Incubation time is good. I've taken some time away to study and think, and now have some thoughts to jot down...
My previous posts focused on which spiritual family tree you make yourself a part of. They focused primarily on God's family tree, but there is also the other family tree - Satan's family tree - and the Bible has plenty to say about that tree and how to identify it. Jesus showed us how to deal with Satan's family tree in the gospels. First Jesus dealt with Satan's temptations in the wilderness for 40 days, then He continued to deal with Satan's childrens' temptations for the remainder of His 33 years (40 years less 7 years).
Satan's children are the Pharisees in the gospel - this is undeniable. Both Jesus and John the Baptist call the Pharisees a "generation of vipers" (Matthew 3:7; Matthew 12:34; Matthew 23:33; Luke 3:7) meaning the children of the serpent (Satan being the serpent from the Garden of Eden in Genesis 3). Jesus makes this even more explicit in John 8:44 where He says to the Pharisees, "You are of your father the devil, and the lusts of your father you will do. He was a murderer from the beginning..." This pinpoints what Satan's goal is - to murder. It's my belief that Satan couldn't give two figs about murdering a human body, because a human body is temporary. Rather, Satan wants to murder the souls of people. He does this by scattering people from God, keeping them from the truth. And this is where the title of the post comes in because Jesus said in Matthew 12:30, "He that is not with Me is against Me; and he that gathereth not with Me scattereth abroad."
The idea of scattering is the principal idea for the post. This was what the Pharisees intended to do. When you read the Bible and take note of how the Pharisees act when they are around Jesus, they continually want to use the Old Testament law to condemn and kill people, but they never use it for it's intended purpose, which is to protect people (especially vulnerable people). The only time they use it to protect someone is to protect and justify themselves. They separate themselves from all of the other "sinners" that they believe are going to hell.
The idea of separation and scattering in connection with the Pharisees is interesting, especially when you look at what the word Pharisees means. The word Pharisee (the Greek word) comes from the Hebrew root "parash", which is translated a couple of different ways. In a couple of verses, it is translated "show" or "declare", but the sentiment is more like "distinguished", and the Pharisees definitely thought they were distinguished (see Matthew 23 for a better picture of this). In Ezekiel 34:12, the word parash is translated as "scattered" and refers specifically to the scattering of sheep ("He that gathereth not with Me scattereth..."). In Proverbs 23:32, the word parash is translated as "stingeth", as in the sting of the serpent ("Ye generation of vipers...").
These verses all go hand in hand so that we can observe the types of behaviours the children of Satan exhibit, so we can not behave that way, and so we can protect our family (our spiritual family) from people that do behave this way. They let us know how not to scatter, so that we can go on gathering. God bless.
