KEYSTONE

                                                                        Keystone

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It was as if I got out of bed one morning and began wondering. ‘Is this all there is?’ I had a wife, three daughters, a house, a car, and a job. But what was the purpose of it all? So began my quest for truth. I needed to find meaning, that thing that makes it all make sense. I started reading all sorts of philosophy as I searched for the Hegelian ‘concrete universal’, something that would bring and then hold it all together. I investigated things such as Darwinism, Marxism, the Jewish Kabbala, Mormonism to name a few. I even attended services at the Kingdom Hall of Jehovah’s Witnesses!

It was while growing up in Scotland that I had become interested in Freemasonry. If you don’t know, ‘Freemasonry is a beautiful system of morality, veiled in allegory, and illustrated by symbols.’ Which is to say that Masonry is an organisation that teaches men morals using the construction of Solomon’s Temple and the tools used to ‘take a good man and make him better.’ Now, whatever you may think of Freemasonry, please note and consider the fact that God used this organisation to convert this lost sinner by teaching him about ‘the stone the builders rejected.’

My book From Mason To Minister (Nordskog Publishing Inc.) tells my story. However, before we look at a quote from therein, let’s set the scene. I had been asking some JWs if Jesus was Jehovah, which, as seemed clear to me, that Jesus and other New Testament writers seemed agree that He was. The name Jehovah or Yahweh or LORD are the same. Referring to Exodus 3:14-15 where Moses asks God’s name and God had answered with the ‘I AM WHO I AM’ references. Says John Frame, ‘Here, God gives Moses his mysterious name in three forms: long (I AM WHO I AM), medium (I AM), and short (Heb. Yahweh, translated “LORD”). These are all related to the name Yahweh.’ The truth of this was about to fall on me like a ton of bricks!

As I looked for the glue that held it all together, I had taken my search into Freemasonry while living in Manitoba.   

‘The final degree in the Chapter of the Royal Arch refers to a strangely shaped stone supposedly found among the rubble of the destroyed Temple of Solomon. I had been taught in the Blue Lodge that Masonry is synonymous with Geometry. Therefore, when the stone the builders rejected was referred to as a keystone that holds an archway together I started studying the shapes of keystones. And Lo! and Behold! Did the Hebrew letters in the Tetragrammaton (YHWH) when viewed in terms of their numerical equivalents, not present the shape of a trapezoid otherwise known as a keystone? Y = Yod, the tenth (10) letter in the Hebrew alphabet; H = Hé, the fifth (5); W = Vav, the sixth letter (6); and H = again Hé, the fifth (5). Jesus was the keystone and the keystone was JeHoVaH! Find a piece of paper and draw lines forming a box shape with the dimensions 10 x 5 x 6 x 5 (use millimetres or inches) and the shape of a keystone will appear. This was astounding to me! If you remove the keystone from an arch, the arch falls down. My personal darkness turned to light when I realized the reality that Jesus Christ is - in every way - the keystone that holds the entire creation together (see Col. 1:17). Christ is the “missing link”!’

YaHWeH or Jehovah = the LORD.‘In him all things hold together’ (Col. 1:17b). ‘Jesus is “the stone you builders rejected, which has become the cornerstone.” Salvation is found in no one else, for there is no other name under heaven given to mankind by which we must be saved.’ (Acts 4:11-12).