The Bride Not Ready

Western Christian men aren’t always comfortable with idea of being a part of the Bride of Christ. Western mythology makes them so. Western culture has no place for parable as a means of communication as it comes to us in Scripture.
I’m deeply concerned, almost painfully sorrowful, at how many Christians are going to lose their faith in the coming tribulation. Try to understand: The eternal status of a soul is entirely God’s business. I don’t fear people losing their citizenship in Heaven, since there is nothing any human can do to affect that either way. Hell is bad enough, but there’s no reason to wallow in Hell on earth. I fear people losing what is available in Kingdom Service here on earth. A vast number of Western Christians, Americans in particular, will lose what little grip on peace and sanity is available to them right now.
Permit me to inject here a bit of prophetcraft for the students of prophecy. Actually, it’s fundamental mysticism itself. I struggle to verbalize how God communicates to a living spirit in such a way that the mind can formulate its mission. God speaks to those whom He has raised to spiritual life, but the conscious part of that is really difficult to express. For me, it often comes as a piece of fiction, an imaginary narrative. Even when some part of that story appeals to my lesser fleshly desires, if I ride out that part of the storm, if that story simply won’t go away after I get past the initial human weakness, then somewhere in there is a message from God. I have to keep bouncing that thing off my convictions until something comes back I can recognize. So I play with the story line and rewrite the dialog, testing it again and again. I keep trying to see if something in my convictions will click, something which will give me peace so the story stops nagging me.
Sometimes I write the story here for you to read; sometimes I can’t. Either way, this is how God speaks to me and I’ve learned to listen. I keep running the story in my mind with variations until it all falls into place. Not the quality of the story, but its meaning in spiritual terms I can recognize and can use. I look for something that can be woven into my mission, something which constitutes a command from God. It’s not always a clarification of something I didn’t quite understand. Sometimes it’s just a restatement in fresh terms.
The most recent story went peaceful when I realized it was about the Bride of Christ. There was another thread of preaching winding its way through my head, and the two merged at the point of that image. If you’ve been keeping track of my blather the past few days, you may recall I wrote about a frightful vision of people here in America being dragged off to Hell alive. I suppose if I could grab a few ears in Washington, DC, I’d give them that warning. Not my concern, really. I’m given a message to share with whomever will listen. A thread of peaching arose from that vision as a warning to the churches here in America. Most of them aren’t ready to accept their reservation as part of the Bride of Christ.
Don’t get hung up on the idea of His coming back in the same literal sense which fills so much garbage Christian entertainment these days. He comes into a lot of people’s lives all over the world, and all over human history. For them, in spiritual terms, or on the spiritual plane, it’s a Second Coming apocalyptic experience in the soul. Every time God sends His wrath on the earth, it’s a time of Christ coming for His Bride in that same spiritual sense. See beyond the merely literal; see through the shadows. What we have coming down upon us now in this part of human history is a time of tribulation, a time of visitation. It won’t be the Second Coming in the typical sense, but it will be a return of Christ for His people on a spiritual plane. He’s coming to visit and bring gifts to His Bride and stoke her interest; the wedding isn’t for a while yet.
It’s this visit I sense the American Christians won’t understand. They are so wrapped up in a vast ocean of mythology drawn from Western culture, their expectations are far removed from the reality. God doesn’t operate according to your rules of logic, American Christian. You think you know the Bible, but you don’t have a clue. Some of this will be like the Passover during the Exodus, when His people can be spared some of the curses, but only if they apply the blood on the door frame. Because so few understand the spiritual meaning of this, because they reject the Hebrew meaning of how it applies in the rituals of our daily existence, too many of them will lose their firstborn or whatever else that image represents.
In their minds, they are going to hold God accountable to their logical frame of reference. When things don’t go as they expect, some part of them will die. They are in for an extremely rough ride. They may well fall away from any practice of Christian faith, accurate or otherwise. It will destroy what little witness they have, leaving them even farther away from God’s glory than they already are. Outside of God’s glory is exposure to things which will prick their living spirits in ways dead spirits never experience. The inner turmoil is worse than madness; it will be the Devil taunting them and gaining a far bigger hold on their human experience on earth. The shadows will deepen for them. It will be Hell on earth.
God intends what is coming to be a shock. He can’t simply ignore what’s going on. But truth can’t be adjusted to match what Christians insist it is. God has to be true to His nature, which means consistent with His past revelation. That revelation must be in terms of the Hebrew mystical intellectual culture He created as the vehicle for His revelation. If you miss it, that’s your problem. We might heap a lot of blame on all those who went before us and buried the truth, and then complain to God we were crippled by those who claimed to speak for Him. Yet I warn you, if He can break through my hardheaded blindness and show me this painfully obvious message, He can do it for you.
And, dear Christian brother and sister, after reading this warning, if you can simply walk away shaking your head, but unshaken in your heart, there is nothing left I can do for you. I’m going to write that story that has been buzzing in my head, but please don’t mistake the warning written between the lines. When God comes to visit, you may well miss Him because you simply don’t recognize Him.