No one can read the Bible and not walk away knowing that the number seven is somehow special to God. Seven days of creation, seven thousand years in this age, seven years for a year of release, seven weeks of those years in a Jubilee cycle, seven candlesticks in the temple… a comprehensive list would probably take a couple of pages by itself. Suffice it to say, God likes seven.
But why? Surely God has a reason, something that goes beyond mere arbitrary likes and dislikes. Men have said that seven is the “perfect” number, or the “number of completion”. But those are labels that are just as arbitrary. This article will have to be rather long, because seven shows up in literally every aspect of life – it is in fact, fundamental to life itself.
In the process, we’ll have to cover a quick primer in a lot of areas such as music, physics, biology and so on – just to make sure that everyone who reads this is up to speed. And, I’m afraid I’ll have to question a bit of established scientific dogma here and there, but hopefully you’ll bear with me on that. In the end I promise you will have a REAL answer – I can’t promise it’s the right answer, but at least an interesting one.
PYTHAGORAS
Once upon a time in the sixth century B.C., there was a man named Pythagorus. Called by many the father of mathematics, he was the first to really understand a lot of the math we take for granted, and we owe many of our fundamental theories of math to him.
For example, he was the first to prove that A2+B2=C2, which is why that theorem bears his name. But unlike modern researchers who are content to ask “How”, and “What”, He was obsessed with the question WHY. For Pythagorus, the fact that 2×2 is four wasn’t enough; he wanted to know WHY 2×2 made four.
He was also one of the first to discover that music was essentially audible mathematics. He realized that there was a mathematical ratio between notes that ultimately led to the diatonic scale we use today. According to legend, he was walking past a blacksmith’s shop and noticed that the bangs of hammer on anvil made beautiful music; but he had to know WHY, so he observed the different anvils and the sound they made, and then realized that they were musical because each of the anvils was a whole number fraction of each other; they were 1/2 or 2/3 or 1/5 the size of each other, thus making them correspond to the notes in a musical scale.
He also believed that the planets moved in precisely the same way music is formed – in a strict pattern of ratios and mathematical equations. He lived in an age where much of this couldn’t be proved, and so it was taken on faith. Faith in the logic of the idea.
It was he who coined the phrase “the Music of the Spheres”, claiming that “there is geometry in the humming of the strings. There is music in the spacing of the planets” (although he called them spheres). So he believed that there was music to be heard in the motions of the planets if only one had ears to hear it. And it was his insistence on the WHY of the matter that led to these leaps, which were ahead of science by over two thousand years. He couldn’t accept that music just WAS, he had to know WHY it was. When his contemporaries were content to bang on drums and twang harps, he had to understand WHY sounds were different, what made them different, and desperately sought to UNDERSTAND.
MUSIC
Since music is the fundamental expression of all mathematics, we do well to start with it. Music as we know it consists of seven notes – do-re-me-fa-so-la-ti-do. You’ll notice that while I cited eight notes, the eighth is the same as the first. There are seven unique notes in the scale, and every eighth note is the same as the note that began it – but twice as high pitched, vibrating twice as fast.
This procession of notes continues, theoretically indefinitely, although the human ear can only hear an average of about ten octaves – ten groups of seven, making seventy whole notes. But each octave where the notes are repeated is has exactly twice the frequency of the last; in other words, middle A vibrates exactly twice as fast as low A. High A vibrates twice as fast as that, and so on.
These vibrations don’t stop there; not only do they go up into the ultrasonic and down into the subsonic range, the same vibrational scale works in photons as well as air waves, where everything from gamma radiation to light to short waves and radio and even the pulsations of the galaxies are all vibrations which can be measured in doubling octave-like cycles; from pulsations which take the lifetime of the universe to complete, to pulsations which happen quadrillions of times per second. But more on that later.
Staying with music for now, the sound waves that make up middle A are vibrating back and forth 440 times per second – called “440 hertz”. High A vibrates at 880 hertz, while low A is 220 hertz. Pythagorus could not possibly measure this, but he understood the concept when He saw that a hammer struck on an anvil twice the size of another made the same sound, only higher.
And that understanding was the first glimpse into the true nature of music. He discovered that all the musical sounds we hear can be expressed as true fractions; 1/3 of an octave, 1/5, and so on. And that it is these constructs which make up the chords in music which tie individual notes together into pleasing harmonies or “dischordant” noise.
It is easiest to understand in stringed instruments. If a string in a guitar is strung to produce a certain note, E for instance, and a finger is pressed in the center of it, the string still hums an “E” – but exactly an octave higher. This place of inactivity that divides the active portions of a string is called a “node”.
The guitar player exploits this usage of nodes by pressing his finger on the string at different points on the guitar (called frets), which are separated by exact ratios to the length of the string, and by pressing at the various frets they control the note of the music by shortening the string by a major fraction – 1/8th, 1/24th, and so on.
Pythagorus learned a lot of this based on the lyres and harps which were common around the Mediterranean sea then. And he took what had been an abstract “it just works!” idea and attempted to understand WHY. But he wasn’t content to understand music. He wanted to make music explain the planets as well. And he never succeeded – but he was right.
THE PLANETS
The dark ages came and went and Galileo and others began to study the heavens anew. They knew of the teachings of Pythagorus and so they looked at the heavens searching for this music. And they found that, in many ways, he was right. There was a distinct, mathematical ratio to the orbits of the planets as well as their size. Not exact, although that too can be explained, but an unarguable ratio nonetheless.
The concept is called the Titius-Bode Law, and they were seeking a mathematical progression of the planets; they discovered that if they divided the earth’s distance from the sun into ten parts, that Mercury sat at four units from the sun, and Venus at seven, and the Earth at ten, and Mars at sixteen. So what, you ask?
They noticed that if they subtracted 4 from those numbers, that Venus was 3, earth was 6, and Mars was 12. Notice that, without the “4” they subtracted, the numbers exactly doubled each time! So they pursued this reasoning by continued doubling and theorized that the next planet would be at 24+4 earth units from the Sun, the next 48+4, the next 96+4, the next 192+4 and the next 384+4.
Bear in mind that this was theorized in the late 1700s – before the discovery of the asteroid belt, Neptune, Pluto or Uranus. Now look at the chart below to see how that progression matched the actual distance.
| Planet | n | Titius-Bode Law | Actual Distance |
|---|---|---|---|
| Mercury | 0.40 | 0.39 | |
| Venus | 0 | 0.70 | 0.72 |
| Earth | 1 | 1.00 | 1.00 |
| Mars | 2 | 1.60 | 1.52 |
| asteroid belt | 3 | 2.80 | 2.8 |
| Jupiter | 4 | 5.20 | 5.20 |
| Saturn | 5 | 10.0 | 9.54 |
| Uranus | 6 | 19.6 | 19.2 |
| Neptune | – | – | 30.1 |
| Pluto | 7 | 38.8 | 39.4 |
This chart was made on the basis of the theory alone, and successfully predicted the EXACT orbit of the asteroid belt – when the first asteroid hadn’t been found for several decades yet. It predicted almost exactly the orbit in which Uranus was to be found, by which point it was widely accepted as a valid theory – that with each new planet, the distance from the sun was doubled, if you started by subtracting 4.
As you can see, it matches quite well with the embarassing exception of Neptune. That widely discredited the law, until the discovery of Pluto showed again a remarkably close correlation to this law. Today it is dismissed as a curious anomaly, but the remarkable accuracy in predicting three out of four planets (counting the asteroid belt) can’t be denied – and I think I can even offer an explanation for Neptune a little later.
The comparison is compelling; it shows that there is an element of pure math in the motions of these bodies, showing that the planets follow a “harmonic scale” of their own, much as Pythagorus believed they must.
KEPLER’S THIRD LAW
But regardless of Bode’s law, Kepler’s law showed a direct relationship between a planet’s year (the time it takes to orbit the sun) and the planet’s distance from the sun. Not an obvious ratio, but an unarguable one.
