul strives from prison “that their hearts might be comforted, being knit together (G4822) in love.” That study said that whatever holds the body is not, on that evidence, a thing the body does alone. Here the letter says so outright. The knitting Paul labors for at 2:2 is the knitting the body has from the Head at 2:19. Ephesians says it, too, with the same word, rendered “compacted” in the verse quoted above.

Lastly, the growth. Paul prayed at the start of this letter that these people would be “increasing (G837) in the knowledge of God” (Colossians 1:10). Here the same growth is named again, and now it has an owner: “the increase (G838) of God.” What he prayed for is God’s own increase. As he said of Apollos and himself, “God gave the increase (G837)” (1 Corinthians 3:6).

Notice who it is that does not hold the Head. It is the same man Paul has been describing since verse 18, the one puffed up by his fleshly mind. The sentence carries straight on: puffed up, and not holding. The verse lays no charge on the Colossians. It describes the man at their door.

That settles the other half of a question earlier studies sent here. What a man loses went to 3:24. How he is moved, and what he ceases to hold, they sent to these two verses. He is moved when he lets a man who has let go of the Head take the seat over him. That is why the warning is spoken to the Colossians — “let no man” — and why the next study will hear Paul ask them, “why… are ye subject (G1379) to ordinances” (Colossians 2:20). What he would cease to hold is exactly what that man let go of. Everything reaching the body comes from the Head: the supply, the knitting, the growth. Their charge is the one already given: “As ye have therefore received Christ Jesus the Lord, so walk ye in him” (Colossians 2:6).

What These Verses Establish

Read whole, the four verses take the finished work of the cross and turn it into a boundary.

The bond was nailed up; therefore no man may judge these people by what was written on it. That writing held the whole calendar of the law — feast, moon, sabbath — and the calendar was a shadow. Not a lie. An outline cast by something real, and the real thing belongs to Christ.

Then the second warning turns from the calendar to the man who comes with a humility, a devotion to angels, and an intrusion into things he has not seen. He wants to sit as umpire and rule them out. Paul looks inside him and finds him swollen. His lowliness has puffed him up, and he has let go of the Head.

Against him stands the body as God made it. All of it is supplied from the Head. All of it is knit together — the very thing an apostle strives for in prison. All of it grows, and the growth is God’s.

The order this series has found through nine studies holds a tenth time. The bond was blotted out before any verdict was forbidden. The Head supplies before the body grows. The charge these people carry, to walk in Him, is given to men who already stand in a body whose every supply comes from Him.

What is new is that the danger now has a face. Earlier studies named a teacher at the door. This one shows what he is like inside: humble, devout, intruding into what he has not seen — and not holding the Head.

That man still comes to doors. He rarely comes with a calendar now. He comes with something to add — a discipline, a deeper experience, a higher way — and he comes humbly. The test Paul gives is not how humble he is. It is whether he is holding the Head.

Next study: (Colossians 2:20–23)

“Wherefore if ye be dead with Christ from the rudiments of the world, why, as though living in the world, are ye subject to ordinances, (Touch not; taste not; handle not; Which all are to perish with the using;) after the commandments and doctrines of men? Which things have indeed a shew of wisdom in will worship, and humility, and neglecting of the body; not in any honour to the satisfying of the flesh.”

2 Samuel 3:1–21 Abner’s Treaty with David

[Study Aired September 28, 2026]

In today’s study, we shall look at the long war between the house of Saul and that of David.  The study also focuses on the quarrel between Abner and Ishbosheth, which resulted in Abner resolve to shift Israel’s allegiance to David, preparing the way for David to be crowned king of Israel.   

Abner Joins David

2Sa 3:1  There was a long war between the house of Saul and the house of David. And David grew stronger and stronger, while the house of Saul became weaker and weaker. 

The house of Saul represents our brothers and sisters in the churches of this world, and the house of David signifies the church of the Lord’s elect. What we need to understand is that this war was initiated by Saul because of his fears that David would usurp his kingship. David had no intention of waging any war with Saul, just as we, His elect, do not want to have any conflict with our brothers and sisters in Babylon. With the death of Saul, this war continues with Ishbosheth, his son, also fearing that David will become king of Israel if not checked. This long war between the house of Saul and that of David therefore signifies how in every generation, our brothers and sisters in the church system of this world hate us, His elect, because they feel insecure of their reward because of us. 

As indicated in Revelation, our brothers and sisters in Babylon consider us as spiritually dead, and their hatred against us is demonstrated by their refusal to bury the bodies of the two witnesses who represent the elect.

Rev 11:7  And when they have finished their testimony, the beast that rises from the bottomless pit will make war on them and conquer them and kill them, 
Rev 11:8  and their dead bodies will lie in the street of the great city that symbolically is called Sodom and Egypt, where their Lord was crucified. 
Rev 11:9  For three and a half days some from the peoples and tribes and languages and nations will gaze at their dead bodies and refuse to let them be placed in a tomb, 
Rev 11:10  and those who dwell on the earth will rejoice over them and make merry and exchange presents, because these two prophets had been a torment to those who dwell on the earth.

It is important to note here in verse 1 that David grew stronger and stronger over time as the house of Saul grew weaker and weaker. This is to tell us that as His elect, represented by David, even as our flesh is wasting away, our inner man is being renewed in Christ day after day. On the other hand, our brothers and sisters in Babylon are becoming worse off as their flesh wastes away over time.  

2Co 4:15  For all things are for your sakes, that the abundant grace might through the thanksgiving of many redound to the glory of God. 
2Co 4:16  For which cause we faint not; but though our outward man perish, yet the inward man is renewed day by day.

2Sa 3:2  And unto David were sons born in Hebron: and his firstborn was Amnon, of Ahinoam the Jezreelitess; 
2Sa 3:3  And his second, Chileab, of Abigail the wife of Nabal the Carmelite; and the third, Absalom the son of Maacah the daughter of Talmai king of Geshur; 
2Sa 3:4  And the fourth, Adonijah the son of Haggith; and the fifth, Shephatiah the son of Abital; 
2Sa 3:5  And the sixth, Ithream, by Eglah David’s wife. These were born to David in Hebron. 

The meaning of the names of the children born to David over the years in his stay in Hebron (which means ‘association’), signifies how the Lord has dealt with David or us over the years. The name of the first born son, called Amnon, means ‘faithful.’ It shows how we have come to realize the faithfulness of the Lord to us in our walk with Him. 

1Co 1:9  God is faithful, by whom ye were called unto the fellowship of his Son Jesus Christ our Lord.

The name of the second son is Chileab, which means ‘like his father.’ This implies that how we are becoming like our father, Jesus, over the years. 

Rom 8:29  For whom he did foreknow, he also did predestinate to be conformed to the image of his Son, that he might be the firstborn among many brethren.

The third son was called Absalom which means ‘my father is peace.’ It demonstrates that as we walk with Christ, the peace of God which passes all understanding is keeping our hearts and minds through Jesus Christ. 

Php 4:7  And the peace of God, which passeth all understanding, shall keep your hearts and minds through Christ Jesus.

The name of the fourth son was called Adonijah which means ‘My Lord is Jehovah.’ The literal translation of the name “Jehovah” means ‘to be’ or ‘to become’ or that ‘He causes to become.’ David naming his fourth son Adonijah is the recognition by the Lord’s elect that it is the Lord who is causing us to become like Him. It is therefore, not by our efforts or wisdom or anything that we have done, but by His grace and mercy. The process of making all things new by the Lord, starts with us, His elect, as He is making us to become like Him in this age. 

Rev 21:5  And he that sat upon the throne said, Behold, I make all things new. And he said unto me, Write: for these words are true and faithful.

The name of the fifth son was called Shephatiah, which suggests ‘Jehovah has judged.’ It indicates how the Lord is judging us, His elect, in this age to become like Him. 

Psa 75:7  But God is the judge: he putteth down one, and setteth up another.

The Lord putting one down and setting up another through His judgment means destroying the old man or flesh even as He establishes the new man in our hearts and minds. 

The sixth son born to David was named Ithream. It denotes the abundance  or multitude of the people. What this implies is how the Lord is preparing us to bring in the harvest of multitude of the people, in the fulness of time.

Gal 4:27  For it is written, Rejoice, thou barren that bearest not; break forth and cry, thou that travailest not: for the desolate hath many more children than she which hath an husband.

2Sa 3:6  And it came to pass, while there was war between the house of Saul and the house of David, that Abner made himself strong for the house of Saul. 
2Sa 3:7  And Saul had a concubine, whose name was Rizpah, the daughter of Aiah: and Ishbosheth said to Abner, Wherefore hast thou gone in unto my father’s concubine? 

Abner represents the leadership of the church system of this world. The fact that Abner made himself strong for the house of Saul implies that the conflict, perpetuated by our brothers and sisters in Babylon against the Lord’s elect, is good for the leaders of Babylon as it makes them entrench their position as leaders. 

Ishbosheth accusing Abner of sleeping with Saul’s concubine in verse 7 demonstrates the sins of the leaders of the church system of this world. The sin that Abner was accused of by Ishbosheth is spiritually the same as the man who slept with his father’s wife in the Corinth church.

1Co 5:1  It is reported commonly that there is fornication among you, and such fornication as is not so much as named among the Gentiles, that one should have his father’s wife.
1Co 5:2  And ye are puffed up, and have not rather mourned, that he that hath done this deed might be taken away from among you.

The question is, “What does it mean spiritually to sleep with the father’s wife or concubine?” Possessing a predecessor’s or father’s wife/ concubine was a symbolic act of claiming his household, authority, and status. There are several examples in the Bible. For example, Reuben sleeping with Bilhah (Genesis 35:22, 49:4) and Absalom sleeping with his father David’s concubines (2 Samuel 16:22). Therefore, Abner being accused of sleeping with Saul’s concubine demonstrates how the leaders of the church system of this world are usurping the Lord’s authority over His church. 

Eze 34:2  Son of man, prophesy against the shepherds of Israel, prophesy, and say unto them, Thus saith the Lord GOD unto the shepherds; Woe be to the shepherds of Israel that do feed themselves! should not the shepherds feed the flocks? 
Eze 34:3  Ye eat the fat, and ye clothe you with the wool, ye kill them that are fed: but ye feed not the flock. 
Eze 34:4  The diseased have ye not strengthened, neither have ye healed that which was sick, neither have ye bound up that which was broken, neither have ye brought again that which was driven away, neither have ye sought that which was lost; but with force and with cruelty have ye ruled them.
Eze 34:5  And they were scattered, because there is no shepherd: and they became meat to all the beasts of the field, when they were scattered.
Eze 34:6  My sheep wandered through all the mountains, and upon every high hill: yea, my flock was scattered upon all the face of the earth, and none did search or seek after them.
Eze 34:7  Therefore, ye shepherds, hear the word of the LORD; 
Eze 34:8  As I live, saith the Lord GOD, surely because my flock became a prey, and my flock became meat to every beast of the field, because there was no shepherd, neither did my shepherds search for my flock, but the shepherds fed themselves, and fed not my flock;

2Sa 3:8  Then was Abner very wroth for the words of Ishbosheth, and said, Am I a dog’s head, which against Judah do shew kindness this day unto the house of Saul thy father, to his brethren, and to his friends, and have not delivered thee into the hand of David, that thou chargest me to day with a fault concerning this woman? 

In his response to the accusation by Ishbosheth, Abner did not deny the allegation but rather became furious for being questioned about the affair. The fact that Abner is comparing himself to a dog’s head signifies that our brothers and sisters in Babylon have the mentality of going back to their vomit, just as we were, when we were entrapped in Babylon.  

2Pe 2:22  What the true proverb says has happened to them: “The dog returns to its own vomit, and the sow, after washing herself, returns to wallow in the mire.”

Abner asking why Ishbosheth should charge him with a fault concerning the woman tells us how the leaders of the church system of this world do not want to hear any criticism concerning their dealings with their churches. No wonder they are spiritually poor.  

Pro 13:18 If you refuse criticism, you will end in poverty and disgrace; if you accept criticism, you are on the road to fame. (The Living Bible)

Abner Decides to Support David

2Sa 3:9  So do God to Abner, and more also, except, as the LORD hath sworn to David, even so I do to him; 
2Sa 3:10  To translate the kingdom from the house of Saul, and to set up the throne of David over Israel and over Judah, from Dan even to Beersheba. 
2Sa 3:11  And he could not answer Abner a word again, because he feared him. 

Abner deciding to help David to be enthroned as king of both Judah and Israel because of the conflict with Ishbosheth shows how the Lord is working out all things according to the counsel of His own will. We can see from these verses therefore, that everything that had happened between Abner and Ishbosheth was all of the Lord. It demonstrates how the Lord uses both good and evil to accomplish His purpose.

Eph 1:11  In whom also we have obtained an inheritance, being predestinated according to the purpose of him who worketh all things after the counsel of his own will:

Psa 139:11  If I say, Surely the darkness shall cover me; even the night shall be light about me. 
Psa 139:12  Yea, the darkness hideth not from thee; but the night shineth as the day: the darkness and the light are both alike to thee.

Abner was still full of the flesh when he decided to help David to be enthroned as king of both Judah and Israel. It shows how the Lord is using people of this world, including our brothers and sisters in Babylon and their resources, as His instrument to accomplish our enthronement as kings in the fullness of time when the kingdoms of this world become the kingdoms of our Lord and of His Christ.   

Isa 60:1  Arise, shine; for thy light is come, and the glory of the LORD is risen upon thee. 
Isa 60:2  For, behold, the darkness shall cover the earth, and gross darkness the people: but the LORD shall arise upon thee, and his glory shall be seen upon thee. 
Isa 60:3  And the Gentiles shall come to thy light, and kings to the brightness of thy rising.
Isa 60:4  Lift up thine eyes round about, and see: all they gather themselves together, they come to thee: thy sons shall come from far, and thy daughters shall be nursed at thy side.
Isa 60:5  Then thou shalt see, and flow together, and thine heart shall fear, and be enlarged; because the abundance of the sea shall be converted unto thee, the forces of the Gentiles shall come unto thee.
Isa 60:6  The multitude of camels shall cover thee, the dromedaries of Midian and Ephah; all they from Sheba shall come: they shall bring gold and incense; and they shall shew forth the praises of the LORD. 
Isa 60:7  All the flocks of Kedar shall be gathered together unto thee, the rams of Nebaioth shall minister unto thee: they shall come up with acceptance on mine altar, and I will glorify the house of my glory. 
Isa 60:8  Who are these that fly as a cloud, and as the doves to their windows? 
Isa 60:9  Surely the isles shall wait for me, and the ships of Tarshish first, to bring thy sons from far, their silver and their gold with them, unto the name of the LORD thy God, and to the Holy One of Israel, because he hath glorified thee. 
Isa 60:10  And the sons of strangers shall build up thy walls, and their kings shall minister unto thee: for in my wrath I smote thee, but in my favour have I had mercy on thee.

2Sa 3:12  And Abner sent messengers to David on his behalf, saying, Whose is the land? saying also, Make thy league with me, and, behold, my hand shall be with thee, to bring about all Israel unto thee. 
2Sa 3:13  And he said, Well; I will make a league with thee: but one thing I require of thee, that is, Thou shalt not see my face, except thou first bring Michal Saul’s daughter, when thou comest to see my face. 

As indicated earlier, the Lord was using Abner to bring Israel under David’s rulership. Abner asking David to make a league with him to guarantee his rulership over Israel is to emphasize how the Lord is working all things after the counsel of His will. It also indicates that the mercy we are receiving to guarantee our rulership in the fullness of time is at the expense of our brothers and sisters in Babylon, signified by Abner’s fall from grace.

Rom 11:30  For as ye in times past have not believed God, yet have now obtained mercy through their unbelief: 
Rom 11:31  Even so have these also now not believed, that through your mercy they also may obtain mercy. 
Rom 11:32  For God hath concluded them all in unbelief, that he might have mercy upon all. 

We need to know that Michal was first married to David but was taken away by Saul to be married to another man. David requesting for the return of Saul’s daughter means that the mercy that we have received by the Lord to rule with Him in the fulness of time (that is, in causing Abner to help David become king of Israel) shall be extended to our brothers and sisters in Babylon, represented by Michal. 

2Sa 3:14  And David sent messengers to Ishbosheth Saul’s son, saying, Deliver me my wife Michal, which I espoused to me for an hundred foreskins of the Philistines. 
2Sa 3:15  And Ishbosheth sent, and took her from her husband, even from Phaltiel the son of Laish. 
2Sa 3:16  And her husband went with her along weeping behind her to Bahurim. Then said Abner unto him, Go, return. And he returned.

David reminding Ishbosheth that Michal was espoused to him for an hundred foreskins of the Philistines signifies that the only way we can become the bride of Christ is the destruction of our flesh, represented by the Philistines, and this happens only after we bear witness of how full of the flesh we have become (significance of the number 100 = 10×10. We should note that 100 has two tens which speaks of a witness and the tens represents fullness of the flesh). 

In another perspective, we can say that Michal’s marriage to Phaltiel represents the phase of our walk when we were in Babylon with our father being the devil, even though, the Lord, represented by David, had paid the price for our sins, signified by the hundred foreskins of the Philistines delivered by David to Saul for the hand of Michal. 

1Pe 1:18  Forasmuch as ye know that ye were not redeemed with corruptible things, as silver and gold, from your vain conversation received by tradition from your fathers; 
1Pe 1:19  But with the precious blood of Christ, as of a lamb without blemish and without spot: 

Taking Michal from her husband in Israel and taking her to Judah where David reigns symbolizes our deliverance as the Lord’s elect from Babylon to the church of the firstborn or heavenly Jerusalem. 

Rev 18:4  And I heard another voice from heaven, saying, Come out of her, my people, that ye be not partakers of her sins, and that ye receive not of her plagues. 

The fact that both Ishbosheth and Abner were instrumental in bringing Michal to David in Hebron indicates that it was our brothers and sisters in Babylon who pushed us out of Babylon to become part of the church of the Lord’s elect, in the fullness of time. 

2Sa 3:17  And Abner had communication with the elders of Israel, saying, Ye sought for David in times past to be king over you: 
2Sa 3:18  Now then do it: for the LORD hath spoken of David, saying, By the hand of my servant David I will save my people Israel out of the hand of the Philistines, and out of the hand of all their enemies. 
2Sa 3:19  And Abner also spake in the ears of Benjamin: and Abner went also to speak in the ears of David in Hebron all that seemed good to Israel, and that seemed good to the whole house of Benjamin.

We can see from these verses that Abner was doing all the work for David’s rulership of Israel to be fulfilled as quickly as possible. When the time is right, the Lord fulfills that which He has said concerning us speedily. 

Isa 60:22  The least one shall become a clan, and the smallest one a mighty nation; I am the LORD; in its time I will hasten it. ESV

Psa 138:8  The LORD will fulfill his purpose for me; your steadfast love, O LORD, endures forever. Do not forsake the work of your hands. 

Psalm 138:8 assures us that God is actively working on the burdens, dreams, and situations that worry our hearts, like an artist finishing a masterpiece. 

2Sa 3:20  So Abner came to David to Hebron, and twenty men with him. And David made Abner and the men that were with him a feast. 
2Sa 3:21  And Abner said unto David, I will arise and go, and will gather all Israel unto my lord the king, that they may make a league with thee, and that thou mayest reign over all that thine heart desireth. And David sent Abner away; and he went in peace. 

