Voice of the Kingfisher speaks out …from a different perspective
by Elinor Montgomery
March 20, 2017
Chapter two begins with a trumpet call. Joel, the prophet, has spiritually been taken forward in time, saying it is now time to blow the shofar and to round up the army of Israel. It is time for the bride to come forth with her Bridegroom to make the last call as the final witness of Israel. History is about to be shut down and the sky recede as a scroll when it is rolled up, with the judgment of God being right at hand.
He is going to step back from man and allow Satan full rule over those choosing to rebel against Him. There is none of the love of God in Satan for man. How foolish mankind has been to seek love in all the wrong places where there was none! Pride in oneself has kept man apart from worshiping God, with Satan reveling in the damage his evil spirits have caused. Man is ready, in the fullness of time, to worship the devil, for he has reached the climax of history, the end of his wilderness journey, and is consumed by evil.
All men in their deception will bow in worship before the Antichrist, the beast, the false god and counterfeit of the true Christ. This is the pretender to the throne and the god of all false gods, who, in fact, is nothing more than a small man, like the long line of all other small men of spiritual stature, who would be world rulers, such as Nebuchadnezzar, Caesar, Napoleon and Hitler. But these evil men, in spite of their atrocities against God’s people, gave us only a hint of the terrible things to come.
The Antichrist is the sum total of all these little men who would rule over mankind as gods. He is the Antichrist who will bring us to the time of the fullness of the gentiles and their god worship, wrapping it all up when the entire world will be brought into his camp of a one world religion, a one world government and a one world economic system, the number of the beast, being 666, the number of man. This will be the camp of the enemy, which will come against the camp of the Lord and His bride. She will rest only on her apostolic foundation of truth, refusing to take the religious mark of the beast, which desires nothing more than to get its teeth into her to destroy her with lust for the things of this world. The devil’s time of darkness is about to spread over the entire earth, like a cloud of the dawn, which covers over the mountain.
A clash is described as one, which is about to take place between two great armies – the army of Satan and the army of the Lord. The camp of the Antichrist will become great and strong, having walls of religion, which will make it impenetrable. Its stiff-necked nature will make the Pharisees of Judaism seem almost angelic, for nothing will ever have been seen, or ever will be seen, like the brutality of those who hate God’s people, those who will actually believe that killing believers will serve God’s purposes, instead of those of the Antichrist. It will be a time of great deception.
The fire of God’s judgment will go before the evil camp and behind God’s people. The time has come when there will be nowhere to escape in this world, except upward and into the kingdom, being like the Garden of Eden, lying straight ahead of them, with nothing but a wilderness of destruction left behind them. It truly has become the hour of decision, when men will be forced to choose between one camp and the other.
Jesus has given His Word and shown man the narrow path to the kingdom, known as the Way, with the broad road of destruction being the alternative. Because of Satan’s deceitful, counterfeiting nature, he has seen to it that both the Way and the broad road are called by the same name of ‘Church’ under the broader term of the religion of Christianity. But man has all but lost sight of the fact that Jesus battled religion with His testimony of truth. He never fit into the priestly robes of Judaism any more than He fits into the priestly robes of Christianity.
The power of the satanic army, which will destroy all the works of men, leaving nothing but a wilderness behind, is described by Joel. He sees it in terms of horses and swift steeds with noise like chariots having the crackling sound of fire all around them, with the fire judgment being released through them. These are mighty men in the battle gear of men, as were the soldiers of Saul, who wore the armor of men, which was rejected by David. They looked strong and worldly, but the truth was that they were really weak men unable to face the giant.
It all boils down to the fact that there was no strength in Israel, or any other nation under kings, outside of the anointing of God upon the nation. The army of Philistia points to the strong arm of man terrorizing the hearts of weaker men, causing them to writhe in pain when the slaughter of battle begins. Faces, which once loved the things of the world, will now be drained of color. The force of Philistia’s army overpowers the walls, which had once offered protection. They move in well-calculated columns, which just keep coming, as they force their way past any weapon coming against them, for they know well every crack opened by man’s flirtation with evil.
