A sad and unenlightened trend of late is how many historians are
rewriting our history books. Some
assuredly make appropriate revisions based on indisputable and unbiased
discoveries made during their research, but alas, much of it is based on less
than true scholarship and shoddy research.
God, however, intervenes in the affairs of men, and by so doing, brings
His Omnipresence into the equation (He’s always there and is always righting
wrongs [but not on our timetable and not always in ways which make sense to
us]). Technically, God is no revisionist,
but from our perspective, He is. Indeed,
God is rewriting the history book of His people (you didn’t know God was a
revisionist did you?). He is restoring
back to them their initial placement within the Garden of Eden, and
consequently back to the origins of the destiny they lost when the thorns and
thistles of the curse choked the life out of them.
And in that garden there were four rivers, the fourth one being the
Euphrates, and the meaning of its name is “fruitfulness, to bear fruit, sweet
water”; and that is very pertinent to us in this particular hour in history. The fact that it was the fourth river (and
considering that four is the WORLD NUMBER and about MATERIAL COMPLETENESS) and
that it was the only river of the four in Eden which did not flow to anywhere
worth mentioning by Moses, the author of Genesis, suggests a significance worth
noting.
A 2009 article by the NY Times reported: “The river [the Euphrates] is drying up as a result of the water
policies of Iraq's neighbors, a drought and years of misuse by Iraq”; I think
perhaps it might really be because: “The sixth angel poured out
his bowl on the great river Euphrates, and its water was dried up, to prepare
the way for the kings from the east” (Revelation 16:22 ESV). I believe the “kings of the east” mentioned
here represent enthroned deception; the fact that it is crowned only after a natural
disaster of biblical proportions indicates the true origin from where most
people draw the waters of their lives from. If they draw from the true wells of
salvation (their spirits infused with God’s Spirit) they remain unmoved even if
they lose all their possessions; if they draw from the false wells of salvation
(their souls infused with their own interpretations of life and from
pseudo-spirituality) they are moved (from off their centers) and are discombobulated when they lose all
their possessions.
I believe the hour has come;
it is declared, “Release the FOUR angels who are bound at the
great river Euphrates” (Revelation 9:14 ESV).
And once the Euphrates river is done drying up, when the river of
natural vigor has entirely evaporated (when mankind is done populating the
earth with their first Adams), when God wraps up the age, natural man will be
left with little option but to be divinely led to their death in the valley of
Meggido at the feet of true Israelites. Those addicted to their appetites will suffer, some
more than others, but God is faithful.
Those who know their God will flourish; their souls will fatten while
their bellies flatten. But those who
trust in their riches and the abundance of their stores will wither away; their
souls and their bellies will both alike flatten.
These
are parallel realities, circumstantially identical, but experientially different. That which is drying up naturally is removing
all joy for those whose joy is dependent on natural pleasures, but for His
spiritual children, the evaporation of the Euphrates is but the trials and
tribulations through which we must enter the Kingdom of God. Indeed, His children have suffered the loss
of all things (some really, but all figuratively); then another river comes
into view. It too must be traversed upon
dry ground, except not by kings of the east, but by the King of Kings Himself
(and we following). It is a modest and
insignificant river (as viewed by the natural eye), this river Jordan; and it
too does not want to stay in its bed. It
is supernaturally rolling back like a scroll (God rewriting our past and failed
histories) all the way back to the first Adam.
And this is not only the key, or the door into the Promised Land, it IS
the Promised Land. Yes, there is an
advancement into a glory-land beyond its dried up river bed plot, but in the
very channel which once ran red with blood and miry clay, there at the breach
of the river (at the wound of our circumcision), God inserts Himself and
forever changes the course of our lives.
Just
as Moses threw a tree in the bitter waters of Meribah and thereby forever
sweetened them, so God throws Himself into the river course of our lives and
sweetens our dispositions forever. Many
are given over to the sword (destroyed by the death power of the tongue),
famine (by want of knowledge people perish), and to be torn apart by wild
animals (the end result of what the works of the flesh produce); we however
(those who walk out life in the Spirit), are given our lives back to us as our
booty (the reward or treasure [the pearl of great price] of following on,
enduring to the end (through the trials and tribulations), to know the Lord
(the upward call of God in Christ Jesus).
The
Promised Land is us with Christ inserted.
We are those who have obeyed and lost our souls (temporarily) to gain
them back (forever); we are the second generation of Israelites, those which
entered the Promised Land, children of the second/last Adam. Again, the essence of what He is ultimately
giving us is OURSELVES (as we were originally designed to be); we are the
booty, the city, the prize. The Promise
Land is between our ears and in our gut!
He rolls all the intervening failures, tributaries of tears, and
rivulets of sin, which swim about within the stream of our lives (past,
present, and future), that river of God He made inside us (but which we
degraded to the lowest place on earth), that basest place in us, and He removes
it once and for all by taking our stream (and everything in it) back to its
origin, to its root in the first Adam.
Indeed, God the revisionist!
