29. The Apocalypse
You cannot have Christ without cataclysm. You cannot have light without darkness being revealed. You cannot have victory without the shattering of heaven and earth. Everything John saw is nothing more than what happens in the darkness as the light turns on.
God is in this thing to win: God is in us to win. God intends to bring an end to sin, the presence of Satan and his demons, the world, and death in and through His people, filled with all the power of Christ, right here on this earth. Every word God spoke in the Bible, He spoke into this age and into this earth. If God does not fulfill even one word of that which He spoke concerning us right now in this age and on this earth, He is finished; Satan is correct – God is wrong.
We know that right now, as we trust and believe in Jesus with all of our hearts, He is in us, He fills our humanity, and every part of who we are He carries in Himself. But we also know that what God says has not been fulfilled in our lives in all fullness – as it must be.
The New Testament indicates there are indeed two parts to the birthing of the age to come. To most Christians, the first part means, “God, get us out of here.” However, Jesus says a most precious thing in John 14. He says that He will reveal Himself to us and that He and His Father will come to us and make their home in us. Peter also commands us to set our hope fully upon the grace that will come to us at the time of the unveiling, the apocalupsis, of Jesus Christ.
How is Christ going to triumph, to win, to end sin and death and all things in me and through me? I have my eyes set fully on Jesus showing Himself quietly and secretly to many whom He has chosen across the earth, those who separate themselves from the nonsense of the compromised church and wait eagerly in expectation of faith, not for an escape, but for empowerment, not to become a great name, but to see the challenge against God – and sin, and death, and Satan, and the world defeated right here on this earth – in our bodies. That enablement is coming. It will transform us and empower us, and we will stride through the coming darkness with the nourishment, the refuge, the help that all Christians will soon so desperately need.
We are not waiting for the “endtimes” to come, we are in them. We are not waiting for “The Antichrist”; Christians already serve the Beast and do his will, working and fighting to see that he triumphs upon the earth.
We are waiting, by the command of the gospel, for the grace, the power of Jesus inside of us, that will enable us to be, right here, right now, in this dark and hate-filled world, the full, victorious revelation of Jesus Christ.
Are you called to that? Do you want it? If you do, you are called. Set your face upon that grace and He will reveal Himself to you as well.
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There are many throughout the churches today who attempt to remove the Revelation given to John on the island of Patmos from being a personal word to us fulfilled now in fullness and in the fullness of times in which we live.
You cannot have Christ without cataclysm. You cannot have light without darkness being revealed. You cannot have victory without the shattering of heaven and earth. Everything John saw is nothing more than what happens in the darkness as the light turns on.
Let’s present some absolute facts of human reality. Adam chose the tree of the knowledge of good and evil because the serpent magnified the GOOD and whitewashed the evil. Adam chose what was GOOD; he chose “doing right.”
God, in His mercy and love, with His eye completely on the redemption that would come and His intention to reveal Himself through man, placed upon Adam and his seed a seven-fold curse. But inside that curse, the two primary parts of the curse, the subjection of all creation to vanity, are death and human government.
God spoke through Nebuchadnezzar that He chooses who will sit upon the thrones of men and that He always finds the worst, the basest of men to place into human government, including all presidents of the United States.
The history of human government upon this earth, especially modern political government, is the story of the psychopaths, the men without conscience or sense of humanity, clawing their way to the top. Almost all human rulers are those who who have sold themselves for power over others. And even the handful who were “good” (David, Alfred, possibly George Washington, I know of hardly any others) used their power wrongfully, bringing death and grief into the lives of many.
The revelation of Christ through us comes into this earth doing two things. First, it casts off the curse that sits upon creation, and second, it cuts out of the hearts and experience of man the tree of the knowledge of GOOD and evil.
But here is the problem. Look out around you at the world in which you live. What is it that people love? Human achievement. And what do they look to as the answer for all the problems of the world? Human government.
