Two As One

January 9, 2012 ©Homer Kizer
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Common Greetings —

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For there is one God, and there is one mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus, who gave himself as a ransom for all, which is the testimony given at the proper time. For this I was appointed a preacher and an apostle (I am telling the truth, I am not lying), a teacher of the Gentiles in faith and truth. I desire then that in every place the men should pray, lifting holy hands without anger or quarreling; likewise also that women should adorn themselves in respectable apparel, with modesty and self-control, not with braided hair and gold or pearls or costly attire, but with what is proper for women who profess godliness—with good works. Let a woman learn quietly with all submissiveness. I do not permit a woman to teach or to exercise authority over a man; rather, she is to remain quiet. For Adam was formed first, then Eve; and Adam was not deceived, but the woman was deceived and became a transgressor. Yet she will be saved through childbearing—if they continue in faith and love and holiness, with self-control. (1 Tim 2:5–15 emphasis added)

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Democracy represents the enfranchisement of citizens within a nation-state, with enfranchisement permitting self-rule and with the definition of citizen being as expansive or as restrictive as the prevailing political class allows or permits. If in a nation-state, citizenship is limited to property owners, then non property owners are disenfranchised and are not represented in the democratic mechanisms of the state. If the nation-state limits citizenship to its male members, or to Caucasian males, or to circumcised Semitic males, then the democracy will exclude more residents of the nation-state than are included as citizens. Yet, the nation-state will remain a democracy. So political democracies have no theoretic need to enfranchise women, or ethnic minorities, or religious minorities, as Americans will again discover in the near future.

Nevertheless, the historical disenfranchisement of women and of Americans of color—both African-Americans and Native Americans—forms a blotch on the stated intentions of the founders of the United States of America; for if all men [human beings] within the nation-state’s boundaries have the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, then today’s abortion of unborn Americans and yesterday’s enslavement of Americans of color are heinous acts that offend the representational democracy that as if it were a person identifies itself as the last great hope of humankind. And yes, a land or an ideal or spoken words can metaphorically be assigned personhood just as ships are traditionally assigned female personhood, and rifles have been assigned female personhood. Both Germany and Russia have historically assigned personhood to the land representing the nation-state.

It is, however, America’s neglected enfranchisement of women in the 18^th-Century that has come back to bite American Christendom, with the venom from this bite pumped into the heart of the Church by un-enfranchised women who, a century ago, overcame the enmity that long separated the seed of the Woman from the seed of the Adversary; for democracy is of the Adversary who sought equality with the Most High God (see Isa 14:13–14), with the best expression of democratic ideals expressed by Korah in his rebellion against Moses: “They assembled themselves together against Moses and against Aaron and said to them, ‘You have gone too far! For all in the congregation are holy, every one of them, and the LORD is among them. Why then do you exalt yourselves above the assembly of the LORD?’” (Num 16:3).

Why, indeed, did Moses do what he did? Moses did what he was commanded to do by the Lord. It is the Lord that opposes democracy; for as the Watchers told King Nebuchadnezzar,

Let his mind be changed from a man's, and let a beast's mind be given to him; and let seven periods of time pass over him. The sentence is by the decree of the watchers, the decision by the word of the holy ones, to the end that the living may know that the Most High rules the kingdom of men and gives it to whom he will and sets over it the lowliest of men. (Dan 4:16–17 emphasis added)

All authority to rule in this world comes from the Most High God who has given this authority to the Adversary for the destruction of the flesh of human sons of God; for all of humankind has been consigned to disobedience so that God can have mercy on all (Rom 11:32). Hence, the concepts bundled into the identifying term Human Rights form modern humanity’s rebellion against God; for what right does a human person have when God can take the person’s life at will, or return to the person life at will? What right to life does an unredeemed firstborn have? The life of this firstborn belongs to the Lord to do with as He pleases—and the Lord has already decided to take the lives of all unredeemed firstborns as the ransom price for Christians who refuse to walk as Jesus walked. For Jesus’ death at Calvary does not pay the ransom price for human beings who claim to Know the Lord yet who flatly refuse to walk in this world as Jesus walked.

What is a parent to do with a lying child who, when told that the child’s lies will be forgiven if the child tells the truth, continues to stand by his or her lies, refusing to tell the truth? Christianity is this child. And what will be done amounts to another ransom price being paid for the liberation of Christendom from indwelling sin and death, with this second ransom price being God taking the lives of all uncovered [by the blood of Christ Jesus] firstborns in heaven and on earth.

