Voice of the Kingfisher speaks out …from a different perspective
by Elinor Montgomery
October 09, 2015
What is the standard for the church? The Lord set it many centuries ago through His dealings with the nation Israel, and the prophetic nature of the foundations He laid with them. The apostolic church is the only true church with her foundation resting squarely upon the covenant, which God made with Abraham.
Hence, we have the New Testament open in the book of Matthew with the heritage, or lineage of Jesus, going back to Abraham, introducing Him as the Way to His future kingdom on the throne of David. But, in Luke, the Word reveals that there is a bigger picture of the Way going, in fact, back to creation and, ultimately, to His Father God, with the complete picture of the divine, holy nature of a Man born of the Spirit of life, meant to sit on the throne of God.
From the moment God created the world in perfection, evil was separated from His creation and from God’s first-born son born of the Spirit of life. He made the separation of the spiritual waters from beneath by collecting them into the seawaters to provide a pure, dry dust with which God was able to work.
The living being was created from this pure dust and, in a way, began like Pinocchio, the wooden creation of his carpenter father, Geppetto. He was really not, in fact, a son at all but merely a puppet on a string to whom the blue fairy announced that he could become a real boy if he were to prove himself to be brave, truthful and unselfish.
This is a story line with a message, which points back to the events of the Garden of Eden. God breathed the breath of life into His creation of man turning him into a real live man as a living being created in his Father’s image. He now was cut from the umbilical cord, as is suggested by the puppet strings, to breathe on his own.
But there was a stipulation made by God. If the living being called Adam wanted to remain alive and not die, then he must not eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, a tree, which grows the deadly fruit of pride at the center of its evil root system. If man were to do so, like Pinocchio, he would return to the dust of burnt wood, for God will one day judge all men with a fire judgment, in accordance with His laws governing them. He will not allow man’s disobedience by breaking His covenant agreement in the Law. If he wants to follow Satan, then for him, it is back to the wood for burning, which is the only kind of branches the tree of the knowledge of good and evil is able to produce.
At the same time that man came off his so-called ‘strings’ to become alive in the Spirit, the spirit of the deadly seawaters lurked in the sea and in the darkness on the face of the deep. The bottom of the sea is the deepest place on earth and eternally dark where all things eventually decompose and return to dust.
In the past century, after so many years had passed, divers made an extraordinary return trip in a deep-sea capsule to the site of the sunken Titanic at the bottom of the sea. There, they took pictures and gathered information, which have caught the imagination and fascination of the entire world. In these pictures one could see the disturbed dust at the bottom of the sea, which was once human life, with nothing remaining of it but perhaps a pair of shoes still resting where, at one time, two feet held them in place.
This all so powerfully takes us back to Abraham and even back beyond him to the Garden, to Adam, the first created son of his Father God, the Creator, and the warning He gave to him those thousands of years ago. In him dwelled the power of life itself, so fragile in the face of fleshly pride, lack of faith in the truth and the ensuing disobedience, which brought forth the downfall of both Adam and his wife, Eve. Henceforth he would sire children only in a lineage of death leading up to Jesus and the cross.
The power of life itself is found in the breath and Spirit of life, which comes from the mouth of God. It could be described like the kiss of a Prince who has always been with the Father from whose same mouth comes the Word. And so it could be said that by the Spirit of life the Word was born or came forth as a Son of Man and a Son of God. The Word was always with the Father throughout all time and all creation.
God used it as a call to life in the midst of darkness to bring forth goodness. Man was created by the Spirit of life in God’s own image to be a light in the darkness, as is He. The Father’s holiness rests on His solid foundation of trustworthiness, as solid as rock and as transparent and clear as the finest cut diamond through which the light breaks into a kaleidoscope of colors.
They are the source for sight and for understanding as they open the door to knowing Him. Relationship with Him begins with the rainbow of color, which reveals the holy, glorious nature of our Father and our relationship to Him once we are off the strings as sons of the Spirit, including all the hazards, which surround such liberty.
The church is defined by what one does with Jesus, for there is no doubt about His being an historical figure. His existence on earth has been proven without a doubt by historical writings of various historians of various cultures. You have a choice between believing on Him for salvation, and trusting in the truth of His Word, the Bible, or you can consider Him to be a liar and one of the biggest con artists of the liberal, religious group deeply rooted in witchcraft. He is either Son of God or a son of the devil. There are no other options, because of the claims He made.