Yet God says that all creation will be set free into the glorious liberty of the sons of God. Does that mean that everyone will wake up one day and think, “Oh my, I was wrong about everything. I realize now that these radical Christians – who said that America, the exaltation of human achievement and human “GOODness,” was the curse of God upon this earth – were completely right”? Hardly.
All mankind, including almost all Christians, love the tree of the knowledge of GOOD and evil and the achievement of modern political, democratic human government more than life itself. They will kill you rather than let it go. Some have the incredible notion that the sons of God will fit themselves into the systems of this world and slowly transform things from the inside out, making life in this world just get better and better until it gradually becomes all that God intended.
Why, then, does the very opposite seem to be happening? How, then, do we see human government rising to its fullness in today’s world instead of slowly diminishing away? How is it that things are screwing up towards the very opposite of this gradual transformation? How is it that every element of the revelation the Lord Jesus gave to John stands in all fullness upon the earth today?
God placed us in this earth at this time to deal with what is real, that is, the revelation of Christ in the midst of the darkness, and not the concocted fantasies of modern society.
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The Apocalypse is the unveiling – taking off the cover so that now all things are seen as they really are. God removes the cover from Christ and anti-Christ both at the same time. Those who say they want all of Christ are saying that they want the lights to turn on and all things hiding in the darkness to be revealed as they really are.
Jesus said, “The world hates Me because I testify against it, that its deeds are evil.” He then said that the world hates us for the same reason.
Christ is the truth, no matter how unpleasant the stuff hiding under the rocks really is. The Lie is the Lie no matter how “positive” it makes everyone feel. But understand, lies are much more than just “mistaken understanding.” By their nature, believing lies about this world sucks the life out of those who believe those lies, no matter how full of good vibrations they make a person feel.
The life of the age to come as it floods forth upon this earth from out of our bellies will come into immediate conflict with the life of this present age. Part of what John saw in his vision is a description of that conflict. Anyone who wants all of Christ wants the end of the life of this present age. That end is cataclysm.
These are of one mind, and they will give their power and authority to the beast. These will make war with the Lamb, and the Lamb will overcome them, for He is Lord of lords and King of kings; and those who are with Him are called, chosen, and faithful. Revelation 17:13-14
Everything hiding in the darkness will come out with guns blazing to eliminate the terrible threat that the life of Christ revealed in us is to them. Christ in us will win; we will win by the demonstration of love.
But to be effective in the revelation of Christ in this hour, we must know God on both sides of the Apocalypse.
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I am not looking for “The Antichrist.” There is the spirit of anti-Christ that includes both the Christianity that pledges allegiance to the world and, primarily, all of Judaism. Judaism and Is- today are open, in-your-face, rebellion against God. Judaism since the cross denies that Jesus is the Christ, refusing to accept the Messiah God sent them, which denial John said is “anti-Christ.” Paul said that God has made the natural Judaic the enemy of the gospel for our sakes, and Paul commanded us by the Spirit of God to cast out the natural Judaic and his false claim to the inheritance. The church refuses to obey God, but has cast all blame upon an innocent people, the Arabs, bearing false witness against them and joining in their murder.
[In any of these words I am not suggesting in any way anything intended to bring hurt to any individual person, J-sh or otherwise.]
“The Antichrist” is not Biblical; such a “person” will never be.
John is the only one who used the word “antichrist” and he used it only in his epistles, not in Revelation. And John gave clear definitions of what he meant by using that word. First, it is both a spirit that moves upon many and a plurality. He used it to refer to Christian apostasy, people who turn their backs on God and walk away. He defined anti-Christ as being the denial that Jesus is the Christ (the Pharisees – the Talmud – Judaism) and the rejection of Christ come in the flesh.
You can see that thread then through Jesus’ confrontation with the Pharisees. They claimed that they believed that God appeared in Moses and in Jeremiah, but those men were dead and gone, so it was an easy and worthless claim. They could not believe that God appeared in a man before them right now.
