Friday, October 26, 2012

Mark 8:12 commentary: of signs and generations


12 And he sighed deeply in his spirit, and saith, Why doth this generation seek after a sign? verily I say unto you, There shall no sign be given unto this generation.

Sorry, just had to go off on a tangent here. It’s too interesting to pass by.

In another place Jesus promises the Jews only the sign of the prophet Jonah;

Matthew 12:38 ¶ Then certain of the scribes and of the Pharisees answered, saying, Master, we would see a sign from thee. 39 But he answered and said unto them, An evil and adulterous generation seeketh after a sign; and there shall no sign be given to it, but the sign of the prophet Jonas: 40 For as Jonas was three days and three nights in the whale’s belly; so shall the Son of man be three days and three nights in the heart of the earth. 41 The men of Nineveh shall rise in judgment with this generation, and shall condemn it: because they repented at the preaching of Jonas; and, behold, a greater than Jonas is here.

By this statement we can understand that Jonah did die and was brought back to life in this passage;

Jonah 2:1 ¶ Then Jonah prayed unto the LORD his God out of the fish’s belly, 2 And said, I cried by reason of mine affliction unto the LORD, and he heard me; out of the belly of hell cried I, and thou heardest my voice. 3 For thou hadst cast me into the deep, in the midst of the seas; and the floods compassed me about: all thy billows and thy waves passed over me. 4 Then I said, I am cast out of thy sight; yet I will look again toward thy holy temple. 5 The waters compassed me about, even to the soul: the depth closed me round about, the weeds were wrapped about my head. 6 I went down to the bottoms of the mountains; the earth with her bars was about me for ever: yet hast thou brought up my life from corruption, O LORD my God. 7 When my soul fainted within me I remembered the LORD: and my prayer came in unto thee, into thine holy temple. 8 They that observe lying vanities forsake their own mercy. 9 But I will sacrifice unto thee with the voice of thanksgiving; I will pay that that I have vowed. Salvation is of the LORD.

As an interesting aside, notice how the great fish, a unique one of a kind fish for those people running off to try to prove that this or that sea creature can or has swallowed a man whole, was prepared by God for Jonah and is a type of Hell, as you read the passage in Jonah again. The fish is also a type of something else, though, or someone else, rather.

Jonah 1:17 Now the LORD had prepared a great fish to swallow up Jonah. And Jonah was in the belly of the fish three days and three nights.

Jesus calls this great fish, a whale. Modernists, steeped in modern taxonomic expressions will scream, “A whale is not a fish! Ha, a mistake!” But, man’s taxonomic classifications are just that, man’s. Notice the creatures around God’s throne in Revelation 4 are classified in categories; domestic, wild, flying, man-like (primates?). God mentions whales in Genesis 1:21 as the first creatures coming out of the water where He started life.

Genesis 1:21 And God created great whales, and every living creature that moveth, which the waters brought forth abundantly, after their kind, and every winged fowl after his kind: and God saw that it was good.

In Job 7:12, in Job’s lament, it is implied that God would set a guard over a whale as if you select all the verses that contain “watch” you see that it is an alert guard over something or at a certain time. (Genesis 31:49; Exodus 14:24; Judges 7:19, etc. etc.)

Job 7:12 Am I a sea, or a whale, that thou settest a watch over me?

Pharaoh is likened to a whale in Ezekiel 32:2

Ezekiel 32:2 Son of man, take up a lamentation for Pharaoh king of Egypt, and say unto him, Thou art like a young lion of the nations, and thou art as a whale in the seas: and thou camest forth with thy rivers, and troubledst the waters with thy feet, and fouledst their rivers.

I am going to put forward that, rather than being a specific reference to a specific taxonomic classification, a whale represents a large sea creature; what we would call a large fish, which is God’s obvious classification by comparing verses between Matthew and Jonah, in that case a specially modified fish, or the Leviathan of Psalm 104:26 as in BIG.

