“Yahweh” also means “HE IS all things.” Nothing spiritual, nothing pertaining to eternal salvation, nor anything material, is apart from God. Yahweh alone is our salvation, our righteousness, our hope, our all. Eternal elect human spirits were breathed into their flesh from His inner Being, created from His Spirit and made in His image. Then all other eternal living spirits were created merely through His spiritual power, according to His will, not directly from His Spirit. And, to many of these other spirits of living things on earth and living things in the spiritual realm, He also granted some of His greatest attribute of love, more to some and less to others, but gave the demonic spirits, together with Satan’s non-elect human children, no love at all. So Yahweh is the source of all that is spiritual and physical, the Creator of all, even all loving and non-loving spirits. Thus, Yahweh eternally owns all that He created, and maintains all through His power. But Yahweh truly “owns” all, in the real sense of the word, since He alone bears the right to do with His property whatever His will desires. And, since He alone holds all of His creation together in real time, all would instantly cease to exist if He withdrew His power. Thus, He is not able to transfer true ownership of anything to anyone else, except to His elect children created from His very Spirit, and only after their spirits are completed and perfected by His teaching and training. Yahweh can only grant stewardship to other spirits, never a full ownership. For ownership means being entirely separated from Him and ceasing to exist. Even in hell, the demonic spirits and the human spirits He allowed to be created by demonic spirits were directly and indirectly created by His power alone, and are owned by Him. None of those spirits originated from His Spirit, like the elect human spirits did. So all of those spirits must always remain His property, maintained by Him, though He created them for hell. And, even in hell, all those spirits can only continue to exist through His power. But God must be present in every place that His power is working according to His will. Therefore, God surely must be present even in hell. Every living spirit is forced to admit before God, “If I ascend to heaven, You are there! If I make my bed in Sheol, You are there!” (Psalm 139:8, ESV). No living entity can possibly hide from God, not even in hell.
The full meaning of “Yahweh,” God’s name, was not known to Abraham, Isaac or Israel, although they called Him by this name. Yet, when God granted His Law to Israel, through Moses, a far more real meaning of His name became known to all, since the Law revealed more of His attributes, the immutable ways of just love that the will of the creating Spirit always followed, together with all His other attributes and authority. That Old Covenant Law revealed the innermost character of God, the core nature of God, what God is truly like. And, in those days, a name was meant to summarize the character or essence of a person. So, only after one truly knew the driving motives that caused a person to do all one did, would one truly know the “name” of that person. And, in the presence of Moses, “Yahweh” was the name that God chose to call Himself in the day He revealed the Law by that man. That day was the first time His people began to know God by His name. Now all God’s revelations are granted at their appointed times and in appropriate seasons, since the highest parts of the structure of our knowledge cannot be built until the foundation and lesser concepts have been thoroughly understood. Therefore, only after God revealed His Law did He give us His true name.
Through an elect spirit’s prayers and meditations on the principles of just love revealed in the Law, which God gave us through Moses, many elect hearts in Israel were better equipped to know God, to be drawn into a closer relationship with Him. Yet, even those who received God’s Holy Spirit did not feel that they had become fully sanctified and entirely familiar with the Father, not like true children of God. Abraham, Moses, the true prophets, some kings and others were granted God’s Holy Spirit, and long before the New Covenant times began, like some were even before the Old Covenant times began. Throughout history, God, who is a Spirit, chose to be with some elect souls. God spoke to every generation through a few chosen ones, by granting His counsel to some elect spirits, which they then expressed to others through their flesh. But all who heard from God’s Spirit before the New Covenant times also knew they lacked something. Only true Christians of the apostolic church in the New Covenant times felt that they did not lack anything regarding their relationship with God.
