The most sacred ordinance of the Christian/Messianic Faith is the Lord's Supper, also known in various traditions as 'Communion', the 'Eucharist' and 'The Sacrament'. It represents the intimate and indissoluble bonds between Christ and His plural Bride, the Church (Messianic Community). This union between Yah'shua (Jesus) and His saints is effected by a two-fold merging represented by the communicants symbolically eating the Body of Christ (the bread) and drinking the Blood of Christ (the unfermented red wine). And the Scriptures on this subject tell us that without this 'partaking' the Bride can in no way be a part of the Bridegroom.
For those of us living this sacred lifestyle there are a thousand-and-one potent symbols for us to understand. To begin with, this ordinance is for the Bride, not the Bridegroom. It is the Bride that must partake of the body and blood of the Bridegroom, not the other way round. Understanding the significance of this alone will open up a great mystery - not just of polygamy but of monogamy and of marriage itself - which time and space will barely allow me to touch upon in this article.
As I have tried to explain elsewhere in my writings, marriage is not about the joining together of two equal and identical halves. The ordinance of marriage is an exodus of the dispossessed from the captivity of aloneness (Israel in Egypt) to a bridal chamber (the Holy Land) where union with the Creator may take place through covenant and sacrifice (the covenant of Torah at Mt.Sinai). This involves the disposessed Bride being led supernatrally out of bondage and into the intimate Presence of the Creator, Yahweh-Elohim. It is the return home of Eve to Adam, from whence she came.
The sexual impulse which drives not only the human race but the whole of the created order is mute witness of this almost stampeed for re-union of the Bride with the Bridegroom. The whole Fall was a separation of Husband and Plural Wife and the whole Plan of Salvation is a cosmic impulse to bring back the lost Wife to the Cosmic Husband. And its accomplishment is effected by the Bride accepting the Reconciling Gift of the Bridegroom which she herself ought to have brought. For it was the Bride, our mother Eve, who caused the Fall. But because she has no life of her own -- being derived from Adam -- only Adam can make the necessary sacrifice to effect that reunion again -- a terrible, bloody and painful sacrifice.
We, the plural Bride of Yah'shua (Jesus), are reconcilled to Him and reunited with Him in intimate spiritual embrace, by accepting the Ransom which He paid for us in the two sacred elements of bread and wine. And though the reaching out is made by the Bridegroom to the estranged and cut-off Bride, the actual journey home must be made by the Bride in responding to the free gift of salvation and in being obedient to the commandments:
"Here is the patience of the saints; here are those who keep the commandments of Elohim (God) and the faith of Yah'shua (Jesus)" (Revelation 14:12-13, NKJV).
The Bride has her eyes on Christ at all times, and the Bridegroom upon Elohim (God) the Father, Yahweh-Elohim. To understand, see and experience a true human marriage requires no different a formula of living: the eyes of the wives must be upon their husband, the eyes of their husband must always be on Christ.
This union is, however, based far more than on sight and the imitation of an example. It is based firmly and squarely on eating and drinking. In order to be delivered from the bonds of sin, we are required by our Lord to literally partake of His flesh and blood by complete and total immersion (baptism) into his life. In order to be reunited with Him as He is united with His Father and with the Ruach haQodesh(Holy Spirit), we must partake of the Living Bread which came down from heaven. It starts with faith - those who believe have eternal life. And it ends with the actual eating and drinking - an active participation in the very life-substance of the Messiah which comes about by entering into a pattern of thinking, feeling and behaving made possible only by obedience to His commandments.
Whatever this mystical union represents on the plane of literal marriage it is so far removed from the traditional concepts of the monogamy-only culture that in order to understand it we must necessarily throw aside all our preconceived notions of marriage - 'Christian', 'Messianic', 'Jewish' and secular - and start again by letting this sacred model teach us.
To begin with, a husband must understand that he has no eternal headship unless he is 100% focussed on the will of Christ. He is, in the eyes of Christ, strictly speaking no earthly husband at all unless he is bought and sealed by the blood of Christ. Without this gift from Calvary as an integral part of His soul, any earthly marriages he has will be but phantoms in the eternities. He may "marry" and his wives may be "given in marriage" (Matthew 22:30) by the world, he may eat, drink and be merry, and do what human beings have been doing since the beginning of time, but unless he is united to Yahweh through the Son he in practice has no marriage at all. Though from a legal point-of-view he may be 'married' (according to the statutes laid down in the beginning to prevent fornication and adultery), from a spiritual and eternal one he is single and alone, just as a soul who has not made his peace with Yahweh will be alone in the eternities.