Kepler’s third law, stated simply, is that the year of a planet, squared, was equal to the distance from the sun, cubed.
So Jupiter has a year that is 11.86 times longer than ours, 11.86 squared is 140.7. Jupiter is 5.20 times farther from the sun than we are, and 5.20 cubed is 140.6. It is impressive that the cube of one number can be practically identical to the square of another, showing again a direct mathematical, almost musical, relationship between the time it takes a planet to orbit the primary, and its distance from that primary.
But that’s not all! The same law applies to the electron, which I’ll get to a little farther along.
THE ELECTRON
Most everyone knows that the electron orbits the nucleus of the atom. That different numbers of electrons and protons in an atom is what determines the different chemical elements. Fewer people recall that there are seven orbits of the electron, and that each orbit only has space for a certain number of electrons.
There are seven electron orbits theoretically possible. No more. But each of these orbits has a specific amount of electrons which it can hold, again, no more. In the first orbit only 2 electrons can be held. In the second, 8; third, 18, then 32, 50, 72, 98. At first sight that looks like it should be a mathematical progression… and yet it isn’t, quite. But then again, it is – just not a simple progression. It is a progression of doubled cardinal squares!
- 1×1=1×2=2 – the first shell
- 2×2=4×2=8 – the second shell
- 3×3=9×2=18 – the third shell
- 4×4=16×2=32 – the fourth shell
- 5×5=25×2=50 – the fifth shell
- 6×6=36×2=72 – the sixth shell
- 7×7=49×2=98 – the seventh shell
So you see there is a distinct, mathematical progression in these orbits. One that is quite beautiful in both its simplicity and its secrecy. So all of matter is made up of SEVEN. Atoms make up every visible thing in existence except light, and the way matter interacts is almost all based on which of these seven shells is filled and how full they are. But that’s not the reason God likes seven.
And there is another, even more beautiful harmony in them; for the distance of the shells from the nucleus is measured in regular, cardinal squares. The first shell of the nucleus is one angstrom unit in diameter; the second is four angstroms, then 9, 16, and so on – mathematically expressed as the series 12 22 32 42 and so on.
THE UNCERTAINTY PRINCIPLE
Since the time of Newton, science believed in something called “classical physics”. The cornerstone of which is that “for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction”, or “cause and effect”. This was proved over and over in every possible way. Planets moved this way. Stones moved this way. And, it was believed, atoms moved this way.
But in the 1920s a new wave of thought came along that questioned all of this. Men like Bohr and Heisenberg and Schrodinger and Planck sought to change the way we thought, and tried to draw a division between the “big” or macro-cosmic world – basically everything that we could see – and the small, “micro-cosmic” world, the stuff we couldn’t.
They theorized that while classical mechanics – cause and effect – unarguably reigned in the macrocosmic world, the microcosmic world was governed by sheer chance; random probability factors where an effect might not need a cause. Where things just “happened”, sometimes for no reason and with unpredictable effects. This and similar ideas led to the formation of the “uncertaintly principle”.
The uncertaintly principle is a cornerstone of modern physics. Basically, it means that you can’t know both the location and speed of an electron. You can know one or the other, but not both at the same time; and to know one better meant you’d know the other worse.
But Einstein never believed the uncertainty principle. He said that “God does not play dice with the universe” – meaning that God didn’t just guess at where the electron was, or just calculate a random probability of its location, but that the electron had “hidden springs” which controlled WHY it went where it went. And that it was POSSIBLE to know exactly what an electron would do and when, if you truly knew all the laws governing it. That is also what I believe.
But the modernists said it was NOT possible to know – that you CAN’T know what will happen next in the “unknowable” world of the electron. That if you look at an electron you’ll see either a dot that isn’t moving… or a blur that is “an electron cloud” as it’s called. Building on these thoughts, they now believe is that the electron doesn’t HAVE a location – it might not even exist – until it is observed.
This was never accepted by the “old school” physicists of the day like Einstein, but schools picked up on it and so most of the university graduates were educated in it and they outlived the old school and so it’s believed today. As Planck himself put it “A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.”
I’ve written elsewhere on the uncertaintly principle and how it’s been destructively applied to all fields of life in my article “God prophesied stupidity“, so I won’t go into it here. The reason I brought it up, is that, in the spirit of the uncertainty principle, physicists today believe that the electron cannot exist between the seven shells; that they are always in ONE of the shells; and yet contradictorily, they say that the electrons MOVE from one shell to another, and yet are NEVER are in between the shells.
Being essentially a macro-cosmic person with faith in what I can see and little else, I’m uninclined to accept that electrons just “warp” from one orbit to another, which is essentially how physicists view it. They support it by saying that the shells don’t really exist anyway, but it is instead one big cloud of probability where an electron comes into existence when viewed.
I think that’s a lot of hooey, myself. And some great physicists – actually, the greatest physicists – would agree with me. But the fact remains that the electrons ARE in seven shells, and that they must move from one to another. So why can’t they exist between the shells?
Hold that thought!
THE SOLAR SYSTEM
When anyone sees a drawing of an atom for the first time, their first thought is always “wow, a tiny solar system!”. Which it is – just like the solar system, the vast majority of its bulk is in the nucleus – its version of the sun. The nucleus contains over 99.9% of the mass of the atom, while the sun contains over 99.8% of the mass of the solar system.
They both have “planets”, and both have – very roughly – the same number of planets. By that I mean that the Sun has nine (I guess it’s eight now) planets, plus the asteroid belt. The vast majority of the planetary mass is in the outer “gas giant” planets.
Similarly, the atom has seven orbits. Similarly, most of the electron mass is in the outer “planets” of the atom, where an ever increasing number of electrons can be housed.
But each of the seven orbits of the atom can contain many electrons – up to over a hundred. But these atoms don’t orbit singly, spread out like pearls – instead, they appear to act in groups, with a certain number of electrons acting together.
There are over a hundred and sixty moons in the solar system; and they don’t act by themselves, but group around a primary; and most of them are in the “outer shells” of the solar system – only three orbit the inner planets. So you can see there are a lot of similarities between them.
And yet we are told that the atom and the solar system follow completely different laws. That cause and effect reigns in our solar system, and not in the atomic system. That sheer chance is king anywhere below the visibility of the smallest microscope, and everything else in the universe, which is built up of those “unlawful” subatomic particles, operates on law.
The logic of that is doubtful; what we CAN see works according to repeatable, reliable laws, but what we CAN’T see, and therefore can’t prove, doesn’t? I realize that it explains certain things about physics and solves certain problems, but I contend that it does so in exactly the same way as, for instance, when a savage sees a gun for the first time and shoots himself in the foot – his conclusion “it just happened!” answers the question, and is technically true, but is far from the real answer.
The savage simply doesn’t understand that pulling the trigger makes certain levers move and ingites powder, which forces a bullet to leave the muzzle at a very high velocity. Saying “it just happened” and “we’ll never know why”, and in fact “you can’t know why” will be satisfying to him, but it isn’t the right answer. The fact that the bullet moved so fast that he couldn’t see it, doesn’t mean that it warped from the muzzle into his foot – it just means he didn’t see it.
Similarly, saying “we can’t know” something is mostly an excuse for justifying why we don’t know it. And why we aren’t looking. I contend that the solar system and the atom follow the exact same laws – but are different only because of one thing. And we’ll get into that after one more digression…
THE RINGS OF SATURN
Saturn is the second-largest planetary body in the solar system and the only one with rings readily visible from Earth. Most people know that the rings of Saturn have divisions, but few know why.
Saturn’s rings are composed of dust and ice, mostly of very small particle size ranging from microns to meters. No one is really sure how they started out, whether as a broken up planet or dust from the formation of Saturn, but it doesn’t really matter. What they are is a snapshot of gravity in action.
We know that the inner rings move faster than the outer rings, because the gravitational pull keeps them “falling” harder as they swoop around Saturn. In fact however, each of the rings – and there are thousands composing the grand ring of saturn – has a specific minimum and maximum speed required to be in those rings.