The apostles, as they wrote the New Covenant Scriptures, did not act, feel or write in the same way as the prophets, kings and other elect souls did in the days before Christ. Yes, in all history, before and after the New Covenant times began, all the awakened elect of God’s true church received the same Holy Spirit and some of the very same harmonious truths taught by that Spirit. Nevertheless, God’s Holy Spirit called the New Covenant apostles to write words that differed in only one way from what the Old Covenant prophets wrote. And the only thing that caused that one difference was the previous distance of the elect spirits from God’s Spirit. After the death and resurrection of Jesus’ body, and after Jesus sent His Holy Spirit to His church on the Pentecost, God’s relationship with His priesthood of the church of Israel changed in a profoundly significant way. One might even say that the true New Covenant church, the apostolic church, knew a truer and better name of God than the name God revealed to Moses. In the New Covenant, the name of “Jesus” (or “Yeshua,” meaning “to save” or “He who comes to save us”) was frequently used, but His name “Yahweh” was never used (although the Greek word “Εἰμί,” meaning “I AM,” was used occationally in reference to God’s name, “Yahweh”). This was not because the apostolic church observed a sinful Pharisaic prohibition against using the name “Yahweh,” since they never heeded any false doctrines of the Pharisees. The reason was that the apostolic church knew God by a new name which revealed God’s character much better than the name of “Yahweh.” Through their New Covenant relationship, God became their very beloved Saviour, dwelling right beside their own spirits within their own hearts. God was now a real Father to them, one to whom their spirits could run to at any time of the day or night, for counsel and His powerful protection from evil spiritual powers. God was far more trusted and beloved. All the joy of their elect spirits was fulfilled in Jesus, and these awakened elect spirits no longer saw God’s face from behind a veil. In New Covenant times, the awakened elect felt closer to God, next to Him at a family table, able to talk to Him freely and openly, revealing their innermost thoughts to Him and having their His innermost thoughts revealed to them. The personal counsel from their heavenly Father, and from their oldest Brother, was far deeper and more gratifying to their souls through Him.
When God revealed the Old Covenant Law, His priesthood of the church still stood apart from Him, at a safe distance, with fire and dark threatening clouds holding them back. Death awaited anyone, even any animal, who trespassed beyond the barrier set around the mountain where God's presence manifested. Only His sternest voice reached their ears of flesh, down in the valley below. But when the new Law came to Israel, for their New Covenant relationship with their God, Jesus the Christ, many elect Jews saw their sins of the flesh washed away by the sacrifice of their holy Messiah’s flesh, and the Father of their spirits drew their very spirits to near to His Spirit, so they may embrace Him. After the Holy Spirit fell upon them on the day of the Pentecost, a heavy curtain, which barred them from God’s presence in the inner Holy of Holies, tore in two, allowing them to see the face of Yahweh. Of course, when God revealed the Old Covenant Law to His church of Israel, He revealed Himself to their flesh, in a way to make their flesh fear His wrath. Nevertheless, this was one more step that He took in reconciling His people to Himself. For now they knew they must approach their God in their spirits and in truth, not through words and deeds of the flesh in the delusions and lies of the flesh. When God revealed His name and His old spiritual Law, which condemned thoughts of the flesh, He reached out to their hearts, so they might begin to separate and divide the thoughts of the flesh and thoughts of the spirit in their souls. But, when their Messiah died for their sins, rose from the dead to teach and train their spirits, when He sent His Holy Spirit to counsel their spirits within their souls, the Father of their spirits introduced them to a far superior relationship with Himself.
Like a shadow provides an outline of details regarding the shape of a real person’s face and body, and even shows how a person moves as the shadow moves, the Old Covenant Law provided an outline depicting God's general features and actions. And, since one can follow a long shadow back to its source, that shadow led us to Christ. But the real Person of God who made that shadow of the Old Covenant Law camouflaged Himself and stood in plain sight, but unable to be seen, apart from us, until He came to walk among us in the body of Jesus. Or, like a tutor describes the character and ways of a far off king in another land, when he teaches that king’s lonely children, so they can grow up to know and appreciate their father, the Law was a tutor to God’s elect children. Or, like a friend of the King, who knows much about the King, the Law testified or witnessed about the deeds and attributes of the real God, the Creator, describing Him to His children, in a way that fascinated and shaped their hearts. But a tutor or friend is not the King. The Law merely describes the High King.
