If I am hardest on myself, no one else has to do it for me.
While I’ve surrendered the prophet’s mantle, I still have visions. There’s no way I can keep them to myself, but you’ve been warned that they are not always connected with reality. Having resigned eldership, these are now the mysterious gibberings of a madman who may or may not say anything useful.
That’s a good thing, in that it now requires more of you. Instead of trusting me simply because of my name and title, you have decide whether to trust the message itself. You have to decide whether it rings a note of truth in your own heart. Even then, it’s not a question of what’s real, but a question of what God requires of you. There is a place for God to lead people into madness for His own glory.
I will never again tell you, “Hear the Word of the Lord.” Rather, I will tell you what I see and you can decide what part, if any of it, is from the Lord. Sometimes even I don’t know what I’m saying.
Here is what I see — We are starting back at the beginning. Like Abraham, we each have been called from a world that is ending.
Quick note: If our dating is anywhere near correct, Abraham left Ur around 2100 BC, during Sumer’s Gutian Period. The Gutians were barbaric tribes from the Zagros Mountains east of Mesopotamia, truculent in their resistance to being civilized. During their reign, a lot of infrastructure degraded from lack of maintenance, including the canals and irrigation system, which in turn caused famines. Sumerians regarded that as a very bad time in their history, a punishment from the gods.
It was the perfect time for a man to begin questioning everything he thought he knew, so that he was ready to hear from the one true God speaking of an entirely shocking revelation. While the Sumerian Empire did recover sometime after Abraham left, it went in a very bad direction. To secular minded people, it looked like a very good time, because a great deal of what we do today was born in that period (Ur III). However, it alienated people from the kind of openness to genuine faith that God wanted to implant in Abraham’s heart, and for his descendants. Abraham missed out on the birth of this period in Sumerian civilization, instead building the model of desert nomadic living that was the foundation of God’s revelation. That revelation climaxed in the Messiah.
So back to the vision. There are lots of parallels here. We are on the threshold of a fresh civilization and it will carry secular humanity far, far away into horrors of oppression we cannot imagine. On the way there, we will pass through a very barbaric time as current civil governments are wrenched and torn. However, there’s not a lot of open land to which we can migrate, so the plan is a little different this time around. God is going to call a bunch of Abrahams into a recovery of simple living in faith where they are.
But the point is that we will all have to learn how to stand alone in Christ. We won’t be in a literal wilderness like Abraham, but a virtual wilderness where genuine heart-led faith is quite rare. Our brand of connection to Creation is exceedingly rare among believers. We will each have to receive our own individual covenant from God, with a promise that our descendants will inherit things we see only dimly in the future. But as in the New Testament, it’s not literal descendants, but spiritual descendants.
As with Abraham, those spiritual descendants will come very late in the game. There is way too much we have to learn from scratch, even with most of us already way past our prime. But in order to hear from God what He really wants from us, there has to be a very radical decline in the civilization around us. We won’t see too many spiritual children until they are shaken free from their dependence on a very badly failed civilization.
In other words, our current persecution and tribulation has very little resemblance to the persecution and tribulation the first century churches faced.
