#messianic kingdom

[kdmiller55]

The Lord of Heaven’s Armies

27 And Balak said to Balaam, “Come now, I will take you to another place. Perhaps it will please God that you may curse them for me from there.” 28 So Balak took Balaam to the top of Peor, which overlooks the desert. 29 And Balaam said to Balak, “Build for me here seven altars and prepare for me here seven bulls and seven rams.” 30 And Balak did as Balaam had said, and offered a bull and a ram on…

[world-v-you-blog]

Considering Psalms, 14 – Psalm 72, Part 2

For he will rescue the needy when they cry, the poor too and those with none to help them. He will have pity on the poor and needy; and the lives of the needy he will save. He will redeem them from oppression and violence; their blood will be precious in his view/sight. Psalm 72: 12-14, The Complete Jewish Bible. This instalment of “Considering Psalms” continues our reflection on King…

[mindfulldsliving]

Ezekiel 37 Prophecy: Uniting Sacred Texts and Peoples

We aim to explore the intricate connections between this Old Testament prophecy and the teachings within the Book of Mormon. Knowing the background and context of these scriptures helps to illuminate their potential meanings and enriches our appreciation

The Prophecy of Ezekiel 37: Unveiling Its Connection to the Book of MormonCriticism of Ezekiel 37:15-17 and Its Relation to the Book of MormonUnderstanding the Two SticksEzekiel 37:15-19: Books or Sticks? From Mormonism Research Ministries – by Bill McKeever and Eric JohnsonAppraising Ministries blog – Two Sticks: Refuting the Mormon View of Ezekiel 37:15-17 by Pastor – Teacher Ken…

[thinkingonscripture]

What Must I Believe to Be Saved?

The Terms of Salvation God requires that certain information be believed before He saves someone. This means saving faith requires content. Though faith alone is the only requirement by God, the content of faith has changed throughout the ages, depending on what God revealed at a particular time. What God revealed to Adam and Eve was different than what He revealed to Abraham, and what He…

[pastorhogg]

Truths for a Modern World from Matthew 11:1-6

The core themes of Matthew 11:1-6, particularly those of restoration, divine authority, and the unveiling of God’s kingdom through Jesus, echo across the expanse of biblical narrative. In this passage, Jesus responds to John the Baptist’s disciples by enumerating His works: the blind see, the lame walk, lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, and the good news is preached to the…

[kgdrendel]

(via The Curious Upside Down Kingdom of God Revealed in the First Prophetic Utterance in the Bible)

Finishing up some thoughts I started with over the Holidays.

[ephratah]

[atfnews]

The Messianic Banquet is an intriguiging aspect of end times studies. It comes after the arrival of the kingdom and marriage of the Lamb. Along with the Messianic Banquet is the war against Gog and Magog. In this study, we clearly show how all these events line up during the endtimes. This study presents major challenges to the Amillennial and Dispensationalist views.of the endtimes, dispels the idea of rapture and shows that the battle of Gog and MaGog in Revelation occurred in connection with the Roman invasion of Jukdea. It is hope that the listener will pay careful attentioni, take notes and check the Scripture references and reason logically. Check Us Out Our On YouTube channel to leave us questions or comments.

[cyndaquilisbestboi]

One thing I’ve yet to see talked about with Nimona, but that I really really liked, is how it tackles the mythology of war and valor. Specifically, when we first see Gloreth during the intro book sequence, she’s depicted as a full grown adult, this divine, messianic figure heroically battling threats to her nation and people. The city’s equivalent of “good god” is even “good Gloreth”. But then when we actually get to see when all this started through Nimona’s flashback by the well, Gloreth is *very much* a whole ass six year old, maybe eight or nine if we’re stretching it. The mythical hero driving back the “evil darkness” is a few inches shy of a toddler. We don’t know much about the intervening conflict between Nimona and the people of the city, other than that it probably lasted longer than that one mob burning down their own village, and Gloreth abandoning Nimona. But one thing we do see when we pick back up 1000 years later is that the “elite force of knights” who Gloreth (supposedly) put in place whose “descendants would protect the kingdom for generations to come” are being succeeded by a whole new batch of child soldiers. The footage of Ballister breaking into the training grounds as a child isn’t him running to meet adult heroes honing their skills, it’s of him as a seven or eight year old trying to go train with the other child soldiers. This whole movie is a commentary on how media likes to portray soldiers as mature adults who go to war for honor, glory, and patriotism instead of a pack of kids being pushed into the line of fire because it’s what the adults in power tell them is right. It’s certainly something that stood out to me as someone who’s grown up in the hyper nationalism of the US, has seen who society *claims* is sacrificing their lives in military service, and has also seen who *actually* is recruited (the fact that Ballister is a homeless street kid who tries to use the military to get a decent life is not an accident.) And I think that’s neat and important.