Now, the message of the rainbow takes us further back from Abraham to Noah and the world-wide judgment of a destroying flood, which would cover over mankind, with the exception of this one man who was deemed by God to be as righteous as one could be in a fallen world of sin. By sin, the door was opened to Satan to bring his spiritual evil, leading to death, into a world created good and separated from sin.
The rebellion of man would result in a flood of drowning, destroying seawater. Because of the will of man to lean like a branch toward the tree of his choice, the dead tree of evil combined with good, evil would ultimately rule over him. It grows from within like leaven in everything it enters, to eventually consume and destroy it.
Man had exchanged the Father, with the breath of life filling him like a vine fills its branches, for another father like Geppetto who had no ability to do anything but work with dead wood, creating wooden puppets without life in them. Man’s new father, the devil, had long ago given up his own spirit of life as a fallen angel from heaven, when the iniquity of pride was found in him, attempting to be like the Most High God.
God drove him from heaven to earth where fire came out of him and reduced him to ash or dust (see Ezekiel 28:18). As a holy God, He cannot abide the sin of darkness in His wonderful house of light. He wanted the living being of His creation to reflect His light on earth as it is in heaven. Hence, His warning is given in the book of Revelation about the church’s golden lampstand being removed by Jesus from its place, unless she repents.
Now, the church’s foundation goes back to where the Way began when sin was found in man in the Garden. Try as he might, man could hide nothing from his all-knowing Father who so generously had given him the priceless Spirit of life, but now, would place a price on the blood of life coursing through his veins.
Man could never seem to understand this, as he placed so little value on either his life or the Word of God’s Law concerning the blessing of life. First there was one commandment concerning life and death, to later be broken down into ten commandments, which would eventually be summarized in two commandments. You could say that, in a way, it was like the number twelve of God’s government rule. It just took the disobedience of Adam in the breaking of one commandment, for him to receive the penalty of death, exactly as God said he would.
“…of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall surely die (Genesis 2:17).”
Here we have all the Law bundled up in one commandment meant to keep man from the lies of religion, which kill. Satan was allowed, by a wilful woman, to feed her the first lie of the first belief system built on a foundation other than that of truth, called religion. This opened the door for a new world spiritual leadership and the road to destruction for mankind.
This was the beginning of the empires, the foundation for which is religion, with the ones applying to Judah being called the Babylonian system of empires. Hence, the spiritual river waters from beneath now began to flow in the world above, the flow of which began with the harlotry against God of this Jezebel-spirited woman called Eve. She simply disregarded the commandment of God who had created her to be the budding, blossoming and fruitful branch of the spiritual marriage between Himself and His creation of real, live sons and daughters, born in the Spirit of life.
Those rivers of evil ran through the empire of first, Cush, another name for Egypt, with the name of that river being the Gihon. It took the nation Israel captive. The second empire was the Assyrian Empire, which also took Israel captive, with the river encompassing the whole land at that time being the Hiddekel. Like the Gihon, that river dried up as well, when that empire gave way to the next one. But then, one major empire broken into five parts would become the last group of empires, which would take Judah captive.
This group would begin with the Babylonian Empire, located on the Euphrates River. It will continue until the end of wars and the entire world will sit in worship at Satan’s feet in a One World Order, with the Revived Roman Empire emerging as the final empire of the system coming from out of Babylon. This empire will be short-lived at the end of the religious church age of Christianity. The Euphrates River has never dried up as that spirit of Babel still rules in this world, with men trying to find their own way to the stars without Jesus, just as they did at Babel. It is called astrology and witchcraft.
But the world is in for a big surprise. The same Messiah whom God’s people Israel rejected, in order to bow before Caesar of the Roman Empire, declaring him to be their king and government ruler over the religions of the day, will return to earth again as the Victor of the cross. He is as the live branch of the tree of life, who overcame the dead branch of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, on the cross.
At this point, the Euphrates River will dry up to allow the armies of the East to move in upon Israel, only to meet their doom at Jerusalem’s eastern gate as did the army of Sennacherib’s Assyria meet its doom at the walls of the city of Jerusalem during Hezekiah’s reign.
The harlots of religion in the Garden were driven eastward on the broad road of the devil leading to destruction. The Way of salvation began at the eastern gate of religion and ended in the West where the last step before kingdom entry will be taken by the church of Jesus Christ. Make no mistake! No one will enter the Sabbath rest of the Lord on the Lord’s Day without making one’s own exodus from religion to follow and trust only in the truth of the Word for salvation.
