tulsa 2011
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- Dec 18, 2010
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On Literalng Revelation 11 - the Two Witnesses
Revelation Chapter eleven should be understood as what it is. It is written in the language of metaphor, and the knowledge it gives comes from the metaphoric meaning. Making the prophecy literal makes it into a fable. Paul warns about getting into fables in I Timothy 1: 4, I Timothy 3: 7, II Timothy 4: 4 and in Titus 1: 14. Making the prophecy of Revelation 11 literal rejects the knowledge it offers. "My people are destroyed for lack of knowledge: because thou hast rejected knowledge, I will also reject thee..." Hosea 4: 6 Often, the prophecy of the Two Witnesses is literalized as being two Old Testament characters, such as Moses and Elijah, and sometimes it is made literal by saying the Two Witnesses are two nations in history.
Verse 8, on their dead bodies lying in the street of the great city spiritually called Sodom and Egypt where our Lord was crucified, can be used as a starting point for understanding what this language of metaphor is saying and in grasping the knowledge it provides to us..
The tradition of men called dispensationalism and Christian Zionism has, in the last hundred years or more, been an important source of the literal "hermeneutic," or system of interpretation. "Hermenetiocs" is connected with the pagan god Hermes, who was the messenger who brought the word from Zeus. There were also the rules of interpretation of Old Testament scripture by Talmudic Judaism.
On realapologetics.org
Jamin Hubner says about dispensationalism that: "Despite the revisions and
“improvements,” one thing hadn’t changed: it was still a system based
on man-made rules of Bible interpretation. It still made a sharp
distinction between Israel and the Church. And it still stressed a
literalist hermeneutic. These presuppositions didn’t come without
problems."
A "hermenutic," is, in the dictionary definition, "a method or
principle of interpretation." It is a word used by Christian
seminary professors and their students. On
The Liminality of Hermes and the Meaning of Hermeneutics they say
"hermeneia--can be traced back to the god Hermes...hermeneutics, as
the art of understanding and of textual exegesis, does stand under the
sign of Hermes. Hermes is the messenger who brings the word from Zeus
(God); thus, the early modern use of the term hermeneutics was in
relation to methods of interpreting holy scripture."
Hubner says "It’s very common to read or hear dispensationalists talk
about a “literal interpretation” of the Bible..."
On realapologetics.org
they quote C. I. Scofield, the first classical American dispensationalist, as saying "[Prophecy is] the ground of absolute literalness.[5] Jerusalem is always Jerusalem, Israel always Israel, Zion always Zion…Prophecies may never be spiritualized, but are always literal.[6]"
In 1936, Lewis S. Chafer, a classical dispensationalist who founded the Dallas Theological Seminary, defined Scofield's literalism as "The outstanding characteristic of the dispensationalist is ... that he believes every statement of the Bible and gives to it the plain, natural meaning its words imply."
From: L. S. Chafer, ‘Dispensationalism,’ Bibliotheca Sacra, 93, October (1936), pp410, 417.
Charles C. Ryrie says "This distinction between Israel and the church is born out of a system of hermeneutics that is usually called literal interpretation. Therefore, the second aspect of the sine qua non of dispensationalism is the matter of historical-grammatical hermeneutics. The word literal is perhaps not as good as either the word normal or plain, but in any case it is interpretation that does not spiritualize or allegorize as nondispensational interpretation often does. The spiritualizing may be practiced to a lesser or greater degree, but its presence in a system of interpretation is indicative of a nondispensational approach."
From: Dispensationalism. Charles C. Ryrie. Moody Press, Chicago. 1995.
The literalist interpretation of end time Bible prophecy leads to the fables described by Paul. The birds of Babylon who have roosted in the Christian tree (Daniel 4: 10-12, Revelation 18: 2), and have taken over many denominations since the late 19th century, have been teaching fables about end time prophecy.
In the metaphor of the grain of mustard seed which grows big, the birds of the air come and lodge in its branches. A mustard seed does not become a tree, so this represents an unnatural entity which grows large - which are the false doctrines of the false prophets. The birds of the air in Matthew 13: 31-32 - the parable of the mustard seed - are the false prophets who are under the fallen angels.
