Kingdom Come

“Are ye not as children of the Ethiopians unto me, O children of Israel? saith the LORD. Have not I brought up Israel out of the land of Egypt?…

Behold, the eyes of the LORD God are upon the sinful kingdom, and I will…sift the house of Israel among all nations…

• In that day will I raise up the tabernacle of David that is fallen…
• AND of all the heathen, which are called by my name, saith the LORD that doeth this.” (Amos 9:7-12)

The definition of tabernacle as a temporary dwelling place covers a variety of agents:

• David’s body which was genetically raised up in his descendant Jesus
• the temple at Jerusalem that David determined to build which was destroyed,
• and the ark – also a temporary dwelling place – for the Ten Commandments written on with the very finger of God which disappeared when Jerusalem was sacked by the Babylonians.

“For there was a tabernacle made…after the second veil, the tabernacle which is called the Holiest of all; Which had the golden censer, and the ark of the covenant overlaid round about with gold, wherein was the golden pot that had manna, and Aaron’s rod that budded, and the tables of the covenant / Ten Commandments; And over it the cherubims of glory shadowing the mercyseat; of which we cannot now speak particularly.” (Hebrews 9)

Why couldn’t the writer of Hebrews speak particularly about the ark of the covenant? Because it had been lost to sight.

That is not to say it had been lost.

“For the eyes of the LORD run to and fro throughout the whole earth, to shew himself strong in the behalf of them whose heart is perfect toward him.” (II Chronicles 16:9)

According to the writer of Hebrews, the purpose for which it was designed and built by Moses under the LORD’s explicit instructions remained in force for many more years after it was lost to Israel.

“into the second [tabernacle, which holds the ark of the covenant] went the high priest alone once every year, not without blood, which he offered for himself, and for the errors of the people: The Holy Ghost this signifying, that the way into the holiest of all was not yet made manifest, while as the first tabernacle was yet standing. Which was a figure for the time then present.”(Hebrews 9)

So when the items signifying access to God’s holiest presence were lost to Israel, what nation was given the responsibility of acting as God’s High Priest?

Hint –  transferring leadership from one nation to another is standard practice with God.

“The kingdom of God shall be taken from you, and given to a nation bringing forth the fruits thereof.” (Matthew 21:43)

“when the Jews [religious leaders in Israel] saw the multitudes, they were filled with envy, and spake against those things which were spoken by Paul, contradicting and blaspheming. Then Paul and Barnabas waxed bold, and said...we turn to the Gentiles. For so hath the Lord commanded us, saying, I have set thee to be a light of the Gentiles, that thou shouldest be for salvation unto the ends of the earth.” (Acts 13:45-47)

Paul’s decision was absolutely based on precedent – the Babylonian Captivity.

• “Then Shephatiah the son of Mattan,
• and Gedaliah the son of Pashur,
• and Jucal the son of Shelemiah,
• and Pashur the son of Malchiah,

heard the words that Jeremiah had spoken unto all the people, saying, Thus saith the LORD…“This city shall surely be given into the hand of the king of Babylon’s army, which shall take it.”

Jeremiah is God’s oracle at this stage in Jerusalem’s corruption exactly as Jesus Christ and Paul in the future. And these Jewish rulers’ reaction to God’s words?

“Therefore the princes said unto the king, We beseech thee, let this man be put to death: for thus he weakeneth the hands of the men of war that remain in this city, and the hands of all the people, in speaking such words unto them.”

And the king’s response to their request?

“Then Zedekiah the king said, Behold, he is in your hand: for the king is not he that can do any thing against you.”

Zedekiah is not YHVH’s king of Israel, he was appointed regent by the king of Babylon.

The true Son of David is Jehoiachin (Hebrew) / Jechonias (Greek) who languished in a Babylonian dungeon for 37 years until he finally got right with God.

Since Daniel, a royal prince, was taken to Babylon at the same time as Jehoiachin, I have to believe that Daniel maintained his royal relationship with him despite the danger to his own reputation, visited him in prison bringing him clothes and food and encouraged him from scripture, and ultimately led him to the LORD.

“Inasmuch as ye have done it unto the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me.” (Matthew 25:40)

And what Jeremiah’s / the Christ’s adversaries did was consign Jeremiah to a drawn-out death by torture.

“Then took they Jeremiah, and cast him into the dungeon…Jeremiah sunk in the mire.”

“Now when Ebed-melech the Ethiopian”

Braaaaake!!! Stop right here!!!

Isn’t it obvious that these individuals’ names are being documented in this Book of Remembrance for the future when the books are opened and the actors judged to be discarded into fire or cherished forever?

