Feast: Strategies for Escaping Babylon (Part Four)
#FT23-06
David F. Maas
Given 05-Oct-23; 68 minutes
description: In the annual Jewish cyclical tradition of Torah readings, the seemingly pessimistic treatise Ecclesiastes is designated the megillah for Sukkot or the Feast of Tabernacles, chronicling Solomon's quest for pleasure and the disillusioning consequences of worldly pursuits. Ecclesiastes 3:11 proclaims that God has made everything beautiful in its time. Sadly, the entire world, including most professing Christians have no idea what God's overall plan is. God's Called-out saints have been entrusted with the mysteries of God (I Corinthians 4:1) having received the gift of God's Holy Spirit or the very mind of Christ (I Corinthians 2:16) to sort out what is chaotic and hopelessly confusing to the rest of the world, those who are left with only the public revelation (referring to Romans 1:20), available to all who have the spirit in man (Proverbs 20:27 and I Corinthians 2:11). We, as God's called-out ones must respond to our precious calling, choosing permanent eternal spiritual treasures, such as knowing God, the equivalent to eternal life (John 17:3), the earnest payment of His Holy Spirit (Ephesians 1:13-14), enabling us the ability to keep His holy and spiritual law, giving us the metaphorical DNA to convert our genotype (a seed or embryo) into a full grown phenotype (a fully mature spiritual organism).
transcript:
Greetings brothers and sisters, from Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, a truly millennial venue right off the beautiful Atlantic Seaboard. Please turn over to our umbrella verse for this message:
Ecclesiastes 3:11 He has made everything beautiful in its time. Also, He has put eternity in their hearts, except that no one can find out the work that God does from beginning to end.
The Amplified Bible version adds further insightful salient details: “He has made everything beautiful and appropriate in its time. He has also planted eternity [a sense of divine purpose] in the human heart [a mysterious longing which nothing under the sun can satisfy, except God]-yet man cannot find out (comprehend, grasp) what God has done (His overall plan) from the beginning to the end.”
Sadly, the entire world, including most professing Christians, have no idea what God’s overall plan is, either for the world at large or for every individual dwelling on the earth. But, as we learned from Richard Ritenbaugh, God’s chosen saints have been enlightened to His plan of salvation through knowledge of His holy days, immunizing them from such nonsense as pretribulation rapture theories and other such hogwash. I Corinthians 4:1 says that God’s called-out saints have been entrusted with the mysteries of God having received the gift of His Holy Spirit, or the very mind of Christ, to sort out what is chaotic and hopelessly confusing to the rest of the world, those who are left with only the public revelation (referring to Romans 1:20), available to all who have the spirit in man.
Let us turn to Deuteronomy 29:29. We learn here that Almighty God has not revealed every intricate detail of His divine plan to His creation, not even to His John 6:44 saints, who are still seemingly on a very strict need-to-know basis, requiring unconditional trust and submission to His law to expect any such feedback of His divine plan.
Deuteronomy 29:29 “The secret things belong to the Lord our God, but those things which are revealed belong to us and to our children forever, that we may do all the words of this law.”
As Richard explained in one of his Feast of Tabernacle takeaways six days ago that to know the truth, we must practice it, keeping God’s law motivated by following Jesus Christ’s example of providing continuous loving service to others.
From the Day of Trumpets (Yom Teruah) to the Day of Atonement (Yom Kippur), we have learned that God has reserved for Himself, or set aside a special crop of, firstfruits, which in I Peter 2:9 the apostle Peter describes as a “chosen generation, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, His own special people, that they may proclaim the praises of Him who called them out of darkness into His marvelous light.”
In his Feast of Trumpets sermon, Richard explained that Christ, on His triumphant return to this earth, will systematically resurrect His dead saints, while transforming His living saints instantaneously into glorified spirit beings containing the mind and character of Christ to follow their Leader back to earth to put an end permanently to the satanically directed governments of mankind, namely the oppressive Babylonish system in which the entire world has been living under abject bondage to sin for the past 6,000 years, replacing it permanently with the glorious Kingdom of God, administered exclusively by sanctified spirit beings under the rule of Jesus Christ, our Lord, King, and Bridegroom—the offspring of God—who will be interfacing with their fleshly clientele from a newly acquired permanent vantage point, gently, but firmly, shepherding them to follow as they, the remnants of Jacob’s family and the rest humanity, begin their trek into eternity.
