Divine Appointment
Many who read this will know, of course, that the Bible is the history of OUR people; the White people of the race that loosely we group under the term of Anglo-Saxon, Germanic, Scandinavian, Celtic peoples. In our history, as given in the Bible, there were a good many times when our people got themselves in trouble; not times when they got in trouble merely through the actions of the enemy, because, if they were behaving themselves properly and maintaining their loyalty our God, He always took care of our enemies for us.
The enemies became dangerous when we lost the protection of Yahweh because we turned away from Him. And repeatedly we had to get our noses rubbed in it, and it was always the same; there are no new mistakes, we just keep making the same old ones over and over again. When we read today’s newspapers and then open the Bible to read Isaiah or Jeremiah, we can understand exactly what they are talking about because we see the same conditions around us today.
Every time Yahweh rescued us from our troubles and put us in a condition of peace and prosperity, and everything good, it didn’t take long until people began drifting away into conditions that brought calamity on us again. During those repeated periods of trouble, we can be sure that there were a great many men, good intentioned men, men of great ability and great courage, who set out as self-appointed leaders to bring our people out of these troubles.
None of them ever succeeded because they were trying do it on the strength of man’s ability: and that isn’t enough. One man of good common sense and good character can’t carry the dead weight of 200 million stupid and evil people; it is too big a job. Occasionally it was Yahweh’s time to bring us out of these troubles, after He felt that we had been in it long enough, that some of our people at least had learned a lesson by it. Then a man came along who had been picked by Yahweh to do that job, and he succeeded where all the others failed.
First: We had Noah; it was necessary to take a few remaining, purebred Adamites and get them out of an area of mongrelization. Among the places in your King James Version, where it is mistranslated into meaningless nonsense, it tells you about Noah. It says he was a just man and perfect in his generations, which is a meaningless phrase if ever there was one.
If one looks it up in a concordance they will learn that the word the translators mistranslated “generation,” means ancestry or descent. He was perfect in his ancestry. There was no mongrelization there; he was purebred and that is why Noah and his family were selected to be saved, while the mongrels were wiped out by the flood. This wasn’t the case of Noah volunteering, that in his own admiration of his own abilities he was going to step up and save the people: he was picked by Yahweh for the job.
Yahweh picked His man again, appointed him: Abraham. Now by this time there were a good many purebred Adamites around, but the best of the group still had to be selected to breed a specific line to do a job that the rest of them could not do.
Anybody who has had any experience breeding animals can tell you that you must continue selective breading for many generations if you expect to obtain a superior specimen. To develop a thoroughbred strain of dogs, out of each litter you take only the best pup out of the lot, to be the mother or father of the next generation. You don’t kill off the rest. There are puppies there, good enough to give to some child who wants a puppy for a pet, but not good enough to breed the next generation for what you are after. And so on, generation after generation, you pick the best of the litter until you finally have bred the quality you want.
That is the sort of thing Yahweh is doing, too. So out of the Adamites, here, Yahweh had appointed one man to be the father of a specially selected line. Then his grandson, Jacob, whose name Yahweh Himself changed to Israel, didn’t have any particular job to do, but he was selected as the starting point from which Yahweh said; “I have now bred the quality of man I want and his descendants are the ones that I will choose as My people.”
Centuries passed and when the time came for somebody to make a nation out of only a mob of browbeaten slaves; then comes Moses. Yahweh picked him: appointed him. Remember, Moses wasn’t at all eager to take the job, but it was thrust upon him. But here was a man who had the qualities of character and the courage to stick to it regardless of what happened. He wasn’t the politician either, who would always take the path of expediency. Yahweh knew with whom He was dealing and He picked His own man for the job.
Moses led the people of Israel up to the Jordan River, but was not allowed to go on and lead them into the Promised Land. Someone else was needed to take his place, and again Yahweh picked His man: this time, Joshua; somebody who had much of Moses’ qualities: to lead them in, divide up the land among them, and establish the nation in its new homeland.
You know the rest of their history; they go along as well as they deserved. They went through alternating periods of loyalty to Yahweh, in which they prospered and their enemies left them alone, as their enemies were in deadly fear of them, and then periods of apostasy when their enemies came upon them and whipped them soundly and depressed them. They finally demanded a king and as Yahweh told Samuel, “Then all the elders of Israel gathered themselves together, and came to Samuel unto Ramah, And said unto him, Behold...now make us a king to judge us like all the nations. But the thing displeased Samuel, when they said, Give us a king to judge us. And Samuel prayed unto the LORD. And the LORD said unto Samuel, Hearken unto the voice of the people in all that they say unto thee: for they have not rejected thee, but they have rejected me, that I should not reign over them.” (1 Samuel 8:4‑8)
Thus we have Yahweh telling Samuel in essence “All right, this is part of their lesson: If they want a king give them a king, but warn them in advance what they are going to have, under him: bureaucracy with all its high taxes, with all its meddlesome interference in the life of the people, and tyranny. And they chose it; so they were given their king, Saul, and you know how poorly that worked out. Therefore, Yahweh picked a man to bring some order into the monarchy and organize it on a sound footing: David.
