Voice of the Kingfisher speaks out …from a different perspective
by Elinor Montgomery
March 23, 2017
Jonah was a prophet from the Galilee. His home was three miles north of Nazareth, in the lower Galilee. Of course, the religious Pharisees got it wrong when they declared, “Search and look, for no prophet has arisen out of Galilee (John 7:52).”
Jonah was the only prophet to whom Jesus likened Himself. He said that an evil and adulterous generation seeks after a sign, and no sign will be given to it except the sign of the prophet Jonah who was three days and three nights in the belly of the great fish, as was Jesus three days and three nights in the heart of the earth.
The prophet represents the twice-called man of God to come back to the truth of His Word and Law, first, the nation Israel, and secondly, the spiritual nation, the church. From the rebellion of the Garden, all of mankind, born of the seed of Adam, was under the curse God placed upon them for the sin of their rebellion to the truth. This changed the spiritual waters in their lives from the water of life from above, to the sea waters of death from beneath.
The waters, which the Lord God separated from the dry land beneath the firmament of heaven, He called the sea. These were the spiritual waters of death, which would take down all death cults, arising out of them in the name of religion, the means by which the serpent masterfully wove lies around the truth of God’s Word. You could say the great fish represents the grave and the seaweed represents the confusion in men’s minds created by the deceiving lies of the devil. They blind men to the truth.
Jonah was a man of God, chosen to be His voice of the prophet, to deliver His message of warning for the time. He was not unlike the bride of the church today, who has been given a commission to spread the gospel of truth to all nations, including the gentile nations and the failed nation of Israel. But she has done with her commission, exactly what Jonah did with his. She has fled into the arms of religion and boarded the ship of fools (the Titanic of our day).
One might call her the ‘Allure of the Sea’, a huge ship heading into the deep pit of hell. The church has been deceived into believing the serpent, which has taken her captive to the religion of his belief system, to separate her from her apostolic foundation, set in place on the gospel of truth.
The church has actually separated from the truth of God to embrace the works of her own hands, in order to be like the Most High God. Yet God’s plan is to transmit the power of His right hand to His church, in the same manner as He transmitted the power to the rod of Moses. There was no power in Moses, other than that which came from the Lord, causing their wills to blend into one accord. This makes it virtually impossible to act outside of the will of the Lord.
The mind of God knows all things, the beginning from the end. Our minds are clouded by the seaweed of religion, which thickens around our heads like leaven, the same leaven, which filled the minds of the religious Pharisees. We have boarded this ship of fools, unwittingly in some cases, and knowingly in others, just as Jonah knowingly boarded a ship going in the opposite direction from that in which God had sent him.
Little did he know that he would be at the center of a storm he had created, which would face him and the others in the doomed ship, a merchant ship of trade on the high seas. Like all who go down to sea in merchant ships, there is a destroying deadly power, which rules over the sea, waiting to claim them. This particular ship was a cargo ship of international trade, which we would call today a ship belonging to a ‘one-world-order of trade’.
”…Alas, alas, that great city, in which all who had ships on the sea became rich by her wealth! For in one hour she is made desolate (Revelation 18:19).” Her name is Babylon the Great, Mother of all harlots to God, and the final system of empires to follow Assyria, the capital of which was Nineveh, the city to which Jonah had been sent as God’s witnessing voice.
When the judgment begins to fall, there will be a time when the prophets and the church will no longer be able to witness to the truth. For the final empire will be a One World Order in which all will be deceived by religious lies, and the light of the Bridegroom and the bride no longer will shine in her, the harlot. At this time of darkness, there will be no witness to the truth.
For the merchants were the great men of the earth, greatness being defined by wealth and the deception of the harlot’s sorcery. Today, we call such deception to be that of the establishment, with a real, live world-wide conspiracy, which has deceived the world of nations (see Revelation 18:23-24).
The gods of the world empires have no power whatsoever to save those who have trusted in these governments of the devil and not in the government and Law of God. They have trusted in the power of money, in the provision of God and in religious belief systems, instead of trusting in the Word of God. This is all to say that they have fully taken the mark of the beast, the mark of man, 666, government, religion and the world economic system.
The first thing the sailors threw overboard from the ship on which Jonah was traveling was the cargo of the merchants. The fall of the twin World Trade Towers, was as the first sign of the problems facing the true church today in this the dawn of a new millennium. World trade will have an enormous effect upon the success and failure of the church, as it will affect the rise and fall of America. Is the church moving in the wrong direction with the oars of time? Should Jesus not once again overthrow the tables of the moneychangers, and then throw them out of His apostolic boat?
