Jesus, The Good Shepherd and The Son of God, Was David and Adam In His Past Lives
- robrensor1066
- Oct 2
- 17 min read
All Bible quotations, unless otherwise stated or referenced, are taken from the online World English Bible, which is in the public domain. It is available at the following link: https://ebible.org/eng-web/index.htm. English language Bibles are translated from Hebrew and Greek manuscripts. I am no linguist, and I don’t know any linguists, so I have had to rely on others’ translations and romanizations of the Hebrew and Greek texts. Occasionally, I have examined the original Hebrew, Aramaic and Greek of the Bible, zeroing in on key words where the received English translation is debatable or misses the full meaning of the original.
Disclaimer: I am not a doctor or a therapist – merely a concerned layperson (!) – and nothing in this book should be considered medical advice. Nor should it be considered a substitute for diagnoses, prescriptions and treatments from qualified doctors. If you have symptoms, I recommend that you see a doctor to rule out anything serious and get proper care.
Jesus, The Good Shepherd and The Son of God, Was David and Adam In His Past Lives This blog is about Jesus, The Son of God, and his past lives as Adam and David. You may think this is a wild title, but there is plenty of evidence in the Bible to back this up, some of which I will highlight in this blog. The content in this blog is partly compiled from my book Godmindbody, specifically Part 2, Part 3, Chapter 3: Isaiah, Chapter 4: Jeremiah and Chapter 5: Ezekiel.
Christ is the Son of God in many ways. The body of Jesus was conceived by God the Father, via the Holy Spirit, in the womb of the Virgin (Luke 1:35). The soul of Jesus, which was the soul of ‘Adam, the son of God’ (Luke 3:38) in that he had no human parents, merged permanently and completely with the Word when the Spirit of God descended upon him ‘as a dove’ (Matthew 3:16). Hence Christ is the ‘Son of Man’ (Matthew 26:24) and the ‘Son of God’ (John 10:36), the Word who was there ‘in the beginning’ (John 1:1) and Jesus of Nazareth, the craftsman of royal descent. Everyone who has received the Spirit of God is a child of God (Romans 8:14–17), but more than that, Jesus was biologically the Son of God, and the second birth given to Christians is had through him, because he combined in glory with the Father and the Holy Spirit.
Before proceeding any further, it is necessary to provide scriptural evidence for Jesus as the reincarnation of Adam, since it flies in the face of accepted church teaching. Jesus and Adam were both born of God, without human fathers: Adam from untilled virgin soil; Jesus from the womb of a virgin.[i] When God decided to make Adam, it was ‘after our likeness’ (Genesis 1:26), with ‘our’ signifying the preincarnate Word of God and the Father. Christ is even referred to by Saint Paul in 1 Corinthians 15:45 as ‘the last Adam.’ That is, the last incarnation of Adam. Note that Paul didn’t say the second Adam, but the last Adam. Adam’s disobedience in eating the fruit of the tree of knowledge, that led to death, was corrected by Christ’s obedience on another tree (the cross), which enabled us to eat from the tree of life. Jesus’ forty days of fasting in the wilderness (Matthew 4) was the reversal of Adam’s eating from the tree of knowledge in the Garden of Eden when he wasn’t hungry.[ii]
Similarly, Jesus’ bravery in the Garden of Gethsemane was the undoing of Adam’s missteps in the Garden of Eden; a knot is loosed by a reversal of the steps taken to tie it, and who better for such a task than the one who made the knot? Jesus was crucified in Golgotha, the place of the skull, the site where Adam’s skull was said to be buried.
The Son of Man, the term Jesus used to identify himself (Matthew 9:6), is a translation from the romanized Hebrew ben-Adam, literally meaning Son of Adam (he was also called Son of David…). The first to descend was the first to ascend in glory and the family tree of humankind was restored to life by the watering of its deepest root. This gives new meaning to the verse, uttered by Jesus in Revelation 22:13: ‘I am the Alpha and the Omega, the First and the Last, the Beginning and the End.’ The Christian mystic Edgar Cayce channelled a similar message about Jesus being the reincarnation of Adam.
