Lessons in the Ladder Days

Candace Long: I’m Candace Long with Lessons in the Ladder Days, offering biblical commentary to make sense of the times that we’re living in. Today I conclude the transgenderism series by exposing the plot to transgenderize Jesus. Now before you throw me under the bus as a heretic, I’m going to show you how this movement took place and what God is calling us to do about it.

I’m not alone in this view. I will share the writings of prominent Messianic rabbis who are also speaking out because this affects everyone who considers ourselves part of the body of Christ. This series is all about identifying signs that we are living in the final days before the Messianic kingdom. One of those signs is the growth of this transgender movement and how it is impacting our culture.

But what I want you to see underneath that layer is that we are witnessing the unfolding of an ancient demonically inspired plot whose agenda has been the same for thousands of years. Number one: to groom and enslave an entire generation. And number two: to destroy the identity of the one true God.

What is this ancient agenda? The technical name is Hellenism. It’s been around since the kingdom of Greece under Alexander the Great and was adopted by Rome, and it exploded as a way of life under the Roman Empire. And now since the final kingdom is coming together with the New World Order, which is patterned after the Roman Empire, Hellenism and its ways are what’s being crammed down our throats. Transgenderism is one way this movement is expressing itself now in the 21st century.

Today we’re going to examine three things. Number one: what did Hellenism do to the prophet Daniel? Number two: did this same pattern emerge with Jesus? And number three: how is this movement affecting us, the body of believers who follow Jesus as the Messiah?

Now to understand how all this unfolded, we need to keep in mind a couple of Hebrew principles of interpretation. First, we’re going to look at the story of Daniel as a tavnit, a picture that teaches us what will happen prior to the kingdom. A tavnit, as you recall, has multiple layers of meaning. It’s the way God speaks. And you will see that Daniel is a prophet not only by what he wrote, but what happened to him physically. More than his words, he is the message we’re going to examine today, and we’ll let his story teach us.

A second principle to remember comes from Ecclesiastes 1: what has been is what will be, and what has been done is what will be done. This is an underlying principle for why God speaks using tavniot. For those who have been trained to study the Word of God this way, it is a powerful tool to give us insight as to what is to come. When you look at the stories within Scripture itself, as the rabbis have always known how to do, these stories teach us year after year the ways of God, the challenges we will face, the lessons God wants us to know going into the most dangerous time in all of history. God did not and would not leave us unprepared with no understanding.

So, bullet point number one: what did Hellenism do to Daniel? Let’s review. In part three, we saw how the Hellenistic culture transgendered Daniel as a young boy. King Nebuchadnezzar wanted to groom him and the other young captives to be useful to his kingdom. He was made a eunuch. This was forced on him. They cut off his testicles and his testosterone dried up, his body hair went away, his ability to have children destroyed. Daniel’s spirit, which God placed inside of a young boy whom He called to be a prophet, was now trapped inside a strange body that was not him.

And that new body began to change unnaturally. Daniel undoubtedly became effeminate, androgynous-looking, through no fault or intention of his own. It probably would have been hard to tell if he was a young boy or a young girl. We saw last time in part three that one of the goals of Hellenism was to meld the sexes together so that the lusts of the flesh could be expressed by the Greek and Roman leaders with any and all genders.

Androgyny was highly sought after. Effeminate men were highly esteemed. Their ultimate goal: to destroy the face of God as He desires to express His fullness in both males and females. So if you blend the genders as Hellenism did, you forever bury the true image of God expressed in the earth.

Bullet point number two: does this pattern repeat in Jesus' life? Messianic Rabbi Michael Washer is not only a brilliant writer and teacher, but he is also a very gifted artist. In his book, When All the Pictures are Restored, he spends a lot of time instructing readers about the dangers of Hellenism and what the culture did to destroy the face of Messiah.

Here is some of what Rabbi Washer wrote: Alexander the Great reversed the trend of the Assyrian and Babylonian kings. He changed the way that the world saw gods, kings, and holiness. Everything was based on hairstyle. Now the basic premise began with the androgynous or effeminate look of the Greek god-man, which was the blending of the male and female. The beard had to go, so all of the gods of Greece had long hair.

In royal portraits within Hellenistic cultures, the hair was about shoulder length and then it grew longer over the years. The hair began to part slightly off-center and on top it lifted like a crown. Over time, these portraits of Hellenist kings morphed into the idealized image of what we call Christ. This was not Yeshua.

Rabbi Washer is a gifted artist and a Torah-observant Jew. When he says this is not Yeshua, we need to at least stop and listen. I have been under Rabbi Washer’s teaching for many years now. I’ve read his book and seen his visual tour of the images of the Roman kings before and after Jesus, and how those kings visually depicted themselves in statues and on coins throughout the Roman Empire.

