The Shape of Matthew 24-25: Analysis – Part 7

A Passover sacrifice could be either a lamb or a kid, a smooth Jacob or a hairy Esau. The “sheep and goats” judgment was likewise a division between rival brothers.

Read the Overview.  Read Part 1.  Read Part 2.  Read Part 3.  Read Part 4. Read Part 5. Read Part 6.

The biblical dominion pattern culminates with a qualified human legal representative bearing the sword with justice and mercy on earth as an image of God’s reign in heaven. In the primeval world, Adam was disqualified but Noah was qualified in his stead. The same pattern is found in the Heptateuch (Genesis to Judges) where Israel’s priestly representation of God to the surrounding nations need repeated rescues by extraordinary legal heads who were raised up by God Himself.

Matthew 24-25, as a single heptamerous sequence, works through the same pattern, so the claim that some of the events described are yet to be fulfilled makes nonsense of the covenant-literary “meme” employed by Jesus in His discourse as it is recorded in Matthew’s Gospel. Once we are familiar with the pattern, the fact that the sequence ends with Jesus enthroned over the nations as their judge is not unexpected.

The other reason we fail to perceive the fulfillment of this particular judgment in the first century as the end of the Old Covenant era, and not the New, is the fact that we overlook not only the covenant context but also the deliberate use of Levitical symbols. Neither the structure nor the imagery is arbitrary. Both are important channels of communication that cannot be ignored without accidentally misinterpreting—or deliberately perverting—the intentions of the author.

Overview

The “sheep and goats” pericope is comprised of twelve stanzas. The introduction and the inheritance of the righteous gives us the first seven stanzas. The judgment and disinheritance of the wicked gives us another five stanzas. This arrangement is yet another means of transmitting the purpose of the prophecy. The seven stanzas correspond to the Heptateuch, Genesis to Judges, in which the nation of Israel is conceived, set apart, instructed, tested, matured, and finally receives the land that was promised to Abraham. The fivefold pattern corresponds to the Pentateuch, the five books of Moses, which ends in the wilderness. The message here is that the sheep would make it to the next “level” of the game of history but the goats would be disqualified.

Pentateuch	Heptateuch	Dominion
TRANSCENDENCE	Genesis Creation	TRANSCENDENCE
HIERARCHY	Exodus Division	HIERARCHY
ETHICS	Leviticus Ascension	ETHICS: Priesthood
OATH/SANCTIONS	Numbers Testing	ETHICS: Kingdom
SUCCESSION	Deuteronomy Maturity	ETHICS: Prophecy
—	Joshua Conquest	OATH/SANCTIONS
—	Judges Glorification	SUCCESSION

The same message is contained in the difference between the fivefold and sevenfold biblical covenant patterns. In that regard, the central point of the fivefold pattern—Ethics—has yet to be opened in history as the Triune office: priesthood (hearing God), kingdom (acting for God), and prophecy (speaking for God). Thus, the initial seven stanzas of the sequence work through the Dominion pattern as an “opened” sequence where those who honored Christ turn out to be on the right side of history, and the remaining five stanzas work through the Document pattern as an “unopened” sequence regarding those who failed to “incarnate” the Word by their actions in history. Instead of conquering with “Joshua” and entering the new era with greater authority, they were deposed and left behind, judged under the Law of Moses.

The use of both the sevenfold and fivefold patterns to highlight the contrast between the faithful and the unfaithful reverses the order of the fivefold and sevenfold sequences earlier in the discourse (the twofold Ascension) in order to represent the reversal of fortune resulting from this judgment.

