November 9th.

I desire mercy, not sacrifice, and acknowledgment of God rather than burnt offerings.
Like Adam, they have broken the covenant—they were unfaithful to me there.

The covenant between God and the first human was simple, just trust Him no matter who or what comes along and tries to convince him toward the otherwise. The first covenant was simple and it's the foundational premise behind all of God's covenants—trust me and show me that by not just what you say with your mouth, but what you do in your actions. It wasn't just telling the snake what God had said, but not doing what all of a sudden seemed so appealing because of the lie that it offered them.

That other thing was the reason there needed to be a covenant, the created alternative to God as their Father, which presented an allure out of a spirit of jealousy and envy. The adversary, devil, serpent, beast, accuser, liar, deceiver of all men; didn't want to be their father, it just didn't want the humans to be God's children because it wasn't God's child. It is the metaphorical alternative to the Father and His way for the son He has chosen. It is the way the Father tests His own children so they become pure and devoted to Him as their Father. It is a power and force that is alive in the humans, not the bad entity who fights the good gods, which is metaphorical. It is the force and power that the humans are bound to, which binds them to the ground. It is definitely alive, but not as the devil god which tries to lure the "good people" away from their good lives; it is the good people and their good little animal lives that they are bound to protecting. It is the human way and everything they hold sacred and valuable, all the things they want to protect. It is their sense of fairness for all and self-justice and their keen ability to make sure nobody ever does them wrong. It is the animal need to survive when it goes past the physical into the complex regions of the emotional and mental, and all the complicated ways the animals are driven to survive in so many ways. It's the need to feel like we're the one who's right, like we're the special ones, and the super intense need to find that animal agreement that we are, which has to keep getting renewed all the time in us because we have to continue to survive.

What is the snake's purpose for the animals? To keep them unclean, and far away from God so that they won't see and hear, then turned and be healed. What is the snake's purpose for those who are chosen to become sons? To provide a way for the sons to prove their faithfulness to the Father, to enable them to give God something in return for what He has extended to them—the choice toward Him and away from what they're driven to want/need/crave to keep getting within themselves, which is that agreement that they are okay, good, fine and dandy; that they are not the unclean animal who must be kept separated from the Father. He is not extending wealth, ego or anything else the animal cherishes because it helps it survive better or longer; but love as a Father who loves His own son more than any random child He doesn't even know. He extends that which is behind the intention to remember them and not let them rot in the ground so that they might become one with Him as He has become One with the firstborn Son of many sons, the cornerstone upon which the whole house of God is built.

Which of you fathers, if your son asks for a fish, will give him a snake instead? Or if he asks for an egg, will give him a scorpion? If you then, though you are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father in heaven give the spirit of the Father and the Son to those who ask him!

What does the snake offer? Whatever leads to a better, longer, more self-satisfied life in the physical here and now, which always goes away, so it also extends to their own children who at a certain point when they realize their own demise, they begin living through in the only way they consider they will be able to live on past the grave they are buried in. The snake offers the things the humans naturally love and run after, only because they do satisfy their many needs to survive on so many levels, from the very tangible to the totally obscure. The snake offers peace in the body of flesh, because it is the father of the bodies of flesh that are bound to the earth and to it, who is the king of the animals. The snake offers whatever gives an agreement to the instincts that are naturally in the humans. The instincts that are in them are what makes them unclean animals which cannot come near to God, which is the curse put onto Adam.

The world and the creatures that inhabit it serve themselves and each other by lifting up so as to worship all those things the snake offers to them, whatever can give them that agreement they seek within themselves that satisfies the instinctual cravings and drives to keep finding more. The devil isn't trying to lure the good people into bars, smoke shops and bordellos, it's offering them more money to buy more things that can make the animal feel like it has a purpose (one form of agreement it seeks). It's offering them a more honorable name and position amongst the humans, so that again, it can find more agreement within itself that it is okay and everything's good the way it is. It keeps their focus on the three foot bubble all around them all the time, which is their temporary little existence and the agreement they find within that little bubble.

No longer will there be any curse. The throne of God and of the Lamb will be in the city, and his servants will serve him. They will see his face, and his name will be on their foreheads.

However good all that is for the animals who need to keep finding that agreement within themselves, what the snake offers to the world of human animals tends to reinforce those instincts in the sons in a negative way. Therefore their exposure to the culture of the humans and what they hold up as good and valuable, worth running after, tends toward keeping them unclean and evil, which is not pleasing to the Father because it means they cannot come near Him. Their instinct to continue trying to find that animal agreement within themselves is a thing that must begin to fade away, and it starts with the simpler things like giving up what they love and how they serve themselves by getting it for themselves, which can be the more tangible things. The things that are more difficult to identify is their need to find the agreement that they are the better, righter, more perfect sons than the others, the instinct as recorded in the Cain/Abel episode.

The opposite is Jesus the truly good Son, who even though he knew he was good (because of his position as Son of God), didn't take that agreement into himself as the one who should be served because he was good, but instead became a shepherd to those who were totally ignorant, and laid down the right to live his life as he was for the sake that the sons could see how a son acts, for the Father's sake, for the sake of the nature of the Israel of God, the hidden yet only true family.