Finally, Abner came to Hebron with twenty men to meet David. As a gesture of goodwill, David made a feast for Abner and his men. David sent Abner away with the promise by Abner that he was going to gather all Israel for David to become their king. These verses therefore show us how the Lord uses both the people of this world and our brothers and sisters in Babylon to accomplish His purpose in our lives of getting us ready as the Lord’s elect, to rule the kingdoms of this world in the fullness of time. 

Rev 11:15  And the seventh angel sounded; and there were great voices in heaven, saying, The kingdoms of this world are become the kingdoms of our Lord, and of his Christ; and he shall reign for ever and ever.

What the Lord starts, He is able to bring to completion. May His name be magnified in our lives. Amen!!

Alleged Contradictions in Scriptures, Part 8B – Why Have a Bride?

[Study Aired September 27, 2026]

We paused our last study with these questions:

“If Christ’s ministers are not to lord it over the Lord’s flock, and if Christ Himself tells us we are not to exercise dominion over each other as the Gentiles do, then what is the function of the elders and ministers within the body of Christ? Did Christ have any authority over His apostles? Was Christ given any power over those who followed Him? Do Christ’s ministers have any power or authority over the Lord’s flock?” (End Quote)

Today we will, Lord willing, answer each of these questions. Answering this apparent contradiction will inform us of why the Lord has a “firstfruit” harvest, and a “bride”. It will inform us of what the mindset and the temperament and function of the ‘firstfruit… bride’ must be if we are to be granted that blessing.

To answer these questions about whether God’s minister have any authority over His flock, let’s examine a few of the verses which appear to contradict the doctrine that God’s ministers have “[no] dominion over [your] faith.”

We are told this of Christ’s own style of teaching:

Mat 7:24  Therefore whosoever heareth these sayings of mine, and doeth them, I will liken him unto a wise man, which built his house upon a rock:
Mat 7:25  And the rain descended, and the floods came, and the winds blew, and beat upon that house; and it fell not: for it was founded upon a rock.
Mat 7:26  And every one that heareth these sayings of mine, and doeth them not, shall be likened unto a foolish man, which built his house upon the sand:
Mat 7:27  And the rain descended, and the floods came, and the winds blew, and beat upon that house; and it fell: and great was the fall of it.
Mat 7:28  And it came to pass, when Jesus had ended these sayings, the people were astonished at his doctrine:
Mat 7:29  For he taught them as one having authority, [Greek: exousia, G1849] and not as the scribes. 

‘Hear and do these sayings of mine and you are building on a rock. Hear and do not these sayings of mine and you are building upon the sand.’ Christ certainly did “teach as one having authority”, what is the holy spirit telling us of His authority? Is it telling us He had great authority over all who heard His sayings.

Here is Strong’s definition of the Greek word which is translated as ‘authority’ in Matthew 7:29:

G1849
ἐξουσία
exousia
ex-oo-see’-ah

From G1832 (in the sense of ability); privilege, that is, (subjectively) force, capacity, competency, freedom, or (objectively) mastery (concretely magistrate, superhuman, potentate, token of control), delegated influence: – authority, jurisdiction, liberty, power, right, strength.

These are the New Testament entries for that word exousia:

G1849
ἐξουσία
exousia
Total KJV Occurrences: 103
power, 61
Mat_9:6, Mat_9:8, Mat_10:1, Mat_28:18, Mar_2:10, Mar_3:15, Mar_6:7, Luk_4:6, Luk_4:32, Luk_5:24, Luk_10:19, Luk_12:5, Luk_22:53, Joh_1:12, Joh_10:18 (2), Joh_17:2, Joh_19:10-11 (3), Act_1:7, Act_5:4, Act_8:19, Act_26:18, Rom_9:21, Rom_13:1-3 (3), 1Co_7:37, 1Co_9:4-6 (3), 1Co_9:12 (2), 1Co_9:18, 1Co_11:10, 2Co_13:10, Eph_1:21, Eph_2:2, Col_1:13, Col_2:10, 2Th_3:9, Rev_2:25-26 (2), Rev_6:8, Rev_9:3 (2), Rev_9:10, Rev_9:19, Rev_11:6 (2), Rev_12:10, Rev_13:4-5 (2), Rev_13:7, Rev_13:12, Rev_14:18, Rev_16:9, Rev_17:12, Rev_18:1, Rev_20:6
authority, 28
Mat_7:29, Mat_8:9, Mat_21:23-24 (3), Mat_21:27, Mar_1:22, Mar_11:27-29 (4), Mar_13:33-34 (2), Luk_4:36, Luk_7:8, Luk_9:1, Luk_19:17, Luk_20:2 (2), Luk_20:8, Luk_20:20, Joh_5:27, Act_9:14, Act_26:10, Act_26:12, 1Co_15:24, 2Co_10:8, Rev_13:2
powers, 8
Luk_12:11, Rom_13:1 (2), Eph_3:10, Eph_6:12, Col_1:16, Col_2:15, Tit_3:1
right, 2
Heb_13:10, Rev_22:14
authorities, 1
1Pe_3:22
jurisdiction, 1
Luk_23:7
liberty, 1
1Co_8:9
strength, 1
Rev_17:13

This word ‘exousia‘, meaning power and authority, is used in connection with both God’s witnesses as well as the beast, each in his own predestined turn:

Rev 11:6  These [two witnesses] have power [exousia] to shut heaven, that it rain not in the days of their prophecy: and have power [exousia] over waters to turn them to blood, and to smite the earth with all [seven – Rev 16] plagues, as often as they will.

Rev 13:7  And it was given unto him [the beast] to make war with the saints, and to overcome them: and power was given him over all kindreds, and tongues, and nations.

So Christ tells us that ‘exercising dominion and authority upon others as the Gentiles do’, “shall not be so among you”, and yet we find that He Himself “spoke as one having authority”, ‘exousia‘, which is most often translated as ‘power’.

Mat 20:25  But Jesus called them unto him, and said, Ye know that the princes of the Gentiles exercise dominion [G263 katakurieuō] over them, and they that are great exercise authority [G2715: katexousiazō – pronounced kat-ex-oo-see-ad’-zo] upon them.
Mat 20:26  But it shall not be so among you: but whosoever will be great among you, let him be your minister;

Mat 7:29  For he taught them as one having authority [exousia, G1849], and not as the scribes.

Notice that the Greek word translated ‘authority’ in Matthew 20:25, which “shall not be so among you”, is a different word from the word translated ‘authority’ in Matthew 7:29.

Before we demonstrate that there is no contradiction at all between Matthew 7:29 and Matthew 20:25-26, let’s look at a few other of the places where this word ‘exousia‘, which is translated as ‘authority’ in Matthew 7:29, appears:

Mat 9:1  And he entered into a ship, and passed over, and came into his own city.
Mat 9:2  And, behold, they brought to him a man sick of the palsy, lying on a bed: and Jesus seeing their faith said unto the sick of the palsy; Son, be of good cheer; thy sins be forgiven thee. 
Mat 9:3  And, behold, certain of the scribes said within themselves, This man blasphemeth.
Mat 9:4  And Jesus knowing their thoughts said, Wherefore think ye evil in your hearts?
Mat 9:5  For whether is easier, to say, Thy sins be forgiven thee; or to say, Arise, and walk?
Mat 9:6  But that ye may know that the Son of man hath power [Greek: exousia – authority] on earth to forgive sins, (then saith he to the sick of the palsy,) Arise, take up thy bed, and go unto thine house.
Mat 9:7  And he arose, and departed to his house.

1Pe 3:22  Who [Christ] is gone into heaven, and is on the right hand of God; angels and authorities [G1849, exousia] and powers [Greek: dunamis, G14111] being made subject unto him.

Here is Peter telling us plainly that this ‘exousia‘, this ‘power’, this ‘authority’ given Christ, places the “angels and authorities and powers… subject unto [Christ]”.

The question now becomes, has Christ given this same power and authority to His children? What does Christ Himself tell us?

Luk 10:19  Behold, I give unto you power [Greek: exousia, G1849] to tread on serpents and scorpions, and over all the power of the enemy: and nothing shall by any means hurt you.

This brings us back to those verses brought up in Tony’s Thursday night study:

Psa 91:11 For he shall give his angels charge over thee, to keep thee in all thy ways.
Psa 91:12 They shall bear thee up in their hands, lest thou dash thy foot against a stone.
Psa 91:13 Thou shalt tread upon the lion and adder: the young lion and the dragon shalt thou trample under feet.

Nothing empowers “the enemy” more than his lies and false doctrines, typified throughout scripture as seducing spirits and doctrines of devils being taught to us by the serpent, the devil, and the dragon.

Mat 15:9  But in vain they do worship me, teaching for doctrines the commandments of men.

Col 2:22  Which all are to perish with the using;) after the commandments and doctrines of men?

1Ti 4:1  Now the Spirit speaketh expressly, that in the latter times some shall depart from the faith, giving heed to seducing spirits, and doctrines of devils;

Heb 13:9  Be not carried about with divers and strange doctrines. For it is a good thing that the heart be established with grace; not with meats, which have not profited them that have been occupied therein.

Rev 12:9 And the great dragon was cast out, that old serpent, called the Devil, and Satan, which deceiveth the whole world: he was cast out into the earth, and his angels were cast out with him.

Now if one of these “doctrines of devils” is injected into the body of Christ, Christ Himself has given His children power over all such powers and authorities, whether those powers are coming from without or from within His body. This is power [over what is taught as the Truth of the Word of God.

How is it possible to have “power… over all the power of the enemy” and not have dominion over the faith of a brother or a sister? The answer to that question is:

Mat 18:15 Moreover if thy brother shall trespass against thee, go and tell him his fault between thee and him alone: if he shall hear thee, thou hast gained thy brother.
Mat 18:16 But if he will not hear thee, then take with thee one or two more, that in the mouth of two or three witnesses every word may be established.
Mat 18:17 And if he shall neglect to hear them, tell it unto the church: but if he neglect to hear the church, let him be unto thee as an heathen man and a publican.
Mat 18:18 Verily I say unto you, Whatsoever ye shall bind on earth shall be bound in heaven: and whatsoever ye shall loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven.

Clearly the power, the authority, G1849, ‘exousia’, is the power of  persuasion of the heavens of our minds and is not the G2715, ‘katexousiazo’ the “power”, the “dominion” which the Gentiles exercise over the kingdoms of this world.

Christ is not just us an individual. We are indeed also Christ (Act 14:22), but we are Christ only as a “many member[ed] body”:

1Co 12:14 For the body is not one member, but many.
1Co 12:15 If the foot shall say, Because I am not the hand, I am not of the body; is it therefore not of the body?
1Co 12:16 And if the ear shall say, Because I am not the eye, I am not of the body; is it therefore not of the body?
1Co 12:17 If the whole body were an eye, where were the hearing? If the whole were hearing, where were the smelling?
1Co 12:18 But now hath God set the members every one of them in the body, as it hath pleased him.
1Co 12:19 And if they were all one member, where were the body?
1Co 12:20 But now are they many members, yet but one body.
1Co 12:21 And the eye cannot say unto the hand, I have no need of thee: nor again the head to the feet, I have no need of you.

Here is how Peter asserts this power and authority over all powers and authorities when external governments attempt to affect the actions of the body of Christ from without:

Act 5:27  And when they had brought them [The apostles], they set them before the council: and the high priest asked them,
Act 5:28  Saying, Did not we straitly command you that ye should not teach in this name? and, behold, ye have filled Jerusalem with your doctrine, and intend to bring this man’s blood upon us.
Act 5:29  Then Peter and the other apostles answered and said, We ought to obey God rather than men.

Peter did not claim to be an infallible Pope. He used the pronoun “We”. He did not tell the leader of the Jews that the outward kingdom of God was here on this earth at this time, as a brother insisted we are to do just a few short years ago and as the Roman Catholic church proclaimed for over four hundred years (1073—1517). In other words, Peter asserted his power only over the kingdoms of this world within himself only in the same way Christ exercised that same power. That is what is meant when we are told:

Mat 7:29  For he taught them as one having authority [G1849, ‘exousia’ power], and not as the scribes.

Christ always spoke for His Father:

Joh 14:10 Believest thou not that I am in the Father, and the Father in me? the words that I speak unto you I speak not of myself: but the Father that dwelleth in me, he doeth the works.

Christ and Peter were both willing to give up their physical lives to the outward political governments of this age for the reward of an inward spiritual life in this age in down payment form, and as “the redemption of the purchased possession” (Eph 1:14) in the age to come. As Christ told Pilate:

Joh 19:9  And [Pilate] went again into the judgment hall, and saith unto Jesus, Whence art thou? But Jesus gave him no answer.
Joh 19:10  Then saith Pilate unto him, Speakest thou not unto me? knowest thou not that I have power to crucify thee, and have power to release thee?
Joh 19:11  Jesus answered, Thou couldest have no power [G2634: katakurieuō] at all against me, except it were given thee from above: therefore he that delivered me unto thee hath the greater sin.

Paul demonstrates the power and authority we all have, and with which we are to deal with the doctrines of devils which attempt to infect the body of Christ from within or from without:

1Ti 6:3  If any man teach otherwise, and consent not to wholesome words, even the words of our Lord Jesus Christ, and to the doctrine which is according to godliness;
1Ti 6:4  He is proud, knowing nothing, but doting about questions and strifes of words, whereof cometh envy, strife, railings, evil surmisings,
1Ti 6:5  Perverse disputings of men of corrupt minds, and destitute of the truth, supposing that gain is godliness: from such withdraw thyself.

2Ti 1:13  Hold fast the form of sound words, which thou hast heard of me, in faith and love which is in Christ Jesus. 
2Ti 1:14  That good thing which was committed unto thee keep by the Holy Ghost which dwelleth in us. 
2Ti 1:15  This thou knowest, that all they which are in Asia [“The seven churches of Asia”, (Rev 1:4)] be turned away from me; of whom are Phygellus and Hermogenes.

The apostle John tells us the same:

2Jn 1:9  Whosoever transgresseth, and abideth not in the doctrine of Christ, hath not God. He that abideth in the doctrine of Christ, he hath both the Father and the Son.
2Jn 1:10  If there come any unto you, and bring not this doctrine, receive him not into your house, neither bid him God speed: 
2Jn 1:11  For he that biddeth him God speed is partaker of his evil deeds.

The difference between ruling the house of God in this age and ruling the nations during the millennium is the difference of realizing that God is using this present dispensation to produce sons who have conquered the kingdom of the beast within every man. Such ‘sons’ will then be qualified to rule over the kingdoms of this world for a thousand years, as we are promised in Revelation 2:27 where we are told what awaits those who have been granted the honor of becoming overcomers in this age. These promises include those who have fallen “asleep in Christ” over the past two thousand years, as well as those saints who will still be living in these earthen vessels at the time of the appearing of Christ at the first resurrection. The first resurrection takes place at the beginning of the thousand-year reign of Christ and His bride, His elect, “we… who first believed in Christ” (Eph 1:12). This is what is promised to those who are granted to partake of that “blessed and holy… first resurrection” (Rev 20:6):

Rev 2:26  And he that overcometh, and keepeth my works unto the end, to him will I give power over the nations:
Rev 2:27  And he shall rule them with a rod of iron; as the vessels of a potter shall they be broken to shivers: even as I received of my Father.

The word translated ‘rule’ in this verse has much in common with what we read about a Godly ruler in this age, but it is a different word. Here is this Greek word, and here is Strong’s definition of this word:

G4165
ποιμαίνω
poimainō
poy-mah’ee-no
From G4166; to tend as a shepherd (or figuratively superviser): – feed (cattle), rule.

Here are all the entries for this word:

G4165
ποιμαίνω
poimainō
Total KJV Occurrences: 12
feed, 4
Joh_21:16, Act_20:28, 1Pe_5:2, Rev_7:17
rule, 4
Mat_2:6, Rev_2:27, Rev_12:5, Rev_19:15
feeding, 2
Luk_17:7, Jud_1:12
cattle, 1
Luk_17:7
feedeth, 1
1Co_9:7

This word actually appears only eleven times, because the word ‘cattle’ is a double count of ‘feeding cattle’ in Luke 17:7. Of these eleven entries it is seven times translated as ‘feed, feeding, or feedeth.’

The word obviously is associated with feeding God’s people. Whether they are converted or not, they are still His, and He feeds them all.

Eze 18:4  Behold, all souls are mine; as the soul of the father, so also the soul of the son is mine: the soul that sinneth, it shall die.

The difference between feeding God’s children at this time and during the millennium is the same as the difference between feeding God’s children for forty years in the wilderness and feeding them at this time. In other words Christ is, at this time, in the process of gathering His elect under His wings as a hen gathers her chicks. The “rod of iron” is not the emphasis of this dispensation, whereas being ruled with “a rod of iron” is the emphasis of the authority of God over the kingdoms of this world during the thousand-year reign of Christ and His elect.

The phrase “a rod of iron” appear four times in the Bible, and three of them are in the book of Revelation:

Psa 2:9  Thou shalt break them with a rod of iron; thou shalt dash them in pieces like a potter’s vessel. 

Rev 2:27  And he shall rule them with a rod of iron; as the vessels of a potter shall they be broken to shivers: even as I received of my Father.

Rev 12:5  And she brought forth a man child, who was to rule all nations with a rod of iron: and her child was caught up unto God, and to his throne.

Rev 19:15  And out of his mouth goeth a sharp sword, that with it he should smite the nations: and he shall rule them with a rod of iron: and he treadeth the winepress of the fierceness and wrath of Almighty God.

So the feeding of that period of “a thousand years” is for an entirely different purpose than the feeding of God’s flock at this time. The manchild of the woman of Revelation 12 is given to rule the nations with a rod of iron, and we are told when that will take place:

Rev 20:1  And I saw an angel come down from heaven, having the key of the bottomless pit and a great chain in his hand.
Rev 20:2  And he laid hold on the dragon, that old serpent, which is the Devil, and Satan, and bound him a thousand years,
Rev 20:3  And cast him into the bottomless pit, and shut him up, and set a seal upon him, that he should deceive the nations no more, till the thousand years should be fulfilled: and after that he must be loosed a little season.
Rev 20:4  And I saw thrones, and they sat upon them, and judgment was given unto them: and I saw the souls of them that were beheaded for the witness of Jesus, and for the word of God, and which had not worshipped the beast, neither his image, neither had received his mark upon their foreheads, or in their hands; and they lived and reigned with Christ a thousand years.

The overcomers of Revelation 2:27 are the woman’s manchild who will rule with Christ with a rod of iron for a thousand years. The feeding of those who will be living at that time will not produce a single overcomer because there will be no ‘wicked one’ to overcome during that period. Read this link for much more on this point:

http://www.iswasandwillbe.com/gods-purpose-for-the-millennium/

Conclusion

To conclude this study, I will again quote what Christ has commanded us to avoid:

Mat 20:25  But Jesus called them unto him, and said, Ye know that the princes of the Gentiles exercise dominion over them, and they that are great exercise authority upon them.
Mat 20:26  But it shall not be so among you: but whosoever will be great among you, let him be your minister;
Mat 20:27  And whosoever will be chief among you, let him be your servant:
Mat 20:28  Even as the Son of man came not to be ministered unto, but to minister, and to give his life a ransom for many. 

Mat 23:8  But be not ye called Rabbi: for one is your Master, even Christ; and all ye are brethren.
Mat 23:9  And call no man your father upon the earth: for one is your Father, which is in heaven.
Mat 23:10  Neither be ye called masters: for one is your Master, even Christ.
Mat 23:11  But he that is greatest among you shall be your servant.
Mat 23:12  And whosoever shall exalt himself shall be abased; and he that shall humble himself shall be exalted.