In The Old Testament prophets, David is described as ruling God’s future kingdom, and so is Jesus in the New Testament. For example, God will set up one shepherd over them, ‘even my servant David.’ (Ezekiel 34:23). ‘I, Yahweh, will be their God and my servant David prince among them.’ (Ezekiel 34:24). Commentators have come up with different interpretations of this verse. Some believe that Yahweh here could be the Lord Jesus, and a resurrected David could be ‘the prince’ under him, whose allotment or portion and ceremonial functions are described later in the book of Ezekiel. In 34:24, I read Yahweh as God the Father, and David as Jesus, often associated with David typologically; after all, David was the first Jewish conqueror of Jerusalem, and Jesus will be the last. But there is more to this than a prophet speaking on behalf of God, or a mere typological comparison, because the Bible repeatedly says that David and Jesus (e.g. Revelation 11:5) will rule the kingdom, there is one shepherd, not two, ‘over them’ (Ezekiel 34:23), and that one is identified as ‘David’, further corroborating the identity of David with Jesus, the shepherd boy (1 Samuel 16) and the Good Shepherd (John 10).
In Jeremiah 30:9, David was named as a leader in the future kingdom: ‘they will serve Yahweh their God and David their king, whom I will raise up to them’. Raise up – Hebrew qûm – may mean physically standing up as in resurrection, rising up against someone (attacking) or setting up something.[iii] In Jeremiah 30:9 David was explicitly called the king (Hebrew malkam), and he himself was promised an eternal throne (2 Samuel 7:16): ‘your throne will be established forever’. In Revelation, Jesus rules God’s kingdom with the saints, but clearly he is in charge of that kingdom.
The whole picture becomes much simpler and clearer if we accept that Jesus was the reincarnation of King David, as well as the divine Word incarnate. After all, multiple senses of qûm or ‘raise up’ apply to Jesus, who is risen from the dead, was raised up above the ground during the crucifixion, will attack the Antichrist and establish an earthly kingdom. He also rose into the sky during his ascension.
David prophetically experienced the Crucifixion from the Messiah’s perspective in Psalm 22, accurately describing a death by crucifixion centuries before crucifixion was even invented, and he wrote as Jesus on other occasions in the psalms. For example, in Psalm 2:7–8, David wrote: ‘Yahweh said to me, “You are my son. Today I have become your father. Ask of me, and I will give the nations for your inheritance”’. I think that passage speaks for itself, especially when you consider that in Luke 3:23, God said to Jesus, ‘you are my son’.
‘For you will not leave my soul in Sheol, neither will you allow your holy one to see corruption’ (Psalm 16:10), written by David, foretold the resurrection and glorification of himself and Jesus, as a single entity, by means of the ambiguous ‘holy one’. David’s body rotted, but Jesus’ never did, on account of his Resurrection.
David was anointed as king by Samuel (1 Samuel 16), making him the anointed one, and the Hebrew word Mashiach, from which we get Messiah, literally means the anointed one. Christ means the same thing. When he was anointed, God’s Spirit came to David (1 Samuel 16:13). This prefigured Jesus, who was later anointed by the Spirit of God following his baptism by John the Baptist. Micah (5) prophesied that a Messianic ruler would come from Bethlehem, who would rule to the ends of the earth, and David and Jesus were both born in Bethlehem, a relatively small town. Two such important figures coming from such a small town would be quite a coincidence, but it is not a coincidence.