In the parable of Matthew 13: 31-32, the small mustard seed grows much bigger than a mustard seed should get. It is Babylon as New Covenant Israel in false doctrines. The mustard seed can be seen as the spiritual seed planted by Christ when he transformed Old Covenant Israel. But the seed was corrupted and diverted away by the army of false prophets from what the seed was intended to become. When the original seed was corrupted, the true Gospel was replaced by another Gospel. The true Gospel, the absolute truth of the word of God, was attacked by the dialectic process and compromised into a false Gospel which is a counterfeit. The counterfeit is the corruption of the original mustard seed so that the corrupted plant grew into a huge thing on the earth.
But the word of God remains. The dialectic process of arguing against it from the viewpoint of a man made counterfeit has not overcome the absolute truth of word of God, not has it replaced the real Christ with another Jesus (II Corinthians 11: 4). The real Christ is "...the way, the truth, and the life." John 14: 6. If you do not have the truth, the Gospel, you do not have the real Christ.
Revelation 11: 1-2 says "Then there was given me a measuring rod like a staff; and someone said, "Get up and measure the temple of God and the altar, and those who worship in it.
2. "Leave out the court which is outside the temple and do not measure it, for it has been given to the nations; and they will tread under foot the holy city for forty-two months." Remember that Stephen in Acts 7: 48 says "Howbeit the most High dwelleth not in temples made with hands; as saith the prophet." And Paul in I Corinthians 3: 16-17 teaches that "Know ye not that ye are the temple of God, and that the Spirit of God dwelleth in you? If any man defile the temple of God, him shall God destroy; for the temple of God is holy, which temple ye are."
Those who claim to be Christians and claim that Christ has begun to be formed in them would, under the New Covenant, be the temple of God, if they really were in Christ Jesus. So, when Revelation 11: 1-2 talks about measuring the temple of God, it is those who claim to be in Christ and to be Christians who are being looked at, or measured. What the people who claim to be in Christ call the capital C proper noun Church is what is being measured or examined.
Then, Revelation 11: 3-6 says "And I will grant authority to my two witnesses, and they will prophesy for twelve hundred and sixty days, clothed in sackcloth. These are the two olive trees and the two lampstands that stand before the Lord of the earth. And if anyone wants to harm them, fire flows out of their mouth and devours their enemies; so if anyone wants to harm them, he must be killed in this way. These have the power to shut up the sky, so that rain will not fall during the days of their prophesying; and they have power over the waters to turn them into blood, and to strike the earth with every plague, as often as they desire." This is describing early Christians, calling them the Two Witnesses, as having spiritual power.
The "Church" in 2014 does not have that spiritual power. In the parable of Matthew 5: 13 and Luke 14: 34, about the salt of the church loosing its savour, it turns out to be about a loss of cognitive clarity or intelligence, which, for the church, is loss of its spiritual intelligence and strength. Savour is from moraino, and from moros, Strong's number 3474, "dull or stupid...blockhead."
Daniel 12: 7 says "...when he shall have accomplished to scatter the power of the holy people, all these things shall be finished." It does not say that the end will come when the holy people are scattered, but when the power of the holy people is scattered. How do you scatter a power? Scattering a power diminishes that power. So, when the spiritual power of those claiming to belong to God is scattered, or diminished, then the end is near. For example, the people claiming to be of God - the church - now has little influence over the morals of the society. Either the preachers no longer strongly preach the truth about the Gospel and also about the righteousness of God, or they go through the motions of doing so, but the church has no spiritual power and so cannot influence society.
The Two Witnesses are not literally two guys from the Old Covenant. They represent Christians. As being in principle two parts, they could be Gentiles and Jews, as in the very early Christian groups, and they can be men and women. They can be young and old.
Revelation 11: 7-11 says "And when they shall have finished their testimony, the beast that ascendeth out of the bottomless pit shall make war against them, and shall overcome them, and kill them.