Paul’s doctrine accords with Christ’s words:

2Co 1:24  Not for that we have dominion over [G2961: kurieuo’ the dominion exercised by the princes of this world] your faith, but are helpers of your joy: for by faith ye stand.

Yet we are told by the same Lord:

Luk 10:19  Behold, I give unto you power [G1849] ‘exousia’, authority] to tread on serpents and scorpions, and over all the power [G1411, ‘dunamis’, “strength power, ability”] of the enemy: and nothing shall by any means hurt you.

So there is no contradiction in telling us that we have no dominion over each other’s faith, while at the same time telling us that we are to submit ourselves to our leaders who must render an accounting of how they have been overseers of the Lord’s flock. While we have no dominion over each other’s faith, if we are in Christ, we do have “power… over all the power of the enemy”, and we have power and authority over all of His lying serpents and scorpions, and we are commanded to tread upon those lies, even if they are coming from “any man who is called a brother”, and we are to follow our Lord’s instructions in Matthew 18:15-18, and cast him and his lies out of our fellowship before his leavening lies leaven the entire body of Christ as we are instructed in:

1Co 5:9  I wrote unto you in an epistle not to company with fornicators:
1Co 5:10  Yet not altogether with the fornicators of this world, or with the covetous, or extortioners, or with idolaters; for then must ye needs go out of the world.
1Co 5:11  But now I have written unto you not to keep company, if any man that is called a brother be a fornicator, or covetous, or an idolater, or a railer, or a drunkard, or an extortioner; with such an one no not to eat.
1Co 5:12  For what have I to do to judge them also that are without? do not ye judge them that are within?
1Co 5:13  But them that are without God judgeth. Therefore put away from among yourselves that wicked person.

When we follow the commandments given us in Matthew 18…

Mat 18:15  Moreover if thy brother shall trespass against thee, go and tell him his fault between thee and him alone: if he shall hear thee, thou hast gained thy brother.
Mat 18:16  But if he will not hear thee, then take with thee one or two more, that in the mouth of two or three witnesses every word may be established.
Mat 18:17  And if he shall neglect to hear them, tell it unto the church: but if he neglect to hear the church, let him be unto thee as an heathen man and a publican.
Mat 18:18  Verily I say unto you, Whatsoever ye shall bind on earth shall be bound in heaven: and whatsoever ye shall loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven.

…we will not be dominating each other’s faith because “the church” itself is a united and healthy body of one man, “the man Jesus Christ”, and He alone is dictating what is and what is not Truth, as we are instructed:

1Ti 3:14  These things write I unto thee, hoping to come unto thee shortly:
1Ti 3:15  But if I tarry long, that thou mayest know how thou oughtest to behave thyself in the house of God, which is the church of the living God, the pillar and ground of the truth.

If Christ is living His life within us, then we will have His mind and…

1Jn 1:6  If we say that we have fellowship with him, and walk in darkness, we lie, and do not the truth:
1Jn 1:7  But if we walk in the light, as he is in the light, we have fellowship one with another, and the blood of Jesus Christ his Son cleanseth us from all sin.

If indeed “any man that is called a brother… is lying and not doing the Truth”, then we have been given power over all the power of the enemy, and the gloves are off. It is incumbent upon every leader in the body of Christ, as the Lord’s angels (messengers), to “tread upon the lion and adder: the young lion and the dragon.”

Psa 91:11  For he shall give his angels charge over thee, to keep thee in all thy ways.
Psa 91:12  They shall bear thee up in their hands, lest thou dash thy foot against a stone.
Psa 91:13  Thou shalt tread upon the lion and adder: the young lion and the dragon shalt thou trample under feet.

If we are Christ’s, then we are also His angels:

Rev 17:1  And there came one of the seven angels which had the seven vials, and talked with me, saying unto me, Come hither; I will shew unto thee the judgment of the great whore that sitteth upon many waters:

Rev 19:10  And I fell at his feet to worship him. And he said unto me, See thou do it not: I am thy fellowservant, and of thy brethren that have the testimony of Jesus: worship God: for the testimony of Jesus is the spirit of prophecy.

Rev 22:8  And I John saw these things, and heard them. And when I had heard and seen, I fell down to worship before the feet of the angel which shewed me these things [same angel as the angel of Rev 19:10]
Rev 22:9  Then saith he unto me, See thou do it not: for I am thy fellowservant, and of thy brethren the prophets, and of them which keep the sayings of this book: worship God.

“If we walk in the light, as He is in the light, we have fellowship one with another”, and there will be no desire to attempt to dominate one another’s faith. If ever there is such a desire on the part of any brother, obedience to our instructions in Matthew 18, will purge us of the rebels:

Eze 20:38  And I will purge out from among you the rebels, and them that transgress against me: I will bring them forth out of the country where they sojourn, and they shall not enter into the land of Israel: and ye shall know that I am the LORD.

When the rebels are purged we will then “have fellowship with Him”, and we will be “of the same mind” to the extent that we will be able to say with the rest of the body of Christ:

1Jn 4:6  We are of God: he that knoweth God heareth us; he that is not of God heareth not us. Hereby know we the spirit of truth, and the spirit of error.

The Song of Solomon, Part 10 – The Company of Horses, and the Chariot That Draws the World Home

[Study Aired September 26, 2026]

Introduction

The last study concludes with the Shulamite, deeply feeling somewhat imposter-like, although deeply graced, asking her Lord why He should choose her (Son 1:7). Internally, she vividly recalls her similarity to her sisters in Solomon’s harem — though with a greater sense of righteous conscience — aware that they, as a cortege of young women thrust together often do, discuss and compare their intimacies (paradoxically, a strange phenomenon rarely found among men). Particularly when chosen for intimacy, from among one thousand wives, would have been extremely arid. Typically, their lust for them was not necessarily driven by an eager desire to be intimately acquainted with Solomon. Rather, as young women often do, indiscreetly debate their individual experiences as raunchily did Ahola and Aholabah (Eze 23:20), the knowledge of being desired and chosen evokes far more romantic allure and competitive envy than the notion of an eagerly desired unified spirit, which ultimately and inevitably leads to coition—and spiritual fruitfulness from our Husband and Lord. As with Old Israel with her Husband, a tedious paradox preferably avoided — and the Lord of the Old Covenant, and Solomon, as do all husbands, mostly silently and often bitterly endure (Col 3:19).

The Shepherd who hides His Bride even from herself does not leave her question unanswered for long. She has just asked where He feeds His flock (his teeth in kisses) at noon. His answer arrives, and it arrives strangely — not with directions, but with a mirror held up to the very sisters she has already left behind. He says,

Son 1:8-11 If thou know not, O thou fairest among women, go thy way forth by the footsteps of the flock, and feed thy kids beside the shepherds’ tents. I have compared thee, O my love, to a company of horses in Pharaoh’s chariots. Thy cheeks are comely with rows of jewels, thy neck with chains of gold. We will make thee borders of gold with studs of silver.

If Thou Knowest Not

Notice the shape of the answer before its content. Solomon does not simply tell her where He feeds His flock. He turns her gaze backward first, toward the very tents she has already fled, as though her own certainty about Him cannot be fully secured until she has looked, one more time, at what she left. Not only that, but he laments their disconnectedness from really knowing him, and he doesn’t want her to ever be beguiled by their tired old artifices, to which she four times in the SoS viscerally agrees.

Son 2:7 I charge you, O ye daughters of Jerusalem, by the roes, and by the hinds of the field, that ye stir not up, nor awake my love, till he please.

Joh 10:27 My sheep hear my voice, and I know them, and they follow me.

Mat 25:33 And he shall set the sheep on his right hand, but the goats on the left.

Sheep and goats are not a contrast between the saved and the yet-to-be-judged and saved, in any final sense. They are the few who were chosen, set against the ones who temporarily were not — specifically for the first resurrection. Ultimately, the signified goats and “other sheep in other pens”, almost indistinguishable from Babylon, who don’t hear the Shepherd’s voice, will hear Him in the Resurrection to Judgment. Goats equate to the flesh and carnal mind. She remembers that she, too, is a signified goat, occasionally succumbing to the mere fact of being flesh, yet strengthened by the power of her Lord’s signified sacrificial goat in transition to being an emblematic sheep. It stands to reason that only sheep hear the Lamb of God’s voice for their marriage to the Groom (Lev 16:8-10, 21-22).

Joh 10:15-16 As the Father knoweth me, even so know I the Father: and I lay down my life for the sheep. And other sheep I have, which are not of this fold: them also I must bring, and they shall hear my voice; and there shall be one fold, and one shepherd.

Mat 13:30 Let both grow together until the harvest: and in the time of harvest I will say to the reapers, Gather ye together first the tares, and bind them in bundles to burn them: but gather the wheat into my barn.

Joh 10:26-28 But ye believe not, because ye are not of my sheep, as I said unto you. My sheep hear my voice, and I know them, and they follow me: And I give unto them eternal life; and they shall never perish, neither shall any man pluck them out of my hand.

The goats she is sent to feed are the young of the “first company”: by the world’s standards, gifted, beautiful, quick-witted, endlessly frolicking beside the forty thousand tents of Orthodoxy each Sunday, clever as any kid ever born, and just as immature in what actually matters.

Mat 18:3-4 Except ye be converted, and become as little children, ye shall not enter into the kingdom of heaven. Whosoever therefore shall humble himself as this little child, the same is greatest in the kingdom of heaven.

The kingdom does not ask for a kid’s cleverness. It asks for a lamb’s dumb, trusting humility — and this is precisely the trade her sisters have never made, still clattering their eager little hooves toward shepherds’ tents that will feed them everything except what their souls actually require (Isa 53:7). Incidentally, goats, when being injured or mauled by predators, bleat their heads off, while sheep rarely ever voice their pain, only with pained grunts.

Notice what she is commissioned to do about it. She does not condemn them; though she does so overwhelmingly, to deaf ears, she feeds them, typical of callow youth, without their gratitude. Her commission is not to force-feed, but to observe from outside, beside the shepherds’ tents, not inside them — she is not sent to join the tents she has left, nor is she permitted to abandon the kids simply because their shepherds have failed them. She feeds what she can reach, from outside the fold that raised them, exactly as her own Husband once fed her from outside every fold she was raised inside (Luk 15:3-7; Matt 10:14).

Mat 18:5-6 And whoso shall receive one such little child in my name receiveth me. But whoso shall offend one of these little ones which believe in me, it were better for him that a millstone were hanged about his neck, and that he were drowned in the depth of the sea.

This is why the warning attached to the kids is so severe, and why it lands, without exception, on whoever is entrusted with feeding them — not on the kids themselves for their immaturity, which was never their choice, but on any shepherd, false or otherwise, who mistakes their cleverness for readiness and feeds them accordingly.

Solomon’s frank purpose in challenging her with “if she knew not” was to cause her to feel viscerally, and thus profoundly honour and respect, the choosing he (Christ in us) gives her — the reverent awareness of the magnitude of being His Bride.

A Company of Horses in Pharaoh’s Chariots

Here, the Song turns from pasture to battlefield, and the shift is not accidental. Love, rightly understood in this Song, has never been separable from war — not war against her, but war being waged on her behalf and within her, against everything Eden left standing.

He compares her to a company of horses: uniform, disciplined, white — no longer the red, black, or pale creature Babylon once bred her to be. Scripture’s own catalogue of horses supplies the exact anatomy of what has changed in her.

Rev 6:2, 4, 5, 8 And I saw, and behold a white horse… And there went out another horse that was red… a black horse… a pale horse.

Read locally, within the heavens of a single soul rather than merely across the skyline of nations; each horse names a movement of Christ’s own conquest within her. The authentic white horse is Him overcoming her remaining enemies from within, particularly the counterfeit white horse whom her sisters ride. The red horse is Him taking a false peace from her, forcing a division between her carnal mind and her spirit, which is trying to discern his holy spirit, where she had long preferred a comfortable truce. The black horse is the deliberate famine He allows in her when His Word has been perverted or withheld, so that she learns to hunger correctly. The pale horse is death itself, applied specifically to the flesh, proving what no amount of religious effort could otherwise teach her: that what is born of Adam cannot inherit what belongs to the spirit.

Zec 6:5 And the angel answered and said unto me, These are the four spirits of the heavens, which go forth from standing before the Lord of all the earth.

Four spirits, one dispatching office — and she is no longer merely the territory these horses ride across. She has become one of them, a white horse herself now, ridden by a rider who conquers through her rather than merely upon her. This is Joseph’s own inheritance applied directly to her: second in the chariot, not first, yet unmistakably the one through whom the King’s authority now reaches a kingdom that cannot yet see the King Himself.

Which of these four has been at work in you most recently, and have you welcomed it as conquest or resented it as loss? The famine that strips a false doctrine from you feels, in the hour it arrives, exactly like abandonment. It is not?

The Chariot and the Power It Carries

Horses and chariots are not synonyms in this vocabulary, and the distinction matters more than it may at first appear. The horse is the strength itself, indicative of men’s assumed spiritual strength. The chariot is the instrument that carries that strength into the field where it can actually be used.

Psa 147:10 He delighteth not in the strength of the horse: he taketh not pleasure in the legs of a man. 

Eze 26:7, 10 Behold, I will bring upon Tyrus Nebuchadrezzar king of Babylon… with horses, and with chariots… thy walls shall shake at the noise of the horsemen, and of the wheels, and of the chariots.

Tyre’s judgment is not primarily a lesson in ancient geopolitics. It is a diagram of what happens to every fortified tower of self-sufficient religiosity when the same horses and chariots are finally permitted to enter its gates from the north, where Scripture consistently locates the seat of the Lord’s own dwelling from which judgment descends to the south.

Chariots, used rightly, are never a boast. Adonijah’s attempt to multiply chariots and horsemen for himself stands as a warning against the opposite use — fleshly strength assembled to exalt a man’s own name rather than to carry the Lord’s.

Psa 20:7 Some trust in chariots, and some in horses: but we will remember the name of the LORD our God.

Even the chariot that finally rescues can arrive wrapped in fire rather than gold. What appeared to Elisha as a chariot of fire was never decoration. It was the precise shape a trial takes when it is sent to make the Word suddenly, unbearably visible — the horses of fire supplying the warfare against the flesh, the awe of the chariot of fire supplying the furnace in which that warfare becomes something the watching eye can no longer deny it has seen.

The fiery chariot represents the fiery process of God’s judgment that separates us from the old/carnal way of thinking and enables us to see and receive the exalted Christ and His spirit. Our “baptism by fire” refines us so that we can eventually administer righteous judgment ourselves.

A final, quieter detail is worth pressing before this section closes. When Israel finally prevailed over the kings of the north at the waters of Merom, the instruction given was not to keep the enemy’s chariots as trophies.

Jos 11:6, 9  …thou shalt hough their horses [cut; hamstring], and burn their chariots with fire… and Joshua did unto them as the LORD bade him: he houghed their horses, and burnt their chariots with fire.

The horses being hamstrung is not merely defeat — the power is disabled at its source, and the instrument that carried it is reduced to ash rather than repurposed for a nobler rider. This is the standing warning against every attempt to sanctify the flesh’s own machinery by simply pointing it toward godlier ends. Adonijah made the same mistake in reverse, assembling fifty men to run before his own chariot before his father’s throne had even cooled, mistaking the trappings of authority for authority’s substance. The lesson repeats in both directions: fleshly strength is not converted by being aimed correctly. It is hamstrung, and something entirely new runs in its place.

The Incomparable Distinction between Pharaoh’s Horses and the Bride

Son 1:9 I have compared thee, O my love, to a company of horses in Pharaoh’s chariots.

Before this glory was hers, it was a costume she manufactured herself, and Job’s own catalogue of creatures exposes precisely what that manufacture cost her.

Job 39:19-20 Hast thou given the horse strength? hast thou clothed his neck with thunder? Canst thou make him afraid as a grasshopper? the glory of his nostrils is terrible.

Psa 18:8 There went up a smoke out of his nostrils, and fire out of his mouth devoured: coals were kindled by it.

Christ, represented as a horse in Psalm 18:8, smelled the battle before the foundation of the world was laid, and He gave the horse its grandeur and strength, not the reverse. Just as the Father accomplishes all things through His Son, Christ manifests the same glory through His Bride, the Church, in a hierarchial manner. Ultimately, this influence extends through her to her Children of the world, conceived since Eden, numbering as numerous as the sand of the sea. Accordingly, she is poetically seen at first in the genuine grandeur of Pharaoh’s horses of Egypt, equivalent to the carnal glory and riches of Sodom and Old Jerusalem.

Historically, the kingdoms of men are signified by the riches of royal headship, reflecting the nation’s wealth and strength. In ancient Egypt and across the Bronze and Iron Ages, royal chariot horses were not just beasts of burden—they were extensions of the king’s divine power and military propaganda. Pharaohs and rulers of neighboring empires (like the Hittites, Assyrians, and Mycenaean Greeks) spared no expense, transforming their steeds into breathtaking, moving monuments of gold, leather, and plumage.

Based on temple reliefs, tomb paintings, and surviving artifacts — such as the leather harnesses found in Tutankhamen’s tomb — royal chariot horses were typically decorated using several distinctive elements:

• Ostrich Feathers: The most iconic feature of a pharaoh’s horse was a towering crown of dyed ostrich plumes fixed between its ears, waving majestically as it ran and adding dramatic height and theatrical flair.
• Solar Disks and Religious Symbols: Stiff head plates, or frontlets, often featured sacred motifs like the solar disk (representing Ra), the lotus plant, or the uraeus (royal cobra) to signal divine backing and protection in battle.
• Gilded and Coloured Leather: Harnesses were crafted from high-quality layers of dyed leather—often in vibrant shades of red, blue, and green—heavily embossed or overlaid with gold leaf.
• Metal Amulets and Disks: Bridles and cheekpieces were heavily studded with polished bronze or gold disks that caught the sunlight, flashing blindingly as the chariot advanced.
• Decorative Blinkers: Horses wore beautifully carved or painted leather blinkers, often featuring the Eye of Horus to ward off evil and protect the animal from flying debris.
• Exquisite Blankets: For ceremonies, parades, and hunts, the horses were draped in heavily embroidered, lightweight cloths featuring complex geometric patterns or depictions of defeated enemies, symbolizing the king treading over his foes.

However, the operative word is that Solomon “compared” her to the stateliness of Pharaoh’s horses. Although Christ’s throne is symbolized by a chariot with interlocking wheels that do not turn when it goes, He does not possess a chariot—He is the chariot whose will, his spirit, goes wherever He wills without a wheeled mechanism (Eze 1:15-21). Solomon delineates the unparalleled contrast between Pharaoh’s arrogance, grandeur, and ceremonial display—symbolized by numerous horse-drawn chariots signifying his authority and strength—and her, whose strength, authority, and royalty derived solely from her Lord. It is her former archenemy within, the Great Whore, who, like Pharaoh, gloried in spectacle.

Rev 17-18  …I saw a woman sit upon a scarlet coloured beast, full of names of blasphemy… that great city Babylon, that mighty city! for in one hour is thy judgment come… The merchandise of gold, and silver, and precious stones, and of pearls… and horses, and chariots, and slaves, and souls of men.

Her “chariots” were her many vehicles of beguiling, fornicating doctrines that deluded humanity.

Son 1:10-11 Thy cheeks are comely with rows of jewels, thy neck with chains of gold. We will make thee borders of gold with studs of silver.

Cheeks of Jewels, a Neck of Gold, Borders of Silver

Cheeks — H3895 lechiy
1. cheek, jaw, jawbone
Related to a root associated with softness and the place where speech and eating both originate.