They know how to use the lures of harlotry perfectly and how to suck weak, unprepared men, without the defenses of God, into the snare. Men are defenseless against this thief who will enter their lives and take away all that was good, all for which they have labored, seeing it to be worthless now as this evil army advances before them. Oh, that they had been taught and had been given the protection of the Word, for this army will cause the earth to quake before them and the heavens to tremble. To what will man cling when the shaking down begins? Everything will grow dark, leaving men in a state of blindness, as was Paul when he was confronted with the Light. He was blinded in religious darkness.
On the other side of this coming Day of the Lord is the Lord’s camp and His army to which the Lord gives one thing; He gives it voice, not position or rank; not a coat of armor made by man and not the power of horses and chariots, as were they the power of Solomon. No, the army of the Lord is as a voice coming from one who executes the Word. If the Lord called His church to fish for men, then the voice is exactly that; it is a voice for the Kingfisher of men.
Let us never forget that this is the showdown for mankind between the religion of the belief system, which the serpent in the tree of the knowledge of good and evil placed before newly created man, and the truth of the Word of God. As was the Word in the beginning, so shall it be in the end. As surely as the Potter created the vessel by the work of His hands, so too will He destroy that which does not easily shape up to His satisfaction. For the vessel, it will be a terrible day, when nothing will endure, which does not suit the eyes of the Creator. One could say that this describes the cherubim with eyes all around (see Ezekiel 10:12).
The Lord speaks again with hope for a wicked world, always showing His mercy and the plan for an escape route from sure death. There is only one way, and the way is Jesus. Turn to Him for salvation; mourn for what man has rejected. There could have been peace instead of the miserable situation in the world today of violence and terror, created by the rebellion of man accepting the lies of religion, the first belief system, when he forsook obedience to the truth of God in the Garden.
Repent to a good and gracious God who wants to show His mercy and keep us from harm. His Law is for our own good, not for His. He wants us to give up to Him the food or grain that was never truth, and the waters of this world that were never living waters; for He has endured all of this for us on the cross. Hand it over to Jesus and then feel the blessing of life flow through your veins. This is God’s offer to all men; but remember, the numbers of those who accept His gift of life through the works of Jesus, rather than placing their faith in the works of man, are very few indeed.
When we are ready to raise up our voice at the sound of the trumpet, as did the army at Jericho, then we will see results. It is time, on the dawn of the seventh day for that trumpet to be heard in the land, so that the army can come together under the banner of the Lord. The little ones and the newborns need to come into the protection found only in the place where the Bridegroom and His bride will be heard, when the Spirit and the bride, together, make the final call to “Come!” to all who are thirsty and desire to drink of the living water, rather than the deadly waters of this world. The testimony is for everyone who can hear the words of the prophecy of this Book, the Book of Life.
How foolish were those who allowed the Bible to be taken away from the children and from the nation! There will be weeping between the place of teaching and the altar of sacrifice. Then their priests will cry out for God to spare their people and to not let their heritage become a reproach to God by having the gentile nations they invited into the land, rule over them as they mock and rebuke them, saying, “Now, where is your God?”
Joel is given a message of hope in spite of all the gloom surrounding the Day of the Lord. God is going to show that the love, which He has always had for His people, is more powerful than hate. He is going to send a new teaching that will open our understanding, just as He told Daniel He would do, by unleashing a great move of the Spirit (new wine) with the anointing of the Lord (oil).