Do you realize that this will be the very first time since the dawn of earth’s creation that finally the entire world will be properly keeping God’s ordained seventh day Sabbath (the day scorned and rejected today by the majority of professing Christians) ushering in 1,000 glorious years of relatively permanent peace, enabling God’s saints to lead our human clientele to refurbish the earth which mankind, since the creation of Adam and Eve, whose descendants, for the most part, have polluted and trashed like vile cockroaches. God’s resurrected saints, having previously experienced deliverance from the shackles of decay and oblivion, will now have the solemn responsibility to teach their human clientele to crave the same permanent source of peace and joy they have longed for during their entire process of conversion, as identified in the Matthew 5 Beatitudes.
In the annual Jewish cyclical tradition of Torah readings, the seemingly pessimistic treatise Ecclesiastes is designated as the Megillah for Sukkot (or the Feast of Tabernacles), chronicling Solomon’s quest for pleasure and the disillusioning consequences of worldly pursuits. In his 1993 Feast sermon, John Ritenbaugh asserted that Ecclesiastes illustrates the disillusionment that love for worldly pleasures will inevitably bring. John admonished us that “when we realize that this physical world is passing away, including our relatively frail human bodies, our priorities should be on attaining permanent things by trusting and fearing God, faithfully keeping His commandments.”
The temporary booths (short lived and quickly deteriorating) at the Feast depicts our temporary and impermanent, often pleasant but sometimes unpleasant, often enjoyable but sometimes disappointing, mirroring our lengthy earthly pilgrimage (also known as our rigorous, often grueling roller coaster-like sanctification process (a kind of parity between happy and sad, sweet and bitter, described by Moses in Psalm 90:15, which is rendered in the Amplified Classic Version, “Make us glad in proportion to the days in which You have afflicted us and to the years in which we have suffered evil.”
But contrast this unstable mixture of good and evil we currently experience with the permanence of Christ’s rule and our glorious life in His Kingdom as family members of the God Family, as the psalmist David records in Psalm 16:11, “You will show me the path of life; in Your presence is fullness of joy; at Your right hand there are pleasures forevermore.” In our current spiritual pilgrimage, if we fail to discover and live for God’s purpose for us, carved out or programmed in us before the foundation of the world (Ephesians 1:4), our existence will be rendered meaningless—hopelessly depressing.
Ecclesiastes 1:12-14 I, the Preacher, was king over Israel in Jerusalem. And I set my heart to seek and search out by wisdom concerning all that is done under heaven; this burdensome task God has given to the sons of man, by which they may be exercised. I have seen all the works that are done under the sun; and indeed, all is vanity and grasping for the wind.
Romans 8:20-23 For the creation was subjected to futility, not willingly, but because of Him who subjected it in hope; because the creation itself also will be delivered from the bondage of corruption into the glorious liberty of the children of God. For we know that the whole creation groans and labors with birth pangs until now. Not only that, but we also who have the firstfruits of the Spirit, even we ourselves groan within ourselves, eagerly waiting for the adoption, the redemption of our body.
The late Herbert W. Armstrong, during his final years of his life, once told a group of students gathered near the library, “We don’t really have true life in the flesh; it is more a physicochemical existence.” Again, in his sermon, “Ecclesiastes and the Feast of Tabernacles,” John Ritenbaugh reminds us that God has indeed subjected the creation to futility, but He did it in hope. He did it because He wants us to think about how life is whenever He permits our human nature, through free will, to have sway (as our original Mom and Dad did in the Garden of Eden), to dominate what is happening on earth and in our lives.
We see, for example, how the entire world has been dangerously led to the brink of a nuclear war because all of mankind (including the defiant rebellious offspring of Jacob—probably the most stiff-necked of all the world’s inhabitants) has not yet (over a turbulent, troubled 6,000 years of history) learned to beat its swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks (referring to Isaiah 2:4, something we, as God’s resurrected saints will be instructing the entire world in the Millenium), but today, on October 5, 2023, the present, dangerous, out-of-control military industrial complex (which the late President Eisenhower warned about in his 1961 farewell address) has come into full fruition as deadly weapons of mass destruction (unapproved by the United States Congress but somehow paid for by American tax dollars) have been surreptitiously filtered into Eastern Europe, ensuring a wholesale genocide of Slavic peoples. As of August 2023, the New York Times reported that 500,000 (a half million) Russians and Ukrainians were slaughtered in this meaningless and senseless conflict, while most descendants of Jacob’s offspring are oblivious about the true historical sources of the conflict (as they and all the rest of the world’s inhabitants have been oblivious to the true sources of all the previous world conflicts over the past 6,000 years) and the dire consequences to the entire world for the calculated escalation of the armed conflict underway.
