Voice of the Kingfisher speaks out …from a different perspective
by Elinor Montgomery
June 12, 2004
As described in the book of Genesis, God created Adam in His image and, by the breath of the Spirit gave him life to become the son of God. In the book of John, Jesus is described as the only begotten Son of God, born of the Spirit and of a virgin to become the Son of Man.
Who is this man called Jesus? Is He just another ordinary man, or is He who the apostle John says He is – an extraordinary Man, a divine Man, and a Man without beginning or end? Let us look very closely at what John has to say about Him! He said that Jesus was with God from the beginning as the Word, which was made flesh and dwelt among us. He was not only with God, but He was one with Him. Essentially, He took bodily form as God became man, with John introducing Him to us as the Word of God. All things were made through Him, and by Him, and, by His words He spoke, saying, “Let there be light!”
This is the starting point, where John begins, with Jesus’ voice speaking creation into being. There is no evolvement of the human race from any species of the beast. As the Light of mankind, He is also the Giver of life. The interesting thing, which John has to say, is that in Him was life, and the life was the light of men. The light shines in the darkness and the darkness did not comprehend it.
Once we understand that darkness and sin are one and the same, we can then understand what is being said here. Man’s sinful state turns men into sons of the beast, making them like animals without understanding. It would appear that man can ‘devolve’ into a beast, but a beast cannot evolve into a man. Therefore, man was to take dominion over the beast so that he does not return to dust and the darkness of death.
In darkness man cannot discern truth from the lie, which is no different from the king of the dark side called King Nebuchadnezzar of the Empire of Babylon. It took him seven years of living in darkness, literally like a beast of the field, eating the food of beasts, before the light suddenly dawned for him. This king depicts a seven millennial plan of God for man, whereby he will live in a beastly state designed to return him back from the state of rebellion to become once again a living being in the Spirit of Life with understanding and the ability to comprehend the darkness. This is to say that man will come to the knowledge that God rules over man from on high, and that the beast does not rule from beneath. Man cannot alter the curse and his death sentence for sin himself.
John effectively was saying that Adam and Eve had caused the doom of man with their Garden rebellion. Even though there was light, they did not understand its nature as life-giving. There was the issue of the weakness of the will and the flesh, in spite of the fact that they walked with the Lord God in the Garden. They had had the Spirit of life breathed into them, which had separated them from the darkness, but obviously there was a strong pull toward the dark side of things.
There was a way by which the darkness God had separated from the world, before man was created, could be returned, but only if man were to choose to accept the lies of religion in place of the truth, in disobedience to God. In other words, man’s willful rejection of the light and truth in favor of the darkness of the lies of Satan’s belief system, today called religion, would cause, not only Adam’s death, but the subsequent deaths of all the descendants of his corrupted seed. This boiled down to the sure result of his disobedience to God’s command to not eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.
There was a man sent from God, another John, called John the Baptist, to be a voice bearing witness of the Light, so that all through him might believe in the truth. This prophet’s calling is prophetic of both the church and the nature of the witnesses, just before the second coming of Jesus, the time of the bride. It leaves no doubt as to the nature of her commission. She, like John the Baptist, will bear witness to the Light, so that men might have a last chance to believe. She will make straight the way in purity for her witness to be spoken only in the truth of the Word. Like John, she will have zero tolerance for the corrupt priesthood coming in the name of God.
New revelation from the Lord will be given to her as the scrolls are opened immediately before the judgment is rained down, with the breaking of seals, which have kept secrets of God hidden in Scripture for release at such a time as this. Likewise, the 144,000 witnesses who comprise the bride of the church are sealed on their foreheads, while the angels are sent to the four corners of the earth to hold back the winds, before carrying out their job of harming the earth and the sea.
John the Baptist declared his position unequivocally that he was not the Light itself, but rather was sent to bear witness of it, so that the believers could make straight the way directly to the kingdom, with no interference being run, which will be capable of taking them off the Way. A true prophet will never seek to point to himself. He will redirect men away from him and toward the true Light, so that they, in turn, can witness also, not to self, but to the Light of the world. The point of the witnessing is to reach an ever increasing number of believers. The witnesses have but one job. It is not to knock down buildings and systems anymore than it is to erect them. It is simply to be a voice, which will witness to the truth and to a growing church from all nations.
Jesus came to His own nation through bloodline, but it did not receive Him. It was in the darkness of religion and could not comprehend the spiritual birth of Jesus and the spiritual rebirth of man being necessary due to the blindness and lack of understanding, which come with sin. Sin is the result of the belief system of the Garden. It could be better described as religious blindness, which rejects life, light and truth; it prefers dark places where it can hide from the light.