Psalm 104:26 There go the ships: there is that leviathan, whom thou hast made to play therein.

Which then, links these large creatures to the reptilian Lucifer or Satan, which are titles rather than personal names.

Isaiah 27:1 In that day the LORD with his sore and great and strong sword shall punish leviathan the piercing serpent, even leviathan that crooked serpent; and he shall slay the dragon that is in the sea.

This verse links the serpent of Genesis 3 with the dragon of Revelation 12, which is the Devil.

Revelation 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.

Satan is likened to a dragon, which is the word we used for giant reptiles before the word dinosaur was invented. You can see the description in Job 41 as the word Leviathan in the first verse links the whale, Satan, the dragon, and the Devil in one as typified by a giant reptile.

Keeping in mind that the Philistine god, Dagon, is part man and part fish, imported from the Assyrian and Babylonian pantheon of gods (Judges 16:23; 1 Samuel 5:2). Perhaps he is also referenced in Revelation 13:1, linking him to Satan as well.

And remember Manna, that unknown substance that fed the Jews in the wilderness? Well, consider this;

Psalm 74:14 Thou brakest the heads of leviathan in pieces, and gavest him to be meat to the people inhabiting the wilderness.

There are so many deep things in this Book of God that we can never know the entire story here in this life.

A generation refers to our polluted bloodline. Death came into the world that we know by sin.

Let’s take a look at an unbelieving evolutionary scientist’s scholarly statement;

“Death did not appear simultaneously with life. This is one of the most important and profound statements of all biology. At the very least it deserves repetition: Death is not inextricably intertwined with the definition of life.” William R. Clark, Sex and the Origins of Death (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 54.

Romans 5:12 Wherefore, as by one man sin entered into the world, and death by sin; and so death passed upon all men, for that all have sinned:

In our natural state our bloodline is polluted. Starting with the proscriptions against eating blood before, during, and after the Law given to Moses;

Genesis 9:4 But flesh with the life thereof, which is the blood thereof, shall ye not eat.

Leviticus 17:12 Therefore I said unto the children of Israel, No soul of you shall eat blood, neither shall any stranger that sojourneth among you eat blood.

Acts 15:28 For it seemed good to the Holy Ghost, and to us, to lay upon you no greater burden than these necessary things; 29 That ye abstain from meats offered to idols, and from blood, and from things strangled, and from fornication: from which if ye keep yourselves, ye shall do well. Fare ye well.

Let’s move on to the fact that Satan used Eve as a sort of shill in his rebellion against God by giving Adam the opportunity to go against the one thing God had forbidden him to do.

He beguiled her through subtlety;

2Corinthians 11:3 But I fear, lest by any means, as the serpent beguiled Eve through his subtilty, so your minds should be corrupted from the simplicity that is in Christ.

She added to God’s command which we are forbidden to do repeatedly (Deuteronomy 4:2; Proverbs 30:6; and Revelation 22:18);

Genesis 3:3 But of the fruit of the tree which is in the midst of the garden, God hath said, Ye shall not eat of it, neither shall ye touch it, lest ye die.

God had said merely not to eat of it;

Genesis 2:17 But of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, thou shalt not eat of it: for in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die.

She became part of Satan’s scam but Adam knew full well what was happening;

1Timothy 2:14 And Adam was not deceived, but the woman being deceived was in the transgression.

And he was right there with her when this happened, when Eve fell for the three things that God warns about again in 1 John 2:16, and he willingly disobeyed while she was deceived as the previous verse says;

Genesis 3:6 And when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was pleasant to the eyes, and a tree to be desired to make one wise, she took of the fruit thereof, and did eat, and gave also unto her husband with her; and he did eat.

Eve sexually knew her husband, Adam, after the Fall and declared that her firstborn was from the Lord;

Genesis 4:1 And Adam knew Eve his wife; and she conceived, and bare Cain, and said, I have gotten a man from the LORD.

