CHAPTER 2
THE TIME OF THE END
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this particular study, we will focus our attention on the Tabernacle in
the Wilderness, given of God to Moses as a pattern of the whole Gospel
of Jesus Christ in its fulness.
This is authenticated by Jesus Himself.
John 5:46-47, "For had ye believed Moses, ye would have believed me: FOR HE WROTE OF ME. But if ye believe not his writings, how shall ye believe my words?"
Peter also subscribed to this thought in Acts 3:22-23.
"For Moses truly said unto the fathers, A prophet shall the Lord your God raise up unto you of your brethren, like unto me; Him shall ye hear in all things whatsoever He shall say unto you. And it shall come to pass, that every soul, which will not hear that prophet, shall be destroyed from among the people."
Many of us as Christians do not know that all the writings of the Old Testament are written of and about Jesus Christ. If it were not, then it would have no value as scripture.
Every book of Moses' writings has been authenticated by Jesus Christ and the apostles. They quote from them freely in the Gospels. This we know is not just the case of one person casually mentioning the other, but Jesus Christ based His teaching upon the books of Moses, and then in John 14, He made it plain that the words He spoke were not His, but of the Father that sent Him.
We can safely say then that God quoted Moses because the words of Moses were from God - the word of God.
God clearly stated to Daniel and other prophets that the Gospel and the fulness of Christ would be revealed to the people of the time of the end. Many people in the past have claimed that they have had revelations that they were that people of the endtime spoken of by these prophets, and some even prophesied the time when the end would come.
TIME OF THE END
Many years ago, there was a notable case in Jamaica of this nature. A man named Bedward attracted a very great following because he prophesied that on a certain day, the world would come to an end, and that he and his followers would fly away to some prepared heaven in the skies.
They were all encouraged to sell their properties, and to give him the money, and so they did. Cash piled up and I understand he was made quite rich as the day of deliverance drew near.
The faithful moved their families to his camp and waited in blissful anticipation.
The day arrived and as morning turned to midday, and midday to afternoon, and nothing happened, the faithful began to be a little less faithful.
It is alleged that a deacon climbed a tree and many others followed suit. In their anxiety to hasten the rapture, they jumped from their perches, only to fall heavily to the ground. That day the hospital was busy with broken bones, and that was the only eventful thing that happened that day.
There were hundreds of cases like this all over the world, and even at this moment, there are those who are prophesying the end of the world.
SMOKE SCREEN
The adversary is making a smoke screen to frighten away those who can be frightened and deceived, but the truth still lives. In spite of all that has been said, and all the deception which has been perpetrated, every sign that has been given in the natural and in the spiritual proves that we are indeed at last in the end time.
THE END TIME
I am sure that after you have read these thoughts on the end time, you will not any more have to guess as to what time we really are in.
John 6:39-40, 44, 54, "And this is the Father's will which hath sent me, that of all which he hath given me, I should lose nothing, but should raise it up again AT THE LAST DAY."
Verse 40, "And this is the will of Him that sent me, that every one which seeth the Son, and believeth on him, may have everlasting life: and I will RAISE HIM UP AT THE LAST DAY."
Verse 44, "No man can come to me, except the Father which hath sent me draw him: and I WILL RAISE HIM UP AT THE LAST DAY."
Verse 54, "Whoso eateth my flesh, and drinketh my blood, hath eternal life; and I will RAISE HIM UP AT THE LAST DAY."
In each of these verses repeated by Jesus in one sermon, He promised to RAISE US UP AT THE LAST DAY. If we succeed in identifying what Jesus meant by the "Last Day," then we can identify what day we are in at this moment, and when the Last Day will come. God created a seven day week in Genesis, and on each day He did a different work. In John 5:46, Jesus said that Moses wrote of Him. Genesis, then, is about Jesus, and therefore, though the creation was physical, it had a spiritual meaning which is to be found in Jesus.
If we examine the things that God created on each day of creation, and take each day for a thousand years from Adam, there is a spiritual counterpart manifested. That which He began to make on the twenty-four-hour day, He completed in the 1000-year day.1
Since God is Spirit, and spiritual life is the highest form of life, then when God creates natural things, His plan must be to enhance some spiritual purpose.