How does all of this manifest itself today in the life of the two nations of America? The light of life and truth once shone down on these two nations under God who had made them the nations of His people. They honored God and taught the children about truth and the Word, fostering a love of liberty in them and influenced them to stand against evil, something, which can devour our children, our land, and our liberty.
Satan, the author of darkness, has always been the destroyer, and with the lures of the flesh, he follows God to all His fishing spots, where the apostolic church fishes for men. He casts his lures into the same waters right beside the apostolic lines. Entanglement of the fishing lines is one of his great ploys for preventing the removal of souls from his evil seawaters of the world. Nothing suits Satan’s purposes better than compromise; he is the master of confusion, sullying the truth so that man can no longer discern the truth from the lie.
Evil cannot withstand the truth and the light, for they dispel the darkness. Communism had no firm foundation without truth and light. President Ronald Reagan of the United States never ceased to call evil what it is, and in so doing made America a light bearer, holding her torch of liberty very high for the entire world to see. He did not publicly bow to Political Correctness, with Canada backing him to unite the two nations together, like sisters, into a formidable wall against the religiously-driven nations of the world.
The West saw the victory in God, as the walls of Communistic atheism crumbled and fell before the very eyes of the world. America, under God, had witnessed to the light while under attack from the darkness, with light prevailing. But these same nations today reject prayer in the name of Jesus by our children and generally within the public square. The light of Israel in America, the land of the true Jew, is quickly going out for lack of spiritual warriors for God of the quality and nature, which Reagan inspired. The hand of God was very visibly protecting His own people, and rewarding them as His light bearers, until they dropped the torch to embrace the religions of their enemies.
No man comes into the world without receiving light from the Light of the world. That Light is Jesus. How is it we cannot comprehend how magnificent a gift from God that our eyesight is? The cherubim, which Ezekiel saw in a vision, had eyes all around, and the wheels functioned according to their moves, for the spirit of the living creature was in them. The wings of the cherubim were like the voice of the Almighty God when He speaks. The light of creation set the direction through the Spirit, moving as the Spirit would lead. This speaks of the harmony of a people led by the Spirit of God.
It was the voice of witnessing to the glory of the Lord, which preceded the first coming of Jesus, and a voice of the same witness will precede the second coming of Jesus as well, so that all might believe. The Baptist’s voice did not point to himself or to his own agendas. His purpose was to point to the imminent coming of the Lord, calling men to repentance, and to make straight the way for His ministry, and not for that of John’s own ministry.
To as many as received Him, to them was given the right to become children of God. It was first, the nation, which was called to be the children of God, but everything was changed with the formation of the church. As with Abraham, the blessing would go from a land blessing to an all-nations blessing, with the nation Israel becoming the spiritual nation and house of Israel for anyone who would believe on His name.
John declared it; no one could become part of the new spiritual Israel simply by being born of a bloodline. Man could only become sons and daughters of the Lord God by being born again of the water and the Spirit. Yet, man had lost his position as sons of God when Adam and Eve disobeyed Him and chose to become children of their new father, the devil; men now had become nothing more than little beasts in their inheritance from their new father also known as ‘the beast’ of Scripture. Hence God removed the covering of fig leaves that Adam and Eve had made to hide their shame, which pointed to the healing coming through the nation Israel. Instead, He covered them in the animal skins they deserved. It is interesting to note, that when Jacob was deceiving his father, Isaac, it was accomplished with the covering of the hairy skin of a beast. This, in turn, pointed to the nature of Esau.
There could only be one way to restore and heal man of the curse of death. It is by the Light and the Word becoming flesh as the Son of God and the Son of Man dwelling among us on earth. One must bear in mind that the nature of man’s sin was the evil action of rejecting the truth of the God of truth, to replace it with a belief system based on the lies of Satan. This is exactly what religion is. All things, which were created good and true, were instantly thrown into a state of religious compromise in the mixture of good and evil.
The first cult of religion came into being in the Garden of Eden. Henceforth, man would identify and be intimate with evil, from the moment that he was lured into sin. This was only the beginning of his love affair with religious idolatry, at which time the Spirit of the living God departed from mankind, just as God had warned would happen, with the spirit of death becoming the curse of man. In the same way, the Lord would one day warn the nation Israel about the blessing and cursing surrounding the keeping of the Ten Commandments, and the failure to do so. Her failure to keep even one commandment would be tantamount to failure to keep all.
