Here is a simple rhetorical question for the reader. Is mankind more intelligent than God or is God more intelligent than mankind?
We have seen in section I5 on pre-adamic man, that the bible is written in a very intelligent way, and of course Jesus said that it was so written...
18 For truly I say to you that sooner would heaven and earth pass away than for one smallest letter or one particle of a letter to pass away from the Law [of God, the whole bible] by any means and not all things take place (Matthew 5).
Since the bible is written intelligently and diligently, we have to read it intelligently and diligently. Here are 3 examples of how intelligently it is written and how intelligently we need to read it. First impressions of bible accounts are often incorrect. The holy spirit will wrong foot you if you do not think about every word in the account and put the entire jigsaw together. Our experience is that pretty much every time you revisit an account you see something in it that you did not see before.
[A] The Sacrifices of Cain and Abel
[B] No one (not no man) has ascended into heaven but he that descended from heaven
[C] Peter and Satan
[D] The spirit of Jairus' daughter
[E] Enoch was trasnferred so as not to see death
[F} Why does God not just tell us the whole plan in plain English? Paul's spaghetti speech in Romans4
2
And Abel came to be a herder of sheep, but Cain became a cultivator of the ground.
3 And it came about at the expiration of some time that Cain proceeded to bring some fruits of the ground as an offering to Jehovah.
4 But as for Abel, he too brought some firstlings of his flock, even their fatty pieces. Now while Jehovah was looking with favour upon Abel and his offering,
5 he did not look with any favour upon Cain and upon his offering. And Cain grew hot with great anger, and his countenance began to fall.
6 At this Jehovah said to Cain: Why are you hot with anger and why has your countenance fallen?
7 If you turn to doing good, will there not be an exaltation? But if you do not turn to doing good, there is sin crouching at the entrance, and for you is its craving; and will you, for your part, get the mastery over it?
8 After that Cain said to Abel his brother: Let us go over into the field. So it came about that while they were in the field Cain proceeded to assault Abel his brother and kill him.
(Genesis 4).
This account is typical of the way in which the bible is written. Please therefore listen to the classroom lesson from God:
Cain was a cultivator of the ground, so he brought some fruits of the ground. Abel was a herder of sheep so he brought some sheep. The question that the reader is supposed to ask is: What on earth was wrong with Cain’s sacrifice?
The account is written so that at first sight it looks like God favoured Abel over Cain out of partiality, having no good reason in justice. If that were the case then there would be no point in serving him, so if you like you can just write God off in Genesis chapter 4 (if you haven’t already done so as a result of his claims in Genesis 1 and 2 that is).
Q: Why did God accept Abel’s sacrifice and yet reject Cain’s sacrifice?
The standard answer is:
A: Because Abel offered his sacrifice with faith, but Cain had the wrong attitude and offered his sacrifice without faith.
Or even worse an answer of the type:
A: Obviously Cain did not have any faith because look what he did after his sacrifice!
Both of these answers are entirely wrong and all modern churches to our knowledge have spectacularly failed to answer this holy poser from God. This question is easy to answer if you understand what sacrifice is all about. In fact the question could just as well be phrased as: What is a sacrifice? To answer this, consider the famous words of Samuel:
22 To obey is better than a sacrifice, to pay attention than the fat of rams (1 Samuel 15).
Obviously avoiding the sin that requires the sacrifice is better than sinning and then making a sacrifice to pay for that sin. So sacrifice comes about because of disobedience. So sacrifices existed to teach us about obedience. With this in mind ask yourself this next question...
Q: How many unspecified sacrifices did God ever prescribe for the Jews?
Or ask yourself this question...
Q: Did God ever say to the sons of Israel bring along whatever you like and I’ll judge your offering on its merit?
A: None and No.
Every sacrifice under the Law was precisely prescribed by God as to the offering itself, the day of offering and even the method of making the offering. Take for example the regulations for the festival of Weeks under the Law of Moses...
16 To the day after the seventh sabbath you should count,
50 days, and you must present a new grain offering to Jehovah.
17 Out of your dwelling places you should bring 2 loaves as a wave offering. Of 2 tenths of an ephah of fine flour they should prove to be. They should be baked leavened, as first ripe fruits to Jehovah.