The same thing happens with those who cling to the King James Bible for religious reasons. (It is perfectly fine to enjoy it for cultural reasons.) They believe that God appeared in intellectual, non-Spirit-filled translators 400 years ago, but He certainly would not appear in similar translators today. That spirit that clings to God coming in the past but not today, John says, is the spirit of anti-Christ. You can see it working all through Christian thinking. Jesus told the Pharisees, “You will not see me again until you say, ‘Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord.’” That is true for everyone. We will never see Jesus, never, until we see Him in ourselves and in our brother or sister, until we see Him in the flesh.
The spirit of anti-Christ is a spirit that fills Christianity. And so I spell it as “anti-Christ” because it is a spirit, it works in many, but particularly in those who follow Judaism, and in those who see themselves as separate from Christ, and it is not the name of some individual.
But Christians have taken the word “antichrist” that John uses in his epistles and stripped it of the definitions John gives. Then they take the “beast” of Revelation 13 and the “man of sin” that Paul speaks of in 2 Thessalonians, disregarding the explanations given, and they stir it all together in a witch’s brew and come up with, Ta Dah! – The Antichrist, a single man who becomes the dictator of the world, clearly identified as EVIL, I guess because he looks like Dracula.
That definition, that everything that opposes Christ culminates in one individual person, that idea is what is NOT Biblical. For one thing, it gets everyone else off the hook. If only one man can be “The Antichrist,” then everyone else is free to practice anti-Christ without danger.
Everyone is looking for Dracula in the same way that everyone is looking for Superman (the false image of Christ in His return).
So many Christians imagine that “The Antichrist,” or the beast, will be obvious and easy to detect. It never enters their minds that it cannot be anti-Christ unless most Christians believe it is from God.
Just as there is no Superman coming, so there is no Dracula, either. Just as Christ is revealed in the simple, the weak, and the mundane, so anti-Christ is found only in the common, the ordinary, and the very, very familiar. Both have been true all down through the present age of the church. Anti-Christ is something people practice and speak all the time. And it is utterly anti-Christ.
And then the lawless one will be revealed, whom the Lord will consume with the breath of His mouth and destroy with the brightness of His coming. 2 Thessalonians 2:8
The idea that the transformation of this world will come gradually, bit by bit, as Christians move into the systems of this world and speak positive thinking into them does not come from the New Testament. It is not found there, rather, the opposite. The revelation of Jesus Christ is a cataclysm. Turning the lights on in our heavens causes the darkness to flee into the physicality of the earth.
Why do I, according to the commandment of the Holy Spirit fulfilled in me, look forward with great anticipation to the failure of all human achievement and of all human government upon this earth?
Because I love God’s people. Because I love the people of this world. Because I love the earth and all of God’s creation. Because God is love in me.
Because I want the age of human folly to end. I want my children to live their lives free of the horrors of demonic assault and human darkness. I want my grandchildren to grow up in the joy of the age to come.
God brings us to failure just before He reveals the next precious thing of Himself to us. I can count those times by the dozens in my own life. In the same way, God brings to total and utter failure all that is man upon this earth. That is how His GRACE moves into the hearts of men.
God brings everything to complete failure that He might show mercy upon all. No flesh will glory in His sight. No one will ever say, “Look, we did it.” Grace becomes our life when we no longer have to be or do anything. Thus God allows all to “blow it” completely. Every single Christian will discover that they themselves, personally, were the ones who got it wrong.
And God has an order for the revelation of Himself. He begins with a first-fruits, a seed; then when that seed is complete, He brings into the revelation of Christ all who belong to Jesus. Finally, in the ages to come, He brings all creation into subjection to the Lord Jesus Christ.
But God will never redeem the world nor ever breathe life into it bit by bit.
The fullness of Christ upon this earth causes the end of all human goodness and all human achievement. The world instinctively knows that this is so, even though the church in the world does not.
Human goodness is the fall; human achievement is the curse.
But all this is but the backdrop, the context against which the most incredible, awesome, unbelievable, HOLY, grand, beyond all human or angelic comprehension ever in all the vast avenues of the universe, beyond, beyond, beyond ALL knowledge, this experience that is coming right now upon you and upon me.
