Wednesday 23 March 2011

“Behold, I am coming soon”


“Behold, I am coming soon. Blessed is he who keeps the words of the prophesy in this book”. The 7th verse of the last book in the Bible, Revelation 22, reminds us that Jesus Christ made a promise to return to this planet, in a shape that everyone would be able to recognise. He made this promise repeatedly, even before he was murdered.
Jesus was murdered. He was betrayed by one of his own friends, Judas Iscariot, who pointed him out to the corrupt lawyers in return for a bag of silver, 30 pieces of silver. Jesus knew that he was going to be murdered, because he read the scriptures, which are the history of the relationship between God and mankind. There are prophesies in those scriptures. A prophesy is supernatural knowledge of something that is going to happen that has not yet happened. Prophesies are like egg timers, they are set to ring an alarm when the egg is ready. There are prophesies for people of all times, they are encouragement for the people of God to know they are on the right path, and that God is with them, like milestones. Judas’s betrayal of Jesus was written in prophesy before Jesus was even born. Jesus knew that he would be taken secretly, and subjected to an illegal travesty of a court hearing. Jesus knew exactly how wicked the Pharasees were, yet he laid down his life for them, in the hope that they might repent of their evil and be saved. He died so that even the most desperate wicked loathsome sinners could see themselves as they actually were, murdering a man who had never done anything evil in his whole life. Jesus kept himself pure, he was the most unselfish, loving, kindest person who has ever lived. Jesus spread love and joy wherever he went. He healed people, he had the power to heal sick people and even bring people back from the dead! But he kept insisting that it was not people’s physical illnesses that was his mission in life, but their mental illness.
Jesus came to earth as a man to show us how to live. He came to reconcile us with God. The day that mankind decided to grab the thing that God had forbidden them to take was the day that a gulf opened up between man and God. That fruit of the knowledge of good and evil was not ours to take – we stole it. Its no use people saying “Well God should not have put it there then”. That’s like saying “Well, you should have put a 5 bolt security lock on your door” when thieves break into a person’s house. That is blaming the victim of the crime for the crime! It was a horrible thing to do, think about it. God had made this beautiful planet, a paradise, and placed mankind into the middle of it. There was nothing mankind needed in that garden, he had a beautiful woman by his side, surrounded by beauty, delicious food that he could just pick fresh off the trees, and all the creatures in the garden were in awe of him. God created man as king of his world.When the serpent came to Eve and told her to taste the forbidden fruit so that she could be like God, knowing good and evil, he was handing Eve a poisoned chalice, because Adam and Eve already were like God, except that they were like innocent babies, they did not know what good was or what evil was.
I don’t know what that tree was doing in the Garden of Eden, but I do know it certainly was not there for us to steal and eat from. It was forbidden fruit, and our ancestors stole it, and the result of that is this big row with God, and many misunderstandings with our Creator. Evil was in the Garden of Eden, in the shape of a subtle serpent, who tempted our ancestors with forbidden fruit, and we made the wrong choice, we chose to obey the serpent and disobey God, even though God had said that those who ate the forbidden fruit would die. Well, that came true sure enough, Adam and Eve lived a long time, but they are long past dead and buried!
We still make those choices today. Every day, we have these choices put in front of us, and the best thing we can do is to ask God what the right thing to do is every time we come up with these decisions we have to make. I do hope that the people in the House of Commons ask God what is the right thing to do every day, when they are making hard choices on behalf of the people of this country. Sadly, I feel that too many of them hold God in contempt.
I have been reading “THE TRUMPET SOUNDS FOR BRITAIN” by David E Gardner. It is a book I would highly recommend everyone to read, it is essential reading for anyone who truly loves this country. Here is a very short extract from that book:
“I can never forget how a few years ago, when I was speaking in Oxford along these lines, the rural dean asked me if I would be prepared to talk to a meeting of the clergy in the city. When I asked him why he was so anxious to arrange this, he said it was because he was deeply concerned about the number of people in Oxford who were being initiated into various forms of Satanism and demon worship every week. He used the word ‘initiated’ which means going the whole way – committing themselves fully. This, in blunt English, means ‘selling themselves, or handing themselves completly over’ to the devil. He quoted a figure which, by any count, was extremely alarming. In fact, working out the figure on the way home, the numbers involved were such, that I found myself saying, ‘If that number of people in Oxford were being converted to faith in Jesus Christ every week, there would be headline news in the national Press telling us that a revival of Christianity had hit one of our major university cities.”
Then this possibility dawned on me: He did not say that these people who were being initiated were from the university. He said they were people ‘in Oxford’. But they could have included people from the university, and no doubt did. As that alarming figure continued to take hold of my mind I thought: could it possibly be that initiation continues at this rate, we shall find that in ten or twenty years time the occupant of 10 Downing Street is a demon possessed person? After all, it is the universities which produce most of our future national leaders; our politicians, our professional men, our teachers, our business magnates – in short, most of the influential people of the future.
It happened in Nazi Germany, friends!”
From “The Trumpet Sounds For Britain” by David E Gardner, first published in the 1980’s.

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