Is it possible that Cain and Abel were twins? There is no mention of a conception between Cain and Abel;

Genesis 4:1 ¶ And Adam knew Eve his wife; and she conceived, and bare Cain, and said, I have gotten a man from the LORD. 2 And she again bare his brother Abel. And Abel was a keeper of sheep, but Cain was a tiller of the ground.

But, was Cain truly from God?

1John 3:12 Not as Cain, who was of that wicked one, and slew his brother. And wherefore slew he him? Because his own works were evil, and his brother’s righteous.

There is a condition where fraternal twins can have different fathers called Heteropaternal Superfecundation.

Remember, the sons of God who came to live in the flesh bore children through the daughters of men which offspring were giants; violent and powerful.

Genesis 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…..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, the same became mighty men which were of old, men of renown. 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….

Their appearance, their representatives or angels (Isaiah 63:9) as angels are not a separate created thing but appearances of God (Judges 2:1), men (Daniel 9:21 with Luke 1:26 and Revelation 21:17), churches (Revelation 2:1), children (Matthew 18:10), suffer for their leaving their original position;

Jude 1:6 And the angels which kept not their first estate, but left their own habitation, he hath reserved in everlasting chains under darkness unto the judgment of the great day.

Remember what Jesus called the religious elite of His day;

John 8:44 Ye are of your father the devil, and the lusts of your father ye will do. He was a murderer from the beginning, and abode not in the truth, because there is no truth in him. When he speaketh a lie, he speaketh of his own: for he is a liar, and the father of it.

If this is so, then Cain’s blood ran through our veins, and by extension, Satan’s blood, through Noah’s sons. Some traditions say that Noah’s wife, the mother of the three men who overspread the entire earth; Shem, Ham, and Japheth, was Naamah, Tubalcain’s sister, a descendant of Cain.

If that is so, then the blood of Cain entered our veins through the wife of Noah as he was perfect in his generations. There was something wrong with Shem’s, Ham’s, and Japheth’s blood. There is something wrong with our blood. God did something about that spiritually and physically.

Acts 20:28 Take heed therefore unto yourselves, and to all the flock, over the which the Holy Ghost hath made you overseers, to feed the church of God, which he hath purchased with his own blood.

1Corinthians 10:16 The cup of blessing which we bless, is it not the communion of the blood of Christ? The bread which we break, is it not the communion of the body of Christ?

Ephesians 2:13 But now in Christ Jesus ye who sometimes were far off are made nigh by the blood of Christ.

Hebrews 9:12 Neither by the blood of goats and calves, but by his own blood he entered in once into the holy place, having obtained eternal redemption for us.

Hebrews 9:14 How much more shall the blood of Christ, who through the eternal Spirit offered himself without spot to God, purge your conscience from dead works to serve the living God?

Hebrews 13:12 Wherefore Jesus also, that he might sanctify the people with his own blood, suffered without the gate.

1Peter 1:19 But with the precious blood of Christ, as of a lamb without blemish and without spot:

Revelation 1:5 And from Jesus Christ, who is the faithful witness, and the first begotten of the dead, and the prince of the kings of the earth. Unto him that loved us, and washed us from our sins in his own blood,

Seems like blood is sort of important, doesn’t it? Christ Himself has generated a people for Himself by His blood. The prophecy in Psalms 22 which Christ pointed to by quoting its first verse from the cross states that clearly;

Psalm 22:30 A seed shall serve him; it shall be accounted to the Lord for a generation.

Although the Jews had plenty of evidence to look at Christ refused to give them a sign. The Hebrews were born as a people by signs and wonders but Christ refused them. Remember from before, He knew they didn’t believe but were merely seeking a way to accuse Him of something wrong by their standards.

You don’t need a sign. You need the gift of faith to believe. When was the last time you prayed for, not only health, healing, sustenance, success, and lots of stuff? When was the last time you prayed for faith?

Ephesians 2:8 For by grace are ye saved through faith; and that not of yourselves: it is the gift of God:

Jesus is going to leave these people and preach an important little sermon about leaven.

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