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[ Conclusion ]

The Modern Presence in the Lineage of Glory



In this, our final chapter, we want to synopsize what we have learned about Jesus’ end time visitation from the prophetic pattern of His first coming. Beyond this, we want to gain a last perspective on the Lord’s modern Presence as but one phase of a larger self-revelatory “hall of glory” across time ending in union with His eternal glory.



- The Synopsis

Based on the pattern of the Lord’s ancient incarnate visitation, we have learned the following about the “phenomenon” today called “the Presence”:

·        The Presence is not a force or a phenomenon, but the spiritually manifest yet physically veiled personal end time re-visitation of Jesus Christ Himself, hosted within the agency of the Holy Spirit, walking among us, His “candlesticks.”

·        The primary purpose of Jesus’ end time visitation is to prove the hearts and minds of all His people worldwide ahead of His ultimate glorified unveiling—what we call the “second coming.” (From one perspective, the “second coming” has already preliminarily begun.)

·        In recapitulation of the second age of (gentile) unbelief, all the relational dynamics originally seen between Jesus and the various classes of Israel are re-played through His modern spiritual revisitation to the classes of Christendom. These include the self-seeking outside masses, religious critics, simple loving followers and inside followers entrusted with His powers who are yet carnally compromised, some of whom prove out to be betraying antichrists.

·        A wide spectrum of spiritual perceptivity exists from (on one end) the masses who sense the Lord’s aura as an impersonal spirit force described in terms of “thunder” (e.g., “anointing, glory, fire, presence”), to (on the other end) the few intimate perceivers who engage the Lord’s actual personality within His Presence so as to discern His voice to them.

·        The Lord manifestly visits diverse places at sundry times for varying durations, typically measured in days, weeks or months to perhaps a year or two. The destinations and lengths of stay are finally determined by the Father whose will alone the Son continues to express, affected to a lesser degree by the importunity of those to whom He comes.

·        Wherever the Lord visits He is attended by human hype and stirs up demonic activity. Neither the media hype nor demonic evocation aroused by His visitation serves as a measure of “discernment” for disproving His identity behind a spiritual stirring.

·        The Lord is unlimited in whom He may visit, whether the unchurched or the Christian “synagogues,” the “Orthodox”-Evangelical or the “Samaritan”-Catholic, the poor vagrants or the homes of the affluent, the scripturally unlearned or the well-taught. Any deductions made from merely observing who He visits are invalid assessments of what He thinks of the visitees or for verifying that He—rather than a false spirit—has truly visited anyone.

·        Everywhere the Lord visits, He creates social division due to the spectral polarity of heart among those to whom He comes. He does nothing to ameliorate the division or bring clarity out of confusion, but leaves the convincing of His true identity to the Father’s own work in each heart.

·        Wherever Jesus visits, He is rejected most by the self-assured whose confidence in natural scriptural learning is always threatened by His failure to comport with their human parameters of interpretation and practice. Such detractors use that unconformity together with doctrinal and moral errors attending His “fans” to justify their rejection of Him.

·        Conversely, Christ’s visitation is embraced by self-assured crowds who falsely believe that, merely by manifesting among them, Jesus affirms their spirituality and His pleasure with them, and promises fulfilment of their own natural cravings. This false assurance yields a state of spiritual stupor that seals the closing of their hearts to life-changing truth.        

·        Though meant to lead the church to repentance, Jesus’ end time visitation climaxes by stoking carnal corporate expectations of societal grandeur and cultural makeover among His earthly-minded welcomers whereon they intend to crown Him “king.” Such reception however grieves His heart, is adjudged a failed recognition of Him, and represents a temptation He Himself foundationally rejected during His first incarnation. 

·        The mystery of lawlessness generates from within the hearts of those entrusted with Christ’s inside visitational powers and revelation, whereby their own power aspirations stirred under that trust give satan direct means to steal Jesus’ identity and divert His kingdom purposes to his own worship. The intentional heart betrayal by these ministers (called “antichrists”) consummates in their sealed departure under the mystery.

·        In course of usurping Christ’s visitation, satan is willing, as a short term loss for long term gain, to cast out his own demons by visitational power, something he does not do of his own power.

·        To the degree that inside followers of Jesus’ visitation are tainted by their own carnal ambition, they are unable to discern a certified antichrist convert in their midst.

