The Red One is a monster you already know about. In the Book of Revelation, the scarlet beast is a fearsome creature, hunting the children of Israel. It is a conglomerate beast of Babylon, Persia-Media, Greece, and Rome. How The Red One unfolded through history from Day Six of Creation to Esau to the Edomite/Idumeans to the Roman Empire to the current conglomerate of organizations that facilitate the scarlet beast is important to understand. It helps the reader understand the Scriptures as one continuous, unfolding prophetic text.

Oddly, The Red One holds a place of special concern during the Chanukkah season because of the Seven Shepherds and Eighth Prince prophesied to deliver Israel from invading enemies. This is also concerning because so many believers don’t understand the place of Chanukkah in prophecy, preferring instead to debate whether it is “adding to the Torah” instead of studying its seeds in the Torah and Haggai, and even how it unfolds in the Gospels and Revelation.

In Truth, Tradition, or Tare?, I demonstrated Yeshua’s approach to “man’s traditions” and how some he observed and others he dismissed. Better yet, I gave the reader a template to use based on Yeshua’s teaching so that one could test traditions against the pattern. In The Seven Shepherds: Hanukkah in Prophecy, I demonstrated how we can use Yeshua’s template concerning celebrations like Chanukkah and even learn prophecy, especially expectations concerning The Red One.

What follows is the first section of The Seven Shepherds’ chapter entitled The Red Shadow. As we delve so deeply into the prophecies of the Footsteps of Messiah, sometimes it helps to review the basics for newcomers:

The Torah holds the Seed words from which the rest of the Older Testament (TANAKH) and Newer Testament grow. Those books of Scripture between Joshua and Revelation document traditions grown from the Torah. In fact, even the Torah seeds the idea that customs will grow from the Torah itself:

Therefore, to this day the sons of Israel do not eat the sinew of the hip which is on the socket of the thigh, because he touched the socket of Jacob’s thigh in the sinew of the hip.

This ancient battle between Esau and Jacob is a Seed pattern demonstrating both the struggle of mankind and the practice of traditions to preserve the memory of a Seed event in the Torah.

The sensitive areas of both the foot and the hand are symbolic in Scripture. The foot, specifically the heel, represents the soul. In Hebrew, the soul is the nefesh. The shortest definition of the soul is a bundle of appetites, emotions, desires, and intellect. The heel becomes very hard and calloused, but the sole (Hebrew: caph) remains highly sensitive. When Jacob is born, he is holding onto red, hairy Esau’s heel, pointing to the place of Esau’s vulnerability, his appetites. The heel is the point of vulnerability to Eve’s “seed,” yet the point of vulnerability to the serpent-beast is the head, the symbol of the spirit.

In his appetite for the “red stuff” and Canaanite women, Esau is both hardened predator and vulnerable prey, like a beast. He hunts for game and that which pleases his soul, and this is exactly how Jacob deceives his father Isaac out of Esau’s blessing and bargains with Esau for his birthright in Genesis 25. His soul appetites were what made Esau the prey, for all that is needed to bait a Red One like Esau is food, the hunt (competition, games), sexual pleasure, emotional pleasure, or intellectual achievement. Being governed by these desires instead of mastering them with the Spirit are the beast’s vulnerabilities.

Esau represents the red stuff, a rowdy soul seeking pleasure and achievement. When Jacob returns to the Land to face Esau, he struggles one night with a “man,” whom he declares has the face of God, and Jacob names the place of the wrestling match Peniel. This struggle resulted in Jacob being smitten in the thigh socket, the caph.

Before Jacob could face his twin Esau, he had to wrestle the Esau within. Jacob was notorious for relying on his own heel, which in Jacob’s case, was the hardened intellect of his soul, to obtain the result he wanted. Jacob, too, needed for his spirit to prevail over his red soul in order to conquer Red One within, for this is a competition worth winning. It changed Jacob’s walk to do so, as it will any disciple’s walk when he practices walking after the Spirit instead of his soul. When a disciple walks in the Spirit, it is with the sensitivity of the sole of his foot to the Spirit, not the vulnerability to his red desires.

In Revelation Three, the fifth assembly is Sardis. It literally means “Red Ones.” In rabbinic tradition, Esau (Edom) is the Red One, for he was born red and hairy all over like a beast, and Esau’s Biblical nickname Edom comes from adom, or the color red. The Sardinians are singled out as conforming to the image of the hairy beast Esau, a man controlled by his appetites.

The Seed of the Torah hints to the principle of the first born beast, for in Day Six of Creation, the beast was created first, yet the second-born man was created to rule over the beasts, for the man was made in the image of Elohim, who is Spirit.

When he walks into to his father’s tent not knowing that Jacob has already deceived his way to the blessing, Esau tells his father, “I am your firstborn, Esau.” Because his father Isaac has been deceived through his own red soul, his vulnerable appetite for wild game, the Red One Esau is right on target. Isaac began his walk with the God of his father Abraham by sowing seed in the field and reaping a hundredfold, yet at a critical time of rendering the blessing to the firstborn, Isaac is vulnerable to the appetites of a man who hunts in the field instead of sowing seed in it!

These are critical links between the serpent, the most cunning beast of the field (Gen. 3:1) and the man of the field, Esau (Gen. 25:27).