Notice which part of her face is praised first. Not the eyes, which see; not the lips, which kiss; but the jaw, the place from which her own words have finally learned to proceed rightly. The jewels praised here adorn the very instrument of her speech — a fitting tribute for a woman whose changed vocabulary has been the whole substance of this Song so far. The wisdom and speech of an unremarkable woman, if indeed they cause kingdoms to rise or fall righteously (particularly within), do something quite baffling to the people — particularly men. Suddenly, her relative uncomeliness becomes beautiful—written in her eyes, where her every bodily member and joint, her entire ensemble, is seen as beguilingly beautiful in passing.

1Pe 3:1-4 Likewise, ye wives, be in subjection to your own husbands… Whose adorning let it not be that outward adorning of plaiting the hair, and of wearing of gold, or of putting on of apparel; But let it be the hidden man of the heart… the ornament of a meek and quiet spirit, which is in the sight of God of great price.

Mal 3:17 And they shall be mine, saith the LORD of hosts, in that day when I make up my jewels; and I will spare them, as a man spareth his own son that serveth him.

Num 15:38  …that they make them fringes in the borders of their garments… and that they put upon the fringe of the borders a ribband of blue.

Ribband — H6616 pathiyl
1. cord, thread, twisted thread, wire
From H6617, to twist, to braid.

A single strand does not hold a garment together. A twisted cord does — many threads, braided into one strength, which is a hidden picture of the Bride herself, gathered from a thousand scattered sisters into a single, twisted cord of blue, God’s own royal colour, bound now to a single hem.

Gold and silver, promised to her here as ornament, were never mere metal in this vocabulary. Gold signifies the truth of God’s Word in its most refined, incorruptible form — a truth that must first pass through fire before it can be called gold at all.

1Co 3:12 Now if any man build upon this foundation gold, silver, precious stones, wood, hay, stubble.

Notice what gold is measured against in that verse: not merely lesser metals, but wood, hay, and stubble — material that looks entirely serviceable until the same fire that refines gold arrives to test it, at which point the difference between what is precious and what was only ever flammable becomes impossible to disguise. Gold, in this economy, is never natively gold. It is ore first, indistinguishable from the worthless rock surrounding it, until judgment’s own fire is applied and everything that was never truly gold is burned away, leaving behind only what fire itself could not diminish (1Ki 18:38). Her borders of gold, promised here, are therefore not a decoration bestowed for good behavior. They are the visible record of a woman who has already been through that furnace once and did not come out as ash.

Silver carries its own particular freight, closer to the wound than gold’s more general glory.

Silver — H3701 keseph
1. silver, money
From H3700 kasaph, to long for, to be pale [sick from love — Son 5:8] with longing or desire.

The same root that names the metal names the ache — silver was, from its very etymology, the price paid for something desperately wanted. This is why silver is the currency of atonement: someone’s word; the price of Joseph, sold by his own brothers, the thirty pieces later paid for a greater Joseph, betrayed by His own. What adorns her neck and hems her garment is not decoration for decoration’s sake. It is a redemption price, worn openly, refusing to let her forget what she actually cost.

Closing: Plumage or Scar

Set the two horses side by side one final time, because the study has been building toward exactly this comparison and will not let you leave without making it.

Pharaoh’s horse wore ostrich plumes between its ears, gold disks flashing with every stride, and a blinker carved with the Eye of Horus to ward off what its rider refused to confront. Every inch of that animal announced a king. Not one inch of it had been paid for with anything the king himself had suffered. It was a spectacle purchased with another man’s labor, worn to make strength look divine without strength ever having been tested.

Her silver is not that. Her silver is keseph—the ache made metal, the price of a longing that cost the Payer everything and cost her the humiliation of knowing exactly what she was worth on the market the day He bought her. Pharaoh’s gold said, look at me. Her silver internally says, ” Remember what this took; the pain and suffering tried in the fire was akin to her Husband’s pain of the cross.

Now examine your own ornaments, because this study is a mirror of hers.

There is a version of your faith you have learned to wear like plumage — the fluent paragraph about grace, the visible discipline everyone compliments you on, the testimony polished smooth from retelling until it no longer costs you anything to say it aloud. It flashes. It draws the eye. It can be assembled, every part of it, without you ever having gone back to the ore and asked whether the fire actually touched you or whether you simply painted yourself the color fire leaves behind.

Here is what that costs, precisely, if it is left unexamined: a faith worn as decoration ceases to function as evidence. It becomes Pharaoh’s horse — magnificent, admired, and utterly unable to answer the one question that matters: not how good this looks, but what this actually took from you. Every rehearsed testimony that no longer trembles when you tell it is one more gold disk sewn onto a bridle, catching light it never generated.

Ask it plainly, today, before the plumage has time to arrange itself into an answer you like better: is there a single piece of your (imagined) faith right now that you perform fluently but no longer feel — a scar you have quietly recut as jewelry?

Hag 2:7 And I will shake all nations, and the desire of all nations shall come: and I will fill this house [the Bride] with glory, saith the LORD of hosts.
Hag 2:8 The silver is mine, and the gold is mine, saith the LORD of hosts. 
Hag 2:9 The glory of this latter house shall be greater than of the former, [“The first shall be last, and the last, first” principle] saith the LORD of hosts: and in this place will I give peace, [The Heavenly Jerusalem] saith the LORD of hosts.

The repair is not complicated, though it is not comfortable. Find the one conviction you can recite without a flicker of cost, like Solomon looking and looking upon the Shulamite for understanding, and don’t stop mulling it until you have sat with what it actually took — His silver, not your gold — long enough for the ache to return to it. Wear that one openly instead this week, unpolished, and let it cost you something in front of at least one other person before you let yourself speak it smoothly again.

A horse dressed for spectacle and a horse dressed for war can stand in the same stable and look almost identical for a moment. Only one of them has ever smelled the battle. The other is waiting to be found out.

End of Part 10

Next: Son 1:12-14

The Song of Solomon – Part 9

I Am Black, But Comely

[Study Aired September 25, 2026]

Introduction

The last study closed on a woman who had learned to wait before she ever learned to run. This one opens on the same woman making a confession that sounds, to any ear still tuned to Babylon’s frequency, like an apology. It is not one. What follows is not shame dressed as testimony. It is testimony that happens to be wearing shame’s old clothes, cut from a fabric her sisters have never once removed—nor could.

Son 1:5 I am black, but comely, O ye daughters of Jerusalem, as the tents of Kedar, as the curtains of Solomon.

The Word Before the Confession

“I” — H589′ aniy
1. I (first person singular pronoun, used only as subject)
Strong’s: contracted from H595.

The lexicon offers nothing more exotic here than the plainest possible pronoun — no hidden verb for singing folded inside its consonants, whatever devotional traditions have wished onto it. But plainness is its own argument. She does not open with an excuse, a qualifier, or a plea for context. She opens with herself, named and undefended, the way a witness opens testimony before a court that has already threatened to disbelieve her. The song is not hidden in the word. The song is what her willingness to say “I” without flinching makes possible in every line that follows.

Black, Dark, and Night: The Triad of the Unlit Mind

Three words move through Scripture as close relations of the same family, and this study will not let you mistake one for a mere colour, another for a mere hour, and the third for a mere absence. Black describes a condition. Darkness describes a corruption. Night describes a rule. Together they diagram, with more precision than any single word could manage alone, exactly what the natural mind is before light is permitted to enter it.

Black — H7838 shachor
1. to be black (of skin, hair)
From H7835, a primitive root identical with H7836 through the idea of the duskiness of early dawn.

The root beneath black shares its consonants with the Hebrew for the last hour before sunrise — the darkest, coldest portion of any night, and, not coincidentally, the portion immediately preceding light’s arrival. Even the lexicon refuses to let blackness stand as a static, hopeless colour. Its own etymology places it one breath from dawn.

Gen 1:2 And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep.

This is the first verse of Scripture to describe the human condition, though no human has yet been formed. Every soul who will ever be born inherits this verse before any other — formless, void, and dark, before any spoken word moving across it. In this system’s grammar, blackness is not primarily what a person does. It is what a person is, natively, before the spirit moves.

Isa 45:7 I form the light, and create darkness: I make peace, and create evil: I the LORD do all these things.

Darkness is not an accident that slipped past God’s attention. It is created, deliberately, by the same hand that later commands light to divide it. This single verse forecloses any theology that would allow the reader to treat his own darkened years as a mistake requiring an apology rather than a curriculum requiring completion.

Where blackness names the condition, darkness names its operation — the specific mechanics by which the condition keeps itself hidden from the one living inside it.

Pro 4:19 The way of the wicked is as darkness: they know not at what they stumble.

Pro 7:9 In the twilight, in the evening, in the black and dark night.

Note precisely what darkness does not require: conscious malice. The man in Proverbs 7, without a hint of God’s word, even blatantly stating that there is no God, does not walk toward the harlot’s door believing himself wicked. He walks toward it with a resolute delusion, rejecting his pricked conscience of believing himself, at worst, merely curious, at best, entirely safe. Darkness is not the state of knowing you cannot see. It is the state of not knowing that you don’t know — a blindness so complete it cannot even correctly diagnose itself as blindness.

Act 9:4 And he fell to the earth, and heard a voice saying unto him, Saul, Saul, why persecutest thou me?
Act 9:5 And he said, Who art thou, Lord? And the Lord said, I am Jesus whom thou persecutest: it is hard for thee to kick against the pricks. 

1Ti 4:2  Speaking lies in hypocrisy; having their conscience seared with a hot iron; 

Psa 53:1 To the chief Musician upon Mahalath, Maschil, A Psalm of David. The fool hath said in his heart, There is no God. Corrupt are they, and have done abominable iniquity: there is none that doeth good.

Not an endorsement: The Psa 53:1 text does not promote atheism; it, in Orthodox Christianity, condemns the mindset of those who live as though God does not hold them accountable. So black are their minds that they will overwhelmingly hold that concept all the way to the Lake of Fire. (Jer 3:13 Only acknowledge thine iniquity…”)

Definition of “Fool”: The Hebrew word used here (nabal) describes a morally deficient or impious person, referring to ethical corruption rather than a lack of intelligence.

Context: The above verses in both Psalm 14 and Psalm 53 explain that these individuals turn away from moral behaviour and act selfishly because they believe no higher power is watching.

Rom 1:21 Because that, when they knew God, they glorified him not as God, neither were thankful; but became vain in their imaginations, and their foolish heart was darkened.

However, the Orthodox Christians from whom the Elect came are only one step above those who say there is no God, since all have a God-given conscience. The difference is that those who do believe in God have a more acute sense of conscience pricking.

Rom 2:14 For when the Gentiles, which have not the law, do by nature the things contained in the law, these, having not the law, are a law unto themselves: 
Rom 2:15 Which shew the work of the law written in their hearts, their conscience also bearing witness, and their thoughts the mean while accusing or else excusing one another;) 
Rom 2:16 In the day when God shall judge the secrets of men by Jesus Christ according to my gospel.

Night completes the triad by naming the rule under which such blindness is permitted to operate for a season.

Gen 1:16 …the greater light to rule the day, and the lesser light to rule the night.

The lesser light governs night — a real light, not a total absence, which is precisely what makes night more dangerous than blackness alone. A man in total darkness knows, at minimum, that he cannot see. A man governed by the lesser light believes he can. The moon has always signified, in this system’s established grammar, the Old Covenant order, Old Israel, and the church that inherited her shape without inheriting her repentance—a real, borrowed illumination, sufficient to convince its subjects they are walking in day.

Jn 11:10 But if a man walk in the night, he stumbleth, because there is no light in him.

This is why Satan’s most effective disguise was never total darkness but calibrated moonlight—an angel of light, as the Elect once were, convincing enough that entire congregations mistake its glow for the sun. Night is the realm in which a man can sincerely, passionately, even eloquently defend a female doctrine that is quietly starving him—in his own chamber—focused as Adam was upon Eve, preferring lust in darkness.

Pro 4:16 For they sleep not [the antithesis of the Bride who’s asleep, but her heart is awake], except they have done mischief; and their sleep is taken away, unless they cause some to fall.

Psa 139:12 Yea, the darkness hideth not from thee; but the night shineth as the day: the darkness and the light are both alike to thee [the Elect/Christ’s who don’t need a physical sun].

Here, the whole triad resolves under a single sovereignty. God is not confused by any of the three conditions this study has just named. He does not require the black to become comely by her own scrubbing. He ordained the blackness as the very material out of which comeliness, in due season, would be carved. This is the pattern of Genesis itself — darkness first, then light spoken over it, never light pretending the darkness had not existed.

Black to Her Sisters, Chosen by Her God

Blackness, applied to the Shulamite, has never once concerned pigment. It concerns comprehension. She is black to her sisters precisely because they cannot read her — a woman who has walked away from every time-honoured artifice of sensual siege, the same artifice they still polish nightly, believing it strength rather than servitude.

1Co 1:27-29 But God hath chosen the foolish things of the world to confound the wise… and base things of the world, and things which are despised, hath God chosen… That no flesh should glory in his presence.

She comes from behind with no gift her sisters would recognise — no scholastic degree in Babylon’s theology, no inherited pedigree of religious respectability — and this is precisely her qualification, not her disadvantage. What her sisters see as blackness, heaven has already logged as the raw material of glory through her Husband’s gift of the holy spirit.

1Co 1:25 Because the foolishness of God is wiser [Solomon’s wisdom signifying the gift of the holy spirit] than men; and the weakness of God is stronger than men. 

Isa 53:2-3 …he hath no form nor comeliness; and when we shall see him, there is no beauty that we should desire him. He is despised and rejected of men… we hid as it were our faces from him.

Nobody in Orthodoxy, and nobody in the world Orthodoxy has shaped, currently sees Christ as comely. They will not see His Bride as comely either, for precisely the same reason: comeliness of this kind is a spiritual perception, not an optical one, and the optic they are using was never designed to register it.

Where, in your own circle, have you mistaken a former companion’s new blackness — their sudden refusal to keep playing a game you both once played fluently — for coldness, pride, or betrayal, rather than considering that your own eyes might simply lack the light required to read what changed in them?

Mat 13:16 But blessed are your eyes, for they see: and your ears, for they hear.

The Tents of Kedar

Tents — H168 ’ohel
1. tent, nomad’s dwelling, symbolic of wilderness life and transience
From H166, to be clear, to shine.

A tent, by its very root, is named for the temporary light it does not adequately hold — a shelter built for a people still travelling, still exposed, still without the settled architecture of a permanent house. This is her present condition, honestly stated: a wilderness dwelling, not yet the Temple, though already Temple-shaped in promise from which light barely escapes.

Mat 5:14 Ye are the light of the world. A city that is set on an hill cannot be hid.
Mat 5:15 Neither do men light a candle, and put it under a bushel, but on a candlestick; and it giveth light unto all that are in the house.

Kedar — H6938 Qedar
1. dark; a son of Ishmael; his descendants
From H6937, to mourn, to be dark, to grow black.

Ishmael himself is not the definition of blackness — he is one particular case study within it, the son of the bondwoman, born after the flesh rather than the promise, and therefore falling naturally under a symbol far larger than his single genealogy. Egypt, Esau, Babylon, and Kedar all take their place in the same family of flesh-manifestations, each one a separate dialect of the identical darkness.

Gen 17:18 And Abraham said unto God, O that Ishmael might live before thee!

Gal 4:30 Nevertheless what saith the scripture? Cast out the bondwoman and her son: for the son of the bondwoman shall not be heir with the son of the freewoman [the Bride]. 

Even the patriarch’s own affection for the flesh-born son pictures a temptation this study will not let you excuse quietly in yourself: the quiet, sentimental wish that the elder, the familiar, the already-established order might simply be allowed to stand, rather than yielding, as God’s actual design requires, to the service of the younger.

The Curtains of Solomon, the Veil That Would Not Hold

The curtains of Solomon’s own tabernacle-shadow, and the deeper veil they foreshadow, describe the deliberate blinding under which the Old Covenant kept its own house dim — a blinding David’s own servants tried, through Abishag, to resuscitate, and could not, because what is torn cannot be re-hung by devotion alone.

Mat 27:50-51 Jesus, when he had cried again with a loud voice, yielded up the ghost. And, behold, the veil of the temple was rent in twain from the top to the bottom; and the earth did quake.

Top to bottom — not bottom to top, as a man might tear reaching upward in effort, but from the height only God occupies, downward, into the reach of everyone standing beneath it. The tearing was never her achievement. It was accomplished over her, and only afterwards within her, and the earthquake that followed did not stay outside the building.

Luk 5:36 No man putteth a piece of a new garment upon an old; if otherwise, then both the new maketh a rent, and the piece that was taken out of the new agreeth not with the old.

This is precisely why her sisters’ idol of husbandly intimacies remains confounded throughout this Song. They keep trying to patch a torn veil with fabric cut from an already finished garment and cannot understand why the tear only widens with every attempt. Consistently, all that remains of their vain husbandly ministrations is an unfinished foundation “upon the threshold” of their boudoir—their Temple established on sand.

1Sa 5:3 And when they of Ashdod arose early on the morrow, behold, Dagon was fallen upon his face to the earth before the ark of the LORD [Christ]. And they took Dagon, and set him in his place again.
1Sa 5:4 And when they arose early on the morrow morning, behold, Dagon was fallen upon his face to the ground before the ark of the LORD; and the head of Dagon and both the palms of his hands were cut off upon the threshold; only the stump of Dagon was left to him.

Closing: The Sin That Remains Because You Say You See

Here, this study stops describing her and starts describing you.

Jn 9:41 Jesus said unto them, If ye were blind, ye should have no sin: but now ye say, We see; therefore your sin remaineth.

Name it precisely. There is a doctrine you have defended this year, against the multitude of counsel, in a room or in your own head, with more confidence than you have ever tested it. A habit of reading Scripture arrives already knowing what it will find, and is never once disappointed, because it was never actually looking. That is not sight. That is night, governed by a lesser light bright enough to make you certain, and dim enough to make you wrong.

This is what it costs, precisely, and no gentler accounting is available: every doctrine defended from certainty rather than examined in trembling becomes one more curtain you have personally helped rehang after God already tore it down. You are not merely mistaken in such moments. You are labouring, with real effort, “against” the very earthquake sent to free you.

A change is available to you before you finish reading this page, and it does not require you to already know what you have been wrong about. It requires only this: name one conviction you have never once allowed Scripture to contradict, and hand it, today, to the possibility that it might be Kedar’s tent rather than the Temple. Sit in that possibility without resolving it by tonight. That discomfort is not punishment. It is the first hour before your own dawn.

The alternative is a black that never becomes comely — not because God withheld the light, but because you kept insisting, sincerely and at length, that you already had it.

The anger of her mother’s children, and the vineyard she was never meant to keep

The veil has been torn, top to bottom. What follows in these two verses is the sound made by everyone still standing in the room when the tearing happened — and it is not, on the whole, a grateful sound.

Son 1:6-7 Look not upon me, because I am black, because the sun hath looked upon me: my mother’s children were angry with me; they made me the keeper of the vineyards; but mine own vineyard have I not kept. Tell me, O thou whom my soul loveth, where thou feedest, where thou makest thy flock to rest at noon: for why should I be as one that turneth aside by the flocks of thy companions?

My Mother’s Children Were Angry With Me

Not strangers. Family. This is what makes the anger in verse six so much sharper than ordinary persecution — it arrives from the same household, wearing the same surname, invoking the same inheritance she once shared without question. Scripture reserves a specific, chilling description for this particular anger.

Rev 2:9 I know thy works, and tribulation, and poverty, (but thou art rich) and I know the blasphemy of them which say they are Jews, and are not, but are the synagogue of Satan.

