The Blood of the Sabbath

Welcome, once again, it's good to see everyone here this morning. Today, we are going to talk about the blood of Jesus in a certain context. I titled today's presentation, The Blood of the Sabbath.

So we're going to understand this relationship between Jesus's blood and the Sabbath and what that means to us today. In order to come to that, we need to do a little bit of a dive into the calendar of God. So first I'm going to talk about the calendar, just briefly, but some of the important parts, and then we will look more at how that relates to the blood and to the Sabbath, connecting those things together.

So first of all, we are familiar with what is known as the Gregorian calendar. The Gregorian calendar is a solar calendar, it means every year on the Gregorian calendar we come back and the sun is in the same place as it was the year prior. But the Bible calendar is not strictly a solar calendar, but a lunar calendar, with some influence from the sun as well, we will talk about that in a little bit.

But there is a great deal of confusion, honestly, surrounding everything relating to any Hebrew or biblical calendar, because there's so many different possibilities and ideas that people have for how these things are defined. Unfortunately, many of them, or most of them, are lacking a truly biblical foundation. There aren't, in certain cases, a lot of details given in the Bible about the calendar, and that leaves many people to feel free to read into the Bible their own ideas, instead of extracting from the Bible what the information is that is there, giving understanding of the calendar. So looking at Exodus chapter 12, this is where the children of Israel were just about to come out of Egypt. The plagues had fallen, they're ready to leave, and then the Lord speaks to Moses and Aaron in the land of Egypt, saying, this month shall be unto you the beginning of months. It shall be the first month of the year to you.

So God is giving his people a calendar. They didn't have, or if they had one, they lost it from before, so they had been in slavery for hundreds of years. Now he's giving them anew the calendar, and he says, this month.

Now if I ask you, what is this month, you'll say, well, it's April. You don't need any reference for that. But in the Hebrew thinking, they were not abstract thinkers.

They were very tangible. And when God told Moses this month, he was, as it were, pointing to something. There was something tangible there.

And in fact, the word month is translated as month, but it's the very same word as moon. So this could equally well be translated, this moon shall be unto you the beginning of moons, or the beginning of months. That's how they measured the months was with the moon.

So it becomes clear then that the object in reference for the month was the moon. He pointed to the moon. When the new month was registered in Israel, it was the first time they could see the moon after the new moon.

So every month, the moon disappears, and then the first sliver of light, when you can just see the moon, that is then when that new moon, that new month begins. And it's interesting because that happens when you first see the moon. It's too dim.

It's so thin, you can't really see it until the sun sets. And then when the dusk is dark enough, you can start to see that sliver of the moon. But the moon is at the same time setting.

So there's just a short period of time when you have this opportunity to see the moon in that first day of the month. And that defines how they would observe the month. And it also points to when they would see it, then they would say, okay, this is the first day of the month, and it was that day that began with sunset.

So when the sun set, then they observed the moon, okay, this is the first day of the new month. So that's just the basic operation of how a couple of parts of the calendar work. The new moon defining the new month.

But we see there are some other aspects that will come out when we study the calendar with respect to the cross. That's what we're going to do. Just briefly, looking at a prophecy in the Bible that points to the time when Jesus was to be crucified.

I'm not going to go into a lot of detail about this prophecy. It's a rather complicated and difficult prophecy in some respects. But I'm just going to draw a few key points from it.

It comes from Daniel chapter 9, verse 25 to 27. It's known as the 70 weeks prophecy. Know therefore and understand that from the going forth of the commandments to restore and to rebuild Jerusalem unto Messiah the Prince shall be seven weeks and three score and two weeks.

In other words, 69 weeks. So we have the time frame being defined here. From a commandment to restore Jerusalem.

This prophecy was given to Daniel at a time when they were captive in Babylon. Jerusalem was destroyed. And so the prophecy was that there would come a commandment to rebuild and restore the city of Jerusalem.

And that would be a marker in time at the beginning. And then 69 weeks, then would come Messiah the Prince, that is, Jesus. The prophecy continues, the street shall be built again and the wall even in troublous times and after three score and two weeks, that's the 69 weeks in total, shall Messiah be cut off, but not for himself.

So after that time, Jesus would be cut off or he would give his life, but not for himself because he gave his life for many others. And the people of the prince that shall come shall destroy the city and the sanctuary and the end thereof shall be with a flood and until the end of the war, desolations are determined. And then it says this, and he shall, that is Jesus, the Messiah, shall confirm the covenant with many for one week.

