The work of the house of Joseph, part 36

Once the seventh bowl of wine and water was poured out at Babylon, NY, all who witnessed this shouted “It is done!” We then went to the Abraham Lincoln Hotel in Reading, PA for our Tabernacles conference on October 13-15, 2006.

The feast of Tabernacles is the only feast of the Lord where, customarily, the law (Deuteronomy) was read. So even though the city’s name is pronounced “Redding,” we saw it as a time for reading the law. Again, Abraham Lincoln was known historically for freeing the slaves, so we understood this to mean that we were supposed to learn about “the law of liberty” (James 2:12). Those countries who base their laws on God’s law are able to enjoy “liberty in law,” as the song says.

It is only when we make the law the basis of our salvation that we are put into bondage. But that problem occurs when we believe that the Old Covenant can save us. Under the Old Covenant, men vow obedience to God and His law but are incapable of fulfilling their vows.

The law itself is not the problem; it is men’s imperfection and inability to keep the law by the power of his own vow, regardless of his good intentions. Being held accountable to fulfill their vows, men soon find themselves in bondage, striving endlessly to be obedient in order to be assured of salvation.

I know this by experience, because, when I was a child, I struggled with this for years after I “decided to follow Jesus.” Like the apostle Paul, I discovered that “the good that I want, I do not do, but I practice the very evil that I do not want” (Romans 7:19). It was not until God gave me my first major revelation when I was twelve that I found assurance of salvation.

The Spirit of Liberty

So at the Reading conference in 2006 we understood that not only was the fall of Babylon assured, but we were also to proclaim the next step in bringing the creation into the glorious freedom and liberty of the children of God (Romans 8:21). We were to equip the children of God to do the next work that lay ahead. 2 Corinthians 3:17 says,

¹⁷ Now the Lord is the Spirit, and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty.

The context of Paul’s statement tells us that liberty comes only through the New Covenant. If we remain dependent upon the Old Covenant, where man’s salvation depends upon his own vow of obedience, a veil will remain over our eyes. But when the veil is removed, our faith is no longer in our own ability to keep our vows but in God’s ability to keep His vows and promises, as we read in Romans 4:21, 22,

²¹ and being fully assured that what God had promised, He was able also to perform. ²² Therefore it was also credited to him [Abraham] as righteousness.

Setting the slaves and captives free on this level is possible only by removing the Old Covenant veil that blinds our eyes to the sovereignty of God. Unbelievers try to find salvation by being good or by the power of positive thinking; believers usually believe they are saved by promising to follow Jesus, hoping that the Holy Spirit will help them fulfill their Old Covenant vows.

Hence, both believers and unbelievers base their salvation on the will of man, rather than the will of God, contrary to what John writes in John 1:13. Unveiled salvation, which is based on the New Covenant, puts the will of God first. God moves our hearts by His Spirit, and we respond accordingly. He initiates our salvation; we respond to what He initiated. Our faith is in His ability to perform what He promised from the beginning of time.

It took me seven more years to learn this clearly, but I believe that the conference at the Abraham Lincoln Hotel made this understanding inevitable. When we are able to reduce great truths into simple statements, we then have true understanding. If it takes too many words to explain something, it is probably because we are still processing it. It takes time to distill truth.

The simple truth that I learned was this: The Old Covenant is man’s vow to God; the New Covenant is God’s vow to man.

Dedicating the Third Temple

We understood that the Tabernacles conference in 2006 marked the time of dedicating the third temple. Recall that the second temple was completed on March 15, 515 B.C. The prophet Haggai watched the next feast of Tabernacles for a possible coming of the presence of God to fill that temple on the eighth day of Tabernacles, as this is what occurred with the first temple.

Haggai stirred the hearts of the people to complete the second temple (Haggai 1:8, 12). Six months after it was completed, Haggai 2:1 says,

¹ On the twenty-first of the seventh month, the word of the Lord came by Haggai the prophet saying…

This word was dated on the seventh day of the feast of Tabernacles. Haggai 2:9 says,

⁹ “The latter glory of this house will be greater than the former,” says the Lord of hosts, “and in this place I will give peace,” declares the Lord of hosts.

