Why No Salvation For Demons?

I just want to think out loud today. Nothing definitive. Lots of guessing, speculating, and wondering.

A while back, I wrote two posts "Banished or Saved from Eden?" and "Once and Future Kingdom - part II", and in those, I went over the idea that since we chose poorly and went for the Tree of Knowledge rather than the Tree of Life, death was necessary in order to redeem us, and therefore not allowing humans to reach the Tree of Life made our reclamation possible. That sparked a thought in my mind.

If death was critical to human salvation, is the inability to die critical to why demons cannot be redeemed?

This is speculation, mind you! I am not claiming to be so wise that I have the solid answer. The Bible doesn't really tell us about these things. It's ambiguous enough to where some people actually believe there will be a salvation for demons. I'm not convinced of that, though. I think people dream up all kinds of things, and this is one of them. I think there is no salvation for fallen spirit beings. But why not?

There are two thoughts on the immortal nature of the spirit beings we commonly call angels and demons.
One says these beings are unconditionally immortal and therefore they can never die.
The other says the one and only unconditionally immortal being is God Himself. Other spirit beings are conditionally immortal. Meaning they can live forever, but only if God allows it. It appears Adam and Eve were conditionally immortal ...until they weren't.

If fallen spirit beings cannot die, and death is required for salvation, then there can be no salvation at all. Their end is Hell eternal. End of discussion. So, let's not focus on this.
But if their immortality is conditional, then God could simply revoke their existence. Annihilation. God, the Creator and Sustainer, can do all that can be done. The question is, can this be done? Or, perhaps if it can be done, is there some kind of limiting factor like an oath sworn by God that He would never do this? The Bible is silent.

So, according to the second line of thinking, they can die. Like Tolkien's elves. Then, why no salvation? Is it because of annihilation? Perhaps because they have no body, no mortal form, death for them is immediate annihilation, whereas death for us is a separation of our spirit from our physical body without annihilation...? Immediate annihilation would pretty effectively rule out salvation.

I wonder, if they would first be embodied and made human, then killed, would that count?
But would it count as a human death or a spirit being death? Jesus was embodied and died, but His death counted as a human death. My guess is the death of an embodied spirit being would probably just count as yet another human death among billions. It can't be that simple.

I think it wouldn't matter either way because their own death cannot redeem them. Humans die all the time but we've never redeemed ourselves. Only the death of God, as a man, was able to redeem mankind. If you turned a demon into a human and then killed them, there is not sufficient value to redeem anything, not even their self. So, it might count as a human death plus it has insufficient value. Chances are good that this path fails.

Just for completeness sake, I know of two selections from the Bible that seem to talk about Satan being killed.

(EZE. 28: 18-19) 18 By all your wrong-doing and sinful trading you made your holy places sinful. So I made a fire come out from you, and it has destroyed you. I have turned you to ashes on the earth in the eyes of all who see you. 19 All the nations who know you are filled with wonder and fear because of you. You have come to a bad end, and you will be no more forever.

But is Satan going to be destroyed, or just his works? The word translated as "destroyed" does not necessarily mean annihilation of existence. Just two verses prior, in verse 16, Satan was "destroyed" from among the fiery stones. Past tense. Yet, he still exists today. So, what really is being destroyed here? What will be no more forever?
Or, since this is a lamentation for the King of Tyre and an allusion to Satan both, in poetic form, does every little thing even apply to Satan?
I have no answer. Only questions.

And then you have this from Isaiah. The majority of the chapter is about death and it very much seems to be referring to Satan.

(ISA. 14: 15-16) 15  Yet you shall be brought down to Sheol, to the lowest depths of the Pit. 16  Those who see you will gaze at you, and consider you, saying: ‘Is this the man who made the earth tremble, who shook kingdoms'...