These men were not completely faultless angels, any of them; there is no record of any such person in all history in the form of any mere mortal man. They had their weakness and their faults, and David is a good example of it: he broke some of Yahweh’s Commandments. He had sexual intercourse with Bath-sheba to conceive and be with child. Whereas, David also arranged to have the woman’s husband placed in the forefront of the next fiercely fought battle where he would surely be killed; and he was. (2 Samuel 11:3-26)
David then took the man’s widow as his wife, but David’s child which she was carrying died seven days after it was born. She later gave birth to another child sired by David, whose name was Solomon, and Solomon reigned as king after his father died. Although Yahweh had forgiven David for his sins; David still had to pay a penalty, for Yahweh said, “Now therefore the sword shall never depart from thine house” because “thou hast killed Uriah the Hittite with the sword, and hast taken his wife to be thy wife.” (2 Samuel 12:10)
In spite of David’s transgressions, Yahweh still said, “David is a man after my own heart.” (Acts 13:22) Because, despite the fact that David’s foot slipped and he got himself in trouble occasionally, he always picked himself up and started out in the right direction again. Yahweh gave him his orders as to what he should do, and David did his best to follow them. Yahweh doesn’t expect perfection of any of us, because He knows that we don’t have what it takes, but He does expect us to give it the old college try: and this David did!
It would appear that Solomon was picked, just to illustrate man’s failure, that you can’t rely on man as such to accomplish anything. No man ever came into life with a better start for his job than Solomon: he inherited the throne (which was the throne of Yahweh here on earth; 1 Chronicles 29:23) he was immensely rich; he came when the monarchy was popular and there was no thought of rebellion; he had no trouble keeping order. He started out as a man of pretty good common sense; he had Yahweh’s favor as long as he would stay on the right track, and what did he do?
For a very brief period he gave the people pretty good rule, but he wound up as being one of the worst kings in all the nation’s many, many centuries of history: he became an idolater. Remember, this man not merely had prophets come to him with favorable statements which they told him Yahweh actually spoke directly to him. But Solomon later because an idolater, turned his back on the one true God. He misgoverned the people as badly as any of them, with grossly excessive taxes, and he was leading the whole nation into idolatry. As a matter of fact, if you want to look back over history and look at the kings of the Dravidic line, you probably will find no such collection of scoundrels who have escaped a well merited hanging, in all history, as you will find in these kings. There were only four good ones in the whole line: David; Solomon, in the early part of his reign; Hezekiah, and Josiah; and the rest ranged from bad to extremely bad.
Nevertheless, when the time came when somebody was needed to do something, Yahweh picked His man. You will also notice, there were not any leaders or clergymen, it was one man in each of these cases. Look, for example, at Moses. His brother was made the High Priest. Here they were of the same parentage, same heredity. Moses had what it took, to stick to it in the face of rough going; but Aaron was quite different. When Moses was up on the mountain getting the Laws of Yahweh, the people finally said to Aaron, “Well, we don’t know what’s happened to this man Moses; he’s gone up on the mountain to talk to some God, he says.”
So they said to Aaron, “make us some gods to go before us and lead us the way.” Aaron collected their gold jewelry and cast it into a calf. When they were in Egypt, you remember, they were accustomed to worshiping one of the Egyptian gods in the form of a bull; apparently they were not important enough to have a full grown bull, so now it was just a calf. When Moses finally came down and indignantly demanded what was all this, you remember Aaron’s explanation: “Well,” he said, “I feared the people and when they said to make us a god, why,” he said, “I melted down their gold jewels and out came this calf.” He forgot to mention, of course, who had made the mold which gave this thing the form of a calf when he cast it; that was one of these things he didn’t bother talking about.
(The whole story can be read in Exodus 32)
Consider also Abraham and Lot, Abraham’s nephew. Abraham had the character to pretty well fill the job, but not altogether. There were some weak spots in Abraham too, but Lot wasn’t the man to face up to a tough situation. They reached the point where they were both up on the mountain; the west side of the Jordan Valley there, fertile enough for cultivation but not grass land sufficient to be extra good pasturage. So Abraham said, “Well, here’s all the land. You take your share of it. You take your first choice and I’ll take mine.” so Lot said, “Oh, I want that good valley-bottom pasturage down there, down around Sodom and Gomorrah.” (The whole story is in Genesis 13)
He knew, of course, what sort of situation he was getting into, the moral quality of the people in those cities, but he went down and lived in Sodom and he didn’t move away; he was making money. So you see it doesn’t run in families to the extent that we might hope. This is brought up so that your attention can be focused on another thing: How many of you people can find, in your own family, one person besides yourself who is interested in these truths? Not very many. Yahweh picks one person out of generation in any family, and very rarely does He go beyond that.
In Psalm 68:6, we find the phrase, “God sets the solitary in families” which is not a very good translation. The Hebrew rod, “yachiyd” (pronounced yaw-kheed), which they have translated “solitary” means “the only one.” Remember, when Yahweh tested Abraham, He said, “I want you to offer your son Isaac as a burnt offering.” In your King James Bible it says, “your only son Isaac,” which in one sense wasn’t true, because that Ishmael was Abraham’s first son, was older than Isaac, and he was still alive. But it is the same Hebrew word, “yachiyd,” and it means, “your son who is the only one of this line that Yahweh has selected.”
Yahweh had said to Abraham, “In Isaac shall thy seed be called.” He made him these many wonderful promises, and these were all to be fulfilled through Isaac and Isaac’s descendants. Then Yahweh said, “Now sacrifice Isaac as a burnt offering.” That was a test of faith. Abraham knew Yahweh had made the promises; and if He should allow Isaac to be killed, Yahweh’s promises weren’t any good at all. Therefore without, any worry or doubt whatever, with complete confidence, Abraham went out there, ready to go as far as need be with the sacrifice, because he felt certain, either Yahweh would stop it before it reached the point of the boy’s death or Yahweh would resurrect him and bring him back to life. (The story is found in Genesis 22)
The promises could only be made good through Isaac, and here was a man with the faith in Yahweh, to go ahead, even when it looked rough and difficult. Yahweh puts these unique ONLY ones in families. You’ll find lots of people where everybody in it is equally good, in their attendance at the Baptist church or whatever it is, in the outward forms of religion, but when it comes to wanting to find out what it is all about, very rarely do you find such a one in more than a single generation in any family.
