After so long a time of wandering in prophetic circles with the insight and information we have on our times, the Lord speaks a “breakthrough” word to boost us into another dimension of prophetic vision and thinking. Such a time occurred in 1830 when the Holy Spirit imparted the “end time readiness vision” to Margaret MacDonald bringing again to life the imminent expectation for the Lord’s return.  

I believe such a time is at hand and want to convey to you what I have seen and heard within my own spirit in recent weeks.

In short, God wants to move us from expecting the “inevitable” to expecting the “unexpectable.” Let me first explain what I mean by expecting the inevitable, and then what I say about expecting the unexpectable will make more sense.

The Inevitable Prophetic

What we foundationally know prophetically about our times is derived from the scriptures. These especially include the Book of Revelation, the end time dissertations by Jesus, those by Paul and some smaller commentary by Peter, John and Jude. We could also add the expositions of the Old Testament prophets, but for simplicity, let’s stick to the New Covenant predictions. On the whole, these dissertations paint a very dismal picture of the end. (And as we look about us, anyone can see that the times predicted have indeed come upon us. What was scripturally prophesied would come has come.)

The additional prophetic revelations and insights we have today are built on these scriptural foundations—rightly so. This means for example, where the scriptures predict “there will be earthquakes,” present tense prophets will tell us “where” and/or “when” such earthquakes will be. The same applies to wars, rumors of wars, destructions, world takeover by the “beast” commercial system, collapse of the commercial system, etc. The Bible predicts all these things. Today’s prophets give more specifics and details on the wheres, whens and hows. Some prophets exceed the predictive details to exhort to certain actions regarding those details. For instance, you are hearing more prophets coming out and say “store food and water” or “buy gold against the collapse.”

All of this prophecy falls into the category of what I am calling the “inevitable prophetic.” The inevitability of this prophecy is in the fact that the scriptures “cannot be broken.” If the scripture predicts something is going to happen, it is going to happen. It is inevitable. And because it is inevitable, and because what has been predicted is so bad for life on earth, it consigns us to a prophetic mindset that is able to offer little hope other than to pray as Jesus exhorted that we may be “found worthy to escape all these things and to stand before the Son of Man.”

The predictive scriptures in their inevitability do not tell us much else. And so it is with difficulty that we seek for “silver lining” verses or even phrases of verses by which we can derive hope against an otherwise overwhelmingly negative picture.

A Vision Beyond Prophetic Inevitability

It is against these deliberations I have begun hearing a new word from the Lord—a word that says, “Come up hither.” It is a word that says “I want to show you great and mighty things which you know not.” It is a word beckoning to a vision that is beyond the inevitable prophetic. It is a word to begin hearing the Lord beyond what has already been prophetically revealed and written in the eschatological scriptures.

Now as soon as I say the words, “beyond what is written in scripture,” a protective radar goes up in the studied evangelical mind—as it should. So before I can go further, I must successfully negotiate the defense perimeter around the mind’s ability to deal with this phrase “beyond scripture.”

-         Disarming the Overprotective Pharisaic Scriptural Mindset

Throughout the evangelical world exists a certain protective mindset regarding the scriptures. The purpose of that mindset is to protect the original author intent in scripture from being twisted by the theologically and revelationally lawless. I share that mindset, applaud that mindset and argue many of my own cases against revelationism and false doctrine from that mindset.

But there is also an inherent fault attached to that mindset, which if left uncorrected, prevents the believer from accessing the Spirit’s immediate mind for guidance and instruction. The problem is that the natural mind adds protections of its own to the defense perimeter around scripture that are extra-biblical, without biblical support, and are contrary to biblical example.

The statement that best sums up the position of the overprotective Pharisaic scriptural mindset is this:

“The Holy Spirit will never say or do anything beyond or outside of what He has already said and done in the Scriptures.”

This statement, however well intentioned, is deeply flawed and fatal to growth in Christ. Evangelical believers by the millions remain prisoners to their own mindsets because of it. While it’s true the Holy Spirit will not contradict the author intent of what He has already written, it is a total fabrication of the mind to assert the Holy Spirit cannot prophetically speak outside or beyond the meaning of whatever a scriptural author has written. There is absolutely NO support for this assertion in the scriptures, which are themselves an ongoing compendium of further revelations beyond what was previously said, written or intended prior to them.