Quite a bit of this chapter would go well with the parts in Revelation that speak about the final defeat of evil. Yet, it's poetic, apocalyptic language. It is never a good idea to be too literal with apocalyptic poetry.
These words really seem to describe a conscious existence, as well as something that can be seen. This confounds many, because it says, "those who see you". Does "those" include normal humans, as if to say there is an embodiment involved? Or, does it refer to glorified humans and spirit beings only, with no embodiment involved? Or, is it just more apocalyptic poetry that points to a definite reality but couches it in hyperbolic language?

Both selections talk about a possible death. Neither mention any value coming from it. So, there are no solid answers other than there is no salvation to be found here. We will have to wait and see about the particulars.

I warned you up front that I'm just thinking out loud today!

I think the answer to why there is no salvation for fallen spirit beings is because salvation requires death, and 1) if they can die then they cannot die without being annihilated, and 2) even if they could die as we do, there is insufficient value in it for salvation. I think it won't matter if there is an embodiment or not. The only salvational death is God's death. God would have to become one of them and die. Not gonna happen! (I don't even think that's possible. You can't be born an angel as you can a man.)

In the end, the most reasonable choices I can see are annihilation or eternal torment. Revelation 20: 10 appears to side with eternal torment.

And this takes me right back to my post "Banished or Saved from Eden?". Good thing God kicked us out of that garden before we could access the Tree of Life, or we'd be in the very same boat as those spirit beings. Thank God for our enemy, death. Thank God for HIS death, specifically! He saved us from death, through death. God does love a good turnabout.

Thoughts?

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It is important that you understand; Everything on this blog is based on the current understanding of each author. Never take anyone's word for it, always prove it for yourself, it is your responsibility. You cannot ride someone else's coattail into the Kingdom. ; )

Acts 17:11

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Common Legalist Arguments - Part VII

In my last post in this series, part VI, we went over the idea that the law is eternal like God is. We saw that this does not work. The law had a start and an end. We saw how sin and righteousness both exist apart from the law. Most people who say the law is eternal only believe some 2% of the law is eternal. So, even as they make this claim they don't really believe it. We found what is eternal is actually the nature of God behind the law. Or, you could say, the spirit of the law. God is love, love is in the inspiration for the law, love is over and above the law, and love endures even when the law does not. We found these three things are needed today: faith, love, and God-indwelling. These three bring us to righteousness. Possess these things and you will fulfill the requirements of the law.

This time, I would like to address what I consider to be a very subtle approach that many take to justify their views on continued Old Covenant law-keeping: claiming that the law applied to Israel, and since we are "Spiritual Israel" then the law must apply to us.

A person said as much to me just recently.

ARGUMENT #7
The law applied to Israel, and since we are Spiritual Israel the law applies to us.

Certain people are what we might call "legalist". When I think of legalism, I think of a person who looks to generate their own righteousness in law-keeping before they look to faith. They often fixate on minutiae, and "major in the minors". Armstrongism is a Sabbatarian system. So, they believe that to gain righteousness and please God we must all "keep" a cherry-picked list of Old Covenant laws, like Sabbath, holy days, tithes, and clean/unclean meats for example - but never all 613. And they rarely keep those laws the way the law says to. But are they keeping the law if they aren't keeping the law?

Let's be blunt here. The Old Covenant is gone. Period. When the Old Covenant goes, the law goes. I go into this in depth in other posts (for example "Review - Written By The Finger of God"). Still, perhaps it would help to very briefly review the Old Covenant.

The world rejected God three times - at Eden, the Flood, and Babel. So, God rejected the world. To salvage mankind, God called for Himself a man named Abraham to be the progenitor of a very small and insignificant (by worldly standards) nation whom He called Israel. Out of all the wide world, Israel would be His portion; His people. This little nation would help do the most wondrous thing of all. From the moment He rejected the Gentiles, He put in motion a plan to reclaim them. That plan was to bring the Messiah, and bringing the Messiah is where Israel comes in. The Old Covenant was made between God and Israel alone (DEU. 5: 3). This Covenant literally excluded the Gentiles (EPH. 2: 11-12). Covenants are contracts. God and Israel alone were parties to that contract. What we call "the law" were the terms of that contract. The laws were specifically designed to fence Israel away from the Gentiles until Messiah could come. He has come! He alone kept the law blamelessly. And when God died, the Old Covenant dissolved. End of laws. End of division. Time for a new covenant with all nations.
Enter Spiritual Israel.