All the way through, Yahweh has been selective. He discriminates (if you want to use what they are trying to make a dirty word), Yahweh has discriminated from the beginning. He discriminated in favor of Adam and against all the pre-Adamic people which the Bible recognizes were in existence at that time. He discriminated in favor of the Israelites and against even the rest of the Adamites. And even among the Israelites, for He has discriminated between a select group and those who could just sort of tag along, because that is the best they could do.
The King James Version utterly obliterates that distinction by bad translation, and so far none of the other translations bring it out either. In the King James you will find references to the “congregation” and the “assembly” of Israel, and the terms are used interchangeably. The Hebrew, from which it was translated, uses two different words of very different meaning. When it is speaking of the entire nation of Israel it uses the Hebrew, “Ed-daw.” When it is speaking of the small, select leadership group, those upon whom Yahweh could rely, it uses a very different word, pronounced “kaw-hawl.” The meaning of that Hebrew word, “kaw-hawl,” is exactly the same as the meaning of the Greek word which is used once or twice in the New Testament and is translated church, “ekklesia” those who are selected and called out from among a larger group, a specially select group.
Yahweh knew beforehand the people with whom He was dealing; in Amos 3:2 He says of His people Israel, “You only have I known of all the families of the earth.” The Prophet Jeremiah has this to say in the Book of Jeremiah 1:4-5: “Then the word of Yahweh came unto me, saying, before I formed thee in the belly I knew thee; and before thou camest forth out of the womb I sanctified thee, (and) I ordained thee a prophet unto the nations.” Now the bible doesn’t come out in just so many words and say that we had a previous life, in the spirit with Yahweh before we were put into these physical bodies here on earth, but there are passages in the Scriptures, such as this one, which pretty clearly infer it: “Before I formed thee in the belly I knew thee.” When, where/ There is pretty good inference there.
Then it finally came time for a job to be done, that no man was able to do; Yahweh couldn’t appoint a man to do it, because no man was capable of doing it, and Yahweh had to do it Himself. We have passed the anniversary of the Crucifixion and Resurrection, but it might be worth our while to glance back a little, to that event, so that we don’t make any mistakes by following church doctrine as to what we are dealing with. Practically all of our Judeo-Christian churches seem to have decided to follow the pagans.
Most of them have decided, like the pagans, that we have a number of gods; not as many as some of the pagans (the Jews and the Hindus have more than we do. The Jews have as many as 30) but they say we have three different gods, sort of a board of directors who presumably run things by a majority vote (and we hope they get along well together). They say we have a Father, Son, and a Holy Spirit (mistranslated Holy Ghost). Now they couldn’t have gotten that doctrine if they had studied the bible; but they didn’t. They did what all the Judeo-Christian churches do, and we do not make an exception for any real organized church: they have what they consider a Holy Book and they will not read it. Instead, they sit around manufacturing man-made doctrines which they derive by inference and argument.
Remember Christ quoted to them in His own day, those terrible, bitter words from Isaiah, and 99% of the Judeo-Christian ministers are going to hear Him repeat that someday: “In vain they do worship me, teaching (for) doctrines the commandments of man.” (Matthew 15:9) There is no excuse, because all so-called Judeo-Christian ministers had the truth give to them. For the ordinary Judeo-Christian church member there is excusable ignorance. Go to any Judeo-Christian church in the country, pick out one of the members and demand that he tell you what his religion is, and after fumbling around a little, he will have to finally admit, “Well; I don’t actually know, but my minister knows for me.”
That is what he goes to church for, to find a minister who is supposed to know what his religion is. The minister’s whole job is to know, wand then he says, “Well, you know I never had time to read the Bible carefully, because I was required to spend so much time on doctrine, to make sure I stuck exactly with the Methodist, or the Baptist, or whatever-it-is, church.” That excuse isn’t going to be acceptable to Yahweh. The preacher had the truth given him in the Book, and the Bible tells you clearly and unmistakably that your Savior and Redeemer, Yahsuah was nothing less that Yahweh Himself who took upon Himself a mortal, human body because He came to earth to undergo suffering and death in our place. Therefore He had to have a body capable of it, for that purpose.
It is amazing how people resent being told the truth about all of this; what they want to believe, (and oh how they cling to it; they make out that a terrible injustice is being done to them when told anything different that what they wish to believe): they want to believe their God said, “Well, come here Son, there’s a job down there that I am afraid to do; whoever goes down there on earth is going to get hurt. I’ll stay up here in Heaven where it is nice and comfortable, and son, you go down there and get hurt.” That is the kind of God they want to worship.
The God that I worship never side-stepped trouble, to put it on somebody else; He took care of these things, and the Bible tells us so. Now the Judeo-Christian churches all agree, as far as it is possible to know, that Christ is our Savior and indeed the New Testament says He is, in several places. Al right; but who is the Savior? If they had read the rest of the Book, they would have read that Isaiah 43:10-11: “Ye are my witnesses, saith Yahweh, and my servant whom I have chosen; that ye may know and believe me, and understand that I am he: before me there was no God formed, neither shall there be after me. I, even I, am Yahweh; and beside me (there) is no Savior.” Couldn’t make it any more clear than that could you?