When David defeated Goliath, it was with a stone hurled from his sling (1 Samuel 17:49). Jesus, the Messiah, is symbolised by the stone in Scripture (e.g. Daniel 2:32; Matthew 21:42; Psalm 118) and he was a craftsman (Mark 6:3), that is, a carpenter-stonemason. David’s harp playing had a soothing, healing effect on King Saul (1 Samuel 16), which foreshadowed the healing miracles performed by Jesus. Moreover, David was the archetypal underdog, underestimated by everyone, as demonstrated by his ability to kill Goliath, and Jesus was the stone the builder’s rejected (Matthew 21:42), the most terribly underestimated person ever to walk the earth.
Jesse was David’s father. In Isaiah 11, the Messiah is called a branch out of Jesse’s roots, not a branch of David, who was a much more famous figure than Jesse. Why do you think that is? Because both David and Jesus were descended from Jesse.
Then there was the Davidic Covenant, in which God promised King David that ‘Yahweh will build you a house’ (2 Samuel 7:11), that David’s ‘offspring’ would build a house for God, be God’s ‘son’ and receive the eternal throne of a kingdom (2 Samuel 7:12–16). God said to David, ‘your house and your kingdom will be made sure forever before you. Your throne will be established forever.”’ (2 Samuel 7:16). Solomon, David’s biological son and heir, built the First Temple, but the kingdom he ruled – the United Kingdom of Israel – did not last forever; on the contrary, it was split into the northern Kingdom of Israel and the southern Kingdom of Judah after Solomon’s death, because of his idolatry. The prophecy mainly refers to Jesus, the Son of God, who said he would rebuild the temple in John 2:19. Jesus was a descendant of David through his mother; his stepfather Joseph was also descended from David (Matthew 1; Luke 3). Jesus was thus called ‘the Son of David’, a title of the Messiah, with son in this sense meaning descendant. An eternal kingdom of course entailed an eternal king, hence Jesus had to be God’s Son. The angel announced to Mary that her son will be given the throne of David (Luke 1:32), because Jesus was David.
God’s promise to David that ‘Yahweh will build you a house’ (2 Samuel 7:11) in the context of temple construction, means that Jesus (Yahweh) will build David a temple, which only makes sense if David is Christ, who will build himself a temple – as he said in John 2 – and govern from his throne in that temple. David’s life and reign were characterised by his humility, mercy (he had opportunity to kill his enemy Saul, but relented) and obedience to God. He was not as good and wise as the Messiah, but he was the best of Israel’s pre-Messianic kings and a precursor of the Messiah in the minds of the Jewish people.
Although God was indeed his Father from The Virgin’s miraculous conception, and Father of the Logos in the beginning, because of all the scriptural references to Jesus as David, the allusions to his past life as Adam, Isaiah’s implication of a development period for the Messiah, and Zechariah’s (3) emphasis on Joshua the high priest being given symbolically clean clothes, with ‘Yahweh’s angel’ standing by (Zechariah 3:5), it is manifest that Jesus was born biologically the Son of God with a human soul that was anointed and divinized by the Spirit of God immediately after his baptism. Jesus Christ is God and a man.
Psalm 22 was written by David in the 10th century BC. As previously mentioned, he was anticipating his subsequent incarnation and death on the cross as Jesus, the Christ.
The World English Bible translates Psalm 22:20 as: ‘Deliver my soul from the sword, my precious life from the power of the dog.’ But if we go back to the original Hebrew, we discover that ‘precious life’ is a translation of the Hebrew word ye-kee-dati yechidati, which means ‘only one’ or ‘unique one’.[iv] Yek-ee-dah (Yechidah) can mean only child[v] and is used as such in The Book of Judges 11:34.[vi] The Septuagint translates it as Monogenays monogenēs, which means ‘one of a kind, one and only’ and can also signify an only child.[vii] The ‘only-begotten’ and ‘only one’ in this context is taken by Christians as an allusion to Christ, the Son of God, but in Psalm 22 it is actually the crucified figure (Jesus) who is asking God to deliver his only begotten: Jesus’ only child.
