Do You See All These Things?

Matthew 24:1-2

Yehoshua/Jesus left the Temple and was walking away when his talmudim/disciples came up to him to call his attention to its buildings.  ”Do you see all these things?” he asked…

Yehoshua left the Temple and was walking away.  He did not offer the prophecies that follow concerning the Temple and the end of the world, its judgement and salvation, to those who were worshipping within the Temple on that occasion — those who did not expect judgement to come first on the House of the Lord/Hashem.

His talmudim/disciples were also unprepared for this and were not expecting it, yet their preparation was in following Yehoshua.  He gave his prophecies to his talmudim/disciples only when he was questioned by them.  He was walking away from the Temple because he was about to leave Jerusalem desolate (Zephaniah 3) and return to his Father who had sent him.

Had Yehoshua failed because he was not received by his own, and therefore the Temple would have to be destroyed?  No!  It was unto this end that he was sent into the world.  The Temple would be destroyed because it was made to be one in the word of prophecy with his body.  As his body would be raised again, so the Temple would be raised again.

Out of Yehoshua’s death would be salvation for Israel.  Out of his rejection would be the reconciling of the world.  All of Matthew 24 should be read in this light.

Since the Temple was built to be destroyed, why was it built at all?  Heaven and Earth were created in order that God might dwell with/ את /Et his dear creatures.  This is the pattern of purpose for the Dwelling Place of God that is revealed through the Temple.

God did not make the world in vain but to be inhabited, Isaiah 45:18.  God created the corruptible world to be a seed that He could re-create into an incorruptible world.  Even if death entered through sin, as indeed it did, God would re-create the world through redemption, which indeed He did and is continuing to do by unfolding and revealing that redemption.  This is the pattern of judgement and salvation revealed by the history and the future of the Temple.

Matthew 24:2 specifically

“Do you see all of these things..?”  Our experience of the Time World / Temple is an aspect itself of that very Time World / Temple.  Yehoshua’s teaching and prophecy framed that experience for his talmudim/disciples and for us.  We must experience death and resurrection with minds and hearts and souls and strength that is, altogether as one Adam, learning.  Don’t allow this to be too deep for you.  Understand it.  Our experiencing redemption as conscious souls, learning repentance, through history, through prophecy, through being subject to judgement, through justice, through mercy, all this is essential to re-creation, the re-creation of the Time World, the Temple above and below, the regeneration of the seed of the universe.

My Introduction

From column 19 the Psalms Scroll > Qumran. The Tetragrammaton

My life is characterized at its core by my seeking through a Biblical journey to understand the process of learning. I believe that this life for everyone was from the beginning, and still is, for the purpose of learning to choose life with G-d, to have faith in G-d.  And this has come to mean learning to hear G-d.  It has come to mean learning repentance.  It has come to mean learning reconciliation.  And it has come to mean learning the need for and the process of universal repair and renewal.

I have been drawn especially to understand the process of the learning that takes place within the process of interpersonal communication.  The learning about learning that takes place in the academic theories of learning, while valuable, cover a limited aspect of the great challenge of learning that we face.  Academic theories usually focus more on the learning of skills and subjects than on the dynamics of interpersonal learning.  My Biblical journey has taught me to understand interpersonal learning in the first place as the interpersonal leaning that takes place between G-d and the Human Race, between God and His creature, Adam.

It is from learning how to hear G-d that we learn how to hear one another.  And only when we have learned to fully hear one another have we learned to fully listen to G-d, for this is what G-d is telling us to do.  There is a great mystery involved for us in the great challenge of learning what we have to learn in this life, but because G-d is our Guide we are able to do it.

G-d began to guide us in learning to choose life, to have faith in Him, by forming the family of Israel and giving Moses to Israel and by putting in the mouth of Moses words like these,  “Hear oh Israel, the Lord, the Lord our God is one.  Love Him with all your heart, with all your soul and all your strength in all you do.”

My Biblical journey has taught me that all the world is called to enter into the house of the family of Israel as children or, if not as children, then as honoured guests.  The house of Israel is the place of the Bible.   It is here that we can learn how to learn and how to choose life, by learning how to hear G-d and how to listen to one another in obedience to G-d, with all our heart and all our soul and all our strength in all we do.

Getting To The Quick

Nicholas Roerich – Procopius the Righteous Praying Wikipedia

There is a way that life works and there is a way that life does not work.  And there is a way in which every person is sensitive to the way that life works and the way it does not work.  There is also a way in each person that this sensitivity to the way that life works is broken.  We might say that the way that life works is through righteous nurturing, or a righteous practice of love.  The way in which people are most often broken in their sensitivity to knowing the way that life works is in their not recognizing righteousness.  Virtually all people recognize the need of life for nurturing and the need for love.  Many, perhaps most even recognize that love is something that needs to be practiced, not just felt.  However many people, perhaps most people, will disagree with one another at some point about the right way to practice love.  People even disagree about the right way to nurture life.  The reason for all this disagreement is that people are, in one way or another, all broken within their hearts in a manner which makes them unable to perfectly recognize righteousness on their own.  It is possible for people to perfectly recognize righteousness but to do so they need divine assistance.  It was not always so.  Human beings were created able to perfectly recognize and know righteousness, what a righteous practice of love is and what the righteous nurturing of life is.  In the beginning human beings knew what life needed in order to work.

Now they do not.  Not always.  It is for this reason that the God of Israel gave his son to save the world and began this salvation by sending his Spirit into the world to show the world what the way of sin really is, that is to say, what the way that life does not work really is, so that they might also become able to learn what righteousness really is, and, finally, that God has appointed a day in which he will judge the world in righteousness by the man who he has raised from the dead.  It is in this way that people are brought into the righteousness and the life of the one whom God raised from the dead.  The Spirit of God brings the word of God to the place in the heart that is broken by sin, that has become insensitive to righteousness, and heals it.  That place of brokenness is a place of great fear and insecurity, a place that is usually guarded and protected well and few things ever get through to it.  However, when the needs of love and life call for the attention of the heart at the place where it is broken by sin, whether the sin of the first human beings or by one’s own sins or that of others, the heart is unable to respond in the right way.  Thus the individual and the life around the individual becomes more damaged.  However, when the Spirit of God brings the word of God, the word of the Good News of Israel and Her Messiah, into the human heart this process begins to be reversed.  As this process can be seen with the individual, so it will be with corporate Humanity.  There is a heart of corporate Humanity, a spirit of life in the one blood of all.  This spirit of human life God has preserved according to his will and has nurtured and cultivated himself, personally, through the covenant of his word, for the time of ultimate healing.  For that time, God has kept this corporate heart of Humanity beating in Jerusalem.  As we see the individual regenerated and brought into the life of the resurrected suffering Messiah of Israel, so shall it be with Jerusalem, with the corporate heart of Humanity.  For as the waters cover the beds of the oceans, so shall the knowledge of the God of Israel cover the earth.

Genesis One – The Imperatives

Glory of Creation by The Wandering Angel via Flickr

• For Creation, existence is an act of obedience.  And obedience is a process of learning, an act of learning.  Therefore existing is a process or an act of learning.  We are literally learning to exist.

It is necessary that there should be an aspect of apparent history with the creation of something out of nothing. For creation must have characteristics and characteristics must be organically related thus constituting character. In the creature, character must develop. It requires an element of time and experience. Therefore, even those characteristics which appeared in the creation of heaven and earth needed, as it were, a history, but they could have no history for they were created out of nothing. Thus, being created out of nothing, they were created with an apparent history.

Genesis One – The Imperatives > Read More