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[ Conclusion ]

Death and Resurrection of the Presence

- Predictions of Crucifixion and Death under the Modern Presence 

 

Mk. 13:3 As He was sitting on the Mount of Olives opposite the temple, Peter and James and John and Andrew were questioning Him privately, 4 "Tell us, when will these things be, and what will be the sign when all these things are going to be fulfilled?" 5 And Jesus began to say to them, "See to it that no one misleads you. 6 Many will come in My name, saying, 'I am He!' and will mislead many… 9 But be on your guard; for they will deliver you to the courts, and you will be flogged in the synagogues, and you will stand before governors and kings for My sake, as a testimony to them.… 12 Brother will betray brother to death, and a father his child; and children will rise up against parents and have them put to death. 13 You will be hated by all because of My name, but the one who endures to the end, he will be saved. 14 But when you see the abomination of desolation standing where it should not be (let the reader understand ), then those who are in Judea must flee.… 19 For those days will be a time of tribulation such as has not occurred since the beginning of the creation which God created until now, and never will. 20 Unless the Lord had shortened those days, no life would have been saved; but for the sake of the elect, whom He chose, He shortened the days.…24 But in those days, after that tribulation, …26 Then they will see the son of man coming in clouds with great power and glory. 27 And then He will send forth the angels, and will gather together His elect from the four winds, from the farthest end of the earth to the farthest end of heaven.

The difficult relationship between glory and death as Jesus imparted it to His first disciples has continued throughout His modern visitation to us. Today’s Spirit-anointed church stands in the same position as that of the first disciples before the Lord’s death. In the last section we saw how both the first disciples and today’s disciples have been entrusted with kingdom promises and glory experiences, received through carnal filters leading to false expectations.

We also bore down on the message of death that Jesus repeatedly brought forth to check the disciples’ false expectations tied to the immediate glory projections they were tasting. In this, we witnessed how that, never mind the outer masses, the inner disciples were deaf and blind to the word of the cross. They could not understand it because they did not want to understand it, because they were afraid to understand it, because it contradicted their ambitions stoked under His glory.  

In His modern visit, Jesus has issued a similar word of death to His end time disciples. And just as predictably, we who today most partake of His Presence are in the main deaf and blind to it.

Jesus’ current word of death is not a new one. He already uttered it to His own disciples at the end of His first visitation. And He continues uttering it now to us. It is the very extensive prediction that, before His glory ever appears as the finally established kingdom, the church will pass through a “death” called the “great tribulation,”—a tribulation “such as has not occurred since the beginning of the creation which God created until now, and never will.”

This prediction is every bit as strong as Christ’s own original death prediction to His disciples. In the first prediction, He spoke of how He would be “condemned, mocked, spat upon, scourged and killed,” only afterward to rise from the dead. In His modern prediction, He has told us that we would be “misled by antichrists, delivered to courts, flogged in synagogues (church buildings), put on trial before rulers, betrayed to death, hated worldwide,” witness to the “abominable” man of sin in the heart of His temple and witness to a condition of near world extinction—after all of which He would come to execute His fully manifest kingdom.

This end time prediction was built on Jesus’ own death prediction in Matthew 16, and later more fully expounded in His revelation to John on Patmos:

Rev. 11:17 … “We give You thanks, O Lord God, the Almighty, who are and who were, because You have taken Your great power and have begun to reign. 18 And the nations were enraged, and Your wrath came, and the time came for the dead to be judged, and the time to reward Your bond-servants the prophets and the saints and those who fear Your name, the small and the great, and to destroy those who destroy the earth.” 20:4 Then I saw thrones, and they sat on them, and judgment was given to them. And I saw the souls of those who had been beheaded because of their testimony of Jesus and because of the word of God, and those who had not worshiped the beast or his image, and had not received the mark on their forehead and on their hand; and they came to life and reigned with Christ for a thousand years.

And yet, despite the crystal clarity of these meticulously described conditions precedent to the kingdom’s establishment, those now tasting most of the Lord’s present glory live in denial of them. They are afraid of them, seeking to dismiss them as allegories or as events already fulfilled in the ancient past, and otherwise do not want to talk about them. They just don’t get it, because they don’t want to get it, because they can’t reconcile such predictions to the beliefs of their uncircumcised hearts and identities under Christ’s immediate visitation.

 

Betrayal, Crucifixion, Decimation and Recovery of the Presence

At the end of the first visitation, Jesus’ death predictions become the very trigger for the antichrist betrayal that will shut the whole visitation down. We can be sure that the Lord’s death agenda is what trips Judas into an actual betrayal scheme—a device he concocts to save his own plans for carnal kingdom glory—the same glory over which they all argue right up to the Last Supper!