Who was this only begotten? John the Evangelist, who was there at the cross, alongside Mary Magdalene[viii] and The Virgin Mary (John 19:26). In Psalm 22:20, Jesus prayed to the Father that his only child be spared the martyrdom he was suffering. The prayer was granted: John was the only apostle not to be martyred. He was also the only apostle allowed to witness the Crucifixion because he was Christ’s biological son. This explains why when Jesus saw the ‘disciple whom he loved’ (John 19:26), generally understood to be John,[ix] the Lord said to his mother ‘Woman, behold your son!’ (John 19:26) and to the disciple ‘behold, your mother!’ (John 19: 27).
In ancient Judea, descendants, not only biological sons, were referred to as ‘sons’ of their ancestor, and their ancestors were frequently called ‘fathers’ (1 Kings 2:10), hence the Messiah was widely understood to be ‘the Son of David’, though he was many generations removed from King David. Therefore, John was Mary’s grandson, and she his grandmother.
Some people don’t believe that the disciple Jesus loved was John the apostle, but the beloved disciple who was described as being present at the Crucifixion is identified in the text as he who wrote the Gospel of John (21:20–24). In the earliest manuscripts john’s gospel is not attributed to anyone else. The Church fathers Polycrates, Eusebius and Augustine also believed that John was the beloved disciple, and they were centuries closer to the events than we are now. And the beloved disciple’s presence at the Last Supper means he must have been an apostle.
John’s status as Jesus’ son helps us to understand why John was called the disciple Jesus loved in the gospel of John, and why John rested against Jesus during the Last Supper (John 13:23). It also explains why Jesus called John and James ‘Sons of Thunder’ (Mark 3:17); in addition to the fact he literally called John ‘son’, the true significance of which has escaped many, Yahweh is associated with thunder in the Bible (Psalm 29:3; Psalm 18; Exodus 19), and Jesus is Yahweh. The fiery tempers of John and James being used as justification for the nickname Boanerges concealed a deeper truth.
John’s true parentage was concealed to protect him; even at that time, Jesus was regarded by some as the King of the Jews, the rightful heir to David, and after Jesus’ death and ascension, John may have been construed as the legitimate heir to the throne (although there is no such thing as a successor to Jesus, because he is immortal). This would have painted a huge target on his back with the Roman authorities, an even bigger target than he had as one of the leaders of the fledgling Jesus movement.
Psalm 22 ends with a prophecy that God will rule the world (22:28), clearly establishing the Messianic context of this Crucifixion prophecy.
Then there’s Psalm 72:1, which reads: ‘God, give the king your justice, your righteousness to the royal son.’ People have interpreted the king and his son as being King David and his son Solomon, since the psalms were attributed to David, king of the United Kingdom of Israel. But the context, established by subsequent verses, such as ‘in his days, the righteous shall flourish, and abundance of peace, until the moon is no more’ (Psalm 72:7), is undeniably that of the millennial kingdom. The descriptions are too paradisaical to fit David’s Israel or any historical monarchy, and they cannot be about the new earth, because there will be no moon in the New Jerusalem (Revelation 21:23), which will follow the millennium.
So who is this king’s child, this royal son? Well, Jesus is the king of the millennial kingdom in Psalm 72:1 and in Revelation, and I have already identified his ‘only-begotten’ son as John the Apostle. After Peter was told he must ‘follow’ (John 21:19) Jesus to Crucifixion and heaven, he asked about John’s fate, and the Lord said, ‘if I desire that he stay until I come, what is that to you?’ (John 21:22). The disciples believed this meant that John would not die (John 21:23), but Jesus was saying that, in contrast to the martyred Peter, John will remain alive on the earth until the Second Coming, an event that did not happen during John’s lifetime in the Roman era, that therefore lies in the future and could only happen through his reincarnation in the latter days. Edgar Cayce also predicted that the return of John the Evangelist would signal that the Second Coming is nigh, and that he would be a vehicle through which the physical, mental and spiritual are united.[x]
John’s reincarnation in the last days explains why he was chosen to receive the Revelation of those times; he was, to some extent, seeing visions from his own future incarnation, the purpose of which is to help pave the way for the Second Coming, yes, but also to serve under King Jesus in the subsequent millennial kingdom.
