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The Coming Kingdom

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February 2024 - The Coming Kingdom

Issue #427
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Issue #427February 2024

The Coming Kingdom

The world is changing rapidly as Mystery Babylon collapses and the Kingdom of God rises.

The end of an age is always characterized by chaos, and often by some level of destruction. At the same time, as the next age is birthed, there is hope and good news. Those who live in such times are affected differently. Those who identify as citizens of Babylon will feel distress. Those who identify as citizens of the Kingdom will rejoice.

Knowing Bible prophecy helps Kingdom people plan their lives in accordance with the coming transition and avoid much of the potential chaos. The problem today is that most people know little or nothing about Daniel’s prophetic outline of history. Those who do study it are often misled by those who misunderstand prophecy.

The rapture teaching, for example, often leads people to believe that they will escape tribulation. The result is that they fail to prepare for the chaotic transition. Even those who believe that the church will go through the tribulation have a limited understanding of prophecy, because most of them do not understand the feast days. The rapture teaching itself was developed by those who knew little or nothing about the Autumn feasts which give the order of events surrounding the second coming of Christ.

One must understand that the Spring feasts prophesied the order of events surrounding the first coming of Christ, while the Autumn feasts prophesy of His second coming. In fact, the feast days provide us with the basic outline of the two comings of Christ and their distinct purposes.

See my book, The Laws of the Second Coming.

(By the way, this book has now been translated into Urdu by our affiliate in Pakistan. 3,000 copies should be printed in early February and be ready for distribution. This book will have a serious impact on the churches in Pakistan, as there is nothing like it available in the Urdu language.)

Kingdom people who know the divine plan prophesied in Scripture have great reason to be optimistic about the future. We are not tied to any of the four “beasts” who have had their time to rule the Mideast and the West. In fact, we are more comparable to the people of Judah who were taken captive to Babylon. The Babylonians tried to turn them into Babylonians, and, indeed, they succeeded in many cases. When the time came to return and rebuild, only a handful actually returned, and even those had to repent of their Babylonian economic way of life. (See Neh. 5:1-5.)

We today are reliving those days and are fulfilling the prophetic pattern that they set many years ago. The main difference is that we are not returning to any particular land but are returning to God, as the prophets admonish us. It is about having a Kingdom vision. It is about learning the laws of the Kingdom as well.

We know also that at some point the Autumn feasts will be fulfilled historically in the same manner that Passover was fulfilled at the cross, the wave-sheaf offering was fulfilled on the day most people call Easter, and Pentecost was fulfilled seven weeks later.

Having observed how the Spring feasts prophesied the timing of these important events, we look now to the next set of feasts and expect these also to establish the timing of events surrounding the second coming of Christ. This is what the rapture teachers failed to understand. But Kingdom people know the law well enough to understand this. The feasts themselves are laws that prophesy of Christ.

The Four Beasts

In any study of prophecy, one must understand Daniel 7 and also Daniel 2. Daniel 7 speaks of four empires and pictures them as “beasts.” These are Babylon, Persia, Greece, and Rome. Greece split into four nations after the death of Alexander the Great, when his four generals divided the empire among themselves.

Daniel 11 prophesies specifically about the wars between two of those Greek nations: Syria and Egypt. Daniel calls them the king of the north and the king of the south. The prophecy in Daniel 11 ends with Antiochus Epiphanes. It is so specific and accurate that skeptics assume it must have been written by someone who lived during or immediately after Antiochus (about 160 B.C.)

However, skeptics are silenced when they read Daniel 7, because the fourth beast (Rome) did not take over until 63 B.C., and the “little horn” (extension of power) did not arrive until five centuries after Christ. How could Daniel have known these things, if not by divine inspiration?

From the standpoint of prophecy, the book of Revelation is a continuation of the book of Daniel. Its fulfillment was not cast into the future but was a prophetic description of the fourth beast (Imperial Rome) and the “little horn” (Religious Rome, the Vatican). The book of Revelation speaks in symbolic and prophetic language and gives us snapshots of the history of Rome and the church.

See my 8-book commentary on The Revelation.

Rome was the fourth beast’s manifestation of Mystery Babylon. In that sense, the four beasts were four phases of the same spiritual entity ruling the earth. We today live at the end of the age and are seeing the collapse of Babylon—yet not just Babylon itself but also the other beast kingdoms as well.

This is best described in Daniel 2 in terms of an image made of various metals that represent the four kingdoms. In the end, a stone hits the image on its feet (end of the age), and the entire image is ground to powder. So today we see many types of government collapsing. They are soon to be replaced by the Kingdom of God.

I can only give you a bare outline of prophecy in this article. If you want to study the details, you will have to read my commentaries on Daniel and Revelation.

70 Nations and 70 Jubilees

My study of timing makes it clear to me that the year 2024 is one of the most critical years in history. It is 7 x 490 years, or 70 Jubilee, since Joshua crossed the Jordan. We are about to repeat this history in a New Covenant manner. We no longer are dealing with the Canaanites as such, but with all nations.

