God's Final Battle - 10

The Return Of The King

CHAPTER 10

THE RETURN OF THE KING

When the wicked are confounded, Doomed to flames of woe unbounded, Call me with Thy saints surrounded.

— Dies Irae

The dragon has been deceiving mankind for nearly 6,000 years now. All along he has been promising much and offering wretchedly little in return. His final kingdom will be dazzling and glorious, no doubt. And then, as suddenly as it came, it will be gone.

For it must make way for the kingdom without end.

The sky will tremble as the King approaches. The last trump will sound. And all of human history, all our many golden achievements which once seemed to matter so very much, will be rolled up as a scroll, forever finished.

Where will you be found on that day, my friend? Among the many left weeping on the quaking ground? Or rising up with the few?

The mystery of lawlessness is already at work. And our own generation of vipers will melt like wax in the coming fires. But those who have spurned the world and its empty promises will shine like the stars forever.

Let no one deceive you in any way. For that day will not come, unless the rebellion comes first, and the man of lawlessness is revealed, the son of destruction, who opposes and exalts himself against every so-called god or object of worship, so that he takes his seat in the temple of God, proclaiming himself to be God.

— II Thessalonians 2:3-4 (ESV)

We now know that when Apollo sits in the Temple of God, he also happens to create the Temple of Lucifer at one and the same time. This is the Temple long planned for and carefully erected by the mystic dragon priests. Nonetheless, the Devil will only inhabit his final earthly Temple for a few short years.

The final rebellion – the Greek word is apostasia – Paul refers to here is an oft-debated topic. I believe the confusion is largely understandable because this sort of general statement does not lend itself to precise identification of the eventual fulfillment. Still, this fact does not mean that we cannot see correlations in our own recent times which are likely to all be a part of this broader rebellion.

From the late nineteenth century onward, mysticism and occultism have become much more mainstream and popular than they were in prior ages. This is a form of rebellion. The New Age movement of the early twentieth century was an outgrowth of this larger current. Oftentimes, these movements have used clever wording to disguise the fact that they are all at bottom part of the same pagan religion. Spirituality and theosophy and enlightenment are all just more palatable ways to present the worship of the god of this world and of the self.

The dragon is most cunning. He does not feed his adherents on out and out lies. Instead, he offers them a counterfeit kingdom with elements of truth, which taps into their inner yearning for meaning and understanding and for a future beyond the limits of this world. The problem is that the Devil, just like sin itself, always promises more than he can deliver.

In more recent times, the hippie movement of the 1960s is another obvious example of rebellion. But the true impact goes far beyond sex, drugs, and rock and roll. Indeed, the modern Church owes much of its disfunction to the broad-reaching social changes spawned by the era of free love. Not surprisingly, this age of apostacy is when abortion became popular once again, as age-old child sacrifice rituals were brought back one last time in preparation for the return of old Saturn’s reign.

Traditional Christian values, which had served as the bedrock of the working class for generations, were suddenly abandoned in favor of more open-minded views. And the moral decay has only continued in the decades since.

The Emergent Church, Faith Healers, the Purpose Driven movement, the Word of Faith movement, the New Apostolic Reformation (NAR), and the prosperity gospel are all just different manifestations of the same underlying sickness. They are forms of godliness which deny the very power thereof. They are warmed-over paganism, repackaged for modern American consumers and exported to the world. And the dragon is using them all as part of his larger strategy to ensnare the last generation of souls in his counterfeit kingdom.

I find it exceptionally curious that a number of prominent Emergent Church leaders, including Steven Furtick and Carl Lentz, posed at a “revival” in or right around the year 2016 with their arms crossed out in front of them. From antiquity, this has been known as the Osiris risen pose, and it may be observed in Egyptian sculptures created several millennia ago. What auspicious and precise timing, that this should have been done at that particular moment in time. But, in my view, these are exactly the sort of possessed men (I do not use the term kindly) I would expect to see doing such a thing.

And no wonder, for even Satan disguises himself as an angel of light. So it is no surprise if his servants, also, disguise themselves as servants of righteousness. Their end will correspond to their deeds.