It should be simple to see why the law was brought int, how the situation has changed, and why the law must change with it. Yet some people are absolutely determined to misunderstand that message. Their teachers have failed them.

Don't get me wrong here. I am not advocating a free-for-all now that the Old Covenant law is gone. There is a standard of righteousness in the New Covenant. However, righteousness is not found in trying and failing to keep a few cherry-picked laws from the Old Covenant.

To bind us to some of the law, they have to break into the Old Covenant somehow, as if through a rear window or back door.

BACK DOORS

Let's go over some of these back doors. I discuss all this in depth in other posts, so you can always go to the Categories page to find more. But reviewing this now will help later in this post. You will find that today's common legalist argument never stands alone. It must be paired with another back door, like one of these. Needing so many back doors is evidence that the initial claim is false to begin with.

Some people misunderstand covenants and just assume the laws are separate from the Covenants that create them. That's not possible. A contract and its terms are one. The terms are the contract and the contract is the terms. What is a contract without terms? It is nothing. And what are terms with no agreement to bind parties to them? It is no agreement at all. When the contract ends, its terms by necessity are dissolved.
I speak of the Old Covenant and its laws. People think the Covenant can end but the laws are untouched by this. Understand covenants and you will understand why this cannot be. (See "Confusing the Covenants" and "Parties to the Covenants" for more.)

Some say the New Covenant is the same as the Old, which is completely redundant. This flies in the face of what God Himself said in Jeremiah 31: 31-32. He specifically said they would not be the same. If they are the same, then one isn't necessary, all 613 laws are still in force, and you're still excluded by law. I like to use Passover as an example (EXO. 12: 43, 48-49). If the law has not changed, then Gentiles are still forbidden by law to observe Passover. Saying the Covenants are the same doesn't get you Passover, it gets you excluded from Passover. The law cannot be eternal and gone at the same time. It cannot be unchanged and changed at the same time. It cannot be required and forbidden at the same time. To demand Gentiles must observe the law is to demand all of these contradictions. I agree that the law has changed! Since there are obvious changes, the answer cannot be that the Covenants are the same.

Some say the Covenants are different, but laws defy reason and magically skip like a flying reindeer from Covenant to Covenant ...but only certain ones! (The ones they choose. The  Bible doesn't choose. The Bible makes them an all-or-nothing deal.) How can some terms of a contract flit about so? They say all the terms of the Old Covenant come forward into the New Covenant unless otherwise stated. Notice, it's made up. Nothing in the Bible says this. Absolutely nothing in the New Testament says the terms of the Old Covenant come forward into the New Covenant unless otherwise stated. Since this is the opposite of how contracts work, we must have something in the Bible to say this - yet there is nothing of the sort. Therefore, it is impossible. Also, this ignores the fact that most of the 613 laws are never "otherwise stated", so they should have come forward, yet they don't appear in the cherry-picked list. And no two churches seem to agree on what that list is.

Some believe the laws were given to "us", regardless of whom Moses (DEU. 5: 3) and Paul (ROM. 9: 4) plainly and clearly state they were actually given to. If the laws were given to "us", then Gentiles were never excluded to begin with, which is contrary to the law and the Bible narrative. The Gentiles were excluded by law. In order to keep the law, the Gentiles had to go through steps to join Israel first. If they had to join Israel, then they were not Israel. And if they had to become Israel to get the law, then law was not given to them (to us). Plus, if it was given to "us", then that means all of the laws were given to us. All 613, not just a few. Now, we're right back to the previous paragraph again. Why aren't they keeping all of the laws? This back door is not possible.