Let us now read Isaiah 49:26: “And I will feed them that oppresses thee with their own flesh; and they shall be drunken with their own blood, as with sweet wine: and all flesh shall know that I Yahweh am thy Savior and thy Redeemer, the mighty one of Jacob.”
Let us also read Hosea 13:4: Remember, the Bible is always true to its own law of the two witnesses: for every important fact there must be proof by at least two witnesses. We have had Isaiah, now let us take Hosea 13:4: “Yet I am Yahweh thy God from the land of Egypt, and thou shalt know no god but me: for there is no Savior beside me.” So if Christ is our Savior, and the Judeo-Christian churches admit He is, obviously He is God Himself. Oh, but they say, “The New Testament is the only thing we have. You can’t trust that Old Testament; that’s just a bunch of superstitions of primitive people and, whatever Yahweh said in that, we couldn’t rely on.” You know, if I had that kind of a God, I wouldn’t be able to rely on the New Testament either. But the God I worship is always truthful. So let us look in the New Testament.
The Judeo-Christian churches seem to regard Paul as the successor to God. There is no instance in human history or any man who wrote in such a way as to obscure rather than reveal the meaning of what he said, to the extent that Paul does. Anybody who can make sense at all, out of most of Paul’s writings, has put in a terrific amount of work on it. So because they can construe it as being contradictory, to some of the rest of the Bible, most of your Judeo-Christian churches seem to regard Paul as being some sort of successor to God who took over to straighten things out. Paul is the last person in the world who would have made any such claims, for Paul was sticking strictly to what he knew had been the truth to begin with.
So let us look at some of Paul’s writings. 1 Timothy 1:1; “Paul, an apostle of Jesus Christ by the commandment of God our Savior, and Lord Jesus Christ, which is our hope.” First Timothy 2:3; Titus 2:10; Titus 3:4, all of the same effect. Then in the little Book of Jude, way back next to the Book of Revelation, Jude 25: “To the only wise God our Savior be glory and majesty, dominion and power, both now and ever. Amen.”
Most of the Judeo-Christian churches will say that Jesus Christ is also our Redeemer, although none of them seem to know what redemption is, and they say, “Well, that’s just another word for salvation” but the two are as different as black and white. There are a total of six words, between the Hebrew and the Greek, which have been translated salvation. All of them have the same root meaning which is simply safety.
If you find someone floundering around in deep water, unable to swim, and you grab him by the collar and pull him out; then you have given him salvation. Now it is true that as used in the Bible, another connotation is added to it: that it is not merely safety in this life, but it is safety after this meat and bone that we walk around in dies; it is safety, afterwards. But the mere continuation of the existence, and nothing more, is all that salvation implies.
Whether you are going to be one of the few, way up on the top, or whether you are going to be one of the many, way down on the bottom, is another question. And you know the people who say, “Oh don’t bother me with this, I’m a Christian, I’m saved, that’s all I want to know.” Well, the probabilities are, that is all they are going to get also: that is all they have asked for. It is a strange thing, Yahweh has offered you as much as you ask for, and you refuse to ask for it, who can you blame but yourself?
Redemption as revealed by the Bible is a matter of getting back that which you once had and which you lost. Now our ancestor Adam, when he first came here we are told, was made in the image of God: but are you in the image of God? Does God get sick? Does God grow old and die? You do; for Adam lost the image of God and you lost the image of Yahweh, but you are going to get it back; not by salvation. It was never promised you as a matter of salvation; it was promised you as a matter or redemption which is getting back what you lost. You get hard up and you go down to the pawn ship and pawn your watch and eventually you get money enough to go back and redeem your watch, and the word is used correctly there because you’re not going just to buy whatever watch takes your fancy; you are going there to get back that which was originally yours.
Yahweh has promised that by having paid for the sins which lost us all this, Y will Redeem us and put us back in the condition before the fall, after Yahshua the Redeemer. Who is this Redeemer? Well, Isaiah tells it clearly enough in Isaiah 43:14: “Thus saith Yahweh, your REDEEMER, the Holy One of Israel; for your sake have I sent to Babylon, and have brought down all their nobles.”
Again Isaiah 44:6: “This saith Yahweh the King of Israel, and HIS REDEEMER THE LORD OF HOSTS; I am the first, and I am the last; and beside me there is no god.”
The Apostle John is the only one who uses one other term concerning Yahshua: “The Word.” But, because it’s there in John, the Judeo-Christian churches will agree, yes Yahshua was the “Word.” Of course they are always a little bit nervous about reading John; the two most inspired Books in the Bible are Isaiah in the Old Testament and John in the New Testament. If somebody took your Bible and ripped out of it everything except the writings of Isaiah and John, you could just about reconstruct, from those, everything he tore out; the essentials are all there. But John gives some truths that aren’t good politics, truths that bring you up against these situations where you begin finding opposition from the Devil and his Offspring, so people get nervous about reading John, the words of Yahweh there. Indeed, even now there are attempts by the Jews to have the Book of John removed from the Bible because it is so (sic) antisemitic.
Who was the Word? If Yahshua was the Word. In the first chapter of John he tells us, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and THE WORD WAS GOD.” The first chapter of Genesis tells us that Yahweh created everything, doesn’t it? In the first chapter of John, speaking of Yahshua, we read, “All things were made by him; and without him was not anything made that was made.”