Rev 3:9 Behold, I will make them of the synagogue of Satan, which say they are Jews, and are not, but do lie; behold, I will make them to come and worship before thy feet.

The claim under dispute was never about ethnicity. It is spiritual inheritance — who actually belongs to the household of promise, and who has only ever inherited its address. Her mother’s children are every voice, robed in the correct vocabulary of covenant and chosenness, that has never once submitted to the covenant’s actual demand: come out of her, and be separate. They grow angriest not at her failure but at her departure, precisely as the age nears its own reckoning, and their borrowed tower of understanding nears its own collapse.

Has anger ever risen in you, quick and almost involuntary, toward someone who left a room, a habit, or a belief you both once shared — not because they wronged you, but because their leaving quietly asked whether you should have left with them? Sit with that anger before you explain it away. It is rarely about them.

The Wrath That Belongs to the End of the Age

This anger does not remain a private family quarrel. It escalates, across the whole of prophecy, into the final recorded wrath of the nations against a throne they can no longer pretend not to see.

Rev 11:18-19 And the nations were angry, and thy wrath is come… And the temple of God was opened in heaven, and there was seen in his temple the ark of his testament: and there were lightnings, and voices, and thunderings, and an earthquake, and great hail.

What the nations experience as external catastrophe, the Bride experiences, first and privately, as internal opening — her own temple within unlocked, her own dead works exposed to the same lightning. She does not merely survive this earthquake. She welcomes it, glad of the very hail that sweeps every refuge of lies from the ground she used to call solid.

Isa 28:17 …the hail shall sweep away the refuge of lies, and the waters shall overflow the hiding place.

They Made Me the Keeper of the Vineyards

Here is the confession beneath the confession. She was not idle before Christ found her. She was busy, conscripted, exhausted — enslaved to the maintenance of vineyards that were never hers, tending harvests that fed everyone except her own soul. Bewildered by why her time-honoured boudoir ministrations never satisfied her husband—a mirror of Solomon, who too suffered 1,000 disunified spirits from flabbergasted wives holding ransom of an Eve/Jezebelle-like fatale ( fuh-TAHL) dynamic. In literature and film, a femme fatale is a woman who is fully aware of her hypnotic pull over men and uses that sexual power intentionally to manipulate or destroy them. Her impudence is her calculated, or, as with the everyday virtuous homemaking Orthodox Christian wife, her God-given refusal to conform to Christ’s wifely roles.

This is the precise shape of religious labour performed inside a system one did not choose and cannot leave without appearing ungrateful: the dank walls of inherited ceremony, the rusted pomp mistaken for enlightenment, the forty thousand separate vineyards each insisting theirs alone is the true one. She kept them faithfully, by outward measure, and harvested nothing for herself in the keeping.

Jn 15:1-3 I am the true vine, and my Father is the husbandman. Every branch in me that beareth not fruit he taketh away: and every branch that beareth fruit, he purgeth it, that it may bring forth more fruit. Now ye are clean through the word which I have spoken unto you.

Notice what actually cleans a branch in this passage. Not effort. Not the branch’s own determination to bear more. The word, spoken directly over it, does the purging — precisely the labour her former vineyards could never perform on her, however many hours she gave them.

Where, this week, have you kept a vineyard out of obligation rather than fruit — a commitment, a role, a religious performance sustained because leaving it would cost you your family’s approval rather than because it has fed your own soul for years? Name the vineyard. Do not yet decide what to do about it. Only name it.

Jer 3:13 Only acknowledge thine iniquity, that thou hast transgressed against the LORD thy God, and hast scattered thy ways to the strangers under every green tree, and ye have not obeyed my voice, saith the LORD.
Jer 3:14 Turn, O backsliding children, saith the LORD; for I am married unto you: and I will take you one of a city, and two of a family, and I will bring you to Zion:
Jer 3:15 And I will give you pastors according to mine heart, which shall feed you with knowledge and understanding.

Why Should I Be As One That Turneth Aside

Her question is not rhetorical insecurity. It is Paul’s own arithmetic, run privately: if I am chief of sinners, on what possible ground am I preferred above my sisters in the same harem, the same captivity, the same inherited darkness?

Eph 1:4-6 According as he hath chosen us in him before the foundation of the world, that we should be holy and without blame before him in love: Having predestinated us unto the adoption of children by Jesus Christ to himself, according to the good pleasure of his will.

The answer is not her merit. It is His pleasure, decided before any vineyard existed, for her to keep badly. This is the only ground that can hold the weight of her question without collapsing into either false humility or quiet pride.

Jer 18:6 O house of Israel, cannot I do with you as this potter? saith the LORD. Behold, as the clay is in the potter’s hand, so are ye in mine hand.

One lump. Two vessels, shaped by a hand that owes neither vessel an explanation. She was drafted, not because the clay of her own composition was superior, but because the Potter’s hand, at that particular turn of the wheel, closed around her rather than her sister standing an arm’s length away.

Unblinded, Unburnt

One final privilege remains folded into her question, easy to miss beneath its humility: she is now permitted to look for Him directly, at noon, in the full, unshielded heat of His presence—a privilege that once required a mediator to survive.

Exo 33:20 Thou canst not see my face: for there shall no man see me, and live.

Moses himself was hidden in the cleft of the rock and shown only the afterglow of a glory that had already passed by. What was once fatal to look upon directly, she now seeks at noon, unshielded, because the mediator who once stood between the face and the fire has, in her case, already taken the fire into Himself.

Psa 84:9-11 Behold, O God our shield, and look upon the face of thine anointed… For the LORD God is a sun and shield: the LORD will give grace and glory: no good thing will he withhold from them that walk uprightly.

Sun and shield in the same title — the very light capable of blackening every unprotected face on Sinai’s summit becomes, for her alone, covering rather than consumption. This is why she need not turn aside to any companion’s flock to find rest at noon. She has been given the one flock whose Shepherd does not require her to survive Him from a distance.

Closing: The Anger You Have Not Yet Named as Yours

Return, once more, to where this study began, and let it now land somewhere closer than her sisters.

Someone in your life has spiritually departed from something you both once shared, and it has irritated you longer than you have admitted. You have called it discernment. You have called it a concern for their soul. Examine the timeline honestly: did the concern begin before or after their leaving made your own staying look, for the first time, like a choice rather than an inheritance?

This is what such unexamined anger becomes if it is permitted to stay unnamed: not a passing mood, but a slow, respectable hostility toward anyone whose obedience makes your own comfort visible as compromise. It will not announce itself as hostility. It will announce itself as loyalty to the family, to the tradition, to what your mother’s children have always believed. And it will cost you the very thing her question in verse seven was actually asking for — unhindered access to a face you have not yet dared to seek at noon, in full light, without a companion’s flock to hide behind.

The vineyard you are presently keeping out of obligation will not release you by your own announcement. It will release you the same way it released her: with one honest confession that you have not kept it well, spoken to the only Husbandman ever entitled to ask for an account of it. Bring Him that confession today, plainly, without the customary vineyard-keeper’s excuses — and let the purging, however it comes, begin where it always begins: at the word spoken directly over the branch, not at the branch’s own resolution to somehow try harder.

Remaining a faithful keeper of someone else’s vineyard, respected by everyone in it, is a smaller and colder inheritance than this study can allow you to walk away still believing it is enough.

End of Part 9

Next: Son 1:8 — the Shepherd hides His Bride even from herself

“Divine Order In Creation And Scripture” – Part 8

“The relation of the numbers 15 and 50 in scripture”

[Study Aired September 24, 2026]

The statement “And I will add unto thy days fifteen years” found in (2Ki 20:6), and the combinations of numbers that make up the number 15 further confirm that the fifteen extra years of life that were given to Hezekiah who was “sick unto death”(Pro 16:25), are a parable that reveal how it is by grace through faith, 5, that God’s elect are given extra life (Eph 6:3) as we are delivered from these bodies of death by living by the faith of Christ (Gal 2:20), whose flesh and blood are the abundant life we are called unto, and if we are granted to continue in (Heb 6:3), will set us free (Eph 2:8, Rom 7:23-25, Gal 2:20, Jhn 6:55-56, Jhn 8:31-32).

Eph 6:3  That it may be well with thee, and thou mayest live long on the earth.

Gal 2:20  I am crucified with Christ: nevertheless I live; yet not I, but Christ liveth in me: and the life which I now live in the flesh I live by the faith of the Son of God, who loved me, and gave himself for me.

Jhn 6:55  For my flesh is meat indeed, and my blood is drink indeed.
Jhn 6:56  He that eateth my flesh, and drinketh my blood, dwelleth in me, and I in him.

Jhn 8:31  Then said Jesus to those Jews which believed on him, If ye continue in my word, then are ye my disciples indeed;
Jhn 8:32  And ye shall know the truth,[Jhn 14:6] and the truth [Jhn 6:63] shall make you free.

15 Spiritual Significance of Numbers – The Number Fifteen – by Mike Vinson

50 Fifty = Liberty (no notes for original study done by Mike in 2006)

Liberty (the significance of the number 50) in this life comes about as a result of the process of grace through faith (3×5=15) that God’s judgement upon His people brings (1Pe 4:17). It is only with the spirit of God working within us (Rom 8:9) that this liberty can be experienced, which will lead to going onto perfection on the third day [Luk 4:18-19, Rom 8:21-23, Gal 5:1-6, Gal 5:13, 1Pe 2:16-19, 2Co 3:17-18, Luk 13:32).

Gal 5:1  Stand fast therefore in the liberty [5×10] wherewith Christ hath made us free, and be not entangled again with the yoke of bondage.
Gal 5:2  Behold, I Paul say unto you, that if ye be circumcised, Christ shall profit you nothing.
Gal 5:3  For I testify again to every man that is circumcised, that he is a debtor to do the whole law.
Gal 5:4  Christ is become of no effect unto you, whosoever of you are justified by the law; ye are fallen from grace.[3×5]
Gal 5:5  For we through the Spirit wait [Rom 8:14-16] for the hope of righteousness by faith.[Col 1:27]

In order to be blessed, “That it may be well with thee, and thou mayest live long on the earth”, with the liberty that is found in Christ our Saviour, the first commandment with promise must be kept which is this, “Children, obey your parents in the Lord: for this is right” (Eph 6:1-3). This commandment has a natural and spiritual application to it (1Co 15:46), the natural being to give honour to our physical fathers and mothers. Our spiritual Father is God and our spiritual mother is Jerusalem above the mother of us all, and to contrast the love we have for God and Christ and His body we are told this in (Mat 10:35-39).

Mat 10:35  For I am come to set a man at variance against his father, and the daughter against her mother, and the daughter in law against her mother in law.
Mat 10:36  And a man’s foes shall be they of his own household.
Mat 10:37  He that loveth father or mother more than me is not worthy of me: and he that loveth son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me.
Mat 10:38  And he that taketh not his cross, and followeth after me, is not worthy of me.
Mat 10:39  He that findeth his life shall lose it: and he that loseth his life for my sake shall find it.

If we are obedient children, being received of God in this age (Heb 12:6), we are going to learn obedience by the things that we suffer as Christ did (Heb 5:8, 1Jn 4:17) and we will be looking diligently “lest any man fail of the grace of God; lest any root of bitterness springing up trouble you, and thereby many be defiled” (Heb 12:15), obeying our Father and Christ, acknowledging “that the things that I write unto you are the commandments of the Lord” (keeping of the commandments of God – Heb 12:11-17, 1Co 7:19, 1Jn 5:2-3, Rev 12:17, Rev 14:12, 1Co 14:37).

The 15 years of extra life freely given to Hezekiah typifies our life and liberty in Christ today that is preparing God’s people as the bride of Christ (Rev 19:7), the saviours who are filling up what is behind of the afflictions of Christ in this flesh (Col 1:24) so they can come up in that blessed and holy first resurrection ready to rule (Rev 19:7, Oba 1:21).

Rev 19:7  Let us be glad and rejoice, and give honour to him:(Php 4:4) for the marriage of the Lamb is come, and his wife hath made herself ready.[the bride who was blessed to die daily by God’s favour, favour that takes us through a process of grace through faith for 15 symbolic years (1Co 15:31, Luk 12:32)]

The mind of Christ within us knows that we must suffer as He did in order to cease from sinning (1Pe 4:1), which suffering is the means to the end by which we will overcome the incurable disease of flesh, the sickness unto death (2Ki 20:1) that cannot inherit the kingdom of God (1Co 15:50-52). However it’s not enough to know that we must suffer, we also must be helped in our unbelief so our confidence matures regarding what God has promised He can and will do through the body of Christ (Tit 2:12-13, 1Co 10:13, Heb 12:6).

As surely as Peter’s denial of Christ that was prophesied by Christ to occur would happen, so too the grace and faith needed to overcome that spirit in time that was also spoken of by Christ when He told his disciples, “Ye shall drink indeed of my cup“, reminding us that Christ will not deny Himself within us the work that God is doing as our hope of glory (Mat 26:34, Mrk 14:30, Mat 20:23, 2Ti 2:12-13). It was for our sakes that Judas forsook God in this life, not finding repentance in this age, not being told as Peter was by Christ, “But he turned, and said unto Peter, Get thee behind me, Satan: thou art an offence unto me: for thou savourest not the things that be of God, but those that be of men”, but rather Judas was encouraged by Christ to do what He did the night he betrayed him, “And after the sop Satan entered into him. Then said Jesus unto him, That thou doest, do quickly”.

Mrk 14:30  And Jesus saith unto him, Verily I say unto thee, That this day, even in this night, before the cock crow twice, thou shalt deny me thrice. [grace being prophesied in the midst of Peter’s denial of Christ twice+thrice=5]

Mat 20:23  And he saith unto them, Ye shall drink indeed of my cup, [1Co 10:13] and be baptized with the baptism that I am baptized with: but to sit on my right hand, and on my left, is not mine to give, but it shall be given to them for whom it is prepared of my Father.

Most gladly therefore will I rather glory in my infirmities:

It is through God’s chastening grace that is represented by the number 5 (Heb 12:6, Tit 2:12-13) that God’s elect are being taught to forsake ungodliness and worldly lusts in this life. It is through the much tribulation that we must go through (Act 14:22, Rom 5:3-4) that we are becoming assured that we are more than conquerors through Him who gives us the power to overcome. This suffering and overcoming is richly demonstrated in the supernatural type and shadow examples on that subject found in (Heb 11:1-40), which confirm both the absolute need to suffer and the power of God that will be given to us so that we can be more than conquerors through the faith of Christ (2Th 1:5, 2Co 12:9, Rom 8:35-39, Rom 3:27-28).

2Th 1:5  Which is a manifest token of the righteous judgment of God, that ye may be counted worthy of the kingdom of God, for which ye also suffer:

2Co 12:9  And he said unto me, My grace is sufficient for thee: for my strength is made perfect in weakness. Most gladly therefore will I rather glory in my infirmities, that the power of Christ may rest upon me.
2Co 12:10  Therefore I take pleasure in infirmities, in reproaches, in necessities, in persecutions, in distresses for Christ’s sake: for when I am weak, then am I strong.

Rom 3:27  Where is boasting then? It is excluded. By what law? of works? Nay: but by the law of faith.

Rom 3:28  Therefore we conclude that a man is justified by faith without the deeds of the law

As mentioned in the title we’ll look at how our liberty 50 today comes about as a result of the process of grace through faith that we are going through 3×5=15. I’ve compiled some number combinations and verses regarding the subject at hand.

5+5+5=15

Luk 13:32  And he said unto them, Go ye, and tell that fox,[our flesh] Behold, I cast out devils, and I do cures to day 5 and to morrow 5, and the third 5 day I shall be perfected. [Christ proclaiming how liberty will come about via a process of judgement that takes a life time]
Luk 13:33  Nevertheless I must walk to day 5, and to morrow 5, and the day following 5: for it cannot be that a prophet perish out of Jerusalem. [Christ proclaiming where liberty is found in Jerusalem above, the church, the mother of us all (Eph 2:6, Gal 4:26, Heb 10:25)]
Luk 13:34  O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, which killest the prophets, and stonest them that are sent unto thee; how often would I have gathered thy children together, as a hen doth gather her brood under her wings, and ye would not!

Mat 11:4  Jesus answered and said unto them, Go and shew John again those things which ye do hear and see:
Mat 11:5  The blind receive their sight 1, and the lame walk 2, the lepers are cleansed 3, and the deaf hear 4, the dead are raised up 5, and the poor have the gospel preached to them 6.

[Those who are coming out of “Jerusalem, Jerusalem” below in the earth are being given spiritual sight 1, and are walking with the faith of Christ 2, being forgiven of our sins that are likened unto leperousy 3 that brings death (Rom 6:23). Now we are hearing the things of the spirit 4 being raised in heavenly places 5 “the deaf hear, the dead are raised up” and our impoverished lives which were without Christ are now receiving the gospel of the kingdom of God which is within us if we are His 6 (Rom 8:9, Luk 17:21). These six actions that John would be shown regarding Christ typify what Christ is doing today within his own flesh 6 and blood, the church (Col 1:24)]

Lev 23:34  Speak unto the children of Israel, saying, The fifteenth day of this seventh month shall be the feast of tabernacles for seven days unto the LORD.

[the feast of tabernacles is also a time of witness against the flesh of mankind as Christ’s words and actions unto John the baptist were. When God’s judgments are in the earth men will learn of this process of judgement 15, but there is no conversion as of yet, just like John who was yet in prison, hearing the message but yet in bondage (Isa 26:9). There is an acceptable time to preach the gospel, and a predestined time and order for when that message will be received within the hearts of all of mankind, each man in his own order (1Co 15:22-24). Luk 4:18  The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he hath anointed me to preach the gospel to the poor; he hath sent me to heal the brokenhearted, to preach deliverance to the captives, and recovering of sight to the blind (Isa 42:19), to set at liberty them that are bruised, (Col 1:24, Isa 53:5) Luk 4:19  To preach the acceptable year of the Lord. (Eph 1:6-7)]

7+8=15

Seven represents completeness, but that completeness of overcoming is a process that is being worked within us by Christ who is the new man represented by the number 8 (Php 2:12-13, Rev 17:11, Lev 23:34).

Php 2:12  Wherefore, my beloved, as ye have always obeyed, not as in my presence only, but now much more in my absence, work out your own salvation with fear and trembling.
Php 2:13  For it is God which worketh in you 8 both to will and to do of his good pleasure.

Rev 17:11  And the beast that was, and is not, even he is the eighth, and is of the seven, and goeth into perdition.[2Th 2:7-8]

Lev 23:34  Speak unto the children of Israel, saying, The fifteenth day of this seventh month shall be the feast of tabernacles for seven days unto the LORD.

6+9=15

Hearing the word of God if not mixed with faith does not change the hearer, which is what the thousand year reign will demonstrate (Heb 4:2). It is the trial of our faith, the grace of God that is happening in the lives of God’s elect that is precious unto Him, as it conforms us to the image of His beloved Son (Rom 12:1-2, 2Co 3:18).

Heb 4:2  For unto us was the gospel preached, as well as unto them: but the word preached did not profit them, not being mixed with faith in them that heard it.

Rom 12:1  I beseech you therefore, brethren, by the mercies of God, that ye present your bodies a living sacrifice, holy, acceptable unto God, which is your reasonable service.
Rom 12:2  And be not conformed to this world: but be ye transformed by the renewing of your mind, that ye may prove what is that good, and acceptable, and perfect, will of God.