Some even deny there is a New Covenant at all. Are you really a Christian if you get it this wrong? Tell me you don't read the Bible in light of the Christ event without saying you don't read the Bible in light of the Christ event. Usually, this back door comes from certain extremists who intentionally want the Gentiles to remain excluded. They cut Paul out of the New Testament and become a "Red Letter Christian" in order to minimize the New Testament as much as possible. If the Bible doesn't say what you want - change it! Yet, everything one needs to demonstrate the goal was always to bring back the Gentiles can be found in the Old Testament. (For more, read "Once and Future Kingdom - part II" where I go over a list of verses that state the Gentiles will be brought back.) And bringing the Gentiles back demands a change in the law because it excludes them. And a change in the law requires replacing the Covenant they are strangers to with a Covenant they are party to.

But of all the ways I've seen to bind us to parts of the Old Covenant, the most subtle is probably the "we're all [Spiritual] Israel now" method.

SPIRITUAL ISRAEL BACK DOOR

We are all Israel now ...Spiritual Israel, that is. It's a different Israel.

I'm not going to get deep into what spiritual Israel is. Spiritual Israel is a legitimate, biblical thing. It just means Christians. The idea comes from several verses, but mainly Romans 9. In Galatians 4, Paul uses Jerusalem instead of Israel, but it's the same idea. It is not to be confused with Physical Israel. 

In brief, Christians are all "grafted in" to the promises and inheritance given to Jesus because we are one body with Jesus (GAL. 3: 26-29). He is the vine and we are the branches (JON. 15: 5). Jesus is the true and spiritual Israel promised in the Old Testament, who reenacted Israel's journey and succeeded in every point where they failed. Because of Jesus, the entire church, both Jews (Physical Israel) and Gentiles, are the Israel of God (GAL. 6: 16).

Spiritual Israel gets turned into a back door. The thinking behind this spiritual Israel backdoor goes like this:
The laws applied to Israel, and we are all Israel now, so the laws apply to us. Yay!
...well, only some of the laws, not all, and rarely as written.

I left the word "Spiritual" out of that sentence above on purpose to illustrate the problem.

There are two distinct peoples and two distinct Covenants which are being confused. They must not be. The sleight of hand here is one Covenant and people are being swapped in where another Covenant and people belong. You need to discern this. It's critical. Just like discerning the difference between the New and Old Covenants is critical, discerning the difference between Spiritual and Physical Israel is critical. They aren't the same.

To elaborate a bit, Spiritual Israel is not the same as Physical Israel. All Christians are Spiritual Israel, and that can include some from Physical Israel, but not all Physical Israel are Christians. "For they are not all Israel who are of Israel" (ROM. 9: 6b). If it is possible to be a part of one or the other, then the two are different. Yes, they both contain the word Israel, but that does not make them the same. Just like York, England and New York both contain the word York, but they aren't the same. Joining Spiritual Israel is not the same as joining Physical Israel. And therefore joining Spiritual Israel does not join you to the the things that applied only to Physical Israel, such as the Covenant for Physical Israel. Acts 15 and 21 make this abundantly clear (at least they ought to). In other words, the law. The law is a part of the Old Covenant. The Old Covenant was made with Physical Israel alone; all others were excluded. The Old Covenant is gone for everyone. New Israel is part of the New Covenant alone, not the Old. So, there is still absolutely no reason to apply the Old law to New Israel.

Two Israels. Two Covenants.

Do you see? The thinking confuses Physical Israel and Spiritual Israel because they both contain the word Israel. And it does this in order to remove Spiritual Israel from the New Covenant, turn it into Physical Israel, and then place it into the Old Covenant. This is impossible. This is against the law. And as Jesus said, you cannot put new wine into old wineskins.

This backdoor rests entirely on confusing the two Israels. "Hey! I'm Israel now. So, that makes me the Israel that the Old law applied to. Everybody Sabbath!" No. Not at all.

The law was given to a specific people in a specific area for a specific purpose and for a specific time. That wasn't the Gentiles and it's still not. That wasn't Spiritual Israel, and it will never be.

Israelites are not necessarily Spiritual Israel. You must be a disciple of Jesus to be part of Spiritual Israel, and some simply do not want to join up. Spiritual Israel allows Gentiles in - no circumcision required! How is that possible if the law is still in place? It is not possible.

