7:24. Wherefore I will bring the worst of the heathen, and they shall possess their houses: I will also make the pomp of the strong to cease; and their holy places shall be defiled.-Macaulay, the English historian, spoke of America as destined to be destroyed by its own Huns and Vandals, the unassimilated, uncivilized elements, especially of the cities. The anarchistic masses will literally live in the houses of the erstwhile rulers and prominent people. The display of power and magnificence of the strong one, Satan, the alleged eternal-torment God, and the devil-wor shipers of Christendom shall cease. Literally, the churches, Y. M. C. A.'s, monasteries and convents, supposedly holy, will be defiled by the impious. 7:25. Destruction cometh; and they shall seek peace, ⚫ and there shall be none. There shall be no peace with God, or peace among the conflicting elements of society. 7:26. Mischief shall come upon mischief, and rumour shall be upon rumour; then shall they seek a vision of the prophet; but the law shall perish from the priest, and counsel from the ancients.-Literally "accident upon acci dent" will befall the affairs of Christendom. (Jer. 4:20.) The people, wild with perplexity, will seek to the clergy for an understanding of the world-holocaust; but the true Law, the Word of God, has departed from a clergy more learned in church politics and money-raising schemes than in the Bible. The ancients, the "reverends," college protessor3 and savants do not know what counsel to give to meet the crisis. Isa. 29:9-14. 7:27. The king shall mourn, and the prince shall be clothed with desolation, and the hands of the people of the land shall be troubled: I will do unto them after their way, and according to their deserts will I judge them; and they shall know that I am the Lord.-Satan shall mourn the downfall of his power, as will the heads of the savage, beastly governments under his control. (Matt. 4:8, 9.) "The exalted one" or prince, Satan's chief representative among men, is the pope; and he, with his princes, cardinals, archbishops, bishops, priests and clergy, shall see the desolation due to their work. "O thou of little faith, who dost thou fear? The tempest hath no power when I am near; Then, wherefore dost thou fear?" EZEKIEL 8 MOLECH, THE TORMENT DEITY 8:1. And it came to pass in the sixth year, in the sixth month, in the fifth day of the month, as I sat in mine house, and the elders of Judah sat before me, that the hand of the Lord God fell there upon me.-Chapters 8 to 24 continue the recital of the sins of Jerusalem, Christendom, and the Divine punishment to be inflicted on her. Chapter 8 refers literally to the temple, and its defilement by the seating of an idol of Baal at the door near the Brazen Altar, by the desecration of its interior with symbols of Egyptian heathenism and by the practicing of heathen worship within the temple. This types the condition of the spiritual Temple of God, "which Temple ye are", the Church of God, originally pure and holy, but defiled by the clergy with pagan practices. The type refers back to 2 Chronicles 33:1-9, where King Manasseh established heathen worship throughout Palestine, set up a carved image in Solomon's temple and "made Judah and the inhabitants of Jerusalem to err and to do worse than the heathens whom the Lord had destroyed before the children of Israel." This resulted in Manasseh's overthrow at the hands of the Assyrians. The name Manasseh means "causing forgetfulness." He typed Satan, the god of this world, who, by his lying deceptions has made professing Christians forget God. Satan's chief "angel of light" is the pope of Rome, ably seconded in keeping the people in the dark by the cardinals, bishops, priests, monks and sisters of apostate Rome and by the bishops and ministers of an apostate Protestantism. These keep "their people" from real Bible study, and encourage them in their forgetfulness of God and their individual obligations to God, the Word of God, to fellow-Christians and to the world. The house is the House of the Sons of God, the consecrated. The elders, chosen by the people, represented all the people. The Protestant clergy continually sat before the Lord's steward, could not pick up a paper that they did not see his sermons in it; but they would not hear his words, and they rejected him and the truths which he so plainly and so kindly stated. 8:2, 3. Then I beheld, and lo a likeness as the appear ance of fire: from the appearance of his loins even down. ward, fire; and from his loins even upward, as the appear. ance of brightness, as the colour of amber. And He put forth the form of a hand, and took me by a lock of mine head; and the spirit lifted me up between the earth and the heaven, and brought me in the visions of God to Jerusalem, to the door of the inner gate that looketh toward the north;' where was the seat of the image of jealousy, which provoketh to jealousy.-Through the illumination of the Holy Spirit, the Ezekiel class is now taken up mentally into the powers of spiritual control, to discern the signifi. cance of the evil done by Satan and the clergy. They are brought to Jerusalem the anti-typical, to consider estab lished priestcraft. They are brought to the door of the inner gate, the gate of the altar between the people's court and priest's court-(the same as the Tabernacle court.) They are brought to the antitypical Temple, to the Church of God, to the Lord's people-"Ye are the Temple of God". (1 Cor. 3:16.) "I am the Door" (John 10:9.) The Door represents Christ, through whom all that enter must come. The North symbolizes the seat of Divine government, the spiritual phase of the Kingdom. (Isa. 14:13.) The Door, Christ, looks toward, tends toward spiritual things. Those that enter through Christ are expected to look forward from the condition of belief to that of full consecration, the spirit-begotten condition. In the Door, in the very place of Christ, Manasseh, type of the devil, and an apostate clergy set up an idol, an image of the Devil himself. Those who thereafter entered the court had to wor ship the image, typing that under clergy rule all entering the church, the condition of belief, had to do honor to Satan, whose seat of