For the wife or wives, her life and existence consists in being reunited with her husband. To be reunited with her divided self (for we are all born internally divided until reunited in marriage), she must look to her husband and mystically partake of his flesh and blood. On the human level she does this by sexual union with him (eating the flesh/bread) and by immersing herself into his life (his ministry, life calling, etc. - drinking his wine). Until this pattern is clearly understood the whole purpose of marriage will remain a complete and unfathomable mystery. So long as husbands and wives are looking to each other for fulfilment and nourishment they will completely misunderstand the whole purpose of marriage which was not made for licencing carnal sex or mutual indulgement but is about a reunion of the most sacred and holy nature.
To really understand what human marriage is for in the eternal perspetive the reader ought to carefully read John 6:47-58 and once he or she has understood the import of our complete and total reunion with Christ through the Lord's Supper, then substitute Christ for the human husband and the Church (Messianic Community) for the human wife or wives. Once this has been done, it really requires very little discourse on my part to reveal just what true marriage is.
A clear understanding of the Lord's Supper will furthermore reveal why the universe is polygamous, and in particular why it is polygynous and not polyandrous or polyamorous. Polygyny, as I have said time and time again, is the sacred pattern that runs through everything. You cannot, in reading Elohim's (God's) Word with an honest and truthful heart, avoid it. And the longer Christians who have been taught the pernicious heresies of Rome and inherited through the Reformers continue to resist this sacred pattern, the harder it will be for them to really know the Creator, Yahweh-Elohim, who has made a polygynous cosmos.
The moment a man focuses on himself and his wants, he has broken the covenant of his eternal marriage. And once a woman or women focuses on herself/themselves, she has broken the covenant of eternal marriage. If you want an earthly marriage that dissolves at death, then fine, look to your selfish wants, but do not expect Christ to recognise your unions after the light of mortal life has been extinguished, because they won't be there. For true polygynous marriage consists of Christ, the husband and his wives in exact replication of the Godhead.
The recent publication of the Hebraic-Roots Version of the New Testament by James S. Trimm (2001), which I have waited for for many years, finally settles this matter for those who love the Truth. Though it is not a perfect translation, it is at least based on the original Hebrew and Aramaic texts and not the later and faulty Greek translations that form the bases of all our current English New Testaments which obscure many truths about polygamy and the Godhead.
For years our Order has taught that the Ruach haQodesh (Holy Spirit) is not a male Personage like the Father and Son but female in spite of being yelled down as a 'heretic'. It is based on the very clear and indisputable witness of the Old Testament but no clear progress could be made so long as the Greek texts apparently contradicted this by describing the third member of the Godhead as a 'He' and sometimes even an 'It'. It has always been assumed by the Western Church (from which Roman Catholicism and Protestantism were birthed) that, with perhaps the exception of the Gospel of Matthew, the entire New Testament was originally written in Greek, in spite of the appalling grammar and numerous mistakes.
The Eastern Church has never had such a belief and has preserved the New Testament in Aramaic, the language that Yah'shua (Jesus) and the apostles spoke and which was, in apostolic times, the lingua franca of the Middle East. Over the years more and more scholars have dared to challenge the hegemony of the Greek translations of the New Testament and to maintain that some, if not all, the New Testament was originally penned in Hebrew and Aramaic. Its un-Greek and overwhelmingly Semitic style has never been challenged making the case for a Semitic original even more compelling.
Accordingly the HRV (Hebraic-Roots Version) correctly translates all references to the feminine Ruach haQodesh (Holy Spirit) with feminine verbs and/or feminine modifiers: Mark 1:10; John 1:32,33; 6:63; 7:39; Acts 8:29,39; 16:17; Romans 8;9-11,16,26a-b; 1 Corinthians 3:16; 1 Timothy 4:1; 1 Peter 1:11; 4:14; 1 John 5:6. Indeed, the Aramaic Peshitta of Romans 8:16 opens with:
"And She, the Ruach (Spirit), gives testimony to our spirit that we are the sons of Eloah (God)" (Romans 8:16, HRV).
What this means is that eventually our anti-female Greek New Testaments and Lexicons like Strongs must give way to the Hebrew and Aramaic original and, hopefully, lexicons that will subsequently be developped from it. This does not, of course, mean that the Greek texts suddenly become 'redundant' but what it does mean is that they can only be looked upon as a secondary authority. To some extent we must remain partially dependent on them until further work has been done on the Semitic version.
The advent of the Hebraic New Testament means that we can see the sacred tavnith (pattern) even more clearly. With the understanding that the Godhead consists of Father, Son and seven-fold female Ruach haQodesh (Holy Spirit), the polygamy picture becomes even clearer. And because this is so, the opponents of polygamy will reflexly defend the Greek texts to the death and choose to ignore or demote the Hebraic, devaluing the evidence. Such, though, will stand condemned for they will ignore the admonition of John, which says: "let us not love in word or in tongue, but in deed and in truth" (1 John 3:18, NKJV).