That's the 70th week. So there's 69 weeks and then this 70th week. And in the midst of that 70th week, he shall cause the sacrifice and the oblation to cease.

So it's saying specifically when Jesus would die in the middle of that 70th week, which comes that 70 weeks after the command to restore and rebuild Jerusalem. So in total, 69 plus half a week is when Jesus would give his life on the cross. The last bit of the verse here, I didn't finish, and for the overspreading of abominations, he shall make it desolate, even to the consummation, and that determined shall be poured upon the desolate.

So that's just talking about other aspects of the prophecy, not so much our concern at the moment. But the question is, what decree is it talking about to restore and rebuild Jerusalem? Because there were more than one. In fact, there are three of them described in the Bible.

In the book of Ezra, there's one in chapter one, one in chapter six, and one in chapter seven. Each of these has some element of a command to go and restore or rebuild Jerusalem. But in particular, I'm just doing an overview here, so I'm not going to go over the details, but historically, in 457 BC, King Artaxerxes of Persia gave the command that is the relevant one, and when we calculate the 69 weeks, of course these are weeks of years in this prophecy, then that's 483 years, and that comes to the year 27 AD.

And what was significant about that year? The prophecy said that was the time when Messiah the Prince would come, and indeed, this was the year when he began his ministry. But it was the beginning of that 70th week. In the middle of that 70th week, that would be after three and a half years from AD 27, that would be in the year AD 31, that would be when Jesus was crucified.

So what we have is a biblical foundation that gives us the year through understanding the prophecy when Jesus was crucified, and that's very important. Unfortunately, many people don't understand this relationship, and it's not completely without reason, because this is just the year, but we also want to know the time of the year that Jesus was crucified. What day was it? Well, it's clear in the Bible that Jesus was crucified on a certain feast day in Israel.

What feast day was that? Passover, exactly. So Jesus died on Passover, and we have a biblical definition for when Passover should be held. Passover is on the 14th day of the first Hebrew month.

Now here's the thing. When we look at the calendar, the first month, Hebrew month, is called Nisan, and that happens to come in March, thereabouts in March of AD 31. And in that year of AD 31, on the Julian calendar, this was before the Gregorian calendar, we find the Julian calendar, March began on Thursday, and this would be the calendar for March.

So in the faded gray is March, and then black shows when the first month of Nisan in the Hebrew calendar would begin. And so that would be here, and then you would count until the 14th day, and it comes on a Tuesday. So if this is the correct time when Jesus was crucified, we know he was crucified on Passover, the 14th day of the first month, that would have been a Tuesday.

Well, that doesn't fit with the Bible, because the Bible makes it clear he died on what? On the Preparation Day. Good Friday we celebrate, because that was the day that Jesus died. He gave his life on a Friday, not a Tuesday.

So there must be a problem with this, it wasn't in March. And what we find is a first principle, you'll notice here we have March 21st, what's special about March 21st? That's the spring equinox. Okay, it can vary a little bit, but that's the official beginning of the year, at least on the solar calendar.

And so we see this combination that this isn't the actual beginning of the Hebrew year, because if it were, the first day of the month would begin a full week before the sun even registered the spring. So we say, okay, let's look at April. What does the calendar look like in April? Well, here is the April calendar, the Julian calendar for April in gray, and then when the first crescent moon was seen, that would be on Thursday, counting 14 days, and you come to Wednesday, still not a Friday.

So what does that tell us? The Bible gives us another insight. When God was pointing out the moon to him in Exodus chapter 13, and Moses said unto the people, remember this day in which ye came out of Egypt, out from Egypt, out of the house of bondage. This day came ye out in the month Abib, okay? That's the same as Nisan, it's just Nisan is the later term for the same month, but this is the Hebrew word, and in Hebrew, this word Abib refers to the fresh barley. When they had barley that would grow, the grass in Israel, plenty, and when it would be fresh and green, that was called Abib. That was how they knew when it was that month, is when the season, when the grass showed, it's Abib, then they knew that was the month. So it wasn't strictly just by observing the moon, but they would observe the moon, and if there was barley that was Abib, then that would be the first month, but if not, then would wait until the next month, and that would be the Abib barley.

