25 September 2016
From the Annals of
Believers’ Baptism—
1.1
Typological Exegesis Based upon Chirality
________________
It is sown a natural body; it is raised a spiritual body. If there is a natural body, there is also a spiritual body. Thus it is written, “The first man Adam became a living being”; the last Adam became a life-giving spirit [pneuma]. But it is not the spiritual that is first but the natural, and then the spiritual. The first man was from the earth; the second man is from heaven. (1 Cor 15:44–46)
________________
1.
Chirality is “handedness,” as the left hand is the non-symmetrical mirror image of the right hand, or theologically, as man [humankind] made in the image and likeness of God looks up at God, whom in turn looks down at man. Exegesis is “exiting” a thing, usually a text, and usually a theological text—it is how a person takes meaning from a text. And typological is taking meaning through “types,” with one event or person serving as a type of another event or person, such as the first Adam, having no parent but Elohim [singular in usage], forms the type of Christ Jesus, the second or last Adam (Rom 5:14), who had no parent but God the Father. Someone will now be quick to point out that Mary was the mother of Jesus: yes, she was, but Jesus wasn’t “the Christ,” a root shoot from the stump of Jesse (Isa 11:1–5), until the spirit of God [pneuma Theou] descended in the bodily form of a dove and entered into [eis] the man Jesus (Mark 1:10). And Christ Jesus still wasn’t a life-giving spirit until He no longer had the fleshly body that came from Mary; until He is raised from death by the Father, receiving from the Father the glory He had “before the world existed” (John 17:5), this “glory” seen by the prophet Ezekiel in vision (1:26–28) and seen by John in vision (Rev 1:12–18).
A person’s left hand doesn’t line up with the person’s right hand when one is superimposed over the other; they line up fairly well when palm is against palm, as in a person facing a mirror sees the person’s reversed image in the mirror. So when taking meaning from Scripture using chirality, the surface of the mirror functions as the impenetrable separation between heaven and earth—impenetrable for creatures that possess mass [physicality]. For heaven is a timeless supra-dimensional realm that is without decay for the “moment” doesn’t change. Hence, the author of Hebrews writes, “Jesus Christ is the same yesterday and today and forever” (13:8), because seated at the right-hand of God, the heavenly moment doesn’t change regardless of the activity that occurs within the moment, activity that erases what was before, but activity that must agree with itself as if one entity were engaging in the activity; activity that forms a heavenly “dance of oneness.”
Again, the defining image of typological exegesis based upon chirality has been since Adam and Eve were clothed in skin [‘ôwr] and driven from the Garden, a man in a skin garment (his skin) looking up at God clothed in Light [’ôwr] and as such unseen by human eyes … the difference between skin or hide [‘ôwr] and light [’ôwr] is smooth breathing versus rough breathing, each represented by the direction of the apostrophe preceding the same letters, smooth breathing being inclusive (everything that follows) whereas rough breathing is the end of the matter. Being clothed in light as a son of light is the end of the matter that began with the person being clothed in skin after conception.
Does this mean that before Adam and Eve were driven from the Garden they didn’t have skin? Or does this mean that Adam and Eve didn’t have hair growing from their skin, with modern humans having more hairs per square inch of skin than do dogs? And this question may not be well answered in a short work such as this piece, but it will be answered, if not today then in the near future.
In his first full-length book, anthropologist Ted Banks II writes in Birthplace of the Winds, the account of his 1948 University of Michigan expedition to the Aleutian Islands, about the Aleut elder Afenogin Ermeloff, whose fame as a historian had brought him to Banks’ attention when Banks was still at Atka. So Banks was eager to meet Afenogin when he reached Nikolski; for Afenogin remembered many of the old legends, including the Aleut story of the first people:
In the beginning, [Afenogin] said, the earth was uninhabited except by plants. One day there fell from the sky two beings who resembled man somewhat, but they had long fur all over their bodies. From them sprang a couple of similar beings who had no fur. From these two came all of the people on earth, who then began to spread in all directions. (BW. Chap 22. pg. 204 Robert Hale; London edition, 1957.)
