Shalom, this is Crystal Sharpe and welcome to the Ancient Scrolls program. Today is the first day of the week, January 14, 2018.
Today we are going to examine more about the two seeds from last week.
Isaiah 46:9-10
Remember the former things of old: for I am God, and there is none else; I am God, and there is none like me, Declaring the end from the beginning, and from ancient times the things that are not yet done, saying, My counsel shall stand and I will do all my pleasure.
So let’s go ahead and pray and get started:
Father,
We bless Your name which is above all names, above all situations that distract us. Sometimes we are harassed by illnesses, and sometimes by other people. You are our only hope and security in a world that does not guarantee security. We pray Your will be done in this new year, that Your kingdom of righteousness and justice will prevail over the darkness in the nations.
We pray against the principalities and powers, rulers of darkness, and spiritual wickedness in high places that hinder Your presence, the advancement of Your plans and strategies for this nation and for those that love You and are called by Your name.
We pray against the spirit of weariness that sometimes accompanies the long prayer vigils and warring in the Spirit, when Your people ever look longingly for Your word to become evident in their lives; strengthen Your people today.
I pray for those that are ill today. We pray against virus’ and bacteria that come to afflict Your people. I pray for Your people that have heart conditions, cancer, diabetes, kidney stones, kidney failures, bowel disorders; we pray against every bizarre disease that has come to steal, kill and destroy. We pray a refreshing and renewal in Your people, that You breath on this state and on Beckley new life, new vigor, new innovations, new strength; awaken this state for revival, breathe new life in this state.
We pray that You will destroy every work of the devil in this state and in the nation concerning child molestations, child murder, adultery, idolatry, drug addictions, fornication, its pursuit of self-gratification, our love of money; take out from among us anger, frustration, bitterness, hatred, fear, doubt, jealousy, pride, and arrogance. Help this nation to hate its sins, its iniquities and transgressions, and to pursue You because You have the gift of eternal life.
Our Father, help us to walk in the power of Your Spirit.
We thank You for the exposure of the sexual corruption in our government offices and Hollywood. We ask that You will continue to expose those in these same offices that participate in various nefarious schemes. Bring them to light so they will come to a place of repentance.
We pray for our president that You will enlighten him with Your wisdom, knowledge and understanding. We pray protection over him, over his wife, children and grandchildren.
We pray Israel will recognize Yeshua as their Messiah so they will have peace with You and with their neighbors and we pray conviction on the Muslim nations that hate You and Israel so they will have peace with each other and peace with You.
In Yeshua’s name. Amen
Okay, so last week, we examined the two seeds, one that is from God and the other one that is of the devil—these two come into opposition or conflict with each other, because they have different purposes; because they are from different kingdoms.
In Genesis 3:15 God speaks to the serpent
And I shall put enmity (antagonism) between you and the woman and between your seed (progeny) and her seed (progeny); He will bruise your head and you will bruise His heel.
One seed seeks to do good and seeks after the kingdom of God, to do, be a doer of the word. The other seed seeks to persecute, block, hinder and restrain the work and workers of God, it seeks to slant truth.
Luke 8:11 is a parable of the sower that gives his seed to four different types of soils (and these soils are symbolic of peoples’ hearts) so Yeshua explains to His disciples that the seed was the word of God.
The conflict in the beginning (I am talking about Genesis) was with words. God commanded the man and woman to not eat from the Tree of the Knowledge of good and evil because it would cause them to die, and the serpent’s words were to discredit God’s words to them. The man and woman followed the words of the serpent and they eventually died. We know people die every day so we have inherited death.
The same battle of words occurred in the gospels between Yeshua and the religious sects, or factions of the Temple cult. They had their own statutes that usurped the Teachings of Torah. So this enmity between the seeds is always present.
The law of the seed producing after itself is seen in Genesis 1:11
And God said, Let the earth bring forth grass, the herb yielding seed, and the fruit tree yielding fruit after his kind, whose seed is in itself, upon the earth: and it was so
All living things—animals, plants and people—multiply after themselves based upon a seed which the Father, our Creator, placed in them. We know cows will only produce cows, apple trees apples, humans produce humans and we see this in the natural that the seed produces after itself. This is a model for the spiritual, of how the spiritual world works too, whether it is the seed of the serpent-the devil or the seed of God; It is based on the law; “after its kind.”
All through the bible are stories of the righteous seed and the unrighteous seed—from beginning to the end. The book of Proverbs is replete with contrasts between a righteous man and a wicked man, a wise man and a foolish man, a man who walks uprightly and a man who does violence.
So, what we are going to do is look at are some characters like Esau, Cain, Nimrod, and Ishmael that have characteristics of the unrighteous seed, like the beast in Revelation.