The structure of this final section is as follows—and it is beautiful:

I SHEEP Dominion (Word and Deed)	II GOATS Document (Law and Judgment)
TRANSCENDENCE(Creation – Sabbath) The throne of the Son of Man	TRANSCENDENCE (Genesis) The destiny of the serpent-kings
HIERARCHY (Division – Passover) The nations gathered and divided	HIERARCHY (Exodus) Their rebellion against Moses
ETHICS: Priesthood (Ascension – Firstfruits) The king’s decree to the sheep	ETHICS (Leviticus) The eyes of the wicked
ETHICS: Kingdom (Testing – Pentecost) His invitation to inherit His kingdom	OATH/SANCTIONS (Numbers) The answer of the judge
ETHICS: Prophecy (Maturity – Trumpets) The martyred body of Christ	SUCCESSION (Deuteronomy) Cursing and blessing
OATH/SANCTIONS (Conquest – Atonement) The eyes of the righteous	—
SUCCESSION (Glorification – Booths) The answer of the priest-king	—

• While the shift in Jesus’ attention from the sheep to goats is easy to identify, the placement of corresponding events within the respective covenant patterns is interesting. The threefold Ethics section of the sheep sequence is spoken by the glorified Christ, who is their authority. The “unopened” Ethics step in the goats sequence is spoken by the goats themselves. For the sheep, the question of sight—“When did we see you…?”—comes with the removal or opening of the Veil on this Day of Atonement. It is followed by the granting of covenant Succession to the righteous. For the goats, the question of sight is the actual Ethics step, presumably in order to highlight the fact that their question is actually a questioning of Jesus’ statement. Their tone is disingenuous, because, as we will see, they knew exactly what they were doing. Jesus’ answer in this case is not placed at the Succession step but at the Oath/Sanctions step since it provides the legal justification for Him to “cut them out of His will.” In the terms of the harvest calendar, the Veil remains closed and they are cast out as the “second goat.”
• The the question of sight is likely a reference to Deuteronomy 15:9, which is rendered literally in the KJV: “Beware that there be not a thought in thy wicked heart, saying, The seventh year, the year of release, is at hand; and thine eye be evil against thy poor brother, and thou givest him nought; and he cry unto the LORD against thee, and it be sin unto thee.” This is the text alluded to by Jesus in Matthew 6:22: “The eye is the lamp of the body. So, if your eye is healthy, your whole body will be full of light, but if your eye is bad, your whole body will be full of darkness. If then the light in you is darkness, how great is the darkness!” The context in both cases is a condemnation of the love of money. However, as we will see, the connection between wealth and the reason for this particular judgment is deeper than mere miserliness. It has to do with those who desired to maintain the status quo because they had a great investment in the old order. Denying support to those who preached the Gospel of Christ was a means of censoring the message. The powers-that-were denied the message by denying the messengers. They were those who suppressed the truth in unrighteousness (Romans 1:18). The same word is used in 2 Thessalonians 2:6, a statement that is entirely misunderstood. That which was suppressing (not restraining) would soon be exposed (not revealed). In other words, those who were silencing the Gospel by stealth through starving it of wealth would end up as front page headlines. That which was done in secret (the antiChristian conspiracy) would be “rewarded” by God in the mass media, trumpeted from the rooftops. This “left hand, right hand” judgment was thus an ironic spin on the exhortation to private generosity in Matthew 6:3-4:

“But when you give to the needy, do not let your left hand know what your right hand is doing, so that your giving may be in secret. And your Father who sees in secret will reward you.”

• Thus, this “liturgical” prophecy warned the Jews that those who sided with the “Edomite goats” who had climbed the mountain of God and supplanted the true king would soon get their reward, and it would be the wages of sin.
• So, what does all of this mean? That the sheep and goats judgment is the public exposure of the first-century Jew-Gentile conspiracy against the Firstfruits Church, the one described in the book of Revelation. Just as Herod and Pilate had become “friends” (that is, those who shared their plans as confidants) over the condemnation of Jesus, so the Jewish Land Beast and Gentile Sea Beast attacked the Church from both fronts beginning in AD64. That was the time of trouble Jesus referred to earlier in this discourse. The end of the discourse is thus not some far off, pie-in-the-sky, end-of-history event but notice of an imminent vindication of those who were the subjects of the discourse. It served as a reason for hope and perseverance as they suffered for the testimony of Jesus.