John Ritenbaugh, again in his 1993 sermon, asks poignantly, “Do we really want to live this way? Do we want life to be permanently this way? Is there a better way? Are we willing to do something about it so we are part of a better way, one that is not subject to futility but permanent, enduring, and filled with productivity, joy, and a sense of well-being that never ends? Which way do we want? God wants us to go the right way, so He has subjected us to living it as a prod and reminder.”
In this fourth instalment of the “Strategies for Escaping Babylon” series, my specific purpose is to encourage all of us, as God’s chosen saints, to respond to our precious calling, choosing permanent eternal spiritual treasures such as knowing God, which our Lord and Master Jesus Christ in His priestly Passover prayer assures us is equivalent to eternal life (John 17:3). The earnest payment of His Holy Spirit (Ephesians 1:13-14) enables us the ability to keep His law, giving us metaphorical spiritual DNA to convert our genotype (a seed or embryo) into a full-grown phenotype (a fully mature organism). God’s Holy Spirit, His law in action, enables us to ardently love His law (which very few individuals have ever kept in the spirit), exercising the weightier matters of the law, sometimes referred to as the “Micah 6:8 Mandate”—to act justly, to love mercy, and to walk humbly with your God,” and reprised by our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ in Matthew 23:23. Consequently, we must assiduously guard our hearts (Proverbs 4:23), preventing us from becoming diverted or sidetracked, squandering our time, talent, and treasure on foolish choices which will inevitably perish or decay. (The subtitle of this message is: “Choosing Permanence over Impermanence.”)
Hebrews 1:10-11 “You, Lord, in the beginning laid the foundation of the earth, and the heavens are the work of Your hands. They will perish, but You remain; and they will grow old like a garment; like a cloak You will fold them up, and they will be changed. But You are the same, and Your years will not fail.”
In his January 2002 Forerunner Personal, John Ritenbaugh, commenting on these verses, declares, “To us, the physical seems so solid, indestructible, and permanent, at least in terms of our brief existence” [as Moses quips in Psalm 90:10, around 70 or 80 years, more or less].
I remember vividly back in September of 1957, when my eighth-grade health instructor up in St. Peter, Minnesota, Glen Mattke, on the first day of class, asked us to take a deep breath. After a silent 15 second pause, he solemnly said to the class, “You are all one breath closer to your death.” That seemingly startling admonition was permanently burned into my mind and floats to the surface of my thoughts frequently, especially when our sensory organs begin to deteriorate as we age as Solomon describes in Ecclesiastes 12:1-5, such as losing our balance. (On the 4th of July, I failed to see a step and plunged forward, distributing my weight on both knees and both elbows, all profusely bleeding and turning black and blue for over a month.) Solomon poetically writes how elderly people progressively lose their sense of sight, lose their ability to hear. Likewise, for some of us, the ability to taste and the ability to smell often deteriorates as we grow older. Covid did not help. After my second bout with the Covid virus, I described how my already compromised olfactory nerves riddled by anosmia were knocked out of commission by this deadly virus.
Several months ago, while I was busily gathering data for an upcoming sermon, Julie had gone to the store, but had left something simmering in a pan in the kitchen. When she returned, she opened the door and let out a yelp: “Dave, why aren’t you paying attention?” Because I was sitting in the darkened living room with my computer screen before me from my comfortable perch in the recliner, I was oblivious to the menacing clouds of smoke which had permeated the entire house because I could not smell it. Richard’s announcement about overpowering perfume and cologne is incomprehensible to me. I think if a skunk sprayed me directly on my face, it would not phase me a bit.
