Jesus overlooking the Temple in Jerusalem

 

“Ask in My Name…I have Overcome the World”

In the Footsteps of the Master

By Robert D. Mock MD

robertmock@biblesearchers.com

July, 2006

 

 

John 16:26 - “In that Day you will Ask in My Name”

 

The Last Supper was over.  The moments of intimacy with the Davidian prince in this upper chamber was only highlighted that they were dining right over the tomb of their most famous Israeli king, David the son of Jesse.   Jesus was now on a countdown with His own destiny. 

 

The threats from the Sadducean high priestly family of the House of Ananus and his high priest son-in-law, Caiphas, were rampant throughout the city. Their location was guarded by the Essene guardians of David’s tomb.  Now it was time to talk in the relaxing atmosphere of intimacy. 

Quickly Jesus began talking. Like a father giving his last instructions to his sons; a sequential monologue began: a new commandment of love, Jesus’ relationship with His Father in heaven, the promised help by the Holy Spirit, Jesus as the “Vine”, and the necessity of obedience of the halakha of the observant Jews. This was now redefined in the spirit of love, how the closer they come in relationship with His Father, the more rejection they will receive from the world.  He finished with the need to trust the “Spirit” to guide them in the future times of peril. 

 

The Church with the Upper Room over the Tomb of David – Photo by Robert Mock (2006)

 

The message of Jesus seemed almost surreal, “more than real” to the disciples.  He was so alive and vibrant.   Now the whole evening was spent talking about His soon departure.  How? Why? What are we to do?  The evening floated between literal reality and mystical surrealism. 

 

Suddenly the evening discussion changed.  His voice lowered, pensive, thoughtful and pointed.  “These things I have spoken to you in figurative language, but the time is coming when…I will tell you plainly (pshat or in literal language) about the Father.” (John 16:25) The mystical imagery of the heavenly and spiritual realms would soon be revealed in the concrete world of the present.  He continues:

 

John 16:26 – “In that day you will ask in My name, and I say not to you that I will ask the Father (Abba) for you; for the Father Himself loves you, because you have loved Me, and have believed that I came forth from God.”

 

The life of the emissaries (apostles) of Jesus after the resurrection was not an event that could be anticipated.  They were seeing mystical ideology merging before their eyes in virtual reality.  The private sessions that their Master had taught them on how to reach their mental powers into the heavens on the “heavenly cherub” raced through their minds.  The ability to mentally ascend to the Presence of the Almighty One like Yahshua did on the Galilean hillsides in prayer to His Abba, would soon revolutionize their lives.  They would soon understand the reality that the worlds that were unseen could also be seen.  That which was known to exist could now be perceived in reality.  There was a fine veil between the worlds of the unseen, the perceived and the seen. 

 

How could they reach into the worlds of the heavens where the temple and the throne of the Almighty stood?  Here was the true reality while the temple and the Holy of Holiest in Jerusalem were only a perceptual image, as the reflection from a mirror.  They pinched their arms as they assured themselves that they were “real.” 

 

They were being asked to live in this world yet remain detached from its perceived reality.  They were being expected to perceive the forces of goodness and evil that was swirling around them. Yet the one thing that they were asked to do; identify the world of the unseen “goodness” with the “Name” of their Master and His spiritual world would be opened up to them.

 

The Centacle (Church with the Upper Room) as a 13^th century Franciscan Medieval Friary – Photo by Robert Mock (2006)

 

Some have stated that “to know the name of a person is a mark of your relationship with him.”  The intimacy that the disciples had with their Master, even in times when they could not see or perceive him, was to be a mark of the reality that their union with Him was complete and absolute.  The life of the oneness that Jesus had with His Father was now to be transferred into a life of oneness between the “Son” and his disciples. 

