PARALLELS

PARALLELS

                “In that day I will raise up the fallen booth of David and wall up its breaches; I will also raise up its ruins and rebuild it as in the days of old; that they may possess they remnant of Edom ( descendants of Esau) and all the nations who are called by My name” declares the Lord. Also I will restore the captivity of My people Israel and they will rebuild the ruined cities and live in them, they will also plant vineyards and drink their wine, and make gardens and eat their fruit, I will also plant them on their land and they will not again be rooted out from their land which I have given them” says the Lord your God.”  Amos 9:11, 12, 14, 15.

                “Therefore behold days are coming” declares the Lord, “when it will no longer be said ‘As the Lord lives, who brought up the sons of Israel out of the land of Egypt’, but ‘As the Lord lives who brought up the sons of Israel from the land of the north and from all the countries where He had banished them, for I will restore them to their land which I gave to their fathers.” Jeremiah 16: 14, 15

                Recently I have been writing about rightly dividing the Word of God, and I believe that it is critically important to do so at this time. We know that the religious leaders rejected Jesus the first time He came because their traditions and interpretations had gone off beam so much so that Jesus no longer fit their expectations.

                The same thing is true today and the truth comes down on both those who love the Jews and indiscriminately support their causes today and those who hate the Jews, teaching that God is finished with them and has dropped all future plans for them.

                If we are careful in reading just these two samples of many similar texts in the Bible we can see that they can only apply to the last days and not to some other period of time. In Amos 9 for instance it says that God will restore them to their land and they will never be rooted out from it again. Well, given the fact that the land of Israel was a barren and empty wasteland until 1948 and yet here it is, the deserts having bloomed, the cities rebuilt, the vineyards having been planted so that Israel has become an exporter of food and on and on, we realize that God’s promises to Israel have come to past and since it says that they will never be rooted from their land again, this cannot refer to any other time than the last days.

                Likewise, in Jeremiah 16 God talks about bringing the exiles back from the northland and from all the countries where He had banished them.  This too can only refer to the last days. This is talking about Israel, not Judah and it is talking about their exile in all of the nations and the northland, not Babylon and what we have witnessed going on in our day is a mass exodus of Jews and Israelites coming home from out of Russia, the Ukraine, Romania, Poland and Germany… All places from the north as well as from all of the other nations wherein they have been scattered. This prophecy then can only apply to now.

                So now if we add to this Paul’s statements in Romans 11 where he says that God’s promises to Israel are irrevocable and that Israel has been rendered partially blind concerning Jesus until the fullness of the Gentiles has come in… and then when we read that God will deal with Israel again and save them, here again we have something that can only happen in the last days when the fullness of the Gentiles has come in. ( And I would love to fully understand what that means and what will become of the Gentiles when their fullness has come in)  but needless to say, this speaks of a yet future event.

                So, the long standing doctrine of replacement theology where the church is said to have replaced the Jews is false doctrine and we must now grow out of it.

                However, there is another factor that must be taken into consideration if we are not to be swept away by the great delusions that are said to come in the last days. BIBLE PROPHECY! For Bible prophecy tells us that Satan is going to set up his final global antichrist kingdom in Jerusalem … and so if you wonder why Jerusalem has become a cup of trembling (Zech. 12:1, 2) and the center of the world’s focus and why it is that every entity of this world from the Vatican, to the Zionists, to the Masons, to the globalists and all the power brokers of the world are converging in Israel, what we are seeing there is the formation of the antichrist kingdom.

                I would like to inject here that Trump’s making Jerusalem the Capital of Israel along with the covenants they are trying to work out are highly significant benchmarks in Bible prophecy.

                Satan wants to rule in the place of Christ and he is making plans to do just that by setting up His kingdom on God’s Holy Land, right were Jesus died for our sins, right in the midst of the city of the Great King and he is planning to pull off a counterfeit millennial kingdom reign.

                This time period in which he will rule is described in Daniel 9: 27 when it is said that he will confirm a covenant with the many for one week. ( which we have come to understand as the final week of the 70 week prophecy) and this time in which the antichrist reigns will be known as” the time of the great tribulation” or AKA known as the “Time of Jacob’s (Israel’s) Trouble.” And it is during this same time period that he will commit the Abomination of Desolation that Jesus places in the last days as described by Daniel. (See Mt. 24:15) Not to mention his levying and enforcing the Mark of the Beast upon the entire globe.

                Now, unless we rightly divide the Word of God, we won’t have a clue what is happening and especially if we don’t know Bible prophecy, for if we indiscriminately support Israel, we may be helping with the building of the Antichrist Kingdom… and yet if we reject Israel and say that they have been replaced by the church, we will be just as vulnerable to misunderstanding  God’s plans and purposes for the last days.