— II Corinthians 11:14-15 (ESV)

Now, these movements within the modern Church all have varying beliefs and sometimes there are different viewpoints within a movement itself. But, generally speaking, they all demean Christ and present a false gospel. They are more of the antichrist spirit than of the Spirit of Christ (I John 4:1-3). They have embraced New Age ideals and sought to graft them into their theology. Is it any wonder, then, that we are called the lukewarm Church?

The good news of the gospel is not about health, wealth, and happiness here on earth. Far from it, we were told we would have tribulation here. The good news of the gospel is that Jesus Christ paid our debt and took the nails for us so that we might go free and that we might become citizens in his eternal kingdom which has no end. The good news is that this world is just the title page. The real story is all ahead of us.

You see, all the false religions, the cults, and the false versions of Christianity are at heart the same. Sensing that we were made for more, they all seek to raise man up by his own strength. They offer the same old lie from the Garden; ye shall be gods. Apotheosis by self-determined effort.

Another of the Devil’s principal lies for the masses today is that Christianity is just like all the rest of the world’s religions. It is simply one more. This deception can be sussed out with simple curiosity and a bit of intellectual integrity. The cold hard facts reveal that at its core true biblical Christianity is the exact opposite of all the rest. Where they inevitably zig, Yeshua zags. Only Christianity places man down low enough, to the depths of his rightful place as a sinner before a holy God. And yet only the gospel does not leave him where he has fallen but offers to lift him up to the loftiest heights of his immortal future by something other than his own doing. Only the gospel avoids the ubiquitous performance trap, where mankind must earn his own salvation through moral effort.

Remember, there are many ways to Satan, but only one way to God. Catholicism, Mormonism, Judaism, Islam, Buddhism, the Jehovah’s Witnesses, and countless other world religions all encourage their adherents to rely upon their own good works and merit. These teachings are antichrist. Do you see how they are all part of the dragon’s grand unified deception of mankind? Ye shall be gods.

This know also, that in the last days perilous times shall come. For men shall be lovers of their own selves, covetous, boasters, proud, blasphemers, disobedient to parents, unthankful, unholy, Without natural affection, trucebreakers, false accusers, incontinent, fierce, despisers of those that are good, Traitors, heady, highminded, lovers of pleasures more than lovers of God; Having a form of godliness, but denying the power thereof: from such turn away.

— II Timothy 3:1-5

For all its many distortions over the last two millennia by the agents of evil, the gospel is ultimately a very simple message, as I declared in my first book.

God created man as his image bearers and gave us dominion over the realm of this earth. We were created to be friends and intimate allies of the living God, part of the divine council. However, being deceived by another being made in the image of the one true God – a fallen angel known as Satan, the dragon, the deceiver – our original forebears rebelled against God, bringing a curse upon themselves and upon earth’s whole created order.

Knowing the risk, God had created man with many gifts reflecting his own divine nature, including the gift of free will. This meant mankind had the choice to obey him or not, to love him or to rebel. Indeed, all our lives we have had this fundamental choice before us.

Nevertheless, God had not failed to foresee mankind’s fall. Instead, he had purposed from before the beginning to bring about redemption in his own good time and according to his own plan. He wanted us to be a part of his family for all time. And he was willing to pay the price.

The Father and the Son traveled the path of sacrifice together, just as Abraham and Isaac once had. They kept their own confidence, leaving the forces of darkness off balance, until the victory had been won.

In his first coming, Jesus Christ fulfilled hundreds of prophecies written down many hundreds of years before his arrival. He did this not only through the manner of his life and death, but also through the precise timing of these events, proving that he is the Son of God.

Jesus Christ, Yeshua HaMashiach, is the life-giving center of all human history. God loved us so much that he sent Jesus, his only begotten Son, into the world as a human man. However, when the forces of darkness saw God incarnate in the flesh, they said to themselves, “This is the heir; come, let us kill him, and let us seize on his inheritance” (Matthew 21:38). Yet this, too, was all part of the divine plan. For no redemption could be bought for us without the shedding of blood.