But still they don’t like to recognize this, because they have this primitive doctrine. How did they get that way? Largely, probably, from the deliberate forgery of the Scriptures by the Jewish scribes. You have been told before, how, in the Old Testament the true name of God Yahweh is used always in the original manuscripts. The Jewish authorities say it is used 5,410 times in the Old Testament. We have seen statements by other writers putting it as high as 7,000 times but we havening bothered counting them. So, take either figure: it’s a lot of times.
About 50 years before the Babylonian captivity, the priests of the temple in Jerusalem (always the source of corruption, just as today in the pulpits, and cemeteries (seminaries) of today) began teaching something different, a corrupting that finally brought the people of Judah and Benjamin into the Babylonian captivity. Now up to that time the name of God had been used constantly; reverently of course, but is was used in ordinary, everyday writing.
Archeologists have dug up in many of the ancient cities, clay tablets which were ordinary correspondence; some of them official government correspondence, some merely private letters. Now today we don’t use any of the old, flowery, oriental courtesy: we say “Dear Sir” when we begin a letter. In those days they used a more flowery opening, and one very commonly used, was, “May Yahweh cause my Lord to hear tidings of good.” Now you do not address the man to whom you write, as “My Lord.” but you remember, back in the time of George Washington, even if you wrote a letter somebody you completely despised and who was in a position entirely under your authority, you always signed the letter, “Your obedient servant’ thus and so.
In ancient times, whoever you wrote your letter to, you addressed him as “My Lord” and you said, “May Yahweh cause my Lord to hear tidings of good.” So the name was in common use until these priests said, “Ah no, the name is too holy to be uttered, you must never use the name of God.”
Now go back and look through the Books that give the law: Leviticus, Deuteronomy and Numbers; in verse after verse after verse Yahweh has said, Thou shall do this, or, Thou shalt not do that: and He followed it, scores and probably hundreds of times by stating the authority for it: “Thou shalt not do this;”“I am Yahweh your God.” That is the authority for the statement. He wanted His name to be known. He said, “My people shall know My name.” They have to know whom they are worshiping, but the corrupted priests said “No, you must never utter His name: it is too holy to be uttered.”
Of course they were surrounded by pagans who worshiped a great number of pagan gods, we can identify a good many of them as being Satan and some of the rebellious angels who followed him, and probably the chief of the pagan gods, there in Western Asia, was worshiped under a name which meant the Lord. In Hebrew there were two words which had the identical same meaning; Adon which means Lord and the more emphatic form of it and perhaps corresponding more accurately to my Lord was Adonay.
The other word of identical meaning was the Hebrew word Baal (we write it in English Baal and usually pronounce it as Bale).So by this word Baal or Baali Satan was being worshiped throughout western Asia and the priests said, “Now you must never address your prayers to Yahweh using His name, you must pray to the Lord.” They could not have sold that “bill of good” if they had used this word Baal or Baali; that would have been too obviously lading them into idolatrous Satan worship.
So they chose the thin edge of the wedge; the other word meaning Lord (Adon or Adonay), and in a single generation of time they made it stick. By the time they went into Babylonian captivity, there wasn’t anybody left around there who was worshiping Yahweh by name; they were saying all their prayers to the Lord, or in other words, Satan. Do you want to say in the 23rd Psalm, “Satan is my Shepherd, I shall not want...?” In substance that is what they were doing when they said “the Lord is my Shepherd, I shall not want.” So they get themselves into the condition where God let them go into Babylonian captivity in the hope of letting adversity snap them out of this corruption.
There were of course a great many of these manuscripts written on parchment in existence. (They didn’t have printing to turn these things out by the millions). These manuscripts were rare, expensive, and they were well taken care of and they were made to last a good many generations before they finally wore out and had to be thrown away or destroyed. So what to do?
The priests taught the people, when reading from a manuscript or any part of the Scriptures as they then existed (which was just the Old Testament of course), “Where it says Yahweh, do not say Yahweh, you must say Adonay.” Originally in Hebrew they had no vowel letters. They wrote the consonant letters only, and a good deal of modern shorthand is founded on that system. Eventually of curse they outgrew it. What do the letters “CT” mean? Is it cat, cot, coat, cute? It can be any one of them according to what vowel letters you supply. So eventually they were forced to recognize the need for vowel letters in writing and they had no place to put them on the old manuscripts, because the consonant letters were written on the line and they filled it up with no space left between them to write vowel letters in there.
So they developed, for vowel letters, a number of tiny little marks about the size of periods and commas and semicolons in our writing today, and they put those under the line. A few of the letters had an open space in them like the letter “o” or the letter “c” in our present day alphabet, and they might put a tiny little vowel point in there, but usually the vowels were written under the line. So they wrote beneath the Hebrew rod Yahweh which is written with four Hebrew letters corresponding to “yhwh” in English.
Beneath that, they wrote the vowel letters of the word Adonay; not trying to make a different word, but as a reminder to anybody reading this manuscript, when you come to this word don’t say Yahweh, say Adonay.
As Christianity began to develop in churches, there arose the problem of having to use translations and especially since it became crystalized over so much of the area into the hands of the Catholic Church, which, as a Roman institution adopted the Latin language, translating the Scriptures into Latin brought up some problems that have troubled us to this day. Take for example the name which we use today, Jesus.