Someone might say to me, "If I am joined to Jesus, and Jesus was physically an Israelite, then doesn't that make me a part of Physical Israel?" No. We are not physically joined to Jesus; we are spiritually joined. And, once again, His death dissolved the Covenant. There is no Old Covenant to join. It's like going to your bank and demanding to get the terms of your great grandfather's mortgage. You can't, even if you are literally a physical descendant. That mortgage no longer exists.

Removing the distinctions between Jew and Gentile requires the law to be gone first. If the law is not gone, then the Jews are still separate and the Gentiles are still rejected. But we know the Gentiles are no longer rejected and the Jews are no longer separate, so the law is gone. It's the only way.
And how can those laws be gone? The only possible way is by dissolving the Old Covenant and bringing in a New Covenant. The only way to replace the Old Covenant is for one of the parties to the Covenant to die. Who were the parties? Physical Israel and God. So, either all Physical Israel must go extinct, or God must die. God promised to never let Physical Israel go extinct. Therefore, God had to die. When Jesus died, that Old Covenant - with all of its laws - was dissolved, for everyone, even Physical Israel. There is no Old Covenant to break into anymore. Either you are in the New or you're in no covenant at all. The Old is not an option. The New Covenant was made in His blood. It is the New Covenant that creates Spiritual Israel. To leave the New Covenant for the Old Covenant - or rather for no covenant at all - is to leave Spiritual Israel. Some people think they are pleasing God by this when in reality they are sitting on a fence between two Covenants, satisfying neither.

Even if it were somehow possible to resurrect that old law, you would immediately be excluded by it. And that is the main reason why those who want to resurrect the law only want to resurrect about 2% of the law. They know it is impossible to fulfill the law they say must be fulfilled, so they cheat. But you cannot resurrect only 2% of the law. It's an all or nothing deal. As James said, you break one, you break them all. (Read "Are The Ten Commandments Removed?" for more.) Are they keeping all 613? No. If they aren't keeping all the law, then they aren't keeping the law at all.

Physical Israel was created hundreds of years before the Old Covenant. It can exist apart from any covenant. That is not the case with Spiritual Israel. Spiritual Israel cannot exist apart from the New Covenant. It exists only under the New Covenant. Spiritual Israel does nothing to restore the Old Covenant. Spiritual Israel does nothing to make the laws of the New Covenant the same as the laws of the Old Covenant. "New Israel, Old Covenant" is a contradiction.

So, Spiritual Israel is not the back door into the law that many seem to think it is. One must misunderstand both Israels and both Covenants to achieve this. Having failed here, one must go once again to the list of back doors we reviewed earlier and choose another. And, as we've seen, those back doors fail, too. If any one of those back doors actually worked, the rest wouldn't be necessary. So, why are there so many?

CONCLUSION

Today, we've seen two Israels are being confused and two Covenants are being combined. This cannot be.
Today, we have seen many attempts to pry open a back door into the Old Covenant. All fail.

(JON. 10: 1) Most assuredly, I say to you, he who does not enter the sheepfold by the door, but climbs up some other way, the same is a thief and a robber.

I know I've repeated the same things a few times today. I wanted to try and say this in a way that would resonate. I figured saying it a couple different ways might just do it.

The key takeaway here is, just because you are part of Spiritual Israel does not in any way bind you to a cherry-picked handful of terms from a dissolved Covenant. That's the wrong Israel and the wrong Covenant.

[Also see Part I, Part II, Part III, Part IV, Part V, & Part VI]

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It is important that you understand; Everything on this blog is based on the current understanding of each author. Never take anyone's word for it, always prove it for yourself, it is your responsibility. You cannot ride someone else's coattail into the Kingdom. ; )

Acts 17:11

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The Legalist Dance

For years now, I've been watching a dance. The legalist dance. I didn't realize it at the time, but back when I was a legalist in the Armstrongist system, I was doing this dance myself. What is it? Please allow me to explain.