My Forerunner article, titled, “Guilt: Our Spiritual Pain” made the case that just as physical pain is a blessing alerting us to injury, guilt and shame is the spiritual equivalent. God has placed within our bodies a vast network of millions of pain nerves, specifically designed to alarm the central nervous system that danger or potential danger exists. Pain is unpleasant, but no pain (that is, numbness, deadness in the extremities, sometimes known as neuropathy) is terrifying. As we age, we realize that if it does not hurt, it no longer works.
The writer of the book of Hebrews tells us to get our attention off the immediate, the “around and about,” namely the physical. We are to reorient our lives, our thinking, and our focus toward the eternality of Christ’s dominion. A profound reality of God and His Word is that they are changeless. “You remain,” Hebrews 1:11 says, “but we grow old and die.” The eternal values we are learning during our sanctification process—which we are hearing and practicing during the Feast of Tabernacles—never change, and even more exciting, in the words of the late Bill Gray, they can be taken right through the grave [as part of our sanctified character mirroring the very mind of Jesus Christ].
John Ritenbaugh asked, “What is important in our lives? The immediate gratifications offered by this world? The things we possess? The accomplishments we achieve? If so, we will not likely see God very frequently.” Or we can ask, what in our lives demands our time, effort, and thought? An objective answer to this may reveal what we really worship—or what Bill Onisick referred to as “putting in our spiritual bank account.” We cannot identify with or worship anything transient. Something must “remain” or “continue” (ASV), as verses 10-12 tell us. Something eternal must abide; something unchanging must continue. To this we can cling, and within it, we can live our lives by faith.
Solomon, in his treatise in Ecclesiastes, realizes that in the panorama of nature, everything undergoes constant change from one generation to another. But, in contrast, God never changes; He is permanent and everlasting. John Ritenbaugh assures us that “though Solomon reaches the despairing conclusion that the crooked cannot be made straight, God assures us as His children, His called-out saints, that now [in our current physical life] is the time to effect positive changes with His help, diligently using or exercising the downpayment or earnest payment of His Holy Spirit.” These gradual, incremental changes will eventually become a permanent part of our [emerging] personality because the great Creator is working within us, making their home in us (John 14:23), unless as Mark Schindler warned us five days ago, that our failure to trust Almighty God, compromising with the world’s satanic, anti-God cultures and philosophy, we run the risk of quenching God’s Spirit currently dwelling in us (I Thessalonians 5:19-22).
Often, in the grueling sanctification process, life often appears to be vain and absurd, but for God’s called-out ones, according to John Ritenbaugh, “He (God) has designed things so that we, being able to see the vivid contrasts continually before us, consciously make the choices in our lives to move toward the permanent and eternal, affecting the necessary changes we need to make in our character to be carried through the grave.”
For the past ten years since moving from Texas to California, God has provided me a continual Monday through Friday Romans 1:20 message, expounding Ecclesiastes 3:11, Psalm 37:1-2, 20, and Psalm 90:5-6, and many more scriptures which have helped me to come to grips with my fragile mortality and a need to embrace something permanent and eternal as I hike through the canyons, mesas, and boulders of Corriganville Movie Ranch (now a protected conservancy of the Simi Valley Park system), a venue where over 3,700 films were made from the 1930s to the present. At the end of 2024, several local movie companies are planning to release a weekly TV program called Corriganville Rides Again, celebrating the adventures of a young boy growing up during the heyday of the Western movie ranch.
Reflecting on the first part of Ecclesiastes 3:11, that our Creator has made everything beautiful in its time appropriate to His predetermined seasons, I marvel at seeing something dazzlingly new and different as I tread the trails of endless delight among the boulders, canyons, and mesas of this magnificent sprawling former movie ranch in the Santa Susana Mountains. People in my home state of Minnesota boast of what they call its theater of seasons, but from what I recall, we had had basically two seasons: 9 months of winter and 3 months of tough sledding—or as I heard a commercial the other day on KNUJ, 9 months of winter and 3 months of road construction—maybe a trifle exaggeration. But Southern California is, at least according to The Beach Boys, the land of endless summer with different varieties of plants and trees blooming continually. Bill Onisick four days ago expressed a concern that his mentioning the Beach Boys probably dated him; well, young man, Brian Wilson and I are nearly the same age.