18 And you must present along with the loaves 7 sound male lambs, each a year old, and one young bull and 2 rams. They should serve as a burnt offering to Jehovah along with their grain offering and their drink offerings as an offering made by fire, of a restful odour to Jehovah.
19 And you must render up one kid of the goats as a sin offering and 2 male lambs, each a year old, as a communion sacrifice.
20 And the priest must wave them to and fro along with the loaves of the first ripe fruits, as a wave offering before Jehovah, along with the 2 male lambs. They should serve as something holy to Jehovah for the priest (Leviticus 23).
As you can see the sacrifice was defined precisely by God.
This was because he was trying to teach obedience through sacrifice, he was not trying to teach sacrifice itself.
For example if God specified a kid of the goats, and someone brought along a whole herd of cattle, would that be acceptable? Or if God stipulated an unblemished lamb, and someone presented a Picasso, a Ferarri and a prize winning Dalmatian to the high priest, how far would that get him? If God stipulated a turtle dove and someone brought along the rights to the whole Beatles back catalogue, would that work for God?
The reason that God does not explicitly say why he rejected Cain’s sacrifice and accepted Abel’s sacrifice is that if you understand what sacrifice is supposed to be about, and if you credit God with being fair, you will work out for yourself that Cain offered the wrong sacrifice. The point is that God wants you to think about it and work it out for yourself. And if you are not prepared to do that, then he does not want to show you his true love and he does not want to show you his true justice. God does not want to explain himself to his enemies, he wants to explain himself only to his friends. Because his enemies abuse divine knowledge for their own benefit. So he keeps them in the dark in order to lessen their destructive effects. This was also why Jesus said to his disciples at one point: You can either drink my blood or take a hike!
53 Accordingly Jesus said to them: Most truly I say to you: Unless you eat the flesh of the Son of man and drink his blood, you have no life in yourselves (John 6).
He knew that such a statement was revolting to the Jews under Law, but he made no qualification that they would, in fact, have only to drink wine which symbolically represents his blood, because he was testing them to weed out those who had seen all of his miracles but continued to put no faith in him. John 6 was a faith test by Jesus of his disciples. Genesis 4 is a love test by God of the reader.
Now modern churches do not understand sacrifice to God. They understand self sacrifice, which is giving God what they want to give him, but they do not understand sacrifice to God, which is giving God want he wants to be given.
God could not possibly have accepted Abel’s sacrifice unless Abel had offered him precisely what he had prescribed, and on the correct day. So since God did accept Abel’s sacrifice, we know that he must have stipulated to the pair of them that they should both bring:
4 Some firstlings of the flock even their fatty pieces (Genesis 4).
Cain brought 'some fruits of the ground'. That was not what God asked for, so he rejected it. That is the end of the matter. But in fact the ground was cursed due to Adam, so Cain added insult to disobedience and offered to God the fruits of his father’s disobedience!
17 And to Adam he said: Because you listened to your wife's voice and took to eating from the tree concerning which I gave you this command, 'You must not eat from it,' cursed is the ground on your account. In pain you will eat its produce all the days of your life (Genesis 3).
One might also have a look at Genesis 5, the subsequent chapter, in one's attempts to understand Genesis 4. If so then one will find:
29 And he proceeded to call his name Noah, saying: This one will bring us comfort from our work and from the pain of our hands resulting from the ground which Jehovah has cursed (Genesis 5).
Aha! So Cain offered fruits of the ‘cursed’ ground to be precise. This does not mean that the fruits themselves were cursed. For sons of Adam were all vegetarians, eating these very fruits, until after the flood when God said to Noah (since there wasn’t much vegetation around):
3 Every moving animal that is alive may serve as food for you. As in the case of green vegetation, I do give it all to you (Genesis 9).
When Noah came out of the ark he made a sacrifice of some of the clean beasts to God, who responded as follows:
21 And Jehovah began to smell a restful odour, and so Jehovah said in his heart: Never again shall I call down evil upon the ground on man's account, because the inclination of the heart of man is bad from his youth up; and never again shall I deal every living thing a blow just as I have done (Genesis 8).
At this point sons of Adam became carnivorous. After the flood the earth was no longer cursed, the flood baptised the earth as it were.
So Cain’s sacrifice was not cursed but it was seriously substandard, for the poor quality of the produce of the ground was in fact a punishment on men, and a cause of suffering and pain for them, and here Cain is offering what God was using to punish him personally, back to God!!