Analysis

I
SHEEP
Dominion (Word and Deed)

TRANSCENDENCE (Creation)

• Just as the Succession (or “Judges”) step of the Revelation begins with the enthronement of the faithful saints, so also the Succession step of Matthew 24-25 begins with a description of the enthroned Christ surrounded by the same host of angels who heralded His birth. The star of Bethlehem had now returned, but, as recorded by Josephus, as a star resembling a sword that stood over the city, and a comet which continued for a year (War 6.5.4 288-289).
• The angels who would accompany Christ at the inauguration of the New Covenant era are mentioned for the same reason that the devil and his angels are mentioned later in the sequence.
• Jesus is here presented as greater Solomon (Matthew 12:42). He had reigned over Jerusalem for forty years as greater David (1 Kings 2:11), but now He would also rule over the surrounding nations through the faithful saints with the iron staff of a Noahic Priest-King:

“The one who conquers and who keeps my works until the end, to him I will give authority over the nations, and he will shepherd them (priesthood) with a scepter of iron (kingdom), as when earthen pots are broken in pieces, even as I myself have received authority from my Father” (Revelation 2:27).

• The implication is that those who would soon complete the earthly temple were not wise like Solomon but foolish men who had built their house upon the sand, the unstable domain of compromise between the Jewish “Land” and the Gentile “Sea,” quislings who outwardly professed godliness but inwardly relied upon Roman statecraft instead of the integrating Spirit of God (Matthew 7:24-27; Revelation 10:1-7). Their fate would be the same as that of the kings who made desperate treaties with pagans before the Babylonian exile. Jerusalem’s end would come as a flood—Judea would be suddenly overrun with Gentile armies (Isaiah 8:7-8; Daniel 9:26; Matthew 24:37).
• This coming judgment is the event described by Jesus during His trial in the court of the High Priest (Mark 14:62), so that statement was a warning that the tables would soon be turned—the one being judged by the kings of the Land would soon come to judge those very same kings.

HIERARCHY (Division)

• This stanza runs the legal pattern forwards but also runs the sacrificial harvest festival pattern backwards. In this manner, it takes the God-given authority from the tyrants and gives it to the faithful. Those who rejected the Gospel would have their sacrificial “covering” revoked, removing the mediation and exposing them directly to judgment. Until AD70, the nations were still under the Noahic Covenant but its curses were mitigated by the Abrahamic Covenant operating within it. This explains the decree of the Jerusalem Council in Acts 15—for the time being, the Jews were still Jews and the Gentiles were still Gentiles. But between the incarnation and AD70, Jesus and the Apostolic Church worked through the Creation Week/harvest pattern until every stage of the Old Covenant history had been gradually assumed and transformed by the new order. The end result was that Jesus was not only a better Adam, but also a better Noah, a better Abraham, a better Moses, a better David, a better Ezra, and a better Joshua (the High Priest). Having completely fulfilled the pattern of dominion, He could now bring the final reckoning upon the old order.
• The irony here, at least for the Jewish rulers, was that the Lord’s promises to Abraham that He would bless those who blessed him and curse those who cursed him (Genesis 12:2-3) had now been transferred to the Church of Christ. That is what this judgment, at the end of the “Abrahamic age,” is all about. It was the first step in the blessing of all nations of the world via the Gospel.
• The word “gathered” is a loaded word. God gathers those who will submit to Him. Satan gathers those who want dominion of the earth without submission to heaven. The first instance of such a gathering was the Tower of Babel, the establishment of false religion. Throughout history, Satan attempted to gather all nations against God’s people. In the first century, this extended to the Jewish and Roman rulers, but Jesus foiled the spiritual conspiracy by inciting the Jewish War. Satan was then bound from gathering the nations “as the sand of the sea” until the final judgment. Every attempt at global rule will be shattered like clay, furthering the Gospel instead of hampering it. Until then, Jesus is free to gather the saints from all nations. This relates to the other name used to describe the “all nations” Feast of Booths—the Feast of Ingathering. For her religious and political adulteries, Jesus gathered the nations as birds of prey against Jerusalem to devour her instead of dining with her. This explains the blessed feast in Jerusalem above and feast upon cursed Jerusalem below in Revelation 19.
• In the festal order, this stanza corresponds to Passover. Jesus would bring a sword against the houses that were not “covered” by atoning blood. But in this case, it was a division between those households under the blood of Christ and those still under the obsolete covering of the sacrifices of the Temple of Herod, offerings that reached fever pitch just as the Jews and Romans began to massacre the saints in earnest. Millions of lambs were slaughtered at extravagant Passovers once the house was completed, but it was a house possessed by demons. Judaism ended as Cain disguised as Abel, Esau disguised as Jacob.