Fascinatingly, after the recent downpour from Hurricane Hilary apparently dropping a year’s worth of rain in 24 hours on August 20th, the entire vegetation ground cover seemed to instantaneously erupt into a riot of color as trees, bushes, and plants started to blossom all over the San Fernando Valley and throughout the entire southland. In all my years living in California, I have never seen such a variety of Crepe Myrtle, with white, purple, pink, and red blooms all appearing within a day of that tropical storm, which the left-wing meteorologists attributed to global warming or climate change. Disgustingly, the current occupant of the Oval Office said on September 10, 2023 (25 days ago): “The sole threat to humanity’s existence is climate change, and not even nuclear conflict poses a similar danger.” Well, in my humble opinion, hooray for climate change and global warming for this kaleidoscopic display of dazzling color and fragrance. This can also be seen in the Jacaranda and in the Mimosa or silk tree which glorifies and beautifies the otherwise dormant desert landscape of Southern California.
Additionally, after Tropical Storm Hilary headed up through Bakersfield, Fresno, and Sacramento, the avocado trees, fig, olive, and citrus trees, as well as the bougainvillea blossoms in my backyard, started to mightily assert themselves, shaking off the deleterious paralyzing effects of the sustained drought that has ravaged Southern California over the past several years. Our fig tree in the backyard has never yielded such an abundance of fruit as this summer and fall.
I see massive differing displays of flora and fauna every single day, including California live oak, Fresno (or ash tree) willow, sycamore, eucalyptus, and palm trees, California sagebrush, Chapparal yucca, jimson weed, California poppies, manzanita, mustard plants, and sunflowers, on display at different times throughout the year. Animal life includes squirrels, rabbits, coyotes, bobcats, deer, lizards, rattle snakes, crows, sparrows, bluebirds, blue jays, eagles, hawks, buzzards, vultures, ants, honeybees, butterflies, dragonflies, and crickets, just to name a few examples, barely scratching the surface of what really is out there.
But sadly, over the past 10 years, I have witnessed the whole landscape twice burned to a crisp by out-of-control Santa Ana fires, which, in my humble opinion, seem to be more attributable to the environmentalist polices in Sacramento than the bogus climate change hoax perpetrated by the globalist elites. The only part of the landscape that remained in the forefront after the blazing fires ravaged the landscape were the massive boulder formations which the wildfires could not destroy. Looking at the Romans 1:20 public revelation available to everyone on earth, the grounds of comparison between Almighty God and the rocks and boulders are easily understood. Turn to Deuteronomy 32:4. I will read this from the Amplified Classic version.
Deuteronomy 32:4 He is the Rock, His work is perfect, for all His ways are law and justice. A God of faithfulness without breach or deviation.
The Hebrew word for “Rock” indicates, firmness, stability, and faithfulness. For this reason, the psalmist David throughout the Psalms has chosen the rock as a symbol of God’s permanence.
Psalm 18:1-2 I will love You, O Lord, my strength. The Lord is my rock and my fortress and my deliverer; My God, my strength, in whom I will trust.
David uses a plethora of rock metaphors throughout the Psalms, including:
Psalm 31:3 You are my Rock and my protection.
Psalm 62:7 He (God) is my mighty rock and my protection.
Psalm 71:3 Be my rock of refuge, to which I can always go; give the command to save me, for you are my rock and my fortress.
Psalm 78: 35 “They remembered that God was their rock, that the Most High was their Redeemer.”
Psalm 144:1-3 Praise be to the Lord who trains my hands for war, my fingers for battle. He is my loving God and my fortress and my deliverer, my shield in whom I take refuge, who subdues peoples under me. LORD, what are the humans that you care for them, mere mortals that you think of them?
Both Matthew 7:24-27 and Luke 6:47-49 encourage us to build our house on the Rock, symbolizing Jesus Christ, who instructs us to build our lives on Him and His truth. For me personally rocks, boulders, canyons, gorges, and cliffs have always been my favorite part of the landscape. As a matter of fact, I proposed to my precious spouse Julie on a precipitous cliff in Vasquez County Park. If you have ever seen the 1957 television series Zorro, you can see the location. I chose the precipitous cliff to ensure the permanence of the terms of the marriage covenant.
