THE HOUSE THAT GOD BUILT

And let them make me a sanctuary; that I may dwell among them.

According to all that I shew thee, after the pattern of the tabernacle, and the pattern of all the instruments thereof, even so shall ye make it.  KJV

            In this, the 2^nd Volume of our study on “The House That God Built”, we will study the structure, function and economy of the human cell, the true, physical pattern of that which God showed to Moses so many ages ago. It is plain to us now, that the true sanctuary that is the resident dwelling place of The Most High God is nothing less than the lowly creature called, MANKIND. An innumerable amount of studies have been accomplished on the structure and function of the tabernacle of Moses in the wilderness, but we will attempt to study the greater tabernacle of God’s glory, the human body. Starting with the cell, we will continue this study in sequential volumes that will bring to light the magnificent architecture that the human body is and how that is a representation of a spiritual Body of Christ. Just as God instructed Moses to assemble the tabernacle beginning with the ark of the covenant and working outward in assembling the Holiest of All, the Holy Place and the Outer Court, comprising the tabernacle as a whole, so I have chosen to study the human body in the same pattern. We began our study in Volume One with DNA – The Book of Life. Now, in Volume Two, we will examine the intricate workings of the cell itself, from the innermost sanctum of the Nucleolus (holiest of all), to the Nucleus (holy place), to the cytoplasm (outer court). These three partitions of the human cell correspond to the three partitions of the pattern of Moses’ Tabernacle.

            From the first time I saw a diagram of a human cell while sitting in a college class of Cellular Biology, my heart has been filled with an excitement and a true wonder at how the Great Creator God has entwined His purpose and intent for mankind in the very cellular makeup of man, His most treasured and intimate creation. As the professor of the class turned on the overhead projector and the simple diagram of the cell was displayed on the large screen, I felt I was beholding an image drawn by the very finger of God. There, before my eyes, was not just a boring diagram of a biological entity, but it was the very image that I had studied for many years through the scriptural account of Moses and the tabernacle in the wilderness. Indeed, I have come to know that throughout the entire span of the ages of time the Lord has moved on men and on the world at large by reason of a prescribed calendar of events according to the pattern of the 3 Feasts of Israel, instructed to them by the word of the Lord to Moses. Passover, Pentecost and Tabernacles made up the 3 festivals that Israel was to celebrate throughout the annual cycles of their agricultural seasons. It has been revealed to many today that we are now living in the 3^rd Day from Jesus Christ, or the 3^rd Feast of the eonian cycle. If a thousand years are as one day to the Lord, then at the turn of the Millennium we entered the 3^rd thousand year day, a time that designates our present generation as the time of the fulfillment of the Third and Final Feast of Tabernacles, or the Feast of Booths. In truth, we ARE the Feast of Tabernacles, a walking representation of over 100 trillion “booths”, called cells, each one containing a complete blue print of the entire organism which is called the human body.

            In this introduction, I thought it prudent to start with a historical study on the progress of cellular biology and how it paralleled the revealed orders of the church as it marched through time. For this reason, I will present a comprehensive excerpt from the 3^rd chapter of Volume One, DNA – The Book of Life. I believe it to be vital for us to understand how the hand of God has moved throughout the time of history to bring us to this wondrous time we live in, and how He moved upon the minds of mankind with revelatory insight into how the world has been made, which should speak to us, the Church of Christ, as evidence that we have received the Truth through Jesus Christ and that the holy scriptures are indeed still relevant and revelatory for us. I have inserted the excerpt below.

Rom 1:20

20        For the invisible things of him from the creation of the world are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even his eternal power and Godhead…(KJV)

Col 1:16-18

16        For by him were all things created, that are in heaven, and that are in earth, visible and invisible, whether they be thrones, or dominions, or principalities, or powers: all things were created by him, and for him:

Eccl 3:14-15

14        I know that, whatsoever God doeth, it shall be for ever: nothing can be put to it, nor any thing taken from it: and God doeth it, that men should fear before him.

15        That which hath been is now; and that which is to be hath already been; and God requireth that which is past. (KJV)

            The cell is the basic unit of life. Life can be interpreted as the ability to reproduce, grow, and respond to one’s environment and the cell is the smallest unit of molecules to do so. This statement is known as the “Cell Doctrine”. Even so, if we proclaim to be the messengers of the “Life Message” then we must also meet up to these standards of life. This doctrine is essentially the law of all life.