As hard as the sailors rowed toward the dry land, all their works got them nowhere. The Christian churches’ social gospel and good works are about as useful as the rowing of the sailors in Jonah’s day, once the storm had begun. Has the church not also forsaken the truth, like Jonah, while hiding behind closed doors in the lowest-most-parts of the tired, old boat of Christianity? Have false gods not crept into the church, which has no power of the right hand to change the direction in which this doomed boat is being tossed by the sea?
The sin of the church has been in not telling the truth, like Jonah, and going to sleep in the lower levels of this boat of religion. This has allowed Satan to get a foothold by filling Christian buildings with apostate ministries. The Lord’s heart is to save the mobs of the blinded and unsaved of the empires of man, as represented by the city of Nineveh, the forerunner city to Babylon. The beloved creation of mankind, caught in the empires of Satan, is steadily moving toward death, like the Egyptians who were covered over by the seawaters in the Exodus of the nation Israel.
But now God is getting ready to shut down history, which has been the Biblical record of the trek of mankind through the great world wilderness of six millennia, with a pathway for a very few to reach the kingdom of God. It is called the Way, the name by which Jesus identified Himself in truth and life. Surely, the church, like the rest of the world, must get off the broad road of destruction and onto the Way, if it is to safely survive the spiritual seawaters of death rooted in the lies of progressively-more-dangerous liberalism from God.
It has been a 4000-year journey, as was the Exodus of Israel a 40-year journey through the wilderness, all going back 4000 years from this day to when God made His covenant of the blessing to Abraham. He promised that the families of all nations would be blessed by being part of His inheritance of the kingdom at the end of their wilderness journey.
Jesus gave the keys to the promised kingdom, which open or close the gates of heaven, depending on the church entirely to speak boldly the truth of the gospels. It was His apostolic church, which He removed from out of religion to make His apostles the solid stones of truth, stones like David used to defeat the giant and enemy of God who directed them straight to their target of the giant’s forehead. His true church could never remain in religion, trying to serve two masters at the same time, and still reach the goal set before her. Jonah had chosen to disobey the Lord’s call to be His voice for truth, and instead had joined the sinking ship of religion and its useless gods.
When Jonah finally got down on his face in repentance and began to witness to the truth of his error, the religious crew turned on him viciously and threw him overboard. They desperately wanted the salvation he was depriving them of as much as he was depriving the Ninevites of theirs. Who is going to like the comfortable pews of religion being challenged by truth? Who, if anyone, will particularly like the Jonah’s of today, who will identify with Jesus, a name the establishment does not want to hear?
After all, how do you embrace Jesus and also embrace the agendas of the death cults of abortion, euthanasia and homosexuality, all being pushed and embraced by the religious, Christian churches. They call it tolerance for sin. How quickly this can change to zero tolerance when it becomes a case of their ship going down and their turn arriving for them to account for their sin! Who had a god among them that could deliver one ounce of help for them? Not one! Will they not become part of the very harvest the Lord would have been looking for in Nineveh? God can use evil and turn it around for good, for the well-being of the reluctant witnesses and the lost.
4000 years mark 2000 years of warnings for the voice of God to the nation Israel, and then 2000 years more after Jesus’ birth at the end of one age, and the beginning of the next, the church age, with all those years more of apostolic witnessing by the voices of truth for the gospels.
A revival in Nineveh was of extreme importance to Israel who needed to get her act together and heed the prophet as well; for her very future depended on her not going into captivity to the empire. Unfortunately, we know she never heeded Jonah anymore than the Pharisees of Jesus’ time acknowledged His teaching. Because of her continuing rebellion by ignoring the witness of the prophets, she was washed away in the evil waters of her sin, leaving only a remnant in Judah, with the rest being carted off to Babylon.
Through Jesus, the inheritance of Judah would come through a New Covenant, yet based still on the fulfillment of the promises of the old covenant with Abraham, which went first from a national land promise to a spiritual kingdom promise for the church, in a crossover blessing. It would take place at the cross, to allow both nation and spiritual nation to become one in Jesus.
The prophet, Jonah, was like a sot – sleeping in a drunken stupor of religion, right in the depths of a ship heading to disaster. However, it hugged the dry land but still there was no reaching it by way of their works. The Lord had prepared a great fish to swallow Jonah, just as He had prepared the monster of the sea, the empire of Rome, to take the church into her inner sanctum.
He would allow it to cloud her head with the seaweeds of religion, causing complete lack of understanding, about her condition. There was no understanding of the empire’s spiritual power of the deadly seawaters, which God had separated from the dry land, but had been brought back over the land with the rebellion and sin of man. The waters had invaded the lives of mankind, having been once separated from them.