8. And their dead bodies shall lie in the street of the great city, which spiritually is called Sodom and Egypt, where also our Lord was crucified.
9. And they of the people and kindreds and tongues and nations shall see their dead bodies three days and an half, and shall not suffer their dead bodies to be put in graves.
10. And they that dwell upon the earth shall rejoice over them, and make merry, and shall send gifts one to another; because these two prophets tormented them that dwelt on the earth.
11. And after three days and an half the Spirit of life from God entered into them, and they stood upon their feet; and great fear fell upon them which saw them."
This is all heavily metaphoric, in part because it talks about their bodies lying in the city which is spiritually called Sodom and Egypt, where Christ was crucified.
"And their dead bodies shall lie in the street of the great city, which spiritually is called Sodom and Egypt, where also our Lord was crucified." Revelation 11: 8 The great city, Jerusalem, is called Sodom and Egypt. And calling Jerusalem Sodom and Egypt provides knowledge to those who have ears to hear.
Sodom was the place that God destroyed in Genesis 19 because of their homosexuality, their pride and failure to help the poor. Ezekiel 16: 49-50 says "Behold, this was the iniquity of thy sister Sodom, pride, fulness of bread, and abundance of idleness was in her and in her daughters, neither did she strengthen the hand of the poor and needy. And they were haughty, and committed abomination before me: therefore I took them away as I saw good." A surveillance society that still has some "fullness
of bread" but drives members of the society into homelessness and then persecutes them for being homeless sounds like Sodom. The present day surveillance society now allows same sex marriages in some states. In America homosexuality and lesbianism has been politically correct among many for some decades.
Egypt in Genesis and Exodus is the place where the people of God were held captive.
"For this Agar is mount Sinai in Arabia, and answereth to Jerusalem which now is, and is in bondage with her children. But Jerusalem which is above is free, which is the mother of us all." Galatians 4: 25-26 Literal and physical Jerusalem, representing a clinging to Old Covenant doctrines and practices, is said to be in bondage.
So, calling the Jerusalem which now Sodom and Egypt is giving us knowledge about the spiritual condition of the metaphoric place where the dead bodies of the Two Witnesses lie. The spiritual state of this Jerusalem is not good. It is death. The Jerusalem in Galatians 4: 26 which is free of bondage and is above, is the mother of us all, is spiritual life. The metaphoric Two Witnesses died in the metaphoric city of Jerusalem which is in bondage to false doctrines, and is spiritually dead. The Two Witnesses did not die in Old Covenant literal Jerusalem. They died in a metaphoric place of the New Covenant which Revelation 11: 8 calls Sodom and Egypt where our Lord was crucified. Its the organization which has been leavened (Luke 13: 18-21, I Corinthians 5: 6, Galatians 5: 11, Matthew 16: 6, 11) by the many false prophets of Matthew 24: 11 and II Peter 2: 1-3.
Revelation 11: 7 says "And when they shall have finished their testimony, the beast that ascendeth out of the bottomless pit shall make war against them, and shall overcome them, and kill them." We might come to the conclusion that their testimony is that of the remnant as in Revelation 12: 17 - who have the testimony of Jesus. "And the dragon was wroth with the woman, and went to make war with the remnant of her seed, which keep the commandments of God, and have the testimony of Jesus Christ."
Sometime, at some point in time, the Two Witnesses as the people of God, did have the testimony of Jesus Christ. But the beast out of the bottomless pit inspiring the many false prophets - the birds of Babylon in the Christian tree - caused them to lose their testimony of Christ, and they were spiritually killed.
The knowledge given in Revelation 11: 7-11 is not that the Two Witnesses as two Old Covenant literal men are brought back to life in New Covenant times, then physically killed again, and then resurrected. This literal view does not provide us with the knowledge that some in false doctrines who are spiritually dead will be brought to spiritual life by the Holy Spirit. That some will be brought to life after being spiritually dead in Babylon is consistent with Revelation 18: 4, where God calls those in Babylon who are his people out of it. The fact that there is a call out of Babylon implies that some will be brought to spiritual life and will come out of spiritual death in Babylon.