English translators do not seem to have considered the possibility that before Adam and Eve were driven from the Garden, “the garments of skins” (Gen 3:21 ESV trans) the Lord God made for them were not detachable; were their hide, for modern man is covered with diminutive hair as well as not-usually discernable stripes and spots. So a legitimate assignment of signifieds to signifiers would permit the skin garments (hair coats) with which the Lord God “clothed” the man and the woman to be longish hair of the sort Sasquatch allegedly has. Certainly the received language of Genesis, coupled with the Lord hating Esau (a hairy man—covered with hair) from before birth, coupled with the sign of a prophet being a hair coat suggests that when Adam and Eve left the Garden of Eden, they looked like beasts, not like modern humans. And in this rendering of the Temptation account, the Aleut legend as told by Afenogin Ermeloff to Ted Banks would be in agreement.
What’s certain is that it is the inner self of a person that bears the image-of and a likeness to God, not the fleshly body of a person. But when the inner self has been clothed in skin—when Adam lost his “covering” of belief of God and couldn’t cover his nakedness with leaves as if he were a plant—the “man” and his wife would have appeared as other humanoids whose bones have been found in deposits older than 6,000 years. And the realization that it is the inner self—the spirit of the person [to pneuma tou ’anthropou] in the soul [psuche] of the person—that is in the likeness of God should change how the creation account of Adam and Eve is read. For with this realization the literalness traditionally assigned to the Genesis creation account is probably not valid. This realization should produce a rereading of the “Adam narrative” that gets beneath the skin of critics.
It is easy to read the Genesis account of Adam’s creation and believe the words on the page: my grandfather did; his grandfather did, his father before him did, and his father before him did, all of them German Baptists after coming to America as Mennonites to settle in and around Germantown Pennsylvania in the 1680s. But early in the 20th-Century the words of Genesis were challenged. Scientific inquiry became fashionable, and an “informed” citizenry couldn’t accept the creation of Adam as a factual story. It had to be myth; it was myth, or so intellectuals reasoned. And Anabaptists, who had been persecuted—hunted as if they were vermin—until they had become the silent folk, put their heads down and kept working, while continuing to believe in a six-day creation.
Is it naïve to believe in a six-day creation account? I suspect that would depend upon how the person read the poetry of Genesis chapter one; for in verse two, the spirit of God is seen hovering over the face of the waters … human eyes cannot see the spirit of God, and the poetic movement from verse one in which God “filled” [created is not a particularly good translation of bara] to verse two is from physical to spiritual as is typical of Hebraic poetics. Therefore, from verse two on, this creation account is about a spiritual creation that begins with Christ Jesus being the “light” of Day One [not the “first day”] (2 Cor 4:4–6, particular v. 6). And when Christ is read as the light of Day One, then the night or dark portion of the “second day” that would have begun at Calvary [no wonder God doesn’t declare the second day “good”] and the light or hot portion of this second day would have seen the resurrection of Christ from death. The dark portion of the “third day” would have begun with Christ Jesus returning to heaven, leaving this world in spiritual darkness, its present state. The greater and lesser light created on the “fourth day” will be the resurrection of firstfruits as those who will be great in heaven and those who will be least (from Matt 5:19). So when Genesis “P” creation account is read as an account of the spiritual creation of God the Father, humanity is still in the dark portion of the third day—and it is not naïve to believe in a six day creation.
In the 1970s, I was logging two sections of the Kenai Peninsula just to the west of the Russian Old-Believers’ village, and with me falling timber were several of the men from the village. There was, then, a newly started state school in the village, and I asked how they handled required biology texts that taught evolution (I was home-schooling my daughters). One of the men chuckled and said, “The priest, he glue the pages he don’t want read together. Some of those books are mostly glued together.”
Gluing pages of textbooks together might be a short-term solution to a long term problem, but the problem itself is a lack of knowledge, not too much knowledge. For if Jacob, in deceiving his father, put the skin [‘ôwr] of a kid goat on his neck and on the back of his hands so he would “feel” to his father like Esau, a hairy man, then Christians have for centuries read Scripture without truly understanding the words on its pages.