Recall that there are 70 nations recorded in Genesis 10, called the beginning of nations. The number 70 is also the number of restoration. Note that Adam was told that in the day that he would eat of the tree of good and evil, he would surely die. A day is like a thousand years to God. A thousand is also the biblical number of glory.

Paul says that “all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God” (Rom. 3:23). Adam died at the age of 930, which is 70 years short of the glory of God. But this also shows that 70 is a number relating to the restoration of all things, when all nations are restored to the Kingdom of Christ and see His glory. Rom. 8:19-21 says,

19 For the anxious longing of the creation waits eagerly for the revealing of the sons of God. 20 For the creation was subjected to futility, not willingly, but because of Him who subjected it, in hope 21 that the creation itself also will be set free from its slavery to corruption into the freedom of the glory of the children of God.

I believe that the year 2024 will be the beginning of the redemption of all the nations. The fulfillment of this, of course, will take a long time, but this will be the start.

End of the Age Chaos

Jesus said that in the end there would be “wars and rumors of wars” (Matt. 24:6). He did not tell us where those wars would be fought, but the context suggests that at least one of those wars would be fought over Jerusalem.

There have been wars around the world almost since the beginning of time, so these “wars” must carry prophetic significance in order to distinguish them from other wars. If we look at the world today, we see a war in Gaza which could easily escalate.

Secondly, we also see a war in Ukraine, which is the original territory of the Khazar Empire. The Khazars were descended from Togarmah, according to a letter from King Joseph, written in 960 A.D. An earlier Khazar king named Bulan, had converted to Judaism in 760 A.D. That story is told in The Jewish Encyclopedia under the heading of “Chazars,” an alternate spelling of Khazars.

First the Khazar nobles and then the people themselves became Jews and eventually became known as the Ashkenazim to distinguish them from the Sephardim branch of world Jewry. Gen. 10:3 says that Ashkenaz was the brother of Togarmah. Their uncle was Magog. This is the family that Ezekiel 38 and 39 says was to attack the mountains of Israel.

That was fulfilled through Zionism, rather than by uniformed troops marching south through Turkey and Syria. It was a conquest by immigration. Bible teachers failed to recognize what was happening because they did not know the history of the Khazars. I myself knew nothing of the Khazars until Arthur Koestler, a Jewish author, published his book in 1976 called The Thirteenth Tribe.

(What a life-changing revelation that was!)

Only in the last year or two have I begun to hear church prophets speak of the Khazars. Their revelation is yet limited, but I am confident they will see more as they continue to study. At this time, these prophets seem to think that the Rothschilds are the only Khazars in the world. They do not know that the Khazar/Ashkenazim constitute about 80 percent of world Jewry. In fact, it is estimated that 80 percent of Israeli citizens are from the Ashkenazim.

Part of the problem is that these church prophets tend to teach that Khazar Jews are not “real” Jews. Their view is based on the idea that being a Jew is based on race and that conversion to Judaism cannot turn anyone into a “real” Jew.

I do not subscribe to that view, of course. People from other nations have always had the right to submit to the covenant and become Israelites of whatever tribe they chose (Isaiah 56:6-8). The problem is that the Khazars submitted to the Old Covenant, rather than the New. In doing so, they rejected Jesus as the Christ and King, thereby losing their status as Judahites (Jews), as Paul says in Rom. 2:28, 29.

To me, it is ironic that in their desire to become Jews, they joined with a rebellious nation that had lost its legal status and had forfeited its right to use the name “Jew.” But that is the nature of the New Testament conflict which must yet be resolved at Christ’s second coming.

It is inevitable that the church prophets will have to acknowledge the truth at some point, and this will have the potential of changing everything they believed about Zionism.

The point is that in the past 2 years we have seen a war in Ukraine—the old territory of the Khazar Empire—and more recently, a war in the Zionist state itself against Gaza, Lebanon, Syria, Yemen, and perhaps Iran as well. Are these the wars that Jesus was prophesying? Time will tell.

At the moment, Israeli officials have been looking for an excuse to attack Iran. The media is complicit, reminding us in every article that the Israelis and US forces attack only “Iran-backed” militants. They are obviously preparing for a war against Iran but do not want to appear to be the ones who initiate the attack. Even though US troops occupy Iraq and Syria illegally and without their permission, any attempt to fight back is treated as if Iran is starting a war.

Perhaps they should be reminded that Iran is Persia, the nation that conquered Babylon and set the Jews free. If there is a conflict between Iran and the Zionist state, it would be another manifestation of the conflict between Persia and Babylon. One should be careful about siding with Babylon in any way at this end of the age.

Those who actually live in the Zionist state should get a good grasp of prophecy so that they know what to do and perhaps where to go for safety. Recall that even the early church in Jerusalem moved to Pella across the Jordan River just before Jerusalem was destroyed in 70 A.D. After Nero died in June of 68, there was a pause in the war until a new emperor would come to the throne. During this time, the Christians in Jerusalem remembered Jesus’ prophecy and relocated. This probably saved their lives.

I have heard that today there are whole groups of Christian Israelis that have prepared for the coming destruction and can move quickly when the signal is given. Hopefully, many others will take heed of Jesus’ prophecy. Or, if they prefer, they can believe and take heed to the prophecy in Jeremiah 19:10, 11.

