THIS GOSPEL OF THE KINGDOM

THIS GOSPEL OF THE KINGDOM

                Yesterday I buried my precious little dog Desi. Waves of grief and dismay are still rolling over me. I have never loved a dog as completely as I have loved Desi. He never leaves my side. It is 3 AM and normally he would be curled up at my feet, but he is gone and I am still shocked and puzzled.

                We had just arrived home from the Smokey Mountains where we had gone to celebrate our anniversary. Bonnie and the dogs had gone into the house as I took a few items from the car to put away in the out building. I finished my job and went into the house to join the family to watch a prophecy program when our neighbor knocked on the door.  There our neighbor stood, holding my little Desi in their arms and he was dead.

                They had found him on the road in front of their house and he had been hit by a car. His little neck was broken and his head wounded. I still can’t figure it out. Our driveway is a hundred yards long down a steep hill through the woods. The neighbor’s house is another hundred yards down the road. How did Desi get down there and why?

                All I can figure out is that Desi didn’t go in with the other dogs, but hung around to be with me. When I put the things away in the outbuilding he lost sight of me and ran around to the front of the house to find me. When he came back around I was inside the house and the gate was shut. I, thinking that Desi was in the house, had grabbed a snack and was headed back to the den to join Bonnie when there was a knock at the door.

                I wept openly in front of my neighbors, heaving sobs of agony at his loss. So last evening I built a pine coffin and we placed him in it. I went down to a spot we call the meadow and there I buried him in front of a large boulder at the edge of the woods. He had died instantaneously    and most likely without ever knowing what hit him. But I am haunted by his frantic search for me… desperately wanting to roll back time just enough to change events.

                Everyone who met Desi immediately loved him. He had the most incredible loving eyes and a soul that just reached out to people. He was a one man dog and he always kept one eye on me, but he was kind to every child and person who just wanted to touch him. He was my shadow and now this gentle soul is dead and gone. And I am still overwhelmed by the heart gripping pain of his loss.

                But even in the midst of my sorrow, I feel a new fire growing in my spirit… a new determination and focus. There is a message to give to the world in these last days and very few are preaching it. Through most of history since the reformation we have preached a gospel of salvation. It has resulted in the salvation of countless thousands of people over the centuries, but it is not the message that Jesus gave us that would bring His return. It is not the message of the final harvest.

                Jesus told us what the message would be and what it would do and He even demonstrated it for us at every turn showing us the powers of the age to come… modeling for us the way that we must live and teach  and work. We were to live by divine appointment, teach by the gifts of the Spirit and do the works that He did and even greater works because He was going to the Father.

                But we, in time, turned it all into religion, into dead doctrines, into allegories that missed the point and we have ended up with a largely lifeless church… complacent and unbelieving, skeptical and wary. We instinctively know that a lot of what we see being done on TV and elsewhere is smoke and mirrors rather than the genuine power of God that once rocked this world. There is a lot of hype, backed by very little tangible proof.  The silent question in the back of our minds is: How can we do the works of Christ in the world if we don’t have His power?

                Like creation itself, we instinctively long for the revealing of the sons of God and we hope to be among them, but we are not sure how to get there. Now we understand that He is calling us to a new level of purity… to put away the flesh and to learn to live by His Spirit if we are to do His works.

                The Gospel of the kingdom is not one of “Get saved and go to heaven.” Yes, we will be caught up to meet the Lord in the air and we will be in heaven for a short period of time called the Marriage Supper of the Lamb, but then we are going to return with Christ at His second coming to rule the nations with a rod of Iron and to restore the earth back to the way it was when God gave it to Adam. The earth has been destroyed by man and it must be restored by man… and in the process of its restoration we will learn God’s eternal ways of doing things. See Micah 4:2.

                We have allegorized truth so much that we can no longer see anything as being literal. We live in a magical world where God is going to zap us into perfection at eh resurrection and we will not need to learn anything, but we will be instantly qualified to reign with Christ over the works of His hands.

                Read what Micah has to say about our near future: “And it will come about in the last days that the mountain of the house of the Lord will be established as the chief of the mountains. It will be raised above the hills and the peoples will stream to it. And many nations will come and say, “come let us go up to the mountain of the Lord, and to the house of the god of Jacob, that He may tach us about His ways and that we may walk in His paths.  For from Zion will go forth the law, even the word of the Lord from Jerusalem. And He will judge between many peoples and render decisions for mighty distant nations.  And they will hammer their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks; Nation will not lift up sword against nation and never again will they train for war.” Micah 4:1-3 Read the rest of the chapter along with Zech. chapters 12- 14

                Jesus voiced the Gospel of the Kingdom in the Lord’s Prayer. “Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.” God’s plans and purposes are earth centered. The coming millennium will be ruled over by Christ and His saints here on the earth. And when the Holy City the New Jerusalem comes, it will come to earth and God will forever tabernacle with His people. It all takes place here.

                People say: “Then why does Jesus talk about building mansions for us in heaven? How will we enjoy life in the Hold New Jerusalem if we are down here and it is up there? Listen, my friends. When we have our glorified bodies we will have instant access to heaven. Like the angels we will be able to travel back and forth at the speed of thought. Do you think that angels spend weeks and months or years travelling between heaven and earth?

