“the power of an endless life”
(Heb. 7:16, NKJV)
The previous teaching again underscored the question of What is your reading of it? (Luke 10:26). Our new way of reading is currently bringing forth such exciting insights that we can call out, like Isa. 34:16 does, “Search from the book of the Lord, and read”! Also: “whoever reads, let him understand …” (Matt. 25:15).
Isa. 34:15 that is quoted above comes, interestingly enough, from a chapter that appears just before the one we examined in last week’s teaching. It is a chapter that initially seems like great vengeance on the part of God, and yet the chapter starts with this seemingly promise-rich call to everyone and everything: “Come near, you nations, to hear; and heed, you people! Let the earth hear, and all that is in it, the world and all things that come forth from it.” (Isa. 34:1).
What however follows in the verses after is nothing short of terrifying. It indeed seems as if God avenges Himself, without any limits. The following number of verses read like a horror story: “For the indignation of the Lord is against all nations, and His fury against all their armies; He has utterly destroyed them, He has given them over to the slaughter. Also their slain shall be thrown out; their stench shall rise from their corpses, and the mountains shall be melted with their blood. All the host of heaven shall be dissolved, and the heavens shall be rolled up like a scroll; all their host shall fall down as the leaf falls from the vine, and as fruit falling from a fig tree. For My sword shall be bathed in heaven; indeed it shall come down on Edom, and on the people of My curse, for judgment. The sword of the Lord is filled with blood, it is made overflowing with fatness, with the blood of lambs and goats, with the fat of the kidneys of rams. For the Lord has a sacrifice in Bozrah, and a great slaughter in the land of Edom. The wild oxen shall come down with them, and the young bulls with the mighty bulls; their land shall be soaked with blood, and their dust saturated with fatness. For it is the day of the Lord’s vengeance, the year of recompense …” (Isa. 34:2-8a).
Matthew Henry’s Commentary on the Whole Bible provides the following interpretation of this section: “This prophecy looks very black, but surely it looks so further than upon Edom and Bozrah. It describes the melancholy changes that are often made by the divine Providence, in countries, cities, palaces, and families.”
You should by now be able to draw much from this Scripture in typological terms, as we already know many of the master symbols of the Bible. You should know what the host of the nations and the host of the heavens signify; what it implies if it notes that mountains will melt from their blood; what it means that the heavens are compared with a scroll; what exactly God’s sword is; what the symbolic importance of the fig tree and the vine are; and more. The Bible has its own lexicon that is used throughout its many different books, across the entirety of the text, and there is a remarkable amount of cohesion that is embedded within it.
In verse 8b a matter is suddenly brought in that positions the discourse in a completely different light. The first part of the verse was quoted earlier, but for the sake of context we’ll repeat it again: “For it is the day of the Lord’s vengeance, the year of recompense for the cause of Zion.” The CEV translates this last section as, “he will take revenge and come to Zion’s defense”. It then absolutely seems as if vengeance on the enemies is on the one side of the coin, with goodwill and restoration for Zion on the flipside. This state of affairs is often a Biblical pattern, as it is also for instance presented together in Isa. 61:2: “To proclaim the acceptable year of the Lord, and the day of vengeance of our God …” It is very important to understand that both occur simultaneously, and that this will not only take place eventually, but is already happening TODAY.
From verse 9 to just before the penultimate verse of the chapter the depths of these vengeful events are spelled out, drawing on all kinds of horrific demonic characters. Then, in conclusion in verse 16, God’s hand in all of this is also distinguished: “for the LORD has promised this. His Spirit will make it all come true” (CEV). It is very important that we understand that the demonic realm does not have free reign to do whatever it wants.
But the central question that hangs over this chapter is certainly: what is offered as testimony in Zion’s defence? In the previous two verses that preceded this important phrase, lies the concealed answer: “The sword of the Lord is filled with blood, it is made overflowing with fatness, with the blood of lambs and goats, with the fat of the kidneys of rams. For the Lord has a sacrifice in Bozrah, and a great slaughter in the land of Edom. The wild oxen shall come down with them, and the young bulls with the mighty bulls; their land shall be soaked with blood, and their dust saturated with fatness.” (Isa. 34:6-7).
Based merely on the repetition of certain phrases, it should be clear that there are two substances that are foregrounded in these two verses: blood and fat. What would the symbolic significance of this be? Lev. 3:17 spells out the following important Old Testament law: “This shall be a perpetual statute throughout your generations in all your dwellings: you shall eat neither fat nor blood.” Blood is obviously symbolic (Ex. 12:13) of the soul of man and animal (Deut. 12:23) and the only substance that can be used for the cleansing of sin and for making reconciliation with God possible (Heb. 9:22). In the light of the teaching of Day 1621-1623 and what was said about the redemption price of the firstborn of the donkey, Num. 18:17 is very insightful within this perspective: “But the firstborn of a cow, the firstborn of a sheep, or the firstborn of a goat you shall not redeem; they are holy. You shall sprinkle their blood on the altar, and burn their fat as an offering made by fire for a sweet aroma to the Lord.” [Make a mental note about the use of the word sweet here, to which we will return later.] Blood and fat are “holy,” and clearly of great importance to God:
- “blood … is most holy to the Lord” (Ex. 30:10); in addition, it is the symbol of “the blood of your covenant” (Zech 9:11) with God in both the Old Testament (Ex. 2:48) and the New Testament (Heb. 13:20); and
- “All the fat is the Lord’s.” (Lev. 3:16).