If they don’t believe in prophecy, then, I suppose, they will have to rely on their own observation and reason.

The Good News

In the midst of chaos in the Babylonian world order, the Kingdom of God is rising. Hence, there is good news in the midst of bad news. The Kingdom is not waiting for Christ to come. It is being prepared now so that He will have a throne to occupy when He comes.

This means the Kingdom is now rising and preparation work has been ongoing. In the broader sense, of course, God has been preparing since the beginning of time. The Bible is the record of God’s preparations over thousands of years. But at the end of the age, our preparations more specifically focus upon the fall of Babylon.

Yet in both the long-term and short-term preparations, there is a season where most people do not see how the Kingdom of God is emerging. Luke 17:20, 21 (KJV) says,

20 The kingdom of God cometh not with observation. 21 Neither shall they say, “Lo here!” or, “lo there!” for behold, the kingdom of God is within you…

One cannot easily see what is within someone. It takes time to get to know people to see such things. But the word translated “within” is entos, which means “within or in the midst of you.” It has a double meaning or application. It can mean within individuals or within a group of people.

In other words, the kingdom of God comes without being noticed or acknowledged by the world at large. So don’t say, “Lo here!” or “Lo there!” The Kingdom will ultimately cover the whole earth as the waters cover the sea, but during the preparation time, it has no territory here on earth.

The Kingdom has a King, who is Jesus Christ. It has laws written in Scripture. It has citizens who are believers. The last element will be territory. But as long as the dominion was held by beast nations, the Kingdom of God could have no territory, because God Himself gave the territory to those beast nations.

The world does not recognize kingdoms that have no territory. Hence, the Kingdom is coming without their observation. But we are not blinded in that way. Every believer ought to see the Kingdom as it progresses through history. In fact, how else can they prepare?

John 3:3 tells us,

3 Jesus answered and said to him, “Truly, truly, I say to you, unless one is born again he cannot see the kingdom of God.”

So the Kingdom comes without observation—except for those who are “born again.” These have had their eyes opened to see the Kingdom. This requires discernment until such time that the Kingdom acquires territory and emerges for all to see. And while such territory is being acquired, it may require participation or some inside information during that process.

Most people have the mistaken idea that when Jesus arrives, everything will immediately fall into place without any real preparation time. In fact, many believe that they will be raptured away for 7 years, during which time they will have no opportunity to do any such preparation. One big reason why we must “occupy” until He comes (Luke 19:13 KJV) is to help with preparations.

The Pattern under Moses

The Israelites left Egypt, the house of bondage, under Moses as a prophetic pattern for those of us who follow Jesus Christ by leaving the house of bondage (to sin). When they arrived at Sinai, they saw the glory of God come down upon the Mount. The Kingdom was formally established beyond individual experiences as before.

To see His glory is to see His Kingdom. This event was thereafter celebrated as the feast of weeks, because it was 7 weeks since leaving Egypt at Passover. A thousand years later, during the Grecian empire, the feast was known in Greek as Pentecost, which means “50th day.”

Although we are justified by faith through Passover, we are given the Holy Spirit through Pentecost, by which we are given eyes to see the Kingdom. Even so, there is yet another level of experience where we enter the Kingdom. Jesus spoke of this in Matt. 5:20.

Most of the Israelites who left Egypt under Moses did not actually enter the Kingdom under Joshua. Acts 7:38 KJV refers to these as “the church in the wilderness.” Most of that first church died in the wilderness without receiving the promise of entering the Kingdom. Why? Because even though they were justified by faith through Passover, they rejected the law at Pentecost and refused to hear His voice.

Essentially, they were lawless, a problem that Jesus addressed in Matt. 7:21,

21 Not everyone who says to Me, “Lord, Lord,” will enter the kingdom of heaven, but he who does the will of My Father who is in heaven will enter.

Jesus concluded in Matt. 7:23,

23 And then I will declare to them, “I never knew you; depart from Me, you who practice lawlessness” [anomia].

The lesson of the church in the wilderness is a warning to the church in the Pentecostal age as well. Entering the Kingdom refers to entering with immortality, having received the ultimate promise as an inheritance. These are the overcomers who are raised or changed in the first resurrection (Rev. 20:6).

Other believers will have to wait for the general resurrection a thousand years later (Rev. 20:12; John 5:28, 29). During the interim, they will have to repent of their lawlessness and observe the laws of the Kingdom in order to live within the boundaries of Kingdom territory. Most of these believers will indeed become lawful and will find their place in the Kingdom. Their only real disadvantage is that they will not enjoy immortality, or what Scripture calls, “life in the age.”

The Kingdom is at Hand

Wherever the King is present, the Kingdom is there. But a king alone is not a complete kingdom. It must have citizens, laws, and territory as well. On the deepest level, the territory of the Kingdom is our bodies, our land inheritance. When heaven fully comes to earth, as Jesus prayed, then the plan for creation is complete.

Territory is the last element to be added, in the form of our bodies as well as the rest of creation. This is the purpose of the feast of Tabernacles, soon to be fulfilled historically and personally.