Accordingly, we, as the children of the Most High God, must be able to grow, respond to our surroundings and reproduce that Life that we possess. We know this is possible because of our elder brother, Jesus Christ, who was the “first begotten” of the Father and has gone before us into resurrection life and has established His will and testament, the intents of which He has made known to us through His Word, that we are the heirs of His salvation and joint-heirs with Him in His kingdom. We claim this inheritance by reason of our “blood relation” to Him, being born of the same Heavenly Father in spirit, and having His breath in us. We have been born of the same incorruptible seed as our forerunner, our Prince of Peace, and are in reality His identical copy. We are partakers of His divine nature and we have been named with His eternal name, identified throughout eternity as bone of His bone and spirit of His spirit. The only difference between our brother and ourselves is that He is the FIRST of many sons and because of this we call Him LORD. He is the Pattern Son, the Promise Son of better things to come. He is the divine prototype of all that would enter into God-Life. Without Him we would be lost and would have no inheritance of life. With Him we are heirs to all things pertaining to Him.

In the present world, if someone claimed to be heir of a vast fortune but had no papers to prove a relationship existed with the holder of that fortune, they would have to subject themselves to a blood test to see if they were indeed blood-related. With modern technology it is possible to identify kinship through a test of the DNA of an individual and those that they are related to. It used to be, that if a woman became pregnant with a child and the alleged father had his doubts about the child being truly his, the best thing they could do is to wait to see if the child bore any physical resemblance when birthed. Now, one simple blood test will settle the issue once and for all time. We have come to find out that we are unique in more ways than just our fingerprints, but science can now look into the very root of our being and find there a “genetic fingerprint” that is undeniable and unalterable. It is now possible to identify a person by obtaining a single cell from their body, such as blood, hair, skin, semen, saliva, all it takes is a single cell and they can be positively identified within astronomical odds of being wrong.

We will now give a history of the discovery of the cell, and later, the organelles found in the cell. Put on your study caps and don’t be afraid to try to comprehend some of these natural facts, as you will find that they are very significant to us, and at times have been dated in a parallel time frame to the moves of God in the earth. In ancient days, man was limited in his knowledge of things around him and was prone to superstition and mysticism. Things that went “bump” in the night were more often considered to be demonic rather than having their origin in natural causes. Perhaps this was helped a great deal by man’s innate fear of those things that he could not see or touch. If something had a physical effect to it, but could not be seen, it was given a mystical definition, such as a spirit, which could be both good and evil. Whatever could not be seen with the naked eye was usually given this supposition. As a result, if the heavens did not give rain when it was needed during the growing seasons, the gods were thought to be angry with man, since they could not see where the rain came from naturally, they assumed the gods controlled the weather. This could lead to desperate acts on the part of the people to be brought back into the good graces of these invisible beings, such as animal sacrifice and even human sacrifice. In the times of the Law of Moses, God had to make it plain not to offer up human sacrifice and was careful to list all of the animals that were to be used as sacrifice so that the people of Israel would not get caught up in the superstitious beliefs of the other nations, which they did anyway.

Disease was thought to be brought on by spirits, since bacteria and viruses cannot be seen with the naked eye. Man, as a whole, was not interested in the anatomy of himself, much less those things around him, and only started to notice and to study in a scientific way the anatomy of animals around 500 BC. By tradition, the first man to dissect animals solely for observation and to describe the anatomy to others was a man named Alcmaeon in the sixth century BC. He described the nerves of the eyeball and studied the growing structure of the chick in the egg. Thus, he might be the first student of anatomy and the first embryologist! Biology is the study of living organisms, and in its beginnings was an excruciatingly slow process. It was accomplished by observation and the person doing the study had to wait for long periods of times for the natural processes of the world around him to go through their cycles and then to be able to be on hand at the right time to catch the miracle of life, that in so many cases was rare and hard to observe. It was a job only for the patient in spirit, and biology advanced in ancient times at the pace of a tired snail. In fact, Alcmaeon even described the narrow tube that connects the middle ear with the throat, (the eustachian tube) which was lost sight of by later anatomists and was only rediscovered two thousand years later!