I do not have time to develop this further here. Suffice it to note that Jesus spoke prophetically many times beyond the contexts of the scriptures He quoted to make applications beyond original author intent—and He expected to be believed. Paul likewise draws many prophetic extrapolations from Old Testament scriptures to apply to the gospel beyond original intent of Moses and the prophets. In all these things, neither Jesus nor Paul contradicted their source authors. But the Holy Spirit did speak beyond them.

I have said all this to say that, by my saying God has a word to speak “beyond the inevitable prophecy of scripture,” I am not advocating anything contrary to the intent of the unbreakable end time prophecies of scripture. But what I am advocating beyond the prophecies is in a fashion the scripture does already support. The scripture does support prophetic extrapolation beyond its original meanings and the Spirit does reveal things in later generations not revealed to earlier generations whose writings have already become scripture.

-         The New Things of God

So now I want to return to advocating for a vision beyond the prophetic inevitability of the Book of Revelation and the end time discourses. Consider with me first the numerous patterns of developing revelation over the course of salvation history. God revealed Himself in a way to Abraham that was beyond what He had revealed to Noah, giving Abraham the revelation of the chosen seed. But God revealed Himself to Moses 400 years later in a way that exceeded how He revealed Himself to Abraham, showing up in bombastic fire and earthquake on Mt. Horeb, giving the Law, demonstrating the cloud and pillar of fire, etc.

Still later, Jesus appears in a way that transcends the glory of Moses and anything by which the writings of Moses had to anticipate with real expectability the nature of the first coming. They didn’t even know about a “first” coming versus a “second” coming. Ezekiel’s vision of the “end time” Temple did not foresee the temple of the church. And when we look at what happened on the day of Pentecost and the birth of the church, the entire phenomenon of tongues was unprecedented and unexpectable. It was not even covered in Joel’s prophecy by which Peter explained what was happening that day.

We have been told that we are partakers of a “new” covenant. The Greek word for “new” (kainos) means “unprecedented.” We belong to a covenant that is continually characterized from its inception by things that are unheard of before—totally contrary to the presumption of the scripturally overprotective mindset.

So what I am saying now is this: in the same way God constantly builds on prior scripture to reveal Himself beyond what He has shown of Himself before, so He is speaking a word to us now to begin hearing and seeing Him beyond the scripturally inevitable prophecies of scripture. He wants to raise our vision beyond confinement to the limits placed on the end time discourses as they were first given.

“To Give You a Future and a Hope”

We can get some feel for this call by looking at Jeremiah. Jeremiah had been given to predict a clear unmitigatable scenario of doom and destruction upon Jerusalem. This was the prophetic inevitability to which Jeremiah was confined in his day. There was no escape from it. These things were going to happen. Nevertheless, God did not leave Jeremiah to that level of vision—one of hopeless destruction. He wanted Jeremiah to be able to see beyond the inevitability of the destruction he had otherwise been given to prophesy. God told Jeremiah that he had a “future and a hope.”  God also told him to call on Him to apprehend “great and mighty things which you know not”—beyond the inevitable prophetic.

God wants us to understand something as we move into this next year. He wants us to know that He has not played His entire hand in the eschatological writings of the New Testament. He has not told us everything about what He will do or how He will do it for our good and welfare as this age ends. He has not described all the positive things He will do to protect and prosper His faithful people through these inevitably horrible times. He has specifically hidden those things because He wants them only apprehended by faith, and not assumed. They cannot be obtained by an assumptive knowledge of scripture.

(Look what the church did with the pre-trib rapture! So do you think God would lay out in scripture all the good things He wants to do for us in these wretched times? Not a chance. They can only be obtained by a faith beyond the inevitable.)  