chief power is at Rome, and whose influence spreads wherever the clergy class is found. The word "Baal" means "Lord." The clergy have set themselves as lords over God's heritage (1 Pet. 5:3), the Church. By perversion of the plain meaning of literal Bible statements, they have set up in the place of God the deity of the Devil. This God of Romanism and Protestantism is not one, but three; he inflicts tortures eternal; his favor can be bought for money; he dwells in earthly buildings (Acts 7:48), which are consecrated to him; he teaches the direct opposite of the Word of God-that the dead are alive; he favors spiritual adultery-the union of the church with the governments of this world; he fosters lordship of the clergy class. The clergy's God is plainly not Jehovah, but the ancient deity, hoary with the iniquities of agesBaal-the Devil himself. God pity the clergy, who have so long deceived themselves and the people with their "carved image, the work of their own hands!" "I am jealous for Zion with a great jealousy." (Zech. 1:14.) "I, Jehovah, thy God, am a jealous God." (Ex. 20:5.) There is little wonder that the literal typical Baal of the Jews and the anti-typical eternal-torment God of the clergy should provoke Jehovah to jealousy. 8:4. And, behold, the glory of the God of Israel was there, according to the vision that I saw in the plain.-The usual place of the Shekinah Light was in the Most Holy between the cherubim above the golden Mercy Seat. It was from this glory that fire came out at times like lightning to consume and destroy iniquitous offenders. (Lev. 10:2.) It bodes ill for the devotees of the eternal-torment god that the glory of Jehovah has come out against them. 8:5, 6. Then said He unto me, Son of man, lift up thine eyes now the way toward the North. So I lifted up mine eyes the way toward the North, and behold northward at the gate of the altar this image of jealousy in the entry. He said furthermore unto me, Son of man, seest thou what they do? even the great abominations that the house of Israel committeth here, that I should go far off from My sanctuary? but turn thee yet again, and thou shalt see greater abominations. It is needless to look for abominations far off when such an abomination has been set up by "impudent children" at the very door of the Church. 8:7. And He brought me to the door of the court; and when I looked, behold a hole in the wall.-In Solomon's temple the court of the priests was surrounded not by a simple wall, but by a row of rooms or chambers where the priests and Levites stayed. The hole in the wall was an opening or window into one of the chambers. 8:8. Then said He unto me, Son of man, dig now in the wall, and when I had digged in the wall, behold a door.-The wall was the wall of secrecy, misrepresentation and deception, by reason of which the pagan practices and beliefs of various classes of professed Christians were hidden from 'publicity and consequent popular judgment. A little was known about them, represented by the little hole in the wall. It is the work of the Ezekiel class to dig through the wall and throw the light on these hidden things. The time has come for judgment, and for everything that is done in a chamber to be proclaimed from the housetops. (Luke 12:3.) Once the wall of secrecy is dug through, the door is open to see whatever transpires. 8:9. And He said unto me, Go in, and behold the wicked abominations that they do here.—The court typifies the condition of faith-tentative justification. The chambers surrounded the court. They symbolize the condition of those who profess faith and justification, but whose lives and beliefs contradict their professions. 8:10. So I went in and saw; and behold every form of creeping things, and abominable beasts, and all the idols of the house of Israel, portrayed upon the wall round about. -To the Egyptians, artistic portrayals of creatures had a religious significance. All kinds of living creatures were worshipped. Chief of these was the bull Apis, which symbolized life and especially the power of procreation. The devotees of the antitype are never so happy as when giving life to new spiritual offspring. The children thus begotten are mostly tares. But few of them have the life that comes from consecration to the Word of God. The revivalist and the clergy care little for any begotten of the Word of God and do little to help them grow up in Christ. They grow, if at all, like starved, neglected children. As the service of this worship could be conducted only by the regular priests of Egypt, so the antitypical work can be done only by the man-made clergy class of the world (Egypt) and those "ordained" by them. Among the creeping things, objects of worship, was the fly-the evangelist. (Rev. 16:2.) The prince of the flies was Beelzebub. Flies breed in and feed upon the "dung hill of Popish decretals" and other "traditions of men." They never get far above earthly things, but circulate in the lower strata of the air-ecclesiasticism. They bite and annoy both worldly people and the Lord's people, as did the plague of flies in Egypt, and are specially persistent in the humid condition of a rain-a downpour of Truth. These, like all clergy-approved workers, are looked up to, worshipped by the people of Christendom. Other creeping things that fly signify degrading or forbidden beliefs and practices, attractive, garbed in the cloak of religion, under church auspices, as typed by their flying in the air, ecclesiastical powers; but they are displeasing to God and tending toward death. 8:11. And there stood before them seventy men of the ancients of the house of Israel, and in the midst of them stood Jaazaniah the son of Shaphan, with every man his censer in his hand; and a thick cloud of incense went upWorshipping the pictured images were the elders, or an cients, appointed by and representing all the people of Jerusalem. Jaazaniah was a Levite, typical of a believer in Christ. The word Shaphan means "sly", and suggests the slyness of the adherents of wrong beliefs. Jaazaniah means "God is listening," and signifies the fact that what ever "Christian" sinners may say, God is actually paying attention. The censer was used to carry the fire in which |