THE THIRD SEAL OF THE COVENANT PATH:
THE GREATER MYSTERIES/THE SECOND ESTATE
FISH AND SHEEP
The Aires constellation signifies a covenant with God. The age of Aries the ram, dating from around 2160 BC to 0 AD, established a relationship between a people and its God. In a few cases, that relationship was covenantal. All were sheep of a fold; some of this fold and some of another, but all were bound by the intuition that sacrificial offerings were reciprocated with blessings from on high. Everything in Israel, from Abraham to Malachi, happened in the age of Aries. Further, Aries signifies the seal of sacrifice on the covenant path, which is why some of the covenant people sacrificed rams and sheep. Had the setting for the Exodus story been in any other age, the covenant and nature of God would have been represented quite differently. The principal sign of the times of the covenant age was a million blood sacrifices all pointing to the sacrifice of its archetype. With the sacrifice of the Lamb of God, a new age began, and put an end to this type of offering. If the covenant of every age was sealed by blood sacrifice, then Christ would have been subjected to repeated deaths upon the altar. “For Christ has entered, not into holy places made with hands, which are copies of the true things, but into heaven itself, now to appear in the presence of God on our behalf. Nor was it to offer himself repeatedly, as the high priest enters the holy places every year with blood not his own, for then he would have had to suffer repeatedly since the foundation of the world” (Hebrews 9:24-28, ESV). With the crucifixion of the archetype of Aries the gates to other covenant seals were opened.
When Christ inaugurated the age of Pisces, he called on his disciples to become fishers of men because, in the turning of the age from Aries to Pisces, humanity had forgotten the terms of the covenant. Many would be born fishes not yet emerged from the water onto the covenant path. To supply the necessary ordinance representing this paradigm shift, the ancient ordinances of ritual cleansing were enveloped into baptism. Baptism was the sign of the age of Pisces that was to replace ritual sacrifice in Aries. Through the ordinance of baptism, the fishermen turned fishes into sheep. Thus, Jesus put a fisherman at the head of the church.
The quickenings from state to state would not end there. Just as some of the fish were turned into sheep, some of the sheep were turned into shepherds. An apprentice shepherd was one whose wooly coat, stained by the sin and violence of this world, was washed clean. Disciples of Christ were bidden to undergo a metaphysical change wrought by the Holy Ghost that thinned the veil between matter and spirit. These disciples become an Orion, the Good Shepherd at the gate, with “his right foot upon the sea and his left foot on the earth” (Revelation 10:2). With one foot in the veil of the waters of the Milky Way and the other planted in the pastures of Taurus and Aries, the shepherd is a citizen of both worlds. The shepherd’s garment is the cloak that quickens the mortal body, bound for death, into an ascension body crossing heaven toward the celestial kingdom. Upon advancing past the angels of Gemini that stand as sentinels, and through the marriage sealing that meshed duality into one, the shepherds became the sons and daughters of God. Having insured the proliferation of the Father’s seed, they are qualified to sit down on a throne in the kingdom of the Father; to become lions, or the kings and queens of the kingdom. “And he cried with a loud voice, as when a lion roareth” (Revelation 10:3). Once the disciple has been invited to sit down in the kingdom of the Father, he or she has one transformation to go: from a lion into a tree.
How a fish is turned into a sheep is a mystery. No less mysterious is the marvel of turning a lamb into the shepherd. Even more mysterious and self-contradictory is the conversion of a shepherd into a lion, the most fearsome predator to the vulnerable flock. Most mysterious of all is the turning of a lion into a tree. To do this, the lion has to die. As his body decomposes, his flesh becomes the building blocks of the nutrient-rich bread of life. The elements and compounds of the lion become the fibers of boughs and branches. “Then Jesus said unto them, Verily, verily, I say unto you, Except ye eat the flesh of the Son of man, and drink his blood, ye have no life in you. Whoso eateth my flesh, and drinketh my blood, hath eternal life; and I will raise him up at the last day. For my flesh is meat indeed, and my blood is drink indeed. He that eateth my flesh, and drinketh my blood, dwelleth in me, and I in him” (John 6:53-56).
Sheep status was never intended to be permanent. The sheep is the symbol of pure potential. When one goes from being a sheep to putting on the garment of the shepherd, Christ is not only Savior but also Exemplar.
KAMRON COLEMAN ART 