So that's the condition of the barley that would be sought, and therefore, if in April there wasn't that barley found in the right state, then it couldn't be the month of Abib. And therefore, we look one more month in May, still the springtime in AD 31, the Julian month of May began on Tuesday, and the Hebrew month, the sighting of the moon was on May 11th. There's software that helps us. It's based on actual observations, so it can calculate whether you would be able to observe the moon or not, and that helps us to identify exactly the day, but it's always one or maybe two days after the astronomical new moon, which was on the 10th in that case.

But details aside, counting the 14 days, lo and behold, you have a Friday for the 14th, that Passover, and therefore, this must be the scenario for when Jesus was crucified. There's no more ambiguity. Because the prophecy points to AD 31, and this is the only month when Passover falls on a Friday, it must be this late month on the 25th of May when Jesus was crucified.

And this also confirms the need for that barley test. That's one of the rules of the biblical calendar, and we know that that must be a rule, because if it weren't a rule, then it would be in April. But because it must be in May, we know that that barley test is a valid rule that should be kept.

All right, so that's how the cross points us to the correct calendar of God. Now, this was Passover on the 14th, but there were certain Sabbaths that were declared as ceremonial Sabbaths in the feast seasons of God. And there was a week of unleavened bread that began immediately after the Passover.

On the 15th day of the month, that was the first day of unleavened bread, and that was declared a ceremonial Sabbath. Now, here's the interesting thing. That ceremonial Sabbath fell on a weekly Sabbath.

So there's two types of Sabbaths that we're talking about here. Every seven days, you have the weekly Sabbath, but there's also the ceremonial Sabbath. Those are once a year on their appointed time.

And once in a while, they coincide, where you have the feast Sabbath also on a weekly Sabbath. Oftentimes, they're at any other time of the week. But in this case, Jesus died on the cross on the 14th toward the evening on Passover, and then he was in the tomb, and he rested in the tomb on that 15th day of the month, the first day of unleavened bread, and then he was raised on the 16th, which was May 27th.

This is confirmed in John chapter 19. It's speaking of his crucifixion. Jesus had been crucified.

It said the Jews, therefore, because it was the preparation, that is Friday, that the bodies of the crucified should not remain upon the cross on the Sabbath day, and then it puts this parenthetical statement in there. For that Sabbath day was an high day. The Jews, therefore, besought Pilate that their legs might be broken and that they might be taken away.

So they had the three people crucified: Jesus in the midst of two thieves, and they wanted to hurry this up so they would break their legs and get them buried before the Sabbath would come. And then in this statement, that Sabbath day was a high day, and high day is what they would call those ceremonial Sabbaths. They were high days.

And so this is saying that high day of the first day of unleavened bread was also a Sabbath day, a weekly Sabbath day. That's what it's pointing out, making that distinction or clarifying that point that the two were in that time overlapping, the weekly Sabbath and the festal Sabbath. Paul, in Colossians, tells us something about these Sabbaths because there's a significance in this overlapping of the Sabbaths, not the least of which is that Jesus was buried in the tomb on that day.

That gives it a lot of significance, but there's also prophetic significance, and that's what Paul refers to in Colossians 2, verses 16 and 17. Let no man therefore judge you in meat or in drink or in respect of an holy day or of the new moon or of the Sabbath days. And then he says, those Sabbath days or these things which are a shadow of things to come.

That means they're prophetic of things yet to come in the future. But the body or the essence is of Christ. The significance of it is in Christ.

So it's pointing to a future time. First he speaks of meat or drink or holy days, new moons, what sort of things are those referring to? These are the ceremonial feast days that it's talking about when these things were involved. And then he mentions the Sabbath days.

So he's including both aspects. There's the feasts and in combination with the Sabbath, and together those are a shadow of things to come. Now the question is, how would we know what that prophecy is? What is it pointing to? What things is it pointing to that are to come? This is about the calendar.

It's about time. And these Sabbaths and high Sabbaths, once we understand God's calendar, we can see how that plays out in our time. And so we can know exactly when the feasts are according to God's calendar in our day.

And we know when the weekly Sabbath is. And so we can see how those high Sabbaths are scheduled in our time, just the same. And just so you have a visual picture of this, the weekly Sabbath, of course, every seven days, each one of these marks represents one Sabbath.

And then in blue are the annual Sabbaths. There are three Sabbaths in the springtime and four Sabbaths in the autumn. And then the high Sabbaths are when they're aligned.

So the red mark shows the alignment between the Sabbath of the appointed feast and the weekly Sabbath. Similarly, on this side. So we have three possibilities for a high Sabbath in the spring.