Hippocrates (460?-377? BC) is without a doubt one of the most important names in the beginnings of biology and its struggle to convince mankind that there are natural and rational causes for the changes in our physical state. Whereas the general population held that spirits caused sickness, Hippocrates believed that the body was healthy because all of its parts worked well, or it was unhealthy because they did not. To him, it was the duty of the physician to observe what was wrong in the parts of the body and then to try to find a way to make them work again, and not to offer up sacrifices to the gods to try to drive away the spirits of sickness.

I am afraid that we are still in this frame of mind, even in our present day. Many in the church still believe that if you are walking with the Lord that nothing will happen to your body or to your goods, and if it does happen, then you have some repenting to do and some kind of appeasement is necessary for that hidden sin in your life. I don’t know how the Apostle Paul would have felt about that outlook. He must have had some real whopper of sins in his heart to be stoned and left for dead and ship wrecked and imprisoned and physically beaten until he was deformed in parts of his body. Poor Paul would not have a chance to preach in many churches today with all that wrath of God working in him.

Oh, how superstitious we still are! Many still think that they don’t have to watch what they eat in order to have a healthy body, all they have to do is say “grace” over their food and God will cleanse their food from all cholesterol and sugar. The same ones will accuse this word of life to be a non-working word if anything does happen to them. They accuse God of not keeping His word and upbraid Him for not watching over them. Perhaps the Lord is instructing us to start doing things for ourselves that we already know will keep us healthy. You don’t have to be off balance in anything, just use wisdom and the God-given common sense that we are all supposed to have. No one is going to be able to gain immortality by eating certain herbs or taking a miracle drink, but if something makes you feel better, and makes you feel better about yourself, then by all means do what you can to stay healthy and strong. Become a student of life, and start to teach yourself a better way to eat and live. God will be able to use you more and you will feel better to do His will.

Hippocrates established a medical tradition that continued for centuries after his time. The followers of this tradition honored him so much that they inscribed his name to their writings, so that it is difficult to ascertain the true authorship of his writings. He was so honored that the “Hippocratic Oath” is still recited by medical graduates today at the moment of the receiving of their degrees, although the oath was not likely written by Hippocrates but was probably written some 6 centuries after him. But truth is truth and a rose is a rose no matter what name goes before it!

Aristotle (384-322 BC) contributed to the science of biology by grouping the animals of the world into classes according to species. His view of the world was one of 4 kingdoms, the first being the inanimate world of the soil, sea, and air, the second being the plants, the third being the animals, and the fourth being man, all in ascending order with man at the highest level. Aristotle then started to subdivide the four groups into even more defined classes, until he created a “ladder of life” and he became the father of the science of Zoology, the study of animals. After him came Theophrasus (c.380-287 BC), a student of Aristotle who became the father of Botany, the study of plants.

As time went on, science and religion continued to struggle against each other. The religious community has always thrived by reason of the ignorance of the believers. Knowledge tends to set us free from the confines of organized religion and opens us up to revelation which in turn brings change. Even in the days of Jesus, the Pharisees and Sadducees operated under the fear of the law and the commandments. It was during the days of Jesus that the Alexandrian medical community was holding public human dissecting classes and knowledge of the gross anatomy of the human body was well known. Still, they did not know how the parts all worked yet. For instance, Herophilus (c.300 BC) was the first to pay adequate attention to the brain. He believed it to be the seat of intelligence, which Alcmaeon and Hippocrates did also, but Aristotle saw the brain as only an organ designed to cool the blood! How true this is today! We can all sense the presence of the Lord in this day, and we all have the feeling that something great is going to happen, but none of us have a clue on how it is going to be accomplished. It is my suspicion that we don’t have the clarity of the vision yet. We are all missing a few parts of the mystery that God has been peeling back the layers of veil from. How smart we think we are and how wise we consider ourselves in the plan of the ages, and how foolish we will look in the days to come when we describe the brain as a glorified radiator! I am sure, in the ages ahead, we will sit down and have a good laugh at ourselves and our foolish, short sighted notions. Ha!

