Voice of the Kingfisher speaks out …from a different perspective
by Elinor Montgomery
Baptism
May 7, 2008
The first type of baptism took place at Creation. It was separation by God of the seawater of the world, with darkness upon the face of the deep, from the living water from above. With this separation the dust of the earth was purified in the first act of water baptism by the altering of the waters.
The darkness on the face of the deep can be equated only to death. It had to be separated from the dry land in order to provide the substance of dust in a form of purity, ready to form the vessel, which was to receive life. Water had to fall from above, sprinkling the earth with dew, before anything could grow as food for man. This was the living water in which there was no death.
It was from the purified dust of the earth, void of any seawater, that God created man, breathed the Spirit of life into his nostrils and provided the living water from above for his needs. It was with this same combination of dust and the saliva of Jesus (the living water) that He healed the blind man giving him sight to take away the darkness in his life.
Noah’s separation from the flood judgment upon the world to settle upon dry ground from which the waters had receded, represents another type of baptism by which sin was washed away and covered over by the waters, but not removed from them. Darkness was separated again from man, with sin being washed away – all except for one man called Noah and his family, a man deemed righteous by God, whom He chose to save. But Satan pursued Noah’s family relentlessly, as he had pursued Adam before them, until man chose to have darkness come into his life again by rejecting the living water.
The promise of the rainbow covenant came along side of the flood judgment; it pointed to Jesus, the Light broken for you and me. It would only be through Jesus that one could be entered into the book of remembrance. God promised to remember His everlasting covenant with every living creature of all flesh on the face of the earth, when He looked upon the rainbow, symbolic of His Son’s broken body and His blood shed for you and me.
It is with this covenant with Noah that the promise of the kingdom comes forth. It is a promise made by God with all men, long before the Abramic covenant was put in place, for those who would be saved by grace and faith in the Lord Jesus Christ (see Malachi 3:16-18).
This leads us to Abraham and the Abramic covenant, whereby all the nations of the earth were to be blessed. The prophet Ezekiel tells us that the establishment of the nation Israel was like the washing clean of a baby born and left lying in its own blood in the land of Canaan, struggling to live, but doomed until the Lord passed by and said “Live!” (see Ezekiel 16:3-6)
The future of Abraham’s family depended upon his spiritual baptism, which saw his separation and removal from the darkness of the religious idol worship of his fathers before him. Once again, the living water washed away religious impurities, so that the way was made ready for Israel to worship only the one true God and to obey His truth.
The life of the nation depended upon her people not falling into the same trap as that set by Satan for Adam and Eve. God made it clear that there would be no room for any religious idolatry among His people Israel.
Israel’s exodus from Egypt represented another type of baptism by which the nation of God’s people, which had embraced sin in direct rebellion to the word of God, was separated from the seawater. God caused the sea to be divided and separated from the earth, in order to allow Israel to pass through the water on dry land. This represents a purifying process by which she was made ready to receive her promise and her inheritance, as the national heir-apparent of Abraham.
It was at this same time of her separation from Egypt, representing the world empires ruled by Satan, that the Egyptian army was taken down to the bottom of the sea to be covered over while attempting to pursue the Israelites and take them captive once again. God allowed the Egyptian army to enter onto the dry land before covering it over with the waters, which He no longer held back.
On the other side, after a three-day trek through the wilderness, without food or water, the Hebrew children came to bitter waters where Moses miraculously made them sweet by casting a tree into them. Of such was the changing of the waters from its impurity to purity, with the tree representing the person of Jesus.
While in the wilderness, God provided pure water for the people from the rock, just as Jesus indicated to the Samaritan woman when He, the Rock, stated that He could provide pure water for her. He informed her that the water He had to offer would cause her to thirst no more, unlike the water she was drawing from the well that had belonged at one time to Jacob. Jacob, named Israel, could never provide that perfect cleansing living water for his tribes of the nation.