And in reality, there's only two options in the autumn because three of them are all together. When there's one high Sabbath there in the Feast of Trumpets, then there's also high Sabbaths, two more in the Feast of Tabernacles that week. And then the other option is when Yom Kippur is a high Sabbath.

So that's just to give a visual understanding. And you can see if you take the time, you could plot out all of those potential high Sabbaths that could happen in a given time. And what we've done is through all the years of the time of judgment from 18 in the 1840s all the way until 2015, and there's a reason why we stopped there, but I'm not going to go into that.

We've tabulated all of the potential high Sabbaths according to what groups they might be in, whether one of the three in Nisan or one of the two in Tishri, and we make this big long table. And then you say, what do you do with all of that? Well, that's where it starts to get very interesting and more relevant to our discussion. Because just as we look up and we see in the heavens many symbols and shapes that represent different things that we might see on the earth, so it is in this case.

Except it's not something that God created in the heavens, but it's something that he created on the earth on a much smaller scale. Because this has the representation of something that looks a lot like DNA. You've got these two strands on the outsides representing the spring and the autumn feasts, and for each of those feasts there are connecting links which are the high Sabbaths.

Which high Sabbaths there are in any given year, there are a given set of possible high Sabbaths that year. And this forms this long code, long sequence of codes that seems a little bit, or maybe a lot unintelligible at first, but in fact there's a lot of information there, just as there is in biological DNA. There are many correlations between the list of high Sabbaths and DNA, and I'm not going to talk in too much detail about that, but one key place where we find DNA in the body, the most readily available source, is in the blood.

Now this is interesting because it's not actually in the red blood cells, but blood has two different major components, the red blood cells, and then to a lesser degree there are white blood cells, and it's those white blood cells that have the DNA. So this analogy of the high Sabbaths to DNA must relate to the function of the white blood cells. Who can tell me what white blood cells are for? Okay, it's a mechanism for defense, protecting your body, it's part of your body's immune system.

Exactly. And the immune system fights off infections. So you get infected and your body activates these white blood cells, they multiply and they fight off that infection.

And there's many correlations with that whole biological process of how that happens and how the DNA is used to fight off an infection. And of course, in the spiritual sense, the infection is what? Sin. Sin, exactly.

So the high Sabbaths relate to blood and they relate to fighting off the infection of sin. That's the spiritual analogy that he who created the body with all of these special molecules and cells, he did that knowingly, and he put that analogy in there to draw our attention to that work. We've talked about what the different constellations represent, and the symbolism points to the different commandments.

And the Sabbath is a time commandment and that points to the horologium. So the blood, we've seen also before how the horologium is the wine press, it represents the blood aspect. And the other side of the sign is Orion.

And I've drawn it here with the judgment cycle, which is very relevant to those high Sabbaths. It takes the same time frame from 1846 until 2014 / 2015. In that time, 168 years, that was what we call the judgment cycle. It's the time when we looked at all of those high Sabbaths that give information about that blood, that DNA, if you will.

It's a representative of one of the feast days. Which one? Yom Kippur, it's the day of judgment. In the autumn feasts, there was a day of trumpets at the beginning of the month.

Then on the 10th day of the month, there was Yom Kippur. And it just means the day of judgment. And then there was the feast of tabernacles with two other Sabbaths there.

So here we have in Orion represented this day of atonement. It's a feast day, an annual Sabbath. And the weekly Sabbath, the commandment, the seventh day Sabbath, represented as we saw in the Horologium with the Ten Commandments.

So we have the weekly Sabbath represented in the Horologium, the annual Sabbath represented in Orion. And we're interested in the high Sabbath, which is when the two come together. Do you see what combines the Horologium and Orion? It's the river, Eridanus.

That's the blood that flows from Jesus. So you see how everything fits together. The high Sabbaths themselves point to DNA.

They give that visual impression with this long list of spring and autumn with connecting links of the high Sabbaths. It points to DNA. It's about the immune system, how we overcome sin in our lives.

And that is through the blood of Jesus Christ. And so that points directly to the Eridanus, that river of blood that flowed from Jesus' side. And that's what connects Orion, the annual Sabbath, with Horologium, representing the weekly Sabbath.

So what we see here is that Eridanus points to the high Sabbaths. It points to that list of high Sabbaths or that DNA of Jesus by which we overcome sin. And of course, we're familiar with this part inside the sign that represents the Church of Philadelphia.