“If any particle in this ring could fail to respect either of these limits, it would automatically and literally be expelled from the ring, pressed either outwards or inwards according to whether centrifugal force or gravity had the greater influence” (Guy Murchie, Music of the Spheres)
So if a certain particle were tugged at by either Saturn or one of its moons, the particle will either gain energy and have to move away from Saturn, or lose it and fall towards it. As it happens of course, all particles are tugged both directions all the time – but most of the tugs cancel each other out.
But there are three moons of Saturn that happen to harmonize, in a literal, musical sense. And these moons tug in harmony, and pool their gravitational resources at certain “nodes”. One of these nodes is the 2500-mile-wide Cassini division, the largest division in Saturn’s rings. This “gap” which is (relatively) almost entirely devoid of matter, orbits Saturn roughly every eleven hours.
The moon Mimas orbits Saturn about every 22 hours. Enceladas orbits approximately every 33 hours, and Tethys every 44 hours, give or take. The rings are exactly 1/2 the orbit of Mimas; 1/3 the orbit of Enceladus and 1/4 the orbit of Tethys.
What that means is that for every fourth time the gap rotates, Tethys and Mimas are lined up combining their gravitational pull on that one spot of the rings. Every sixth time the rings orbit they face Mimas and Enceladas, and every twelfth time they orbit ALL THREE line up to pull anything that would be in those rings away from Saturn!
It acts just like the tides do on Earth; tides are highest when the Moon and the Sun are on the same side of the earth; second highest when the Moon and Sun are opposite one another. And so these moons of Saturn have literally pulled the gaps into the rings by their gravitational harmonics.
To put it another way, the gaps we see would be better expressed as musical nodes. When a string is plucked it makes a certain note; but when a finger is placed on the middle of that string and it is again plucked both sides of the string make the same note – but exactly an octave higher!
The vibration on both sides of the empty node that is Saturn’s Cassini division is just as related to the music of Saturn’s moons as the finger that holds the string to produce a guitar’s note.
Saturn has something over thirty moons, and their motions account for the gaps between the rings of Saturn. There are similar nodes in the Asteroids from the action of Jupiter’s tidal forces. Something similar probably keeps the Moon facing the same side to the Earth, something many other moons do to their own primary.
BACK TO THE ELECTRON
I know I’ve taxed your patience with that science lesson, but it is going somewhere. As I said a few sections ago, Kepler’s third law (that the square of the year of a planet would be equal to the cube of its distance from the primary) applies to Bohr’s model of the atom. That means that, inside the atom, the seven shells of electrons orbit their primary in the same way – relatively – that the planets orbit our sun.
So the square of an electron’s “year” is equal to the cube of its distance from the nucleus. This is widely accepted. What isn’t widely accepted is what I’m about to propose. One of the major objections that modern physicists raise to prove that the sun’s system isn’t like the nucleus’ system is that the sun clearly does not have “shells”. Clearly, it is possible for something to be in between the orbits of, say, Mars and Earth. And yet in the atom, they say an electron is “transported” instantly from one shell to the next.
But if we look at the Atom like Saturn’s rings, we can see that as particles of matter get between the rings, they are pulled out – either towards the primary or away from it, depending on how much energy they have.
It’s an automatic process, but not an instant one, for the moons only line up together every twelve “months”, and so it could take years for a given object to get pulled out of the gap.
Every physicist today believes that there is a dividing line between causality-based macrocosmic law, and random-based microcosmic chance. But this evidence doesn’t point to that – the conclusion this leads to is that there IS no difference at all.
The only difference is in the SPEED at which it happens.
A year is defined as the time it takes a body to orbit its primary. Thus, from our moon’s perspective it takes one Earth month to travel one “year” – one lunar orbit around the earth being defined as one month.
The Cassini division takes 11 days to travel a “year” around its primary, Saturn. Earth takes one year to travel one year. But the hydrogen atom travels one year in 1/1,420,405,752 OF A SECOND!
Almost one and a half billion times a second, the lone electron of the hydrogen atom orbits its “sun”! That means that, for things to happen the same way in the macrocosmic world – for a spaceship caught between, say, Mars and Earth to be affected by the gravitational tides and FORCED out of the “gap” between worlds, we would have to look at what happens to the solar system over 1.42 BILLION years!
Think about that. If an electron is “caught” between orbits in an atom, in a single second over a billion electron years will have gone by; a billion and a half revolutions, a billion and a half times for tidal forces to have “stabilized” that electron into a new orbit and kicked it out of the gap.
It would be like setting a spaceship in orbit between Earth and Mars for over a billion years, taking a picture of its location every year, and then at the end fast-forwarding the whole event into a single second’s worth of video. Surely that ship would appear from that perspective to “warp” from the second it entered the gap to the other side, as the pressures of tides from Mars and Jupiter pulled it one way or Earth and the Sun pulled it the other!
And once it settled down into one stable orbit in one of the “shells” where Mars and Earth are, it would appear, as would the planets themselves, as no more than a “cloud” when a billion years are condensed into one! And what of the atoms like cesium-133, whose electrons orbit their primary at over nine billion times per second!
So the same laws affect them the same way; when energy is input, electrons jump to a higher level. But it does so in a “year” or two – some fraction of billionths of a second, just as enough energy to make the Earth move into the orbit of Mars would be expected to work over the period of a year or two. Practically instantaneously over the view of the last five billion years – but nonetheless real and practical.
In nine billion years, it’s even possible that Neptune will have “jumped” to the orbit of Pluto, where Bode’s law predicted it should be. If it were possible to spread the entire solar system with grains of wheat, and watch the gravitational forces spread those grains as Saturn’s rings have been spread, we would have a perfect picture of gravity – and very likely, a perfect picture of the atom. If we waited a few billion years.
I don’t know how that concept could have been missed, but in all my reading on the subject I’ve never heard it hinted at, much less disproved. I can’t imagine I’m seeing something all the greatest physicists never considered, but then again… I can’t see the slighest flaw in the reasoning. God is a God of law. He does not play dice with the universe, it is not governed by random chance but by regular, predictable, immutable laws.
But I started this article to explain to you the significance of seven. What I’ve shown you is that the seven notes in the octave have correspondences to the electron shell, the planets, even gravitation in the rings of Saturn. That each of these dead spots in gravitation correspond to nodes between vibrations, as the nodes created by holding a string on a guitar.
What I haven’t yet told you is how that all connects to God and the grand meaning of seven. I couldn’t do that without laying this groundwork – and so part two will explain all of that.
PART TWO: THE SEVEN SPIRITS OF GOD
There are sevens in all of creation – the seven vertebrae in the neck of all mammals, including giraffes and mice, seven continents (although that’s probably a coincidence), seven notes, seven electrons, the periodic table of elements is even arranged into patterns of seven, where the most fundamental expression of matter is “coded” into octaves of seven elements each.
But these physical applications of seven all reflect the bias of the designer. The only real explanation for the unerring presence of seven in everything from the tiniest atom to the ray of light to the vertebrae in your neck is that they had a common designer. Since one Being designed all of these things, He built them all after a certain pattern.
When He wrote the Bible, seven naturally was used a lot; and of all the recurring themes of seven in the Bible, the fundamental one upon which all others are based is the seven spirits of God.
Revelation 4:5 And out of the throne proceeded lightnings and thunderings and voices: and there were seven lamps of fire burning before the throne, which are the seven Spirits of God.
Here we see that there were seven LAMPS – that is, individual candles or oil wicks – burning before the throne. And it is worth noting that the Bible makes a clear distinction between candlestick, and candle. The Bible ALWAYS says “Candlestick” to refer to a place the candle is placed; in the temple sense this ALWAYS means the seven-branched candlestick. There are no exceptions.