The rock formations which I currently walk through daily, I have often seen in a plethora of movies filmed in Corriganville dating back to the 1930s, 1940s, 1950s, 1960s and right up to the present. If it were not for these relatively permanent, rugged, towering rock formations, the late Bob Hope, I am afraid, would have been tempted to construct wall-to-wall condos next to his sprawling adjacent Hopetown, gobbling up field to field until no space would be left alone for godly reflection and solitude (referring to Isaiah 5:8). As spiritual stewards of God’s real estate in the Millenium, this kind of overcrowding and unsightly ghetto-like projects, structures, and complexes will never be allowed to occur ever again in the millennial World Tomorrow.
My daily walk through Corriganville gives me an opportunity to deeply meditate on the clashing, warring concepts of temporary existence and decay contrasted to eternal life and permanence, reflecting on passages from Scripture which are played out in the flora, fauna, and aggregates of mineraloid matter— namely rocks, stone, pebbles, hills, mountains, etcetera. Like the other mortal temporal life of all His physical creatures, I recognize that there is an expiration date on my short tenure here. I have lived 5 years longer than my mother’s expiration date, 27 years longer than my grandpa Maas’ expiration date, and my eldest son’s expiration date by 46 years. I have 13 years to catch up to my father’s expiration date, 41 years to catch up to Moses’s expiration date, 51 years to catch up to Aaron’s expiration date, 96 years to catch up to Father Abraham’s expiration date, and 890 years to catch up to the expiration date for the old Finlander Matt Tusala (Methuselah). But every one of us has an expiration date.
Mortality (the capability of dying and lapsing into oblivion) is the common lot of all flora and fauna, but for human beings created in God’s image, willfully practicing sin (or lawlessness, I John 3:4) makes mortality and oblivion permanent or everlasting as we learn from Ezekiel 18:20 that the soul who sins shall die, but verse 21 assures us that “if a wicked man turns from his sins which he has committed, keeps all My statutes, and does what is lawful and right, he shall surely live; he shall not die.”
As Richard pointed out on the opening message, Jesus Christ in the Olivet Prophecy proclaimed that because lawlessness at the end time will abound, the love of many will grow cold—as one “phoofs” on a bowl of hot soup. Lawlessness destroys love as is seen in antinomian Christianity giving assent to abortion which is first degree murder of a fetus with a beating heart, and the hideous practice of same-sex marriage, which stops the reproductive process God had intended to create godly offspring. Let us see this in Malachi 2:15. Permit me to read to you from the Amplified Classic edition.
Malachi 2:15 And did not God make [you and your wife] one [flesh]? Did not One make you and preserve your spirit alive? And why [did God make you and preserve your spirit alive? And why [did God make you two] one? Because He sought a godly offspring [from your union]. Therefore take heed to yourselves and let no one deal treacherously and be faithless to the wife of his youth.
As we have learned throughout this Feast, the handwriting is on the wall for the nations inhabited by Jacob’s offspring, whose manmade laws blatantly and defiantly break God’s moral laws, breaking God’s fifth commandment, accepting the wholesale slaughter of unborn children as a women’s rights issue, elevating sodomy (same sex marriage), and other sexual perversions as equivalent to the God ordained, God-plane relationship between a man and a woman. It angers me to see the LGBT+ flag flying in full splendor over the Shepherd of the Valley Lutheran Church in Simi Valley just three and a half miles from my house. The governments of the Jacob’s children (the United States of America, Canada, Great Britain, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, and the state of Israel) who want to give their blessing to such horrible perversions, have no right to refer to themselves as God’s people, nor can they count on His protection from enemies, or continue to experience the largess of the blessings bestowed on Father Abraham for His faith and obedience. Without God’s John 6:44 calling and our invitation to know God the Father as the equivalent of eternal life (John 17: 2-3), our tenure is as fragile and hopeless as the animals, plants, or minerals with which we share company on this earth.
Please turn over to I Peter 1:24-25 which is the passage Johannes Brahms used in his German Requiem—Denn alles Fleisch es ist wie Gras (For all flesh is as grass)—one of my favorite choral works, which I played continually following the deaths of my mother and my oldest son Michael, who was only 33 years old at his untimely death.
I Peter 1:24-25 because “All flesh is as grass, and all the glory of man as the flower of the grass. The grass withers, and its flower falls away, but the word of the Lord endures forever.”
This verse is a reprise of Isaiah 40:6-8. As Augustine of Hippo once declared, “The new [testament] is in the old concealed; the old [testament] is in the new revealed.”
