The Sword of Truth
A Primer on the Messiah who is called
the Light of the Gentile
by Mel West
The Sword of Truth
A Primer on the Messiah who is called
the Light of the Gentile
by Mel West
Preface*
I don't know who first said it, that the truth hurts, nor do I know when it was first said, but this I do know: the framers of the Bible, which are credited as Moses and the Prophets, had a pretty sound understanding of this precept. Moses spoke of an angel that would be sent before the Children of Israel. That angel would be feared; and perhaps one reason why he would be feared is because he shall know [and uncover] the secrets of men. Of course, the other reason he might be feared is because he is characterized as carrying the wrath of God with him. He comes during a time of God's Wrath: a time of vengeance.
Because he is also called The Word of God or the Son of Truth, in all likelihood there will be those who will be stung by His Word. So be prepared in our Similitude: we shall be seeing things and hearing things many will not desire. For we will be seeing and hearing Truth – not from man's point of view, but another.
Exodust 23.20 Behold, I send an Angel before thee, to keep thee in the way, and to bring thee into the place which I have prepared.
23.21 Beware of Him, and obey his voice, provoke him not; for he will not pardon your transgresssions: for my name is in Him.
23.22 But if thou shalt indeed obey his voice, and do all that I speak; then I will be an enemy unto thine adversaries.
23.23 For mine Angel shall go before thee, and bring thee in unto the Amorites, and the Hittites, and the Perizzites, and the Canaanites, the Hivites, and the Jebusites: and I will cut them off.
This Angel is patterned after the Angel of the Lord's Presence which first introduced itself to Abraham, then to Isaac and Jacob, and ultimately Moses. It took up residence with the Children of Israel as a Cloud by Day and a fire by night atop the Mercy Seat of the Ark of the Covenant. The Ark was placed in a tent called the Tabernacle; inside the Ark were stored the Ten Commandments, a sample of the manna from heaven, and the Testimony of God. The Cloud, or Angel of the Lord's Presence, led the Children of Israel around the desert of Sinai, Edom, etc., for forty years and then, under the leadership of Joshua, led them across the Jordan river into the Promised Land which is now called Israel.
Moses, with succeeding prophets following in his curse, ascertained that the Children of Isael would not obey their God and would deviate fom his way. In anticipation of this Moses created a Curse which would be applied to them when they stray from their God. Later prophets, such as Joel, Isaiah and Jeremiah expanded upon this Curse.
The Curse also containe a Blessing! It turns out that all the Curses recorded by Moses and the other prophets also had an attached Blessing. The Blessing ultimately said that after God had scattered Israel to all the nations and purified them with a Spirit of Burning, he would then bring the scattered remnant back to the Promised Land of Israel.
Wenote that Moses was the Gatherer or Deliverer whom God chose to act in his stead to lead the Children of Israel out of captivity in Egypt to bring them to the land promised to Abraham and his seed. The punishment for straying from the Law of Moses was to send them back into captivity; but this time, said Moses, it would be to all the nations of the world. They would flee when no one was chasing them. If they were to escape one sword another would be sent after them. They would have no place of their own until God would send them His Angel, called The Anointed One, to redeemthem and participate in the gathering of the Childre of Israel back to their land from the four corners of the world, wheresoever they had been scattered. This Anointed One, or Messiah (Gr. Christ) is gifted with the same attributes mentioned in the Angel of the Exodus. In short, He is one whom allmen will fear.
The prophets realized from the outset that the Messiah, whom we shall call the Deliverer Messiah, who is also given the title, the Light of the Gentile, will come in a period of great darkness. Nationswill be against nations, the highways would lie waste, with it not being safe to travel; it would be terribly gloom and all would expect the end of the world at any moment. At that time, in those dark and gloomy days, the Deliverer Messiah would be sent to say unto the scattered remnant: Thou art My People. Thus, He has the formal job of redeeming the remnant to God.
Before He is seen, say the scriptures, Elijah will be resurrected; and Elijah has the job of turning the hearts of the children to their fathers and the fathers to their children. Up to that moment, it follows, the fathers had been neglecting their children, etc. This makes sense because Elijah comes at the moment before a great war of Fire and Brimstone, like nto that sent upon Sodom and Gomorrah, where all the cities of man and their high towers would be brought down. The world, during the time of Elijah, says Malachi, will be purged of its wickedness by fire, out of which will be left a remnant. With the remnant God would create a New heavens and a New Earth, says Isaiah.
According to the prophets, all this begins to take place during a time calle dthe Latter Days, andmost noteworthy about that time is the fact that you will see the sons of Israel carried back to the Holy Land in the arms of the Gentile; and upon the shoulderrs of the Gentile would be carried the daughters of Israel. When the daughters of Israel are restored, the remnant that are in Jerusalem, every one of them, shall be called Holy. The reason they are called Holy is in part due to thefact that they were carried upon the shoulders back to the Promised Land. Holy things are carried by the priests upon their shoulders. The Ark was carried upon the shoulders, for instance. In all probability, animals carried to the altar were usually carried above the shoulders on a truck of some kind. Thus, we can see how the preserved of the Children of Israel may be viewed as Holy unto the Lord after they are restored. For they will have endured a terrible thing in having survived the Curse of Moses.