The text of the Davidic Covenant literally states that David’s offspring would be God’s ‘son’, and that this son would build a temple and be given an eternal kingdom. After David/Jesus, the primary figure of the Davidic Covenant, this secondarily applies to David’s biological son Solomon, who built the First Temple. Solomon was a previous incarnation of John the Apostle, the Son of Christ – which explains why in one sense, Solomon was prophesied to be God’s son: because this was to occur in a future incarnation. This same individual is Ezekiel’s (46) future prince of God’s Kingdom under King Jesus; the Davidic Covenant applies to Solomon across two incarnations, as well as to David/ Jesus, the Son of David; in addition to being identified with David in Scripture, Jesus was descended from David and is also prophesied to build the temple (John 2:19). Of course, even in this interpretation, the kingdom and authority will be Christ’s, with John in a subordinate position, as one of the saints who rule with Christ in Revelation 20:6. Solomon and John were both fascinated with the knowledge and wisdom of God, which was reflected in their work. John’s gospel begins with: ‘In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God’ (John 1:10). Proverbs 8:22–23, written by Solomon, is about wisdom: ‘Yahweh possessed me in the beginning of his work, before his deeds of old. I was set up from everlasting, from the beginning, before the earth existed.’
Zechariah 6:11-14, written centuries before Jesus’ birth, goes as follows: ‘take silver and gold, and make crowns, and set them on the head of Joshua the son of Jehozadak, the high priest; and speak to him, saying, ‘Yahweh of Armies says, “Behold, the man whose name is the Branch! He will grow up out of his place; and he will build Yahweh’s temple. He will build Yahweh’s temple. He will bear the glory, and will sit and rule on his throne. He will be a priest on his throne. The counsel of peace will be between them both.’
Now, here’s where things get even more interesting. The World English Bible has ‘He will be a priest on his throne. The counsel of peace will be between them both’ (Zechariah 6:13). The common interpretation of this passage is that it’s a prophecy that the the Joshua-ruler – Jesus – will be king and high priest. Joshua is the anglicisation of Yeshua, Jesus’ Hebrew name, so this is a prophecy that Jesus will be the king and have a throne and build a temple, as he said he would do in 3 days in John’s gospel.
Jesus is currently the head of the church (Ephesians 1:22; Colossians 1:18), our ‘great high priest’ (Hebrews 4:14) in heaven, since he has given an eternal and ultimate sin offering, making Joshua the high priest an apt sign of things to come. But there are other ways of translating that passage, which cast an additional shade of meaning. An alternative translation reads: ‘And there shall be a priest by his throne.’[xi] But the Hebrew word translated ‘by’ is usually translated ‘upon’. This could also mean that Zechariah was writing about the priest being a priest (a separate individual from Joshua) on his own throne, and therefore stating the existence of two separate thrones, or that the priest and the king would both sit on the king’s throne.[xii] The ‘priest’ is not described by Zechariah as a high priest, because that honour belongs to Jesus (Hebrews 4:14), further implying that the priest is another person. Reading Zechariah 6:13, one is reminded of Revelation 3:21 ‘to he who overcomes, I will give him to sit on my throne, as I sat on my father’s throne’, which refers not only to the chosen, but to one individual in particular who will be this ‘priest’. Indeed, likening the way this person sits on Jesus’ throne to the way Jesus sat on his Father’s throne implies that this individual will be Jesus’ son.