                It is amazing to watch the rapid formation of the antichrist kingdom in Israel today and plans for the third temple are right on que… and so it is of utmost importance for us to  understand enough to know whether we are supporting God’s plans for Israel or Satan’s plans don’t you think?

                Now, as unimaginable as it may seem; today, at the most critical time in earth’s history, most of the church has dropped the study of Bible prophecy and some of those who have traditionally taught it have it wrong and so much of the world is going blindly into the era of the great tribulation not having a clue as to the issues that we face and why.

                No wonder Jesus said that if possible even the very elect would be deceived. (Mt. 24:24.) And many are going to fall for the false Christ… and as we watch church after church and denomination after denomination going with hat in hand to visit the Pope of Rome to find their place in the coming religion of the Beast, we just have to shake our heads and wonder what happened.

                But there are those intrepid students of Bible prophecy today that are forging ahead in their study and discovery, using Bible prophecy with fresh eyes so as to see exactly how it is unfolding in our day. One of my measuring sticks for prophecy teachers is whether or not they have tumbled to the Vatican’s role in all of this… and there are many other markers as well. But we need understanding so that we can deal rightly concerning both God’s and Satan’s plans for Israel in the last days.

                All I can say is that it has become extremely important to rightly divide the Word of God. We need a proper understanding of the completeness of the New Covenant. Jesus, God Himself… Creator of all that exists, came from heaven and lived and died and rose again to bring this covenant to us and yet we often treat the New Covenant as inadequate unless we add Old Covenant laws and types and shadows to it. We misuse the Old Covenant when we make it a part of our religion, rather than using it as a foundation of understanding for what the New Covenant has brought to us.

                We can see from Paul’s impassioned plea in all of His writings, that we grieve the Holy Spirit when we fall back to the Laws that have no power to change us, rather than living by the Spirit who alone can transform us into the image of Christ. We have failed to rightly divide the Word of truth and so we are sort of strung out between two covenants and not keeping either one of them as God designed for us to keep them.

                The Old Covenant leads us to the foot of the cross, for until we have died to this world and been born again into the kingdom of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, we are merely citizens of Satan’s kingdom, sons of Adam who has fallen. Jesus alone is our second Adam who did not fall and it is in Him that we may be born again into His eternal kingdom and we do so through His cross and resurrection. It is not by accepting a list of doctrines that we are born again, but through death to the world through the cross, and rebirth into the kingdom of God’s Son.

                Jesus cut right to the chase when He was talking to Nicodemus in effect saying, “Your religion isn’t worth a nickel unless you let it put you to death so that you can be born again. Paul said the same thing counting his religion and all that he had done as dung or refuse compared to knowing Christ.

                This dying and rebirth is the most radical thing that you can do on this planet. The Christian life begins with our death to one kingdom and our birth into another kingdom with a new priesthood and new laws and a Holy Spirit that has been enabled to live inside of us and to transform us into Christ’s image and anything short of this is not the way of salvation. No amount of intellectual understanding can in any way replace our death and rebirth through the cross and resurrection of Jesus. That is the only passage way into Christ’s kingdom.

                So when some preach that we must keep the Law… they are wrong… and on the other hand, when some say that it is okay to go on sinning… they too are very wrong. We are being conformed into the image of Christ through the indwelling Holy Spirit and that means obeying and being faithful and walking in the Word. But it also entails knowing what covenant we are walking in and how the Old Covenant forms a foundation for the New Covenant, while at the same time ceasing to be the covenant that we now live in. Only the New Covenant has the power to transform us into the image of Christ.

                We are, in our day, like never before, seeing the divine parallels in this great battle between Christ and Satan. Israel becomes the template in which we see both Christ and Satan vying for the same piece of property. The antichrist will arrive first with his counterfeit kingdom and deceive many and then in the days of those ten kings, in the toes of Daniel’s image, a kingdom will come down to destroy the kingdoms of this world and then fill the whole earth. And as for us? We need to more fully understand which kingdom we are in… for just as Israel is divided between false Jews who say they Jews and are not, but are of the synagogue of Satan, and true Jews who have accepted their true King… so the Church is being divided between those who are worshipping in Spirit and in Truth and those who are falling away, to join in the global religion of the Beast.

                Can I make it any clearer? IF we want to be among the elect that is not deceived by these things, we need to rightly divide the Word of truth and we must live truly born again lives by the Spirit of God. And as I have said previously: We must treat the words of the Bible more seriously. We gloss over vitally important information, being satisfied with our own traditions and fading interpretations and so we are sleeping in a false security. God help us to wake up and to enter into the fullness of all that He has provided for us in our New Covenant in Christ.