SYMBOLIC MEANING OF THE SEVEN DAYS OF CREATION
THE FIRST DAY symbolic meaning is the first thousand years. There was a separation made between light and darkness. This symbolically means that from the beginning, God was going to make a separation between good and evil. The instance given in the Bible, of God calling for a sacrifice from Cain and Abel, and Cain taking his fruits from the field and Abel taking a lamb, was only God's way of showing us the working of the evil heart, as different from that of the good. Wherever light shows itself, darkness is revealed.
The First Day or first thousand years produced Enoch who lived for 365 years, and then walked so closely with God that "God took him." Hebrews 11:5 declares that it was done by faith. His years on earth were the number of one solar year of days. This man, therefore, marked the end of the first day (thousand years) by being caught up into heaven without seeing death.
THE SECOND DAY symbolic meaning is the second thousand years. This second thousand years which is depicted by the creation of dry ground, in preparation for the growing of trees, symbolically spoke of the sons of God being a separate generation from the sons of earth.
It ended with Noah, whose righteousness sealed the doom of the other inhabitants of the world who would have destroyed him had they not been destroyed by the flood. Evil had run ahead of righteousness so far that God had to intervene and put a halt to it. In God's plan, however, the first two thousand years represent the Outer Court of the Tabernacle, whose destiny is to be destroyed. This will be expanded in a later chapter.
THE THIRD DAY symbolically means the third thousand years. On this day, God created the fruit-bearing trees and the green vegetation. This is interpreted to mean that on the third thousand years of life on earth, God would bring forth men of godly nature to show forth fruits of God. This is the age which produced some of the mightiest men of the Bible.
Shem was a mighty one who some authorities think might well have been the Hercules of Greek mythology. Shem, of course, is the father of the Semitic nations of which is Israel, the chosen people of God. Of course, not much is said of him in scripture, but the inference is very strong when we consider him to be the father of Eber, from whom the Hebrews come. It is also believed that Shem was instrumental in leading the righteous people to fast for ten days and defeat the iniquity of Nimrod, which resulted in Nimrod's death.
This period later also produced Abraham, the father of the faithful; the friend of God. Thus Abraham, a man "planted" of God, bore fruit abundantly on the THIRD DAY. Also Isaac, Jacob, Joseph, Moses, Joshua, David, etc.
THE FOURTH DAY symbolically means the fourth thousand years. On this day were created the sun, moon and stars. Symbolically, the sun is Jesus Christ. The moon is the Church. And the stars are the sons of God.
Jesus was born during the law near the end of the fourth thousand years, and lived for thirty years under the law before He ushered in the age of grace by His resurrection. The church was born, and God began the process of begetting sons in His nature.
THE FIFTH DAY - Symbolically, the fifth thousand years were when Jesus resurrected, and brought forth LIFE EVERLASTING, and triumphed over death, giving us immortality as a present. On this day, the Lord created the living creature. Symbolically, this means that life and immortality would be brought to light by Jesus Christ, and so it was. 2nd Timothy 1:10.
THE SIXTH DAY - Symbolically, this is the sixth thousand years, and on this day God created the beast first, then He made man to control the beast and the whole creation. The word "beast" in scripture speaks of a man in whom the basic human function is missing. Man was made of God in His own image, and created in His likeness. This means that man would look like God in his natural attibutes (seeing, smelling, hearing, etc.), but was created to be LIKE God in his final completion. God, of course, saw him as complete and perfect even before he was made. Man, therefore, was to function as a soul, having a spirit and living in a body. When a man blocks out his spirit, which is the only means of leading him to God, then he is soul and body being led by evil spirits - he is beast. The beast, then, is an evil spirit in a man, which will manifest itself in a system of government, void of God, and will not even be human, but totally demonic and infernal.
The time of the completion in the creation of this man, therefore, must be the sixth day or the sixth thousand year, which began with the dawn of the 1900's. By our calendar, which is not correct, but could be used for this purpose, it is now 1995. This means that we are in the evening of the sixth day or sixth thousand years. It would need only 5 years to end the sixth day. Please do not count on this, because as before stated, the calendar is wrong, and when it comes down to as small a number as 5 years, it means that we could be near, or actually in the year 2000, while we are thinking that we have more time. I might as well be a little more specific in this matter.