The unveiling of Jesus Christ.
Now, let me give a clear and Biblical definition of the term “the beast” as it is used in Revelation 13 – human government, men manipulating others for gain and for hurt. But first, I must say this. Prophecy and the prophetic word are not given for us to “predict” the future. They are given for us, to each generation of the church in their generation, to understand the present.
The beast of Revelation 13 is simply modern human government, socialistic, democratic, bureaucratic, holding all monopoly on power, armed with weapons of destruction, controlling every aspect of everyone’s life. The modern state, especially the American, rules by absolute violence. You cross its will, you die or disappear into prison.
The Beast of Revelation 13 IS modern human government as we know it today, including the entire governmental system of the United States. The head of the Beast that was wounded to death but now lives IS the nation and government of Is-, the false fulfillment of a “natural” and false gospel. — The son of the bondwoman SHALL NOT be heir with the son of the freewoman. Galatians 4
The seven heads of that beast are symbolic as well. Obviously the beast is pulled this way and that, because the heads compete with each other. The American church imagines that they can ride the beast, controlling it by putting a “Christian” into office. The Satanists who control America laugh every time they succeed in getting a “Christian” into office to cloak their own deeds. Christians, like sheep, are so easily fooled.
[I have removed this section because of censorship on the Internet.]
The false prophet includes two things among others. It includes the power of science to convince man by its miraculous abilities. Who is not convinced by science? Science causes fire to fall from heaven upon the earth in great destructive power. Science creates fantastic things including an image that speaks and causes men to act as the greatest change agent of history, the television set. Science is the first power on earth to give a “convincing” argument why there is no need for God. And the false prophet includes that spirit moving through the church of Christ that waves the flags of the Beast and that exalts the modern nation of Is- as if such could possibly be the anointed of the Lord!
Let me throw in something important here. Jeremiah told both the Judaics, and all nations around, that God had given the kingdoms of men to Nebuchadnezzar and that if they would obey and serve him, God would preserve their lives, but if they rebelled against Nebuchadnezzar, God would destroy them. It is clear that God meant submission only in certain areas. Nebuchadnezzar built the golden statute for all to worship – clearly, a symbol of the Beast of Revelation 13. But God honored those Jews who refused to obey Nebuchadnezzar to worship that symbol of the glory of the nation (a tiny minority, three, among the Judaics in Babylon).
This truth is exactly the same thing as what we see in the words of Paul in Romans 13 and of Peter. God has ordained that we submit to the Beast in certain ways. But that does not make the Beast holy or of God – no, the Beast is part of the curse. (Just read 1 Samuel 8 for a clear description of the history of the US government.) And clearly, there is a line of separation between godly submission to that Beast and the ungodly worship of the pride of life. The Beast is evil; we obey it in what is right, but we do not worship it.
American children speaking a binding oath of allegiance to the American flag is exactly the same thing as the children of Israel falling on their faces before the golden statute of Babylon. There is no difference. And if you want to feel out of place in church, refuse to join them as they practice these things. You will feel exactly like the three Hebrew young men felt as they alone were standing while all other believers were worshipping the world.
Singing “The Star-Spangled Banner” IS worshiping the Beast. Look at how people tear up and are mightily moved. That is an unholy spirit of worship of the pride of life, of human glory upon this earth, moving through them. And all such worship swirls around mass murder and burning with fire, Cain killing his brother Abel, which is the exaltation of Satan, and exalts those who managed to kill more of them than they killed of us in an anti-sacrifice of death that mimics and mocks the sacrifice of Jesus. The “Star-Spangled Banner” is nothing else.
Now, the “man of sin” that Paul describes in 2 Thessalonians is related to and is often the same thing as the spirit of anti-Christ as John defines in his epistles. But the beast of Revelation 13 is slightly different. The beast shows up particularly as human government, whereas the “man of sin” and the spirit of anti-Christ works its way through all the fabric of man upon this earth, specifically selfs, living for self, trying to maintain some definition of separation from God.