 

The life and ministry of Yahshua in Galilee and later in Jerusalem was a life that was moment by moment planned and orchestrated by His Father.  He lived His life in constant dependency of what His Father willed for Him to do.  This relationship was so constant and transparent that it appeared flawless as it worked its way out in all the actions and perceptions that Jesus lived.  The fact is that we are all so aware of what others may think, what our parents may desire, what the institutional church or their synagogue’s dogma demands and what the “conventional wisdom” may dictate for our lives.  It only enhances the understanding that Jesus’ life was immune and impervious to each of these perceptual influences. 

 

The reality is that the Almighty One of Israel, the Father of Yahshua, lived and interacted with the world around Jesus through the life and actions of His “Son.”  This interaction came to all those humans that surrounded the life of Jesus.  God’s will was able to flow through Yahshua in transparent and flawless perfection.  How so, you may ask? 

 

While most of us have mental and perceptual filters that affect, alter, and distort how we perceive our lives, our cultural imprints, genetic alterations and egos blocked by our individuality and autonomy warp our perception of divine reality.  The flawless filter of Jesus’ allowed the “still small voice” of His Father to flow with transparency through His life to all those who came in contact with Him. 

Jesus sought to teach His disciples the same spiritual discipline.  Give up your rights to yourself.  He asked for them to do the best in this material life, while being indifferent to the seductive powers that seek to control your lives.  Become impervious to the social cultural dictates of your family, friends, church and political orders.  Choose not to become immersed in your own selfish narcissism, personal adulation and the impetuous seeking of sensory pleasure. 

 

The Tomb of David with Israeli Guide Roni – Photo by Robert Mock (2006)

 

Again Jesus urged his disciples to choose life and to devote their body, soul and mind to the spiritual journey of seeking the God of the Universes.  How so?  By focusing, identifying, emulating and patterning their lives after Yahshua, the fullest manifestation of living a life of Torah. 

 

Jesus did not ask his disciples to give up their observant Jewish lives.  He did say, concerning those chief rabbis who sat on the seat of Moses to “Do as they say…. but not as they do.”  With their intense study of the Torah, they composed the Oral Torah that became the most concise way of physically living all the commands of the Lord.  Though hypocrites, these disciples of Shammai were theologically correct.  The way of the Torah for the Jew was the path of righteousness.   

 

Jesus did ask them to “Follow Me!”  He would show them how to live their Torah observant lives with the spiritual understanding of the commands of God.  Not only that, He promised to them that through Him would come the Holy Spirit (Ruach HaKodesh) to give them the power to live out that life of Torah. 

 

Since “My Father and I are One”, Jesus urged them to use His pure and transparent filter to gain an understanding of His Father, the Almighty One of Israel.  Jesus asked them to focus on Him as the full embodiment of the Torah.  By observing and patterning their lives after Him, they could live in “virtual reality” the spiritual life in the flesh.  If they did, the power and might of His Father would flow through Him to them. 

 

We were not asked to look upon Jesus as though He were the same as His Father.  Rather, His Father, by His love and grace, allowed Yahshua to become this inter-dimensional channel direct from the throne of God in heaven to them.  In the “Plan of Salvation” instituted in the Council of Heaven before the foundation of this planet earth was created, the role of the “Son” was to be a “funnel” or a “vortex” for the creative power of the all the seven emanations that were permitted by His Father for life and creation in the universes.  It would be through Yahshua (Jesus) that the power of the Holy Spirit (Ruach HaKodesh) would minister to His disciples.  It would be through Yahshua that the channel of communication (Jacob’s ladder) would flow to and from on High. 

 

Jesus spoke of this pathway, this “door”, as a spiritual ladder from the World of the Unseen Divine to us. 

 

John 16:28 – “I came forth from the Father and have come into the world (olam hazah – this age or this world).  Again, I leave the world and go to the Father.”

 

Social seekers and power brokers like to drop names of the influential.  Jesus, did not give us permission to “drop” His Name as a talisman or magic spell.  We were not to use His Name to create our own influence of self righteousness.  He did say that when we need the Father, to ask for His Father in “Yahshua’s” name.  This would be the key to open the spiritual channels from on high.  The power of the Name of the Father “Yah”  would flow through “Yahshua” to us.  (The Names of God)

 

Jesus told his disciples:

 

John 14:6 -  “I am the Way, the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through Me.” 