So the Church of Philadelphia is one that combines the annual Sabbaths with the weekly Sabbaths. Although we chose our name in 2016, High Sabbath Adventist Society, long before we knew any of this relationship, but we did understand the high Sabbath list and that it pointed to the DNA of Christ. And we see that in the sign represented there in that position that we now understand to be the Church of Philadelphia.

With the additional year that we've been talking about in recent weeks, we see those who accept the blood of Jesus, they continue and ultimately go with Christ. And then on the other side, we have those who reject the blood of Jesus. So let's look at this relationship a little bit more from the biblical perspective.

Let's look at the Horologium and the Sabbath, the weekly Sabbath in the commandment. It says, remember the Sabbath day to keep it holy. Okay, I'll leave it there for now.

In Orion—remember this points to the Day of Atonement, and that day is described in the book of Leviticus, chapter 16. That whole chapter is dedicated to this day. But in verse 29, it says, and this shall be a statute forever unto you, that in the seventh month, on the tenth day of the month, you shall afflict your souls and do no work at all, whether it be one of your own country or a stranger that sojourneth among you.

For on that day shall the priest make an atonement for you to cleanse you, that ye may be clean from all your sins before the Lord. You see the relationship? The priest, Orion, represents Jesus as the high priest, and he cleanses us from our sins by his blood. And it also mentions that this day would be a day of affliction, of afflicting your souls, and a day of rest.

When no work, so it was a Sabbath day, an annual Sabbath day. It shall be a Sabbath of rest unto you, reiterating that point, and ye shall afflict your souls by a statute forever. There we go.

And the priest whom ye shall anoint and whom he shall consecrate to minister in the priest's office, in his father's stead, shall make the atonement. So Orion makes the atonement, if you will, and shall put on the linen clothes, even the holy garments. So it's the priest, it's Jesus in Orion, who gives us, he's the lamb slain from the foundation of the world.

That's what is represented in Orion, Alnitak of Orion, the wounded one. So I just wanted to ask you to remember this affliction of the souls. Don't let me forget to come back to that.

But meanwhile, let's look back at Colossians, because he says these ceremonial Sabbaths, or the feast Sabbaths, and the weekly Sabbaths, they are a shadow of things to come in our time. Now we see that it points to the judgment period and this final time of cleansing in the blood of Jesus. And that's where it comes to the body of Christ.

So what we see here, we have the day of atonement represented in Orion. And that comes from which law? That's the ceremonial law, what we would call the law of Moses. Whereas the weekly Sabbath comes from the moral law, the Ten Commandments.

And Jesus is represented in both. We have Jesus in Orion, and we have Jesus on the cross in the Horologium. And where are we represented? God's people, in general, in the middle of Philadelphia, we're in the body of Christ and receiving the blood of Jesus.

That's the combination of Orion and the Horologium, the annual and the weekly Sabbaths. And that's where we find that healing represented. So we have Moses's law represented in Orion, and we have the Ten Commandments, the moral law represented in Horologium.

But here in the body of Christ and his people, there is that combination written where? In the heart, in the blood of his people. So that's what this is pointing to. There's the two different laws on one side, but we have it written in the flesh, in the heart of the people.

So looking back now at the commandment, it says, remember the Sabbath day to keep it holy, six days you shall labor and do all your work. Now it starts to go into some of the details of the weekly Sabbath. But the seventh day is the Sabbath of the Lord thy God.

In it thou shalt not do any work. Thou nor thy son nor thy daughter, thy manservant nor thy maidservant, nor thy cattle, nor thy stranger that is within thy gates. Now, how many have manservants and maidservants? Nobody? This is a description that is very particular.

It's geared specifically toward the culture in which it was given. At the beginning, it says, remember the Sabbath day to keep it holy. But then he starts giving these details that were pertaining to those people specifically and their lifestyle.

And then it continues, now it gives the reason to keep the Sabbath. For in six days the Lord made heaven and earth, the sea and all that in them is, and rested the seventh day. That's an important point.

It's going back to creation and the rest on the seventh day. Wherefore the Lord blessed the Sabbath day and hallowed it. Now, this blessing, you can read the whole Bible front to back.

There's nowhere where that blessing is taken away. The Sabbath is blessed by God. If it weren't for the Sabbath day, we would have never come to the understanding of the high Sabbath and its relation to the blood, to salvation, or any of the many things that have come from that.

It's only made possible because of the keeping of the Sabbath. It enabled us to make those discoveries. All right, let's look at this passage first in Matthew chapter 12.