Yeshua sacrificed himself for us on the tree, that whosoever would believe on him might have eternal life.

He was raised to life the third day, yet this was only a partial vindication. Our blessed hope is his promised return at the end of the age to reign as King and to restore all things. Heaven will come down to earth and God will dwell with us, his chosen people who have chosen to love him. We will become the sons and daughters of God, like the angels yet still distinctly human, living forever in his presence in a new worldwide Eden.

All this because of God’s great love for us. And all you must do to receive the gift of life is to believe from the heart in Yeshua.

In the end, the Bible is a love story, written in blood on a rugged wooden cross almost two thousand years ago.

— God’s Final Week

The gospel is simplicity at its most profound. And yet, so many manage to narrowly miss the beautiful truth in the end. So many Christians today are weak as water because they have traded the power of the gospel for the allure of an attractive counterfeit. They have bought the lie that they can keep their heart in the world and still attain treasure in heaven. They’ve bought the lie that everything they need is within them.

But I fear, lest by any means, as the serpent beguiled Eve through his subtilty, so your minds should be corrupted from the simplicity that is in Christ.

— II Corinthians 11:3

In these last days, the spiritual warfare grows hot. The very air is rife with deception and false hope. Men are growing desperate and soon they will gladly bow before Antichrist, if only to taste of the brief splendor of his kingdom. But the counterfeit will never satisfy, it will only rot in their mouth.

The true capstone is not Apollo. It is Jesus Christ, the King of kings and Lord of lords. He is the cornerstone.

If we are to avoid being lost in this last age of apostacy we must cling to the Word and to the narrow way of Yeshua.

It is easy to be a madman: it is easy to be a heretic. It is always easy to let the age have its head; the difficult thing is to keep one’s own. … To have fallen into any one of the fads from Gnosticism to Christian Science would indeed have been obvious and tame. But to have avoided them all has been one whirling adventure; and in my vision the heavenly chariot flies thundering through the ages, the dull heresies sprawling and prostrate, the wild truth reeling but erect.

— G.K. Chesterton (Orthodoxy)[57]

The narrow way to the celestial city is never crowded, least of all in these final hours of history. It is far easier to follow the masses on one of the many different gilded paths leading to the pit.

Fortunately, Yahweh has been merciful upon our children in this venomous (Deuteronomy 32:24, ESV) age. In God’s Final Week, I explored the typology surrounding the wilderness wandering and the people of Israel’s entry into the Promised Land under the leadership of Joshua and, importantly, after Moses’ 120th year. But I believe there is yet more typology to be glimpsed in this story.

But Joshua the son of Nun, which standeth before thee, he shall go in thither: encourage him: for he shall cause Israel to inherit it. Moreover your little ones, which ye said should be a prey, and your children, which in that day had no knowledge between good and evil, they shall go in thither, and unto them will I give it, and they shall possess it.

— Deuteronomy 1:38 & 39

Here God is specifically contrasting the rebellious Israelites who did not inherit the land with their children who did. Yahweh refers to the children – those who inherited the land – as being without knowledge of good and evil. There are many Christians who take passages such as these to be indicators of an age of accountability, beneath which young children are held as innocent before God. I myself am partial to this view.

It certainly appears that King David shared this view, or a similar one, based on his words after the passing of his infant son (2 Samuel 12:18-23).

I realize that this perspective is at odds with certain systems of thought pertaining to the doctrine of salvation (soteriology). Yet, any soteriological view which requires for its own internal coherence that our God damn dying infants to hell I find to be truly abominable. Such doctrines are built at best upon shaky biblical footings, reliant upon the twisting of some Scriptures and the marginalization of others rather than a careful harmonization of the whole.

For my part, I am thankful that such matters will soon be put to rest when the last day arrives, and our God displays the full riches of his love and his goodness to all men. The only human beings sent to hell when the end comes will go there because of their own free choices. They will go there because they chose not to love God, not because God chose not to love them.