Isaiah 40:6-8 The voice said, “Cry out! And he said, “What shall I cry?” “All flesh is grass, and all its loveliness is like the flower of the field. The grass withers, the flower fades, because the breath of the Lord blows upon it; surely the people are grass. The grass withers, the flower fades, but the word of our God stands forever.”
As Richard mentioned on the opening night, even though the rest of the world rejects Holy Scripture, we as God’s called-out ones cannot get away from this Book, adding that now is the worst time to avoid the authority of the Bible, one of the dependable roadmaps or spiritual GPS devices to living life permanently.
Psalm 103:13-18 As a father pities his children, so the Lord pities those who fear Him. For He knows our frame; He remembers that we are dust. As for man, his days are like grass; as a flower of the field, so he flourishes. For the wind passes over it, and it is gone, and its place remembers it no more. But the mercy of the Lord is from everlasting to everlasting on those who fear Him, and His righteousness to children’s children, to such as keep His covenant, and to those who remember His commandments to do them.
In August of 1986, Greg Hutchison was appointed choir director of the North Hollywood congregation. Initially, I was not on board of having the choir members memorizing their parts, but I felt very empowered after we performed a rendition of Psalm 103 with the memorable words, “The Lord pities His children, knowing that we are dust.” To this day, because of Greg’s insistence on memorizing, this musical selection has been burned permanently into my memory. (Now, I do not want to give Rex Ulmer any fancy ideas about us memorizing.)
The brevity of our physical life is a pervasive, recurring theme throughout Scripture. We may consider life to be long when we measure it by the year, but when we measure it by the year and when compared to eternity, life is a mere vapor. The Scriptures refer to the concept of death more than 1,300 (in such expressions such as die, death, dead, etc.). Obviously, it is a perennial topic in both the Old and New Testaments. To go through all the examples would require the entire Feast of Tabernacles. Listen to this handful of passages:
James 4:14 Yet you do not know [the least thing] about what may happen tomorrow. What is the nature of your life? You are [really] but a wisp of vapor ( a puff of smoke, a mist) that is visible for a little while and then disappears [into thin air].
Job 7:6-7 [Job laments] My days are swifter than a weaver’s shuttle and are spent without hope. Oh, remember that my life is but wind (a puff, a breath, a sob); my eye shall see good no more.
Job 8:9 [We learn that] For we are but of yesterday and know nothing, because our days upon earth are a shadow.
Job 14:1-2 Man who is born of a woman is of few days full of trouble. He comes forth like a flower and withers; he flees also like a shadow and continues not.
Psalm 39:4-6 Lord, make me to know my end and [to appreciate] the measure of my days—what it is; let me know and realize how frail I am [how transient is my stay here]. Behold, You have made my days as [short as] handbreadths [a measure of four fingers, equal to about four inches]. And my lifetime is as nothing in Your sight. Truly every man at his best is merely a breath!
Please turn over to Psalm 37.
Psalm 37:1-2 Do not fret because of evildoers, nor be envious of the workers of iniquity. For they shall soon be cut down like the grass, and wither as the green herb.
Psalm 37:18-20 The Lord knows the days of the upright, and their inheritance shall be forever. They shall not be ashamed in the evil time, and in the days of famine they shall be satisfied. But the wicked shall perish; and the enemies of the Lord, like the splendor of the meadows, shall vanish. Into smoke they shall vanish away.
Psalm 37:35-36 I have seen the wicked in great power, and spreading himself like a native green tree. Yet he passed away, and behold, he was no more; indeed, I sought him, but he could not be found.
Let us go to Psalm 90, the beginning of Book Four of the Psalms. My friend, former colleague, and brother in Christ, Mark Kaplan, once pointed out that if we would number each of the books of the Psalms, we would have 70 books rather than the number 66, which might carry some unpleasant connotations. In many ways, Moses (the second meekest man alive) falls into the position experienced by Hezekiah, almost blowing it, but recovering and triumphantly finishes his valiant spiritual trek, providing a shining example for all of us.
Psalm 90:1-7 Lord, You have been our dwelling place in all generations. Before the mountains were brought forth, or ever You had formed the earth and the world, even from everlasting to everlasting, You are God. You turn man to destruction, and say, “Return, O Children of men.” For a thousand years in Your sight are like yesterday when it is past, and like a watch in the night. You carry them away like a flood; they are like a sleep. [continuing the grass metaphor] In the morning they are like grass which grows up; in the morning it flourishes and grows up; in the evening it is cut down and withers. For we have been consumed by Your anger; and by Your wrath we are terrified.