On the other hand, when the Bible wishes to refer to one of the candles WITHIN that candlestick, it uses the word “candle”, also translated as “light” but from the same Greek word, or the word “lamp” from a different Greek word. In this verse, the one candlestick holds seven candles, and those seven candles represent the seven spirits of God. This verse is talking about the heavenly temple, which is the source of the pattern for the earthly temple.
Numbers 8:2 (GWV) “Speak to Aaron and tell him: When you set up the seven lamps on the lamp stand, they should light up the area in front of it.”
Revelation 4:5 explicitly tells us that these seven lamps in this one candlestick represent the seven spirits of God. But what are the seven spirits of God? The New Testament makes it clear in several places that “There is one body, and one Spirit” (Ephesians 4:4). But the Bible makes it equally clear that there are seven spirits of God.
Zechariah 3:9 For behold the stone that I have laid before Joshua; upon one stone shall be seven eyes: behold, I will engrave the graving thereof, saith the LORD of hosts, and I will remove the iniquity of that land in one day.
If we ignore for the present the prophetic trappings of this verse, it is clear that one STONE can only be Christ (Daniel 2:34, 1 Peter 2:4-8, Ephesians 2:20, etc), particularly since it is connected with removing iniquity, and it is likewise clear that this stone has seven “eyes”. Revelation explains this symbol, by tying the eyes back once again to the seven spirits.
Revelation 5:6 And I beheld… a Lamb as it had been slain, having seven horns and seven eyes, which are the seven Spirits of God sent forth into all the earth.
So the eyes of God and the lamps of the Candlestick are both symbols of the same thing: the seven spirits of God. But now we have added a bit of information, for if the seven eyes were written on the one rock, then these seven eyes are eyes of, specifically, Christ. Likewise the seven candles all have a single base, which is the body of Christ, His Church. And so the seven spirits of God are specifically spirits of, or working for, Christ. Ezekiel allows us to explain these symbols by describing the physical characteristics of Angels, as well as he could perceive them.
Ezekiel 1:13 As for the likeness of the living creatures, their appearance was like burning coals of fire, and like the appearance of LAMPS: it went up and down among the living creatures; and the fire was bright, and out of the fire went forth lightning.
Now you can see why God chose to use lamps to represent angels; even Ezekiel thought that these beings looked like the lamps, the flaming part that set on top of the candlestick! But why would God also use the symbol of an eye to represent these seven angels, who most likely are the top rank of angels which would include Gabriel and Michael?
Psalms 34:15 The eyes of the LORD are upon the righteous, and his ears are open unto their cry.
Proverbs 15:3 The eyes of the LORD are in every place, beholding the evil and the good.
By themselves, there is no reason to assume that these verses imply any more than the normal two eyes; but when you compare what these “eyes” in these verses do with what they do in the next verses, it is evident that they refer to all seven eyes…
Zechariah 4:10 … those seven [this refers back to the seven eyes of Zechariah 3:9]; they are the eyes of the LORD, which run to and fro through the whole earth.
2 Chronicles 16:9 For the eyes of the LORD run to and fro throughout the whole earth, to shew himself strong in the behalf of them whose heart is perfect toward him. …
Comparing those two scriptures, as well as the already quoted Revelation 5:6, it becomes clear that the “eyes of the lord” which “are upon the righteous” and “are in every place, beholding the evil and the good”, are no doubt the seven eyes of God spoken of elsewhere, the seven spirits of God. They are the ones who “behold” the evil and the good that men do. They are elsewhere called the watchers…
Daniel 4:13-17 I saw in the visions of my head upon my bed, and, behold, A watcher and AN holy one came down from heaven; He cried aloud, and said thus, … [the pronouncement about Nebuchadnezzar’s seven years of eating grass] … This matter is by the decree of THE WATCHERS, and the demand by THE WORD OF THE HOLY ONES: to the intent that the living may know that the most High ruleth in the kingdom of men, and giveth it to whomsoever he will, and setteth up over it the basest of men.
We’re about to make sense of a lot of stuff here, so hang on; notice that in this verse, A watcher – a single watcher – came down and made a pronouncement. This can only be an angel, and it’s not hard to see how an “eye” could be called a “watcher”, particularly when you consider that unlike the rest of the old testament, this was written in Aramaic, not Hebrew.
So ONE watcher/eye/angel came down; said his piece, then said that this matter was by decree of THE watchers – a plural! This was a decree that came from ALL SEVEN eyes of God, who are here called “the HOLY ONES”. It is quite rare to see anyone but God called holy, but this is quite plain that this angel was “a holy one”, and one of the watchers, who are “holy ones”; so why are they holy?
Because these angels are the seven spirits of God. They work directly for God, managing the efforts of millions of angels. They have a place in the temple of God, and it is well known (God said it dozens of times) that everything in the temple was HOLY, which naturally included the CANDLESTICK with the SEVEN LAMPS which are the SEVEN SPIRITS OF GOD!
But why were these “watchers” making decrees about who is cursed and who isn’t? Why was this group of “holy ones”, making decisions about the affairs of men? Well, that’s an excellent question…
Revelation 5:6 And I beheld… a Lamb as it had been slain, having seven horns and seven eyes, which are the seven Spirits of God sent forth into all the earth.
Earlier we glossed over part of this and focused on the eyes of the lamb; the same eyes we found in the stone in Zechariah; but now we see that the Lamb has seven HORNS as well! And that these seven spirits, the seven eyes, are “sent forth into all the earth” to, as we know from other scriptures “behold the good and the evil”, to “hear the cry of the righteous”, and to “show himself (God) strong on behalf of those whose heart is perfect towards him”.
But part of those duties is to rule kingdoms and to direct the fulfillment of prophecies and to “set up over kingdoms the basest of men”.
Daniel 11:1 Also I [Gabriel] in the first year of Darius the Mede, even I, stood to confirm and to strengthen him.
Gabriel claims the credit for Darius the Mede’s power and authority; as if Gabriel was directly and actively involved in seeing to it that the kingdom was run according to God’s plan. Of course, not every kingdom is run by a righteous angel…
Daniel 10:13 But the prince of the kingdom of Persia withstood me one and twenty days: but, lo, Michael, one of the chief princes, came to help me; and I remained there with the kings of Persia.
The prince of Persia is rendered in the Young’s Literal Translation as the “head of the kingdom of Persia”. Other translations render it “Chief of Persia”. It’s widely understood that this is Satan, since it’s difficult to imagine another being whom Gabriel cannot defeat in three weeks, and whom Michael ultimately had to come and ward off.
But if Satan is the ultimate head of the Persian empire, we see in the last part of that verse that there are other “kings of Persia”, also apparently angelic beings who require Gabriel’s “attention” to see that things don’t get out of hand; these would be Satan’s lieutenants who probably administer smaller portions of the kingdom under his guidance, and who probably have lower echelons below them who manage smaller and smaller chunks of it.
Daniel 10:20 Then said he, Knowest thou wherefore I come unto thee? and now will I return to fight with the prince of Persia: and when I am gone forth, lo, the prince of Grecia shall come.
So here we are introduced to another high-ranking angel, perhaps another of the “eyes” of the Lord, who is in charge of Greece. It doesn’t say specifically why he is there, but the point is clearly made that God rules the kingdoms of men through successive echelon of angels, probably down to individual cities and perhaps even finer than that. And that He still does so today. And that the highest echelon consists of seven angels, collectively called “the watchers”, the “eyes of the lord”, or the “seven spirits of God”.
To confirm what I just said, I’m going to quote that scripture yet again…
Revelation 5:6 And I beheld… a Lamb as it had been slain, having seven horns and seven eyes, which are the seven Spirits of God sent forth into all the earth.
Now we know beyond question that a “horn” in the Bible represents a kingdom (see Daniel 7). And we know that God rules these kingdoms through the seven angels; and for a horn to have an eye is not a unique symbol in the Bible!
Daniel 7:8 I considered the horns, and, behold, there came up among them another little horn, before whom there were three of the first horns plucked up by the roots: and, behold, in this horn were eyes like the eyes of man, and a mouth speaking great things.