Judas doesn’t believe Jesus will or is supposed to die any more than Peter or the others do. He doesn’t believe Jesus can really possibly mean it, because all of them are sold only on the carnal kingdom idea which has no room for any “death.” Judas thus believes that if Jesus is cornered into actual arrest, He will be forced to break out of it in a samsonesque show of glory (just as He had just overthrown the temple’s money changers)—the way Judas himself would do it. Judas superimposes his own thinking on Jesus, believing he will thus compel Jesus into a “put up or shut up” position of manifesting his kingship.

The betrayal however does not go as planned. Jesus had already defeated the ambition Judas lived for on the mount of temptation, therefore can never think like Judas, therefore will never act to save Himself. He did mean what He said about death. Judas realizes too late that Jesus won’t save Himself, which means Judas’ plans for his own glory through the further siphoning off of Christ’s powers are now completely wiped out. Self-condemned, he commits suicide.

But now, in that single stroke of antichrist action, Jesus is taken from all the disciples. In a matter of just over 100 hours since the throngs were triumphantly clamoring for their king, Jesus is violently separated from everyone, and with Him go all His powers. Suddenly, He is not there! He is no longer Present. The visitation is over.

The disciples are left alone and scattered. As a core band, they are decimated. Peter yields to betrayal to save his own skin. The others flee into hiding. Only John appears to maintain followership, if at a distance. But all are now helpless, powerless, and the true carnal substance underlying their kingdom “faith” appears for what it has always been. The dreadful “dark night of the soul” descends on them.              

After another two days, Jesus returns from the dead, but the disciples are now completely emotionally crippled. They cannot interface with Him from the familiar place of “strength” where they had so confidently been. No more power trips. No more arguing about who will be the “greatest” about anything. A deep repentant recovery begins—internally, emotionally, mentally and spiritually—one that requires soul searching and reconciliation to develop.

After a few more weeks, Jesus ascends. The kingdom for which the disciples had believed under the previous promises and power impartations is still nowhere to be seen. Instead, after just a few more days, Pentecost comes. Jesus arrives anew to dwell within His beloved ones by the Holy Spirit. Most importantly, a deep circumcision has now occurred within these followers that utterly alters their relationship to the new internal “Presence” Who has arrived—a Presence with Whom we in our generations still have to do, but not as yet in the way that these first habitations of the Spirit had come to learn.

 

The Nearing End of the Modern Visitation

The events just rehearsed here tell us more about what is going to happen to the church before the Lord returns than about where we are now under His Present visitation. As we follow the original pattern, we learn that, contrary to most belief inside today’s Spirit-filled church, the Presence as we know “it” is going to come to His end of visitation to us before He Returns in that final actualized earth-governing glory of which we all continue to sing. 

As outlined already, we thunder followers are all now on a final road trip to Jerusalem. Like the inner circle before, we are largely carnally culture kingdom attuned, unable to hear Jesus’ prediction of global death, and harbor our own seeds of antichrist betrayal that will not be revealed for what they are until push finally comes to shove. We will be shocked to have revealed to us, as with Peter, what is really within us.        

For generations now a duel between end time prophetic voices proclaiming glory and predicting death has been engaged among us. Those entertaining one have been unable to entertain the other. We purpose to bring the whole into view that we may fully embrace these together as the Lord expressed them.

Nevertheless, it remains that, as friction between the voices grows, the prophetic death predictions will swell to eventually trigger a reactive antichrist burst in the closet Judases among us who will seek to force God’s hand of kingdom manifestation into the open, but which will instead result in the end of the Lord’s end time visitation as we now know it.

In some way to come, a certain segment of culture kingdom advocates will show their truest colors by entering into a betrayal agreement with the world. That agreement will result in the “arrest” and removal of Christ’s Presence from us as the antichrist spirit simultaneously bids to show itself as “God” in our midst. This will plunge the Presence-devoted church into a place of deep inner darkness—synchronous with the great tribulation Jesus predicted.

This “crucifying” of the Presence through internal antichrist betrayal will figuratively “take Him away” from us, ending the modern visitation we have enjoyed and under which our carnal ambition has thrived.  It is by His Presential removal that the hearts of all “kingdom” proclaimers will be severely tried. The love of many will “wax cold” because all the visions for cultural takeover will have been reduced to a failed fantasy.

To be clear, none of what we say here is to deny any of the other glorious prophetic truths we understand about the advance harvesting of the Lord’s firstfruits into glory, or of the manifesting of the companies of witnesses in power during the time of trouble. Glory will yet mysteriously intertwine with death throughout the time of world darkness.