As time rolled on, Biologists continued to look more and more into the world and its vast variety of life forms and functions. It was still grossly hindered by the limitations of the human eye. Science still had more questions than they did answers. They had theories, and suppositions, but little facts. Too many things were happening in the world of science that were strangely void of observable evidence of natural causes. No one had ever seen a germ, and no one had the faintest idea of the existence of microscopic viruses or airborne diseases. Plagues swept through the land and although the physicians had theories that something natural was causing the sickness, no one could prove it.

In 1348 AD Europe was invaded with a plague that would kill half the population in just 2 years. “The Black Death” or, bubonic plague, swept through Europe and parts of Asia and in 20 years it wiped out three quarters of the population. The sickness seemed to come into a room through locked doors, stealing into the persons body in the middle of the night, like some disembodied spirit looking for a body to claim for the grave. The physicians were helpless in the face of the plague. How can you fight that thing which you can’t see? People were carted away in wagons like garbage carried to the dump. The symptoms started with a high fever and chills which made the individual bed fast. The victim’s lymph nodes would become enlarged and very painful, particularly in the groin. It was called the Black Death because all over their body would rise hemorrhages that turned black on their skin. Eventually, the lungs would become filled up with fluid and they would finally succumb to the plague in a grisly act of suffocation. How could this be anything but the great apocalypse of the world, brought on by an enraged God, or by the devil himself, leaving God helpless to defend His people from this Black Death?

How sad it is, to realize today, that the plague just described was brought on by a microscopic bacterium, named Pasteurella pestis, transmitted to the Europeans by fleas from infected rats. As the fleas bit the infected rats and then bit the people in their homes and outside, then the bacteria was passed into the bodies of the populace and made them sick. After becoming infected, the people then passed it on to each other. How could they have dreamed back then, that each time the victim coughed, tiny droplets of spittle found their way onto the skin of those in their presence and invaded the bodies through the mouth, eye, nose or broken skin? They couldn’t see what we are able to see today with our technological advancement. It seemed to be a supernatural act of judgment that was passed on by an angry god. The Black Death is still around today, with the latest outbreak occurring in India in 1994, but such antibiotics as tetracycline and streptomycin have been able to greatly reduce the death rate.

While thinking on these things, I feel very blessed to “see” what I see today in God. Did you know that we have seen more moves of God in this century than at any other time in the history of mankind? The natural world doesn’t know anything about what we have seen with our own eyes. They are blinded to the hidden truth just as much as former ages were blinded to the microscopic world. God remains an invisible entity to them because they “see but do not see and hear but do not hear”. At one time the church was content to know God from far off, blindly leading the blind. What God has shown to us, dear ones, was a shadowy mystery to ages past. We take many things for granted today, such as all of the literature that comes to our house, filled with revelation and truth, all of the video and audio tapes that we can get our hands on any time we want them, all of the meetings held all over the country pouring forth revelation of God, and if one of those hungry ones from the dark ages were to be able to feast at our table today, they would look at us like kings. Yet, I find myself looking in my mailbox at times, and hoping that I don’t have to wade through the literature and tapes that are sent my way. How foolish of me. How foolish of you. At the touch of a button, whether it is a TV program, or a DVD, or a CD and we can be in instant heaven, surrounded by a multitude of fellow believers, inundated with the sounds of worship and praise, without ever leaving our recliner. God help us. How pitifully lazy we have become.

We have become like the Romans and their infamous feasts, whereupon, bored with the idea of eating to live, they lived to eat. Food was ingested just for a moment of taste and enjoyment and when they became full, they would go to the latrine and put a feather down their throat and vomit the food up so they could go back and gorge themselves again. Some of these feasts would last all night, a nonstop display of perverse pleasure-seeking, eating just for the sake of pleasure and not survival. Are we not the same in this day of God? Have you not seen meetings where night after night everyone was jumping and hollering and dancing to some pied pipers flute and bathing themselves in the glory of the Lord, and by the time that the services were over nothing was accomplished in their hearts? Each night they gorged themselves on the richness of the Lord’s table and by the next nights service they had vomited it all back up and emptied themselves out in time to fill themselves up again. God help us!