·        The innermost germ of mystery lawlessness is expressed through belief in the sanctifiability of sin. While those who singularly promote this mystery from inside Christ’s visitation are seen in the masculine as antichrists, the corporate expression of those falling away to follow them is femininely identified as “mystery Babylon.”

·        The high number of (“many”) end times antichrists and their followers is due to the worldwide extensiveness of Christ’s own visitation. Inferable from the word “many” is that the antichrists will number far more than the disciples who remain true under the modern visitation—affirming all the more that nearness to Christ’s visitation offers no basis for assurance of one’s spiritual state.

·        In course of visitation, Jesus releases genuine kingdom glory promises and experiences to followers who are yet incapable of rightly understanding and holding them. That such encounters may be real does not affirm the followers’ otherwise carnal beliefs about the kingdom, nor conversely does their faulty belief prove they have not encountered genuine kingdom glory.

·        Jesus communicates to devotees of His visitation that death is an inescapable condition attached to kingdom glory, creating a serial intertwine between promises of glory and predictions of death. But under blindness of carnal kingdom perceptions, visitation followers are unable, unwilling and afraid to process the death component.  

·        In the modern visitation, the difficulty attending the glory-death intertwine is witnessed by the inability of devoted “lovers of the Presence” to accept Jesus’ prediction of the church’s death under the great tribulation, which contradicts their expectations of triumphal cultural restoration and revival under Christ’s kingship. 

·        As the Lord’s visit progresses, the tension between glory and death builds inside the visitation’s core until the death frequency incites the hidden antichrist pathogen to open exposure by betrayal and departure. The betrayal in turn produces the actual deaths of both Christ’s visitation and the antichrist germ yet within the preserved faithful, only to be followed by an incomprehensibly greater return glory of Christ’s visitation / coming.

·        In the original visitation, the greater return glory of resurrection and Pentecost arose out of the deaths of Christ and of the disciples’ souls—stemming from Judas’ betrayal. In the modern visitation, the greater return glory of manifest sonship (“translation”) and the Lord’s physical unveiling (the “second coming”) will arise from the deaths of the modern visitation and of the church under the great tribulation—stemming from an as yet unthinkable antichrist betrayal from within the core of the modern visitation.    

·        Spiritual delusion results from ongoing interface with the Lord’s visitational glory without submitting to the soul death process necessary to properly receive and convey that glory. Soul death beneath divine visitation, not the glory of visitation itself, establishes spiritual maturity associated with the Lord’s glory. This applies to all classes of His self-revelation, whether His original incarnate coming, His Pentecostal indwelling via the Holy Spirit, His modern visitation, or His unveiled physical appearing yet to come.    

 

Perceiving the Glory Progression within the Presence

Jn. 1:14 And the Word became flesh, and dwelt among us, and we saw His glory, glory as of the only begotten from the Father, full of grace and truth….2:11 This beginning of His signs Jesus did in Cana of Galilee, and manifested His glory, and His disciples believed in Him.

Proceeding from our synopsis of Christ’s parallel visitations, it behooves us to lastly bring forth the developmental aspect of His glory across and between them. Wherever Jesus visits, His glory manifests. In opening his gospel, John identified Jesus’ coming in terms of His glory. And as we noted early on, “glory” is one of the terms of thunder commonly used to describe Jesus’ aura.  

In Part 7 and Part 8, we carefully observed the “intertwine” between the Lord’s promises of glory and predictions of death relative to both visitations. We also saw how His glory stoked—and still stokes—carnal kingdom expectations and ambitions unable to embrace the death predictions. In effect, we have been witnessing a three-fold intertwine between glory, carnality and death.   

Here, in our final chapter, we want to understand how the jostling of glory, carnality and death acts to move Jesus’ visitational glory across a developing spectrum of intensity—in which the visitation is never the end, but always a means to a greater glory display. Grasping this aids our successful interface with His Presence today, for He wills us to see how His visitation is always taking us somewhere beyond itself –hence beyond where we are with Him at any time now inside His modern visitation.   

We start by appreciating the cycle between Jesus’ glory, our carnality evoked by it, and thus the death He must predict to us. The “glory and death” intertwine happens only because there is first a glory and carnality intertwine that must die. But as the threefold cycle ensues, the next visitational glory arising out of death is of a higher order than before. As this cycle repeats, a glory development appears across a visitation as well as between visitations.   