ETHICS: Priesthood (Ascension)

PRIESTHOOD (Submission)		PRIEST-KINGDOM (Dominion)
And He (No false Gods)	TRANSCENDENCE	will set indeed (No false vows to God)
the sheep (Honor the Sabbath: blessed land)	HIERARCHY (Priesthood)	on His right hand, (Honor parents: blessed land and womb)
and the goats (No murder)	ETHICS (Kingdom)	on the left. (No adultery)
Then will say (No theft)	OATH/SANCTIONS (Prophecy)	the King (No false witness)
to those (No coveting house)	SUCCESSION	on His right hand, (No coveting household)

• The Priesthood stanza cleverly mimics the Ten Commandments, its five phrases aligning with the five dyads of the Law (according to the Jewish “scroll” division).¹
• In the Tabernacle, which was humaniform and thus cruciform, the priestly Table was on the left hand and the kingly Lampstand was on the right hand. In the Temple of Solomon, these roles were represented outwardly by the two bronze pillars, however their order was reversed—kingly Boaz was the “left leg” and priestly Jachin was the “right leg.” What this means is that the Solomonic order is bridal, a mirror-image of the Mosaic-Adamic order. If that is difficult to imagine, think of ballroom dancing—the female must do everything the male does but backwards. However, in this case the reason has more to do with God “loving” Jacob and “hating” Esau, an idiom that speaks of choosing an heir. Yahweh had told Rebekah that the elder would serve the younger. Through Rebekah’s godly cunning, the blessing was switched from kingly (firstborn) Esau to priestly Jacob. Likewise, Jacob gave the primary role of heir to faithful Joseph over his delinquent elder brothers, and also crossed his arms in a human chiasm to give the greater blessing to Joseph’s younger son, fruitful Ephraim. So when Jesus puts the priestly sheep on His right and the kingly goats on His left, He is doing what Yahweh did throughout the Bible—choosing His firstborn based upon faithfulness (Spirit) instead of birth order (flesh). We see the same reversal in God’s choice of David, the youngest of Jesse’s sons.
• This brings us to the reason for the choice of sheep and goats as images of the nations. Why would priestly domestic animals be used by Jesus to describe the Gentiles? The reason is that the “oikoumene” order set up in the days of Daniel the prophet was a Jew-Gentile construct, the spiritual “temple-city” described in architectural terms in the final section of the book of Ezekiel. This explains the use of a ram and goat to symbolize the roles of Persian and Grecian monarchies in Daniel 8, in contrast to the use of “cherubic” land animals from the Gentile Sea to describe them in Daniel 7. The witness of the synagogues over half a millennium had “domesticated” many of the wild animals, increasing the dominion of the Abraham tent. The factor that distinguished the sheep from the goats at the end of the Abrahamic order was whether they followed the seed of Jacob (the smooth sheep at the Table of bread and wine inside the tent—culture) or the Herodian seed of Esau (the hairy, bloodthirsty hunter whose domain was the bronze altar outside the tent—nature). Just as Jacob had disguised himself with goatskin, so Jesus had come as a thief, disguised within the Herodian order, that He might steal back the Abrahamic blessing for the true Sons of God. The inheritance assumed by the “hairy” kings (nature) would be given to the “bridal” priest-kings (culture). While the Herods and the Romans were “cultivated” in an earthly sense, the cultivation that God honors is spiritual.
• The rivalry between the Israelite kingdom of Christ and the Edomite kingdom of the Herods is described in Revelation with a reference to the battle between Joshua (of Israel) and Amalek (grandson of Esau).²