He never heard that in His lifetime you can be sure, because nobody then ever spoke it that way. In the Greek manuscripts, from which our New Testaments are nearly all translated, the name was spelled with Greek letters which correspond to the English “I E S O U S” and was pronounced Jesus (Yesus). Then they translated that into Latin. In Latin, as an initial letter before a vowel, either “i” or “j” can be used t give that “y” sound. Sometimes in Latin they wrote it IESUS and pronounced it Yesus and sometimes they wrote it Jesus and they still pronounced it Yesus. So when they came to the name of God, Yahweh, and began writing these things in Latin instead of the Hebrew letter, for the initial “y’ the Hebrew letter Yod corresponding to “Y,” they put in the Latin letter “J,” so you had JH.
There has been an argument of long duration between scholars, over whether that third letter is pronounced as a “W” or a “V,” and some of them still argue about it. The best scholarship today seems to be agreed that it was “W.” But some of them had used the Latin “V” in place of this Hebrew letter, so on the line here was”JHVH,” and then underneath were these vowel letters (and up until the early 1500's S.D., even the stupid and ignorant monks still understood that this was not the same word; this was two words, and they simply were copying, the way the old manuscripts had been.
So on the line was the word Yahweh, or give it the V sound of Yahveh, and below that word were the vowel letters from Adonay. Then finally a stupid and ignorant monk, Peter Galatinus by name, who was in charge of the work in his monastery of copying these manuscripts, thought this was all one word. He moved the vowel letters up on the line between the consonant letters, and he manufactured a word that never existed in any language known to man: Jehovah.
So we have had all these things, evils that have come of the evils that were permitted in the priesthood and among the scribes in the monasteries of long ago. They knew the tradition had come down, that where you saw “Yahweh,” you were to say “the Lord” instead. So in the early days of the Church they were quite accustomed to God the creator being called Lord. Then the New Testament speaks about Jesus Christ as being Lord, so they assumed from this, that there must be two Lords, and then there was mention of the Holy Spirit which they mistranslated Holy Ghost, and he was very important and you better not offend him by assigning him any lower place, so evidently we have three lords or gods, they decided.
Of course there was an increase in controversy in the early Church about that. There were people who believed in one God, led by Arius, and there was another group who believed like the pagans that we had at least three gods. So, the Church was split, and we were then in the process of getting two different, bitterly fighting, Christian churches.
The Emperor Constantine stopped the persecution of Christians. First he gave them freedom of worship and then made Christianity the official religion. It then became part of the Roman state apparatus. Of course you cannot tolerate this sort of a split in part of the State machinery. If you don’t have, in the tax collecting department, agreement on what taxes people must pay, you compel them to settle the argument in favor of the concept that brings in the most taxes; and that’s that.
So Constantine commanded the divided Church to settle its differences. They had to make an agreement; they were a part of the State machinery. And in 325 A.D.,he called the Council of Nicaea where they were required to gather and settle this thing. Invitations to attend were sent mostly to those churchmen, the various bishops and arch-bishops, who were believers in three gods. So they constituted a majority of the Council of Nicaea (and whenever government gets a hand in it you know why God has to become a politician and work for votes like the rest of us), so they outvoted Him.
We had three gods instead of One, according to their decision. And the churches generally have followed that, since then, but there is no excuse for it. When people say, “Oh, but you know the Bible mentions the Father and the Son and the Holy Ghost, so there must be three,” Tell them, “If you can find just one verse where Jesus Christ says I and my Father are two, we’ll take your argument seriously.”
So far nobody has ever been able to produce it. Oh they have not been convinced, but they haven’t shown any argument in support of their decision, either. Jesus Christ, as you know, in John 10:30 said, “I an my Father are one.” Now He didn’t say, I and my Father are on good terms with each other and we get along well and we have the same general outlook on things; that isn’t what He said, and they can’t twist it into that, even if they try. He said: “I AND MY FATHER ARE ONE.”
In John 12:45 Christ said, “He that sees me sees Him that sent me.” Pretty hard to get away from that one. Then there is the one that the churches like to go back to; Jesus had the disciples assembled there with Him and He asked them, “Who do men say that I am?” And they said, “Oh some say that you’re this prophet or that or the other, you’re Elijah that’s come back or something of the sort.” He said, “Whom do you say that I am?”
Peter replied, “Thou are the Christ, the Son of the living God.” Jesus said, “Blessed art thou Peter, for flesh and blood didn’t tell you that, but my Father which is in Heaven.” Reading on in that same passage where He was talking to them there (this is John 14:6-9), “Jesus said unto him, I am the way, the truth, and the life: no man cometh unto the Father, but by me. If ye had known me, you should have known my Father also: and from henceforth ye know Him, and have seen Him.”
Now merely having somebody tell you about His is not seeing Him; nobody can twist language that far. “Ye know Him and have seen Him. Philip saith unto Him, Lord, show us the Father, and it suffices us. Jesus said unto him, HAVE I BEEN SO LONG TIME WITH YOU, AND YET THOU HAST NOT KNOWN ME, PHILIP? HE THAT HATH SEEN ME HATH SEEN THE FATHER; AND HOW SAYEST THOU THEN, SHOW US THE FATHER?” You couldn’t put it any more clear: When you have seen Me you have seen the Father.
One other thing the Judeo-Christian churches have garbled up, because they would rather make their own doctrines than study the scriptures, is the matter of when He was crucified Now they tell you that it was on a Friday, for the reason that the following day was the Sabbath, and so ignorant are they of the Bible to which they give lip-service, that the only Sabbath they ever heard about is the Saturday-Sabbath that came every week. But if they had read the Bible, they would have known that everyone of the important feast days (in both the Spring and Fall Festivals) was a Sabbath and the Bible calls it that, no matter what day of the week it comes on.