John the Baptist understood and called to Israel to make straight the way before the coming of Jesus, and the end of the first 2000 covenanting years of the nation Israel. The new age was about to begin as Jonah would be vomited up by the fish and thrust forward onto the dry land, with a second call, now going to the second person in the fiery furnace, with One like the Son of God, found in the book of Daniel, chapter 3. This is the apostolic, church calling going out to the gentile, empire nations to join the prophets of Israel with the apostles of the early church from the final 2000 years of her exodus wilderness journey, along with the revived apostolic church at the end of the church age, all represented by the three friends of Daniel in the fiery furnace.
When the church comes to realize that she lacks understanding, and turns back to the Word in prayer, crying out to Jesus to seek genuine relationship and help like that of a bride from her bridegroom, then there will be real light at the end of the tunnel. Many know things are not right in Christianity, but now is the time to make it right with the same warning message, which the Lord God gave to Jonah. It was a message that moved from thousands of years to tens of years ending with number of days, for the time is now short until the Day of the Lord to make that final exodus from religion before the judgment falls.
Once Jonah’s mind cleared and he came to understanding of his relationship with God in faith, obedience and truth, he was ready to let go of his captivity in rebellion and come out of her, Babylon the Great, mother of all harlots, and into the light of truth. He had shed the curse of rebellion and was ready for the truth, because of his captivity for three days and three nights in the belly of the great fish. Because Jesus spent three days and three nights in the depths of the earth, the bride accepted her salvation, repented of her former state and was ready to witness to the truth for one last time before the way was made straight to the door of the kingdom.
And as the second call came to Jonah to witness, so, too, will the second call go out to the bride of the church to witness this very day as the Ark of the Covenant again goes before the church under the leadership of Jesus with a new priesthood behind it as it leads her, rather than her carrying it.
And the message of the bride today is a warning of imminent judgment; “Yet 40 days, and Babylon the Great, mother of all harlots, shall be overthrown.” The covenant of 4000 years ago and the wilderness trek of the Exodus of 40 years, have now become a vital message about time being measured now by days. It is only days before the harlotry of mankind, which led to empire rule rather than God’s Law, is about to go down. The final empire of the Babylonian system of empires, the Revived Roman Empire, is about to rise up and as quickly go down, taking with her the religious priests of Romanism.
At the same time, the bride, which God always sought for His Son, the woman with the garland of stars on her head, wearing the crown of spiritual Israel, rises up. The baby she is in labor to deliver is the fruit of the Spirit of life and is the new creation and good fruit God always wanted from mankind. This child is snatched up to the throne of God (see Revelation, chapter 12). One woman produces the long sought-after fruit for the Lord God, but the other woman of Revelation, Babylon the Great, mother of all harlots, goes down riding the beast to the bottom of the sea, as the seawaters cover her over and she is seen no more, like the armies of Pharaoh.
Yes, Jonah has a message for today, by which judgment can be counted as being only days away. The final empire of Satan will rise up as a One World Order, to fall as quickly as it appears out of the evil waters. We have reached the time to cross over and enter into the kingdom, but to do so we must complete the exodus in the lines of Judah and Ephraim, with the two sticks coming together in victory as did Caleb (Judah) and Joshua (Ephraim) when they crossed over the Jordan River to reach the dry land of promise called Canaan.
The prophet, the apostle and the bride will reach out their left hands to the right hand of One like the Son of God, called Jesus. In His power they shall walk with Him through the fiery furnace, stoked up to seven times the usual heat, unscathed as they walk in victory through the fire judgment, to fulfill the dream of Abraham and the covenant God made with him. They shall be clothed in the sun and walking on the moon in the perfect light of His countenance (see Genesis, chapter 15, Daniel, chapter 3 and Revelation, chapter 12).
One of the major problems of our time is the same problem Jonah had in his time. After his successful witnessing to the truth, he went back to the idolatry of placing the nation Israel on a pedestal that did not belong to her. It was in a place Jacob called the House of God where he began his journey for a bride. It is to Bethel, the House of God he will return to receive the remnant of his covenant promise he made to God, a place once called Luz.
Jonah seemed to forget that it was the same tree of life, which God planted over him to save him, to which all mankind was guaranteed access by salvation in Jesus. The fig tree would wither and die, but the tree of life is forever. Should the Ninevites and all nations not have the same opportunity God extended to Israel?
Elinor Montgomery: emontgomery@cogeco.ca
Voice of the Kingfisher: www.newsnblues.ca All commentaries are archived on this web site.