By the Law, God's people began to learn about the holiness of God. But that Law also made them realize their own selfishness and sinfulness worked by their minds of flesh, while their ignorant and infantile spirits remained bullied and held captive by their flesh. And neither the Father of their spirits, nor their oldest Brother, who has always been one with their Father, was not there, beside their spirits, to apprentice their spirits, to show them how to overcome their spiritual weaknesses, to provide resources to enable their spirits to learn and put into practice what their flesh knew as theory. Through the Law, they began to better understand their desperate need to be with the Father of their spirits, their spirits’ need to be taught and trained in an apprenticeship under God’s Spirit. For only their Father knew their hearts, which He created in His image. Only He could put a new heart inside them, one that would love Him more than life, with a love that overflowed out into all His creation.
In the days before Christ, the true prophets, as well as a few other awakened elect souls, had spirits that began to sense this need. But most souls in the Old Covenant church of Israel treated God’s revealed Law as though it were just another kind of pagan superstition for a pagan-like worship. Not many of their spirits were awakened and granted the opening of eyes to see the beauty and balance of the just and God-like love revealed in the Law, the consistent and wise order of God’s kingdom, which had never been seen to this extent in the world before the Law came. Since Satan’s world order always treats God’s kind of just love as a hindrance, not as the greatest gift of life, that wicked kingdom incessantly turns the eyes of its citizens away from God’s Law. All God’s Law is built on a foundation of love for God and for His people, even upon a love for all of God’s creation. That Law reveals this love in such a harmonious and balanced way, when administered as God administers it, that no other law created through the biases of men, by their propensity for self-serving bullying, ever came close to equalling it. Not one of the pagan legal systems has ever come even close to the loving justice of God’s Law. God’s written Law itself is not love. But it truly shows how genuine and God-like love behaves, justly and equitably, striving to work good for the sake of all through love.
During this era of the fifth seal, especially now that this era is drawing to a close, a cold, loveless lawlessness has flooded over the entire world, including the false churches that are institutions of Satan’s world order. Now everyone lives in a delusion, fearing one’s neighbour, who is a soul just like oneself, with the same fears and the same hopes in the same kind of spirit. Then that delusional fear causes suspicions which create false accusations out of thin air in the deluded mind, which leads to anger and hatred. There is no attempt to find equitable justice and solutions to conflicts in all of this, through the just and loving principles of the law, which examines inner motives. There is only a demand for revenge and death. Of course, mainline churches have always replaced God’s Law with an unjust, vengeful, humanistic law borrowed from the pagan Roman Empire. But the evangelical churches, who are always influenced by the humanism of the mainline churches, have increasingly rejected God’s Law too, and Christ’s fulfilling of that Law. With existential hermeneutics and other compromises of the truth, they have become greedy, cheating, lying, thieving, cold, ruthless, unjust workers of iniquity, more vile and hypocritical than most pagans. But there was a time when some of the evangelicals cracked open the eyes of their spirits long enough to see the beauty of God’s just and loving Law. For example, Nelson's Illustrated Encyclopedia of Bible Facts (J.I. Packer; M.C.
Tenney; W. White, Jr.) recorded the following comparison of pagan secular laws with God's Law: “Mesopotamian laws told people how to handle their money and property, how to collect damages, how to get a divorce, and so on, but did not teach moral or religious lessons.... most law systems of the Near East consisted of case laws; they laid out the age-old traditional decisions in various legal cases. [Likewise, God’s Law does this too. Most of God’s laws begin by giving an example of a sin committed with full intent and malicious motives, then provides the decision and maximum penalty God would provide in His judgment of such a sin. And God’s Law cannot be understood unless one knows this.] They were cold, hard, and capricious. But the laws of the Bible point back to a personal law-giver: God. The Bible says that God gave His Law with a purpose of love. Though the laws of the Bible are firm, they point to a God who cares about human beings personally and therefore directs how they should live so as to please Him and enjoy His favor. Bible scholars call this the apodictic form of law [That is, in a conditional statement in logic often contains two clauses like this: ‘If this, then that.’ In such a statement, the apodisis is the conclusion, like the clause, ‘then that.’ So the adjective ‘apodictic’ refers to a conclusive, certain, demonstrably true concept. And an ‘apodictic form of law’ is a conclusively proven form, because it is commanded by the highest possible authority, that is, by God whom no man can ever question.], because it demonstrates how God governs His people.... In Mesopotamia, it was the king's word that was binding ... But the Law of God was different. God's statements did not control Israel; God did.... This is why biblical law contains so much moral and religious material: it tells about God and His relationship with His people.