No wonder that God has put some of us on a fast. Not for bread or water, but for the pure Word of God. We have had to become hungry again and we have had to come to the place where every morsel that He places in our mouth is precious to us and it is chewed slowly and carefully and thankfully. He has called us from the perverse feasts of the Babylonian harlot and has brought us to a mount where we are being fed milk and honey and unleavened bread, the food of prophets and priests. We are being healed from our deranged past and we are starting to come out of our enchanted trance and bewitchment. Have you ever considered Nebuchadnezzar? After boasting of his own accomplishments the voice of the Lord spoke to him out of the heavens and declared that he would be put out into the field by men and live like a beast.

Dan 4:33-34

33        The same hour was the thing fulfilled upon Nebuchadnezzar: and he was driven from men, and did eat grass as oxen, and his body was wet with the dew of heaven, till his hairs were grown like eagles' feathers, and his nails like birds' claws.

34        And at the end of the days I Nebuchadnezzar lifted up mine eyes unto heaven, and mine understanding returned unto me, and I blessed the most High, and I praised and honoured him that liveth for ever, whose dominion is an everlasting dominion, and his kingdom is from generation to generation: (KJV)

            It is interesting to think that God had put the cure for the derangement of Nebuchadnezzar right within the judgment of his self glory. I believe that he was healed as he ate of the grass of the field and that was what allowed him to look unto heaven and have his understanding returned back unto him. A good herbalist would be able to prescribe some healing grasses for any number of mental derangements and I have no doubt but that God, the foremost herbalist, was prescribing a cure for the derangement of Nebuchadnezzar, which, I might add, was in the boasting of his kingdom and glorifying himself above God, which is in itself an act of madness. The subsequent condition of Nebuchadnezzar was not madness, but a return back to sanity! He was mad in his mind and spirit BEFORE he became a beast of the field. Many times, you have to lose your mind in order to find it again! Thank God, we are starting to lose our minds, because in the losing we will find the mind we had with Him in the beginning. Praise His name!

            The scientific world continued to progress through the centuries. Gross anatomy became more and more refined and in the 16^th century there were the beginnings of a “Scientific Revolution”. The sun was found to be the center of the solar system, instead of the earth, and with the aid of the printing press, anatomical illustrations of the human body and its structure were put into book form by a Belgian anatomist, Andreas Vesalius and was published in 1543. In the coming years of the 16^th century biologists continued to make advancements in describing and illustrating the human body in fine detail. This was all done with the natural eye and it was not until the invention of the microscope that biology got a glimpse into those things hidden from the natural vision.

            In the beginning of the 17^th century there started to appear crude models of the microscope. The telescope was used as a model for the microscope and the inventors started to make lenses that could make small things look bigger. For the first time, scientists could look into the finer details of the world we live in and see things clearer than they ever could have. The scientific world was given new sight and took advantage of it to try to verify their suspicions of how things actually were in the microscopic world. They soon saw some astounding things.

            In 1665, Robert Hooke, an Englishman, first saw the remains of dead cells. Here are his own words: “I took a good clear piece of Cork and with a Pen-knife sharpen’d as keen as a razor, I cut a piece of it off, and thereby left the surface of it exceeding smooth, then examining it very diligently with a Microscope, me thought I could perceive it to appear a little porous; but I could not so plainly distinguish them as to be sure that they were pores…I with the same sharp pen-knife cut off from the former smooth surface an exceeding thin piece of it, and placing it on a black object Plate…and casting the light on it with a deep plano-convex Glass, I could exceedingly plainly perceive it to be all perforated and porous, much like a Honey-comb, but that the pores of it were not regular…these pores, or cells, were not very deep, but consisted of a great many little Boxes, separated out of one continued long pore by certain Diaphragms.”

            This account is what has lead to the universal term, CELL, to describe the basic unit of life. Mr. Hooke called it a cell because it reminded him of the small, unadorned cells that monks occupied. It could very well have been called “boxes” and today we would be discussing the structure of the “human box”. I like the word “cell” much better, don’t you? Mr. Hooke then went on to discover the little cells in a variety of other objects, such as the pith of an Elder, or the leaf of a tree, ferns, vegetables, all of them had these little cells that joined together to form a solid structure. The microscope had opened up a new and exciting world. A ripple of exhilaration went through the scientific community and better microscopes were created. Blood was examined microscopically and was found to be made up of little red objects, which we know today as red blood corpuscles. All of this was astounding!