Psalm 90:10 The days of our lives are seventy years; and if by reason of strength are eighty years, yet their boast is only labor and sorrow; for it is soon cut off, and we fly away.
Psalm 90:12 So teach us to number our days, that we may gain a heart of wisdom.
In my series “The W’s and H’s of Meditation,” I described a practice developed by American business principles D. J. Pree, calculating his age in terms of days rather than years, claiming that literally counting his days reminded him of the swift passage of time and the need to live with eternity’s values in view. For six years I have followed his example, finding the concept of overcoming daily more negotiable and user friendly than thinking I have years and years to accomplish that goal.
As we continue our spiritual journey to the Kingdom of God, we must reposition our focus not on the perishable things of the here and now, but on permanent things over the sun, as Jesus instructed us in Matthew 6:
Matthew 6:30-33 “Now if God so clothes the grass of the field, which today is, and tomorrow is thrown into the oven, will He not much more clothe you, O you of little faith? Therefore do not worry, saying, ‘What shall we eat?’ or ‘What shall we drink?’ or ‘What should we wear?’ For after these things the Gentiles seek. For your heavenly Father knows that you need all these things. But seek first the kingdom of God and His righteousness, and all these things shall be added to you.”
The Kingdom of God will last for eternity while all the worldly governments currently in power will be destroyed, including democracies or constitutional republics, which are infinitely worse than any other form if most of the population follows their evil carnal nature instead of the direction of Almighty God. The Scriptures proclaim that God’s Kingdom, of which we are currently ambassadors, will reign for eternity. You can see this in Exodus 15:18, Psalm 9:7, Psalm 45:6, and Lamentations 5:19.
Three days ago, Richard explained the grounds of comparison of the living water image Jesus explained to the woman at the well and the symbols of the water ceremony at the conclusion of the Feast found in John 7. Let us turn over to that passage.
John 7:37-39 On the last day, that great day of the feast, Jesus stood and cried out saying, “If anyone thirsts, let him come to Me and drink. He who believes in Me, as the Scripture has said, out of his heart will flow rivers of living water.” But this He spoke concerning the Spirit, whom those believing in Him would receive; for the Holy Spirt was not yet given, because Jesus was not yet glorified.
The remedy for the Jeremiah 17:9 heart—that fickle, two-faced, unreliable, unstable heart which displeased God in Deuteronomy 5:29, who declared, “O that there were such a heart in them, that they would fear Me and keep all of My commandments always that it might be well with them and their children”—the remedy is that God has established a new covenant with God’s chosen people, providing the attitude and the motivation, as well as the action which Richard gave as Feast of Tabernacles takeaways from John 7, converting a vacillating, carnal heart needing carrots and sticks to keep it on the straight and narrow to a heart thoroughly refurbished from the inside out by our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.
To wrap up this message taking us from the deadly carnal pulls of the flesh, the world, and the prideful rebellious pride from the father of liars and murderers, I will read to you my favorite scripture in the Bible, in Hebrews 8 (a reprise of Jeremiah 31:31-34).
Hebrews 8:10-12 (AMP) For this is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel after those days, says the Lord: I will imprint My laws upon their minds, even upon their innermost thoughts and understanding, and engrave them upon their hearts; and I will be their God, and they shall be My people. And it will nevermore be necessary for each one to teach his neighbor and his fellow citizen or each one his brother, saying, Know (perceive, have knowledge of, and get acquainted by experience with) the Lord, for all will know Me from the smallest to the greatest of them. For I will be merciful and gracious toward their sins no more.
Brothers and sisters, this covenant has already been established and implemented in the Israel of God and is being practiced in Feast sites all around the world. It will be the function of God’s resurrected saints in the wonderful World Tomorrow, whose minds and character have been molded permanently in the image of God the Father and Jesus Christ, who are totally composed of law as their first rather than second nature, serving as kings, priests, and teachers in God’s Kingdom, with omni-agape love to impart the terms of this new covenant to the human clientele in the Millenium who will now be seeking eternal life rather than foolish and temporal goals, gently admonishing them, “This is the way, walk ye in it” (Isaiah 30:21).
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