“Rulers of the Near East were not trying to express universal wisdom through their laws. They were trying to maintain their personal political and economic power and their image as lawgivers. ... [So] they just borrowed the ideas for their own legal system... no matter where [they] got them [At times, they claimed their authority and/or their laws came from their pagan gods. But it is clear that they ruled by their own wills.] ... In contrast, the Bible teaches that God's people received their laws from God Himself, not from their neighbors....
“Biblical law was public law ... In many nations of the ancient Near East, the king carried the laws in his head, as they were his personal possession.... Thus a person could be arrested for breaking a law he had never known. The laws were [often] kept secret, even when a person was put on trial for breaking them.... But in Israel, the leaders of government read God's Law to the people at regular times of the year ... [A portion of the Law, the first five books of the Bible, was read aloud every Sabbath morning, during the Sabbath every Saturday and during the Sabbaths that God ordained during the various religious holidays of the year.]
“Individual Responsibility: The Bible stresses that each person's duty to God was more important than the duty to go along with his community. If his community was wrong, God still held him responsible for his own actions (cf., Ex. 32). [Ultimately, one’s loyalty was supposed to be to God alone, not to any religious or secular leader, not to a priest or king. Whereas the principal motive of other legal systems of the time, even today's humanistic governments, is to ensure a loyalty to men, so nothing disturbs the harmony of these men, even at the cost of moral principles.] ...
“Personal Punishment: Outside Israel, rich people could buy their way out of punishment [and kings could never be prosecuted]; but God declared that every lawbreaker must suffer for his own crime too. No one could pay a ransom for the criminal (Num. 35:31) [nor bribe a judge] ... Only the system of religious sacrifice allowed a person to offer a substitute for his punishment. [A sin sacrifice was only for unintentional sins, or for sins made unintentional through a change of the intentions in the heart, in true repentance, in a way that bore genuine fruits of repentance. And, since God provided these sacrifices for all unintentional sins, His Law legislated strictly maximum penalties for the most intentional, maliciously motivated sins, but where God expected a softening of the penalties for sins possessing some degree of repentance or some lack of malicious motive in some way.]...
“Equitable Penalties ... Universal Justice: God's Law protected the rights of the poor, the widow, the orphan, and the alien [meaning immigrants and Gentiles in their land]. God ruled that no Israelite could be enslaved forever (Ex.21:2), and He guarded slaves from abuse (Ex. 21:20-21, 26-27), including foreigners who were enslaved (Lev. 25:44). He forbade heavy penalties for debt [God commanded the rich to lend, interest free, all that a poor soul needed for life, work and hospitality. Then God commanded all lenders to cancel all debts every seven years, so everyone could begin a debt-free life again, every seven years. And, every 49 years, God returned the land that a soul sold, returning it, debt free, to the one who sold it, or to one’s heirs, so all His people could have a home.], and He told His people to share their goods with the needy.” (pp. 379-382)
God also revealed laws that were designed to set apart His people, the church, from all other peoples of the earth, from the pagan nations, from Gentiles who worshipped false gods. Of course, we call this separation unto God, this setting apart of our lives, so we can live for His purposes alone, our “sanctification.” And, if God keeps us sanctified for His purposes, then He will also teach and train us to accomplish His purposes. God Himself will make us into a righteous and holy people, since all God's purposes are righteous and holy, all done through genuine love that comes directly from the spirit, and never originate from the mind of flesh. For His very nature is to be loving in a righteous and holy way. Therefore, God made the laws of sanctification for the express purpose of making us into His loving priesthood, so we might do His loving and just works on earth, as they are done in heaven. So the Old Covenant laws of sanctification, such as the dietary laws, were for this purpose. They were highly symbolic, representing a loving, righteous life that was different from the lives of the pagans. By His Law, Israel was to learn true righteousness worked spontaneously through love, which God taught to their spirits, so they might shine His bright light into the dark world. Their light proved to be very dim, lit only by the fuel of weak flesh and blood. Nevertheless, it was a true light.
