Isaiah 1:21: How is the faithful city become an harlot! it was full of judgment; righteousness lodged in it; but now murderers.
Isaiah 57:3: But draw near hither, ye sons of the sorceress, the seed of the adulterer and the harlot.
Jeremiah 3:6: The LORD said also unto me in the days of Josiah the king, Hast thou seen [that] which backsliding Israel hath done? she is gone up upon every high mountain and under every green tree, and there hath played the harlot.
Ezekiel 13:6, 8: Thou hast played the harlot also with the Assyrians, because thou wast unsatiable; yea, thou hast played the harlot with them, and yet couldest not be satisfied.
And I saw, when for all the causes whereby backsliding Israel committed adultery I had put her away, and given her a bill of divorce; yet her treacherous sister Judah feared not, but went and played the harlot also.
It is this same imagery that John is drawing on in the Book of Revelation when he describes Babylon the Harlot:
Revelation 17:5: And upon her forehead [was] a name written, MYSTERY, BABYLON THE GREAT, THE MOTHER OF HARLOTS AND ABOMINATIONS OF THE EARTH.
The harlot is the church because
there is no church. There is only the nation of Israel who was scattered among the Gentiles -- and Israel has been just as disobedient to the Torah for the past 2000 years following Yeshuas death as she was for the previous 2000 years before His birth. All of us make up the "congregation of Israel." That's why the apostles used the word "ekklesia" to refer to the "congregation" -- because it had always been used to denote the "congregation of Israel" in the Septuagint, which was the popular "bible" among the Gentile believers of their day.
As it is written: The Lord is a "jealous God:"
Exd 20:5: Thou shalt not bow down thyself to them, nor serve them: for I the LORD thy God [am] a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth [generation] of them that hate me
Jealous for whom? Jealous for His bride. Thats why He uses the word jealous in the first place.
Notice what else he says in that verse: of them that hate me. Yeshua said that if we love Him, we will keep His commandments -- His Torah, and the verse above tells us that those who do not obey His commandments *hate* Him.
Hosea 1:2: The beginning of the word of the LORD by Hosea. And the LORD said to Hosea, Go, take unto thee a wife of whoredoms and children of whoredoms: for the land hath committed great whoredom, [departing] from the LORD.
God tells Hosea to take a harlot for a wife. She represented Israel, who had become a adulteress -- she was unfaithful to her marriage covenant.
Hosea 1:6: And she conceived again, and bare a daughter. And [God] said unto him, Call her name Loruhamah: for I will no more have mercy upon the house of Israel; but I will utterly take them away.
Because Israel had been an unfaithful bride, God declared that He would divorce her and have no more mercy for her. He would scatter the Israelites among the nations.
Hosea 1:9: Then said [God], Call his name Loammi: for ye [are] not my people, and I will not be your [God].
God said that they would no longer be His people, and He would no longer be their God.
Hosea 1:10-11: Yet the number of the children of Israel shall be as the sand of the sea, which cannot be measured nor numbered; and it shall come to pass, [that] in the place where it was said unto them, Ye [are] not my people, [there] it shall be said unto them, [Ye are] the sons of the living God. Then shall the children of Judah and the children of Israel be gathered together, and appoint themselves one head, and they shall come up out of the land: for great [shall be] the day of Jezreel.
But God promised that the House of Israel and the House of Judah would again be re-united. He would gather back and restore the family:
Ezekiel 37:15-23: The word of the LORD came to me: "Son of man, take a stick of wood and write on it, 'Belonging to Judah and the Israelites associated with him.' Then take another stick of wood, and write on it, 'Ephraim's stick, belonging to Joseph and all the house of Israel associated with him.' Join them together into one stick so that they will become one in your hand.
"When your countrymen ask you, 'Won't you tell us what you mean by this?' say to them, 'This is what the Sovereign LORD says: I am going to take the stick of Joseph-which is in Ephraim's hand-and of the Israelite tribes associated with him, and join it to Judah's stick, making them a single stick of wood, and they will become one in my hand.' Hold before their eyes the sticks you have written on and say to them, 'This is what the Sovereign LORD says: I will take the Israelites out of the nations where they have gone. I will gather them from all around and bring them back into their own land. I will make them one nation in the land, on the mountains of Israel. There will be one king over all of them and they will never again be two nations or be divided into two kingdoms. They will no longer defile themselves with their idols and vile images or with any of their offenses, for I will save them from all their sinful backsliding, and I will cleanse them. They will be my people, and I will be their God.
Notice what He says here: They will be my people, and I will be their God. Contrast this with Hosea 1:9: for ye are not My people, and I will not be your God.
God had planned, from the very beginning, that the House of Israel would be scattered among the nations and they would lose their identity. They would become
Lo Ammi -- "Not My People." But, He promised that He would regather them from the four corners of the earth, out of every nook and cranny, and bring them back to the Promised Land, and that when they came back, they would bring with them Gentiles. These are the "companions" of the House of Judah and the House of Israel that is spoken by Ezekiel in chapter 37.
Again, there is
no "church." There is no "replacement" of Israel. The "church"
IS Israel, made up of true descendants of the twelve tribes as well as Gentile companions, and Israel has continued to be unfaithful to the marriage covenant. Constatine committed the very same transgression as that of Jereboam in leading the House of Israel to idolatry. This is the "spirit of antichrist" that we were warned about. "Antichrist" does not mean "against Christ." It means "counterfeit," or "fake." It is a false Messiah that people accept as the real thing. That is what has happened: we have been worshipping a Hellenized "Jesus" who freed us from the Torah, rather than the Jewish "Yeshua" Who commands obedience to His Torah. But in Revelation, we find that harlot Israel is still just as disobedient to His Torah as it always was. God sends judgment after judgment in an effort to get her to repent, "but they repented not," because they refuse to accept that they have been taught wrong, and that they have *not* been "freed" from the Torah.
Shimon