                Listen to John’s description of the Holy City in Revelation 21:22-24: “And I saw no temple in it, for the Lord God, the Almighty and eth Lamb are its temple. And the city has not need of the sun or of the moon to shine upon it, for eh glory of God has illumined it, and its lamp is the Lamb. And the nations shall walk by its light and the kings of the earth shall bring their glory into it.”

                 Who are the kings of the earth? Who are the nations that will live by its light? We are the kings and priests… the sons of God for whom all creation waits.  We are the ones who will reign with Christ. And the nations will be those sheep nations that crossed over, that survived the final holocaust.

                Read Ezekiel 39. Beginning at about verse 7 and onward, he describes the cleanup that will come after the Gog of Magog war. It will take Israel 7 months just to bury the bones and to cleanse the land. The God says in verse 21, 22: “And I shall set My glory among the nations; and all the nations will see My judgment which I have executed and My hand which I have laid on them and the house of Israel will know that I am the Lord their God from that day onward.”

                Zechariah 12:7 tells us that God will save the tents of Judah first and that is exactly what we see. It is largely the Jews that have come back into Israel, but there is coming a time in the near future when Go will bring the whole house of Israel to the land for it says in Ezekiel 39:25-28:

                “Therefore thus says the Lord God, “Now I shall restore the fortunes of Jacob, and have mercy on the whole house of Israel; and I shall be jealous for My holy name. And they shall forget their disgrace and all their treachery which they perpetrated against Me, when they live securely on their own land with no one to make them afraid. When I bring them back from the peoples and gather them from the lands of their enemies, then I shall be sanctified through them in the sight of many nations. Then they will know that I am the Lord their God because I made them to go into exile among the nations and then gathered them again to their own land; and I will leave none of them there any longer.”

                In 1948 God started the process of bringing His chosen people back into their own land. He started with the Jews, but it will end up with all of the tribes of Israel coming back. And Christ will be among them as their long lost Messiah and He will rule the nations from Jerusalem and He will teach us His ways.

                Can we get a glimpse as to why there is such a struggle for the control of Jerusalem? Even now we see the global government of the beast seeking to divide and conquer Jerusalem. We see the false prophet, working to form a global religion that will give its homage to the beast. We see the power brokers of the world seeking to build their political base for global control and we see the rich men of the world stealthily gaining global control of the finances so that they can control all buying and selling. We see the technologies coming on line that will make it possible for them to track ever person and every financial transaction on the planet. We see AI computers coming on line that can process a billion billion pieces of data per second. They will have no problem controlling the 7 billion people simultaneously.

                So we see what Satan is doing in an effort to take control of the world and to reign in the place of Christ. We know instinctively that trouble is on the way for both Jews and Christians. God’s people will not fit into their agenda. But according to the Bible they will reign for only a short time until the kingdoms of this world will be handed over to the saints. The Gospel of the Kingdom is all about enforcing that which Jesus Christ has already bought for us by HIS death. He bought the world back. He rescued this planet from its eternal doom. He conquered death and hell and the grave. He crushed Satan and His kingdom and triumphed over them. Now He wants us to go forth in the power of His kingdom to do the works of Christ in the world. We have a huge harvest to bring in before we can leave here. We will be gone for the marriage supper of the Lamb but then we will return with Him to reign with Him for 1000 years. See 1 Thess. 3:13, 1Thess 4:14, Rev. 19:14, Rev. 20:4, Rev. 3:26, 27, Zech. 14:5.

                Jesus told us what would bring the end of this present age. He said: “And this gospel of the kingdom shall be preached in the whole world for a witness to all nations and then the end shall come.”

                In the world today we see two concepts of the gospel of the kingdom that are at war with each other. One concept, borne out of Catholicism and pagan/Christianity is the idea that we will gain global control through governments and institutions and politics. With this concept they are now forming the global government of the antichrist. It will be enforced with persecution.

                The other concept is that we, His people, will go forth in the spirit and power of Christ, as living temples of the Holy Spirit to do His works in the world with love and compassion. Our fight will not be against flesh and blood, but against principalities and powers.  We will be ministering as Christ did because He is in us and working though us. We are going forth in the spirit and power of Elijah.

                In order to do this, we must deny self and take up our cross and follow Jesus. We must be truly born again, dead to the world but alive unto Christ so that it is no longer I, but Christ who lives in me.

                We talk about a partial blindness that has been imposed upon the Jews until the times of the Gentiles be fulfilled, but the church has been wrapped in blandness as well. We have taught a partial Gospel and there is very little power in it. The time has come to seek God with all of our hearts and to come into alignment with the fullness of His truth, the Gospel of the Kingdom. I have only touched on one or two aspects of it today. Lord God, please help us to get this and to walk in it. The Gospel of the Kingdom needs a whole lot more study and prayer. We are just now breaking out of the lethargy of the Dark Ages and into the Light of God’s Word. But even as we do, the world is entering into a new Dark Ages… the age of the Antichrist.

                Dr. Jack van Impe, who knows large portions of the Bible from memory, has recently become aware that Pope Francis may be the False Prophet or Revelation. Well, I have been preaching this ever since the end of 2015 at the last blood moon, but people ware very slow to catch on. He is the second beast of Revelation 13 that looks like a lamb, but speaks like a dragon. The prophet Neville Johnson was told this by the Lord in a vision… and rather than try to make doctrine out of these things, we should rather search the scriptures to see if these things are so.

                There is so much to say, so much yet to discover, but I must close for now. Little Desi is no longer curled up at my feet and I feel broken.