It is hard to overestimate the importance of a few simple words from the Lord’s mouth about the incredibly evil woman of Matt. 13:33.“ Another parable He spoke to them: “The kingdom of heaven is like leaven, which a woman took and hid in three measures of meal till it was all leavened.” Inspired by Satan, she dispenses into the fine meal of truth concerning the life and person of Jesus, an insidious and pervasive yeast that has a life of its own. Yeast is a one-celled organism whose cell matches the cells of animals and humans, and which reproduces rapidly. Satan has a life of his own, with his own set of genes capable of reproducing in the flesh of human beings in order to corrupt and ruin. This is the exact element that the woman “hides” in the three measures of meal. She does it clandestinely, out of sight of those most affected by her duplicity – the followers of the pure Jesus. The leaven corrupts the believers’ appreciation and grasp of His sinless life and beloved personhood and its requirements upon His followers, and the harsh truth of sin and righteousness and judgment. Leaven adds air into dough and makes the bread easy to eat. Jesus, with His flawless human life, is not easy to take, because to enjoy it and live by it requires the complete commitment of our souls. But when “yeast” is added to Him and to His Word, He becomes in our imagination much milder toward sin and our sinfulness, and more accommodating to our sensitivities. This is the way of Satan – to dilute the message and person of Christ, and to diminish His authority among the human race. Leaven, or yeast, is the active, living element of Satan that, because of its genetic viability, is able to reproduce and overtake its host until it is utterly corrupt and useless. This is the work of the Woman of Matt. 13, and she is the mystic and spiritual Babylon of the Apocalypse.
The corrupting Woman surreptitiously placed into the fine flour of truth the symbol of Tammuz, the child miraculously conceived and carried in the arms of his mother; aka, “heroic lord”, “healer”, etc. He is the same as Osiris in Egypt, and Bacchus in Greece and Rome, and Baal in Israel. His source is Nimrod. The sign of the cross, or ‘†’ stands for Tammuz, who was slain by a wild boar (Christian “Lent” came from the 40-day period of mourning for his death) and brought back to life as a child in the arms of his mother Semiramis. He is the predecessor of Baal, dominant in Israel’s idolatry. This cross symbol (initial of Tammuz) originated in the ancient world long before Christ, and is proudly displayed in almost every Christian house of worship, some with a human figure hanging on it. Many Christians were the initial around their necks as a fashion statement. The mother and child occupy a prominent place in every religion in the ancient and modern world, excepting Islam – a political, not a religious system.
The mistranslation of the Greek word staurosas “cross” is a flagrant deception conceived and executed by the enemy of Christ. W. E. Vine explains: “STAUROS….denotes, primarily, an upright pale or stake. On such malefactors were nailed for execution. Both the noun and the verb stauroo, to fasten to a stake or pale, are originally to be distinguished from the ecclesiastical form of a two beamed cross. The shape of the latter had its origin in ancient Chaldea, and was used of the symbol of the god Tammuz (being in the shape of the mystic Tau, the initial of his name in that country and adjacent lands, including Egypt). By the middle of the 3rd century A.D. the churches had either departed from, or had travestied, certain doctrines of the Christian faith. In order to increase the prestige of the apostate ecclesiastical system pagans were received into the churches apart from regeneration of faith, and were permitted largely to retain their pagan signs and symbols. Hence the Tau, or T, in its most frequent form, with the cross-piece lowered, was adopted to stand for the cross of Christ.”
There are symbols of the cross all over the ancient world long before our Lord died, all the way back to the Babylonian sun god. Constantine’s so-called “vision of the cross” (labarum, which yields “everlasting Father Sun”) that supposedly resulted in his conversion to Christianity (he died as Pontifex Maximus, high priest of the pagan religion of the empire, and high priest of the Christian Church) was found on a coin of Ptolemeus III in the 200s B.C. There are many other examples too tedious to mention.