I am a creative who had a marketing agency for almost 30 years. I understand the power of the media and its use of repetitious visual images to portray whatever the leaders in power want communicated. So when Jesus was physically here on earth, the religious leaders of the day had all sold out to the Hellenist culture. So here was the Son of God, Torah in the flesh, who stood in all of his Jewishness before a Hellenized people who gave lip service to their Jewish heritage.

Let’s return now to the parallel with Daniel. When Daniel was turned over to the Babylonian kingdom in power, he was physically changed forever. The very same thing happened to Jesus. Once he was arrested and turned over to the Roman leaders, his physical attributes came under attack, and most especially his face.

When Caiaphas the high priest asked him a direct question, "I adjure you by the living God, tell us whether or not you are the Messiah, the Son of the living God." Now Rabbi Washer writes, most people completely miss the amazing significance of his question. The high priest asked this question in a Jewish environment, within a Jewish schema, with Jewish words, and a Jewish audience, with some of the most learned Jewish leaders present.

And the high priest said in this passage in Matthew 26 that the Messiah was recognized to be the Son of the living God. Yeshua's answer was just as clear. He said, "I am. Hereafter you will see the Son of Man sitting at the right hand of the power and coming with the clouds of heaven."

After this, the Jewish leaders went berserk. They and the Romans took turns beating him in the face. Washer wrote, Yeshua's face began to bruise and swell and bleed. They ripped his beard out of his cheeks. Now for a Jew, this is a horrible thing, which I'll explain in a moment. But for now let the words of Isaiah’s prophecy in chapter 52 suffice: many were astonished at him; his appearance was so marred beyond human semblance, and his form beyond that of the sons of men.

Now recall that in Daniel’s day, the ultimate goal of Hellenism was to destroy or change the face of God. Now let's return to why the face of Jesus was under attack. For answers, we turn to the Torah, and you will see that God designed it so that the face of the Jew, especially the high priest, teaches us about God.

Here are three verses for you to consider. I’m just going to read them first and then bring them together with the Hebrew understanding so it will make sense. Leviticus 19 says, "You shall not round off the hair on your temples or mar the edges of your beard." Leviticus 21 is directed as instruction to the priests: "They shall not make tonsures upon their heads, nor shave off the edges of their beards." Now a tonsure, by the way, is the practice of cutting or shaving some or all of the hair on the scalp as a sign of religious devotion.

The third verse I want to read is from Ezekiel 44, in which the prophet describes the Levitical priests during the Day of the Lord, meaning in the kingdom that is coming: "They shall not shave their head or let their locks grow long; they shall only trim the hair of their head."

All of these verses go to describe how God’s priests were different from all the other religions of the day. And I especially want you to take note of the importance of the hair and the beard. The Egyptians shaved not only their hair and beard, but they shaved the whole body every three days. In the Assyrian statues, the hair is long, it's combed closely down upon the head, and ends up in a mass of curls on the shoulders.

The Babylonian statues likewise feature their kings with very long hair. The Greeks regarded long hair as an ornament, and they cut it only when they were in mourning. With the Hebrews, however, God was very specific about the way His men were to look, especially the priests. The hair was to be trimmed and the beard long.

Rabbi Washer writes, in the Torah, instructions are given to the priest for their appearance. They are pictures, tavniot. If you looked at a priest, you would know what God looks like metaphorically. If you change the way the priest looks, you change the information transmitted about God. Every Jew was and is to have long, uncut beards. Why?

The answer lies in the word corners. The Hebrew word is pe'ot. It means an edge or a corner of a side. There are four corners of the beard and head, just as there are four corners or edges to the Jew’s garments, where there is to be a tzitzit, usually translated as fringes. So there are four corners called arba'kanfot to the clothing and four corners to the Jewish man’s face.

Now time does not permit to fully explain why, but Rabbi Washer goes into detail in his book, Pictures, and it relates to the prophecy in Ezekiel 5 where God caught him up by a lock, a tzitzit of his head, and was told to act out certain things with three parts of his hair. Washer writes, in this little one-man play of Ezekiel's, the facial hair are a picture of the Jews.

The hair is the closest thing to the ears, pe'ot; to the nose, mustache; and to the mouth, the beard. The Jews, by being close to God’s mouth, experience His words first. By being close to His nose, we smell what He smells first: the offerings, the prayers, the doctrine, the attitudes. By being close to His ears, we hear what He hears first. As Yeshua said, every hair of your head is numbered.

God takes notice of every Jew. That is why God’s desire is for the Jews to have long beards as a picture for God Himself, with His face surrounded by the Jews doing those things in Judaism which God entrusted to them. This is why Hellenism removed the beard.