By the time God revealed His Law through Moses, the world lived in utter darkness, with brutal psychopaths seizing and maintaining power through ruthless violence. And the autocratic kings and authorities were all abused themselves, bound in their brutal slavery to demons, sins, delusions and lies. So, in this very black darkness, even the light of a small candle could blind a worldly man with its brightness. Yet, since the most evil non-elect usually rose to the top of these Satanic hierarchies, they loved this darkness, then sought to strike out both God’s light and the bearers of that light. For these Gentiles often loved to wallow in the mud and mire of their ruthless animistic religions, which strongly appealed to the pride and lusts of their flesh. In reality, the spirits of most kings worshipped demons, though they called those fake gods their benefactors and feared them, then fashioned dead reminders of those evil spirits into images of wood or stone, in the likeness of men and animals that portrayed some of the attributes of those devils they served through fear. Only rarely would some pagans take the light of the truth, which Yahweh was whispering to their elect spirits, then fashion that truth into a god of stone or wood, to worship it. That was not quite as bad as their demon gods. Yet that was not the bright and radiant reality of the spiritual realm and the truths that God created.
The Greeks and Romans, supposedly the wisest of Gentiles, had artisans who made their gods by using male and female prostitutes as models. Then they bowed reverently before those man-made images and killed all who refused to do so. The pagans exalted everything appealing to man’s loveless and ruthless flesh. Thus, they made themselves into utterly destructive fools who lived for carnal pleasures by pillaging and enslaving other souls. But all those other souls were actually their brothers and sisters, born of Adam and Eve, descended from the priest of God named Noah. Now those same Greek and Roman fools are the people we call secular and theistic humanists today, and their same darkness still fills the entire earth. But the true Israel was nothing like them. The true priesthood of Israel, the elect Jews awakened by God, received true light from the real Creator God.
The one God did indeed set apart a people, the church of Israel, the spiritual children of Abraham, as His priesthood, with access to Him and to His truth. God granted them the potential to serve Him, if their very spirits prayed to Him and meditated upon His words, so their spirits might wisely apply the revealed principles God created through their flesh, to war against demonic, oppressive and unjust delusions. In a biblical Jewish life, lived according to their elect spirits, as their spirits were taught by God, God would sanctify and separate them from the unjust and deluded Gentile nations, to work His will. What a beautiful and spiritual Law God made! If their spirits allowed their God to teach it and set all the priorities of its application, to wisely emphasize the one right, just and loving aspect over all others, that Law’s Creator would nullify all the wicked practices of the Satanically inspired religions around them. Although God's physical creation also revealed His truth to other nations, in part, God did not give any other nation anything even close to the extensive revelations He wrote down in His Law, which He awarded to His priesthood of Israel. His love flooded upon the Jews, and was meant for the good of all His creation. God chose Israel as His people through whom He would save the world, as a light to Gentiles. “For salvation is of the Jews” (John 4:22, NKJV).
All the other elect of the earth inherited a very basic knowledge of good and evil, a discernment through Adam and Eve, an inherent ability to assess God’s physical creations around them. All that is good, and its effects, as well as all that is evil, and its effects, is revealed in nature. So, if an elect spirit has its eyes opened and able to see it, that one can learn much about God and His ways through His natural physical creations alone. But the thoughts of the Gentiles were always severely corrupted and turned from that truth by Satan’s world order. The devil used the pride and lusts of the flesh to falsely interpret and apply all they saw in nature, just as Israel did with God’s written words. So most Gentile nations ended up becoming murderous, unjust, irrational, foolish, destructive, slave societies, who took great pride in exploiting the more vulnerable souls for their own selfish gain. Then Israel soon followed in their footsteps, and cast aside God’s Law. Thus, they rejected God too. Many of those Jews, like Christians today, still thought they worshipped Yahweh God. Yet, by rejecting His words, they also rejected their Creator God, Yahweh, and had merely created a false idol in their minds, one which they called Yahweh, to fool themselves into thinking they worshipped Yahweh.
Two of the most unjust, deluded and deluding Gentile oppressors in Satan’s world order were Greece and Rome. Their philosophers, like Plato and Aristotle, wrote the “scriptures” of the most Satanic religion on earth, the worship of man, humanism. They developed a religion which revealed the very most core desires of Satan, especially the desire to be a god. And, when men deluded themselves into thinking they were gods, even gods able to rule over the will of the Creator God, they welcomed the self-justifying devil into their places of power, especially into the hearts of their “philosopher kings,” who slaughtered souls and brutally terrorized the innocent, all in the name of their false, irrational and self-justifying self-worship. Their so-called “justice” was revenge, terrorism to empower the ruthless psychopaths who ruled their lands, violently oppressing all so all would serve their whims.