ETHICS: Kingdom (Testing)

• While the Passover sacrifice could be a lamb or a kid, the Firstfruits sacrifice could only be a “priestly” lamb. This is why the “Firstfruits/Leviticus” section of the book of Revelation describes the ascension of Christ as the enthronement of the Lamb. Having been faithful as the ultimate High Priest, Jesus could now rule as the true Lion of Judah.
• Jesus’ invitation to these “firstfruits” nations to enter the new age was only possible because of the sacrificial “tithe” of the Firstfruits Church as their legal representative (Revelation 14). Just as those living sacrifices received their heavenly inheritance (described in Daniel 7:18), so also those nations who had not withstood the apostolic witness would maintain their identity beyond the convulsions coming upon the world in the Jewish War, an event which saw violence spread right across the empire and changed the world forever. This might seem to be a strange interpretation but it was simply a repeat of what happened after the destruction of the first temple in Jerusalem: all of the Canaanite kingdoms that had troubled and tempted the kingdom of Israel were disempowered. Only Israel was raised again from beneath the waters of the Babylonian “flood,” and even then it was to serve in a prophetic role among the other nations, Nehemiah’s “new Jerusalem” hinting at the spiritual nature of the final New Jerusalem that arrived through the ministry of the Messiah. Likewise, the “peoples” here who had conspired against the Church would be disempowered and conquered. Most importantly, the “Jewish” Edomites and the Jewish zealots—those who really troubled the people of God—were cut off along with all of the Gentile “goats.” All of the extrabiblical Jewish genealogies were destroyed by fire along with the Temple. Under the rule of Christ, inheritance and family are no longer in focus. The old order of “bifurcated flesh” has been transcended and its demarcations are gone forever.

ETHICS: Prophecy (Maturity)

• The Maturity step describes the outcome of “kingdom” obedience as a multiplication into a host or swarm. In terms of humanity, this is plunder for the righteous and plagues upon the wicked. For Israel under the Law, these are specified in a priestly “Garden” sense in Leviticus 26 and reiterated and expanded upon to the next generation in a kingly “Land” sense in Deuteronomy 28.
• The structure of the stanza itself communicates a great deal of important information. Firstly, it is comprised of six points, not seven. This deliberately omits the inheritance and rest of Day 7, but in this case it is obviously not because Jesus was an Adamic failure. It is because it corresponds to the sixfold structure of the book of Leviticus, which also omits the inheritance step to highlight the fact that the Levites were given no earthly land; their domain was a heavenly country.³ Secondly, each line is a priest-king dyad, comprised of a need and a supply—the need of the itinerant evangelists and the supply of “Gentile” sponsors. This requirement for sponsorship was begun in the establishing of the tithes given to the Levites (who then tithed those tithes for God) in order to teach the nations to be rich towards God. Melchizedek of Salem had been Abraham’s Gentile sponsor, providing the riches of the Land. Hiram of Tyre was Solomon’s Gentile sponsor, supplying riches from the Sea. The same process is seen in the fact that Paul was willing to bear the humiliation and ignominy of “priesthood” in order that the Corinthians might enjoy the blessings of the kingdom. In turn, he called them to priestly humility that they might minister in true power.