Having this information at our disposal, what should we do who follow the lowly Galilean who never once sanctioned any kind of symbol? Realizing that He (as the wilderness serpent lifted up on a pole) was nailed to a pole as He said He would be: “And as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness even so must the Son of man be lifted up” (John 3:14), that He took the deadly serpent resident in His flesh to the execution stave and crushed his head forever in order to deliver salvation to His people. They would thereafter look upon Him as the brass serpent whose wrists were pinned together over His head in contradiction to Christian tradition. With this knowledge at our disposal, what should we do?
I visited a website with this caption under its title: “Where the Bishop is, there let the multitude of believers be; even as where Jesus is, there is the Catholic Church.” This is a quote from a first century father, Ignatius, a bishop of Antioch, who was instrumental in securing a prominent place for the bishops at the expense of the common Christians. He was the prototypical clergyman, and the clergy came into complete power and control through the Papacy. This website graphically displays and describes 47 Christian symbols that have been used throughout history, many of them current. Of all these symbols, there can be no debate over the one symbol that identifies Christians, viz., the cross. Because we know Jesus and His disciples never once sanctioned symbols for any purpose, should we display them on our person, in our homes, and in our meetinghouses? If we do, are we opening the door for trouble upon our lives from the unseen world? We should fear to find out.
Too often information goes through the brain and doesn’t stick. I’m afraid this is true of Christians more than most because of the enemy’s daily activity around us to confuse us or to cause us to miss life-changing truth. So bear with my iteration.
It is too clear that the cross is not what the Greek language meant by the word stauros. According to Greek dictionaries and lexicons, the primary meaning of stauros is an upright pale, pole, or stake. The secondary meaning of “cross” is admitted to be a “later” rendering. In spite of the evidence, almost all common versions of the Scriptures persist with the Latin Vulgate’s crux (meaning cross) as the rendering of the Greek stauros.
Jesus was executed on a pole, with His hands either attached to the sides of the pole above His head, or, more likely because the Romans would not have wasted a perfectly good spike when one could do the job, crossed over His head and nailed together. The cross symbol is a “T”, the initial of Tammuz, the child born of Semiramis, wife of Nimrod of Babel. She, through duplicity, convinced her followers her child was the reincarnation of her deceased husband. The Christian cross is an ancient Babylonian symbol concocted by the evil serpent Satan to confound the saints and confuse the truth. The words “cross” and “crucify” are mistranslations, a “later rendering,” of the Greek words stauros and stauroo. According to Vine’s Expository Dictionary of New Testament Words, STAUROS denotes, primarily, an upright pole or stake. The shape of the two-beamed cross had its origin in ancient Chaldea. In the third century under Constantine, pagans were received into the apostate ecclesiastical system and were permitted largely to retain their pagan signs and symbols.
The most accepted reason for the “cross” being brought into Messianic worship is Constantine’s famous vision of “the cross superimposed on the sun” in A.D. 312. What he saw is nowhere to be found in Scripture. Even after his so-called “conversion,” his coins showed an even-armed cross as a symbol for the sun-god. Many scholars have doubted the “conversion” of Constantine because of the wicked deeds that he did afterwards. After he had the “vision of the cross,” he promoted another variety of the cross, the Chi-Rho or Labarum. This has been explained as representing the first letters of the name Christos (CH and R, or, in Greek, X and P). The identical symbols were found as inscriptions on rock, dating from ca. 2500 B.C., being interpreted as “a combination of the two Sun-symbols.” Another proof of its pagan origin is that the identical symbol was found on a coin of Ptolemeus III from 247-222 B.C.
Does this symbol have innate power over people, over true believers, who wear it and display it? I can’t say, but Israel’s good kings destroyed all physical instruments of worship when they burned the Baal/Ashtoreth high places. Moses had the golden calf symbol ground to powder. Israel worshiped her Temple and not their Messiah, and Titus reduced it to rubble.
The point is this: religious symbols come from the fallen angels and from their leader, and they offend Yahweh. It is one more item of leaven the evil Woman put into the fine flour. Isn’t that enough to rid our lives of things that smack of paganism? We’ll answer to the Lord for our ignorance, but we’ll pay dearly if we know the truth and don’t act upon it.