Now the Hebrew calendar was a Lunar not a Solar calendar. Their day began at sunset, not midnight; at sunset. And every month began on the day of the new moon. Now it wouldn’t keep step with either the week or the months as we have them, or even the years (the solar year) because a Lunar moth is 29 1/4 days (not quite a quarter day, but that’s close enough).
So it won’t keep step with a 28-day, 4-week period, you go a day and a quarter over. So never on any two successive years wold any one of these feasts which came, not on a certain day of the week but on a set day of the month, never would they come on the same day of the week any two successive years.
Over a cycle they would get back to it eventually but nevertheless, whenever these occurred, these were Sabbaths and, to distinguish them from the mere Saturday-Sabbaths, they were generally called High Sabbaths or High Holy Days. Now if they had even bothered reading their New Testament, there would be no excuse for the Judeo-Christian churches making this mistake.
The Judeo-Christian churches, have taught that Christ was crucified on a Friday because they didn’t know their Bible. Now if they had even read the Epistle to the Hebrews in the New Testament, they would have seen it there. From listening to and watching the Judeo-Christian clergy on television and on radio one can expect them to be ignorant of the Old Testament because they all like to say, “We are New Testament Christians.” So they can be expected to know a little bit about the New Testament. Paul points out that Christ was exactly fulfilling the Passover ritual of the Old Testament: that the sacrifice of the Passover Lamb was symbolic to the sacrifice of Christ on the stake; therefore, you should turn to that and see what it is about.
You will find that the Spring Festivals were all symbolic of Christ’s first coming, Crucifixion, Resurrection, and Gift of the Holy Spirit. The Fall Festivals were symbolic of His second coming. There would be no way of knowing whether He was fulfilling these symbolic ceremonies or not, if He did these things on some merely randomly selected day. He fulfilled the great reality of which the festival was only a symbol; in each case, on the exact day of the festival that symbolized it. So now let us go back and look it over.
In the 12th chapter of Exodus the rules about the Passover Lamb. Remember they were still in Egypt at that time, and Yahweh had said, “In a few days now I am going through the land of Egypt about midnight and I will killed the first born of every living creature from the oldest calf of the cow out in the field to the oldest son of the Pharaoh on the throne. That is even going to happen to you Israelites unless you do the one thing that will get you out of it: You select the Passover Lamb, you kill the Lamb and you put its blood on the door post outside your front door, as a public proclamation of your faith, that by the blood of the Lamb you are saved from death. And that even you eat the lamb as your Supper because what is going to happen that evening will cause Pharaoh not only to let you go, the Egyptians will even hurry you out of the country.” (This is a paraphrase of Chapter 11 of Exodus)
So the rules were given. They were told in advance, on the tenth day of the month they were to select the particular lamb which was to be the Passover Lamb, the symbol of Christ. And on the fourteenth day of the month they were to kill the lamb in the afternoon. Exodus 12:3: “Speak ye unto all the congregation of Israel, saying, In the tenth day of this month they shall take unto them every man a lamb, according to the house of their fathers, a lamb for a house.” Then in Exodus 12:6: “And ye shall keep it up until the fourteenth day of the same month: and the whole assembly of the congregation of Israel shall kill it in the evening.”
The Hebrew phrase was between the evenings. It really means, between the time when the sun first starts down toward the West; in other words, noon - and the time when the sun actually sets. So the phrase, “In the evening,” really means in the afternoon, and that is the way it was always interpreted and followed. The lamb was selected on the tenth day and actually killed on the fourteenth. Now remember their day changed at sunset; not midnight. (The Passover lamb at the supper after sunset of the fourteenth, and of course the fifteenth carried over into the following day, by their calendar, and ended at sunset.
The churches all agree that Christ’s final triumphal entry into Jerusalem was on Palm Sunday, when He was greeted with joy by the people and they shouted, “Hosanna to the Son of David, Blessed is He that cometh in the Name of Yahweh,” and so on. Here the people were ready to receive Him. But there is one thing you ought to know, even if you ignore entirely Christ’s standing as being God Himself in human form, but you look upon Him as a mere man: He was the legitimate heir to the throne of Israel.
The Edomite Jew usurper on the throne, Herod, had killed all the surviving descendants of David that he knew of, and who were nearer in line to the throne than Christ. That is why you notice in your Bible the people were greeting Him as the Son of David: they recognized He was their legitimate king. Here he was being greeted with tremendous enthusiasm as “Son of David.” And the Jews, especially the priestly group (even the Judeo-Christian churches admit this) on this particular Sunday, Palm Sunday, the Jews decided they couldn’t let this go on any longer: they were going to kill Him. Now he had annoyed them plenty of times before that and they had grumbled and said, “We ought to get rid of Him,” and so on, but they had not dared to do anything to carry it out, because He was too popular with the people: but now they felt it was now or never. “If we don’t stop Him now, He’ll have such a public following that we’ll be thrown out and the real Israelites here will take over.” So there was definite determination to kill Him: they had selected the Passover Lamb to be killed. (This is a paraphrase of Chapter 11 of the Book of John)
All right. On the tenth day the Lamb is selected, on the fourteenth day He is to be killed. Counting from the tenth, 11, 12, 13, 14, four more days isn’t it? On Palm Sunday He was selected to be killed. Then Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, and four days brings you not to Friday but to THURSDAY. The bible again tells you, all four Gospels agree on this, that He was killed on this Preparation Day as they called it, the day before Passover.