What makes this particular guy’s behavior worth recording?

Ebed means Servant. Transliterated to Arabic in Islam as abd it is always followed by a name of God in the sense of worshipper, as in “Abdullah” Slave of Allah.

Melech means King. We can brush right over this as meaning servant to the current king of Israel, or we can apply some higher order critical thinking skills to the record of this critical event to determine who exactly which king he served.

“Ebedmelech…spake to the king saying, My lord the king, these men have done evil…he is like to die.”

Wow. Ebedmelech approaches the puppet king, not as a servant, but as a father-figure, a spiritual authority, in the same way that Joseph in Egypt earlier and Daniel in Babylon speaking out for the God of YHVH despite facing death for doing so.

And clearly the true king served by Ebedmelech is the same one served by Daniel – Melchizedek “king of Salem priest of the Most High God.” (Genesis 14:18)

“Then the king commanded Ebedmelech the Ethiopian, saying, Take from hence thirty men with thee [to fight the opposition to this action!], and take up Jeremiah the prophet out of the dungeon, before he die…So Jeremiah abode in the court of the prison [under guard for his own safety] until the day that Jerusalem was taken: and he was there when Jerusalem was taken.”

Where, in the ages-old “The enemy of my enemy is my friend”, the Babylonian conquerors treated him as Zedekiah’s prisoner of war and released him to freedom.

As for Ebedmelech:

“Now the word of the LORD came unto Jeremiah…Go and speak to Ebedmelech the Ethiopian, saying…thou shalt not be given into the hand of the men of whom thou art afraid. For I will surely deliver thee, and thou shalt not fall by the sword…because thou hast put thy trust in me.” (Jeremiah 39:15-18)

Can we not figure out that just as Ebedmelech the Ethiopian (hint, hint, stated 4 times in 9 verses) risked his life to save one oracle of YHVH, he would likewise risk his life to save the other, even more valuable Word of God? And risked his life he would have, trying to filch some solid gold items from the national treasury.

“Nebuzaradan, captain of the guard, a servant of the king of Babylon…burnt the house of the LORD, and the king’s house, and all the houses of Jerusalem…” and a detailed listing of all the plunder from the combined temple / national treasury follows.

But! no mention of the Ark of the Covenant with the tablets written with the very finger of Israel’s God. Totally out of character from one victorious national god to his defeated adversary’s god. Israel did not have statues of YHVH. The Ark of the Covenant was Israel’s only physical manifestation of their national God.

One of the most well-known theories about the Ark of the Covenant is linked to Ethiopia’s 14th-century national epic, the Kebra Negast. According to this account, the Queen of Sheba visited King Solomon in Jerusalem during the 10th century BCE and had a son by him on her journey home…

This is 100% consistent with King Solomon’s political agenda, and more credible than not.

“king Solomon loved many strange women, together with the daughter of Pharaoh, women of the Moabites, Ammonites, Edomites, Zidonians, and Hittites…Solomon clave unto these in love. And he had seven hundred wives, princesses…” (I Kings 11:1-3)

Ethiopia’s medieval kings—called the Solomonic dynasty—claimed direct descent from Menelik and Solomon. This dynasty ruled until 1974, and their biblical connection was codified in Emperor Haile Selassie I’s 1931 and 1955 constitutions…

the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church leaders claim that the Ark of the Covenant has for centuries been closely guarded in Aksum at the Church of St. Mary of Zion. Not even the high priest of Aksum can enter its resting chamber. Its sole custodian is a virgin monk who cannot leave the sacred grounds until his death…

throughout the Ethiopian Orthodox world…Each one of their churches houses its own tabot, a sacred replica of the Ark. Tabots are kept in the Qeddest Qeddusan, or Holy of Holies, and are only taken out during festivals and times of need. Indeed, each tabot is venerated as if it were the Ark itself.

We can scoff at anything legendary, but the Sumerian version of the pre-Flood Creation and the Fall is too similar to the biblical to be discounted as pure invention, and an Ethiopian connection to safeguarding the Ark of the Covenant is consistent with the claim that the Ethiopians also archived the pre-Flood words of Enoch.

In 1773, rumors of a surviving copy of the book drew Scottish explorer James Bruce to distant Ethiopia. True to hearsay, the Book of Enoch had been preserved by the Ethiopic church, which put it right alongside the other books of the Bible. Bruce secured not one, but three Ethiopic copies of the book and brought them back to Europe and Britain. When in 1821 Dr. Richard Laurence, a Hebrew professor at Oxford, produced the first English translation of the work, the modern world gained its first glimpse of the forbidden mysteries of Enoch…

The earliest Ethiopic text was apparently made from a Greek manuscript of the Book of Enoch, which itself was a copy of an earlier text. The original was apparently written in Semitic language, now thought to be Aramaic.