Legalism is very much like a conspiracy theory. Everyone in the world has it wrong except the legalist and a few other people who think as closely as possible like they do. Everything else is a lie. History is wrong. Books are wrong. Statues and carvings tell a tale that's wrong. Tradition is wrong. Christians are wrong. Jews are wrong. Others in their own church are often wrong. Everything and everyone, but themselves, is wrong.
Once you dismiss everything that could possibly witness against the conspiracy, then you start piling on the theories as if they're true. You can't prove it right or wrong, because absolutely everything is a lie except their claims. Something has to be right. Guess what. It's them!

No proof, because proof is dismissed. Just baseless claims shouted into a vacuum.

The conspiracy bleeds into the Bible. The legalist's interpretations of the Bible do not come out of the Bible, they are forced into it, based on other things the legalist has accepted. The Bible has to change because they need it to change to get the conclusions they want. Conclusions are pre-determined. If you believe in a "lost century" and a "great falling away" after the Apostles died, and the Early Church Fathers were all liars and deceivers, then everything from mainstream Christianity must be false. Therefore, we have to force new interpretations into the Bible, where the Jews are wrong and the Christians are wrong but the conspiracy is right. This will require much proof-texting and cherry-picking.

Take Acts 15 for example.

They rush into the chapter, grab verse 1, then head off as quickly as possible.
The legalist must undo the decision of the Council of Jerusalem in Acts 15 in order to retain legalism. So, they will remake the discussion to one that's all about circumcision and Pharisaical customs. They reframe everything in the light of a misreading of verse 1, saying, "You have to understand the discussion was only about circumcision, and only because some Jews were saying circumcision is needed for salvation." (A guy said that to me just this week.) They must focus on verse 1, willfully blind to the context of the entire chapter and the culture in that place and time, purposefully skipping right past verses 5 and 24, and you can forget about Acts 21: 25. Then they are off once again.

In, grab, out, skip. 1-2-3-4.
But what happens if we linger a while and read?

The debate was never about circumcision only. No Jew ever thought circumcision all by itself was anything. No one at any point thought circumcision led to salvation. No Jew thought babies were saved at eight days old. Verses 5 and 24, with Acts 21: 25, make it abundantly clear that the entire point was law-keeping. If we stop interpreting three clear verses in the light of one, and start interpreting one unclear verse in the light of three, then we'll see this. Circumcision is merely the gateway to the law. Can't keep the law if you're not circumcised (for men, at least).
And those Pharisaical customs, yes, they were burdensome. They annoyed Jesus. They sometimes contradicted the very law they were meant to interpret. However, Peter threw the context backward in time to "our forefathers", which reaches back in time to Moses himself, before Pharisees existed (ACT. 15: 10). James didn't boast to Paul about Jewish converts being zealous for customs before saying, "But concerning the Gentiles who believe, we have written and decided that they should observe no such thing" (ACT. 21: 25). No, that was about the law. And if it was about the law, then it also handled circumcision and customs besides. And, at times, the legalist preaches that it was about the law. One moment, they boast about the law-keeping in Acts 21: 20, then spin right around the next moment and say it was only about circumcision and customs.

Verses 5 and 24, with Acts 21: 25, make it beyond clear that the debate was over teaching the Gentiles to be circumcised and keep the whole law, and that the decision of the Council was against this. But if it was about the law, then Mainstream Christians are right after all and the conspiracy disintegrates. This will not do. The legalist cannot allow it. Therefore it must be twisted into a new interpretation. They have little choice. It's either rewrite Acts chapters 15 and 21, or give up the beloved conspiracy.

