It's Imminent

Yesterday morning (7/17/13) the Holy Spirit whispered “it’s imminent” to me while simultaneously giving me a flashback about a dream a lady from my church had once communicated to me.  In it, our mutual pastor was sitting at a table with his head slightly drooped and muttering about something that involved the whole world.  He seemed somewhat despondent—but also filled with wonderment—as he contemplated the magnitude of this thing God had communicated to him regarding the whole world.  Not directly communicated in that scene—but there behind the phenomenon which affected the whole world—were some things about the number 4 (and especially the triplicate and most intensified form of it: 444).

Prior to the day this church lady told me about her dream I had been communicating to both her and our pastor many things in regards to the Biblical significance of the number 4.  Basically, the number 4 signifies God’s inanimate and lower animate creative works; Bullinger, in his book Number in Scripture, said “It is the number of things that have a beginning, of things that are made, of material things, and matter itself.  It is the number of material completeness.  Hence it is the world number, and especially the “city” number.”  A quick list of some things in quadruplet form are: the 4 great elements (earth, air, fire and water), the 4 regions of the earth (north, south, east and west), and the 4 seasons of the year (spring, summer, autumn and winter).

Additionally, Vallowe, in Biblical Mathematics said “The world, in which men lived and worked and died, was conveniently symbolized by FOUR.  A number of further divisibility, FOUR stands for WEAKNESS found in the world and man.” He also said “Important is the indirect meaning of trial, testing, and experience, derived from the fact that the earth is the scene of man’s testing.  FOUR is the number of CREATION and mark’s CREATIVE WORKS.  It is the signature of the world.”  Lastly, and from which I deem to be the most evocative point about the significance of 4, I look to Naish and his book Spiritual Arithmetic.  In it he said the Greek word “therison,” which means “reap,” has a value of 444 and is used 21 times throughout the New Testament.  However, its 2 time use in Revelation 14: 14-16—about an angel asking someone like a son of man who sat on a cloud to put in his sickle and reap the harvest of the earth (because the hour to reap had come)—is of particular interest to me.

Finally, I surmise from these snippets of revelation, insight, and research that the final reaping of the earth is imminent.  I am not sure exactly what it means (how it will play out)—and I want to avoid being presumptuous—but it seems to me God is about to finalize everything.  To sum it all up, I wrote these words months ago:

“The heydays of correction and instruction are essentially over; the maturing process will not wait for us forever.  We are ever moving to a sealing—but not the kind that has skylights!  The days of youth gather information and instruction which are the engines of our old-age wisdom; if we fail to buy gold tried in the fire and white garments to cover our shame and nakedness—if we fail to transact with Christ—we are fools. Either God will seal us as His servant (see Revelation 7:3) upon our forehead or an angel will stencil a ‘666’ across it; either way, we are going to eventually be forever sealed, locked into a perpetual state of being."

Are you ready?

The Shape of Humility

The first and foundational posture of humility is one that expresses repentance by groveling in the dust in prostration, but the last and highest posture is that which is pictorially depicted by someone arising—only after being forgiven—and walking into the fullness of their destiny by obeying the entire council or will of God.  But this mature picture of someone walking in humility never outgrows prostration; it rather grows out of prostration.  Walking before God and being perfect subsumes the previous steps of life and is necessarily dependent upon them to get to the ultimate erect posture that is the prerequisite posture for walking.  In other words, the humility of prostration is like a baby picture: inceptionally wonderful and promising; but the humility of walking with God is like a portrait of Enoch: eternally wonderful and the consummation of someone who has walked with God until they fulfilled God’s perfect will for their lives.

Walking uprightly is even more humble by nature than contrition because contrition implies periods or episodes of a failure to walk uprightly.  And God’s ultimate goal or design for man is to walk with Him, not to grovel at His feet.  Sure, there is a sense wherein the heart of any uprightly walking man is paradoxically prostrated, because uprightness of action can only be achieved by prostration of attitude.  Just because “before honor comes humility” does not mean there is no humility in honor; quite the contrary: honor is the coronation or fulfillment of humility (Proverbs 15: 33, New American Standard Bible).  To not get up and fulfill specifically what God has in store for us is inherently prideful.  If God says to point out another person’s sin in loud and bombastic terms, and instead you fall on your face to intercede and bemoan his condition, then the proper expression of humility—in this particular case—is to cry out in a loud and bombastic way.

We too often immaturely think of humility only in terms of repentance, which is only a birthing or beginning; but the end of humility is best expressed as a man walking humbly before God until a crystallization of godly character has been achieved.  Indeed, “The end of a matter is better than its beginning” (Ecclesiastes 7:8, New American Standard Bible).  Mature humility is therefore about transcending, about overcoming the very things which bring us to prostration in the first place.

Ultimately, the genuine picture of humility can be visualized by thinking of someone being completely fleshed out and fitted into a mold surrounding their entire body.  It would depict their three dimensional form and the amount of space displaced to fit them there.  Symbolically, this physical displacement of mass represents the parameters or boundaries of the full extent of that person’s responsibility before God; to not fill out the entire space would be to deficiently walk in humility.  A healthy maturation is only achieved if, as one matures, responsibilities and requirements grow—and in proportion to that growth—the scope or sphere of that which pertains to their destiny also grows.  The posture of prostration is about prayer and worship; the posture of an erect man walking is about answers to prayer and worship and ultimately the fulfillment of destiny.  And to fulfill the will of God is synonymous with fulfilling one’s destiny; humility is therefore about our destiny and the will of God becoming the same thing, about solving the seemingly paradoxical dilemma of God’s sovereignty and of our free will.  It is about our responsibilities and freedoms existing within the same space and time, about the boundaries which define the parameters of our own Promised Land (the extent of where we dare to live and breathe and have our being).  We are only to be humble in proportion to the gate of our stride as we follow hard after Him, and as God enlarges our steps beneath us, we will become more and more brazen and determined to possess our full inheritance.  To grow into incrementally larger spaces, to inhabit more and more of the promises of God, is finding out experientially how ultimately those lines fell to us in pleasant places.