The baptism of John was an extension of God’s baptism at the time of Creation. He required the Israelites to purify themselves by being baptized in the waters of the Jordan River. Coupled with repentance, he was preparing a people to receive their Messiah, the only One Who could take them from death to life. They required a changing of the water in their lives, from seawater to living water, if they were to live.
This river, running through the heart of Israel, strongly etches into our minds the spiritual condition of the nation in its captivity to the religion of Judaism at the time of Jesus, just before He began His ministry. The fish not fished out of the Sea of Galilee have the potential for going down the Jordan to the Dead Sea, where there is no life and they are doomed to die. Unless the Hebrew people, like the fish, were not fished out of the dark waters of death, which were ruling over their nation, they would die without the living water.
As one rooted in the lineage of the Levitical high priesthood, John had the authority to call the nation to repentance and to challenge the apostasy of the religious Roman-appointed priesthood of the Pharisees. He was between the end of the old Levitical priesthood and the beginning of a new apostolic priesthood, between the old covenant with Abraham and the new covenant in Jesus, and between the crossover from the witnessing nation Israel to the witnessing church of the spiritual nation of Israel.
In the spirit of Elijah, John the Baptist was calling the Israelite people of God to come out of the religious system, repent of their religious idolatry and cleanse themselves by returning to the words and commandments of the Scriptures, forsaking all man-made doctrines of men. In contrast to John’s voice crying in the wilderness was the condemning voice of the religious Pharisees and the Roman political rulers of his day, an unholy alliance if ever there was one.
It will be the same unholy alliance, which will plague the bride, as the forerunner messenger of today, who calls with the Spirit of God – And the Spirit and the bride say, “Come!” (Revelation 22:17). In the spirit of Elijah, she will call for church separation from the Roman system of Christianity, deeply rooted in the reviving Roman Empire, or the coming new One World Order, the last empire of the Babylonian system of Satan.
Again an unholy alliance will form between the religious system and the state, as it was in the time of Jesus and as it was in the days of Elijah, who called the nation to separation from religious idolatry. They were the prophets of Baal and the prophets of Asherah who served Jezebel, that wicked woman married to Israel’s king Ahab, who was the head of state, giving her access to control the nation with her religious idolatry.
A strong religious element tied to a spiritually weak, immorally guided state system, produces exactly what existed in the days of Elijah, and exactly what we find we are straddled with today in a failing America.
The last act of Jesus with His apostolic church was to wash their feet clean. He declared it was not this act, which had cleansed them, but rather they had been cleansed by His teaching of the Word. In other words, the water of the world could only wash away the dust of the world, but the truth cleanses one of religion that is only able to produce more dust from the decaying bodies of dead men.
The nature of truth is to produce light, making it incompatible with the darkness produced by the lies of religion and liberalism. Take a close look at the politics of the candidates running for the office of the President of the United States, today. Their statements are riddled with lies, and when exposed to the light, they simply continue with more lies.
The question, which I have to pose to the institutional church is this – “Are you willing to sit back in your pews and accept this standard of religious liberalism?” If so, to which camp does the institutional church belong – the camp of Satan and his lie or the camp of the Lord God in truth? Does your institutional church really offer baptism, or is more water of the world poured over your heads as you sit in your pews, totally void of understanding?
Jesus taught nothing but truth, which dispelled all religion and religious practices of the devil. It was the understanding, given in the spirit of prophecy, which He transmitted to His apostles, washing them clean in readiness to teach and write His imparted understanding for others.
Whether they all had experienced John’s baptism or not, we do not know, but we do know that they were all baptized with the Holy Spirit, which will lead men only to Jesus and the Word. This baptism restored the apostles to the position in God, which Adam lost. They would become sons of the Most High, and the brethren of Jesus. That is to say, all but one, who was not washed clean because he maintained his ties with the priesthood of the religious system of Judaism. His name was Judas.