 

Did He say that He was the Source of truth?  No!  He did say:

 

John 10:9 – “I am the Door. If anyone enters by (through) Me, he will be saved, and will go in and out and find pasture.  …I have come that they may have life, and that they may have it more abundantly.”

 

The “path” and the “door” would go through Jesus to the Fountain of Truth, His Father in heaven.  This “door” and “pasture” would later be testified by His brother, James the Just (Tzadik) who was the President (Nasi) of the Nazarene Sanhedrin and Synagogue or the supreme council of what the Christians know today as the Jerusalem Church. 

 

James’ final testimony was concerning His brother, Jesus the Messiah (Yahshua haMaschiach) as the “Door.”  This testimony was given on the temple portico in the Spring Passover in 62 CE.  Afterwards, the murder of James the Just was instigated by the order of the high priest, Ananus the Younger, the son of Ananus the Elder who convicted Jesus to death in 30 CE.  James, the brother of Jesus, was then stoned and clubbed to death and his body thrown over the temple walls.   

 

The Dormition Abbey on Mount Zion, the site of the Tomb of King David and the Church with the Upper Room – Photo by Robert Mock (2006)

 

The rabble or the “tumult” who pressured that James the Just must be stoned to death were the same “Scribes and Pharisees” of Beit Shammai, the school of the Shammai the Elder, the Vice-President (Av Bet Din) of the Sanhedrin, who plotted to kill Jesus the Nazarene on that fateful Passover, thirty two years prior.  As recorded by the second century Nazarene historian, Hegesippus, and quoted by Eusebius in his “Ecclesiastical History of the Christian Church:” 

 

Hegesippus in his Memoirs - “Some of the seven sects of the people mentioned by me above in my Memoirs asked him (i.e. Jacob) what was the door to Jesus?  And he answered, ‘that he was the Savior’ from which some believed that Jesus is the Christ…As there were many therefore of the rulers that believed, there arose a tumult among the Jews, Scribes and Pharisees, saying that there was danger, that the people would now expect Jesus as the Christ. 

 

They came therefore together and said to Jacob, ‘We entreat thee; restrain the people, who are led astray after Jesus as if he were the Christ.  We entreat thee to persuade all who are coming to the feast of the Passover rightly concerning Jesus; for we all have confidence in thee...Stand, therefore upon a wing of the Temple that thou mayest be conspicuous on high, and thy words may be easily heard by all the people...

 

“The aforesaid Scribes and Pharisees, accordingly, placed Jacob upon a wing of the Temple, and cried out to him ‘O thou Just One, whom we ought all to credit, since the people are led astray after Jesus that was crucified, declare to us what is the door to Jesus that was crucified.’ But he answered with a loud voice, ‘Why do you ask me regarding Jesus the Son of Man?  He is now sitting in the heavens on the right hand of the Great Power, and is about to come on the clouds of Heaven.’

 

And as many were confirmed, and gloried in this testimony of Jacob, and said, ‘Hosanna to the Son of David,’ these same priests and Pharisees said to one another… “Let us stone Jacob the Just.’

 

And they began to stone him as he did not die immediately when cast down; but turning round, he knelt down, saying, ‘I beseech Thee, O Lord God and Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.’  Thus they were stoning him…Thus one of them, a fuller, beat out the brains of the Just with the club he used to beat out clothes.  Thus he suffered martyrdom, and they buried him on the spot where his tombstone still remains, close to the Temple. He became a faithful witness; both to the Jews and to the Greeks that Jesus is the Christ.  Immediately after this, Vespasian invaded and took Judea.” (Hegesippus as quoted in Eusebius, Ecclesiastical History, Book II, xxiii citied in “The Murder of James the Just (62 CE) and the Final Years of the Hebrew Nazarene Ecclesia in Jerusalem”, BibleSearchers, February, 1999)

 

It is interesting that within one hundred years after the death of Jesus, the Roman Christian Church perceived that the “Door” was to Jesus rather than through Jesus to His Father in heaven.