Already you have all you want! Already you have become rich! Without us you have become kings! And would that you did reign, so that we might share the rule with you! For I think that God has exhibited us apostles as last of all, like men sentenced to death, because we have become a spectacle to the world, to angels, and to men. We are fools for Christ’s sake, but you are wise in Christ. We are weak, but you are strong. You are held in honor, but we in disrepute. To the present hour we hunger and thirst, we are poorly dressed and buffeted and homeless, and we labor, working with our own hands. When reviled, we bless; when persecuted, we endure; when slandered, we entreat. We have become, and are still, like the scum of the world, the refuse of all things. (1 Corinthians 4:8-13)

• The sequence of suffering seems to accord with certain highlighted themes of the Pentateuch, resulting in the requirement for mediation in the step that corresponds to the Day of Coverings. The Law of Moses did not prescribe incarceration as a solution for debt—prisons were the invention of Satanic men who treat other men as beasts. Of course, the apostolic witnesses were not criminals, but they were indeed treated as such. Just as Abraham bore the Edenic curses of a barren land and a barren womb for the sake of all nations, so the Firstfruits Church suffered on behalf of the entire oikoumene. Baptism is a voluntary death, in the same way that the Levite priests were “baptized for the dead,” washing their entire bodies and clothes while the actual one they mediated for only required a sprinkling. Christian baptism is the extinguishing of the old life in a flood, not a sprinkling of rain that maintains the old life. The mode matters because symbols speak. Christians identify with the mediators, not those mediated for (Numbers 19:19; 1 Corinthians 15:29). This is a grave misunderstanding of the New Covenant priesthood and its rites. They are not about cultivation but representation, not obligation to God but accountable, authorized service for God.
• This brings us to another grave misinterpretation, and a cure for the rampant, ignorant abuse of this warning as a call to generosity towards the poor and the marginalized. Jesus is not telling us that the eyes of the hungry and homeless as His CCTV cameras. Even worse, the text is now being used to shame those who rightly stand against mass immigration. Certainly, the Law reminds us to look after the sojourner, but the Scriptures that are being used to shame the saints are in fact being perverted to disguise an agenda of weaponized people displacement akin to that practiced by Assyria and Babylon with the ultimate goal of neutralizing “Christian” nations that impede the spread of a globalist Babelism. In context, the actual call is to support the ministry of the Gospel. Those who misinterpret this are either disingenuous traitors or idiots who have no business teaching others.
• Any commentator worth his salt will make the link between the prophecy of the sheep and goats and the sending out of the disciples to the houses of Israel. The call to generosity towards the ministry of Christ was actually a test of faith. That is why those houses of Israel that shunned the disciples would be “cut off” as unholy. The disciples shaking the dust off their feet was a symbolic explusion of these faithless Jews from the spiritual Tabernacle of Jesus. Likewise, the ministry of Paul among the synagogues of the empire and the cities of the Gentiles was a test of faith, and this prophecy describes the reckoning. The Gospel went to the Jew first and then to the Gentile. Hospitality towards the suffering members of Christ was ministry to Christ Himself, who suffered in the Garden, filling up His sufferings in the Jewish Land (the houses of Israel) and then in the Gentile World (the nations of the oikoumene as a greater “household”).

“Whoever receives you receives me, and whoever receives me receives him who sent me. The one who receives a prophet because he is a prophet will receive a prophet’s reward, and the one who receives a righteous person because he is a righteous person will receive a righteous person’s reward. And whoever gives one of these little ones even a cup of cold water because he is a disciple, truly, I say to you, he will by no means lose his reward.” (Matthew 10:40-42)

OATH/SANCTIONS (Conquest)

OATH (Word – Forming)	COVENANT	SANCTIONS (Deed – Filling)
Then	TRANSCENDENCE	when saw we you hungering, and fed you, (Genesis)
will answer Him	HIERARCHY	or thirsting, and gave to drink? (Exodus)
the righteous,	ETHICS	When now saw we you a stranger, and took you in, (Leviticus)
saying,	OATH	or naked, and clothed you? (Numbers)
Lord,	SUCCESSION	When now saw we you ailing or in prison, and came to you? (Deuteronomy)