Jesus is the firstborn Son in God's world, the leader in His house and family which is not random and chaotic like the world where everyone is trying to get more, at the expense of everyone else. His family is orderly because it runs according to a nature that isn't survivalistic and animalistic, but one like that which lived in the firstborn Son of God. His sons are the priests who are closest to Him because they minister to Him in His house, because they are clean. They can serve Him day and night because they surround Him, they can be close to Him.

My sons, do not be negligent now, for the LORD has chosen you to stand before him and serve him, to minister before him and to burn incense.

However,

As marauders lie in ambush for a man, so do bands of priests;
they murder on the road to Shechem, committing shameful crimes.

If Jesus is the head, cornerstone, firstborn and high priest among God's family of priests, then the way he was when he existed in his human body is the model and example that the sons have to follow, as to how they are to behave. However, that's more than a mouthful because no human can just act like Jesus acted; it's impossible to even know how he acted with a knowledge that isn't tainted by the animal prejudices, unless that veil is being lifted. To act like he acted is something so far away from the animal capacity, it's not even possible to ponder adequately. The journey in toward the Father isn't light or like a hobby, but so intense that there is no other option except to give up all the things that define our animal existence. It takes that much devotion to the singular purpose of the son who wants to find the Father, that everything else must be given up, just to keep going further in.

Therefore, since we are surrounded by such a great cloud of witnesses, let us throw off everything that hinders and the sin that so easily entangles, and let us run with perseverance the race marked out for us.

Everything that hinders is everything we know and love, and what we find any kind of little fulfillment in, which is to say how we naturally find our animal agreements that we are constantly looking for. Those agreements start diminishing as they're being taken away and the son's life loses its luster because the places he used to go to in order to find his little agreements that keep him interested are closing down and he wanders around like an orphan without the comforts that his old father the snake used to offer him. His life becomes tragically dull and bland in the animal sense, which is the beginning of the search for a life that isn't driven by such temporary fulfillments, but only one—the singularly pure search for the Father's love, which is hidden beneath all the piles of rubbish the humans call valuable stuff, what they live for.

I am the good shepherd; I know my sheep and my sheep know me—just as the Father knows me and I know the Father—and I lay down my life for the sheep.

The reason my Father loves me is that I lay down my life--only to take it up again.

This is the great example that Jesus existed as, which humanly speaking was nothing, but to God is everything, the very reason that his Father loved him. The example is to go against and away from where the animal wanted him to go (be a human and act like one), and to instead go the other way, the way that the humans don't want to go because according to the humans it's the way of the shameful and dishonorable—what they despise no matter what they might say with their meaningless words, sacrifices and rituals.

Having loved his own who were in the world, he now showed them the full extent of his love.

If he was a god then the temptation meant nothing, nor did his work or what he meant to God. If he was a god then the reason the Father loved him was a joke, some token gesture, and God is a liar and His word does become just meaningless conceptual drivel. Most especially important, if Jesus was a god and the spirit was a god, then the condition of God living in Jesus' body—what made him the firstborn son among many who later received the spirit into their hearts—is also meaningless for the true sons.

I tell you the truth, no one can enter the kingdom of God unless he is born of water and the Spirit. Flesh gives birth to flesh, but the Spirit gives birth to spirit. You should not be surprised at my saying, `You must be born again.' The wind blows wherever it pleases. You hear its sound, but you cannot tell where it comes from or where it is going. So it is with everyone born of the Spirit.

That condition was the basis and example of what happened in the first century to those who were chosen to be under the new covenant, before it went away. If Jesus existed before as a god, then he was self-contained and wasn't in fact at the complete and utter mercy of the Father who lived in him, who gave him the real food, and taught him to accept His way and reject the way of the humans, of the snake. That teaching enabled Jesus to choose the Father's way, and reject the serpent's way, which kept him clean and pure—what his whole purpose was based upon, to remain that way so as to be offered up by God as the only perfect sacrifice which could saved His family of sons. That sacrifice was enough to be able to transform those chosen humans who weren't clean—thoroughly and completely unclean because they were under that curse God put on Adam because he broke the covenant—into sons who are clean and able to be brought near to God, to be in His presence because they've been made clean by the blood of the perfect Lamb which washes away their uncleanness.

"Whoever believes in me, as the Scripture has said, streams of living water will flow from within him." By this he meant the Spirit, whom those who believed in him were later to receive. Up to that time the Spirit had not been given, since Jesus had not yet been glorified.

Water is able to wash dirt off a body and make it clean. Living water is the spirit, which is that same life force that lived in him, what also had to live the same way in the sons after him, if they were to be transformed and made clean. It is the spirit that makes the son able to be transformed from unclean to clean; that is, able to be brought near to God and be in His presence. That is, to become able to know the Father because he is being brought near to Him, and eventually become pleasing to Him, useful and able to give Him enjoyment. They are able to serve Him.

These are they who have come out of the great tribulation; they have washed their robes and made them white in the blood of the Lamb. Therefore,

they are before the throne of God and serve him day and night in his temple;
and he who sits on the throne will spread his tent over them.

Never again will they hunger; never again will they thirst.
The sun will not beat upon them, nor any scorching heat.

For the Lamb at the center of the throne will be their shepherd;
he will lead them to springs of living water. And God will wipe away every tear from their eyes.