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DEAD MEN'S BONES

Part XI

Experience with prophetic patterns has demonstrated how the principalities and powers, which war against the will of God, consistently seek to erode the truth of Jesus Christ. The LORD Jesus Christ clearly understood how the flesh and blood manifestation of this dark power had turned Israel away from their role as the ambassadors of the kingdom of God to the Gentile nations. Instead of letting the righteousness of God flow through them to the Gentiles, the flesh and blood nature within Israel gradually reversed the Spiritual flow, and imported the darkness which resided in the nations.

Since the LORD was the one who appointed Israel to be His "holy people" in the first place (as a Spiritual outreach to the unredeemed nations), when Israel grievously sinned, Moses tried to use that fact as part of his intercession on behalf of Israel. As the LORD was angry enough to destroy Israel (and start over with a new chosen people), the great lawgiver said that if the LORD were to destroy His people because of their apostasy, He was in the position where the nations would attribute Israel's failure to God Himself.

Reviewing Israel's repetitive backsliding, Moses reminded the people that He had pleaded with the LORD not to destroy them, for the Gentiles might then blame God for the failure to keep His promise to redeem the nations. In short, if God were to give Israel a just recompense for their constant blasphemy (and destroy them), then the Gentiles might say the following:

"The Lord was not able to bring them into the land which he promised them, and because he hated them, he hath brought them out to slay them in the wilderness" (Deuteronomy 9:28). 

Jesus alluded to this predicament in an allegorical fashion, when He taught His disciples the parable of counting the cost.

"If any man come to me, and hate not his father, and mother, and wife, and children, and brethren, and sisters, yea, and his own life also, he cannot be my disciple. For which of you, intending to build a tower, sitteth not down first, and counteth the cost, whether he have sufficient to finish it? Lest haply, after he hath laid the foundation, and is not able to finish it, all that behold it begin to mock him, Saying, This man began to build, and was not able to finish" (Luke 14:26-30).

Obviously, the LORD does not want us to "hate" our family members, as He is simply saying that God must be preferred, and pre-eminent above every relationship we enjoy. In this parable, we see the omniscient creator, in looking at the end from the beginning, knew that to redeem His creation through the agency of His chosen mediator, He would have to sacrifice all to complete the task.

"For God so loved the world, that He gave His only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in Him should not perish, but have everlasting life" (John 3:16).

Since God Himself had chosen the identity of Israel as His agent (to shine the light of His presence to the much larger body of humanity), His divine nature required Him to fulfill His promise. As mentioned earlier, even as the story of Israel unfolded, elements of the salvation which would ultimately arrive in Christ continued to emerge. Thus, when Moses came down from the mountain with the tablets of the Ten Commandments (and found the people had constructed the golden calf idol to worship), Moses earnestly prayed, and pleaded with God not to destroy the entire race, for the LORD was justifiably very angry. With this act, the intercession to the Father on behalf of the people prophetically parallels how JESUS intercedes with the Father on behalf of those who trust in Him.

"It is Christ that died, yea rather, that is risen again, who is even at the right hand of God, who also maketh intercession for us" (Romans 8:34).

However, as Israel continually provoked God through their unbelief, the LORD progressively intervened to fulfill His promise to redeem the world. Even as He moved to accomplish this, the events themselves were consistently laced with supernatural signs pointing towards the LORD's glorious plan. An excellent example of how the LORD continually communicated things which served to symbolically predict things to come was seen when the children of Israel were still in the wilderness.

"And [the LORD] said unto Moses, Come up unto the Lord, thou….and seventy of the elders of Israel; and worship ye afar off. And Moses alone shall come near the Lord…" (Exodus 24:1, 2).

This remarkable passage coincides with the formal response of Israel, in accepting the covenant made with God, through the mediation of Moses. In the wilderness after the LORD miraculously delivered Israel from the oppression they had experienced as slaves in Egypt, The great lawgiver gathered all Israel before him. The Exodus account documents how Moses told the people "all the words of the LORD" (Exodus 24:3), and the people willingly vowed to honor the covenant.

"And all the people answered with one voice, and said, All the words which the LORD hath said will we do" (Exodus 24:3).

It is on this occasion that the LORD told Moses to take seventy of the elders of Israel up to the mountain of God with him. This number not only coincides with the precise number of the children of Israel which went into Egypt, that very number was stated in Scripture as a mystical figure indicating that Israel was to be the unique interface between God and the Spiritual "inheritance" of the Gentiles.