[maybe-boys-do-love]

What are some possibly significant queer associations with St. Bartholomew for Ticket to Heaven?

I'm glad you asked!

For those who don’t know, Bartholomew’s considered one of Jesus’s twelve disciples, but barely mentioned in the Bible. It's generally agreed that he is referred to also as Nathanael in the gospel of John, and as someone with the name Nathaniel, which means gift of God in Hebrew, I can tell you that’s a gay-ass name and will also def make me cry if I think too hard about Gem's character having that parallel during the show).

Bart’s often depicted holding his flayed skin (ew gross!) from when he got martyred, most famously in queer Italian Renaissance artist Michelangelo’s "Last Judgment" painting in the Sistine chapel at the Vatican. The skin St. Bart’s holding there is actually a (skinned) self-portrait of the artist. Peek at Aof’s insta and you’ll see that he actually visited the work. It’s giving queer influence in (Catholic) Christianity and autobiographical reference, baby ✨

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Bartholomew and another disciple Philip, who was written to have introduced Bartie to the big JC party and to have traveled with him after JC’s post-post-mortem, are mentioned in a translation by Yale scholar John Boswell of a liturgy for an adelphopoeisis ceremony between two monks from the tenth century. Boswell argued that adelphopoeisis, or spiritual brotherhood unions in the pre-sodomy-law-era early church should be understood as same-sex unions. This, as most discussion of gay shit with the Church, has been controversial, although some of those controversies are issues with Boswell’s translation. There does seem to be some evidence that these spiritual brotherhoods were understood to have the potential to be sexual in nature. Either way, it seems likely Aof has come across Boswell’s ideas because it’s pretty prominent in discourse for anyone looking into gay Christian history.

THEN, although it might be unintentional, the Thai-ification of Bart is homophonic with Bath????!!!! If Bart can be short for Bartholomew, y'all are gonna have to let me stretch a little bit past Aof's official statement so Bath can be short for Bathsheba because...

Giving us another Biblical name reference but from the other gender who's THE example of coveting in the Bible/Torah is such a power move! King David sees Bathsheba bathing from his roof and has her over to sleep with him even though she's the wife of one of David's soldiers who's literally off fighting for his kingdom. Then he gets her pregnant. Then David has the poor guy over for dinner and doesn't admit to it, sends him back out and has him put in the front lines to get killed. He dies and Bathsheba mourns for a bit before becoming David's wife. It's heterosexual failure! It's the temptations of the flesh! It's one of the inspirations for Leonard Cohen's cold and broken Hallelujah! This connection reframes the queer temptations as something no less normal than heterosexual desire.

After all, David is the good guy. The celebrated little David who killed Goliath. It's essential to trace Jesus's lineage back to this most-celebrated king in the Bible for the messianic prophecies to be correct. So giving us a reference to this venerated and simultaneously deeply human figure really complicates the kind of Christianity that expects immaculate humans.

And, Bathsheba wasn't David's only paramour. Researching same-sex relationships in the Bible, David and Jonathan will be at the very top of the list. "The soul of Jonathan was knit to the soul of David, and Jonathan loved him as his own soul...Then Jonathan made a covenant with David, because he loved him as his own soul. And Jonathan stripped himself of the robe that was upon him, and gave it to David, and his armor, and even his sword and his bow and his girdle." That's coming from the book of Samuel in the Revised Standard Version of the Bible, which was the first in 1946 to have any reference to word ‘homosexuality,’ using it to replace in the King James Version "abusers of themselves with mankind" and "effeminate” (which at that time did not have the common association with gay men the way it does today) on the list of sinners barred from heaven. Would David have been far enough on the Kinsey scale to qualify? Well, David had some other wives on top of Jonny and Bath, too. Whatever happened to family values!?

Of course, Bath also gives us images of washing and purifying alongside the sacrament of baptism!

The Bartholomew connection deserves more legit emphasis with Aof's statements and actual evidence for his visit to the Vatican, but how fun that the translation gave us another queer part of Christianity even if it wasn't intentional!

Complicating all of this discussion further is Catholicism's very late switch away from Latin and its more emphatic focus on tradition, hagiography, and liturgy rather than the text of the Bible. My ex-Christian fixation is on issues in Reformed Christianities (and I still love me some iconophobia, a topic with which Aof loves to engage), so I know more about the books and interpretations. I'm looking forward to the Catholic and ex-Catholic contributions here as the show gets underway. Like, y'all have been doing the most for production values of a Sabbath!

And to all my ex-Christians who can get sucked into spirals about this stuff, just remember that the concept of God is chill and all if it's just the comforting sense of connection between things in the universe, but any concepts of Christology, sin, or puppet-master deities are literally the most whack things if they're being thought of as anything more than a kind of out-there overly-simplified metaphor for trying to live a life where you can be yourself and get along with other people.