Now, here is a problem almost all Christians face who want to come into a knowledge of the truth and of things as they really are. Christianity has concocted such a fantasy world in their imaginative and un-Biblical definitions of “heaven” and “hell,” of Christ and antichrist, of salvation and judgment, a greater fantastical world than Tolkien created in Middle Earth or Cameron created in Avatar. The difference is that those two men created fantasy worlds to illuminate the truth, whereas Christianity’s fantasy concoctions have so filled the minds and thinking of all Christians that to rebuild an understanding of reality as it really is takes a life-long process of re-defining everything.
God created me with a passion to understand the world and the creation of God as it really is, a drive that has been evident since age five, when my understanding first opened to a map of the world. And I am willing to say, by faith as Paul did, that God is working in me. And so I continue to circle around these things – the Beast, the man of sin, the mystery of iniquity versus the mystery of godliness, Cain versus Abel, Christ versus anti-Christ – not to “figure them out,” but that God might grant me understanding of reality and truth as it really is. We are only just opening our eyes, blinking and not understanding what we see. And it is only as we see God in all things, more and more, that we can begin to understand God inside this great conflict or contradiction that He has instituted into His universe.
And so it is only one who sees God in all things, who understands His ways and His heart, who has His passion burning inside of them, who thinks as God thinks, who walks as God walks, it is only such a one who can see and understand the full meaning and purpose of the great and terrible contradictions that are woven all through the fabric of the universe. But such we are becoming; it is our sure and certain inheritance.
But to understand these things, the man of sin and the mystery of iniquity, and their opposites, we cannot look at Christianity or find much help in the “Christian” world view based on so much un-Biblical nonsense. And thus our minds and our understanding must be completely re-written before we can understand reality as it really is.
If you could see the difference between the thinking of the average evangelical Christian in this world, and the thinking of one who understands all things as they really are, you will see almost no similarity. And yet, here is a marvelous thing! The one who sees all things as they really are will recognize the Spirit of Christ inside that brother or sister whose mind is filled with darkness, and will receive them with open arms in just the same way that Christ receives us. The sad, sad, thing is that the receiving often will be met with rejection.
And so, to gain a clearer glimpse of the mystery of iniquity working in this world, I sometimes turn to perspectives that are not twisted with Christian fantasy. As Jesus said, “The children of this world are wiser than the children of light.” These things simply give us glimpses of understanding, they point us in a direction that is true, but truth itself remains the person of the Lord Jesus revealed in us. But Christ revealed in us is always a light that shatters the darkness. And darkness always snarls for one brief moment before it vanishes forever.
Here is one article that gives a clear understanding of reality that has not been understood in the past. It is important that all who want to understand the issues of Christ and anti-Christ, issues that we are right now caught in the grip of, issues that no man, woman or child living right now upon the earth will escape, to read this article and ponder these things before the Lord.
http://www.sott.net/articles/show/213382-Reflections-on-Political-Ponerology
What you see in this article is a significant signpost pointing towards the reality of the mystery of iniquity and the man of sin working in this world.
Now, understand this. Contrary to the fantasy of Christianity, the devil and the beast do not rule the end of this age. On the contrary. It is the man of righteousness who exposes the man of sin. It is the mystery of godliness that confounds the mystery of iniquity. It is the exaltation of Christ, speaking Him only, that banishes the false separation of anti-Christ from our hearts and minds.
It is the kingdom of God revealed in us that brings the kingdoms of this world, the political kingdoms of America and Is-, of the European Union and Russia and China, the kingdoms of democracy and socialism, the kingdoms of banking and medicine and the increasingly insane pursuits of modern science and technology, and all the darkness of man upon this earth, crashing down into ruin.
It is the overcomers who cast the evil one out of the heavens. It is the unveiling of the sons of God that overthrows the curse upon this earth.
It is the most exciting time in all the history of the world.