2Co 3:18  But we all, with open face beholding as in a glass the glory of the Lord, are changed into the same image from glory to glory, even as by the Spirit of the Lord.[going from glory to glory or obedience to obedience is made possible by God’s judgement 9 that is upon the flesh 6 and bones of Christ (Eph 5:30) (9+6=15)]

These numbers 6+9=15 remind us that flesh 6 must be judged 9 and that judgement can only be accomplished through a life long process (3×5=15). When God’s judgments are in the earth, meaning in the body of Christ because we have his spirit within us (Rom 8:9) we will learn righteousness. When God’s judgments are on the earth via the body of Christ for a symbolic 1000 years the world will learn of His righteousness but no conversion inwardly will take place (Isa 26:8-9).

5+10=15

Simply put, grace 5 has to be added to flesh 10 by God in order for us to be able to endure to the end and be saved, (Mat 24:13) and very few are called to “press toward the mark for the prize of the high calling of God in Christ Jesus” and be saved in this age (Mat 22:14, Php 3:14, Php 2:12-13).

Mat 24:13  But he that shall endure unto the end, the same shall be saved.

Php 3:14  I press toward the mark for the prize of the high calling of God in Christ Jesus.

Php 2:12  Wherefore, my beloved, as ye have always obeyed, not as in my presence only, but now much more in my absence, work out your own salvation with fear and trembling.
Php 2:13  For it is God which worketh in you both to will and to do of his good pleasure</b

4+11=15

The whole of humanity 4 has to go through 11 Eleven = The Ruin And Disintegration Of The Perfection Of The Flesh which will be accomplished by a process of judgement upon our carnal minds (3×5=15)

3+12=15

Three is the Three = The Process of Spiritual Completion.

Judgment is upon the earth, earth, earth 3 foundation 12 of our hearts and minds that is being conquered and overcome by grace through faith (3x5=15)

2+13=15

It takes the witness 2 of Christ in our lives as our hope of glory (Col 1:27) to overcome the rebellious flesh we abide in 13 Thirteen = Rebellion. That flesh can only be conquered and go unto perfection on the third day by a process of spiritual completion that is accomplished by grace through faith, of which Christ is the author and finisher of (Eph 2:8, Heb 12:2) (3×5=15)

1+14=15

Spiritual progression 14 Fourteen = Spiritual Progress and Spiritual Progression comes as result of the day of the Lord 1 which is accomplished by a process of spiritual completion through grace and faith (3×5=15).

In (2Ki 20:1-11) we learn of Hezekiah who typifies God’s elect who are saved by grace through faith (Eph 2:8). Those numbers above are there to show us some examples in God’s word that demonstrate that the number 15 has to do with the process of salvation that God’s elect are experiencing first, as a kind of first fruits of God’s creation (Jas 1:18).

In this last section of the study will look at the number 50 and some relevant verses that show us how 50 liberty is connected with 15.

5×10=50

Lev 25:10  And ye shall hallow the fiftieth year, and proclaim liberty throughout all the land unto all the inhabitants thereof: it shall be a jubile unto you; and ye shall return every man unto his possession, and ye shall return every man unto his family.[symbolizing the salvation of all, the land representing our bodies that are immeasurably indebted to God]
Lev 25:11  A jubile shall that fiftieth year be unto you: ye shall not sow, neither reap that which groweth of itself in it, nor gather the grapes in it of thy vine undressed.
Lev 25:12  For it is the jubile; it shall be holy unto you: ye shall eat the increase thereof out of the field.

30+20=50

These numbers (30+20) demonstrate how liberty is going to come to all the world. The sum of 30 and 20 is 50. Grace and faith must apply to both the head and the body, Christ being represented by the head 30 and the body represented by 20.That grace 50 will be applied to all men in time. Christ never had to repent of sin (2Co 5:21), but he was in sinful flesh that learned obedience by the things that he suffered (5×10) (Heb 5:7-9), and those sufferings prepared him to be our high priest who now can and will save His children. If we are granted to suffer as Christ did, if we are granted to be armed with the mind of Christ, it will be reflected in our seeing the value of that suffering as well as being accompanied with the strength of Christ who will make it possible for us to bear the cross we are each called to carry (Rom 5:10, Heb 11:26-27, 1Pe 4:1-4). 

Heb 11:26  Esteeming the reproach of Christ greater riches than the treasures in Egypt: for he had respect unto the recompence of the reward.
Heb 11:27  By faith he forsook Egypt, not fearing the wrath of the king: for he endured, as seeing him who is invisible.

Liberty through Christ and His Christ (30+20=50):

Mat 26:15  And said unto them, What will ye give me, and I will deliver him unto you? And they covenanted with him for thirty pieces of silver.

Gen 37:28  Then there passed by Midianites merchantmen; and they drew and lifted up Joseph out of the pit, and sold Joseph to the Ishmeelites for twenty pieces of silver: and they brought Joseph into Egypt.

Lev 16:9  And Aaron shall bring the goat upon which the LORD’S lot fell, and offer him for a sin offering [30].
Lev 16:10  But the goat, on which the lot fell to be the scapegoat [typified by Joseph 20], shall be presented alive before the LORD, to make an atonement with him,[30+20=50] and to let him go for a scapegoat into the wilderness.

40+10=50

This last combination of numbers demonstrates the same point that it is through much tribulation 40 Forty = The Number Of Trials upon the flesh 10 Ten = Completeness Of The Flesh that God’s people will inherit the kingdom of God. The number 50 grace through faith (Eph 2:8) is being endured in the lives of those who are being saved in this age (5×10=50). The multiple of ten reminds us that while we are in this flesh we will suffer and be persecuted as Christ was and will be more than conquerors through Him. God is our comforter and liberator through all our trials and afflictions (Jhn 15:20, Rom 5:10, Psa 34:19, 2co 1:3).

We’ve seen how 15 and 50 being multiples of 5 have many ways they can be looked at to help us understand how we are being liberated through Christ. Both numbers are very revealing and their sum adds up to 65 which is a fitting number seeing this whole study is about how grace 5 is applied unto the flesh 6 of God’s elect who are the first to be judged in this life (1Pe 4:17).

May God grant us great courage (Jos 1:7) and power through Christ to endure to the end as His kind of first fruits, via grace through faith (Mat 24:13, Jas 1:18, Eph 2:8) knowing and believing that it is through the trials that we endure in this life that we will be strengthen and able to produce much good fruit (Num 14:9) born of the righteousness of Christ within us (Gal 2:20, Luk 6:43-45, Jhn 15:5).

Jos 1:7  Only be thou strong and very courageous, that thou mayest observe to do according to all the law, which Moses my servant commanded thee: turn not from it to the right hand or to the left, that thou mayest prosper whithersoever thou goest.

Num 14:9  Only rebel not ye against the LORD, neither fear ye the people of the land; for they are bread for us: their defence is departed from them, and the LORD is with us: fear them not.

Jhn 15:5  I am the vine, ye are the branches: He that abideth in me, and I in him, the same bringeth forth much fruit: for without me ye can do nothing.

Book of Colossians 2:14-15 Nailing It to His Cross

[Study Aired September 22, 2026]

“Blotting out the handwriting of ordinances that was against us, which was contrary to us, and took it out of the way, nailing it to his cross; and having spoiled principalities and powers, he made a shew of them openly, triumphing over them in it” Colossians 2:14–15.

Where the Last Study Stopped

The last study took the first six verses of this passage and stopped. Before we take the last two, it is worth recalling what the first six settled.

Paul had named a danger. Someone might carry these people off (G4812) “through philosophy and vain deceit, after the tradition of men, after the rudiments of the world, and not after Christ” (Colossians 2:8). Teachers were at the door of that church with something to add to Christ — a wisdom held elsewhere, a discipline, ranks of beings between a man and God.

Against that Paul laid six verses of ground. All the fullness of the Godhead dwells in Christ, bodily. These people are complete in Him, and He is head of all principality and power. They were circumcised by no hand, buried, raised, and made alive — and every verb of it was one they did not perform.

It ended on one more thing done to them: “having forgiven you all trespasses.” That raised a question the last study named and did not answer. If the trespasses are forgiven, what became of what stood written against them?

Paul answers that first, and the answer takes three verbs. Then he says what became of those who stood over them.

Four things stand in these two verses: What the writing was, and what was written on it; Who it stood against, and how it reached men who never received the law; What became of it — three things done to it, and all three at one cross. Then the powers: put off, shown openly, and set against what this letter had already said of them in chapter one. Three of the words in these two verses stand nowhere else in all of Scripture.

Blotting Out the Handwriting

He begins with what was written.

Colossians 2:14 “Blotting out (G1813) the handwriting (G5498) of ordinances (G1378) that was against us, which was contrary (G5227) to us, and took it out of the way, nailing (G4338) it to his cross.”

Something was written against the Colossians. It is gone.

Start with the thing itself. “Handwriting” is cheirographon (G5498), a word used nowhere else in Scripture. There is no second place to weigh it against, so the sense comes from the lexicons, and they give it as a document in a man’s own hand — a bond he has signed. Paul does the thing itself in another letter, though he does not use the word: “I Paul have written it with mine own hand, I will repay it” (Philemon 1:19). That is the picture: an obligation, acknowledged in writing, by the man who owes it.

Now what was written on it.

“Ordinances” is dogma (G1378), and Paul does not leave us guessing. The verb built on it stands six verses on (G1379) — “why, as though living in the world, are ye subject to ordinances?” (Colossians 2:20) — and then names them: “Touch not; taste not; handle not” (Colossians 2:21). Just before that he had listed “meat, or in drink, or in respect of an holyday, or of the new moon, or of the sabbath days” (Colossians 2:16).

Those are the laws of Moses. Writing to another church he joins the word to the law itself: “the law of commandments contained in ordinances (G1378)” (Ephesians 2:15). And the word names binding requirement delivered to churches: “they delivered them the decrees (G1378) for to keep, that were ordained of the apostles and elders which were at Jerusalem” (Acts 16:4).

So the decrees written on it were the ordinances of the law, and the bond is what those decrees held a man to. That keeps both halves of the verse: a writing of ordinances, and an obligation standing against men.

Paul is not describing a page that someone tore up. What kind of writing can be nailed to a cross?

Hebrews answers it. It speaks of a covenant made with the fathers and broken — “they continued not in my covenant” (Hebrews 8:9) — and of another to come, whose terms God says He will “put my laws into their mind, and write them in their hearts” (Hebrews 8:10). Written. Nowhere on a page. Of the first, that God “hath made the first old” and it is “ready to vanish away” (Hebrews 8:13).

That is the kind of instrument in view. A covenant binds. It sets terms. Its terms can be written where no page exists. The same book assigns the very things Paul names — meats, drinks, washings — to that first covenant (Hebrews 9:1, 9:10). It does not use Paul’s word there; it makes the same list belong to the same covenant.

Hebrews 9:1 “Then verily the first covenant had also ordinances of divine service, and a worldly sanctuary.”

Hebrews 9:10 “Which stood only in meats and drinks, and divers washings, and carnal ordinances, imposed on them until the time of reformation.”

So the handwriting was not a scrap someone tore up. It was an obligation, and it held men the way a signed bond holds a debtor.

Now who it held.

Paul states it plainly: the writing was “against us.” He was a Pharisee. He could say of himself, “touching the righteousness which is in the law, blameless” (Philippians 3:6), and he says the writing stood against him. Not against the Gentiles who never had it. Against the man who kept it best.

He explains that elsewhere. The law speaks to those under it, he says, “that every mouth may be stopped, and all the world may become guilty before God” (Romans 3:19). Being outside it did not leave the Gentiles innocent: “as many as have sinned without law shall also perish without law” (Romans 2:12). To the Ephesians he names a second effect — a wall standing between two peoples, broken down at the cross.

Ephesians 2:14–15 “For he is our peace, who hath made both one, and hath broken down the middle wall of partition between us; having abolished in his flesh the enmity, even the law of commandments contained in ordinances; for to make in himself of twain one new man, so making peace.”

So the writing cut two ways. It stood against the people who had it, and it shut out the people who did not. 

“Contrary to us” is hupenantios (G5227). It is used once besides here, where a fiery indignation “shall devour the adversaries (G5227)” (Hebrews 10:27). What was written was no inconvenience standing between them and a blessing. It was an opposing party.

Then what became of the writing. Three things.

It was blotted out. “Blotting out” is exaleiphō (G1813), and the verb by itself decides nothing, because Scripture uses it of very different things. Of sins: “that your sins may be blotted out (G1813)” (Acts 3:19). Of a name: “I will not blot out (G1813) his name out of the book of life” (Revelation 3:5). Of tears: “God shall wipe away (G1813) all tears from their eyes” (Revelation 7:17). Sins, a name, tears. The verb names an erasure, and what is erased is named beside it. Here what is named is the writing.

Notice what was blotted out together with it. The clause just before says “having forgiven you all trespasses.” Those are not two acts laid side by side. Paul says elsewhere that sin is not reckoned where there is no law — “sin is not imputed when there is no law” (Romans 5:13) — and that “the strength of sin is the law” (1 Corinthians 15:56). The writing did not make these people sinners. It made their sin chargeable. Blot out the writing and the charge has nothing to be written on.

It was taken out of the way. Carried off, so that it no longer stands where it stood.

And it was nailed to the cross. “Nailing” is prosēloō (G4338), used nowhere else in Scripture. The bond was not filed away where it might be produced again. It was fastened, in public, to the cross where Christ died. What was nailed there was not the law’s goodness. Paul calls the law holy, and the commandment “holy, and just, and good” (Romans 7:12), and says faith does not make it void but establishes it (Romans 3:31). What ended was the bond men were held to, not the righteousness the law spoke of. The Lord Himself said He came not to destroy the law but to fulfil it, and that not one jot or tittle should pass from it “till all be fulfilled” (Matthew 5:17–18).

It was not nailed up at a distance from these people. Something else hung there that day, written over His head, naming the charge against Him — “set up over his head his accusation written” (Matthew 27:37). John records the same written charge, giving the title in his own words (John 19:19) “And Pilate wrote a title, and put it on the cross. The writing was, JESUS OF NAZARETH THE KING OF THE JEWS.” The writing against us was fastened to the same wood. These people had already been told in this passage that they were buried with Him and raised with Him, and Paul says it of himself plainly: “I am crucified with Christ” (Galatians 2:20). What is done to the Head is where the body is.

One thing more. Two sayings here might seem to pull apart. Hebrews says the first covenant is “ready to vanish away” — something still passing. Paul says the writing was blotted, carried off, and nailed up — something finished. Scripture speaks both ways about one thing, and this series has met it before: God “hath raised us up together, and made us sit together in heavenly places” (Ephesians 2:6) while we still walk about on the earth. The nailing was the act. The vanishing is what men see of it in time.

Paul writes “against us” and “contrary to us.” Not against them. He is not describing someone else’s trouble from a safe distance. The writing had his name on it too.

Spoiled, Shewn, Triumphed

Forgiveness was one half of it. There were also the powers — the thrones and dominions the teachers were pointing toward, the ranks a man was told to climb. Paul says what the cross did with those.

Colossians 2:15 “And having spoiled (G554) principalities and powers, he made a shew (G1165) of them openly (G3954), triumphing (G2358) over them in it.”

Read the two verses together and something seems to answer itself. Verse 8 warned that a man might spoil them. Verse 15 says Christ spoiled the principalities and powers. They would carry you off, and He carried them off.

However, that is not what Paul wrote. The word at verse 8 is sulagōgeō (G4812). The word here is apekduomai (G554). They share nothing but the English the translators chose for them.

Colossians 2:8 “Beware lest any man spoil (G4812) you through philosophy and vain deceit, after the tradition of men, after the rudiments of the world, and not after Christ.”

Colossians 2:15 “And having spoiled [put off] (G554) principalities and powers, he made a shew of them openly, triumphing over them in it.”

What it does carry is a thread that entered four verses back. Apekduomai stands twice in Scripture, both times in this letter: here of the powers, and later of the readers — “ye have put off (G554) the old man with his deeds” (Colossians 3:9). Its noun stood four verses back, where these men were told of “putting off (G555) the body of the sins of the flesh” (Colossians 2:11). So the same root is used three times in this letter. The body of the sins of the flesh, put off. The old man, put off. And here, the principalities and powers put off.

Colossians 2:11 “In whom also ye are circumcised with the circumcision made without hands, in putting off (G555) the body of the sins of the flesh by the circumcision of Christ.”

Applied to the powers it raises a question the letter does not answer, since the form Paul uses will bear either a stripping of them or a stripping off from Himself. The other place the word stands shows why: at 3:9 it is the readers who put off the old man — the subject stripping something from himself. The KJV takes the first reading here. We need not choose between them, because what the verse states either way is that the powers were dealt with at the cross, and that they were shown openly.

Paul says next that the powers were shown. “Made a shew (G1165) of them openly” is deigmatizō (G1165), another word that stands nowhere else in Scripture. Its longer form is used of men who crucify the Son of God afresh and “put him to an open shame (G3856)” (Hebrews 6:6). That is the sense — something held up where it can be seen.

Paul is not content to let the verb carry it alone. He adds “openly” (G3954), which is a phrase of its own and not part of the verb.

“Triumphing over them” is thriambeuō (G2358), and it stands in one other place: “thanks be unto God, which always causeth us to triumph (G2358) in Christ” (2 Corinthians 2:14). The same verb at both ends of it — something God works in us there, something Christ does to the powers here. What the two hold in common is a victory carried where it can be seen. And “in it” could look back to the cross, the nearest thing   named, or to Christ Himself. Either way the place of the triumph is the place of the dying.

Reconciled, and Triumphed Over

Now the hardest thing in the passage.

Back there he wrote that God was pleased “by him to reconcile all things unto himself… whether they be things in earth, or things in heaven” (Colossians 1:20). The powers are among those things — He made them, and made them for Himself (Colossians 1:16). Here, at the cross, He puts them off and makes a shew of them openly. Reconciled, and triumphed over.

Colossians 1:15-17 “Who is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of every creature: For by him were all things created, that are in heaven, and that are in earth, visible and invisible, whether they be thrones, or dominions, or principalities, or powers: all things were created by him, and for him: And he is before all things, and by him all things consist.”

These are not two separate dealings. The reconciling was made “through the blood of his cross.” The triumph was “nailing it to his cross… triumphing over them in it.” One cross for both.

What cannot be said is how it ends. Paul tells us what these beings are to Christ, and he tells us what the cross did to them. He never sets those two sayings side by side and tells us what they amount to together. That is a gap in the letter, not a defect in the question.

It is a gap this series said would close here. The third study set the reconciling of “all things” at 1:20 against the powers put off at 2:15, and said the answer would wait at this verse. It does not wait here. What such beings were made for, and what the cross accomplishes in that, are weighed across the whole of Scripture. That is a study of its own, on what the principalities and powers were made for.

What These Verses Establish

Read whole — these two verses and the six that carried us to them — the passage names a danger and then buries it under the Person Jesus Christ.

A man may be carried off. Paul does not identify the thing that would carry him off by what it teaches, but by what it is patterned after — the traditions men hand down, the rudiments of the world, and not Christ. Against that stands one sentence: all the fullness of the Godhead dwells in Him, bodily. Everything else here is drawn out of it.

These people are filled full in Him, and He is head over the very ranks a teacher would send them climbing toward. They were circumcised by no hand, buried, raised, and made alive, by a working that raised Christ from the dead and is the same working that exhausts the apostle who tells them so. The writing against them was blotted out, carried off, and nailed up where Christ died, and the powers were put off, and shown openly.

They did none of it. It was all done to them. Verse 8 tells them to watch; the seven verses under it give them nothing to do. The order of standing before doing holds again, and holds it in the strongest form the letter has yet given. What is new is the position: the warning came first this time, and the ground was laid underneath it rather than before it.

