'Then said the Lord, Thou

hast had pity on the gourd, for the which

thou hast not laboured, neither

madest it grow; which came up in a night, and

perished in a night: and should

not I spare Nineveh, that great city, wherein

are more than sixscore thousand

persons that cannot discern between their

right hand and their left hand;

and also much cattle?' (Jonah 4:10,11).

The key to the prophetic teaching of the Scriptures, whether prophecies

concerning Christ Himself, concerning Heaven and Earth, concerning Man,

Israel or the Gentile nations, is Genesis 3:15.

'I will put "Enmity"'.-- The origin of evil is to us an unsolved

enigma, but so far as we are concerned, and confining ourselves to Man and

his world, enmity between the two seeds is a state introduced by God as an

essential factor in the outworking of the purpose of the ages.  This presence

of enmity is the key to the Parables of the Mysteries of the Kingdom of

Heaven, and a reason for the rejection of Christ at His first coming.

'An Enemy hath done this' (Matt. 13:28).

To ignore this explanation has led some to interpret, in another

parable, 'leaven' as good.  The same need that compelled the ignoring of the

typical meaning of 'leaven' calling it 'good' in Matthew 13, in spite of the

inspired meaning given in Matthew 16:6, and 1 Corinthians 5:6, is seen in the

transfer of the whole seventy weeks of Daniel 9 to the future, the felt need

to substitute the word 'government' for 'kingdom', and the suppression of the

evidence of 'usage' when dealing with the translation 'feigned obedience';

the ignoring of the intention of the addition of the word 'iron' in the

phrase 'the rod of iron', and other similar moves made under the compulsion

of the primary false position taken up over a pre -Millennial Kingdom, is a

warning to us all of the solemnity of any approach to the Scriptures that

uses them to bolster up a theory rather than make all our theories conform to

the usage of the terms employed.  Dr. Bullinger once said: 'Let me be a

bucket lowered into the well of Truth; not use the Scriptures as a bolster or

a buttress'.  It is a fatal exegetical mistake, with serious consequences,

ever to mistake the kingdom of the Beast for the kingdom of heaven.  The

recognition of the place the 'enemy' occupies illuminates the purpose of the

book of Job.  One Greek translation adds to the book of Job the genealogy of

the patriarchs, and declares that his name was originally 'Jobab'.  Whenever

a name is changed elsewhere in the Scriptures, we expect and find that its

new meaning has a bearing upon the Scriptural record. Now 'Job' is the Hebrew

word found in Genesis 3:15 'enmity', and the whole of the story of Job is an

exhibition of the enmity of Satan to one of the true seed, concluding with a

triumphant double blessing of Job at the end.  (See our book, The Book of Job

and the Enigma of the Ages).

The purpose for which Adam was created, and for which Christ the last

Man and the second Adam, died and rose again, was among other things to:

'Still the Enemy and the Avenger' (Psa. 8:2).

This Psalm not only throws light upon the question 'what is man?' it

throws a wonderful light upon the essential purpose of the Sabbath, for the

word 'still' in Psalm 8:2 is the Hebrew shabath, the word used in Genesis