Behind every kingdom is an angel. This we have proved. But not necessarily a righteous angel, as the “prince of Persia” also proved. Behind the kingdom of this little horn, the Papacy, was of course the same dark prince. And this is shown in symbol here as the “eyes” of this little horn.
But the Lamb has seven horns – so He has seven kingdoms, presumably His way of dividing the earth at a given time into seven divisions – if I were to guess, I’d say something like North America/Northwestern Europe/Australia, Latin America, Eastern Europe, The Middle East/North Africa, Black Africa, The Far East and Central Asia/India. That’s just a guess mind you, but it’s roughly how the world is divided up today in terms of commerce, race, type of government, general mindset of its people, and so on. It gives us a possible case in point to think about, anyway.
But if these are the current “seven horns” of the Lamb, ruled as nations always have been by “the seven spirits of God”, the “holy ones”, the “watchers”, then each of these seven horns has one of God’s “eyes” over it; So when, as Revelation 5:6 says, these seven spirits are “sent forth into all the earth”, they BECOME the seven horns because they manage seven kingdoms!
There are of course opposing kingdoms on Earth; those set up by Satan and his cronies. But God, through His top angels, keeps the whole thing going according to His plan, and maintains His rule throughout, and even Satan must ask God’s permission to do many things (Job 1, etc).
But enough about that for right now. Let’s look slightly closer at the seven angels. We have names for two of them, Gabriel and Michael, with the reference to a third “prince of Greece”. But are they all equal in authority? I would remind you at this point of the seven-branched candlestick; the central lamp was distinctly the center; although they were all of equal height, one formed the center and the rest were built onto it.
The picture at left is the most reliable image we have of what the candlestick in the temple actually looked like. This is from the arch of Titus, an arch built in Rome around 81 A.D. Showing the triumphant return of Titus after sacking Jerusalem and looting the temple, carrying back to Rome the candlestick, the table of showbread, and so on. Bearing in mind that it was carved more than a decade after the event by a Roman who was probably less concerned with facts than with keeping the Emperor happy, it still represents what is probably a good idea of what the candlestick looked like. But notice how the original description in the Bible seems to emphasize the central branch as being the primary one…
Exodus 25:31-37 And thou shalt make a candlestick of pure gold: of beaten work shall the candlestick be made: his shaft, and his branches … so in the six branches that come out of the candlestick. … according to the six branches that proceed out of the candlestick. And thou shalt make the seven lamps thereof: and they shall light the lamps thereof, that they may give light over against it.
It just seems that these sidebranches are treated as adjuncts to the main candlestick; as if they “proceed out of the candlestick”, meaning out of the principle, central shaft. If this is correct, it would imply that one of the top angels is superior to the others.
It seems reasonable since Satan was apparently superior in rank to the other angels; “perfect in beauty”, “full of wisdom”, “THE anointed cherub that covers” of whom God said “I have set you so” (Ezekiel 28:12-14). But we have more direct proof from one of the top angels himselves…
Daniel 10:13 But the prince of the kingdom of Persia withstood me one and twenty days: but, lo, Michael, ONE OF THE CHIEF PRINCES, came to help me; …
The KJV margin says that instead of “one of the chief princes” it perhaps should read “first of the chief princes”. Chief princes are the top angel rank of which we’ve been speaking, and this implies that Michael could be the top angel among them; About this verse, nearly all the other translators, reading it for what they believe rather than necessarily what it says, render this as “one of the chief princes”, in spite of the KJV margin; but Young’s Literal, the most impartial of the translations as far as language goes, supports the KJV margin:
Daniel 10:13 (YLT) … and lo, Michael, first of the chief heads, hath come in to help me …
“First of the chief heads” would definitely mean that Michael was in charge. And these next two scriptures together make the case just about airtight. First, it seems that whenever the Devil needs to be disputed with, Michael is sent; the one case we’ve already read in Daniel, it required Michael to hold the Devil at bay; and in the other…
Jude 1:9 Yet Michael the archangel, when contending with the devil he disputed about the body of Moses, durst not bring against him a railing accusation, but said, The Lord rebuke thee.
When Moses’ body was an issue, Michael again was called; here the word “archangel” is used. It is worth noting that “archangel” is never used as a plural. Everyone believes that archangel refers to the top echelon of angels, but there is no reason to believe that. Only Michael is called an archangel, and the word simply means “top angel”. Young’s literal translation again leads us to believe that “archangel” is a title reserved strictly for Michael, where he translates “archangel” as……
Jude 1:9 (YLT) yet Michael, THE CHIEF MESSENGER, …
And when you think about it, the whole point was to show that “these filthy dreamers” were speaking evil of people in power, and yet EVEN MICHAEL, the TOP ANGEL – the highest ranking being in the universe next to Jesus and His Father, didn’t DARE rail against the Devil; so this statement of Jude’s would make the most sense only if Michael was, as Young’s Literal Version translates it, THE chief messenger. And one final scripture to clinch it:
Revelation 12:7 And there was war in heaven: MICHAEL AND HIS ANGELS fought against the dragon; and the dragon fought and his angels,
If there is a war in heaven, it is hardly likely that all the angels would not be involved; and yet this one specific angel is clearly in charge. Michael and HIS angels, not Michael and THE angels. Just as it is the Dragon and HIS angels.
Gabriel Himself acknowledges this, and in addition to saying Michael was the “first of the chief princes (angels)”, pretty much says that Michael is the highest ranking angel:
Daniel 12:1 And at that time shall Michael stand up, THE GREAT PRINCE which standeth for the children of thy people: …
That should pretty well settle it that of the seven spirits of God, Michael is the first, he is the central lamp in the candlestick. But now we can add to this idea, for Gabriel earlier had said that he himself had “stood to confirm and to strengthen him”, meaning Darius specifically and the Medes in general. But this verse adds to that concept and says that, as Gabriel stood for the Medes, so Michael stands “for the children OF YOUR PEOPLE”, meaning the people of Daniel; meaning the Israelites.
Since it is unlikely that has changed, it means that Michael is probably the angel in charge of administering the white Anglo-Saxon peoples who descended from the house of Israel. Since they have historically always been the most important people to God, it makes sense to put the top angel in charge of the most important job. Gabriel may still be in charge of the Medes (the Middle East). But to say any more about this would be to guess, and you can do that as well as I.
On one final note about the relationships between these Angels, it appears that Gabriel is the second-in-command to Michael from this scripture:
Daniel 10:20-21 (RSV) Then he [Gabriel] said, “Do you know why I have come to you? But now I will return to fight against the prince of Persia; and when I am through with him, lo, the prince of Greece will come. But I will tell you what is inscribed in the book of truth: there is none who contends by my side against these [fallen angels] except Michael, YOUR PRINCE.
Perhaps the other five angels were busy elsewhere and couldn’t help Michael and Gabriel; perhaps they aren’t as righteous or as strong as Michael and Gabriel; Perhaps they have even joined the rebellion and that’s why only these two righteous angels are mentioned, and why only two cherubim cover the mercy seat. I don’t know for sure and won’t speculate on that any further at this time.
Psalms 11:4 The LORD is in his holy temple, the LORD’S throne is in heaven: his eyes behold, his eyelids try, the children of men.
All I can say on this subject is that it is in this way that God beholds and tests the children of men. And this is, in general, how His angelic government works.
But now, a completely different angle on angels. One which, I promise, I will tie together in the end, even though it might seem a bit off the wall up front…
LIGHT
The only light in the temple of God came from these seven candles on this candlestick. Just as the only truth in our temples comes from something revealed through God’s spirit, or one of God’s seven spirits. Remember, Daniel received understanding, at God’s command, from Gabriel.
Daniel 8:16 And I heard a man’s voice between the banks of Ulai, which called, and said, Gabriel, make this man to understand the vision.
So when our physical temple – our body – is “lit” by understanding of God, it comes, as did illumination in the ancient temple, from God who IS light, or at His command through one of the candlesticks in the lamp of God.