• The question asked by the righteous is comprised of four sentences, but the use of the words “then” and “when” cleverly split it into two columns—Oath (Word) and Sanctions (Deed, that is, the act of actual blessing or cursing by physical means). The deliberate combination of sickness and imprisonment into one line makes each column a miniature of the Tabernacle, with its three domains and two mediating partitions. The first column works from the ground up to heaven as a holy petition and the second works from the head (above) to the body (beside) to the constrained feet (below). Together, this ascent and descent is the in-and-out or up-and-down movement of the High Priest on the Day of Atonement. It is also the ascension of Christ and the descent of the Spirit, events pictured in His baptism. Note that the sickness, and the indebtedness (which in later times led to imprisonment, Matthew 25:25) are both included in the curses of Deuteronomy 28, so combining them now in order to fit the literary architecture is not a problem. Both represent constraints upon movement, on standing and walking, as the opposites of dominion.

SUCCESSION (Glorification)

• The placement of the king’s response at Succession highlights His authority as the ultimate judge. The legal sequence in this stanza bears some resemblance to its use in the sevenfold pattern of the book of Revelation, which begins with a vision of Christ, His words to the Gentile pastors, and the opening of the New Covenant scroll. Notice that the central Ethics point alludes to the just weights, measures, and portions of the Law, and the witnesses (martyrs) follow as the fifth “seal.”
• Jesus’ mention of “brothers” is an allusion to the straw that broke the camel’s back before the destruction of the first Temple—the release of Hebrew slaves by King Zedekiah who then changed his mind. The point here is that the mistreatment of Jesus’ disciples (as His family, Mark 3:35) was the final crime of the old order, and the one that raised up the avenger of blood against them (Numbers 35:19; Deuteronomy 19:11-12; 31:21; Psalm 8:2; Matthew 21:16). Fattening them for the slaughter under the ministry of Peter, and then sending them out as sheep among wolves, was a snare for the wicked, just as the incarnate God make “killable” was a snare for the devil. This means of enticing the wicked to expose their hearts was the kind of wisdom that made Solomon famous (1 Kings 3:16-28; Hebrews 4:12-13).
• In the letters to the seven churches (Revelation 2-3), Philadelphia (“love of a brother”) is the sixth letter. The point is that we are called to “cover,” advocate and mediate for each other, bear each other’s burdens, especially those who are close to us in the family of God. This is a veiled insult of those who had followed the greatest family of “Cainite Esaus” in history, upon whom the blood of all the innocent prophets from Abel onwards would be avenged (Matthew 23:35; Revelation 6:10).

II
GOATS
Document (Law and Judgment)

TRANSCENDENCE (Genesis)

• The pronouncement of the curse works through the Tabernacle sequence, from heaven above, to the land beside, to the abyss under the land—a fitting takedown of idolaters according to the prohibition in Exodus 20:4. Jesus now ruled all three domains (Philippians 2:10).
• The curse upon the wicked is an ironic sacrifice, one that defiles the old altar in the way that Josiah exhumed human bones to defile the high places and altar of Jeroboam (2 Kings 23:15). Note that this Tabernacle architecture also explains the nature of the “fire” in the parable of Lazarus and the rich man.⁴
• The language ties the fully mature conspiracy at the end of the age of blood sacrifices to its seminal beginnings in the Garden of Eden. “The devil and his angels” must be understood in its legal sense, Satan acting as an accuser in the court of God who weaponizes the Law with the intention of bringing down the curses upon God’s people to destroy them. The “incarnate devil” was thus the Herodian order, the anti-Christ, a royal false prophet like Balaam, hired to wipe out the new order of baptized priest-kings. The “angels” were the false apostles, the Pharisees whom Jesus condemned as a brood of vipers, the seed of the serpent—those who traversed land and sea to make converts for their perverse cult (Matthew 23:15).
• Notice that the word “prepared” is used once again, implying that these “goats,” like the sheep, would still receive an inheritance, but in this case their spiritual father was the devil (John 8:44).
• Like the judgment of the beast and the false prophet, this is not a judgment of individuals but of institutions, in this case, the governments of nations. Ezekiel 32 uses similar language to describe the fate of judged nations, and Jesus Himself spoke of ancient nations who would rise up to testify against the generation of His day (Matthew 10:14-15; Matthew 11:20-24; 12:38-42).
• In this Transcendence stanza, Jesus’ authority as greater Solomon is once again implied. We must remember that the king of peace (the bringer of shalom whom God set at peace with his enemies) established his reign by executing or exiling all of his father’s enemies (1 Kings 2:13-46) and installing new heads of government (1 Kings 4:1-19). That is what is happening here, and it also explains the enthronement of the saints in Revelation 20:4.

