Voice of the Kingfisher speaks out …from a different perspective
by Elinor Montgomery
Christmas, 2011, Part 1 – The Parable of the Good Samaritan
A parable is a story with a spiritual meaning.
The apostles lived with Jesus, but the bride, by the powerful infilling of the Spirit into her life, has a special spiritual intimacy with Jesus, comparable only to that of Paul’s, which few, if any, have had throughout all of history. Her passionate love relationship with the Lord marks her walk. How can the legalistic mindset ever understand?
To reduce Jesus to a figure of the Law is to miss the bridal calling on man’s life. When the Lord established the husband-wife relationship as one bone, one flesh, He was depicting, for man, the spiritual relationship that would exist between Him and His bride of mankind, the church. All He ever wanted from Israel was a bride in a one flesh relationship with Him, a people who would love and accept Him as their Savior who would deliver His precious possession from her beastly nature and from her captivity to death.
The legalistic, religious group loved to use legal jargon to trick Jesus into the legal error of breaking more than just the Law of Moses, but also the many laws they had added to Judaism. Their trickery was evident as they asked the question, “And who is my neighbor?” Jesus answered with a parable describing a man who had gone down from Jerusalem to Jericho.
This points us prophetically and spiritually to a man of faith, who had backslidden, was hurting, and had been robbed of his salvation by the thievery of satanic religion. In fact, this was a man in a state of near death. Jesus spoke the message first to the priesthood of Christianity saying that they had missed their calling and had done nothing to save hurting mankind. The Levites, before them, had not saved man, as they had failed in their calling to provide salvation with their legalistic, religious practices.
The Samaritan woman whom Jesus met at the well, along with those whom she evangelized, represent the bride, who is singled out as being different in this story from the Christian priesthood and the Levitical priesthood caught up in the religion of Judaism. The bride will come forth in an attempt to heal the wounded church, so neglected by the priesthood of religion. She will take the dying wounded out of the religious institutions and place them in a temporary location, where they can be nurtured and cared for, until the Lord should return, for it is the religious system that has wounded her.
She will be given the wherewithal and funding to do her job. She will help the wounded who have been caught in the grip of religion and are dying. It will not be her purpose to amass a fortune for herself or seek to live in a lifestyle, which would rival that of the CEO’s of the Fortune 500. This is the Samaritan woman who ran from the well of meeting with Jesus, to bring the others with her safely into the fold. The wounded are on the way to Jericho, so the mission of the bride is to become purified and prepare her voice for the final assault on the religious, to bring the walls down that are separating the people of God from the kingdom, under the Lord’s guidance and leadership of His Davidic-type army.
Speaking the Word of truth, instead of religion, which was killing the dying man, is the real spiritual act, which is considered neighborly by the Lord. This is what was meant by loving one’s neighbor as oneself enough to die to the world so that another might be saved. Social band-aiding is often needed, but will prove to be useless if the cause of the wound beneath the Band-Aid is not treated. Handing out food and money to the poor, in itself, does not constitute neighborly love. Standing for truth and offering one’s life to feed others the truth demonstrates real love for one’s neighbor.
A man’s spiritual salvation is the single most important thing to God. He provides the manna necessary for spiritual feeding, when we are in the right place, moving in faith and dependency on Him toward the kingdom. Being faithful to the truth within the Lord’s covenant relationship with His church of spiritual Israel assures us of spiritual victory over Satan and his evil forces.
Theological wrangling is useless and meaningless in the face of the real need for the healing of the bride. Truth brings the only cure, the truth of the Word of God. There was no inn in Bethlehem that would accept the laboring body of Mary to bring forth her Son, Jesus, King of the Universe. The religious system will accept most anyone, except the woman laboring to bring forth the adopted son, born again of the water and the Spirit, to rule and reign with the King.
Like Mary, she, as the bride, will give over her body by dying to the flesh, in order to provide the vessel from which the new creation will come forth. She, unlike the rest of the world, will not reject the Lord in this, her time of birthing. Her baby will be placed spiritually in the same kind of feeding trough for the animals as that into which her Lord was placed before her as a newborn King. For the bride, too, must feed the church the truth in the spirit of prophecy, which, in turn, will restore it to life from its blindness leading to death through lack of understanding.
Reference; excerpt from The Healing Power of Luke for the Bride, chapter 13, The Bride’s Appearance Arouses Religious Rejection, December 22, 2003, by Elinor Montgomery.