Remember, though, true love always set boundaries. This is precisely the sort of love which will be on full display on the last day, as God showers his love upon his people and destroys their enemies from around them. Scripture makes these truths abundantly plain, yet the traditions of men hold feeble minds fast.

Now, if children who die beneath the age of accountability are necessarily saved, then what of the last generation of children? Will they not share in this bounty of mercy? I believe they will.

You might think we have no clue when this age is attained. And yes, I grant that it may vary somewhat by child and for some (such as the mentally handicapped) it may never arrive even in old age. But for the average child, is it 7 years old? Or is it 18? There could be arguments made either way.

Fortunately, Scripture does not leave us without additional information.

Therefore the Lord himself shall give you a sign; Behold, a virgin shall conceive, and bear a son, and shall call his name Immanuel. Butter and honey shall he eat, that he may know to refuse the evil, and choose the good. For before the child shall know to refuse the evil, and choose the good, the land that thou abhorrest shall be forsaken of both her kings.

— Isaiah 7:14-16

Did you catch that? This is a prophecy speaking of timing related to Yeshua’s life. We are told that before he comes of age to know good from evil (similar language to Deuteronomy Chapter 1) both Israel and Judah will lose their kingships.

Now, Israel lost its final king many years before the Messiah came to earth (somewhere around 700 BC) when Hoshea was captured by the Assyrians. However, Judah’s case is quite a bit different because they retained their right to enforce the Mosaic Law through the Babylonian captivity. So, even though Jeconiah – who was taken in the Babylonian captivity – was the last king to sit on David’s throne, there is a good argument to be made that the scepter or ruling authority did not depart until a much later date. This is important because this, too, was prophesied.

The scepter will not depart from Judah, nor the ruler’s staff from between his feet, until he to whom it belongs shall come and the obedience of the nations shall be his.

— Genesis 49:10 (NIV)

Do you see how the combination of these two prophecies places the coming of the Messiah into a quite narrow window? He will be born before the scepter departs, yet before he comes of age Judah will lose the scepter.

The term “scepter” refers to their tribal identity and the right to apply and enforce Mosaic Laws and adjudicate capital offenses: jus gladii. It is significant that even during their 70-year Babylonian captivity (606-537 B.C.) the tribes retained their tribal identity. They retained their own logistics, judges, etc.

— Chuck Missler (The Scepter of Judah)[58]

This understanding allows us to make sense of the Genesis 49 prophecy. When King Herod – the man who killed the babies in the vicinity of Bethlehem in a failed attempt to stamp out the Messiah – died, his second son, Herod Archelaus, succeeded him. We know from Josephus that Archelaus was removed from power in his tenth year of reign, and Judaea then became a Roman province with a Roman procurator. As part of this change in power, the Sanhedrin lost their authority to adjudicate capital cases. This was the departing of the scepter.

Now most historians place this deposing of Archelaus at AD 6-7, or so. However, this is based upon a 4 BC death for Herod the Great. As I explained in my first book, a 1 BC death for Herod is far more likely. Additionally, we have strong evidence for placing the birth of Christ some 18 months earlier, in the fall of 3 BC. This means that Herod Archelaus was likely deposed in or around the year AD 10. And Yeshua would have been either 11 or 12 at the time.

Going back to Isaiah 7:16, we see that this implies that Yeshua had not yet come of age to discern good and evil in AD 10. Conservatively then, this may potentially mean that children born in the fall of 2017 or later will not reach the age of accountability prior to the Messiah’s return.

But Jesus said, Suffer little children, and forbid them not, to come unto me: for of such is the kingdom of heaven.

— Matthew 19:14

In our day, these words can be seen to take on a whole new prophetic meaning. This brings to mind again the prophetic words of Yeshua on the ending of Satan’s kingdom.

And if a kingdom be divided against itself, that kingdom cannot stand. And if a house be divided against itself, that house cannot stand. And if Satan rise up against himself, and be divided, he cannot stand, but hath an end.