            World history is made up of paralleling time lines that correspond to each other and sometimes overlap one another. The discovery of the cell parallels the time of the Reformation, (1500 - 1700). As the scientific world had its eyes opened to a new frontier, Martin Luther and the reformers were opening the eyes of the world to the Catholic Church and its doctrines of heresy. I don’t believe in fate or luck. Everything that happens in the world happens for a reason and has a relevance to us if we can comprehend it. As we go through this history I will try to show you some comparisons in the times of enlightenment that I hope will give you confidence in the sovereignty of God’s hand upon the world and ultimately in your everyday life.

The Reformation was instrumental in returning us back to the Apostolic truth and coincided with the invention of the printing press that allowed the common folk access to the word of God, which beforetime was privileged only to the scholars and to the priesthood. The discovery of the “cell” gave mankind a chance to see the beginning of creation and to see the manner in which God built the world and His most prized creation, man. Indeed, when God said, “Let us build man” the man was built with tiny building blocks, called cells, which in turn are made up of even tinier building blocks called amino acids, which when all joined together in a covenant of life, they become the stuff that make us who we are. Both revolutions, the reformation and the discovery of the cell, were used by God to reveal His divine will to mankind and to exalt His greatness over the earth and all its inhabitants and to establish Himself as the only True Omnipotent God. All other gods must give Him glory, whether they are scientist or priest, they must give way to His Excellency and to His manifest wisdom.

The church was able to comprehend the reformation and its relevancy, but the other revolution went unheeded by reason of the leaven that remained in the bread of the reformation. Although the reformers separated from the Catholic Church and formed the Protestant movement, they were not able to completely separate themselves from the doctrines of the Mother Church. Eternal damnation, rapture, and a belief in a seven 24 hour day creation remained with many of the leaders, and today the modern Protestant church and its leaders carry on the heresy. In other words, the church has separated itself from the womb of the whore but they are still suckling from her breast.

As a result, science, and their world-changing revolution, was left to the ungodly and the heretical and science and religion went their separate ways, never to meet again. However, they remained eerily connected to each other in the following centuries by paradoxical time frames of advancement. While the church looked into the future toward heaven, science looked backward into our beginnings. So, it seems, it has always been. The church runs from its past, afraid of what it may reveal and the demands it would make on church leaders in the changing of its age-lasting doctrines. The future is where the church focuses its attention on because the future is pretty much up for grabs and is able to be ministered to the people in the most advantageous ways by a church that is eager to have its people remain in ignorance and, hence, dependent upon her for their future state of being.

It is quite amusing to me to see the church squirm at any new discovery from the past, like for instance the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls. Immediately the church sequesters the scrolls into the hands of its “scholars” so that they can ascertain if they are to be trusted as being “genuine”. In truth, the church had its greatest fear rise up in their collective throat, because the last thing the church wants to happen is to have an ancient writing show up that disproves everything they have preached as indisputable truth. They are not seekers of truth. Truth should be embraced no matter what form it arrives in, but the trademark of the church over the centuries is to fight any revelation of truth that they don’t already have set in their creeds. This is why the latter part of the 18^th century and the 19^th century were so hard on the church.

The 18^th century marked the first inroads to the question, “Where does life originate from?” Naturally, the scientific world knew that cattle came from cattle and humans came from humans and so on. But the microscope was revealing a new, unseen world and biologists wanted to know if the old theory of “spontaneous generation” was going to hold up to this new dimension of life that was being unfolded before their eyes. Spontaneous Generation covered the lower forms of life, such as insects and worms and other things that seemed to appear out of inanimate objects such as dead meat. It was thought that maggots were generated out of the dead meat itself. It then became clear that there may be eggs in the meat that were invisible to the eye that produced the maggot. Francesco Redi, an Italian physician, did an experiment wherein he prepared eight flasks with different kinds of meat in each one. Four flasks were sealed and four he left open to the air. Flies could only land on the four flasks that were open and those flasks were the only ones to produce maggots. He then did the same thing over again, but put gauze over the open flasks, so that air itself could get into them but not flies, and no maggots were produced in any of the flasks. This experiment and others like it turned science onto a different road of discovery. Life comes from Life!