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Revelation Chapter eleven should be understood as what it is. It is written in the language of metaphor, and the knowledge it gives comes from the metaphoric meaning. Making the prophecy literal makes it into a fable. Paul warns about getting into fables in I Timothy 1: 4, I Timothy 3: 7, II Timothy 4: 4 and in Titus 1: 14. Making the prophecy of Revelation 11 literal rejects the knowledge it offers. "My people are destroyed for lack of knowledge: because thou hast rejected knowledge, I will also reject thee..." Hosea 4: 6 Often, the prophecy of the Two Witnesses is literalized as being two Old Testament characters, such as Moses and Elijah, and sometimes it is made literal by saying the Two Witnesses are two nations in history.
Verse 8, on their dead bodies lying in the street of the great city spiritually called Sodom and Egypt where our Lord was crucified, can be used as a starting point for understanding what this language of metaphor is saying and in grasping the knowledge it provides to us..
The tradition of men called dispensationalism and Christian Zionism has, in the last hundred years or more, been an important source of the literal "hermeneutic," or system of interpretation. "Hermenetiocs" is connected with the pagan god Hermes, who was the messenger who brought the word from Zeus. There were also the rules of interpretation of Old Testament scripture by Talmudic Judaism.
On realapologetics.org
Jamin Hubner says about dispensationalism that: "Despite the revisions and
“improvements,” one thing hadn’t changed: it was still a system based
on man-made rules of Bible interpretation. It still made a sharp
distinction between Israel and the Church. And it still stressed a
literalist hermeneutic. These presuppositions didn’t come without
problems."
A "hermenutic," is, in the dictionary definition, "a method or
principle of interpretation." It is a word used by Christian
seminary professors and their students. On
The Liminality of Hermes and the Meaning of Hermeneutics they say
"hermeneia--can be traced back to the god Hermes...hermeneutics, as
the art of understanding and of textual exegesis, does stand under the
sign of Hermes. Hermes is the messenger who brings the word from Zeus
(God); thus, the early modern use of the term hermeneutics was in
relation to methods of interpreting holy scripture."
Hubner says "It’s very common to read or hear dispensationalists talk
about a “literal interpretation” of the Bible..."
On realapologetics.org
they quote C. I. Scofield, the first classical American dispensationalist, as saying "[Prophecy is] the ground of absolute literalness.[5] Jerusalem is always Jerusalem, Israel always Israel, Zion always Zion…Prophecies may never be spiritualized, but are always literal.[6]"
In 1936, Lewis S. Chafer, a classical dispensationalist who founded the Dallas Theological Seminary, defined Scofield's literalism as "The outstanding characteristic of the dispensationalist is ... that he believes every statement of the Bible and gives to it the plain, natural meaning its words imply."
From: L. S. Chafer, ‘Dispensationalism,’ Bibliotheca Sacra, 93, October (1936), pp410, 417.
Charles C. Ryrie says "This distinction between Israel and the church is born out of a system of hermeneutics that is usually called literal interpretation. Therefore, the second aspect of the sine qua non of dispensationalism is the matter of historical-grammatical hermeneutics. The word literal is perhaps not as good as either the word normal or plain, but in any case it is interpretation that does not spiritualize or allegorize as nondispensational interpretation often does. The spiritualizing may be practiced to a lesser or greater degree, but its presence in a system of interpretation is indicative of a nondispensational approach."
From: Dispensationalism. Charles C. Ryrie. Moody Press, Chicago. 1995.
The literalist interpretation of end time Bible prophecy leads to the fables described by Paul. The birds of Babylon who have roosted in the Christian tree (Daniel 4: 10-12, Revelation 18: 2), and have taken over many denominations since the late 19th century, have been teaching fables about end time prophecy.
In the metaphor of the grain of mustard seed which grows big, the birds of the air come and lodge in its branches. A mustard seed does not become a tree, so this represents an unnatural entity which grows large - which are the false doctrines of the false prophets. The birds of the air in Matthew 13: 31-32 - the parable of the mustard seed - are the false prophets who are under the fallen angels.