Further, the fact is, the seventy were only to proceed so far up the mountain, and then Moses was to be the only one to go further to the point where he encountered the LORD Himself. The solitary standing of Moses continues the prophetic foreshadowing of how Christ alone ascended to the Father, where He mediates the light of God, to the Spiritual Gentiles who are estranged from God.

"And no man hath ascended up to heaven, but he that came down from heaven, even the Son of man which is in heaven" (John 3:13).

Further, God was gradually revealing that, as His chosen people, Israel is to be the unique mediator between the LORD and the balance of the nations. Moreover, as the account shows there were seventy people of the seed of Jacob who functioned as the allegorical "salt" which preserved the Spiritually dead body of Egypt, this number is going to resurface time and time again to reference the covenant between God and Israel.

"And all the souls that came out of the loins of Jacob were seventy souls: for Joseph was in Egypt already" (Exodus 1:5).

In fact, these heavenly signs are embedded throughout the Scriptures. For instance, at Kadesh-Barnea, shortly before entering Canaan to possess the land promised to them, the Israelites had grown very discontented, and wanted to rid themselves of Moses and go back to Egypt.

Moses was obviously weary of the people's complaints, and the burden of leading such an ungrateful people. The LORD's solution was to shift part of the Spiritual load of leadership to those who remained faithful among the flock. Once again, the LORD expanded His Spiritual anointing on the faithful, and the number seventy again looms large.

"And the Lord said unto Moses, Gather unto me seventy men of the elders of Israel…and I will come down and talk with thee there: and I will take of the spirit which is upon thee, and will put it upon them" (Numbers 11:16, 17).

Once again, this is directly related to the number of the children of Israel, who were stated to supernaturally impact the Spiritual inheritance of the Gentile nations.

"When the most High divided to the nations their inheritance, when he separated the sons of Adam, he set the bounds of the people according to the number of the children of Israel" (Deuteronomy 32:8).

Prophetic discernment shows that when Solomon mingled the worship of the LORD with the six gods of the Egyptians, and the "Moabites, Ammonites, Edomites, Zidonians, and Hittites" (I Kings 11:1), he moved the six pointed star – the "image of jealousy" -- into the temple (Ezekiel 8:5, Acts 7:43), as it represented the "divine council" of devils. It is here that we again find the number seventy – thus connecting the number of the children of Israel which the LORD had purposed to represent His mercy toward the Gentiles, to the apostate act. However, at that point this number symbolized the LORD's chastisement falling upon His backslidden people.

Jeremiah and Daniel pronounced the sentence.

"And this whole land shall be a desolation, and an astonishment; and these nations shall serve the king of Babylon seventy years…I Daniel understood by books the number of the years, whereof the word of the Lord came to Jeremiah the prophet, that he would accomplish seventy years in the desolations of Jerusalem" (Jeremiah 25:11, Daniel 9:2).

As the LORD had chosen Israel for the wonderful role of mediating the glory of God to the Gentile nations, and had symbolically keyed the Spiritual boundary between Israel and all the other nations with "the number of the children of Israel," His chastisement of His people repeatedly utilized the number seventy. In effect, God arranged to return Israel to the cruel bondage they had experienced in Egypt, by allowing Babylon to enslave them for seventy years, as a grim reminder of their offense towards the LORD.

By the time of Ezekiel during the Babylonian captivity, the temple was completely immersed in the Divine Council Paradigm, which was the direct result of Solomon's efforts to mingle the religions of the heathen gods with the worship of the LORD. God showed Ezekiel the depth of the depravity:

"So I went in and saw; and behold every form of creeping things, and abominable beasts, and all the idols of the house of Israel, portrayed upon the wall round about. And there stood before them seventy men of the ancients of the house of Israel" (Ezekiel 8:10,11).

The fact that seventy men were seen in the temple surrounded by idols, indicates they were participating in a blasphemous ritual within the temple itself. The LORD told the prophet Ezekiel that He was to make Israel aware that their forthcoming punishment was the LORD's response to the fact that Israel had broken their covenant with Him. Thus, the number seventy signified that Jerusalem was to go into bondage to Babylon, because of their refusal to honor their covenant with God – as seen when the seventy elders were baptized in the Spirit of God at the time of their willing acceptance of their role as the mediator to the Gentiles.

"Son of man, cause Jerusalem to know her abominations" (Ezekiel 16:2).