Training to Watch for the Unexpectable

I am convinced at this point that the only way we are to find the genuine hope of God for our lives in this world is to begin listening for the Spirit’s Voice beyond the eschatological scriptures. Our minds have become prisoners of the inevitable through a natural familiarity with these passages that cuts us off from discovering promises of God yet to be apprehended “that we know not” and that “eye hath not seen.” We are being called to begin embracing God over the unrevealed outside the Book of Revelation by which He would give us our future and our hope back.

Truth be told, I never wanted to see the year 2014. I never wanted to see any of these 2010s. I always had a feeling they were going to be a repeat of what the 1910s were like. 1914 was the start of World War I. What a terrible war that was. And all the years after it as well. So as the decade has approached—I’ve just sort of braced myself against the worst and hunkered down in hope of I-know-not-what to get us through these years. And of course you can add to that the decades long exposure we have all had to the drumbeat of evil prophecies to fall upon us in tandem with the raunchy culture now all around us. Evil culture. Evil prophecies. What is left?

I feel that many of us longtime watchers on the wall have become wearied of the evil culture and equally wearied of our trek around the same old predictions around the same old scriptures. Without walking in denial of these times and of the scriptures as many other worldly positive thinkers do, don’t you think we could start looking to God for something beyond what He has already shown us? (How many more prophecies of imminent economic collapse, martial law and exhortations to buy gold and food reserves do I need to feed upon?)

Where the Spirit of the Lord Is, There is Liberty

God is speaking to my heart. He hears my weariness. He hears yours too. I think He has something else to say. I think He has a word of a future and a hope, of a provision and of a prosperity, that entirely transcends what we see around us and transcends the prophecies of inevitable destruction. I don’t think we have to be stuck there anymore. But we have to let Him attune our ears to a new frequency to hear these better things that speak of life and hope. What do you think? Are you up to that?

I’ve been meditating on II Cor. 3:17. I am in a very confined place on many accounts. But I know that where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty. I know that we are not to be entangled again with the yoke of slavery. I know that it is the anointing that breaks every yoke. So as I am ever confronted with one more circumstance of confinement, I am standing in this word of liberty. I am declaring it. And I want to keep declaring it until I see it manifest in my life, entirely outside of the grasp of the world system that would eat me alive because I dare to live by the vulnerability of faith alone.

‘Twas the Night Before Passover….

As the Exodus approached, everyone in Israel knew they were about to leave Egypt. They also knew that every day was just like the rest of the days before them—another day under the hand of the taskmasters. They had a vague knowing they were to leave, but they had nothing in their daily experience to really tell them it was going to happen. So nobody knew what the mechanism was that would set them all free from Egypt and give them the go ahead to leave.

Then suddenly, God showed up and spoke, and gave the plan. We don’t know how many days notice there was of this. Perhaps just a few. But God said what was to happen. And God gave the plan, beginning with the instructions for the Passover meal and the preparations for imminent departure. Those instructions and plans were unexpectable until the moment they were issued. Nobody could know before that what they were to do. They could not concoct their own plan. And more prophecy about how bad things were going to get in Egypt wasn’t helping anything. It was time to tune in to the unexpected.

Conclusion

And that is where I believe the Lord is calling us in this upcoming year. We are being called to tune in to a new wavelength for hearing the unexpectable, for seeing “great and mighty things that we know not”—things that the Book of Revelation was not intended to tell us, things to set us free from our captivity to the inevitable prophetic based only in the evil picture given by the scriptures.

God has a future and a hope for us that is not dependent on the plagues of Egypt or the rise of the mark of the beast or the threat of martial law. We’ve circled this mountain long enough. It’s time to “come up hither” and to see and hear hitherto unspeakable things—to live by a prophetic faith and its righteousness beyond the letter of Matthew 24 as we have never known before. God has an unrevealed supernatural Goshen for us that cannot and will not be touched by what is happening to the rest of the world.

Those who turn their ears to become tuned to this unrevealed Voice will find it, and will be safe, protected and will prosper despite the surrounding mayhem. (Psalms 91 affirms this!) God has not even begun to reveal all that He has for us in this place of the beyond the inevitable…  

If I hear any more than this, I will certainly tell you!