Christ’s visitational glory manifests progressively in variegated ways. It is not of one kind only. But carnality, as it interfaces with a single aspect of glory, is naturally blinded to the variations and can’t anticipate the development. Drawing false conclusions about its immediate glory experience, carnality can’t move with Christ’s plan to show Himself in greater ways. For this cause—to eliminate carnality and to advance His manifestation—death must follow our mortal experience of God’s glory at every turn.

Throughout Jesus’ first visitation, we see various applications of “glory” to His acts. At Cana, John says Jesus “began” to manifest His glory through one simple miracle. But as we proceed, we find glory demonstrations beyond and other than this. At Bethany, Jesus told Martha if she would believe, she would “see the glory of God.” From this proceeded Lazarus’ resurrection, something way greater than the glory at Cana.

Just before the Lazarus display, Jesus revealed His glory altogether differently through His brilliant self revelation on the mount—a “taste” of heavenly glory shown to earth. Further on, He spoke of glory in terms none could comprehend inside that visitation. He told His disciples how the Spirit would glorify Him within them—something completely unfathomable until Pentecost.

In other ways further still, Jesus spoke of how the Christ must “enter into His glory” after dying, and of how He would return “in the glory of His Father with His angels.” These predictions exceed anything seen in His modern visitation now, never mind anything He manifested to His first mortal disciples.

Yet amid all these various glory encounters, the frail disciples could not help but focus on their own immediate historic appreciation of them. They could only argue about their “position” in the eternal kingdom, interpreting that future glory by their still mortal-referenced interface with Jesus’ visitational glory.

James and John, on tasting Jesus’ mountaintop brilliance, immediately move to ask Him to seat them on His right and left when He comes “in His glory,” ignorant of what that “glory” will be like. They believed it could only be more of what they had just mortally seen. Jesus could only rightly reply, “You know not what you ask.” See how exposure to lesser glory under mortal visitation is blind to greater immortal glory, and why therefore death must interdict our beliefs based in fleeting mortal encounters of visitational glory.   

Paul well understood and best articulated the reality of glory differential. He instructed how different glories exist in progression—from the mortal Mosaic Law, to the mortal dispensation of the Spirit, to the immortal resurrection of the body with its own sub-array of glories. But most of all, he understood the mandatory role that suffering and death must play to move us in transitional experience and comprehension of these dimensions “from glory to glory” (See II Cor. 3:7-12; 4:16-18 with I Cor. 15:40-42).

Our point here is that, inside Jesus’ modern visitation, our relation to His glory is just as mortally blinded as was the disciples’ before Pentecost, even though we be now “filled” by the Spirit. Through over a century of worldwide Pentecostal re-visitation, Jesus has revealed His glory in uncountable ways over a developing lineage from “Cana” to “Lazarus.” But He has been revealed among Spirit-filled earthen vessels who still yield to the same fleshly conclusions and assumptive expectations as to what His coming immortal glory will entail.

We harness Christ’s present visiting glory to our unrenewed anticipations and ambitions—ambitions that will ultimately birth betrayal among us. We express this harnessing through our worship, our prophesying and our intercession. We’ve heard glory thunder under mortality (called “Revival!”), and think that more of the same—just on a grander scale—is what the Spirit’s now-prophecies of coming glory are all about.

But no. A death first awaits the church ahead of realizing the prophecies. The coming glory has no comparison to that now being perceived. And we won’t enter that glory without death’s first sheering off our carnality evoked under the present visitation. When Jesus “comes in His glory with all His angels,” it won’t look like “Cana,” or “Lazarus” or the “transfiguration.” It won’t look like Azusa or the global charismatic/ prophetic movement “enjoyed” these recent generations. Above all, it will absolutely not be to “at this time restore the kingdom to Israel” (or America) according to their former earthly “glory” under men.

Perceiving this ahead is the Spirit’s gift now to deliver us from unnecessary hurt when the triumphal prophecies disappear under the betrayal, and God’s glory is instead removed from open society. We are to believe the prophecies, but seek deliverance from our carnal vision attached thereto ahead of the nearing global crucifixion; all preceding the now unfathomable resurrection and “Pentecost” of the Lord’s true unveiled eternal bodily glory at hand. 