At that time, Jesus went on the Sabbath day through the corn, that is the wheat fields, and his disciples were in hunger and began to pluck the ears of corn and to eat. So they're wandering through this field, his disciples are with him and they just nibble on some of the wheat that is growing in the field. But when the Pharisees saw it, they said unto him, Behold, thy disciples do that which is not lawful to do upon the Sabbath day.

So here we're getting into details of how to keep the Sabbath, or at least that's what the story is about. And there was a disagreement between the Pharisees and how they would keep the Sabbath and how Jesus and his disciples kept the Sabbath. Because Jesus didn't say, Oh, sorry, my disciples shouldn't have been eating or getting the grain out of the kernels on the Sabbath day.

But Jesus said unto them, Have you not read what David did when he was an hungered and they that were with him? How he entered into the house of God and did eat the showbread, which was not lawful for him to eat, neither for them which were with him, but only for the priests. Now, what law is Jesus talking about this? He says it wasn't lawful for David to eat. It's a ceremonial law, the law of Moses.

There it's written in the essence that that was only for the priests. And then he continues and he says, Or have you not read in the law how that on the Sabbath days the priests in the temple profane the Sabbath and are blameless? And what law is he talking about there? Which law? That's the fourth commandment. He's talking about profaning the Sabbath, the weekly Sabbath, because the priests, they always had work on every day of the week.

They would be working. And therefore, that work was profaning the Sabbath because the Sabbath says you shall not work on the seventh day. And yet Jesus pointed out they are blameless.

But Jesus continues, If ye had known what this meaneth, I will have mercy and not sacrifice, ye would not have condemned the guiltless. So again, he reiterates that his disciples are also guiltless.

For the Son of Man is Lord even of the Sabbath day. Now that's a power-packed statement. And I would like to look at that in a little bit more detail.

So first of all, he says, I will have mercy and not sacrifice. We talked a couple of weeks ago about how that connects with the sign of the Son of Man. Where is mercy represented? In Orion.

And sacrifice, that's represented in the Horologium. And of course, we have already seen how the Sabbath, the weekly Sabbath, is represented there at the cross. And Jesus said, take up your cross and do what? Follow me.

And where did Jesus go from the cross? Yeah, following K2, he was buried and resurrected. After the cross, he took his cross. If we are to take his cross and follow him (of course, we first come to the cross), but after that, we take the cross through burial and baptism. And then in resurrection, the newness of the life of Christ. So what this represents is a process from going from sin, the sacrifice, the sacrifice that was made for sin, Jesus dying on the cross, through baptism, that death to self, and then having freedom, freedom from sin.

That's the process that is illustrated. And that's what Jesus means when he says, take up your cross and follow me. He's saying, leave sin behind and be free from sin.

And when we're free from sin, that's when we have the law written in our hearts. It's when we no longer need the written law because it's in the flesh. The Sabbath is a rest.

It points to our rest in Christ, in his sacrifice. We come to rest. And that rest brings us the freedom from sin that we have through Christ's sacrifice.

Now, there's something that Paul said that drives this point home. In Galatians chapter 3, he says, wherefore, the law was our schoolmaster, the commandments, the law was our schoolmaster to do what? To bring us to Christ, to bring us unto Christ, that we might be justified by faith. But after that faith is come, we are no longer under a schoolmaster.

So the law, whether Moses' law or the Sabbath or the Ten Commandments, the law was given as a schoolmaster. That's a teacher. When a teacher is teaching something, they use props or illustrations to make a point. And we saw how even in the Sabbath commandment, and it's also the case in some of the other commandments, the wording there is not very relevant to us in the 21st century. Most people, at least in our modern societies in the cities, don't have cattle. And if they do have cattle, like we have some cows here, we don't use them for work.

Like the Sabbath commandment was talking, refrain from making your cattle work. But in those days, the cattle were the strong animals and they would use them for work— the oxen to plow the field or to thresh the grain. They would do that kind of work using the animals. And therefore, God was writing in the commandments targeting those people who were in that kind of a lifestyle and saying, don't do that. They had servants, men servants, maidservants.

And therefore, he was showing how it applied to them. There was an underlying principle in the law that he was using that he wanted to teach them. And that's what the purpose of the law was for.

It was a tool to teach them that underlying principle. I want to back up here a little bit. In Orion, we mentioned that it represents the Day of Atonement.

That was that feast day in the beginning. I said, don't let me forget. And that's what I want to come to now about the affliction of the souls.