My grandfather bought his oldest son, Floyd, a business course at a local school (to get a degree in business), but Floyd wasn’t interested in taking the course and didn’t. Thirty years later, my grandfather’s sixth child, Pearl, wanted to take the course, but my grandfather didn’t think women needed educated; women needed to stay at home, have children, and raise families. And Pearl had to finally tell him that he had wasted his money in buying the course if he didn’t let her take it … my grandfather wasn’t one to waste money, so reluctantly he agreed to let her take the course—and Pearl retired from Central Soya as a vice-president.
Is knowing how to read and write enough education to get along in this world? Certainly. A person doesn’t need to know how to factor a quadratic equation, or how to calculate acceleration, or even how to balance chemical equations in order to get-by in this world. And while college recruiters are quick to show with graphs and charts how much more money the college graduate will make over a lifetime than a high school graduate, their numbers have never worked for me. For once I began to keep the Sabbath, jobs dried up. In Alaska, the summer norm was 7-12s, twelve hours a day for seven days a week, 84-hour work weeks, usually with overtime after 40 hours. And a Sabbath-keeper is excluded from these jobs: there are simply too many people willing to work these hours for the big money that can be made.
A person cannot serve two masters: a person can either serve God, or serve the prince of this world, represented by the word, “mammon.” And while I didn’t choose to serve God but was drafted into the Body of Christ in 1972, I knew that I could no more run from my “draft notice” than Jonah could run. So as a reluctant inductee I quit rotating shift work in Georgia-Pacific’s pulp and paper mill at Toledo, Oregon, and I relied on income from a fledging rifle shop for support in 1973.
But with God, things have a strange way of working out: I needed an offering for the High Sabbath of Trumpets, 1973, with services for the high day being held in Eugene, a hundred miles away (so I also needed gas money). And I turned in every pop bottle I had on the place, and all that I could find. On top of what I needed for gas, I had $3.73 for an offering, an amount too embarrassingly small for me to put in an offering envelope so I put my offering in the basket as change … when I returned home that evening, there was in my mailbox a check for $373.00 from the State of Oregon, a shortage they found in what they had previously paid me. Ten days later would be the Yom Kippur war, followed by the Arab Oil Embargo and the artificial gas shortage that shutdown employment on the Oregon Coast until mid-January. The money from that check carried me into January when I got a fur check for pelts I had trapped and sent to a buyer in Seattle.
So how much education is needed to serve God? Actually, much more than a person realizes. For when fishing a small boat out of Dutch Harbor in 1979, while tied to the old Sub Dock, I threw Ken Follett’s novel Triple across the cabin because I didn’t believe he had been to sea, and I began to write. First a novel for which I received a contract: it was allegedly published in 1986, but it really wasn’t. Its publisher sold his press to Alaska Pacific University, which publishes no fiction so the novel was never released. I wrote articles for outdoor magazines. And I wrote a second novel, the basis for being accepted into graduate school without an undergraduate degree … after nine years of writing nearly fulltime, I entered—fall semester 1988—University of Alaska Fairbanks’ graduate writing program without any English coursework beyond Freshman Comp. My first degree is my M.F.A. in Creative Writing. And not having an undergraduate degree has proven to be an employment handicap, especially since George Bush’s “no child left behind” educational initiatives requiring a Bachelor’s degree to teach in the public school system became the law of the land. It doesn’t matter if a person has a higher degree; the person still needs a Bachelor’s degree.
However, I wouldn’t know to do what I do when I reread a prophecy without having been exposed to UAF’s graduate coursework and realizing that my critical reading skills were in no way inferior to anyone else’s. My work at UAF will support the previous statement so there is no bragging here.
Would I have liked to have remained in the university community? Yes and no. Learning promotes learning, but at the same time, limits what can be said about a text; for academia builds off itself. If no one has ever said what a person wants to say, the person cannot say what he or she wants. The person can only build on foundations his or her predecessors constructed … very few members of academia are allowed to figuratively pour concrete. Thus, since leaving academia I’m free to write whatever I believe is correct, even when no one has previously plowed the field.