It has long been my belief that Yah'shua (Jesus was married) and for many reasons (which has again made me the object of much scorn amongst Christian/Messianic brethren). But such a thought would not have been alien to the Hebrew mind - the idea of a celibate Christ is in truth a product of Helenistic (Greek) philosophy which has so contaminated Christianity over the centuries. And you would have thought that had Yahweh viewed marriage in such a way, the last thing He would have done was to create a metaphor of such importance to the Christian faith which shows Christ married to His Church (Messianic Community). If Yahweh had wanted us to become distanced from such 'earthly' (and implicitly 'sinful') things as marriage you'd have thought He would have found some other comparison or allegory. The fact of the matter, though, is that Yahweh is not Greek (no disrespect to our Greek friends) but established a Hebrew culture and mindframe in which to reveal His eternal Truth. And that Hebrew mindframe was supposed to continue into the New Covenant but was cleverly hijacked by Satan in the disguise of a counterfeit New Covenant Antiochus Epiphanes (the antichrist who tried to eradicate the Hebrew culture and make it Greek in the days of the Maccabees - see the main website's Hannukah articles for the background to this).
When you get back to the Hebraic roots of the New Testament what you see is not a move away from marriage (as represented by the Lord's Supper) but actually a landslide movement towards it. With the key of the identity of the Ruach haQodesh (Holy Spirit) dusted off and plainly seen in the light of the noon day sun, we see at last that there are in fact two kinds of marriage - an earthly one (which perishes) and a heavenly one (which never ends). We discover that the allegory of Christ married to the Church (Messianic Community) is in fact simply a representation of Yah'shua's own marriage to the seven-fold Ruach haQodesh (the seven brides or daughters of Isaiah 4:1, which represent also the unsaved, desperate to reunited to their Messiah than to be locked outside the presence of Yahweh in eternity) and a pointer to what the redeemed are called to live as a matter of natural practice.
The seven women of Isaiah 4:1 are a picture of the Holy Spirit
The Ruach haQodesh (Holy Spirit) is known in the Old Testament as the spirit of "Wisdom". How appropriate! Wisdom is female. It is that same Spirit who teaches the redeemed whom Christians/Messianics have been insulting for centuries by calling Her 'him' or 'it' (for simplicity I refer to the collective "Her" though I am referring to the Seven Spirits of Revelation 1:4; 3:1; 4:5 & 5:6, in much the same way we speak of the "Church" whilst knowing it is a plural Bride or mjore accurate designation of "Messianic Community" [1]). Yet because She is subject to Her husband, Yahweh, She is not in truth offended, for it is Her desire to give all the glory to Her Husband, Yahweh.
Paul warns us in no uncertain terms that we are not to partake of the Lord's Supper unworthily, and that if we do, we become guilty of the Lord's body and blood and stand condemned (1 Corínthians 11:26-29). We ought also to remember that Marriage is a sacred ordinance and was created by Yahweh to be lived in sacred awe of what if represents. And more so those of us who are living polygamously for we are in truth imitating and reflecting the pattern of the Godhead above.
For wives in monogamy or polygamy, I hope this article has opened up new vistas of understanding. As wives your sole reason for existence is to eat your husband's bread and drink his wine in Christ, for you were not created to have separate existences, but to be reunited as One Adam in Christ. That means having your eyes on your husband in Christ and not your own desires and ambitions, just as your husband must have his eyes on Christ constantly. For you were made out of your husband, just as Eve was made out of Adam, and it is your sacred calling to return to him as bone of his bone and flesh of his flesh. This does not mean that your independent identity ceases to exist but it must certainly mean that it is defined by your husband's, just as your husband's is defined by Christ's.
Because of what He did for us on the cross, the Lamb of Elohim (God) is worthy of all praise, power, riches, strength, honour and blessings (Revelation 5:12-15). And if a husband unites with his Lord and Saviour through submission and obedience as an allegorical wife, then he too is worthy of all these things from his wives. But not before. For in order to be a Head, you must first be completely submitted. By the same token, wives are the heads of their children, acting as proxies for their husbands just as believers are proxies for Christ on earth. By becoming completely submitted to our Elohim-ordained head (the husbands to Christ, the wives to their husbands) we all become rulers in the eternnal worlds. But not before. The only Head who is not submitted is Yahweh-Elohim, who stands in the unique position as the Almighty One, the Most High Elohim (God), the Eternal Father - blessed be His Name forever. Amen.
Endnotes
[1] The Greeks perverted this sacred Pattern of Father-Son-7-fold Spirit (2+7=9) by removing the Father and Son and creating the 'Nine (female) muses', the nine sister-goddesses who protected the different arts and sciences. The muses dance before the Greek god Apollo (Satan), a mockery of the Divine Godhead.
The nine Greek Muses dancing before Apollo (Satan)
Author: SBSK