*This info and a great deep dive into the induction of the language and discourse of homosexuality in the Bible and its progressive! roots and aftermath is Reforming Sodom: Protestants and the Rise of Gay Rights.

[idylls-of-the-divine-romance]

What’s your favorite(s) Jesus moment?

Okay so I was thinking about this and I was going to list several but I’ve actually got a single answer

The Sermon on the Mount. It’s incredible and so masterfully designed. Now, whether there actually was a big sermon on a mountain side that Jesus gave or if this is just a collection is for scholars to debate (tho, naturally, I do have my own opinion) but either way it’s amazing.

Especially, the beatitudes: the manifesto of the messianic kingdom. The citizens of (G)Arden are the poor in spirit, the grieving, the low trodden, those desirous for justice and righteousness, the merciful, the pure of heart, the peacemakers, and the persecuted.

How incredible is that??

[kdmiller55]

I Will Dwell In Your Midst

6 Up! Up! Flee from the land of the north, declares the Lord. For I have spread you abroad as the four winds of the heavens, declares the Lord. 7 Up! Escape to Zion, you who dwell with the daughter of Babylon. 8 For thus said the Lord of hosts, after his glory sent me to the nations who plundered you, for he who touches you touches the apple of his eye: 9 “Behold, I will shake my hand over them,…

[world-v-you-blog]

Considering Psalms, 13 – Psalm 72, 1

Please read Psalm 72 in whichever reputable translation you prefer in preparation for this reflection. The translation I am using is the Complete Jewish Bible, translated by David Stern, 1998. Psalm 72 is accredited to Solomon (Shlomo in Hebrew). It is in the form of a prayer for God’s blessing to rest upon the anointed King of Israel, according to the covenant between Solomon’s father, King…

[mariacallous]

Donald Trump’s fans and critics alike have compared him to some of history’s most famous rulers: Cyrus the Great, Adolf Hitler, King David and more. 

But on the eve of the election, a celebrity pastor named Jonathan Cahn wants his evangelical followers to think of the Republican candidate as a present-day manifestation of a far more obscure leader: the biblical king Jehu, who vanquished the morally corrupt house of Ahab to become the 10th ruler of the Kingdom of Israel. 

“President Trump, you were born into the world to be a trumpet of God, a vessel of the Lord in the hands of God. God called you to walk according to the template; He called you according to the template of Jehu, the warrior king,” Cahn told the hundreds of Christian leaders who gathered last week for the National Faith Summit outside Atlanta. He also shared a clip of his prophecy about Trump on his YouTube channel, which has more than a million followers. 

What Cahn means — and why at least one scholar of the Christian right says he is worried — requires some background. Cahn, 65, is the son of a Holocaust refugee and grew up in a Jewish household in New Jersey. When he was 20, he says he had a personal revelation that led him to Jesus, and he eventually became the head of a Messianic congregation, blending Jewish rituals with Christian worship and a focus on doomsday prophecies. 

Cahn helped popularize the interpretation of 9/11 as an apocalyptic biblical allegory. In his telling, the terrorist attacks were akin to God’s rebuke of the biblical nation of Israel, and they happened because God wanted the United States to revert to a time before legalized abortion and gay rights when religion held a more central place in society — or else. His book on the topic, “The Harbinger,” came out in 2012 and spent months on The New York Times bestseller list. 

Cahn continued to release commercially successful books, and combined with his social media activity, he established a growing and enthusiastic audience for his prophetic warnings. 

Then Trump came along. During Trump’s first term, many evangelical Christian supporters explained his lack of religiosity by comparing him to Cyrus, the pagan ruler of ancient Persia, who served as God’s agent by, according to the Bible, helping the Israelites return home from exile. In 2018, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, amid an effort to build stronger ties with the evangelical movement, praised Trump as a modern-day Cyrus. 

But Cahn had spun a different prophetic narrative about the new American president. He released a book called “The Paradigm” a few months after the 2016 election, which cast Trump as Jehu, the biblical king who took control of and restored the Kingdom of Israel, whose territory largely overlapped with parts of present-day Israel and Lebanon. Just as Jehu killed the idol-worshippers who had taken over the kingdom, Trump would “drain the swamp” of Washington and “make America great again.” In this contemporary rendition, Hillary and Bill Clinton play the role of Ahab and Jezebel, the evil rulers who had led the kingdom astray. Jezebel is also seen as wicked in the Jewish tradition, but she is far more prominent as a symbol in evangelical discourse today, representing feminism, sexual promiscuity, and moral decay. 

In the 2024 election, Biden’s replacement with Harris as the Democratic candidate challenging Trump allowed the template of Jehu-versus-Jezebel to get updated and become salient again. 