The calendar we now have, called the Ecclesiastical calendar, or the Gregorian calendar, was created by a brief issued by Pope Gregory XIII in March of 1582, in which he abolished the use of the ancient calendar, and instituted the one we now have.
Man has had an interminable struggle with time, and the calculating of it, from the very beginning. God stated in Genesis 1: 14, 16,
"And God said, Let there be lights in the firmament of the heaven to divide the day from the night; and let them be for signs, and for seasons, and for days, and years: And God made two great lights; the greater light to rule the day, and the lesser light to rule the night: He made the stars also."
The word calendar comes from the Roman "kalends," which was a method of distributing time into periods adopted for purposes of civil life: hours, days, weeks, months and years. The earth revolves around the sun in an egg-shaped or ecliptic orbit, once every 365 days, 5 hours, 48 minutes and 46 seconds, and this is called an astronomical year. The civil year differs among different nations and peoples according to how they might set different events, and when they would begin their year. The great problem comes when men try to reconcile solar and lunar periods. Months are calculated according to the moon, whose synodic revolution is accomplished in about 29½ days. The confusion comes in, therefore, when we multiply this by twelve months: it only comes to 354, which leaves approximately 11¼ days to account for. No extended period of time, therefore, can be calculated by the lunar method.
We must assume that God, the great architect, deliberately created this situation, and clearly gave us a puzzle that we have not been able to reconcile over the years by generations of scholars. We count our weeks and months and years by days, and every year there is a fraction of a day which is not counted. We try to correct it by having a "leap year" every four years, which still leaves us with a fraction not accounted for. Let us look at two scriptures which seem to address this subject.
Daniel 7:25, "And he shall speak great words against the Most High, and shall wear out the saints of the Most High, AND THINK TO CHANGE TIMES AND LAWS: and they shall be given into his hand UNTIL a time and times and the dividing of time."
Here we see that a man and his system would come in the end time and try to change times and laws which God has set into motion. Note that the scripture says "think to change," which means that actually nothing would change by man's action.
Ecclesiastes 3:11, "He hath made every thing beautiful in his time: also He hath set the world in their heart, so that no man can find out the work that God maketh from the beginning to the end."
The above verse tells us that there is a block in man's thinking which prevents him from finding out what God is doing in the earth. In deciphering accurately where we are in time, the carnal, natural man does not have a ghost of a chance. This block might well be the flaming sword which God set in the garden to prevent man from returning where he could take of the tree of life while in sin. Genesis 3:24.
All the countries of Europe have borrowed the Roman calendar. In the time of Julius Caesar, there was a difference between the civil and the astronomical equinox of three months, which brought winter months into autumn, and autumn into summer. This was very confusing, so Julius Caesar abolished the use of the lunar year altogether, and regulated his civil year entirely by the sun. He it was, with the help of Sosigenes, who fixed our year at 365¼ days, and after every three years, a fourth year of 366 days (leap year, or in Latin, "bis-sexto calendas.") This was done 46 years before the birth of Christ on the 1st of January, and the 708th year from the foundation of the City of Rome, which was the commencement of the first Julian year.
Now we get to the real heart of the problem to which Daniel 7:25 refers. The Julian method of intercalation was the best that could be adopted, yet it supposed that the year was 11 minutes and 14 seconds too long, and an error of a day in 128 years. In the course of a few centuries, the equinox moved towards the beginning of the year.
Pope Gregory XIII, therefore, in an effort to correct Julius Caesar, and to restore the equinox to its proper place (since the sun, God's clock, is not watching our calendar), ordered that ten days be suppressed in the calendar, and because the error in the Julian calendar was now found to be 3 days in every 400 years, he also ordered that the intercalations (added days) of Caesar on all the centenary years be omitted, with the exception of those that occur on every 400th year.
Scholars and scientists, over the years, have contended and still do contend concerning the errors of the present Gregorian calendar, but no corrections have been made. It has been estimated that the calendar is wrong by about four to seven years. If we should accept the least number, it would be four years, and it would now be 1999, and not 1995.
IT IS LATER THAN YOU THINK
There is another reason for why we believe that we are just a few years from the end of the sixth day.