We suspect that the view of them is like unto the view God showed toards cities destined to be sacrificed. When God sacrificed a city before the hands of Joshua, for instance, that city so designated had to be wasted completely. Its silver and gold, its women and children, its animals, etc., could not be used for the benefit of the conquerors. In a like scenario, the Curse against the Children of Israel provided for a complete desolation of the people, to scatter them off the land, so that the land could once again enjoy its Sabbaths. These are some criteria of the scatering and redemption of Israel.
We find tht the entire time-line of prophesy since Moses is broken down into these Two Events;
’óèThe Scattering of Israel
’óèThe Gathering and Redemption of Israel
Each of these Two Events, it turns out, had its Angel or Messiah. Before the Scattering, for instance, we have the Sign of the Virgin and her son: Messiah Immanuel:
Apparently the people of Judah had been asking Isaiah to prove that he was a prophet. Elijah the prophet who preceded him was asked to give a similar sign. Elijah stood before the priests of Baal, fashioned an altar in the earth with a trench around it, filled the trench with water – which overflowed into the altar and drenched the tinder – and then called God in Heaven to light the altar on fire! Fire came down from Heaven and not only lit the altar on fire but destroyed (with the help of Elijah's sword) a multitude of the priests of Baal standing by the site.
So the people of Judah asked Isaiah for a sign. He responded with a sign far more terrible than the sign Elijah brought:
Isaiah 7.14 Therefore, the Lord himself shall give you a sign: Behold, a Virgin [or maiden] shall conceive, and bear a son, and shall call his name Immanuel.
7.28 And it shall come to pass in that day, that every place shall be, where there were a thousand vines at a thousand silverlings, it shall even be fore briers and thorns.
7.34 With arrows and with bows shall men come thither; because all the land shall become briers and thorns.
The Koran, verse, The IMRANS 3.45, refers to the Mary, the mother of Jesus, and Jesus the Messiah in the context that infers that they are equal signs of God. Mohammed was right on track with this precept. For the sign of the Scattering of Israel, and the turning of its land into briers and thorns, was the Virgin who gave birth to a son. We are not particularly concerned whether she was a Virgin or, as the Masoretic Bible calls her, a Maiden; it is significant that a young girl conceives and gives birth to a child out of wedlock prior to the moment of the scattering of Israel. The Scattering, as we might add, to fulfill prophesy, must be to all the nations of the world, as Moses so clearly described it.
We have discussed this event in Biblical Time in another work called the "Son of Man, a Commentary on Immanuel and the Gospel of Truth," 1990. This work is about a thousand pages and features a separate bound volume of the Synoptic Matrix and an Index of Bibilcal words and precepts. The Index alone is 183 pages. The Son of Man examines the precept of the Son of Man and Immanuel, whose name means "God is with us."
Since the Sign, Immanuel, was geared before the Scattering of Israel, we dealt with possible contenders for that Messiahship. Since Jesus of Nazareth called himself by the name, Son of Man, and claimed many attributes of the Messiah, we examined him. We concluded, using our Matrix of the four Gospels laid side by side (so that they could be viewed verse by verse together), that Jesus reflected a gread deal of wisdom – certainly equal to any rabbi of the Oral Torah – but nevertheless was initially confused as to which role he would paly and what time it was. He, for instance, thought it was the time for Fire and Brimstone to be rained down upon the earth and claimed that John the Baptist was Elijah and that he, himself, was the Light of the Gentile of whom we shall speak momentarily.
John the Baptist denied that he was Elijah, as shown in the Gospel of John. Most of the people, according to the gospels, thought Jesus to be Elijah and Elijah to be the Messiah! In the Gospel of John we have a suggestion that the people viewed both Jesus and John the Baptist as the expected Two Messiahs mentioned in the Bible (Zechariah 4.14) and understood by the Oral Torah (including the "Sayings of the Fathers according to Rabbi Nathan"), and so well described by the Dead Sea Scrolls. The Jews during Jesus' day were expecting Two Messiahs. In the Gospel of John we have Andrew opening the story by saying to his brother Simon [St. Peter], "I have seen the Messiahs!"
Apart from this we concluded that the gospels show considerable disagreement among themselves over major issues. As the Word of God, they show a confused God.
We also drew upon the teachings of Paul, the self-appointed apostle to Jesus [who never met Jesus in person]. In other works, "Hidden Pavilions" and "The Tempting," we had been concerned that Christianity had abrogated the Torah, using Jesus as an excuse to do so, when Jesus clearly stated full support of the Torah. He said, among many examples, that "not one tittle of the Law or the prophets will go unfulfilled." His turning over the tables of the money changers in the temple (another record places the incident in a synagogue), for instance, was an act of defending the Torah. For the Torah forbade tithes not enumerated in the Torah. Selling doves in the temple and changing money was an act of the priests raising extra monies for themselves. Cleaarly, of all his actions, that act in the temple was particularly in defense of the Torah.