Jesus was the only answer to restoring man from the curse of death, in so far as only He could offer the way back to the tree of life. They were the cherubim, which guarded the closure on the east side of the Garden, leading back to it. Adam and Eve were driven out of the Garden on the east side and into what would be the area of the Middle East today, where religion is reigning supreme in the vilest of cultic forms.
The apostle John claimed to have seen the glory of the Lord, the glory of the only begotten of the Father, full of grace and truth. We must remember that, not only was John privileged to sit at the feet of the Master as he was taught truth, which opposed the religion of the Pharisees, but he also was taken with Peter and James to behold the Transfiguration of the Lord.
The scene returns to John the Baptist as the witness whose purpose is to attest, like the apostles, to the divinity of Jesus, and to His timelessness like that of Melchizedek, the king of Salem, who blessed Abraham with a communion of the sort the Lord served His apostolic church, which will also give a tithe of all to the Lord Jesus. It is like a marriage covenant being made with Him as the bride participates in complete submission to her Lord and Beloved.
Though Jesus came into this world in the flesh as man, He never fit into the confines of time. As the begotten Son, He was loved of God from the beginning, before time ever existed. It is in His fullness as Man and Creator that we receive His grace. The nation received the Law and animal sacrifices. There was no saving grace in it, only a pattern of things to come. The nation Israel, through her suffering, in many ways deserves our gratitude. For in her failure to achieve salvation, she opened the door to all the nations of the world as the pattern and the principle leading to the birth of the Christ Child, the long-awaited, promised Messiah of the Hebrew prophets of old.
Jesus was not only from the bosom of Abraham, but He was also from the bosom of the Father God. The two heritage lines combining man and Spirit in Jesus, established the rock foundation for the house of Israel. Will the world ever have eyes to see the true nature of Israel and understand it as His true church does?
If religion had not caused religious blindness, there would be nothing but empty pews today. This is what the Light has done; it has departed from the system of institutional churches every bit as much as it departed from Adam and Eve and from the temple of Solomon, when idolatrous religions entered into it with their cultic idol worship. The institutional church, like Solomon’s temple, was on extremely shaky ground from the moment it was constructed in conjunction with the workmen and supplies coming from the Prince of Tyre, Satan, himself.
The inability for the darkness to comprehend the Light was seen in the Pharisees’ desire to know who John the Baptist was. They could not separate him from the Christ, Elijah, or the Prophet. What they wanted to try and understand was under whose authority he was baptizing the people of Israel. His natural authority from within the nation was derived from his entitlement, of the Levitical high-priest lineage, but that was about to give way to a new High Priest and a new priesthood, which would come from a new kind of spiritual lineage.
John never once pointed to his authority as that which comes from man, yet no man had more right to claim pride of position than he. He knew that the baptism of Jesus was to mark the crossover point of history, when he willingly lay down the reins of the Levitical high priesthood, and handed them over to Jesus as the High Priest of spiritual Israel, His church. John’s nature could be compared to that of Jonathan, the rightful heir to his father Saul’s throne of Israel in his willingness to give over the reins of kingship to his beloved David. Jesus had no need of baptism, for He was free of the waters of the world. He had the Spirit of Life in Him, but all righteousness was fulfilled in His baptism, when God declared He was pleased with His Son.
John, a voice with the message of the coming of the Lord, came into the wilderness of mankind. As the very nature of the priesthood was being altered right before the eyes of the Pharisees, John sidestepped them to point the way to truth, something lost to them in their religious darkness and inability to comprehend the Light. What was this baptism of his about, if he did not receive his authority from men? They were unable to recognize from the prophecy of Scripture that he was fulfilling the words of the prophet Isaiah, for which reason John quoted the words of the prophet.
His credentials were found in the prophecy of the Word and not in any Roman appointed priesthood. Of such will be the credentials of the bride, his counterpart on the dawn of the Lord’s second coming. It is the prophecy of the Word, which will validate her voice, needing none of the authority of man. John humbled himself in his interaction with the priests who loved position and authority. He described himself as unworthy of the honor God had bestowed upon him as a witness. He also described himself and his position as being even lower than that of a servant loosing the sandal straps of the Lord.
The location of where this interaction took place is very significant. These words were all spoken in Bethabara, as the Pharisees questioned him about his water baptism. The name Bethabara means ‘house of the ford’. A ford is a place of crossover through the waters. This presents not only the notion of the crossover blessing, which is about to take place, but it also takes us back to Israel’s exodus from Egypt and her crossover through the waters of the Red Sea.