James 1:17 Every good gift and every perfect gift is from above, and cometh down from the FATHER OF LIGHTS, with whom is no variableness, neither shadow of turning.
God is here called the “Father of Lights” – a phrase which is usually glossed over as poetic, but if God created the angels, if the angels are the seven flames in the candlestick, then God is quite literally “the father of lights”. Furthermore, we know that Jesus was a burning and shining light (John 5:35). We know that God dwells in “the light which no man can approach” (1 Timothy 6:16). Jesus is “The light of the world”.
But God’s analogies are well thought out; I’ve yet to break one. For instance, oil represents our works; it lights the flame in the candlestick of God. So the better we obey God, the brighter the candle in our temple, the spirit of God inside of us, burns. (See my article, “Symbolism of Oil”).
But what happens when you put water on an oil fire? It splatters. Water represents the holy spirit. So when you splash the holy spirit on a fire of the works of true Christian, it can’t extinguish it; it only makes it scatter to other places and burn even brighter. So if you want to put out an oil fire, what must you use? What’s the best thing that every housewife knows would kill a grease fire? Baking soda! Leavening! And we find that the only way to kill a powerful candle in a powerful church is to LEAVEN IT WITH SIN!
This is just one example that shows that no matter how far you stretch it, if you understand the analogies and the symbols God uses well enough, you can’t break the analogies. So yes, the sun lights the world so we can see and the law lights the world so we can see spiritually; God is our light, and is the spiritual type of the light of the world. But that’s so simplistic! Physical light is so much more than that, and for the analogy to be air-tight God’s light must also be so much more than that!
If God is light, then God is exactly LIKE light, or God wouldn’t have said it. In all of light’s interesting quirks and facets, it is like God and God is like it – in some way, at least. So we’re going to study light, but first we have to study music. Trust me, it will tie in to what we’ve been talking about. Eventually.
Music is made by vibrations – waves – in the atmosphere. When you strike a drum the drum displaces air in a certain shape; those air molecules then push other air, which pushes other air, until it reaches your ear which breaks the vibrations of this wave down into what we understand as sound. The same basic thing happens when a flute makes the air inside the shaft vibrate at a certain speed or a guitar string stretched to a certain tension is plucked.
Music is arranged into octaves. Pretty much everyone is familiar with the white keys on a piano being the notes C, D, E, F, G, A, B; Each of these vibrates at a different frequency and so makes a wave that vibrates faster or slower, which our ear interprets as a different note. Everyone also knows that as you continue up the keyboard striking keys you find another C. Eight keys later is another C, and then another. Each of these eighth keys is called a “octave” higher than the last, octave being from the Latin octavus meaning, well… “eighth”.
Each eighth key sounds identical to the human ear except it’s higher in pitch as you go up the keyboard. So middle A (the A in the middle of the piano) sounds just like high or low A, which are the eighth key above and below, respectively. All the songs you know, if they were played an octave or two or three higher or lower would sound exactly the same as far as melody goes, although the pitch would sound strange, something vaguely like playing a 33rpm record at 45rpms – for those old enough to remember vinyl records.
But from a scientific standpoint, each octave key is exactly TWICE the frequency of the previous note. For example, Middle A vibrates at 440 Hertz (times per second). The “A” one octave higher has a frequency of 880 Hertz. One octave lower is 220 Hertz. And so on. Some of this will sound familiar from Part 1, but I have to make sure all my readers are thoroughly, painfully familiar with the concept of an octave.
WAVES
The universe is built around waves. Waves from trillions of trillions of vibrations per second all the way up to waves the width of the universe that vibrate once every infinity. And these waves form one successive chart from the innermost particle of the atom up to the largest galaxy. Some traverse in photons, some move in oceans, some move in air, but regardless of the medium these waves are all arranged in octaves!
Just as one note on a piano is identical to one an octave below, so one gamma ray is identical in type to one an octave below; one radio wave corresponds to a C, just as one octave below another wave corresponds to a C. This entire spectrum of waves, most of which is shown on the Electromagnetic Spectrum, covers about seventy octaves. And of those seventy octaves, we humans can see only slightly less than ONE octave!
(Lest I be like other religionists who want to see sevens in everything, let me be clear; no one agrees on exactly how many octaves there are. Science is sure there is are least 60, and probably less than 81, though some say over 100. Many agree on 70 as a round number. But since we don’t know how small the most fundamental structure of the atom is, nor the size of the universe, we can’t really put a bracket on either end of the spectrum. Seventy fits very nicely with what I propose here.)
Most of these electromagnetic radiations – x-rays, gamma rays, microwaves, radio and so on are vibrating so fast or so slow that we can’t see them, just as we can’t hear a silent dog whistle because the waves are vibrating too fast for us to pick up.
But of the seventy octaves, we can see just a bit less than one. We call this visible light. Visible light when viewed all at once is pure, bright, blinding white, but when separated or “magnified” it contains seven colors – red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo and violet. And each of those colors corresponds to a single note on the piano.
Just like on the piano, each octave is twice the frequency of the one below it; and despite the fact that light vibrates much, much faster than sound, it is arranged in the same way; as you can see on the above chart, infrared light which we cannot see is exactly twice the wavelength of the first hint of violet which we can see.
What this means is that if we could see infrared it probably would appear blue as the seven-note spectrum of light (just like the seven-note spectrum of sound), probably repeats itself – which explains why the red colors blend back into the violet in a color wheel, just like notes on a piano, as shown in the picture at left.
As most people know, black is no color and white is all color. But what is not commonly known is that no light which we have is complete. Sunlight is the best we have, but as the light passes from the fusion in the heart of the sun to us it must go through many layers of hydrogen and helium and so on in the outer layers of the sun; these atoms absorb certain parts of the light, so those portions never make it to us. So the sun appears yellow, rather than white. Still, sunlight does contain most of the spectrum.
When sunlight is passed through a prism, it breaks up into a rainbow. Essentially the prism just puts a magnifying glass on sunlight and magnifies it so we can see the components that make up the light. When these colors are merged again, white light is again produced.
Why all the talk about a rainbow? Because God is light. So why should we not assume that God’s light can also be broken up, like a rainbow, into seven different “colors”?
Ezekiel 1:28 As the appearance of the bow that is in the cloud in the day of rain, so was the appearance of the brightness round about [the throne of God]. This was the appearance of the likeness of the glory of the LORD. And when I saw it, I fell upon my face, and I heard a voice of one that spake.
When Ezekiel saw “the glory of the lord”, which is elsewhere “bright light which no man can approach unto”, he saw it as a rainbow. This light was not imperfect yellow sunlight, with certain fractions of colors absorbed by the sun, but pure light. John also saw the glory of God as a rainbow…
Revelation 4:3 And he that sat was to look upon like a jasper and a sardine stone: and there was a rainbow round about the throne, in sight like unto an emerald.
But John adds something and says that the rainbow looked like an emerald; that is, a rainbow with a prominent green color, or more likely the central green band was wider or brighter than the other bands. Regardless, it is clear that green, the central color, stood out in this rainbow. In physics it is known that the human eye is most sensitive to green; it is the boldest color, the least vague in all backdrops.
John 8:12 Then spake Jesus again unto them, saying, I am the light of the world: he that followeth me shall not walk in darkness, but shall have the light of life.
Jesus said that He IS the light. He wasn’t speaking of His body, but of His Spirit that was the light. The light of life. And we see behind God’s throne, that this light does indeed break up into seven colors forming a rainbow. The conclusion that this leads us to is that God’s spirit, if passed through a spiritual prism, would form seven notes. One octave in a spiritual spectrum.
The Father only has one spirit. Jesus has another. But Jesus created millions of angels, and to govern those angels he created seven “chief princes”. But what nature was He going to give them? How could He have the most diversity possible among them, while still being able to relate to them and have them relate to the angels below them?