As the arrow of time points to still greater civil disorder and worldly loss of civility, the enfranchisement of mobs clamoring for equal human rights will endanger the lives of all humanity; for democracy ends in mob rule and the self-organization of the nation-state into autocratic rule to protect itself from itself. For nation-states acquire personhood that the nation-state feels compelled to protect: the United States of America will not willingly cease to exist, but will suspend Constitutional Rights so as to protect itself and its citizens from the social chaos that erupts if, say, the dollar as a currency collapsed and social safety net commitments could not be met.

When a cultural assumption exists that all citizens of a nation-state have equal human rights, then woman have as much of a right to speak in public places as men have. When churches are political entities as Section 501(c)3 tax-exempt corporations are, the pulpit becomes public space even though the church continues its illusion of being private property. If the church were truly private property, it would not have sought relief from property taxes by claiming to be of public benefit. Therefore theological discrimination against women or against homosexual individuals or even against adulterers runs counter to the Christian Church’s advocacy for equal human rights.

The Apostle Paul wrote to the holy ones at Corinth,

It is actually reported that there is sexual immorality among you, and of a kind that is not tolerated even among pagans, for a man has his father's wife. And you are arrogant! Ought you not rather to mourn? Let him who has done this be removed from among you. For though absent in body, I am present in spirit; and as if present, I have already pronounced judgment on the one who did such a thing. When you are assembled in the name of the Lord Jesus and my spirit is present, with the power of our Lord Jesus, you are to deliver this man to Satan for the destruction of the flesh, so that his spirit may be saved in the day of the Lord. Your boasting is not good. Do you not know that a little leaven leavens the whole lump? (1 Cor 5:1–6)

Are there not in every large Christian fellowship individuals openly living together without being married to each other? Do pastors not say that the Church is for sinners? Indeed, it is, but it is also for condemning sin, labeling sin as sin. The Church is to judge itself, purging willful sinners out from fellowships, delivering such individuals back to the Adversary as his seed.

All authority in this present world comes from God through the Adversary, who as the spiritual king of Babylon, functions for God as King Nebuchadnezzar served the Lord:

Therefore thus says the LORD of hosts [to Jerusalem and to the house of Judah that still dwelt in the city]: Because you have not obeyed my words, behold, I will send for all the tribes of the north, declares the LORD, and for Nebuchadnezzar the king of Babylon, my servant, and I will bring them against this land and its inhabitants, and against all these surrounding nations. I will devote them to destruction, and make them a horror, a hissing, and an everlasting desolation. (Jer 25:8–9 emphasis added)

In the days of the prophet Jeremiah, the Israelite who was inside the walls of Jerusalem fighting against the armies of the king of Babylon fought against the Lord, not for the Lord. And in this present era, the Christian who fights against civil disorder rooted in uninformed democracy fights against the Lord, who has delivered all authority to the Adversary … the authority that resides in the office of the President of the United States of America comes from the Adversary; the authority that resides in the CEOs of international corporations comes from the Adversary; the authority that resides in the papacy comes from the Adversary; the authority that resides in General Conference for Latter Day Saints comes from the Adversary; the authority that formerly resided in the Pastor General of the Worldwide Church of God came from the Adversary. Yes, until the kingdom of this world is delivered into the hand of the Son of Man, all authority in this world comes through the Adversary and his hierarchy of rebelling angels; for this is what it means to have all of humankind consigned [concluded] to disobedience.

The Most High God used the Adversary to bring about the death of Christendom as the Lord used Nebuchadnezzar to bring about the destruction of earthly Jerusalem. Hoping to preclude God from delivering all of Christendom to the Adversary, the Apostle Paul commanded saints at Corinth to cease tolerating sin and to purge the sinner from the fellowship … a universally recognized sign of life is a body’s ability to heal itself, purging from itself that what makes it sick. Thus, when the Christian Church ceased purging willful sinners from its ranks, the Church was no longer a living entity. When the Church ceased keeping the commands of God, the Church died—and the visible Christian Church has been dead ever since, but will be resurrected to life at the Second Passover liberation of Israel, when a second ransom price is paid for this dead Body of Christ.

Modern American women use their sexuality as a source of state-supported power … state-supported because the enfranchisement of women under the guise of equal civil rights permits even Christian woman to appear in public scantily clad and garmented in sexually explicit attire. It is their civil right to go forth looking as if they just got out of bed, but this is not a right received from God, who would have—if Paul’s pastoral epistles are genuine—Christian women adorned in good works and not in revealing clothing.