After verse 1, they samba to verse 21. But not the whole verse! Only the second half.
They say, "Moses being read in the synagogue on Sabbath means the Gentiles were being taught to keep the Sabbath law." (That same guy said this to me, too.) Except this interpretation nullifies everything else in the chapter as well as James' reiteration of the decision in Acts 21. It makes Peter's words into a secret message, encoded for those with gnosis to understand that, despite what they clearly said and wrote, the real decision was against Paul and Barnabas - to teach the Gentiles to keep the law after all. Secret codes and hidden messages are like candy to a conspiracy theorist.
Oh wait! So, it is about the law after all. It's not about the law, but it is about the law, at the same time.
They want James to say, "Some came to us, troubling you. The Holy Spirit is against this. We only burden the Gentiles with these necessary things: the whole law (except the parts requiring circumcision, and the parts forbidding Gentiles to participate, and sacrifices, oh, and national laws, and some things we don't want to do like travelling to Jerusalem.) Never mind the whole law. Gentiles should keep 2% of the law. We could say that clearly, but instead we say, 'Moses is read in the synagogues.' So, leave your Christian house church and go to Jewish synagogue. And none of this is written in the letter we send with Paul and Barnabas. You'll find this out when Luke writes Acts later on. Many of you will be dead by then. Farewell."

Makes perfect sense.

Let's go back to verse 21 and look at the first half of the verse, which was ignored. "For Moses has had throughout many generations..." Guess what verse 21 is not doing. Speaking about the future! Had Gentiles been going to synagogue and listening about Moses for many generations? No. Gentiles had only been called to the faith for a short while, not generations. Who had? The Jews! It's about the Jews, who for many generations went to synagogue and listened about Moses. The Greek Interlinear reads, "from generations of old". Use of the Greek word "archion" proves this is not just past tense but quite old. And did Moses write about the Pharisaical customs? No. Moses wrote about the law. So, the burden no one could bear was not the Pharisaical customs. It was the law. And do these legalists believe Gentiles were going to synagogue in the first place? No. The legalist believes the Jews were corrupt, so synagogues would be avoided. Gentiles could not go to synagogue. Even Jews who believed in Jesus could not go to synagogue. Christians were meeting in Christian churches, not Jewish synagogues. So, Peter is referring to their forefathers, the Israelites, who, over centuries of time, sat every week and listened to the law given by Moses. This is not at all some secret code for instructing future Gentiles to keep the law.

I could give you multiple other examples of the legalist dance besides Acts 15. Jeremiah 10 and Christmas Trees, for one. The legalists read all the way to verse 4, then it's off like a shot. They got a tree and gold and they're gone before the rest of the chapter, the context of the book as a whole, the parallels in Isaiah, and the history of the Middle East can obliterate the conspiracy.

This same legalist I mentioned also said this to me, "You have to pay attention to what they are saying. Circumcision is not a custom of Moses, they {Judaism} added it from the Abrahamic covenant, into the instructions of Moses..."
Circumcision is a conspiracy! According to the conspiracy, circumcision was a lie stolen from Abraham by those evil Jews, then secretly added into the Old Testament in several places. All those verses about circumcision - lies! And that's the message we need to hear from Acts 15.
Now, even the Old Testament is false.

See what I mean?

You just go ahead and try to point this out to them. I'll wait.
What did they do? They ignored you, didn't they? They raced off to some other idea as quickly as they could, didn't they?
That's the dance. The dance is a metaphor for proof-texting, driven by conspiracy theories.

The legalist dance is diving in and out of ideas and verses as fast as possible, staying only long enough to get what they want from the selection, then they're off again to something else before the context can dissolve their conspiracy. A hop here. A pirouette there. Like a honeybee going from flower to flower. Stop, take a bit, move on. On and on and on. Perhaps I should have titled this post "Biblical ADHD".

And if you find the intestinal fortitude to follow them through this dance to its end, you will only discover it starts all over again from the beginning, as if nothing at all had been discussed up to that point. Round and round they spin. The conspiracy simply must be right. They have too much invested to abandon it.

As I said, I've been watching this dance for years. Longer than I've had this blog! Because I used to do this dance back when I was a legalist. I just didn't realize it.

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It is important that you understand; Everything on this blog is based on the current understanding of each author. Never take anyone's word for it, always prove it for yourself, it is your responsibility. You cannot ride someone else's coattail into the Kingdom. ; )

Acts 17:11

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