The apostles and disciples received the baptism of the Holy Spirit only after their cleansing by the Word and the living water from above, in the name of Jesus. This fulfilled the message given to the Samaritan woman at the well about the spiritual water baptism of salvation and to the Pharisee, Nicodemus, about the necessary rebirth of the water and of the Spirit for the kingdom inheritor.
She was the Samaritan woman, who immediately grasped the message and ran with it; he was the Pharisee, who merely posed a question about the law to the other Pharisees, asking them whether or not it judged without a hearing. This was hardly the voice of a great witness, who sought out Jesus in the dark, when he could not be seen by the others.
The baptism, necessary for kingdom inheritance, took place on the Day of Pentecost after the Passover had first taken place when the Lamb of God was sacrificed on the cross for all men. All was in place for the exodus of the church from the world of religion, politics and economics to stand only on the solid rock foundation of truth, at last cleansed of Egypt, from which the tribes of Jacob, called Israel, had departed so many centuries beforehand.
This is the spiritual baptism that replaced the pattern for baptism called circumcision, nothing more than a symbol of purification, unable to cleanse the seed that produces rotten fruit. The seed of man was corrupted by the flesh, which could not be fully cut away from the walking dead; this could only be accomplished spiritually by Jesus. Circumcision, in its inability to purify man, was but a symbol of that which only Jesus could do when He returned the Spirit of life to him, which had been lost when Adam responded to the fleshly lure of the serpent.
With the infilling of the Holy Spirit, the spiritual fig tree of the re-born was then ready to yield fruit worthy of being called sons and daughters of God. This was fruit acceptable for inheritance in His kingdom household, coming from temples, which only God, and not man, could build. This, and only this baptism of the changed water and the Spirit, is the prerequisite for kingdom inheritance.
However, spiritual baptism is not necessary for salvation; the thief on the cross gives us that understanding. He declared himself a sinner and called upon the name of Jesus for salvation. He was guaranteed a place in the spiritual nations of the spiritual Israel of God, dwelling around the tabernacle of heaven, just as the Israelites dwelled around the tabernacle in the wilderness.
And the nations of those who are saved shall walk in its light, and the kings of the earth bring their glory and honor into it. Its gates shall not be shut at all by day (there shall be no night there) (Revelation 21:24-25).
It is the tabernacle, and never man-made temples, which gives us the picture of heaven. There are the two distinct and different aspects of kingdom inheritance – the priest-king line of son-ship, the throne inheritance, and salvation, eternal life without the throne inheritance. The spiritual nations of inheritance are described in the book of Genesis with the spiritual blessings of their spiritual father, Jacob, designating the key to eternal placement among the nations surrounding the tabernacle of the kingdom.
Baptism is a simple, yet complex, subject, which the institutional church greatly misrepresents because of its religious nature. He was Judas who never gained full understanding from Jesus and the Word, thereby retaining his religious nature, which led him to serve a corrupt temple system rather than serve Jesus. He did not separate from the waters of this world, which covered him over in his betrayal of the only One capable of giving him the living water of baptism and of life.
My friends, if it is a Judas you want to be, then your choice is nothing less than that of committing suicide. It is free will, the gift of God, which allows men to make the choice. Choose wisely, for your very life is at stake. It is evident that baptism requires separation from the deadly religious waters of this world, which flow directly into the Dead Sea, in preparation for receiving the living water from above.
When Jesus was baptized by John, and came up immediately from the waters of the Jordan, were the heavens not opened to Him? Did the Spirit of God not descend like a dove, alighting upon Him (see Matthew 3: 16)?
Take a very close look at the floods now pouring in over America and over other wicked places of this world. They are the warning signs of the great need for a world-wide spiritual baptism, if men and nations are to survive.
Heed these words as a warning from above. Judgment is coming, and it is coming soon. Get yourselves off the fence where you are sitting poised between the two camps of religion and truth. Be baptized and washed clean of it all by the Word, for no man can serve two masters. If you do not serve Christ, you will serve the Antichrist.