In the parable of Matthew 13: 31-32, the small mustard seed grows much bigger than a mustard seed should get. It is Babylon as New Covenant Israel in false doctrines. The mustard seed can be seen as the spiritual seed planted by Christ when he transformed Old Covenant Israel. But the seed was corrupted and diverted away by the army of false prophets from what the seed was intended to become. When the original seed was corrupted, the true Gospel was replaced by another Gospel. The true Gospel, the absolute truth of the word of God, was attacked by the dialectic process and compromised into a false Gospel which is a counterfeit. The counterfeit is the corruption of the original mustard seed so that the corrupted plant grew into a huge thing on the earth.
But the word of God remains. The dialectic process of arguing against it from the viewpoint of a man made counterfeit has not overcome the absolute truth of word of God, not has it replaced the real Christ with another Jesus (II Corinthians 11: 4). The real Christ is "...the way, the truth, and the life." John 14: 6. If you do not have the truth, the Gospel, you do not have the real Christ.
Revelation 11: 1-2 says "Then there was given me a measuring rod like a staff; and someone said, "Get up and measure the temple of God and the altar, and those who worship in it.
2. "Leave out the court which is outside the temple and do not measure it, for it has been given to the nations; and they will tread under foot the holy city for forty-two months." Remember that Stephen in Acts 7: 48 says "Howbeit the most High dwelleth not in temples made with hands; as saith the prophet." And Paul in I Corinthians 3: 16-17 teaches that "Know ye not that ye are the temple of God, and that the Spirit of God dwelleth in you? If any man defile the temple of God, him shall God destroy; for the temple of God is holy, which temple ye are."
Those who claim to be Christians and claim that Christ has begun to be formed in them would, under the New Covenant, be the temple of God, if they really were in Christ Jesus. So, when Revelation 11: 1-2 talks about measuring the temple of God, it is those who claim to be in Christ and to be Christians who are being looked at, or measured. What the people who claim to be in Christ call the capital C proper noun Church is what is being measured or examined.
Then, Revelation 11: 3-6 says "And I will grant authority to my two witnesses, and they will prophesy for twelve hundred and sixty days, clothed in sackcloth. These are the two olive trees and the two lampstands that stand before the Lord of the earth. And if anyone wants to harm them, fire flows out of their mouth and devours their enemies; so if anyone wants to harm them, he must be killed in this way. These have the power to shut up the sky, so that rain will not fall during the days of their prophesying; and they have power over the waters to turn them into blood, and to strike the earth with every plague, as often as they desire." This is describing early Christians, calling them the Two Witnesses, as having spiritual power.
The "Church" in 2014 does not have that spiritual power. In the parable of Matthew 5: 13 and Luke 14: 34, about the salt of the church loosing its savour, it turns out to be about a loss of cognitive clarity or intelligence, which, for the church, is loss of its spiritual intelligence and strength. Savour is from moraino, and from moros, Strong's number 3474, "dull or stupid...blockhead."
Daniel 12: 7 says "...when he shall have accomplished to scatter the power of the holy people, all these things shall be finished." It does not say that the end will come when the holy people are scattered, but when the power of the holy people is scattered. How do you scatter a power? Scattering a power diminishes that power. So, when the spiritual power of those claiming to belong to God is scattered, or diminished, then the end is near. For example, the people claiming to be of God - the church - now has little influence over the morals of the society. Either the preachers no longer strongly preach the truth about the Gospel and also about the righteousness of God, or they go through the motions of doing so, but the church has no spiritual power and so cannot influence society.
The Two Witnesses are not literally two guys from the Old Covenant. They represent Christians. As being in principle two parts, they could be Gentiles and Jews, as in the very early Christian groups, and they can be men and women. They can be young and old.
Revelation 11: 7-11 says "And when they shall have finished their testimony, the beast that ascendeth out of the bottomless pit shall make war against them, and shall overcome them, and kill them.
8. And their dead bodies shall lie in the street of the great city, which spiritually is called Sodom and Egypt, where also our Lord was crucified.