For example, the chirality of Adam in the Garden of Eden (left hand) after he was no longer “clothed” in belief of God [covered — keth-o’-neth — by his belief of the Lord God] and the Adversary as an anointed cherub in Eden, the Garden of God (from Ezek 28:11–19) versus the Adversary as seen in Nebuchadnezzar’s vision (right hand) shows “loss” of a sort not discussed by theologians:
The Adversary in Eden,
You were the signet of perfection, full of wisdom and perfect in beauty. You were in Eden, the garden of God; every precious stone was your covering, sardius, topaz, and diamond, beryl, onyx, and jasper, sapphire, emerald, and carbuncle; and crafted in gold were your settings and your engravings. On the day that you were created they were prepared. (Ezek 28:12–13 emphasis added)
But the Adversary as king of spiritual Babylon in the Affliction (the first 1260 days of seven years of tribulation) no longer has the gems:
You saw, O king, and behold, a great image. This image, mighty and of exceeding brightness, stood before you, and its appearance was frightening. The head of this image was of fine gold … . (Dan 2:31–32)
All he has after iniquity was found in him are the gold settings—the gold—in which gem stones as his covering [garment] were set when he was in Eden. He lost what was intended to cause him to be “perfect in beauty.” And he became frightening in appearance.
In iniquity being found in the anointed cherub who becomes the Adversary, the Lord God stripped him of his clothing so that he was “naked” as Adam and Eve were naked when Adam ate forbidden fruit and his obedience to God no longer clothed him and Eve. But there is no indication that the Adversary received any “protective clothing” when cast to the ground …
Your heart was proud because of your beauty;
you corrupted your wisdom for the sake of your splendor.
I cast you to the ground;
I exposed you before kings,
to feast their eyes on you. (Ezek 28:17)
indented lines are spiritual portions of couplets
From the perspective of the timeless heavenly realm, the Adversary is no more; he has been exposed before kings. However, from the perspective of humanity, the Adversary still lives, and remains the prince of the power of the air. He will not be exposed before kings until he is cast to earth after dominion is taken from him and given to the Son of Man (see Rev 11:15–18; 12:7–12).
With being clothed in skin/hide [‘ôwr], Adam moves from serving as the chiral image of the Adversary to serving as the chiral image of the second Adam, Christ Jesus, clothed in Light [’ôwr]. And this movement has tremendous significance for angels who succumbed to the Adversary’s broadcast of unbelief as Adam and Eve had …
Once the Lord God clothed Adam and Eve in skin [‘ôwr], they were free to go where they wanted, but they were prevented from returning to the Garden of Eden, just as the Adversary was prevented from returning to Eden—and we see the Adversary going where he wants in Job:
Now there was a day when the sons of God came to present themselves before the Lord, and Satan also came among them. The Lord said to Satan, "From where have you come?" Satan answered the Lord and said, "From going to and fro on the earth, and from walking up and down on it." (Job 1:6–7)
Again there was a day when the sons of God came to present themselves before the Lord, and Satan also came among them to present himself before the Lord. And the Lord said to Satan, "From where have you come?" Satan answered the Lord and said, "From going to and fro on the earth, and from walking up and down on it." (Job 2:1–2)
That little declaration, “And the Lord God made for Adam and for his wife garments of skins and clothed them” (Gen 3:21) changed everything for Adam and Eve: their nakedness was covered in a way that the Adversary’s was not … the hair coat of a prophet covers his “nakedness” before God that came with his circumcision; the body hair of Esau would have reminded the Lord God of Adam and Eve’s unbelief, and the entrance of death into this world—and that brings us to how most Christian scholars read verse 21. Most read the verse by adding to what’s written, thereby having God kill animals as sacrifices for Adam’s sin [unbelief], and from the skins of these sacrifices God made hair coats for Adam and Eve. It would seem that any concept as significant as a sin offering would have a more conspicuous introduction in Scripture. No animals were sacrificed in the Garden of Eden. Rather, what God did was open the door just a crack to rebelling angels deceived by the Adversary.
If the skin/hide of Adam and Eve served to cover the nakedness that came with their unbelief of God, and if all that is necessary to transform their skin into “light,” humanity then becoming sons of Light, is the addition of aspiration—the breath of God [pneuma Theou] in the breath of Christ [pneuma Christou] in the spirit of the person [to pneuma tou ánthropou]—then rebelling angels that are presently “covered” by a blanket death sentence should have an appellate process available to them that would be analogous to the maturation process of human sons of God. Whereas every human person is humanly born with a spiritually dead inner self, imprisoned angels remain spiritually alive but by being imprisoned in the Abyss, their deaths are certain if in being individually judged by sons of God these sons of God do not find evidence of repentance and belief of God. And these glorified sons of God will have the indwelling mind of Christ and a track record of resisting the Adversary; so they will not be without mercy, but they will not be fooled by faked repentance and feigned good deeds.