Though it was once believed to be post-Christian (the similarities to Christian terminology and teaching are striking), recent discoveries of copies of the book among the Dead Sea Scrolls found at Qumran prove that the book was in existence before the time of Jesus Christ. But the date of the original writing upon which the second century B.C. Qumran copies were based is shrouded in obscurity.

It is, in a word, old. It has been largely the opinion of historians that the book does not really contain the authentic words of the ancient biblical patriarch Enoch, since he would have lived (based on the chronologies in the Book of Genesis) several thousand years earlier than the first known appearance of the book attributed to him. Although in the book he commands his son Methuselah to preserve the book unto future generations, which in itself is a call to copy the books he wrote so they might not be lost to the ages…

In fact, many of the key concepts used by Jesus Christ himself seem directly connected to terms and ideas in the Book of Enoch. Thus, it is hard to avoid the conclusion that Jesus had not only studied the book, but also respected it highly enough to adopt and elaborate on its specific descriptions of the coming kingdom and its theme of inevitable judgment descending upon “the wicked” – the term most often used in the Old Testament to describe the Watchers.

There is abundant proof that Christ approved of the Book of Enoch. Over a hundred phrases in the New Testament find precedents in the Book of Enoch. Another remarkable bit of evidence for the early Christians’ acceptance of the Book of Enoch was for many years buried under the King James Bible’s mistranslation of Luke 9:35, describing the transfiguration of Christ: “And there came a voice out of the cloud, saying, ‘This is my beloved Son: hear him.” Apparently the translator here wished to make this verse agree with a similar verse in Matthew and Mark. But Luke’s verse in the original Greek reads: “This is my Son, the Elect One (from the Greek ho eklelegmenos, lit., “the elect one”): hear him.”

The “Elect One” is a most significant term (found fourteen times) in the Book of Enoch. If the book was indeed known to the apostles of Christ, with its abundant descriptions of the Elect One who should “sit upon the throne of glory” and the Elect One who should “dwell in the midst of them,” then the great scriptural authenticity is accorded to the Book of Enoch when the “voice out of the cloud” tells the apostles, “This is my Son, the Elect One” – the one promised in the Book of Enoch.

The Book of Jude tells us in verse 14 that “Enoch, the seventh from Adam, prophesied…” Jude also, in verse 15, makes a direct reference to the Book of Enoch (2:1), where he writes, “to execute judgment on all, to convict all who are ungodly…” The time difference between Enoch and Jude is approximately 3400 years. Therefore, Jude’s reference to the Enoch’s prophesies strongly leans toward the conclusion that these written prophesies were available to him at that time.

The piece d’ resistance for an argument in favor of the Ark of the Covenant with its contents being, with forethought and intent, safeguarded and operated by Ethopians until Jesus the Christ fulfills its purpose by his return is found in the New Testament.

“And the angel of the Lord spake unto Philip, saying, Arise, and go toward the south unto the way that goeth down from Jerusalem unto Gaza…and, behold, a man of Ethiopia, an eunuch of great authority under Candace queen of the Ethiopians, who had the charge of all her treasure, and had come to Jerusalem for to worship, Was returning, and sitting in his chariot read Esaias the prophet… And he desired Philip that he would come up and sit with him. The place of the scripture which he read was this, He was led as a sheep to the slaughter; and like a lamb dumb before his shearer, so opened he not his mouth…And the eunuch answered Philip, and said, I pray thee, of whom speaketh the prophet this?…

In the media frenzy over the recent unjust execution of Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews, without question this high-ranking politician would be wondering, “is the prophet speaking of this Jesus?”

“Then Philip opened his mouth, and began at the same scripture, and preached unto him Jesus…

[Christ being come an high priest of good things to come, by a greater and more perfect tabernacle, not made with hands, that is to say, not of this building…by his own blood he entered in once into the holy place, having obtained eternal redemption for us.” (Hebrews 9:11-12)]

And he answered and said, I believe that Jesus Christ is the Son of God. And he commanded the chariot to stand still: and they went down both into the water, both Philip and the eunuch; and he baptized him / joined him to the body of believers.” (Acts 8)

“For by one Spirit are we all baptized into one body, whether we be Jews or Gentiles.” (I Corinthians 12:13)