This new discovery, and indeed, every scientific discovery of the 18^th and 19^th century, put the church world into a tizzy. To many of the conservative scholars of the day, spontaneous generation must be true, because the bible plainly declares that Adam was made from the “dust” of the earth, a plain display of an animate object coming from an inanimate source! As the scientific world started to categorize the different species of the world, they also ran into troubling discoveries. Could a certain specie have come from a different specie, in a process of evolution? The actual word “evolution” did not gain popularity until the mid-nineteenth century. Some of the religious scientists were up in arms over the suggestion, holding a literal view of the creation in Genesis. The scientific world debated the evolution theory over the next century and slowly started to observe a “hybridization” of certain species that obviously evolved from a former form of species.

During this time of scientific upheaval, the church also was going through a time of upheaval, brought on by the need to give an answer to the common Christian concerning these discoveries. It was during this time, in early America, that a movement that is written and talked about very sparingly amongst the modern denominations arose and increased in numbers. That movement was the “Universalist Movement”. This movement was the forerunner of the truths that you and I are speaking of today. Whereas the other church orders were in an upheaval of denial over the scientific theories, the Universalists debated them openly and fervently and sought God to show them where to place them in their relationship with Him. This movement, which began in America in the days of the Colonies and which came to America from England in the ranks of the Anabaptists, which were born out of the reformation, contained some of the most learned men and women of the times. This was an exhilarating time, the birthing of a new nation and the discoveries of the scientific enlightenment, and for these scholarly intellectuals it was a time of expansion and truth. The 18^th and 19^th century were positively the most explosive centuries of truth in the history of the world. All things were possible to these early Americans and the whole world was caught up in change and advancement, and the Universalist Movement moved freely in this kind of atmosphere. To them, truth itself was in an evolving state, as it was comprehended by mankind and became more clearer with each passing age. The movement arrived at its name by reason of the members inherent belief in the ultimate redemption of mankind back into the grace of God, which we know to be the message of reconciliation. God was Universal in His love and His salvation was for the whole earth. This movement was to grow to be the 5^th largest denomination in the United States and to have founded some of the oldest and most respected universities in America. They covered the world in their missionary outreach and taught the word of God with a dynamic vitality representative of the newness of the times that they were a part of. This freedom and openness of mind proved to be their downfall. Their ranks were taken over by a radical group known as “Ultra-Universalists” which promoted the idea that there will be no future purging after death, but every one would be perfected at death and forgiven. They also opened the door to all faiths to be represented in their services, eventually becoming a disjointed movement that lost the support of the upper class and eventually ended up merging with the Unitarian movement. Still, the early Universalist movement was a bright light of God’s revelation in Early America and has left its mark on the church, however stridently they have attempted to obliterate it from its history.

By 1800 good microscopes were available, and the science of Biology was making inroads into the structure and function of cells. However, confusion still abounded as to the significance of the contents of the cells and the cell wall itself. By this time, it was known that some cells had a second and third partition within them, which came to be known as the “nucleus” and the “nucleolus”. The significance of this structure was still hidden from them, however, and they continued to ponder this new insight into microscopic life. Little did they realize that in the viewing of this “pattern” of three separate compartments within the cell they had looked into the mind of God when He created life on earth.

Moses was instructed by the Lord to make a tabernacle in the wilderness according to the PATTERN shown to him in the mount. The cell is the basic unit of life and is the PATTERN for all other cells of like-kind. In 1838 & 1839, two German scientists, botanist MJ Schleiden and zoologist Theodor Schwann, took the loose threads of the ideas and observations available to them and wove them into a doctrine, which stated that cells with nuclei were the structural and functional basis of all living things. Twenty years later, Rudolf Virchow, a great German physician, made another important generalization. “Cells come only from preexisting cells”. This sounds fairly basic to us today, but in the 19^th century this was all new and exciting information.

When the writer of Hebrews wrote about the instruction to Moses to be sure to make it according to the “pattern” shown in the mount, Heb 8:5, the following is the definition for the Greek word translated “pattern”.

5179  tupos (too'-pos);

from 5180; a die (as struck), i.e. (by implication) a stamp or scar; by analogy, a shape, i.e. a statue, (figuratively) style or resemblance; specifically, a sampler ("type"), i.e. a model (for imitation) or instance (for warning):

KJV-- en- ex-) ample, fashion, figure, form, manner, pattern, print.