God allowed these Gentiles, who bore no love in their hearts for any truth, to fall into a very deep and very dark pit of destructive delusions. And God refused to reveal His spiritual, comprehensive truths to them. God seldom raised any true prophets from among them. And, whenever God did send one of His children, to minister the truth through love, those pagans usually killed those bearers of God’s light. Yet, although Israel was always a small, weak nation of humiliated, humbled slaves, a nation that was barely a dot on the globe, God granted them His written Law through the faithful prophet Moses, His loving, just, effective truths that not even the “greatest” of the Gentiles could ever hope to find by studying God’s natural creation, not even after a thousand years of walking according to the minds of their spirits. Still, while the desires of the flesh, covetousness of the eyes and pride of life carried Gentiles into an infinite array of convoluted, self-contradicting errors, into horrifying sins causing indescribable suffering and death, God reached out to them through Israel.
God directly and plainly spoke the truth to and through Israel, truth that could convict elect spirits to repentance. Furthermore, God’s wrath did not allow the foolish flesh of Israel to corrupt His words too much, nor for very long. The power of God Himself preserved His words among a faithful elect with awakened spirits. So now, this day, we still possess His untarnished words. Because God’s true priesthood of Israel was “the apple of God’s eye,” and because, by His words, their elect spirits were able to know that their sins were indeed sins, God treated Israel firmly. Like a Father of lawless adult children, God disciplined their flesh more carefully and firmly than He disciplined the flesh of any other nation. Yet, at the same time, God also granted them more mercy than He granted to any other nation, for the sake of the elect within Israel. For God knew their flesh was weak regarding matters of the spirit. Thus, by this discipline and mercy, God endorsed His written truths with might, even with His loving and teaching miracles at times, in a loving wisdom that no other nation received.
Nonetheless, that great problem obviously existed. Although God gave His wise Law to the Jews, telling them how to live just and loving lives that pleased Him, the Jews still found themselves to be like all other men. For the powerful desires and pride of their flesh overcame the logic and love of their spirits. And their unruly flesh proved to be incapable of admitting the truth of God’s Law, even when they needed that truth most. Their minds of flesh twisted and contorted the Law to gratify the self-serving lusts of their flesh. Their flesh prevented them from understanding God’s intended meaning of His words. And, without this understanding, they could not hope to ever apply it rightly. Consequently, the entire nation of Israel, even most of the elect Jews in Israel, often became as sinful as the Gentiles. Then God deemed the sins of Israel to be much worse than the sins of the Gentiles. For their access to the truth, to God’s words, provided them with no excuse for their sins. But the Gentiles did have a legitimate excuse, since the Gentiles had no such access to the truths of God. Thus, Gentiles committing the same sins remained far less guilty than Israel. Because all Gentile sins were considered unintentional, due to their ignorance of God’s Law and God’s ways, all the sins of the Gentile elect could be instantly forgiven on the judgment day, through the sacrifice of Jesus.
Like the Gentiles, Jews were simply human beings whose spirits did not have the power or wisdom to guard God's deep truths from the corruptions of their own flesh. Having the Words of God, and having the power to remain inwardly honest about those words, are two very different things. So the Jews, like all men, fell into a state of sin and very deep hypocrisy. They changed the Word of God into man-made rule upon man-made rule, into one physical deed after another. Their dull, lethargic spirits were not awakened, fed and revived by God’s Spirit. They possessed no strength nor wisdom to honestly follow God’s personal counsel whispered in their hearts, regarding His words. God’s Law and words did not serve as their guide to a holy and abundant life that fulfilled God’s loving justice, since they let their minds of filthy flesh develop all kinds of regulations of men, man-made traditions and rules which ripped God’s spiritual Law to shreds, then scattered the pieces in the wind. Through their man-made traditions, they deceived themselves into thinking they obeyed God’s Law, and deluded their proud minds of flesh into thinking they were more righteous than anyone else. But that pri