If time should be counted from Jesus, then we would have to hear from God as to what time in Jesus' life He began to count. Was it at the birth of Jesus? Was it at His baptism, when He began His ministry? That would add three and one half years to the error in our calendar. One thing we do know is that God generally makes one era gradually fade out while the other is coming in. In this light, we can see John the Baptist's ministry fading away while Jesus' was increasing.
Another point which might be important, if not inspired, is that in the prophetic book of Revelation, in chapters 11 and 12, it is clearly stated that God counts 1,260 days as three and one half years, which makes one year to be 360 days. If God's year is 360 days, then our solar year of 365¼ days would leave us 5¼ days too much, which would amount to about 30 years to be added to our 1995.
ONE THING CERTAIN
In spite of our calculations, there is one thing certain. God has allowed man to be confused in his calculations of time, because the times and seasons, spiritually speaking, will be revealed to the sons of God, and not to the world. I can therefore state with great certainty, that it is later than we think, and to be more specific, we are indeed AT THE END OF THE SIXTH DAY or the sixth thousand-year period.
In order not to leave any doubt in the minds of my readers, let me say that the sixth day, according to the word of God, must end in a period of tribulation - distress and war as never seen upon the earth since God made man until this time.
THIS THEREFORE is the time in which we are, I believe.
THE LAST DAY OF JESUS
We can here, therefore, identify the "last day" utterances of Jesus in John 6:39, 40, 44 and 54 as referring to a ONE THOUSAND YEAR PERIOD which corresponds with the SEVENTH DAY of creation in which God rested from His work. This rest must necessarily be symbolic, since God is never tired, neither needs to rest. This is explained in Hebrews chapter 4. From these utterances in John 6, we see Jesus impressing upon us a very urgent message, made more pointed by its repetition, that there will be a RESURRECTION OF THE RIGHTEOUS during the seventh thousand-year period.
THIS IS THE TIME
It is now 1995 plus the errors, and at the end there will be a three and a half year period of intense trouble for the world, which will be the end of the period called the "Great Tribulation," after which the church will be delivered by resurrection, and the sons of God will reign and rule on earth with Jesus Christ in a glorified body.
MY REVELATION
In 1970, it was revealed to me by a wide-awake, open-eyed vision in which I saw a man enter my room in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, and present me with two sheets of paper. The first was fully written from the edge of the top clear to the bottom. He pulled it away from me as I strained to read it and could not, and said, "Do not worry about it, it is the past."
He pushed the other sheet into my lap. It was blank, except for two lines written at the extreme top in the same illegible hand of a man, and then he said, "This is the tribulation." That was in or about April, 1970.
An apology is needed here. The first writing of "The Pattern" was in January 1973. In the subsequent edition, in 1975, on page 23 under the heading of "My Revelation," it was stated that "the sons of God will come forth into a higher nature in or around 1977." This error was caused by submitting to the erroneous teaching of the church, that the Tribulation will be seven years, since seven years from 1970 was 1977. Already 25 years of tribulation are gone, and every year it is getting worse, and as yet the 3½ years of the ministry of Christ by the church has not yet begun. I here apologize to my readers for that error.
My interpretation may be wrong, but I believe, especially because of this vision, that there will be a great war in our time, which will make all other wars look like child's play, and there will be such suffering as never was experienced on earth among so many people before. The sons of God will come forth into a higher nature, and eventually overcome the beast nature in the earth, and that this will culminate in the earth being brought under the rule of God. For Jesus Christ, our Lord, will descend from heaven with a shout, and with our brothers who now live in the invisible realm, and then the invisible realms of God will become visible, and the visible invisible - that is, we will be changed and have power to be either visible or invisible.
The earth will be at rest. Praise be to God.
REVELATION NOT STATIC
The revelation of Jesus Christ within the hearts and lives of the saints is a flowing experience, and by the time you get these revelations I have committed to paper, there might be others coming forward which will make these obsolete. It is therefore necessary for Christians to be in touch with one another at this time, for I have heard from the Lord that things are happening within the body of Christ, and the sons are moving higher and higher, so silently and so imperceptibly, that the breaking forth will even take us by surprise.
Strive to get your minds off the things of the earth, for this is the hindrance of the body of Christ. We must overcome in the area of the mind, or else we will not overcome at all.
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