When the Lord God [YHWH Elohim] said that it wasn’t good for Man to dwell alone in the Garden of Eden, that He would make a helpmate corresponding to Adam, He made the beasts of the field from which no helpmate for Adam was found. Then He caused a deep sleep to come upon Adam and He took from Adam’s side a bone from which He built the Woman, and He awakened the Man and brought to him the Woman. Adam said, “‘This at last is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh; she shall be called Woman [ishshah], because she was taken out of Man [ish]’” (Gen 2:23). And because the Woman was of the Man, was an addition to the man with the Man being in the Woman and the Woman receiving life via the indwelling breath of the Man—which is why the bone used to construct the Woman was from the ribs of the Man—Adam was the head of Eve, and these two were and became one flesh (v. 24).

Elohim [singular in usage] breathed the breath of life into the nostrils of the man of mud (Gen 2:7): He did not need to breathe the breath of life into the Woman, who was constructed from the living flesh and bone of the Man. So the Man, who was of mud, was in the Woman when the Lord constructed her from the flesh and bone of the Man, not from the dust of the earth.

Apart from Adam, Eve had no life—and apart from Eve, no man or woman would have life in this world. Hence, Paul wrote, “For man was not made from woman, but woman from man. Neither was man created for woman, but woman for man. … Nevertheless, in the Lord woman is not independent of man nor man of woman; for as woman was made from man, so man is now born of woman” (1 Cor 11:8–9, 11–12).

That Woman was made from Man will have the breath of the Man in every Woman, with this indwelling breath spiritually representing Man as the head of Woman, which is then outwardly represented by both male and female genitalia.

Within the Christian community there is feinted cultural sensitivity when it comes to discussing the biological construction of men and women: when a man and a woman are one flesh through marriage, they have one fleshly head that can be circumcised, not two, and this one head is of the man’s penis, with circumcision of the penis disclosing the man’s commitment to walk uprightly before the Lord as Abraham was commanded (see Gen 17:1–11). Circumcision of the foreskin symbolically makes a man naked before the Lord by removing the natural skin covering of the man’s head—circumcision equates to scalping, a practice that apparently Christians introduced to Native Americans.

Because circumcision makes a man naked so that his only natural covering is his obedience to the Lord, circumcision figuratively returns the man to the Garden of Eden, where by the Temptation narrative it can be shown what it means for the Man to be the head of the Woman … sin did not enter the world when the Woman ate forbidden fruit, but when the Man ate. For the Man was the Woman’s covering—as obedience to the Lord God was the Man’s covering, the Man was the Woman’s covering; so what the serpent told Eve was true. She would not die when she ate of the tree in the middle of the Garden. Thus, the Man being beside her and seeing that nothing happened to her when she ate forbidden fruit no longer believed the Lord God, and he ate without being deceived by the serpent.

Adam ate forbidden fruit because he no longer believed the Lord when he saw that Eve could eat and not die; he ate because of his newly formed unbelief—

Sin is unbelief (Rom 14:23) that inevitably manifests itself as transgression of the commands of God (1 John 3:4). And because neither Adam nor Eve understood that Adam’s belief of the Lord that caused Adam to initially obey the Lord could be likened to clothing and was metaphorically the covering for both the Man and the Woman, these two being one flesh, Adam did not understand that when Eve ate, he should have rebuked the serpent and rebuked the Woman and then beseeched the Lord to have mercy on the Woman; for he was the head of the Woman. Her life came from him; she was his responsibility. Adam was to Eve what the glorified Christ Jesus [the last Adam — Rom 5:14; 1 Cor 15:45] is to the Church [the last Eve].

America’s founding fathers believed literally that a man and his wife were one flesh, that they were one entity with the man being the head of his wife. Therefore, there was no need to enfranchise women for they were enfranchised through being one with their husbands, their heads. And America’s founders would not have anticipated the breakdown of so-called Christian morality that would have women striking out on their own, liberated from the shackles of marriage and childbearing, washdays and spinning wheels.

America’s founders knew that slavery, an economic reality, was immoral, but they never thought in terms of giving two votes to a married household but only one vote to a single man heading a household; for why should one man have two votes simply because he was married and another man only have one vote because he was not married. It was unimaginable that a wife would vote for someone other than for whom her husband voted. And even to this day, most Christian wives vote for the same candidate that their husbands support. Hence the vote of the progressive female college professor is cancelled by the vote of the Evangelical pastor’s wife, but each woman feels good about herself for she is fully enfranchised in the Adversary’s preferred system of governance, democracy.

The modern Christian woman’s uncovered hair stands as the defining symbol of what’s wrong with endtime Christendom.

It is my intention to keep these Greetings shorter than Commentaries from the Margins, or Endnotes; therefore I will temporarily end this Greeting here and resume it in a later posting.

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