But that blooper was not why the sacrifice was rejected. It was rejected quite simply because it was the wrong sacrifice.
Furthermore men are incapable of judging faith, we can only judge works. So we are simply not in a position to judge either Cain or Abel as to their faith. In fact under the law of works, if you absolutely hated God and the high priest and your brother and had just finished bullying your entire family yet brought along the correct sacrifice, possibly to show off to your peers, then your sins were forgiven.
The purpose of Sacrifice to God is to humiliate the sacrificer and to glorify God. One does not bring to the altar of God one’s latest screenplay or the fruits of one’s commercial success, in order to get a pat on the back or an Oscar or the Queens award for industry or the medal of freedom from the High Priest. One brings instead something pointing forward to the sacrifice of Jesus, so that God can give him the Oscar that he deserves. As for our efforts, they are not worthy of consideration when compared to the sacrifice and love and righteousness of the Christ and his father.
13
Moreover, no one has ascended into heaven but he that descended from heaven, the Son of man (John 3).
If no one has ascended into heaven except the son of man who descended, then the son of man had already ascended before he descended and made this statement. So Jesus, the son of man, had ascended to heaven before he descended as Jesus. But if he had ascended to heaven before he descended as Jesus, then he must have descended as someone else prior to that ascension in order that he could actually ascend. For it is impossible to ascend into heaven without first descending from heaven. So Jesus had descended from heaven before and then ascended back and then he descended again and made the statement above.
In other words, when Jesus came to preach to the Jews and to give his life for all mankind, this was at least his second visit to us. In other words he had come here before as someone else, before Jesus.
This information is simply an earthquake, but it is merely one step of logic away from John 3:13 above. Why has mankind been unable to take that step? Because we throw away our logic when we join a church. We believe the lie perpetrated by control freak priests, that faith involves taking things on trust from a priest. And that God moves in mysterious ways that only a trained priest can understand. He most certainly does not. He could not be more logical and the priests of all the false churches have done a great job of hiding that from their flocks for 2,000 years. Worshipping God involves serving him with one's God given mind.
57
Therefore the Jews said to him: You are not yet 50 years old, and still you have seen Abraham?
58
Jesus said to them: Most truly I say to you, Before Abraham came into existence, I have been (John 8).
Search and see if any church other than the Lords' Witnesses has ever understood this one sentence! Jesus first came to the earth as Enoch - see
33 But when he had turned about and looked on his disciples, he rebuked Peter, saying, Get thee behind me, Satan: for thou savourest not the things that be of God, but the things that be of men. (Mark 8 KJV)
33 o de epistrafeij kai idwn touj maqhtaj autou epeteimhsen petrw kai legei upage opisw mou satana oti ou froneij ta tou qeou alla ta twn anqrwpwn (Mark 8 VatB)
23 But turning He said to Peter, Go behind Me,
Satan! You are an offence to Me, for you do not think of the things of God,
but the things of men. (Matthew 16 GLT)
23 o de strafeij eipen tw petrw upage opisw mou satana skandalon ei emou oti ou froneij ta tou qeou alla ta twn anqrwpwn (Matthew 16 VatB)
The precise translation of upage opisw mou is Bring [yourself] under behind me Satan/Resister. Whereas Jesus initially said to Peter..
17 So Jesus said to them: Come after me, and I shall cause you to become fishers of men. (Mark 1 NWT)
17 kai eipen autoij o ihsouj deute opisw mou kai poihsw umaj genesqai aleeij anqrwpwn (Mark 1 VatB)
The precise literal translation of deute opisw mou is Come hither behind me.
In fact Jesus said to Satan himself...
10 Then Jesus said to him: Bring [yourself] under,
Satan! For it is written, 'It is Jehovah your God you must worship, and it is to him alone you must render sacred service.' (Matthew 4 LWT)
10 tote legi autw o Ihsouj u?page satana gegraptai gar kurion ton qeon sou proskunhshj kai autw monw latreusij
(Matthew 4 SCSa)
10 tote legei autw o ihsouj upage satana gegraptai gar kurion ton qeon sou proskunhseij kai autw monw latreuseij (Matthew 4 VatB)
So what is the difference between Come hither behind me, and Bring yourself under behind me? Sure he was talking to Peter, but his words were in respect of Satan and he said directly to Satan: Bring yourself under Satan.
