The
destruction that occurs by THE
BRIGHTNESS OF HIS COMING is hardly inherently
cruel; those who respond right, or have responded right, will already have
eyes that can handle this effulgence or extraordinary shock of light. In His light the Christian sees light. In other words, the unsaved will be consumed
and blinded utterly by His appearance, whereas the mature and prudent Christian
will lose nothing. Then there are those
Christians, in varying degrees which remain Christian, but will lose rewards; or,
as I have come to believe, functionality of soul to the degree that they did
not lose their souls to gain them. In
some aspect or aspects they have not allowed their souls to experience
resurrection life; therefore their souls have not been fully preserved.
When our blazing heart begins to
clarify, when the flames finish consuming the last vestiges of our sacrificed
life, represented as the fat and entrails (our visceral parts), and the wafting
smoke begins to abate, our minds, where all that smoke was going, begins to
clear, and so too our thinking.
Remember, the early church went nowhere and did nothing until they were
baptized with Holy Ghost and FIRE
power. The Holy Spirit in our spirit is
supposed to enlarge enough to affect the mind of Christ in us; our hearts are
supposed to get inside our heads. Unity,
the foundation of power, is what needs to occur; it was only after unity of
mind (which followed unity of heart) occurred, that the early disciples were
empowered enough to turn the world upside down.
THE
BRIGHTNESS OF HIS COMING is first expressed through His people; His
ministers are flames of fire and He intends to prepare and set this world on
fire by them. I believe God is
fashioning an end-time group of people like Jeremiah the prophet; God said to
Jeremiah yesterday what He is saying to us today: “I am making
My words in your mouth fire and this people wood, and it will consume them”
(Jeremiah 5: 14). Indeed, our consuming
fire God makes us after His own image and nature; we
are supposed to be consuming fire ministers setting the world on fire. And the unrighteous are kept “under
punishment for the Day of Judgment” (2 Peter 2: 9).
Also, this
purports:
Blow
a trumpet in Zion, and sound an alarm on My holy mountain! Let all the inhabitants of the land tremble,
for the day of the Lord
is coming; surely it is near, a day of darkness and gloom, a day of clouds and
thick darkness. As the dawn is spread
over the mountains, so there is a great and mighty
people; there has never been anything like it, nor will there be again
after it to the years of many generations.
A fire consumes before them and
behind them a flame burns. The land
is like the garden of Eden before them but a desolate wilderness behind them, and
nothing at all escapes them. (Joel 2:
1-3; emphasis mine).
“As were the days of Noah, so will be the coming of the Son
of Man” means more than most people think (Matthew 24: 37). Beside the fact that people will be behaving
the same way, completely obtuse to anything above indulging their flesh, they
will be like the proverbial frog which does not jump out of the boiling water
before it is cooked because it doesn’t boil straightway; it rises in
temperature at a rate not discerned by the frog. In other words, we, walking in the spirit,
and as flames of fire, are an agency of God: we are being used to escalate or
heat up their judgment by our words and lifestyle; they are sitting like those
frogs, unaware that they are already being cooked by us. Most don’t consider the story of Noah closely
enough to remember that God flooded the earth not only by rain (sent down from
heaven) but by breaking up the deeps (sent from the bottom of the seas; sent up
from the earth). “All
the fountains of the great deep were broken up and burst forth, and the
windows and floodgates of the heavens were opened” (Genesis 7: 11). The ancient world got it from both
ends; the modern world will too (but with fire).
But how greatly and sorely was Christ
urged on to the cross so that the Holy Spirit and fire would come? Right before He talked about how impelled He
was to accomplish the task of dying for mankind on the cross, He said: “I have come to cast fire upon the earth, and how I wish that it were
already kindled!” (Luke 12: 49). Indeed,
“EVERYONE shall be salted with fire” (Mark 9: 49; emphasis mine). His winnowing fan (shovel, fork) is in
His hand, and He will thoroughly clear out and clean His threshing floor
and gather and store His wheat in His barn, but the chaff He will burn
up with fire that cannot be put
out” (Matthew 3: 12). But only those who
have already allowed this process to occur, having judged themselves so as to
not be judged when God comes to examine His work, are ready for His day. Only those who have been sanctified, those
fully immersed or baptized into the water of the Holy Spirit, can handle the
fire of the Holy Spirit. Indeed,
Set me like a
seal upon your heart, like a seal upon your arm; for love is as strong as
death, jealousy is as hard and cruel as Sheol (the place of the dead). Its flashes are flashes of fire, a most vehement flame [the very
flame of the Lord]! Many
waters cannot quench love, neither can floods drown it. (SOS 8: 6-7; emphasis added; Amp.).