9. And they of the people and kindreds and tongues and nations shall see their dead bodies three days and an half, and shall not suffer their dead bodies to be put in graves.
10. And they that dwell upon the earth shall rejoice over them, and make merry, and shall send gifts one to another; because these two prophets tormented them that dwelt on the earth.
11. And after three days and an half the Spirit of life from God entered into them, and they stood upon their feet; and great fear fell upon them which saw them."
This is all heavily metaphoric, in part because it talks about their bodies lying in the city which is spiritually called Sodom and Egypt, where Christ was crucified.
"And their dead bodies shall lie in the street of the great city, which spiritually is called Sodom and Egypt, where also our Lord was crucified." Revelation 11: 8 The great city, Jerusalem, is called Sodom and Egypt. And calling Jerusalem Sodom and Egypt provides knowledge to those who have ears to hear.
Sodom was the place that God destroyed in Genesis 19 because of their homosexuality, their pride and failure to help the poor. Ezekiel 16: 49-50 says "Behold, this was the iniquity of thy sister Sodom, pride, fulness of bread, and abundance of idleness was in her and in her daughters, neither did she strengthen the hand of the poor and needy. And they were haughty, and committed abomination before me: therefore I took them away as I saw good." A surveillance society that still has some "fullness
of bread" but drives members of the society into homelessness and then persecutes them for being homeless sounds like Sodom. The present day surveillance society now allows same sex marriages in some states. In America homosexuality and lesbianism has been politically correct among many for some decades.
Egypt in Genesis and Exodus is the place where the people of God were held captive.
"For this Agar is mount Sinai in Arabia, and answereth to Jerusalem which now is, and is in bondage with her children. But Jerusalem which is above is free, which is the mother of us all." Galatians 4: 25-26 Literal and physical Jerusalem, representing a clinging to Old Covenant doctrines and practices, is said to be in bondage.
So, calling the Jerusalem which now Sodom and Egypt is giving us knowledge about the spiritual condition of the metaphoric place where the dead bodies of the Two Witnesses lie. The spiritual state of this Jerusalem is not good. It is death. The Jerusalem in Galatians 4: 26 which is free of bondage and is above, is the mother of us all, is spiritual life. The metaphoric Two Witnesses died in the metaphoric city of Jerusalem which is in bondage to false doctrines, and is spiritually dead. The Two Witnesses did not die in Old Covenant literal Jerusalem. They died in a metaphoric place of the New Covenant which Revelation 11: 8 calls Sodom and Egypt where our Lord was crucified. Its the organization which has been leavened (Luke 13: 18-21, I Corinthians 5: 6, Galatians 5: 11, Matthew 16: 6, 11) by the many false prophets of Matthew 24: 11 and II Peter 2: 1-3.
Revelation 11: 7 says "And when they shall have finished their testimony, the beast that ascendeth out of the bottomless pit shall make war against them, and shall overcome them, and kill them." We might come to the conclusion that their testimony is that of the remnant as in Revelation 12: 17 - who have the testimony of Jesus. "And the dragon was wroth with the woman, and went to make war with the remnant of her seed, which keep the commandments of God, and have the testimony of Jesus Christ."
Sometime, at some point in time, the Two Witnesses as the people of God, did have the testimony of Jesus Christ. But the beast out of the bottomless pit inspiring the many false prophets - the birds of Babylon in the Christian tree - caused them to lose their testimony of Christ, and they were spiritually killed.
The knowledge given in Revelation 11: 7-11 is not that the Two Witnesses as two Old Covenant literal men are brought back to life in New Covenant times, then physically killed again, and then resurrected. This literal view does not provide us with the knowledge that some in false doctrines who are spiritually dead will be brought to spiritual life by the Holy Spirit. That some will be brought to life after being spiritually dead in Babylon is consistent with Revelation 18: 4, where God calls those in Babylon who are his people out of it. The fact that there is a call out of Babylon implies that some will be brought to spiritual life and will come out of spiritual death in Babylon.
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