The fullness dwells in Christ; the church is filled in Him, and the letter never trades the one for the other. All of it was done to a people who could not have asked for it. What holds them holds us on the same terms, and for the same reason: not because we laid hold of the fullness, but because it dwells where God put us, in Christ.

Next study: (Colossians 2:16–19)

“Let no man therefore judge you in meat, or in drink, or in respect of an holyday, or of the new moon, or of the sabbath days: which are a shadow of things to come; but the body is of Christ. Let no man beguile you of your reward in a voluntary humility and worshipping of angels, intruding into those things which he hath not seen, vainly puffed up by his fleshly mind, and not holding the Head, from which all the body by joints and bands having nourishment ministered, and knit together, increaseth with the increase of God.”

2 Samuel 2:1–32 David Becomes King of Judah

[Study Aired September 21, 2026]

Chapter 2 of Second Samuel under review today can be divided into three sections. The first section has to do with David inquiring from the Lord regarding where he should go, which ultimately resulted in David being made king of Judah. The second section focuses on the conflict between Abner and Joab, resulting in a bloody contest beginning at the pool of Gibeon. The final section deals with the calling for truce by Abner after the pursuit of Abner by Joab, for killing his brother Asahel.  

David Anointed King of Judah

2Sa 2:1  And it came to pass after this, that David enquired of the LORD, saying, Shall I go up into any of the cities of Judah? And the LORD said unto him, Go up. And David said, Whither shall I go up? And he said, Unto Hebron. 
2Sa 2:2  So David went up thither, and his two wives also, Ahinoam the Jezreelitess, and Abigail Nabal’s wife the Carmelite.
2Sa 2:3 And his men that were with him did David bring up, every man with his household: and they dwelt in the cities of Hebron.

As we are aware, David was anointed by Samuel to become king of Israel before the conquest of Goliath. 

1Sa 16:13  Then Samuel took the horn of oil, and anointed him in the midst of his brethren: and the Spirit of the LORD came upon David from that day forward. So Samuel rose up, and went to Ramah. 

With the death of Saul and Jonathan, he did not immediately try to seize power as king, but waited with patience for the Lord to work things out for him. His enquiry as to where he should go shows how David was waiting upon the Lord to accomplish that which he had promised. It implies that we need to be patient in order to receive the Lord’s promise.

Heb 10:36  For ye have need of patience, that, after ye have done the will of God, ye might receive the promise. 
Heb 10:37  For yet a little while, and he that shall come will come, and will not tarry.
Heb 10:38  Now the just shall live by faith: but if any man draw back, my soul shall have no pleasure in him. 
Heb 10:39  But we are not of them who draw back unto perdition; but of them that believe to the saving of the soul. 

In the Bible, cities also represent churches. Hebron means ‘association.’ David going to Hebron signifies that being associated or being part of the church of Lord’s elect is a requirement to being crowned as king when the kingdoms of this world become the kingdoms of our Lord and of His Christ.

Heb 12:22  But ye are come unto mount Sion, and unto the city of the living God, the heavenly Jerusalem, and to an innumerable company of angels, 
Heb 12:23  To the general assembly and church of the firstborn, which are written in heaven, and to God the Judge of all, and to the spirits of just men made perfect, 

The fact that it is mentioned in verse 2 that David went to Hebron with His two wives is to remind us that although we are called and chosen as the Lord’s elect to belong to the church of the first born, represented by Abigail, we still had ties with the church system of this world or Babylon, signified by Ahinoam. It is instructive to note that Ahinoam means ‘my brother is a delight’ and that of Abigail denotes ‘my father is joy.’ What this means is that when we were in Babylon, we considered our brothers and sisters as our focus of delight. In other words, our attention was more on men than the Lord. However, in the church of the Lord’s elect, our focus is on our father, who is represented by Christ, who is our joy. 

Psa 48:2  beautiful in elevation, is the joy of all the earth, Mount Zion, in the far north, the city of the great King.    

David bringing the men who were with him each with his household to the cities of Hebron in verse 3, is to let us know that in the fullness of time, we shall lead our families to Christ.

2Sa 2:4  And the men of Judah came, and there they anointed David king over the house of Judah. And they told David, saying, That the men of Jabeshgilead were they that buried Saul. 
2Sa 2:5  And David sent messengers unto the men of Jabeshgilead, and said unto them, Blessed be ye of the LORD, that ye have shewed this kindness unto your lord, even unto Saul, and have buried him. 
2Sa 2:6  And now the LORD shew kindness and truth unto you: and I also will requite you this kindness, because ye have done this thing. 

The men of Judah coming to anoint David as king over the house of Judah speaks of our future reward of being made rulers over the kingdoms of this world in the fullness of time, when the kingdoms of this world become the kingdoms of our Lord and of His Christ.

Rev 11:15  And the seventh angel sounded; and there were great voices in heaven, saying, The kingdoms of this world are become the kingdoms of our Lord, and of his Christ; and he shall reign for ever and ever. 

Rev 2:26  And he that overcometh, and keepeth my works unto the end, to him will I give power over the nations: 
Rev 2:27  And he shall rule them with a rod of iron; as the vessels of a potter shall they be broken to shivers: even as I received of my Father. 

The mention of what the men of Jabesh-Gilead did in respect of risking their lives to remove the body of Saul, and those of his sons, from the house of idols of the Philistines to give them a befitting burial is to remind us that in the fullness of time, we shall show mercy to our brothers and sisters in Babylon, who are fallen victims of the flesh. 

1Sa 31:11  And when the inhabitants of Jabeshgilead heard of that which the Philistines had done to Saul; 
1Sa 31:12  All the valiant men arose, and went all night, and took the body of Saul and the bodies of his sons from the wall of Bethshan, and came to Jabesh, and burnt them there. 
1Sa 31:13  And they took their bones, and buried them under a tree at Jabesh, and fasted seven days. 

In other words, the mercy or kindness we have received from the Lord shall be meted out to our brothers and sisters in the church system of this world.

Rom 11:30  For as ye in times past have not believed God, yet have now obtained mercy through their unbelief: 
Rom 11:31  Even so have these also now not believed, that through your mercy they also may obtain mercy. 
Rom 11:32  For God hath concluded them all in unbelief, that he might have mercy upon all. 
Rom 11:33  O the depth of the riches both of the wisdom and knowledge of God! how unsearchable are his judgments, and his ways past finding out! 

2Sa 2:7  Therefore now let your hands be strengthened, and be ye valiant: for your master Saul is dead, and also the house of Judah have anointed me king over them. 

The men of Jabash-Gilead represent the Lord’s elect, and here in verse 7 the Lord is enjoining us, His elect, through David, to be strengthened in Him and to be courageous. The reason for this admonition by David was that their master Saul was dead and that the house of Judah had anointed him as king of Judah. Saul here represents our brothers and sisters in the church system of this world who have been disqualified because of their unbelief. This implies that if we are not strengthened in Christ and are courageous, we, too, shall be disqualified. 

The second reason why we should be strengthened in Him is that David had been anointed as king of Judah. Because of the reward of ruling with Christ in the fullness of time, as depicted by David’s appointment as king of Judah, we are admonished to be strengthened in Christ and to be courageous, just like when the Lord commissioned Joshua to take the role of Moses.

Jos 1:6  Be strong and of a good courage: for unto this people shalt thou divide for an inheritance the land, which I sware unto their fathers to give them. 
Jos 1:7  Only be thou strong and very courageous, that thou mayest observe to do according to all the law, which Moses my servant commanded thee: turn not from it to the right hand or to the left, that thou mayest prosper whithersoever thou goest. 

Rev 3:21  To him that overcometh will I grant to sit with me in my throne, even as I also overcame, and am set down with my Father in his throne. 
Rev 3:22  He that hath an ear, let him hear what the Spirit saith unto the churches. 

Ish-bosheth Made King of Israel

2Sa 2:8  But Abner the son of Ner, captain of Saul’s host, took Ishbosheth the son of Saul, and brought him over to Mahanaim;
2Sa 2:9  And made him king over Gilead, and over the Ashurites, and over Jezreel, and over Ephraim, and over Benjamin, and over all Israel.

Abner signifies the leaders in Babylon who are appointed by their Pastors to assist them in their rulership. The fact that Abner appointed Ishbosheth, Saul’s son as king over the people of Israel is to make us aware of the way leadership is chosen in Babylon. It depends on people’s lineage to the founder or the one who started the church. This is what we see in many churches all over the world. When the founder is too old or passes away, the successor to the church is either the son or daughter. It is also important to note that in the case of Ishbosheth, there was no mention of him being anointed with oil to become king. It shows how the leadership of the church system of this world is devoid of the spirit, which is represented by the anointing oil. 

Jud 1:17  But, beloved, remember ye the words which were spoken before of the apostles of our Lord Jesus Christ; 
Jud 1:18  How that they told you there should be mockers in the last time, who should walk after their own ungodly lusts.
Jud 1:19  These be they who separate themselves, sensual, having not the Spirit.

2Sa 2:10  Ishbosheth Saul’s son was forty years old when he began to reign over Israel, and reigned two years. But the house of Judah followed David. 
2Sa 2:11  And the time that David was king in Hebron over the house of Judah was seven years and six months. 

The number forty signifies a period of trial and testing, purification and preparation for a new beginning. More details of this assertion can be found in the iswasandwillbe website. Ishbosheth being forty years old when he began to reign over Israel, means that throughout this age, our brothers and sisters in the church system of this world are being tried and tested in preparation for a new beginning in the fullness of time. We were also tried and tested, when we were in Babylon, which made us come to realize that we are the worst sinners, and unless the Lord intervenes in our circumstance, there was no way we could become His obedient children. This was what happened to the people of Israel in the wilderness.

Psa 95:10  Forty years long was I grieved with this generation, and said, It is a people that do err in their heart, and they have not known my ways: 
Psa 95:11  Unto whom I sware in my wrath that they should not enter into my rest.  

It is important to note that Ishbosheth reigned over Israel for two years. The negative application of the number two speaks of divisions, chaos and confusion. Ishbosheth reigning for two years in Israel therefore signifies the chaotic dispensation which we experienced during our time in the churches of this world. 

David reigning in the house of Judah for a period of seven and a half years suggests that the work of David, a symbol of the men of faith whom the Lord used in the Old Testament is not complete without us. 

Heb 11:39  And these all, having obtained a good report through faith, received not the promise: 
Heb 11:40  God having provided some better thing for us, that they without us should not be made perfect.  

The Battle of Gibeon

2Sa 2:12  And Abner the son of Ner, and the servants of Ishbosheth the son of Saul, went out from Mahanaim to Gibeon.
2Sa 2:13  And Joab the son of Zeruiah, and the servants of David, went out, and met together by the pool of Gibeon: and they sat down, the one on the one side of the pool, and the other on the other side of the pool. 

The pool of Gibeon represents the word of the Lord, while Abner and his men signify the church system of this world. Joab and his men, on the other hand,  denotes the Lord’s elect. The fact that Joab and his men sat at one side of the pool, while David and his men sat at the other side indicates that what separates the church system of this world from the Lord’s elect is the word of the Lord. As we are aware, our brothers interpret the word of the Lord differently from the Lord’s elect as they focus on the letter of the word. On the other hand, the Lord’s elect interpret the word of the Lord in the spirit. 

Joh 6:63  It is the spirit that quickeneth; the flesh profiteth nothing: the words that I speak unto you, they are spirit, and they are life. 

2Sa 2:14  And Abner said to Joab, Let the young men now arise, and play before us. And Joab said, Let them arise. 
2Sa 2:15  Then there arose and went over by number twelve of Benjamin, which pertained to Ishbosheth the son of Saul, and twelve of the servants of David. 
2Sa 2:16  And they caught everyone his fellow by the head, and thrust his sword in his fellow’s side; so they fell down together: wherefore that place was called Helkathhazzurim, which is in Gibeon. 
2Sa 2:17  And there was a very sore battle that day; and Abner was beaten, and the men of Israel, before the servants of David.

The number twelve means ‘foundation’, and we know that Christ is the foundation. The fact that twelve people were chosen from both sides indicates that in building our foundation in Christ, we all start by using wood, hay, stubble before we are given to build with gold, silver, precious stones. The wood, hay and stubble represent the false doctrines which we imbibe and causes us to become victims of the flesh. It is instructive to note that the place where they fell was named Helkathhazzurim, which means ‘fields of sword.’ As we are aware, a sword represents the word of the Lord and the fields of sword means we have a worldly word of the Lord, which is false doctrines, since ‘field’ represents the world.  Therefore, what we are being told is that it is false doctrines that put us to death. 

In verse 16, we are reminded that both Abner’s men and Joab’s men fell. It shows that we stumble as the Lord’s elect, just like our brothers and sisters in Babylon, before we are given to overcome. In other words, we start our walk with Christ with the foundation of wood, hay and stubble, before we are given to overcome as we replace our foundation with gold, silver and stones. It is important to note that in verse 17, it was mentioned that Abner and his men were defeated. This shows how in the final analysis, we, as the Lord’s elect, are victorious as our foundation is replaced with gold, silver and stones.   

1Co 3:11  For other foundation can no man lay than that is laid, which is Jesus Christ. 
1Co 3:12  Now if any man build upon this foundation gold, silver, precious stones, wood, hay, stubble; 
1Co 3:13  Every man’s work shall be made manifest: for the day shall declare it, because it shall be revealed by fire; and the fire shall try every man’s work of what sort it is. 
1Co 3:14  If any man’s work abide which he hath built thereupon, he shall receive a reward. 

2Sa 2:18  And there were three sons of Zeruiah there, Joab, and Abishai, and Asahel: and Asahel was as light of foot as a wild roe. 
2Sa 2:19  And Asahel pursued after Abner; and in going he turned not to the right hand nor to the left from following Abner. 
2Sa 2:20  Then Abner looked behind him, and said, Art thou Asahel? And he answered, I am.
2Sa 2:21  And Abner said to him, Turn thee aside to thy right hand or to thy left, and lay thee hold on one of the young men, and take thee his armour. But Asahel would not turn aside from following of him. 
2Sa 2:22  And Abner said again to Asahel, Turn thee aside from following me: wherefore should I smite thee to the ground? how then should I hold up my face to Joab thy brother? 
2Sa 2:23  Howbeit he refused to turn aside: wherefore Abner with the hinder end of the spear smote him under the fifth rib, that the spear came out behind him; and he fell down there, and died in the same place: and it came to pass, that as many as came to the place where Asahel fell down and died stood still.

As indicated in verse 18, Asahel was gifted, with his feet as swift as a wild gazelle. He represents our brothers and sisters in the body who are gifted. Spiritual maturity is not the same as gifts, and therefore we must be prepared to listen to counsel from our brothers and sisters in our walk with Christ. As we can see in this story, Abner told Asahel twice that he should turn away and fight with the young men, but he refused. Asahel wanted to do something great by capturing Abner. 

Rom 11:20  Well; because of unbelief they were broken off, and thou standest by faith. Be not highminded, but fear:
Rom 11:21  For if God spared not the natural branches, take heed lest he also spare not thee. 

On a positive note, Abner represents our brothers and sisters who are experienced in this struggle against our flesh and can guide us in our walk with Christ. When we take a look at the scripture, we see Paul and Barnabas submitting to the counsel of the elders, although their understanding concerning the issue raised about the Gentiles was far deeper than the elders. Many who have left the fellowship thought that their understanding was far better than that of the elders and therefore were not prepared to submit to the counsel of the elders, as we see in the case of Asahel. As a result, we become spiritually dead as we see Asahel dead through the butt of the spear from Abner. The butt of the spear signifies false doctrines, which has put to death many of our brothers and sisters who were so gifted. 

Jer 9:23  Thus saith the LORD, Let not the wise man glory in his wisdom, neither let the mighty man glory in his might, let not the rich man glory in his riches: 
Jer 9:24  But let him that glorieth glory in this, that he understandeth and knoweth me, that I am the LORD which exercise lovingkindness, judgment, and righteousness, in the earth: for in these things I delight, saith the LORD. 

2Sa 2:24  Joab also and Abishai pursued after Abner: and the sun went down when they were come to the hill of Ammah, that lieth before Giah by the way of the wilderness of Gibeon. 

Joab and his brother Abishai pursuing Abner to take revenge for the death of their brother Asahel implies that they were still of the flesh, since vengeance is of the Lord. This is to make us aware that in this journey of faith, it takes a lifetime for our flesh to be destroyed completely. That is why we need patience, after we have done the will of God, to receive the promise.

Heb 10:36  For ye have need of patience, that, after ye have done the will of God, ye might receive the promise.  

2Sa 2:25  And the children of Benjamin gathered themselves together after Abner, and became one troop, and stood on the top of an hill.

The children of Benjamin gathering themselves together after Abner instead of David shows us how the church system of this world has many children, while the church of the Lord’s elect, signified by David and his men, are relatively small in number.

Gal 4:25  For this Agar is mount Sinai in Arabia, and answereth to Jerusalem which now is, and is in bondage with her children. 
Gal 4:26  But Jerusalem which is above is free, which is the mother of us all. 
Gal 4:27  For it is written, Rejoice, thou barren that bearest not; break forth and cry, thou that travailest not: for the desolate hath many more children than she which hath an husband. 

2Sa 2:26  Then Abner called to Joab, and said, Shall the sword devour forever? knowest thou not that it will be bitterness in the latter end? how long shall it be then, ere thou bid the people return from following their brethren? 
2Sa 2:27  And Joab said, As God liveth, unless thou hadst spoken, surely then in the morning the people had gone up every one from following his brother. 
2Sa 2:28  So Joab blew a trumpet, and all the people stood still, and pursued after Israel no more, neither fought they any more.  

Abner calling for a truce was to avoid a great slaughter of his men. Joab accepting the truce indicates that as the Lord’s elect, we should be men of peace and that we should not put a stumbling block of iniquity before our brothers and sisters to cause them to become spiritually dead. This stumbling block of iniquity is false doctrines, represented by the sword used to slay many. 

Eze 14:2  And the word of the LORD came unto me, saying, 
Eze 14:3  Son of man, these men have set up their idols in their heart, and put the stumblingblock of their iniquity before their face: should I be enquired of at all by them? 
Eze 14:4  Therefore speak unto them, and say unto them, Thus saith the Lord GOD; Every man of the house of Israel that setteth up his idols in his heart, and putteth the stumblingblock of his iniquity before his face, and cometh to the prophet; I the LORD will answer him that cometh according to the multitude of his idols; 

2Sa 2:30  And Joab returned from following Abner: and when he had gathered all the people together, there lacked of David’s servants nineteen men and Asahel.

The number nineteen means judgment of the flesh. The fact that nineteen men were missing or dead from the camp of David after the fight with Abner and his men signifies that as His elect, it is through the judgment of our flesh that our flesh dies. 

2Sa 2:31  But the servants of David had smitten of Benjamin, and of Abner’s men, so that three hundred and threescore men died. 

Abner’s men who died were 360 and here they symbolize our brothers and sisters in the churches of this world. The number 360 = 10x3x12. What this means is that it is at the fullness of the flesh after the final rebellion against Christ (the significance of the number 10) that our brothers and sisters in Babylon shall go through the process of judgment (the significance of the number three) in the lake of fire, which will result in them becoming like Christ (the significance of the number 12). 

2Sa 2:32  And they took up Asahel, and buried him in the sepulchre of his father, which was in Bethlehem. And Joab and his men went all night, and they came to Hebron at break of day. 