Two weeks before Cahn spoke at the National Faith Summit, an ally of his named Ché Ahn evoked the comparison at another mass religious event. Ahn heads Harvest Rock Church in Pasadena, California, as well as a network of thousands of ministries all over the world. He is a leader of a spiritual movement known as New Apostolic Reformation, which aims for Christians to dominate society and government. Major Republican figures like Mike Pompeo, Sarah Palin, and Josh Hawley have visited Ahn’s church, reflecting the growing influence of Christian nationalism on the Republican party.  

On Oct. 12, Yom Kippur, Ahn appeared at the “Million Women March” event on the National Mall, speaking before a crowd of tens of thousands with many wearing prayer shawls or blowing shofars — traditionally Jewish symbols highlighting the movement’s overlap with Messianic Judaism. 

“Jehu will cast down Jezebel,” Ahn said, and prophesized a victory by Trump over Harris.

The social media user who brought the recent Jehu comparisons to wider notice through posts on X is Matthew Taylor, a scholar of the Christian right at the Institute for Islamic, Christian, & Jewish Studies, a Baltimore-based Interfaith research and advocacy group, dedicated to “[dismantling] religious bias and bigotry.”

“Since Harris became the candidate this summer, we’ve seen the Jehu image really rise to the surface much more,” Taylor said in an interview. “This is the story [Cahn and Ahn] want running through their followers’ heads, their lens for interpreting the election and its aftermath.”

In the grim biblical story, recounted in the book of II Kings, as Jehu ascends the throne, he kills Jezebel by ordering her thrown out of a palace window, after which he stomps on her body, which is then eaten by dogs. The new warrior king then goes on a killing spree, slaying the families of Ahab and Jezebel and other Baal-worshiping pagans who had despoiled the kingdom.

“Jehu came to the capital city with an agenda to drain the swamp,” Cahn said in his speech, addressing Trump, who also spoke at the National Faith Summit. “Jehu formed an alliance with the religious conservatives of the land. So, it was your destiny to do the same. Jehu overturned the cult of Baal by which children were sacrificed. So, God chose you to overturn America’s cult of Baal, Roe vs. Wade.”

Cahn and Ahn did not respond to a request to their ministries from JTA to discuss the theology of their recent statements. 

Neither pastor elaborated on the analogy they were drawing and neither made an explicit call for violence. But Trump has generated widespread concern by speaking of retribution, calling his political opponents “the enemy from within,” and talking about using the military against political enemies if he wins. 

Given the riots that took place at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021 after Trump challenged the election results, and his ongoing promotion of electron fraud narratives, independent experts and government agencies are warning of increased political violence. Many Jewish leaders are particularly concerned because Trump recently blamed Jews for his potential defeat.

Taylor says the pastors’ followers would be familiar with the biblical story of Jehu and he believes that they are priming their audience to accept violence during the election or afterward.

In a post on X, formerly Twitter, that surfaced the Jehu prophecies, Taylor voiced his alarm. 

“If Trump wins in this election, the Jehu ‘template’ tells Trump’s Christian supporters: some real-world violence may be needed to purge America of her demons,” Taylor wrote. “If Trump loses this election, particularly to Kamala Harris their ‘Jezebel,’ the Jehu template prescribes vengeance.”

[mybeautifulchristianjourney]

٨ يَسُوعُ الْمَسِيحُ هُوَ هُوَ أَمْسًا وَالْيَوْمَ وَإِلَى الأَبَدِ.

Yeshua [God is Salvation] Moshiach [Messiah] the same yesterday, and today, and forever. — Hebrews 13:8 | Arabic Bible (Smith & Van Dyke) and New Messianic Version (NMV) The Arabic Bible, Translated by Smith & Van Dyke (1865) is in the public domain and the New Messianic Version Bible by Tov Rose © 2012. All Rights Reserved. Cross References: Genesis 21:33; Exodus 3:14; 2 Corinthians 1:19-20; Hebrews 1:12; Jude 1:25

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Notes: That God can be trusted and counted on is a comfort to His people. Knowing He is “the same yesterday and today and forever” reminds us that God was reliable in the past, we can trust Him today, and we can hold fast to the hope that is tomorrow. God has always existed, and He wants us to be part of His kingdom.

[kgdrendel]

The Curious Upside Down Kingdom of God Revealed in the First Prophetic Utterance in the Bible

The imagery in Genesis 3:15 is confusing in light of Isaiah 53, but that is a clue to our understanding

In my last blog article, I focused on the way that Genesis 3:15 anticipates and foreshadows the coming of a Messiah, generally, and how it was specifically fulfilled in the virgin birth of Jesus. Not only that, but it introduces a thread in Scripture (the elevation of women) at the very beginning that runs through the entire Bible. That the Bible uniquely elevates the stature of women despite…