"The Future History of the Church, Part 1"
A typological and midrashic examination of what will happen in the future of the church by seeing how the past history of the church is recapitulated eschatologically; how past events happen again in the Last Days. What to expect, and what to prepare for.
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Everyone wants to know the future. For this reason, people will go to fortunetellers, the occult, and all kinds of other sources to try to discover it. Jesus, however, told us the future.
Before I was a believer, I used to go to a witch who read my tarot cards; she was quite skilled at it, and one day she saw in the cards that I was going to become a follower of Jesus. When she saw it, she began saying "Don't come back and burn me when this happens; it's going to happen, but don't come back and burn me". She was quite accurate. The occult can often be very accurate in its predictions of the future. However, Deuteronomy 18 says that “quite accurate” is not good enough; a true prophet must be exactly right every time. I see many people today who claim to be prophets and build prophetic ministries around themselves, yet they make outlandish predictions that fail to happen. When this occurs, people defend the false prophet by saying that he is “usually right”. That may be so, but the witch in New Jersey who used to read my tarot cards was also usually right. Deuteronomy 18 is very clear: if you speak a word in the name of the Lord, it had better happen or you are a false prophet. (Deut. 18:20-23) This is dangerous; people are better off keeping these “prophecies” in their mouths rather than speaking them when they're not of God. We should never suppress the Holy Spirit, but if a word is truly from the Holy Spirit it will surely happen.
There was an occasion where I witnessed a true prophet: About 40 people were in a room in Mount Carmel, Israel with this man who came from the Soviet Union (as it was called then). There were no diplomatic relations or direct air flights between Israel and the Soviet Union in those days; he had to fly via Europe. He flew into Tel Aviv where someone picked him up at Ben Gurion Airport and brought him up to Galilee. He began speaking in English, making prophesies and predictions. When I heard what he was saying, I decided that either this man was a true prophet or not only was he a false prophet, but he was also out of his mind. This gentleman wrote a book and in it he told of taking the Lord's Supper in Red Square. He said that the Lord told them to throw the communion cup into the Moscow River after which they stood in Red Square and predicted that God would do to the Soviet Empire what He did to Egypt because their government was persecuting the church and refusing to allow Jews to immigrate to Israel; they proclaimed "'Let My people go', and 'Let My Gospel be preached', or God will destroy your empire. We proclaim a curse on your land – God is going to curse your land." Immediately after that Chernobyl happened and they had the worst harvest of all the bad harvests they'd had. These Christians also said, "God is going to destroy the Soviet war machine"; right after that, the Soviets withdrew from Afghanistan and the Warsaw Pact collapsed. Next these believers turned around to face the Tomb of Lenin in which Lenin was kept permanently embalmed and on display and they said, "This is the spirit of death; God is going to destroy the spirit of Lenin-worship." There were about eleven factories in the Soviet Union that manufactured nothing but statues and busts of Lenin; every one of them closed and on the evening news we saw all these busts and statues with their heads cut off. The believers then turned around to the Kremlin and said, "God is going to destroy your empire; the Soviet Union will collapse, and no one will be able to believe how fast God will judge it. 'Let My people go, and let My Gospel be preached'!"
To say these things in 1984 or 1985 would have been unfathomable, totally unthinkable. You would either have to really be hearing from God or crazy. These were outrageous things to say, but they all happened. I have never met that brother since, and I never even read his book, but I know what he said and I saw it happen right in front of me.
After that I came to Britain to go to Bible College and I saw some people from Kansas City and California calling themselves the Kansas City Prophets and the Vineyard. They came before tens of thousands of people and predicted a great revival and a great Latter-Day Rain was going to come to the United Kingdom in October of 1990. In the years since the “great revival” more mosques have been built in England than churches.
This is Page 1 of 15 of part 1
Scripture taken from the New American Standard Bible Copyright © 1960, 1962, 1963, 1968, 1971, 1972, 1973, 1975, 1977, 1995 by The Lockman Foundation.