All right. This Day of Atonement, it was one day out of the year, but that was in the ancient times. In the end time history, it points to a whole clock cycle, actually 168 years that represents that time of afflicting the soul.

And this is the same time when the schoolmaster was needed again, when God saw fit to bring his people back to the law, back to the schoolmaster, because they had forgotten some things. They didn't have his law in their heart anymore. And so they needed that instruction again.

And so he brought a certain church. He raised up a church in this time frame, the Seventh-day Adventist church. And they had an understanding of the law, the Sabbath, and they observed the weekly Sabbath throughout this time, in addition to some other aspects of the law as well.

And that was, as Paul said, as a schoolmaster, bringing God's people back again to Christ, coming back from the law to being written in the heart. And so that's the affliction of the soul. That's what it's talking about.

Traditionally, the Jews would fast on the Day of Atonement, on that Judgment Day. And so even that is represented in some special dietary habits that God gave to the Seventh-day Adventist church during that time. But the question is, do you fast forever, or is it an allotted time? It's always an allotted time, and that time was specified, in fact, very clearly, identified as from evening until evening.

Just that Day of Atonement, that was their time when they would afflict their souls. But afterward, they were freed from that affliction, from that burden of heart and sorrow of heart, as it were. And therefore, what we see is this period of time when God intentionally brought the law back so that it would serve as a schoolmaster to re-teach what his people had lost over the years.

Because unfortunately, what tends to happen is when the law is used to bring us to Christ, that's good. That's how it's supposed to work. But it can be abused in that we say, okay, I'm not under the law, and therefore, I don't have to do certain things.

And then the human nature kicks in. And then instead of doing God's will and having his law written in our hearts, which is the same law, it's the underlying principles of the commandments and the underlying principles that went into Moses' law, that's written in the heart. But if we use that as an excuse to do what our own fleshly heart wants to do, then we get into trouble.

And then ultimately, we need the rules again to say, no, you follow the rule, and if you don't, you get a spanking. That's more or less the idea. And so, what we have is, although we are no longer under the schoolmaster, if we have the law written in our hearts, because we have Christ, and we receive him into our heart, then we're not under the schoolmaster.

And then we can ask ourselves if we are at peace with him. We go from the tables of stone, the Ten Commandments, to singing the song on the ten-stringed harp. That's what is represented in the Revelation when it talks about the 144,000 singing a new song with their harps.

It's pointing to the Ten Commandments, the law of God, being written in the heart of his people. And when you're singing a song, what happens if you forget the words? You have to look at it again, right? If you don't know it, we say in English at least, by heart, then you have to look at the words. It's the same principle.

The words on the commandments give us a tangible way to understand the principles. It's just the teaching aid to show us what God really wants in the heart. Now, the reason this is very important, this understanding of the Sabbath and how it points to the law being written in the heart, especially the High Sabbath.

This is very important, especially for this time that we're living in, because of the things that are happening in the world. We've been keeping watch on the developments with the bird flu, and now it has progressed to the next step where they say it's been detected in milk. Even fragments of the virus have been found in a certain amount of the even pasteurized milk.

So, little by little, they're building it up to make a case, it looks like, for another big pandemic with this bird flu situation. Every day, it's developing more and more. And we see this in connection with the digital health pass.

We talked about that also with, you remember, the 666 in the crossings of the Horologium, as we've seen before. And the times when it crosses, they were relevant to when the world was putting out this digital health pass at the beginning, February 20th. And then, again, in May, they will be voting on that.

And this is very relevant to us, because there's even parts of the world today where this can be implemented overnight. In fact, in China, it already is implemented, where to do various forms of business, you have to have your QR code scanned. Everybody scans their QR code in China, and that links to their status with the government.

And if they don't have a green pass, they don't get their product or service or whatever it is that they are going to get. So that is very severely limiting to those who, for example, have criticized the government in China. Those people then are degraded from a green pass to a yellow pass, and now the companies don't want to serve them.

That's how things are going. That's now. And in another part of the world, in Italy, just this week, there was, I think it was yesterday, in fact, was the first day that they instituted a fee for visiting the city of Venice as a tourist.

Yes, a five-euro fee that you have to pay, and they also have a QR code. You just go and you get this QR code, and then wherever you go throughout the city, they scan this QR code that you got. And it makes it convenient in some ways, but at every place you scan it, immediately they know where you've been, at what time, and so they can track your movements all throughout the city.