Another exodus is about to take place as Jesus becomes the ground, or rock foundation of dry land for the crossover. A crossover is about to take place from a natural nation to a spiritual nation, and it is to this, which John is witnessing. We must look back in time to the prophetic crossover blessing of Jacob upon the sons of Joseph, when his father, Jacob, blessed his son, Ephraim, the second born, as opposed to blessing Manasseh, the first born. Joseph was a type of Jesus, as the son of the inheritance of the Father crossing the usual line set in place for the first-born.
Now, we move to the next day, when John sees Jesus coming, and identifies Him as the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world. With this statement, it is goodbye forever to the temporal, temple, animal sacrifices of the pure, little, spotless lambs. To regress backward is as though, having seen the Light before one’s very eyes, one instead chooses to scurry back into the darkness of hopelessness to depend on one’s own works for salvation.
John did not claim to know Jesus in an intimate way of ‘knowing’, as one knows another by sharing the oneness of the flesh in the intimacy of marriage. For this reason John baptized only with water; it was but the natural picture of the spiritual baptism and the prophetic picture of the intimate ‘knowing’ between Jesus and His bride of the church. The Spirit was upon Jesus, the same Spirit of Life, which, in itself, births fruit in man with the consummation of man and the Lord Jesus becoming as one in spirit. Such unfathomable intimacy was the very thing Adam and Eve rejected in the Garden for the sake of embracing religion, just as the nation Israel rejected intimacy with Him for the idolatry of their surrounding nations.
The religious Pharisees wrapped all of this rejection up in a neat package, which can only be described as the antichrist spirit of religion, the harlotry of God’s own children toward the Father and His Son. And so religion becomes one of the 6’s of the mark of the beast. Not only was the attack fierce against Jesus, but it will come fiercely against the bride of the church as she witnesses, like John the Baptist, to the Light and truth. John, the apostle, witnessed to all this as he wrote the name of the bride on the wedding invitation. It is to be the social event of history, but it is also going to be only for sufferers, the suffering of which will make their joy of the occasion all the greater.
Again, we move in prophecy to the next day and the time of the church’s exodus from religion with a revival of the early church leading ultimately to the second coming of Jesus. John the Baptist is standing with two of his disciples, looking at Jesus who is walking along with His plans very much in progress. Again, John points to the Lamb of God turning back to see who is following Him, as He walks ahead of them.
He is looking for people according to what it is they seek. Their response was, ‘Rabbi’. In other words, they were teachable. They knew there was a feeding of the Word that they had not received ever before from anyone. To where was He calling them, if not to a place where His teaching could be found? He said to them literally, “Come and see.” In other words, if you come to the place where My teaching can be found, you will gain insight into the light of truth and come out of your darkness in the tomb of religion.
Their immediate response was the response for which Jesus had been searching among His own people. He loves a heart that is searching for the truth, wanting nothing more than to be with Him. These are men driven by their love of the truth and not by agendas of their own. It took no persuasion for the two disciples of John to leave him and the fading priesthood of man, to follow Jesus, the High Priest of God.
The two disciples were like the two witnessing branches of the early and the latter-day church who came, saw and remained where Jesus was staying. No witnessing voice of the church is complete without the two. They will be the first to hear and receive light in a time of great darkness. They will be the outward-reaching evangelists, the witnessing voice, which will witness to the Light, the truth, the coming of Jesus and who He really is.
It is the tenth hour, which by Roman time is conceded to be ten o’clock in the morning, rather than four o’clock in the afternoon. We have a change of scenery and the time for a new day in a progression of days (a day is as a thousand). One of the two followers is identified as Andrew, the brother of Simon Peter. One must remember that Peter always points to the church and his name here, as Simon, points to the time before his apostolic calling to become a stone laying the foundation for the bride. In witnessing to him of Jesus, Andrew sets the groundwork of the witnessing church, which is called to lead the brethren to Christ. There is no flowery oratory; his words are pretty basic as he says, “We have found the Messiah”.
Jesus renamed Simon Peter with the name of Cephas, the Aramaic name for stone, rather than using the Greek/Roman term Peter. This is about the stone foundation of the church being put in place for the stone pillars of the bride. It is a brother to brother calling, which will span time from early church to latter-day church. They were brothers in the fishing business, and Jesus said that He would make them fishers of men if they followed Him. The town they came from was Bethsaida, which means ‘house of fishing’.
Jesus established from the beginning of His calling forth His apostles that the brethren will be fishers of men. They must come from a house of fishing, and not from an institutional church of man-made building blocks. As His witnesses, they will become the voice of fishermen, fishing for men for the Kingfisher of men. Andrew was the one whom we could call the first evangelist. Note that he brought his brother to Jesus, the truth and the Word; he did not take him to any institutional religion, creed or clergyman.