The implication is that Satan will one day become a disciples of Jesus just like Peter. Indeed Jesus said...
26 In the same way, if Satan expels Satan, he has become divided against himself; how, then, will his kingdom stand? (Matthew 12 NWT)
Well Satan can only expel Satan if Satan has joined the true church and got the power to expel demons. This actually is the original Satan (Lucifer) having repented and joined the true church, expelling his successor Satan2.
Furthermore Satan will transfer his firstborn rights to Michael so that Satan becomes behind Michael in angelic birth order - see U27.
52 But people were all weeping and beating themselves in grief for her. So he said: Stop weeping, for she did not die but is sleeping.
53 At this they began to laugh at him scornfully, because they knew she had died.
54 But he took her by the hand and called, saying: Girl, get up!
55 And her spirit returned, and she rose instantly, and he ordered something to be given her to eat. (Luke 8 NWT)
She had died from a medical standpoint. But there is a period after medical death when the spirit of the subject is asleep in the gates of Hades before she is officially dead from a divine standpoint. In any event her spirit returned and she rose. So when you are asleep your spirit is not in your body. So when you sleep, you expire, your spirit goes out (exit - spirit). It actually goes out into your sleep angel. You actually dream in your angel. Then when you awake your spirit returns to your human brain. So when Moses said...
1 Then Moses went and spoke these words to all Israel
2 and said to them: 120 years old I am today. I shall no more be allowed to go out and come in, as Jehovah has said to me, 'You will not cross this Jordan.' (Deuteronomy 31 NWT)
He not only meant that he could no longer go into the temple and come out of it. He meant his spirit would no longer go out of his body when he fell asleep and come back in when he woke up.
Here is what Genesis says about Enoch.
23
So all the days of Enoch amounted to 365 years.
24
And Enoch kept walking with the [true]
God. Then he was no more, for God took him (Genesis 5).
So God took him at the end of his life and he was no more. But Paul further informs us:
5 By faith Enoch was transferred/placed among/placed differently/placed elsewhere [metatiqhmi- Liddell] so as not to see death, and he was nowhere to be found because God had transferred [metatiqhmi- Liddell] him; for before his transference he had the witness that he had pleased God well (Hebrews 11).
So when God took him, so that his days ended, he was transferred off the planet so as not to see death. Enoch could have ascended back to heaven or could have been transferred to begin Eden2 - see U54, without dying.
But the question is did God make some kind of exception in the case of Enoch amongst the sons of Adam. Did he decide that he would not apply the death penalty to him because he was such a good old chap, a jolly nice fellow? For that is how all the scriptures frame this. Moses answers:
4
The Rock, perfect is his activity,
For all his ways are justice.
A God of faithfulness, with whom there is no injustice;
Righteous and upright is he (Deuteronomy 32).
So he did not break his own justice in the case of Enoch. So if Enoch did not die, then Enoch was not under a death sentence. And if Enoch was not under a death sentence then he was not a son of Adam. And if he was not a son of Adam then he was a son of God. Just like Jesus was.
9 Does this happiness, then, come upon circumcised
people or also upon uncircumcised people? For we say: His faith was counted to Abraham as righteousness.
10 Under what circumstances, then, was it counted? When he was in circumcision or in uncircumcision? Not in circumcision,
but in uncircumcision.
11 And he received a sign, namely, circumcision, as a seal of the righteousness by the faith he had while in his uncircumcised
state, that he might be the father of all those having faith while in uncircumcision,
in order for righteousness to be counted to them;
12 and a father of circumcised offspring, not only to those who adhere to circumcision, but also to those who walk orderly in the footsteps of that faith while in the uncircumcised state which our father Abraham had. (Romans 4 NWT)
The whole of Romans 4 in the literal meaning ca be summed up by the statement that through Adam, many who had not exhibited the sin that he exhibited we condemned to death, whereas through Jesus, many who have not exhibited the roughteousness that he exhibited are saved for everlasting life. And the statement that those not under law are not guilty of sin. You have to sign up to a law and break it in order to sin.
But Paul is throwing the reader from one side of the room to the other with every phrase in Romans 9-12. Only the strongest mentally can ride that bucking bronco of logical spaghetti. This is deliberate for Daniel has said...
