Quote:
Originally Posted by OBW
Lee erred in making it into a sequence of 'becomings'... Yes God had a process and it was to prepare man, not to prepare God.
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I'm repeating myself, so I'll try to be brief. The one Spirit 'becoming sevenfold' to deal with the degraded church(es) makes no sense whatsoever to me. The record in scripture shows seven lamps of fire, burning before the mercy seat ever since Moses was commanded to "build all things according to the pattern which you have seen on the holy mountain". (Heb 8:5; Exod 25:40)
So when Lee considered the seven flames burning before the throne in Revelation 4:5, to him this was the one Spirit of Ephesians 4:4, now processed? What a stretch. Do we really think John meant that? No; John knew well the history of the tabernacle, the ark and the temple. John knew of seven lamps shining before the throne, at least since the time of Exodus 25, and arguably would be aware that this represented heavenly, i.e. eternal things; immutable, or nearly so, from our earthly and temporal perspectives.
Yet suddenly, five of the seven Asian churches showed degradation, and God needed to intensify the Spirit to overcome that? The more Lee tried to fit the scripture to his hermeneutic, the worse it looked; and his interpretative template disintegrated here, if it hadn't already, with the 'becoming intensified' idea. There had been seven lamps burning, all along. John knew that, and would expect his readers to know that.
And is God that mutable, needing to react to church degradation by processing and 'intensifying' Himself? I don't think this deserves serious and/or lengthy consideration; their recent A&C position paper, with the thinnest veneer of purported 'scholarship', supporting the intensification idea, is also largely posturing for the faithful. Another pamphlet to sell to the True Believers.