And in China's case, who are much more advanced in this idea, they can track you wherever you are in the whole country, pretty much. So we see this is where things are going, and it's not much of a stretch to say one other aspect in addition to your tourist QR code, they have the health pass, the digital health pass. So you add that on there, and then, oh, you haven't gotten up to date on your latest booster shots.

Well, then you can't access the things that you are accustomed to doing. So that's where we're going with this. And what are the things in the world that are subject to regulation in this way? We talked about the inoculations, and there's also if you speak against the government, say, in China, but in general, if you speak against LGBT or anything that could be construed as hate speech, then these things will be tallied up and held against you.

And it's a very convenient way for the government to regulate what you can do or not do, whether you can buy or sell, in the terms of Revelation 13. And the other one is the climate change agenda. He called the Pope called the climate deniers fools, you say.

Yes. So interesting. There's, of course, a huge push for climate habits that are supposedly good for the climate, lowering your carbon footprint.

The last World Youth Day, they already rolled out a system also on the cell phone where they track everybody's food and their carbon footprint, ultimately, but looking at all the different ways according to what they did during that period. And so these are the things that matter to the world today. The Sabbath points to all three of those.

We've seen that before, how in the— Let me back up a little bit here. We've seen before how in the river, we understand now why that's the DNA. It's the DNA of Christ.

But this part where Cetus is taking hold of the river, that corresponds to the vaccine. And that foreign DNA, if you will. Then there's also, you can't see it so well there, but that's a statue, an image, the image of the beast, if you will, that represents the false sexuality in the LGBT movement.

And then there's the furnace representing the climate change. So we have these three aspects all here represented in the presence of the river. And the solution is to stick with Jesus' blood.

But we have to be decided about that because these are very serious things. And when they cut off our ability to buy groceries, then it's going to be very challenging in those times. And we have to be ready, psychologically prepared for that.

And that's a matter of deciding in advance who we stand with and what we stand for. The underlying principle of the Sabbath goes back to the creation, to the creator, and to rest. Resting in Christ, trusting in the DNA that he gave us, the immune system that he gave us that will empower us to overcome sin.

That's what the Sabbath represents. That's what the weekly rest was to drive home to God's people. But just as a teacher wouldn't use an illustration in the classroom to teach the students, and then all the students go out and the only thing they know is that illustration.

They want to teach a principle, right? So it is with God's law. He wants to teach us that underlying principle of honoring the creator and finding rest in Christ. Yes, it's that narrow entrance, the narrow way into that rest of Christ.

Jesus said, come to me, all you who labor and are heavy laden, I will give you rest. So there's a lot of deception in the world about these things. And a correct understanding of the Sabbath highlights those issues that are most important.

So to that end, I want to remind everyone of what Jesus said. This is my blood of the New Testament, which is shed for many for the remission of sins. That's the blood that we're talking about, that high Sabbath blood that represents our trust in his ways as the creator.

And we have on May 24th, after sunset, we are calling for a Lord's Supper to celebrate his gift of his sacrifice, his body, and his sacrifice is the blood that he gave for us. And so I just want to remind everyone of that. This is the anniversary of his own last supper on the 24th of May in A.D. 31.

All right. I hope that's clear. Good.

Let's stand for a word of prayer. Dear Heavenly Father, thank you for the message that you give to us in your word. Thank you for your ways that are higher than our ways and how you have given the law in the past to your people, the Jews, and to lead them to Jesus.

And then for many centuries, your people went without the letter of the law, but they lost their way. They lost sight of Christ. They lost their first love.

And so you raised up a people who went back to the law, who gave regard to your commandments, and fulfilled, as it were, the letter of the law, so that it could be once again taught to your people. And now we're in this time when it must be in our hearts, because you're not after the superficial details of our lives, but you want our hearts. And you want your law that governs your kingdom written in our hearts.

And when that law is written there, it protects us, because through it we understand what is good and right and what is necessary in this world for this time, because it is living. It is in the blood where there is life. So we thank you for writing your law in our hearts.

And we still make mistakes, and we just ask that you will help us in every way where there might be something that is not fully surrendered to you, that we would give that up and do so promptly, because we need to be available for your service, to draw many to you. That your will may be done on earth. So we praise you for your works, because it is in your works that we trust, that we have our faith, as it is seen in the sign of the Son of Man.

We praise your name for these things, in the name of Jesus Alnitak, the wounded one of Orion. Amen. Thank you, and we look forward to seeing you again next week.