10 Many will cleanse themselves and whiten themselves and will be refined. And the wicked ones will certainly act wickedly, and no wicked ones at all will understand; but the ones having insight will understand. (Daniel 12 NWT)
The wicked ones will not hold on tightly enough to understand. They will be shaken off by Paul's tortuous spaghetti logic or by Jesus' symbolic speech, or by many other reader refining techniques encoded in the holy scriptures.
So why does God not just tell us the whole plan in plain English (or Greek or Hebrew). Why all this obfuscation? See Intro40.
The bible is brilliantly written and every little detail does contain a great spiritual gem, hidden for thousands of years. As Solomon said in his second Proverb...
4 if you keep seeking for it as for silver, and as for hid treasures you keep searching for it,
5 in that case you will understand the fear of Jehovah,
and you will find the very knowledge of God (Proverbs 2).
The point is that you have to dig, you have to think logically about every scripture. God did not explicitly say why he rejected Cain's sacrifice, he did not directly list the birth order of Jacob's first 6 kids and Jesus did not flatly say that he had been down here before as somebody else, but the bible does say all three of these things if you read it with your whole mind.
Hopefully this section will help the reader to lay bare the exuberance of the literary genius of our God. Hopefully he will begin to grasp the extent of the linguistic dexterity employed in his perfect book. For the king of the love freaks is a teacher whose moral finesse breaks your heart whilst his incisive metaphors wrench your neurons into divine activity. The very activity that Adam first taught to pre-adamic man, to whom he was sent to give everlasting life through Jesus.
So the inescapable conclusion is that God wants us to think really hard and really deeply about every word of his book. He wants us to look behind the scriptures, to look through the scriptures, to look ahead of the scriptures to look beneath the scriptures and to look above the scriptures, to misquote General Norman Schwarzkopf in the first Gulf War. This is what a spiritual being is (not Stormy Norman, but a person who sees through the physical to the underlying spiritual truth). Spirituality is looking behind the physical with the eyes of the mind to the spiritual cause. The bible, by its very construction, is teaching us to see beyond the physical.
This divine teaching method does not only apply to the holy book. It applies to the entirety of creation as Isaac Newton believed. Let us therefore present you with two key examples from nature of this type of thinking...
Why does God permit the terrible disease of Cancer to torture to mutilate and to kill his children whom he loves so much? Is it because God is a sick and cruel murderer? Is it because God is not very good at genetic engineering and made a few mistakes in our construction so that our DNA goes haywire occasionally? Or is it because he is trying to teach us that any form of corruption (financial, moral, political etc) is ultimately terminal to society, if not eradicated completely?
We all know someone who has died of cancer, which is cellular corruption. But what really have we learned from their pain and their death? Does corruption have a future? So please understand that the death of a loved one to this disease is not a waste.
In fact it is just as heroic and significant as a soldier dying in battle. The soldier died for his country or for his beliefs. The cancer victim dies for your beliefs and for the future of your society, which future is the Kingdom of God. That is the big picture. It is our understanding that God wishes to turn your memories of such deaths and of such suffering into an unforgettable moral lesson that will prevent you having any part in cancerous activity in the future.
For the cancer victim himself, when he is resurrected, he will know for a fact that corruption is terminal. Whenever he sees it in others and whenever he is tempted to indulge in it himself, he will recall its effect on his first body and say. I am not going there. So his pain and his death will be his future inoculation against corruption. All the world is corrupt especially the banks the governments and the intelligence services. This is causing a lot of pain to a lot of people. Cancer is the cure for this corruption once it is understood!
Why does God permit the terrible distress that results from class A drugs? Why does he permit such a terrible physical trap door to shadow our every step in life? Is it because God loves to see us lose our minds to an inanimate chemical? Does he revel in the subjugation of all of our emotions by a biochemical need? Or is it that any form of idolatry (worship of any person, any creed, any political system, any sporting team, any creation of man, any non divine creation of God, such as women, any financial instrument, any form of status, any form of sex or any lifestyle) is ultimately terminal to society, if not eradicated completely. And we all know someone who is addicted to a drug, which is biochemical idolatry, but we have none of us learned this lesson. Does idolatry have a future? Did God give us free will in order for us to give it away to a drug whether physical or metaphorical? Surely not. Idolatry is spiritual cancer, it corrupts your spiritual DNA.