In his dramatic elegy titled ‘The Song of the Bow’, David laments the death of Saul and Jonathan, and describes them as heroes, and then uses the specifications of blood and fat to indicate that they were anointed (1 Sam: 24:6): “From the blood of the slain, from the fat of the mighty, the bow of Jonathan did not turn back, and the sword of Saul did not return empty.” (2 Sam. 1:22). Here we already see a strong indication that blood and fat might imply anointing. It becomes absolutely clear in, for instance, Ezek. 44:15, where the following is said about the sons of Zadok, a specific Old Testament group of Levitical priests who are a typology of the “royal priesthood” (1 Pet. 2:9), the Bride of Christ: “‘But the priests, the Levites, the sons of Zadok, who kept charge of My sanctuary when the children of Israel went astray from Me, they shall come near Me to minister to Me; and they shall stand before Me to offer to Me the fat and the blood,’ says the Lord God.”
But what would the fusion of blood and fat be? Obviously, this forms the marrow! There are two types of bone marrow: the red marrow (medulla ossium rubra), which consists largely of blood-producing tissue (hematopoietic tissue) and yellow marrow (medulla ossium flava), which consists largely of fat cells, and that produces fat, cartilage and bone.
The beauty of this is that the medical name for the red marrow is derived from two Greek words: αἷμα (blood) and ποιεῖν (to make). The latter word should by now be familiar to our readers – it is the same word from which poiēma (ποίημα) derives. One could comfortably refer to it as blood poetry. Within this the soul is hidden, and the life that cannot be destroyed (Deut. 12:23)! It then obviously only produces blood, which is to say, it produces only life! When Jesus speaks to His disciples in John 6:53, He clearly states: “Most assuredly, I say to you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink His blood, you have no life in you.”
The fat tissue of the yellow marrow symbolically represents the anointing. If the Bride is “of his flesh and of his bone” (Eph. 4:30), it clearly points to the incubation space of Jesus’s life and Jesus’s anointing that the Christ received! This Christ, which is to say the Bride, or the Sons of Zadok, or the priesthood of Melchizedek, carry WITHIN them “the power of an endless life” (Heb. 7:16). Where does one find a more beautiful song of praise as this part of Isa. 25:6-8, which is clearly a Christological prophetic song that corresponds with Rev. 21 and 22: “And in this mountain the Lord of hosts will make for all people a feast of choice pieces, a feast of wines on the lees, of fat things full of marrow, of well-refined wines on the lees. And He will destroy on this mountain the surface of the covering cast over all people, and the veil that is spread over all nations. He will swallow up death forever, and the Lord God will wipe away tears from all faces; the rebuke of His people He will take away from all the earth; for the Lord has spoken.”
Back to Isa. 34:6-7 above, and the question that we are trying to answer: what is offered as testimony in Zion’s defence? “The sword of the Lord is filled with blood, it is made overflowing with fatness, with the blood of lambs and goats, with the fat of the kidneys of rams. For the Lord has a sacrifice in Bozrah, and a great slaughter in the land of Edom. The wild oxen shall come down with them, and the young bulls with the mighty bulls; their land shall be soaked with blood, and their dust saturated with fatness.” In the teaching of Day 1346-1348, as well as in Day 1618-1620, we explained that the symbolic sword of Eph. 6:17 is “the sword of the Spirit”, which is to say it is “the [rhema]-word of God”. From this sword drips blood and fat, and creates the imperishable life WITHIN us, which brings about that in the land of Edom [= red = Adam], the dust (Gen. 2:7; 3:19) is SATURATED with blood and fat. What looks like a massacre to the worldly eye, is also a triumphant testimony in the defence of Zion.
This paradox is very difficult to understand, but could perhaps be best explained at the hand of what Heb. 11:7 says about Noah, the hero of our faith: “By faith Noah, being divinely warned of things not yet seen, moved with godly fear, prepared an ark for the saving of his household, by which he condemned the world and became heir of the righteousness which is according to [the holy of holies – Jude 1:20] faith.” Noah walked in the righteousness of God’s calling for his life, and THAT POSITION of third dimension RIGHTESOUSNESS condemned the world even though he did not direct any condemnation toward anyone. The sword of Noah’s rhema-word condemned humanity. This is what is offered regarding your and my position and functioning in the Bride, in defence of Zion!
The only section of this pericope that has not yet been covered, is the phrase: “The wild oxen shall come down with them, and the young bulls with the mighty bulls …”
Let’s start with the last section, which the KJV translates as “bullocks” (root word: “to break up”). In the pictorial Hebrew, this word is indicated by two symbols: “The pictograph p is a picture of an open mouth, the r is a picture of a head. Combined these mean ‘open the head’. The heads of grains are scattered on the threshing floor, a smooth, hard and level surface. An ox is lead around the floor crushing the heads, opening them to reveal the seed inside.” (AHLB). The word bulls is listed in the same source as “the filling of man with life and the image of God”!
In the following teaching, we will further investigate the wondrous implications of these verses, and tie together the different strands of the argument.
- Selah: Try to answer the symbolic meanings that are mentioned in paragraph 3.
- Read: 19-27
- Memorise: 22:4