Paul, it turns out, contrived a plan to transfer the inheritance of the Children of Israel to the Gentile; he authorized the Gentile to disband the Torah and created a policy of anti-Semitism, initially focused against the Circumcised Church in Jerusalem, of St. Peter and the other 11 apostles. This is dealt with in detail in the "Son of Man."
The initial set of our series of books, "Hidden Pavilions," "The Tempting," and the "Son of Man," deals with the identification and separation of the Two Events and their Two Messiahs as stated. "Hidden Pavilions," we might add, argues for the restoration of the Tabernacle, as promised, and addresses the issues involving the Two Anointed Ones as expresed in Zechariah 4.14, other prophesies, the Dead Sea Scrolls, and the Oral Torah.
The time of the Gathering and Redemption of Israel is a momentous event in Scripture. It is a time for joy [and weeping], for at the time the Children of Israel are restored to their land another Curse first introduced by Moses comes into play: God would lay all those curses it had laid upon Israel now upon all those nations (the Gentile and Heathen) who had been against his people Israel. And this Curse is expressed in the gathering of the nations into the Valley of Jehoshaphat (Valley of Judgement) to be wiped out before the face of the restored and redeemed Children of Israel. The desolation against hte nations (including those who come up against Israel or had even condemned Israel during the time of its trial) occurs through plagues, blood and a rain of fire and brimstone down upon the heads of their armies. At that moment in time the Restored Israel is protected by God with a wall of fire. And the Messiah of that epic is first seen when Lebanon is burning and when the Assyrian overflows his banks and tries to come into the land of Israel again. Obviously, if God stated he would be a wall of fire around Jerusalem and Israel, the Assyrian would not get very far with his invasion. This is mostly described by Daniel, we might add.
With this in mind let us now examine the Deliverer Messiah who must come during that period which is the time of "The Light of the Gentile." This Messiah has a significant characteristic about him: He does not go into the streets, lift himself up, or cause his voice to be heard in the streets! He, in fact, does not demonstrate the customary image of a prophet who does go into the streets, crying, as Elijah and others, "Repent!"
In the pursuit of all our works we thought to take the advise of the rabbis and tried to put ourselves in the place of the Messiah, walking in his shoes so-to-speak, so to better understand what is required of him: whether his mission reequirements are feasible, and whether we are truly watching for the right characteristics designated to him. We thought to go one step further with this venture and draw you, our reader, into the experiment, to simulate him as best we can. In all this we would be companions in the REdemption of Israel. As Rabbi hillel said,
"Sayings of the Fathers" 2.4: Do not judge your companion until you are in his shoes.
We took this on good advise and in our judgment of what is expected in the Messiah we thought that all those awaiting Him would do well to try to walk in His shoes.
Our works, of which the most recent is "The Savior of the Poor," all lead to a simple peace plan adopted from the prophets and the library of the rabbis and Jewish philosophers. Essentially this plan argues for theresotration of the Tabernacle, rebuilding the Temple with the aid of the Moslems and the renaming of the state of Israel to a name everyone can relate to: a term on the order of "Married." Our works call all those in Jerusalem – even everyone living there now – holy, and ask all those people living in the new state to recognize that they each have an equal share in it and that it should not be partitioned.
We salute the sons of Ishmael in our works because they comforted Israel's Savior, Moses, in the desert in Midian. Without his father-in-law Reuel's support Moses might never have been in the position to deliver Israel and its Torah. We salute all people, because the Messiah carries the seed of many nations, not just the Jews. See "Savior of the Poor" on this. Phylistia, even you are provided for, because the 50th Jubilee is near...
Mel West
San Francisco, CA
March 16, 1991
Postscrip: After revisiting this text in February 2008, I found some things that I don't presently agree with, so I deleted them. Islam has taken a bad turn, being dominated by a murderous psyche, as we watch suicide bombers spreading devestation against people of all faiths. Murder is not condoned among the faiths, and killing on behalf of God seems to go against all objectives expessed in the Bible. For those who would like to read the pdf version of the original book, here it is: Sword of Truth and Bibliographical Information.
Chapter 1
Fire Fueld by Precepts
It has been a matter of days now since Desert Storm completed its fury; still the troops are being held in Iraq in anticipation that the King of Babylon may rise up again.
Notes:
* A 61 page book mailed to world leaders in 1991 – While this book might have ruffled the feathers of those to whom it was sent, seeming to be preposterous at the time, recent events cause the writer to ponder more what he wrote, hoping to find a common meeting place for the faiths. Another work of the time, "Romance of Anaisfille," carries the same message and was written as an update of the story chronicling the days and heirs of King Arthur. It picks up from the last Grail King, Sir Parzival, and carries forward the story. This "children's story" had a sinister king named George, who reigned over a mythical kingdom called "Quakinbush." The setting of the story was during the Crusades, involving the invasion of Iraq, the most curlish conduct by a king of any time, and significantly it spoke of the son of King George who was notoriously incompetent and invaded Iraq again and carried his crusade even to Afghanistan. These works were written long before George W. Bush was known, at least to this writer, and certainly not a figure active in the nation's politics. The romance was a satire on the presidency of George H. W. Bush.
Mel Copeland
February 8, 2007
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