Asahel represents the Lord’s elect and Bethlehem signifies the house of bread, which stands for the church of the Lord’s elect. The fact that he was buried in a sepulchre in Bethlehem implies that as His elect, our flesh is destroyed in the house of the Lord or in the church of the firstborn.

As indicated, Joab and his men represent the Lord’s elect. In the Bible, the night refers to the time that we are in darkness as we are overwhelmed by the flesh. 

Rom 13:12  The night is far spent, the day is at hand: let us therefore cast off the works of darkness, and let us put on the armour of light.  

Joab and his men travelling all night and getting to Hebron at break of day is therefore telling us that our journey with Christ is like a long night where we are overwhelmed by our flesh, and it is when we come to the church of the firstborn (significance of Hebron which means ‘association’), that the day breaks or the light of the gospel of Christ shines in our hearts and mind to become like Christ.

2Pe 1:19  We have also a more sure word of prophecy; whereunto ye do well that ye take heed, as unto a light that shineth in a dark place, until the day dawn, and the day star arise in your hearts:  

May His name be praised forever. Amen!

Alleged Contradictions in Scripture – Part 7

“Walk… In The Fear of The Lord”, Versus “Perfect Love Casts Out Fear”

[Study Aired September 20, 2026]

Act 9:31 Then had the churches rest throughout all Judaea and Galilee and Samaria, and were edified; and walking in the fear of the Lord, and in the comfort of the Holy Ghost, were multiplied.

1Jn 4:18 There is no fear in love; but perfect love casteth out fear: because fear hath torment. He that feareth is not made perfect in love.

Introduction

Should you and I “Walk in the fear of the Lord”? If we do fear Him, does that mean we are not made perfect in love?

I hope that you have been brought to see that just as the fear of man correlates with the love of this world, so it is with the fear of God. Those who fear man love this world, and those who fear God love God and “the things of the spirit.” Just like every alleged contradiction we have studied to this point, the things of the spirit are understood only by those who have been given to “receive the things of the spirit”, and those who have not been granted that gift will take “some of the word” and attempt to make it contradict “the sum of Thy Word.”

Psa 119:160 The sum of thy word is truth; And every one of thy righteous ordinances endureth for ever. (ASV, ESV)

2Pe 1:20 knowing this first, that no prophecy of scripture at all is becoming its own explanation. (CLV)

1Co 2:4 And my speech and my preaching was not with enticing words of man’s wisdom, but in demonstration of the Spirit and of power: [“the sum of thy word”, (Psa 119:160, Joh 6:63)]
1Co 2:5 That your faith should not stand in the wisdom of men, but in the power of God.
1Co 2:6 Howbeit we speak wisdom among them that are perfect: yet not the wisdom of this world, nor of the princes of this world, that come to nought:
1Co 2:7 But we speak the wisdom of God in a mystery, even the hidden wisdom, which God ordained before the world unto our glory:

1Co 2:13 Which things also we speak, not in the words which man’s wisdom teacheth, but which the Holy Ghost teacheth; comparing spiritual things with spiritual.
1Co 2:14 But the natural man receiveth not the things of the Spirit of God: for they are foolishness unto him: neither can he know them, because they are spiritually discerned.

There are those who know nothing of any of these truths, or who do not know how to apply these truths, who use that statement in 1 John 4:18, (“He that fears is not made perfect in love”) to teach that we need not fear God under the New Testament. More than that, some even teach that if you do fear God, you are not made perfect in love. As is always the case, such people have no idea or have forgotten how to apply all the above verses, and they have forgotten what ‘love’ is or what ‘love’ produces in those who do have “the love of God”.

1Jn 5:2 By this we know that we love the children of God, when we love God, and keep his commandments.
1Jn 5:3 For this is the love of God, that we keep his commandments: and his commandments are not grievous.

Let us establish that the Greek word for ‘fear’ in both Luke 12:5 and 1 John 4:18 is:

G5399
φοβέω
phobeō
fob-eh’-o

From G5401; to frighten, that is, (passively) to be alarmed; by analogy to be in awe of, that is, revere: – be (+ sore) afraid, fear (exceedingly), reverence.

Here are all the entries for this Greek word in the New Testament:

G5399
φοβέω
phobeō
Total KJV Occurrences: 93
fear, 35
Mat_1:20, Mat_10:26, Mat_10:28 (2), Mat_10:31, Mat_21:26, Mat_28:5, Luk_1:13, Luk_1:30, Luk_1:50, Luk_5:10 (2), Luk_8:50, Luk_12:5 (3), Luk_12:7, Luk_12:32, Luk_18:4, Luk_23:40, Act_13:15-16 (2), Act_27:24, Rom_11:20, 2Co_11:3, 2Co_12:20, Heb_4:1, Heb_13:6, 1Pe_2:17, Rev_1:17, Rev_2:10, Rev_11:18, Rev_14:7, Rev_19:4-5 (2)
afraid, 29
Mat_2:22, Mat_14:27, Mat_14:30, Mat_17:6-7 (2), Mat_25:25, Mat_28:10, Mar_5:15, Mar_5:36, Mar_6:50, Mar_10:32 (2), Luk_2:8-9 (2), Luk_8:25, Luk_8:35, Luk_12:4, Joh_6:19-20 (2), Joh_19:8, Act_9:26, Act_18:9, Act_22:29, Rom_13:3-4 (2), Gal_4:11, Heb_11:23, 1Pe_3:6, 1Pe_3:14
feared, 18
Mat_14:5, Mat_21:46, Mat_27:54, Mar_4:41, Mar_6:20, Mar_11:18, Mar_11:32, Mar_12:12, Luk_9:34, Luk_9:45, Luk_18:2, Luk_19:21, Luk_20:19, Luk_22:2, Joh_9:22, Act_5:26, Act_10:2, Act_16:38
fearing, 6
Mar_5:33, Act_27:17, Act_27:29, Gal_2:12, Col_3:22, Heb_11:27
feareth, 4
Act_10:22, Act_10:35, Act_13:26, 1Jo_4:18
reverence, 1
Eph_5:33

Of the 93 times this word appears, it is translated as ‘reverence’ only one time:

Eph 5:33 Nevertheless let every one of you in particular so love his wife even as himself; and the wife see that she reverence [Greek: phobeo, fear] her husband.

Here is that Greek word from which 5399 is taken and which is also translated as ‘fear’:

G5401
φόβος
phobos
fob’-os

From a primary φέβομαι phebomai (to be put in fear); alarm or fright: – be afraid, + exceedingly, fear, terror.

Here are the entries for this word:

G5401
φόβος
phobos
Total KJV Occurrences: 47
fear, 41
Mat_14:26, Mat_28:4, Mat_28:8, Luk_1:12, Luk_1:65, Luk_5:26, Luk_7:16, Luk_8:37, Luk_21:26, Joh_7:13, Joh_19:38, Joh_20:19, Act_2:43, Act_5:5, Act_5:11, Act_9:31, Rom_3:17-18 (2), Rom_8:15, Rom_13:7 (2), 1Co_2:3, 2Co_7:1, 2Co_7:11, 2Co_7:15, Eph_5:21, Eph_6:5, Phi_2:12, 1Ti_5:20, Heb_2:15, 1Pe_2:17-18 (2), 1Pe_3:2, 1Pe_3:15, 1Jo_4:18 (3), Jud_1:23, Rev_11:11, Rev_18:10, Rev_18:15
terror, 3
Rom_13:3, 2Co_5:11, 1Pe_3:14
exceedingly, 1
Mar_4:41
feared, 1
Mar_4:41 (2)
fears, 1
2Co_7:5

There are really only 46 entries for this word because, as you can see, the words ‘feared’ and ‘exceedingly’ are both translated from this one Greek word ‘phobos’ in Mark 4:41:

Mar 4:41 And they feared exceedingly  [G5401: phobos], and said one to another, What manner of man is this, that even the wind and the sea obey him?

Of the 46 times this word appears in the New Testament, it is translated as ‘fear’, ‘terror’, ‘feared’ and ‘fears’ in every case. It is never once translated as revere or reverence. But just for the record, this is the Webster’s dictionary definition of the English word ‘revere’:

“1. Fear mingled with respect and esteem; veneration.

“When quarrels and factions are carried openly, it is a sign that the reverence of government is lost.

“The fear acceptable to God, is a filial fear, an awful reverence of the divine nature, proceeding from a just esteem of his perfections, which produces in us an inclination to his service and an unwillingness to offend him.

“REV’ERENCE, v.t. To regard with reverence; to regard with fear mingled with respect and affection. We reverence superiors for their age, their authority and their virtues. We ought to reverence parents and upright judges and magistrates. We ought to reverence the Supreme Being, his word and his ordinances.”

Here is what we are told of how we ought to relate to this word ‘reverence’ in the Old Testament:

Lev 19:30 Ye shall keep my sabbaths, and reverence my sanctuary: I am the LORD.

Psa 89:7 God is greatly to be feared in the assembly of the saints, and to be had in reverence of all them that are about him.

Psa 119:38 Stablish thy word unto thy servant, who is devoted to thy fear.

Ecc 12:13 Let us hear the conclusion of the whole matter: Fear God, and keep his commandments: for this is the whole duty of man.

The word ‘duty’ here in Ecclesiastes 12:13 has been added by the translators and is better left off. The fact is that mankind is not complete without a healthy Biblical fear of God.

This is what the Old Testament tells us is the relationship of a son to his father:

Lev 19:1 And the LORD spake unto Moses, saying,
Lev 19:2 Speak unto all the congregation of the children of Israel, and say unto them, Ye shall be holy: for I the LORD your God am holy.
Lev 19:3 Ye shall fear every man his mother, and his father, and keep my sabbaths: I am the LORD your God.

Having been a child in need of discipline, I can vouch for the meaning of those words, “fear every man his mother, and his Father.” As much as I hated going to school as a child, I dreaded coming home if my mother had said that morning, “Just wait until your father comes home.” Every mother is just as qualified to administer chastening, as is every father. Ideally that is what my mother should have done. A rebellious carnal child needs a healthy fear of his mother and of his father, and that is just as true today as it was when these words were inspired of the holy spirit “for our admonition” (1Co 10:11).

Pro 13:24 He that spareth his rod hateth his son: but he that loveth him chasteneth him betimes.

Yes, these words “were written for our admonition.”

1Co 10:11 Now all these things happened unto them for ensamples: and they are written for our admonition, upon whom the ends of the world are come.

Fully aware of how politically incorrect these words are today, they are nevertheless the Truth of the Word of God:

Pro 19:18 Chasten thy son while there is hope, and let not thy soul spare for his crying.

The book of Proverbs gets more explicit by the chapter:

Pro 23:13 Withhold not correction from the child: for if thou beatest him with the rod, he shall not die.
Pro 23:14 Thou shalt beat him with the rod, and shalt deliver his soul from hell.

What does all this chastening produce in a son? A child, either a physical or a spiritual child, when chastened by a loving, God-fearing father, a physical or a spiritual father, learns to fear God and keep His commandments (Ecc 12:13):

Pro 23:15 My son, if thine heart be wise, my heart shall rejoice, even mine.
Pro 23:16 Yea, my reins shall rejoice, when thy lips speak right things.
Pro 23:17 Let not thine heart envy sinners: but be thou in the fear of the LORD all the day long.

Our lips are speaking “right things” when we teach our children that the fear of their parents produces love for those parents. It is an undisciplined spoiled child, who has been given everything he wants, who grows up to hate others and murder even his own parents.

1Ti 1:9 Knowing this, that the law is not made for a righteous man, but for the lawless and disobedient, for the ungodly and for sinners, for unholy and profane, for murderers of fathers and murderers of mothers, for manslayers,

Did the coming of Christ and His New Covenant nullify this principle? This is what the New Testament teaches us till this day:

Heb 12:5 And ye have forgotten the exhortation which speaketh unto you as unto children, My son, despise not thou the chastening of the Lord, nor faint when thou art rebuked of him:
Heb 12:6 For whom the Lord loveth he chasteneth, and scourgeth every son whom he receiveth.
Heb 12:7 If ye endure chastening, God dealeth with you as with sons; for what son is he whom the father chasteneth not?

A child who fears to disobey a loving father is a well balanced, respectful, and loving child who will grow up to be of the same mind as his loving father. However, the carnal mind witnesses abusive fathers and declares that all fathers who discipline their children are abusive fathers. That is the same undiscerning, fascist mindset that says that anyone who drinks alcohol is a drunkard. There is a time and a place for everything, including chastening a child:

Ecc 3:1  To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven:
Ecc 3:2  A time to be born, and a time to die; a time to plant, and a time to pluck up that which isplanted;
Ecc 3:3  A time to kill, and a time to heal; a time to break down, and a time to build up;
Ecc 3:4  A time to weep, and a time to laugh; a time to mourn, and a time to dance;
Ecc 3:5  A time to cast away stones, and a time to gather stones together; a time to embrace, and a time to refrain from embracing;
Ecc 3:6  A time to get, and a time to lose; a time to keep, and a time to cast away;
Ecc 3:7  A time to rend, and a time to sew; a time to keep silence, and a time to speak;
Ecc 3:8  A time to love, and a time to hate; a time of war, and a time of peace.

It is not at all ‘adding to the word’ to say… ‘a time to chasten your children and fear God.’

Truly, a mind which does not “fear God and keep His commandments” is not a “whole man”!

Ecc 12:13 Let us hear the conclusion of the whole matter: Fear God, and keep his commandments: for this is the whole duty of man. [the words “duty of” are added by the King James translators]

The ACV gives us a much better translation of this verse:

Ecc 12:13 [This is] the end of the matter, all has been heard: Fear God, and keep his commandments, for this is the whole of man. [‘of’ is added] (ACV)

Old Testament Only?

Let’s ask and answer the question: Is the fear of God just an Old Testament doctrine? Did “the times of reformation” brought in by Christ change our need to fear God and keep His commandments? After all, as some are quick to remind us:

Heb 9:10 Which [Old Testament rituals] stood only in meats and drinks, and divers washings, and carnal ordinances, imposed on them until the time of reformation.

Heb 10:1 For the law having a shadow of good things to come, and not the very image of the things, can never with those sacrifices which they offered year by year continually make the comers thereunto perfect.

Let’s examine what the New Testament scriptures teach on this subject so we can know for certain whether we need to fear God under the terms of the New Covenant. The New Testament reveals that the Lord’s sanctuary spoken of in Leviticus 19:30 is nothing less than you and me if we are God’s elect.

Lev 19:30 Ye shall keep my sabbaths, and reverence my sanctuary: I am the LORD.

1Co 3:16 Know ye not that ye are the temple of God, and that the Spirit of God dwelleth in you?
1Co 3:17 If any man defile the temple of God, him shall God destroy; for the temple of God is holy, which temple ye are.

“If any man defile the temple of God, him shall God destroy.” Is that something you or I should fear under the New Covenant? If indeed “perfect love casts out fear”, what does the New Testament teach about whether we should fear God? Is it possible to fear God and still have “perfect love?”

The answer is that once we know what “the love of God” is (1Jo 5:2-3), then we can see clearly that it is impossible to be perfected in love without having the fear of God, as we are about to see.

This is what we are told is the doctrine of the New Testament concerning whether we are to fear God:

Heb 4:1 Let us therefore fear lest, a promise being left us of entering into his rest, any of you should seem to come short of it.

Rev 11:18 And the nations were angry, and thy wrath is come, and the time of the dead, that they should be judged, and that thou shouldest give reward unto thy servants the prophets, and to the saints, and them that fear thy name, small and great; and shouldest destroy them which destroy the earth.

Rev 14:6 And I saw another angel fly in the midst of heaven, having the everlasting gospel to preach unto them that dwell on the earth, and to every nation, and kindred, and tongue, and people,
Rev 14:7 Saying with a loud voice, Fear God, and give glory to him; for the hour of his judgment is come: and worship him that made heaven, and earth, and the sea, and the fountains of waters.

Rev 19:4 And the four and twenty elders and the four beasts fell down and worshipped God that sat on the throne, saying, Amen; Alleluia.
Rev 19:5 And a voice came out of the throne, saying, Praise our God, all ye his servants, and ye that fear him, both small and great.

It is manifested in all these verses that “perfect love casts out fear” is not referring to the fear of God.

According to the New Testament, we are 1) to “fear… lest we come short… of entering into His rest; 2) Those who “fear [God’s] name” are to be rewarded at “the time of the dead”; 3) A vital part of “the everlasting gospel” is the proclamation that we are to “Fear God and give glory to Him”; and 4) finally, we are told that a voice comes directly out of the throne of Christ commanding us: “Praise our God, all ye his servants, and ye that fear him, both small and great.” That is the New Testament doctrine of who is to fear God in “the time of reformation” in which we live:

Heb 9:10  Which stood only in meats and drinks, and divers washings, and carnal ordinances, imposed on them until the time of reformation.

So ‘phobos’ really does mean ‘fear’ and can rightly be translated “feared exceedingly” in the context of seeing a man walking on water in the midst of a terrible storm:

Mar 4:41 And they feared exceedingly [G5401: phobos], and said one to another, What manner of man is this, that even the wind and the sea obey him?

To conclude this study on the apparent contradiction between these two verses:

Act 9:31 Then had the churches rest throughout all Judaea and Galilee and Samaria, and were edified; and walking in the fear of the Lord, and in the comfort of the Holy Ghost, were multiplied.

1Jn 4:18 There is no fear in love; but perfect love casteth out fear: because fear hath torment. He that feareth is not made perfect in love.

Let’s ask and receive our answer from the Lord Himself about this question. If the scriptures actually teach us to fear God as a child fears his father, did our Lord Himself fear His heavenly Father? Christ Himself has inspired Isaiah to admonish us:

Isa 5:20 Woe unto them that call evil good, and good evil; that put darkness for light, and light for darkness; that put bitter for sweet, and sweet for bitter!

Having inspired Isaiah to give us that warning, this is what Christ, our ultimate authority, taught us during His proclamation of the everlasting gospel while He was on this earth in an earthen vessel:

Luk 12:4 And I say unto you my friends, Be not afraid of them that kill the body, and after that have no more that they can do.
Luk 12:5 But I will forewarn you whom ye shall fear: Fear him, which after he hath killed hath power to cast into hell; yea, I say unto you, Fear him.

There it is out of the mouth of Christ Himself! “I will forewarn you whom you shall fear… I say unto you, Fear [God]” So Christ’s doctrine concerning the subject of ‘the fear of God’ is the same doctrine in the New Testament as it was in the Old Testament.

Finally and most conclusively, we are told that Christ has lived a life which was exemplary for us and that we “should follow His footsteps”:

1Pe 2:21 For even hereunto were ye called: because Christ also suffered for us, leaving us an example, that ye should follow his steps:

Did our ‘Example’ fear His Father? Yes, He did, and this verse concludes this study showing that the fear of 1 John 4:18 refers to the fear of men, as Christ told us there in Luke 12: 4, “Be not afraid of [men]”. Christ Himself feared no man, yet He left us this example:

Heb 5:7 Who [Christ] in the days of his flesh, when he had offered up prayers and supplications with strong crying and tears unto him that was able to save him from death, and was heard in that he feared;

Perfect love casts out all fear of men. It does not cast out the fear of God, rather perfect love is based upon the fear of disobeying a loving God who is our heavenly Father.

Heb 12:5  And ye have forgotten the exhortation which speaketh unto you as unto children, My son, despise not thou the chastening of the Lord, nor faint when thou art rebuked of him:
Heb 12:6  For whom the Lord loveth he chasteneth, and scourgeth every son whom he receiveth.
Heb 12:7  If ye endure chastening, God dealeth with you as with sons; for what son is he whom the father chasteneth not?