Genesis 25:27
So, the boys grew, and Esau was a skillful hunter, a man of the field; but Jacob was a mild man, dwelling in tents (Now this dwelling in tents is a Hebrew idiom for learning of YHWH)
And Isaac loved Esau because he ate of his game (this is now the world will be deceived in the end. Isaac represents those in the church and the world who will follow after the man in the field. They will be unable to see who or what he truly is.
And Rebecca loved Jacob
Why did she love Jacob? Because of the prophecy:
So she went to inquire of the Lord about this struggle she felt in her womb, and she was told
Two nations are in your womb, Two peoples shall be separated from your body; One people shall be stronger than the other, and the older shall serve the younger.
At the time of her delivery Esau was the first to arrive and he came out red and he was like a hairy garment all over (the language used to describe Esau is similar to that of Azazel, the scape goat that was sent out in the wilderness on the day of Yom Kippur or as we say the Day of Atonement in Leviticus 16:8,10).Sending out Azazel was a symbolic expression of the idea that the corporate sins of Israel and their evil consequences were to be sent back to the spirit of desolation and ruin, the source of impurity. The Jewish Encyclopedia states that Azazel belongs to the class of goat like demons, jinn haunting the desert, to which the Israelites were wont to offer sacrifices in Leviticus17:7. It is just a pattern).
The book of Enoch represents Azazel as a leader of the giants in the time preceding the flood of Noah: he taught men the art of warfare, of making swords, knives, shields, and coats of mall, and women the art of deception by ornamenting the body, dyeing the hair, painting the face and eyebrows, and also revealed to the people the secrets of witchcraft and corrupted their manners, leading them to wickedness and impurity.
The Jewish sages relate Esau with Azazel as a spirit of heathenism.
And afterward his brother came out and his hand took hold of Esau’s heel: so his name was called Jacob.
Which the sages say Jacob’s name means “at the heel” referring to his zeal, in this instance wanting to be first and later wanting to be first in the things of the LORD.
So, the passages in Genesis tell us that Esau was a cunning hunter and a man of the field in Hebrew a cunning hunter would literally read a knowing stalker. It isn’t knowing just by experience but with an almost intimate obsession, the nuance of a stealth-like (hidden) characteristic.
We see this characteristic in Luke when Yeshua is eating with the Pharisees and Lawyers who are the Torah scholars who teach the Hebrew scriptures and these people are straining at the gnat of Yeshua not washing His hands before He ate; and Yeshua issues woes to them for being full of greed, for lacking in justice, mercy and the love of God; and He hammers at them for building the tombs of the prophets that their fathers killed; and further stated that the blood of the prophets shed from the foundation of the world would be required of their generation. And we know that Jerusalem was destroyed by the Romans in 70AD.
In Luke 11:54
And as he said these things to them, the scribes and the Pharisees began to assail Him vehemently, and to cross examine Him about many things
Lying in wait for Him and seeking to catch Him in something He might say, that they might accuse Him
The personality of the tares,
Ishmael , the son of Abraham and Hagar, was destined to be a wild man according to Genesis 16:11-12
And the angel of the Ld said to Hagar behold you are with child and will bear a son, and will call his name Ishmael because the Ld has heard your affliction And Ishmael will be a wild man, His hand will be against every man and every man’s hand will be against him and he will dwell in the presence of all his brothers
Who are his brothers? Isaac, and his descendants.
Dwell in Hebrew in this case is the same word used for face.
More literally he shall dwell in the face of his brother. And today they do, and we see this in the parable of the wheat and tares of Matthew 13
Genesis 21:20
And God was with Ishmael, and he grew and dwelt in the wilderness and became an archer. He dwelt in the wilderness of Paran: and his mother took a wife for him from the land of Egypt
As the story goes with Ismael and Esau is that Ishmael’s daughter Basemath became the third wife of Esau.
These men are prophetic insights into the nature and character of the “other seed” or the tares in Matthew13:25 And I am going somewhere with this to help you see something.
The Jewish mystics or sages, have a unique way of drawing nuances from names and words through their alphabet, which are consonants, and their vowels are recognized through dots and dashes above or beneath the consonants. Every consonant is an icon; today we would say something like an emoji that expresses an idea or emotion.
In Esau’s name there is a root word through two icons that means “to waste.” As consonants are added the meaning advances to mean “the grass of the field”. Esau is a Hebrew word for “weed” and when translated in the New Testament it means “tare.’’
Matthew 13:25
But while men slept, his enemy came and sowed tares (esau) among the wheat, and went his way.
I did go back to the passage in Genesis 27 where Isaac spoke a blessing over Esau, and I usually just gloss over it, but this time I looked at it again from the Stone edition of the Tanach. In verse 39 So Isaac his father answered him, and said to him: Behold, of the fatness of the earth shall be your dwelling and of the dew of the heaven from above. By your sword you shall live, but your brother you shall serve; yet it shall be that when you are aggrieved, you may cast off his yoke from upon your neck.
What is said of Esau by Isaac, since he is a man of the field, a hunter, is that he and his descendants were going to live by the sword. Esau is a type of antichrist.