God has a throne in heaven and will have an earthly throne during the millennium. According to a literal reading of the Davidic covenant (2 Samuel 7), Jesus and Solomon were promised a throne or thrones, because both were David’s offspring. The Septuagint, the Greek translation of the Hebrew Scriptures, translates by his throne in Zechariah 6 as ‘at his right hand’, i.e. the priest is at the right hand of King Joshua (Jesus).[xiii] In Matthew 20:21, Salome asked that her sons John and James should sit at Jesus’ right and left hand in the kingdom. The early church father and historian Eusebius wrote that John was a priest[xiv] and John described himself as a priest (Revelation 1:6). This is further evidence for John as the son of Christ, since it would make sense for the king’s son to sit at his father’s right hand. Jesus’ response to Salome on that occasion was oblique, but not definitively negative: he just said that honour is not mine to give; it’s up to my Father (Matthew 20:23). By the way, I am not suggesting that Salome was John’s biological mother.
Regardless of your position on John’s status, the king and the priest are clearly implied to be two separate figures. This is further borne out by ‘and the counsel of peace shall be between them both’, in which the existence of two distinct figures working together in harmony is more linguistically obvious. Their relations will be amicable presumably because the priest will simply do as he is told by King Jesus! In Ezekiel 43 and 45, Yahweh is also prophesied to take the form of a glorified man, with a figure serving him called ‘the prince’. The prince is the individual with the greatest access to Yahweh in Ezekiel’s temple, since he is described as entering and leaving via the porch of the east gate that Jesus himself will enter by (Ezekiel 46:8), presenting the sacrifices and offerings to King Jesus (Ezekiel 46), and giving voluntary sacrifices (Ezekiel 46:12). The prince plays a mediating role between Yahweh and the people of the kingdom. Because of this unique proximity to Jesus, he is the most likely candidate in those temple ordinances to be permitted to sit on Jesus’ throne, or beside his throne. Therefore, Ezekiel’s (44) prince is Zechariah’s priest, and that individual is the reincarnation of John The Apostle and King Solomon.
There’s more detail and more evidence for reincarnation identified in the Bible in my new book Godmindbody, available now to read free on my website (https://www.robertensor.com/post/godmindbody-a-book-about-tms-and-christianity-part-1) or to buy from amazon as a paperback or ebook: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0FQ6MNZ2N
The Ezekiel Chapter of Godmindbody is available to read here: https://www.robertensor.com/post/godmindbody-part-3-chapter-5-ezekiel
You can also download Godmindbody here for free:
[i] Irenaeus. Against Heresies.
[ii] Ibid.
[vi]Rabbi Reuven Klein. 2020. The Chayah and Yechidah, https://ohr.edu/8914#:~:text=Although%20the%20word%20Yechidah%20in,that%20is%20unique%20and%20unparalleled.
[viii] There are rumours that Jesus was married to Mary Magdalene and had a child with her. If they are true it doesn’t diminish the figure of Jesus, although the evidence for this thesis is limited and tenuous, being based largely on Gnostic texts written much later. Unless the Magdalene was John’s mother, which I do not believe, my reading of Psalm 22 casts further doubt on this theory, although it would explain her presence at the cross beside Jesus and I suppose the two viewpoints could be reconciled if this hypothetical child by the Magdalene was a girl, as is alleged, making John the only son. Source: Lincoln, Leigh, Baigent. 2013. The Holy Blood and The Holy Grail. Cornerstone Digital; New e edition.
[ix] Mainly because the beloved disciple who was described as being present at the Crucifixion is identified in the text as he who wrote the Gospel of John (21:20–24). The Church fathers Polycrates, Eusebius and Augustine also believed that John was the beloved disciple. Moreover, the beloved disciple’s presence at the Last Supper means he was an apostle.
[x] Kirkpatrick, Sidney. 2001. Edgar Cayce: An American Prophet. Penguin Publishing Group; Reissue edition.
[xii] Ibid.
[xiii] Ibid.
[xiv] Eusebius. 2019. History of the Church. Beginning and End Press.
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