Men cannot fabricate a revival; this will be a move coming straight from heaven. Now, the enemy is described as a northern army, and Rome was certainly north of Israel. It was also going to be driven to a desolate land. America was most certainly that, when those who escaped the East landed on her western shores of the New World to discover an untamed wilderness. The face of evil over the army of Satan’s camp is always toward the religion of the East, which rises out of the eastern, deadly, spiritual river waters of the empires, leading to the sea. Its back is toward the western sea; for truth always has moved westward, throughout history, as it separated from religion. The stench of the evil of Romanism will be foul to the degree in which the incense of religion is foul-smelling in the nostrils of God.
The Lord speaks consoling words such as these, saying, “Fear not, O land, be glad and rejoice, for the Lord has done marvelous things to save you from the judgment!” Yes, we are as the beast, being children of Satan until we are born again into the inheritance of the Lord, but for anyone who will call on the name of the Lord, He is going to offer green pastures in the valley of death, itself (see Psalm 23).
The fig tree is going to bring forth the fruit God commanded mankind to birth as husband and wife, for now the Lord is going to bring it forth by the Spirit in us. There is going to be an abundance of the dew far greater than formerly seen at Pentecost for the early church. There will be a great new move of the Spirit with an incredible anointing, which will see the threshing floors full of grain, threshing floors like the one where Gideon threshed. After all, the armies of the Lord always see the threshing and the separating of the grain, which, like the fruit, has been separated from one tree or the other, from the tree of life or from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, the last of which can only produce the rot of death.
Joel then sees the tables turned as the judgment comes in the natural form, which corresponds to that of the spiritual, with the locust swarming, eating, crawling, chewing and consuming. The Lord is going to come in glory and power to restore with truth that which religion has stolen away. Satan was always the thief in the night, for he cannot stand the glare of the light of day.
The return of the Lord brings restoration and the bounty of the land, for God has done wondrous things for a people caught in the grip of sin, doomed to die. The Lord shall never be put to shame and when He returns, it will be for Him to dwell with His people, Israel. He said, “And in all your getting, get understanding (Proverbs 4:7), for it is all-important for the world to understand who Israel really is as the kingdom inheritor, who must be born again of the water and the Spirit, along with those who receive salvation for believing on the name of the Lord. This is the only house of Israel, the house of God, of which Jacob was given a vision as he rested his head on a stone and saw the ladder, or stairway, leading to heaven, the stairway of paradise, with a new step all the way.
When will all of this happen? Joel jumps forward in time to the events, which will precede the Day of the Lord. It will be a time of spiritual outpouring on all flesh. It is not the day of the Israel Joel knows. It is a later time after the first Pentecost, with a new spiritual awakening when the man-children, born to the woman in labor, shall dream dreams and see visions. The man-servants and maid-servants of the Lord will have a great anointing of the Spirit in order to carry out their heavy burden of facing the giant of them all in battle, the Antichrist of the final Revived Roman Empire.
Wonders in the heavens and in the earth will accompany their works. There will be blood and fire and pillars of smoke, but God’s people will be delivered from the judgment, with the entire world watching. The sun will be turned into darkness and the moon, the reflected light of the woman clothed in the sun, turned into blood. Whoever calls on the name of the Lord shall be saved.
How great will be the light of the bride, the light of the house of Israel, in these black, dark days, as her truth shines forth making her the witness of Israel, which the Lord sought from His people! She will, at last, come out of the darkness of religion to become the light, which the Lord always wanted His people to be. He kept them in separation from the gentile nations whose teeth, like those of a beast, would chew them up and devour them otherwise. But this remnant will be saved.
Each and every empire of man has been as a devouring beast with the last being the most terrible of them all. But deliverance is coming to Zion and Jerusalem. Make sure you don’t miss the lifeboat of salvation, at the time of the latter-day rains, when that great iron boat, Titanic, representing the iron empire of Rome, the mother of all harlots, Babylon the Great, goes down into the depths of the seawaters of death. There will be a deliverance for the remnant whom the Lord calls.
This commentary was taken from a writing on the book of Joel, written on July 20, 2005.
Elinor Montgomery: emontgomery@cogeco.ca
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