 

From Visitational Presence to Wedded Parousia: Preparing to Meet the Unveiled Body of the Lord

I Jn. 3:2 …We know that when He appears, we will be like Him, because we will see Him just as He is. 3 And everyone who has this hope fixed on Him purifies himself, just as He is pure.

II Cor. 3:18 But we all, with unveiled face, beholding as in a mirror the glory of the Lord, are being transformed into the same image from glory to glory, just as from the Lord, the Spirit.

 

Throughout the modern Presence, we have been meeting Jesus in various new ways, movement to movement. But the command performance is to actually meet Jesus physically in His eternal glory, something that, as we already know, only happens with our own release from mortality. The apostles held this as the ultimate hope, and so directed us toward it—not as a passive foregone conclusion (as pre-tribulation rapture theory teaches)—but as an active pursuit to be apprehended—as a prize.

The modern visitation of Christ has in fact been the prequel to His ultimate glorified "coming." He is "pre-come" to us already on a mission of preparation and reconnaissance. Yet under today’s glory remains the blinded belief that our ultimate expectation is merely for more of the same (“revival”) whose greatest hope is to “change this world.” Some even treat the active hope of meeting the Lord beyond this realm as a “cop out” of our “real mandate” to change culture. And so, as before with Peter, the Lord will burn such human vision out of the church by the very global tribulation it so widely denies will ever happen or says already happened.

But our closing purpose here is not to major on the need for the great tribulation to enter immortality, but to highlight Jesus’ other promise of the possibility of entering permanent glorified union with Him without subjection to that final corporate death process. It is the conditional promise that “I also will keep you from the hour of trial which shall come upon the whole world,” involving the challenge to “be found worthy to escape all these things and to stand before the Son of Man.”

The Lord leaves us an incentive to “die now and die early,” promising a certain generation that, if they will die thoroughly enough within beforehand, they may be spared the great tribulation whose purpose is to thresh out all the remaining chaff preventing the church from entering into immortal glory. It is the promise that we may directly bridge between Jesus' already arrived preparatory glory and His ultimate eternal unveiling.

The uniqueness of this hope was not apparently foretyped in Jesus’ original visitation. No one escaped the effects of the first crucifixion. Such escape would be akin to Peter, James and John having been found worthy on the mount of transfiguration to immediately step over into the same state as Elijah, without passing through the imminent crucifixion drama, had such been possible. But it was not.

Nevertheless, where the Lord in His present visitation will again be taken from the church, this time He holds out the advance conditional promise to the worthy—to those having rigorously played out the intertwine between present glory and death—the promise of stepping straightway from His present glory into His wedded eternal glory, exempted from the general crucifixion of the church.  

In either event, it is for us to now realize that the doorway from present visitation to translated eternal meeting is much closer than any of us can naturally grasp. We are that close, right now. The veil between the glories is now exceedingly thin for those approaching “firstfruits ripeness.” We must not be moved or daunted by those whose highest aspiration is to see Christ’s earthly “revival” glory. It is Him, not “revival,” we really want to see, face to face, eternal glory touching now immortalized glory.

The closing exhortation then of this treatise, is that we all seek, with unveiled face, to see the Lord, to meet the Lord, in His ultimate glory, being thereby wedded to Him in that same glory, as He prayed for us the night of John 17:

“Father, I desire that they also, whom You have given Me, be with Me where I am, so that they may see My glory…”

This was Jesus’ very prayer for our own immortalization with Him. If it be possible, may we pass through all internal death now necessary, thence directly into His same glory before the coming betrayal takes Him from us. If it be possible, may that “cup” of great tribulation “pass from us.” May we be found as Enoch and Elijah who were taken without seeing death. But if not, may we stay fixed on the true goal, the great tribulation notwithstanding.

The Lord knows where we each are in our “ripeness” and in His generational timing respecting these things. Regardless of where we lie in the plan, the goal is the same, and so is the path. The “glory, carnality and death” intertwine intrinsic to the Lord’s original visitation is intrinsic to His visit with us now.

May we thus truly recognize the time of our present visitation for what it is, so as to be changed into His eternal likeness the shortest path possible, find rest from our labors, and be found with Him where He is—atop Mount Zion.




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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