 

Jesus also opened up to his disciples that His mission in life was to be the “Good Shepherd.”  Did he not tell them earlier about this mission? 

 

Matthew 15:24 – “I was not sent except to the lost sheep of the house of Israel.”

 

Yahshua’s rescue mission to the “lost sheep of the house of Israel” was to become a continuation of the rescue mission started by their great Pharisee mentors, Hillel the Elder and Menahem the Essene a half a decade earlier to the Gentiles.  This was a path of righteousness so that the Gentiles might become affiliated with the Jewish people as “Righteous Gentiles.”

 

This was also the mission, commissioned by Jesus the Nazarene to a young Shammai Pharisee, Shaul, whose life had also been touched by Hillel’s grandson, Gamaliel, the Nasi of the Grand Sanhedrin.  Now as an emissary for Jesus, the Apostle Paul would be sent to the Gentiles, for the “Righteous Gentile” also merited a reward in the life to come. 

 

Yet Jesus had a more specific mission, cut out by the lasered purpose of His Father.  He would be sent those Israelites of the Lost Tribes of the House of Israel that had so become assimilated within the Gentile world that they had lost their “covenanted” identity completely. 

 

John 10:14, 16 – “I am the good shepherd: and I know My sheep, and am known by My own…and other sheep I have which are not of this fold: them also I must bring, and they will hear My voice; and there will be one flock and one shepherd.”

 

So today, the “pathway” or “Way” of righteousness, that “door” to truth, and that “power” of the Holy Spirit is available in its fullest to the Torah observant Jew who understands how to live the life of Torah.  Few today access this path of faith.  For these Jews, to “ask” the God of Israel through the “Name” of Yahshua” would unleash a spiritual flood of halakhic truth and understanding of the Torah. 

 

King David’s Tomb – Photo by Robert Mock (2006)

 

Here is the “pathway” for the “Lost Sheep of the House of Israel (Joseph [Ephraim and Mannaseh]) This will become their path to full restoration into the “flock” of Israel.  As they hear the voice of their shepherd, and call upon His Name, Yahshua, their identity will be revealed to them by their God, the Father of Jesus. 

 

The Christian or Islamic Gentile, that want to become a “righteous gentile” and be “grafted” into the vine, can also appeal by the grace of God, to “Abba in heaven” to send them the Holy Spirit (Ruach HaKodesh) down the “Pillar of Grace.” This comes through that vortex of God’s creative emanations and spiritual understanding called by the sages of Judaism, the Tiferet.  Here is the “Name” or the “Door” where we go through to the “pasture” around the throne of the Divine.  When the Gentile is flooded by the “Spirit,” what are we to do?  Yield to the Hand of the Divine and Obey!  By obedience, we become transformed.

 

Many Blessings from our Master

 

 

Message from BibleSearchers

 

BibleSearchers scans the world for information that has relevance on the time of the end.  It is our prayer that this will allow the believers in the Almighty One of Israel to “watch and be ready”.  Our readiness has nothing to do trying to halt the progression of evil on our planet earth.  In our readiness, we seek to be prepared for the coming of the Messiah of Israel so that goodness and evil will be manifested in its fullest.  Our preparation is a pathway of spiritual readiness for a world of peace.  Our defender is the Lord of hosts. The time of the end suggests that the Eternal One of Israel’s intent is to close out this chapter of earth’s history so that the perpetrators of evil, those that seek power, greed and control, will be eliminated from this planet earth.  The wars of the heavens are being played out on this planet earth and humans will live through it to testify of the might, power, justice and the love of the God of Israel.  In a world of corruption and disinformation, we cannot always know what the historical truth is and who is promoting evil or mis-information.  We cannot guarantee our sources but we will always seek to portray trends that can be validated in the Torah and the testimony of the prophets of the Old and the New Testament.

 

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