Let me add something about Esau, or the tribe of Esau, that Genesis 36:9 records that Esau is the father of the Edomites.
And this is the genealogy of Esau, the father, of the Edomites at Mt. Seir.
I am going to make a connection here with the Edomites and the Herods (Plural) that ruled in Judea in the four gospels, and in Acts 12:1-2
The Herods were Edomites from the tribe of Esau
Historians say this particular family endured forced conversion to Judaism by the Sadducee-influenced Hasmonians; and what this meant was that for this Edomite family to keep their land they had to be circumcised and follow the traditions of the Jews.
But true to the blessing given to Esau that he would live by the sword, we witness this in the gospels.
I am limited on time so I will start with Herod the Great. He was the ruler of Judea at the time of Yeshua’s or Jesus’ birth and ordered the massacre of boys two years old and younger at Bethlechem.
Now Herod Antipas, the son Herod the Great, is the one who had John the Baptist beheaded. In Mark 3:6, the Herodians along with the Pharisees take counsel about how to kill Yeshua. Antipas is the ruler when Yeshua is crucified Luke 23:7
There was another Herod in Acts 12:1-2, and this was Herod Agrippa
Now about that time Herod the king stretched out his hand to harass some from the church. Then he killed James the brother of John with the sword.
Have a good week, Keep your spiritual garments clean, ask God to cleanse you of all unrighteousness every day, remain in His service, Love God and love your neighbor.
Those not of the spiritual seed of God are detected by their works and beliefs. In the book of Revelation we see the spirit of antichrist had infiltrated 3 of the 7 churches: the doctrine of sexual indulgences of the Nicolaitans in Ephesus and Pergamos, and Pergamos also accepted the doctrine of Balaam to commit sexual sins and to sacrifice foods to idols; Jezebel infiltrated Thyatira; we know According to Revelation 2, Jezebel called herself a prophetess, and verse 24, she taught the “deep secrets of Satan”, which is the occult. So you can see from Revelation that these apostate leaders lured followers toward immoral sexual expression, obscene practices of the flesh, and to the occult.
These gnostic cults, religions or teachings were at some point called the “mystery religions”. Gnostic comes from the Greek word “gnosis” meaning knowledge, but it a knowledge of a particular sort—that gained by personal experience.
Gnosis . . . came to be used in the 2nd century AD to refer to a mode of religious thought that claimed to have exclusive information about the origin and destiny of the universe and its inhabitants. It taught that the material world was the work of evil powers, which had operated in defiance of God of Light, who was the true and beneficent sovereign of the universe. Human beings were caught in material existence, and were therefore helpless to escape until the agony of divine knowledge came into the material world to explain and to demonstrate liberation. Some of the followers thought they could display their ability to rise above the material world by living in a strictly ascetic manner (Buddhist do this, and I learned in college that Buddhists would send for women in the villages once a year to have sex with them and this was supposed to bring them to a higher spiritual level),
And I want to mention too from I Timothy 4: 1 Now the Spirit (this is nearly equivalent to saying Thus says the Lord in the Old Testament) expressly says that in latter times some will depart from the faith, giving heed to deceiving spirits and doctrines of demons. Speaking lies in hypocrisy, having their own conscience seared with a hot iron (the consciences of these apostates have become the property of evil spirits) forbidding to marry (the Catholic church charges celibacy to its priests, but they don’t have a problem with child molestation), and commanding to abstain from foods (some religions require abstinence because of their belief in reincarnation and the food they eat may be a relative that died some years ago, I guess that where we get the expression Holy Cow?) which God created to be received with thanksgiving by those who believe and know the truth.
And the truth is whatever is taught in the Torah, you can eat anything clean.
The last part of the definition of gnosis is . . . while others took the route of unbridled self-indulgence as a way of showing that the material world was of no significance. In other words, a person could indulge extravagantly in fornication, orgies, adultery and it would not affect the spirit
Well, let’s go ahead and go over I John chapter
This letter is not addressed to any particular leader, church or location, so it may have been meant for a group of churches facing similar challenges as those churches in Revelation that are mentioned.
That which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have looked upon, and our hands have handled, concerning the Word of life—the life was manifested and we have seen and bear witness, and declare to you that eternal life which with the Father and was manifested to us—that which we have seen and heard we declare to you, that you also may have fellowship with us; and truly our fellowship is with the Father and with His Son Jesus Christ
Verse 5. This is the message which we have heard from Him and declare to you, that God is light and in Him is no darkness at all
If we say that we have fellowship with Him, and walk in darkness, we lie and do not practice the truth (or the doctrines, statutes of those moral and ethical teachings of God in Torah)
But if we walk in the light as He is in the light, we have fellowship with one another, and the blood of Jesus Christ His Son cleanses us from all sin
Okay, so we are going to look at today is the examples of antichrist