— Mark 3:24-26

We now know and understand that Satan has risen up against himself throughout history. We are only here to see the final iteration of the pattern. The dragon abandoned paganism a few centuries after Christ, shifting to corrupt the Roman Catholic Church and her pontiff. Next, he hung this same pontiff out to dry over a millennium later in the aftermath of the American and French Revolutions.

The Great Awakening we are living through is just the latest and the last example of these staged shifts. It is a massive worldwide initiation ritual. We are all being initiated into Apollo’s kingdom, and he will reign over a new breed of men.

After the financial collapse and restructuring will come the New Golden Age. Peace and safety. For a time.

Seeing through the appearances of these things as we do, what is our duty to those around us? Must we force the hard truth upon them? Or do we leave them to their fleeting pleasures?

The biblical answer is straightforward.

The word of the Lord came to me: “Son of man, speak to your people and say to them, If I bring the sword upon a land, and the people of the land take a man from among them, and make him their watchman, and if he sees the sword coming upon the land and blows the trumpet and warns the people, then if anyone who hears the sound of the trumpet does not take warning, and the sword comes and takes him away, his blood shall be upon his own head. He heard the sound of the trumpet and did not take warning; his blood shall be upon himself. But if he had taken warning, he would have saved his life. But if the watchman sees the sword coming and does not blow the trumpet, so that the people are not warned, and the sword comes and takes any one of them, that person is taken away in his iniquity, but his blood I will require at the watchman’s hand.

— Ezekiel 33:1-6 (ESV)

I believe that God has placed us here at the end as watchmen, and it is our duty to blow the trumpet in warning of the coming judgment. We should be ready and willing to declare our belief in the soon return of Jesus Christ, and to provide the scriptural evidence supporting our expectation. Most unbelievers will not heed our warning, but at least we will not bear responsibility for them when the Master comes to take account.

Amongst our fellow believers the stakes are perhaps not so high. We still expect to dwell together in the kingdom regardless of their final level of watchfulness. Nevertheless, we naturally want the best for them, and having experienced the blessing of knowing the season we will tend to want to freely share it with those few willing to receive it.

However, I do not believe this means we need declare the deep end times truths carelessly to others. Speaking of Christ’s soon return is one thing, but some of the signs of our own times are quite another. While we ourselves may have put in the mental effort and the hours of research necessary to decipher the final abomination of desolation (Matthew 24:15) and to perceive the final Antichrist, most are not in a position to grasp these hard truths. They will be a stumbling block for most, and this means we must tread carefully.

Still, by helping our brothers and sisters in Christ to comprehend the lateness of the hour, we will encourage them to be even stronger witnesses to our generation. When they discover that Yeshua is coming back in short order, true believers will naturally burn their light even brighter for whatever time is left to them. And so, we must find the courage to speak the truths which many find uncomfortable.

In the end, do the opinions of others really matter all that much to our eternal destiny. Would it not be better to risk the ridicule of the foolish plebeians and to seize our own future place in the kingdom? After all, on Judgment Day it is only God’s vote that counts.

Courage is almost a contradiction in terms. It means a strong desire to live taking the form of a readiness to die. ‘He that will lose his life, the same shall save it,’ is not a piece of mysticism for saints and heroes. It is a piece of everyday advice for sailors or mountaineers. It might be printed in an Alpine guide or a drill book. This paradox is the whole principle of courage; even of quite earthly or quite brutal courage. A man cut off by the sea may save his life if he will risk it on the precipice. He can only get away from death by continually stepping within an inch of it. A soldier surrounded by enemies, if he is to cut his way out, needs to combine a strong desire for living with a strange carelessness about dying. He must not merely cling to life, for then he will be a coward, and will not escape. He must not merely wait for death, for then he will be a suicide, and will not escape. He must seek his life in a spirit of furious indifference to it; he must desire life like water and yet drink death like wine.

— G.K. Chesterton (Orthodoxy)

Spiritual warfare requires this same sort of courage. It is all too easy to succumb to one of the many excuses urging us towards silence and inaction. Yet, we cannot by clinging manage to hold onto anything in this life. And so, odd as it is, we upon whom the ends of the world have come must seek our lives in a spirit of furious indifference to them.