The Apostle Paul was unhappy with the liberality of the saints at Corinth who were willing to abide the sexual immorality of the man with his father’s wife. After severely chiding them for tolerating bad behavior in the fellowship, Paul expanded the scope of his lecture:
When one of you has a grievance against another, does he dare go to law before the unrighteous instead of the saints? Or do you not know that the saints will judge the world? And if the world is to be judged by you, are you incompetent to try trivial cases? Do you not know that we are to judge angels? How much more, then, matters pertaining to this life! So if you have such cases, why do you lay them before those who have no standing in the church? I say this to your shame. Can it be that there is no one among you wise enough to settle a dispute between the brothers, but brother goes to law against brother, and that before unbelievers? (1 Cor 6:1–6 emphasis added)
First, yes, there can be no one in a fellowship with enough wisdom and integrity to settle a dispute among brothers. That was the case at the Tip of Michigan’s Thumb in 2004 when one alleged “brother” defrauded three other brothers, and was then supported by the majority of the Sabbatarian Church of God in Michigan. So there are fellowships in which all are either incompetent to try cases, or too cowardly to make a judgment.
But the purpose of the Church judging matters is to give the firstfruits the wisdom to judge the world, as well as angels—and angels that did not rebel against God do not need to be judged. So yes, glorified saints will judge angels already clothed in “death” through being confined in the Abyss, with the Apostle Peter identifying their place of confinement as tartaroo (2 Pet 2:4), the deepest abyss in Hades, according to Greek mythology. These glorified saints will not give “life” to already living angels; they will give life back to those rebelling angels who have as good as lost their life IF these saints find compelling reasons to do so.
And as the breath of God in the breath of Christ can change a human covering of skin [‘ôwr] into a godly covering of light [’ôwr] through giving life to the inner selves of human persons, the breath of God in His firstborn sons (of whom Christ Jesus is the First of the firstborn sons and as such holds primacy over all other sons) can lift the blanket of death off truly repentant angels, deceived by the Adversary, and return to the Adversary the fruit of their rebellion that is rightfully his fruit by simply speaking this reality into existence …
When the glorified Jesus appeared to ten of His first disciples on the afternoon of the day of the Wave Sheaf Offering, He “breathed” on these ten and said, “‘Receive [pneuma ágion — spirit holy]. If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven them; if you withhold forgiveness from any, it is withheld’” (John 20:22–23).
With receipt of the holy spirit, disciples received authority in this world to forgive sins, or withhold forgiveness of other men. When glorified, that same authority will move up a level, and the saints will truly have authority to judge angels.
When the spiritual king of Babylon (from Isa 14:4) is seen in endtime visions, he’s yellow, the color of gold, and he is without any covering but this yellow color. The gems are gone. He’s a trickster who will, when cast to earth, have run out of tricks. And for angels imprisoned in darkness, the time of their judging will be near. It will soon be known if the death sentences in which they are presently cloaked will be executed. For most, yes, they will be. But there will be a case here and one there that will require the consideration of the glorified saints; for God has concern for all of His creation, including rebel angels. He, though, has already pronounced judgment Himself on the Adversary, who will receive no mercy, no repeal of his death sentence, but who will be used at the end of the Millennium—when he is loosed from his chains in the Abyss (Rev 20:7)—to again wreak havoc on humanity for a short while.
The Garden of Eden will be the chiral image of Eden, the garden of God, with trees in the Garden of Eden being analogous to gems in Eden, the garden of God. Thus, in Eden should be “life” in the form of a gem, a pearl of great price, with a pearl differing from a diamond by its origin.
There is more that needs to be said about chirality, but this “more” will have to wait a little while.
*
"Scripture quotations are from The Holy Bible, English Standard Version, copyright © 2001 by Crossway Bibles, a division of Good News Publishers. Used by permission. All rights reserved."
* * *