WALKING BEFORE RUNNING IN CIRCLES: WE KEEP BACKTRACKING SO LET'S PUT THIS PART TO BED ONCE AND FOR ALL ABOUT FUTURE FULFILLMENT REGARDING ADOPTION.
We all believe in dual prophetic fulfillment, a present and a future fulfillment even if we don't realize it yet, or understand the extent this it is in the Bible. If I don't put this misunderstanding to bed then there is no such thing as a future completion of adoption at the rapture. Let me prove your own belief to you.
We all know the Passover has a dual fulfillment, so we are already on the road to grasping how important this present and future fulfillment is in Scripture.
The Passover was about the hope of a greater redemption fulfilled in the future, however for the Jews, they still believe there is no future fulfillment as they look back the their redemption from Egypt. Most of the church is not taught the details of this fulfillment in the feast when the Jews...
1) Search their home diligently to make sure there is not even the tiniest piece of yeast in the home. In Scripture yeast represents sin. Jesus was tried three times and no sin was found in Him, even though they attempted to frame Him with false witnesses.
2) Unleavened bread is baked and in the process it comes out from the heat with brown heat stripes and pierced holes, just as Jesus body was striped and pierced.
3) Then the bread is placed in three separate pockets, not one nor four, but exactly three representing the Father, Son and Holy Spirit.
4) The middle piece of bread is then removed, broken in pieces, wrapped in white linen and hidden, just as Jesus' body was broken for us and hidden in the grave.
5) Then the children have to go search for the hidden broken bread and the child who finds it receives a prize just as we receive the prize of God when we find Jesus.
6) Then the broken pieces are shared around the family and eaten just as we all share in the broken body of Jesus.
7) The red wine is drunk representing the blood of Jesus.
8) Lamb is consumed just as Jesus said we must eat of His flesh and drink His blood. In our remembrance of Jesus' death till He comes the bread represents His body, though it tends to be a piece of loaf, it does the purpose.
9) Before the destruction of the temple, the high priest took a lamb, and it must be spotless and perfect, and tied it to the altar at exactly 9 a.m. leaving it in discomfort just as Jesus was tied and nailed to the cross at that exact time.
10) Six hours later, exactly when Jesus gave up the ghost, the high priest sacrificed the lamb and put its blood on the mercy seat.
Not many churches teach these details which make it seemingly impossible not to see Jesus is the perfect fulfillment, yet two things happen...
i) Paul wrote the Jews are under spiritual stupor for the moment. They just can't see it.'
ii) Most of the church attendees know more about chocolate bunnies and Eater eggs and painting hard boiled eggs and rolling them down hills than what I just wrote. There is a lot of spiritual stupor in the church too.
I would expect that all of us are in agreement that when the Jews were commanded to celebrate this feast they were looking back to their redemption in Egypt by the blood of animals when the feast was as Paul described all the feasts, shadows of what is to come with the fulfillment in Christ (Col.2:17).
There is nothing strange about all the doctrines of the faith reaching their climax in heaven, but where did dual fulfillment in prophecy first begin? It began before sin in the garden! Yes, the Bible opens and closes with dual fulfillment, for it is a constant theme and not unique to adoption. Let's go to the garden of Eden.
Before the fall God said to Adam, "In the day you eat thereof" meaning, I know you are going to sin, not if you happen to eat of it...
...dying you shall die.
If the translators had left is as it was written and not considered repetition as a device to show emphasis, then we would see two deaths were prophesied. On the day Adam sinned, spiritually he died. The Hebrew Bible uses pictograms to show the story and each letter has a numerical value. A day is both represented by 1 and 1000.
Adam lived to the ripe old age of 969, he did not complete one day that is given in prophecy as 1,000 years, so Adam died as we do, for we are dead in trespasses and sins until we are made alive in Christ and yet this body of sin has a limited life expectancy and is vulnerable to sickness, and we will all die as Adam did, apart from those who are alive at the rapture and then later at the second coming.
Incidentally, Chinese is the 2nd oldest language in the world, and it also uses pictograms and is based on the Hebrew alphabet as well. It records the story of Adam and Eve's sin and both Hebrew and Chinese pictograms show Adam being clothed in either light or flame, but on the day Adam sinned the light faded and they saw they were naked and ashamed and hid from God. There wasn't a nudist colony in heaven while all the angels and Jesus were robed.
So we see that right from the beginning a present and a future prophetic fulfillment was given to us. In fact we can go to the first seven words in the Hebrew Bible and in the pictograms the whole story of salvation is described.
So I go back again to quoting Prof. D. Briones in what he describes as Already, Not Yet.
According to Scripture, believers are
Some of us stumbled on everything on the right hand column, but we have no problem believing in the Passover as both past and present. All out doctrines are like this because God placed us in a state of hope which means having received grace we are awaiting a future completion.
When we stumble at the idea of adoption having a future filament, we are going to stumble at the rest of the doctrines that are all written as being in the very same state of hope.
I hope I can move on from this now, and with that statement demonstrate hope as we understand it in our culture and Biblical hope are not the same thing. Biblical hope is rock solid, but I am not convinced all of us will understand what I write.