By making each a different note. Each of them was a different “color”, if you prefer. And each of them had a distinctly different attitude. We can see some of this in the names of the two angels we know;
Michael means “He who is like God”. Gabriel means “warrior of God”. So Gabriel has the more aggressive warlike personality of God, whereas Michael is more like God’s core nature; closer to the root; and what is the fundamental nature of God? If I say “God is…” your first thought to finish it is what word? “Love”.
Now Michael was the central candlestick. And God’s central nature, the part from which all other feelings and actions emanate, is Love. As you’ll recall from the rainbow John saw, the central color, green, was the strongest; so strong that it dominated the rest of the rainbow. If this is correct, that also corresponds to love. It is not an accident that it is a basic fact of physics that the human eye is most sensitive to green in both dark and light environments.
Alright, now there is one more major side trip we must take before I can tie all of this together. We all know of the seven churches, and you probably also noticed that I have strictly avoided mentioning them until now.
There were seven churches; God had good things and bad things to say about most of them, with a general tendency towards bad things. Ephesus left it’s first love, even though it was very zealous in the beginning; Smyrna was tortured and persecuted mercilessly and many couldn’t take the pressure, Pergamos was under just as much pressure but in a totally different way – this time the church was attacked by deception, the pen rather than the sword. The sword was still used in a pinch, but by and large the enemy relied on lies. And many Pergamons… Pergamosians… Pergamites… Perg… whatever, anyway many of those people succumbed.
Thyatira marked a long era of a basically decent church, pretty much corresponding to the dark ages, where the church hid in the alps and patiently memorized the Bible to prevent its loss, Sardis marked a return to much of the truth in the protestant reformation but, while many were martyred for what they believed, most of them refused to accept key pieces of truth that had been taken to them; the Sabbath and holy days for instance. So God said that they had a name that they were alive, but were actually dead; they acted zealous, but it was all in vain if they wouldn’t do ALL of what God had said. Bottom line, they compromised with the Catholic Church and kept Sunday.
Then the age of discovery with the Philadelphia era began. No church had a better review from God than they, but they had one major flaw; one most people don’t notice, but which the Bible does record, and which I’ll get to in a moment. And finally Laodicea; our time. No church had a worse review than this one. Laodiceans THINK and ACT like they are rich, perfect, awesome, amazingly righteous God-worshipers, but in fact they are miserable, wretched, poor blind and naked. They won’t even let God in their church.
Now after reading that brief summary, it stands out that each era can be summed up in a single word.
- Ephesus = Zealous
- Smyrna = Persecuted
- Pergamos = Deceived
- Thyatira = Patient
- Sardis = Compromised
- Philadelphia = Loving
- Laodicea = Proud
Each of these churches, with each of these attitudes, was ruled by one of the seven spirits of God.
Revelation 1:20The mystery of the seven stars which thou sawest in my right hand, and the seven golden candlesticks. The seven stars are the angels of the seven churches: and the seven candlesticks which thou sawest are the seven churches.
And we have established that the seven angels each have a section of the nature of God. And so the thesis, as you probably guessed, is that each of these attitudes showed up under the administration of a given angel because it reflected the portion of God’s nature which that angel had received.
If what I said is correct about God’s spirit being split by a spiritual prism and being used as the foundation for the nature of these angels, each receiving their own color of the rainbow, then in these seven churches we’ll find every facet of the nature of God.
At first that doesn’t look possible; it’s stumped me for a long time. But with the understanding laid out in the first section of Part 2 of this article, I think I can make sense of it now. I think the best way to explain it is to ask a question; what is wrong with Laodicea?
I would imagine your answer would be “lukewarm”, “arrogant”, “doesn’t need God”, or something like that. But that’s not really the problem. God’s problem with Laodicea wasn’t that they thought they were “rich, and increased with goods, and have need of nothing;” – it was because they thought they were WHEN THEY WEREN’T! God was angry with Laodicea because they ACTED like they were perfect when they were in fact “wretched, and miserable, and poor, and blind, and naked”!
It’s not wrong to act as if you are rich and don’t need anything – IF YOU DON’T NEED ANYTHING!
Psalms 50:10-12 For every beast of the forest is mine, and the cattle upon a thousand hills. I know all the fowls of the mountains: and the wild beasts of the field are mine. If I were hungry, I would not tell thee: for the world is MINE, and the fulness thereof.
God is RICH and increased with goods, and has need of NOTHING! This is the same attitude God condemns the Laodiceans for having; the difference is, God actually IS rich, and actually DOESN’T need anything! Laodiceans AREN’T rich, and DO need a great deal!
But imagine what would happen, if God took that part of His nature that made Him say that, and gave it to an angel. Gave it to the angel without any other part of His nature, just that one part. Why, that angel would be an ignorant, arrogant jerk! Someone who, although he had done nothing to deserve it, although he was “miserable and wretched and poor and blind and naked” – carried around the smugness and superiority that only God deserved!
And isn’t that exactly what Laodicea is? You see, the nature of a person, any person, is a package. God is who He is because of ALL of who He is; in other words, God is authoritative because God is RIGHT.
But if you could cut the fact that God is RIGHT out of God’s nature, and leave all the other parts, God would be a monster. All of God’s authoritativeness, pride (yes, God’s pride is in the Bible), and so on would be completely out of place. So God is a package. And when you slice up that package, your parts are just that – parts of the whole.
What if you took away God’s compassion; would the rest of God be a good God? No, He’d be like the world thinks the Old Testament God is – just cruel and vicious and merciless. So if you sliced God’s nature up, with a spiritual prism, into seven different beings, you’d have all sorts of results; some good, some bad. None perfect.
You’d have God’s Patience as expressed in Thyatira; God’s pride as expressed in Laodicea; God’s love, which is His goodness and righteousness as expressed in Philadelphia. You’d have God’s willingness to suffer persecution as expressed in Smyrna and His ability to resist deception as expressed in Permamos. Finally, you’d have His resistance to compromise as exemplified in those few who were worthy out of Sardis, and His zeal as expressed in Ephesus.
Any one of these things, by themselves or in too great a measure compared to the others, leads to sin. Ephesus left it’s first love because of burnout; their zeal just died. But had you played a spiritual “chord” with Ephesus and Thyatira, combined the zeal of the one with the patience of the other, Ephesus could have survived as a good church for centuries!
If Laodicea were combined with Philadelphia, you’d have a powerhouse of righteousness and confidence! And if you combine ALL of these together – if you use another spiritual prism to put the rainbow back together again, you’ll find WHITE light – the perfect, complete nature of God which can adapt to handle any situation, anytime, anywhere.
And though we may be raised in a Laodicean environment, when we meet God we are to adapt our nature towards His. We are to humble our pride to a level more commensurate with our achievements; learn the patience of Thyatira and get off our lukewarm fence and learn the zeal of Ephesus. Be willing to take persecution and deception and temptation and come out on top; in short, we are going to learn ALL the seven notes before we’re done; but we’re going to build them on a Laodicean foundation.
What that means is that no matter how we grow and what we learn, we will always lean first in the direction of Laodiceanism. We will always think a certain way. We will always be a bit cynical compared to the naïve Philadelphia. Even though we will have learned their love, added their righteousness to our nature, it will be an addition; not the core.
If you are a Laodicean, and that’s all you are, you will not be in the first resurrection. YOU are the prism that must take all seven spirits of God, and put them together into the complete, unadulterated spirit of God living in you, and when you do that you can at last truly be the light of the world.
But then we have to ask yet another question; if the point was for us to reassemble this light, why would God divide it among angels and their kingdoms and eras in the first place? Why not just use all of His nature with all of these seven angels? Well, God doesn’t want clones. He wants individuals. He loves color, which is why He invented it. And while yes, God’s nature is perfect and perfectly adaptable, it lacks something. Yes, it lacks something. It lacks variety.
It is EVERYTHING, all at once; it’s like pressing all seven notes in the octave of a piano. It sounds like noise. White noise, actually, but noise nonetheless. It’s all seven notes, and it is a complete sound. But it’s boring. Breaking it up and bringing out one note here, one there, playing a chord, this is what makes music interesting. Banging on an octave over and over hurts your ears.