The following day Jesus seeks out Philip who, like Andrew and Peter, is from the house of fishing. Romanism and Christianity were very much about institutional religion, with creeds, doctrines and clergymen being the authority over it all. Christianity definitely did not begin in Bethsaida, a house of fishing, but rather in Rome, a city of paganism.
Philip went off to search for and found Nathanael and began his witnessing on a one-to-one basis. The name, Nathanael, means ‘given by God’, and, as Jesus explained later in John 17:6-12, all His apostles were given to Him by the Father. Nathanael’s calling is definitely an apostolic calling. Philip used prophecy as his tool of persuasion for a very doubting Nathanael.
He pointed back to Moses and the prophets to establish the truth of who Jesus is. He applied the legal lineage of Joseph to Him, as being His father, for he did not yet understand anything about birthing in the Spirit. He had only experienced water baptism, and the apostles could not truly understand their relationship to God as their Father until Pentecost, and the infilling of the Holy Spirit, though Jesus would teach them much about the spiritual aspect of Israel.
Nathanael doubted that a Messiah could come from anywhere but the heart of Judah. He must have been pondering how it could be possible for the God of the Law to step outside of the picture and color outside of the lines, which were so rigidly set for Israel. Philip’s only reply was, “Come and see.” Philip was going to allow the Word to speak for Himself. Upon looking at Nathanael, Jesus said, “Behold, an Israelite indeed, in whom is no guile.” In saying this of Nathanael, He was speaking prophetically about His bride, and is describing her as one in whom there is no deceit, craftiness or trickery.
Surely, with these words, we must look back to Jacob and Laban who show us how the brides of Israel were put in the hands of deceitful men. Even Abraham displayed his share of deceit, with Isaac and Jacob following in his footsteps. Rebekah, the bride of the inheritance, encouraged the deceitfulness of her son Jacob. The nation began in its animal state as sons of the beast, and only Jesus could change that. As He looked upon Nathanael, He saw the time of love, the time of perfect worship in Spirit and in truth, with no religion in her. “Yes,” He declared, “My bride of the church will be without deceit.”
Nathanael senses the intimacy of Jesus’ understanding as he asks, “How do You know me?” Do not miss the importance of Jesus’ answer when He stated, “Before Philip called you, when you were under the fig tree, I saw you.” Now, the fig tree points to Israel, and we are taken back to the prophet Jonah, at the time when the plant was given to him by God to offer protection from the beating rays of the sun. It withered and was destroyed by a worm, which God sent on the next day. Even while under the fig tree of the nation, the bride was known to Jesus, though still within the bosom of the Father, before the nation began its journey into religious idolatry, and experienced destruction by the worm.
But the Lord would not leave His called-out bride of spiritual Israel, from whom He sought the good fruit, bringing her to her time of labor and not produce the child of Israel, or the adopted son/daughter for God. When Jesus casts His eyes upon the bride, her response will be complete, full of light and truth and understanding. She will bow before no other god but will see her Beloved as her Teacher, the Rabbi of Israel, accepting no man in His place to do His job. She will declare to the world who He is, as she raises her voice to shout, “Jesus is the Son of God and He, not some mythical Messiah who has not yet come, is the King of Israel. Weep you who have pierced Him, whom you rejected!”
Jesus opened the veil of understanding to Nathanael, saying that if he were to believe on Him because of the Word of prophecy, he would see even greater things. And the promise of Israel shown Jacob in a dream will become a reality for Nathanael and the bride. The apostolic church of Jesus Christ will see heaven open to receive the bride. She will ascend the ladder, or stairway to heaven, which is the only rapture this world will ever see, for Jesus is the ladder, the way, the truth and the life, and it is upon Him alone that the angels ascend and descend. He is the dry land and ford through the sea water upon which Israel shall exit from the Egypt of this world, ruled by Satan, to enter the kingdom of God ruled by Jesus.
John began his gospel by presenting the bride and the Bridegroom, identifying exactly who each member of the wedding is, for whom he is issuing the invitation. He is promising an escort provided by the Groom. This is no shabby affair, whereby we are called to get there in whatever manner we can and as best we can. He is providing the invitation and the transportation, but it is only offered to His own immediate family, close relatives and friends. This is a very exclusive wedding indeed, where the first will be on the outer edge and the last will be seated at the head table with the Groom. Let us open the Book and then dress appropriately, for it is a wedding to which we are going.