We must spurn the many different versions of the dragon’s counterfeit salvation constantly proffered to us. They are all false light, only taking advantage of the truth in order to deceive. We know deep down that we are meant for more than this. Yet there is only one true way back to Eden. It is as simple as mustering the courage to lose our own life, that we might gain it once and for all.

Yeshua HaMashiach came once to save the world. He will return to judge it.

In his time on earth, Jesus frequently used the cultural practices and background of the Jews he witnessed to as a means of communicating deep and profound truths about God. His first recorded miracle, interestingly, was the turning of water to wine at a wedding in Cana of Galilea. This small region of Israel was not only where Jesus grew up and began his ministry, it is where he recruited his first disciples. In fact, all of the twelve apostles were Galileans, with the lone exception of Judas Iscariot.

It is fascinating, then, to note that the Galileans had a special wedding tradition which was unique from the customs of all the other Jews around them. And as others have noted, it happens to be a perfect picture of our soon-coming reunion with Christ.[59]

Some of the details are already familiar to us because they are found in places of prominence within the Gospels. Though they are not explicitly linked to the Galilean wedding customs as such in the text, to his disciples the cultural idioms would have been all too clear. They knew that a wedding was being used to symbolize a deeper union.

The ancient Galilean wedding began about a year before the actual event with a betrothal ceremony. The couple and their families would meet at the city gate and a written marriage covenant would be read aloud in the presence of witnesses. Afterward, gifts would be exchanged. Next, the groom would offer a cup of wine – known as the Cup of Joy – to his would-be bride. In contrast to other Middle Eastern wedding customs of the time, in the Galilean wedding the woman had the ultimate say. She was given the choice to either accept or reject her groom. If she accepted him, then she would drink of the wine to signify her choice.

After she had drunk, the groom would seal the betrothal with these words: “You are now consecrated to me by the laws of Moses, and I will not drink from this cup again until I drink it with you in my father’s house.” This sounds almost exactly like Yeshua’s words from Matthew 26:29 because at the Last Supper he was using a wedding union, and the traditional Cup of Joy, as an allegory for the New Covenant in his own blood.

But the betrothal ceremony was just the beginning. Having sealed the betrothal, the groom would leave his bride and go to his father’s house. Over the coming months, he would add a wedding chamber onto the father’s house, preparing a special place for the woman he loved.

Jesus, too, as the perfect groom, has been preparing a place for us (John 14:1-3).

After around a year, on average, the wedding chamber would be ready. Yet the Galilean wedding was unique from other Middle Eastern weddings in that the date was not set in advance. It was a surprise wedding. As the promised day approached, there would be signs of the general timeframe. The father of the groom would need to make ready for a feast, and so these preparations could hardly go unnoticed in the town. Those with a watchful eye would understand that the wedding was soon approaching. However, no one would know the precise day or hour when it would begin.

Traditionally, the groom would come for his bride with the blast of a shofar (trumpet) and in the middle of the night. The bride was to be always ready for the sudden appearance of her beloved.

This was a celebratory moment when the two lovers were finally united again after so long apart. The bride was lifted into the air on a raised chair, borne aloft to the bridal chamber to consummate the marriage.

How amazing it is to discover that God ordered the details of this Galilean custom, prior to the arrival of his Son, so as to precisely correlate to the relationship between Christ and his Church.

Yeshua is waiting to drink wine again with us in his Father’s house. He is coming for us. The wedding feast is being prepared even now; we can discern the signs.

The term is nearly over. The holidays await. Where the expectations of all those who have ever sought after God with all their hearts will be richly fulfilled.

Mystery Babylon is passing away. Her end has been foretold, and it will arrive at the appointed time.

The liar messiah and his kingdom will melt away like the morning frost, but our Messiah will rule for all time. Everything that seems to have been long since lost to us will be restored one hundred-fold. All things will be made new. And of the increase of Yeshua’s peace there will be no end.

Our King is coming.