HIERARCHY (Exodus)

• The fivefold “Tabernacle” architecture is repeated, but this time it consists of three columns—the need (the call to priesthood), the denial (tyrannical kingdom), and the denied abundance (plunder). The negative in each line is a vitriolic twist on the “do not” prohibitions in the Law.
• As part of a great conspiracy, this was not the “sin of wandering astray” committed against, and subsequently forgiven by, Jesus on the cross. This was completely self-conscious high-handed sin, and it would not be forgiven (Numbers 15:22-31). Remember that, as before the exile, the nations that surrounded Israel were held accountable by God in a secondary sense because they had heard the testimony of Moses. The purpose of Paul’s missionary journeys within the limited territory of the oikoumene (the next “growth-ring” in the witness of the Church) was not only to bring salvation to the many Gentiles who were now “white to harvest” but also to bring a reckoning upon those who did not believe and whose intention was to hamstring and destroy the work of Christ in its infancy, just as Herod the Great had sought to murder Christ Himself.

ETHICS (Leviticus)

OATH (Word – Forming)	COVENANT	SANCTIONS (Deed – Filling)
Then	TRANSCENDENCE	when saw we you, (Word)
will answer also	HIERARCHY	hungering, or thirsting, (Priesthood – Garden)
themselves,	ETHICS	or a stranger, or naked, (Kingdom – Land)
saying,	OATH	or sick, or in prison, (Prophecy – World)
Lord,	SUCCESSION	and not did minister to you? (Deed)

• The question to the Lord by the wicked, most likely disingenuous, follows the structure of the question of the righteous, but it cleverly condenses the needs of the saints into the social “above, beside, below” construct, allowing them to sandwich it between references to their own authority as a false Alpha and Omega at the beginning and the end.

OATH/SANCTIONS (Numbers)

• The judge’s answer to the wicked likewise follows the structure of His answer to the righteous but with a significant change: instead of the acts of faithful obedience at the center, the focus or thesis of the chiasm is the pronouncement of the Lord.

SUCCESSION (Deuteronomy)

• The prophecy ends with the Succession of the sheep and the goats. As a final ironic reversal, the goats are in the first half of the stanza as the priestly “forming,” the carnal sacrifice purified from the Land by holy fire, and the sheep are in the second half of the stanza as the kingly “filling,” the fragrant smoke of obedience that ascends to heaven as a pleasing testimony. Despite all the predictions in the mass media of the day, the “sheep” peoples were on the right side of history.
• There is no word for “eternal” as we understand it in either Hebrew or Greek. The word carries the idea of enduring through the ages. The blessed nations would endure into the new Christian era, “the world to come.” What is eternal is God’s decrees when He judges—they cannot be revoked. But that does not prevent Him from redeeming individuals from peoples previously cursed.

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1. See Moshe Kline, The Decalogue. Also see God-In-A-Box. and an extended discussion in “Why Ten Words on Two Tablets? in Schema Volume 1.
2. See Everlasting Arms.
3. See The Shape of Leviticus.
4. See Their Table Made A Snare.