THE CHANGING OF THE GUARD


THE CHANGING OF THE GUARD

                “Dearly loved friends, I had been planning to write you some thoughts about the salvation God has given us, but now I find I must write of something else instead, urging you to stoutly defend the truth which God gave, once for all, to His people to keep without change through the years. I say this because some godless teachers have wormed their way in among you saying that after we become Christians we can do just as we like without fear of God’s punishment. The fate of such people was written long ago, for they have turned against our only Master and Lord, Jesus Christ.” Jude 3, 4 TLB

                Throughout history the Bible has had to suffer at the hands of false prophets and teachers and those who follow them. But here in the book of Jude, he describes so perfectly our own time. The false grace movement in its most overt forms literally teaches that we were saved once and for all and so it doesn’t matter what we do. This is, of course, a denial of all that Jesus and His Word teaches us from one end of the book to the other. Turning Grace into licentiousness or license to be amoral is an abomination to God.

                Yet so much of the church has embraced this tone of thinking. And in its more subtle forms it tells us that the law was done away so that we now live by grace, in which the law no longer matters. Our moral absolutes have been transformed into license to commit adultery, to commit fornication and to sanction any form of sexual perversion we desire, even to the extent of slaughtering millions of unborn children and engaging in and passing laws for same sex marriage.

                It is amazing what the church will embrace in the name of grace and yet this is exactly what Jude warned about in his short little book. And strangely enough, he had started out to write about salvation, but ended up writing a warning to the last day’s church.

                You may say: “Well, Jude, a brother of Jesus, was addressing problems that had occurred in his own time and that is true. But God is eternal and unchanging and so is His Word and somewhere along the line we are going to have to face this fact. His Word is eternally true and He doesn’t change His mind.

                In God’s economy one covenant does not bring the previous covenant to an end, but rather uses the previous covenant as a foundation for the next covenant. Do we think that the Alpha and Omega, the great sovereign God of the Universe that dwells in all time, somehow keeps changing His mind about what truth is? No, He has been building on a progressive revelation of His kingdom from the time that Adam and Eve fell until now… and this idea that the law has been done away is one of those lies that has devastated the church and gutted it of its power. Truth is power. Truth is eternal. Truth will remain standing when every human institution has crumbled into dust.

                Yes, Jesus fulfilled the Law and then He sent His Holy Spirit to write that same law in our hearts so that this same Law might be fulfilled in us who walk not according to the flesh, but according to the Spirit. Rom. 8:4.

                Grace in no way excuses sin; rather it empowers us to overcome sin and to walk in holiness and righteousness. And just like Jude, I started out to write about something else but felt compelled to write this warning. I don’t know what it means for sure, but we are about to see a changing of the guard and with this changing of the guard will come a great shaking and a great falling away as we enter specifically into the separating of wheat from the tares.

                Last night when we got upstairs from working on quilts and dresses for holocaust survivors and poor children in Israel, we came up to watch the rest of the prophecy program we had been watching, but our computer would not come on and with it, a sudden urgency to pray came over me. It came as clearly as if God had spoken it and along with it came a strong feeling of impending danger or change in the air.

                And I, being analytical, began thinking and wondering what this could mean as Bonnie and I began to clean and separate our bountiful harvest of grapes from their stems. But the urgency persisted and so I finally told Bonnie that I thought the Lord was telling us to pray. I felt a bit silly since I had no idea what to pray about, but Bonnie agreed that we should follow the Lord’s promptings and so we dropped everything and went to the living room to pray.

                We prayed for our friends and family. We renewed our vows of faithfulness to the Lord no matter what the situation; we reaffirmed the covenant that we walk in with God. We prayed for whatever names specifically came up. We prayed for our nation and for our Messianic congregation. We prayed for an outpouring of the Holy Spirit upon those who are faithfully watching and praying for the same. We prayed that the Lord would anoint us with a double portion of His Holy Spirit for the harvest that lies ahead. We repented of any unknown sin, every failure to meet divine appointments, every moment of weak faith, every dragging of our feet to enter fully into the doors that the Lord opens.

                We never received any specific purpose from the Lord for why we were praying, but finally the burden lifted and we went back and finished the grapes. We discussed the urgency and the sense of impending change. Bonnie felt it too, in fact we have generally been feeling it for some time now, but last night we felt it in particular as a great storm cloud moving in over the land.

                All I can tell you is this: We are about to see a changing of the guard after Yom Kippur of this year. It is directly related to the signs in the heavens that God has been writing across our sky for the past 4 years and more specifically about the 40 days of repentance that began with the total eclipse of the sun on august 21 and ends with Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement on the eve of September 29.

                All of these things, along with hundreds of other signs meet their climax on Yom Kippur of this year. It is the final Day of Atonement. And speaking of that, did you know that the Day of Atonement contains a trumpet blast called the last trump as well and it also is a time in which no one knows the day or the hour because it is based upon the timing of the Feast of Trumpets. So even though it falls on the 10th day of the 7th month, it varies according to the determination of the beginning of the month of Tishri which starts off the New Year on God’s calendar.

                Do not find yourself among the scoffers who say that nothing happened on September 23. Tell me this: If a bridge was out on the road ahead, would you want the sign to be posted at the bridge or before the bridge so that you had time to prepare? That is exactly my point… and we as God’s faithful remnant people must continue to watch and pray and to ponder what lies ahead that God so graciously warned us about with blood moons and eclipses and His “Great Wonder in the heavens.”

                Prepare your hearts because we are about to see a changing of the guard and when it happens we will then understand the meaning of the signs and warnings that God has given. 2017 is an unprecedented year of destiny and change as we move from an era of grace into an era of judgment, from the times of the Gentiles and into the Time of Jacob’s Trouble, from Yeshua’s High Priesthood and into His role as Judge and coming King.

                This doesn’t mean that grace ends or that our Lord’s High Priestly role ends just now, but rather that He is moving into this changing of the guard that will bring great turmoil to this world as the Dragon seeks to destroy the man child and the remnant and to prevent and destroy the final work of Christ that leads to His soon return.

                This also contains a stern warning to that part of the church (and they are many) that has embraced the doctrines of the false prophets who have turned grace into a license to sin and have made void the laws and principles of the Kingdom of Heaven. It is time to repent and turn back to God with your whole heart. It is time to make your departure from Babylon and its systems. A new Tower of Babel is now being built and Nimrod will once again force the whole world to worship him. “Come out of her My people and partake not of her sins lest you also receive of her plagues.” Rev. 18:1-4                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                

                This is the message that the Lord has put on my heart today. We are about to see a changing of the guard. Repent and turn to God.

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