Now this is the backstory of why for the last 2,000 years, this Hellenistic kingdom is doing everything it can to destroy the facial image of God. Now if you Google the name Jesus Christ and just look at the images, see for yourself. Not one of them has a Jewish face. None.

Now I’ve lived with this understanding for many years now, so if it is new to you, it’s going to take some time for you to grasp how insidious this attempt has been for 2,000 years to set us up to receive the wrong Messiah. The Jesus that is depicted throughout the overwhelming majority of Christian churches and cathedrals is not Yeshua. This Jesus, like Daniel, was made a eunuch. By the third century, the emasculation process was complete.

This Jesus is effeminate and androgynous with long hair parted in the middle and little to no beard at all. His image is seen as meek and mild, stripped of his identity as a Jewish priest, beaten and degraded into worthlessness and his authority removed as the coming King. This Jesus is not Yeshua.

So bullet point number three: what does this mean for Christians? Washer writes, the false Messiah has been received by most people as the Messiah. I do not mean that when people quote "receive Christ" unquote, they are receiving the false Messiah. But I certainly believe that most believers picture this Hellenized Jesus in their minds.

Now consider the growing popularity of the Shroud of Turin. If you look at the image’s hair and beard alone, it will prove this cannot be Yeshua. Washer goes into great detail about the findings of one of the shroud scholars. Dr. Wanger concurs with the early first century dating of the shroud, but believes that the facial image is Zeus Kyrios. The findings show that the shroud image was of Hellenist origin and used as propaganda to spread the idolatry of Zeus.

Now I believe that the same message we are hearing now over and over from transgenders is the message Jesus wants us to hear. He is saying, "I’m in the wrong body." Now just as we are repulsed by someone not in the right body, so is God. He wants His children to recognize Messiah when he comes and stop worshipping a false image, which opens the door to the enemy for all kinds of sickness and disease.

Now before we close, I want you to hear from other Christian and Jewish leaders who are likewise calling out for the real Jewish Messiah. Pastor Mark Biltz, who is the founder of El Shaddai Ministries, was raised Roman Catholic but had Jewish ancestry on his father’s side. In his endorsement of Rabbi Itzhak Shapira’s book, The Besorah, or the Gospel According to COVID-19, Pastor Biltz wrote: this book rattles the cage of Western theological thought as it reveals patterns throughout the Scriptures presenting a Jewish Messiah that has been clothed in the garments of Esau so long that the Messiah has been unrecognizable to the world.

Rabbi Shapira’s book is deep; it is a paradigm shift. He writes, the COVID-19 crisis is completely misunderstood as anger, rage, or wrath of God. It is simply His way to express His great pain toward His beloved bride with His expectation of her return. God has allowed these travails and calamities to increase in our world until the foreign clothes of Edom are stripped away from Messiah, and we fulfill our calling to dress him as the rightful King of Israel.

Psalm 2 clearly says that God does not desire to break the nations or destroy the world. Rather, His desire is for the nations everywhere to repent and uphold His Torah. He provided a formula in Psalm 2 for the nations to be spared from the stricter judgment that is to come. That formula: kiss the Son. The Son is none other than Yeshua, who must be stripped of the foreign garments of Christianity which have rendered him a stranger. Only then can he be redressed in his kedushah, holy garments, as the long-awaited Jewish Messiah of Israel and chosen mediator of the nations before God. Failure to remove his false identity and unify him with Israel will lead to the catastrophic words, "Lest he be angry and you perish along the way."

Now Rabbi Shapira goes into detail about the priestly tunic worn by Aaron that is a picture or tavnit of the Messiah, saying that it is the very ketonet passim worn by Joseph, who for a time was also disguised from his brothers. Another tavnit. Shapira explains that this is the time to return Yeshua HaMashiach to his roots, restore his Jewish identity, and return him to his Jewish people. If ever there was a time for Gentiles to strip ourselves of our preconceived beliefs, strange ideologies, and foreign practices and properly clothe him, now is the time.

Now God is asking of us two things: will you recognize my Son? And will you return him to his Jewish brothers? As Shapira writes, Yeshua needs us to carry him as he has carried us. The Messiah of Israel needs us more than ever to identify him and call upon him in the preparation and establishment of the third and final temple. Our Messiah is Jewish. God’s kingdom is Jewish. God is tearing down the false. That means also the false images and pictures that we have that are not him. God is restoring what is true. Never has it been more important to connect to our Jewish roots.

In my online store, take a look at the monograph called Jewish Roots, God’s Call to Reconnect. You’ll also find my latest monograph called Transgenderism, which contains the transcripts of the four-part podcast series, plus important graphics and pictures that make the relevance of this topic come alive. You’ll find these at candacelong.com/store. Thank you for being with me today. I hope you join me again next time for Lessons in the Ladder Days. God bless.