We are only acknowledging rather that, when these things happen, the entire way Jesus manifests Himself will dramatically change. It will not be on the visitational terms to which we have become accustomed these last generations in the “free” world. His open aura as welcomed throughout the public airwaves and our free congregating thitherto will be removed and replaced as the church passes through her own dark night of soul—a night in which all her false expectations about “revival” will be put to death.

After a period of buried darkness, however, the Lord will “resurrect” by a new way of corrective spirit reconciliation among His shattered scattered people, following which His fullest manifest Coming will, like Pentecost of old, be realized as never before. The full unveiling of this mystery awaits that time.

 

The Presence Before and After the Cross

Perhaps the greatest takeaway for those seeking to understand today’s mystery of “Presence-filled” carnality is found by perceiving the key difference in the disciples between the Lord’s original visitation and His Pentecostal coming. That difference is found in the event of the cross.

Prior to the cross, the disciples received access to the Lord’s supernatural power inside of His visitation. They all possessed the Spirit’s ability to heal and cast out demons. His Spirit was with them wherever they went in this. But also as noted, their heart condition was of no account. The faithful John, the presumptuous Peter and the betraying Judas all received the same power.

After the cross, after the first visitation had ended, the remaining disciples internally received the Lord’s Presence in a way they did not originally possess Him. This is what happened at Pentecost. As such, Pentecost was a visitation of another order. It was a habitation. We refer to that unique habitation as the “baptism” of the Holy Spirit.

In traditional Pentecostal / Deeper Life belief, we credit the change from the disciples’ carnal attitude to the fact that they had now received the Holy Spirit within. But if we carefully examine the full record, we find that receiving the Spirit cannot alone explain what broke their carnal kingdom mentality. For the record also shows that the believers in Corinth who had received the same Holy Spirit indwelling were nevertheless yet very carnally minded:

I Cor. 3:3 for you are still fleshly. For since there is jealousy and strife among you, are you not fleshly, and are you not walking like mere men?

In truth, the “Spirit-filled” Corinthians were as carnally minded as the disciples had been under Christ’s original visitation. The fact that they had become receivers of the indwelling Spirit of Pentecost did not cure that carnality.

This tells us that, as important as was the disciples’ upgrade to Spirit indwelling under Christ’s new Pentecostal Presence compared to their mere gifted empowerment under the original visitation, the Spirit upgrade is not what delivered them from their prior carnality. Rather, what delivered them from their essential carnality was their own internal passage through soul death resulting from Christ’s crucifixion and the end of His visitation.              

This truth cannot be stressed enough, for it is the root issue of the church now so devoted to the Lord’s end time “glory” and “anointing” and “fire” and “revival.” Today’s Presence-embracing church mistakenly believes that, because we have welcomed Christ’s end time visitation and internal Spirit baptism, that we are therefore spiritual, and not carnal.

As the honored A. W. Tozer might have put it, “Scarcely could they have entertained a worse delusion.” And this is precisely the source of the end time delusion “sent by God.” It is that God has indeed sent us His end time visitation, but we have received Him without taking up His cross to internally embrace His death as our own. We have not passed through the crucifixion of our inner selves as the disciples did between first visitation and the receiving at Pentecost. Thus, though having received of the same superior indwelling Pentecostal visitation, we, like the Corinthians, remain as carnal as the disciples were under Christ’s original visitation.

Comprehending this truth under Christ’s modern visitation is the arch purpose for this treatise. We must grasp the largest Christian spiritual reality of our times which is that, under the Presence, most welcoming believers have, like the multitudes of old, received the blessings of Christ’s visitation, or beyond that, been entrusted with prophetic gifts of deliverance power from the Lord, or beyond that, even received a true indwelling baptism of the Lord’s own Spirit akin to Pentecost—but in all cases, have not passed through the interior way of actualized death to self: death to natural familial identity, death to national pride and allegiance, and death to their own cultural lusts and aspirations in this life.

Because this is so, regardless of whether we have received the internal baptism of the Spirit, or just a superficial grace impartation of supernatural power, we are in the main no more spiritual than the disciples under the first visitation. And it is for this cause that we are all globally headed for Jerusalem—to the place of crisis where our hearts and minds will be put on trial; where, when the Presence is taken from us, we will discover just how much antichrist is yet within us; where the betrayers will be sorted by intent and default weakness; and where the soul-circumcised “survivors to the end” will be preserved to enter into the fully glorified manifest return of our Lord.

 

(To be continued…)


Conclusion




Chris Anderson
New Meadow Neck, Rhode Island

First Love Ministry
- a ministry of Anglemar Fellowship
http://www.firstloveministry.org

10/19



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