Continuing to tie His judgment of Israel's despicable departure from their God ordained role of mediating life to the Spiritually dead Gentiles – an interaction which was symbolized by the seventy descendants of Jacob who went in to Egyptian captivity – through an angel, the LORD pronounced that the judgment on His Old Covenant children will be complete after seventy weeks:

"Seventy weeks are determined upon thy people and upon thy holy city, to finish the transgression…" (Daniel 9:24).

During the seventy years when Israel was enslaved by the Babylonian Empire, which occurred several hundred years after Solomon mingled the religion of the "gods" of Solomon's wives with the worship of Yahweh, the adjacent Gentile nations rejoiced that Israel had been conquered, and the Jerusalem temple was destroyed by Nebuchadnezzar. Even though Solomon had given a place to the many heathen deities as part of a cluster of many gods, since the temple itself was dedicated to Yahweh as the chief deity over Solomon's perception of a divine council of gods, each of the adjacent Gentile nation's religious leaders emulated Solomon's collective of gods -- and they incorporated elements of Solomon's mingled religion into their native religion.

In Ugarit, which was an ancient city in Canaan (later known as Syria), their priests recognized that Moses' writings stated the Gentile's destiny ("inheritance" in the Bible) was directly connected to the chosen seventy of Israel which entered into Egypt.

Since Ugarit worshiped Baal (as opposed to Yahweh), and had a version of the Nephilim sons of God – the angels who descended from heaven to breed with the daughters of men – their "scriptures" reversed the roles and claimed the seventy were gods who mingled their seed with human women.

Each of the various Gentile nations – the Hittites, Ammonites, Moabites, and others – resented Solomon's corrupt architecture of the "council," which indicated that Israel's God Yahweh was the alleged leader of the divine council of deities – so each nation reversed the roles, and placed their god at the top of the pantheon. Because the manuscripts at Ugarit were recorded towards the time of the Neo-Babylonian empire, they incorporated Solomon's mingled religion, but reversed the roles to reflect their own heathen perspective.

"Israel's nearest religious competition, the worship of El, Baal, and Asherah at Ugarit and in Canaan, held that their divine council had seventy sons" (The Unseen Realm, Michael Heiser, page 156, emphasis mine).

This role reversal was actually quite common among competing religious traditions. For instance at Canaan when Joshua dispatched 12 spies to reconnoiter the land, 10 were faithless, whereas Joshua and Caleb assured Israel that God would bring them victory. In the Greek version of the Titans (another variation of the Nephilim story), 2 of the 12 were faithless, and the other 10 sided with the deity – in yet another role reversal.

In the book of Judges, Gideon defeats an army of tens of thousands of Midianites with only 300 men. A corrupted Greek legend mirrors this with 300 Spartans defeating a much larger Persian military. There are actually many such accounts, but the Holy Bible is always the original.

When the written Baal Cycle accounts from Ugarit were discovered in 1928 at a Syrian village called Ras Shamra, the similarities between the ancient language and Biblical Hebrew quickly became apparent. Significantly, a long standing dating error in Egyptian chronology, was compounded as Ras Shamra/Ugarit was synchronized with inaccurate Egyptian records, compelling academicians to place the Ugarit Baal Cycle in the 14th century BC – before the Israelites conquered Canaan. This was erroneously believed to be before Moses composed the Pentateuch (Genesis through Deuteronomy), a profound miscalculation which convinced a surprising number of Christian scholars that Moses copied portions of the Bible from the Mesopotamian Baal materials – when the opposite is true.

For more on the original timeline error in Egyptian history, see the author's work Escape From Planet Egypt.

These huge scholarly errors have caused great confusion, resulting in the Ages in Chaos paradigm (see the book of the same name) – and we all know that God is not the author of confusion.

Dead Men's Bones has shown that Israel stumbled and fell – severely under Solomon, when he turned from the LORD. Obviously, the LORD punished the nation – but God intervened by making a New Covenant with the house of Israel through God's only begotten Son Jesus Christ.

Since the Scriptures repeatedly pointed to the seventy Israelites as representative of the LORD's interaction with the Gentile nations (and the seventy years of captivity for Israel's apostasy), all of these references were to foreshadow the eternal blessings which were granted to those who received the Good News of salvation brought by the seventy disciples of Christ – who told of the eternal mediator between God and all men – the man Jesus Christ.

"After these things the Lord appointed other seventy also, and sent them two and two before his face into every city and place, whither he himself would come" (Luke 10:1).

- James Lloyd

To Be Continued

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