God NEEDED people who were… well, specialists. People who were stronger at some portions of His nature, people who naturally leaned in certain directions so that they would come up with unique solutions which a balanced mind would never have considered.
So God wanted people who would have certain parts of His nature stand out more than other parts; and to illustrate just why that would be more useful than millions of people with a balanced portion of the nature of God, I have to redefine Philadelphia to you and tell a story about Loma Armstrong.
See, everyone believes Philadelphia was a church that God had nothing bad to say about – but that isn’t quite true. There was one thing God didn’t like about it! God said of Philadelphia:
Revelation 3:8 I know thy works: behold, I have set before thee an open door, and no man can shut it: FOR THOU HAST A LITTLE STRENGTH, and hast kept my word, and hast not denied my name.
Now you’re probably thinking that “you have a little strength” isn’t so bad – and it isn’t – but then again, it is. How is strength created? If a man wants to be stronger, what does he do? Lift weights. If you want to be a better debater, you have to debate better people. If you want to play better chess, you have to compete against stronger opponents. STRENGTH comes from conquering RESISTANCE.
Philadelphia was a good era. It was SO good in fact, that people from that era didn’t have a hard ENOUGH time and so if push came to shove, they wouldn’t be as good to have at your back as, say, someone who came out of Smyrna and knew how to rough and tumble. Let me put it this way.
In the autobiography of Herbert W. Armstrong, he tells a story of how his wife called him at work one day in tears, saying “something terrible has happened, come home as fast as you can!” – he of course canceled his meetings and rushed across town, thinking she had been in an accident or robbed or something of that nature. When he burst into their home, he asked her “what’s wrong?? What happened??” and she explained to him, as if the world had just ended, that she had been visiting some of their friends, two nice ladies, and one of the ladies had… had… told a dirty joke!
Even Herbert was a bit dumbfounded by her naivete, but it is a very poignant example. Loma Armstrong is one of few people whom I have great respect for, but she simply was naïve. She was righteous, at least as far as I know, and may be in the first resurrection, again, as far as I know… but even if so, her strength will be weak.
When a person is so appalled by someone telling a dirty joke that they go to pieces as she did – and over a joke which, if we knew the facts, probably wasn’t even “dirty” by our standards today – there is simply no way that she can help clean out brothels and go condemn Vegas. She simply isn’t equipped to comprehend evil on the level we accept all around us today without even thinking about it. So the problem with Philadelphia was that they were TOO good.
They were so good that there was no one to oppose them, no one to build strength against, and no way for them to learn the depths of depravity that sin can cause. And so if you want a moral cesspool cleaned out in the millennium, you won’t be asking someone from Philadelphia; you’ll want someone who lived in it, overcame it, and has the stomach to handle it – you’ll want a Laodicean.
Anyone who overcomes the temptation in this time will be tough as nails when it comes to sin. Anyone who can reject the lies, the constant barrage of chances to justify sins, the sheer weight of the world doing its dead level best to force you to sin… will be callous to it. And so a Laodicean – either of the ones who make it into the first resurrection out of this age (just kidding) – will be well equipped to handle the worst sorts of sinners in the world to come. They’ll be sort of like Navy Seals – you know, the few, the proud, the Laodiceans?
But Laodiceans will have rough edges; they won’t be delicate. They won’t be the sort to tenderly explain things to prudish shrinking violets who failed to overcome in the age of Philadelphia. But they’ll have their place. The same thing can be said of each era; each has their place and their own mindset.
But remember how I said that what we see as visible light is only ONE octave of the incredibly massive electromagnetic spectrum? What I’ve said about the churches and what God did in creating these seven angels is only ONE octave in the spiritual spectrum. It corresponds to the octave containing middle C perhaps; the center of all.
Ecclesiastes 12:7 Then shall the dust return to the earth as it was: and the spirit shall return unto God who gave it.
God gave us our spirit. He crafted it. And it is crafted of these seven notes; maybe higher pitches or lower, maybe at a different octave; maybe with a C-E-G chord, maybe with a bit of this octave and a bit of that; but in a way which directly corresponds to both music and light, God created a spirit patterned after His own light; and when you imagine a piano with seventy octaves stretching dozens of feet wide, the tunes you can play are practically infinite.
Some of the spirits God made for men were more balanced; some had nearly all the notes, like John who seemed to have had a well balanced attitude from the beginning; others like Peter were hotheaded and had way too much zeal of Ephesus out of proportion with the other attitudes, and speaks in his books as if he were having to learn the lessons of Thyatira’s patience later in life. Paul may have had too much Laodicea after being in the third heaven, and was “lifted up above measure” as he, himself said, and had to learn the lessons of Smyrna.
There is a candlestick in the temple of God. The flames of fire at the top represent the angels who are the eyes of God. They are portable lights that can be carried here and there at will, while the true light of God remains in the holy of holies.
The candlestick itself represents the church of God – the body of Christ. It is the group of people, wherever they are or however scattered, which together form a seat for the light of the world. Their works create the oil and the flames set on a bushel and scatter the darkness of the world. The works of some churches makes one candlestick perhaps burn brighter than others; but all must burn for it to be a true church of God.
And when a church ceases to create new oil, the flames flicker and die, and when that happens God removes the candlestick and places it, with its seven spirits, in a new church. Wherever He thinks it will get fed.
CONCLUSION
So let this be a lesson to you; there is a reason for everything God does. You cannot ascribe arbitrary labels to concepts or numbers in the Bible. There is a real, fundamental reason to WHY God uses the numbers 7, 12, 40, 50, and all the other recurring numerical patterns in the Bible. As well as all the other, sometimes strange, things He does. The explanation of this concept should give us hope that all those things can be understood – and not in some indefinite point in the future, but NOW, in our time.
What has been laid out here is the ultimate meaning of sevens. It is to fulfill this pattern that God created the universe to fulfill the pattern of music – not that music is the ultimate pattern, but that music is the purest physical example of that pattern that we can all understand.
The importance of this pattern to God is why he created mammals, regardless of size and shape, to have seven vertebrae; why He created laws to hold electrons in seven shells which in all probability is a fundamental part of both electromagnetism and gravity, and perhaps the other fundamental forces as well, in ways we as yet can’t even guess.
We don’t really know how God created the universe – how “the things that appear are made by things which do not appear”, or how “in him we live and move and have our being”. But whatever it is, it was as logical for Him to seed “sevens” throughout the fundamental laws of the universe as it is for us to create bipedal robots. He created the universe in His image – to follow the laws that His own nature does.
And that is why there are seven notes in music, seven days in the week, seven eras, seven thousand years in this age, seven weeks, seventy elders, seventy octaves, seventy families in Genesis 10, seventy thousand years in the plan of God, seventy years allotted for a typical man’s lifetime, seven candles, seven angels, seven animals sacrificed in dozens of places, seven days of uncleanness, seven times circling Jericho, seven days of unleavened bread and tabernacles, seven holy days, seven, seven seven….. and so on throughout all the Bible and indeed all creation.
Seven is not a mystical number God arbitrarily chose to represent “completion”. Seven represents what happens when you put God’s spirit through a prism – it breaks up just as naturally as light itself does. And for the same reason.
That fact explains why there are seven chief angels; the fact that there are seven top angels explains why there are seven eras, one for each angel; seven governmental divisions of the earth for the same reason. These attitudes of the seven angels are imprinted upon people in different eras, and so there will be seven periods of resurrection (See “The True Plan Of The Holy Days”), of seven thousand years each, one period for each era from each angel. And the trappings in the temple and the sacrifices are all pointers to show these and other facets of the plan of God of which we as yet have no inkling.
This concept proves beyond a doubt that from the tiniest atom to the largest galaxy, the universe is made of music. And music is just audible math; and pagan though he was, Pythagoras was right: Math does reveal God.