            Simply put, the word “pattern” denotes something that is a model of things to come, which in turn, are imitations of the model. The Tabernacle in the wilderness is not the model, but is an imitation of the original pattern. The model, or prototype, for humanity was the pattern that scientists saw for the first time in the 19^th century, which was the same structure that God, in His infinite wisdom and foreknowledge, instructed Moses to build in the form of a tabernacle. The three compartments, or “boxes” of the tabernacle are consistent with the three compartments, or boxes of the cell. Both have an outer wall that encloses the inner boxes into a “court”. Then, a second box is built, which is separated from the outer court by a second wall. Finally, a third box is built, separated from the two larger boxes by a third wall, or veil. Although the form of the human cell wall can take many different shapes and sizes, the basic design of the boxes are consistent in relationship to each other, especially in size, the holiest of all being smaller than the holy place which is smaller than the outer court. Likewise, the nucleolus is smaller than the nucleus which in turn is smaller than the cytoplasm, or outer court, of the cell.

            The glorious part of this picture of harmonious patterns is that man has been kept from this image since the creation of Adam, or mankind, and at the very time that God was revealing His nature of love and grace in such a marvelous way to multitudes through the Universalist movement, He was also allowing scientists the ability to look with their natural eyes into the “pattern” of His image and likeness. God has been revealed by Jesus to have 3 manifestations: Father; Son; Holy Spirit. We are also revealed to be made up of 3 units, namely: Body; Soul; Spirit. Now, we are taken back to our beginnings and we are shown to have been created with a 3 dimensional pattern, a divine pattern, consistent and in harmony with the image and likeness of God!! This PATTERN, or MODEL, is a universal representation of the makeup of God. This microscopic pattern is consistent with the macroscopic pattern of our planet: Earth, Atmosphere, Outer Space. The whole universe is made up of an architecture that is consistent with the number three. Even the transcendental number of pi, which is mathematically figured to be 3.14159, corresponds to this universal number. Biblically, the number 3 represents Divine Completeness, and as we read in Revelation 13:18, the number of the beast is three sixes, or a completeness of man in his most base nature, void of the counteracting and overshadowing nature of God. Surely, the odds are astronomically high against the event of man looking into the very foundation of his being and finding a structure that is divinely complete and harmonious with the principals of the Holy Scriptures and with the universal pattern of the world. Glory to the mighty God of our salvation!

Can there be any lingering doubt of His divine determination and sovereign will concerning His children begotten of His own loins? We were truly made in His image and likeness, and we have the evidence right before us today. Oh, give glory to His name all you people of the Lord. Your creator is God and His genes are starting to activate themselves in you. More and more you are starting to take on His holy attributes. You are starting to walk with His gait and starting to talk with His voice. The pattern of His divine nature is taking us over and it is subduing the beast in us with His awesome authority and purpose. Science only recognizes the beast in us and the church only recognizes the lamb in us, but we are a composite being, made up of both heavenly things and earthly things, and that is why the scripture calls us His “new creation”, or in biological terms, His “new species”. Heaven has never seen us yet. Angels are on tiptoe with expectation as the creature starts taking shape.

As the caterpillar goes through its predetermined metamorphosis, we also are changing from that which has been into that which we know not. Who could know? We are being changed into something that has only one replica, and that model has been received into heaven until the time of restitution of all things. To Him all honor and glory belong. He was the first of many to be changed and He is the magnificent die, or icon, from which we all are struck. Our heavenly image has been covered over by an adamic mud that has hid our true self from us, but the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ hath shined in our hearts and we are being re-birthed and reinstated into a life that we had with Him in the beginning. Take hope dear ones! He that is within you is greater than he that is without. Over and over, as the veil between the hidden things of God and the knowledge of men is rent, the message will be repeated, again and again, IN THE BEGINNING, GOD CREATED, and you are the crowning jewel of all that He has created. He has lit you with the light of His own self and He has called you with His own name. Nothing can tear you away from Him, neither sorrow, nor pain, nor tears, nor night, nor sin, nor death, nor cancer, nor fear, nor principalities, nor powers, nor devils, nor angels, nor men, nor pestilence, nor shame, nor guilt, nor shortcomings, nor doubts, nor things above, nor things below. Nothing, no NOTHING, will separate us from His loving intentions for us.

By Bob Torango

(To be continued)