Truth alone is the standard of the church. The entire religious system of Christianity gives off an unsavory aroma to the nostrils of Jesus as did Judaism and its priesthood of whom He said their father was the devil. That which Jesus would indicate to the world in all His messages was the point that, from Garden to kingdom, religion would be ever present with the lies of the serpent, repackaged in one form or another.
The Old Age of Garden deceit is simply repackaged as the New Age of modern deceit. Everyone who believes such trash will fall victim to the open gates of hell and the yawning mouth of the pit of death beside that iron sunken ship called the Titanic. To the contrary, the apostolic church of Jesus Christ will be given nothing but truth, which is the reason, and the only reason, the gates of hell will not prevail against such a church. Take note how they are prevailing against the Christian churches today, as we watch them close their doors for the last time, one after another.
Basic to the standard for the church of Jesus, and running side-by-side with it, is the principle of the Exodus or the separation from the religious systems of the world. As we have seen, the river waters described in Genesis run through the empires and ultimately into the separated seawaters. Sin returned those waters over the earth after having been separated by God at creation. This caused an imbalance in a creation without the protecting right hand of the Lord who holds the scepter of power over the entire universe.
Once the human partner of the divine Creator was spiritually separated from Him, the perfect balance, created in goodness, had been destroyed by the introduction of evil into it. That balance is in the spiritual, with sinners who are blinded by loss of the light no longer able to think spiritually in tune with the spiritual mind of the power behind this world.
The wobbliness in our world of imbalances now is called many things, one of which has progressed of late from global warming to climate change. Another is the secular claim of evolution or big bang theories, all of which progress to the super race and the final destruction of mankind. Our enamorment at the moment with robots and space travel proceeds from this same imbalance spiritually within the world, brought about by sin.
The correction can only come from the separation again of that sin found in the spiritual waters below from the holiness of the spiritual waters from above, which were the river waters that covered the Garden of creation, called the Pishon – the waters of perfect worship as the good gold of Havilah.
Nothing in the history of the world better shows that God will have a bride for His Son, Jesus, called the church, and not called Christianity, than the emergence of the revived, apostolic church on its early foundation of truth and not religion at all. It will be saved from the judgment rod of the Father, when the judgment begins to fall, just as Israel was free of the plagues when God brought them upon Egypt.
He will not spare the rod, in order to bring forth the perfect bride disciplined in love. Discipline creates perfect love in the fear and knowledge of the Lord’s complete trustworthiness and the knowledge that He will provide only good things, which give liberty when two wills are fused together as one. Then the heart of man will beat together with the heart of God. This is what the true church will look like, and it is surely forming as I write and as the judgment is getting ready to fall.
I speak of the true church, the spiritual sons and daughters of David, a man whose heart beat in unison with the heart of God. The Lord has always desired such a bride from mankind for Himself. He will sit on the throne of David with His bride to rule over an entire universe. It will fully light up as the stars of heaven, ever increasing in the reflected light of the Son of God who chose also to be a Son of Man, enabling Him to redeem His bride and remove her death sentence received under the curse of the Garden.
One day her Prince will come and, in love, shall kiss her on the lips to awaken His snow white bride and take her home to the palace prepared for her to live with Him forevermore. She will never live in the captivity of the seven empires of this world ever again, spiritually captive to the secularism of a world without God in fear of the branches and the tree that produced the poisonous fruit of the spirit.
In the Exodus of Israel from Egypt, the spiritual seawaters parted for the fledgling nation to allow her to proceed on her way to the other side. The Egyptian soldiers, Pharaoh’s military forces of the Empire, went down in their military armor on horseback. At the same time, the power of the Lord was vested in His people who would be saved from becoming victims of the sea by keeping Passover exactly as directed by the Lord God and in obedience to Him, during their final hours of captivity in the Empire.
They ate no leaven, which is described in the New Testament as being the religion of the Pharisees. Their food was pure and they did not fall into the same trap as that which ensnared Adam and Eve in the Garden. This is an exodus principle, applying to the formation of the end days’ church as she readies herself for the kingdom in truth and separation from this world of religion, from the government controls of man and his economic system. The number of this system of Satan is 666.
The true church never was about practices, doctrines and denominations of them. It was always about love and truth and life, with abundant life above all else. Love and value life and you will never become a harlot to the Giver of it! Jesus loves you, this I know, for the Bible tells me so. Will you love Him and become part of His church, His bride, His precious one?