No doubt many believed that the Spirit of God would fill that temple once again on the eighth day of Tabernacles, as with the temple of Solomon. But that did not happen, because God had already forsaken that location seventy years earlier (Jeremiah 7:11, 12, 14). Having forsaken it “as I did to Shiloh,” He vowed never to return to Jerusalem. Hence, the second temple remained but a type and shadow of the third temple, which is described in Ephesians 2:20-22.

Haggai’s prophecy caused people to watch the eighth day of Tabernacles in 515 B.C., but he did not specifically prophesy that the temple in his time would be glorified. Instead, he prophesied of another temple that would be dedicated 2,520 years later, that is, “seven times” in the future. That dedication took place at our Tabernacles conference in Reading, PA on Saturday, October 14, 2006. We dedicated this true spiritual temple to God in anticipation of the outpouring of the Holy Spirit.

The Old Man of the Mountain

There is a mountain in New Hampshire that once had the face of a man coming out of it. They called it the Old Man of the Mountain. This face fell off the mountain on May 3, 2003.

http://www.greatdreams.com/Old-Man.htm

The Old Man of the Mountain fell from the mountain today.

High above the Franconia Notch gateway to northern New Hampshire there is an old man. He has been described as a relentless tyrant, a fantastic freak, and a learned philosopher, feeble and weak about the mouth and of rarest beauty, stern and solemn, one of the most remarkable wonders of the mountain world.

Daniel Webster once said, ..."Men hang out their signs indicative of their respective trades; shoe makers hang out a gigantic shoe; jewelers a monster watch, and the dentist hangs out a gold tooth; but up in the Mountains of New Hampshire, God Almighty has hung out a sign to show that there He makes men." Thus it happens that New Hampshire has her Profile, "The Old Man of the Mountain," sublimely outlined against the western sky; a sign unique, distinctive, and inspirational as to the kind of men the sons of the Granite State should be.

The Old Man of the Mountain has several names including "The Profile", "The Great Stone Face", "The Old Man," and "The Old Man of the Mountains".

Biblically speaking, the “old man” is the fleshly soulish nature which our flesh inherited from Adam. As believers who have been begotten by the Spirit of God, we have transferred our identity from the old man to the “new man.” Hence, we are new creatures in Christ, having a heavenly Father. We are no longer the old man that we were when we were born naturally.

The Old Man of the Mountain fell on May 3, 2003, and 1,260 days later (October 14, 2006) we dedicated the third temple to God, made of living stones, who are the sons of God. The cycle of 1,260 days is called “a time, times, and half a time” in Daniel 7:25 and 12:7. It is a tribulation time cycle, a time where the sons of God remain oppressed and persecuted until their deliverance.

The Old Man of the Mountain may indeed have been a sign of “the kind of men the sons of the Granite State should be.” However, men failed to live up to the calling that Adam had been given, and so they practiced oppression, rather than freedom and liberty. When the Old Man of the Mountain fell, it was a sign that the old man’s systems of government were being overthrown. This implied that they were to be replaced by the saints of the Most High God.

So this saw a 1,260-day cycle leading to the proclamation that the sons of God collectively were being dedicated for service in God’s true temple. This was the climax of the work of the house of Joseph, whose calling as “a fruitful bough” in Genesis 49:22 literally means “a fruitful son.”

At the time, we hoped that this would begin the prophetic Open Door ministry in which we would be sent out into the world under the outpouring of the Holy Spirit. We did not realize that more preparation work was yet to be done through the signs of Elisha. Neither did we yet understand that the authority of the beast empires in Daniel 7 would not end until 2017.

Though much had been revealed, there was still more that was hidden from us. Every revelation has its time, and this means revelation is progressive. We are called to do what God sets before us each day, having a measure of revelation but not fully understanding the ramifications of these prophetic acts. God always withholds crucial parts of the overall revelation so that we learn to obey without the need to understand.