The Passover was to be celebrated with their Passover supper that night after dark. So, on Thursday, He was crucified. Notice that the Gospels indicate He was crucified pretty close to noon: and He actually died, they said, the ninth hour. Now the Hebrews in those days, divided the night into four watches of three hours each, and they divided the day into twelve hours, and the hours began with sunrise which was about six o’clock at that time of year.
The sixth hour would be noon, and the ninth hour would be 3 p.m. He died on the stake right in the middle of the time when the Passover lambs were being killed in preparation for the Passover Supper that night. You remember that one of the Gospels in particular, mentions that it being the Preparation, they wanted the bodies removed from the crosses before sunset on the Passover Day wouldn’t be profaned by having those bodies still hanging on the crosses. So now on a Thursday He was crucified and died.
It is amazing the length to which the Judeo-Christian churches will go to make a liar of the Man to whom they make lip-service as their Savior. He had said He would give these Jews no sign but that of the Prophet Jonah, as Jonah was three days and nights in the belly of a great fish. He said, “So the Son of man shall be three days and three night in the heart of the earth.” (Matthew 12:40)
Nowhere are we told that Jonah was in that great fish exactly 72 hours to the minute. He was there on some portion of three days and three nights; that is, on three different days and three separate nights he was, during some part of the time, in the fish. Likewise Christ never said He was going to be in the grave 72 hours. If you take what the Judeo-Christian churches say, He died about 3 o’clock Friday afternoon, He was buried sometime around 4 or 5 p.m., Friday; before 6 o’clock sunset. There you have all of Friday night, you have part of Saturday night, because He was resurrected sometime before dawn the next morning, and how much before we are not told. So you can’t make out of that, either three days or three nights. You can’t get better than a day and a fraction, and a night and a fraction.
He was crucified Thursday, died about 3 o’clock. He was buried sometime between 4 and 5 p.m. He was in the grave during a portion of Thursday; He was there all day Friday; He was there all day Saturday; so He was in the grave two whole days and a portion of another. Remember, you could translate it probably, accurately, as saying, “On three days and three nights He would be in the grave.” He didn’t say He would be there 72 hours. Now, you have Thursday night, the entirety; Friday night the entirety; and not quite all of Saturday night. So on three different days and on three different nights He was in the grave fulfilling what He said.
Another thing, and here again everybody takes the way the bible is mistranslated centuries ago, and they never stop to wonder whether it is right or not. If you will look it up in the Greek, of all four Gospels (Matthew, Mark, Luke and John), it is identically the same in every one of them: they do not speak of the Sabbath singular, they speak of the Sabbaths plural.
It mentions, for example, John 19:31, “The Jews therefore, because it was the preparation” (that was the fourteenth day of the Hebrew month of Nisan when the Preparation was made, killing and skinning out the lamb and starting to cook it for the night’s supper). “The Jews therefore, because it was the preparation, that the bodies should not remain upon the cross on the Sabbaths...” (And that is in the plural, Sabbaths) “for that Sabbath day was an High Day...” which the mere Saturday-Sabbath never was, if that is all it was.
That a High Day never could come on a Saturday; some years it did. But just because it was a Saturday-Sabbath never made it a High Holy Day. But “that Sabbath day was a High Day...” and the Jews asked of Pilate, “...that their legs (the legs of the bodies on the crosses) might be broken, and that (their bodies) might be taken away.”
Now if the High Holy Day of the Passover (for that was High Holy Day), if that had come on Saturday, that could not have made two Sabbaths out of one day. It would just have been Saturday, a Sabbath, and in that particular instance a High Sabbath but still a Sabbath. But here were Sabbaths in the plural. So Friday was the Passover-Sabbath, Saturday was the weekly-Sabbath that came every week the year around. And then He was resurrected on Sunday, the first day of the week. So as usual your Judeo-Christian churches are wrong in practically everything they teach, because they give lip-service to what they recognize as the Holy Book, but won’t read it. They would recognize as the Holy Book, but won’t read it. They would rather conjure up, out of their own ignorance, the man-made doctrines and say, “Well, that is so because the bishops have agreed that it’s so, and God had better conform thereto.” So don’t let anybody ever tell you that Christ was crucified on a Friday. It wasn’t so.
Incidently, by way of further confirmation David Davidson, the great Pyramid authority, has checked out the dates astronomically, and in the year 30 A.D., which was the year of the crucifixion, the tenth day of the Hebrew month Nisan came on a Sunday. Thus the Judeo-Christian churches are right in that one thing, when they say Palm Sunday was a Sunday, which would make the Preparation Day Thursday the fourteenth; Friday the Passover (even the Jews wouldn’t have dared to crucify Him on that day); Saturday the weekly-Sabbath, and then He was raised on Sunday. So by way of summing it up, when there was a job that a man could do and it was the time Yahweh had selected to have it done, Yahweh appointed His man.
You notice He was never elected. No committee or convention ever selected Him. Yahweh picked Him; and He wasn’t a self-appointed adventurer either. Yahweh selected His man and had Him in the right place at the right time. And then when it came to the one job, that no man could do, Yahweh was there to do it Himself. So you don’t have to worry, that your God is one who ducks out when the responsibility gets heavy and lets somebody else go down there and get hurt in His place. No. You God is the One you can always rely upon: and the tougher the going, the more certain you can be that He is there. (Taken, in part, from a study entitled “By Divine Appointment,” by Bertrand L. Comparet)